For two years in college (1990–1991) I shelved books at the University of Nebraska’s Love Library. One day I discovered a whole class of reference books I had no idea even existed: town directories. Love Library had collected all of Nebraska’s town directories for the past several decades.

I found a copy of the Scottsbluff directory from the mid-1970s, when my family lived there. On first glance it looked a little like a phone book: lists of businesses and individuals, their addresses and phone numbers. But to simply pick it up you knew it was’t a phone book. It was heavy: printed on thick 20-poundish stock, hardbound. There were very few ads, no yellow pages. A town directory didn’t just give you contact details, it gave you personal details. The listing for Souders, Vernon gave my father’s profession, employer, his wife’s name including maiden name, and children’s names. I think it might have had ages in it as well, and fraternal associations like VFW, Elks or Rotary. Town directories were the pre-marketing-database equivalent of a marketing database. To be fair they also listed businesses, and (probably) their owners. I suspect they were maintained by the Chamber of Commerce, city newspaper, or some other, similar quasi-governmental organization. They were printed in smaller quantities and less frequently than phone books, and held in CoC offices and libraries. They were public, but not publicly distributed.

I imagine there was something grown-up about being listed in your town directory. Only people (mostly men) with stable jobs and addresses would be listed there. If you found your name in the town directory, that meant you were a bona-fide Member of the Community. Speaking as a man with a stable job and a permanent address, I would find something reassuring about such a listing. “The community knows I’m here. I matter.” Conversely: it would serve to temper potentially bad behavior. I’d be a lot less likely to pick fights in bars if everyone knew where I lived and who signed my paychecks.

In even more ancient times, the church registry would have signified something similar, but more basic, more animal. Paul Souders was born on this day, baptized on this day, confirmed into adulthood on this day, married on this day, had children on these days, died on this day, buried on this day.

I suspect credit scores have largely replaced town directories and church registries as a signifier of your social stability. You can’t rent an apartment or get many kinds of jobs without a credit history (and forget trying to buy a car or house.) A century-plus ago your worth as a person was measured by birth/adulthood/marriage/death, and recorded by the church. A few years later the local merchants wanted to make sure you were a reliable member of the social order. Nowadays it’s the credit card companies.

The Internet, for the past twentyish years, has allowed a strange new kind of personality to emerge: the anonymous citizen. I have no idea who CmdrTaco really is, but I know he(?)’s a heavyweight on Slashdot (or was when I used to hang out there anyway). Despite his(?) amorphous personhood, CmdrTaco is bona-fide Member of the Slashdot Community. Early netizens took for granted that, on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog. This was radically liberating, and like other forms of radical liberation (see also: “The Sixties”) encourages a lot of bad behavior. Trolling, especially.

But social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, and (especially) Facebook have tipped that balance in another direction. I created a sock puppet on Facebook — it’s not hard — but it’s pretty pointless. On Facebook, maybe no one knows you’re a dog, but the only people interested in you are other dogs.

There’s a lot of chatter lately about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s notion of “radical transparency,” which he describes approximately thus:

“You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”

Zuckerberg — a second-generation netizen — knows what he’s at here. Speaking as a first-generation Netizen this kind of terrifies me. But as a grownup person with kids and a mortgage I’m kind of glad to see people posting comments on forums with their real names and links to their blogs or Twitter streams. “I am a real person. You know I am here. My blog and Twitter stream indicate that I matter” If we’re all listed in the Internet’s Town Directory, we’re a lot less likely to pick fights in the Internet’s bars.

I just wish wish wish anyone but Facebook were doing this.

Two things are slowly driving me personally off Facebook:

1. They keep moving the goalposts (“oh we built our platform on privacy...except for demographic info...and except for OpenGraph...and we expire the stuff exposed to external sites in the API after 24 hrs...or maybe never...of course you can change this in your privacy settings...did we mention we reset your privacy settings?”). Respectful businesses do not behave this way.
2. Exposing the social graph. Even if I scrupulously manage my privacy settings, my friends might not. I volunteered my demographic data so I expect FB will use it. But I can’t vouch for my friends’ expectations.

Like any narcissist I’m a chronic over-sharer, this blog is proof. But when I realized I was inadvertently exposing marketing data on Jenny — who is not a narcissist, and not an over-sharer — that pretty much did me in.

Facebook isn’t a publication platform (aka “the web”) on which I’ve been hollering about myself for 15 years. It isn’t Flickr or Blogspot; it’s not about our content, it’s about our relationships. We’re not publishing memoirs on Facebook, we’re voluntarily providing free marketing data to the new town directory. I personally think the Internets needs a town directory — this is our new town square, and we should all stand behind the things we holler here with our real names. The actual reality of real communities — not Slashdot, sorry — is that words have consequences.. But like I said, I wish anyone but Facebook were publishing it.

I don't know anyone who says anything other than “good riddance” to the first decade of the 21st century. I know lots of people who hope it was the anomaly, that the rest of the century will get better. I know a probably-equal number who think it’s only going to get worse.

Personally, the decade was rock bottom and tip top. This was the decade I became a Real Grownup. I started it gliding along with a certain degree of dissatisfaction with success. I’d just stumbled into my new career as a web designer, and my new marriage to my first wife. I was six months away from rock bottom in that marriage but had no idea what was coming or why, only that the unstable place I was in wasn’t going to hold. On this subject, the less said, the better. That new career was subject to the whipsaw vagaries of the Dot-com boom — although in the long run I’ve never been worried about jobs or work or money in quite the way I probably should be.

In 2000, that all cracked up. The marriage wobbled through two separations and a little ugliness until it dissipated altogether in 2002. The cool new career ping-ponged between Real Jobs and freelance and outright unemployment, until I regained my footing at Curiosity (also in 2002). 2002 was the year I learned that I was boy who never quite figured out how to be a man. It took breaking my marriage totally and irreparably to figure it out. The pecularity of modern American manhood is that it’s defined in contrast to womanhood, which is all backwards. Manhood isn’t the state of not being a woman, it’s the state of not being a boy. Anyway, by the end of 2002 I was stable, back on my feet.

2002 was also the year I began riding my bike. A lot. I have one piece of advice for someone who wants to be happier: ride your bike.

Three really important things happened in 2003. I shaved my head. I met Jenny. I put Sitka to sleep. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those three things taught me to release vanity, embrace vulnerability, and accept loss. Together they taught me the only important thing I’ve ever learned: my life isn’t just about me. When Orion was born I learned that the rest of my life isn’t about me at all. The rest of my life until I die is about my children and their children. My haircut is not even remotely important any more.

The glide path of my life turned upward after 2003. Jenny and I married in 2005 — probably my favorite year of the decade, if you really pressed me. We moved to China in 2006, and back in 2007. Orion joined us in 2008. The only two years in which nothing much happened to me personally were 2004 and 2009.

So that was me: pretty good decade I guess. A little bumpy, but the bumps made it good, ultimately.

Impersonally, this was an awful decade for America. (It was a lot better for 2-3 billion other people, though, something I won’t touch on.)

I won’t dwell long on politics except to note that no one got what they wanted. The nation didn’t get the president it voted for in 2000, but we did in 2004. By 2006, we had serious buyers’ remorse. It sucked elephant balls to be a liberal this past decade, but it had to really grate to be a conservative. Conservatives got everything they ever wanted for six or so years and it was an utter failure. I wonder if the resulting cognitive dissonance isn’t driving the utter batcrap crazy nonsense coming out of conservative mouths these days.

Lots of people will want to think September 11, 2001, was a nadir for America (and maybe the world), but I think in a couple of decades it’ll look like the 21st equivalent of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. A big deal only for the stuff that happened around it. Really big objects are in motion, globally, stuff that only crackpots and visionaries discussed ten years ago. Global warming, peak oil, globalization, the shift of global capital eastward and southward, the imminent plateau of human population, the emergence of the infosphere as a pervasive element of society. Ferdinand’s death didn’t start the Great War; the Great War was the first, protracted battle of World War II. The whole mess fell out of the final crackup of the ancient world order of empires built by monarchs.

I wonder whether the 2000s weren’t so much the first decade of the 21st century as the last decade of the 20th. The 19th century didn’t really end until 1918. And then it got worse.

The Internet and mobile phones — the democratization of information, actually — are quietly and relentlessly euthanizing whole industries. 2009 was the year people stopped consuming printed matter. Think hard about what that means. 20 years ago, if you wanted to know a random piece of information — for example, who played the second Catwoman in the Batman TV show with Adam West, for example — it would require several minutes, perhaps hours, of legwork. Minimally, a trip to the library. That’s a measure of how free information has become: we no longer rely on institutions or interlocutors to tell us what apartments are for rent, what a used car should cost, or how much our neighbors’ houses are worth. When people say “information is power,” there’s a concrete case. Twenty years ago, I was at the mercy of the used car guy. I had to hope he was honest, or I had to do days of expensive legwork to keep him honest.

The democratization of information will have consequences. Lots of people depend on that friction for their paychecks. In just a few minutes I can name a dozen or so professions fast becoming obsolete: publisher, newspaper editor, used-car salesman, newspaper carrier, ad buyer, payroll clerk, shipping clerk, bank teller, real estate agent, travel agent (anyone with “agent” in their title, really).

On the other hand, and this really blows my mind, my job title didn’t even exist when I graduated high school 20 years ago. The industry didn’t even exist. The words “web designer” were a meaningless nonsequitur. Man did I luck out there.

All this change was in the air 10 years ago, but most people overlooked the “destruction” part of “creative destruction.” The 90s had been pretty good — pretty great, actually...remember when gas was 89¢/gal? — and the 80s were nearly as good. The 70s sucked a little, sure, but Disco wasn’t as bad as everyone remembered, and black people could finally sit in the front half of the bus. 1975 was the point at which the disparity between rich and poor was lowest in the United States. (I wasn’t alive in the 60s so I can’t tell you whether anyone felt nostalgia for the passing decade on Dec. 31, 1969.) 1999 was coming at the tail-end of 50+ years of economic, political, and military stability for the United States.

I understood this, growing up, in an indirect way. When I read about Henry Huggins in 1979, the life he lived in 1949 was pretty substantially like mine. No kid lives like that in 2009.

So this is where “personal” hits “impersonal.” I’ve led a blessed life: a trouble-free childhood, my teenage and twenty-something years no worse than usual, a career I stumbled into by a fluke of history. All the troubles of my life — the divorce, mostly — are entirely of my own doing. This blessed life is a result of a lottery I won at birth. I was smart enough to be born in America, smart enough to have middle class parents with a good marriage, smart enough to be born into a largish extended family in a prosperous midwest state. All at the point in history when America was doing great and we had plenty of everything we needed: energy, water, topsoil, forests, fisheries, family farms, colleges, factories, credit cards, doctors. We still have doctors and colleges in good supply, I’m not too worried about those. Some of that stuff — e.g. factories and family farms — we’ve surrendered more or less intentionally through economic relationships, so we can get them back. Most of the rest we’ve simply eaten up and crapped out. However much there may be left of topsoil, or forests, or energy, or fresh water, we aren’t making more of it nearly fast enough. For 50 years, America’s been on a pretty effortless upward path; but there’s nothing in history or our present situation to suggest we can rely on momentum alone. I think we need to grow up a little and get a little serious about what America can do (halt global warming) and can’t do (build shopping malls in Kabul). But none of that is gonna fix itself, the way my life just kinda sorta turned out awesome. I think the “era of stuff just turning out awesome” is over.

Before Orion I used to say: I could imagine a heaven no better than to live my life again. But that’s not the heaven I want any more. Heaven to me now would be: I want Orion (and his sibling[s], and their kids) to live a life as good as mine. I mean this literally, by the way, not figuratively. I would gladly surrender personal immortality in paradise for the guarantee that my progeny get to live happy, fulfilling, plentiful lives.

From a romantic perspective, I want that life to have the exact elements I had: snow in the winter, trees to climb, bears in the mountains, paper routes and bicycles, cheap college with cheap beer, travel to fun places, no military draft, and a little dose (but not too much!) of free love. But that world isn’t gonna happen (see above re: creative destruction, stuff in short supply), and nothing as good as that will happen again unless we make it happen.

Which occasioned me to reflect that this year is my twenty year high school reunion.

The year I graduated from college:

• The big summer movies were Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade, the first Batman movie (with Michael Keaton), and the Abyss. Only the Abyss used computer special effects to any great degree, and then only in one scene.
• John McTiernan filmed Hunt for Red October because the Soviet Union represented a safely evergreen nuclear threat.
• There were two Germanys and one Czechoslovakia.
• China was a hermitic third-world country with a troublesome democracy movement.
• There was no World Wide Web. The industry where I have made my career did not yet exist.
• Futurists like John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler thought industries like finance, media and publishing would lead the new Information Economy.
• HS advisors said journalism was a solid career choice for the future.
• Cell phones cost about $3/minute to use, and weighed about a pound.
• Colleges would accept neatly-handwritten application essays.

...who are:

• Claude Stanly Choules, Australia
• John Campbell Ross, Australia
• Fernand Goux, France
• Pierre Picault, France
• Henry William Allingham, United Kingdom
• Netherwood Hughes, United Kingdom
• Henry John Patch, United Kingdom
• William Frederick Stone, United States
• John Henry Foster Babcock, United States
• Frank Woodruff Buckles, United States

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surviving_veterans_of_World_War_I

The last surviving veteran of a Central Powers Nation, Franz Künstler of Austria (Austro-Hungary), died in May.

Of the greatest war that had — in its day — ever been fought; the war that unmade four empires, rewrote the maps of Europe, near Asia, and Africa; the war that destroyed the last great age of globalism; the war so total that it was called, for fifteen years, the Great War: almost no one remains who remembers that war first hand. In four years, the last vestiges of the medieval Europe of kings, fiefdoms and peasantry were unwritten. In only a few years, no one alive will remember that ancient world.

Before I was born, November 11 was Armistice Day. These men were elder statesmen, gentle retirees, and they were everywhere. Today we look over the boundary of oral history and history. A thing we lived through will become a thing we read about.

We can turn the wheel forward: sometime around my own retirement, no one alive will have fought through World War II.

And we can turn this wheel backward: when my father was born, the codgers playing checkers in front of the feed store were Civil War veterans.

When we measure history in lifespans, it becomes shorter. By this measure, Napoleon conquered Europe only three lifetimes ago. For almost a century, when people spoke of “The Wars,” they meant the ones Napoleon started. (When I was a kid, people said “the war“ and meant WWII. No one says “the war” anymore, unless they mean “this war,” that is, the one we fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

With that new span of measurement — lifespans, not years, or decades, or generations — the progress of the last five hundred years takes on a frightening dimension. For 17 lifespans, the people of Europe toiled in varying states of serfdom within a religious and political framework that transcended all memory: living and written. Think about living within a social order that was almost exactly like your parents’ social order; who in turn lived almost exactly as their own parents had lived ... for seventeen lifetimes.

On an archaeological timescale, agriculture — the foundation of almost all existing social order — is ten times longer: 170 generations. Only one tenth of that time — those 17 endless lifetimes — have passed since the fall of the Roman Empire. But agriculture is itself but a blink: human beings, in their present shape, have been making tools, singing songs, telling stories, hunting, fishing, building: for 900 lifetimes.

Of those 900 lifetimes, we have lived with “modernism” (capitalism, democracy, equality, science, and progress) for only seven lifetimes. The United States is only barely three lifetimes old.

I think the men whose names appear above fought for the victory of Modernism over Feudalism, although they almost certainly didn’t see it that way. In 1900, serious thought about history and politics contended with the fate of empires: British, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Chinese...by 1919, only one of those empires mattered. As the Great War slips over the Event Horizon of a Single Lifetime, we might start to think that the modern world order — the one with capitalism and science and so forth — is here to stay. When we consider the weight of all the lifetimes before, however, our modern world order may feel a little fragile.