Eleven Unfashionable Thoughts About Digital Utopianism.
History is littered with Great Seductions. Every couple of hundred years, there is a particularly virulent Great Seduction, a utopian ideology which promises, with catastrophic consequences, to build heaven-on-earth. The last truly Great Seduction was communism which, fuelled by the seductive promises of an international brotherhood of intellectual Casanovas, resulted in widespread political destruction, economic misery and cultural carnage.
The grander the promises, the greater the seduction. So what is the next Great Seduction? What is the next all-encompassing dream knitting together lavish promises about politics, community, culture and media? What next single truth promises to deliver heaven-on-earth to its followers?
The next Great Seduction is digital utopianism. Think of it as the Silicon Valley version of communism. Its outline can now be glimpsed in the fantasies now being peddled by utopians in a revolution that Silicon Valley insiders call “Web 2.0.” These digital idealists are seeking to revolutionize our media and culture through new technologies such as blogs, search engines, wikis and podcasts. For the digital utopians of Silicon Valley, new technology has become the vehicle to create social justice, free culture, democratize media, revitalize politics, confirm humanity and, last but not least, establish heaven-on-earth.
The dreams of the digital utopians are muddle-headed, naive and, of course, seductive. But nobody is arguing with Silicon Valley, nobody is telling the truth, nobody is exposing Web 2.0 as Communism 2.0. To ignite a real conversation about digital utopianism, here are eleven unfashionably conservative thoughts about media, culture and technology:
1. There is something of the philosophical assumptions of Karl Marx and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the digital utopian movement, particularly in its holy trinity of online community, individual creativity and common intellectual property ownership. Most of all, it’s in the marriage of abstract theory and absolute faith in the virtue of human nature that lends the digital utopians their intellectual debt to intellectual Casanovas like Marx and Rousseau.
2. There is nothing inevitable about either the moral or intellectual consequences of technological progress. Silicon Valley intellectuals like Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurzweil resurrect the Marxist eschatology of all-powerful abstract force inevitably leading us to the promised land. But just as the Marxists were wrong about the inevitability of world communism, so Kelly and Kurzweil are wrong that technology must both come to replicate human intelligence and to be morally beneficial.
3. The cult of the amateur is digital utopianism’s most seductive delusion. This cult promises that the latest media technology -- in the form of blogs, wikis and podcasts -- will enable everyone to become widely read writers, journalists, movie directors and music artists. It suggests, mistakenly, that everyone has something interesting to say.
4. The digital utopian much heralded “democratization” of media will have a destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon criticism. “Good taste” is, by definition, undemocratic. Taste resides with an elite of cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a work-of-art. The digital utopia seeks to flatten this elite into an ochlocracy. The danger, therefore, is that the future will be tasteless.
5. To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. Unchecked technology threatens to undermine reality and turn media into a rival version of life, a 21st century version of The Castle or The Library of Babel. This might make a fantastic movie or short piece of fiction. But real life shouldn’t be fantasy; it shouldn’t be fiction.
6. A particularly unfashionable thought: big media is not bad media. The big media engine of the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and publishing houses has discovered and branded great 20th century popular artists such as Alfred Hitchcock, Bono and W.G. Sebald. It is most unlikely that citizen media will have the marketing skills to discover and brand creative artists of equivalent prodigy.
7. Let’s think differently about George Orwell. Apple’s iconic 1984 Super Bowl commercial is true: 1984 will not be like Nineteen Eighty-Four the message went. Yes, the “truth” about the digital future will be the absence of the Orwellian Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth. Orwell’s dystopia is the dictatorship of the State; the Web 2.0 dystopia is the dictatorship of the author. In the digital future, everyone will think they are Orwell (the movie might be called: Being George Orwell).
8. Digital utopian economists like Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson have invented a theoretically flattened market that they have christened the “Long Tail”. It is an idealized cottage market of small media producers industriously trading with one another. But Anderson’s Long Tail is really a long tale. The real economic future is something akin to Google -- a vertiginous media world in which content and advertising become so indistinguishable that they become one and the same (more grist to the Kafkesque and Borghesian mill).
9. As always, today’s pornography reveals tomorrow’s media. The future of general media content, the place culture is going, is Voyeurweb.com: the convergence of self-authored shamelessness, narcissism and vulgarity… a perfect case for censorship. As Edmund Burke reminds us, we have a responsibility to protect people from their worst impulses. If people aren’t able to censor their worst instincts, then they need to be censored by others wiser and more disciplined than themselves.
10. How to resist digital utopianism? Orwell’s focus on language is the most effective antidote. The digital utopians needs to be fought word-for-word, phrase-by-phrase, delusion-by-delusion. As an opening gambit, let’s focus on the meaning of three key words in the digital utopian lexicon: a) elitism, b) democratization, c) community.
11. The cultural consequence of uncontrolled digital development will be social vertigo. Culture will be spinning and whirling and in continual flux. Everything will be in motion; everything will be opinion. This social vertigo of ubiquitous opinion was recognized by Plato. That’s why he banned opinionated artists from his Republic.