The Revolution will be Analog

In the smoking ruins of the internet

I just returned from a week teaching teenage writers, which I have done every summer since I was barely 22. It’s always been an inspiring, community-filled week which gives me the strength to keep going in the lonely work of art-making. This week was a little different. I was exhausted. It was a million degrees. The AC in my classroom kept going out.

The world is exhausted too. And everything keeps going out.

I had to make a stop at the small town drugstore for some items I’d forgotten. The shelves were lined with yellow sale stickers, so many they blocked the items, and a stranger and I joked we couldn’t see anything. Except it wasn’t a joke. I had to wait in line for a self-checkout. All but one machine was broken. They kept beeping, spitting out receipts for no one. No human was around to help.

We live in hell, I thought.

I remember in the late 1990s when that drugstore wasn’t a chain. It had a long soda counter at the back with stools that spun and you could order old-fashioned fountain drinks like brown cows and phosphates. It was the first time I had seltzer, which I would fall in love with later when I lived in New York. One summer I tried to order everything, one drink a day. I don’t remember how far I got into the menu. I think I ran out of money first.

Photo by Daniel von Appen on Unsplash

I’ve never felt so nostalgic for my youth until recently. What I’m yearning for is a time with bicycles, with pay phones, with VHS—and namely, without personal screens.

A big feeling I remember from my adolescence was worry. How am I getting home? Who’s going to give me a ride?

But I also remember awe at the hugeness of everything, its possibility. I thought the world would open up like a meadow. Instead it seems to be narrowing like a road. Unmaintained, the dirt and fallen branches are taking over, and there’s barely enough room to walk along the cracked and broken asphalt.

No ice control read the sign at the start of the country road near where my son was born in Appalachia. No control reads the road herding us all to the end.

The more that happens with AI, the more it’s driving me deeper into the woods, I told a new friend recently. The more remote the cabin in my mind is getting. And that’s my answer. Like Galadriel, I will remove myself. That’s always been the plan, as much as I have one. To end up in a tiny house or trailer or cabin somewhere wild with trees, solar, a water supply, a big vegetable and herbal medicine garden. And the most dangerous thing of all: a whole bunch of books.

Because, as always, my high school students did bring the hope, the big one.

They read.

Right now, reading a book is a revolutionary act, one told me. My students barely used phones or computers all week. No one “wrote” an AI “poem.” No one asked the machine a stupid question at the expense of an entire bottle of water.

When I expressed my surprise at this to my son, who is 14, he in turn was aghast at me. Mom, a huge portion of my generation hates AI, he told me. We know it’s stupid, it’s wrong, and it’s ruined the internet.

In the smoking ruins of the internet, the 14, 15, and 16 year-olds have turned to paperbacks. They shut their laptops and ask for pencils and paper. They say they don’t have Insta.

There is hope. Hope is analog, just like the revolution. Hope is a return: to doing things ourselves and for each other. To writing by hand. To reading books. To repairing items when they break rather than getting more new, cheap junk. To buying used, from a time when clothes and machines were of a higher quality—like my favorite appliance: a vintage, butter yellow Kitchen Aid food processor which cost me a whopping $10 at a thrift store.

They told me I could take it back if it didn’t work. It does work, beautifully.

Why is my next novel set in the 1990s? I guess it was the last time I believed things might get better. But also, I believe it is the way forward. To go on we have to go back. The youngest generation is already there, waiting for us to get a clue.

News

I’m excited to announce my latest novel DUST is finalist in both the High Plains International Book Awards and the Ohio Book Awards. You can vote for DUST in the Reader’s Choice category for the Ohio Book Awards here. It’s free and just takes a minute.