If you only know Douglas Coupland by his zeitgeist-capturing debut novel, Generation X – and, perhaps unfairly, given his extensive body of work, many people do – you might expect him to reject our era of technological ubiquity. This is, after all man, the man who popularised the terms “Gen X” and “McJob” in a story about dropping out of society and the cult of yuppie aspirations for life in a bungalow, working a dead-end bar job in a southern California resort city.
But Coupland is no Luddite – if anything, he’s an internet evangelist. After all, his fourth book, Microserfs, explored the burgeoning technological revolution with serious depth and intrigue at a time when most of us were still using the phrase “surfing the ‘net” without a shred of irony and google wasn’t even a word. Now, he’s Google’s Artist-in-Residence at their Paris office.
In his latest book, the non-fiction title, The Age of Earthquakes – which he co-authored with curator/art historian Hans-Ulrich Obrsit and writer Shumon Basar – Coupland argues that the Internet has fundamentally changed not just our brains, but everything about our world in a way that’s totally irreversible. Now, he argues, we’re living in the Extreme Present. And that’s not a bad thing, though we still struggle to appreciate the ubiquity of our technology. Even if he could, Coupland wouldn’t want to take a vacation from the connected world.
"People are so much more incredibly intelligent than I’d ever realised. It gives me great hope.”
“That would be boring and besides, electronic sabbaticals don’t work,” he writes over email. “Our brains are too rewired to be ‘unwired’ by a month or two of being offline.”
Coupland will be appearing on three panels at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, one of which is called Give Me Back My Pre-Internet Brain. Given his wholehearted embrace of what the Internet has to offer, it’s safe to assume he’ll be arguing in favour of embracing everything our hyper-real world offers.
He resists the common arguments levelled against the internet and its effect on our modern condition – disillusionment, distrust, disengagement, loneliness (“It has a really good knack for forming new relationships and groups as well as reinforcing old group identities”) – and instead posits that those problems are timeless.
“Everything you’ve just said is eternal. It just reconfigures slightly differently from one decade to the next. It means you’re all human and possess full empathy.
“I find infinite intelligence and originality even visiting a simple crowd site like Reddit. People are so much more incredibly intelligent than I’d ever realised. It gives me great hope.”
"A composer presenting something in a concert-like setting and, then, the film itself needs to shine; everything needs to come together.”Köner feels his scores are more personal, more revealing. “You’re much more stuck with your history, and your personal biography, than if you were just stuck in front of a blank canvas. With this silent film presentation we are doing, it’s a one hundred-year-old movie, it’s considered a masterpiece of this and that, there is so much context that you can really see the difference between it and what you are doing. What you are bringing to bear becomes so much clearer.”
