Why do I want to write about Kenneth Goldsmith and Sheila Heti and Social Media and The Afterlife? Cause they all add up to this really hot sweaty tangled love story. With a surprise ending. Here, come with me…
I’ve been running along this intellectual trail for a few months. It’s got some awesome leaps and feel-good views. It starts with Kenneth Goldsmith. He’s the most interesting writer I’ve encountered in the past few years — since Grad School I think? (Although DFW, Dave Hickey and Carl Wilson totally stand out since then.) Goldsmith exists for me in that pantheon of Western thinkers who helped me reach my current state of understanding of the world. (Along with Foucault and Rorty and Baudrillard and a dozen others — you know who they are.) Uncreative Writing is not an easy book; it’s a little wacky at times, sometimes a smidge boring, but so original, so totally worth reading. Please, go read it. Especially if you were an English or Philosophy major. Really it’s for anyone who likes having their brain re-wired once in a while. But his book is just a jumping off point for this essay.
I’ll start like this:
In Diane Johnson’s Nov 2012 review in The New York Review of Books of Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? she writes:
“Their talks are amusing, candid, fast, relevant, the minimalist opposites of old-timey, stolid writers like, say, Thomas Mann, with whom they share some concerns — art, anxiety, the solitude of the self — and add some new ones just for us, especially issues around ‘communication.’ For someone living in the era of Facebook, lack of communication, not making yourself known is viewed as tragic or at least, as they put it, ‘retarded.'”
I love that part. That for us, living in the Facebook era, “not making yourself known is viewed as tragic” — or better — “retarded.” Let me repeat. Not making yourself known is absolutely stupidly “retarded.” It’s just a fact. Something we have to live with. An absolute truth. Like gravity and the speed of light. Right? Anyway, this is actually the place where I will end this essay. So I’m going to leave it there for a minute.
It’s a strange(?) coincidence that one of the reviews (“Praise for”) of Sheila Heti’s novel — printed on the back cover, the last quote, at the bottom — is from our very own Kenneth Goldsmith.
He writes this endorsement of her book:
“The most candid fictionalized memoir ever written…I predict Sheila Heti’s book will continue to be read for 600 years, not just for its sex (which can be found elsewhere), but as a picture of artistic and literary North America in the first two decades of this century.”
Wow! Really? 600 years? It’s fucking fantastic praise. Who wouldn’t want it said about your book that it will be read 600 years from now? (Weirdly, why 600?, not 500 or 1000? What’s with that number? Maybe Bryan can ask Kenny next time they hang out. Perhaps, is that how long ago the printing press was invented?) So there, there, on the last page (the actual back) of Heti’s novel, in the very last sentence, there is Goldsmith with his review and his name and his book’s title Uncreative Writing. Those are literally the last two words of her book. Uncreative Writing. So let’s go there. To Kenny G’s book.
One of the things I like most about Goldsmith is the final chapter, or the Afterword, of his book Uncreative Writing. It is not the best chapter. By far. It’s not even the fifth or sixth best chapter. (Fwiw, there are twelve chapters plus an afterword.) But it explores a topic that I find dear. The future. He gets a little unexpectedly predictive. And starts imagining what our future will look like someday. Kind of like he did with that review of Sheila Heti and the 600 years and all. But mind you, he’s discussing the future of writing.
Basically what he imagines for literature is this. In the future, writing will be produced by machines for machines (Seriously?). He makes a good argument though, citing other authors, that the future of literature will not be written by humans. That some day computers will write “literary productions” deployed for and “readable only by other bots.” He predicts a day when there is an end to human-produced literature. And in announcing such a stunning and uncomfortable future for literature — basically an end to literature as we all love and adore it in its present form — he is sweet, self-deprecating and circumspect and says things like this:
“These predictions make me feel old-fashioned. I’m part of a bridge generation, raised on old media yet in love with and immersed in the new. A younger generation accepts these conditions as just another part of the world: they mix oil paint while Photoshopping and scour flea markets for vintage vinyl while listening to their iPods. The don’t feel the need to distinguish the way I do. I’m still blinded by the web. I can hardly believe it exists. At worst, my cyberutopianism will sound as dated in a few years as jargon from the Summer of Love does today.”
He is a self-conscious and melancholy adapter (like the rest of us) to a barely imaginable future of computing and a totally incomprehensible version of self-ness.
Which brings me around to one more writer. Another futurist. Good ole Ray Kurzweil. If you guys don’t recall, he wrote a book a few years ago called The Singularity is Near in which he predicts 
that in the next 40 years or so, in our lifetime, that computers will reach a point of such devastating memory and power that they will be able to store and enact an individual’s very mind. We will at that point reach an event he names “the singularity” where humans will attain a version of immortality. Our mind will forever be stored on a computer somewhere to be re-uploaded as needed. (I’ve written about him before here.) He also predicts that biotechnology will keep up and provide self-healing, self-youthing bodies for us. And the computer versions of our minds will be back-ups in case of accidents that destroy the original body and mind. Sounds pretty rad to me. Immortality. It also sounds like the predictions of a long line of loony optimist prophets that goes back for centuries — millenia? And his book is terribly written and unreadable at times and it’s like 800(?!) pages long. For me, it’s kind of a joke to bring up Kurzweil in conversation. He requires a bit of ironic body language and knowing glances before you can really talk about his ideas. But still, no one else has laid out a vision of the future quite as clear and confident (and weirdly believable) as he has.
AND, Google saw something in him too. And a few months ago they hired him to be their Director of Engineering. So there’s that. But still, he’s kind of a PT Barnum of immortality. And this year he published a new book called How to Create a Mind: the Secret of Human Thought Revealed which is just a terrible, terrible book and should never have been published. I wish I never bought it. Please don’t read it! But still, once again, he is writing about exactly that subject which matters so much in our possible evolution towards immortality. We really do have to figure out how to create a mind.
But in the mean time, I’m stuck with Sheila Heti and that quote about how we just don’t exist unless we are making ourselves known on the internet. Is it true? Really? And does our afterlife depend on our internet existence? Because until the day comes that they can fully replicate an individual’s mind on a computer (which I do kinda believe can happen someday, maybe quite longer than 40 years though) there will be a lot of versions of life extension software filling in the void. And this is where my brain is stuck lately. With this frustrating dumb-ass question. Does my afterlife fullness depend on my current day-to-day (hour-to-hour) internet activity?
When they start advancing the current primitive versions of software that absorb all of a person’s online postings and writings and deploy them after we are dead as a version of us, will that be the day? Will Facebook become the first most powerful corporation of the afterlife? Or will it be Google? Because our afterlife avatars will be a combination of everything we have said and everything we have searched for. The day is quickly coming where dead people will continue as a version of their online selves. 
Sending out updates and emails based on all of those things that they did in the past. Interacting with all the other cyber versions of people they used to know. The day is coming. No doubt. And the fullness of our afterlife, will it depend on just how stupidly active we are in our day-to-day internet activity? Is that how it will be? It’s totally possible. Seriously. Isn’t that weird?
And I can’t even imagine yet the body of law that will grow up to govern how our cyber afterlives are conducted. But it will be gigantic. Supreme court decisions about our afterlives. Weird. But it’s coming someday.
And this too. That all those millions and billions of people living in poverty without a computer presence. My recent visit to India. Will they slip into death without leaving behind an avatar of themselves. Will we someday see this as a horrible injustice? That there is a universal human right to immortality? Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And the right to an afterlife.
Which sickens me a little. Not the Supreme Court (well, yes) and not the idea of billions of people denied the right to an afterlife (well totally) but about the prospect of my afterlife identity depending on what I say publicly, on-line, on Facebook or some other social platform. Yuck. I really don’t want this to be the case. Is it really going to be like that? If I accept that proposition, then I suddenly find myself in a weirdly familiar gross place again. I feel this strange guilt, a childhood guilt, about not being more active on the internet. “Not making yourself known is absolutely retarded.” I don’t 
want to be retarded! Shit, I have to make myself known! And suddenly, I am back to the strangest place of all — the horrible place where I started in my religious faith as a little pre-schooler. The concept that all of the things I do — or don’t do — today will affect my position in the afterlife tomorrow. Seriously? We’re back to those fucked-up illogical eye-rolling concepts? That how I spend my time every day somehow affects the quality of heaven? Fuck!! I’m super fucking bummed with this idea.
But simultaneously, I’m absolutely thrilled that I might go on existing in some version of “myself.” I really do like that concept. I fucking LOVE that concept. Cause it opens up so many lovely lovely possibilities. Obviously, it means that when I die, I have this new consolation that a part of me — all my online (perhaps, my off-line writings too) will form a new version of me. That concept is really quite explosively consoling. In the face of death. It’s absolutely emotionally rescuing. More than any concept that any religion or philosophy has ever ever offered before. It’s a humungous fucking step forward in dealing with mortality.
And besides the deux-ex-machina possibility of continuing to exist, there is something something else very unexpected and profound. Perhaps, perhaps, most exciting of all is the possibility that my future post-mortality existence could involve a multitude of life opportunities. Paths that I never got to take. Those pick-your-own adventure books. And I’m not talking about careers and hobbies. Suppose in MY WILL in cyberspace I state, I want my afterlife avatar to finally pursue a romantic relationship with x-person and x-person and x-person and x-person from years ago in my past. I want the software to produce a relationship that slowly sweetly interacts with that delightful person that I met in my teens, 20s, 30s, 40s,..until we are old people. I think it’s absolutely possible and so tearfully heart-repairingly lovely to imagine it. That MAYBE we all get a chance to pursue ALL those star-struck relationships that couldn’t quite happen during our actual flesh-and-blood years. 
Maybe the timing was off. We were in another relationship. Maybe we weren’t quite ready for that person. But imagine being able to meet that person finally and everything is cool. And you’re 29 and they’re 29 and life is full of fantastic possibility. Imagine it. It sounds so lovely. The future is ours to invent. We can all have our cake and eat it too. Again and again and again and again and again and again. In fact, maybe that’s what we’re doing right now. This blog is just part of one singular version of our multiple life choices. Oh, that’s weird and awesome and romantic and moving to think about.
So, I hate long goodbyes. Like Jeremy, I think they’re just awkward and unnecessary. So without much more to add to this stupidly long essay, let’s just hug and say goodbye. Thanks for coming out on this stroll with me. Enjoy the loved one you’re with right now. Kisses! Kisses!!! Kisses…
