Sweden-The Power of New
Stockholm / 1996 / A Digital Awakening
The CallThe Power of New
How Sweden, a bicycle, an English bookstore, and one free Hotmail account rewired an analog traveler for a digital life.
How Swede It Is
A Stockholm digital awakening and Nordic adventure: the time enjoyed wasting was not wasted time.
“Travelling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, I wanna love you, but I have to go; this is just the way it is.”
The Asymmetric Equation
Awareness + Friction = SignalNew places slow time down long enough for new ideas to arrive.
Field Note 01
Welcome to Sweden
Welcome to Sweden, with a reputation for extreme winters, the safest cars on Earth (see my SAAB story) and ABBA. I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to the Swedes than being really, really, ridiculously good looking. And I plan on finding out what that is...starting with a bike tour.
Movement
Stockholm’s Cycling Paradise
Stockholm has bike paths everywhere! It’s easy to get around the islands that make up the city. As long as I am riding a bike, I know I am the luckiest guy in the world.
Yet, the Swedes can’t compete with their brethren across the Strait — Copenhagen’s daily cycling masses. If Paris is the City of Lights, then Copenhagen is the City of Cycles. There are 1.7 million people there and 1.7 million bicycles. When it takes 15 minutes to find your bike at the train station, you know you are in Denmark. In Amsterdam too, cyclists are everywhere — and you’re more likely to get hit by one than a car as everybody has a bicycle. Nevertheless, there are bikes everywhere in Stockholm too, and riding is a breeze.
The Start Up — seeking out change and new experiences.
Port of Call
Three Months in ’96
Stockholm was my port of call for Summers 2009 and 2010, but I stayed for three months in ’96; with the usual run-of-the-mill obstacles, the fatigue, the ambiguity, and even the danger of being too enthusiastic. I learned a lot of Finnish jokes too, like the Finnish man loved his wife so much he almost told her.
The Book
Being Digital
Serendipity brought me to an Engelska/English bookstore where I bought — browsing not allowed like at Barnes & Noble — the most important “geek” book of the info revolution, Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital.
This treatise on bits versus atoms, and access and mobility to free content was a primer on how the worlds of interaction, entertainment and information would eventually merge. The paradox of his book or any book nowadays is that its digital version is available online because “Digital books never go out of print.”
The Call Arrives
The Digital Awakening Begins
Boom! The napsterization of cutting out the middleman, the tivoization time shifting of on-demand entertainment, plus the CNN effect, the 24-hour news cycle, were all emerging, and here was The Oracle, Visionary and Digital Pathfinder Negroponte, predicting that “Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living.”
In fact, I took his “Daily Me” concept of a virtual daily newspaper customized for an individual’s tastes and created this blog based on things I would like to read, where “everyone is my neighbor.” Hence the title: Hotel @nyware.
Being Digital, where the world is flat and decentralized, making things bigger and smaller at the same time, was the future, and the future was already here. It just wasn’t evenly distributed yet.
Hollywood
When Production Became Portable
The three reasons why I became a teacher — June, July and August — freed me up to do gigs. First, at Creative Planet, where I consulted on production tools for the movie industry, where I was introduced by UCLA and USC interns to free downloads courtesy of Nutella, Limewire and Napster. I also made Google my default search engine!
More than that, I was lucky enough to get parts as an Extra in film and TV and a union SAG card playing an Attorney in a horror movie. I was amazed how you could shoot and edit a movie on location using a Mac and Final Cut, then send “The Dailys” remotely using wireless, email, and for larger files, FTP sites to the studio.
The Power of One
When TV Watched Me
I got a first-hand account of “the power of one” and the “electronic word of mouth” back in 2010, as a citizen journalist, when Nightline and Good Morning America picked up my YouTube videos, when my ship the Carnival Splendor was dead in the water for four days. I wasn’t watching TV: TV was watching me!
Nicholas glibly pointed out, “The true value of a network is less about information and more about community. The information superhighway... is creating a totally new, global social fabric.” I was doing my part for “Did you hear about” Journalism.
Analog Eyes
From Analog to Digital
Yet the Summer of 1996, my analog eyes didn’t quite see our digital world. In a way, I lived the life I recently described last year in 2011 when visiting Myanmar, aka Burma, as uninitiated and unplugged — setting life unintentionally to airplane mode.
It was still brick and mortar for me, where ramen noodles were a dish of effortless purity, and I had to resign myself to “black work” as a dog walker and digging ditches to take care of my extended vacation. Stockholm wasn’t solving my digital “problems”; it was subsidizing them. The epiphanies would have to wait.
The Application
The Email Revolution
Negroponte was instrumental in the One Laptop per Child OLPC program. Ironically I was one of his “digital homeless.” I didn’t even have a computer. In fact, I had access to free ISDN internet bandwidth at Stockholm University’s library and frequently took advantage of their “user friendly” desktop PCs.
Furthermore, let me say, Tack så mycket Stockholm! for introducing me to one of the most significant applications to my digital life: email. I credit a random student who helped me sign up for my free Hotmail account, which I still am using today.
Stillness
The Art of Doing Nothing
In a very practical way, it was the act of rebirth. I dealt with completely new situations; the days passed more slowly, and most of the time, I didn’t even understand the language the people spoke. It actually made me more accessible to others, because they helped me out in difficult situations. Nobody remains quite what they are when they recognize themselves.
I didn’t consider myself happy or unhappy. I just knew there was something OUT THERE that I needed to get to and it never seemed to be where I was at any particular moment.
Doing nothing always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. It’s evil, dangerous, and subversive, at least for we Americans. It’s a poor workman who blames his tool, and doing nothing is a powerful one. It can give you your best “material.”
Late Scandinavian Light
Still Waters
The sun sets at about 11:30 p.m. and rises again at 4:30 a.m. So we never see night anymore in Scandinavia. Eighty-five degrees and sunny. The Swedes think it will be the hottest day of the year.
We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. Still waters still running deep.
Footnote
I Visited My Email Address
I had the chance to drive up from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley in 1997, and visit my email account! My virtual address that I still “reside” at to date.
Out of curiosity, to my surprise, the offices of Hotmail were in a strip mall, not some huge warehouse full of the UNIVAC tubes of the 1950s. Nothing but towers of computers were stacked up to the ceiling, as I pressed my nose against the storefront glass and looked in at awe of the tiny space where I, along with hundreds of thousands of other users’ email accounts, “lived.” Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith were out of town, according to a UPS guy delivering stuff next door.
It has gotten to the point where I don’t care as much about losing the device — the cell phone, the laptop, the mp3 player — as losing just the data! The address book, the writings, the songs... That’s why storing stuff on the server side, in the cloud, gives peace of mind, and the shift from the physical to the digital.