Our digital dystopia: A diary

It didn't send tremors through the stock market or cause the price of oil to skyrocket, but as several observers of the publishing world noted a few weeks back, Men's Journal, an award-winning men's magazine and one of the first publications to ever give me a desk job, recently sent out its new issue rife with the sort of mistake that causes copy editors to hold their heads and weep.

In the table of contents, in a dozen places where the magazine should have listed page numbers, the entries all read "TK."

Or, as we would have greeted the sight around the Men's Journal break room back in the predigital days of hopefulness and swagger: "D'oh!"

"TK" is a placeholder in publishing, a shorthand used to mark a spot in a layout for details still to come. Like the Great and Powerful Oz, publishing markings like "TK" never should be seen by readers in a glossy jammed with expensive advertising and high-flying reporting. In the not-so-distant past — before the rise of Vice, BuzzFeed, Vox and whatever other fleeting web portal for hot takes it is that the kids all now read — an errant "TK" would have had to survive obsessive rounds of granular scrutiny to slip its way into print.

Then along came digital, its unregulated mayhem of piracy and pillaging and content-devouring-content, a free-for-all unleashed upon our established systems of knowledge organization and social expression. It transferred billions into the bank accounts of engineers in northern California, left the creative economy only pennies, upended the business model for print, and in many places laid waste to its norms of careful attention to the end product.

The magazines that haven't folded in the last 10 years have been sold and resold and have seen staff cut to the bones. Newspapers, the imperfect mechanism for ensuring accountability in American government, have become in many cases day-to-day propositions, and the political system has devolved into chaos.

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Today everyone can publish, appear on video or print a CD, but few can make a living doing it. Not looking for sympathy here, other than to note that it's not at all clear this is a sustainable way to structure an information economy. Yet we've only seen the start of it.

On Twitter, one of the winners in the digital swindle and the publishing firm where our crude and semiliterate leader spends his vampire hours diminishing America with his settling of scores, sowing of mistrust and harassment of victims of tragedy, one editorial hand saw a pic of all those TKs last month and called it "absolutely soul-crushing."

The lament clearly had less to do with a magazine error and more to do with the times. In the digital dystopia now upon us, a new trade is wiped from the landscape each week. I can write only about what it's done to mine, but the same story could be written about law, manufacturing, restaurant work, health care — pick any business besides those employing the waves of ascendant technocrats busily scoring condos in walkable urban locales. The people who do not read for fun were able to wire us all up to transponders, and, surprise-surprise, the future has become paved with opioids, reality TV, unpaid journalism and people sending each other pictures of their food.

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"The technophiles are taking us on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown."

Hard to disagree with that one, right? I mean, no matter where a person falls on the pros and cons of the digital economy and its reorganization of haves and have-nots, few would disagree the changes of the last 15 years have come fast and without warning.

Except for one thing: Though it's sound and reasonable, that warning was a line from the 1995 Unabomber manifesto. It was the prescient assessment of a killer now rightfully sitting in prison and yet clearly a savvy futurist who would have been deemed too mad to stand trial had he only dared to predict what would transpire in 2016.

His manifesto could not have predicted last November and the way in which a misanthropic foreign kleptocracy would so easily game Americans and the digital press into trading enough noise to swing a presidential election. The recent spectacle of the technocracy legal team — lawyers for Facebook, Twitter and Google — all dodging accountability like tobacco lawyers, suggests that the digital billions extracted from us all have hardly gone to the best and the brightest.

Ted Kaczynski's crimes came in the wake of some pretty strange behavior-modification experimentation, mind games played upon the math whiz while he was a teenager at Harvard in the late 1950s. I read that story the other day in the Atlantic, a once-towering intellectual magazine that now pays its bills via pop-up video that starts playing without your consent, among other digital indignities.

On this particular day it was one touting a popular brand of shredded cheddar, one "made for cheese lovers, by cheese lovers,"and it had a funny scene with a dog, a wife and a sloppily-dressed husband eating nachos in a house that few if any Americans can afford. It sure took my mind off the way in which I agreed with the Unabomber.

A separate pop-up offered helpful information on "The Rise of the Connected Family." The sponsored content within this mandatory intrusion into text had been paid for by the Palo Alto-based Nest Labs, a Silicon Valley "home automation" company. The copy touted "a new wave of home technologies" to repair our familial stress points. It promised a digital cure for our "traditional bonding moments" — for "the anxiety folks can feel about the safety of their spouses and kids when they can't be home." It was an ad for home robots.

Something called Ohmni, the technology was a kind of tablet device set to face-time and then more or less mounted on top of a pole attached to a Segway of sorts. Thanks to this Ohmni, "a traveling parent can employ the machine as a kind of surrogate, as he or she calls in to participate in dinner-table conversation or bedtime routines." And why not?

The last 10 years have taken away recorded music, cabs, hotels and shared cultural experiences, not to mention agreed-upon facts and of course unleashed your occasional storm of errant TKs.

• • •

I first learned about TK a year before getting to those gleaming midtown offices of Men's Journal.

It was the '90s, and I was working at the venerable Village Voice, interning for an ambivalent mentor and future winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He had me transcribing his long, dull interviews with local pols. It would still be years before the groundbreaking counterculture weekly would lose its footing like many other publications, falling victim to Craigslist in a long slow unwinding that culminated in its print product shuttering this summer.

I had looked down at a famous Village Voice media critic (that was a full-time staff job, media critic) as he was writing his weekly essay (this was back when you could pay for an apartment in the West Village by writing a weekly essay). I noticed he was inserting "TK" in places he planned to fill in with details.

The famous writers at the Voice never talked very much to the interns, or seemingly to one another. But being around them as they stared into early-model desktops while talking into landlines was inspiring. For someone hoping to break into journalism, it was an eminently more hopeful time to be alive, in fact, than this sad, impossible moment at the all-you-can-eat buffet for user video, a moment that has given us President Donald Trump. A paper was being created. It went into boxes positioned on the street and in the subways all over town. The arrival each week of those papers put everyone in proximity with the same event. There was no swiping of your thumb to move on to something better.

Men's Journal was sold off this summer, getting back to those TKs and the worrisome state of affairs they symbolize. It now belongs to AMI, the Florida-based publisher of the National Enquirer. AMI had already purchased Us Weekly from Men's Journal publisher Jann Wenner in March. AMI is now believed to be eyeing the purchase of Rolling Stone, which also is now on the block.

AMI is run by David Pecker, a transactional publisher and outspoken supporter of the president. In the days since Trump became a candidate and then ransacked the nation's goodwill upon taking power, it's become apparent that the nation's leading tabloid has taken up a position firmly in support of Trump and his support of repressive dictatorships and opposition to a free press. And because I am often bored at the grocery store checkout, I can report that the Enquirer has spent much of the past year scripting Trump into a series of heroic global narratives while casting his critics as enemies of the state.

To glance upon an Enquirer on your way to refilling your fridge has become a field trip to an alternate political landscape, one in which Trump is singularly competent and determined while his opponents are universally malevolent and cunning. If you are paying for milk and it's a slow week for Angie and Brad, your nation's security can only be found in the political wisdom of Donald J. Trump and the outsized frowney-face he adopts in official portraits to convey that he's all business.

This is the new power player in journalism, one that hopes to wrestle control of "Rolling Stone." So we are talking about a transformational change in pop culture and written word, one clearly for the worse, as if that's possible.

Digital is here. It is viewed in long, stoop-shouldered binges interrupted by digital personal communications, the viewing of digital video, digital dating, digital health monitoring, online shopping in digital storefronts and of course, the playing of digital games.

It is an age in which conscientious people feel obliged to say strange things. When asked recently what he thought of the universal ability to publish content, an executive in charge of news for Facebook felt obliged to clarify the question.

"In the end," he said. "I don't think we as a human race will regret the internet."

Paul John Scott, a writer in Rochester, is at work on a novel.