Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: Column Nineteen

12:05 PM on Wednesday is typically the highlight of my week, because it represents the longest amount of time between the publishing of the Geek in Review and the white-knuckled panic that results when I reach blindly into the creative ether and hope to pluck a new column for next week.

Usually, I know around Friday afternoon what I'm going to write about, and if it requires any research, I pick up my materials and spend the weekend reviewing them. From time to time this results in something wonderfully fun, like playing a whole bunch of Guitar Hero II or watching a ton of wonderfully awful movies; most of the time it involves me pacing around my house wondering just what the hell I'm going to write about, and before I know it, it's Monday afternoon, and I have nothing but panic and a bunch of worn out carpet. (Not like that damn Chris Gore, who makes us all look bad by writing eleventy million columns in advance and letting them sit in the queue to quietly mock us.)

When I find myself backed up against the wall, neck-deep in a mixture of writer's block and panic, I often take a long walk, let my mind wander, and hope that something drifts across my mind's eye that inspires me, so when Monday rolled around this week and I had nothing but a blank sheet of paper in my head with some doodles of a dinosaur eating a Moai while two X-wings shot at the Death Star above some Van Halen lyrics, I put on my running shoes, grabbed my iPod shuffle, and headed out into my neighborhood, determined to find something worthwhile along the way.

It took about half a mile before my brain dropped into that zone where I was sort of moving on autopilot and mentally drifting around some the ideas I'd collected and discarded over the previous five days: The one about watching 2001 at the Cinerama Dome in 1989 . . . the one about the Wii . . . the one about fan culture and different conventions . . . another look at Guilty Sci-Fi Pleasures (not enough time to watch them all, dammit. Maybe next week.)

I reached into my pocket and pressed play on my shuffle. Oingo Boingo's "When the Lights go Out" began, and I recalled listening to Dark at the End of the Tunnel on repeat while I wrote the first drafts of what eventually became Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot. I cradled my tiny iPod shuffle and its 240 songs -- about 26 albums or so -- in the palm of my hand, and began to jog.

And that's when I had it: I held, in the palm of my hand, a gigabyte of memory, and on that gigabyte of memory sat more music than all the records I owned just before the CD came out in 9th grade. I've grown up and come of age in a world where technology advances so rapidly and costs come down so quickly, I totally take it for granted.

Think about how many times your computer, truly a marvel of modern engineering (even if it runs Vista), does some annoying thing like locking up (especially if you're running Vista) and taking a bunch of unsaved work with it (especially if you're me, and you're running a Mac to avoid these damn things.) In your frustration, you stab the power button and declare it's "a piece of shit." These things that would be magical to our parents when they were our age are such a commonly accepted part of our daily routines, we can cavalierly describe them the same way we'd (correctly) describe a 1989 K car with a busted air conditioning system.

Right now, I can splat-tab my way into Firefox, and watch this week's Heroes, and it looks good. I'm just a few clicks away from starting up MAME or Stella, and playing every single arcade or Atari 2600 game from my youth. I can access even more than the 240 songs I have on my shuffle, and effortlessly stream them through the air and have them magically come out of my totally rockin' Dolby 6.1 surround sound system out in the living room. This stuff is fucking incredible, but it's such a normal part of our daily lives, we rarely stop to think -- even for a moment -- how lucky we are to have it, and how incredible it is.

Last week, I went to the store to pick up some cables and networking equipment, and saw an external hard drive which could hold one terrabyte of data. I unsuccessfully tried to explain to my wife why the simple fact that I could own it made my pants feel funny, but that won't stop me from trying it here: I've been using computers for almost my whole life. I remember feeling like I was sitting at ENIAC when my dad got us a tape drive for our Atari 400 around 1980, and I could use it to actually save the silly little programs I copied out of computer magazines so I could turn the computer off and load them up at a later time. I still can't believe that I can play on a Gameboy the exact games I played on my NES, including Legend of Zelda, (which I finally beat in 2006, a full 20 years after I started playing it, without strategy guides or walkthrough; it turns out that the map of Death Mountain I made in 8th grade was worth the effort, after all.) The simple fact that I could hold more storage capacity in one hand than exists in every computer I owned throughout my childhood combined was exciting to me. My wife? Not so much . . . but she's not a nerd like her husband.

So as I jogged through my neighborhood, with 1 gigabyte in my hand and Boingo in my ears, I recalled how much I love technology, and how I don't mind a bit that it's so ubiquitous I can essentially take it for granted. I thought about the Internet, and what a huge difference it has made in my life -- it's not exaggerating at all to say that without the Internet, I would truly be a washed up former child actor, struggling to make ends meet in crappy direct-to-video movies, and that's if I was lucky (ah, the haters are going to have a field day with that one, but fuck 'em.)

See, here's the thing about technology and the Internet: the old rules that applied for so long, that gave voice to the very few, that kept a few old rich guys in big glass buildings very rich and very powerful just don't apply any more. When I wrote my first book, I knew that there was no way I could take it to a big publisher and expect it to get noticed; at the time, I was just a former child actor with a "Weblog" (whatever that was) and without any real scandal in my life, why bother publishing me? I also knew that a lot of people were reading my "Weblog" (it's kind of like an online journal with a guestbook!) and a lot of them enjoyed the stories I wrote, enough to encourage me to put my stories into a book.

When I wrote my first book, I never intended to take it to a big publisher. I'd read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and I knew that if I was going to be successful, it would happen in the Bazaar, because that's where I lived. I'd already played the stupid bullshit Hollywood game for most of my life, and I knew that if it was already that hard for me to get work as an actor with my acting resume, it was never going to happen for me as a writer if I tried to do it according to the old rules.

However, there was a different way: I could use the Internet to take my work directly to the audience, and let the audience decide if it was worthwhile or not, instead of some over-worked intern in an office somewhere who skimmed every fifth page. I didn't have to worry about convincing a bunch of bookstores across the country to stock my book, because I could keep stock in my garage, and ship it to whomever ordered it as those orders came in. Yeah, I sacrificed people who were casual browsers in book stores, but my disastrous experience with a big publisher for my second book (which attempted to play by the old rules) proved to me that it wasn't worth the trade off; new technology gave me a different way to do things. Like Yoda said, "Do or do not. There is no 'try.'" Why try to do it the old way, when I knew I could do it the new way?

I've written in the past about my doubts, but I have to admit that I love technology, and I owe much of my ability to support my family to the opportunities afforded to me because of it. Though I have occasional auditions for voice overs and other acting work, I'm very much a full time writer now, and I am published online, where I can reach a truly global audience in ways that were unavailable to all but a very select chosen few less than a decade ago, and I know I'm not alone. Right now, there are thousands of musicians, writers, artists, and other undiscovered creative people who can let the audience, not some guy in a corner office, decide if their work is worth sharing with their friends. Not all of them are great, and most of them are probably pretty awful, but at least they have an opportunity now that doesn't involve humiliating themselves and then signing on for indentured servitude on American Idol.

And one day, those people may hear one of these artists, buy her music online, and put it onto a 1 gig iPod that fits in the palm of their hand, so they can listen to her while they go out for a run to break the writer's block . . . only to discover that they forgot to charge the battery, leading to the obligatory declaration that their mp3 player is a piece of shit.

Wil Wheaton is the modren man.