"You want the whole story?"
"Whatever parts you think are important."
"It's a Tribal thing."
"I see," the doctor said.
"It's like this," I said. "It used to be that the way you chose your friends was
by finding the most like-minded people you could out of the pool of people who
lived near to you. If you were lucky, you lived near a bunch of people you could
get along with. This was a lot more likely in the olden days, back before, you
know, printing and radio and such. Chances were that you'd grow up so immersed
in the local doctrine that you'd never even think to question it. If you were a
genius or a psycho, you might come up with a whole new way of thinking, and if
you could pull it off, you'd either gather up a bunch of people who liked your
new idea or you'd go somewhere else, like America, where you could set up a
little colony of people who agreed with you. Most of the time, though, people
who didn't get along with their neighbors just moped around until they died."
"Very interesting," the doctor said, interrupting smoothly, "but you were going
to tell us how you ended up here."
"Yeah," Lucy said, "this isn't a history lesson, it's Group. Get to the point."
"I'm getting there," I said. "It just takes some background if you're going to
understand it. Now, once ideas could travel more freely, the chances of you
finding out about a group of people somewhere else that you might get along with
increased. Like when my dad was growing up, if you were gay and from a big city,
chances were that you could figure out where other gay people hung out and go
and --" I waved my hands, "be *gay*, right? But if you were from a small town,
you might not even know that there was such a thing as being gay -- you might
think it was just a perversion. But as time went by, the gay people in the big
cities started making a bigger and bigger deal out of being gay, and since all
the information that the small towns consumed came from big cities, that
information leaked into the small towns and more gay people moved to the big
cities, built little gay zones where gay was normal.
"So back when the New World was forming and sorting out its borders and
territories, information was flowing pretty well. You had telegraphs, you had
the Pony Express, you had thousands of little newspapers that got carried around
on railroads and streetcars and steamers, and it wasn't long before everyone
knew what kind of person went where, even back in Europe and Asia. People
immigrated here and picked where they wanted to live based on what sort of
people they wanted to be with, which ideas they liked best. A lot of it was
religious, but that was just on the surface -- underneath it all was aesthetics.
You wanted to go somewhere where the girls were pretty in the way you understood
prettiness, where the food smelled like food and not garbage, where shops sold
goods you could recognize. Lots of other factors were at play, too, of course --
jobs and Jim Crow laws and whatnot, but the tug of finding people like you is
like gravity. Lots of things work against gravity, but gravity always wins in
the end -- in the end, everything collapses. In the end, everyone ends up with
the people that are most like them that they can find."
I was warming to my subject now, in that flow state that great athletes get into
when they just know where to swing their bat, where to plant their foot. I knew
that I was working up a great rant.
"Fast-forward to the age of email. Slowly but surely, we begin to mediate almost
all of our communication over networks. Why walk down the hallway to ask a
coworker a question, when you can just send email? You don't need to interrupt
them, and you can keep going on your own projects, and if you forget the answer,
you can just open the message again and look at the response. There're all kinds
of ways to interact with our friends over the network: we can play
hallucinogenic games, chat, send pictures, code, music, funny articles, metric
fuckloads of porn... The interaction is high-quality! Sure, you gain three
pounds every year you spend behind the desk instead of walking down the hall to
ask your buddy where he wants to go for lunch, but that's a small price to pay.
"So you're a fish out of water. You live in Arizona, but you're sixteen years
old and all your neighbors are eighty-five, and you get ten billion channels of
media on your desktop. All the good stuff -- everything that tickles you --
comes out of some clique of hyperurban club-kids in South Philly. They're making
cool art, music, clothes. You read their mailing lists and you can tell that
they're exactly the kind of people who'd really appreciate you for who you are.
In the old days, you'd pack your bags and hitchhike across the country and move
to your community. But you're sixteen, and that's a pretty scary step.
"Why move? These kids live online. At lunch, before school, and all night,
they're comming in, talking trash, sending around photos, chatting. Online, you
can be a peer. You can hop into these discussions, play the games, chord with
one hand while chatting up some hottie a couple thousand miles away.
"Only you can't. You can't, because they chat at seven AM while they're getting
ready for school. They chat at five PM, while they're working on their homework.
Their late nights end at three AM. But those are their *local* times, not yours.
If you get up at seven, they're already at school, 'cause it's ten there.
"So you start to f with your sleep schedule. You get up at four AM so you can
chat with your friends. You go to bed at nine, 'cause that's when they go to
bed. Used to be that it was stock brokers and journos and factory workers who
did that kind of thing, but now it's anyone who doesn't fit in. The geniuses and
lunatics to whom the local doctrine tastes wrong. They choose their peers based
on similarity, not geography, and they keep themselves awake at the same time as
them. But you need to make some nod to localness, too -- gotta be at work with
everyone else, gotta get to the bank when it's open, gotta buy your groceries.
You end up hardly sleeping at all, you end up sneaking naps in the middle of the
day, or after dinner, trying to reconcile biological imperatives with cultural
ones. Needless to say, that alienates you even further from the folks at home,
and drives you more and more into the arms of your online peers of choice.
"So you get the Tribes. People all over the world who are really secret agents
for some other time zone, some other way of looking at the world, some other
zeitgeist. Unlike other tribes, you can change allegiance by doing nothing more
that resetting your alarm clock. Like any tribe, they are primarily loyal to
each other, and anyone outside of the tribe is only mostly human. That may sound
extreme, but this is what it comes down to.
"Tribes are *agendas*. Aesthetics. Ethos. Traditions. Ways of getting things
done. They're competitive. They may not all be based on time-zones. There are
knitting Tribes and vampire fan-fiction Tribes and Christian rock tribes, but
they've always existed. Mostly, these tribes are little more than a sub-culture.
It takes time-zones to amplify the cultural fissioning of fan-fiction or
knitting into a full-blown conspiracy. Their interests are commercial,
industrial, cultural, culinary. A Tribesman will patronize a fellow Tribesman's
restaurant, or give him a manufacturing contract, or hire his taxi. Not because
of xenophobia, but because of homophilia: I know that my Tribesman's taxi will
conduct its way through traffic in a way that I'm comfortable with, whether I'm
in San Francisco, Boston, London or Calcutta. I know that the food will be
palatable in a Tribal restaurant, that a book by a Tribalist will be a good
read, that a gross of widgets will be manufactured to the exacting standards of
my Tribe.
"Like I said, though, unless you're at ground zero, in the Tribe's native time
zone, your sleep sched is just *raped*. You live on sleepdep and chat and secret
agentry until it's second nature. You're cranky and subrational most of the
time. Close your eyes on the freeway and dreams paint themselves on the back of
your lids, demanding their time, almost as heavy as gravity, almost as
remorseless. There's a lot of flaming and splitting and vitriol in the Tribes.
They're more fractured than a potsherd. Tribal anthropologists have built up
incredible histories of the fissioning of the Tribes since they were first
recognized -- most of 'em are online; you can look 'em up. We stab each other in
the back routinely and with no more provocation than a sleepdep hallucination.
"Which is how I got here. I'm a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe. We're
centered around New York, but we're ramified up and down the coast, Boston and
Toronto and Philly, a bunch of Montreal Anglos and some wannabes in upstate New
York, around Buffalo and Schenectady. I was doing Tribal work in London, serving
the Eastern Standard Agenda, working with a couple of Tribesmen, well, one
Tribesman and my girlfriend, who I thought was unaffiliated. Turns out, though,
that they're both double agents. They sold out to the Pacific Daylight Tribe,
lameass phonies out in LA, slick Silicon Valley bizdev sharks, pseudo hipsters
in San Franscarcity. Once I threatened to expose them, they set me up, had me
thrown in here."
I looked around proudly, having just completed a real fun little excursion
through a topic near and dear to my heart. Mount Rushmore looked back at me,
stony and bovine and uncomprehending.
"Baby," Lucy said, rolling her eyes again, "you need some new meds."
"Could be," I said. "But this is for real. Is there a comm on the ward? We can
look it up together."
"Oh, *that*'all prove it, all right. Nothing but truth online."
"I didn't say that. There're peer-reviewed articles about the Tribes. It was a
lead story on the CBC's social science site last year."
"Uh huh, sure. Right next to the sasquatch videos."
"I'm talking about the CBC, Lucy. Let's go look it up."
Lucy mimed taking an invisible comm out of her cleavage and prodding at it with
an invisible stylus. She settled an invisible pair of spectacles on her nose and
nodded sagely. "Oh yeah, sure, really interesting stuff."
I realized that I was arguing with a crazy person and turned to the doctor. "You
must have read about the Tribes, right?"
The doctor acted as if he hadn't heard me. "That's just fascinating, Art. Thank
you for sharing that. Now, here's a question I'd like you to think about, and
maybe you can tell us the answer tomorrow: What are the ways that your friends
-- the ones you say betrayed you -- used to show you how much they respected you
and liked you? Think hard about this. I think you'll be surprised by the
conclusions you come to."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Just what I said, Art. Think hard about how you and your friends interacted and
you'll see that they really like you."
"Did you hear what I just said? Have you heard of the Tribes?"
"Sure, sure. But this isn't about the Tribes, Art. This is about you and --" he
consulted his comm, "Fede and Linda. They care about you a great deal and
they're terribly worried about you. You just think about it. Now," he said,
recrossing his legs, "Fatima, you told us yesterday about your mother and I
asked you to think about how *she* feels. Can you tell the group what you found
out?"
But Fatima was off in med-land, eyes glazed and mouth hanging slack. Manuel
nudged her with his toe, then, when she failed to stir, aimed a kick at her
shin. The doctor held a hand out and grabbed Manuel's slippered toe. "That's all
right, let's move on to Lucy."
I tuned out as Lucy began an elaborate and well-worn rant about her eating
habits, prodded on by the doctor. The enormity of the situation was coming home
to me. I couldn't win. If I averred that Fede and Linda were my boon companions,
I'd still be found incompetent -- after all, what competent person threatens his
boon companions? If I stuck to my story, I'd be found incompetent, and medicated
besides, like poor little Fatima, zombified by the psychoactive cocktail. Either
way, I was stuck.
Stuck on the roof now, and it's getting very uncomfortable indeed. Stuck because
I am officially incompetent and doomed and damned to indefinite rest on the
ward. Stuck because every passing moment here is additional time for the
hamsters to run their courses in my mind, piling regret on worry.
Stuck because as soon as I am discovered, I will be stupified by the meds,
administered by stern and loving and thoroughly disappointed doctors. I still
haven't managed to remember any of their names. They are interchangeable, well
shod and endowed with badges on lanyards and soothing and implacable and
entirely unappreciative of my rhetorical skills.
Stuck. The sheet-metal chimneys stand tall around the roof, unevenly distributed
according to some inscrutable logic that could only be understood with the
assistance of as-built drawings, blueprints, mechanical and structural
engineering diagrams. Surely though, they are optimized to wick hot air out of
the giant brick pile's guts and exhaust it.
I move to the one nearest the stairwell. It is tarred in place, its apron lined
with a double-row of cinderblocks that have pools of brackish water and cobwebs
gathered in their holes. I stick my hand in the first and drag it off the apron.
I repeat it.
Now the chimney is standing on its own, in the middle of a nonsensical
cinderblock-henge. My hands are dripping with muck and grotendousness. I wipe
them off on the pea gravel and then dry them on my boxer shorts, then hug the
chimney and lean forward. It gives, slowly, slightly, and springs back. I give
it a harder push, really give it my weight, but it won't budge. Belatedly, I
realize that I'm standing on its apron, trying to lift myself along with the
chimney.
I take a step back and lean way forward, try again. It's awkward, but I'm making
progress, bent like an ell, pushing with my legs and lower back. I feel
something pop around my sacrum, know that I'll regret this deeply when my back
kacks out completely, but it'll be all for naught if I don't keep! on! pushing!
Then, suddenly, the chimney gives, its apron swinging up and hitting me in the
knees so that I topple forward with it, smashing my chin on its hood. For a
moment, I lie down atop it, like a stupefied lover, awestruck by my own inanity.
The smell of blood rouses me. I tentatively reach my hand to my chin and feel
the ragged edge of a cut there, opened from the tip and along my jawbone almost
to my ear. The cut is too fresh to hurt, but it's bleeding freely and I know
it'll sting like a bastard soon enough. I go to my knees and scream, then scream
again as I rend open my chin further.
My knees and shins are grooved with deep, parallel cuts, gritted with gravel and
grime. Standing hurts so much that I go back to my knees, holler again at the
pain in my legs as I grind more gravel into my cuts, and again as I tear my face
open some more. I end up fetal on my side, sticky with blood and weeping softly
with an exquisite self-pity that is more than the cuts and bruises, more than
the betrayal, more than the foreknowledge of punishment. I am weeping for
myself, and my identity, and my smarts over happiness and the thought that I
would indeed choose happiness over smarts any day.
Too damned smart for my own good.
14.
"I just don't get it," Fede said.
Art tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice. "It's simple," he said.
"It's like a car radio with a fast-forward button. You drive around on the
MassPike, and your car automatically peers with nearby vehicles. It grabs the
current song on someone else's stereo and streamloads it. You listen to it. If
you don't hit the fast-forward button, the car starts grabbing everything it can
from the peer, all the music on the stereo, and cues it up for continued play.
Once that pool is exhausted, it queries your peer for a list of its peers -- the
cars that it's getting its music from -- and sees if any of them are in range,
and downloads from them. So, it's like you're exploring a taste-network, doing
an automated, guided search through traffic for the car whose owner has
collected the music you most want to listen to."
"But I hate your music -- I don't want to listen to the stuff on your radio."
"Fine. That's what the fast-forward button is for. It skips to another car and
starts streamloading off of its drive." Fede started to say something, and Art
held up his hand. "And if you exhaust all the available cars, the system
recycles, but asks its peers for files collected from other sources. You might
hate the songs I downloaded from Al, but the songs I got from Bennie are right
up your alley.
"The war-drivers backstop the whole system. They've got the biggest collections
on the freeway, and they're the ones most likely to build carefully thought-out
playlists. They've got entire genres -- the whole history of the blues, say,
from steel cylinders on -- on their drives. So we encourage them. When you go
through a paypoint -- a toll booth -- we debit you for the stuff that you didn't
fast-forward, the stuff you listened to and kept. Unless, that is, you've got
more than, say, 10,000 songs onboard. Then you go free. It's counterintuitive, I
know, but just look at the numbers."
"OK, OK. A radio with a fast-forward button. I think I get it."
"But?"
"But who's going to want to use this? It's unpredictable. You've got no
guarantee you'll get the songs you want to hear."