Welcome to The Modern Nomad, a meditation on geographic promiscuity and the pathological need to travel. On the urge to stay and to go. On the people you meet on the road. On a search for community. On here, there, and everywhere else. And on nomads past and present.
Boulderpavement, a literary magazine published by The Banff Centre, in Canada, has just published an excerpt from the modern nomad book that looks at Occupy London and the life of a temporary community.
Read it here: http://bit.ly/PEcYQY
[Aram Bartholl’s clever art intervention, in Taipei]
The London Underground was quick to the mark when Apple recently brought out its new operating system for iPhones, iOS6. Seen on a noticeboard at Highbury & Islington Station: “For the benefit of passengers using Apple iOS 6, local area maps are available from the booking office.” Dropping Google Maps from iOS6 left many iPhone users lost and confused. In a city like London, where people are happy to give you directions if only they knew where they were, Google Maps was indispensible.
Which makes you wonder: How does Google build its maps? Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, asks this very question in a recent story. Madrigal, who met with numerous Google mappers, including a former engineer for NASA, writes that, “How the two operating systems incorporate geo data and present it to users could become a key battleground in the phone wars.”
Part of that data is collected from Google’s Street View cars. Setting aside the creepy issue of seeing people and your own home online, without your permission, Google Maps is an example of the blurring and blending real worlds and digital worlds. “Humans are coding every bit of the logic of the road onto a representation of the world,” Madrigal writes, “so that computers can simply duplicate (infinitely, instantly) the judgments that a person already made.”
Think about this as more than just humans using data and creating real-world maps. This is about how our mental images of the physical world will change as we create more sophisticated programs to represent it. Manik Gupta, a product manager, told Madrigal, “If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online. Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and [the online world], and Maps really plays that part.”
Madrigal continues: “As we slip and slide into a world where our augmented reality is increasingly visible to us off and online, Google’s geographic data may become its most valuable asset. Not solely because of this data alone, but because location data makes everything else Google does and knows more valuable.”
But Google Maps is about more than just accurate information or, with the case of Street View, privacy issues, or even about how data is king. It’s about how our perception of real and virtual have already changed so much. The same way our children will not remember the era of cassette tapes and the world pre-smartphone, they will likely have different mental reconstructions of the world around them.
Unless they’re using iOS6. Then they might just get lost.
Reading List
+ Shout-out to long-form journalism. I first read this on Longreads.
+ Worried about being caught walking through your living naked when one of Google’s Street View vehicles rolls by? Read The Guardian’s story about Google’s latest privacy controversy.
More fun with travel: artist Adolf Konrad’s 1963 “packing list!” Via http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?id=53
[A young seafaring nomad. Photograph by Bangkok-based freelance photographer Giorgio Taraschi, via The Guardian]
I arrived home to find a note from a friend about the Moken nomads, a tribe of seafarers from Burma and Thailand. These are not modern nomads—their migrant roots go back up to 4,000 years, according to a story in The Guardian. As borders shut for many people, they open up for others, such as those of us with the privilege of money and dual citizenship and multiple passports (in Jay-Z’s words, “Got five passports / I ain’t never going to jail.”) If the modern nomad is the individual with the luxury to work across borders, to move three, four, five times in as many years, to form communities across continents, the traditional nomad is seeing their world get smaller. The Moken, for instance, are being forced ashore by falling fish stocks (thanks to overfishing by international companies and the 2004 tsunami).
[A Moken nomad works the aisles at a 7-Eleven in Thailand. Photograph by Bangkok-based freelance photographer Giorgio Taraschi, via The Guardian
The challenges they face illustrate the complexity of nomadism. In 2012, you must be from somewhere, you must claim (and prove) citizenship.
A recent push by various charities and the Thai government to issue Thai identity cards has granted some access to state-run schools and health care, but claiming full-blown citizenship – by proving that they, or a parent, were born in Thailand – is a complex issue for a nomadic people who hardly use numbers and mark the date according to the tide, not the Gregorian calendar.
The result is a dislocation that eerily matches that of modern nomads, but with different results. Social problems, such as substance abuse, are spreading; luxury resorts squeeze Moken into housing situations that sound very much like the reserve structure of Canada’s First Nations (with similar problems); and cultural amnesia seems inevitable. What happens when a nomadic group can no longer migrate? “Moken are supposed to travel, to be nomadic, to travel freely. So if we cannot travel freely, we are dead, culturally at least,” a community leader named Hong told The Guardian. “Moken children use mobile phones, study English and choose to be educated. We’ve abandoned our old traditions so much we risk losing them entirely.”
+ See “Living With the Moken,” The Guardian’s photo gallery with Taraschi’s pictures of Moken nomads.
+ As some nomads are being forced out of the sea, others are flocking there. Is “seasteading”–ocean-based cities–the final frontier in urban design? See this piece in The Economist for more.
1. The Hobo Code circ 1889. See Web Urbanist for more about hobo culture in America.
2. The Hobo Code circa 2012, in Good magazine’s Migration issue. Also, apparently, the name of an episode of Mad Men.
[“In Search of Bigfoot (Ode to Thoreau),” by Tricia McKellar, for sale at Society 6.]
Are we born nomads? Are we meant to be restless? How does one tackle a chapter on that ocean called “community”? These are the sorts of questions I wrestle as I research for my book about modern nomads, drifters and next-gen communities.
What does this mean? Well, I’m wading, like a child who is only learning to swim, into a deep philosophical pool of citizenship, community and home–those esoteric things of which there are many definitions and no fixed answers. And with uncertainty comes restlessness.
But I’ve leave aside these intellectual insecurities for a moment to share a thought by Benjamin Phelan about another restless soul, the late author Bruce Chatwin. In the following quote, Phelan is thinking about the transition from nomadism to agriculture and about Chatwin’s theory that humankind was built to be nomadic. (I’m quite broadly synthesizing this, so if you like Chatwin, follow the link above to read Phelan’s book review in the New York Observer.)
It’s a long quote, tangentially linked to the meaning of home and notions of community, so bear with me:
Since Chatwin died, it has been shown by molecular genomics that humanity teetered on the verge of extinction in the distant, prehistoric past, and that our genomes are still reeling from the violent transition from nomadism to agriculture. The humans who survived weren’t the strongest or the smartest, necessarily, but the most restless—the ones who upped sticks and left the trouble behind. We are their descendants. We carry that DNA that saved them.
This hyperbolic assertion of our innate nomadism is one I only partly share. But I find something comforting in it, as if it affirms the inevitability of restlessness.
Tangential, eh? Geeky, certainly.
Well, you were warned.
Yet, as many scholars observe, it is this boundedness of citizenship to the nation-state that has become problematic in the age of migration and globalisation. Many scholars have noted that with the increasing movements of people across boundaries there have been transnational, cosmopolitan, global forms of citizenship where dual and multiple nationalities are being negotiated. Some have attempted to develop concepts of cosmopolitan or global citizenship. Others have called for open borders. Yet, all these pre-suppose, I submit, a moving subject rather than an acting subject.
These are some of the ideas I’ll explore in my otherwise un-academic exploration of community and migration, of what makes a place a home and what fosters community. I suspect I will come across stories about ambiguity and confusion, migrants who can’t quite say where is home or what citizenship they feel in their hearts–never mind the one on their passports.
I’ve thought about citizenship and belonging for a long time. My mother was born in Northern Ireland and emigrated for Canada in the mid 1960s. Time wore away one accent and replaced it with another. Decades passed before she took Canadian citizenship. So is she Canadian or British? Is she both? For some people, it becomes a quest, a question, a riddle: Where is home? This is central to the question of citizenship.
Another question: Is it time to come up with new notions of citizenship and new definitions of community?
Photo by Kristian Schuller, via The Nomad Chronicles. First published in Beware magazine.
[Revellers at Wilderness Festival, via wildernessfestival.com]
As the London 2012 Olympics arrive in my ‘hood of Hackney, I’m reminded of something the British-born author Jonathan Raban once wrote in Granta: The English are “born into a casual phlegmatic acceptance of astounding alterations to the landscape.” It was what he described as second nature, kind of like nature 2.0, where the old growth forests are long gone and what we think of as nature is deeded, divided and landscaped. We are not talking about, say, northern British Columbia or the wilds of Alaska, where a tree could fall in the forest and no one would hear.
There’s some nostalgia for “wilderness” right now, and I’m not talking about the foxes who follow me down the streets of London as I walk my dog. Consider Wilderness Festival, one of many (sure to be rain-soaked) festival weekends in the UK. Sharon Jones is playing. Lianne la Havas is playing.
The visual branding for the festival hints at the kind of boutiquing of wilderness that seems trendy now. Case in point: the festival comes with its own beach-side “spa” with everything from “hand-built luxurious oak hot tubs to soak and relax in to wooden saunas and a champagne bar…” I suspect that Raban would dispute the festival’s claim that it is in the “wilds of England.” There is no such thing, I can hear him argue.
But why put words in his mouth? Here’s his definition of wilderness in an interview with Granta:
“A wilderness that’s truly wild is beyond human rule, which is something I’ve always loved about the idea of the wilderness of the sea, at least before we fucked it up and made it wild no more, just one more critically endangered habitat.”
[The hyper-saturated lake at Wilderness Festival, via wildernessfestival.com]
When it comes to the Wilderness Festival, I’m only partly cynical about such branding . If I wasn’t oppressed by what seems like relentless, endless rain and put off by the hefty ticket price, I’d probably go. (See, a true outdoors person would not be deterred by weather.)
And just to link it back to The Modern Nomad and notions of community, I wonder if true wilderness is a rejection of community. The Wilderness Festival is less a way to approximate the outdoors and more of an excuse to throw a party. And who can complain about that?
+ I am getting somewhat off topic, because this is a blog first about communities shaped by mobility, but I’ve just started reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, so all definitions of wilderness are coming up. I like Macfarlane’s estimation:
“…this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.”
[Adolf Konrad’s illustrated 1963 packing list from the exhibit “Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations.” Via The New York Times.]
I pack:
Passports (Canadian and European)
Photocopy of my citizenship papers (Britain)
Photocopy of my birth certificate (Canada)
One or two or three books (paperback, not eReader)
Laptop, fully charged
iPod shuffle filled with podcasts
Running shoes
Notebook & pens (ballpoint, as I’ve had countless of my favourite liquid pens explode on planes)
Knitting
Clothes—one week’s worth
Camera and digital recorder
Toothbrush, toothpaste, hair brush
Ear plugs
Sometimes I pack my camera but not the charger, or I pack the wrong charger and the battery expires on the first day of my trip. Or I change the settings without realizing it and, as happened in Scandinavia, come home with only a photo of a small bird trapped on a cruise ship and a pretty yellow flower.
Sometimes I forget my pajamas. Sometimes I forget my trousers. I almost always bring one pair of shoes too many.
Sometimes the airport security guards question the legality of knitting needles on planes. (Once, on a flight from Denmark to Canada a starched flight attendant stopped by my seat when we were halfway across the ocean and said, incredulous,“You can’t have those on here!” But I already did, I told her, and kept on knitting.)
I must take off my shoes at La Guardia, in New York, and Dulles, in Washington, but am allowed to keep them on in Toronto and London. In Vancouver, the American customs agent smiles and he does not seem to be trying to trick me with friendliness into admitting some immigration error. (Tip: Never joke with customs agents.) In Toronto, an agent interrogates me when I arrive, sleepless, on a red-eye from Paris. “You mean you went alone? Why would you travel alone?” It is a judgment presented as a question. She waves me through.
Every airport looks the same but different, like a brightly lit, too-clean shopping mall. The terminal in Zurich is bright and spacious and the one in Copenhagen is small and intimate. I spend five hours in an almost-deserted section of O’Hare Airport, in Chicago, and do my daily stretches. A man in a uniform sleeps on the other side of the room. Up the hallway, a queue forms in front of a flight to Guadelajara. A stream of Mexicans going home for a visit or for good. In Edmonton, I negotiate for two hours with the airline sales attendant about the matter of a refund for a cancelled flight and then walk to a competing airline to buy a ticket. Deprived of sleep, fresh off a flight from London, I begin to cry and she says, calmly, “Don’t worry. We’re going to sort this out.” I half expect her to offer me cookies and a glass of warm milk.
I have already mapped out my directions from the airport to the city I am visiting. The city is still fresh and new in those first few hours. When I arrive in a new place, I walk the streets, poke in shops, right myself. I am trying to place myself within its geography. I want to map the space, wrap my head around the city. For a long time I would immediately begin to imagine where I would live, what my flat or house would be like. I tried to picture myself living there. I don’t do that so much anymore.
But soon, after a few days, some strange emptiness gnaws at me. Even after all these years I rarely sit in a bar alone, even if I bring a book. I circle cafés in Paris unable to take a table. It takes many trips and moves to overcome what is not quite shyness but some inarticulate discomfort. The only reason I ended up chatting with a stranger from France and a few locals at a “ruin pub,” or kert in Budapest is because I was on assignment for a travel magazine and my editor would have been angry if I simply stood, like a wallflower. I needed quotes.
That emptiness is a temporary dislocation. I could probe it further, but blogs are not the place for deep psychoanalysis. And anyway, part of the beauty of a new place is that you are invisible. This is also the peril.
I rarely leave anything behind when I leave a place. Except perhaps a person I have grown fond of, or a memory. Sometimes I shed books. In a guesthouse in Prince Edward Island, on the east coast of Canada, I left a Michael Ondaatje novel, its spine uncracked, hoping that the next person along would find more in it than I did. On that trip I scraped the red Prince Edward Island sand off my shoes. But it didn’t quite come off and was the only souvenir I took home.
Further Reading
+ “Lost and Found” is a short personal essay by philosopher Mark Kingwell that I commissioned when I worked at enRoute magazine. Getting lost in a city, he writes, might be the best way to discover who you are. “Becoming strange to ourselves is the gateway to seeing how dependent on strangers we are for our own identities.”
+ “Why We Travel,” a classic think-piece by Pico Iyer, who writes “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.”
+ Which brings up Rebecca Solnit’s non-fiction book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, a plotless, meditative book on all kinds of ways of being lost: abandon, transformation, and self realization. (From The Guardian’s review: “reading her prose is like spending time in the company of an earnest, determined hiker who disdains maps but nevertheless knows some unexpected and fascinating fact about every house, hill or tree that you pass.”)
+ Do you, like my mother, proofread your packing list? Do you illustrate it, like Adolf Konrad, above? Do you even make one? See more lists from the 2010 exhibit on lists from the Smithsonian’s archives here on the Archive of American Art’s website.
