Against the Machine | Lee Siegel | Talks at Google

Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's Authors at Google event with Lee Siegel. Mr. Segal's work has appeared in various publications, including the New Republic, where he currently serves as a senior editor. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Columbia University and was the recipient of a National Magazine Award in 2002. Mr. Siegel is the author previously of two collections of essays and a recently published critique of Internet culture against the being human in the age of. Of the electronic mob, which hopefully all of you are now holding in your hands and which I think is especially relevant to us here at Google. He'll be speaking about the book and then taking questions from you. If you do have a question for him, please wait for the microphone to arrive as we are recording this event for YouTube. After the event, Mr. Siegel will be sticking around to sign books for anyone who happens to be interested. So with that, please join me in welcoming Lee Siegel to Google.

Thank you. Well, you know, I originally came from dark, blustery New York, driven by an adversarial spirit, determined to ruin your sunny California day and your utopian life here at Google. But after this wonderful lunch and a tour of the campus, I would like to exchange copies of my book for Google shares and a position. Yeah. The flyer describes this talk as the case against the Internet. And I think that's a radical overstatement. Obviously, no one in his right mind would seek to make a case against the Internet. It's as much a part of our lives as shoes and socks at this point. But I want to make a case for examining the Internet more rigorously, more honestly. I want to make a case for looking at it the way a generation of people looked at other transforming technologies like radio and television. I don't really see any criticism, any rational, substantial criticism of the Internet. And you certainly won't get it in the mainstream media where they don't have the sang froid, the confidence that you have here, because the mainstream media is all quaking in their boots. They're terrified of the wave of the future. And you say Internet to the most powerful editors of the New York Times, and they just jump out of their chairs because everybody wants to ride the wave of the future, not be swept away. And it's the mainstream media who are most afraid of this. And it's the mainstream media where you would really get substantial criticisms of the Internet. So I think that maybe this is the right place to begin a critique of the Internet. This is the place where you really have the confidence, the insouciance, even to radically examine this new technology. Maybe there's a future Deep Throat among you who will talk to a Woodward and Bernstein of the Internet and the future. You could have Google Gate. You know, that's a joke. I don't want to turn anyone. But anyway, I want to just read a little bit from my book and then jump into the question and answer period because I think that you probably have a lot of, I hope a lot of criticisms of my criticism. In this passage I talk about. I'm especially concerned in my book with this concept called prosumerism. Do you know this word prosumer? It's a word coined by Alvin Toffler, who wrote Future shock, published it 30 years ago. And he. By the word he means a fusion of the producer and the consumer. So he's talking about Web 2.0. He's talking about the Internet's participatory culture. He's talking about a culture in which nobody really has any leisure time. Everybody's either producing or consuming. And my concern is that in this culture, in this participatory culture, everybody's swept into the marketplace and nobody has any leisure time. Nobody can sort of sink into themselves. Nobody can be inner directed anymore. Do you remember there was a book decades ago written called the Lonely Crowd by David Reisman, a sociologist. In this book he made at the time very famous distinction between inner directed personalities and outer directed personalities. The inner directed personality just takes signs from his own conscience. He proceeds from his own inner thoughts. He's an original person. He doesn't look to others before he makes a decision. The outer directed personality won't do anything that's not approved of by the crowd. He only wants to do the most popular thing. He wants to do the thing that has the widest appeal. It used to be that the outer directed personality was a kind of stigmatized personality. Now I believe that it's become the respectable personality. And I think that the web has hastened this, this other directed, outer directed person. In my book, I talk about Malcolm Gladwell's the Tipping Point. And I, I don't like this book because I think this book is all about teaching people how to market themselves to other people. It's all about looking to the crowd first and then looking to your own instincts. One of Gladwell's disciples, James Surwicki, wrote the Wisdom of Crowds. I feel very old fashioned if I tell you that I hear that and I get like all shaky inside. I start to panic because I don't trust crowds. I don't think there's any wisdom in crowds. And in fact, I think if you get more than two people in a room, the politics become. Becomes so intense, the ego politics, the ego dynamics, the jockeying for status and power, that the whole situation changes. It becomes psychological. It becomes very problematic. So a crowd simply multiplies all that complexity exponentially. I trust the individual, and I think changes come from the original instincts of the individual. I don't think that a Martin Luther King could have. And now I'm going to say something that I hope I'm not violating a taboo, but I don't think he would have become a person in a culture that privileges page views and popularity over every other quality. So that's my bee in my bonnet. I think popular culture's giving way to popularity culture. I think popular culture used to draw people to what they liked, and popularity culture draws people to what everyone else likes. And that makes me nervous also. So this passage is kind of about that. With the Internet culture, I define culture broadly, as any shared public expression never ends. For over 100 years, high culture has been merging with popular culture. But now all experience is available as a form of culture. I'm thinking of YouTube, for example, which means that there are no criteria for judging these disjointed echoes of each other, except their popularity. And what drives popularity is a routine success emerging with the mass. In extending the most generic and derivative appeal on the Internet, you must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else. Exaggeration, intensification, magnification of proven success become highly effective means to success. The loudest, most outrageous or most extreme voices sway the crowd of voices this way. The cutest, most self effacing, most ridiculous or most transparently fraudulent voices sway the crowd of voices that way. A friend of mine calls this megademocracy, meaning democracy, about to tip through perversion of its principles into its opposite. I call it democracy's fatal turn. Actually, the friend who said that to me was Norman Mailer, whom I got to know in the last year of his life. And I Wonder what the YouTube culture would have done with Mailer, because you could take moments from Mailer's public appearances and make him look absolutely ridiculous. And on YouTube you can find clips being played over and over again of his famous headbutting with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett show. And I wonder what the Internet culture would do with this original personality. I think he would be made to look rather ridiculous. I think the ridiculous is exalted. It has a very high appeal on the Internet. Look at the Huffington Post expose of Obama. You all remember that, right? Just a few weeks ago, the bitter clinging remark that a so called citizen blogger snagged and now it's all over the Internet. It was just bracketed for something he said. This was a person who supposedly was on Obama's side, but taking it out of context like that made it a very successful item on the Internet, but made it humanly very disheartening because what it actually did was drain from Obama the vitality of his complete context as a person. And I see on the Internet with mashups and so on and so forth, I see a lot of fun, a lot of pleasure there. This goes without saying, right? But I also see a kind of schadenfreude, a kind of thrill in taking down the public figure, making him or her appear ridiculous. I think it satisfies the disconnected, lonely, isolated ego, but it doesn't help society at all. Another one of the bees in my deranged bonnet in this book there was always one chief difference between popular or high culture and commercial culture. The former, even at their crassest and most profit driven, were meant to be enjoyed disinterestedly. Whether you were watching a play by Sophocles, or attending a concert by the Beastie Boys, or reading a book by Danielle Steele, you had no material interest in in what held your interest. You are in the experience for the pleasure that comes either from high art's absorption of your attention or from popular art's gifts of diversion. In both cases, you were briefly sprung from the daily pressures of self interest. You laid yourself and your ego aside in one degree or another. Commercial culture, on the other hand, is all about the gratification of your self interest, and it involves the total engagement of your ego. The success of a commercial transaction lies in your ability to project yourself into the scene of the transaction. Assertiveness, initiative, full participation in every aspect of the deal that has a bearing on your self interest. Those qualities are what carry the day for a buyer or seller, not passive enjoyment of the situation unfolding before you. At the heart of a successful work of art, high or low, serious or so called or popular, lies something fresh and other some type of original experience. At the heart of a successful transaction, on the other hand, is the satisfaction of your self interest. At the heart of a successful transaction is you. With the rise of participatory culture 2.0 culture, pop culture has entirely merged into commercial culture. Enchantment of the imagination has given way to gratification of the ego, vicarious transport out of yourself has given way to yourself. It's not just YouTube that's about you in this new order of things. It is every cultural experience that is about you. Welcome to the U Y O U niverse. Welcome to the world of the Internet. I think that's what bothers me about the worst aspects of the blogosphere. Again, I'm not. This is not an attack on the blogosphere or the Internet. I acknowledge the marvels and the miracles of the Internet and the blogosphere in my book. It's an attack on the darkest aspects of the Internet. I think one of the problems in the blogosphere is a problem of the first person. I think the country is experiencing a national crisis in the first person. We're surrounded by the abuse of the first person. It's very hard to use the first person in the right kind of way. If you flip the printed I over, it looks like a barbell. And it's so hard to lift that I in just the right expressive way. We're surrounded by expressions in the first person. The age of the memoir I think the ascendancy of rhythm over melody in music is the ascendancy of first person over third person. I think melody carries you out of yourself and rhythm drives you deeper into yourself, into a kind of fantasy life. I think close up in film is the rise of the first person. And I think that the first person is so prevalent now in journalism also. The reason is that we can live, we can inhabit someone else's life more easily, vicariously. If they're writing in the first person, if they're speaking in the third person, we have to get out of ourselves along with them. We have to meet on some common ground of reality. And I think that's harder and harder for us to do. And so the worst parts of the blogosphere, the worst aspects of the blogosphere are these screaming, self conscious, inflated eyes, this abuse of the first person. And I think that that's another thing that the Internet at its worst promotes. It drives us deeper into ourselves to the point where we're online and really we're projecting ourselves out into the world. The whole world seems a projection of our first person. I mean, we're communicating in a chat room with an alias, we're using an alias. We don't hear a voice, we don't see a face, we don't know where they are in space or maybe even in time. And so we have to fill in the blanks, we have to project and we act out and they're acting out and they're projecting. And as all of us know who've been in a relationship, once you start projecting too much, that's where trouble begins. So part of my book is a critique of self absorption in the form of this inflation of the first person on the Internet. But it's also, in the end, a critique of technology, a kind of warning not to rely too much on technology, which I think has to be, again, scrutinized and examined. And I think that the changes that have happened through the Internet have happened faster than any other technology. Everyone always says to me, oh, you know, you're a Luddite. You would have said the same thing about the printing press. You would have been sitting in a cave and wringing your hands over the introduction of the stone tablet and so on and so forth. But those things happened over great periods of time. It took 300 years after the invention of the printing press for this technology to seep down from the scholars cloister into the hands of the ordinary person. Radio, television, the telephone also took decades for these things to really permeate society and change people's lives. The Internet has revolutionized people's lives in what, 15 years? Something like that. So in this section, which maybe is a little bit hyperbolic, I talk about the suddenness of all these changes. It's called through the Looking Glass. What would you have said if I had told you 10 years ago that there would soon come a time when anyone with something to say, no matter how vulgar, abusive, or even slanderous, would be able to transmit it in print to millions of people anonymously and with impunity? How would you have reacted if I had said that more drastic social and cultural changes were afoot, to wit, powerful and seasoned newspaper editors cowering at the feet of two obscure and unaccomplished 20 somethings, terrified that this unassuming pair might call them quote douchebags, unquote, in a new gossip sheet called Gawker. An obscure paralegal in Sacramento, California, who often makes glaring grammatical mistakes on his blog, becoming one of the most feared people in American literary life on account of his ability to deride and insult literary figures. High school kids called administrators editing entries in a public encyclopedia. Wikipedia, of course, entries that anyone using an alias could change to read in any way he or she wanted. Writers distributing their thoughts to great numbers of people without bothering to care about the truth or accuracy of what they were writing. Writers who could go back and change what they wrote if they were challenged or even delete it so that no record of their having written it would exist. You would have laughed at me, I'm sure. Maybe you would have thought that I was purposefully and ludicrously evoking Stalin, who rewrote history, made anonymous accusations, hired and elevated hacks and phonies, ruined reputations at will, and airbrushed suddenly unwanted associates out of documents and photographs. You might have said, what point are you trying to make by saying that our American democracy is moving toward a type of Stalinism? How trite to compare American democracy to its longtime nemesis using crude inversions. Are you some sort of throwback to the anti American New Left? And what if I had? To your great irritation, which perhaps is what you're all feeling now, persisted and told you that anyone who tried to criticize one or another aspect of this situation would immediately be accused of being anti democratic, elitist, threatened by change, and pathetically behind the times. That's to stick to polite expressions. If I had told you that in fact, because of these risks, few people ever did offer any criticism. The gospel of popularity had reached such an extent in this upside down world that anyone, even powerful, distinguished people, cringed at the prospect of being publicly disliked. What I've been describing is the surreal world of Web 2.0, where the rhetoric of democracy, freedom and access is often a fig leaf for antidemocratic and coercive rhetoric, where commercial ambitions dress up in the sheep's clothing of humanistic values, and where, ironically, technology has turned back the clock from disinterested enjoyment of high unpopular art to a primitive culture of crude, grasping self interest. I'll read one more section and then take questions just in case I'm lulling you to sleep. This is the end of the book where I talk about technology and I express my. My sense of disquiet about technology which isn't examined. I mean, technology is neutral. It takes on the character of the people who use it. It's neither good nor bad. And what I'm afraid of is this new technology that's not being examined, scrutinized, discussed. I talk a little bit about pornography, which takes up, I don't know what, 70% of the web, 80% of the web, Internet, porn. And I talk about the similarities between pornography and technology. In a sense, pornography and technology are joined at the hip. They both transform the reality outside your head into means whose sole end is convenience. Pleasure is convenience as physical sensation. Technology is a blessing and a miracle, but it will not lead you to other people as finalities, as ends in themselves existing outside your needs and desires. We all need each other as means. We need each other as instruments of help, sustenance and pleasure. But without experiencing each other as an end and not as a means, we will lose our freedom to live apart from other people's uses for us and from ours for other people. The world around us will shrink to ourselves as the only reference point in the world. Yet the world will still be there, but we will no longer understand it. We will no longer be ready for it. Most of all, we will no longer be patient with it when it fails to fulfill our most superficial and our most selfish desires. Technology without human and humane content is a round trip with just one familiar destination. Commenting on the breakthrough of scientists at the MIT touch labor who sent a sensation from Cambridge, Mass. To a man in London wearing a glove attached to a computer, one radio announcer said, and I'm quoting, inevitably then, the fingertip touch the scientists experienced this month will blossom into a full blown bodysuit. In fact, there are companies working on that right now. That will be the moment when communications technology fulfills its ultimate potential to connect us entirely, antiseptically and without fear of judgment or rejection with the person we most desire. End of quote. There is one person in the world who connects with us entirely antiseptically and without fear of judgment or rejection. He is at the very heart of our desire for convenience. He is at the other end of our wrist and finger. The less he needs the actual presence of other people, the more he will depend on goods and services to keep him company and populate his isolation. The more distracted and busy his isolation, the more he will measure people by their capacity to please him or to gratify him without getting in his face. For the only face he can bear will be his own. That's the end of my. Of my sermon for today. And now I'll take questions happily. Bring it on. Thank you.

I agree with what you say that technologies can be used for good or evil. And I think that the Internet, it's in a way a more democratic technology. So anyone that is willing to learn a little bit about it and break the entry point can leverage it. In this sense, I think it's better than broadcasting technology like TV and radio, which are controlled by a small group of people that they're basically using for their own interests. So I was just wondering if you have, in addition to critiques, if you have any insight on this specific topic and ideas on how we can provide infrastructure like the Internet and prevent the kind of issues that you point out in your book?

Well, that's a very good question. For one thing, and I know it's rather heretical to say this in these precincts, but it seems to me that the Internet is taking on the formation of earlier capitalist entities and it is being controlled by large corporations which are buying up the social networking sites and currently fighting over another site whose name begins with a Y. And I think that these are really more amplified, more intense reiterations of earlier capitalist forms. Also, I'm very suspicious of populist arguments for democracy because in the last century, the most terrible totalitarian movements began with a populist base. And what concerns me is the way the individual voice is drowned out by all this rhetoric of the crowd, the wisdom of the crowd, the page rank algorithm which exalts popularity as the highest criterion of success. I don't know if democracy can express itself on that level. What I always look for in democracy is a society's ability to allow the individual to emerge from the mass with his individually individuality intact, so that the example of his individuality can inspire other people, inspire them to empower their own individuality. I see too often on the web individuality getting drowned in this mad rush towards popularity, towards the most generic appeal. So ideally, yes, the Internet ought to be an instrument, a vehicle for a magnification of democracy, but I'm afraid that it isn't at the moment.

Two things. One is, I'm not certain that it's worse than letting Rupert Murdoch decide what we're going to see. But my real question, it seems when I was growing up, there were like three news stations, and everyone got their news from those three that were competing to be as broad as they could, to get as big a market as they could. And so everyone shared a certain information source. And we all knew when we were arguing politics or something, we all had the same information. What I'm seeing now with 500 channels of TV and the Internet and all of these things is that a bunch of people can choose their sources of information that reaffirms their predisposal attitudes towards things. And I no longer find that I share information sources with people when I'm trying to speak with them. You know, I talk to people who, you know, try to convince me that evolution isn't real and, you know, or any number of things. And I just want to say, where are you getting this? You know, so having lots and lots of choices and things seems to be leading towards a fracturing. You were talking about culture as a shared experience, and now we no longer have that.

Exactly. Very eloquently put. And I don't address that in my book because it has been written about better and eloquently by Cass Sunstein in a book called Republic.com where he talks about the echo chamber effect, which is exactly what you so vividly described. Where people get what Bill Gates calls, cheerfully calls customized information. What Nicholas Negroponte, you know, of course, you know who that is, calls the Daily Me. He made that term up, I guess, maybe 20 years ago or something like that, where people just get news about themselves. I once saw a New Yorker cartoon and it showed people standing on a bus holding onto straps, commuters coming home. And they were all holding newspapers. But instead of the papers saying the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, the paper said the Daily Bob the Morning Louise, they were just reading papers, news about themselves. And I think that is. That is the danger. That's the danger. When you have an entity like the Internet ruled by convenience. It really is. That is the strongest argument, the bottom line argument for the Internet in every realm is it's convenient. Wikipedia is convenient. It doesn't matter if it says that you embezzled money, you know, when you were working at law firms, they'll change it. And anyway, it's convenient. That's the trade off. Few inaccuracies, but convenience. Information from all these different sources, cutting people off rather than bringing them together because they don't have shared sources. It's convenient. You go on, you click, you get customized information. But convenience can be a terrible thing. You know, it's convenient for me to lie to you. It's convenient for you to lie to me. It's convenient maybe for somebody to take the pocket wallet out of my pocket. It's convenient to kill, to lice, to steal, to betray. I don't think that any entity ruled by convenience alone can be humane. And I think one of the consequences is this atomization of information, this cult of information, in fact, right? Where information is just. And I think Google is partly responsible for this. Where information is just good for its own sake. Information. And we're told again and again and again, information is a necessity for democracy. Information is the marrow of democracy. Well, that's simply not true. In my book I talk about how after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, and up until the Civil Rights act in 1964, everyone had information about what was happening to blacks in the South. They were still being tortured and lynched. Everyone had this information, but only when the moral and ethical framework of the society changed. Did the lot of blacks in the south change? Same thing of in Germany in the 20s and 30s. The most articulate and intelligent members of the society knew what was being done to Jews and homosexuals and gypsies and Catholics and dissenters. They knew about the slave labor camps. They had information. But the society had completely lost its moorings. And you only get those moorings through knowledge. Knowledge shows the interconnectedness of things. It puts information into context. I think that at this point, what Google has to do is create alongside its information business, a knowledge business. You know, I was thinking coming into San Francisco, I used to fly into Pittsburgh a lot for personal reasons. And Pittsburgh of course was where the original robber barons made their fortunes. And they left behind, well, at one point they all packed up their cars and took a caravan to New York and planted themselves on fifth Avenue. They left behind in Pittsburgh these huge edifices to culture, museums, universities. Once in New York, they proceeded to build the same thing. And I was thinking about the dot com revolution in the 80s when you could drive down San Francisco street and see all these kids, basically 22, 23 years old, $2 million in their checking accounts, smoking cigars, speaking loudly on the corners. That bubble burst. What did they leave behind? Just lots of empty pizza boxes. And I wonder what Google will leave behind. I don't understand why Google is not in fact building great cultural edifices instead of doing business with libraries, building its own library, moving away from the information ethos, or at least not moving away from it, but establishing a knowledge ethos to show the depth and the context of things instead of tearing things out of their context. Yes.

So my sense is you, you do have this almost completely backwards in that the 20th century was the century of broadcast and the century of totalitarianism. The fact that Hitler and Stalin could speak with one voice to the entire country was what enabled their good etats and their ability to control entire nations.

The fact that they used this technology.

Yes, but the Internet is the opposite of broadcast technology because it enables all these multiplicity of voices that you're simultaneously condemning as the daily me. So you seem to have this sort of two headed criticism here that is internally inconsistent with itself. The point is that the Internet is not a commercial culture. It is a culture, as Gazans says, it's a gift economy. Broadly, Wikipedia is not a commercial entity. And many of these other things are not commercial transactions. They are small individual transactions that because the transaction cost is so low, people are willing to engage into to spread information. And Generate more knowledge. And your episode with the New Republic, where you set up sock puppets to criticize, you were effectively slumming in that culture, saying, okay, this is the worst of it. I will go and roll myself in the worst of it and behave in that way, rather than look at the way that you could engage with it and make it stronger.

Well, you brought up many things. Let me take the last one first. Are you aware of this Sprezza Torah incident? I was a senior editor at the New Republic. The New Republic circulation was down. The magazine was on the block. They tried a desperate strategy, which was to use the Internet to raise subscriptions in a very particular way. They allowed people to come onto the New Republic website using aliases so long as they were subscribers and to say whatever they wanted to say. No blog, no newspaper, no magazine, to my knowledge, has ever allowed that to happen. So they came on and they just said these things that, as I'd been on the Master of the New Republic for 10 years, a practicing journalist for 10 years, I'd never seen before. I don't even want to repeat them. But the last straw was when someone called me a pedophile. Now I just had a little baby boy, and these things stay on the Internet forever. And I went yet again to the New Republic's editors. I'd asked them several times and said, you know, why don't you edit these things or block the worst of them? This is libelous. This would not have happened just two or three years ago. And they said, this is the new policy. Love it or leave it. You know, give up your salary and your health benefits and go off somewhere else or put up with it. I couldn't do that. Temperamentally, I was simply unable to allow these people to make these comments. I had, over the past several years, under my own name, criticized what I called thuggish anonymity. And I did that on my blog at the New Republic. I went after very passionately this convention of malicious anonymity. When I hit this brick wall, when the editors refused to cooperate with me, I thought, you know, I'll give them a taste of their own medicine. I'll make a point. That's all. And because I had. Well, because of the dynamics of things and because I had roused the ire of the blogosphere, it was turned into something that, as William Safire said in the New York Times Magazine, rocked. Rocked people from the Potomac to the Thames. But it was actually a very small incident, so that was that. As far as your other points, I think you're confusing the ideal with the real. I think you are saying that the Internet ought to be a force for democracy. The Internet ought to be non commercial. By commercial I don't just mean making money. What I mean, as I tried to describe in that passage I read to you, commercialism is a way of being. When we're in a transaction with someone, we participate in that. We don't surrender ourselves to what's going on. We don't just become a passive spectator, we aggressively participate. We try to change things, we reach in, we try to reshape. That to me is a commercial state of mind. That to me is what participatory culture, Web 2.0 culture promotes. That's my problem with it. That's the problem. My problem with Wikipedia, nevermind all the inaccuracies, which I think is another, another problem with Wikipedia. And as to your first point about Hitler and Stalin, that's exactly my point. They used the new technologies of the modern era to affect their coup d'. Etat. I'm saying that this technology has to be examined so that it does not get flipped, so that democratic principles are not used to pervert democratic values. Which is exactly what Hitler and Mussolini did. You're very passionate. Yes, but it's not the same.

I mean, this point was, and I agree with him that, I mean, radio and TV are fundamentally not the same as the Internet.

No, they're not.

Controls the radio and the tv, whereas there's many voices on the Internet. I'm sympathetic with your comments on anonymity. I think it has a lot of bad aspects on the Internet. But I think, you know, and I'm a little bit older here, I think anonymity is the price sometimes that we pay for people to have to express themselves openly in certain. I mean, I don't condone it in every instance, but I can see.

Well, it's useful if you're a Chinese blogger. But even in that case, and here is really where I get very skeptical about Internet technology. If you're a Chinese blogger, you're a dissenting blogger. Obviously you vitally need to use an alias to hide your identity. But once the government gets a hold of the Internet, and this is the problem with the Internet, there goes the multiplicity of voices. They've got the, they can find out where you are, they've got the IP addresses of everyone. I don't know if the individual blogger, the dissenting anonymous blogger, could ever stand up to a government who seizes control of this entire entity with all its multiplicity.

Look, at the media in the start of the Iraq war, how much self censoring was done there? I mean, this despite the fact that.

We live in an office.

I mean, people do work, right? I mean, people do work for companies. News sources. I mean, news sources really replicates Reuters.

And a couple of other.

When you read one newspaper, it's almost like reading all of them because, well, 80% of their content is replication of resources.

Oh, and the Internet also draws for it.

Some of the media brought this to themselves. The other thing, I mean, something that you didn't mention, but which I find in the critique of Wikipedia relevant, is that, you know, the bulk of scientific publishing is behind the fault. I mean, it's vaulted, you know, like in scientific magazines, published function houses which are not letting this information out. So, you know, how can somebody cite and be correct? We cannot use the primary sources, some of them which were financed by taxpayer money. Some of that research.

Well, that's another issue. But I want to go back to the Iraq war because I don't think you would even have a blogosphere if it had not been for the Iraq war and for the Bush administration, if you had not had people feeling helpless and impotent before these criminals who just transparently were literally stealing the country. Right? I mean, when the next guy gets into the White House, he'll probably find that there's no furniture there. And just seeing these guys do it and brazenly, insolently, just flying in our face with it, it made us all feel so helpless that the Internet came just at the right moment. But what upset me at the time was that the Internet was not just a source of information. And I think you're wrong about the main. I think you're selling the mainstream media short. It was the New York Times that screwed up big time. But I got all the information I needed about what was really going on from the Guardian. For example, you know, the Guardians, well, the Herald Tribune also made its mistakes. You know, it's financed by the Times, but the Guardian had everything that you could possibly want. But I think that if it hadn't been for the outrage created by the Bush people, you would not have had the blogosphere. And what bothers me about it is that it's often a catharsis. People get on these threads, go on Atrios now or even daily cost, which I think's gotten better. But look at the threads. After about 10 comments, they're completely off message. You know, people are arguing about how to raise their kids, how to toilet train their kids. Where to find parking. They're just going after each other, you know, trying to needle each other, and it becomes this catharsis. I don't think politics should be a catharsis. You know, it should keep you pissed. Art's a catharsis. Politics should keep you angry. But people go on these threads and then it's like, whoa, wow, okay, all right. So they've got. These bad guys are in the White House. But that felt great. And that, to me, is the dysfunction in the political blogosphere that our absolutely dysfunctional politics has caused. Totally different way to go on.

This would be education.

We were talking earlier about high school.

Kids and digital natives versus digital immigrants.

Did you look at any of the issues around learning and how we just assume that everything's a click away, that I just get to look up information?

Back to your comment about Google doing information versus knowledge.

Well, you know, New York City had this laptop. That's a great question. Had this laptop program, which finally it abandoned because it found that the students were just. They were too distracted. You know, this particular process of learning was taking them away from learning. They weren't making the connections. Also, you give a kid a computer and, you know, forget it. You can't control what he's doing. And there are a million distractions, and everything's the worst. Not learning, but the worst distraction is a click away. I think that. I mean, there's no way to stop it. My son's 20 months old. By the time he's. He's 21, he'll live in a completely different world from mine. But I do think that there's going to be a kind of book backlash. And I think eventually people will fuse the best aspects of the Internet with the best aspects of the old print culture. There has to be a return to knowledge, interconnectedness, context. There has to be. I mean, we're too distracted to stay distracted, right? Nobody even has the discipline to stay distracted anymore. I can't just. Too many things going on. So I think that there's going to be a backlash against that. This is just kind of the first epoch, right, of the Internet. There'll be all these changes and this restless dialectic going back and forth.

How do you define the difference between information and knowledge? You seem to embrace knowledge. And don't you think that having a choice between three stations and 500 stations is kind of.

It's a real plus? Well, as this man said earlier, you know, with the three stations, you at least had the advantage of sharing a common culture. When you have A multiplicity of information outlets. People can customize their information source and then no one has a common vocabulary. Ideally, yes, again ideally. And we have had the ideal of the Internet thrust down our throats. Ideally 500 outlets, a thousand outlets, if they're all good, meaningful, substantial outlets. Of course, that's better than the three. Anything's better than that old paradigm. Paradigm? The handful of music studios, a handful of networks, handful of book publishers. But in reality, is it working? Doesn't multiplicity create not just its exclusions, but also its own hierarchies, its own distortions, its own biases?

I'm a little confused by how a couple of your arguments interact. On the one hand, you seem to be objecting to the active engagement of individuals rather than the sort of passive absorption of an art or cultural experience. And on the other hand, you seem to be bemoaning the isolation of individuals and commodification of our relationships. And I'm not sure how those two.

Am I promoting the commodification of relationships? No, no.

You're bemoaning sort of isolation and inward facing individuals. And on the other hand, you seem to be encouraging people to passively accept experience rather than actively engaging in relationships with other people.

Oh, right, yeah. Well, that's an interesting distinction. I mean, there are. I'm all for engagement with other people. I just don't like when it's strictly transactional. And I do think that passive contemplative enjoyment of art, whether it's high or popular, I don't think it's isolating. I think you blend into a common culture, into a common wisdom, you get out of yourself and you begin to live imaginatively, not vicariously, but imaginatively in other people's lives. You know Bruno Bettelheim, the child psychologist, I'm always wary when I quote Bettelheim. He was a famous child psychologist, taught at University of Chicago. And I once had a friend who lived across the courtyard from him in Hyde Park, Chicago. And every day at 4 o', clock, when the kids got out of school, he heard Bettelheim throw up at his window and the famous child psychologist scream in his German accent, shut up. So I'm always wary of quoting him. But he did say, when he was not screaming at children, he said that literature captures the imagination, but that television seizes the imagination. And I think that when you're passively contemplating something, your imagination is captured, but it's allowed to roam free. It's not just seized and taken away from you. I don't think it's isolating reading a book or watching a movie.

Hey there. You brought up a few interesting points that sort of brought new ideas into my mind or things that I had seen all around, and I just wanted to bring those up. So your point about the Internet being like 70% pornography? I don't know the stats, but that sounds pretty. Pretty right. And it's interesting because I feel that through this convenience, people are becoming obese, so to speak. I mean, there are certain dogs, right, that you give them unlimited food, they'll eat themselves to death. And humans have some of those tendencies. And it's with sex and it's. And it's with food in our country, obviously. And I'm just sort of. I'm a little bit afraid of those things. And also the convenience of the Internet and becoming so transactional along with consumerism. So kind of bringing those three things together kind of equals loneliness and isolation. And I guess I'm just wondering where you think that. I mean, you know, there are a lot of really smart people here, and maybe we can recognize, oh, this is the right thing to read, or I only use the Internet for good, or, you know, that kind of thing. But I see where you're coming from. I kind of appreciate that perspective and also tying that in together with some, you know, my grandfather saying these things, he's kind of equating. He doesn't really explain where he feels that we are, but he kind of equates, you know, world wars and this communism and to sort of this same sort of idea. And following what other people say is like, think for yourself, you know, and it's just all those things coming together, you know, what's your response? Or are there any solutions in your mind, or where are you at with all of this?

Well, I think a little bit younger than he is, but I like your grandfather. I like where he's coming from. Solutions. It's such an American thing. Everything has to have a solution. Bill. But it's a great question because you don't want to just be left with these problems, just like you don't want to have a novel taken away from you when you're in the middle of it. I don't think a solution is so easy. I think it's all a question of cultivating a consciousness in each of us. And as you said, there are some very smart people here, obviously very smart indeed. And I think that all of us have to have a consciousness of what's wrong with this technology even as we're seeking to improve it. We know Its virtues. We know its capacity for good. But we just have to start thinking negatively, but in a positive way. We have to infuse negative thinking with a positive energy and begin thinking of worst case scenarios, bad scenarios. Begin talking about the downside of the thing. Whenever I get in a panel talking about this, people always bring up examples of the best things about the Internet. And I don't deny that. But that's not an argument. That's like saying, well, you know, you have a debate about cigarettes. Well, but cigarette, you know, nicotine is the most wonderful, calming thing in the world. Without cigarettes, you wouldn't have romantic Hollywood movies. You wouldn't have French existentialism, which maybe is a good thing. You wouldn't have the cafe. Think of all the good things. Yes, yes, but then there's the other thing. And I'm just saying that bringing up the good things, it's not an argument, it's an evidentiary cry of protest. But we simply have to create a consciousness, through debate, through discourse, through writing of what's gone wrong with this very young technology.

Could you wait for the microphone, please?

So my sense is that your Caliban raging is reflection in the mirror. You're saying that the Internet reveals humanity in all its ugliness and broadness, and you wish the Internet looked more like you and the culture that you come from that established the media culture, the previous media culture that you're comfortable with, and that seems to be what's behind your argument, is that you are comfortable with the east coast high culture that you are clearly a successful part of. And you're concerned that the Internet is revealing these other cultures that were suppressed by that media hegemony before.

You know, it's funny that you should say that, because I spent 10 years raging Caliban, like against east coast high culture. I must have angered every editor from the Times to the New Yorker to the Atlantic to Harper's. I would write for these magazines and then I would stop writing for these magazines. I'm not comfortable with any kind of exclusivity. I'm not comfortable with any concentration of power. More than two people in a room and I break out in hives. I'm not comfortable with any kind of received opinion. No, I want to see Internet culture to be at its best a true, original, dissenting culture. That's what I want. But I see it more and more becoming conventionalized. I don't think it has the most. I don't think it has the ugliest aspects of human nature by any means. But I do think that it has the most average aspects of human nature. In other words, this lust for popularity, for one thing, which I think is a terribly destructive force in Internet culture. I think there has to be room allowed for the individual existing outside page views. There has to be. There has to be room for losing, for failure, for setback. Internet culture, it's too much about success. It's driving people crazy. You're not allowed to fail on the Internet. There should be. There should. Instead of the most popular blogs, there should be the least popular, the most failed, the most unsuccessful. Do you remember Howard Stern did a kind of send up or rather retort to American Idol. He celebrated the worst. Sanjaya Malakar, do you remember that he celebrated the worst Idol contestants as a way to turn upside down this obsession with popularity? No. I'd love to see all those marginal qualities exalted and celebrated.

We have time for one more question.

I'm wondering if this might not be self repairing. That over time people realize that everything they see on the Internet written in black and white is not truth. That they learn how to get knowledge out of the sea of information. When you, when you compare American Idol or other, you know, pop TV things, those are also going after being the most popular, trying to reach a big audience in order to sell more stuff that, you know, a lot of us don't watch that stuff because it is of no value. And in the same way on the Internet you can find whatever you want. You don't necessarily have to go for the things that are that are most popular. In that sense, what PageRank does is it says that this is a vote for this thing that's not always popularity in a large sense. Some of the things that have been done to PageRank since its inception are actually quality metrics where it's not just that it had a lot of links, but that it has some other quality signals that are used. And we have things like Google Scholar and things like this. So I think that there might be just like on ebay, there are reputation systems where you say this guy is someone you can trust to deliver the goods once you pay them, that there might be self repair for a lot of the things that you're worried about with reputation systems and things so that you're not just getting information, you're getting truth.

Well, it's funny, what you're describing is really a return to the old paradigm. But you had editors, for example, doing the filtering and then we stopped trusting them. But now we see that we need filtering from the bottom up. So you're really calling for a return to the same editorial function that at one time was boldly pronounced obsolete. And I think you're right. I do think that we're going to have to filter and edit and all of that. I think it's very hard to do that yourself and I think that's why the old system kind of worked. You had a bunch of editors report you had layers and layers of institution, institutional controls, all of which were competing to some extent with each other and keeping each other honest. And now you're saying rightly so, one looks at the chaos and the anarchy of the web and the lack of truth that can come in great bursts and storms and saying we've got to learn how to edit that. Yes, but that's a return to the same kind of caretaker sensibility that once was proclaimed obsolete.

Lee Siegel, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.