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Volume2 NQl As BafJ1er 18 went to press they were setting out the Christmas book display at the Kansas City Costco, a retail bazaar whose parking lot occupies the site of the city's last jazz club. We never enter this particular Costco without thoughts about mortality, about what had to disappear in order to make its amazing bargains possible, and this time its Christmas book display with its shiny piles of mass-market wisdom, vampires, and comely vice-presidential candidates served to heighten the somber mood. Outside, the world of letters was dying from the bottom up, as newspapers, magazines, bookstores, and perhaps, not too long from now, even book publishing itself discover that there is no conceivable business model that will support the production of quality prose. But inside, the Glenn Beck books were selling briskly. Shoppers were giving the gift of wholesome paranoia this year. Here was Glenn dressed up like one of the commies who have supposedly infiltrated our government. Glenn bearing messages from the heartland. Even a Glenn Beck Christmas book, a new tradition for your family. Here it was, the second holiday season of the recession, and all across the decaying, dying Midwest, families would soon be gathering round the hearth and swapping theories about how those scheming liberals have done us in. And maybe Glenn Beck is right about the impending end of the republic. Maybe it is just a matter of time until Beckiana and its allied genres are the only sort of material that our system finds it can publish profitably. Maybe all the work we have done to revive The the weeks of editing and copy-editing and has been for naught. Maybe publishing is as practical a way of sharing ideas as dumping print - outs from the cargo door of a DC-3. We headed home for a glass of Old Charter to mull it over.

Copyright 2010, The Baffler Literary Magazine, Inc. [ISBN 0-56698-56859-9] No part of this magazine may be republished in print or electronically without the express written permission of the publisher. This issue of The Baft1er was assembled in December 2009 in Chicago, Washington and New York after having been painstakingly ghostwritten by Bill Ayers. The magazine was designed by The Map Office, New York City, and printed by Shapco Printing Inc, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thomas Geoghegan, we are proud to report, is the first Baft1er politburo member ever to run for u.s. Congress. Sadly, the Democrats of Illinois' Fifth Congressional District chose to anoint someone else. The nation's loss is our gain, however, as Tom will now have more time to toil in our very own editorial salt mine. The list of people that we have to thank for helping us revive The Baffier is so long this time that we can't possibly hope to remember everyone. But here goes: The Baffier wishes to thank Debi Bergerson and her cohort at Shapco; Phoebe Connelly; Ben Edwards; Charlotte Fairlie; Josh Glenn; "Uptown" Mark Greif and Ali Heifetz; Hunter Kennedy; Brad Kotler and the team at Latham & Watkins; Lewis Lapham; Shana Lutker; Rick MacArthur; Jeremy McCarter; Ben Metcalf; Robert Nedelkoff; James Njus; Jennifer Norback; Eddie Opara and Salvador Orara at The Map Office; Dan Peterman and Connie Spreen; Melanie Raucci at Disticor; Rich Schaefer; Joe Spieler; Rick Wojcik; Lastly, Brankica Kovrlija deserves a special mention. The doughnuts are on us. The essay by Henry Fairlie was first published by The Washington Post on July 27, 1980, under the title, "Mencken's Booboisie In Control of GOP." It is reprinted here by kind permission of the estate of Henry Fairlie. A different version of the essay by Walter Benn Michaels was published in Bookforum in 2009 under the title, "Going Boom." Thanks to Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian for permitting us to print "Exercise" and "untitled," by the late, great Jack Spicer.

The Baffier invites submissions of essays, reviews, fiction. found documents and other interesting writing. Sorry, no poetry submissions will be considered. Send submissions or proposals to: submissions@thebaffler.com, and write your surname and "essay" or "fiction" or "review," as the case may be, in the subject line of the e-mail. Those who submit longish nonfiction pieces would do well to include a precis of a paragraph or so in the e-mail.

Contents Totentanz Thomas Frank, Dave Mulcahey, Conor O'Neil

01 I Essays

02 I Columns Poetry Slam Dan Kel!y

140

Let Them Eat Dogma

144

Chris Lehmann

What Does the Internet Look Like? Christine Smallwood

Lost on Nelson Algren Avenue Mike Newirth

152

Blood Drive Matt Taibbi

160

Serfing the Net Astra Taylor

No Logo Update Naomi Klein

TheO-Word Michael Lind

A Cottage for Sale A. S. Hamrah

Indispensable Men Yves Smith

The Un-usable Past Walter Benn Michaels

Journals of the Crisis Year Moe Tkacik

Poetry

This Is Rae Armantrout

Motor City Elegy Will Boisvert

Zones Devin Johnston

110

Exercise Jack Spicer

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Michael R. Bloomberg Ryan Ruby

King's Row Jim McNeill

116

[If I had invented homosexuality ... ] Jack Spicer

Race Inauguration Thomas Sayers Ellis

The Mix -Tape and the Auteur Will Schmenner

120

The People, No Henry Fairlie

125

03 I Fiction The Failed Plot to Assassinate Our Leader by Three Men, All Subsequently Deceased Paul Maliszewski

166

Jimmy Carter's Rabbit Lydia Millet

174

79 100

Art Simon Norfolk Joel Sternfeld Jules Spinatsch

13 John Miller 27 James Griffioen 40 Angie Waller

81 103 127

the Baffler Volume 2 NOl

Totentanz TIwmas Frank, Dave Mulcahey, Conor O'Neil

When we launched this magazine back in 1988, our beef with the world was simple and singular. We objected to the deliberately obscure academic style that was then applauded as political engagement of the most advanced sort. We thought it would be fun to heave some dead cats into the sanctuary of high theory. The priestly class was not amused. One battle led to another, and over the years we took on the culture industry's clamoring for "alternative," its adoration of middleness, its cult of youth. Through it all, what remained constant was a sense of the poverty of profit, the absurdity of the market, and the sheer, thundering cluelessness of mainstream cultural commentary. It all came together for us in the late Nineties, with all the new varieties of libertarianism that arose to sing the coming of the millennial technogasm. The media were gulled as usual: The freemarket New Jerusalem was at hand, they agreed; the information utopia had arrived. We disagreed, of course. This was the beginning of a high-tech "dark age," we insisted, not a renaissance. It was a political triumph for particular interests masquerading as an age of enlightenment. If anything, the great Nineties info-glut marked the termination of certain forms of economic reasoning' the replacement of traditional democratic forms with the populism of the focus group. Oh, for a day of reckoning, some historical earthquake in which all the misconceptions were corrected and all the charlatans exposed! In retrospect, the catastrophes that have befallen our friends in the "mainstream media" seem to have been almost inevitable. The industry was contemptuous of doubters like us. Its solons were dedicated utterly to the superstitions of the market, convinced in the face of all that is obvious that the formula for success was to drain the last bit of personality out of their product.

Although it's hard to remember nowadays, the chieftains of monopoly journalism had arrogance to burn. Their product was tepid, even banal, but their attitude was Olympian. No sooner had their "golden age" commenced in the Seventies than they were celebrating themselves as "The Powers That Be," as chuffed with their influence and as enamored with the customs and rituals of authority as have been any bunch of professional courtiers since the dawn of time. And now. In the space of a few short years, they have gone from lofty lordliness to whimpering irrelevance. The wipe-out has been awesome in its sweep, and it grows more devastating by the day. In the legendary newspaper town of Chicago, both surviving papers are in bankruptcy. Labor reporters are gone; book review sections are just about extinct; newsroom staffs are being decimated; investigative units are disappearing. Towns go from two papers to one paper to no paper, and it generates not even a ripple of surprise. We take no joy in watching this danse macabre. Newspapers may have done their job poorly, but the answer is hardly to renounce the job itself. With their eclipse is coming a parallel collapse of public knowledge, a catastrophic shutdown of scrutiny whose costs we will never be able to calculate. Places such as New York and Washington, of course, will always be over-described territory, abundant plains where the dwindling tribe of the pundits can hunt their game in perpetuity. But in the lesser metropolises of the republic, the lights are already going out. Already the people of those places don't know much more about those who rule them than their rulers choose to divulge. We fear that TV producer David Simon has it right when he warns, "The next 10 to 15 years will be halcyon days for local corruption. It's going to be a great time to be a corrupt politician. " What has precipitated the great journalism die-off, ironically, is a massive overproduction

The Raffler TOlenlazlThomas Frank, Dave Mulcahey, Conor O'Neil

of content. The abundance of information and connectivity we were promised in the early days of the World Wide Web has duly arrived, trailing its clouds of glory. But it is the consumer, not the producer, who sings hosanna. The voracious news reader- and there are more of us than ever- has countless newspapers at his disposal, proffering their contents for free. But it seems free is not a very good price for publishers. And so we read, we comment, we blog voluminously. But what we can't do on our own is the kind of literary work that requires reporters, editors, organizations. It is doubly ironic that we are losing our faculties of inquiry at precisely the moment when public-minded scrutiny of our institutions is most needed. The economic collapse oi 2008 was a direct consequence of scrutiny's demise, in his case as a result of the great political project of regulatory rollback. with bankers and brokers and mortgage entrepreneurs freed from the intrusive gaze of the public. Financial journalists, too, played their appointed role in the disaster, transforming themselves over the years into cheerleaders for the market and fans of this or that hero CEO. The coming collapse of journalism will merely finish the job of deregulation that the market's allies began. And surely it can only be described as a bonus triple-irony hat-trick that what the nation is doing to fend off the coming reign of ignorancei.e., nothing - is already being described in the happy, reassuring terms of the very order that has brought us to these straits: "The marketplace will sort this out," says Chris Anderson of good old Wired magazine, an institution that will apparently stand forever beyond the sobering influences of shame or bankruptcy. And as we stand before the market's judgment seat awaiting that great sort -out- which will undoubtedly cause all surviving journalistic organisms to evolve ever closer to the libertarian views of the foundations that will fund them we can't help but ponder the perversity of it all. The great, long-running contest between art and commerce is coming to an end, and com-

merce is preparing to declare unconditional victory. From experimental novelists right down to journalistiC legmen, those who work with words are to become society's interns. We will all work for free, the market is telling us, or we won't work at all. But those who provide the useful social function of crafting derivatives and corporate mergerswhy, nothing is too good for them. They can even crash the global economy, and society will reach out a helping hand to get them on their feet again. Art is short, but Wall Street is forever. And so the culture war fmally comes home. Not only is our criticism debatable; the very existence of journals like this one is a standing affront, a condition of which society will soon be cured. For us, of course, that means it's the perfect time to re -launch The Baffler magazine. As the world careens one way we faithfully steer the other. Print is dead, they say; we double down in our commitment to the printed word. Brevity is the fashion; we bring you long-form cultural criticism with an emphasis on stylistic quality. We look out at this upside-down landscape and are convinced that what it requires is not silence but a strong dose of our particular brand of scoffing: Strong ideas, elegantly expressed. And so, once more into the breach.

What Does the Internet Look Like? Christine Smallwood

Serfing the Net Astra Taylor

No Logo at Ten Naomi Klein

TheO-Word Michael Lind

A Cottage for Sale A. S. Hamrah

Indispensable Men Yves Smith

The Un-usable Past Walter Benn Michaels

Crisis Lit Moe Tkacik

Motor City Elegy Will Boisvert

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Michael R. Bloomberg Ryan Ruby

King's Row Jim McNeill

The Mix - Tape and the Auteur Will Schmenner

The People, No Henry Fairlie

'Ihe Baffler Volume2NQI

What Does the Internet Look Like? Christine Smallwood

Last summer, Popular Science broke important ground in Internet visualization theory-an ongoing effort to describe what happens behind our computer screens, or, more accurately, beyond them, inside Ethernet cables and satellites t1ying around in the upper atmosphere. What does all this activity look like? The answer, according to PopSci, is "an enormous, hulking Tootsie Roll pop." The task your data faces is to lick its way to the center, where all the magic happens. The history of the Internet is a history of metaphors about the Internet, all stumbling around this dilemma: How do we talk to each other about an invisible god? How does it appear, this mess of data and bytes and information and code, transforming itself into alphabet and image? We can rule certain images out right at the start. We know, contra former Senator Ted Stevens, that the Internet is not a "series of tubes." We know that "the Wild West" doesn't fit, not for a landscape that's been so nicely parceled, policed and manicured. We also know that it's not that other Nineties favorite, an "information superhighway"the point of a highway is to get somewhere, after all, somewhere that is not a highway, while the point of the Internet is to stay there, forever and ever, like a hot tub. A hot tub, after all, is shared with friends and strangers, whose warm water swirls around you, lulling you into complacency while silently transmitting disease. Yes: The Internet is definitely more like a hot tub than a highway. You might be willing to call it a day with the image of a Tootsie Pop, but Popular Science isn't stopping there. It also suggests that the Internet looks like a plane that stops at O'Hare en route from JFK to LAX - in other words, like an "inefficient" t1ight plan. Which, come to think of it, isn't anything at all like a Tootsie Pop. A Tootsie Pop is among the most efficient of all human creations. Its purpose is to maximize taste pleasure. It does so simply, elegantly, cheaply and sweetly.

No: The Internet is not like a Tootsie Pop at all. I'm not quite ready to give up on the hot tub idea, though. More on this in a minute. The Internet is not merely a matter of mind; our bodies are positioned by it, conditioned by it, contorted by it. Maybe you get whiplash from sneaking peeks while your boss isn't looking, or you slouch in front of it, slack-jawed, glassyeyed, t1uorescent -lit, all day long. Maybe you perch on the edge of your swivel chair to check your stocks and the headlines before the kids get up in the morning, and then creep back again at night for a little Amazon.com. Maybe you, a grandchild of people who "hunt and peck" with two forefingers, only write with your thumbs. Maybe you wear two wrist braces and tote around a special keyboard for ergonomic support. The way we address the god dictates how we sit and slump and bend and the height at which we hold our wrists and when we stand up and when we run back to the desk, just to check one more thing, before skipping out the door. Its magnetic pull yanks your head away from human interlocutors and redirects your gaze, a modern spring of Narcissus. Looking down at its tiny face on "smart phones" is surely the leading cause of non -lethal pedestrian crashes. We also spend an awful lot of time gazing at other people using the Internet, on television shows, in commercials, on billboards, in print ads, in movies. On the fake-looking screens of CSI and 24 we get impossibly detailed online databases, rotating three-dimensional password prompts, and helpful scans of state secrets. We watch actors do Google searches, sort through YouTube clips, answer MySpace messages, upload photos, click "send" and participate in high-quality livevideo chats. Sometimes these things look just like they do in real life. But more often, they look different. More technicolor. More volume.

Does the Internet Look Like?/ Christine SmaJlwood

More official seals. More like .. . Important Business. And yet, using the Internet - even the high speed Internet -never feels like Important Business. Awkwardly jutting my face to the screen as I puzzle over the comments and ratings the anonymous denizens of Internet - ville have left behind never feels like the civilized tete -a- tete with a knowledgeable gentleman featured in those ads for YellowBook.com. It feels slightly more like the cacophonous ad for the "Optimum Triple Play," a cable-phone- Internet package that features pirates, sea monsters and mermaids having a beach party, streaming video and rapping about calling Puerto Rico. And yet ... on the couch, with my overheated laptop burning my legs, one eye on the pirates and one on Wikipedia, I'm all alone, far from the sea, and jealous of the flexible mermaids, able to shimmy with ease despite the hours they pass hunched in front of their computers. My hunch about that hot tub thing must be right, though, because Optimum isn't the only

one peddling a water party. Hayden Panettiere, shilling for LG, uses her phone as an online "hobby-finder" before she summons her friends and favorite band to her backyard pool for a big blowout. Liquid in general connotes "fast." Cox sells its high-speed Internet as a "Power Boost"a foul-tasting sports energy drink that athletes spit out in disgust but that the Cox pod people, little marshmallow men in Hazmat suits, guzzle down the way the kids suckle cans of Monster Energy drink or Mountain Dew. The Internet, you see, is not only fast; it is also playful. Our most futuristic and, frankly, adult technology- a zillion hours of human creativity and brilliance have built a system whose primary use is to ogle pornography - is sold with youth and innocence. The young, knowing as they are, must be protected. Even when one would prefer to smack them in the mouth. For worried parents, Optimum has a special line of security commercials. Two beefy men in suits, sunglasses and earpieces stand guard over the living room while "Billy" researches Abraham Lincoln. His mother tries

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CIVILIZATION

The Baffler

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to sail in with a glass of milk and a snack, but little Billy, that joker, pretends not to recognize her: "I don't know this woman." She's confused, then exasperated in the way of a TV mom. Where a real mother might grow something like wrathful if her child were to turn the security apparatus against her, this commercial mom just rolls her eyes. She should be less sanguine. People worse than pedophiles lurk outside the living room wallspeople like the Eighties metal band Dokken, who represent, in an ad for Norton AntiVirus software, the terrible havoc that can befall your hard drive, imagined as a tender raw chicken. When Dokken does a synchronized pelvic thrust-i.e., when the virus fucks your computer-the chicken taneously combusts in the special kind of irony endemic to modern advertising. Sometimes the viruses don't announce selves with scowls, leather jackets and torn blue jeans. Sometimes, they're hidden. In Microsoft's commercials for its search engine Bing, one human being asks another human being a softball tion -such as, Did you book our tickets to Hawaii? or, Do pregnant ladies have special dietary needs?-only to discover that the yoga buddy, spouse or parent is not a human at all but has turned unexpectedly into an Internet zombie, monotonously rattling off useless facts. It's a brain harvest nightmare with a Freudian twist: an alien virus that colonizes minds and forces mouths to spew out random associations. It com bines the technological (a robotic voice, access to infinite information) with the peculiarly human (an associative way of thinking). A search engine, after all, ranks information based on popularity over time in large sample sizes; free association is an individual tic whose meaning is private and unrepeatable. The terror at first seems to be that humans have become machines, but in fact the malfunction is the reverse-the machine has become human, has acquired a human pattern of thought. Hence the need for a technological solution, a superior search engine that will "cut through the beings. clutter" for us feeble, Modern humans: still able but lousy weeders.

Most Internet service companies sell something very simple: togetherness. In the living room, at poolside, in bed, on a train, you are always connected. You are never alone. The relentless parties they offer, though, only emphasize the Internet's tragic flaw: It can't tuck you in at night. It can't make out with you. You love it, but it doesn't love you back. Two hypotheses: 1. We believe that the Internet has banished

solitude. 2. The actual experience of using the Internet is inherently solitary. Commercial pantomimes shore up the first hypothesis while denying the second. We are born alone, we die alone, and we use the Internet alone. You may gather round the screen with friends to watch a video clip (turning the Internet into a television), or hang out while you play music on Pandora (turning the Internet into a radio), or post to your blog, or "comment" on someone else's blog (turning the Internet into a roundtable, or a bathroom wall, depending). But these are subsidiary Internet uses. The essence of the Internet, the thing it does that nothing else can do, its is the search. Comedian Dave Chappelle captured this with the skit" If the Internet Were a Real Place," in which he loitered in a seedy mall like a modern Odysseus, ransack ing CD stores, ducking into curtained rooms to indulge various temptations, and running away from spammers. Wandering around the Internet, the thing we are always searching for is the doorthe exit ramp off the superhighway, the way home. But it's hard to find. How do you know when you're done doing nothing? Searching can be defined as the simple action of typing language into a browser for the purpose of calling up more language, or images, or video, or sounds. Point, click, hunch over, type, scratch your nose, backspace. (Calling this "surfing" requires a level of irony, or cognitive that can only be dissonance, or labeled a pathological denial of bodily experience.)

n Does the Internet Look Like?!Christine Smallwood

The search is not a group activity. Only one set of fIngers can type, only one hand can guide a mouse to click on a link. Daily life presents few frustra tions more profound than sharing a keyboard. We are beholden to countless Internet fantasies: It's quicker than the speed of light; it appears and dissolves at whim; it's guarded by big strapping men friendly to our own interests and hostile to the interests of others; it's magical. evanescent, as portable as our own bodies and imaginations; it looks like a sWirling hypercolor tie-dyed video game. These are, of course, also common fantasies about capitalism. But the ultimate fantasy of being online, echoed in much writing about the Internet, is existential: that it's a place where you are never alone. And yet, by definition, the experience of the Internet is an isolated one. The search demands solitude while promising to eradicate it. It turns out that the old metaphor- the Net. or the World Wide Web-was a pretty good one: webs and nets are traps. Like a fIshing trip, or like being a cop or a drug dealer, searching online involves hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror or pleasure. And more often than you'd like, you wind up ensnaring yourself, like a hunter lying bleeding in a bear trap. We seek on the Internet because that's where we find. In the tween movie Twilight, heroine Bella discovers that her boyfriend Edward is a vampire by consulting a website with a conve nient link to supernatural occurrences in her very own tiny town. The Internet is here collectively written, but perfectly tailored to exactly her individual needs. It is not the wizened woman in the house down the road that holds the truth to Edward's identity, but an anonymous and multiply sourced repository of lore. A silent film would have cut to an intertitle to explain a secret; a Thirties noir would have spun newspaper headlines in circles to leap forward in time ; aSeventies sci-fi flick would have introduced a wacky professor or scientist to deliver a piece of arcana. Today a quick cut to Google delivers the missing link. It advances the plot.

The cinematic look of the computer screen is arranged to convey maximum information at a minimum strain on the viewer's resources. Favored: Bright, readable colors; large, legible type; and unmistakably clear language. FILE NOT FOUND, with a big red X like a cherry on top. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. SPRINKLER TEST: NEW TIME ACCEPTED.

In Tony Scott's remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, a renegade stock trader played by John Travolta jerry -rigs a Wi -Fi signal in a subway tunnel so that he can log on and learn if his diabolical scheme to crash the market is working. Luckily for him, the generic fmance sites he visits feature thick, helpful arrows indicating which commodities are "up" and which are" down." Internet visualization is not merely a matter of the appearance of screens-it's a matter of Internet ideals, the divine tenets of the day. Film editing makes connectedness look like rapid crosscutting and mobility like swooping, sudden zooms in and out; speed sounds like techno, or synthesizers, or, if you're Miami Vice director Michael Mann, like Audioslave. And it's a plot device, too: American movies since the dawn of the Internet Age have been about connectedness. Ensemble-driven stories - everything from Traffic to Babel to Crash to You and Me and Everyone We Know-are dazzled by the unremarkable fact that individual Iives are interdependent and interpenetrating. A flap of a butterly's wings triggers a monsoon, SARS spreads across the

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oceans, a virus originating in Bangladesh brings down Wall Street, and so forth. There are three key cinematic moments in the annals of Internet Visualization: The Net (1995), The Matrix (1999) and Minority Report (2002). In The Net, Sandra Bullock's life is turned upsidedown by an evil hacker conspiracy chasing down the MacGuffm of a missing floppy disk. (As far as I'm concerned, a woman who enters her credit card information into "Pizza.Net," which looks like it was designed by the makers of the original Donkey Kong, deserves to have her identity stolen.) When she brings them down, the Internet actually dissolves-"It's eating through the mainframe!" someone cries, and pixels drip down, data reduced to a pulverized, bloody pulp. As for a "series of tubes," it's just possible that Ted Stevens was a few years late to The Matrix, which imagines that the natural energy of bodies submerged in watery pods and connected via a complex of wires and, yes, tubes, is harvested in order to power a god-like machine civilization of sentient servers. Sort of like Microsoft's Redmond campus. In the Nineties, the look of the Internetcomic-book web sites that changed to illegible green lines of code-corresponded to traditional fears about technocracy. Characters worked to rescue their identities from the machine. Since Minority Report, the focus has been on a more inner-directed search, described with a new search aesthetic: elegant touchscreens, grand postures, classical music. Tom Cruise, playing a future policeman, searches with sweeping gestures of his arms and hands, summoning images up and then casting them decisively aside, rifling, rotating, sweeping, zooming in and out. As in The Matri.x, the Internet forms an architecture that frames human life; he's actually surrounded by data. It's still a solo flight -only one person can search the screen at a time-but it's a full-body experience. Cruise doesn't bend his neck before his laptop or have to do forearm stretches when he comes home at night to relieve his aching joints; he throws his back into it, hands and arms flying around like he's conducting the New York Philharmonic.

The search used to be practical-In The Net, Sandra Bullock knew she was Sandra Bullock, her job was to convince everyone else. Our newer search anxieties are amnesiac. In The Bourne Identity, the assassin on a self-quest played by Matt Damon personifies the search. With nothing but a handscan (read: a few keystrokes) and a bank account number (an IP address), he accesses the multiple identities that he has strewn around the globe like the little pieces of ourselves that we leave littered around cyberspace. In The Matrix, Neo is "plugged in" via a series of Ethernet wires. In Minority Report, the "pre-cogs," the human psychics, contain information that is downloaded to disks. In the Bourne trilogy, Matt Damon is the Internet. He is mobility; he is the point of connection; he is search-optimization. He's a Bing zombie, without the zombie part. The problem isn't really that we don't know what the Internet looks like. It's that what it looks like is so horribly ugly: not a glistening Tootsie Roll pop, not an open freeway, not a shimmering clear pool of chlorinated water nor a siren -littered sea, not even a chiseled movie star, but giant, hulking factories dotting the landscape of the Paciftc Northwest and the Eastern Seaboard, covering old landfills, sprawling, like dozens of Costcos smashed together, stacked with metal and diesel generators and powerful cooling systems, crossed by power lines that deliver 2 percent of the world's energy to the so-called cloud, where your tax returns and credit card statements cross paths with Medicare files and corporate budgets and your old love letters and the photos of Jennifer Aniston's newest boyfriend. I wish the Internet looked like Matt Damon, or like lines of light written by an invisible hand in the night sky. I wish it sounded like tinkling bells and xylophones. I would be sad if it sounded like techno, but I'd get used to it. It turns out, though, that it looks like a warehouse of space junk, and it sounds like an industrial-strength air-conditioning system. Beyond the screen, the Internet looks like everything else. It looks like money.

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