After a while there my arm felt better and I went back on the water, fueled up and ready to help more people. There were fewer of them in the later afternoon, people were either dead or had gotten to a high point of some kind. So I joined the other boaters and we made some street sweeps. It was really fun to ride down Orange Grove Avenue, I have to say, running the brown flow almost as fast as a car, but you had to stay sharp, because sometimes an easy flow would head under a freeway bridge or the like and it could quickly become desperate getting out of that current before you got sucked down and killed. People shared knowledge of these danger zones, that’s how I heard about Sepulveda, no one’s phone was working but some people had GPS devices with maps saved on them, and they were happy to share their orienteering news, and a lot of people out had local knowledge as well, so we paddled around and the motorboats zipped around, often wasting gas without thinking that they weren’t going to be able to refill anytime soon, but after a while they remembered, if they didn’t run out, and so most of the action as the sun went down was kayakers and a few rowboats and the like, even some sailboats with their sails down and people in them paddling along awkwardly. Little flotillas like human water bugs on the great lake of LA.
And what was occurring to me over and over again as all this was happening was, Hey: I hate LA. I was born here and I know it well, and have even read or been told some of its history in school, and I really do hate it. The truth is, after World War Two this place went from a sleepy little spread of villages to the ten million people here now, and during that time the developers were getting rich making ticky-tack suburban neighborhoods, that and putting in the freeways, which cut the plain into a hundred giant squares, and all of it crap. No plan, nothing good, no parks, no organization, no plan of any kind. Just buy some orange grove and subdivide it and tear out the trees and build a bunch of plywood houses, and then do it again, over and over. It happened in a snap of the fingers, and it was never anything but stupid. And that’s what we’ve been living in ever since! And more than a few of us trying to live out a remake of the movie La La Land. It was double stupid.
So as we were paddling around in our kayaks, people were saying to each other, This whole fucking place is gone! Everything is going to have to be torn out! The entire city of Los Angeles is going to have to be replaced.
Which was great. Maybe we could do it right this time. And I myself am going to find a different job.
60
Spring came and Mary began to swim again from the Utoquai schwimmbad, first once or twice a week, then every day. Then tram back up to the office. She gave the final nod to Janus Athena’s YourLock, and J-A posted the website address to the internet and they watched it go through its unobtrusive birth, a slow week as it turned out, as it was just one spike in the endless interference patterns of discourse. Then people began to share the news that you could transfer everything going on in the rest of your internet life into a single account on YourLock, which was organized as a co-op owned by its users, after which you had secured your data in a quantum-encrypted cage and could use it as a negotiable asset in the global data economy, agreeing to sell your data or not to data-mining operations out there who quickly saw the new lay of the land and began to offer people micro-payments for their data, mainly health information, consumption patterns, and finance. The royalties for being oneself in the world machine were not insignificant, a kind of lifetime annuity, small but useful. And so people began to make the shift, and one day that tipping point arrived where a non-linear shear occurred, like an earthquake, and suddenly everyone had a YourLock account and would henceforth be conducting their internet life by way of it. A whole new internet ecology, the much-hyped but previously vaporwaresque Internet 3.0.
This was news, of course, remarked on everywhere. But on the other hand, when Mary went down to the lake in the mornings to swim, everything looked the same; and this was true everywhere. Global revolutions these days were strange, Mary thought, being as virtual as everything else. And of course in the virtual world it had indeed caused an uproar. What did it mean? Who owned this new system? It was open source, some said, no one owned it. People working in the gift economy had made it, which meant maybe just people playing around. So who profited from it? Other people said its users were its owners and thus made whatever money it made, mostly, as always, by way of advertising fees. It was somewhat like a credit union, perhaps, inserting itself into the social media discourse space. As with a move from bank to credit union, instead of the company using the consumer, the consumer used the company, and owned it too. What did the company per se get out of it? Nothing, because a company was nothing. It was just an organization devised to help its employee-owners, nothing more. Like any other company, in the end. If you thought that was what they were.
All this was going over very poorly in China, where the stance had always been that the Chinese Communist Party was precisely a
