ANALYSIS: The Digital Divide: The Example of Missoula
by Tamara Kachelmeier and Biodun Iginla, BBC News Technology Analysts
Contemporary Montana can be said to be a production of European literati, specifically, a Gallic invention in the best of the Romantic tradition. In the eighteenth century Montana was already an invention when white Frenchmen (the La Verendrye) penetrated the "virgin" (in the word of one historian) territory for the first time. At that time the trapper followed the explorer, and was in turn followed by the priest and the prospector. Also at that time George Catlin in painting and James Fenimore Cooper in fiction had fixed for the American imaginary the fictive Indian and the legend of the ennobling wilderness, allowing the possibility of Montana as a mythic Utopia.
We know from American history that America had been relentlessly dreamt (the "Dream") from East to West as a testament to the original goodness of "man": from England and the Continent to the East Coast of the New World; from the East Coast to the Midwest and the Northern Territories; and from there all the way to the Pacific. Montana has always functioned as a Frontier. In a sense the Old Frontier was transformed into the Old New Frontier. And currently it is in transition once again: the frontier between a minimum-wage slave economy into what can be called the "ether" economy of cyber technoculture.
Let's talk a little bit about the history of the Frontier. By Frontier we mean the margin where the Dream encounters resistance. In the Old Frontier this encounter was between Rousseau's fantasy of the Noble Savage (the Indian) and the Cowboy, with his ritual drunkenness, the shooting up the town, the "rape" of nature, and the slaughtering of the buffalo. Now the inhabitants of the Old Frontier, struggling for their lives, had neither the time nor the energy to reflect on the contradiction between their reality and their dream. The contradiction remained unrealized and was split geographically: People still living safely on the East Coast continued to dream the Dream, and those living in Montana (the Northern Territories) became total Westerners deliberately cut off from history and myth, immune to the beauty of their landscape.
Next came the second stage of the Old Frontier (what we have called the Old New Frontier). The school mistress followed the prostitute (the signifier of the denial of romance), moved from the East to marry the rancher or mining engineer, and the Dream and reality finally confronted each other. The school mistress brought with her the sentimental and romantic Frontier novel, consequently producing a demand for an art that nurtured the myth, an art that transformed a lifestyle into a cultural practice. The legend quickly became readymade and then found form in hokey pulps, B-movies, and fake cowboy songs. This second stage of the Old Frontier moved from a certain naiveté to a virtual history produced from a discrepancy: On the one hand, this stage idealized a recent past into the image of the myth. On the other hand, it exposed the failures of the original settlers to live up to Rousseau's ideal. The West was reinvented.
Montana's own recent past (say up to around 1990-1992) in some respects could be said to share aspects of this second stage of the Old Frontier: It was torn between its valorization of its virtual past (a pristine culture held up defiantly against the sophistication and "corruption" of the East Coast--Montana has been the Other of New York for some time now, and vice-versa), and a malaise resulting from the collision of this virtual history with the "real" history that kept breaking through.
I first went to Missoula in the summer of 1992 to visit an old graduate-school friend from the East Coast who was now teaching at the University of Montana. First off, I was quite impressed (in the original sense of this term) by the monocultural Montana demographic: white, parsimonious, healthy, nature-loving, and friendly, set at the vortex of reality and myth, and surrounded by all those splendid mountains and stunning vistas where several weather systems were visible from a distance. And Missoulians were friendly.
The friend I visited was born in France, and he had come to the US to study and then decided to stay and work. He got married to an American, and they had a son together before they eventually split up. After graduate school he was an itinerant professor in several midwestern colleges before he finally landed at the University of Montana in 1988, where he eventually attained tenure in 1994. Never really the outdoor type in France when he was growing up (born in Paris and raised in Toulouse), he quickly came to appreciate the mountains, hiking trails, and camping sites in Montana. Missoula was changing and expanding quite rapidly in those years. Signs of this expansion were everywhere, especially in those outer neighborhoods, like Pattee Canyon and South Hills that were littered with new bungalows with tacky architecture. Shortly before I went to Missoula, his friend (let's call him Pierre from now on) had just bought one of these bungalows in South Hills (a house currently worth three times what he paid for it in 1992), and he was dying to introduce me to the thrills and pleasures of whitewater-rafting and wild camping. And I most certainly was dying to get out of claustrophobic New York City. The many hikes they did up Blue Mountain and Lolo Peak that summer, the camping at Glacier National Park, the exquisite dining on buffalo burgers washed down with red wine, and the skinny-dipping in the hot springs and mud-baths of Hot Springs were definitely tonics for a psyche exposed to and blasted by the subways and the gritty sidewalks of New York City. In any case, that was my first concrete encounter with the Other that Montana is to New York. (I had had a previous virtual encounter with Missoula via Kim Williams's colorful and folksy dispatches in the mid-1980s for Susan Stamberg for her "All Things Considered" on National Public Radio.)
From the Old New Frontier, Montana then shifted onto the next stage, the Virtual Frontier, with history simply constructed for commodification and folded into the time and space of Capital. This stage is crucial because it more or less prepared the terrain for the stage that is currently emerging: the "ether" economy (in all senses of financial, social, political, and psychic) of cyber technoculture. This Virtual Frontier is characterized by dude ranches, chamber-of-commerce rodeos, Indian pow-wows (to a certain extent), and sometimes state government and corporate-sponsored "Pioneer Days." The East Coast came to see its Dream in action and demanded it on order for the two-week vacation. In the Virtual Frontier average Montanans (including some transplants) became the pimps or prostitutes of the local "culture" and myths of the state.
Obviously the most "cosmopolitan" and culturally diverse town in Montana, Missoula is curiously positioned with respect to this Virtual Frontier. This dusty town (pop. 70,000) has no tourist attraction in itself--aside from the dime-a-dozen boutique stores and faux "trading posts" on North Higgins Avenue and environs. Missoula functions in this economy of the Virtual Frontier as more or less a trajectory for transients--either professional ones or tourists passing through from Glacier National Park to Yellowstone (or vice versa) or heading for (or from) the lakeshore cabins of Flathead. Let's talk a bit about Missoula before getting back to my discussion of frontiers.
Before I went back to Missoula to live there intermittently for a year, from July 1998 till June 1999, I had been back in the intervening years every summer, each time to visit Pierre. They had spent most of the time with Pierre's friends and colleagues at the university at private (sometimes dinner) parties, at drinking sessions at downtown bars, or at outdoor picnics at Caras Park and elsewhere. In July 1998, I was again living in New York, and again he was becoming claustrophobic and dying to get out into open spaces and skies. Pierre invited me to join him and his group of seven on an extensive camping trip to the Olympic Peninsula and Glacier. The six-week camping trip was soon transformed for me into an extended one-year sojourn in Missoula because I needed a break from New York to work on revising my novel according to the specifications of his publisher. And Pierre was extremely generous letting me stay at his bungalow in South Hills.
Now that I was living in Missoula, I had to depend on mass transit to get around (I grew up in New York City and never learned how to drive). Because there are very few blacks in Missoula (there are always few blacks in American frontiers), I quickly became popular with most of the Mountain Line bus drivers. In fact, I very soon became known to more or less everybody in Missoula.
Somewhat replicating the spectrum of my life in the US since high school, at first, I hung out mostly with Pierre's university colleagues and friends. But then I began to meet people not affiliated with the university: wannabe and best-selling writers; cyber-entrepeneurs who owned their Internet companies (see more below); failed graduate students; divorced women trying to recover from failed marriages or careers or abusive husbands (or two or all three combined); and nature-loving (and sometimes tree-hugging) college dropouts involved in local politics, some of whom were also aspirant writers or artists. I was close friends with an aspirant artist who was also a forest-preservation activist, a local, born on the Northside of Missoula, whose "day job" was doing deli retail work at Worden's on the corner of North Higgins Avenue and Pine Street (let's call her Bryn). High on the sauce herself, she (sometimes including her friends, who were in fact quite interesting in many respects) introduced me to seedy karaoke bars on and off Brooks Avenue, and to legendary (for the locals) bars on North Higgins and environs (Mulligan's; CharlieB's; Oxford, AmVets, Missoula ("Mo") Club, and others). Bryn told me that as a writer I had to experience first-hand local scenes and flavors before writing about them (which we must be reminded is an exemplary American "Western" requirement in the enterprise of writing.)
I was recognized in restaurants, in already mentioned karaoke bars at night, downtown during the day on North Higgins (drivers would honk and wave to me), in the South Gate Shopping Mall, and at drunken dinner parties (fueled by nicotine, alcohol, gossip, and casual sex) around town, from the dilapidated houses on the Northside, to the "bougie" cottages in Rattlesnake, to the nondescript bungalows on the slopes of South Hills.
Currently, Missoula residents can be classified into three economic categories: university faculty and staff (like Pierre); telecommuters; and minimum-wage slaves (like Bryn). Some people traverse two categories: writers (who by definition are telecommuters) teaching at the university part-time; faculty moonlighting as freelancers; and a number of minimum-wage slaves trying to earn either undergraduate or graduate degrees or who have already earned graduate degrees (like a few of the divorced women I knew: one of these had studied in France with the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and was now working in a used-clothing store on South Higgins Avenue and Fifth Street). Indeed, a lot of minimum-wage slaves in Missoula are highly educated. As in many American college-towns, there is a robust labor force of perennial and professional students and nature-loving graduates eager and desperate to be slaves in order to earn the privilege of living in a town surrounded by mountains and hiking trails. To belabor our point: in Minneapolis (where I now reside full-time), where the landscape is flat--albeit with lakes--but where the labor market is tight and unemployment is around 2 percent, workers get paid $10 an hour to flip hamburgers. Whereas in Missoula, writers get paid $7-8 an hour at a local editorial sweatshop to summarize the content of websites.
(The cyber-community of Hollywood-film and New York-media transplants in huge ranches around Bozeman, Flathead Lakes, and elsewhere west of the Continental Divide in Montana is definitely beyond the scope of this essay and deserves an extensive discussion.)
To repeat: Missoula, and by extension the state of Montana, is once again at another Frontier, which we can call Cyber: the transition from a minimum-wage slave economy into the ether economy of cyber technoculture. The slave economy is already shrinking in Missoula: Families who cannot afford rising housing and living expenses have been moving out to the trailer parks in the outskirts of town. Consequently, enrollment in public schools has dropped precipitously, resulting in the closing of two schools. Because the yuppies and Internet people moving into town (and constituting the cyber-community) were either not married with kids or were married with no kids yet. The last group I fell in with during my tenure in Missoula are pioneers (if we may use this term) of this Cyber-community.
Because my work is definitely facilitated by high-speed Internet access, which I got in Missoula at an Internet company (located downtown on South Main and Ryman Streets) that a friend (to whom Pierre--his friend--had introduced me, one example of the commingling of the university and commuter groups: let's call him Rob--a transplant from northern California) owns with his seven employees, each of whom he pays a six-figure salary plus stock options. All his employees have spouses (some with kids) who don't work because their income is more than enough to support their moderate lifestyles in Missoula. (Definitely more than enough: In fact, during my last two months in Missoula Rob and his employees all bought huge houses in Missoula and environs.) I spent at least four-five hours each weekday at Rob's company (Click News-Net) doing his online work. The atmosphere at Click News-Net was most certainly something out of central casting for Net-Heads working for a cyber company: of the eight employees (two women, six men, Rob included), two worked at home (a female programmer and a male web developer). The ones who came in everyday had flex-time. The refrigerator in the office kitchen was stuffed with frozen pizzas, Diet Coke, Mountain Dew, and Pepsi. When Pierre and his business partner are in town, they often walked around the office speaking into their headsets while holding their Palm Pilots. When they’re in town: They often fly around the US and sometimes to Europe on business. To repeat: These people, these pioneers of the Cyber Frontier are displacing local Montanans by the day.
When I went to restaurants, he saw signs of incredible wealth, wondering where the money came from. Montana was certainly depressed economically. A friend of mine--a native Missoulian--who worked at the post office on Brooks Avenue, told me that when people came in to fill out a change of address form (which happened quite frequently because of the cyber-people moving into town from out-of-state), they often put the same phone number for their daytime and evening phone number: a clear sign that they were telecommuters. They lived in Montana but all the money they earn come from out-of-state and even out of the country. And these same cyber-people (again constituting the Cyber-Frontier) were driving up the real-estate market and forcing the locals and their families out of town.
And this Cyber Frontier might be the last Frontier in Montana, fully armed, as it is (like Athena sprung from Zeus’s head) with the new Global Capital. In another nanosecond, the nature-loving slave (like Bryn) will no longer be able to afford herself in new time and space of Global Capital. (I personally observed the wreckage of Rousseau's fantasy on the faces of the teeming beer-guzzling locals fastened to one another or to the pool tables amid the funky interior decor of Charlie B's.) Capital is in the process of transforming and folding the geographical space of Missoula into the time of Capital. And the contemporary Missoulian still yoked to a nostalgia for myth and history is at this point being transformed into a relic in a museum. The cyber telecommuter (like Rob), yoked in his own way to the time-light (that is, the time it takes to transmit data: the speed of light) on the screen of the monitor in front of him, and who produces and circulates codes, words, graphics, data, or money through the Internet, is becoming the new resident of Missoula--and to a certain extent Montana. In fact, this new Montana resident is himself simply an interface in the Internet of Capital. And the new technology that makes this telecommuter possible is dissolving the boundaries of town, constructing a new digital topology without limits, and most significantly, exploding the figure of the Pioneer and the Cowboy in dude ranches that were never real--that is to say that were virtual--to begin with.
Now I turn my attention to the third world, where the digital divide is more palpable than that of Montana because it is subtended by political and economic machines set up more by capital than by technology.
Posted by Biodun Iginla at 1:15 AM Email This
Labels: BBC News Technology, cyber technoculture, Digital Divide, Frontier, George Catlin, James Fenimore Cooper, missoula, Romantic tradition, Tamara Kachelmeier and Biodun Iginla, the Dream