Digital Trends in the Early Millennium

Why would somebody with crippling self-doubt and high anxiety decide to report from war-torn Iraq? Bound and blindfolded, my classmates were locked in tiny, ramshackle rooms below the yip-yipping of their captors. We were inside a warehouse, somewhere in the Maryland suburbs, a chorus of car alarms and howling rioters embellishing the realism of this mock-kidnapping and detainment. The sounds interstitched with strobe lights for nearly 20 minutes. All I could do was watch. I recused myself from participating in this portion of a hostile environment training course for journalists and aid workers, in which I’d enrolled before taking reporting assignments in Iraq. Looking back months later, I wasn’t proud of abstaining from the activities at hand. But I could not shake the angst and anxiety that has been woven into me over many years, to say nothing of what it meant for me to take an assignment in a war zone thousands of miles away from my rituals of comfort. The class was a

The Hollywood idea of mania makes it seem like a creative superpower. The reality is very, very different. I once had an overwhelming urge to draw. I don’t draw. I’m not good at drawing, but I wanted to fucking DRAW. I drew pictures all day, every day for a week. Anything I could see, I drew: people, water bottles, bananas, real thought-provoking stuff. I filled two notebooks in a week and remember thinking to myself, “This is how Picasso must have felt.” Another time I didn’t sleep for three days and spent the nights applying for jobs I wasn’t qualified for. In between University Professor and Museum Curator, I impulse-bought things I didn’t need. Aroma diffusers. Every book Amazon recommends. If buying a ton of random stuff at 3:01 a.m. sounds normal to you, great, but it’s not usually my thing. I’m — how can I put this? — really fucking cheap. Earlier this year, I wrote 10,000 words in one day. I’m not a fast writer usually. I continued to write and rewrite. After four

Bitcoin is an illusion, a mass hallucination, so one hears. It’s just numbers in cyberspace, a mirage, insubstantial as a soap bubble. Bitcoin is not backed by anything other than the faith of the fools who buy it and of the greater fools who buy it from these lesser fools. And you know? Fair enough. All this is true. What may be less easy to grasp is that U.S. dollars are likewise an illusion. They too consist mainly of numbers out there in cyberspace. Sometimes they’re stored in paper or coins, but while the paper and coins are material, the dollars they represent are not.  U.S. dollars are not backed by anything other than the faith of the fools who accept it as payment and of other fools who agree in turn to accept it as payment from them. The main difference is that, for the moment at least, the illusion, in the case of dollars, is more widely and more fiercely believed. In fact, almost all of our U.S. dollars, about 90 percent, are purely abstract — they literally d