by Lee Siegel (Spiegel & Grau, $9.99)
We-Think
by Charles Leadbeater (Profile, £12.99)
Here Comes Everybody
by Clay Shirky (Allen Lane, £20)
Central to these three books is an old idea: that technology is a "locomotive" revolutionising society. Where the authors differ is in their views as to where the locomotive is pulling us. Lee Siegel is a pessimist who believes that information technology is destroying society; Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater are optimists who think it is enabling us to realise ourselves as social beings.
The locomotive may be old and dirty, but it does have a fancy new engine. Let's call it the digital express. Siegel, Shirky and Leadbeater all agree about its features. It consists of digital products and services: the worldwide internet; mobile telephone systems; and, above all, the new self-broadcasting collaborative communities of Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube and Google and the hundreds of interactive Web 2.0 start-ups that are transforming our use of media. Each author seeks to imagine the new kinds of communities emerging as a consequence of the mania for wikis, blogs and other collaborative, open-source technologies.
So to what sort of community is this shiny engine heading? For Siegel, an American critic, it is dragging us away from, not towards, what it means to be human. His spirited jeremiad, Against The Machine, fears for the survival of true human community, if not man himself, in today's digital culture. The heart of Siegel's argument is that life in the digital realm has no equivalence with the "real" community of flesh and blood: "A real social situation, even when people are not talking to one another, is full of faces and objects caught sight of, gestures seen, sounds heard that keep communication going. But these sights, sounds, gestures… also serve as barriers to what you can express. You cannot be totally 'yourself'… That is what it means to be in public."
For Siegel, the intricate, complex sensuousness of social reality is giving way to the artifice and vulgar utility of virtual life. Life on the internet, he tells us, is fake and thus everyone in its "virtual community" is also fake. Sitting alone in front of a networked computer and "communicating" with other solitary beings is a profoundly unsocial act. It "shrinks" the socially complex world down to ourselves and our appetites, the internet being the "first social environment to serve the needs of the isolated, elevated asocial individual." The worldwide web is, for Siegel, essentially an optical illusion, an infinite hall of mirrors in which atomised, self-broadcasting individuals are really just staring at themselves.
So how can we fight against the machine? "Being human," says Siegel, requires us to become cultural dissidents in today's internet epoch, a grand historical moment he describes, with the solemnity of a neo-Marxist undertaker, as the "final phase of capitalism." The dissident must refuse to participate in what Siegel calls the "empty theatre" of transforming one's inner life into a public "commodity." Being human means diligently guarding one's privacy. In the age of the electronic mob, the cultural dissident remains silent.
Silence is certainly not a virtue in We-Think, Charlie Leadbeater's optimistic antidote to the fin-de-siècle pessimism of Against the Machine. We-Think is a polemic in support of the social benefits of the new media revolution. For Leadbeater, an Islington-based new media guru who once tutored Tony Blair in the communitarian implications of the digital age, the internet frees humanity's vast capacity for sharing. "The future is us," Leadbeater announces.
We-Think turns all Siegel's assumptions about individualism and community on their head. Now, with sharing technologies like blogs and wikis, "we are defined not by what we own, but what we share." On Wikipedia, we can become altruistic knowledge-sharers; on Facebook we can share our lives; on the blogosphere we can share our ideology; on our mobiles we can share our movements. We-Think rewrites Cartesian epistemology. "We-think," Leadbeater asserts, "therefore we are."
Like Leadbeater, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University, sees the digital express as representing the true beginning of human history. Only he outbids We-Think in the cultural, economic and above all political implications of this revolution. In Here Comes Everybody, he claims that new technology exposes the artifice of leadership, the pretence of unnatural human hierarchies. The new social tools reduce organisations to their core component—people. And people, for Shirky, are naturally loving creatures, not given to ordering each other around.
Here Comes Everybody is the most overtly political of the three books. While Siegel is imprisoned within the narcissistic self, and Leadbeater is too energetically idealistic to slow down for something as mundane as politics, Shirky devotes a considerable part of his argument to the potential "suffering" of political elites. Not surprisingly for someone who sounds like a 21st-century version of Antonio Gramsci, Shirky sees the crisis of the dominant political class brought about by the social media revolution as a good thing. Information technology allows for "real-time," "interactive" "flash mob" rebellions everywhere from George W Bush's America to Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus.
If this debate between Shirky, Leadbeater and Siegel about the relationship between community and technology sounds familiar, that's because it is. It's at least version 5.0 of a conversation about industrial society begun by Rousseau and Marx and then, as the web 2.0 crowd likes to put it, "remixed" by everyone from Arnold and Spengler, Weber and Durkheim, the Frankfurt school, the situationists, the postmodernists, the communitarians and so on. Round and round we have gone, and round and round we will continue to go, because it's a debate that has no possible resolution.
To be fair, Shirky, Siegel and Leadbeater all pay their intellectual debts. Siegel is clearly a descendant of the Frankfurt school of late Marxist cultural critics He also explicitly pays his debt to both Christopher Lasch and Daniel Bell, the two great neo-Marxist (or, at least, ex-Marxist) critics of the narcissism of late capitalism. But it's Leadbeater who is most nimble at tracing the intellectual genealogy of his own argument. He recognises that We-Think's idealism is a synthesis of nerd, academic, hippie and peasant ideology, and he acknowledges his debt to everyone from Ivan Illich and Marshall McLuhan to Guy Debord and Roland Barthes.
Should we embrace Siegel's apocalyptic pessimism or Leadbeater and Shirky's messianic optimism? I am not the fairest judge of this, since my own little book, Cult of the Amateur, is squarely in the Siegel camp. What I will say, in the interests of impartiality, is that all three books make important points about the increasingly salient role that information technology is playing in politics and society. But do not be seduced by the usual breathless talk of "epochal" change that all these writers claim we are witnessing. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan was predicting the same revolutionary consequences of the computer age. In the 1980s and 1990s, the debate shifted to Neil Postman, Kevin Kelly and George Gilder. Last year it was my own jeremiad versus Chris Anderson's utopian "long tail." The truth is that wave after wave of digital futurists are convinced that they are living through the most profound shift in human history. And the only thing I know for sure is that in ten years' time, there will be a new generation of Shirkys, Leadbeaters and Siegels telling us that the digital express is pulling society in directions that will alter human history forever.
