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thing stable from week to week seems to be the cast. The arts in America are strange thatway: we seem to care what our vision falls upon, but not whose vision it is.
    I remember being enchanted as a kid with the early Hardy Boys books by Franklin W. Dixon, but after a certain point in the series, the magic seemed to disappear. It wasn’t until more than fifteen years later I discovered that Franklin W. Dixon never existed. The first sixteen books were written by a man named Leslie McFarlane. The next twenty were written by eleven different people. What I’d chalked up to the loss of something intangible in those later books was in fact the loss of something very tangible indeed: the author.
    Aesthetic experiences like these for me are like an unending series of blind dates where you never follow up, conversations with a stranger on the bus (or the Internet) where you never catch the other person’s name. There’s nothing
wrong
with them—they’re pleasant, sometimes memorable, even illuminating—and all relationships start somewhere. But to live a whole
life
like that?
    The
New York Times
reported in June 2010—in an article titled “The End of the Best Friend”—on the practice of deliberate intervention, on the part of well-meaning adults, to disrupt close nuclei of friends from forming in schools and summer camps. 4 One sleepaway camp in New York State, they wrote, has hired “friendship coaches” whose job is to notice whether “two children seem to be too focused on each other, [and] … put them on different sports teams [or] seat them at different ends of the dining table.” Affirms one school counselor in St. Louis, “I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults—teachers and counselors—we try to encourage them not to do that.” Chatroulette and Omegle users “next” each other when the conversation flags; these children are being nexted by force—when things are going too
well
.
Nexted in Customer Service
    The same thing happens sometimes in customer service, where the disruption of intimacy seems almost tactical. Recently a merchant made a charge to my credit card in error, which I attempted to clear up, resulting in my entering a bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine the likes of which I had never before experienced. My record for the longest single call was forty-two minutes and
eight transfers
.
    The ultimate conclusion reached at the end of this particular call was “call back tomorrow.”
    Each call, each transfer, led me to a different service rep, each of whom was skeptical and testy about the validity of my refund request. If I managed to get a particular rep on my side, to earn their sympathy, to start to build a kind of relationship and come across as a distinct “nonanonymous” human being, it was only a few minutes before I’d be talking to someone else, anonymous again. Here’s my name, here’s my account number, here’s my PIN, here’s my Social, here’s my mother’s maiden name, here’s my address, here’s the reason for my call, yes, I’ve already tried that …
    What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun showing me was that we fail—again and again—to actually
be
human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time. And it had begun showing me
how
we fail—and what to do about it.
    Cobbled-together bits of human interaction do not a human relationship make. Not fifty one-night stands, not fifty speed dates, not fifty transfers through the bureaucratic pachinko. No more than sapling tied to sapling, oak though they may be, makes an oak. Fragmentary humanity isn’t humanity.
The Same Person
    If the difference between a conversational purée and a conversation is continuity, then the solution, in this case, is extraordinarily simple:assign a rep to a case. A particular person sees it through from start to finish. The
same
person.
    For a brief period a tiny plastic tab that held the SIM card