The importance of being right

ITHACA, N.Y., the Patent Office — Before the Internet, you could pretty much say anything. There was a more sober consensus about large-scale reality, but with things medium-size or smaller, a bold line of thought required a trip to the library to debunk and was hardly worth the skeptic’s effort. It was great.

Even the desktop and laptop phases of the digital revolution were tolerable; by the time you got fact-checked, you were out the door and on your way. When smartphones made it not only technologically possible but also socially acceptable to verify conversational claims in real time, I basically had to rebuild my social self from scratch. With effort, you can do this sort of thing in your 30s.

But I worried about my mother. This is a woman whose earliest childhood memory is of telling fellow parishioners that, had they only Jesus’s faith, they too could walk on water. Splash, scream, outrage, ostracism — Yahoo Answers would have averted it all. In fact, it would have averted my existence, insofar as every stage of my mother’s relentless courtship of my father involved the kind of deception that dies a quick death in the thin air of the cloud.

My siblings and I grew up thinking that French toast grew hair on your chest, that acne resulted from negative thoughts, that watching a bag of popcorn inflate in the microwave could shrivel gonads and cripple sperm. My mother’s authority blossomed in situations where access to reliable information was limited. Neighbors would drive 45 minutes to a remote butcher shop she’d never visited but — whether out of boredom, mischief or malice — warmly recommended.

Rarely was she caught red-handed. A beach house we rented had a plaque that read, “Stella Maris.” Maris was a famous Los Angeles architect who had re-envisioned the California beach bungalow, Mom explained to visitors. Her best friend, Carol, years later found herself at a dinner party discussing Maris’ influence. A distinguished-looking man at the far end of the table asked where she’d learned of her work.

“From my friend Pat Brown.”

“I suspected as much. The Browns used to rent our place on the Rincon. Stella Maris is the name of the cottage. It’s Latin for ‘Star of the Sea.’”

Confronted with this kind of thing, my mom would offer a breezy shrug of pseudo-apology. It was like complaining to the weatherman that it rained when he had said it wouldn’t.

To test the truth of a proposition by toppling into a filthy fishpond is to live in an enchanted world. Schoolchildren today stay dry, by contrast, in a fallen world of fact. Neurally crowdsourced, they can list the anatomical features of the “Jesus lizard” that enable it to walk on water, explain that a human can hope to do so only by adding cornstarch and making a Newtonian fluid and so on.

They don’t know these things, of course, any more than I do, which in turn is no more than the functionary sitting in the Chinese room of John Searle’s famous thought experiment knows Chinese. We’re just relays — very efficient relays; we Google it, cite it and forget it. We debate the prospects of artificial intelligence as though it were something incipient and external, something we hope to endow future creations with rather than something already maturely developed within us. Searle devised his scenario in 1980, but it was a prescient image of the mind online.

Think of all the crazy, idle crap you now ask your computer. In the very old days, people traveled to see the priestess Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi. For a brief spell, sometime after the fall of Greece and Rome but before the rise of the Internet, they asked my mom.

“How far west do the east winds blow?”

“Van Nuys Boulevard.”

God knows why Fayzie, a billowy friend from the neighborhood, was asking this, but she got her answer. Mom’s way with such nonsense was compelling, even comforting. My father, an intelligent man, took his slops contentedly from this trough for more than half a century.  

• • •

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation,” Don DeLillo famously wrote in “White Noise.” The remark punctuates a scene in which the Gladney family sits on the couch debating when camels were introduced to America, what role they played in the construction of the railroads, whether it is food or water they store in their humps (“There are one-hump and two-hump camels,” the older son observes, “so it depends which kind you’re talking about”) and sundry other matters.

DeLillo was onto something, but that something is now historical. “The family process works toward sealing off the world,” he wrote. No, it doesn’t, not anymore. For all his reputation as American literature’s techno-prophet, he had, in 1986, no inkling of the future domestic life of data, its penetrative power and imminent ubiquity.

I think my mom did, though. Sensing the threat to her dominion, she adopted a stance toward technology that can only be described as passive-aggressive. We never had the Internet at home, and at my father’s legal firm, where she was the sole secretary, they ran Windows 95 on dial-up well into 2012. Instead of learning to set up a conference call or use the speakerphone, she’d leave phones off the hook at either end of the office and stand between them, shouting.

She even resented movies — what, her stories weren’t entertaining enough? — and treated the DVD player like a household flunky whose name and function eluded her. “Tell your machine to halt,” she’d say if she had to get up for something.

“The word is ‘pause.’”

“Just do it, Bob. Who gives a flying leap what the word is, anyway?”

“I’m back,” she’d say upon returning, “so you can tell it to stop stalling.”

Things changed in the last year of my father’s life. Along with medical equipment and personnel, we had Wi-Fi, and hours passed quietly with everyone, lay and professional, perusing grave information on iPads. Mom was suddenly a bystander, her protective fictions stripped from her, along with much of her swagger.

One day she heard my father’s caregiver, Jun, talking to his iPhone. Awestruck when Siri responded, she asked if she could talk to her own computer. Jun, the sort of fellow who enlivened a death vigil by putting on Fox News at full volume and hiding the remote, replied in the affirmative.

“Find last year’s tax forms for the office!” she shouted at the bulky, beige desktop Dell.

“You have to speak softly,” Jun urged from behind.

“Listen, you little hussy,” my mother whispered, leaning in close to the side of the monitor, where she must have thought an ear should be. “I want those forms, and I want them now.” 

• • •

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1945 short story “The Aleph” has an epigraph from “Hamlet”: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.” Borges’ narrator mourns the death of a former lover, Beatriz, and befriends another of her lovers, a pompous windbag writing a poem called “The Earth.” The poem’s subject is nothing less than our planet, with modern man at the center of it, “in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins …”

The would-be poet reveals his muse: a point in the cellar that contains all points. Thinking his host both madman and bore, the narrator downs some cognac and descends the stairs — and suddenly sees it. There begins one of the great lyrical lists in literature, spanning the elemental (“I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall … I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam”) and the personal (“I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast”). From that hot spot in the basement, he can summon the universe and everything in it; nevertheless, as the story ends, he is “losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz.”

After my father died, my mother recalled every detail of their lives together but not his laugh, nor his face before he became ill. She could see a photo or hear a recording, and say, “Yes that’s it,” but couldn’t summon either on her own.

We left California for Ithaca the day after. Joining my DeLillo-esque menage — two hapless parents and two impressionable toddlers in a low-tech rented house — she was soon back in her element. Ithaca, moreover, struck her as an isolated community awaiting her input, and for the first couple of weeks, clad in sweatpants, bulky sneakers, a long black puffy coat and a purple fur over that — “dressed like a rapper,” a friend of mine said — she strolled every street and gorge, taking things in with a critical eye.

She found a companionable crankiness in my 3-year-old daughter, Layla. Together they devised a sticker system to show their approval or disapproval of things and people. Depending on what your yard or car or store looked like or your general bearing when you crossed their path, you might get a thumbs-up sticker or you might get some sort of “Shape up!” warning affixed to your hood or forehead. (Sourcing suitable stickers locally was tricky — “everything we have seems a bit too positive for your project,” one toy-store assistant told her — so she ended up ordering them online.)

One day, a friend of mine somehow Googled a small news item from 1962 about my parents’ wedding. I found myself, to my horror, waxing lyrical about the Web. “You could look up old friends,” I gushed to my mom. “You’d be surprised who’s still around. This whole sticker thing reminds me of how people interact now. You can ‘like’ things on Facebook, for example.” In the crowning moment of my gin- and grief-fueled idiocy, I actually said this sentence: “It’s not too late to become a digital native.”

Mom waited for me to sputter to a stop.

“Can you ‘dislike’ something on Facebook?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then to hell with Facebook,” she said, throwing her drink down the hatch and donning her fur. “Layla, put on your coat and get your stickers. We’ve got work to do.”