Peace in the pod

Twice this year I have been victim to identity loss. Last May during graduation rush one night, I stuck my cell phone in the back of my pants and wandered around the bar, not realizing that my pants had no such back pockets. Only too late at post-celebratory munchies did I notice a lacking heftiness on my buttock. I scampered across the street, past skidding taxis and back to the bar where it was nowhere to be found, but already as I was searching, I thought I felt this zen calm wash over me – so I’ve lost all my numbers, my contacts, and my only-in-Asia Nokia phone. It’s OK. For a short moment between now and till I get a replacement, I will be unencumbered by the demands of daily life. This is a gift, a stab at my own corner escape button, where my every excuse for failure and avoidance is defaulted to, " I lost my phone."

Everyone loses their phone once in a while, it is part of the process of regeneration and upgrading and black market sales. Phone numbers, while an important function of one’s daily transactions, are essentially only an assigned identity, and they can be traded and switched without much sentimental currency attached. Phone numbers are easy to recollect, as long as you know someone who knows someone, and invariably everyone does.

One’s computer, on the other hand, is a creature of intense personal cultivation. More than a communication device it is an external storehouse of our dreams and desires, memories and madness, secrets and solitude, past and possibility. Last week the desktop on my PowerBook made a gurgling sound, spun its wheels uselessly and put on a sad face before disappearing itself. The hard drive suddenly decided, at the ripe old age of two, to retire to the Bermuda triangle of electronics. As if it got fed up with my archival abuse, my constant mainlining of illegal music, overweight photos, pirated software, not to mention a ton of bad writing and several versions of resumes that have yet to attract a prospective employer, cluttered all over the wallpaper like a 2D reflection of my actual room.

If I had learned anything from Sex and the City, it was definitely not from the episode when Carrie’s first-generation PowerBook bemoaned the very same tragedy. Against all reason, logic and warning, I did not back dat ting up. Three hundred dollars in the poorhouse later, I have my computer back, but it’s just a ghost in a titanium shell. The shiny new hard drive the hipster nerd technicians at Tek-Serve installed in my coffee-stained laptop was a tabula rasa, and so was I.

Prop Culture

The youth generations of late have successively been labeled according to the technology they are associated with, and not with any defining zeitgeist or collective inner turmoil or dominant creative expression of the day. Generation X, perhaps the last meaningful marker of a decade, gave way to the MTV generation, then the last-two-letters-of-the-alphabet generation (who are they anyway?) and from there everything became a marketing grab of the banal and revolutionary. Reality TV addicts feast on celebreality fodder; blogorrhea for bored office workers; text message massacres; invasion of the podpeople; I love the‘80s/’90s reviva-lists; pomosexuals; viral remix clones; all wave-jumping on an ocean of digital delirium and a Spam sandwich.

The New York City subway, subterranean second home of the rambling kind, is also a gathering space for paused podophiles –those amblers cloaked in an ambient cocoon of MP3, their omnipresent white ear buds twining into a secret place. When the iNano was innocuously released to the frothing masses who reactively shrieked "I wanna be updated," it only reconfirmed that this handheld music player was more than just another sterling page from the book of Jobs, but the incarnation of a defining moment.

Some of the complaints people have projected on to the current version of youth are that they have no focus, no backbone, no rallying desire to change the world. A recent Vanity Fair essay contest posed the question of what is on the mind of American youth. The accompanying photos seem to imply that yesteryear’s youth were all anti-war do-gooder types, protesters, activists, people engaged with the world; they also implied that today’s kids are zonked out on pharmaceuticals, drift-less media junkies trapped in a 24-hour party, people disengaged with the world. This is both true and unfair.

I’ve met young people who spent time in the Peace Corps, lived in Africa where they lost 40 lbs and gained a few indescribable parasites, others who willingly left comfort and cable TV to hunker down in off-Lonely Planet places like the mountains of Uzbekistan or the dark heart of Congo. Then again I know a lot of people who don’t have that inclination, but it also doesn’t make them ignorant or uncaring about the world outside their social orbit. These are the same kind of people who rallied and raved at EDSA 2, but come the next morally bankrupt establishment, only burnout is in the soul, and you can’t blame them.

Now there is a multiplicity of modes for being, a thousand different ways to rouse your rabble. That people’s attention spans have shortened significantly and only operate better when on multi-tasking mode. The shifts come much quicker. We are a culture of rupture and interruption. We can’t even slap a label on this generation now because it’s so in flux. We try to live in the moment, but once we figure things out, that moment is already passé.

Bobos and tweeners caught in the throes of their quarter-life crises, all these catchwords were created to capture the palpable feeling of je ne sais quoi, a result of those who lose their bourgeois de vivre. Click-wheeling back to the iPod, it is this little portable music-player that has come to stand in for our effervescent moods, our downloadable interests, our party shuffles. The iShuffle in particular symbolizes its users most accurately. Not that life is simply random, but that we allow it to be, in fact, we morbidly desire it to be. We shuffle from one degree, one job, one relationship, one belief, one city, one country to the next (all the while still partially dependent on parental indulgence) because, we say, we’re keeping our options open, we’re experimenting, we don’t want to settle and be shackled down. The truth is, there’s less of a defined path, what our parents may have seen much more clearly before, it’s not really there before us. We see bare wisps of paths, trailing into the future like smoke.

‘I-Nako’

After locking myself in the apartment for a few days, trying to inject my blank computer with a personality and a history with any bits I could salvage from the floating world wide web (think Replicants and their artificial memories, am I a Deckard?), I had to hand it to my iPod for being the one constant, a conduit between old and new. I managed to transfer most of my music collection back to the laptop, and in so doing managed to keep those pieces of myself that I have developed latently, like my fondness for the Waterboys (and I grudgingly have to thank Mandy Moore for the throwback), bootlegs from monsters of indie Modest Mouse, and even nostalgia pieces from Debbie Gibson to Weezer. I could have chosen to build again from the ground up, like a person with amnesia. But we’re not an amnesiac generation. Our seemingly random shuffles and missteps are not based on denial or forgetting or wholesale ignorance – maybe just an enlightened confusion. So we have flashes, we don’t see the plan. But really, there is no plan.