3 Cultural criticism is a temporary kind of art. Works of this variety sometimes experience massive spikes in popularity at the time of their release, but the shelf life is short. If a piece of cultural criticism truly succeeds, its ideas and theories are completely absorbed by mainstream society (which means that the book itself becomes unnecessary). This has happened with lots of influential books from the past forty years that are now rarely purchased by new audiences—The Closing of the American Mind, Within the Context of No Context, the novel Generation X, and other works in this vein. One of the most fascinating examples of the phenomenon is Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Part of what makes this book so entertaining is the laughable impossibility of its nonmetaphorical goal: The author seems to have written this book with the hope that everyone in America would read it, agree with all its points, and literally destroy their television sets with sledgehammers. This did not happen. But there are still tons of great ideas in Four Arguments, and it’s amazing that Mander came to these realizations in 1978, before the advent of cable or the inception of the web. When Mander rails against his version of mediated culture, he’s really just railing against three networks and PBS. But three channels and Sesame Street were all he needed to see the truth, which is this—TV takes away our freedom to have whatever thoughts we want. So do photographs, movies, and the Internet. They provide us with more intellectual stimuli, but they construct a lower, harder intellectual ceiling. The first time someone tries to convince you to take mushrooms, they often argue that mushrooms “allow you to think whatever thoughts you want.” This sentiment makes no sense to anyone who has not taken psychedelic drugs, because everyone likes to assume we already have the freedom to think whatever we please. But this is not true. Certain drug experiences do expand a person’s freedom of thought, in the same way that certain media experiences make that freedom smaller.
On page 243 of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Mander lists a variety of scenarios and asks the reader to imagine them inside their own mind. These are things like “life in an Eskimo village,” “a preoperation conversation among doctors,” “the Old South,” “the flight of Amelia Earhart,” or “the Old West.” This is very easy to do, and you can do it right now— pick any one of those situations and watch it inside your mind’s eye. But once you’ve done so, consider what Mander says about the process:
It is extremely likely that you have experienced no more than one or two of [these situations] personally. Obviously, these images [inside your head] were either out of your own imagination or else they were from the media. Can you identify which was which?
In all likelihood, all of your internal images did (at least partially) originate from television. Your supposedly unique mental picture of a Georgia plantation during the Civil War is just an interpretation of what you unconsciously recall from Gone With the Wind or Roots (or some other show that used the same set). Mander goes on to make an even more troubling request—he asks the reader to imagine a basketball game. Do that right now. Close your eyes and imagine a basketball game in your head. What did it look like? One can assume that virtually everyone in the United States has attended a live basketball game at some point in his or her life, and almost as many have played in a basketball game for real (at least for five minutes at recess in sixth grade). I played organized basketball for thirteen years. So why is my first mental image of a basketball game a moment from game four of a Celtics-Lakers championship series I saw on CBS in 1984? Why is that my immediate, galvanized definition of a sport I actively played?
It’s because we really can’t differentiate between real and unreal images. We can describe the difference, but we can’t manage it.
Decadent French critic Charles Baudelaire made a comparable point about photography way back in 1859, but the process is accelerated a thousand fold when applied to images that move and talk and morph. Mander’s point is that technology evolves much faster than we do physically or mentally, and the consequence is that vague sense of alienation expressed by Thom Yorke on OK Computer. Humans have existed for 130,000 years. The Great Train Robbery was made in 1903. For roughly 129,900 years, any moving image a human saw was actually real. It was there, right in front of you. If a man in 1850 saw a train chugging toward his face, it was actually a train. For 129,900 years, we were conditioned to understand that seeing something in motion had a specific meaning. But that understanding no longer exists; today, we constantly “see things” that aren’t actually there. Intellectually, we know that there’s a difference between The Great Train Robbery and a real train. Intellectually, we know there is a difference between a living person and a Facebook profile. We know that The Sopranos and our own life are different. But is there any possible way that 129,900 years of psychological evolution can be altered within the span of a single century? Is it any wonder that people feel paradoxically alienated by the mechanical devices they love?
We do not have the freedom to think whatever we want. We don’t. And until we accept that, it’s useless to think about anything else.
2A I don’t expect consumers of this book to read Industrial Society and Its Future, or even to spend more than two or three minutes scanning it on Wikipedia. I know how this works. But just to make things a little more collectively cogent, here is the document for Matt Damon fans who prefer the editing of The Bourne Ultimatum to Gerry:
1. The first line of the introduction is “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” The important thing to note here is that the words Industrial Revolution have been capitalized. Kaczynski’s complaint with society starts around the year 1760, almost two centuries before he was born.
2. The next sections discuss “the psychology of modern leftism,” which is an attack on a certain kind of person—not necessarily a political liberal, but people whose worldview and morality are marked by “feelings of inferiority” with characteristic traits that include “low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc.”
3. A big chunk of the manifesto is about the desire for power and socialization. He argues that modern people are so obsessed with socialization that they deceive themselves about everything—about what they feel, why they do things, or what their true morals are. It’s weird to take moral advice from a guy who sent bombs to strangers, but his thoughts are not invalid: Basically, the Unabomber believes modern people have no idea how they’re supposed to think or feel, so they convince themselves to care about whatever rules the rest of society seems to require. It’s something of a rudimentary loop—people conform to the status quo because the status quo validates the conformity they elected to adopt.
4. Kaczynski was obsessed with autonomy. “For most people, it is through the power process—having a goal, making an autonomous effort and attaining the goal—that self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of power are acquired.” This is the root of his hatred of technology—he could not be a singular individual if his livelihood was dependent on machines.
5. In a section titled “Sources of Social Problems,” he argues that conservatives are “fools” for complaining about the deterioration of values while supporting economic and technological growth. This is a key point for Kaczynski. He sees these things as interrelated.
6. Science, the Unabomber argues, is the ultimate “surrogate activity.” This is the term Kaczynski uses to refer to pursuits that give people an artificial goal and a constructed meaning to their lives. As applied to the Internet, the argument is almost unassailable.
Now, here are the three points that matter most:
7. The manifesto outlines five principles of history. Only the fifth principle is important: “People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control.”
8. Technology is a more powerful force than the desire for freedom.
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9. We cannot separate good technology from bad technology.
If you mention these last three statements to most normal people, they will say number 7 is usually true, number 8 is possibly true, and number 9 is probably false. But they’re all equally accurate.
3A While writing this essay I read Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine, a 2008 book subtitled Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. One of the author’s central thoughts involves the way the Internet has negatively transformed people’s sense of self and about how widespread anonymity on the Internet has inadvertently lowered the level of American discourse. These are good points. But Against the Machine is ultimately an unreliable book, simply because of Siegel’s motive for writing it.
The author describes all this in the book’s introduction: In 2006, Siegel wrote a piece for The New Republic that questioned Jon Stewart. When the article was posted online, dozens of people hurled childish, ad hominem insults against Siegel in the comment section—a phenomenon that now happens when almost anything interesting is published in public. But Siegel responded in the worst possible way. He created a fake profile for himself and wrote self-aggrandizing attacks directed at his critics. (He injected insights like “You couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces.”) Siegel was suspended by The New Republic for doing this. According to the author, the debacle prompted him “to write the book on Web culture that I’d long wanted to write,” which turned into Against the Machine.
I believe Siegel is lying, at least to himself. I don’t think Against the Machine was the book he’d been waiting his entire career to publish. The whole tome reads like an ill-advised reaction to the controversy on The New Republic’s website. He wasn’t against “the machine” until it personally wounded him.3 Had the commentators only praised his arguments, it’s easy to imagine Siegel writing a completely different book about how the Internet is saving the American intellectual. This is why reading about the social meaning of technology tends to go nowhere: Such works are almost always written for wholly personal reasons. The only people who think the Internet is a calamity are people whose lives have been hurt by it; the only people who insist the Internet is wonderful are those who need it to give their life meaning. Web philosophy is an idiom devoid of objective, impersonal thinking. In 2008, the Columbia Review of Journalism interviewed a man named Clay Shirky about the pitfalls of modern Luddism and the meaning of information overload. Shirky teaches interactive telecommunication at NYU and wrote a book about social media called Here Comes Everybody. In the CRJ interview, Shirky said things like “I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on.” This is the message net-obsessed people always deliver; the condescending phrase most uttered by frothing New Media advocates is “You just don’t get it.” The truth of the matter is that Clay Shirky must argue that the Internet is having a positive effect—it’s the only reason he’s publicly essential. Prior to 1996, no one wanted to interview Clay Shirky about anything. He used to be just another unassuming intellectual (of which the world has many). Now he’s the prophet for a revolution. By promoting online media, he promotes himself. And this is not uncommon—the reason so many bloggers fixated on the TV show Gossip Girl was because inflating the import of Gossip Girl amplified the significance of blogging itself. The degree to which anyone values the Internet is proportional to how valuable the Internet makes that person.
This is why Industrial Society and Its Future feels so different. Unlike just about everyone else who writes about technology, Kaczynski doesn’t have a horse in the race. Had he elected to embrace the trappings of the modern age, there is no doubt he could have been wildly successful—I suspect he could have been one of the Internet’s architects, were that what he wanted. It wasn’t that he was frozen out or ostracized—he chose not to be involved. Moreover, he was ultimately able to live separate from the electronic age as successfully as any American could expect; it wasn’t tangibly impeding him at all, unless you count the occasional airplane coasting twenty-eight thousand feet above his head. Technology wasn’t damaging him in any real way. Were he not a sociopath, he could have stayed in his cabin and avoided the advancing world forever. He made things personal by mailing bombs to strangers, but his complaints were not about himself or his career or what anonymous cretins might be saying about him on The New Republic’s website. His ideas were too radical, but at least they were his own.
2B The Unabomber writes that society evolves irrationally, which is probably how he justified mailing people bombs. But what would a rational society look like? He never explains that part.
When it’s warm out, I like to sit inside air-conditioned rooms. This feels rational to me. It seems rational to want to be comfortable. But is it rational to expect to be cool when the outside temperature is 95 degrees? I suppose it isn’t. But why would it be irrational to build and use a machine that makes things cooler? Here again, that seems rational.
Yet what am I giving up in order to have a 70-degree living room in July?
Nothing that’s particularly important to me.
For the air conditioner to work, I need to live in a building that has electricity, so I have to be connected to the rest of society. That’s fine. That’s no problem. Of course, to be accepted by that society, I have to accept the rules and laws of community living. That’s fine, too. Now, to thrive and flourish and afford my electric bill, I will also have to earn money. But that’s okay—most jobs are social and many are enriching and unnecessary. However, the only way to earn money is to do something (or provide something) that is valued by other people. And since I don’t get to decide what other people value, what I do to make a living is not really my decision. So—in order to have air-conditioning—I will agree to live in a specific place with other people, following whatever rules happen to exist there, all while working at a job that was constructed by someone else for their benefit.
In order to have a 70-degree living room, I give up almost everything.
Yet nothing that’s particularly important to me.
When Kaczynski wrote, “Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom,” I assume this is what he meant.
3B When I was younger, people would often ask what my political affiliations were. These days, I find that people will just tell me what they assume my political affiliations must be, usually based on something I’ve published that wasn’t remotely political. Everyone I’ve met in New York or California tells me I’m conservative. The rest of America tells me that I’m almost comically liberal. I feel good about this. I enjoy writing about my own life, but I don’t like people knowing anything about me.
However, the Unabomber knows me. He knows me better than I know myself.
I would never have guessed that I am a Modern Leftist; I’ve never been involved in a Parisian riot or aligned myself with a black bloc or campaigned for Russ Feingold. But I embody at least half of Kaczynski’s Modern Leftist criteria. Here (once again) are the qualities he assigns to the Modern Leftist: “feelings of inferiority,” “low self-esteem,” “feelings of powerlessness,” “depressive tendencies,” “defeatism,” “guilt,” and “self-hatred.” Granted, some of these traits are amorphous. Low self-esteem is a totally meaningless designation, simply because there’s no extension of human behavior that doesn’t qualify. If you have no self-confidence, you are believed to possess low self-esteem; if you have an abundance of self-confidence, it’s assumed your arrogance is an attempt to overcompensate for a lack of self-esteem. I don’t think I’ve ever met a person with the “correct” level of self-esteem. But some of Ted’s other designations are more telling. To me, it seems naïve not to feel as though one is powerless, a sentiment that probably proves that I also possess a feeling of inferiority. I’m depressed a lot, usually for no reason (although sometimes I’m just hungry, which often feels the same). I’m extremely defeatist about anything that doesn’t com
e easily to me. I don’t have much guilt (in fact, my wife claims I don’t have enough), but I do hate myself. In fact, I can’t relate to people who don’t hate themselves, which might mean I have low self-esteem (or, I suppose, the complete opposite). Another trait of the Modern Leftist (according to Ted) is someone “interpret[ing] as derogatory almost anything that is said about him.” I understand how this feels, too: I always suspect people are saying negative things about me, even if they are being friendly and flattering. But I’m sure I make other people feel this way, too. For years, I tried to avoid overused words like nice and cool whenever I made small talk. I’d always try to offhandedly compliment strangers with less predictable phrases, like “Wow! That’s an unorthodox haircut.” As it turns out, most people— and especially most women—hate this. They typically respond by hiding in the bathroom, trying to get drunk, or (on one occasion) attempting to get drunk in the bathroom. This used to bother me. But now I realize I was simply partying with too many Modern Leftists. I should have spent more of my social time with Post-modern Leftists; they never care what you say to them, as long as you don’t criticize architecture or Girl Talk.