<Lee Siegel>

Excerpted from Against the Machine (pp. 125–37).

LEE SIEGEL is The Daily Beast’s senior columnist. He publishes widely on culture and politics and is the author of three books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination (2006), Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television (2007), and, most recently, Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and Commerce—And Why It Matters (2008). In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.

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. In this topsy-turvy galaxy, no person, fact, or event is beyond your grasp.

Web 2.0 is what the Internet calls its philosophy of interactivity. It applies to any online experience that allows the user to help create, edit, or revise the content of a website, interact with other users, share pictures, music, and so on. Amazon.com is a product of 2.0 technology because it allows visitors to write their own reviews of books that Amazon offers for sale, and to sell their own used books as well. eBay is 2.0-based because buyers and sellers interact with each other. Web 2.0 rules the social-networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster, and also the blogosphere, whose essence is the online exchange of opinions, ideas—and spleen.

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. While the liberal blogosphere thundered with cries of hypocrisy about Bush’s claim that he was bringing democracy to Iraq, no one bothered to peek behind the Internet’s use of the word “democracy” to see if that was indeed what the Internet was bringing to America.

Here is Lawrence Lessig, the foremost advocate of Internet freedom in the realm of copyright law, on the Internet’s capacity for “capturing and sharing” content—in other words, for offering full participation in the culture:

You could send an e-mail telling someone about a joke you saw on Comedy Central, or you could send the clip. You could write an essay about the inconsistencies in the arguments of the politician you most love to hate, or you could make a short film that puts statement against statement. You could write a poem that expresses your love, or you could weave together a string—a mash-up—of songs from your favorite artists in a collage and make it available on the Net . . . This “capturing and sharing” promises a world of extraordinarily diverse creativity that can be easily and broadly shared. And as that creativity is applied to democracy, it will enable a broad range of citizens to use technology to express and criticize and contribute to the culture all around.

Before you try to figure out what Lessig is saying, you have to get through the Internetese, this new, strangely robotic, automatic-pilot style of writing: “A poem that expresses your love” . . . for what? How do you “express . . . the culture all around”? As usual, the Internet’s supreme self-confidence results in lazy tautology: “This ‘capturing and sharing’ . . . can be easily and broadly shared.” And never mind that elsewhere, in the same book—Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity—Lessig defines democracy, strangely, as “control through reasoned discourse,” which would seem to disqualify Comedy Central from being considered one of the pillars of American democracy.

More telling is Lessig’s idea of “democracy,” a word that in the American context means government by the people through freely elected representatives. Lessig seems to think it means “creativity,” or, as they like to say on the Internet, “self-expression.” But even tyrants allow their subjects to write love poems or exchange favorite recordings. The Roman emperor Augustus cherished Ovid for the latter’s love poetry—until Ovid’s romantic dallying came too close to the emperor’s own interests. And only tyrants forbid their subjects to make political criticisms—loving to hate a politician in public is hardly an expansion of democracy. It’s the result of democracy. Lessig has confused what makes democracy possible—certain political, not cultural, mechanisms—with what democracy makes possible: free “expression.”

Lessig isn’t the only one singing 2.0’s praises who seems confused about fundamental terms. Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, is maybe the most voluble booster of the “citizen journalism” that he believes fulfills the blogosphere’s social promise.

Rosen has started a blog-based initiative called Assignment Zero, in which anyone, journalist or not, can file an “investigative” news article. Rosen called this “crowdsourcing” in an interview with The New York Times’s David Carr, who reported the story without expressing the slightest skepticism and without presenting an opposing view to Rosen’s. And there is an opposing point of view. In the world of Assignment Zero, if you are someone working for a politician with an ax to grind, you could use Assignment Zero to expose a pesky journalist. Or you could just go on the blog to take down someone who has rubbed you the wrong way. No institutional layers of scrutiny, such as exist at newspapers, would be there to obstruct you.

Yet Rosen celebrates the 2.0-based blogosphere for what he portrays as its anticommercial gifts to democracy.

We’re closer to a vision of “producer democracy” than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform. We won’t know what a producer public looks like from looking at the patterns of the media age, in which broadcasting and its oneto-many economy prevailed.

But we do know what a “producer public” will look like. Alvin Toffler described it thirty years ago. It will look like a totalized “consumerist” society, where everyone’s spare moment is on the market and where journalists in the blogosphere will have their every word quantified and evaluated by vigilant advertisers. Where “producers” are simply consumers made more dependent on the marketplace by the illusion of greater participation in the marketplace. On the blog Assignment Zero, the public pays for the stories it wants to see reported. Rosen hasn’t escaped the constrictions of commerce. He’s made them tighter.

Lessig and Rosen are true believers in the Internet, people who have staked their professional (and economic) futures on its untrammeled success. It’s in their interest to confuse American democracy’s meaning with what American democracy means to them. Time magazine, on the other hand, has no stake in the triumph of the Internet.

Yet like every other “old” media news organization, Time is so frightened by the Internet boosters’ claims of “old” media’s impending irrelevance that for its “Person of the Year” in 2006, it put a picture of a computer screen on the magazine’s cover with the single word “You.” Then it went on to celebrate Web 2.0 as “the new digital democracy”:

It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.... Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.... We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Yes, seriously, who has the time, energy, and passion to make a movie about his pet iguana and broadcast it over the Internet? Who has reached that level of commitment to democracy? Who has the time, energy, and passion to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals, to blog about his state of mind or the state of the nation or steak-frites? Time’s encomium to a brave new world reads like a forced confession’s rote absurdity.

About one thing, however, Time was right. All this so-called play was not play at all. Everyone was getting “backhauled”—whatever that means—into the “global intellectual economy,” though by “intellectual” Time meant nonmaterial, mental. Deliberately or not, Time was adding its voice to the general gulling of Internet boosterism and giving a helpful push to the facile shift of culture to commerce.

Tim O’Reilly is more explicit about this commercial democracy, if not all that comprehensible. O’Reilly is the head of an Internet company called O’Reilly Media, and he is generally considered the originator of 2.0. To begin with, O’Reilly has a somewhat different view of the blogosphere from Rosen:

The blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.

“It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought.” If your toaster could write a sentence, it would write one just like that. O’Reilly goes on:

First, because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results. Second, because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers magnifies their visibility and power . . . like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter . . . much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value.

PageRank is Google’s algorithm—its mathematical formula—for ranking search results. This is another contribution, according to its touters, to access to information, and therefore yet another boon to “democracy.” PageRank keeps track of websites that are the most linked to—that are the most popular. It is, in fact, the gold standard of popularity in Web culture. What O’Reilly is saying, in plain English, is that the more people blog, and the more blogs link to each other, the more highly ranked the most popular blogs will be. When O’Reilly writes in his appliance-like manner that “the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value,” he simply means that where the most bloggers go, people who are interested in general trends—businessmen and marketing experts, for instance—will follow. “Value” in O’Reilly’s sense is synonymous with popularity.

In this strange, new upside-down world, words like “democracy” and “freedom” have lost their meaning. They serve only to repel criticism of what they have come to mean, even when that criticism is made in the name of democracy and freedom.

>>> through the looking glass

What would you have said if I had 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 millions of people? Anonymously. And with impunity.

How would you have reacted if I had said that more drastic social and cultural changes were afoot? To wit: Powerful and seasoned newspaper editors cowering at the feet of two obscure and unaccomplished twentysomethings, terrified that this unassuming pair might call them “douchebags” in a new gossip sheet called Gawker. An obscure paralegal in Sacramento, California, who often makes glaring grammatical mistakes on his blog, becoming one of the most feared people in American literary life, on account of his ability to deride and insult literary figures. 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. Writers distributing their thoughts to great numbers of people without bothering to care about the truth or accuracy of what they were writing; writers who could go back and change what they wrote if they were challenged—or even delete it, so that no record of their having written it would exist.

You would have laughed at me, I’m sure. Maybe you would have thought that I was purposefully and ludicrously evoking Stalin, who 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. You might have said, What point are you trying to make by saying that our American democracy is moving toward a type of Stalinism? How trite, to compare American democracy to its longtime nemesis using crude inversions. Are you some sort of throwback to the anti-American New Left?

And what if I had, to your great irritation, persisted and told you that anyone who tried to criticize one or another aspect of this situation would immediately be accused of being antidemocratic, elitist, threatened by change, and pathetically behind the times? If I had told you that in fact, because of these risks, few people ever did offer any criticism? The gospel of popularity had reached such an extent in this upside-down world that everyone, even powerful, distinguished people, cringed at the prospect of being publicly disliked.

What I’ve 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. And yet these drastic transformations are difficult to perceive and make sense of. The Internet is a parallel universe that rarely intersects with other spheres of life outside its defensive parameters.

Here is John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired magazine, in his book, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. Like Toffler and Gladwell, Battelle is all for bringing leisure time into the marketplace:

On the Internet, it can be argued, all intent is commercial in one way or another, for your very attention is valuable to someone, even if you’re simply researching your grandmother’s genealogy, or reading up on a rare species of dolphin. Chances are you’ll see plenty of advertisements along the way, and those links are the gold from which search companies spin their fabled profits.

Battelle wants to press home the importance of multiple searches to advertisers. He uses the following quotation to make his point:

Thorstein Veblen, the early-twentieth-century thinker who coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” once quipped, “The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before” . . . In fact, Pew research shows that the average number of searches per visit to an engine [that is, a search engine, like Google] is nearly five . . . This copious diversity drives not only the complexity of the search itself, but also the robustness of the advertising model that supports it.

But Veblen was talking about the humanistic value of research, not the commercial value of a “search”! He was saying that the world was ultimately mysterious and unfathomable, and that therefore the quest for knowledge had no terminus—that the disinterested, endless quest for knowledge was an end in itself. Battelle can only understand Veblen in the context of commerce and the Web.

Which context is often so unreal, yet so confident in its unreality, that it has the very real effect of making any criticism of it seem absurd.

That’s what Alice Mathias, a senior at Dartmouth College, discovered. On a blog in the New York Times called “The Graduates: Eight College Seniors Face the Future,” Mathias contributed a dry, witty, yet openhearted column titled “Love in the Digital Age.” She concluded it like this:

For example, Dartmouth students have recently had to deal with the construction of the website boredatbaker.com (which has cousins at the other Ivies, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and Stanford). Intended as a community tool, this website has mutated into a forum for the anonymous publication of very personal attacks on students who must try their best not to be emotionally affected when people publicly question their sexuality, comment on their appearance and speculate about their value as humans.

In anonymous Internet attacks, people can say things they would never mention aloud while looking their target in the eye. No one need take any personal responsibility. The victims of these unfortunate manifestations of free speech must suspend their emotions and try to trust that people around them (including love interests) aren’t the ones who are writing or consuming this stuff. The safest thing to do in our boredatbaker-shadowed community is to be emotionally isolated from everyone until graduation brings escape.

College students used to be the active arm of society’s conscience. The ones, like Mathias, with the most sensitive consciences often protested war, racial bias, inequitable social policies. If an instance of corruption or injustice occurred in the town or city where they went to school, they often took to the streets to demonstrate or to march with the local townspeople or to stand on a picket line. Or maybe they just edited a mordantly honest literary magazine. Now they tremble helplessly before the Internet’s Alice-in-Wonderland, truth-eliding, boundary-busting juggernaut.

What can they do? The language of protest college students once used—democracy, freedom, power to the people, revolution—has been taken over by the very forces that are invading and bruising their inner lives. The people who run boredatbaker.com would no doubt respond to criticism of their anonymous character assassinations by echoing Lawrence Lessig, Jay Rosen, and others and crying “free speech” and “democracy” and “don’t fight the future.” Graduation probably won’t bring escape, either. At Gawker.com, a Manhattan-based website that makes random attacks on media figures, a site run by people you’ve never heard of—who might just as well be anonymous—you even have the opportunity to buy the official Gawker T-shirt, which has the word “Douché,” referring to a favorite Gawker insult, printed on the front. Incredibly, the high school stigma of unpopularity has become so great that the accomplished adults of the New York media world live in fear of this adolescent silliness.

In this upside-down new world, student rebellion would have the appearance of reactionary resentment. But then, in this new upside-down world, politically active students appear in long threads on political blogs as “hits” rather than as real bodies protesting in the streets.