Eco also published a lavish and philosophical coffee-table book under the same title. In doing so, he added to the growing field of list literature. This genre boasts in its ranks everything from academic studies to journals that invite the reader to list her way to self-discovery, to 100 Facts about Pandas.

In the U.S., we often laud things by naming months after them. December might then be proclaimed “Lists Month.” At that cold, reflective time, year-end best-of’s inundate us like blizzarding clumps of snow. How do we navigate our way through them? Why do we love them so much?

Dictionary.com includes one “glazomania: a passion for listmaking.” Merriam-Webster doesn’t have a similar entry… yet.

What, exactly, is the list doing to—or for—us?

***

8 Tricks for Putting Off a Haircut. 12 Globe-Shaped Foods. Top 10 Famous Buses. 40 Culturally Relevant Birds. 13 High-Tech Steampunk USB Flash Drives. The 10 Most Phallic Cars. Top 10 Evil Sports. 5 Insane Celebrity Conspiracy Theories (That Make Sense). Top 10 Weirdest Twin-Crime Stories. Top 10 Strange and Bizarre Dead Bodies. The 10 Hottest Women on the Texas Sex Offenders List. 25 Sexy Chests to Be Thankful For. 9 Surprising Things Men Look for in a Wife. Top 10 Ways to Piss Off Your Wedding Planner. The 4 Worst Times to Be on the Internet. Ways I Am Prematurely Mature. Inconsistencies Between Original Star Wars Trilogy and Prequels. Things I Would Do to Fix the Mets. Indian Film Songs in Kharahara Priya Ragam. Top Excuses Women Give Not to Have Sex. Random Things I’m into Lately. Expensive Things I Need to Buy Someday. Cool Hoodies for Hackers. 100 Things in the World I Love. Lists to Make. Indicators that You Might Need to Focus More…

***

1. “The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order—not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.”
—Umberto Eco, interview with Der Spiegel

2. “Lists help us manage the chaos of our lives—to impose order, if only for a moment. Writing a list clears the mind. … Once everything is written down, it’s easier to see which tasks are important and in what order to tackle them. Tasks that seem overwhelming look easier when reduced to mere lines on paper.”
—Sasha Cagen, To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us)

3. “To my mind, the difference would be where lists support your quality of life or where they begin to impede your quality of life—where having your list perfected gets in the way of your functioning, or having too many lists. It’s a matter of how you use them. They can give you control in a certain way, but you don’t want them to be the only thing you do to gain control.”
—Dr. Cynthia Green, clinical psychologist and brain health/memory specialist, interview with the author

***

According to Robert Belknap in his book The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing—a study of literary lists, particularly in the work of four American Renaissance authors—lists of sequential signs appeared as early as 3,200 B.C.E. Used as a means of accounting and record keeping, they signified an early form of communication that would evolve into written language. If this is true, then Eco is right: the list is the origin of culture.

In his own book, Eco goes back to ancient history to find examples of literary lists. Homer, in The Iliad, spends 350 verses naming generals and ships in the Greek army. Eco gives us lists contained in the works of Virgil and Dante, the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and on through the centuries.

***

The bestseller list, though not quite so old, has deeper roots than we might expect. Harry Thurston Peck compiled and published the first one in February 1895, in The Bookman magazine. Publishers Weekly caught on and inaugurated its own bestseller list in 1912. The ranking-by-sales trend spread to other industries. Billboard began releasing music charts in the 1930s and inaugurated the Hot 100 in 1958.

It’s easy to see how critics might regard these types of lists with indifference bordering on disdain. They’re a useful tool for publishers, distributors, and everyone on that side of an industry, but they’re a real downer for critical authority. Who cares what people are actually reading—we want to tell you what you should be reading! We’ll keep it simple, though; we’ll give you lists, too.

One wonders which critic penned the first top 10, and when. What magazine or newspaper was it for?

“Pauline once called me a ‘list queen’ to my face,” wrote film critic Andrew Sarris in 2001, after the death of his critical rival, Pauline Kael. “…[I]t started me thinking. To my knowledge, Pauline was the only critic never to compile a 10-best list. Her admirers might say that Pauline was above such trivial journalistic diversions. But with a 10-best list, a critic puts his or her tastes on the line, and makes an easier target than one would get, for example, by plowing through Pauline’s stream-of-consciousness prose.”

***

If the list is the origin of culture, then all culture springs from the compulsion to order. In other words, the to-do list I make as a private individual is an unlikely sibling of the “Top 10 Exhibitions of This Year” list I write as a critic: both reflect me trying to manage the chaos of the world. The grocery list I jot down when I decide to bake brownies is, I would venture, a cousin. (Trying to manage the chaos of the supermarket.) What do we make of this?

Another question: What happens when so many lists vie for supremacy? The Publishers Weekly bestseller list dukes it out with the New York Times bestseller list; the New York Times bestseller list takes on the Time critic’s top picks list; the Time critic’s list faces off against the Entertainment Weekly critic’s list; the Entertainment Weekly critic’s list goes blow-for-blow with an Amazon user’s Listmania list. And then there’s your friend with the blog you like—you know, that one. He’s got his own lists of books you should read, too.

***

To mark the tenth anniversary of September 11, New York magazine created an encyclopedia of 9/11, an alphabetical ordering of phrases and symbols: “Irony, The End of” preceded “Islam,” which led to “Jumpers.” It was, the editors wrote, a reaction to the overwhelmingness of the event, an attempt “not to shrink from its scale but to embrace it.”

The encyclopedia builds on our usual method of collective remembrance for tragedy: listing the names of people who died. The etched walls of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the reading of the names on Holocaust Remembrance Day—these are attempts at comprehension in lieu of comprehensiveness. Listing as an imposition of form on a mess of history and memories.

***

The list is omnipresent, and in that sense, it’s a bit like God: existing all around us, capable of assuming many different forms, a way to structure our lives. “Thirteen are the ways that God is good,” goes the song that Jews sing on Passover. The whole song is, in fact, a list—from one through thirteen, each number represents a different tenet of Judaism. “Eight are the days before a bris,” and so on. As a kid, I bellowed those words in a gymnasium filled with hundreds of other Jewish kids dressed awkwardly in their holiday best. We would stand on the laminated benches of the cafeteria folding tables and yell-sing the number corresponding to our grade—“FOUR ARE THE MOTHERS!!” We did that for eight years (we didn’t have a high school; I don’t remember who filled in numbers nine through thirteen in the song), always trying to be louder than the other grades.

***

Let’s talk about the Internet.

The Internet has been to lists what it was to home videos and amateur porn: the great enabler. In his book Belknap calls it “the apotheosis of the list.” There are simply more lists on the Web than could ever possibly be useful, or enjoyable. Wading through it all—publications that offer them both earnestly and ironically, user-based sites that let you generate and vote on them, various tools and apps for making and managing them—it’s hard not to feel the water rising around your waist.

Even the way we navigate the Internet and get information—by typing a query into a search engine—results in a stack of links. If you use Google, you’ll get anywhere from one to three more lists on the left side of the page, representing ways to edit and refine your search. At the bottom, a two-column list of related searches will appear, and below that a horizontal list of more pages. You are boxed in. The list is inescapable. It is helpful, but it is also confining, organized yet overwhelming. On the Internet, the consummate mechanism for controlling chaos struggles not to become a form of chaos itself.

***

Contrary to popular belief and much critical ire, the Internet did not beget the listicle (a portmanteau of “list” and “article”). Magazines did. But the Internet offered a garden in which this hybrid journalistic form could grow and spread its seed. Not only that, but because the listicle and its fellow species, the slide show, could be broken up into multiple pages and thus induce people to click through, slide by slide, some people believe this genus provides part of the answer to the nagging question, how can websites make money?

Though I can’t do the precise math, the model looks something like this:
More slides=more pages=more page views=more ads=more money.

Among other places, listicles and slide shows have found a home at the cultural commentary website Flavorwire. Its editors have perfected the art of turning any given topic into a list or slide show. Speaking with me about a recent post that could have run as an essay but was instead broken into a top-10 slide show, managing editor Caroline Stanley said: “I think couching it like that makes it more accessible. Slide shows are obviously generating page views, but I always try to think of myself as the reader first. Breaking 3,000 words into something that’s less intimidating to look at is important; it helps people move through something. … I think there’s nothing, for the Web, worse than looking at this page where it’s a few thousand words to get through.”

Maybe Nicholas Carr is right—maybe we are deep in The Shallows, and the Internet has changed the way we read and think. Shorter attention spans. More pages. Less writing per page. Pictures! LISTS!

***

I recently met the culture editor at an esteemed magazine that produces a lot of lists. When asked about them, she replied that she finds something incredibly satisfying about the process of clicking through a slide show.

This comment bounced off my brain like a rubber ball. I despise clicking through slide shows. I’m not sure what this says about me. Either I represent the past, when we used to read articles all on one page, or maybe two or three pages, but certainly not ten (unless it was in The New Yorker); or I represent the future, a world in which our attention spans are too short even for slide shows and all we want are clean, simple lists.

***

I write a lot of lists. These days I probably make a to-do list a day, in addition to the others I keep floating around: story ideas, exhibitions I want to see, people I’ve slept with. But I don’t want to share them with you. Do you want to read them? I doubt it. And I’m not sure I want to see yours.

The Internet has this funny tendency, though: it turns us inside out and makes us into narcissists. On the Internet, we suddenly think most of what we have to say is interesting and worth sharing with the world. Enter listography.com.

The website was founded by Lisa Nola and her partner, Adam Marks, in 2006 (they’ve also published an accompanying series of fill-in-the-blank, diary-like journals). It provides a platform for users to create lists of any kind; people use it for everything from daily to-dos to television episodes (yes, episodes, not shows) watched in a given year, to places they want to travel. Each listographer gets a page, for which he or she chooses a background theme. The lists are laid out on top of it, like pieces of paper arranged neatly on a desktop.

On the site, Nola and Marks bill the project as autobiography through list making: “A listography is a perpetual work in progress, a time capsule, and a map of your life for friends and family.” Fair enough—except that traditionally, personal lists are more like diaries than autobiographies. In fact, they often go in diaries. Do we really want to read the private musings of strangers? I had thought that kind of interest extended only to people we love or dead celebrities.

But I was wrong! Not since the coming of Live Journal and Blogger and MySpace and Facebook do we only care about the quotidian existences of those we know (or think we know). We are equal-opportunity snoopers now.

“When we were building the site, it was a time when social networking was really popular,” Nola told me. “A lot of this became a question of, would people want to share their lists publicly, and would that be the majority? We had to figure out what the overall picture would be.” In the end, as with so much of the Internet, the overall picture was public sharing.

***

Possible reasons we make and share lists:

1. Maybe it’s about helping ourselves.
Psychologist Dr. Green: “The bulk of information we come across that really matters to our functioning is information that we need to remember for a short time but that we don’t, over the long run, need to commit to memory. Those are the things we keep in a calendar or on a list. Lists and other organizational techniques play a very important role in keeping track of that information and helping us function well. I think we feel better when we’re organized. It feels good to get things done.”

2. Maybe it’s about having an “expert” help us.
Author Sasha Cagen, on her website: “As the world's leading todolistologist, I'm all about breaking down your big dreams into manageable steps and fully celebrating every crossed-off item along the way so you ENJOY the process of doing.”

3. Maybe it’s about helping each other.
Listography's Lisa Nola: “A lot of people enjoy sharing and commenting and being inspired by other people. I made some lists about her [Nola’s mother, who died of cancer last year] that were really private, but I made them public at the time. It was the same way people use any social media website—it was sort of reaching out for comfort. A lot of people reached out, and I was surprised at how comforted I was.”

***

When you think about it, list making has a kind of creative limit: it’s mostly aggregation, filling empty spots with preexisting items. But choosing those items is often an assertion of power, an act of curation: what doesn’t make the cut is as important as what does.

Today, though, as we increasingly rely on obscure knowledge for novelty, what kind of power does list making give us: the supremacy with which to name globe-shaped foods? A fine eye for spotting the 10 hottest women on the Texas sex offenders list? I worry that we find ourselves knowing a lot, so little of it worth knowing. We risk becoming masters of our own triviality.

Eco, in his interview with Der Spiegel, said, “The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it.” This may once have been the case, but it isn’t anymore. For better or for worse, the list now recycles culture. Where once it bred, today it borrows.



Related: 100 Great (Not Best) Songs of 2011 and How Much More Do Books Cost Today?

Jillian Steinhauer writes about art, comics, and other things that strike her fancy for places like the New York Observer, Guernica Daily, Hyperallergic, and The Jewish Daily Forward. Like you and all your friends, she's on Twitter. Image: A page from Madonna's to-do list in 1990, courtesy of Gotta Have It, via Lists of Note.

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We really encourage you to make some noise today. Like much of the rest of the web, we're totally vulnerable. (Hech, so are you and your Tumblr.) For more reading on SOPA/PIPA, here's this great analysis and here's a PDF of the group protest letter by law professors sent back in July.

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The anonymous blogger behind CDAN claims to be an in-the-know entertainment lawyer living in Beverly Hills—he signs his emails “Enty.” He posts first- and second-hand gossip about celebs while withholding their names and any obvious detail that might identify them. Because they are anonymous, the stories are often more salacious and drug-fueled than what you’d find in US Magazine, and as a result are extremely popular. Although Enty would later tell me, in an emailed interview, that he doesn’t keep track of the number of hits he gets, his blog is a clear beneficiary of the booming celebrity news industry. Enty claims not to make much money off his blog's Google ads. But if public attention is a currency, Enty is getting very rich indeed. Among celebrity newshounds, he’s become a celebrity himself.

Fueled by sites like TMZ and Radar, the celebrity news industry, The New York Times reports, generates more than $3 billion a year, and a sizeable portion of that is derived from online traffic—TMZ alone attracts 8.7 million visits a month, according to Compete.com. Within this market, the most valuable commodity is exclusivity—publications will pay big bucks for first-hand information. As noted in that same Times piece, Dawn Holland, the woman who worked at the seemingly unbreachable Betty Ford Center, was paid ten thousand dollars for Lindsay Lohan’s files by both Radar and TMZ through a secret account set up by her lawyer. In 2007, TMZ purchased stolen photos from the main production office of the Steven Spielberg movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Ultimately, they decided against publishing them, reportedly after receiving a call from a Paramount attorney. But the transaction signaled to many in the media community the kind of game TMZ was going to play.

Often, celebrities set up the tents at their own circus. Many work hand in hand with the media outlets covering them to raise their public profile. As epitomized by Kim Kardashian’s highly profitable wedding, celebrity publicists may brainstorm with editors to fabricate the controversies or relationship developments that will bring the most attention to their clients.

Blind items are the black market of this gossip economy: they operate on the fringe of mainstream celebrity news. They are unverified, unpaid and are often the jotted-down whisperings of people who work closely with the celebs. The seeming authenticity of the gossip comes from its sources' proximity to the film industry. As CDAN's Enty told me, he never has to pay for information, and he gets much of it from other insiders in Hollywood.

Blind gossip is becoming so popular that many older gossip mags, like the National Enquirer are adding them to their sites. And “[s]ites that do depend on traffic for business have added blind items to their sites,” said. Enty.

After five years of writing his blog, Enty has developed a large network of people who work in different areas of the film industry. “I would say 80% of the items come from someone else as there are only so many places I can be every day,” says Enty. “Of that 80%, I would say 75% is solid stuff and the other 25% is so-so on trustworthiness.”

Although it took years as an entertainment lawyer to develop the network of eyes and ears that makes CDAN possible, Enty shrugs off any suggestion that the blog requires much effort. “It is not that hard. You just have to have a network of people. The juicier bits of course require knowing someone who is really tight with a subject, but, again, it is not that hard.”

But what gives blind items their shine of authenticity is also what renders them totally unreliable. Because they are single-sourced and anonymous, there is no way of knowing if they’re simply made-up. In other words, it’s the purest, most uncut form of gossip. There are accusations against Enty that he fabricates most of his blinds, a rumor in part fueled by the disclaimer on his site that it is a work of fiction. Not so, he says. “I never fabricate blind items. The disclaimer is because in some of my posts I include a lot of satire.” But one wonders if would really matter if he did.

***

Credit for the invention of the blind item is given to a man named Colonial William d’Alton Mann. After becoming a Civil War hero in the battle of Gettysburg, he made a fortune licensing an invention for an equipment-hauling rig to the US and Austrian armies. In 1891, his brother, who published the New York City society paper Town Topics, vanished after he discovered he was wanted on an obscenity charge. Mann, whose long white beard and shock of white hair made him a dead ringer for Santa, took over Town Topics and transformed it into one of the most notorious gossip rags ever published.

Colonel Mann’s written contribution to the paper was a column called “Saunterings,” a sharp, sardonic weekly piece about the goings on in high society, much of which he witnessed himself. He often kept his musings nameless, as with this example from February 3, 1893:

High society has been treated to a sorry spectacle of inebriety during the last two weeks at balls and dinners, and I am glad to say that this shocking example, though unfortunately a woman, is not an American, but a specimen of British aristocracy. … If Great Britain is to send us such specimens of her boasted aristocracy, I would advise society to entertain in camera and with a bread and water diet.

Although no one was named in these items, Colonel Mann devised an easily breakable code to help tip off readers. Flip over the piece of newsprint and directly on the other side of “Saunterings” one would find a tepid write-up about an act of charity by a member of the Sykes family, or a barely news-worthy piece about William Vanderbilt. Blind item solved.

Town Topics didn’t just make its money by printing juicy gossip—its editors also had one of the most elaborate blackmail schemes in publishing history. For example, Edwin A. Wall Main Post was approached with evidence of his “white apartment,” the place where he wined and dined his mistress. He was told to pay a large sum to the paper in exchange for a glowing piece about him in one of the paper’s supplements (which never saw the light of day). If he didn’t, another piece, on the front page and far from glowing, would be printed. The paper had been using this strategy for years. But Town Topics had chosen the wrong mark in Wall. Wall approached his wife Emily Post (yes, the same Emily Post who, ten years later, would write the consummate etiquette guide) and, together, they decided to go to the police, despite the fact that it meant public disclosure of the affair.

***

Enty has developed his own system of hint-giving, as have other sites like Ted Casablanca’s The Awful Truth and Blindgossip.com. For example, he recently asked which actress who was “foreign born B-list actress who has been nominated for one of the big awards” was caught doing drugs in a bathroom stall by a "teenage movie actress." Many readers, posting their thoughts in the comments section, guessed the drug user to be Carey Mulligan. Those details—foreign-born, B-list, award-nominated—are the closest he can come to publishing the information without being sued for defamation. “I have received e-mails from lawyers for celebrities,” said Enty. But despite the threats, Enty is protected. “Comments are protected by free speech and guesses are opinions which are not defamation,” he wrote. “Just because people guess the right answer does not mean someone is liable. I would have to confirm their guess as accurate and be wrong myself before I would be liable.”

Hints are also telegraphed by wording choices in many blind items. Read something that includes “midnight,” “pale” and “teeth,” you have a pretty good sense of the franchise to which the item is referring.

Online speculation about Enty’s true identity ranges in guesses from "female blogger in Calgary" to "fiction writer in LA." But, according to Enty, there are only a few people who accurately know who he is. “I would say there are about 20-25 people who know I write the site.” And of those, he says, one only one has threatened him face-to-face, a surprisingly low number given how much hate flows his way.

Enty receives a steady stream of angry email from publicists representing both the celebs the blind items were actually about as well as those who show up in the comments section as guesses. They have reason to be concerned. Once a celeb’s name is guessed often enough, it becomes a search engine result. Take actor Jake Gyllenhaal. Five years ago, Ted Casablanca started writing about a closeted Hollywood actor he refers to as “Toothy Tile .” In these items, Toothy comes across as a sad, repressed character, skulking around shopping mall parking lots looking for male prostitutes while allowing his handlers to determine his (hetero) relationships. If you Google “Gyllenhaal,” it takes a little while to get to a link to Toothy. But Google “Toothy Tile” and the first search result is “Jake Gyllenhaal is Toothy Tile.”

But not all publicists stress about blind items. Marlan Willardson, owner of MWPR, a Los Angeles-based public relations firm specializing in the entertainment industry, thinks that blind items are preferable to the outright fabrication in which many gossip mags engage. “I think people have a love-hate relationship with Ted [Casablanca],” says Willardson, “but that's Hollywood. He's certainly more responsible than someone who writes an outright lie connected directly to the celebrity.”

So why does Enty do it? Why does someone spend the time to develop networks that enable him to collect intimate information about people he doesn’t know? It may be that, despite his claims to not care about traffic, Enty has his sights on becoming the next TMZ—he recently created his own CDAN YouTube Channel . So far the channel seems to consist mainly of red-carpet interviews conducted by someone named Tom, who looks to be about 13. But Enty says it’s all just for fun. “I just post as a hobby. It is just something I enjoy doing.” Why does he enjoy it? “I just do.”

Carrie-May Siggins has spent the last couple of years writing for true crime TV and is currently working on a young adult novel.

Photo by s_bukley, via Shutterstock.

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I don’t even know what I want to look at most days ending and beginning the day in this way. The first and last things are almost always the same sites. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, turned to in small rotation in between whatever else I try to do. Waking up begins with wading with what has accumulated in feed at each of these electronic locations while I’ve been unconscious however long. Sometimes while I’m dreaming I seem them there too, reading or writing emails to people who may or may not exist inside that fold, status updates culled out of my head and slipped into me the same way they do when I’m awake, though drummed from somewhere in me instead of someone else. Maybe.

The general feeling pervading all these hours of constant silent prodding folds up in everything we do. Each object bathes in the light around it, never quite asleep or all awake. When at rest, the body remains open; while ambulatory, it seems hard to stick to anything for long. I’ve never been able to shake the scene in David Lynch’s Lost Highway where Bill Pullman’s character meets Robert Blake’s character (credited only as “The Mystery Man”) at a party, saying “We’ve met before, haven’t we? At your house, don’t you remember? Of course. As a matter of fact, I’m there right now. At your house. Call me. Dial your number. Go ahead.” Of course, Fred does, dialing a number that we are not given but seems to clearly end in 666, and at the far end the “Mystery Man” (or an instance of him) answers, indeed inside his house, saying, “I told you I was here.”

It seems important that at no point in the movie do we see Robert Blake, in his puffed body, blink. He is always staring, always seeing. He is in many rooms at once. He films Bill Pullman and his soon-to-be-murdered wife while they are sleeping, the act of which will later cause Pullman’s character to become someone wholly else, his identity shapeshifted and taken up to be carried by another actor. Something is always there: a conduit for skewing and erasure, resulting, soon, in the shifting of the inhabitant’s identity, skin, and mind. “In the East, the Far East,” Robert Blake’s person tells Bill Pullman’s character (now embodied by Balthazar Getty) over another phone, “when a person is sentenced to death, they're sent to a place where they can't escape, never knowing when an executioner may step up behind them and fire a bullet into the back of their head.”

It seems like it’s gotten harder to talk to people or even be around them sometimes in this dual folding of how the set of waking hours begins and ends. Often at dinner or a bar with friends I’ve newly met or known for fifteen years it’ll end up being all of us sitting around the table on the smaller machine always on our person, whatever brand of phone. We are updating the status about where we are now and with who or for how long and what we mean to do, uploading photos of ourselves sitting there or what we’re about to eat, as if there’s anything anyone could do outside the room in response to that beyond saying, mmm. Or we’re looking at the mobile versions of the same sites again to see again if anything is new again and though it is, because there’s always new there, there isn’t, because it’s hardly ever something you’ll remember beyond the look. The feed exists to feed, and so you eat.

You could say anything to people staring into their machines in this way and they respond often with the same grunt: I hear you making words and I am here too but I don’t know. Because there’s so much more to hear and see you hear and see it less, then it is buried. All words are in the wake of other words. All images are in the mental fat with the others and the skin is getting large. It seems like there is air to walk around in between buildings and people and the woods or whatever else though what isn’t there almost seems there. The machines seem to be breathing.

This is not to say the object by its own nature demands participation. Brian Eno’s Music For Airports, when actually played aloud as sound installation in Stansted Airport in the UK, elicited almost no commotion among travelers beyond occasional brief curiosity: still strung up in forward motion, moving on. “Soothed but suspect,” read the liner notes to the Flaming Lips’s eight-song album Zaireeeka, where to hear each song in full you must play all four discs at once, allowing into the experience of the music both acts of error or intentional manipulation (such as messing up the timing of starting all the discs together at the same time, or choosing to play only two of the discs, so on). “In a state of suspended anticipation. The listener could hear an exaggerated dimension of sound where sometimes reverb comes before a sound occurs, other times it’s delayed… Where a melody that’s pleasant and uplifting, upon being slightly shifted, becomes dissonant and interruptive… Where crescendos miss their cues either late or early or both… making music that purposely destroys its own momentum…” Indeed, the listening experience of Zaireeka contains some sense of strobing, of rooms growing or shrinking in size, of containment and the contained. In this same creation spirit, one might think of Captain Beefheart recording layers for his records with headphones off so as to not know for certain how the tracking lined up in the arrangement. I don’t need to go at length about John Cage’s 4'33", for sure, wherein the composition is not the composition but the air on, in and around the scent of which it sits. Even more apt might be his ORGAN2/ASLSP As Slow aS Possible, which is currently being performed as the longest piece of music ever, over a period of 639 years in the church of St. Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany, wherein no living person will hear the both the beginning and the end, except perhaps generationally, except the organ, and the air.

Behind all of this endless thinking, the circling of a mind that can not disregard itself, there must be a running bead, fueled by various somethings, that weighs heavy on the waking state. Because most likely, for the majority of people, it is not simply the brain itself that creates these encampments. There is something behind them. There is a pulse: an obsession, or series of obsessions, that sits at the center of a consciousness that can’t turn off, if at times a definitive factor to such things as lost sleep.

ob⋅ses⋅sion [uhb-sesh-uhn] noun

1.          the domination of one's thoughts or feelings by a
persistent idea, image, desire, etc.
2.          the idea, image, desire, feeling, etc., itself.
3.          the state of being obsessed.
4.          the act of obsessing.

Origin:
1505–15; < L obsessiōn- (s. of obsessiō) blockade, siege, equiv. to obsess(us)

Here the name at once invokes the state, the act, and the object of the act all at the same time, as if the obsessor and the obsessee are not mututally exclusive, but a duality contained in one mode, wrought from the same stripe. Obsession has also been used as a title or a brand name for books, films, a TV series, a band, a record label, albums, songs, board games, video games, a pornstar, a telescope, and a perfume. Even the transcribed lyrics to Mariah Carey’s single “Obsessed” seem to, probably accidentally, exhibit some of the bizarre weight of the state’s encampment:

         “I was like, why are you so obsessed with me?
         So oh, oh, oh, oh, so oh, oh oh, oh
         So oh, oh, oh, oh, so oh, oh oh, oh
         So oh, oh, oh, oh, so oh, oh oh, oh
         So oh, oh, oh, oh, so oh, oh oh, oh

All those holes as little portals, mouths to slinking tubes shaped like the S’s, the h’s little rooms where one might stop and lay or turn around. Carried as well are the groundpoints of what might separate obsession from mere fascination: routine and repetition, semi-inexplicable expanse, a guttural want, nonsensical or nameless, some simultaneous founding in the exquisite and the mundane. It would seem then that the objects or cues at the center of these obsessions—however they manifest themselves in the individuals, and to what degree—must be significantly responsible for occupying some disruption of the clean working of the brain—helping common thoughtflow from one of simple input/output and into ways of mania would require an inordinate kind of aura—an attraction wrought in the sublime, somewhere between the wanting and the having, the skin of something unnameable in frame.

It seems too late for any of this to be stopped. Even making aimed attempts to avoid these machinations and the silent spread seems bent against a thing that continues with or without you to be growing in no glow. If we promise not to look online in front of others, we’re waiting for the moment the other becomes consumed. If I put the computer on the far side of my apartment so as to let it know we won’t be sharing the sheets together tonight I can see the light of its eye still there winking, even if I cover the light with a book or make it face the wall. And in the book are words and through the wall are all the other people.

Previously: Existential Googling, Personality Seepage

Blake Butler's most recent book is Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. He lives in Atlanta and edits HTMLGIANT .

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I have a hard time networking with white guys. And I think they have a hard time networking with me, too.

I’m not saying I don’t have any white male friends—I do. But within my social network, the ratio of white men to any other group is disproportionately small.

I’m so bad at networking with white guys that even the most serendipitous circumstances are foiled. I once had an interview with a Boston-based founder of a certain “game layer on top of the world.” I learned that the startup had recently been asked to create a geo-located adventure to teach about the Underground Railroad. I thought, cool, I know a lot about the Underground Railroad and I know a lot about educational computer games. Just months earlier, I'd assisted with a PC game project funded by the NEH that tracked the journey of fugitive slaves from Virginia to Massachusetts. For research, I played and compiled a report about every game ever created about the Underground Railroad. The most interesting was the 1993 release Freedom!, by MECC, creators of The Oregon Trail. The game was hard to track down, and hard to win. When the overseer’s green face appeared on the black screen with the words “CAPTURED” it was game over and you were back in green chains. The game had some problems. I felt I had the answers that would make a new game better.

I could not believe this marvelous act of fate. After the interview, I told everyone about it. I was sure I'd get a call back.

Then I waited—and waited.

Deep down, I knew the meeting had been awkward. I'd felt uncomfortable just walking through the mid-sized office; looking around, I noticed absolutely no black, Asian or Latino people worked there. I wasn’t entirely surprised when I didn’t get a call back.

I’m not the only one sitting by the phone. As far as I can tell, very few black women work at tech startups, or at super social networking companies like Facebook or Twitter, despite our strong participation in the social-media sphere And ever since Web 1.0, the social web has mirrored the qualities, quirks and culture of the few—mainly white, mainly male—programmers who've developed it.

Soledad O’Brien’s latest installment in the series “Black in America” recently dubbed Silicon Valley as “The New Promised Land.” So I've often had to wonder: how do you negotiate access to this land? Do you have to slip in under the cover of night? Can my Android or iPhone stand in the place of walking papers?

Eventually, I got a tech-related job in Boston. I spent a couple years working for different community-based technology nonprofits in the area. I regularly crossed the Charles to attend events in Cambridge at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard. There are very cool things happening there, but the disparities in access by neighborhood were astounding to observe. A few months ago I moved back home to Virginia.

Almost as soon as I returned to the area, The Atlantic began an online series about technology startups in the South. I followed the stories with great interest. The feature highlighted innovative hotspots from Nashville, Tennessee to Shreveport, Louisiana. Great things are happening across the South.

Inspired by this energy, I began tossing a couple of ideas around in my head. My mom told me they were good ideas. I decided to sign-up to pitch at a 48-hour startup competition in southeastern Virginia that I'd read about on Facebook.

I was excited yet nervous to pitch.

***

My nervousness sprang in part from communication problems I'd noticed online. Any casual web user knows that comments sections of blogs have been terrible for a long time. Yet it's taken years for developers to streamline solutions. This delayed movement may point to underlying issues about contesting space in the tech community. My takeaway: if you want to change something related to development, don’t expect the guys behind the scenes to read your mind, and be prepared to write a lot of support tickets.

For the past couple years I'd been working in out-of-school time programs committed to empowering youth through technology. I'd flag any stories on the tech-industry blogs that involved people of color or dealt with issues of diversity, thinking that that stories might be inspiring to share with the students I worked with. But the comments sections of these stories were plagued with nasty, insensitive remarks and jokes. Coming across them made me feel as if I'd walked into a room where I didn't belong—and where no one expected me.

I liken this feeling to walking down a street and having a derogatory comment hurled at you. It'll ruin your day. But a friend may walk down the same street, without encountering a similar incident. In fact, you could walk down that same street every day for the rest of your life and never have that experience again. It might have just been one crazy day. But when you walk down that street again that incident will always be in your mind.

If I read an article online and come across a nasty comment, it feels aimed directly at me. When I share the link with someone I care about, I transfer that feeling onto him or her: “You don’t belong here.” And when I look up that story a year later and see the comment again, I am forced to encounter that feeling all over again. 

This is a problem that a team of diverse engineers could have potentially anticipated and approached with a solid solution for civilized comment exchange.

As it is, almost every reputable news site and major blog is now trying to play catch up and implement its own better solution for comment moderation. A reevaluation is needed. Threaded comments evolved from the social needs predicated by the 1980s development style; it was how small groups of programmers would communicate on shared projects. When the web grew this system was simply scaled out. But divorced from its actual context and applied on a massive anonymous scale, this de facto implementation turns up a lot of problems.

Media theorist Jaron Lanier describes this type of shortcoming as a result of relying on “locked-in” technologies. It's one example of the ill effects of scaling Web 1.0 philosophy to an entire global community, one that took no part in its creation. As time went on, instead of broadening the base, Web 2.0 just added on new stuff horizontally and vertically, like a precarious, wobbly LEGO construction.

Consequently, my worry about pitching my idea came from feeling that these predominantly white American male, technology communities exist in an environment built around making things fit in locked-in patterns. Whether that locked-in logic continues to serve us well today is what’s up for debate.

***

The Startup Weekend was held in my hometown. Attending the event sort of felt like when you were in high school and on the Model UN team and sequestered at the local Marriott all weekend. The same excitement; same feeling of spending forever in one room. Also, as with a Model UN, the folks convened did not necessarily know each other, yet together we were endeavoring to solve social, political and economic problems.

My pitch could be summed up as “fair wages for digital trade.” From my experience working in community technology centers, I’d noticed a lot of requests coming in that asked young people to perform free web-based work. These tasks were entry-level stuff; they ranged from altering images in Photoshop, to making an update or two to an existing website, to creating a slideshow of last year’s vacation, and other like chores that fall short of a professional’s pay grade. They were mostly things you could do yourself, like washing your car or mowing your lawn. You could do it—or you could pay the neighbor’s kid to do it.

Most people have few qualms about asking a young person to do this sort of unpaid work. They figure kids are online all the time anyway (and are therefore maybe just innately better at technology). Even more fundamentally, the expectation to get something for nothing is built into the very fiber of the web. It’s another ingrained Web 1.0 technique that hasn’t scaled well.

The early architects of the web were so excited about the possibility of the Internet that they dedicated untold hours of free labor just to see it up and running as quickly as possible. For the most part, this model assumes that you, the creative but unpaid laborer, have some private resources on which to draw while you do the work you love; in other words, it assumes some privilege and comfort. The kids I worked with didn't have such resources; they couldn’t afford to give away their expertise for free.

My idea: a marketplace where students can earn money for performing digital tasks and where they can also pick up some new skills. If all goes well, perhaps these same kids will pursue a tech career and one day earn the professional salary that goes with it. The idea isn’t groundbreaking, but there isn’t a widely used solution yet out there.

My 60-second pitch went well. Out of 37 entrepreneurs who presented, my idea was one of eight selected to move forward with the 48-hour build. Of the eight, I was the only woman selected and the only person of color (there were three woman and six African-American guys who pitched). Everyone registered for the Startup Weekend (entrepreneurs, designers and developers) now had to join one of the eight teams. My team maxed out almost immediately. All white guys.


We moved to a large open room that resembled a warehouse. With plenty of ergonomic seating on deck, and two kegs of craft beer on tap, creative ideas flowed freely. The dress code was relaxed. I imagined the atmosphere to be something like the super fraternity house of the future. I even learned a new term: “brogrammer.”


We worked the entire weekend to develop my basic idea into a more complex product. It felt difficult at times; there was competition within the group, and there were moments of utter discouragement. But overall I was impressed by the progress we made. Greater social good was at the heart of our work, and we had challenging and mentally draining discussions about how to advance our goals. We identified unemployment and career preparedness among 16-24 year-olds as our key problem, hoping to serve young people from underrepresented communities in particular. By the end of the weekend I’d say we were downright giddy. I’m sure we will stay in touch.

Still, there were moments throughout the weekend that felt uncomfortable. Jokes that were a little off the mark that made me squirm in my seat a bit. I noticed the same slight unease among other black people present. The four black guys who stayed told me they were called each other’s names all weekend. The only other black woman present, a graphic designer, told me that she had been congratulated on her (that is my) pitch. Her tone was nonchalant. Once I bristled when a white male explained a technical concept to me in the language of basketball, because I was “so tall.” I watched as he, realizing he should have chosen his words better, bristled with his own embarrassment. Our discomfort was completely mutual. It's not that I felt any of the white male participants had malicious intent, but I did get the distinct impression that all sorts of other comments would have flown, easily and without a second thought, if a person of color, has not been present.

Often the discomfort of these situations stems more from what's unspoken than what's said. For example, at the event was a group of university students who, just a few days earlier, had had their startup profiled in the local paper. The young men, who were black, arrived at the conference in freshly starched white dress shirts and ties. The white developers were all in jeans and t-shirts. One of the developers knew one of the guys; he said, "Dude, why are you wearing a suit?" But otherwise there was no way to joke about and diffuse whatever (unspoken) tension had walked in the room with those suits. The young men didn’t advance to the top eight, and while some local BBQ places had donated dinner, they didn't stick around to eat and mingle either.

Feeling comfortable enough to sit at the table is a real challenge.

At a different point in the weekend, another entrepreneur, also black, introduced himself to the judges as an implementation manager. A judge repeated, “Did you just say you were an intimidation manager?” Of course he hadn’t, but the guy flexed his muscles and grinned sheepishly anyway. Tension circled the room.

A black programmer named Clynton told me that while diversity seemed to be valued in theory among entrepreneurs, whenever he approached VCs with a concept, they always seemed to be going in a different direction with projects, or not currently funding, or otherwise giving him the cold shoulder. (I think his idea— an interface from which users can order crowd-sourced feedback before purchasing stocks, to the benefit of all parties—is great; his pitch: “If you have extra time, you probably wish you had extra money. If you have extra money, you probably wish you had extra time.”)

Then there was the persistent refrain from the event’s organizer: “Should we rap now?” that seemed to always come before, during or after someone of color spoke.

***

I listened to a story on NPR recently about biotechnology. The show pondered genetic modification and the possibility of introducing completely new advantageous traits into humanity through this process. The total number of biotechnologists involved in this field is tiny. This was shocking to the interviewer: No group this small could possibly appropriately anticipate the repercussions, the uses and misuses, of such engineering in our vast world.

The information technology being developed by today’s startups have significant ramifications towards social engineering, too. A diverse audience needs to be considered. Think about how many times actual usage patterns of social media have been completely off-target: How many of your Facebook friends still show what songs they are listening on Spotify? How long did Google Latitude last in your friend group? What is Color?

The energy that goes into these tools and services should be doing more for more people:
• When I try to locate services using Foursquare in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, I am frequently guided miles out of the area, even though community-owned businesses exist right in front of me. How can we put these institutions on the map?

• Facebook helps me understand the profiles of the people in my community, but it doesn’t help me to understand the profile of the community itself. If Facebook can calculate what we “like” in the community, couldn’t it also help us understand what we “need” in a community? This could stimulate small business and franchise growth.

• I wonder if Twitter can put the potential of digital organizing to the test next November. Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky could finally settle the score. Black women are the most represented group on Twitter. Black women had the highest voter turnout rate in November 2008. This seems like a great opportunity to show a definitive correlation between social media and civic action.

• And just look at the shifting demographics of the United States. It'd be amazing if Google would help us conduct searches for US-based news and services entirely in Spanish, and also in combinations that use some Spanish, some English. When I use my phone to Google, “¿Dónde puedo votar in San Francisco November,” I don’t come up with a list of helpful locations. But a complete list of polling locations is the first hit when I ask for it in English.

If these issues were of greater importance to most founders, then the work would be done already.

***



I chose my alma mater, Wellesley College, for a number of reasons. Since I'm interested in technology, it was nice to have the opportunity to take a few classes at our brother school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, it was the idea of one day joining a fantastic network of alumnae that tipped my decision.

Because I went to a women's college, I don't ever have that awful feeling that the guys I went to school with are colluding with fellow classmates in some Old Boys Club alumni network. On the other hand, I didn't gain the experience of networking with white guys in competitive situations until later than most. Luckily, the rigorous atmosphere thickened my skin and helped me gain resilience and excellent communication skills (so now I actually don’t think I’m so bad at networking with white guys—I just have my quirks). I got used to presenting my ideas and taking leaps. I met women from all around the world who have great ideas and innovative ways to contribute. In my home state of Virginia and throughout the South, historically black colleges and universities help African-American students to have a similar experience.

Atmospheres like these can be instrumental in becoming self-assured and confident—both key factors in presenting yourself well in networking situations. They also project to local communities and the world that: knowledge is being cultivated here, too. Most women and underrepresented minorities don’t get to experience being in a community where we feel comfortable to experiment in exciting, but nerve-wracking opportunities. We may feel we cannot afford to take risks. Often, without the benefit of savings, loans or venture capital, we literally cannot afford to fail.

With so much work to do, I'm happy that incubators like the NewME accelerator are starting to pop up in the Valley and in other places. These incubators give startups founded or co-founded by underrepresented minorities and women the opportunity to get established in a supportive environment. If your startup fits the bill and you have a working prototype, you might want to consider applying for NewME’s 12-week residential program. The second cycle begins in mid-February, with another cycle beginning next summer.

If more programs like this can gain traction, the tech industry is going to start looking very different. And that's great—more than ever, it’s important that women and people of color start making waves in Silicon Valley and other tech corridors. It's going to take some different and honest critical perspectives to ensure the future health and relevance of these industries.

Because of the relatively diverse makeup of the southeastern Virginia region—and with the prominence of HBCU’s in the area—enough factors converged in my favor that I didn't feel like a token when I advanced at the Startup Weekend. I noticed my own comfort; but did the white guys in attendance entertain similar thoughts and feelings? Would they have noticed if the top eight included zero ideas led by women or people of color?

On the last evening of the event, a black developer, whose concept was not moved forward, told me he was happy that my idea got selected. “One of us had to get chosen,” he said.

You can follow Allison Bland on the Undergr- uh, Twitter, @alliebland.

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¹ Computerworld, "Open To Attack" [source]
² Network Magazine [source]
³ NBC New York, "FTC to Regulate Blogger Payola [source]
⁴ The Journal of Lending & Credit Risk Management [source]
⁵ InfoWorld, "View from the sidelines: technology, wit, wisdom, and collectible buzzwords" [source]
⁶ On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Judge: Appellate Courts' Use of Internet Sites, Coleen M. Barger [source]
⁷ One Salt Sea: A October Daye Novel, Seanan McGuire [source]
⁸ This is not architecture, William J. Mitchell [source]
⁹ Bloomberg Businessweek, “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Robot” [source]
¹⁰ The Atlantic Wire, “Bitcoin Heist May Be Victim of New Moneygrubbing Malware” [source]
¹¹ Extreme Speech and Democracy, David Fraser [source]
¹² The L Magazine, “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Loser” [source]
¹³ The New York Times, "Two Boys," by Nico Muhly [source]
¹⁴ The Ottawa Citizen, “Country lane gets linked to information highway” [source]
¹⁵ National Underwriter Property & Casualty, “Carriers Fear Being ‘Leapfrogged’ On Tech” [source]
¹⁶ New York Observer, “Bonnie Fuller 2.0: On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re A Famous Magazine Editor!” [source]
¹⁷ Salon, “The right’s Helen Thomas hypocrisy” [source]
¹⁸ Library Journal, “Rings, Kings and Evil Things” [source]
¹⁹ Mother Jones, “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Werewolf” [source]
²⁰ The Australian, “Spider uses Web to trap crooks”
²¹ InformationWeek, “IT Confidential: Playing Post Office And Looking For Love” [source]
²² Slate, “Sex Sells” [source]
²³ Psychology Today, “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a God” [source]
²⁴ The New York Times, “A Dog or a Cat? New Tests to Fool Automated Spammers” [source]

Related: It is a truth universally acknowledged...

Elon Green writes supply-sider agitprop for ThinkProgress and Alternet.

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