Against the Machine by Lee Siegel - Excerpts

Against the machine: Being human in the age of the electronic mob.
Siegel, Lee. 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0385522656

EXCERPTS

Convenience is an essential part of what most contemporary commercial propositions promise to bring us.

But a revolution in convenience cannot possibly be … anything that can be called a revolution. And yet the Internet has indeed caused a revolution. It’s just that the prophets of the Internet don’t ever want to talk about what type of revolution it is.

Satisfying our own desires has become more important than balancing our relationships with other people.

We live more in our own heads than any society has at any time, and for some people now the only reality that exists is the one inside their heads.

The Internet is the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolated, elevated, asocial individual.

Technology is a catalyst for bringing forth some human traits and suppressing others.

Ten years ago, the space in a coffeehouse abounded in experience. Now that social space has been contracted into isolated points of wanting, all locked into separate phases of inwardness.

What kind of idea do we have of the world when, day after day, we sit in front of our screens and enter further and further into the illusion that we ourselves are actually creating our own external reality out of our own internal desires?

Today’s New Entrepreneur represents an all-out assault on the idea that a person can exist outside the sphere of the marketplace.

People don’t want their privacy invaded. They now want other people, as many people as possible, to watch them as they carefully craft their privacy into a marketable, public style. Real private life has gone underground; it is a type of contraband.

… people have now come to expect inner life to be performed, rather than disclosed.

But self-expression is not the same thing as imagination.

What “self-expression” does not mean is the making of art – of any kind of art, popular or high. You would not refer to The Catcher in the Rye as a major feat of self-expression …

The comparison of art to self-expression would make no sense if the latter had not entirely supplanted the former in the lives of self-expression’s vast number of producers and consumers.

Like the novice performers on American Idol, every one of those videobloggers is performing some piece of popular culture; you recognize the shticks of a hundred comedians you’ve seen on television …

Let’s accept [Alvin] Toffler’s crude and simplistic definition of what is still the modern economy: an arrangement in which life is divided into producing – that is, earning a living – and buying what other people produce or provide. Though Toffler doesn’t say so, in the activity of buying we also find our leisure time. We do so by purchasing a product or a service and then, once the transaction is finished, by withdrawing into our private space to enjoy it. For Toffler, however, a social space in which nothing economic takes place is a terrible waste. It is a kind of sin.

In Toffler’s vision of the future, countless activities that were once disinterested and private, or simply leisurely, are converted into one type of transaction or another. Indeed, no private or leisure time exists. Every private thought is performed for public consumption, and every leisure moment (from toilet training to lovemaking) is a highly focused search for a specific gratification, guided by experts serving you in their field. No unexpected events or unanticipated human contact need apply.

[Pierre] Omidyar’s eBay directly took its cue from Toffler’s “prosumer” – it has hyperefficiently perfected the art of having people cram its products down their own throats, and all in the transvaluing name of “democracy” and “libertarianism”.

No matter how different the Web sites are that you visit, the experience of being on them is similar.

… on Match.com, she and I are learning to perform ourselves, and package ourselves, and sell ourselves to each other. We sound like everyone else, and like everything else.

… if you are the “seller” – a funny irony takes place. Amid all these infinite-seeming choices, the only way to stand out and be chosen is, paradoxically, to sound more and more like everyone else. But you must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else.

The saddest person experience, the most outrageous sex act, the most blatant insult, gets “produced” as a video clip or blog entry for worldwide consumption. Demassification is a more advanced means of allowing mass culture to reach down deeper into life. Product and producer get enfolded into the single individual, who then goes public in order to tout his privacy.

All the imitation and derivation stem from the fact that on the Internet, success – like choice and access – exists for its own sake. Since the greatest success is, well, being greatly successful, you choose a performance that’s already been certified as being a big success. Popularity being the best guarantee of success, you end up imitating the most proven popular act. You must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else.

When you’re an adolescent, to be like someone is often a prerequisite for being liked by that person.

Maybe he was the “class clown”, who ingratiated himself at the price of his dignity. Or the boy who vandalized or outraged in order to please. Or she was the “easy” girl. Such a person did not appeal to other people on the basis of a quality that he shared with them, a quality that was also the essence of an activity which did not belong to anyone: athletic prowess, dramatic skill, intellectual capacity. Such a person divorced popularity from identity, and from the kind of accomplishment that might boost self-esteem and strengthen identity. He transformed his very self – not his interests, talents, or skills, his self – into a product that he tailored to fit the needs of others. For this type of person, there was no such thing as other people to try to relate to. There was only an audience to try to please.

The Internet loves preadults … What could be more democratic than uttering an obscenity?

… its wild success lay mostly in the fact that [Malcolm] Gladwell was writing a guide to making yourself a prosumer. The Tipping Point is a how-to book on Homo interneticus.

The Internet’s premium on popularity as the sole criterion of success gives the lie to its claims of “choice”, “access”, and increased opportunity for individual expression.

In Gladwell’s eyes, the self is always a packaged commodity. It is a product we shape and sell through our performance of what we want other people to think is going on inside us.

Popular culture used to draw people to what they liked. Internet culture draws people to what everyone else likes.

A quirk attracts attention. Originality holds it.

Like the people on YouTube and on the social-networking sites, on the Internet dating sites, and in the blogosphere, [American] Idol’s striving singers package and perform their privacy for public consumption. What makes this show, this enemy of originality, so original is that the private and the public are literally fused and exposed before your very eyes. In the race for popularity – that is, fame without accomplishment – the self is left behind. They just want to be liked. They just want to be big.

The rise of reality TV, which celebrates physical and psychological imperfection, is a revolt against the oppressiveness of other people’s fame – a rebellion against the oppressive authority of those glamorous, unattainable “screen icons”. An even more explicit uprising against glamorous authority is the celebration of mediocre, merely derivative talent on the anti-original Idol. Fame is now a “virus” that “infects” the masses by means of its “contagiousness”. Popularity has bullied fame out of its perch.

If he were starting out today, the photographer Robert Frank, for example, would not be traveling across America, snapping pictures of ordinary life. He would be orchestrating his photographs to look like stories about American life, artificially real stories that we had to mentally project ourselves into in order to complete.

Rhythm is music’s first person, as the close-up is film’s.

Commercial culture … is all about the gratification of your self-interest, and it involves the total engagement of your ego.

“Web 2.0” is the Internet’s characteristically mechanistic term for the participatory culture that it has now consummated and established as a social reality.

Although Web 2.0 is the brainchild of businessmen, many of its promoters extol it with the rhetoric of “democracy”, that most sacred of American words. But democracy is also the most common and effective American political and social pretext.

… when Internet boosters speak ringingly about “the many wrestling power from the few”, as Time put it, what they usually mean is finding a different way for the same old few to bring in many new customers.

”Convenience” is also the rote answer to another fundamental question: Why does anyone not employed in the news media need a constant flow of news and information?

The Internet does indeed have achievements in the news business. It has forced the traditional news outlets to seek out more and more trivial news, in order to compete with the Internet. And it has engorged the “old” media with streams of useless information. The latter development is yet another consequential creation of a new value that thrives behind the mask of an old one. For what this new religion of information has done is to pretend that information now has the power of knowledge. In the process, knowledge has been devalued into information.

You desire knowledge for its own sake, not for the sake of knowing what someone else knows, or for the sake of being able to pass it on to someone else. Knowledge guarantees your autonomy. Information gets you thinking like everyone else who is absorbing the same information.

… the Internet has no interest in knowledge for its own sake. It prizes information because, unlike knowledge, information has exchange value on the market.

Wikipedia, with its video-game-like mode of participation, and with its mountains of trivial factoids, of shifting mounds of gossip, of inane personal details, is knowledge in the process of becoming information. At the same time, consume participation in the creation of the news is information crumbling into particles of incoherence.

But we are living in a popularity culture, where being liked is the supreme value. Therefore, few people write critically about anything any more. Instead of criticism, the air brims with mockery and sarcasm …

[Wyatt Mason] argued that social criticism is now mostly in the hands of the comedians and that their humor was characterized by a tone which was “so sarcastic, so ironic, so sardonic.” … Perhaps Mason did not want to risk the cascade of obloquy that would have fallen on him from the popularity-driven blogosphere if he had developed an argument about, say, the similarity between the contemptuous sarcasm of sensationally popular Stephen Colbert and the contemptuous sarcasm of sensationally unpopular George W. Bush. Who could blame Mason for his caution, given the deafening clamor of mockery, taunting, and rage that is all around us? The deafening clamor of tons upon tons of information being chewed up and spat derisively out. The sound of the blogosphere.

Blogs are in the vanguard of the popularity culture. They must sound more like everyone else that anyone else is able to sound like everyone else. On any given day, the political and gossip blogs move in lockstep from one hot topic to the next. What gets attention is the most outrageous variation on what everyone is talking about. That gets the most links, and the most links get the most page views, and the most page views win the highest Google ranking. Traditional media outlets have divided the business side from the editorial side. Bloggers, who are prosumers par excellence, are in the business of selling their only product, which is themselves.

… since the blogosphere represents mass opinion galvanized by the promise of approval and recognition, it is more mainstream than the so-called mainstream media ever were.

FIVE OPEN SUPERSECRETS
1. Not everyone has something meaningful to say.
2. Few people have anything original to say.
3. Only a handful of people know how to write well.
4. Most people will do almost anything to be liked.
5. “Customers” are always right, but “people” aren’t.

Now the blogosphere’s drags on fairness, honesty, and accuracy are accepted as an immutable condition, a set of trade-offs that have to be made for the sake of democracy, anti-elitism, true dissent, and greater access to information. It follows, then that any criticism of the blogosphere is antidemocratic, elitist, protective of the status quo, and a form of censorship.

In the name of “full participation”, unbiased, rational, intelligent, and comprehensive news, news as a profession, like the practice of law or medicine – will be come less and less available. Standards will get drowned out by the mass pressure of universal access. For universal access requires that the news deliver universally appealing items. Like demagogic politicians, who appeal to appetite and emotion rather than reason, this will be the age of demagogic journalism.

Internet users generally, however, and bloggers especially inhabit an absolutely solitary space in which other people exist as stick figures filled out by the user’s or blogger’s conception of them. It is a personal space disguised as a social space. In the blogosphere, the ego operates unobstructed by other egos. That’s why virulent hatred comes so easily, and why any response to it comes as a shock, and an outrage. Stick figures are not supposed to answer back. Not when they exist mostly in our head.

You never enter the Internet as you would enter a park, or go onto the street, or browse through a bookstore. You don’t go online to just go for a walk, not knowing what you’ll find or who you’ll meet. You go online to look for something. Everyone you meet online is looking for something, too. The Internet is the most deliberate, purposeful environment ever created.

QUOTATIONS

Brady, Jim
The best thing about the Web – you have so much information about how people use it – is also the worst thing.

Gladwell, Malcolm
When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them.

Turner, Fred
[for Stewart Brand] the rhetoric of community provided the ideological cover necessary to transform a potentially stark and single-minded market transaction into a complex, multidimensional act.