In “Against the Machine,” the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic Lee Siegel pays a visit to Starbucks.
He sits down.
He looks around. And he finds himself surrounded by
Internet zombies, laptop-addicted creatures who have so grievously lost
their capacity for human interaction “that social space has been
contracted into isolated points of wanting, all locked into separate
phases of inwardness.” How long until they wake up and smell the coffee?Mr. Siegel’s field trip illustrates several things, not least that
Starbucks is today’s most hackneyed reportorial setting. His outing
captures a vision of connectivity that is the precise opposite of what
it appears to be. For him the semblance of a shared Starbucks
experience masks endemic computer-generated isolation, a condition that
has prompted psychic and ethical breakdowns that go well beyond the
collapse of community. Though Mr. Siegel is hardly the first
observer to deem this a sinister side of Internet culture, he turns out
to be an impressively tough, cogent and furious one. His diatribe would
bring to mind the prescient haranguing style of Pauline Kael,
even if Mr. Siegel, who does not treat his own reputation lightly, were
not trumpeting the phrase “Pauline Kael of the Internet” himself. In
any case, Mr. Siegel has done something in which Ms. Kael once
specialized: nailing an inchoate malaise that we already experience but
cannot easily explain. He asks, in brief, why we are living so gullibly
through what would have been the plot of a science-fiction movie 15
years ago. Why does the freedom promised by the Internet feel so
regimented and constricting? Why do its forms of democracy have their
totalitarian side? What happens to popular culture when its sole
emphasis is on popularity? How have we gone “from ‘I love that thing he
does!’ to ‘Look at all those page views!’ in just a few years”? Mr.
Siegel links all these questions to a fundamental assumption about the
Internet, one that has been widely posited by other analysts: that it
is a liberating entity, one that generates endless opportunities for
creative endeavor. He is quick to insist that most of those
opportunities boil down to business matters, and that “the Internet’s
vision of ‘consumers’ as ‘producers’ has turned inner life into an
advanced type of commodity.” At the risk of harping heavily on this
central point, Mr. Siegel provides example after example of how
surreptitiously this process of co-option works. He shows, for
instance, how the fan of a television show can be led to a Web site
where the show can be approached in a supposedly interactive fashion.
“ ‘Which character are you most like?’ ” he asks, citing a question
posed about “Grey’s Anatomy.” And parenthetically: “(You’ll also have
to read an ad for a vaccine against genital warts. Ask your doctor if
it’s right for you.)”The price of such diversions is, in Mr.
Siegel’s succinct appraisal, devastating. It turns our passive,
private, spontaneous appreciation of popular culture into something
active, public and market-driven. It leads us to confuse
self-expression (which is, of course, all about us) with art (which
more generously “speaks to us even though it doesn’t know we’re
there”). It has created what Mr. Siegel calls the first true mass
culture, though he cites critics who in 1957 worried about how culture
could be degraded by the masses. Culture for the masses, he says, was a
worry of the past. Culture by the masses is what is being born in the present and will shape the future.Peppering
his argument with potshots at writers (among them Mark Dery and Malcolm
Gladwell) who view any of these developments enthusiastically, Mr.
Siegel both defines and decries an array of current misconceptions. We
are being persuaded that
information and knowledge are interchangeable,
he claims, when they are not; we would have citizen heart surgeons if
information were all that mattered. And mainstream news outlets, which
Mr. Siegel is otherwise delighted to assail (his love-hate relationship
with The New York Times is particularly intense), suddenly look
worthwhile to him by virtue of their real, earned authority. Better the
old press than the new tyranny of bloggers. Their self-interest, he
says, makes them more mainstream than any standard news source could
possibly be.The vindictiveness and disproportionate influence of
the blogosphere is a particularly sore subject. Who is it that “rewrote
history, made anonymous accusations, hired and elevated hacks and
phonies, ruined reputations at will, and airbrushed suddenly unwanted
associates out of documents and photographs”? Mr. Siegel’s immediate
answer is Stalin. But he alleges that the new power players of the
blogosphere have appropriated similar powers. Mr. Siegel
himself became a great big blog-attack casualty when, in what he
wishfully calls “my rollicking misadventure in the online world,” he
was caught pseudonymously praising himself on the Web site of The New
Republic, where he had been a particularly savage and reckless blogger.
One of the improbable virtues of “Against the Machine” is that it
presents a rigorously sane, fair and illuminating incarnation of its
more often hotheaded author.But Mr. Siegel is still Mr. Siegel,
which is to say that he isn’t shy. So the reader can learn more about
him than the reader might want to know. His example of how the Web
finds the banal in the formerly forbidden? Masochism.com His avatar in the spooky online game Second Life? Delbert, a guy in a red fedora. His example of an eBay experience? Sit back with him and shop for a watch, or graze at match.com . “I take a sip of coffee and consider,” he writes. “Various options are before me.” At
moments like this “Against the Machine” is dangerously close to
revisiting that lazy, figurative Starbucks. But far more often it
brings dead-on accuracy to depicting the quietly insinuating ways in
which the Internet can blow your mind.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.