John Gray:
Technological progress has brought into being a system of surveillance more far-reaching than any Bentham could have conceived.
Enclosing the entire population in a virtual Panopticon might seem the ultimate invasion of freedom. But universal confinement need not be experienced as a privation. If they know nothing else, most are likely to accept it as normal. If the technology through which surveillance operates also provides continuous entertainment, they may soon find any other way of living intolerable.
Alongside the system of surveillance there is a world of media images in which terror and entertainment are intermingled. Seemingly safer than the world outside and more stimulating than unmediated everyday life, this virtual environment resembles the settings of reality television more than it does a prison. A feature of reality shows is that the inmates have nothing to do. Aside from overcoming cleverly staged challenges and interacting emotionally with one another, they are completely idle. It may not be too far-fetched to see in their condition an intimation of the future for the majority of people. If the advance of smart machines leaves most human beings an economic role only as consumers, this may be how they will be expected to pass their time.
One of the strengths of such a universal Panopticon is that the perils against which it protects are not all imaginary. The atrocity exhibitions that are on display in the media are not just fantasies. The most savage wars rage unabated; random violence can happen anywhere at any time. With the rapid evolution of techniques of cyber-attack, every modern amenity is vulnerable to sudden disruption. To assume that the inmates yearn to escape the universal Panopticon would be rash. Their worst fear may be of being forced to leave.
Cf. Dickinson: “A prison gets to be a friend…”
See also Nicholas Carr (sort of):
We’re still attracted to a flame at the end of a wick. We light candles to set a romantic or a calming mood, to mark a special occasion. We buy ornamental lamps that are crafted to look like candles or candleholders, with bulbs shaped as stylized flames. But we can no longer know what it was like when fire was the source of all light. The number of people who remember life before the arrival of Edison’s bulb has dwindled to just a few, and when they go they’ll take with them all remaining memory of that earlier, pre-electric world. The same will happen, sometime toward the end of this century, with the memory of the world that existed before the computer and the Internet became commonplace. We’ll be the ones who bear it away.
All technological change is generational change. The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their outdated parents to the margins. As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived. Only the sense of what was gained remains.
The caveat that I’ll add (to Carr, not to Gray; with Gray you get no sweetener or chaser) is something from the margins of the last issue of Local Culture. Adam Smith’s piece in it, “The Work of Liesure: An Essay on Jacob Snyder’s Leisure,” is excellent. I’m not going to capture the smarts in Smith’s piece here, but he argues that it’s only because of our laziness and condescension toward the past that we have such a hard time imagining how they did great things. “We find it easier to believe that aliens built the pyramids than to believe that people just like us could build pyramids without bulldozers.”
A healthier attitude, he argues, would respect the craft — or, crafts — and see in the past a “memory of skilled activity.” But his real point is that this skilled activity also applies to leisure. “If people in the past knew how to work in ways that we’ve forgotten,” he writes, “maybe people in the past also knew how to not work in ways that are lost on us.”
While much of our work is not intrinsically valuable, most of us have at least some tangible experience of work that is its own reward, and that gives us a handle on the idea that our problem is not too much work but too little good work. By contrast, few of us have any experience of good leisure. We all know how to take a break, to be entertained, to practice “self-care.” Most of us have no clue how to “take our leisure.” You might as well ask us to build a pyramid without a bulldozer.
As I said, it’s an excellent piece. But I wonder if he takes the argument too far. At one point Smith suggests that good leisure “is a much more fragile achievement than good work, and it is subject to more permanent loss when the know-how disappears.” My caveat-in-the-margins is that, though it might be more fragile in some ways, I suspect leisure — and the “expansion of being” good leisure brings — is more innate than the collective knowledge of craft, and therefore less subject to permanent loss.
Ditto for Carr. It is not difficult for me to imagine those who were never limited to the wick and flame being more enchanted by it than those who were and have no desire to go back. This technology has not only ruined the young, not by a long shot. There are plenty of Boomers who I sadly but honestly consider a lost cause in this regard. (I suspect it has something to do with trajectories: the young were not subject to the optimism and momentum of “Western development.” Gray: “Nothing is more alien to the spirit of the age than to suggest that anyone might seek inner freedom, for it suggests doubt as to the prevailing faith that the human world is improving. Clearly, there are many who cannot do without this comforting faith. The most charitable course is to leave them to their slumbers.”)
But the main point is simply this: candle wicks and walking sticks are still not just available but abundantly available, right now.
Open your eyes. Or: lift your head and extend your elbows.
Dickinson:
To be alive—is Power—
Existence—in itself—
Without a further function—
Omnipotence—Enough—
To be alive—and Will!
‘Tis able as a God—
The Maker—of Ourselves—be what—
Such being Finitude!
Technology has not, no matter what the flip they tell you, eclipsed anything. “As soon impeach my Crown!,” writes Dickinson in a slightly different context. The world and the wisdom and the wicks and the sticks and the damn good leisure are still right there waiting.
In other words, Gray’s warning applies and it applies harshly — but in a very real sense, pace Carr, it applies equally to anyone. And therefore it can be heeded equally by anyone.
It may be too late for the Boomers. But for all my deep ‘n dark pessimism about what humans will do, I remain fairly committed to the idea that we can, anytime we like, escape the machine. Your phone isn’t heroin or alcohol to your body, and an electronics-free walk into the woods or just away from home carries its own dopaminergic reward — an eminently, imminently, infinitely discoverable reward.
I was not intending anything past the Gray quote, so these are just rough notes. But while I’m thinking of it, there are two nearly contradictory visions I have of all this. One of them is not unlike that scene at the end of V for Vendetta, but instead of the mass removal of Guy Fawkes masks it would be a mass hurling of “devices” into a molten abyss.
The other is that moment Merwin describes when “after three days of rain / Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease.” Except that it is not death being described but life.
The second one does not require a mass movement; an individual whimsical mood can suffice. But the mass movement would be nice, wouldn’t it?
