ULTRAKILLBOT

In 1931 the modern world was finally coming into its maturity. Many of the technological wonders that had been prophesied at World’s Fairs and by Victorian scientists were commercially available, and moreso, cheaply. In the decades leading up to the 1930s the idea of leisure gained cultural credit – prior to the 19th century, nobody (except the fabulously wealthy) had any time to waste on pursuits and distractions that kept us from working. If you didn’t work, you didn’t make enough food, and thus, you starved. This was pretty constant with any lifestyle – artisans and craftspeople in the cities, as well as the Yeoman farmers of Jeffersonian lore. There was some time, but very little, and that was often spent at church or other social functions.

But technology came and made the work day shorter. At least for farmers, and then, with time (and pro-union legislation) for the extremely small middle classes and proletariat. Everybody had 4 or 5 hours to kill every day before they went to bed as the workday was cut down to around 9 or 8 hours. And you had two weekends instead of one! Luxury! Books had classically been the pastime of choice for the literate and upper classes, and as education quality and availability increased (again, thanks to social legislation), more and more could read and write, and as such, enjoy a good book or two.

But technology was on its unstoppable modernist march, and in the late 19th century, we got the telephone, the radio and film. And as with all new things, lots of people were very scared of them. Young people? No problem. They wanted more phones. Phones for everybody! Rotary dials here we come! And young people are the test of the future, and those social reactionaries who feared the new technologies went the same way as all those today who raise their collective voices over the horrors of sexting. “Our children are horny and using technology to express that? The horror!”

By the time 1931 rolled around the world had enjoyed one of the greatest periods of economic growth ever, as evidenced by the wonderful excess of the roaring 20s. Everybody just loved credit! So things expanded, and technology got more sophisticated and cheaper. There were movie theatres everywhere and by the time the stock market crashed, nobody cared, at least, when it came to movie viewing. Thus dawned the golden age of film – maybe people wanted to escape from the harsh realities of life or maybe they just really liked movies. Point is, people by this time, even with the worst economic climate in history, were still taking part in leisure that was ultimately, a cultural distraction – and they were probably on the poverty line!

In this same year, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, a novel about, among other social degradations, our society being in love with leisure. Huxley’s biggest worry is that instead of an outside repressive force overwhelming democracy and ruining all the fun and freedom and subversive books, it would be the opposite – we would so fall in love with our leisure and pleasure that nobody would be around to read the subversive books. We wouldn’t care. As the ultimate result of liberal economics and social policy, “Fordism” would order the day. We would be so doped up on drugs, sex and super-awesome movies called “feelies” that the idea of doing anything challenging or subversive would be… well, pretty crazy. Why bother, you know? It was dystopian… but very ambivalent.

The reason I’m talking about all this technology and Huxley is because of this interesting illustration by Stuart McMillen that took the concepts presented by Neil Postman’s polemic work (that I have seen quoted, and discussed, but never read) Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of show-business. The main thesis of the book? That instead of the totalitarian nightmare of Orwell’s 1984 (full of groupthink, censorship and violence), we get a world of mindless pleasure (stunted intellectual growth and mass culture). This is a theory that gets parroted rather often in various forms, most often by anti-globalization theorists, critics of mass culture, and sometimes social reactionaries.

From the forward:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions’. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right. — Neil Postman, 1986.

What’s interesting is that this book is often hailed as the a 21st Century book written in the 20th century. Postman was primarily discussing the prevalence of television as this all encompassing box; The Tube. As a dominating technology it was supposed to envelop our entire mind. Strangely, it seems that technology has outpaced The Tube. Advertising space on television is slowly losing its value (much like all adspace these days). Hell, last year the much coveted Superbowl slots are didn’t sell at the rate they used to (to be fair, that might have just been the recession talking) – and for the most part they had lower production values, and more duds than ever.

No, it’s the Internet and mass media that is the new opiate – the new means by which our “infinite appetite for distractions” will be fed. Right now you reading this post shows this… or does it? The argument for that says we waste our time on the Internet is mostly associated with the pitfalls of tabloid journalism, video games, social networking etc. All those stupid quizzes everybody takes now on Facebook? Badly put together and pointless they may be, but not any more harmful than paying a palm reader to tell you about your future.

So yeah, we waste time.

We love leisure – but isn’t the Internet more about information than leisure? My pal Alex Hayter at Society Eye posted on how information always wants to be free – and the Internet is the ultimate tool for communication and information. Sure, some people might only use the Internet for streaming video and other meaningless pursuits, but at the end of the day isn’t it about information? I remember going on the Internet 10 years ago and if you Googled something, you had better have hoped that it was a website or a news story – because anything as obscure, as say, Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, was pretty much a no go. At that time the best you would have found would have been a geocities site made by a 13 year-old for a class project. Seriously. Now there is a surprisingly accurate account of the mans life and political intrigues on Wikipedia.

So is all this fear that we are wasting our time just another moral panic? Was Huxley just an old fart afraid of the future? As it happened the world had to have its run-in with totalitarian repression before it would come to what we have today – so he was sorta half-wrong, and Orwell’s fears were based on the concrete fascist reality that he had seen the world sink into.

Or is it, (as I think) that our current preoccupation with leisure is just another step in the ongoing change of our culture, one that is neither better nor worse than the previous. It seems to me that we are just finding new ways to spend all that free time we found ourselves with a hundred years ago. All too often it seems, people seem to see some golden age of human society in those that preceded them, and conveniently miss all of the problems and social insecurities those very generations had themselves.

TV didn’t destroy us, and neither will the Internet.