Human Meme

There was a moment in your life when you found out. Maybe you were eleven, and a cousin let something slip at a family dinner. Perhaps it happened at thirty-four, going through a parent's papers after a funeral, when a folder you were not supposed to open contained a name you had never heard. Or you were fifty-eight, and a half-sister you did not know you had appeared in your DNA results. The detail varies from one person to the next. What stays constant is the texture of the moment. The room reorganizes itself. Around it, the faces of the people who had known reorganize along with the room. And then the realization arrives, that the world you had been living in was a smaller version of the world, edited for you, by people who had decided what you could be told and when. I want to talk right now about what it means to sit on the receiving end of a structural decision someone else has made about your knowledge. The decisions where a person, or a committee, or an institution, looks at another human being and decides that the truth would not serve them. That the truth will be administered later, in doses, on a schedule the person being administered to did not consent to and cannot see.

I keep walking past the same stretch of river. Most days I cross over it. Sometimes I stop. There is a place along the New Jersey side of the Hudson where you can stand and see the water moving in two directions at the same time, depending on where you fix your eyes. The surface goes one way. Beneath it, the deeper current is going the other way. The Mohican word for the river is Muhheakantuck. It means the waters that are never still. When you say the word, you have already been told what to look for. This is what I have been thinking about for the last several months, while finishing a book that came out this week. The book is called RelationShaping: Field Studies. It is the companion volume to The Scientific Aesthetic, and it asks one question across ten different settings: what changes about a person when they become trained to see something the rest of us walk past? The book's working claim is that relational seeing is a competence. A real competence, the kind you acquire the way a child acquires reading. Reading is acquired somewhere in the practice. After several thousand hours of reading across genres, against difficulty, with attention, the capacity arrives. There is no moment to point to. Sentences just appear and you know what they say. Reading French is the same. The capacity arrives somewhere in the reading itself, after the exercise sets are done, after several thousand pages have crossed the eye against difficulty.

Paris, August nineteenth, eighteen thirty-nine. François Arago, perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences, stands at a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He reads into the record the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process. The French state has acquired the rights from Daguerre and Isidore Niépce in exchange for life pensions of six thousand francs per year and four thousand francs per year. Sunlight, Arago tells the chamber, can now be made to draw its own pictures. Within weeks the satirical press of Paris is mocking photographers as mechanics, copyists, charlatans. Paul Delaroche, the academic history painter at the height of his reputation, is reported, perhaps apocryphally, to have said: from this day, painting is dead. Twenty years later Charles Baudelaire writes the canonical hostile statement. He wants photography kept in its place. Useful for documenting monuments, useful for assisting the working artist, excluded from the category of art. The painters of 1839 were wrong. They were also partly right.

I want to start with four seconds. If you watched public television anywhere in the United States between 1971 and January of this year, you know these four seconds. A human face in profile, rendered first in the three colors of mid-century corporate design, recast in 1984 as a trio of interlocking faces on a field of white. Six synthesizer notes descending, resolving to a sustained major ninth chord. A voice that said three words. This is PBS. The sequence took less than four seconds. Before it ran: documentaries, children's programming, nature films, dramatic adaptations of novels too difficult for commercial television to attempt. News came after it. Cooking instruction followed. Home-improvement demonstration, classical music, weather announcements on rural affiliates, local public-affairs segments, national programming from Omaha and Boise and Portland and Lincoln, Nebraska, all carrying the same four-second preamble.

Shakespeare wrote the apothecary twenty lines and then disappeared him from the text. Think about what that means for a moment. Romeo, banished to Mantua, walks into a shop and asks a starving man to sell him poison. The apothecary refuses. The apothecary cites the law. Mantua punishes the sale of such drugs with death. Romeo counters that the world affords no law to make him rich. Forty ducats change hands. A vial changes hands. Romeo leaves. Shakespeare's attention returns to Verona, to the tomb, to the reconciliation of the feuding houses. The apothecary remains in his shop. He has forty ducats on the counter. He has just committed a capital crime. Nobody has ever asked him what happened next.

1862. That is the year Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act said that any American willing to settle on 160 acres of public land, live there for five years, and improve the parcel, could file a claim and receive title. Between 1862 and 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act finally repealed the Homestead Act in the contiguous states, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America through this mechanism of the registered claim. The claim, the parcel, the boundary line, the survey marker. That is how the American imagination learned to think about territory. My new book, The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves, argues that the American body is now claimed the same way. Not metaphorically. Structurally. The body you are sitting in right now, the body listening to my voice, is divided among institutional claimants who have filed on portions of it with the same legal and procedural logic that once divided the continent. A hospital claims your birth. A school claims your developmental measurements. An insurer claims your diagnostic history. An employer claims your labor capacity and your drug screens. The state claims your reproductive eligibility and your military eligibility. If the criminal claim succeeds, a prison claims your physical presence. At the other end of life, a dying registry claims the moment of your cessation, and a funeral corporation claims the disposal of your remains. Operating in the shadow of all of these, a data broker claims an ongoing right to your metabolic patterns, your consumption patterns, your grief patterns, your sleep patterns, your pharmaceutical patterns, and sells them forward to whoever will pay.

We talked once on this podcast about the pause before a lie. That episode, "Pause Before the Lie," examined the 200-millisecond hesitation that researchers have measured in the human voice when a speaker is about to say something untrue. I argued that the pause was proof of consciousness caught between realities, and that the hesitation itself might be the most human thing about us. Today I want to talk about a different pause. A longer one. One that has nothing to do with lying and everything to do with freedom. Somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, you started to type something and stopped. A sentence composed itself in your head, and you swallowed it. The thought of attending an event, visiting a website, searching a phrase flickered through your mind, and then it went dark. An edit was made before anyone requested one.

I was seven years old, sitting on red shag carpeting in Nebraska, in front of a wood-grain television cabinet heavy enough that two adults would struggle to move it. It was a Saturday morning in October 1972. My mother was somewhere else in the house, or she was not home. Curtains were drawn. A rotary dial on the front of the cabinet clicked through thirteen VHF positions, though only three of them produced a signal. The rest produced static, a white hiss I associated with emptiness. I turned on the set myself. No one helped me. No one told me to. I did not know I was being trained.

In the fall of 1984, I was sitting in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, watching slides click through a Kodak Carousel projector. Greek marble. Benin bronze. Mughal miniature. Japanese woodblock. The professor's argument was plain: these works endured because they were beautiful, and beauty was the thread that connected every person in that room to every person who had ever stood before the original object. Down the hall, in a different semester, a film professor made a different case. Beauty, he said, was larger than prettiness. The ugly, the reprehensible, the fantastic, the comic: all of these were forms of beauty because all of them enchanted and instructed. A movie theater was a secular chapel. We watch together because beauty is a collective event. Both professors were right. Both were incomplete. And the question that has taken me forty years to formulate is the question my new book, The Human Universal Beautiful, attempts to answer: if beauty connects and instructs, who controls the connection? Who writes the lesson plan?

Three seconds. That is all it takes. Three seconds of your voice, captured from a public meeting, a conference call, a video posted to social media, and a machine can learn to speak as you. It can produce your cadence, your rhythm, the way you pause before a name, the way your pitch drops when you are certain. It can say things you have never said, in rooms you have never entered, to people you have never met. And the people who hear it will believe it is you, because the only test the human ear can perform is recognition, and recognition is no longer proof of origin. This is the condition that The Likeness, the ninth novel in the Fractional Fiction series, examines from the inside.