One unexpected side effect of the floods in New Orleans was the sudden proliferation of high-tech gadgetry. In the months after Katrina, the phone and power were out all the time. Soon some of the most Ludditical folks I've ever met could be seen tapping away on a MacBook at the coffee shop or struggling to maintain balance while text messaging on their bikes.
Before the storm I would sometimes feel as though the whole town was on the verge of returning to the earth, succumbing to the will of the swampy, prehistoric pteridophytes that work their way up through our cracked and crumbling cement. Whether the day was radioactively sunny or deluged by the remnants of whatever tropical storm had just hit Florida, life in New Orleans ambled on like a tuba bass line, all half-drunk and in no hurry, far removed from the roar (or maybe whir) of the information superhighway.
Then Katrina, by knocking out the traditional forms of communication, cut an onramp from the information superhighway straight through the middle of town. Next thing you know the city is a jungle of microtechnological quackery: Blackberries and Bluetooth, Skype and Wi-Fi and G4s and Mp3s and DVDs. The blatting of that drunken tuba was suddenly drowned out by the clacking of keyboards, the doodly-doos of dying batteries, the snippets of ironic hard rock erupting from cell phones. The great technological takeover was so quick and thorough that it was suddenly difficult to even remember that there'd ever been a time when it would've been considered odd for your back pocket to suddenly start playing an eight-bit version of "Paradise City." While many local conspiracy theorists whispered about the Army Corps and dynamite, I suspected that Apple or Microsoft might have actually been behind the whole thing.
All these little gizmos certainly had a polarizing effect on the population, jamming a silicon wedge between those that embraced the conveniences of the information age and those diehards who hung on to their anti-tech ways, distrusting and maligning all technology invented after, say, 1989. I always considered myself to be in that diehard camp: From 1999 to 2005 I never owned much more than a bike (or four), some tools, books, and every T. Rex record. At the time of the storm, I had just (fatefully) moved to Asheville, North Carolina, and my house didn't even have a phone. Soon afterwards, I began putting together Stories Care Forgot, a collection of zines from New Orleans. I soon realized that to pull the project off, though, I might need a phone. Also a computer, which turned out to be a slug-slow PC with a dial-up modem and a bunch of photos on the hard drive from the wedding day of the co-worker I bought the thing off of. This felt, at the time, like some great ethical sellout. The hum of the thing's fan kept me up at night, and in its blank screen I was taunted by the face of my friend Shelley.
Shelley and I had both been mechanics at a bike shop in the French Quarter where any customer who came in with any sort of gadgetry would be subjected to our less-than-subtle eye-rolling and mockery. I moved into a house full of maniac punk rockers where we couldn't keep the water on, much less a phone (see "Up Lee's Ass" in Leaning With Intent to Fall). When I suggested to Shelley that I was maybe, well, kind of sort of thinking about possibly getting a well uh...cell phone, she made me feel so guilty about joining the ranks of all those rude customers that were in the shop screaming into those things that I ended up instead getting a pager, circa 1990, that I bought for eight dollars at a barber shop, and which never really worked.
When I came back to post-diluvial New Orleans, however, I found Shelley driving around in her truck with an arsenal of little plastic gizmos ? from cell phone to fancy digital camera. One day when the battery on hers died, she asked to use my phone.
"Shelley," I said, "I don't have a cell phone."
She looked baffled. "What have I been calling you on?"
"That was my landline." I marveled that this was the person who, last time I'd seen her, had been living in a rundown shotgun house that she shared with a bunch of chickens, banging out her zine about bikes (Chainbreaker) on an old Coronamatic typewriter. In the backyard, she did her laundry with a bike-powered washing machine. Back then I would've been stunned to ever hear the words "land line" come out of her mouth. Now she stood looking at me like some alien creature and said, "Oh, no wonder you haven't been getting my text messages!"
That's when I realized that yes, the information age was upon us, and the world was never going back.
And am I complaining? Well, I'm not sure.
My friend Dan, an eccentric geek of the "I can't go out tonight because I'm going to hole up in my room full of computers and read about Superman vs. Predator online" variety, recently moved back to New Orleans and began volunteering with the Tipitina's music co-op. There he helps local musicians navigate the crumbled terrain of the post-K NOLA music scene by teaching them HTML and helping out with their websites. And while yes, there is a little Luddite idealist inside of me whose heart pangs to think of aged Mardi Gras Indian chiefs and jazz musicians who don't give two shakes of a tambourine about technology, I don't think that even old Ned Ludd himself would want to deprive these musicians of the opportunities that the internet makes possible. Likewise for hundreds of other projects in town, from band's personal websites to greater efforts such as www.neworleansairlift.org ? a project that is trying to establish a sort of sister city exchange program for artists in New Orleans and Berlin.
Once I saw the new technological world embraced by some of my most gung-ho, hell-with-technology friends ? people who used to make the Unabomber look like Inspector Gadget ? I hopped on too. Soon I was the asshole who had to remind himself, "No! Don't text while driving!" I was the guy who took "Shake Your Tambourine," an old New Orleans R&B hit, and turned it into his damn ring tone. And I was the guy whose laptop got stolen, leaving him wandering around in a daze, unsure of what to do with himself, saying repeatedly, "My whole life was on there!" while secretly I was thinking: "Sweet, now I can get a Mac so that I'll finally fit in down at the coffee shop!"