The Long Rant

“What sane person wants a culture in which the border between truthfulness and lying is constantly being eroded?” Lee Siegel, Against the Machine

Lee Siegel is angry, and he’s out to discredit and debunk just about anything related to the source of that anger: the Internet. His recent extended diatribe, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, examines with great breadth and some depth how the Internet is adversely (and sometimes perversely) affecting individuals, culture, and contemporary society. Yes, the Internet is causing a revolution but just what kind of a revolution is it really? His fundamental question is this: What does it mean to be human in the Internet Age? It’s a question many of us have forgotten to ask recently.

To be sure, the last ten or twelve years have brought significant and rapid changes. But Siegel digs back far deeper into the technological, intellectual, and social developments over the last century—from Freud through the Culture of Narcissism and the Me Generation. Over this period of time, individuals became increasingly more inwardly directed, more isolated, and more focused on gratifying their own desires. The Internet provides, Siegel says, the perfect social environment to nurture this condition. Lives are hectic, fragmentary, disconnected. People have become lonely, self-absorbed, asocial. (We do wonder though: didn’t the Internet also create—and enable—this  behavior as well?)

Performing, Not Living, a Life 

Internet culture is defined by “prosumers,” that is, consumers who also produce their own media form and content. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, all these so-called social websites are merely the quintessential examples of a culture that promotes full viewer participation. In effect, it is a culture that encourages people to perform their lives rather than live them. “User-generated content” is really just the latest form of self-expression, says Siegel. And he is quick to point out that self-expression differs dramatically from creativity. It is not art, it is not innovation.  It’s simply self-indulgence and it produces only mildly amusing novelties at best.

The Cult of Popularity

Popularity, particularly the kind of popularly valued in peer-dominated adolescence, dominates the current culture. It’s that simple pre-adult desire to be liked and admired. Using examples as varied as American Idol, The Tipping Point, and Google, Siegel argues that to be popular means you are and act according to whatever everybody else likes. The Internet in this sense encourages everyone to become like everyone else. It rewards the derivative, the unoriginal. “You remember high school,” Siegel says. “Everybody wanted to be liked by everybody else.” Internet culture relentlessly focuses on the youth market and panders to a specific personality type: the high-schooler who wants to be popular with everyone. “The prerequisite for popularity on the Web is a willingness to use whatever is the most effective means of conformity to gravitate toward—or attract—the largest share of the market.” The result of mass self-expression is a pile of personal ads, trivial graphics, inane videos, and extraordinarily ordinary text. Life with the electronic mob turns out to be profoundly inauthentic, often ugly, gleefully immature, too-often obscene, and always, always commercial.

Try a Little Common Sense
What’s Siegel’s antidote for the prevalent unthinking acceptance and “irrational boosterism” of the Internet? It’s a combination of asking the hard questions and appealing to common sense. What kind of values does this Internet foster? What kinds of behaviours? What effect is this technologically induced solitude having on us? Siegel ponders: ‘We shop, play, work, love, search for information, seek to communicate with each other and sometimes with the world online. We spend more time alone than ever before. Yet people are not arguing about the effects of this startling new condition.”

Siegel examines the lack of judgment among utopian technophiles, who babble on about a future where what is true and what is false is not only unclear but celebrated that its very lack of clarity. One critic predicts that, as entertainment technology becomes dominant, the current distinction between human and digital actors will disappear as the distinction between what’s real and what’s simulated blurs. Siegel quite rightly responds: ”What sane person wants a culture in which the border between truthfulness and lying is constantly being eroded?” Good question that.

Surreality 2.0

Enthusiasts for the Internet often proclaim that it enables democracy and freedom, but Siegel argues that the very opposite is true. The Internet as it exists seems to be an open forum where anyone and everyone can express themselves regardless of whether they have the skills to do so or actually have anything original to say:

“What would you have said if I told you, ten years ago, that there would soon come a time when anyone with something to say, no matter how vulgar, abusive, or even slanderous, would be able to transmit it in print to million of people? Anonymously. And with impunity. . . . High-school kids called “administrators” editing entries in a public encyclopedia, entries that anyone, using an alias, could change to read in any way he or she wanted. . . . What I have been describing is the surreal world of Web 2.0, where the rhetoric of democracy, freedom , and access is often a fig leaf for antidemocratic and coercive rhetoric; where commercial ambitions dress up in the sheep’s clothing of humanistic values; and where ironically technology has turned back the clock from disinterested enjoyment of high and popular art to a primitive culture of crude, grasping self-interest.”

This Siegel sees is the triumph of the electronic mob.

Against the Machine is one long rant, but it an intelligent rant and a human one in the bargain, peppered with a good deal of insight and old-fashioned good sense. Apropos Wikipedia, Siegel rails: “A reader might well ask what the point is of an encyclopedia in which meaning and value are constantly shifting, being challenged, disproved, or exposed as the fraudulent product of ulterior motives.” We would hope that there are more and more readers who start asking this and similar questions in the future. The Internet is here to stay, says Siegel, but it doesn’t have to always be the way it is right now. Perhaps not, but it would be wise to remember the words of Friedrich Schiller, “Against stupidity, even the gods themselves contend in vain.”

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More information . . .

Joseph Weizenbaum believed attributing inevitability to technological and social changes was not just irresponsible but morally wrong. See a review of his Computer Power and Human Rationality.

Review by Louis Bayard in Salon.com

Interview with Lee Siegel

Buy Against the Machine at Amazon