Farewell, www...

      For some reason I've never delved into Shakespeare and his era of thees and thous.  But I do remember when farewell once meant (and was said as) fare-thee-well, just as goodbye once meant God-be-with-ye.  But all things contract, and change, and often vanish...even the internet, or at least the original version of it.  This issue came up in a piece in the New York Review on the web's early creation, all of which was pioneered by the visionary computer programmer, Tim Berners-Lee and written in his recent book, This Is for Everyone.  His breakthrough idea (bouncing off the computer "super-highway" idea of then vice-president Al Gore) was to tie everything together with links, spiderwebbed chains of more and more information...a web of world-wide proportions.  He envisioned a free and public inter-"net" whose idealistic origins, in his view, are rapidly disappearing.  Wrote a review in the New York Review, Bergers-Lee felt that: ...the Internet seemed to promise new freedom, a breaking of corporate shackles, a chaotic counterpoint to the uniformity of what was soon to be labeled “old media.”  The Internet he created "was different: multifarious, decentralized, and democratic, 'like a vast television station without programmers or a newspaper without editors—or rather, with millions of programmers and editors,' as one eager newbie put it in 1994," wrote the review.  But it continued: Here are some of the things the optimists failed to foresee: the erosion of privacy and, as Berners-Lee writes, “the industrial-scale harvest of user data.”  The emergence of ruthless giant corporations—Google, Meta, Amazon—mightier than nation-states.  The creation of a powerful new oligarch class.  The collapse of the aforementioned old media; the loss of a consensus reality; the rise o clickbait and deepfakes...This offended Berners-Lee’s intuition about information: that what matters is not objects but relationships.  For him the interconnections—links both ways—were paramount.  “I was proposing…to free those documents—essentially to dump the files from their folders onto the floor,” he writes.  “What you wanted, instead, was to encourage new and unexpected relationships between pieces of information to flourish.  And, to do that, you had to let the users make those connections, in any way they saw fit.”...Along with other Internet pioneers, he believed that the essential tools—shared protocols and software—should be available to everyone free of charge.  No company or government should control the web—that was his vision...To its users, the web browser was a lovely tool. To its owners, it was a platform—a means of control, a system that locked users in and monitored their behavior.

     American Online (AOL), then Netscape, then Microsoft: the browser wars.  As the article noted: There was money to be extracted, data to be harvested...Novel platforms emerged and swelled in overlapping sequence: the browser, the search engine (Google), the social network (Facebook, Twitter), the megastore (Amazon).  When Rupert Murdoch bought the then-popular MySpace, Mark Zuckerberg posted this about his up-and-coming Facebook: Has it occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, and he spies on you with every hour that God sends?  Come to Facebook, where we will never spy on you.  My how things have changed.  And the article continued: ...the rush to AI seems to be embracing the same pathologies: deprecation of workers and creators; secretive closed standards; overheated marketing; and consolidation of power.  The users are not in control; the strings are held by Google, Andreessen, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Sam Altman (one should note that Altman's OpenAI started out with protecting users but, like Zuckerberg and others, gave up its ideals as money and power grew larger and larger, which caused 3 of Altman's early engineers to drop off and form Anthropic, the AI platform that refused to allow Trump and the military to have unlimited use of Anthropic's AI system and walked away from Trump's Pentagon threats...Open AI jumped in to bow down to the Pentagon's demand but in doing so, may now be facing serious trouble unloading its debt as investors walk away from Altman's AI and turn instead to Anthropic, wrote Bloomberg.  As for walking away, Berger-Lee: ...urges us to walk away from Facebook and X in exchange for “something pro-human”—decentralized platforms like Mastodon, a user-controlled, open-source alternative in the so-called Fediverse [where] users can move freely from one server or community to another without losing their friends and followers.  Berners-Lee suggests that new software protocols can return the power of personal.  To back that up (that "no company or government should control the web), Bergers-Lee gave up all intellectual property rights to his software and coding when he created the web...Zuckerberg and others took the ball and ran with it...

    But let's move away from the Internet and head to the country.  Wander the plains long enough and you may bump into Marie Mitsuki Mockett, a city girl with childhood roots on a family farm in Nebraska.  In the 90s, her father found Eric as a replacement for his long-hired helper, and it was Eric who invited Marie to accompany him doing something she had long forgotten since moving away from that family farm...a harvest.  Eric was now part of a combine group, professional harvesters that will use their $250,000+ massive combines to help smaller farms bring in their wheat crop.  Paying $35,000 to harvest 1,000 acres is a bargain for those unable to afford the massive combines.  As author Mockett wrote in her book, American Harvest:

Amy number of things can happen to your mind if you drive across the country every year for thirty years.  Eric had patiently studied the details of his repeated trips, like a monk reading and rereading the Bible.  I imagined him squinting at these details until they coalesced, and what he saw, he likes to tell me, was "the divide."...Eric told me he wanted to share his America because he feared how little we have come to understand each other.  The divide between city and country, once just a crack in the dirt, was now a chasm into which objects, people, grace, and love all fell and disappeared..."If you come with us, you'll meet farmers.  You'll meet hunters.  You'll meet some racists.  You'll meet closeted Democrats.  Lots of Christians.  I want you to see the Tetons and the wheat in Idaho.  I want you to see the sunsets there.  I want you to know this America."  Added the author: How hard could it be to go on the road with Eric, through the middle of America, which is, after all, my own country, and try to learn something about it?  Maybe then I would know what I think about them, the flyover states.  And so began my journey to see the heartland.  Her book is appropriately subtitled: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland...

     So here's where this is heading: the past few weeks have found me watching a few documentaries, which is unusual for me.  First up was the rise of Judit Pulgar, the Hungarian chess whiz who became the youngest grandmaster in chess, beating Bobby Fisher's record by 2 months of accomplishing the same at just over 15 years old.  Now I am no real chess player, more of a friendly luck-be-with-ye sort of player.  If I win, I win, and if I lose, well it was fun playing...that sort of player.  And admittedly, I thoroughly enjoyed the earlier fictional version of a young female chess prodigy portrayed in The Queen's Gambit.  But this documentary was far different, and to be honest, even more enjoyable.  Judit Polgár was one of three sisters growing up in a period when the Soviet domination of her native Hungary was near total.  Trying to leave the country, even as a rising star seeking to play in a tournament, was basically an exercise in futility, especially because chess was a sport dominated by men (Bobby Fisher is shown on tape saying that "women aren't smart enough" to play that high level of chess).  But Judit kept winning, and winning, so much so that Hungary had no choice but to let her out.  And that was when my own world expanded, learning about the scoring systems of chess, the rankings, the cities (I had never heard of Linares, the be-all of chess championships).  And once out, Judit was allowed to play not only against men, but against the top men who were sometimes grandmasters themselves (many were so aghast that they had been beaten by a young female teenager that they simply walked out in a huff -- she was the top female chess champion at age 12).  And then came Gerry Kasperov, the flamboyant playboy and the chess champion considered untouchable by many.

     Jump back 10 years to Lake Placid, a town of just over 2000 people at the time, but one hosting the Winter Olympics.  Now I had seen the Disney version of this miracle on ice several times, enjoying Kurt Russell's performance with each viewing.  For all teens who once had a strict coach, his no-nonsense style of coaching was a vivid reminder of days long gone.  But here was footage of the real thing, capturing the now-grown team members looking back on that period of coaching and of remembering their mothers and fathers, many of whom were simple working class folk and who instilled those values into their children.  Work ethics, no quitters, just desire and passion etched into them since childhood.  And then there was the coach, Herb Brooks, the last one to be cut from his own Olympic dreams when he was a star hockey player himself.  He wanted something different for the team, a team so conditioned that they, as amateurs, could outlast the professional players that came into the Olympics from the Soviet countries...Russia had not been defeated in 30 years.  So Brooks took this ramshackle American team through their paces, doing drill after drill and having them skate even when the lights went out after practice.  And they skated even after the lights went out on the Olympic rink.  They came in as a disjointed, clique-filled group of college kids and united on one common front, a hatred for their coach (this was the goal of Brooks, to unite the group as a team, even at his own expense).  Never a smile, never a pat on the back, never a night out with the boys from Brooks.  They either wanted to be there and to train or they could pack their bags.  And along with that ride you witnessed the close ties each play had to their families, some often sharing a home with aunts and uncles, as well as siblings and cousins...they loved it and were loved back.  And when they beat the Soviet Union in the semi-final, one player commented that he felt the Soviets weren't so much upset to have lost, but had simply forgotten how amazing it felt to have won.  

      And finally go back another 11 years to the launch of Apollo 11 and its goal of putting the first man on the moon.  The 2019 film using archived NASA footage captured the engineering marvel, a rocket with 7.5 million pounds of thrust lifting a 6.5 million pound object ever so slowly, and perhaps even more impressive, maintaining that thrusting power for a full 2.5 minutes, at which point it was out of fuel (it was burning over 4750 gallons of fuel per second) and gave way to the second stage .  As the Institute of Physics put it: It took eight years, 10 practice-run missions, more than 400,000 engineers, scientists and technicians, and in today’s money roughly £150bn to make the first tentative steps on another planetary body.  To witness the banks and banks of slide-ruled engineers and Instamatic camera takers, all watching this gigantic object just doing something we now almost take for granted, and then realize that all of that is the actual footage, is alone a marvel.  

      Beyond the complexity of putting together such footage, of getting the timelines correct, of discovering and likely restoring old film footage, to assemble those people still alive today, and to then make it interesting is itself a wonder.  Someone, or some group, had to have the desire and finances and connections and time to put it all together and then find a venue where it could reach an audience.  And there are SO many documentaries out there, thank heavens (much of the original D-Day landing film footage was believed to have been lost in the rough ocean waters from that time).  But these three films in particular -- Queen of Chess, Miracle: The Boys of '80, and Apollo 11-- were real, and in my lifetime, and somehow reminded me of what I had forgotten.  As an elderly Mark Twain once said: I have arrived at an age at which the things I remember most clearly never happened.  These 3 documentaries were of my time, and of events that did happen.  But they were more than that...

     Melissa Kirsch wrote in her NY Times column of the overview effect, "the change in perspective, the feeling of awe that people experience when they see Earth from space.:"  Astronauts speak of recognizing the beauty of the planet, a feeling of interconnectedness, a deep understanding of Earth as home.  These are insights we, forever terrestrial, may understand intellectually but have a hard time truly embodying.  Christina Koch, another of the astronauts on the mission, described the phenomenon: “You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries.  All you see is Earth and you see that we are way more alike than we are different.”  The Artemis II astronauts are the first who’ve been permitted to bring smartphones into space.  Will we see selfies at Earthrise, TikToks in zero gravity?  And NASA has made it possible for anyone with an internet connection to track the crew.  And yet, as another NY Times piece wrote: This is, it seems, a country impervious to unity these days, led by a president with little interest in pursuing it.  Rather than take advantage of the moment to try to bring Americans together behind a fresh voyage to the next frontier, Mr. Trump focused on what has torn Americans apart.  Our world "leaders" --in tech, finance, and politics-- appear to have once again let money & power, politics & religion, severely cloud their earlier visions of just caring for, and helping others (the newly released Trump budget proposal increases defense spending to $1.5 trillion while cutting $73 billion from domestic services).  Indeed, journalists are asking why Trump chose to speak just hours after Artemis II successfully took off and yet not even mention that launch?  Still, the 4 astronauts tried to bring the divide back to Earth (all four are 50 or younger): Mr. Glover, the mission’s pilot, noted the parallels between his mission and the launch of Apollo 8 in 1968, another tumultuous year in American history, remembered for the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.  “That was a tough time in the country,” he said, “and I hope that we can create a touch point for our generation that’s equal to, or maybe there’s a path to be even greater than, because it’s current and it’s ours.”

     Perhaps I was looking at things now through old eyes, living with old attitudes and pondering old memories.  But the commonalities of these documentary films and writings reminded me of a time or a moment when something pulled things together: past and present, city and country, united and divided.  Bitter divisions, conflicting views, prejudices, and pent-up discords all magically faded away as we became one.  We shared as a whole, and it felt good, as if it were something long overdue.  At those moments there were no thoughts of war, or in-house fighting, or rights or wrongs.  There was only us.  And for that brief period, we saw what was possible, how we could exist together, and how we could celebrate as a country and as a world.  So things do change, and they do repeat, and they do progress and regress.  And perhaps people of today will remember that massive Artemis II rocket to the moon just as clearly as I did back when Apollo 11 launched.  But for me it didn't feel the same.  My tainted eyes saw that massive rocket almost as an ICBM of my youth, a ballistic missile displaying power and arrogance of what nations (so far) hold in check.  I didn't want to see it that way; I wanted to feel that wow, that excitement, that all-will-be-okay feeling.  But just as quickly as the launch faded out of camera sight, we were back to the war of bombing schools and hospitals, and now water supplies and electrical grids threatened or actually targeted, as Russia recently did with Ukraine, and Israel did with Gaza (and Trump now threatens with Iran).  These are war crimes, crimes against humanity.  And I had to wonder as Artemis II took off with its 8.8 million pounds of thrust, where did we stand as humanity?  So I took solace in understanding a tiny bit more of the farming community by reading American Harvest, and of understanding that there is a movement breaking away from the tech tycoons on the internet, and of countries such as Ukraine quickly and effectively learning to create and change weapons and tactics against oligarchs.   But more so, it was in watching these three documentary films that made me realize that regardless of how accurate my memory was or wasn't of those times, I do know that I once took away a glimpse, a peek, a sliver of who we really were as a people and as a country.  

     A phrase I remember from my teenage years, but rarely hear now, was "the world is your oyster."  I didn't know what it meant,  or why is was such a popular idiom.  But I think that now I somewhat understand.  We can treat our world without caring, blindly ending life and slurping down one thing after another without a thought.  Or we can treat an irritant --in the case of an oyster, that of a single grain of sand-- as just that, and deal with it, taking the time to slowly create something beautiful, a pearl.  Perhaps the way I am seeing things now is merely a speck of sand in my eye, and that I should learn to deal with it, and that by doing so and changing my attitude, that something beautiful will emerge.  I saw it happen several times before.  I look forward to seeing it happen once again...