Lee Siegel - Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

CONTENTS

For Julian

Introduction

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT the way the Internet is reshaping our thoughts about ourselves, other people, and the world around us. Its also about the way the Internet itself has grown out of changes in society and culture. I had been wanting to write it for years, yet the books origins dont lie in the Internet. They lie in a belief that, for better or worse, has guided my life as a writer, and especially as a cultural critic. Things dont have to be the way they are.

Consider the automobile, like the Internet one of the more marvelous inventions of humankind. By the early 1960s, however, fifty thousand people were dying in car accidents every year. Among other reasons for the high rate of fatalities, transmissions were hard to operate, the use of chrome and other brightly reflective materials inside the cars made it hard for drivers to see, and there were no protective restraints to keep passengers from being hurled through the windshield in a crash. Yet the public didnt complain. The rhetoric surrounding the automobile had made it impervious to skepticism. Cars were not just a marvel of convenience, people were told, they were a miracle of social and personal transformation.

Advertising identified the cars power and mobility with the promise of American life itself. The cars speed made any criticism seem fuddy-duddy and reactionary. So did the fact that changing automobile styles functioned as the visual embodiment of a particular year. The make of your car was the very definition of your social relevance as its owner. Cars moved so fast and their styles changed so fast that they acquired the illusion of an eternal condition, like the revolving of the seasons.

Such an illusion gave auto manufacturers a pretext for their neglect. They could hide their cost-conscious refusal to make cars safer behind their claim that nothing could be donethe trade-off in human life was inevitable and inexorable. That was the nature of cars. Whats more, cars empowered the individual to an unprecedented degree. The increasingly affordable automobile seemed like the ultimate proof and fulfillment of democracy. If people were dying on the road in greater numbers, it was because greater numbers of people were enjoying the freedom, choice, and access provided by the new machines roaring along the open road. Criticize the car and you were criticizing democracy. Anyway, thats just the way things were.

Until 1965. That was the year Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, his classic expos of the automobile industrys criminal neglect. The public was horrified. It seemed that auto industry executives had known all along what the problems were. Engineers had pressed them to make changes that would have saved tens of thousands of lives, but the bosses silenced the criticism for the sake of cutting costs and protecting the shareholders and their own jobs.

Not only was the public horrified; it was shocked. What it had accepted as an inevitable condition turned out to be wholly arbitrary. Things should have been very different from the way they were. And gradually, by means of public pressure, the permanent condition of the necessarily dangerous car did yield to the new condition of a safety-conscious auto industry. People stopped dying on the road in staggering numbers. Things changed.

Heaven knows, Im not comparing the Internet to a hurtling death trap. But the Internet has its destructive side just as the automobile does, and both technologies entered the world behind a curtain of triumphalism hiding their dangers from critical view. Like the car, the Internet has been made out to be a miracle of social and personal transformation when it is really a marvel of convenienceand in the case of the Internet, a marvel of convenience that has caused a social and personal upheaval. As with the car, the highly arbitrary way in which the Internet has evolved has been portrayed as inevitable and inexorable. As with the car, criticism of the Internets shortcomings, risks, and perils has been silenced, or ignored, or stigmatized as an expression of those two great American taboos, negativity and fear of change. As with the car, a rhetoric of freedom, democracy, choice, and access has covered up the greed and blind self-interest that lie behind what much of the Internet has developed into today.

Now, you would have to be a fool to refuse to acknowledge that the Internet is a marvel of convenience. Google, Amazon, and Nexis saved me months of research and title hunting while writing this book. Recently, the Internet enabled my family and me to find an apartment in perhaps one-fourth the time it would have taken in pre-Internet days. Without some trustworthy medical Web sites, my wife and I would have spent countless more nights worrying over our infant son during the first weeks of his life. Without e-mail, it might even have taken me longer to meet my wife, or to have a career as a writer! I sometimes speak haltingly, and shyly. E-mail made it possible for me to pursue work and love in the medium in which I, as a writer, feel most comfortable.

No one can deny the Internets capacity to make life easier, smoother, and more pleasant. But lets be honest. I would have installed myself at the library and made the rounds of used-book stores, and eventually written this book without the Internet. My family and I would have found an apartment. A few extra trips to the doctor would have spared us anxiety about our little boy. Work and love would not have eluded me even if I had had to rely on the spoken rather than the written word. Without the Internet, all these things would have been accomplished, or they would have ironed themselves out. The Internet made one big difference. Everything worked itself out more quickly and efficiently. More conveniently.

Convenience is an essential part of what most contemporary commercial propositions promise to bring us. Yet commerce and convenience exist not for their own sake, but to make life more meaningful outside the arena of commerce. No ones epitaph ever read: Here Lies Mr. Cavanaugh, Who Led a Convenient Life, and Made Life Convenient for Others. And yet in the name of convenience, the Internet has been declared a revolution on a par with the invention of the printing press.

The Internet, however, is completely unlike the printing press. Spreading knowledge through books has nothing to do with buying books online. Spreading knowledge to people who lack it has nothing to do with the Internets more rapid dispersal of information that is already available. And giving everyone a voice, as the Internet boosters boast of having done, is not only very different from enabling the most creative, intelligent, or original voices to be heard. It can also be a way to keep the most creative, intelligent, and original voices from being heard.