Future Rage: Bubbles, Fuckwads, And The Illusion Of Control

Here's professional bubble-smith Sterling Johnson on Stinson Beach last month, blowing giant bubbles as children chase after them.

If you were to ask me to name one thing that progressives and Tea Partiers, Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis would all agree is a nice, positive, peaceful image, something no one in or near their right mind could argue about, I'd probably say blowing giant rainbow-colored bubbles on the beach as children chase after them.

Or would have said that before today.

Because if you look at the YouTube page where this video is posted, you will see that the comments on this peaceful, lovely, utterly uncontroversial vignette have degraded into a bitter flame war.

@WTFYouPoser ur profile says u r 24, so u really? must be just an idiot. @magus424 and @sterlingjo told u the same thing that he was being sarcastic 

@WTFYouPoser the reason y u must b really young, or just an idiot from planet retard, is cuz u r not old enough or wise enough to realize that he was being sarcastic!! This is not the first time someone has done this, I have seen this before! i'm pretty sure if u are? able 2 comment on youtube, that means u r at least passed the elementary school phase, almost everybody in this country that went 2 school did some type of experiment with bubbles where u make bubbles with tied string or the other 

@WTFYouPoser lmoa! how old r u? if u r under 14 then just disregard this. I am just guessing u r young by the way u spelled stupid, its not 'stoopid' sweetie. I can understand if you were trying to shorten a word or phrase but u were not, u actually added an extra letter. I had to address this? issue, cuz if ur gonna come at me please make sure for your prides sake, that u r not an idiot from planet retard!!

The video, as I say, has been up for a month. One can only imagine how far it will descend into the depths of ad hominem hostility over the next 10 years.

This might just be an object lesson in what's known as John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

An oft-quoted research paper from John Suler in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior explains that the insular and usually solitary experience of being online bypasses the brain's "social circuitry" and brings out the worst in us:

Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure.

Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming. The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming. This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track. 

Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward. 

The Journal of the Association for Psychological Science tells us that road rage is more or less the same thing — an artificial sense of isolation which also isolates us from our frontal cortex:

It turns out that all of these actions can be fostered by the feeling of security generated by the locked doors of your car. Psychologists assert that drivers may develop a sense of anonymity and detachment in the confines of their vehicles. And tinted car windows may be more than a safety hazard. They may even further detach drivers from the situation during an aggressive incident (Whitlock, 1971; Ellison-Potter, Bell Deffenbacher, 2001).

All of which may be true. Yet there are plenty of instances where this hostility expresses itself in public, without the benefit of locked doors or a computer session's isolation. Thanks to flight attendant Steven Slater and his exit, stage left, down the airplane's emergency escape slide, we've all heard of "air rage."

And now comes desk rage, too.

In my opinion all these flames and rages are manifold expressions of a single underlying psychological reaction to our modern age. Call it future rage.

My theory is that the contemporary lifestyle's many creature comforts, conveniences and technological enhancements comprise an environment so alien that it's beginning to bypass brain circuitry designed for a far more tactile and visceral world. The sense of control that we have over our world — push-button, air-conditioned, connected and mobile — may be illusory. I believe people feel, if less than entirely consciously, that they don't have control over much of anything.

That brings with it disconnectedness, and dislocation. Trapped in cars, in the flying tubes that are planes, in the particle-board boxes of office cubicles, even in the wireless harnesses of our mobile device-enhanced lifestyle, we are profoundly cut off from our tribe, our earth, ourselves. We lose the moderating, centering, grounding influence brought by those primal contexts. And the more we cut off we feel, the more we tweet, update statuses, comment, flame, honk, flip the bird, jump down the emergency slide, act out.

The pace of today's life just makes some people frustrated, people say, some a little too frustrated.

Perhaps. But I really think on some level it's a form of panic at a world that's gotten away from us.

Afterthought — Some readers may be too young to remember The Prisoner, the surreal and sublimely paranoid 1967 television series from the BBC. A secret agent (Patrick McGoohan) is kidnapped after he tries to retire from the MI5 and is taken to a deceptively placid island resort called "The Village". Comfortable settings and constant amusements thinly mask the individual's complete lack of control or identity. (McGoohan's character, now called Number 6, screams "I am a man, not a number!")

There are no fences, walls or guards around The Village. Those who attempt to escape and get back to where they came from (or who otherwise assert their individuality) are hunted down, surrounded and suffocated by Rover — a giant bubble. (Played with great conviction by a weather balloon.) At time time, a lot of people probably shrugged off the bubble-as-Gestapo metaphor as just another drug-addled image from the producers.

But in thinking about how a beautiful, fragile, giant bubble on a beach could be a vessel for rage and, ultimately, dislocation, I remembered Rover, and how that unpoppable, implacable bubble scared the crap out of me.

Park Tango

Took a recovery ride through the park, closed to cars on Sundays. On the mountain bike, spinning furiously in a low gear, working the lactic acid out of my legs. Drifting along with rollerbladers, kids on training wheels, cocker spaniels chasing tennis balls. Cut over to the concourse between the Academy of Sciences and the De Young Museum, where the dreamily convulsive strains of vintage tango music wheezed from an underpowered PA. Under the bandshell, dozens of couples turned, slid, dipped, stopped, all with the utmost gravity. Korean couples, Irish couples, Hispanic couples...Russian men and Chinese women, blacks and Filipinos, young couples with 42 piercings between them, couples who had plainly just met, thrown together by the tango. Astor Piazzola and his bandoneon in fierce mono. The halting scrape of shoes on a wooden stage.

Shooting the curl and displaying my pancreas.

A friend encourages me to write. Which I do as a writer/editor for hire, with the frowning, clinical remove of a pathologist taking out a dipsomaniac's liver. But she wants me to write write. Like, you know, blog, journal, reach inside myself, mulch fingers around in lymphy interstices, grab hold of my innards and put them, dripping, on display.

Take my spleen—please.

She has a point—beyond books on the institutionalization of user experience, zingy headlines about candy bars or the occasional email of apology (it's late, I don't have the bandwidth, I can't make it to the bar-mitzvah)—I write nothing. I sit inert, a ball of Pillsbury chocolate chip cookie dough, filled with sweetness, potential, and complex, nutritionally useless chemical chains. I conceptualize farces, lampoons, burlesques; elegiac, generation-defining novels. None of them happen. Nor is any of what I do write—or think about writing, more to the point—in any way self-revelatory.

To be fair, in those rare moments when I do I leave my pen unsupervised, well, boy howdy, it weighs fulminant, self-directed invectives, bilious screeds aimed at a failure to write, sort out my debts, get out of my parents' attic, get the girl, get on with life, become something. Which, OK, fine, it's a fair cop…but that's an hour wasted. Necessarily wasted, mind you, because you have to paddle out there, straddle your board and and wait out a few sets in a seaweed patch before you catch a wave. Not to get all blond-dreadlocked about it, but eventually it will come along, wave, topic, whatever, so you write/paddle furiously, hop on at just the right moment and then it just, like, happens. Ride it in to the beach.

I'm not winning any surf contests here, or writing contests, and still may not be offering up much for the organ harvesters. My critics—God love 'em, I have critics!—will still call me shallow, evasive, emotionally dishonest. Whatevs. I say that with the greatest love and respect. But once you're on top of it, see, sliding down the face or—best yet—full-on tubed, it's all the same. The deepest longings, darkest moments and a tidal swell of other connections, transpositions and imaginings are all so much fluid sliding up and over you in a dark crest of knowingness, form flashing bright along its edge and sweeping up truth, unreality, mind, body, now and an ever-receding then into an implacable thing and depositing you on the sand

and fuck it's 5:00 and what have you really accomplished?

So it's a little complex.

Blowing the Wogs Out of the Water

I found myself cheering on the Indian Navy as it sunk a pirate ship during the piracy crisis of late '08 (never mind that the boat turned out to be a Thai fishing vessel) and thinking about how much it would cost to put Blackwater guys with RPGs on every ship or to simply slap a 5" gun turret on the freighters. About blowing the kaffirs out of the water and sending them scurrying back to shore. And then I think about why I'm so eager to take the fight to these Red Sea raiders, these brown buccaneers. Isn't it a form of racism? Is there anything that makes us different from stuffy peers in a London club in the 1900s, fulminating about the brazen wogs (Sepoys, Boxers, Afghans, Zulus) and how they need the taste of good English iron to put them in their place?

Could it be that with our own empire crumbling, the industrialized world going to hell in a handbasket, the American economy settling into its own dust, that we approach the piracy problem with a special verve? Like the tyrannical schoolyard bully with the abusive father and the alcoholic mother?

A bad political haircut.



From an aesthetic standpoint, Communism was without a doubt the least appealing political system, like, ever. Other than the Russian Constructivists, whose stylistic forays never quite meshed with the industrial and social imperatives of the moment and fell into disfavor, the style of Communism -- Socialist Realism -- was always a bad look. Cloaking the aspirations and esprit of whole societies the way a big, badly made, ill-fitting suit hides a good physique, social realism gave Communist countries a shambolic image redolent of old potatoes, body odor and stale cheese. The Soviet bloc style was the aesthetic projection of a sodden, Orwellian reality: what future you will have will be without joy.

A friend has just returned from Hungary, where all the Soviet-era statuary that littered Budapest were gathered up and stuck in Szoborpark ("Memento Park"), a desolate spot on the far edge of the city. There they moulder and tarnish and collect bird droppings, unseen by all but the most crusty, die-hard, party loyalists.....beribboned old functionaries looking up at Lenin and gumming silently in a thin, late afternoon snow.

Heed the Call of Vigorous Commerce!

What is it about the Victorian broadside that so pleases me? Is it simply nostalgia? Portly, vested, mutton-chopped America in the Gilded Age, relentlessly optimistic and vigorous in pursuit of its Manifest Destiny? Mustachioed lawmen eyeing dipsomaniacal pistoleros across dirt streets choked with longhorns? Or perhaps the self-assured, hearth-fire coziness of the British Empire—Sherlock Holmes on the case, the Hindoos subdued, the labouring classes mindful of their place.

Or is it instead the sheer hysteria of the medium? Overblown, stentorian exhortations and adumbrations - "LIFT HIGH THE SHINING CUP OF ENTERPRISE FOR ALL TO SIP!" "SMALL INFRACTIONS, SEVERELY PUNISHED!! A DEFENESTRATION OF PETTY THIEVES IN THE STRAND A FORTNIGHT HENCE!" A zillion different fonts outpointing and outserifing each other.


It resonates with my own, overwrought rhetoric. If I only could, I would post each blog entry in 15 different wood type styles, each one redolent of horse urine, sagebrush, cool granite banks and the sweet cedar of freshly-built gallows.

Surrealist Journalism - A Post-Structuralist Critique and Meta-Textual Dialogue

[Mark wrote:]

Interesting, funny, disturbing and strange. Morbid yet opaque. Piquant yet clairvoyant.

Here is my assessment:

1. It’s an ’88.

2. I have bad posture?

3. My eyes are dead ? ? Gee...thanks.

4. I have latent violence? Well yes I guess I do, but it’s only about scum, assholes and criminals.

5. The front is seats are cloth, not vinyl, and there are two seats. Yours and mine.

6. The impression I have of your brother is that he’s a heartless, soulless, uneducated, cigarette-smoking proto-serial killer. Is that accurate?

7. Have you ever thought of writing surrealist fiction?

[Doug wrote:]

No, the actual Mark was not slouching, nor were his eyes dead. The actual Mark has little if anything to do with our story. The Mark of the story, however, is a cold, hard man, a man of action, a man who drives a cop car and has seen the bad side of the world. He is a man qualified to cut through the crap. He calls life as he sees it, and he sees it with clear, hard eyes. The rose tint wore off long ago.

His slouch is a statement -- a strategy. Cigarettes, while implied, were at no point stated.

The Dodge Diplomat of the story is an '86 with vinyl bench seats. And the Doug of the story (wait, he is never named, let us call him the model narrator) may end up in the back seat, behind the prisoner grille. Which, by the way, the Diplomat of the story will have.

Anyone who knows you will think this is funny, anyone who doesn't will think you are world-wise, impressive -- and dangerous. Umberto Eco will write an essay about "The Layers of Mark". A course on Mark Gorney vis á vis Mark Gorney: Sémiotiques Syncrétiques will be taught at Université Toulouse.