Orwell described life in the year 1984 as “decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage.” A fair description of antifa locales in Portland, Oregon, or hip, artisanal Brooklyn. On the other hand, it’s also not too different than the rust belts and trailer parks from which the alt-right pours forth.
“We make the laws of nature,” the Inner Party interrogator and torturer O’Brien tells Winston. That sounds to me like both sides of the LeftRight climate change debate.
Likewise we have doubled our Thought Police forces, with one squadron apprehending visiting lecturers who fail to address college students in Newspeak and another squad circulating among Republicans in the House of Representatives arresting any notion that they can be reelected without Trumpthink.
But what is the goal, what is the objective of the LeftRight Party? Why do they oppress and overpower us? (Or, rather, why do they trick us into oppressing and overpowering ourselves?)
Orwell goes straight to the point. O’Brien tells Winston, “Power is not a means; it is an end . . . The object of power is power.”
What the LeftRight Party wants is power. And what will the LeftRight Party do to us with its power?
Again, Orwell is clear. O’Brien asks:
“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”
Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.
“Exactly. By making him suffer. Unless he is suffering, how can you know that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is inflicting pain and humiliation.”
And thus Orwell neatly summarizes our choice in the current presidential election. Will you vote for pain? Or for humiliation?
Whose Bright Idea Was It to Make Sure That Every Idiot in the World Was in Touch with Every Other Idiot?
Social media comes in for a lot of other criticism as well. The big corporations that operate social media platforms have the ethics of opioid addicts with jobs as Oxycontin pharmaceutical sales reps.
User privacy is equivalent to getting a prostate exam in the middle of Times Square on New Year’s Eve while you and your urologist ride the ball drop.
Social media turns us into easy victims of fraud and financial manipulation. (Darn it, of all the Nigerian government officials, I spam blocked the one who actually had $100 million that needed to be wired to my bank account.)
Social media is giving young people a bad case of “phone face” with a big, permanent Samsung Galaxy Note 9 pimple between their eyes. And it makes our kids into victims of bullies or perpetrators of bullying—depending on whether our kids are dorks or jerks, and in my experience every kid is both.
Social media polarizes our politics by allowing us all—no matter how wrong we are about a political issue—to find a large, enthusiastic group of people who are even wronger.
But those are the small problems with social media. There’s a bigger problem. Consider just the top six Internet social networks.
Facebook—2.3 billion users
YouTube—1.9 billion users
WhatsApp—1.5 billion users
Facebook Messenger—1.3 billion users
WeChat—1 billion users
Instagram—another billion users
Plus there are at least sixteen other social networks with more than 100 million users each. Do the math. No, don’t. Stop the math! Quit adding. With just the top six we’ve already reached a tally of 9 billion social media accounts. And there are only 7.5 billion people on the planet earth.
We’ve run out of things to talk about—1.5 billion social media posts ago.
The first broadly functional social media network, SixDegrees, wasn’t introduced until 1997. At the height of its popularity it had 3.5 million subscribers. But since then we’ve created a world where we can hear what everybody’s got to say.
Nobody’s got that much to say.
Social media is CB radio. “Breaker, breaker.” “You copy?” “I’m wall to wall and treetop tall.” “What’s your handle, good buddy?” Except it lacks the intellectual depth. “And that’s a big 10-4.”
We’re just blithering. The brilliant media theory philosopher Marshall McLuhan said in 1964, “The medium is the message.” (Or, as my mom put it long before Marshall McLuhan had been heard of, “It’s not what you say it’s how you say it.”) If the medium is blather by the billions, the message is a load of crap.
Crap and vicious crap. Crap thrown with intent.
McLuhan foresaw the World Wide Web almost thrity years before the fact. He was not sanguine about its yackety-yackety-yak. In his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan wrote:
The world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction . . . And as our senses have gone outside us . . . we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence . . . Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.
McLuhan predicted that advances in electronic media would create a “Global Village.” At the time a lot of us thought that was a swell idea. McLuhan didn’t.
In a 1977 program on Ontario TV McLuhan was interviewed by the Canadian journalist Mike McManus.
McManus: But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly.
McLuhan: The closer you get together the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any situation we’ve ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other.
In the middle of the past century there was a quaint idea that what the world needed was “communication.” If only parents and children could communicate, the Generation Gap would be bridged with a hug.
If only white folks and black folks could communicate, the struggle for civil rights and integration would end in handshakes and backslapping.
If only we had “cultural exchange” so that the ordinary people of the United States and the Soviet Union could communicate . . . Therefore an exceedingly dull publication called Soviet Life showed up in American public libraries and a sort of bowdlerized version of Life magazine, Amerika, published by the U.S. State Department, showed up—or didn’t—somewhere—or not—in the U.S.S.R. (The Cold War was not noticeably defrosted.)
All of this was nicely satirized in the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke when prison warden Strother Martin beats the (decent and freedom-loving) crap out of Paul Newman and says, “What we’ve got here is . . . failure to communicate.”
Or, as it was put more succinctly by Joan Rivers: “Can we talk?”
The hazards of talking too much are proverbial. The Oxford Dictionary of American Proverbs has fifty-two entries on the subject of “talk” and “talking.” All of them admonishments.
Big talk will not boil the pot.
Idle talk burns the porridge.
Talk is easy, work is hard.
Big talker, little doer.
Who talks the most knows the least.
People who wouldn’t think of talking with their mouths full often speak with their heads empty.
A child learns to talk in two years, but it takes him sixty years to learn to keep his mouth shut.
Money talks, but all it ever says is goodbye.
Or, as my mom also said, “Not everything that runs through your mind has to pour out your mouth.”
With social media, we’ve done something worse than create a world where we can hear what everybody says. We’ve created a world where we can hear what everybody thinks.
And that’s a scary thought. Scary enough that it’s the premise of a terrifying 2008 YA novel by Patrick Ness called The Knife of Never Letting Go. Ness describes the phenomenon, which is driving his twelve-year-old p
rotagonist mad, as an “ever present cascade of ‘Noise.’”
Hearing what’s going on in other people’s minds is also the premise of a 2000 romcom starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt, What Women Want, which is also scary—in the sense of being a frighteningly bad movie.
Mel Gibson gets a shock from his electric hair dryer. (He has a hairstyle from the year 2000.) This causes him to be able to hear what women think. They aren’t thinking good things about him. Being that it’s a romantic comedy—as opposed to something closer to real life such as a terrifying young adult novel—this makes Mel Gibson (after a lot of predictable plot) a better person.
Although not in real life. In 2006 Gibson got in trouble for an anti-Semitic outburst at a Los Angles County sheriff’s deputy who’d pulled Mel over for suspected DUI.
After we got to hear what Mel was thinking, he had to enter a substance abuse recovery program. Which should remind us that we’ve always had a way to hear what everybody thinks. It’s called booze.
Sure puts my mouth in gear. Meanwhile, what social media should be drinking is a big cup of shut up.
A Brief Historical Digression on How Communication Has Devolved
If there be e-volution, there surely is de-volution, a degradation of the species.
—sermon by Rev. Hugh S. Carpenter, 1882
They tell us that
We lost our tails
Evolving up
From little snails
I say it’s all
Just wind in sails
—Devo, 1977
The computer is a handy device. It’s terrific for looking up who played Wally Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver. But the computer is essentially meaningless to wisdom, learning, and sense.
My laptop may be a great technological improvement on my old IBM Selectric. (Wally was played by Tony Dow—I just Googled it.) But there is no historical indication that technological improvements in the way we inscribe our ideas lead to improvement in the wisdom, learning, and sense of the ideas themselves.
The opposite case can be made. When words had to be carved in stone, we got the Ten Commandments. When we needed to make our own ink and chase a goose around the yard to obtain a quill, we got William Shakespeare. When the fountain pen was invented, we got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, we got Jack Kerouac. And with the advent of the smartphone keypad we got Donald Trump on Twitter.
It’s not just the written word that exhibits “degradation of the species.” The quality of what’s communicated seems to decline steadily with every advance in the ease of communicating. And the decline started from the get-go.
Samuel Morse successfully demonstrated the telegraph in 1844. The first words he sent down the wire had gravitas, were thought-provoking, and possessed a literary (King James Bible, Numbers 23:23) pedigree:
“What hath God wrought.”
But by 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, messaging had already turned prosaic. The first words spoken into a phone were:
“Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.”
And Thomas Watson was all the way over in the next room. He could probably hear Bell just fine through the doorway—in case you thought your kid texting you in the kitchen from the breakfast nook was something new.
(Poor Tom, never remembered as anything but Alexnder’s butt boy, when in fact he took his phone company profits and founded one of the largest shipyards in America.)
In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi made the first long-distance radio transmission. What did he have to say?
“s”
That’s it. Or, to put it literally (Marconi was using the Morse code developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail):
...
And Marconi was a real chatterbox compared to the man who invented television in 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth (really, that was his name). We can’t analyze the content of the first TV broadcast because it didn’t have any. What showed up on Farnsworth’s cathode ray tube was:
———
A straight line. Which is, I suppose, some kind of “intellectual level,” so to speak. But Farnsworth soon brought the intellectual level of television further down to where it has remained ever since. The second thing he broadcast was:
$
He put a dollar sign in front of his primitive camera because—according to what I read on the Internet—an investor asked, “When are we going to see some dollars in this thing, Farnsworth?”
Which brings us to that Internet, which tells me—with no apparent embarrassment—that the first word ever to appear on itself was:
“lo”
In 1969 a UCLA student named Charley Kline tried to transmit the command “login” to a Stanford Research Institute computer on ARPANET. This caused the system to crash, and all that came through was “lo.” About an hour later (if you think the people in tech support are bad now, imagine how bad they were when they didn’t exist) the “gin” arrived.
And I am still waiting for the olive and the vermouth.
And While I’m Ranting Against the Digital Age Let Me Not Forget to Excoriate an Aspect of Social Media that Lacks Even Sociability . . .
On the Fresh Hell of the Internet of Things
Our belongings as well as our selves are online. The world is filling with “smart devices.” A tirade on these gadgets might seem to be off the topic of America having worked itself into a state of angry perplexity. But, in abetting furious confusion, they work for me.
To requote Marshall McLuhan abbreviated: “The world has become a computer, and as our senses go outside ourselves we move into a phase of panic terrors.”
I’m not exactly panicked or terrorized by the Echo Dot that I (unaccountably) received for my seventy-third birthday but I take McLuhan’s point.
I’m an ordinary old married man. I’m used to everybody being smarter than me. Major media outlets are full of reporting and editorials about how stupid my political, social, and cultural ideas are. I long ago conceded the point about who has the brains in the family. A twenty-fifth wedding anniversary proves it. I have children ranging from sixteen to twenty-two. They know everything. I have hunting dogs. I can’t tell if there’s a pheasant in a corn row forty feet away.
I suppose I’m smarter than the chickens I keep. Although they’ve got a swell coop, a spacious yard fenced high and low to protect them from life’s perils, free food every day, and they’re not doing a damn thing—such as laying eggs—in return. So I suppose not.
But now it isn’t just everybody that’s smarter than me. Everything is smarter too.
Or so I’m told—by a certain smart-alecky smart device in my lap being a five-pound know-it-all. (Although it turns into a moron if I spill a cup of coffee on its keyboard.) Forgoing that temptation, I Google and find PC Magazine’s “Best Smart Home Devices.” The article beings,
What if all the devices in your life could connect to the internet? Not just computers and smartphones, but everything: clocks, speakers, lights, doorbells, cameras, windows, window blinds, hot water heaters, appliances, cooking utensils, you name it. And what if those devices could all communicate, send you information, and take your commands?
Let me tell you what the “what” is in this “what if” scenario. I’d forget my password. That’s what.
Also, I do not care to start having conversations with inanimate objects. I’m at an age where this is the kind of behavior that could cause my wife and children to stage an intervention. (“He forgot his password and his password is ‘password.’”) I’d wind up in the Memory Care unit of the local nursing home.
Even assuming I remember my password and assuming I’m allowed to remain in my own house with in-home senior care, I’m still baffled by PC Magazine’s list.
Video Doorbell Enhances my household security by giving me an on-screen real-time image of who’s at the door. Really? There’
s this thing that never needs recharging and works perfectly when the Internet crashes. It’s called a window. I look through it. Also, I have a 12-gauge pump.
Smart Thermostat The temperature can be adjusted from anywhere with wifi. Oh good. Now my wife and I can argue about whether it’s too hot in our living room or too cold in our living room even when we’re on vacation hundreds of miles from our living room.
Smart Microwave So smart that when you touch “defrost” it tells you, “Quit nuking the Swanson Hungry-Man Classic Fried Chicken frozen TV dinners and learn how to cook something healthy, Fatso.”
Smart Bathroom Scale If it’s in league with the Smart Microwave and thinks telling me what I really weigh is a smart idea, it’s about to find out just how heavy the big back tire on my John Deere is.
Smart Vacuum Cleaner It doesn’t look so smart anymore. The iRobot Roomba i7+ may have AI but my black Lab has teeth.
Smart Lawn Mower Who needs a $2,430 Husqvarna Automower 315XH that mows the lawn automatically when you’ve got a teen who mows the lawn automatically (if a lot of nagging counts as automation) in return for the car keys? (Although there is the matter of that $2,430 body and fender repair from when Buster backed into the phone pole.)
Home Surveillance Camera 5g hi-def 2.0 version. I mentioned I have children. Do you think I want to know what goes on when they’re home and my wife and I are not? Besides, they leave evidence from which even Sherlock’s dimwit sidekick Dr. Watson could make accurate deductions. “I detect that someone has tried to flush a pony keg down the toilet.”
And that’s just some of the latest stuff from the “Internet of Things.” What kind of things will get smart next? Are we ready for “Smarty Pants”? This is a pair of slacks that will send you a text message: “We really do make your butt look big.”
The Internet of Things—when I hear the phrase I feel like things are not only getting too smart but starting to gang up on me. It makes my flesh crawl. Which is medical information that my smartwatch would send directly to my in-home senior caregiver. If I owned a smartwatch. Which I don’t because I own Chicago’s first album, released in 1969, when people were still skeptical about the benefits of technology, even the analog kind with very limited intelligence.
A Cry from the Far Middle Page 8