NIcholas Carr and his world-wide cage

*It's not that there was never a frontier, or that it was always some kind of fraudulent confidence racket. It wasn't a fraud any more than Sutter's Mill was fool's gold. The electronic frontier existed for a generation, then the frontier got very crowded and now it's a business and a political platform.

*The Electronic frontier actually did a whole lot better than the Atomic frontier or the Space frontier did, because they had a lot of the excited and extreme rhetoric of a frontier yet then never worked out on the scale of a civilization.

*We're currently in a post-Internet world of social media and cyberwar, and if it has many discouraging aspects, as indeed it does, it's because that's true of the dark tenor of contemporary society generally. The touching illusion here isn't that blogs don't work – they did work, just for a while, much like, say, xeroxed fanzines used to work, only more so.

*The illusion is in Nicholas Carr's closing idea that there's some more authentic, more thoroughly lived-and-felt analog world where he can serenely retire to read Emerson in the rose garden and it will somehow be okay that Zuckerberg shot the bison. The truth is that Zuckerberg did indeed shoot the bison, Zuckerberg's day too will pass, and Emerson poems and a picket-fence rose gardens are also period artifacts. They're like Cicero's scrolls and his slave-supported leisure.

*There is no ideal Platonic situation from which a man-of-letters can make absolutist moral judgements, from outside the cage, about the mere passing parade inside the cage. People are time-bound entities; we are made of parade. The future is a process, it's not a destination.

*It's still good stuff to read though; I enjoyed it. Nicholas Carr as all-passion-spent, see-what-you-did has a much stronger moral position than the previous Nicholas Carr who was oh-stop-that-hyping, this-is-just-kid-stuff. This stuff he is currently decrying is indeed the way all Californian intellectuals have always talked since 1849, and the Golden State's gold rushes always finish ugly.

*So that's just a given, so at this point it's more interesting to wonder what the next frontier might be. It won't have much to do with Moore's Law any more, because that law's been repealed, but it will be something-or-other. I've seen enough of these techno-romantic effusions that I no longer worry much about 'em; they're not entirely healthy, but they're not moral flaws, they are part of the human condition. "Without vision, the people perish," and if those visions are mostly "innocent frauds," hey, the bigger the better.

All liberations are frauds if you wait long enough

Blogging has since been subsumed into journalism – it’s lost its personality – but back then it did feel like something new in the world, a literary frontier. The collectivist claptrap about ‘conversational media’ and ‘hive minds’ that came to surround the blogosphere missed the point. Blogs were crankily personal productions. They were diaries written in public, running commentaries on whatever the writer happened to be reading or watching or thinking about at the moment. As Andrew Sullivan, one of the form’s pioneers, put it: ‘You just say what the hell you want.’ The style suited the jitteriness of the web, that needy, oceanic churning. A blog was critical impressionism, or impressionistic criticism, and it had the immediacy of an argument in a bar. You hit the Publish button, and your post was out there on the world wide web, for everyone to see.

Or to ignore. Rough Type’s early readership was trifling, which, in retrospect, was a blessing. I started blogging without knowing what the hell I wanted to say. I was a mumbler in a loud bazaar. Then, in the summer of 2005, Web 2.0 arrived. The commercial internet, comatose since the dot-com crash of 2000, was up on its feet, wide-eyed and hungry. Sites such as MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn and the recently launched Facebook were pulling money back into Silicon Valley. Nerds were getting rich again. But the fledgling social networks, together with the rapidly inflating blogosphere and the endlessly discussed Wikipedia, seemed to herald something bigger than another gold rush. They were, if you could trust the hype, the vanguard of a democratic revolution in media and communication – a revolution that would change society forever. A new age was dawning, with a sunrise worthy of the Hudson River School.

Rough Type had its subject.

The greatest of the United States’ homegrown religions – greater than Jehovah’s Witnesses, greater than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, greater even than Scientology – is the religion of technology. John Adolphus Etzler, a Pittsburgher, sounded the trumpet in his testament The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men (1833). By fulfilling its ‘mechanical purposes’, he wrote, the US would turn itself into a new Eden, a ‘state of superabundance’ where ‘there will be a continual feast, parties of pleasures, novelties, delights and instructive occupations’, not to mention ‘vegetables of infinite variety and appearance’.

Similar predictions proliferated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and in their visions of ‘technological majesty’, as the critic and historian Perry Miller wrote, we find the true American sublime. We might blow kisses to agrarians such as Jefferson and tree-huggers such as Thoreau, but we put our faith in Edison and Ford, Gates and Zuckerberg. It is the technologists who shall lead us.

Cyberspace, with its disembodied voices and ethereal avatars, seemed mystical from the start, its unearthly vastness a receptacle for the spiritual yearnings and tropes of the US. ‘What better way,’ wrote the philosopher Michael Heim in ‘The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace’ (1991), ‘to emulate God’s knowledge than to generate a virtual world constituted by bits of information?’ In 1999, the year Google moved from a Menlo Park garage to a Palo Alto office, the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter wrote a manifesto predicting ‘the second coming of the computer’, replete with gauzy images of ‘cyberbodies drift[ing] in the computational cosmos’ and ‘beautifully laid-out collections of information, like immaculate giant gardens’….