Christopher SchutziusOne sleepless night in my apartment I made the mistake of scrolling down to read the comments beneath a YouTube video of Phil Ochs. A well-meaning young lad had posted an enthusiastic assessment of Ochs’s talents. According to him, Ochs was not only a better singer and guitar player than Bob Dylan, but a better songwriter as well.
I felt a certain sympathy for the young man. I too was an admirer of Ochs. He did have a wonderful voice, and by most accounts may even have been the better human being—certainly the better drinking companion. But the suggestion that Dylan’s songwriting was somehow inferior struck me as a historical error of sufficient magnitude to require correction.
I wrote a thoughtful and gently corrective reply, acknowledging Ochs’s considerable virtues while pointing out that although he had written one or two songs approaching the quality of Dylan’s early work, he could not reasonably be compared to Dylan’s middle and later periods. I reviewed the comment with satisfaction. It was concise, balanced, and persuasive.
A mere thirty thousand words.
I was sure the comment would go viral and be acknowledged as worthy of a Pulitzer. Or maybe the cover of Rolling Stone.
Having thus discharged my duty in one important area of cultural preservation, it occurred to me that many other pressing problems of modern life still demanded attetntion.
Then I realized there was no guarantee the young man—or anyone else—would actually read it. It might simply drift into the electronic void, unnoticed by the very audience it was intended to enlighten. This troubled me for a moment. But then I reflected that William Shakespeare must have faced similar uncertainties when he finished writing Hamlet. There was no guarantee anyone would read that either.
Still, it was an annoying problem.
My solution was simple: a mobile phone application that would deliver a sharp electric shock the moment a user attempted to scroll down to the comments. The shock would be strong enough to cause the phone to drop from his hand and give him a brief opportunity to reconsider the direction of his life. Unquestionably, this app—I named Rabbit Hole—was destined to shake the world out of its depressing over-reliance on vicarious experiences. People would finally leave their sofas and coffee shops and head out into the real world to bungee-jump, start bar fights, or hop freight trains.
Of course, I lacked the technical expertise, ambition, and general industry required to build such an application myself, and I wasn’t sure if the app already existed in some form. Fortunately, the city was full of tech entrepreneurs and digital nomads who were creating twenty new mobile applications every hour of the day and knew how to circumvent intellectual property concerns. Surely one of them could be persuaded to assist. I had already conceived of another application that addressed a problem of practical urgency: a system that would allow users to determine, in real time, which branch of 7-Eleven currently had a functioning Slurpee machine.
Since one or the other of these innovations was sure to make me a mega-rich superstar whose opinions people would finally take seriously, it seemed clear that the moment had arrived to begin work on a long-postponed book addressing the rest of the world’s problems.
Ways We Might Avert Global Catastrophe — A Brief but Definitive Explanation of Why Modern Civilization Is Clearly Not Working, Together with Several Comprehensive Suggestions for Fixing It
This was just a placeholder title—obviously it would have to be expanded later.
It occurred to me that people these days have shorter attention spans and have grown weary of pronouncements from those of us in the billionaire class. I therefore decided to include in the preface some of the gentler proposals I had concerning current issues such as the decline of language, medical ethics, and the modern workplace.
Anyone who says “Let’s circle back to that” must immediately begin walking in a circle until the conversation has naturally moved on without them.
Anyone claiming never to peek inside a neighbor’s medicine cabinet will have their internet browsing history published on the cover of USA Today.
Anyone proposing after-hours team-building workshops must perform a solo trust fall off the edge of the Grand Canyon.
Before beginning the manuscript, I decided to sketch a brief outline.Table of ContentsAre we Rome?................................... 1
How to order Coffee.......................... 2-211
Global Warming................................ 212
Sports Debates.................................. 213-1143
Peace in the Middle East................... 1143 ½
The Demise of The Modern Novel... 1143 3/4
Banned-Yoga Mats, Podcasts etc...... 1144-1999
Comment Section.............................. 2000-9997Having thus outlined the structure of the work, I paused to consider the scale of the undertaking. It was clear that the project might require several months, perhaps even weeks, of sustained effort.I decided to begin the following morning.In the meantime, I checked to see if anyone had responded to my comment.Back to Current Issue