Spooge Against the Machine

Ugly apparition, God's gift to oxygen, the puffed up immortal son
How they love him, 'cause he'll become the ghost at number one
How does it feel to be the only one?
How does it feel to be the only one that knows that you're right?
How does it feel to be a loaded gun?
How does it feel inside a chamber packed with piss and spite? -- Jellyfish

Occasionally when I venture into skewering pop-culture cows, I find myself at least attempting to guard against becoming one of those tedious, pedantic cultural elitists that everyone (including myself) hates. It can be difficult to parse that fine distinction between pointing out, for example, why The Wire is quantifiably, undeniably better than Deal or No Deal or what have you, instead of just randomly beating the shit out of people for bothering to read or listen to music or watch anything on teevee.

Fortunately, people like Lee Siegel take some of that cultural elitist heat just by being themselves.

His diatribe would bring to mind the prescient haranguing style of Pauline Kael, even if Mr. Siegel, who does not treat his own reputation lightly, were not trumpeting the phrase “Pauline Kael of the Internet” himself.

In any case, Mr. Siegel has done something in which Ms. Kael once specialized: nailing an inchoate malaise that we already experience but cannot easily explain. He asks, in brief, why we are living so gullibly through what would have been the plot of a science-fiction movie 15 years ago. Why does the freedom promised by the Internet feel so regimented and constricting? Why do its forms of democracy have their totalitarian side? What happens to popular culture when its sole emphasis is on popularity? How have we gone “from ‘I love that thing he does!’ to ‘Look at all those page views!’ in just a few years”? Mr. Siegel links all these questions to a fundamental assumption about the Internet, one that has been widely posited by other analysts: that it is a liberating entity, one that generates endless opportunities for creative endeavor.

He is quick to insist that most of those opportunities boil down to business matters, and that “the Internet’s vision of ‘consumers’ as ‘producers’ has turned inner life into an advanced type of commodity.” At the risk of harping heavily on this central point, Mr. Siegel provides example after example of how surreptitiously this process of co-option works.

He shows, for instance, how the fan of a television show can be led to a Web site where the show can be approached in a supposedly interactive fashion. “ ‘Which character are you most like?’ ” he asks, citing a question posed about “Grey’s Anatomy.” And parenthetically: “(You’ll also have to read an ad for a vaccine against genital warts. Ask your doctor if it’s right for you.)”

How can you not like someone who calls himself "the Pauline Kael of the Internet"? Oy. Where to begin? The "inner life" was commodified long ago, probably even before Dark Ages popes were selling indulgences. Pop culture has always and ever, by definition, been about popularity first and foremost. And if goony fansites save a few trees by replicating what goony chick mags have been doing for decades, so much the better. The mindless commodification is not new, merely its current media, not that the old media don't do their damndest to keep up. Pauline Sprezzatura should know better, and probably does. He has simply found a marketable niche to ply.

Peppering his argument with potshots at writers (among them Mark Dery and Malcolm Gladwell) who view any of these developments enthusiastically, Mr. Siegel both defines and decries an array of current misconceptions. We are being persuaded that information and knowledge are interchangeable, he claims, when they are not; we would have citizen heart surgeons if information were all that mattered.

Why is this only a problem in the blogosphere, where 99% of the participants engage in their craft for free? Why is this not more, far more of a problem in Siegel's vaunted legit media, where people like Billy Kristol, who have no clue what the fuck they're talking about, never run out of paid gigs? How does a couch loaf like Jonah Goldberg get a fucking publishing contract, and all the promo gigs he can squeeze into a pair of Dockers his schedule? Talk about blurring the distinctions between "information" and "knowledge", and making a buck and peddling undue influence while you're at it. Fugging chump.

And mainstream news outlets, which Mr. Siegel is otherwise delighted to assail (his love-hate relationship with The New York Times is particularly intense), suddenly look worthwhile to him by virtue of their real, earned authority. Better the old press than the new tyranny of bloggers. Their self-interest, he says, makes them more mainstream than any standard news source could possibly be.

Again, follow the money, and look at accountability, fool. Siegel himself is proof that the blogosphere exercises far more institutional discretion and accountability than most mainstream media outlets.

The vindictiveness and disproportionate influence of the blogosphere is a particularly sore subject. Who is it that “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”? Mr. Siegel’s immediate answer is Stalin. But he alleges that the new power players of the blogosphere have appropriated similar powers.

Mr. Siegel himself became a great big blog-attack casualty when, in what he wishfully calls “my rollicking misadventure in the online world,” he was caught pseudonymously praising himself on the Web site of The New Republic, where he had been a particularly savage and reckless blogger. One of the improbable virtues of “Against the Machine” is that it presents a rigorously sane, fair and illuminating incarnation of its more often hotheaded author.

Heh. Stalin would have taken a tool like Siegel and either turned him into a state mouthpiece, thrown him and his family into the gulag, or just ended his ass. This is positively, literally pantload-esque hyperbole at its worse. This preening butthole didn't get dropped down the memory poop-chute, unfortunately -- like Pantload, he got a fucking book contract for his troubles. And he's still pissed off because he got caught red-handed.

"Rollicking misadventure", how typically self-serving, like he's some swaggering buccaneer of teh intartubez, sailing the seas of virtual cheese and avasting unfortunate galleons who have the misfortune to cross his path. Bullshit. Siegel engaged in one of the more pathetic episodes of sock-puppetry in recent memory, showing up on his own blog under another handle to pimp himself. And he can't stand it that it completely disintegrated any semblance of credibility he might have had out in this brave new commodified dimension. No one except his old-media dead-tree publish-any-piece-of-crap-for-a-buck buddies care about what he says about anything. And he knows it.