When 'WELLs' Run Dry...

…we’ll have nothing left to drink. Profitable "connections" will be no more and we will have nothing left of ourseflves to package and sell. We will have lost our appreciation for human spirit and the pleasantry of taking a stroll in a park, or having a drink at a bar with a friend. But we will have our MySpace friends and mash-ups.

The internet is a marvelous, powerful invention and tool that humankind can and does benefit from. Siegel doesn’t disagree. In an interview with Jon Stewart last month, he clarified that Against the Machine is not so much an attack on the internet as it is the commercial forces that have moved the internet in a direction away from what it could be. It is a critique of authors, theorists, and bloggers (eek, to tout bloggers with such esteem) who constantly defend the internet using only internet based jargon and who manipulate and misuse the ideologies of great philosophers to fit their defense.

Siegel constructs his argument with bricks of research that seem to include every book and blog he has read (granted, he believes blogs aren’t read and that the words are “watched” onscreen), every website he has visited, Youtube video he has watched, all the culture he has encountered, and media that he has consumed in his lifetime. But the framework of his argument, that is, a yearning for human nature to coexist with technology, is more impressive than the masonry of his research. A critic with values as rigid as Siegel’s seems rare in our day and age of digital-democracy that runs on misconstrued rhetoric and erodes the leisure of human spirit and true originality.

The core argument, which defends what it means to be human in the information age, rests on the notion that “the internet creates a vast illusion that the physical, social, world of interacting minds and hearts does not exist” (17). The book begins with a hypothetical trip to a Starbucks that is devoid of the nuances of human nature that café’s once had, that society and communities thrived on for so many years. Everyone around him is “bent into their screens and toward their self-interest” (16). Throughout the book, Spiegel makes quips about himself for seeming prehistoric, but only because he knows how progressive a thinker he actually is and how willingly many of his critics will look past this fact. Regardless, at the books end, Siegel recounts that “a real social situation, even when people are not talking to one another, is full of faces and objects caught sight of, gestures seen, sounds heard that keep communication going” (172). On the internet, identities are lost (some stolen!) and formed at the expense of true personality. I don’t think we need to fear the end of interpersonal communication, but if we do not pay mind to Siegel’s ideals and we continue to “breath life into the ghosts” in the machines in front of us, it won’t be long before we all turn without question to our computers for console, when all we really might need is a pat on the back.

After denouncing Stewart Brand’s idea of the WELL (a fluid boundary between public and private), Alvin Toffler’s “crude and simplistic” definition of the modern economy (prosumerisim), and the stock that the internet has invested in the “producing as we consume” mentality, Spiegel criticizes Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of the “Connector.” Spiegel acknowledges that “connectors” are legitimate and successful in winning audiences and selling ideas, attitudes and products, but brings to light the “malleable and servile” nature of such a person or institution, which would “bend without principle to satisfy the interests of the powerfully placed” (94). Too much faith is stored in morally lacking connectors, but I guess that is just one of the burdens of capitalism. In the viewpoint of many of the thinkers Siegel discredits, “human existence is wholly driven by commercial concerns…life is divided into manipulating winners and manipulatable losers” (95). This furthers the dehumanizing spirit of not the internet, but the individuals who cause the internet to flourish. Spiegel’s belief is not naive, but it is unique; few who are willing to recognize this flaw of consumerist nature also keep the faith that this should and can change. Siegel does, and with this book he attempts to start the dialogue.

Of all things, I will conclude with a quote from the aptly named Anton Ego of the Oscar winning animated film Ratatouille: “There are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.” Sorry, Mr. Ego, but it would seem here that the contrary holds true as well. By warning us against the maladies of a grand technology, Siegel is defending something new of his own –a movement toward human nature and technology co-existing in a way in which neither is exploited.