Ellen Ullman

ELLEN ULLMAN
TCG National Conference, June 17, 2005

Ellen Ullman

INTRODUCTION

OSKAR EUSTIS, Artistic Director, The Public Theater; TCG Board Member:

Ellen Ullman is a computer programmer who worked for 20 years in the field, starting in the late ‘70s, and then began to write on what she calls “the social and emotional costs of her profession.” She has written for Harper’s, Salon, Wired, the New York Times, she was a contributing editor of the American Scholar, and she has two books—and in deference to her age, and I’m going to be sure I mention both books—the 1997 memoir Close to the Machine, which won a Salon Best Book of the Year Award, and more recently The Bug: A Novel, which was a New York Times notable book for 2003 and runner-up for the Pen/Hemingway prize for first fiction.

Ellen, after this speech, will be out in the lobby signing copies of Close to the Machine. I’m sorry to say that we’ve fallen down a little bit and we don’t have copies of The Bug: A Novel, and in order to make up for that I’m going to repeat the name three times now. The Bug: A Novel, The Bug: A Novel, The Bug: A Novel. So be sure to bother your local bookstores and Amazon.com for that.

After Ellen speaks we’re going to have a few minutes for Q&A, so I urge you to stick around and ask questions. And now it’s my great pleasure and honor to introduce to you Ellen Ullman. [applause]

Ellen Ullman:

I feel like James Still. I’m a writer, I’m used to doing this by myself. It’s a great pleasure to be here today—thanks for inviting me.

My thinking for this talk started 15 years ago, before the Internet as we know it had come into existence. It was Christmastime in 1990. I was at a friend’s house where her nine-year-old son and his friend were playing the video game that was then state-of-the-art, Sonic the Hedgehog. The two kids jumped around in front of the TV and gave off the sort of rude noises boys tend to make when they’re shooting at things, and after about an hour of that they stopped and tried to talk about their experience. And the dialogue went something like this:

“I wiped out at the part with the ladders.” “Ladders? What ladders?” “You know, after the rooms.” “Oh, you mean the stairs?” “No, they were ladders. I remember because I died there twice.” “I never killed you around any stairs or ladders. I killed you where you jumped down off this wall.” “Wall? You mean by the gates of the city?” “Are there gates around the city? Anyway, I always called it the castle.”

Had the boys been playing the same video game, I wondered? Were there castles, or gates, stairs or ladders? How to explain where one fired his weapon and the other died? The boys muddled along for several minutes more, getting themselves more confused as they went, and finally they gave up trying to talk about their time with Sonic the Hedgehog. They looked at the each other, shrugged, and went off to play something else.

I didn’t think about the two boys and Sonic again until I watched my clients try out the World Wide Web. By then it was 1995; the Internet as we know it was beginning to exist, but it wasn’t quite cool yet. People didn’t really know how they were supposed to feel about the web. And the two women who work for my client who I’d just helped get online had never before connected to the Net, so I thought their reactions were fresh and honest. They took to the web instantly, disappearing into nearly an hour of obsessive clicking around—after which they tried to talk about it.

“It was great,” said one. “I clicked that thing and went to this place, I don’t remember its name.” “Yeah, it was a link,” said the other. “I clicked here and I went there.” “Oh, I’m not sure it was a link. The thing I clicked was a picture of the library.” The other one said, “The library? I thought it was City Hall.” “Oh no, it was the library, I’m sure it was the library.” “No, City Hall, I’m sure because of the dome.” “Dome? Was there a dome?”

Right then I remembered Sonic and the two boys. Because like them, the women had experienced something pleasurable and engaging, and they very much wanted to talk about it—talking being one of the primary ways human beings augment their pleasure. But what had happened to my clients, each in her own electronic world, resisted description. Like the two boys, the women had fallen into verbal confusion—“I was here,” they said, “then I was here”—like the baffling cuts from place to place that happen in a dream. How could they speak coherently about a world full of little wordless pictograms? About trails that led off in all directions, of idle visits to virtual places chosen on a whim, click?

Following hyperlinks on the web is like the synaptic drift of dreams, I realized. It has the same loosening of intention, the mind associating freely, an experience that can be compelling or baffling or unsettling or all of those things at once. And like dreams, the experience of the web’s intensely private, charged with imminent meaning for the person inside the experience, but often confusing or irrelevant to everyone else.

At the time I had my reservations about the web, but not so much about this private, dreamlike experience it offered. Web-surfing seemed to me like a video game or pinball. It was entertaining, sometimes interesting, sometimes a trivial waste of time—not so much antisocial as asocial. In a social sense, it seemed to me harmless, since only the person engaged in the activity was affected.

Something changed, however. Not in me, but in the Internet and the world. And that change was written out in person-high letters on a billboard on the corner of Howard and New Montgomery streets in San Francisco. It was then the fall of 1998. The Internet bubble was just about to expand. I was walking toward Market Street one day when I saw this sign: a background of brilliant sky blue, on it some airy white letters which said, “Now the world really does revolve around you.”

The letters were lowercase, soft-edged, spaced irregularly as if they’d been sky-written across a hot August beach and were just now drifting off into the air. The message they left behind was a child’s secret wish—the baby world of narcissism we’re all supposed to abandon when we grow up—the world really does revolve around me.

What was the billboard advertising? Perfume, a resort? There was nothing else on it but the airy white letters. And I had to walk up close to see the URL written on the bottom. It was the name of a company that manufactured semi-conductor equipment. Machinery used by companies like Intel and AMD to manufacture integrated circuits. Chips, I thought, computers—of course! What other subject except sex produces such hyperbole? [laughter]

The billboard loomed over the corner the next couple of weeks, and every time I passed by it, which was often—I had to go under it to get to my office—I found its message more and more disturbing. I couldn’t understand why the sign bothered me so much, because it seemed to be doing what every other piece of advertising does. It whispers in your ear, “There’s no one like you in the whole world, what we’re offering is for you, special you, and you alone.” And then one day it came to me. All advertisers try to convince you that you’re a special, individual buyer. I don’t know if you remember, Toyota used to have this utterly absurd commercial that said their cars weren’t for everyone, they were just for you. [laughter] As if something manufactured in the hundreds of thousands could be a boutique item.

But chip makers were another story, I thought. By manufacturing the infrastructure for the World Wide Web, they were creating an actual environment in which a buyer might be led to believe that his or her most nuanced desires could be satisfied. That is, after using “My Yahoo” and “My MSN” and “My Snap” and “My FedEx” and “My Computer” and “My Network Neighborhood,” you just might come to think that the world really does revolve around you.

Is that a bad thing? Shouldn’t our desires be satisfied? If the web and related technologies help us navigate through the world to fulfill our most dearly held wishes, what’s wrong with that? Well, nothing. When the web helps us get a good price on a DVD burner, or help us find the address of a restaurant or shows us the latest headlines, well that’s just terrific. I can’t even imagine life anymore without the Internet. The web has shaken up retailing, news gathering, politics, social life in ways that are profound and sometimes exciting.

But technology is never an unalloyed good. The changes it brings about has darker sides, and those are examined infrequently. Anyone who points out what was lost in the rush of technological change risks being labeled a Luddite. But since I was a computer programmer for 20 years, I sometimes get away with it. I can sometimes say that the changes technology has wrought on our lives are not altogether fortunate.

Today I’m going to look at some of the downsides of the web. I’m not going to try to be fair and balanced about it. I think there are plenty of Internet cheerleaders and far fewer critical voices. So even though I myself can no longer imagine life without the web—I mean, there are days when Google finds just what you want and you shout right out loud, “Thank God for the web!”—even so, what I’m going to offer is a one-sided, rather dark, contrarian view. [laughter]

My thesis is this: I believe that the web has helped to weaken the social dimensions of happiness. The Internet search engine is the signifying program of the web. And what that program explicitly says is that you, alone, with just a little help from Google, can search through all the world’s wares and peoples to satisfy your own needs and desires—which of course are completely different from everyone else’s. It’s a vision of happiness in which the individual stays at home or within a sort of private bubble on a public street. And there, using a computer or a cell phone or some other device that may be on the horizon, in the supposed safety of one’s personal space, he or she seeks out a private individually tailored path to a satisfied life. It’s a sort of ownership society, if you will. A world where the link between one’s own happiness and that of others has been weakened, if not severed.

The web certainly didn’t create this state of affairs. We were well on our way to a privatized idea of happiness with the advent of suburbs and gated communities and private schools—maybe even the election of George Bush—but the web is what the computer industry calls an enabling technology. A technical breakthrough that takes a difficult task and makes it suddenly doable, easy; it opens the door to change which then comes in an unconsidered, breathless rush.

How did we get here? A very brief history. The Internet was not created by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, it wasn’t created by Bill Gates. It was conceived of within the United States Department of Defense and first used for internal DOD communications. Later it was opened up to university researchers and then computer industry engineers and finally to the public. That is, the Internet was sort of the mother of all public works projects. It was paid for by the citizenry and then turned over to the public for general use. With the creation of World Wide Web software by [Tim Berners Lee], the web quickly became a homegrown, vibrant, grassroots, undisciplined world of fledgling websites and really goofy ideas.

Then, almost immediately, it came to be dominated by a handful of very large corporations. Between 1995 when my clients were first trying out the web, and 1998 when that airy billboard loomed over the corner of Howard and New Montgomery, what had happened was the near-compete commercialization of the web. By 1998, half of all the click traffic on the web passed through sites owned by only four corporations.

And this commercialization of the web proceeded in a very particular and single-minded way, creating an environment that dismissed the world of expert intermediaries—brokers, agents, editors, librarians, curators, reporters, politicians—professionals of every kind who had for centuries help guide our commercial, political and cultural lives. In this newly commercially constructed world, there are really only two entities: you and what you want. And no one, no professional interloper, is supposed to stand between you and your unique, irreducible desires.

The buzzword that described this new structure is “disintermediation”: removal of the intermediary. As a buzzword, it’s hopelessly obsolete. Industry hipsters have moved on to “reintermediation,” and “smart-mods,” and “bricks-and-mortars,” “front end through the web,” and what have you. But this doesn’t mean that disintermediation has not been effective. It does not mean that a radical restructuring of social and commercial life has not indeed occurred. Through the agency of the web, the individual is now isolated within a swirl of electronic transactions.

You don’t need an agent; come to E-surance. You don’t need a stock analyst; come to E-trade. Forget about a mortgage broker; click on E-loan. Do travel agents even exist anymore? Log onto Orbitz. Not getting along with the neighbors? Join an E-group. Don’t try to meet a mate by joining a theatre club or a book group; true love awaits at E-harmony.com. Is your public transportation spotty and filthy and your downtown full of pesky poor people begging you for money? Then don’t go downtown at all; just shop at Gap.com. Don’t read the New York Times or the Washington Post; they use unnamed sources and they make mistakes. So you should just click on My Blog—no, My Blog—no, Mine. [laughter]

All the human beings who stand in the middle of a transaction—out. Even the professional handlers of intellectual goods—anyone who sifts through information, books, paintings, scripts—anyone who selects, rates, reviews, sums up—librarians, disc jockeys, teachers, editors, analysts—who needs them? Even the women you once invited into your dressing room to help you decide if that top made you look too fat—no need to bring a girlfriend when you’re shopping on the web. You can make your own decisions. Why trust anyone but yourself to make judgments about what’s interesting, valuable, useful, good or true?

The popular wisdom about buying things on the web is that you get a better deal. You eliminate the middleman, the agents, brokers, salespeople who used to take their cut—and go directly to the seller, compare one seller’s price to another, pick the lower price, and there you’ve got it: a great deal.

But is this true? Do you always get the best price on the web? I’ll say from the outset that for commodities, electronic items, airplane tickets on high-volume routes, car insurance that’s the minimum required by state law—yes, for commodities you’re probably going to get a good price on the web, albeit at the risk of being taken in by a less-than-honest seller. But I don’t think this holds true for a purchase of any complexity. On the contrary, I believe that as the variables in a purchase increase, the web buyer loses control. He or she becomes more subject to the workings of the marketplace, which are now hidden inside software code that the buyer cannot see, analyze or understand.

I believe this because of the software I’ve written for the intermediaries who are now being banished from online transactions. I have programmed large insurance systems, and I know the power of the programs used by insurance agents. In comparison, the web insurance sites are children’s toys. What the web has done is replaced an expert end-user—an insurance agent with years of experience and training, someone who knows how to operate a complex computer system to get you what you want—it’s been replaced with a naïve user. And that would be you. Someone with no experience at all.

Same is true for travel agents. Travel agents use the Saber system, which is a famously difficult program with arcane commands. And Saber sits behind sites like CheapTickets.com and if you want to go to New York from L.A., that’s the place to go. Go to the web, you’ll get a great price. But if you have go from someplace like San Francisco to Bratislava, Slovakia, as I have had to do, and you don’t want to wait 17 hours between connections, and you’re worried about who’s going to handle your luggage and where it’s going to be checked through to, maybe use your frequent flyer miles to get upgraded on that oversees leg—that’s when you’re really going to miss your old travel agent who’s no longer in business. Someone who knows that there really are direct flights between SFO and Munich and who might even get you on one.

What has happened again is the replacement of an expert end-user, the travel agent, someone who directly manipulates complex software, with a naïve user—that would be you again—who interacts with the system through some dumbed-down closed interface, giving the advantage to whatever company is behind the website, and sometimes not even that’s clear.

And the web user becomes ever more naïve, now that software has moved off the desktop and onto the web server, where it is completely controlled from afar. You can’t buy a web program, use it, gain confidence, becoming what we used to call a “power user,” an expression that has completely vanished from the computer vernacular. Whenever I log onto a website I never know what’s going to happen. Buttons move, icons disappear, forms are rearranged, overnight whole areas of functionality seem to vanish. Yesterday I was an expert user, today I’m a beginner and a fool on the web. The commercial world does not really revolve around me—it twirls me around.

All right. If the web doesn’t always give me the best price, maybe it makes me happier by giving me more choice. Maybe by giving me access to an unprecedented range of goods and services, maybe I can select the one thing that will please me most. Or maybe not. Maybe something like the following has happened to you:

One day the faucet in our downstairs bathroom began to leak. After a handyman twice failed to fix it, my husband and I had to accept the fact that we needed a new one. In the past, I would have called a plumber or more likely I would have removed the old faucet, since I’m handy, taken it into a good plumbing supplier, looked at a selection of, say, six or eight appropriate replacements, chosen one, taken it home, installed it, one day, job done. But now, having succumbed to the lure of the electronic marketplace, I instead turned to the web. On Google I typed in “faucet” and then I began to browse. [laughter]

Faucet.com, Faucet Depo, Faucets Direct, Faucet Bay... I looked up and it was night. [laughter] It’s happened to you, I guess. Faucets R Us, Delta Faucet, Peerless Faucet. The next day: Rizzo Faucet, Faucet Line, Faucet Supply, Faucet Design—a kind of fever came over me. Never before had a single whole faucet seemed such an exquisite object of desire. [laughter] I looked at hundreds, possibly thousands of faucets. The set of all faucets in the universe seemed to have expanded to infinity. Day three. [laughter] LK.com, Broha.com, Mowen.com, HomeDepot.com, Loews.com, Bed Bath and Beyond, Faucet One, Faucet Central, Faucet Choice... Faucet choice? By then I had bookmarked tens of websites, had printed out a stack of paper, had learned about spout reach and deck width and valves, had not changed out of my pajamas [laughter], had led my husband to believe that I’d become completely insane, but I still did not have a faucet. And I don’t have one as I stand before you today. [laughter]

I once read a study about the effect of choice on happiness, and the study found that people who had no choice were unhappy. Okay, that’s expected. But it also found that people who had too many choices were almost as unhappy as the people who had no choice at all. And that was the state of unhappiness into which the web had lured me. I had cut myself off from the plumbers, contractors and plumbing supply people who would have helped me see the world of faucets in its true form—a rather small world, actually, where maybe 8 or 10 units in my price range would have worked. Instead, on the web I was alone. Hopelessly adrift in a sea of empty, illusory, misery-inducing choice.

Perhaps the most abiding idea about the Internet is that it fosters democracy. This is usually expressed by saying that on the web, everyone’s a publisher, and with the advent of blogs (weblogs, in case anyone’s been on Mars) it would seem that the dream of everyone a publisher has been realized. Blogs are interesting and lively, stupid and trivial, profound and probing, silly and boring. The best bloggers are akin to good columnists, I think—most of them are more like soapbox speakers trying to draw a crowd on the street—a practice that has disappeared from American public life, and its return cheers me enormously. But there’s something that disturbs me about blogs. And this is the attempt to see bloggers as somehow more authentic than professional journalists.

A week before coming here, I received an invitation to a cyber-salon that has been ongoing since the mid 1990s. I’d gone to it off and on for years. This particular session was to be about citizen journalism, and the invitation, after listing the participants and their blogs, goes on to say, “With organic publications like these, who needs the artificially flavored New York Times?”

This disparagement of major media is a very common point of view in the blogosphere. As if bloggers could somehow replace journalists. But a newspaper reporter is someone who’s followed a beat, forms personal connections among the participants, has a deep knowledge of the subject. Someone who is, in short, another one of those expert intermediaries now struggling to retain their footing amidst the rush of technological change. Reporters and editors make mistakes of course, but the fact that there’s such an outcry when they do should only serve to highlight how high a standard we hold them too. A blogger, on the other hand, can say anything. Anna Marie Cox, an old friend of mine and much more famous as the author of the blog Wonkette, was asked one day where she gets her stories, and without apology, as a matter of fact with great grinning relish, she replied, “I make things up.”

It’s important to remember that the FCC cited the proliferation of blogs and websites in an attempt to loosen the restrictions on how many media outlets a single company can own. That is, because of the gaggle of bloggers, it would be all right if Rupert Murdoch, for instance, controlled TV stations that reached 45 percent of the population of the United States. Thankfully Michael Powell, the FCC chairman who proposed these changes, did not prevail. But only because of a surprising, stunning outcry of alliances by political and social groups.

Notice how dangerous a too-sunny view of the web can be. While we revel in the thought that blogging increases the number of speakers in the public sphere, we may forget that simultaneously we’re witnessing a relentless attack on the fourth estate. The current administration’s attempt to discredit professional journalists. The court’s attempt to compel journalists to reveal their sources. Deregulators’ attempts to deliver media into ever larger hands. While this week’s Berkeley Cyber-Salon features Peter Meyerholz discussing BeastBlog.com, a group blog that “covers everything of note in the San Francisco East Bay,” Newsweek is still recovering from having gotten its Koran abuse story just a little bit wrong. No, the Koran was not actually flushed down the toilet, as it turned out. It was merely dribbled with urine, but by mistake, the military says.

Now there’s another, perhaps deeper way that the web and related personal technologies undermine the workings of democracy, in which they indeed weaken the cohesion of culture. And these can be summarized by saying: On the web you can believe anything. Before the advent of the web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in really far-fetched ideas you had to go move out into the desert. [laughter] Or live in a compound in the mountains or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses. Physical reality, or discomfort in abandoning your life, put a natural break on a formation of cults, separatist colonies, underground groups, apocalyptic churches, and extreme political parties.

But now, without leaving home, from the comfort of your easy chair, you can divorce yourself from the consensus on what constitutes truth. Each person can live in a private thought bubble, reading only those websites that reinforce his or her desired beliefs, joining only those online groups that give sustenance when the believer’s courage begins to flag. For instance, it’s possible to believe that evolution is just another mythical creation story: Evolutionlie.faithweb.com. The Jews, through secret cabals, really do have control of the world. Jewwatch.com. That the white race is superior to all others: Cofcc.org. That every American citizen is on an evil crusade to crush Islam: alnaeda.com. That Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction are there, lying beneath the sands of Iraq, awaiting discovery: Jihadwatch.org. Or along with all 501 members of the national organization for antifeminism, that women should go back into the kitchen: Groups.yahoo.com/group/anti-feminism. From the well-designed sites with their own domain names, to the many slashed URLs of the little groups on Geocities and Yahoo, from sites attracting thousands of eyeballs to those visited by a few hundred die-hards, something for everyone.

A democracy, indeed a culture, needs some sustaining common mythos. Yet in a world where truth is a variable concept, where any belief can find its adherents, how can a consensus be formed? How can we make the compromises that must underlie the workings of any successful society?

There is a whole generation now coming of age for whom the Internet has been the dominant means of interaction with the world. Young people of this cohort talk to each other via e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging. They watch Internet videos, download music from the web, they do term papers by searching Google. This generation is suspicious of mainstream journalism, cynical about politics, certain they will never reap the benefits of the great social programs—but they trust the web. They’ve spent their young lives in the web’s privatized electronic universe, and it has become all too easy for them to believe that each person must plan for his or her own old age, must arrange for his or her own health insurance, must provide for his or her own security and education, in short, to believe in a private ownership society.

Gradually this group is slipping out of social life altogether. They watch less TV, go to fewer movies, rarely attend plays. They’re accustomed to an on-demand world, and they shrink from the exertion of even trying to synchronize their lives with the comings and goings of others.

In 1994, I wrote an essay called “Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life,” in which I imagined a future in which everyone would learn to live like computer programmers. Asynchronously to other people; alone, out of time, disdainful of anyone who could not interact with the world through machines. Eleven years later, my hair stood on end when I unfolded my New York Times and read a page-one story in which a college senior described his life of DVD renting, video game playing, Internet browsing and movie theatre avoidance. “If I want to watch a movie,” he said, “I can just rent it on DVD. I want to do things that conform to my time frame, not someone else’s.”

One evening a few years ago while watching television, I looked up to see a commercial that seemed to me an explicit portrayal of the ideas behind this out-of-time, privatized, lonely universe. I gaped at it, because usually such ideas are kept hidden behind symbols, but this commercial was like the sky-blue billboard, a shameless and naked expression of the web world, a glorification of the self, at home, alone. The commercial first aired six years ago. The computer brand it’s pushing isn’t even sold in the U.S. anymore. But the ad accomplished its mission, I think. It was images like the ones I’m about to show you that taught the college senior in the New York Times how to live in his own time frame, and no one else’s. Can we roll that video?

VIDEO: Operatic singing over dark chords and the sound of thunder. A gray, nightmarish city. Miserable people read in a library patrolled by grim-faced soldiers, grow old before our eyes as they stand in line in the rain, etc. Scene shifts to a vividly colored house in a valley, an inviting living room with a desktop computer. Voiceover: “Now, you can do it all from home with the world’s number one selling home computer, featuring the Intel Pentium processor with MMX technology. Packard Bell: Wouldn’t you rather be at home?”

Ellen Ullman:

This is going to run again, so you can look at some of the images. [Video rolls again.] Notice that this house has no neighbors, it’s all alone in the middle of a green valley. What a relief after the blasted city to sit in the chair in that lollipop-orange room—it really is orange. On the screen, safe images of the world outside go by: There is the bank, but you don’t have to leave home. There are the telephone poles, but there are no skulls. [laughter] Wouldn’t you really rather be at home?

In 60 seconds, this commercial communicates a worldview that reflects the ultimate privatization of existence. A retreat from the friction of the social space for the supposed idyll of homely ease. It’s a view that depends on the idea that desire is not social, not stimulated by what others want, but generated internally; and that the satisfaction of desire is not dependent upon other persons, organizations or structures. It is a profoundly libertarian vision, and it is the message that underlies all the mythologizing about the web. It is the idea that the civic space is dead, useless, dangerous; the only place of pleasure and satisfaction is within. You, home, family—beyond that the world goes from the intensely private to the global, with little in between but an Intel processor.

It is in this sense that the Internet ideal represents the very opposite of what democracy is, democracy being a method for resolving differences in a relatively orderly manner, through the mediation of unavoidable civic associations. Yet there can be no notion of resolving differences in a world where each person is entitled to get exactly what he or she wants. Where all needs and desires are equally valid, equally powerful, I’ll get mine, you get yours, no need for compromise or discussion, I don’t have to tolerate you, you don’t have to tolerate me, no need for messy debate or the whole rigmarole of government with all its creaky, bothersome structures. No need for any of those. Because now that we have the world wide web, the problem of the pursuit of happiness has been solved. We each click for our individual joys and disputes may arise only if something doesn’t get delivered on time.

And that ideal represents not only a retreat from the political life but also the cultural, from that tumultuous conversation in which we try to talk with one another about our shared experiences. As members of a culture, we see the same movie, read the same book, watch the same play, hear the same string quartet. Although it is enormously difficult for us to agree on what we might have seen or watched or heard, it is out of that difficult conversation that real culture arises. Whether or not we come to agreement or understanding—even if some people believe that understanding and meaning are impossible—we are still sitting around the same campfire.

So what is an artist to do in a world where people don’t want to sit around the same campfire? Where there isn’t reverence for the public space? Each individual has been led to believe that his or her own particular sensibility is all there is to be trusted. It’s a paradox. On one side, all good art has its origins in the most private interior spaces of a single human being. Yet, until it becomes public, is published, shown, recorded, filmed, taped, performed, it remains a solitary dream, like the experience of the two boys playing Sonic the Hedgehog or the Internet surfers riding from site to site without a plan.

When I was reviewing this talk I thought of you in the theatre, an art that relies so supremely on the physical body, on its presence and the immediacy, on the fact that the event is live. As Edward Albee said in a recent interview: “Theatre is real. It is happening right before you.” But what will be the future of this most physical of arts in a technological world which values the virtual? Where people refuse to believe what everyone else believes, where people disdain even the attempt to synchronize the mundane events of their lives with others?

Theatre asks us to sit still, at the same time; to suspend disbelief together; to enter into a common myth; to share collectively the inner world of the playwright and actor. To put this in a language I’ve been using in this talk, theatre asks us to let the actor serve as the expert intermediary into our emotions, into the depths of what it means to be human. But technology as it has evolved is based on the idea that we do not even want a shared experience.

I once attended a symposium about art and technology. And in the course of the evening the director of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art told an audience that we no longer need a building to house works of art. We don’t need to get dressed, go to town, move from room to room among crowds of people. Now that we have the web, he said, we can look at anything we want when we want and we no longer need him or his curators. To a questioner in the audience named Bill, he said, “You don’t have to talk through my idea of what’s interesting to look at. On the web,” said the director, “you can create the Museum of Bill.”

And so by implication there can be the Museum of George, of Mary, of Heather. What then will this group have to say to one another about art? Let’s say that the Museum of Bill is featuring early Dutch masters, the Museum of Mary is playing video art and the Museum of Heather is showing German Expressionists. In this privatized world, what sort of cultural conversation can there be? What can one of us possibly say to one another about our experience, except, “Today I went to the Museum of Me, and I liked it.”

Thank you very much. [applause] Thank you. I think we have time for a few questions.

Q: Can you talk about Wal-Mart’s—the article that appeared recently about Wal-Mart sponsoring a new TV reality show, and the implications for the FCC around that situation?

Ellen Ullman:

I think that television is becoming more like the web. And on the web it’s wall-to-wall product placement, wall-to-wall advertising. I think the whole notion of reality TV is part of a symptom of this idea of not trusting the expert intermediary. To sit back and receive a story. Instead thinking that the story is always unfolding, and in most of these reality shows the viewer can control the outcome by voting.

As far as Wal-Mart getting involved in it—I think Wal-Mart is the devil. [laughter and applause] In so many ways—the next thing I’d like to write about Wal-Mart is that they’re demanding in all of the suppliers the use of a device called radio frequency ID tags, these little identifiers on each object that’s manufactured. Right now, barcodes identify the class of goods, you know, like Tide without scent. That would translate to that barcode. Now, with an RFID tag, you would have like, Tide without scent named Mary, Tide without scent named George. Each individual unit has its own ID. And Wal-Mart is demanding within a very short time that all its suppliers provide it. And it’s going to drive the conversion of manufacturing and retailing; it’s going to change completely. And this is coming because of Wal-Mart.

So I don’t know if I’m being clear about this, but...it disturbs me because—people worry about these radio tags because of privacy because they can be tracked. Where did this thing go, who bought it? You can match the individual item to the credit card, for instance. For me, I have another thing about it, which is more philosophical. Where is the anonymity in the world today? I mean, can’t even an object sit there anonymous? I mean, I know a group of technology freaks who are working on giving every rock a name in a trail they like to walk. People used to name rocks, there is big red rock, right? And that’s because people live near this big red rock. But the idea that every rock that you could see from space would have a name somehow offends me.

Q: I wonder if you might give us your thoughts on the social communities, particularly for young people, that are being developed through the world of interactive gaming?

Ellen Ullman:

It’s a very compelling world. I know people who are very involved in it. I’ve also been involved in some of these online worlds. These are these actual interactive worlds—you can have an avatar and you can fly and all these wonderful things. These are very intense relationships. But gaming is a little bit like a drug. I don’t know if you’ve played these games but when I play them, it feels to me like programming felt. I’ll just do one more compiling and then it’ll work, I’ll just do one more. I’ll just do this for a minute more, I’ll just—you look up, and it’s night.

And I’m glad that people are interacting with each other but I worry that more and more of the interactions between young people are machine-mediated. That fewer and fewer of these experiences happen with people in the same room. How can you read someone’s body cues, how can you actually learn social interaction without seeing someone’s face?

These kinds of worlds are the kinds of things that all the programmers I work with dream of. They think it’s great that you don’t have to be there physically and no one can see you. Um, they’re not really great at social interaction, most of these people. [laughter] That’s a broad generalization, but stereotypes exist for a reason.

So I worry about it, I suppose is the short answer. I do worry that, as I said, young people are slipping out of social life as we know it. The idea that they would come to a theatre and sit still for an hour and a half and breathe the same air as other people, I think, is going to become foreign and frightening.

Q: I actually look at that as the intersection of, as we take away the arts in education more and more from our curriculum and that kids don’t have the opportunity to role play in school, to be able to participate actively with each other, using their imaginations and fantasy in a structured place like school, that they’re looking for it elsewhere and they’re looking for it in that interactive gaming industry, and it’s by taking that away that we’re actually feeding this mechanized world where there’s no interaction.

Ellen Ullman:

I think you’re right. I mean, these things do engage the imagination in extraordinary ways. They’re compelling. And I think you’re right, they are replacing the kind of things where—I don’t know, I had to study theatre at school. I had to learn to do a recitation, and do it for an audience. I thank God today I had to do that! [laughter] And I wonder what kind of world it will be where people don’t have that experience. They’ve never memorized a poem or performed a piece or done a play. I don’t know what the world’s going to look like because of that. As you can see in my talk, I’m not optimistic.

Q: I think the portrait of the world you’ve painted is really compelling and we all ought to recognize it. Here’s the question I have: You’ve thought about this a lot, and we don’t really have any example of technology running backwards. The technology is there—it’s not going to go away. So I wonder, have you thought about an alternative use of this technology, an alternative model for how the technology could be configured that would somehow allay some of the dangers you’re describing?

Ellen Ullman:

Obviously it would be visual. Every computer would have a camera so you could see the other person. That would be part of it.

But what you’re asking is so profound in terms of how much investment there already is in how technology works. Computer operating systems are based on certain principles—that there are things people can and can’t do with computers. It’s so built into to what’s there; trying to move it to be something different—you’d have to throw it away and start over.

I think we are seeing that in a way, because the next computer is the cell phone. I just read a statistic that for the first time, sales of laptops have surpassed sales of desktops. So you can see people are into smaller, more portable devices, those are going to shrink down. Cell phones are the new computer—all the interesting new things that are going to happen in technology are going to pass through a cell phone. So there’s going to be picture-taking, you know...it is becoming a visual medium, a visual interactive medium. I worry, though, do you watch the commercials about this picture taking thing...? They’re all about humiliation. You know, you take a picture of someone in a really humiliating situation—gotcha! And you send it to all your friends. It’s sort of like the reality shows. They’re about humiliation. So the tenor of the times is not socially friendly even though this device is much more socially friendly than a computer.

Q: I’m sure that everything you’re saying is true—

Ellen Ullman:

Oh—okay! [laughter]

Q: But actually I’m pretty hopeful about it and I think that all of us, actually, are in the right business. Because I don’t think we could say the same thing that that museum curator could say. I think you can download art, if you want to read a book you can do it online, if you want to watch a movie or listen to music you can do that all online. You cannot download theatre. You cannot stream a play, really a play, I mean it would be an image of a play and then it’s not a play. And I think that as all of that happens, people are going to miss the opportunities for community and they will come to the theatre to have that experience. And so I think that’s hopeful, at least for us—maybe I’m being Pollyanna-ish about it. And I also know that my website has driven a lot of people to my theatre and more and more people are finding us online and buying tickets online.

Ellen Ullman:

I hope you’re right. I mean, as I said, what I gave today was not even the whole of what I think about technology. I really just segregated out the darker parts of it, because I felt it’s not expressed that often. So I do hope you’re right; there may be a way the web can help people find more of the art that is not getting attention otherwise.

I’ll give an example: When Close to the Machine came out, it was 1997 and the Internet was just sort of beginning to go...and the publisher of that book was City Lights, and she was very worried about Amazon. She did not like the idea of the book being sold online. And Amazon actually featured it on their front page for a day. And it actually sold many many more books than it would ordinarily coming from a small publisher. So there is a sense in which the web does make small outlets, small theatres, small publishers, more available to the world.

Now, whether you get found by search engines is another whole story. You’re all probably aware of what’s going on with Google, accepting more advertising, making more deals with people. There’s a constant arms race between people who put up websites and the web crawlers that create what you see on Google. It’s very hard to get your website found, actually. So while the web looks dramatically large and democratic, I don’t have the statistic—like maybe 6 percent of the web is actually being covered by search engines. It might be as high as 12 percent now. But if you think about it, that’s still a tiny tiny percentage of the number of people who have put things online. So, good news, bad news.

Q: Ms. Ullman, I wonder if it’s possible for you to post your speech on TCG and we can have a chat about it. [laughter]

Ellen Ullman:

On what? I’m sorry, I missed the joke.

Q: I wonder if it’s possible to get your speech, and then people can respond online? [laughter] I’m not mocking you!

Ellen Ullman:

That is my idea of hell. [laughter and applause]

Q: Is that no?

Ellen Ullman:

That’s no. I mean, I spent my years as a programmer being exactly in that situation where you have these group e-mail things, and when people are not in the same room with you they say all kinds of horrible things, arguments get really polarized online and so...oh, I just don’t want to do that!

Q: Will your speech be available?

Ellen Ullman:

It will be—parts of it have been published at Harper’s. The original for this was in Harper’s and it will come back in some form, I’m not sure what. Thank you for asking.

Q: One of the things that I’m trying to follow through this is what is the need, what is the human need, that the Internet is fulfilling? Because I have trouble with the not wanting to go out in public spaces—living in New England where we hide in the winter, and in the summer all we want to do is be outside. And also, with the incredible rise in revenues in rock concerts and sporting events, it’s theatre alone that is really suffering that, so I don’t feel comfortable blaming the Internet for it. I mean, I understand the film industry as well.... But I’m just trying to figure out what—there’s a different, and I think you hit it a little bit with the reality TV, this idea of empowerment. I’m wondering if you can talk more about that.

Ellen Ullman:

I think part of what the web fosters is this idea that it’s interactive, that the individual has more power than just receiving a news report or just watching the a movie. That somehow you can influence what happens by your vote. And to some extent that’s true. I did read a story though about these reality shows being somewhat rigged. Oh, was that a surprise? [laughter]

It is, I believe, an illusion. The web has fostered the idea among people that you shouldn’t just sit back and be told a story. You should get in there and determine how the story turns out. And in some ways that’s good because it means that people are more skeptical, and more open and listening more carefully. In other ways, it makes me sad, because I think what’s at the very base of what we call human culture is a bunch of people sitting down and telling stories, and people listening. Trusting, or making a choice, to actually put your trust in another person’s story. So this idea that you don’t do that, you decide how the story should end, I always know best how I want my story to be, is to me a really solipsistic view, and technology reinforces it.

Q: This is akin to your comment that technology does not go backwards. Thinking from a historical perspective, the last computer was the printed book. And many of the downsides you just presented to us were presented about reading a book. Is that a place to think about that might help?

Ellen Ullman:

I’m really glad that you asked this because it’s something I wanted to work into the speech. Each technology brings something new to the table. Movies—people don’t go to books anymore for the most part to get their narrative, dramatic fix. They go to the movies to get it. And so people can download movies, so why would they want to sit and watch a play? So most of these technologies sort of make the audience for the previous technology a little bit smaller.

And I guess what I wanted to say to you is what I say to myself as a writer. A writer of fiction, literary fiction, my God—it’s just—worse than that would be to be a poet. [laughter] So what do you do? People say, oh, you should do an e-book. You program, you’ll do one of these interactive books. I went, no, no. I actually think the important thing is to stick to what your particular medium is really good at. And so what a book is really good at is communicating one to one, without any intermediary in between. I mean, the medium of a book just is transparent. It’s not collaborative. It’s one individual to one individual. There’s no other art that actually does that.

What does theatre give you? It gives you a kind of ceremony. I don’t know, you can tell me what it is. But I think what you in the theatre should do is not become interactive video. I mean, you may use video, it’s very interesting to mix these things, but to be theatre, to be what theatre is really good at, is to give people a collective interior experience, rather than trying to mimic or chase after the next hot thing. [applause]