*So, I just attended the 17th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association in the Universita of Bologna, where I delivered a scholarly lecture in the oldest university on earth (founded 1088 AD).
*The "Media Ecology Association" saw fit to bestow on me their "Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity." To accept this award I had to deliver an address suited for humanities scholars, so the following is me in full-on "Professor Sterling" mode. These poor guys must have called me "Professor Sterling" fifteen times, though I make no claims to any career achievement as an academic.
*I enjoyed describing my long-term interests in media studies to educators who appreciate such matters.
AMUSING OURSELVES WITH DEAD MEDIA
Bruce Sterling
Bologna June 02016
Buongiorno tutti. Thanks for inviting me to attend your event here in Bologna. It was kind of you to offer me an award which was won by so many distinguished people. It's pleasant to think that my "Public Intellectual Activity" somehow adds up to a "Career."
So in response I have a talk, which should last less than an hour, or maybe more, considering that this is Italy.
I know you guys are keen on PowerPoint slides and similar cutting-edge digital media, so I brought you on speech written on paper. I call my speech "Amusing Ourselves With Dead Media." It's on the subject of Neil Postman as a historical figure from a past media environment.
I wouldn't claim to do a lot of "media ecology" myself, but I do a similarly foggy thing called "media philosophy," so I know about Professor Postman and his work.
He once said, wisely I think, "A culture's ideas of truth are a product of a conversation man has with himself, about and through the techniques of communication he's invented."
That is "media philosophy." It's about epistemology. It's about truth – as conveyed by media. How do we know what we know? How can we tell each other that, and confirm, and debate, and justify our beliefs, acting as a public, as a culture – using media?
This is in fact a lifetime career matter for me, because I am a veteran of a ruthless digital media revolution.
I'm a writer, mostly using a computer. For instance I often use weblogging software to write. But I will never, ever say, "This blogpost I just wrote is a classic! Blogs will link to my blogpost for a hundred years!" Because I know that the weblog, or the 'blog,' is quite a short-lived species in the ol' media ecology.
It's thanks to the ground-breaking efforts of scholars like Neil Postman that I can think critically about the nature of media, and that I do have some tactical ideas about where and how to devote my creative and journalistic energies in a media environment. So I'm grateful for his contribution, and I owe him a cultural debt.
However, I so think rather differently than he does, in some ways because I'm younger, but also because as a technology critic I have a different sensibility. Neil Postman was a professional educator who was sincerely devoted to acculturating young people. While I teach almost randomly, maybe once every five years.
Also, he was a moralist of media. I moralize about media sometimes, but mostly I spend time trying to outguess its development, or to discover broad-scale trends that existed historically and might be extended into the future.
Also, Professor Postman was from New York literary culture, while I'm a Texan travel writer, technology journalist and genre novelist. So it's not that our ideas directly clash, it's more that there are broad areas to analyze where we can't agree on the nature of the questions.
Time will tell in these matters. "Media Ecology" was a coinage of the 1970s. Neil Postman was warning us that a disturbed media ecology would be bad, in much the way that a wrecked and polluted physical environment would be bad for us. Forty years later and our planet's environmental situation is indeed disastrous. And – this would not surprise him, I suppose – our public discussion, in media, about our climate crisis and other environmental difficulties, is chock-full of disgusting immoral and unethical deceit.
One can also imagine Professor Postman taking some sarcastic satisfaction at the appearance of Donald Trump, a reality-TV star, as a possible President. Of course Neil would be horrified at the grisly prospect of a great republic choosing at the ballot box to amuse itself to death, but there's no question that it vindicates his analysis. American television is a sump of vapidity and demagoguery.
With the appearance of The Donald, practically every American political analyst, of both the left and right, are talking Neil Postman's language today. They are all declaring that Trump's domination of television confounds serious issues by demeaning and undermining political discourse. By turning real, complex issues into superficial images. By draining American politics of ideas, thoughts and policies. By turning democracy into a form of entertainment.
However, many people don't realize that Neil Postman declared that thirty years ago. A Cassandra level of prophecy, because people would indeed listen to Neil, and his weighty aphorisms would breeze right through them with scarcely reduced velocity.
Television as Neil Postman once knew it is dead. Literally: the analog wave forms that formerly carried TV network broadcasts don't work any more. They're technically obsolete. The infrastructure is all digital. So TV screens are basically legal and regulatory formats, rather than an independent medium per se. So the medium of TV he was describing in the 1980s is no longer with us. Television as a sub-format, as one business model of streaming data over digital cable distribution, is different in character now.
Neil Postman warned us that television was not much use for education, that it conveyed entertainment efficiently, but would inherently fail at enlightenment. Marvin Minsky once had an even scarier hypothesis: "Imagine if television were actually good. It would mean the end of everything we know."
I'm not here to decry television as a medium. Dramatic entertainment television of our current era is actually pretty good. As a form of entertainment, of creative expression, American television now is much healthier than American cinema is. American television now is probably the best American television there has ever been. The TV politics and news coverage is abysmal. The business models are malign. The TV ownership racket is sinister. But the entertainment's great.
But TV still won't give the public enlightenment and rational debate that Neil Postman wanted from a proper medium. He was print-centric, and looked back to 18th and 19th century America as eras of rational argument, an Age of Reason. Because, in print, complicated arguments could be transmitted without the oversimplifications and interruptions of broadcast media.
I'm also quite interested in the media of earlier centuries, but not because I admire their Golden Age control over their discourse. As a historian-futurist type, I tend to look at things functionally and instrumentally rather than morally. "What behavior did the system afford?" rather than "What should they have done to become a better civilization?"
Neil Postman was not a science fiction writer, but he quoted my colleagues Aldous Huxley and George Orwell rather a lot. He often warned that we would have the universal surveillance of Orwell, or the blathering consumer-media of Huxley. He was spared the spectacle of what we have now – surveillance-marketing social media – which are both Huxley and Orwell running concurrently on the same global platform.
Neil Postman wrote the book "Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology." But, since he considered this surrender a bad and a final thing, he didn't think to speculate what would happen AFTER this surrender. He tended to think, well, surrender means culture-death, so there will be nothing left for a culturatus to say. But historically, cultures die rather often. So do their media structures. New people get born. New media arrive too.
This may sound like a counsel of despair on my part, or maybe like an embrace of a vapid technological determinism. But I am a novelist, and I don't have this "solutionist" approach of Engineering Uber Alles. No, I have more of a Balkan or Eastern European sensibility, which means, not simple despair, but a lively awareness of the imminence of collapse.
To say that television can kill American culture is absolutist, it's fatalistic. To say that television, too, will collapse, that this vast empire of glass tubes will all be tossed out and replaced by scary little digital flatscreens, well, it's weirder and may sound grimmer, but there is more of a scope for futurity.
Consider Vaclav Havel, who is an intellectual dissident and political activist in a totally poisonous media environment. His only media tools are a manual typewriter and a neighborhood theater, and occasional help from the jailbirds in a rock and roll band. Nevertheless the entire apparatus of state control of media collapses around Vaclav Havel. And it's good news.
Neil Postman is on the editorial board of THE NATION magazine, so he wants his nation and its national order to persist and thrive. Vaclav Havel is a creative guy in a colonized state when his nation is repressed by armed invasion forces and a totalitarian ideology. But Vaclav's on the attack against the media structure, so in some ways he's rather a perkier historical figure than Neil Postman.
What the two men have in common is morality. Vaclav Havel was exceedingly keen on morality. He wrote a lot of political manifestos about allegiance to truth. His essay, "The Power of the Powerless," is a useful and inspiring piece of political writing, a closely argued text, in very much the Neil Postman vein.
But Vaclav didn't give himself a lot of credit for the persuasive power of his texts, which I think was wise of him. Havel said that the reason the Czech people took him seriously was that he was the first Czech dissident who was shut up, for years, in jail, and came out unbroken and saying the same things that had put him in there. In other words, it is grit and consistency and endurance that empowers political leaders rather than long, clever textual arguments.
I suspect that is true. If you're doomed to live in a world where huge media structures are repeatedly collapsing and dying: newspapers close, eight-track tapes vanish, record stores vaporize, telephones lose their wires, Morse code vanishes, email lists are abandoned, websites evaporate – then you have to play a long Vaclav Havel game.
I'll drill down on the point here, if you'll indulge me.
Among other things, Neil Postman was famous for his list of "six questions about new technologies." I happen to hang out with lots of guys who are quite keen on creating new media technologies. Industrial designers, interaction designers, software engineers, venture capitalists, corporate myrmidons for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft – they're creative-class types. This is my readership, basically. A cyberized generation.
I can't say that I treat my readers kindly. Neil Postman wanted to enlighten his readership. He was an educator, he wanted to equip people with critical thinking skills so that they could create lives of dignity for themselves as American citizens. While I have to confess that I'm a subversive, postmodern, cyberpunk novelist. I like to provoke people with cognitive dissonance and use elaborate fictional stunts to get them to confront the unthinkable. I'm too sarcastic and paradoxical to be a force for enlightenment.
In fact, it's probably rather sad that a chuckling, media-savvy amoralist like me even gets to hang out in the same world as Vaclav Havel and Neil Postman. But, I do have my own niche in the media ecology, maybe like some nocturnal, furry, Madagascar lemur creature, so I thought I would answer Neil Postman's famous Six Questions today.
Furthermore, I will answer them with a creative act of fiction. I will answer them from the point of view of a fictional character, an imaginary new-media developer. He is a practical, modern commercial operative guy who is in the everyday modern business of new media as it is built and deployed today, in 2016.
So, Neil Postman Question Number One:
1. "What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?"
And my fictional protagonist replies. He says:
"Oh yes, Dr. Postman, that's the famous 'killer app' question. Well, we do have an application that we think will supply some revenue for our project. Enough money to keep us going for a while, until we can create or discover other solutions. Once we have a LOT of solutions, then we'll have a technology platform. And we want a platform because that's what the big guys have.
"So we certainly don’t want one clear technology with one clear solution. That would be fatal to us. We want to be large and profitable service where our developers bring our users the solutions. That's what success means.
"So what's question number two, Dr. Postman?"
2. Whose problem is it?
"Well, our problem is clear. Basically, it's the problem of return of investment to our VCs, angel investors and, eventually, our shareholders. None of this new media would happen if they weren't ponying up the money. We're entrepreneurs and inventors, but basically we're solving one-percenter problems of where to stash their cash where it pays off very well. That's their problem, and we get paid to solve it. It's a hard problem, too. We fail a lot."
Question number three.
3. Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?
"Oh, you mean who are we disrupting? Well, of course that's the beauty of our work. The more disruption and serious harm, the better. Like, if we disrupted ballet dancers, there aren't very many of them. So we'll just ignore them. They're vanishing anyway, because nobody wants to sit in a theater and watch people dance for hours while when you can't use your cellphones.
"So if you want to disrupt somebody – taxi drivers. Man, there are millions of them worldwide. Put them out of business as fast as you can, move fast and break things. That's worth billions. Also, taxi drivers are mostly crooked little union cliques in local cities. So if you steal a march on them globally, you can wipe them out in a hurry while they can't hit back! We're looking around the clock for people and institutions of that kind, and man, we obliterate 'em."
Question number four:
4. What new problems might be created because we have solved this problem?
"Oh man, we hope, thousands of them. All possible sets of problems. We want as many problems as possible dealt with through our platform. Basically, we want every possible human problem to be made into an app that you can hold in a device in your hand. All of them, and if more problems are generated by doing that, great! It means more features.
"Actually, apps are getting somewhat tired as an approach, though. Apps are old. Now it's about talking to devices, you know, you just verbally state your problem, and Amazon Alexa, or Siri, or Google Now, or Facebook M will answer the question. Right now it's pretty modest and simple, mostly about ordering pizza or turning the lights on, but our frontier there is the entire codeable phase-space of all answerable human problems.
"Does that answer your question, Dr. Postman?
"You should ask Siri that question, actually. No kidding. Siri is great at questions.
"A guy like you, Neil Postman, should be writing for Siri. Seriously. You should look into that career arc."
Question number five.
5. What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?
"Oh. Well, there's two kinds of people and institutions that matter now, basically. Global financiers, and the tech elite. And digital spies and national secret police, a little bit. But mostly, it's just us and them. All other forms of political and institutional power are in decay. All of them, for many years now.
"So the real issue now is: are 'We' actually 'Them'? Like, Google Apple Facebook Amazon Microsoft, the tech elite, are we actually also the rich guys? Or is it that the richest guys on earth – the moguls, the oligarchs, the offshore investors, the Panama crowd, the Trumps, the Murdochs, the Wal-Mart clan – are they our deadly enemies?
"Maybe it is thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Like Bill Gates, who is super-rich and also super-technical, and also a really nice gentleman curing malaria. That's our best-case scenario.
"Or maybe there's hell to pay where even stately ancient democracies like Great Britain fall to pieces because we, the global rich and the global technologists, are both chewing the meat right off their little old-fashioned bones.
"Exciting times, Neil. If you want to complain we can buy you some national newspapers. Got 'em all subsidized out of the petty cash."
Last question.
6. What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies and what is being gained and lost by such changes?
"Well, that language question is marvelous. Because that sounds like an abstract literary question, like something a novelist or a moral essayist would worry about. But when you've got a searchable database of real-time changes in language, that's not literature or morals, that is a business! You can actually track what masses of people are doing with language. Of course you can track whatever is being gained and lost. And that is monetizable! You can list trackable hashtags and you can even SELL the language – like hashtag-Orwell, hashtag-Newspeak, or hashtag NeilPostman, if you'd like us to place that hashtag in our top ten.
"And get this – we can even do that to TELEVISION. Yes! Not just to written language! We've got Big Data Deep Learning systems that are self-trained to recognize images in television. They can label those changes, and track the changes.
"Instead of like it was in the 1980s, with huge monster television networks versus the lonely human viewers, these devices are like GIGANTIC ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT TV VIEWERS! They never eat, they never sleep and they can watch millions of TVs at once.
"In fact they can drain the content right out of TV. So if TV was your Frankenstein, Dr Postman, these are like giant ghostly Big Data leeches that can suck the content right out of the bolts on Frankenstein's neck! If I were in the dying TV biz, I'd be terrified of these deep-learning creations.
"But you know what, Neil? In the old analog media, they were too dumb to catch on. TV could have ruled the world, like Orwell stamping on your face with a glass boot, forever. But the world just dropped right out of their hands. Yup. Smashed on the ground like a bursting vacuum tube. Dead media, Neil. It's all over. Finito.
"Good talking to you!"
So, that was me enjoying a bit of my novelist's schtick there. Old-school cyberpunk satire, like Aldous Huxley 4.0. But I don’t want to end my speech on that note. I always thought dystopia was corny.
And besides, this is Italy. I spend a lot of time in Italy. I even write Italian science fiction books about Italy, what they call "fantascienza." I'm not required to stay in Italy, I don't have any kind of job here and I have no interest in becoming a citizen. So I have to struggle to explain what I do around here.
Mostly, in Italy I seem to do what you might call "public intellectual activity." My activity is quite different than it was in my previous creative base of Austin, Texas. Why is that?
Well, Neil Postman used to talk about what he called the "deluge of chaos," or the "din," of too much information. He said that we were drowning ourselves in flows of information when we ought to be thoughtfully working on deeper problems of the human condition.
Frankly, the American chaos and din never bothered me much while I was in it. The fire-born are at home in fire, so I was used to it. If America has chaos and din, then Italy also has chaos and din, plus lots of hand-waving and car horns.
However, it's not my own chaos and din. It's the chaos and din of a foreign society. At first I just didn't understand it. Then, when I came to understand some of it, it didn't impinge on me. I had lost my own native chaos and din, while the Italian din felt harmless to me.
I had achieved a form of Neil Postman freedom that I had never expected to have.
Italians hate their Italian media. They loathe their Berlusconi-controlled television. They distrust their banker-controlled newspapers. They have all kinds of media problems. And I became aware of those, but only in a very analytical, public-intellectual way.
Instead of being engrossed by Italian media, or entertained to death by it, I found myself with very much a Neil Postman analytical position toward it. Basic, deep questions, like: why did that happen? Who benefited by that? What is the point?
Italy is an ancient society. If you want carnivals, tragedies, dystopias, even dramatic comedies, they've had dozens of centuries of them. I can physically see the layers of collapsed civilizations in the material culture of places like Bologna. The panoply of human struggle is laid out before one in Italy in quite an unfeigned, awkward, and genuine way.
I spend a lot of time in Turin, where the people of Torino have been very accepting of a curious Texan novelist walking around for no good reason. The very first institution I visited in Torino was the National Cinema Museum. A veritable Mecca of media archaeology. This media museum is installed in the grand central tower, the landmark building of Turin, the Mole Antonelliana.
They say you are a true Turinese when you live 'sotto la Mole,' in the shadow of the Mole Antonelliana. I'm not Turinese, but I feel that shadow keenly. When I saw these ancient, dead media devices, the magic lanterns, the optical toys, the zoetropes, the phenakistoscopes, I felt that this great museum of dead media, and the city that housed it and, somehow, supported it, had to be of great consequence to me.
So I want to conclude my award speech, not by complaining about television, or social media, or advanced computation, or the morality of what we are doing at the present moment, but about my deeply felt relationship to Italian silent film.
I know rather a lot about Italian silent film and its social and technical milieu. I don't know anyone who has quite my emotional rapport with it. There was a brief Belle Epoque period, from the invention of cinema to the Great War, when Turin was a world capital of silent cinema.
There were about half a dozen production houses, Ambrosio, Aquila Film, Pasquale and Tempo, Itala Film, with their panoply of actors, divas, screenwriters, and directors. They had technical talent, and available capital, and a friendly city press, and a supportive city government for their daring new-media venture in silent photoplay pictures that move. They made over a thousand films, mostly one-reelers. Silent comedies, dramas, documentaries, epic historicals and so forth.
So they had a genuine, home-grown Turinese media ecology once. Inside the Turin National Cinema Museum, they basically have the thing stuffed. It's all long-extinct, and the remnants of it are mounted in glass. They also have one big-game trophy – the giant bronze beast-god from the epic film "Cabiria."
I'm quite the student of the city of Torino, and the people I hang out with there are basically digital new media people, Internet people, academics, electronic art people and weird alternative open-source Arduino controller-board guys. A remarkable local culture.
This silent-film, 'cinema muto,' media ecology of Turin is, if not their direct spiritual ancestor, at least their haunting, silent spirit. Because they're the same people, in the same place, one hundred years apart.
So I engaged with Turinese silent film. I read a number of books and articles, and I picked around diligently in what is publicly available to see.
Oddly, I'm not a film critic. I rarely write about film, and never use the critical armature of film studies. What compelled my attention was the intense Italian-ness of Italian silent film. Their medium was silent, so they didn't speak any Italian. Instead they were semiotically Italian, as the late Umberto Eco might have it. They had to visually perform their Italianness with mime, costume and set design.
And, since they belonged to a pre-global, very regional era, they were far more Italian than any modern Italian can be. It's physically impossible to get more demonstratively and silently Italian than these people were, or are, in the tattered ruins of their celluloid artwork – which are now our copied, cleaned-up, digital, software-based ruins of their artwork.
Much is lost forever, but a lot remains. I even discovered a couple of items that were clearly meant for the Turinese period equivalent of a guy like me. One was one of the world's first killer robot movies, while the other was a romance set on Mars. Two Italian silent films, precursors of science fiction cinema, well before the term "science fiction" was invented by a radio parts guy from Luxembourg, Hugo Gernsback.
Naturally I looked on these films kindly, and I tried to tell everybody I knew about them, but these primordial silent Italian science fiction movies have yet to arouse the frantic critical interest that I suspect they deserve.
Naturally, as a visiting American from a nation that has effortlessly dominated world cinema for decades on end, I wanted to know: so, what happened to them? Why are they dead, what did Turinese media do wrong? After such a great launch, and many successful cinema exports that did well even in the USA, why did their media ecology collapse almost entirely? Why did their studios go broke, why did the theaters close, why did the talent scatter? What was their moral failing, what had they done to deserve this harsh fate?
And the answer, I discovered, was nothing much.
Of course some media critics have answers, firmly based in media criticism. They say that 'cinema muto' became dead media because Italian cinema was too dispersed among the major cities of Rome, Turin and Milan. Also, the exhibition circuit was fragmented, so they didn’t have major theater chains. And, their attempt to consolidate their creative studios into one national trust didn’t work. And foreigners lost their taste for grand historical epics with lots of swords and togas. And sound was coming to movies and that would have finished them off anyway because they spoke Italian.
And these explanations do sound plausible, even when they're sometimes contradictory. Of course a media critic familiar with media will find ways to say that media creators managed their affairs badly. But I don't believe that those are the good and sufficient reasons.
The real problem was that their society, the Kingdom of Italy, lost control of events. The Italian silent film creators were swept headlong into the general holocaust of the Great War. Trade collapsed. They couldn't make or buy film stock. They couldn't ship the movies they made. Also their work force was drafted.
Plus, five million viewers out of their core movie audience – the young men eighteen to 25, the men with loose money, guys who like entertainment and want to go out on dates, were all killed by rifles, cannons and disease.
That catastrophe destroyed their entertainment business, root and branch. The Italian movie business didn’t die because it was media. It didn't amuse itself to death frivolously. It died because it was one aspect of civilization when the lights were going out all over Europe.
The post-war situation was about inflation and hunger and a huge epidemic, and their most glamorous screenwriter, their multitalented poet and playwright, turned into a ranting militant megalomaniac who became the godfather of Fascism.
Neil Postman said, "Our genius lies in our capacity to make meaning through the creation of narratives that give point to our labors." Well, such is my narrative of Italian silent cinema. That is the story, in my capacity to understand it.
Their inventive labors in new media could not save them. They had genius, and it had meaning, but they went down kicking in the larger convulsions of civilization. They died in epic tragedy.
They did everything they could think of to save themselves, but it didn’t help them, any more than media criticism could have saved Pompeii from Vesuvius.
But, as Czeslaw Milosz wisely said, in his Eastern European fashion, "We should never despair of the past, because the past takes its meaning from whatever we do right now."
So if I take a strong, media-ecology, moralist approach, I might make meaning through the creation of a moral narrative that would likely have to say that Italian silent cinema had something bad about it. They're gone because they were bad. The divas were immoral femmes fatale, and the poet screenwriter was really a Fascist all along.
Worse yet, maybe these Italian cinema entrepreneurs were actually an abusive medium. Maybe they were fatal entertainers. Maybe they were distracting and seducing the Italian audience with their silent sword and toga spectacles, when the Italians should have been reading more text, and somehow showing the political maturity to remain neutral during the Great War.
I have to invoke a lot of special-pleading to say that they deserve such a fate, as opposed to all the other nations in the bloodbath of a world war. But maybe there's some kinder intellectual approach here, in which we recognize their frailty and mortality – and also our own.
Neil Postman said that we should "Use media rather than being used by it."
Well, Italian silent film, whether it was morally good or bad, cannot "use" anybody any more. The entire media ecosystem of silent film is fossilized like the Jurassic. Its slender remains are abject and need protection and preservation – even digital preservation, because digital preservation is the only preserving we know how to do nowadays. To our shame, because the long-term archival quality of digital formats is terrible.
We don’t have to use moral use-value arguments about the abject dead medium that is silent film. As Postman saids, "To be quite honest about it, I don’t see any point in studying media unless one does so within a moral or ethical context." I disagree with that, because it overlooks too much media. It concentrates on ethics and public affairs and neglects cave art, pneumatic tube post, semaphore stations, rocket mail, balloon posts and other eccentric but real phenomena.
Unless, that is, one shifts the moral context, and recognizes that morality involves – not just public struggles over justice and power and knowledge – but how we choose to treat people who cannot affect us at all. How do we morally choose to treat other people, when it's not about power or class or wealth or the political structures of our platforms of interaction?
Because these people don't participate, they don't struggle. They are silent and dead, and so is their media technology.
Instead of being a buzzing and active machine, whose functions, inputs, outputs, should be designed, engineered, financed, maintained, queried, policed, silent film is a media technology as a black box. An ecosystem in a black coffin, a platform that slowly dissolves into the dusty cloud of the media afterlife.
We could frolic in the ruins of the past, which is a steampunk version of media studies. Because they're dead, and they can't defend themselves, so we can pick and choose from the loot and maybe write historical fantasies, which, in fact, I must confess that I do. Yes, I do that, and I even write about Italian silent film in a science-fictional context. And that fills me with creative glee, but I recognize that it's not entirely the proper scope for a public intellectual response.
The truth is, that if we merely treat the people of the past as curios, then we will be treated as curios ourselves. So instead of marinating in a sepia-tinted nostalgia for the lost world of silent film, we'd be much better off applying that weltschmertz directly to ourselves. We can anticipate our own future by recognizing our own media ecology as a jostling Balkanized mess of potentially obsolete artifacts. Not that some parts are good and will live, while some are bad and should die, but that sooner or later, it's all gonna go.
If we pity an Italian silent actress, as she's plunged to her melodramatic doom from a hopeless love affair, we ought to manage at least a little humane, contemporary pity for the likes of Marissa Mayer, who is flailing to save Yahoo in an era when an Internet "portal" is destroyed by newer paradigms of "clouds" and "platforms," pretty much as surely and remorselessly as movies failed without sound.
As history passes, a little remorse is a proper thing. Yet, it's better to give flowers now and then our neighbors who are alive, rather than showing up with some heaping bouquet at their funeral.
The truth is that American TV probably did its level best to entertain us to death. But American TV failed to do that. It died before we died.
Not that the Internet is any less lethal to us. On the contrary, our wildly turbulent digital media systems are volcanic. But even this seems to me to offer at least a glimpse of a kind of grandeur of spirit. A society with our grave media vices ought to be able to FORGIVE American TV for trying to entertain us to death.
Not to obscure or ignore the historical pain and suffering from TV, I don’t call for that, but I can see a Vaclav Havel truth-and-reconciliation effort here. The old regime has dissolved, and no, it was never much good, but maybe we can hash that out. Just, put that on the public intellectual table.
Yes, television... you could have killed us… you really wanted to… we sat down for that maltreatment, we paid you to do it… Our own hands are not clean, we sat on the couch and willingly ate those Cheetos, our fingers are orange with snack-dust… It really was a cruel media ecology, and it was never a nice civilized city park.
But it was what it was, and we accept that truth and are reconciled as survivors. Because it is an extinct ecology, while we have achieved a new, Anthropocene, red of tooth and claw ecology, with predators and parasites and even volcanoes, tsunamis and even horrible forest fires where everything that used to live off trees and paper is galloping off in all directions!
And, rather than dismissing our dead, we extend to them our own ghostly, digital, immaterial hand, in human solidarity. We recognize, with a kind of ecstasy rather than dread, that we're all at the same séance table.
Our mutual human mortality ends nothing for us. It only intensifies our dark, pervasive, gambling games, where every high-tech generation is another frenzied shuffle of our ancient and mysterious Tarot deck.
Thanks for your attention.
