Mid Summer-Home Swede Home
Stockholm · Sweden · Bikes, Bits & Becoming
The ElixirHow SWEDE It Is
A bicycle tour became a digital origin story: Stockholm, Being Digital, a first Hotmail account, and the wired life that followed.
Field Note · The Longest, Not Hottest Day
A Bike and a Prayer
“Travelling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, I wanna love you, but I have to go; this is just the way it is.”
Jag var i Stockholm, Sverige, 600 dagar sedan. I remember the longest—not hottest—day of the year.
Welcome to Sweden, with a reputation for extreme winters, the safest cars on Earth—see my SAAB story—and ABBA. I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to the Swedes than being really, really, ridiculously good looking. And I planned on finding out what that was, starting with a bike tour.
Stockholm in Motion
The City at Bicycle Speed
Stockholm has bike paths everywhere. It’s easy to move among the islands that make up the city.
As long as I am riding a bike, I know I am the luckiest guy in the world.
Amsterdam had 880,000 bicycles in a city of 800,000 people—four times the number of cars. Yet the Swedes couldn’t compete with their brethren across the strait: Copenhagen’s daily cycling masses. If Paris is the City of Lights, then Copenhagen is the City of Cycles. When it takes 15 minutes to find your bike at the train station, you know you are in Denmark.
In Amsterdam, too, cyclists are everywhere—and you are more likely to get hit by one than a car because everybody has a bicycle. Nevertheless, bikes are everywhere in Stockholm, and riding is a breeze.
The Operating Belief
Work to Eat · Eat to Live · Live to Bike · Bike to WorkThe bicycle was the GR8est incident of the nineteenth century: the most influential piece of product design ever, and the most civilized conveyance around.
Biking past the old city. No Ice Bar this time: I roasted myself in a sauna, then plunged directly into freezing water. Mamma Mia—shipwrecked!
You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life.
Read Splendid StockholmThe Metal Cowboy
Think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world. It is anarchy without malice. It gets you there and more. There is always the thin edge of danger to keep you alert and comfortably apprehensive.
It is not so much a way of getting somewhere as a backdrop for randomness; it makes every trip an unorganized tour. Life is too random to be left up to chance.
Ed Reif 2.0 · The Start-Up
The Bookstore That Changed the Route
Stockholm was my port of call for the summers of 2009 and 2010, but I stayed for three months in 1996—with the usual run-of-the-mill obstacles: fatigue, ambiguity, and even the danger of being too enthusiastic. I learned a lot of Finnish jokes, too, like the Finnish man who loved his wife so much he almost told her.
Serendipity brought me to an English bookstore where I bought—browsing not allowed, unlike Barnes & Noble—the most important “geek” book of the information revolution: Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital.
This treatise on bits versus atoms, and access and mobility to free content, was a primer on how interaction, entertainment, and information would eventually merge. The paradox of his book—or any book nowadays—is that its digital version is available online, because digital books never go out of print.
Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living.
Boom! The Napsterization of cutting out the middleman, the TiVo-ization of time-shifting on-demand entertainment, plus the CNN effect and the 24-hour news cycle were all emerging. Here was the oracle, visionary, and digital pathfinder Nicholas Negroponte, predicting what came next.
The Daily Me
Hotel @nyware
I took his “Daily Me” concept—a virtual daily newspaper customized for an individual’s tastes—and created this blog from the things I would like to read, where “everyone is my neighbor.” Hence the title: Hotel @nyware.
Being Digital, where the world is flat and decentralized, making things bigger and smaller at the same time, was the future. The future was already here; it just wasn’t evenly distributed yet.
The wired/less attitude and lifestyle hit me big in 1998 in the USA, when I started teaching visual literacy using the internet to get students engaged and connected—away solely from “space,” the printed page, toward “time,” the web-based timeline and interactive multimedia. It led me to believe that good education is about good entertainment.
The three reasons I became a teacher—June, July, and August—freed me up to do gigs. At Creative Planet, I consulted on production tools for the movie industry. UCLA and USC interns introduced me to free downloads courtesy of Nutella, LimeWire, and Napster. I also made Google my default search engine.
I was lucky enough to work as an extra in film and TV and earn a union SAG card playing an attorney in a horror movie. I was amazed that you could shoot and edit a movie on location using a Mac and Final Cut, then send “the dailies” remotely by wireless, email, and—for larger files—FTP sites to the studio.
Authorship is both the transmission of experience and the construction of utterly personal experiences.
When TV Was Watching Me
Being Digital, along with Wired magazine, which Nicholas co-founded, became my Web 2.0 Rosetta Stone for interpreting what we were—and still are—experiencing: there is no such thing as a bad address when using the internet. Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and Blogger shatter time and space. Now it all happens in real time.
I got a firsthand account of “the power of one” and electronic word of mouth in 2010 as a citizen journalist, when Nightline and Good Morning America picked up my YouTube videos while my ship, the Carnival Splendor, was dead in the water for four days.
The Media Turn
I wasn’t watching TV. TV was watching me.“The true value of a network is less about information and more about community. The information superhighway… is creating a totally new, global social fabric.”
I was doing my part for “Did you hear about?” journalism.
Summer 1996 · Airplane Mode
Digital Homeless
Yet in the summer of 1996, my analog eyes didn’t quite see our digital world. In a way, I lived the life I described while visiting Myanmar, formerly Burma: uninitiated and unplugged, setting life unintentionally to airplane mode.
It was still brick and mortar for me. Ramen noodles were a dish of effortless purity, and I had to resign myself to “black work” as a dog walker and ditch digger to take care of my extended vacation. Stockholm wasn’t solving my digital problems; it was subsidizing them. The epiphanies would have to wait.
Negroponte was instrumental in the One Laptop per Child program. Ironically, I was one of his “digital homeless.” I didn’t even have a computer. I had access to free ISDN internet bandwidth at Stockholm University’s library and frequently took advantage of its user-friendly desktop PCs.
Then: Tack så mycket, Stockholm! A random student helped me sign up for a free Hotmail account, which I still use today.
In a very practical way, it was an act of rebirth. I dealt with completely new situations; the days passed more slowly, and most of the time I didn’t understand the language people spoke. It made me more accessible to others because they helped me through difficult situations.
Nobody remains quite what they are when they recognize themselves.
The Time I Enjoyed Wasting
The idea occurred to me when I was there. At first it was only vague, a question looming—what should I do?—with an answer taking shape: nothing.
I didn’t consider myself happy or unhappy. I just knew there was something out there that I needed to get to, and it never seemed to be where I was at any particular moment.
Doing nothing always carries the sense of violation, of sacrilege. It’s evil, dangerous, and subversive—at least for us Americans. It’s a poor workman who blames his tool, and doing nothing is a powerful one. It can give you your best material.
The Swedish Elixir
The time I enjoyed wasting in Sweden wasn’t wasted time.I made some great friends. I read a book that changed the way I thought about the world as I knew it. I got a free email account.
I got wired.
Footnote · The Virtual Address
Where My Email “Lived”
In 1997 I had the chance to drive from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley and visit my email account—my virtual address, where I still “reside.”
To my surprise, the Hotmail offices were in a strip mall, not a huge warehouse full of 1950s UNIVAC tubes. Towers of computers were stacked to the ceiling. I pressed my nose against the storefront glass and looked in awe at the tiny space where my account—and hundreds of thousands of others—“lived.”
Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith were out of town, according to a UPS driver delivering next door.
The original field note records that the web-based email service was later sold to Microsoft. What stayed with me was how little physical space the microcomputers took up—and how much life was contained inside them.
If we placed a value on a lost laptop not in terms of atoms—the price tag at Best Buy—but in bits, the data, I would place a million-dollar value on my personal content. This is my own example of bits versus atoms, exactly what Nicholas was talking about in 1996.
I care less about losing the device—the cell phone, laptop, or MP3 player—than losing the data: the address book, the writing, the songs. Storing things server-side, in the cloud, gives peace of mind.
Continue the Route