Ftrain, by Paul Ford

It’s the 30th anniversary of Silicon Alley—always a specious concept, but a useful one. By merits of basic intransigence and inertia I’ve been here for most of it.

There’s a big, big party downtown and normally I’d be looking for a reason to stay home and mess with computers—but I wrote the intro to the cool-sounding oral history zine they put together, in my ceremonial role, and I want to see it. I’m part of the merchandise.

I’m writing this in the dark in bed because it doesn’t start until 8:30 and goes until 2am, which is so outside my parameters that I made myself nap.

I also just re-read the introduction I wrote—I filed it in October—and it feels like a missive from a different universe. It’s not wrong or anything. It just is an attempt to capture a moment in tech history and talk about the value of NYC—and after I sent it in and did my edits, things really started to…change. Trump slid into an exceptionally cruel madness, the country is committing suicide, the Valley became craven quislings, NYC elected a gleaming young socialist, Grok started undressing children, and computers started writing all the code.

Then again my essay basically said: We are temporary and the city remains. That’s true.

The other thing is, and I left this out of the essay, is that one day NYC will be gone too. The steel girder architecture would crumble into mounds over centuries. The subways flood in hours without pumps. This place desperately wants to be a wooded island if only we’d let it.

Everything is ephemeral without constant maintenance. Networks are the source of all power but networks are ephemeral.

Perhaps the Brooklyn Bridge has the best potential as a ruin. A big pile of stones. Probably our closest to the pyramids. We don’t have a coliseum (we did have a bookstore named after the one in Rome, now gone, and missed).

But that’s okay if it’s all that remains because the Brooklyn Bridge is the best idea in the city. It brought two cities into one. It will absolutely outlive everyone here. It could outlive the flag atop it. Thirty years of the Internet will seem like such a small blip to the future.

Update: An absolute disaster. The fire marshal shut down new entrants. 600 grumblers in a big lobby. Six degrees outside. All of us in a huge snaking unmoving line:

I stood alone, getting depressed, and listened to VC murmurings.

Someone said: It’s a large fund.

Someone said: He’s not liquid.

Someone said: I never knew what Diplo even looked like.

Some people paid a good bit for tickets and flew in. They were disappointed and started to express it. I did not tell them that I was, in a way, the official essayist. They might have killed me or stolen my fountain pen.

My friend made it to the 41st floor but it was mobbed. The bar was unreachable. “I’m by the broken TVs,” he texted me.

It is very, very hard to do something for a truly large group in New York City. At a certain scale you need to go through a hotel. It’s heinously expensive. Humans at scale are a liquid. You have to manage them like a liquid. So many things desperately want to be a shitshow. Just like NYC wants to become a forest.

My friend came down. I went under the velvet rope intended to funnel us upstairs; there was no way up. I was annoyed. I wrote the piece and wanted to go to the party. But in NYC the Fire Marshal is a sacred figure of total power. This is why we don’t have so much death.

And also—whatever.

So we left the six hundred grumblers and the thousand elect who got there early enough, and the VCs, and bailed. My friend gave me a copy of the event magazine. It’s really well done. Jut a lovely artifact. I’m the foreword. Mayor Bloomberg is the afterword. So there you go. Paul Ford and Michael Bloomberg, bookends to 30 years of NYC tech. That’s diversity for you. I wonder if he did it for free too.

I love having a blog again.

All the VCs were upstairs, making deals.

We went to Brooklyn. After a drink, just one, I took a car home.

The thing I left out of the essay—because it would have been very heavy handed, and in violation of my ceremonial role—is that entually this all will become the Anthropocene discontinuity, a few inches of rock in the record, and I think it will appear very funny to the oddly plumed cyber-birds whose species succeeds us a few hundred million years from now. Dinosaurs shaking their heads up at us in disappointment. We will be a bright stripe of nonsense in between some very serious strata.

I think I end up owing him everything: My fascination with Vaudeville, my sense of entertainment history being the true history of this country. And some of the fondest memories of rough times, watching this show as a kid with my mother. Actual laughs. Pure foolishness. That sense of chaos about to unfold, everything ready to collapse at all times. The sets were so cheap, the jokes so fragile, that you spent the entire show rooting for him, for Oogie the puppet, just waiting for entropy to claim every victory.

In addition to his brother Jimmy, Mr. Vivino is survived by another brother, Jerome Jr., a saxophonist known as Jerry; a daughter, Lauren Vivino, two sons, Christopher and Eric, from his second marriage, to Lisa Vitale, which ended in divorce; three more sons, Gregory, Dante and Massimo, from his marriage to Jane Hillenbrand, which ended in divorce; and three grandchildren. His first marriage, to Debra Gallison, also ended in divorce.

Can't win 'em all. I was ten. I'd stare in awe, like other kids might watch a wrestler or a racecar driver. The cast, they'd always survive, to amuse another day. This is the miracle of entertainment—that they get through it! That is always the secret story of the concert, the talent show, the dog agility run, that it could, absolutely, collapse, and what have they done to manage this, to avoid it, to bring order to the creeping disaster that is always waiting? But in the case of this show they did almost nothing. Sometimes Cyndi Lauper would come on. David Bowie was a huge fan. But there was absolutely nothing between Uncle Floyd and the terrible void. The abyss was practically a guest host.

For all they trash the humanists out there, measure the tears when a guy who used to emcee events for the Knights of Columbus tanks it. Man that's us who kicked. We all know who gets the loudest funeral. All I personally ever wanted to be was someone who could give a good toast at a function. Everything else comes second. He gave us all of that. A beautiful model of lo-fi shenanigans, a debased and kitschy folly. We knew what a treasure he was. Those alimony payments must have been a trip. Then again they all knew exactly what they were marrying. Blessings upon Uncle Floyd forevermore. Thank you for showing me how much fun it could be sing into the void.

The synth store is at the back of a warren of hallways in a former industrial building on the Brooklyn side of the East River. The building is vast and now given to artists’ studios, tattoo parlors, and various forms of yoga, screenprinting, and other forms of middlebrow health and craft. There are many of these culture factories around the city, liminal spaces between art and commerce, always in former warehouses where, I don't know, horse skulls were rendered, or footmen's boots were cobbled, or baby’s bottles were impregnated with healthful plutonium, or radios were manufactured. There is something in America that yearns to reconstitute an intentional community—to assemble artisans, and celebrate craft, like it was Roycroft in 1905. We love to re-imagine utopian commerce within the ghosts of local industry. Anyway it's one of those. I love it.

I went not to buy anything exciting but rather simple, maintenance objects: A black metal modular case that is essentially an expensive surge protector, some power cords, and some patch cables. I was, alas, buying stuff for my stuff. That is the hobbyist's curse.

It is a well-regarded store if you are a particular kind of nerd, and it is the subject of many appreciative Reddit threads. It moved deep into this warren after the rent got too high in Williamsburg. I go there every couple of months. The next day would be given to snow removal for myself and various older neighbors; my spouse commits me and they thank her for it. I don't mind. We have a snowblower. But today, before—a little trip for Old Dad.

I always feel slight anxiety on entering. I'm a little seasoned for the hobby. I'm not a musician. I don't have talent. A fraud alert goes off when I get too close to the knobs and sliders.

But I just love the gear, and learning music theory, and learning little Bach pieces, and spending hours with the very same note droning in my ears. My therapist says I like modular synths because I’m atomized and it’s a way to put myself together. I don’t know. I want that long slow waveform with a little vibrato, a little reverb. Most music has too many notes. The best music, the music I make, has one note that plays until I get angry at it, often a half hour. One day I'll explain how many hours I've spent in Surge XT, looking for that one tone. I’m embarrassed by this. Others are embarrassed for me.

When I walk in I see a $32,000 analog synth the size of a washer-dryer newly arrived. I admire it. I turn one knob then turn it back. I am spoiled but I have limits.

The shopkeepers, they're nice, especially these two, who seem to kind of...be the store. They know literally everything about the field: Every manufacturer, every method, levels of detail unimaginable to me. They tell me about a new module maker in Gowanus, contrasting digital processing to analog. I try to keep up and chitter away but I know I don’t have the details right. Never stopped me from talking before.

One of them goes over towards the 0-C0AST, a paperback-book sized device that is the antithesis of a computer—display-less, electric, glowing, studded with knobs, and patch wires coming out of multiple sockets, entering other sockets to change the flow of signal. But ultimately it can make only a very narrow range of sounds.

“I should sell you mine,” I say. “I could bring it in. It's just sitting at home.”

Hearing this, he proceeds to patch it, tune it, pointing it to itself—no external sources. Boops emerge.

I bought mine...well I don't remember where. Craigslist, maybe—somewhere in Brooklyn? Some Saturday morning, a bleary-eyed dude coming down to take $350 off of me? Used for sure. At the moment it was exciting but now it is a thing I own.

This person doesn't say much as they patch and adjust. They just keep turning knobs. I am—uncertain, wanting to spend money, one foot always out the door. I didn't expect an impromptu concert.

But then I am entranced. A minute, another minute. A million tiny little tones. Three or four wires crossing each other. “You can feed the square into the overtone like this. Take a picture,” he says, “then you can reproduce this at home.”

I take a video and I realize, watching it later, that I'm talking, not listening. It's not an LFO, as I offer; it's a function generator and the difference is subtle, until you decide it isn’t. The larger issue is, Can I shut up? And the answer, I think, is No. But I can try.

I realize haven't understood this synthesizer at all. It's absolutely full of ideas, of West Coast and East Coast ideologies of synthesis; it's filterless, but has all kinds of different ways to achieve tonalities, and while before I've found it kind of noodly, that's because I'm noodly and uninformed; in the hands of someone who knows what overtone and multiply mean—not just what they do, but what they mean—it becomes an extension of their thoughts, a living thing. Each note gets imbued with subnotes, wrapped in envelopes of various angles, just a few things feeding into each other and making as much sound as one might ever need. I watch him work on it, with gentle awareness, treating it not as a gadget or toy, or as a password to a secret club, but as an instrument.

It might not sound amazing to you—you'd need to have struggled with this tiny instrument to know that you were hearing something to special—but to me it sounds guttural, textural, full of ideas. Now this is not some miracle. It's knowledge and patience, and I lack both.

I keep thinking I should offer some fact, some data they can use, but I'm helpless, and then I remember that's the point: I'm a hobbyist, visitor, customer. That's my role.

I took a synth class a few months ago at the School of Visual Arts. A night class. It was the best thing. The teacher seemed to be in his 20s. He taught us to solder and program microcontrollers that could then be played like instruments. I didn't get to know my fellow students, except to nod at them. I just sat in a place surrounded by machines for making things. It was wonderful.

I'd been a teacher in the graduate school in the same building not long ago. It was hard and I never felt good at it. But here I was a student, and my solder joints were...not good. I needed help, and received it, and felt happy.

I realized that I’d approached teaching wrong. I felt beholden to the students. I wanted them to get what was in my brain. I felt on the hook. But instead I should have just created a space where it was interesting to learn and talked about things in a very paced, orderly way.

You get used to being the teacher, the source of information, the provider. Not so much arrogance but habit. I tell things to my teens. I exchange information over coffee. I parse signal and translate it. Most of my friends, we have two conversations at once, talking right over each other.

At work I boss and thought lead and grumble. My midlife crisis takes the form of being an amateur wherever I can—a student, a patient, forced into humility by the tasks at hand. My piano lesson is exactly one lesson, repeated over week:

Go.

Slow.

So I left the store into the cold. They sold me a synth I already had. What a gift! They also gave me a stack of ICE OUT posters to distribute.

I've spent hours trying to patch. Using the same wires. I can't quite get the sound in the video, in the store. It's not that it's not acoustically the same, it's that I don't understand. I can’t get from one sound to another. My hands don't get it, my ears don't get it, and I don't understand the signal flow. So I have to go slow, slow, slow. In an age of panic. As the world warms. As the culture melts and robots grow voices.

As I type this I have a Make Noise 0-C0AST playing a modified Krell patch. For an hour. Little tweaks. I know so much more than I did two days ago. And very little. The sound is undistinguished—but also...mine. No one else can hear what I hear. It's not actually very good. But it is mine. Spiritual people will say: There are teachers everywhere! You just need to open your sclerotic hearts! I’m pretty basic so I just end up buying synths, or hiring a piano teacher. I think it works out about the same.

From Minnesota Algae, 1910.

I've spent a lot of time in rebuilding this website and making a nice CMS which handles taxonomy. But I wonder if I should have. I can simply paste things to Claude and let it organize and publish them. You don't need software, in some cases. I keep seeing people building applications on top of these tools, but then you could just tell the tool and skip the application.

And yet. I don't think I'd have what I want if I'd just instructed a bunch of agents to chew through gigabytes of files.

Nonetheless. Software is still software but also a substrate now—a thick algae layer above the pond, nutrient-rich but throwing off the ecosystem too. It's out of balance right now. It's choking the fish. You don't have to write any code at all quite often. But you forsake a lot of control when you do not.