It became all the more galling when, after a relatively short period, Pete’s success started to eclipse my own. His quirky musings about the impact of new technology and the shape of things to come seemed to strike a chord with a certain type of reader. I imagined them disdainfully as spotty, long-haired types with thick-lensed spectacles, who spent their time doing geeky things with computers to the strains of heavy metal.
But I am hardly an authority on what these people look like or do with themselves. The marketing people who design the kind of magazines Pete wrote for would probably be able to give you a far more accurate description of the behavioural patterns of their target audience. Whoever they were, they seemed to regard Pete as “one of them”. As a result, he was able to carve a comfortable niche for himself as a freelance, writing for a plethora of specialist technology magazines and websites with names that looked like typos, such as “F@Q” and “!com”.
He certainly had an amazing ability to churn the stuff out on a regular basis. Perhaps it was this rhythmic consistency which contributed to his success. The fact that he hammered away on the same old riffs week after week somehow made his readers feel reassured. They knew that they could rely on him to produce something that would articulate their view of the world.
I don’t mean to imply that Pete wrote exactly the same thing every week. He had a number of different “songs” and he knew when it was time to vary the pace. There were the slow, slightly melancholic pieces, usually in a minor key, which lamented the ignorance of the vast bulk of the population about all things technological. Pete’s readers were excepted of course - they were the enlightened ones. Then there were the fast, thrashy pieces - angry raps against all the whining critics and sceptics of the technological revolution, the people who couldn’t see that computers and the internet were going to transform the world into a virtual paradise. And finally there were the melodic anthems, hymns to the power of technology. These usually started off with some new discovery that Pete had read about in a popular science journal. Pete would then lay on the power chords, turning a minor piece of research into a full-blown rock opera of outlandish speculation.
But there was another aspect of his writing style which was an equally important part of its appeal. For Pete, technology was a kind of drug. He could get high on the mere idea of it. He had no qualms about invoking the language of drug culture in his articles. As far as he was concerned, technology was the ultimate clean fix, with no unpleasant side-effects - so there was no shame in encouraging others to indulge. But for many of his readers, these references to drug culture gave his writing an attractive, subversive gloss; they made his optimistic projections sound a little less wholesome and a little more dangerous and exciting.
I am probably making it sound as if Pete’s appeal was largely superficial. But this is not entirely fair. He had a real talent for making something out of the most unpromising subject matter. In fact, I sometimes wondered if he deliberately picked mundane starting points for his pieces, just as a challenge to see whether he could turn it into something interesting. I remember an article he once wrote on barcodes. He had dug up some statistics on just how much data was reckoned to be transmitted in this way each day. The numbers certainly were impressive. That something so simple, which we all took for granted, could allow so much information to be exchanged clearly struck him as a very wonderful thing.
Searching for a metaphor with which to express his sense of wonder, he came up with the bizarre-sounding notion that barcodes resembled a new form of musical notation. His thinking went something like this; musical notation and barcodes are both ways of recording complex information in a relatively simple, graphical form. But for Pete there seemed to be no distinction between the nature or quality of the information conveyed in each case. The fact that information could be conveyed in this way was cause enough for rejoicing.
The article used this metaphor as a springboard to speculate about the potential for barcodes to be printed onto all sorts of everyday objects - not just products on sale in a shop but doors, signs and machinery. In order to read these codes, citizens would be equipped with miniature versions of the scanners in supermarkets. Tiny scanners could even be surgically implanted into your fingertip and wired to your brain. They would allow people to get all sorts of information out of what would normally be totally unresponsive, inanimate objects. In this way, the article rambled on, your whole environment would become decodable, readable and information-rich.
I remember that particular article because we ended up having an argument about it. I had become increasingly jealous of Pete’s success. My own writing career was in the doldrums. My publishers had just rejected my first novel, an “experimental” work which was intended to be the follow-up to my book of short stories. I was advised to write something that people would actually want to read, in a style that wouldn’t give them a headache, and to drop the sci-fi elements. And yet here was Pete, churning out shallow, pseudo-scientific, journalistic froth, but with more offers of work than he could cope with. On top of which, I was getting nowhere in my oblique efforts to make contact with Kay again. So what, I asked myself, was the point of my meetings with Pete?
You could say that I was looking to pick a fight with him anyway. But as it was, Pete’s behaviour that evening gave me ample excuse. Normally, when he came round, he wanted me to play devil’s advocate. I think this sometimes helped him to clarify his own thoughts. But this time, he just seemed to have come round in order to show off. When I tried to make a few constructive comments, he brushed them aside impatiently. I realised that he was expecting praise not criticism. When I made a joke about some aspect of the article, he just looked offended. Normally, he had quite a good sense of humour. But this time his manner was entirely serious, and he seemed physically changed as well. His eyes were gleaming and he often seemed to pay no attention to what I was saying. He just gazed past my head as if distracted by some obscure insight, which he was unwilling to share. This infuriated me.
I can’t remember exactly how the argument started. But before I knew it, I was telling him that his writing was crap and so were all the magazines he wrote for. Then I accused him of just using me to get where he wanted to go. He clearly wasn’t interested in me as a person. After all, he had not once asked how my own writing was going. It ended with me asking him to leave and suggesting that he not bother coming back.
After I had unceremoniously ejected him from my flat and the meetings came to an end, I was surprised to find that I missed having them. I had never consciously attached much importance to them, except as a means to an end; a way to get back in touch with Kay. Now I realised that, whilst they had inspired a degree of professional jealousy, I had also derived a certain comfort and even enjoyment from them.
Part of it was that, despite my scepticism, I actually liked discussing Pete’s articles with him. Although my role was to play devil’s advocate, I didn’t really want him to lose the argument. Emotionally, my sympathies were with Pete; I could see that his ideas were often flawed and his enthusiasm was way over the top, but I still found his unfailing optimism about the future rather attractive.
This was not a side of myself that I wanted others - even Pete - to see. I preferred to give people the impression that my outlook on life was coolly sceptical. It’s a defensive posture; people find it much harder to attack your beliefs if you don’t really seem to have any. My meetings with Pete allowed me to indulge the part of myself that desperately wanted to believe in something, but was normally hidden behind the comforting façade of scepticism.
There was also a sense in which the meetings acted as a tonic for my flagging ego. My own lack of success on the writing front had made me withdraw into myself. I was reluctant to see friends in case they asked me how things were going. I would then have to either lie or admit to them that I had got precisely nowhere since the last time I saw them. My meetings with Pete, on the other hand, allowed me to console myself with the thought that I had made my own small contribution to his success - that without me, he might not have got as far as he had.
So once the feelings of self-righteousness had ebbed away, I found that the whole affair left me feeling rather flat and empty. But I made no attempt to contact him. I was too proud to let on that our meetings meant something to me. It was easier to mope around and feel sorry for myself. And then, out of the blue, I got a call from Kay.
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