Photo: photo courtesy of Burke De Boer

I was born in a dying town. Don’t worry. Since I left, it’s recovered. Prineville, Oregon has been a cowtown since day one; while cattle drives from Texas up the Chisholm might be more prominent in the cultural eye, the Pacific Northwest had a cattle drive history of its own. From the big outfits on the Great Basin, up through Central and Eastern Oregon, Washington, and on into British Columbia. Prineville was a big stop for its blacksmiths and saloons, and a big spot to raise the cattle in the first place.

At the end of the nineteenth century came the first of many timber booms that would drive the economy upwards over the next hundred years. What brought my family here was less its cowboy culture and more the timber work. It was logging and sawmills that paved the roads.

I was born in 1993, amid clashes between environmentalists and logging companies, amid the bleak decline of American industry signaled by the bleak sounds of American grunge music. Throughout my childhood and teen years, problems that plagued small towns all across America came here too. Shuttered storefronts, meth cooks in the National Forest, pharmacy break-ins. A farm around the corner from my family’s was shot-up in a drive-by, the shooters looking for revenge on a guy who whipped them in a bar fight. They shot the wrong house – a neighbor’s. But that one wasn’t our fault. Those boys came from Culver.

Then, right before I left, Facebook came to town.

These days, it’s called Meta. But before any attempts at rebranding, Facebook brought a boom to surpass any timber or cattle boom before it. The Cowboy Capital of Oregon became a data center city, as Apple soon followed. Every time I visited my hometown after months away, as new Facebook and Apple buildings went up, the whole town changed around them. For the better, I might add. The jobs and money that Facebook and Apple injected into the economy helped build a new school, and my old grade school was converted into apartments. They gave cutting-edge computers and trades programs and arts money to the whole school system. My buddy Nathaniel is the drama teacher now, and got funding for a summer Shakespeare in the Park series; this is a powerful transformation from our own high school days when our local paper, The Central Oregonian, ran an editorial whose thesis statement was addressed to the youths and said Your town does not owe you entertainment, quit complaining and quit causing trouble. Thank God for folks like Nathaniel who stay around to fix things while the rest of us make like Lonnie Bannon and ditch the town for the city. All the money coming into town helped us get a new hospital built, and while I was away the hospital where I was born was converted into the new jail.

Put that in my own country song: I was born in a jailhouse.

Technically. 

Just don’t look too close at the timelines.

All this to say I’ve spent a lot of time thinking on cowboy culture in the digital age.

“We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, now we’re going to live on the internet” is an earworm of a line from Aaron Sorkin’s incredible script for The Social Network. The story of the birth of Facebook is about as far from the western genre as narrative can get. Not just aesthetically, in the sense that it’s about the rise of a techno future set in Harvard and Silicon Valley, but in the sense of narrative arcs and their role in deification. 

In a way, The Social Network and other technopreneur films such as BlackBerry and Steve Jobs depict work. Downtrodden nerds rise from their own hard work (and sociopathic tendencies) to change the world. Oppenheimer and the movie about Air Jordans work the same way. While most westerns may operate with a Shane and Magnificent Seven ethos, wherein the gunslinger saves farmers and ranchworkers who are generally bystanders, tech narratives emphasize the work itself. 

Even if that work makes for a goofy narrative: “We need an idea! …I have an idea.”

More modern-set westerns, such as Horseman, Pass By and its film adaptation Hud also take this approach. The central plot of Horseman follows a cattle ranch being struck with hoof and mouth disease that demands a culling and quarantine. The central plot of The Social Network follows a lawsuit attempting to corral a website. In both of these stories, and in our own lives outside of the media we consume, rather than the clear stakes and clean climax of high noon showdowns and saloon shoot-outs, we have to deal with a mess of building emotions and contradictory intentions.

Contradictory intentions: cowboy country living online.

Prineville’s cultural ties to cattle heritage permeate the whole county. Our high school, Crook County High, is called the Cowboys and Cowgirls, sport depending. Other regional schools feature mascots like Outlaws, Prospectors, Buckaroos, Mountaineers, and Loggers. Sports unites a community, and through its names and titles can enforce the community’s values and self-image. No matter how much money Facebook actually gives to the Crook County School District, it’s tough to imagine a team rolling out called something like the Crook County Matrix, or the Hackers, or the Pirates But In A Digital Copyright Sense Not A Seafaring Sense (the fight song would be too long!).

Country music is often, perhaps always, about loss in some form or other. You can have the wife-left-me, dog-run-off, truck-got-repoed stereotype, but it doesn’t need to be so on the nose either. Take Forrest VanTuyl’s poignant lyrics Out in the county, we called it the county / For a while there I called it home. Even if a song is written on horseback, it must be recorded, cut, and pressed in civilization. Riddy Arman’s first album is filled with the Big Sky, both its beauty and its lonesomeness, but was recorded on Portland’s hip Mississippi Avenue, beneath the tall multi-angles of modern architecture apartment buildings. 

When we went off to college, fellow Prinevillain David Roswell and I roommated together in the rainy Willamette Valley. This is where we were when Zuckerberg was brought before congress. 

Eating cereal in our underwear in the living room, Dave and I watched a bunch of old fogies try and fail to skewer the cyberman. Ted Cruz tried to press him on why more conservative posts were taken down for promoting misinformation and hate speech. The answer was obvious to us. It’s because lies and bigotry tend to skew conservative. Our own small-town conservative tendencies were melting away with the thawing spring, and our skeptical guards were up in the same way my parents would grumble when an actor in a western would ride away from the ranch on a palomino and ride up to the saloon on a paint. It may not be enough to call the whole thing off, not as egregious as mounting a horse from the right side instead of the left, but it is enough to know these people don’t know what they’re talking about.

Crazier questions followed, and the foolishness was bipartisan. “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”

“Senator, we run ads.”

Senators were essentially asking this guy how their phones worked. How were so many tech-illiterate people getting to ask one of the biggest technocrats in history the questions we’d covered in Computer Science 101? And why was it televised?

I guess it was televised because politics is largely a spectator sport, no matter what’s at stake. And really, how can it not be? In the democratic experiment of Ancient Greece, while they had drama and poetry to inform them, their media wasn’t a constant swirl of dopamine being leveraged by everyone from mega-corporate advertisers to niche micro-press novelists hoping to sell a single book that day. Today, we are surrounded by music and movies at nearly every waking moment.

No wonder so many people want to go country.

Psychologically, we were all once cowboys on the quiet plains; now, in our distracted lives, it often feels like the city’s sprung up all around us. And somehow we’ve transformed from the rider to the horse.

A few years later, I moved to Dallas, Texas. The place where Charley Crockett first blew up. I didn’t move for Charley, but his presence on the big wallside mural in Deep Ellum was encouraging. Here I met the woman who would become my wife, and while here I produced a radioplay and a compilation album and published my first one-act, short story, and novel, in that order. At one point I had genuinely dreamt of “making it big,” and had done approximately nothing to achieve that goal. Now I was just making art that I felt like making for whoever vibed on my wavelength. Country kids gone city, mostly. I think a lot of the people I talk about in this book are the same way. Which is encouraging because they’re a lot better at it than me. Whatever we’re selling our goods for, at least we’re free when we’re making it.

As anyone who has experienced it can tell you, Kris was right – Freedom ain’t worth nothing, but it’s free.

Well, free don’t make much money.

Neither do cowboys, of course.

Burke De Boer is an Oregon-grown, Texas-based writer and viticulturist. You can read his work at Cowboy Jamboree, Feign, and elsewhere, and you can drink his work at Local Customs and Terry Black’s BBQ. This essay is part of his recent book, Songs of the Cyberspace Cattle Drive.