Gary Shteyngart’s recent best-selling novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” is set in an absurdly distopian but sadly plausible future where the information age has reached maximum insanity.
Everyone obsesses over their “äppäräti,” geniusphone devices that constantly send and receive massive torrents of information.
These smartphones-on-steroids allow for real-time broadcast of anything that crosses their camera nozzles, and several characters make decent livings sharing every narcissistic detail of their lives, along with political commentary, celebrity gossip, health tips, and discussions of such navel-gazing trivia as “the ‘wah-wuh’ sound of the doors closing on the 6 train versus the resigned ‘sheesh’ sound on the L.”
The book’s protagonist, Lenny, has a friend “who spends seven hours a day streaming about her weight” and whose signature line is, “Hey girlfriend, gots muffintop?” Another of Lenny’s acquaintances reports news headlines while engaged in enthusiastic hardcore porn.
Talk about your niche programming!
Shteyngart envisions this happening in a few years’ time, or possibly, as the jacket copy notes, “next Tuesday.”
I’m going with next Tuesday.
We reached a watershed moment on our journey to digital babel recently when tired Internet meme Charlie Sheen shared his disjointed thought torpedoes via an awful livestream called “Sheen’s Korner.” Despite its amateur-hour production values, the show drew three million users to Ustream, the live web video service that carried the feed. Ustream is one of many such sites, including Blogtv.com, Justin.tv, and Livestream.com, that allow anyone with a Flipcam or Facetime to act the fool in real time on the world stage. And each of those sites already has a bazillion streams to choose from.
Livestreaming is mainstreaming, thanks to plentiful bandwidth and a wealth of easy-to-use tools and technologies. Everyone is a channel, everyone is a reality show, and everyone’s fifteen minutes can be flogged twenty-four hours a day.
YouTube is so yesterday, or some other long-ago day. Livestreaming is right now.
There’s interesting programming out there, if you know where to look. One example: TMG Art Director Josh Coleman, who when not designing award-winning layouts co-hosts an excellent tech-centered talk show every Wednesday night at 9 called the T4 Show. He and cohost Michael Manna have created a program that’s fast-paced and surprisingly slick for its shoestring budget. A recent episode drew 26,000 viewers.
And now big names like Keifer Sutherland, Kevin Spacey and David Fincher are getting into the digital-original space. Streaming services like Netflix—where Fincher is developing his Web series “House Of Cards”—combined with internet appliances like Apple TV, are making the transition to Web-based video virtually seamless.
Forget next Tuesday. I’m going with the next ten minutes.
Content is exploding like never before. Remember the quaint old days at the dawn of cable, when Bruce Springsteen complained about “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)?” Ha! The number of ‘channels’ will soon be infinite. The infodeluge will be ceaseless.
But once content, new and old, great and small, has migrated to the on-demand warehouse of the Web, once it’s happening everywhere constantly, will anyone care? How will we filter it all?
I don’t know. I can’t keep up now.
“Super Sad True Love Story” finds much to mourn in the information age, including our attention spans. But Shteyngart’s future is only the beginning.
“Gots muffintop?”
Related articles
- Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart – review (guardian.co.uk)
- Super Scary Dystopian Nightmare: Gary Shteyngart’s satire delivers [Book Review] (io9.com)
