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By Root 833 0

one another they all seemed unconvincing and small. And that, to a certain extent, has been my own goal in writing this book: to consider political smears, and meaningless fads, and perishable bands, and momentary celebrities, and disposable narratives in general, as all objects in the same class, as species in the same low family of invertebrates. When herded together, the extent to which they have overrun our culture becomes clear. We love our nanostories, their birth and death thrill us, and yet we know that they are devouring us. We want reason in our politics, greatness in our art, and we see that these are incompatible with our feckless, churning conversation. We must learn how to neuter our nanostories, or at least to cut off their food supply.

During my own years adventuring in viral culture, all the meme-makers I met were on some level trying to engineer a fix for this problem, the dilemma of disposability—the curse of the nanostory, the spike, the terror of the abandonment that inevitably follows the rush of viral blowup. And the approach arrived at by each was one that I, at some time or another, came to try on for myself. Like Jonah Peretti, the memetic engineer extraordinaire, I by and large approached meme-making with the remove of the social scientist, who can thereby explain away his projects’ abandonment or even outright failure as more experimental data. Like John Harris of The Politico, Henry Cowling of the Viral Factory, or any of the countless other can-do viral entrepreneurs of the Web 2.0 boom, I have felt the temptation toward making memes for profit, toward learning to love the viral hive-mind whose whims, once detected by way of “most e-mailed” lists, MySpace friending, or Digg voting, can be continuously placated in exchange for hits and dollars. I also, at various times, have harbored a techno-utopian fondness for the meme machine, and I even have felt tempted, like Time’s “You” issue, to lionize viral culture as a people-powered paradise. But I also have seen the day-by-day destructiveness of the Internet churn, of the manufacture of nanostories with little regard for their ultimate truth. And like Kurt Strahm, even, the former painter and now Accidental Oracle, I have in my dark hours understood the personal allure, in the face of all this disposability, of receding into cynical monasticism, of conceiving meta-ideas but never executing them and thereby risking nothing.

So: how to sap the machine of its tyrannical power? For most of us, disengaging entirely from our communications technology is hardly desirable—or even possible, for that matter, if we are unwilling to lose our jobs and slide into Luddite penury in some far-off yurt. There are promising half measures, however, and some of them are being tried. Jake Silverstein, a writer and editor in Austin, has advocated for the celebration of “Internet Ramadan,” a monthlong annual holiday when all Internet use is forbidden during the daytime. Along similar lines, the cookbook writer Mark Bittman recently wrote in the New York Times about his attempts at a “Secular Sabbath,” a twenty-four-hour period each week when all electronic communication devices are to be powered off. The computing giant Intel has been experimenting with “Quiet Time” on Tuesday mornings, where employees are encouraged to go entirely offline, post DO NOT DISTURB signs on their doors, and give over four straight hours to the decadent pursuit of uninterrupted thought.

The hope is that by cordoning off spaces in our lives away from information, we will less often fall prey to our obsession with short-term thinking and the ephemeral narratives that accompany it. One is reminded of Nassim Taleb’s fictional dentist who, when he reads his stock reports less often, paradoxically becomes better informed. By the same principle, we would be far better off reading our blogs daily instead of hourly, watching the news weekly instead of daily, looking for new bands and books and trends monthly (or even yearly) instead of weekly. For a particularly extreme corrective on this subject,