Computer Downloads

Nick Gillespie from the December 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

After watching Roots, I remember asking my Irish grandmother why she left the old sod, a place from which people have been fleeing en masse ever since they could tie logs together to make rafts, and why she had never gone back. She answered both questions with the same matter-of-fact reply: "Because there was nothing there for me." In the late '70s, after more than 50 years of self-induced exile, my Italian grandparents finally made it back to their hometown, a tiny village a few hours outside Naples. They knew better than anyone that the world had changed 1,000 times over in the interim. "We left on a boat to find work," my grandfather told me. "We went back on a plane for vacation." The steps in between seemed to make sense to him.

Subj: Computer complaints

Date: 95-10-27

From: [e-mail]

To: [e-mail]

In a message dated 95-10-26 16:13 EDT, you write:

<<Okay, so Stoll, Birkerts, and Slouka spin out a larger critique of technology. But what about computers specifically?>>

Fair enough. Stoll, Birkerts, and Slouka confess at various points to Luddite tendencies even as they all go out of their way to say that they aren't calling for a
return to caveman days. One thing that clearly gets under their skin is the exuberance of telecomputer boosters such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Perry Barlow, who is fond of saying the move into cyberspace is "the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire."

In a Harper's forum featuring Birkerts, Slouka, Barlow, and Wired magazine's Kevin Kelly, Slouka and Birkertswho has compared Wired to a porno magbristle at "the theme of inevitability," the idea that the computer revolution is a totally done deal, even as they accept the fact that the train of technological development has left the station. "Computers themselves don't bother me, it's the culture in which they're enshrined," writes Stoll in Silicon Snake Oil. "The medium is being oversold, our expectations have become bloated."

There's more than a grain of truth to such discontent. While computers are here for goodor at least the foreseeable futureit's unclear what exactly that means. And Stoll is right that going on-line is oversoldalthough he, Birkerts, and Slouka should recognize that as a good thing. While being on the Internet has added some things to my life and subtracted little or nothing, it sure as hell hasn't been a revolution.

Not surprisingly, Stoll is more willing than Birkerts and Slouka to grant the general usefulness of computer technology, if only as an introduction to his larger condemnation of the burgeoning Republic of Cyberspace. Stoll is, after all, an astronomer, a longtime devoted computer and Internet user, and the author of the delightful The Cuckoo's Egg , which details his role in catching a gang of hackers who broke into a computer system at the University of California at Berkeley. (Silicon Snake Oil is not only more engaged with its subject matter; because it's written with wit and self-conscious irony and packed with cold data and interesting anecdotes, it engages the reader more than either The Gutenberg Elegies or War of the Worlds.)

But all three authors contend that computers (and, as important, computer networks) attack the "real" world by luring us away from such time-honored activities as reading, writing (in longhand or on typewriters), spending time with friends and family, hiking, and puddle-jumping. Instead, we while away our days at an electronic coffeehouse, answering gratuitous e-mail messages, engaging in gossipy chit-chat about Star Trek and The X-Files, and sampling various pornographic cyberthrills.

Computer networks, says Stoll, "isolate us from one another and cheapen the meaning of actual experience. They work against literacy and creativity. They will undercut our schools and libraries." Birkerts sings the same dirge with slightly different lyrics. He certainly agrees with Stoll that computers, all things electronic, really undermine the solitude and quiet necessary for deep readings of books and mankind alike.

But computers don't so much isolate us as destroy us, says Birkerts. For him, going online means nothing less than dissolving your subjectivityyour sense of selfinto electrical impulses scattered out into space. "[B]eing on-line and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations," he writes. We have destroyed "duration...deep time, time experienced without the awareness of time passing." His "core fear" is that we are becoming as shallow and flattened out as the TV and computer screens we use to communicate. "We are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion of human presence, both of the authority of the individual and, in ways impossible to prove, of the species itself," frets Birkerts.

Slouka, too, worries about the individual. "For just as surely as [the interstate highway system] had helped homogenize the American landscape," he writes, "replacing the distinctive color and lingo of regional culture with the ubiquitous ugliness of the corporate strip, [the information super highway] would make us blander still, sacrificing a different kind of regionalitythe 'regionality' of race and gender and age and opinionto the needs of the all-blurring, eternally inoffensive Netsoul."

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.16.10 @ 10:54PM|#

xthgh