#58: How to Exist
In Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon introduces the concept "temporal bandwidth" as the novel's protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, loses his grip on reality and eventually vanishes from the book's broader narrative: "'Temporal bandwidth' is the width of your present, your now...The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago." Conventional wisdom has always assigned value to the ability to grasp broader time horizons, from the marshmallow test to the platitude about being doomed to repeat the history we don't learn. Pynchon's approach is more interesting because it intensifies the connection between time and those who perceive it: Without a foot in the past and the future, you don't really even exist.
It's tempting to say that, right now, we need robust models for evaluating the past and future more than ever, but that would repeat the fallacy I'm about to criticize, the belief that the present is exceptional and more urgent than any circumstances our predecessors faced. Technology, in particular, presents this temptation: So much discussion of it involves complaining about how new things—iPhones, social media, email—have cheapened experiences and weakened institutions; the opposite position counters that the same technological sophistication means life is better than it's ever been. Both positions undermine any serious effort to build things that actually improve the world, because they don't distinguish between the good and the bad aspects of now. Pynchon's temporal bandwidth theory offers an escape route from this trap: Reality marches on with or without us, but if we choose to engage with a broader spectrum of it, we'll at least have the chance to combine the better aspects of different time periods instead of accepting or rejecting the present wholesale.
Sarah Perry's essay Gardens Need Walls is one of my favorite assessments of the contemporary condition, "an explanation of why everything is so ugly and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it." She observes that ancestral, well-established solutions to basic problems like food and housing also happened to solve higher-level problems like the need for social cohesion; newer technology tends to solve the former more efficiently while discarding the latter, causing the higher-level problems to return. The danger of software isn't its novelty, but that it's too good at solving individual problems without indirectly solving adjacent problems, and so flexible that it starts disappearing when something better supersedes it. I've made a similar point about the benefits of the cumbersome, slow-to-change urban built environment, a complex system that solves problems we don't even know exist (in other words, we're lucky we can't change cities as fast as we'd like to). The inefficient junk that software disrupts isn't good (or bad) because it's old, but because it forces us to confront a past that we wouldn't create from scratch today. Continuously solving every problem anew is a sign of poor temporal bandwidth—the durable stuff that clutters our environment reminds us that we actually exist.
Reads:
A visualization of street grid consistency in various US cities. I knew Boston was chaotic but I was surprised to learn that Charlotte, NC is also totally unhinged (h/t John for the link).
The abdication of the current Japanese emperor next year could precipitate Japan's version of Y2K (Japanese eras are a component of dates and the last one began in 1989).
Joanne McNeil has a cool newsletter and in this week's she reflected on the movie Sneakers, an absolute classic of the paranoid '90s spook/hacker genre.