Frontline

The “big idea” guys, high on more than the Internets, called big meetings so they could rhapsodize on creating virtual communities and breaking down traditional Western phallocentric patriarchies and enabling subcultures to reach out and robustly interface with like-minded hives.

My bosses at Suck.com, meanwhile, accurately predicted that the Web would soon become something between a gigantic mall catering to the lowest common denominator and an infinite tabloid echo chamber. Their mantra: Sell out early and often. Why? Because those of us musing about murderous robot showdowns (or scratching out angry cartoons under a pseudonym, for that matter) would all go back to grabbing ankle for The Man sooner than we thought.

What they didn’t know, and never could’ve predicted, was that the Web would also transform itself into an enormous, never-ending high school reunion (See also: hell).

Revolutionary in a coal mine

Even though I’ve opted out of the big-idea, Future-of-the-Web bloviating business over the years (mostly because it’s more my style to wallow in obscurity, wearing outdated shoes), I think it’s finally safe to proclaim, together, that the information age has officially arrived. After all, my 13-year-old stepson texts more often than he speaks, my 3-year-old daughter wants her own bright pink iPad so she can see what Cinderella is doing right now, I waste most of my day reading Tweets from a Laura Ingalls Wilder impersonator and a recent dinner guest spent half the night answering lingering trivial conversational unknowns by looking them up on his iPhone.

Let’s see, so the digital revolution led us all to this: a gigantic, commercial, high school reunion/mall filthy with insipid tabloid trivia, populated by perpetually distracted, texting, tweeting demi-humans. Yes, the information age truly is every bit as glorious and special as everyone predicted it would be!

Apparently our futuristic “Blade Runner”-esque digital dystopia is so bewildering that even Internet “big idea” man Douglas Rushkoff is currently reconsidering his unconditional love for new media in Frontline’s “Digital Nation” (premieres 9 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 2, on PBS, check local listings), an in-depth investigation into the possibilities and side effects of our digital immersion.

“I want the luxury of being able to push the pause button, you know,” Rushkoff, one of the producers of this 90-minute report, muses to the other producer, Rachel Dretzin, as the cameras roll. Rushkoff says he wants to “really ask whether we’re tinkering with some part of ourselves that’s a little bit deeper than we might realize at first. You know, how are we changing what it means to be a human being by using all this stuff?”

Keep in mind, this is a guy who, despite his Dilbert-meets-Derrida perspective, spent the better half of the ’90s gushing about the power and the glory of the Internets in intelligently written books and on crappy “all about the Internets” shows like “The Site” (Christ, remember that one?). If Rushkoff is rethinking his ardor for the digital realm, you know we’re in trouble.

Even if you’re too distracted by your iPhone to care whether continual distractions will take a toll on our souls, “Digital Nation” should beat a little sense into you. You know the routine: A kid says proudly, “I never read books. I’ll be honest. I can’t remember the last time I read a book”; an English professor tells the camera, solemnly, “I can’t assign a novel that’s more than 200 pages”; we learn of a Kaiser Family Foundation study indicating that 8- to 18-year-old kids spend 53 hours a week using media.

And don’t believe the hype about a whole new generation of effective multitaskers, either. “Most multitaskers think that they’re brilliant at multitasking,” says Stanford professor Clifford Nass. But “it turns out that multitaskers are terrible at nearly every aspect of multitasking.” (In an article on the Stanford News Web site, his colleague Eyal Ophir comments, “We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it.”)

Even Sherry Turkle, director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, confesses that a plugged-in state doesn’t necessarily make her life more satisfying or more productive. “I’ve been busy all day, and I haven’t thought about anything hard,” Turkle says. “I mean, the point of it is to be our most creative selves, not to distract ourselves to death.”

“I’ve always prided myself on offering soothing answers to people’s anxieties about this stuff,” Rushkoff continues later. “I felt like I was in on a secret, that these old fuddy-duddies were panicking unnecessarily, underestimating our kids’ ability to adapt to the new reality unfolding before us.”

But Rushkoff’s mind has changed, and now he feels like a fuddy-duddy himself. But, as he accurately points out, stepping away from it all isn’t always possible. “Combating distraction, it’s not as easy as just turning off your e-mail program. You turn off your e-mail program, it’s not your e-mail program that complains, it’s your friends, it’s your boss, it’s your bills. You know, ‘Where’s that report?’ ‘Why haven’t you answered your e-mail?’ ‘Are you mad at me?’ You can’t do this in isolation. If you’re going to deal with the problem of distraction it’s something that we’re all going to have to deal with together.”

But how, Doug? How? Instead of suggesting some answers, we’re off to South Korea to watch teenagers in a dark underground PC Bangs (gaming centers) playing video games for hours on end, then we’re off to an Army Experience Center, an eerie new style of recruitment center that lures young men with violent video games and then discusses enlisting with the ones who are legally eligible. Next, we watch a guy in front of a computer screen operating an unmanned drone, then view footage of similar drones dropping bombs on targets a world away.

And just when you’re pretty sure that technological advances are transforming our globe into a seething cauldron of violence, hatred and pointless musings about Snooki from “Jersey Shore,” here’s a lighter segment on “Second Life” to distract us back into a state of complacency. Apparently IBM uses “Second Life” to hold virtual meetings between people who live thousands of miles from each other. Each person at the meeting is embodied by a different avatar, and the participants end up feeling like they’ve met in person, even though they’re actually in upstate New York, Vermont and San Paolo, Brazil. (Note to boss: Can we hold our Salon meetings this way, and can my avatar be an enormous roach that occasionally hits other people over the head with a crowbar?)

“It may be decades until we know what living in a state of constant distraction will do to us,” offers Rushkoff, although right now I’m a little more concerned about what the people getting bombed to smithereens by those drones are going to do to us, once they have the means.

But don’t worry, everyone! “For all of the moments of isolation the digital may promote, there’s also a chance for engagement,” Rushkoff says. “So I guess that means you can still count me among the faithful!” With that chirpy conclusion, Rushkoff shuts off his computer and heads outside to his garden. Suddenly I can’t help picturing Louis Rossetto and the big idea guys (plus that guy who sold “big.com” for a few million dollars) all padding out to their lush backyard gardens, paid for by those years as Web visionaries, and I think: I should’ve sold out earlier, and more often.

Not that I had anything to sell in the first place. But who’s going to help the rest of us turn this stuff off? Doug? Before you leave, um, where’s the exit to the mall? How do we filter out the tabloids and the instant messages from long-lost high school acquaintances? Doug? Dooouuuug! Come back here! Help us!

C
amera disappears into screaming mouth, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”-style. Fade to black.

Others would argue that there’s nothing worse than being robbed of your money. Not being able to purchase things for your wife or children, becoming a ghost who haunts your family with your empty pockets? Some of us can’t imagine anything worse. “I can always live in a tent in your backyard,” my mom often tells me when she reviews her decimated retirement savings, in a tone that suggests she might actually enjoy it, particularly compared to living in my house with me and my (screaming) baby and (magical fairy princess) toddler and two (barking, stinky) dogs.

Losing your memory and losing your money may be the two top-ranking fears among older people — and by older people, I mean everyone over 37. While so many of us rage against the dying of the light by indulging in the countless frivolities of youth culture — twittering, ice blendeds, ass pants, Adam Lambert — it probably pays to step back and take a hard look at our futures. Far less sexy are the dark forces that await us there, from minivans filled with bitchy teenagers to bad knees, incontinence and finally, cheap coffins festooned with fake flowers and a few stragglers who strain to remember our names for the sake of a plate of broccoli-cheese casserole.

Bernie Madoff with my cash!

But then, some of us don’t have to wait until the bitter end to watch as the world falls to pieces before our very eyes. Just look at once-esteemed investment specialist and “market maker” Bernie Madoff, who went from king of Wall Street to destroyer of fortunes overnight. For Madoff, it wasn’t enough to burn and pillage his own village, he had to set half of the world ablaze along with it.

And if Frontline’s “The Madoff Affair” (9 p.m. Tuesday, May 12, on PBS, check listings) is any indication, far from a vision of regret and self-hatred, Madoff chuckled softly to himself as he poured gasoline over many, many sizable fortunes, then struck a match. Who knew there was a sadistic, half-crazed anarchist behind that calm, professional demeanor?

“He confessed with pride,” Lucinda Franks tells the camera. “Like, ‘Look what I did. I mean, you’re not gonna believe what I did when you get to the bottom of this.’”

“Here’s a guy who thinks he got over on the world for the last 30 years and doesn’t have a bit of remorse,” adds securities fraud lawyer Ross Intelisano.

Harder to parse is the culpability of the other players in the Madoff scandal. While most of the investment firms that funneled money to Madoff were unaware of Madoff’s treachery, they clearly neglected to perform due diligence, the investment term for carefully and thoroughly examining the soundness of the investments you’re advocating. The investment firm Fairfield Greenwich, in particular, entrusted $7.5 billion to Madoff without adequately exploring the man’s practices. Like so many other firms, they were willing to turn a blind eye as long as millions of dollars in commissions were rolling in.

You also have to wonder whether Madoff had some kind of pull with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the way it systematically ignored multiple warnings from whistle-blower Harry Markopoulos, the financier who at one point went so far as to send a detailed memo to the SEC warning that Madoff was quite clearly up to something fishy.

The remarks of Michael Bienes, one of Madoff’s early partners who was interviewed extensively for the Frontline special, give us some idea of how one man could pull off such a colossal fraud.

Frontline: What made you think that he could return 20 percent?

Bienes: I don’t know! How do I know? How do you split an atom? I know you can split them, I don’t know how you do it. How does an airplane fly? I don’t ask.

Frontline: Did you ask him?

Bienes: Never! Why would I ask him? I wouldn’t understand if he explained it. Something with arbitrage between bonds and stocks and blah blah blah.

We really are living in the age of the idiot, aren’t we? Most people are so comfortable with their ignorance that common wisdom is no longer wise. My new rule? Whatever course of action everyone else agrees on, do the opposite.

Whether you’ve been thinking this way for years or just a few months now, Frontline’s “The Madoff Affair” (along with the new Vanity Fair tell-all by Madoff’s secretary) provides a nice excuse to gawk at the misfortunes of the fortunate. Of course, once you take a closer look at the list of Madoff’s victims and consider what it would be like to lose a nest egg you spent a lifetime building, or factor in the unions, pension funds and charities that took a hit, this taste of schadenfreude becomes a little less palatable. What kind of a man could lay ruin to so many fortunes with a twinkle in his eye?

“I have no interest in psychoanalyzing Madoff,” says Burt Ross, who lost most of his net worth, around $5 million, investing with Madoff. “The man is a monster. He’s evil. I cannot fathom hurting every single person I met, every dear friend. It just doesn’t get worse than that.”

Laughter and forgetting

If you’re starting to think that being robbed of your life savings would be the worst thing ever, HBO’s four-documentary series “The Alzheimer’s Project” is here to demonstrate just how unfathomably awful it is to live with limited access to your memories.

The first documentary in the series, “The Memory Loss Tapes” (9 p.m. Sunday, May 10, on HBO), offers an up-close look at how Alzheimer’s affects its victims. This isn’t something most of us want to see, but it does impress upon us the relative triviality of things like plundered fortunes and dear friends who turn out to be monsters. From 76-year-old Fannie Davis, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, who’s upset that she’ll lose her independence when she fails a driving test, to 77-year-old Josephine Mickow, a later-stage victim, who wanders around her daughter’s fenced front yard, singing to herself, the documentary gives viewers a very personal look at the shape of a disease that afflicts 5 million Americans.

Sadly, no matter how valiantly patients and their families struggle to maintain some semblance of normalcy and happiness, the reality is that a life without memory is, in most cases, a living hell. You look at someone like 63-year-old Joe Potocny, who’s worked with computers all his life, keeps a blog about his battles with the disease, and seems to have a good sense of humor and a positive attitude about most things, and figure he’s the kind of person who can withstand the challenges of losing his memory. Instead, Potocny seems incredibly depressed most of the time, and tells the camera at one point that he plans to say goodbye to his family and kill himself as soon as he thinks most of his mind is gone for good.

Just when you think that’s an extreme solution, you meet perpetually confused 75-year-old Yolanda Santomartino, who spends most of her waking hours at her nursing home crying about the snakes she sees everywhere. A few other nursing home residents seem to do nothing but weep and ask where they are and what’s happening.

Thankfully, while the reckoning of “The Memory Loss Tapes” is probably necessary, the other documentaries in the series are a little more hopeful. “Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am?” (7:30 p.m. Monday, May 11) is aimed at grandchildren who are coping with their grandparents’ Alzheimer’s. “Momentum in Science” (8 p.m. Monday, May 11, and 8 p.m. Tuesday, May 12) examines what researchers have learned about how Alzheimer’s affects the brain, what causes it, and what kinds of treatments might slow its progression. “The Caregivers” (7 p.m. Tuesday, May 12) offers a look at how five different families are coping with their loved ones’ Alzheimer’s.

But whether you take a bullet to the head or wind up in a tent in your daughter’s backyard, it pays to remember one thing: We all end up with nothing eventually. See you in hell, sea donkeys!

“He was outta his mind, worried about when he was gonna be able to get back to the house,”  Cheryl told the filmmakers behind Frontline’s “The Old Man and the Storm” (premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 6, on PBS; check local listings). At first glance, the documentary looks like another uplifting, ultimately hopeful story about how Hurricane Katrina laid bare one man’s will to persevere against all odds.

Sadly, though, Gettridge’s experience is anything but positive. First there’s the heart-wrenching discovery that his house has been all but destroyed by floodwaters. Even so, Gettridge gets to work, living without electricity, drinkable water or a bed. His wife is still in Wisconsin and longs to be home with him, but the house isn’t ready for her yet, and since she’s in poor health, it makes more sense for her to stay with her daughter.

As the months roll by, few of Gettridge’s neighbors return to the neighborhood, because few can afford to come back and rebuild. Where he was once surrounded by his family, several generations all living within a few blocks of each other, Gettridge now finds himself alone, his seven kids and dozens of grandchildren and great grandchildren scattered across the country and hesitant to return to New Orleans, given the destruction and the lack of opportunities waiting for them there.

While several charities help Gettridge to rebuild, his homeowner’s insurance doesn’t pay nearly the amount it promised to pay on his policies. Then there were the empty promises of city, state and federal aid. The Bush administration claimed that it would “do what it takes” and “stay as long as it takes” to help residents rebuild their lives, but those initiatives ran aground. Despite the Road Home program’s pledge to help underinsured homeowners rebuild their homes, by the end of 2007, over 100,000 homeowners had applied for assistance but fewer than 500 had received a check.

Two years after the storm, Gettridge’s house is finally in livable shape, and his wife, Lydia, returns home. But this isn’t the Oprah-style Katrina homecoming we’ve come to expect, replete with brand-new throw pillows placed at jaunty angles on the couch by plucky interior designer Nate Berkus. No, this is Frontline, the Debbie Downer of documentary series. Instead of smiles and tears of joy, we see Lydia bewildered by the changes in her home.

“I don’t like the smell,” she says, and then remarks that the house is way too hot. Gettridge tries to cheer her up with a little flattery, saying, “You lookin’ like sweet 16!” meaning she’s just as pretty as she was when they were younger.

“I know better than that,” Lydia grumbles. “I ain’t buyin’ that stuff.”

As uncomfortable as these moments are to watch, they provide an unvarnished look at the reality of life in New Orleans, as those in the Ninth Ward and elsewhere continue to struggle in Katrina’s wake after the rest of the world has moved on.

Despite all of the valiant promises by Bush, FEMA, the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans, men and women like Gettridge and his wife and their extended families have been torn apart. “The Old Man and the Storm” reveals how many of the city’s underinsured residents have received little or no help in getting back on their feet and bringing their families back together. This documentary is the crashing denouement to the uplifting, tear-jerking feel-good Sundance documentary “Trouble the Water.” Three years after Katrina, these residents’ lives are still in shambles, and no amount of individual hard work and hope and determination could change that fact.

Gettridge himself seems to be struggling with this hard truth as the film closes. When asked if he’d do it all again, his answer isn’t one of a hero. It’s the answer of a tired old man who feels defeated by forces far bigger than himself.

“I’m kind of skeptical about that now. Once upon a time, I could answer that question in a split second for you. I can’t do that now.”