Lee Siegel wants to tell you why he doesn’t like the internet. But
wait, you might protest, all this new-media talk is tiresome. Well,
shut up: Lee Siegel is not interested in your opinion. This isn’t some
dirty blog, where the author’s prose mingles with commenters’ “thuggish
anonymity,” but serious work by a cultural critic lamenting the State
of Online Discourse. But still, you might wonder, Lee Siegel?
The writer who was suspended by the New Republic for blogging
under an alias to praise his own blog posts—now he’s an expert on
what’s wrong with the internet? Yes, but there’s a bright side. Even if
you detest this elitist attack on participatory culture, you don’t have
to shoot the messenger; he’s already bleeding all over the
keyboard.
Bloggers thrashed Siegel in 2006 for creating a fake web persona to
praise himself, a superfan who wrote that Siegel was his “hero,” a
“brave, brilliant, and witt[y]” writer, with the “fire and guts of a young
man.” A reader outed Siegel, the New Republic placed him on
probation, and
Siegel marched into that special limelight the
media reserves for public sinners, nabbing PR and
a book deal.
Against the Machine is not (consciously) about Siegel’s web
transgressions, which are dismissed as a “prank” in two cursory pages.
The book takes a wider view, contending that the internet makes us more
self-centered, crass, and uncivil. In a breezy, generalizing style,
Siegel muses that the web rushes thought, commodifies content, and
undermines merit. Few can “write well” or “have anything original to
say,” he says, unoriginally, but the web lets them compete with
established writers.
This virtual world thrives by sapping life from the real world.
Siegel concedes that young people talk politics online, but it’s so
surreal—and the anonymous attacks so harsh—that they do
less offline. “College students used to be the active arm of society’s
conscience,” he writes. “They often took to the streets to
demonstrate… Now they tremble helplessly before the internet’s
Alice-in-Wonderland, truth-eliding, boundary-busting juggernaut.” The
book is studded with such sweeping claims, sans data, as if everyone
accepts the trade-off between blog comments and marches. But is this
even accurate?
Students were a key part of the immigration rallies in March 2006,
gathering 500,000 people for “one of the largest demonstrations for any
cause in recent U.S. history” (AP). So many students learned about the
rallies through MySpace—the internet!—that one paper
reported it was the largest political gathering ever organized on the
site. Yet Siegel thinks the web “is a parallel universe that rarely
intersects with other spheres of life outside its defensive
parameters.” Oddly, he never mentions MeetUp or MoveOn, which organize
offline action. In fact, the Guinness record for the largest protest
ever was a series of 800 coordinated antiwar marches across the globe
in 2003, organized online. Then there’s the hopemonger: Barack Obama
raised money from a record-shattering one million small donors online.
He literally could not have funded his historic, 15-month campaign
without the web.
Readers won’t hear those stories on this terrible tour. Instead,
Siegel provides awkward descriptions of mundane sites, sounding like a
grandfather narrating web surfing—in 2003:
Your boss… logs on to JDate, a Jewish dating service, where she
fields inquiries from dozens of men. Perhaps your husband is…
carrying on several torrid online affairs at the same time under his
various aliases: “Caliente,” “Curious,” “ActionMan.” When he emerges
from his sequestered lair, red-faced and agitated, is it because he has
been arguing for moderation with “KillBush46” …has failed in his bid
to purchase genuine military-issue infrared night goggles on eBay, or
has been desperately masturbating while instant-messaging
“Prehistorical2”?
He could go on. This passage is followed by more hopeful activity.
“Maybe your husband died four years ago from a rare disease,” Siegel
offers, and an “internet grief support group helped you get through the
pain.” (Was this the same husband toggling from sex chatting to eBay?
Unclear.) All these hypotheticals are building to an insight:
“Like all significant technologies, the internet is a blessing
and
a curse.”
By combining the fact-free observations of a futurist pundit and the
hypocritical tirades of a sinful preacher, Siegel’s book is as
unreliable as it is insufferable. Ironically, he sounds like the
caricature of bloggers he denounces: uninformed, shrill, defensive, and
self-obsessed. The nascent web culture does have problems, which fine
thinkers have tackled before (Cass Sunstein and Yochai Benkler, for
example). But Against the Machine fails to support its antiweb
hostility, let alone offer specific reforms, because it’s too busy
ranting in the mirror. 