a. My Online Public Book

Writing Online

Dear world. This is the first time I am trying such a thing. What I want to do is to write my book, which I have for the moment titled ‘The Last Cultural Mile’, as a public online act. I suppose it doesn’t especially matter to me how many people actually read this:  it’s more to do with writing this in public, so to say: to see what this does to my writing, as practice and as discipline. I hope to write simpler. I also hope to write more regularly, since I am making this into a public duty. There will be more to say about the public nature of this. Since I work on my texts over and over again, I will keep changing this text, and at the same time adding new chapters to the book. Let me see how this piece of unmoulded rock can be hewn into shape as the world – meaning of course the three and a half people who do care – watches.

Years ago, inspired by the new journalism that was fashionable when I was young (and myself a journalist) I tried speedwriting, typing on my Royal typewriter whatever occurred to my head, as fast as I could, ensuring – in, I imagined, the grand tradition of Tom Wolfe and the abstract expressionists behind him – that, whatever happened, I would change not a word: that this will be my consciousness speaking unmediated, so to say. This is close, and perhaps a useful update on that technology: for here I CAN change, and yet it is pure consciousness speaking. (I tried many things then: to work with the xxx marks that showcased error when I thought I would be inspired by Tagore’s doodles),

then to type on teleprinter rolls so as to eliminate the tyranny of the A-4 page. The important thing about such consciousness always being to try and discover what my book is actually about  only as I write it, or even – who knows – after it’s all done.

Note on cyberluddites

So what does this new technology do to to those old concerns, about ‘consciousness’ so defined? Can this sudden and unexpected direct access to the grand public domain change anything? I am unable to find out where I can save this document: I updated my post yesterday (when I set up this blog and got some terrifying HTML commands, and for a while thought I had lost everything: the terror remains). On the other hand, I feel supremely plugged-in. I’m there, this work exists. I have overcome a threshhold of some kind.

What This Book is (hopes to be) About (must complete this section today)

The central argument this book is to do with threshholds. The capacity to deliver. To change a promise, a potential, into something that actually has an end, and, who knows, maybe even an end-use. On the one hand, I realize that there is no end to anything in such neat ways – despite the fact that this technology seems most tantalizingly to allow for end-stops – and that such ends are only stops to newer destinations. On the other hand, I am equally concerned with inquiring into a current obsession all around us: the ‘last mile problem’, in India’s development paradigm. The assumption: whatever the development, however radical, India’s ‘last mile’ is more and more looking like a saga from a myth: it has become the point where all major technological progress grinds to a halt – mysteriously, just one stop before journey’s end. So it is not as though you have reached one stage of the journey, only to discover further horizons: it is that you can never complete any journey. The destination appears like a mirage, the journey forever condemned to remain unfinished. And like sons trying to fulfil their father’s incomplete ambitions, newer technological innovations keep the optimism eternally alive, forever doing battle against old monsters.

I am not sure this was always the characteristic definition of ‘last mile technology’, which – as a means of providing connectivity to the widest possible number of potential users – has been around for at least six decades now. I will attempt two tracks to this inquiry, one, personal – to do with things like cyberludditism, and the day-to-day fears about one’s inability to deliver, for I believe that such large social phenomena act subjectively,  upon me the individual, as much as they act politically. I will try and sequentialize them like this: 1,2,3 will indicate chapters of the possible book I intend to come out of this: and this will be the public nature of the argument, one hopefullt to come out some day within the covers of a book. That section I will write offline and simply paste into the blog. And, a,b,c, written directly, re-done and re-re-done, to provide more subjective notes on direct experiences I have, and hopefully others have had, on overcoming the last mile problem: such as, I suggest today, the terror of putting an idea into the public domain, the promise of the blog and its fear.