Revision and Collapse

I am writing from my third-floor cubicle at the University of Minnesota. A few yards away, the din of renovation overwhelms the building’s corridors while several classrooms are gutted and remodeled. The chemical smell of latex paint seeps under my office door, curved chunks of ductwork lie scattered across scratched linoleum. Staccato bursts from power tools chip away at the plaster, grinding walls into a fine dust that leaves the floors slick and matted. The false ceiling tiles have all been removed, exposing a true apex much higher than expected, wires and plumbing twisting from room to room—and truth be told, I prefer this transitional geometry to the textured grays and blunt fluorescent lighting that normally fill the space.

Construction is everywhere. In the past month I have missed buses because of detoured routes, have woken to the sounds of jackhammers tearing up the street outside my bedroom window, have watched bearded men in neon vests flip signs from Stop to Slow to Stop again. A mile from my desk sits the newly constructed Saint Anthony Falls Bridge, across the Mississippi River, replacing the stretch of highway that collapsed under the weight of rush hour traffic roughly two years ago. Since then, all local bridges have been evaluated for structural integrity, and as a result, the main bridge across my campus, the same bridge where poet John Berryman jumped to his death, has been partially closed for preventative maintenance. This has caused an influx of human traffic jams, and vaguely repressed anxiety whenever I walk across the expanse, wondering how long it would last without repair if we let nature take it back into churning waters below. I find myself trapped between love and trepidation—a need for silence against the affecting sounds of revision, the fascination with process, with progress, with transitioning from now to something new, recursive. I try to envision a time with no construction. Stagnation. A world where we can have everything at once, uninterrupted, without the glimmer of failure.

I am writing while sprawled across my couch, having had far too much to drink, doing whatever I can to delay creating a syllabus for my freshman composition course. The course is remarkably unstructured compared to the college’s other offerings, taught by graduate students who, like myself, don’t necessarily feel prepared to educate uninterested students a few years our junior. Teachers living week-to-week in an incongruity of authority and ignorance, and as a result the subject and theme of each section vary significantly. But instead of finalizing a syllabus or even choosing a textbook, I find myself downing 40 ounces of La Fin du Monde, meaning “The End of the World,” a fitting name for the Unibrou’s high alcohol content that occasionally destroys me , in front of my laptop, repeatedly clicking the “Random article” link on Wikipedia. I spend entirely too much time here, amending articles, studying the unique dynamics of the Wikipedia Community, consuming it.

Here I must admit that I use Wikipedia and YouTube as substantial (if not primary) sources for most of my own projects, including all forthcoming information regarding collapsing bridges, CNN transcripts, and various other failings of infrastructure. This, I suppose, constitutes an entirely different set of implications than those found in the academic five-paragraph bullshit I’m trying to teach my students to forget.

As a frequent Wikipedia saboteur editor, I spend a lot of time considering the methods of vandalism corrupting the site: blanked articles, embedded links to improper sources, pornography, the excessive use of profanity that plagues an otherwise credible source of information. Although most of this content is easily found and eliminated (avoided by those in search of “verifiable data”), the new trend among vandals consists of full-blown manipulation. These false revisionists are creating third-party websites and self-published books full of false information that meet and often exceed the necessary Wikipedia qualifications for what’s considered verifiable, meaning it exists outside of the digital world, exists as hard copy and artifact. This vandalism causes the line between truth and fiction to become irrevocably blurred. One [End...