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Citation: The American Prospect March-April 1998, n37, p86(5)
Author: Purdy, Jedediah S.
Title: The God of the digerati. (Wired magazine) by Jedediah
S. Purdy
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COPYRIGHT 1998 The American Prospect, Inc.
"No ambition, however extravagant, no fantasy, however outlandish, can any
longer be dismissed as crazy or impossible. This is the age when you can
finally do it all. . . . You can become whatever you want to be." This bold
invitation stretches across the first few pages of the October 1994 issue of
Wired magazine, emblazoned over a computer-generated, Dali-esque landscape
populated by transparent human forms whose brains, muscles, and entrails are
tangles of silicon chips and fiber-optic cable. The phrases echo a favorite
slogan of Wired editor Kevin Kelly: "We are as gods, and we might as well get
good at it." Do these proposals amount to the same thing? Should we accept
them? And, if we do, what might be the consequences for our culture and
politics?
These questions are not idle. Wired is the lifestyle magazine par
excellence--the chapbook of tastes, taboos, and aspirations--for the shock
troops of the. information economy. More than 300,000 readers earn their
average annual income of over $80,000 designing, selling, and hacking the
computing systems that increasingly shape everyone's workplace, home, and
civic life. More than any other group's, their job description includes
designing the future. Wired outfits that future, announcing which ideas and
products are "wired" and which "tired"; keeping up a "jargon watch" so that
readers will know to say "lifestyle reboot," not "power cocooning"; pointing
out the goods and manner that bring "street cred," as in credibility; and
holding forth on "fetishes," the super-goods of the super-wired.
Prominent among the magazine's fetishes is a new brand of libertarianism,
the hoary political temperament that thinks of government as serving only to
iron out a few inconveniences that arise between private individuals, and
otherwise staying out of the way. Wired exchanges the gray woolens of
conventional, economically minded libertarianism for the shimmering colors and
romantic rhetoric of a technologically enhanced Friedrich Nietzsche. The
magazine heralds a nascent political culture, a Nietzschean libertarianism.
THE NIETZSCHEAN TRIBE
Nietzsche, the German philosopher and iconoclast who died in 1900, has been
the perennial source of twentieth-century efforts to break the chains of the
past and create an entirely new intellectual and moral universe. He thought
that all the old myths of religion, nation, and philosophy had failed and that
people found themselves for the first time in a world without gods or magic.
While desperately painful, this situation presented an opportunity. Christian
morality, with its secular avatar, liberal democracy, had oppressed the most
strong-willed and charismatic individuals, drawing them into its cult of
meekness and sowing self-contempt with the doctrine that humanity is
essentially sinful. With this burden lifted, the strongest individuals could
create new myths, remake themselves as they wished, and form communities of
the equally strong and like-minded. They would become, in the unfortunately
popular phrase, supermen.
Wired styles its readership a tribe of budding supermen. The magazine's
first issue declared boldly, "Wired is about the most powerful people on the
planet today--the Digital Generation." Publisher Louis Rossetto prefers the
term digerati, a play on literati, for the new economic and, increasingly,
cultural elite. This elite not only enjoys the usual perquisites of its
position, but anticipates expensive biological and electronic advances that
promise people the capacity to tinker with themselves in unprecedented ways.
The quote that begins this essay comes from a leader of the Extropians,
favorites of editor Kevin Kelly's. The Extropians are committed to "turning
humanity into something far superior" through technology, espousing "a
philosophy of freedom from limitations of any kind." Those who can afford it
will eventually be able to overcome mortality by "downloading" consciousness
into computers, where it will survive forever as disembodied mind, perhaps
helped along by robotic accessories and virtual-reality sensations. They are
equally committed to pharmaceutical, surgical, and other ways of concentrating
and expanding the power of the mind. They also "hate government" and wish to
develop wholly voluntary communities governed by "spontaneous order."
Extreme as they are, the Extropians are representative lunatics. In "Birth
of a Digital Nation," a piece that aspires to take a generational pulse,
contributing editor Jon Katz writes that the zeitgeist honors "relying on
oneself to be the captain of one's ship and charting one's own course." Nearly
every issue of Wired includes a lionizing portrait of a trail-blazing,
go-it-alone entrepreneur, delivered in tones that would make Ayn Rand blush.
The magazine's governing assumption is that we make ourselves and our
communities as we will.
The tone of these voluntary communities, among which the digerati are
preeminent, is pungently techno-pagan. This is a tribal libertarianism. Just
over a year ago Wired featured a cover story on Burning Man, a weekend
gathering in the deserts of Nevada where technology and counterculture meet in
a festival of body drumming, and electronically enhanced mayhem, culminating
in the burning of a huge human figure, a custom last practiced by Europe's
ancient Celts. The following issue featured an admiring interview with
Canadian media studies professor Derrick de Kerckhove, who believes that
internet users have re-attained "a tribal world, where the cosmos has a
presence. It's alive. The tribe shares in this huge, organic reality." In a
sense, the magazine's Tired/Wired and Fetish features track the symbols of
tribal membership, which require constant updating; this tribe is all about
being on the move, and about buying.
GODS AND THEIR WORLDS
Stranger stuff yet lurks in Wired's circuits. In Out of Control, editor
Kevin Kelly proposes that the old line between "the born and the made" has
been irremediably blurred. Biotechnology, especially genetic engineering, has
begun to insert technical processes into organisms. At the same time,
self-replicating computer programs that mimic evolution by developing
unplanned order, and the early stages of "artificial intelligence," bring the
dynamics of living things into machinery.
According to Kelly, these changes enable us to see what has always been
true but hitherto hidden. "Life" means not carbon-based organisms, but any
self-ordering, self-reproducing system--what Kelly calls a vivisystem. We are
vivisystems, but so, too, are computer networks, market economies, and "hybrid
patches of nerve and silicon." Moreover, Kelly speculates, life has a tendency
to spread itself into previously inert matter, fighting back against
entropy--hence the label Extropian--and slowing the death of the universe. By
passing from us into computers, "Life has conquered carbon" and gone on,
leaving humanity "a mere passing station on hyperlife's gallop into space."
Here again, Wired shows Nietzsche's mark. His last work, dubiously edited
and written in the mental eclipse of creeping dementia, highlights the idea of
a "will to power" that flows through the universe, forging order out of chaos.
We are among the chief agents of that order. In this view, Wired draws not
only on Nietzsche, but also on a tradition of romantic vitalism that forgoes
troublesome political and ethical questions in favor of celebrating "life,"
whatever it might do.
Only man can make a computer, so it is our task to extend life's march by
building the next vivisystem. We do this by designing computer programs that
replicate and expand themselves in unpredictable ways, setting *in motion a
"post-Darwinian evolution." The best of these, in Kelly's view, will be
virtual-reality programs, in which creators can become virtual inhabitants.
This is not so far-fetched as it seems. Some people already spend considerable
time in "virtual communities," multi-user versions of the computerized
role-playing games that came into prominence in the 1980s, where players
interact with each other and perhaps with "bots" (programs designed to imitate
people) in a landscape described onscreen. This technology Could be
straightforwardly united with the indeterminate "evolution" of
self-replicating programs and with the virtual-reality techniques that give
users the impression of actually inhabiting programmed landscapes.
A few people, mostly college students, have largely withdrawn from their
embodied lives to participate in virtual communities. Kelly wants this
practice to go much further, to see more people inhabiting specialized online
communities, sometimes of their own making. Creating these worlds extends
"life," and "every creative act is no more or less than the reenactment of the
Creation." By entering these realms, their programmers reproduce the "old
theme" of "the god who lowered himself into his own world." Kelly identifies
this theme with Jesus, but one wonders if Narcissus is not a more appropriate
touchstone for his ambition.
GODS AND OUR WORLD
These odd ideas shape the attitudes that Wired prescribes to the digerati.
Take, for instance, Wireds worshipful attitude to the free market. Markets are
ideal instances of "spontaneous order," and so very nearly of fife itself. It
is in this light that the magazine celebrates the economic dislocation that
accompanies industry's replacement by the information economy. Last year,
Kelly wrote in Wired, "In a poetic sense, the prime task of the Network
Economy is to destroy--company by company, industry by industry--the
industrial economy." Knowing that Kelly considers economic transition an
evolutionary triumph of one vivisystem over another, in which people are only
"a way-station," illuminates the rhapsodic tone of his description.
The irony of this view is that the free-for-all that Wired admires on the
Internet is threatened less by government than by the prospect of domination
by mega-corporations. Less than a year ago, as Wired's online publishing
efforts foundered, Microsoft announced plans to devote a healthy portion of
its $9 billion in cash to dominating that field. A favorite Wired icon for the
information feedback loop, a dragon curling in a circle to swallow its own
tail, could become more apt as a symbol of the timeless libertarian paradox:
Monopoly verging on feudalism emerges from unregulated competition to bite
libertarianism in the posterior.
In the same vein, Kelly's techno-romanticism guides Wired to a willful
obtuseness before ecological concerns. Last year, UCLA]s Gregory Stock, who
"believes that genetic engineering is the next stage in natural evolution,"
told the magazine: "The planet is undergoing a massive extinction. . . . We're
at the center of it." We shouldn't be concerned, though, because "modern
technology is a major evolutionary transition. . . . It would be astonishing
if that occurred without disrupting existing fife." In an earlier issue, Paul
Levinson reassured readers that, now that DNA can be preserved for possible
reconstruction, "extinction no longer means gone for good." To be sure,
large-scale extinction and global warming can be considered 49 evolutionary
transitions," triumphs of the human and industrial vivisystems, if one
interprets them insistently enough. Similarly, if the existence of a species
is reduced to a matter of recoverable genetic information, we may be comforted
about the loss of the ecosystem that it now inhabits. Still, the reader is
right to think that something--perhaps the most important thing--is lost in
this view. Kelly's bizarre biological ideas underlie a giddy indifference to
public policy.
Such complacency is an intrinsic temptation of this attitude. When any
transformation is taken to be the fruit of life's battle against entropy,
debating social and economic change appears fatuous. Trends take on an air of
inevitability, and of inevitable goodness. Any doctrine that celebrates the
raw power of natural processes as they flow through society will end by
sacrificing the rigors of democratic deliberation for the pleasures of
vitalist enthusiasm.
THE TECHNOCRATIC CONCEIT
Of course, there is more to Wired than romantic libertarianism. The
magazine now and again veers into a Panglossian picture of democracy's future
on the Internet. Contributing editor Jon Katz, in particular, enjoys comparing
the digerati to Jeffersonian yeomen: rugged, self-reliant individualists with
their own ideas and the courage to voice them. Katz is fond of asking
questions like, "Can we build a new kind of politics? Can we construct a more
civil society with our powerful technologies? Are we extending the evolution
of freedom among human beings?" Regrettably, he answers with tired
observations and insubstantial proposals: The digerati are uninterested in and
disaffected from mainstream politics, and haven't contributed much to that
politics except defense of their own cyberinterests; however, if they ever put
their lively minds to politics, they would probably come up with something
worthwhile.
The substance of that something, when made explicit, usually rests on the
benefits of online conversation and the extraordinary availability of
information on the Internet. Both of these are valuable, especially for
citizens who are committed to particular issues and have trouble finding
neighbors who share their interests and adequate resources in the local
library. The more we cultivate informed, contentious citizenship, the better
off we all are. However, these technologies chiefly enhance the efforts of
already-engaged men and women; they enrich the margins more than they affect
the main current of politics. Overlooking this fact is typical of the
technophiles' tendency to mistake new tools for new worlds. Katz refers in
awed tones to "the unprecedented ability of individuals to speak directly to
each other" on the Net, but thoughtful folk will recall that earlier eras are
known, now and again, to have achieved conversation.
Moreover, the picture of democracy that Wired honors rests not so much on
shared deliberation as on "spontaneous order." Kelly offers as a parable for
democracy a stadium full of people who, without express instructions,
manipulate light sticks to form patterns. This sort of "hive mind," as Kelly
unnervingly puts it, may be a fitting ideal for stadium performances; it is
less obviously one for self-government. In fact, this is a basically
vitalistic picture of democracy.
This vitalism, bordering on mysticism, spurs Wired to contempt for the
banal institutions of government itself. Frequent contributor and Net guru
John Perry Barlow suggests that in short order, "the U.S. Senate will seem
about as relevant as the House of Lords. " In the same spirit, Wired publisher
Louis Rossetto told the New York Times three years ago, "In ten or twenty
years, the world will be completely transformed. . . . We will see not just
the change from L.B.J. to Nixon, but whether there will be a President at
all." By every indication, the Wired crew would prefer that there not be. An
admiring article on cyberspace tax dodgers who operate out of the Caribbean
gleefully invited readers to imagine a future "nation state--with 20 percent
of its current tax revenue." The Extropians have already imagined it.
THE POVERTY OF GODHOOD
In some ways, it is best not to take all this too seriously. Wired is
redolent of intellectual pretense and factual delusion. Some portion of the
magazine is just the adolescent effusion of overgrown boys with too much
money. The article on Burning Man misses no chance to show young,
bare-breasted celebrants in body paint. Every few issues, a breathless piece
on the future of military technology evokes video games brought down to earth.
A long description of internet entrepreneurs in Canada's near Arctic Northwest
Territories is mostly an admiring look at hard-drinking, hard-living
frontiers-men recognizable from any Louis L'Amour novel. Whether Hefner or
Hemingway, the young men of Wired--and the magazine's readers are mostly
men--get their share of fantasy material.
The more ambitious moments are equally unsatisfactory. Professor Derrick de
Kerckhove's claim that we are rediscovering a "living cosmos" turns on the
fact that, on the Internet, language is both experienced in real time and
given permanent, recorded existence. The first supposedly creates an organic
immediacy, while the second secures ontological stability: Permanent language
becomes part of the structure of things. This "new guise of language," when
parsed, means that we have verbatim records of our conversations, get our mail
almost instantly, and see magazines as soon as they go online. One wonders
whether, once L.B.J. and Nixon began taping their Oval Office conversations,
they experienced a living cosmos. Envision the transcript: "P: Henry, I feel
so expletive deleted tribal] "
More seriously, the future that Wired evokes belongs to a single
population--the digerati--who are happy to tout their experience as universal.
The information economy emphatically does not mean "reenacting the Creation"
for most of its workers. Data-entry workers, shop clerks, and the warehouse
staff at amazon.com. will face the same problems as ever: depressed wages,
battles over benefits, barriers to unionization, and inadequate political
representation in a Congress whose resemblance to the House of Lords is for
them a matter of economic class more than of anachronism. Their situations
will be the less stable for the "creative destruction" of firms and industries
that Kelly celebrates. Tribalism will do them little good, as is generally
true of lesser tribes.
LIBERTARIANISM OR LIMITS?
It is precisely because the digerati are not a lesser tribe that their
defining cultural document demands attention. Wired's unlikely ideas and
improbable prognostications are less significant in the end than its
temperament, the turn of mind and set of moral--and amoral--priorities that it
displays. Temperament is a theme too little appreciated in reflecting about
culture and politics. Although no temperament neatly supports any particular
political order, there are echoes, affinities, and latent hostilities between
habits of mind and political practices.
The Wired temperament is contemptuous of all limits--of law, community,
morality, place, even embodiment. The magazine's ideal is the unbounded
individual who, when something looks good to him, will do it, buy it, invent
it, or become it without delay. This temperament seeks comradeship only among
its perceived equals in self-invention and world making; rather than scorn the
less exalted, it is likely to forget their existence altogether. Boundless
individualism, in which law, community, and every activity are radically
voluntary, is an adolescent doctrine, a fantasy shopping trip without end.
In contrast, liberal democracy at its best starts from a recognition of
certain limitations that we all have in common. None of us is perfectly wise,
good, or fit to rule over others. All of us need help sometimes, from
neighbors and from institutions. We are bound by moral obligation to our
fellow citizens. We share stewardship of an irreplaceable natural world. This
eminently adult temperament is alien to the digerati.
The choice of which temperament we will cultivate is timely, for it lies
near the heart of our decisions about how to regard the ascendant, global,
information-based economy. Will we see in it the latest set of temptations to
our familiar maladies of greed, mutual indifference, and self-absorption, and
work to address those with the best resources of liberalism, privately and
through our political 'institutions? Or will we pretend with Wired that those
hazards and their accompanying obligations are finally behind us, that the
millennium has come in a microchip?
The invitation to godhood inhabits a long tradition in our culture, from
the original temptation in Eden to the bargain of Faust. Kelly has this
tradition in mind when he asks about the prospects for creating artificial
evolution, "Have we ever resisted temptation before?" Before accepting too
blithely, though, we should recall that bargains in this tradition are tragic
at best, destructive at worst. With this in mind, we do refuse temptation, not
least when we decline the pleasures of glib libertarianism, idle romanticism,
and technophilic hubris. In the face of these, refusal deserves pride of place
among the liberal virtues. We should learn to recognize an infernal bargain
when we see one.
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