Craig Smith

  It is the eleventh of January and the new year is still fresh out of the oven. My daughter is with a friend and my wife is accompanying our son to preschool so I decide to enact an idea I have had for some months - to walk the length of Industrial Drive.

While I was a frequent visitor to Newcastle as a young lad it was only in my twenties that I moved here, near the university. I remember one day driving some friends, who lived in the east end of town, to see my place and I couldn't quite work out how to get from the inner city to the edgelands. I had particular routes in mind but they all seemed inefficient, particularly as evening was setting and GPS and phone maps were not mainstream.

By chance I took a turn down Industrial Drive and it felt as though I had entered a dream state. What was this annex that ignored all residential realities and posited as a pipeline from the tundra outskirts of the city through a starfield of high tower glitter and train line sweep.

This will sound like a joke at best for any locals in the area who recognise the dual carriageway as nothing less than baseline banality, a featureless eight kilometre stretch that serves little more than to connect the thoroughfare to and from Maitland and the Hunter Region with Newcastle harbour. There is no 'dream state' about it, except perhaps within the ghosts of its industrial history, as a necklace that skirted the city within a city that was the Broken Hill Proprietary steelworks which dominated the region between 1911 until its demolition in 1999, employing nearly fifty thousand residents across the century.

The economic impact caused to the nearby suburbs by the polluted output is still apparent. Gentrification is the holy word sprayed on the walls of young coffee shops and pizzerias trying to shake off the smog that foreclosed the neighbourhood and sent families to the other side of the lake. A nearby school I taught in saw that its empty classrooms soon needed to be split in half to fit all the new enrollments in the decade since the steelworks collapsed.

There is no pedestrian access along Industrial Drive. It is for vehicles only, often fuel tankers not permitted to drive through residential streets. While the steelworks are closed it is still home to heavy industry - petrol depots, coal exports and shipping containers at the port, manufacturing.

I meet a council worker mowing the lawn, he stops and asks me if I need help and I explain what I'm doing. He says he wouldn't be here if he wasn't working, a nice day like this, if he were twenty years younger, my age, he'd be at the beach or at the pub. I ask if many people walk along here and he says sure, more than you'd think.

Some years ago I began an online dialogue with a game designer who was seeking small funds to help finish a point and click game set in the Louisiana petrolbelt. To thank me for support he posted printouts of pixel art landscapes from the game. I knew the geography of desolate riverland set against empty superhighway immediately - this was Industrial Drive, just another version of it, set on the other side of the world.

We talked about our shared fascination with these landscapes. Both of us were repulsed by the way expansive natural settings had been choked by polluted industries and yet we were drawn to them, swooned by telegraph poles standing amid bushland like misplaced crucifixes, like a Friedrich David Caspar painting where the potential of Spinoza's nature-as-god is theologically corrupted by the presence of a tiny stooped human distant against a rock.

My recurring sentiment is that this attraction is one of analogy, that we look for landscapes that mirror the internal topography of our subjectivity. We see a sunset marred on the horizon by plumbs of distant smog and feel, unspoken, a metaphor for the last innocent hours of childhood before economics scheduled our future.

When the designer finished the game he sent me a copy and I was delighted to see my name in the credits. As a young video game enthusiast I never anticipated seeing my name one day scroll down the closing sequence of a title.

There is a side street that turns off a rise in the road, it cordons an overgrown nature reserve that has a little playground and, my favourite part, a water bubbler nestled in an alcove of trees near absolutely nothing. It's a good walk from the playground, it's a good walk from anywhere, and it's everything I hope to find on these excursions.

I imagine a question on a psychological screener: do you seek out symbols of isolation instead of community.

My wife has a friend from her school days that lives around here, mere streets away, with two children of her own now. We see her now and then.

'Bowling Alone', that seminal end-of-90s text by Robert Putnam on the decline of in-person social intercourse, rings true to me, but perhaps primarily so because I embrace the trend. I take solace in the world becoming ever more like an Edward Hopper painting, another set of painted metaphors, even as I rue the rise of corrupting populist forces that rush in to fill the void.

Richard Yates knew it all too well, and realising that 'The Easter Parade' will be fifty years old soon is a sobering thought. Were the seventies really half a century ago. In the nineties, only three percent of surveyed Americans said they had no close friendships. Today that number adds another ten points to its currency, and the pandemic just spotlighted the trend ever more starkly. The Australian statistics are pretty much at parity.

There is a bridge here that crosses an access road and a rail line where trains trek coal from the Hunter out to ships at the port that sail to China. I remember seeing smokestacks near Shanghai one evening, behind a field and the basketball courts of a medical rehabilitation hospital, and wondering if the fuel was from some hole back home.

An ex-colleague and I recently published a chapter in an academic textbook on the role of technology, specifically augmented reality, in supporting the soft skills involved in public sociability.

Years ago, during the period you could buy monthly pocket guides on the best websites to visit, a single comic panel was published in the New Yorker that has gone on to become the most reproduced cartoon in the publications history. In the comic scene, a dog is sitting on a chair using a desktop computer, and he turns to a dog looking up from the floor and says, 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog'.

Friendships are now maintained through group messages, rarely through individual contact. Only the most intimate companionships are funneled into solitary text streams. Group chats are, like parties, entirely performative, every message either a setup or a punchline, although the punchline is enough these days, no setup required, though sometimes, increasingly, there is no punchline either.

Over the rail line Industrial Drive curves towards the barrier bushland and empty mansions of the BHP. There is a steel spring coil manufacturer near the lights.

On the Internet, nobody knows what came before.

One of the differences between virtual reality and augmented reality is that in the augmented version you can still see the offline world around you. A digital overlay is pressed against your field of view similar to what the pilot of a spaceship would see during some futuristic dogfight sequence rendered with neon coordinates and crosshairs.

The gist of the chapter my colleague and I penned is that augmented reality could provide a supportive avenue for those seeking guidance in how to engage socially with others.

Technology has been framed as antithetical to human consciousness since factory cogs began turning on their own, but do you remember Pokemon Go, the way that young people, including the shy, the nervous, a community of introverts, all gathered on the streets to catch pocket monsters with their phones.

There are ways of getting people out onto the streets that don't necessarily lead to the Arab Spring. The new illusion will be standardised.

On the morning of the eighth of June nineteen forty two a Japanese submarine fired thirty four shells at the BHP steelworks. They landed over a broad expanse of Newcastle. Only one of the shells exploded, near my father's boyhood house in the east end near Parnell Place.

There are two memorials positioned in the region some of the shells landed in the BHP zone but neither are in relation to the war. One is comprised of a ring of thin vertical metal rods with spheres atop. They look like burnt matches and represent the men and women who lost their lives through industrial accidents working at the site.

A second memorial, the Muster Point, stands as a four-walled building with no roof, signifying a conclusion to the steelworks operations.

Both used to be accessible, you could just walk off Industrial Drive and push through a bit of bush and scrub and you'd be amongst them, but everything is fenced off now pending redevelopment plans to build something new.

Great mansions also used to stand behind this zone, administration buildings of thirty and forty rooms. Twenty years beyond their utility they still remained in immaculate condition: no graffiti on the walls, no signs of forced entry. Security closely monitored the nearby port and rail lines, so this may have kept them safe. Not so other parts of the city, Hunter Street Mall comes to mind, decimated, I took a walk with a close friend through there the other week, a mate from boyhood that I try to see once a year. Mostly we talk about the death of god and our favourite comedy routines.

On this occasion he reminded me of something I said once, during our university days, about how I only need two chips from a bag: the first chip to know the sensation, the flavour, the second chip to feel what it's like to relive the experience of the first chip, to receive the gift of repetition, comfort in geometry, and that is enough. Any further chips are hollow mimicries of the critical first two.

He says he thinks about that a great deal these days.

A little up the road there are a set of three neat brick cottages. I don't know when they were built, they have similar architectural properties to turn-of-the-last-century homes a few streets back from the highway. They are unoccupied and would look all but abandoned except for two rows of garden beds between the cottages, each containing an assortment of different plants, a jumbled selection really of vegetables and ground foliage and varieties that could be arranged into sweetheart bouquets.

Signs above the garden beds note that they are managed and monitored by the University of Newcastle, in coordination with local industry funding, to monitor the impact of polluted soil on the health of plants and agriculture. The same soil here is in the gardens of the homes across the road a few streets back from the highway.

There are dozens of garden gnomes spread across the grounds of the cottages, particularly beside the driveway area. They are all spray painted in a universal silver.

It is not always, if ever, easy to see what's coming down the road, so to speak. Industrial Drive only unfolds fifty metres at a time before it curves and turns beyond the range of any current vantage point, and this seems in line with any measured predictions of the future, no matter how much big data tries to render science from wishful thinking.

We have in recent years seen a lot of collective social action stem from online communities that have found their way into offline physicalities, shouts on the street. Some say that whenever a progressive movement begins online it results in an opposing, reactionary display of old world power that quickly works to subvert the possibility of change.

Others still would say that social movements only succeed, like gains made in civil rights, when individuals are prepared to come together as real world communities and give their lives over to a cause, whether for years or forever.

What, then, is the relationship between the virtualisation of life lived online and the shout on the street.

I have been following the rapid development of visual art generated by machine learning algorithms. At first, a long time ago (say, eighteen months) when the technology was in its infancy you would ask the computer to paint a picture of a face and it would give you a finger painting produced by a toddler in a dark room. Months later the face was more finely rendered, not unlike the quality a talented amateur artist could produce in an hour. Weeks beyond this the resulting computer generated portraits made the works of the Old Masters look poorly realised, and then, in what felt like mere hours later, the images produced by the algorithms made me look in the mirror and feel more uncanny than the most real, most human, faces looking out of the screen.

The other week two images of pastoral landscapes were posted on an artificial intelligence forum. Which one, a question posited, was a real photograph and which was computer generated. The punchline was that both were undetectable fictions, and that they were posted by a bot.

I stop at one of my favourite destinations anywhere, when I come upon them: a wooden bench seat beside a tree. You find them out the back of service station truck-stops, in the rest areas of public institutions like council buildings and hospitals, near Lions Club waterside parks and boat ramps, and here, on the side of Industrial Drive, within view of some approaching sport fields.

Researchers who study online social communities say that there has been a move in the past two years away from people accessing broad, public, all-access social networks towards smaller, curated, invite-only private servers. The big social networks are thought of as gross public spaces where animosity is fuelled and monetised by agents of chaos and their legions of bots, where elections and pandemics are called into question. But now the smaller servers are being marked as echo chambers where like-minded folk simply reinforce group-think cognitive bias.

History will be written by the victorious code.

During the pandemic, Major League Baseball games were played between two teams in stadiums void of fans. Yet when you watched the games on the television, or listened on the radio, you could hear the ambient roar of the crowd beneath the crack of ball meeting bat, and then an eruption of cheer when the ball arced into the empty stands.

Where did the sounds come from - they came from a video game version of baseball. Sounds from the game were extracted, seventy five effects and fan reactions, and then triggered at suitable moments through speakers within the stadium. Interviews with the players said they appreciated the audio, that it encouraged them to play their best.

Video game sounds played in empty baseball stadiums, synthesising the presence of teeming thousands. On the radio you wouldn't know, but on the television, what a dissonant spectacle. Like an inverted Camus when he talked about looking through the glass windows of a dance hall full of revelers, what you'd think if you couldn't hear the music.

The end of Industrial Drive meets another main road that heads up into the coalfields. There isn't much to see up here - I can see the neighbourhood I moved into near the university, and if I turn back around to face where I've just walked from I can see an industrial area off to the west, beside the Hunter River.

The estate is rezoned swampland turned warehouse buffet. They call it, you can't make this up, Steel River.

I wonder if that's why the few dozen garden gnomes around the heritage cottages investigating contaminated soil are all spray painted silver. Probably not.

One of the first warehouses I pass is a medical research facility. It's near another research operation, one investigating energy, that I took a class of school children to once. Our guide showed us how when you walked on the floors of the building the vibrations charged kinetic energy which fuelled the lights. So too the sapling birches outside, wires on their branches charged batteries as they swayed.

Some years ago a mate of mine who works at the university in the biology department showed me a video game called Foldit. The object of the game is to fold protein structures as perfectly as possible. Ten years ago there were a quarter of a million people registered to play Foldit, I don't know what the current stats are.

When I said the object of the game is to fold protein structures, what I should have more accurately said is that the premise of the game is to record how humans fold protein structures, to note the ways we go about the task, our creative wins and errors, in order to teach algorithms how to get better at doing the same.

A 2019 research article reported that Foldit players were able to solve a set of protein problems more accurately than experts in the field and automated algorithms due to the game mechanics the players were employing. This accuracy will be taught to the computer.

A crowd is not always inherently wrong.

Consciousness is, it would appear, a collective phenomena. It does not exist in isolation - its ontology is birthed through dialogue. Like Wittgenstein's thing about how if a lion could talk we couldn't understand it, your mind is not yours alone. Like an analogy, it only exists as a mirror.

Down by the Hunter River, a half kilometre from the thoroughfare of Industrial Drive, from the stream of vehicular traffic, I'm not walking down the non-pedestrian zone anymore, not flirting with being on the sidelines of the concrete information superhighway or suggesting anything about having one foot in and one foot out of that state of public community. Instead I'm in a subtracted space on the edgelands looking beyond the boundary, across the river to where some formless geography radiates potential.

There are powerlines that span the gap. They are of the variety that transmit but do not receive, they are not bi-directional; likewise if you gaze for long into the plentitudes of community, the returning gaze cannot meet your eyes.