======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
Counterpunch January 24, 2012
Reculer pour Mieux Sauter
Facebook and the Degradation of Personhood
by CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
Behold homo sapiens lashed on the wheel of the digital social
network: held frozen over a computer which is tied by a cord to a
wall wherein the fiberglass cable carries the message; staring
into the lit screen, the face pale in the unnatural light; or,
with head bent in the street, the appearance sullen, running
fingers across the blinking object of desire. The creature is
secretly harried: Constant updates are necessary, the user must
tend the machine whenever and wherever possible – which is all the
time and everywhere – and god forbid there is too long a lapse in
the slipstream. On Facebook, new friends and old are counted –
may they always increase in number! Some are in fact “friends,”
in the now rotting sense of the word: the person who is to be
confided in, who listens, cares what to listen for, knows secrets,
keeps them, knows who you are to the extent that a friend can –
the friend as he or she who might look into your eyes and, with
affection and even love, claim to see the windows of the soul.
As we know, however, many Facebook “friends” bear no relation to
how we want to understand the term. Perhaps known to the user at
work or at school in the flesh, yet they cannot be counted as real
friends. Some are strangers, known only via the interface of the
machine, attracted to the user by an algorithm calculating the
databit “likes” and “dislikes.”
Let’s forget for a moment that Facebook is probably the most
ingenious info-aggregator yet invented for governments to spy on
citizens. Forget that the citizens are willingly doing the work
for the intelligence agencies in building the database. I worry
about the matter of efficiency in friendship. Facebook makes
friendship efficient, in the manner of the assembly line, which is
exactly what friendship should not be – if it is to remain human,
if the friend as person is not to be degraded. Friendship is
dirty. It’s difficult. It smells – it sometimes has bad breath.
It’s unpredictable, and sometimes hazardous. The issue is about
persons and about friendship defined, for if we are to take
Facebook seriously, then we must recognize that the form of
friendship it is promulgating will by technologic necessity reduce
the nature and meaning of the friend. Personhood on the Facebook
page can only go so far. It is a managed self. It is degraded
personhood.
I watched my daughter in Christmas of 2010 using Facebook. I had
never seen the social network machine in action. Lea is 15, lives
in a suburb of Paris with her mother, bored to tears like all
suburban kids, and of course has perfected a Facebook personality.
Many pictures of herself, and friends, at parties and events
attended, and much else: commentary on this or that pop culture
item of interest – musical acts for the most part, but also the
usual amalgam of commodities sought after. I watched for a
moment and then, abruptly, she shut it down, want me to see no
more of the Facebook self. I wondered how many “friends” she had,
but she wasn’t talking.
A few months later, in the springtime, she was in Utah, in the
town of Moab, where I used to live and where I return every few
months or so to hide out and write in a cabin I rent from a
friend. Moab was once a lost little place in the desert. Today
it is invaded by people like me, who want to be in a lost little
place and who thereby nullify each other’s desire for solitude.
Lea had a Blackberry, courtesy of complaining to her mother or
grandmother – I never got a straight story as to who gave her the
gift – but of course it had no signal at our cabin. Disconnection
today is a wondrous event; it’s almost like being punched in the
face. To be shut off from the global chatter, to not have to
field the unending course and scrum of digital information, to be
human in the primary sense of being merely person to person – this
is what cabins in Utah are now apparently made for. Lea and I
sat in this informational darkness and ate big American breakfasts
in the morning and lazed about in the afternoon sun and read books
– she with “Lord of the Flies” – and went on hikes in the long
spring light, carrying extra water but no cell phones.
Still, the connection was sought, and we were both sad little
addicts. Wherever there was wifi – at the neighbor’s house nearby
the cabin, at the library in town, at the restaurants – I wanted
my e-mail. And Lea looked to connect and find the latest news on
Facebook. Being a hypocrite – having gathered up my own email and
touched on my “friends” via the simpler (Lea would say archaic)
interface – I chided her about Facebook. She didn’t laugh. This
is a 15-year-old. Social connection is tragically important.
Yet she admitted there was something not quite right in what
Facebook asked of her. “Facebook is good,” she said, “but it’s
weird too. You have to be constantly social,” she said. “But
with people – with friends – you should also have” – she’s
bilingual in French and English but here searched for the right
word – “some kind of recule.” Recule meaning a stepping back, a
moving away.
“Okay, recule,” I said.
“You’re not always there, you’re not always connected. You have
your own experience. That’s what vacation is for. You’re apart.
And then you come together and you talk, you know, face to face,
and you tell everybody what happened on the vacation.” Weird
indeed, Lea. You sound like a Luddite.
Would that there were more like her among the adults. Not a week
goes by that people who I’d otherwise consider mindful and
intelligent do not fail to invite me on to Facebook. Which
prompts the immediate question: Why would any mindful and
intelligent person be on Facebook? I have a friend in Brooklyn,
admittedly a vulgarian and not much in tune with the melodies of
political correctness, who considers Facebook the province of
“people standing in mirrors tarting themselves up and bullshitting
and mincing around. Facebook is the biggest waste of time since
television.” The man has a point. Facebook is the ideal venue
of expression for a society in which narcissism, as Christopher
Lasch long ago pointed out, has become the rampant personality
disorder. Facebook as sociopathology, as a symptom of social
disorder and disease? Perhaps.
Back in New York City, after three months of marginal grace in the
cabin, I am confronted again with the mass of my fellow humanity
carrying Blackberrys, SmartPhones, i-Phones, i-Pads, i-Pods –
these electroplastic appendages without which modern survival is
apparently impossible. The urge is grab the things, with banzai
scream, and smash them under my boot. An intolerant, and
intolerable, attitude, and certainly anti-social. Still, there is
something at once pitiful and repulsive – nauseating – in so many
fellow human beings doing the same thing with the same
electroplastic appendage hooked up to the same global network: the
hand outstretched with device cupped, the eyes locked on the
singular object, hooked into the Singularity. The appendage,
always making some sort of rude noise demanding attention, appears
to be doing the living, the leading, the looking, and the human
holding it is afterthought, necessary only to point it like a
divining rod to determine the next step forward. A savage dropped
from the sky into the city would say it looks as if the user is
servicing the machine.
I read an essay by one Damon Darlin, a “technology editor” at the
New York Times, who makes the classic argument of the technocrat,
the scientific manager, that the benefits of efficiency trump
whatever cost to humanness imposed by new technologies. Probably
a perfectly decent person, Darlin has at the same time clearly
replaced his mind with a microchip. He writes how he “learned to
stop worrying by loving the Smartphone.” “For most people,” he
writes, “a smartphone will change their lives and most likely for
the better.” And what are these “improvements”? Poor Damon is
“never lost” anymore in New York, or, presumably, anywhere that he
can get a signal – the machine tells him where he is. He is
“never bored” – the machine entertains him. He is “never without
an answer” – the machine provides the answers. He “never forgets
anything” – the machine remembers. “Google,” he writes, “begins
to substitute for my memory.” He writes that the Smartphone “can
help us recall events in our own lives.” The machine, says
Darlin, becomes “an auxiliary memory of everything I do.”
To never be lost or bored or forgetful or without answers is to be
something less than human. That Darlin’s article was not satire,
indeed was grimly serious, is an indicator of how far along we’ve
come in the degradation of personhood to make the machine look
useful. Yet his thinking is the gospel of the age. It is a
demented vision of human life, a form of technology-induced
insanity – accepted almost totally as the norm.
CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM writes for Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s and many
other magazines, and is currently working on a book, “The United
States Must End,” which advocates the dissolution of the US. He
can be reached at cketcha...@mindspring.com.
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
