[tt] NYTDBR: Lee Siegel: Against the Machine

[Premise Checker]

Lee Siegel: Against the Machine
New York Times Daily Book Review, 8.1.17
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/books/17masl.html

Books of The Times
Spinning Out Into the Pileup on the Information Superhighway
By JANET MASLIN

AGAINST THE MACHINE
Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
By Lee Siegel
182 pages. Spiegel & Grau. $22.95.

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. And it announces exactly
what's wrong with this picture.