Conspiracy Theory

I didn’t make the connection. I read about United being grounded before I left for work and saw the blurb about the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) going silent after I arrived. It popped up as an email email alert with a glaring absence of why it was offline. The lack of explanation for the closing of the NYSE (a deeply uncommon event) led me to actually click on the link. The Washington post included a quote from someone assuring America that the failure was not a hack, just a technical glitch. 

Move along nothing to see here. And if they hadn’t assured me there was no hack I probably wouldn’t have thought this might be a hack.

But someone said it so my imagination started jogging. Part of it was just an exercise in fun, a “what if?” game played out against real circumstances. After all, it isn’t unthinkable, I received my obligatory letter from Uncle Sam in the mail assuring me that my information had most likely been stolen in the government breach. It isn’t like a hack is an unthinkable thing.

My day was full though, and so my musings about a hack by anyone receded and United and the NYSE were back up and running (along with the Wall Street Journal and apparently Seattle’s 911 system), certain that they were unrelated technical difficulties. Just isolated unrelated incidents.

And they probably are. Isolated. Unrelated. 

Anonymous’s ominous message the night before it all went down is a coincidence (their words not mine). I hope we heed – fantastical conspiracy theory warnings though they might be. Something or someone will come for us...eventually. That is the way of war and domination, that is the way we play politics as a country. And unlike someone flying planes into buildings, what is coming for us now is something we can imagine- it won’t catch us wondering who thought up such a plan and marveling at the execution. Instead, we will have a list of breaches and breakdowns of the past.

We’ve been warned.

Yet Americans still lay about with our necks and belies exposed. The more we rely on technology the less we seem to protect the very parts of it that we rely on. Now, like some Star Trek (TNG) episode gone nightmarishly wrong, we have thrust all of our information, personal and state, into places we don’t fully understand with the silly assumption that the rest of the world doesn’t understand it either. In ignorance we are safe.

But we aren’t. And right now we have no Jean-Luc Picard to save us.

I’m very much aware that today’s technical difficulties were just that, technical difficulties. But those difficulties provide us with an opportunity to see how dependent we are on our constantly evolving technology. We could use it as a dry-run before the water is real and a rising tide alerts us to the holes in our boat. But we have to be willing to see.

The US Office of Personnel Management (twice) and the IRS, Target, Anthem, Chase (the list goes on)...they seem to come more frequently these days- numbing us into the sense that it is all inevitable. And maybe it is…

The thing about convenience (and our online lifestyles are nothing if not convenient) is it is easy to get accustomed to it and take it for granted. Easy to forget how to function without it. And then its absence feels less like an inconvenience and more like a crisis. 

Back some years ago when I was living in Auckland (New Zealand) there was an electrical failure of some kind, power went out all over the city, for hours. Certain kind of locks didn’t work, elevators in ridiculously tall buildings were useless, stoplights went dark, food went un-refrigerated. 

It was as if the population of Auckland was suddenly filled with children bumbling through the world. We were all wandering around confused about what we should be doing and how it should get done. Even my boyfriend at the time- from a place where electricity routinely goes off as a matter of expectation, and me-accustomed to living in places with no electricity at all, felt disoriented. We joked about how easily we forgot ourselves and all of the ways we know how to function without electricity. Just like that, placed in the context of flipping a switch and trusting that the current would be flowing, we’d become dependent.

Like everyone else (although probably for a shorter period of time) we looked at the dead elevators forgetting the stairs (all 11 narrow flights) existed. We marveled at our useless electric stoves and wondered how we’d cook. We commented on our lack of batteries and flashlights and candles. We were wholly unprepared. 

Right now, most Americans are unprepared. 

We have forsaken house phones for cellular ones, limiting the structural damage necessary for maximum impact. We are tethered to convenience –little boxes of information that light and guide us through the world. I tried to buy a key map last year. Tired of looking at turn-by-turn directions without a context of where I was turning to and from. The people in the stores and gas stations where I searched, looked perplexed and confused. Someone even asked, “Don’t you have a smart phone?” 

Of course I do. But a Gen Xer, not a Millennial, I came of age in a world where everything wasn’t uploaded into the cloud. I straddle the change in times and remember the pre and post digital age. I am close enough to the before and after (technology) to not be too nostalgic or overly and unfairly skeptical. I recognize our technological advances as useful tools. I also recognize them as convenient and not essential.

So I feel the need to throw up at least a whisper of caution. Not because I think the robots are going to revolt circa I, Robot or Battlestar Galactica (even with this recent news story), but because I’m a pragmatist. 

Understanding the strengths and the vulnerabilities of our technological lifestyle doesn’t require a rejection of it. It isn’t necessary to be a Luddite and forsake all of the comforts that technology provides. But on both a micro and a macro level, Americans need to be mindful that the world is filled with uncertainties. And while we shouldn’t live in fear- constantly raising terror alerts until we are numb to the changing color and the threat it implies- we should think about safety.

Safety now looks a little different than it used to. Safety now is hiring the best hackers to protect the secrets we no longer lock away in highly secured buildings, but instead, thrust into strings of 0s and 1s somewhere out in cyberspace. Safety is improving our technological infrastructure as ardently as we should be improving our more tangible infrastructure. Safety now is enjoying the ease of technological living but understanding how to survive without it…if only until the elevators in our really tall buildings start running again.

Anxious others

I don’t know if I was ever a planner of trips; I like to blame my aversion to it on my time in South Africa though. Rural South Africa at that. A place where the best laid plans yielded results not particularly different than no plans at all. Transportation failed, reservations were ignored, business hours deemed irrelevant. I learned to improvise. More importantly, I learned to laugh while improvising. The alternative was much less joyful. I think I began to associate joy with a lack of a cohesive plan, plus there was always an air of surprise to the things I did. Who doesn’t love a surprise?

My current narrative, crafted over the last 15, almost 20 years, is that I learned not to spend energy on something that probably wouldn’t come to fruition. Although, if I really think about it, I have a similar philosophy about deadlines. I could be smart and work on project well in advance of their due dates, but why. That philosophy was part of the reason journalism was a good (if fleeting) fit for me. You spend so much time waiting -hurry up and wait. It worked to my strengths. The flurry of activity when something new is about to happen, and then a lull of navel gazing, and then the slightly nauseating fatigue associated with worry as the deadline approached.

The thing is, I don’t know if I am built to work under deadline or if I simply trained myself into it, either way, I usually trade the turtle’s philosophy of slow and steady for the hare’s procrastination. I’m willing to suffer the consequences for the freedom it provides.

But for some reason my foot loose attitude disturbs other people. People who have nothing to do with the consequences I’ll face. I see it most when I am preparing for a trip. I don’t usually have much angst about preparing for a trip, even to a new country. It isn’t that I don’t worry at all, it isn’t that I don’t know things can go wrong. Actually I assume that something will happen. Something unplanned, some degree of unpleasantness. I just don’t think I can control whatever that unpleasant thing is with additional planning. I also recognize that whatever happens, however horrible in the moment, will probably yield an amazing story after the fact.

In search of the source of the Blue Nile

But I digress…

Other people insert their apprehension into my preparations. It is the oddest reality. 

Friends check up on my planning. Do I have a hotel room? Do I have an itinerary? Have I packed?

I’ve trained my mother over the years. She’s stopped asking me about packing until my trip is literally within a day or two. I don’t doubt that she wants to ask me a week before she actually does- but she already knows the answer. The answer is always “no”.

Peace Corps, 1999, was the last time I packed in advance. And truthfully, even that doesn’t really count. I spent several weeks piling things in the living room – ever higher. Finally, my best friend at the time, came over and looked me in the eyes and asked, “do you need help?”. I almost burst into tears, I was so grateful. I had no idea how to even begin.

She kneeled down beside the pile, held one thing up after the other to see if I wanted to include it and folded it all neatly into my suitcase. I doubt she remembers that. We aren’t friends anymore. But it was a kind and needed gesture. When she was finished I had a suitcase and my father’s Air Force duffle bag loaded with clothes. 

Of course, it was my first trip and I was only thinking about things fitting into a bag not how much the bag weighed. The night before I was actually departing, I had to repack the whole lot, a new pile of things that were discarded and left behind because the whole thing was too heavy to carry.

Ever since then I’ve been a last minute packer. The night before I left for Liberia I had all of my stuff strewn across my sister’s living room floor, her middle daughter asleep across my lap.

Packing at the last minute doesn’t make me anxious. I’ve learned over the years of living in resource poor areas, that although it is sometimes a pain, it is always possible to find what I have forgotten, or at least a reasonable replacement (as long as I have my passport, ticket, and cash/credit card/ATM card). And so I don’t have much angst. 

My calm doesn’t stop other people from having anxiety for me. Wanting me to plan when planning just isn’t my thing. And by thing, I mean it isn’t my preferred method of travel– not that I am unable to do it. When my dad and I went to Peru last year, he was very clear that the planning was on me. And I did. I created a spreadsheet with details about times and money and contact information. I had our days accounted for and possible activities. I handed him his copy and he summarily grinned, folded it, and I never saw it again. He would simply ask me what we were doing next. I guess I got the anti-planning thing honest.

Ultimately, not planning is what calms me down. I have friends and the plan is their balm. The plan is their assurance that things will be ok. But for me, planning is my every day. Planning is my work. Planning is real life. Vacation is a chance to get away from that. To deviate from my script and see what happens. Sometimes that means I spend all day eating a tajine with a shopkeeper in Casablanca after searching out an actual piece of Sandalwood, sometimes that means trudging shin deep through mud and then floating on a papyrus canoe in search of the source of the Blue Nile. And sometimes it means I am stuck, and a little panicked, looking for a way to the Guatemalan village where my language school is located. 

I have learned to take it as it comes…even if no one else seems to appreciate my approach.

Republican state of mind?

He looked at me the way I looked at the guy from this weekend’s car ride. Actually, that isn’t true. He looked at me the way I look at people who said Trayvon Martin shouldn’t have been wearing a hoodie. He looked at me with fatigue and maybe a little bit of derision.

We were at the tail end of a conversation about gentrification. And it seems, where that is concerned, I am the equivalent of a right-wing republican talking about the sanctity of male female marriage and the gift of childbirth. Instead, I was just expressing an opinion urging more nuanced thinking regarding gentrification than what I often see as knee-jerk reactions.

“Us” and “them”. Good and bad. Right and wrong. Resident and interloper. And I’ve written about this before. I’ve expressed the unease I have lumping every new person that comes into a community as a gentrifier…at least when the term gentrification is synonymous with someone who doesn’t belong. 

But my colleague, an older man of color, looked at me with a kind of sadness. Like I am a traitor to the cause. And it threw me. I went inward, trying to sort out my feelings. Trying to see his side. I initiated conversations with other friends who had similar reactions. Not so much the sadness, but irritation and anger. Again, it appeared we were picking teams and I had picked wrong.

Only, even in the midst of the righteous anger about the way things change and the people who are responsible for that change, my friends didn’t disagree with me. Not wholly; hell, not mostly. 

“I know you are right about the ‘us’ vs ‘them’, but sometimes you are angry and you need a place to put your anger.” My friend shrugged. A native of San Francisco she has no love for the techies that have overtaken the Mission. At the same time, she love/hates the new restaurants they have brought with them. 

Everyone seems to want things to change for the better but only if they can stay exactly as they are. And that isn’t how it works. You don’t get new restaurants with the same folks in the same place.

That doesn’t mean I believe that the level of change, the speed of it, is a good thing. It doesn’t mean I think the eviction of families and the skyrocketing cost of living is inevitable and the price of progress. I don’t. It only means that misplaced anger isn’t the route we need to take. Policy is.

My friend argued that policy is made by the rich for the rich. And of course that is true. People don’t hear you until you make them hear you. Uphill battle though it may be, pushing for policy that protects the residents that have been here, paying taxes and making a home of Oakland, has long-term benefits. I’ve got the long stare. I want policy in writing and enforced (with recourse for folks trying to ignore it) so that on cold and rainy days when people are too busy with life to come down to city hall to protest some new development, they are still protected.

I don’t have THE answer. I have some thoughts that might get the conversation started. A tiered pricing structure in every new building, dedicated space for different income levels. Preferred status for long-term residents. All of these suggestions have their benefits and their problems, but they start a constructive conversation that has potential to end in something other than shouting. I’m tired of shouting into the housing I can no longer afford.