The Tristero and the Tri-Lateral Commission no doubt are involved too

     As a rule, people are hot to complain, particularly now, when the Internet allows the gripers and moaners to find each other and form a mass of perceived significance. I can't say that found the Ventra cards particularly oppressive. Then again, my mailbox wasn't stuffed with dozens of duplicates, nor was my CTA account bobbled, nor did I park for hours on the phone trying to get through to a human Ventra worker to try to solve my problems with the transit card. So in that spirit of open-mindedness, I was all too happy to deliver this spanking to Cubic, the ooh-scary defense contractor who masterminded the continually deepening disaster.   

     There is a species of humor I think of as the “just when you think it couldn’t get any worse” joke. You know the type, where increasingly ugly woes are piled, one atop the other, and then the coup de grace, which is always something like “... and the hooker was your mother.”

     Consider Ventra.

     First, regular transit users were inundated with new cards; some received hundreds. Then switching over balances and accounts proved impossible. As did complaining about the problems. Even if you got your card, transferred your balance and used it correctly, Ventra might charge you a couple more times as you fled the train station.

      But that’s not the really bad part.

      Now comes the over-the-top note to kick the whole thing from a problem-plagued rollout — "fiasco" is the word critics are using — to some kind of surreal epic disaster, like New Coke, as skittish passengers already aggrieved over Ventra learn it is run by one of those immense and scary defense contractors of whom half the public lives in moral terror already.
     "Poisonous" was the word used at Tuesday's CTA "good news" meeting taken over by critics who lined up to castigate the "evil company" receiving $454 million to serve as ringmaster over this civic nightmare.
     Ventra is run by Cubic Transportation, which is a division of Cubic Corp.,  the Thomas Pynchonesque name of a San Diego company which, when it isn't botching new fare cards for transit systems is, according to the Cubic website, "a leading provider of live and virtual training systems, and a specialized supplier of military electronics and information assurance solutions."
     Think surveillance drones, which are the cat's paw of American hysteria already.
     It gets worse.
     "Nearly every U.S. and allied soldier and fighter pilot has trained or will train for a mission using Cubic equipment," the website continues.
     Well golly, that kinda explains why we're still in Afghanistan, huh? In the name of fairness, I phoned Cubic's press representative. No reply, but if my house is a smoldering crater, well, you'll know who to blame even if you can't find them.
     But that still isn't the bad part, to me. I have nothing against giant military contractors. I still use Morton salt. Somebody's gotta do it. And besides, Cubic has run the CTA fare card system for 20 years. Nobody cared about its parent company's military surveillance work before.
     The bad part is that this is nothing new for Cubic.
     "Unfortunately, Chicagoland is now only the latest in a long line of metropolitan customers dealing with problems sure to be familiar to Ventra's legion of haters," Jason Prechtel wrote in the Gaper's Block website, in a detailed article on problems in Cubic cities from London to Brisbane to San Francisco.
     Were these rollouts bug-infested or just the standard problems that come with any new system? Hardly matters. It's too late. Ventra has sailed past the still-a-few-kinks-in-the-system shakedown cruise into a special realm of PR debacle hell where each tiny trouble is waved about as Exhibit #246 in the epic Ventra Catastrophe of 2013.
     It's the City that Works, remember? And when it doesn't work, well, it ain't pretty.

The map of time

     I'll probably never know who left this book on the river wall along Wacker Drive, just where it stops going west and begins turning south (or, I suppose, where it stops going north, coming the other way, and turns east).
     Nor will I know why it was left there, exposed to the elements, for quite a while by the time I came by — far beyond any rescue. It was chilling, to see a book so abused. No doubt the product of carelessness, though it did seem to symbolize something larger, a place we are approaching in our society.  Already we've seen books sold by the pound, or with their covers ripped off and bundled with twine as some interior designer's daft idea of decoration. You walk into Half Price Books, and just sense that printed books are worth less. Not worthless, not yet anyway. But worth less than even a few years ago.
     I'm not going to lament the printed word — the electronic word will carry on just fine, just as we can still fill up our cars without gas station attendants. Seneca pressed his words in wax with a stylus — the original meaning of "book" was "writing tablet" (a very old, Teutonic word, The Oxford English Dictionary speculates that "book" and "beech" share a root, and that perhaps the tablets were made from the bark of beech trees). 
    In other words, the manner of writing has always changed, so let's not get too bent out of shape that the process continues. The words remain. The influence of the printed word will continue as countless ghosts in the electronic machine, just as the chapters of books now are thought to reflect the individual scrolls that were once gathered together into "books."
    It can be argued the form doesn't ultimately matter. It is what is being said, not the medium it is being said in.
    That is mostly true. But not entirely.
    The form had value. The drawbacks of books — expensive to print, unable to be corrected — were also their glory, also exactly why they were cherished. Scarcity creates value, and you couldn't get a copy of "Moby-Dick" everywhere you go. Now you can. The reason so much time and effort was put into making books as good as they could be (Sometimes. Let's not overstate the case) is you can't correct them. You have to get them right, because they are supposed to be around for a long time. Were supposed to be around for a long time. Now they're raw material in art projects and, I assume, someday, fuel.
      Books will migrate entirely onto pads and phones and what have you, but it will not be the same, and hybrid forms will quickly emerge that better use those mediums. People will enjoy whatever we call the new art form — maybe "books” still, the way we call the control panels on our cars "dashboards" even though there is no horse to dash and kick up mud. We will still be moved by them, and will look at our paper books with puzzlement and disinterest, the way people today look at player piano scrolls and stereopticon slides.
     They also have flaws. Books don't hold up well to the elements, for instance. Of course, they don't break apart when dropped, either. Different technology, different advantages and drawbacks. But technology can't be fought. Technology wins, eventually.
     The book, by the way, was a novel by Felix J. Palma called The Map of Time. 

Tattoos are here to stay

     At lunch Monday, an older lady was going on about a young man of her acquaintance, and in the middle of her catalogue of his woes—smoking pot, doing poorly in school, facial piercings—she mentioned that he is tattooed too, and I opened my mouth to explain that whatever moral taint tattooing once had is now gone. Long gone. What was once the realm of sailors and bikers and hookers has been claimed by the young and the hip (plus the not so young and not so hip). "Everyone" doesn't have them, but many more people have them than was the case a few decades back, and I don't expect that to change any time soon. 

    Why? Theories abound, but to me it is clear. We are a mobile society where old strictures of community and religion have softened, if not fallen away, and tattoos are a colorful way to manifest yourself, to belong to a portable community of like-minded people, to illustrate your values, quite literally, and try to transcend yourself. Tattoos convey meaning, and getting them is seen as a significant act.  Denouncing them, to me, is an expression of cluelessness and stodginess on par with taking a stand against the Beatles in 1964.  It's a sign you're not paying attention.
     That said, I'd never get one, and over the summer, when I visited a few tattoo parlors, researching a story on the practice, I pondered why, particularly when, at one parlor, I considered getting the smallest of tattoos--say a tattooed freckle—to see what it felt like, and I recoiled at the thought, of even tattooing a dot. The moment I contemplated it, I pictured carving the thing out of my arm with a pocketknife. 
     Why? Because it was permanent? Even though so much we do is "permanent" -- choices we make, people we embrace or reject, doors we open or close. Life is permanent. Isn't the inability to paint a permanent circle on the sole of your foot represent some kind of bone-deep timidity? A flaw I should work on, perhaps by getting a tattoo?
     Perhaps.
     But know thyself, as the Delphic oracle says. And I'm someone who, as a young man, saw a much older, third-tier columnist who had the sort of column where he was always working as a dishwasher and a circus clown, being dipped in pudding and, one day, getting a tattoo. It was a tattoo of a quill pen in a crystal ink well—'cause he was a writer, see?—and I took one look at him, his shirt sleeves rolled up high, a la Bob Fosse, goatish beard, strutting the newsroom, and felt a shiver of revulsion I feel still. So no tattoos for me, ever, thanks to him. 
    Yet for people who are not me, they're fine.  I look placidly upon tattoos, attractive ones I mean. Some people have these enormous blotches, big green mandellas the size of saucers. Those I do shake my head at—what were they thinking?—but not because they're tattoos, but because they're ugly tattoos.
     Most aren't ugly, however. Most are artful, or at least intriguing, and the argument that they will look awful once the youthful skin ages is an empty one — that old skin won't look so hot, tattoo or no.

      Besides, I have eight lovely, smart, accomplished nieces, and most of them have tattoos, some more than one tattoo. That's also common. People tend to  love their tattoos and, rather than regret getting them, they tend to get more, to collect them. So times change, and we change with them, whether decorating your body with ink, or welcoming the practice as a manifestation of the human thirst for meaning and beauty. 

Misericordia: One size doesn't fit all

Sister Rosemary Connelly

     "Above all gentlemen," Talleyrand once said, "no zeal."  He didn't mean no zeal for good causes, or no zeal to help others, but rather no Procrustean determination to treat different situations the same way, or to cling to rigid dogma and ignore particulars. I've been writing about Misericordia for years, ever since I was the paper's charities, foundations and private social services reporter. If it had a dark side, I would know about it. Being politically-connected, I suppose, to the degree that having powerful friends is a sin. 
      So I'm continually shocked to find that this compassionate and competent  home for hundreds of people with disabilities is scorned by some because it's a large institution, period, end of story, since the current trend in housing people with physical and mental challenges is to have smaller residences. It isn't right, to blame Misericordia for the faults of others, or for the faults of large institutions in the past, while ignoring what is good about the place. There is a scandal involving Misericordia, I like to say, and the scandal is there's only one. 
      Or maybe I'm just swayed by the persuasive charm of Sister Rosemary. For the first time in the nearly five months since I've begun this blog, I balked at telling someone its name. I started to, at lunch. Had my mouth open to say the words. But I looked at her and just couldn't do it. Could you? 

      Sister Rosemary Connelly is worried.

      “There are advocates out there, some paid by the government, who really feel that anything big is bad, and there’s no exceptions,” she tells me.

      We’re having lunch at the Greenhouse Inn, one of the more extraordinary restaurants in Chicago, staffed almost entirely by residents of Misericordia, a Catholic home for people with developmental disabilities, particularly Down Syndrome.

      The issue is an old one. Abuses at large institutions warehousing the disabled were a scandal, particularly in Illinois, and in some places still are. The state is pushing to move people out of institutions into small, independent living residences.

     Sister Rosemary feels unfairly maligned.
     "If you're big, you're bad," she says, summarizing critics' thinking. "They're very angry at us because we weaken their story, because we're good. They really would love to get rid of Misericordia."
     She has been in the this business since 1969. She has seen how someone can be active one year and helpless the next.
     "What are we going to do when these people become so disabled? Where are they going to go?" she said. "Dump them in inappropriate nursing homes, and that will be one of the scandals of our time. But right now there's only one way to serve the people, according to a few of these advocates."
     At first I think Sister Rosemary is exaggerating. People without disabilities choose a spectrum of living arrangements - dorm, commune, hut on a remote island - why should it be any different for those facing handicaps? Saying people must live independently is as rigid, and potentially dangerous, as saying they must live in an institutions. "Each according to his own need," as the communists say.
     Surely, she's too focused on her respected institution, which has its own independent houses on campus and is building more. Who, exactly, I ask, are you worried about?
     "Certain very powerful groups, like Arc, they have no room for Misericordia," she says. "And they heavily influence bureaucrats in the federal and state government."
      For all its wealthy patrons, Misericordia relies on government funding, which can be tardy. "2012 was a terrible year for [the state] paying their bills," says Sister Rosemary. "They owed us $27 million."
     The money's flowing again, but this worry remains. I phone the Arc of Illinois, an advocacy group. Executive Director Tony Paulauski doesn't want to speak of Misericordia. "I don't think it's newsworthy," he says. "What's newsworthy is rebalancing. This is a nonissue."
     Gosh Tony, thanks, but how about you don't tell me my business and I won't tell you yours? I have an 82-year-old nun who is worried that when she isn't here, pulling strings, people like you will tear down what she has spent her life building. Humor me.
     "It's a nursing-home model, Neil," he says. "We have better models now. I'm spending all my time on the state closing antiquated state institutions. That's the real story."
     So she's right to worry? "I don't want to tick her off," he says. "I don't want to tick her legislators off. I don't want to detract from what's really important."
     Shutting down big institutions like Misericordia and moving their residents out?
     "Yeah," he said. "What we want to see is people controlling their own homes, choosing what they want to eat for dinner, doing what you and I take for granted."
     I'm all for that too. But when you tour Misericordia, and see people who are locked into their bodies, eyes clamped shut, hands curled and frozen, the idea that they have to be removed from this setting and placed somewhere else to serve some greater activist ideology is what we laymen call "nuts."
     "It's all an overreaction to the past," says Sister Rosemary. "Where big was bad. Today big can be bad, it can be good. Small can be bad. The question is, how much supervision is going into these houses."
     She still remembers what happened last time there was a drive against institutions.
     "A man came in from Boston and said orphanages are bad, close them all, stop the funding," she says. "When I see middle-age people on the street, I wonder, are those the success stories of the 1970s? That they placed them in inadequate places, but they got them out of orphanages?"
     Misericordia isn't going anywhere, for now - with 600 residents, it has a 500-person waiting list. The families of those residents, and those who hope to be residents, obviously see its value. It's a shame that those who should know better refuse to see it as well. I'd like to tell you that you're wrong to worry, Sister. But you're not wrong.

"He's perfect."

     My editor asked me to tell a love story about a same-sex couple who would now be getting married, in the wake of the Illinois legislature legalizing gay marriage, and I was fortunate to find Tzu-Kai Lo and Alain Villeneuve—behold the power of Facebook. 
    There is one bit of background I should mention. As I started to report the story, and the details of their romance, I had a moment of ... I'm not sure what. Difficulty. Despite my 20 years writing about this subject, and despite supporting equal civil rights for gays and lesbians, I had never really focused on one couple before, never chronicled a narrative like this one. To my surprise, there was a renegade qualm, apparently, somewhere in the back of my mind that can be roughly translated as, "It's two guys." I paused, perceived it, contemplated it, then overcame it—shook it off, basically—realizing, once again, that each of us has vestigial prejudices lingering somewhere in the vast cosmos of his or her brain, and everyone has to be vigilant in order to treat others with the fairness and compassion that we all expect and we all deserve. 

Alain Villeneuve, left, with Tzu-Kai Lo (and Oscar)

     Tzu-Kai Lo was studying for his Masters in Law at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 2001.

     If you think studying law is difficult, try studying law when your command of the English language is shaky. Lo, born in Taiwan, had been in the U.S. for just two years.

     And the class wasn’t just law but patent law. That is like regular law, only duller.

     In his class was another international student, Alain Villeneuve, a French speaker from Montreal whose English was excellent and constantly being heard in class.

    One evening, Lo was studying, or trying to, bewildered at what he was attempting to understand.     

     Desperate, he thought the Canadian student might help him.

     “He talked a lot in class, always talking,” Lo said. “You cannot stop him. I figured I would ask him for help.”

     And OK, to be honest, Lo thought the chatty classmate was hot.
     "I can't say there is not some interest," he said.
     But there was a problem. They had met, but Lo didn't know his name.
     "I was never really properly introduced to him," he said.
     So Lo went to the University of Illinois' website portal and started looking at the 600 faces on the profiles of his fellow students, beginning with "A."
     And looked.
     And looked.
     Villeneuve starts with a "V," remember. The search took an hour.
     But what is a love story without obstacles?
     Villeneuve got a momentous phone call.
     "This guy with a big accent asked me to help him with homework," said Villeneuve, a man with a checkered past.
     "I'm a weird guy," he said. "I was once married to a woman, for 10 years. A French woman."
     He had known he was gay since he was 12 (his mother said she knew since he was 6). But he had never had a boyfriend. When he married, Villeneuve was a 21-year-old engineer.
     "When I met this woman, she was very French, and I said, 'OK, I'll run with this,'" Villeneuve remembered. "She was like a best friend."
     But at some point, best friends aren't enough. He divorced her, left France, gave up engineering, started life again.
     "I came back to the U.S., went to law school," he said. Then one day the phone rang. A guy from patent law class.
     "He wanted more than my knowledge of patent law," Villeneuve said. "My heart started racing. I never felt that."
     For Lo, though their meeting was "destiny," love took a little longer. He was impressed with how Villeneuve helped him study—crafting charts, prodding him to work harder with gifts, helping him clear the linguistic hurdles.
     "It was a difficult and frustrating time for me," Lo said. "He was very, very patient. That's when I said, 'He pretty much is standing by my side.' "
     The two moved in together.
     "For quite some time I didn't tell my family about our relationship," Lo said. "They knew something was going on, but it was a don't ask/don't tell situation. I officially came out to my sisters three years ago. They were shocked, but they were happy because it was a person they knew."
     The two men—Villeneuve is 46, Lo a decade younger—live in a high-rise near Navy Pier with their West Highland White Terriers, Austin and Oscar, as well as a tight-knit group of friends who admire them.
     "They're great. Completely in love," said Paul Coyle, a partner at Villeneuve's firm, Vedder Price.
     "They're a great example of why marriage is a civil right. They're no different than any other couple in terms of being committed to each other."
     They knew they were for each other before marriage was a distant possibility.
     "In our case, it's life partners. I'm old-fashioned," Villeneuve said. "I believe in marriage, in being faithful and truthful, and being exclusive with someone."
     The idea of marriage crept up obliquely.
     Villeneuve gave Lo a lovely ring. Then another. "The first one wasn't good enough," Villeneuve said.
     Usually a proposal leads to a ring; here it was the other way around.
     "It wasn't really about proposing, it was about my Christmas gift," Lo said. "He is French Canadian—Christmas is a very important holiday for them. Because of our two dogs, I don't like to board them. So I always have him travel to Montreal by himself. He felt guilty, leaving me alone on Christmas, even though I don't particularly care at all. He got me a ring from Graff. A very, very substantial ring. It was a very beautiful ring. He said, 'This is your engagement ring.' In that sense it was a proposal, though not in a very formal setting."
     Lo wears three rings—platinum bands—one tastefully circled with diamonds. Villeneuve wears a pinkie ring that belonged to Lo's father, a Taiwanese government official.
     Meanwhile, the move toward legalized same-sex marriage continued unfolding.
     "We're both lawyers. We've been following this very closely," Villeneuve said.
     They had been tempted to form a civil union. Same-sex marriage is illegal in Taiwan, though the legislature is moving to change that. It's been legal in Canada since 2005, and Villeneuve's family is there.
     "I think it's a sign of respect [to be allowed to be married]," Villeneuve said. "We're not going to do this until we have equal rights."
     Then Illinois law changed Tuesday.
     "We saw the news," Lo said. "I'd been following the bill online all day and listened to part of the live debate. I texted him, and he was, 'OK, great, let's get married.' "
     "We just kind of waited it out," Villeneuve said. "It's recognition from the straight majority in the state that the fighting's over. A sign of recognition. We've been together for 12 years; we want to be together for 30 years. We need marriage."
     Nobody wants to be proposed to in a text, however.
     "It wasn't him getting down on one knee," Lo said. "I wrote back, 'Hold on a second, you've got to propose again, make sure this time it's more formal.' "
     That's coming, along with a big wedding, and, maybe, kids conceived via surrogate.
     "We want to get married in the state of Illinois," Villeneuve said. "It wasn't making sense for us to be traveling off to get married in a different state."
     And why does Villeneuve want to marry Lo?
     "Why? Kai's Kai. He's perfect. I love him," Villeneuve said. "He's a young prince. He's gorgeous. He's brilliant. He could have been a model if he was a little taller. The full package, just the full package. He's like a tiger mom, very demanding on himself and others."
     And why does Lo want to marry Villeneuve? He spoke about his grandmother, how they were very close, and he dreamt of her a lot after she died in 1998.
     "When we started living together, I dreamt of her less and less. She used to be my guardian angel," he said to Villeneuve, starting to cry. "Maybe she isn't anymore, because I have you. So maybe I have a new guardian angel."
     A June wedding?
     "I think so," Lo said. "The plan is to get married in June. We don't have a date yet."
     "I've been through this before," Villeneuve said. "We need a venue."
     "I know where the venue is," said Lo. "The Park Hyatt."
     So now, like countless other couples, Alain Villeneuve and Tzu-Kai Lo work out the logistics of their wedding, prompted by the classic nuptial concern that if they don't act fast, wherever they go they'll find, as Villeneuve put it, "another 5,000 couples waiting in line."
     June should be a very, very busy month for weddings in Illinois.
     And what is a love story without obstacles?

Happy Saturday

    So I'm walking through the newsroom one day last week, and I see, on a low metal shelf, where people dump stuff they don't want—books, snacks, promotional freebies—someone has left this cool little yellow football.
     I snatch it up, thinking, "Wow, lucky me. A little yellow football."
      And my heart was filled with joy, so much that I immediately displayed my prize to an editor nearby, and said something like, "Since I'm sometimes accused of being a pointy-headed intellectual, I'm going to share with you the exact thought that just went through my mind when I snagged this: 'Wow, lucky me.  A little yellow football.' It takes so little to make me happy."
     She looked at me strangely.       
    Okay, it's Saturday. Stupid stuff should get a pass on Saturday, a day that still retains the whiff of childhood about it. Probably because, when you're young, there is no school on Saturday, and when you grow up, no work either, so the liberating lightness of leisure enfolds the day, or should, or can.
     Said the man who invariably works on Saturday.

     Still. There's more. I take my little football—about the size of a small lemon—and go into my office, and immediately begin bouncing it high against the set of the New Catholic Encyclopedia I have atop a row of cabinets over my desk, near the ceiling. I hope this doesn't strike some readers as anti-Catholic hate -- they can be very sensitive, and focus on the oddest things. I wasn't venting rage against the New Catholic Encyclopedia, wasn't pelting it with this yellow prolate spheroid. 
     It was more of a habit. A while back, a journalism class from Brigham Young University in Idaho came to visit me, and brought a foam potato, as a sort of present. A life-size potato with "BYU" on it. At first I'd just squeeze the thing, occasionally. Then toss it up and catch it. Then bounce it off the cabinet. Then the New Catholic Encyclopedia—again, not violently, not in an anti-papist rage. Just for the exercise, for the distraction. (Jeez, you'd think I'd get credit for having the New Catholic Encyclopedia around, all 17 volumes. It didn't just show up there by itself. And yes, I do use it, when necessity arises). 
     Anyway, I'd toss the foam potato up, it would bounce around the encyclopedia, then drop down, taking unexpected trajectories, and I would catch it, or not catch it, it sometimes took strange bounces that required some skill to snag, it being potato-shaped and not round. The brief game was a welcome break from writing this stuff all the time. But one day, well, I tossed the potato too far, and it became trapped behind the New Catholic Encyclopedia.  It never bounced down. It's there now. 
     I suppose I could get up on the step stool I inherited when the paper shut its library (the same period when I shanghaied the New Catholic Encyclopedia) and retrieve it, but that would involve effort, and I just went without the simple childish pleasure of tossing a foam rubber tuber at a massive set of religious reference works and then catching it again. 
     Which will give you the background of why I was so happy to have the little football, beyond its littleness and yellowness and squishiness. I've been tossing it with more care.
     Anyway, it's Saturday. I think I'll stop writing, so you can stop reading, and we can both go do something fun, though this is my idea of fun, which I suppose is sorta sad.... 
      I should point out, in parting, that it never crossed my mind to wonder, until now, about whatever the little football is promoting. A TV show of some sort.  You wonder why they go to the trouble. 

Will Eggers' "Circle" be unbroken?

     Thursday I was coming back from lunch, and saw a big metal box high atop a pole, containing three cameras. A brutish looking contraption and, for good measure, a police officer happened to be standing across the street. I felt a chill. "Maybe I have this wrong," I thought, regarding the column that follows. "Maybe we will be trapped by all these technologies." Maybe it's foolish optimism, but I don't believe it, an opinion that sprouted long ago, when I read "1984" as a teen, and thought that such a society would require so many watchers, there wouldn't be any people left to watch. Not that we won't change, we will. But we don't need anyone to compel us; we distort ourselves. What happens is, we abandon much willingly—no one forces us to carry iphones and check them constantly, we just do that because we like it. But should technology intrude "too much," whatever we deem that to be, we immediately pull back, and assert ourselves. That at least is my hope.

Franklin Street pocket park, 11/06/13

     Two weeks ago Sunday, The New York Times ran a full-page ad for the Shinola Runwell, a watch assembled in Detroit of parts made in Switzerland. An attractive watch. But if I’ve learned one thing about watches, it is that any watch that appeals to me, even a little, costs a fortune.

     “Probably $3,000,” I muttered to my wife. “If not $30,000.”

      My own watch, a smart Kenneth Cole, cost $29.95 in 1999 at Filene’s Basement on Broadway and has kept perfect Metra train time since. But lately it has had a few hiccups, and part of me is rooting for it to die, just so I can finally get a new one, and if doing so tosses some business in suffering Detroit’s direction, all the better. A watch made in Detroit; how much could it cost?

Shinola Runwell

      Curious, I plugged “Shinola Runwell” into Google, explored the options - the green-faced model is handsome - noted the price, $550. Not the fortune I imagined, but not cheap either for a watch named after a defunct brand of shoe polish that the clueless were said not to know from, er, a substance that looks like shoe polish but isn't.
     I decide that I don't want to help Detroit that much. Besides, my watch still works.
     Every day since, Facebook has dangled a Shinola watch in my face, with a small ad. There was something mildly creepy about it; Google has been spilling the beans to Facebook, tattling about my searches, rather like two friends in different realms of your life getting together, without you. "Remarketing" is the official term.
     Shinola's ad hung in the back of my mind as I read Dave Eggers' new novel, "The Circle," a cautionary tale of an enormous tech company — think Google — married to Apple, at the brink of taking over the world at some time in the near future.
    What I admired about the book is how easily the visionary founders' desire to end privacy reads as perfect sense. Eggers-raised in Lake Forest, schooled at U of I- doesn't make them villains, but sympathetic geniuses. Being monitored all the time by their omnipresent hi-def cameras, "we would finally be compelled to be our best selves," says Eamon Bailey, one of the three "Wise Men" systematically shining the glare of technology in every corner of life. " And I think people would be relieved. There would be this phenomenal global sigh of relief. Finally, finally we can be good. In a world where bad choices are no longer an option."
     Who could argue? The tendency for dystopian novels is to follow the rebel; Eggers instead makes his hero Mae Holland, an up-and-coming "newbie" learning the ropes of the gleaming California campus. As if "Hunger Games" didn't focus on Katniss Everdeen but on a PR gal for the Capitol.
     The parallels with George Orwell's " 1984" are clear, particularly when they start spouting slogans like "Privacy is theft."
     "The Circle" makes you think about technology and is a well-written cautionary tale, though also a reminder that predictions of the future are a far more accurate gauge of general anxieties at any given moment than they are predictors of anything to come. For all its fame, " 1984" was lousy augury — the next half century was marked, not by increasing repression, but spreading global freedom. IBM and Ma Bell were bogeymen in 1960s futurist fiction. Look at them now.
     For all our concern over the surveillance state, you'll notice that what technology has done most significantly is trumpet government secrets that normally would have never been whispered. The big flaw of " The Circle" is its insular world where employees shrug and permit an endless series of escalating intrusions into their lives — Mae is as real as the hero in a Chinese state opera, meeting each demand for increased productivity with renewed energy and enthusiasm.
     Could facial recognition and GPS and drones all unite into some grand web of repression? Sure, but it would be hard-pressed to top the old Soviet-style informant and jackboot repression. Teens are already bored with Facebook, and it's easy to see why. There's only so much Farmville you can play. We like technology, but we insist on it being our choice, or seeming to. You can trace an arc of increasing personal liberty for the past 300 years. A new chip isn't going to change that. We build anarchy into our systems - the speed limit may be 55, but auto speedometers still go up to 160.
     After two weeks of noting the Shinola Runwell ad on Facebook, I looked closely at it and saw a "Hide this Ad" option. I clicked and was asked why, my choices being "Uninteresting, misleading, sexually explicit, against my views, offensive, repetitive" — bingo, "repetitive." It disappeared, replaced immediately by a new ad.