{"id":161077,"date":"2020-05-18T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2020-05-18T11:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=161077"},"modified":"2020-05-17T07:48:22","modified_gmt":"2020-05-17T06:48:22","slug":"the-online-double-bind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/05\/the-online-double-bind\/","title":{"rendered":"The Online Double-bind"},"content":{"rendered":"

17 May 2020 – <\/em>The trap was set at least twenty-five years ago and the mice jumped at the smell of the cheese.\u00a0 I am referring to the introduction of the computer as a mass necessity and the Internet that followed. I was slow to enter the trap, \u201cforced\u201d finally in 2007 by the college where I was teaching. Up to that point I was just a member of The Lead Pencil Club, whose motto was \u201ca speed bump on the information superhighway\u201d and whose membership list numbered twenty-three and a half people worldwide. When I slowly and reluctantly reached for the cheese, the trap snapped not on my neck to finish me, but on my head that was half in and half out.\u00a0 The out part kept thinking.\u00a0 What follows are that half-head\u2019s musings on why I didn\u2019t follow my intuition, the whole damn sorry situation we are all in, and what we might do to spring the trap and run free.\u00a0 I don\u2019t like this trapped feeling.\u00a0 And, by the way, the cheese was American, which is not exactly real cheese.<\/p>\n

In 1960 the sociologist C. Wright Mills said that there was far too much information for people to assimilate and make sense of and that lucid summations were needed. \u00a0He was echoing Thoreau who in 1854 said, \u201cIf you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?\u201d Mills said people needed to develop what he called the sociological imagination that would allow them to condense and simplify news and to connect personal and social matters within historical and structural contexts.<\/p>\n

That was the long-lost era of newspapers, long-form paper magazines, the reading of books, and minimal television stations.\u00a0 To think that there was far too much information then can only make one laugh, now that the digital revolution has buried us in data, information, and \u201cbreaking news\u201d at warp speed, usually contradictory and lacking context.\u00a0 The internet has literally made people crazy, created schizoid or split personalities who don\u2019t know whether they are coming or going or what world they are in, physical or virtual. \u00a0This is the era of social schizophrenia.\u00a0 It is also the era of Covid-19 lockdowns when a far greater online life is promoted as the necessary future.<\/p>\n

If people once felt that all the information was too confusing and they were ending up thinking and doing things ass-backwards as a result, back then they might have understood it if you told them that the only way you can do anything is ass-backwards.\u00a0 Today, many would probably greet you with a look of bewilderment as they googled it to see if there was a way to swivel their asses to the front to get adjusted to the way they feel while waiting online for clear directions to emerge.\u00a0 Which way does an ass go?<\/p>\n

They will be waiting for a long, long time.<\/p>\n

The Internet is a double-bind because we are damned if we do and damned if we don\u2019t. News, writing, and information of all sorts are now often not available any other way. The era of paper newspapers is coming to an end. This was meant to be. Other sources of fact and fiction have gradually been eliminated, while the content on the Internet has been dramatically increased and progressively censored. The dream of an open Internet is turning into a nightmare. If you look at the Internet\u2019s creation and development by the U.S. military-intelligence-Silicon Valley network as a tool for social control, propaganda, and total spying, if you grasp this nexus and their intentions, you will come away realizing that the Internet and the total integrated digital world is a dystopian tool designed to make you crazy.\u00a0 To sow confusion and endless contradictory information from minute to minute.\u00a0 To \u201cflood the zone\u201d (see Event 201) with propaganda and disinformation. To give you a headache, keep you agitated, destroy your genuine human experience in the physical world. To put you into a state of frenetic passivity while whispering in your ear that there is no escape, while allowing elements of truth to emerge to keep you addicted.<\/p>\n

This is the double-bind. It is what Jacques Ellul in 1964 called the technological society that is ruled by technique in every aspect of its life.\u00a0 Technique is a way of thinking that emphasizes efficiency; it is a way of thinking that emphasizes order and standardized means to a predetermined end.\u00a0 It is rational, deliberate, and focused on results.\u00a0 It is a way of thinking that has penetrated deep into the psychic structures of society and opposes spontaneity and unreflective action.\u00a0 Machines grow out of technical thinking, and today the computer, the internet, and artificial intelligence are the ideal manifestations of such thinking.\u00a0 They are the result, not the cause.\u00a0 As such, digital technology satisfies the technical mindsets that have been created over the decades, which includes regular people who have been gradually softened up to believe these machine dreams.\u00a0 Efficiency, results, practicality, and speed. The human body as a wonderful machine.<\/p>\n

We have all been so conditioned, even those of us old enough to have lived before the computer era. Starting particularly in the early 1990s with the rat-a-tat electronic frenzy of the U.S. televised aggressive war against Iraq, euphemistically called the Gulf War and presented live with round-the-clock television coverage by ghoulish announcers more excited than 13-year-old boys with a porn magazine, the speed of everyday life has increased.\u00a0 If you lived through those years and were sensitive to the social drift, you could feel the pace of life pick up year-to-year, as everyone was induced to get in the fast lane.\u00a0 On the information superhighway, it is the only lane.\u00a0 Paul Virilio, a French thinker, has focused on this issue of speed in his studies of dromology, from dromos<\/em>: a race, running.\u00a0 While his language is perhaps too academic, his insights are profound, as with the following point:<\/p>\n

The speed of the new optoelectronic and electroacoustic milieu becomes the final void <\/strong>(the void of the quick), a vacuum that no longer depends on the interval between places or things and so on the world\u2019s extension, but on the interface of an instantaneous transmission of remote appearances, on a geographic and geometric retention in which all volume, all relief vanishes.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the world of teleconferencing and the online life, existence shorn of physical space and time and people.\u00a0 A world where shaking hands is a dissident act. A haunted world of specters, words, and images that can appear and disappear in a nanosecond.\u00a0 A magic show. A place where, in the words of Charles Manson, you can \u201cget the fear,\u201d where fear is king. \u00a0A locus where, as we sit at home \u201csheltering in place,\u201d we are no longer there.\u00a0 Ernest Hemingway sniffed the future when in The Sun Also Rises, <\/em>he has the protagonist Jake Barnes say no to Robert Cohn, who wants him to travel to South America with him, with these words: \u201cAll countries look like the moving pictures.\u201d\u00a0 That was 1926.<\/p>\n

Things have changed a wee bit since then. But the essence of propaganda and social control remains the same.\u00a0 \u201cAll those people who seek to control the behavior of large numbers of other people work on the experiences<\/em> of those other people,\u201d wrote R.D. Laing, in The Politics of Experience.<\/em> \u201cOnce people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways.\u201d\u00a0 Mystification takes place when people can be convinced that a social construction \u2013 e.g. the Internet and the digital life \u2013 is part of \u201cthe natural order of things,\u201d like the air we breathe.\u00a0 And that life online is real life, better and more real than physical existence.<\/p>\n

I believe the digital revolution has gone a long way toward destroying our experience as persons. It is the endless magical mystery tour that goes nowhere.\u00a0 It is the ultimate psychodrama conjured by a satanic magician.<\/p>\n

Do I exaggerate?\u00a0 Perhaps.\u00a0 But how else explain the spell this medium has cast on billions of people worldwide?\u00a0 Did the human race suddenly get smart?\u00a0 Or are many more people crazy?<\/p>\n

I ask myself this question, and now I ask you.\u00a0 Has the Internet and the devices to access it made your life better or worse? Has it made the life of humanity better or worse? Has its essential role in globalization made for a better world?<\/p>\n

Obviously, there are pluses to the Internet, just as there are pluses to almost everything.\u00a0 I don\u2019t deny that. The plus side of death is that the thought of it reminds you that you are alive. The plus side of television is you don\u2019t have to turn it on. Like you, I could rattle off many good things about the Internet (not cell phones, sorry).\u00a0 But on the scale of good and bad, where do you come down?\u00a0 Where do I?<\/p>\n

Or is it possible we can\u2019t decide because we are too conflicted and caught in a double-bind?<\/p>\n

I am of two minds, or more accurately, two half-heads.\u00a0 The upper part, pinned in the trap and dead to my situation, can only answer yes, sir, now that I am trapped, my life is better.\u00a0 I can debate endlessly the minutiae of every issue thrown out like pieces of meat for caged lions.\u00a0 I can check the weather forecast for every hour of every day of the week, even though I know they will probably be wrong.\u00a0 I can get directions even though I know you don\u2019t need a director to know which way the roads go.\u00a0 I can research issues quickly and pontificate as if I were an expert on every matter from a to z.\u00a0 I can feel I am informed while feeling deformed by the contradictory information that appears and disappears every few minutes.\u00a0 Essentially, I can feel in-touch and worthy of respect from friends and neighbors because I can exchange empty words with them about nothing.\u00a0 I can feel so very normal and rejoice in that.\u00a0 I can feel sane.<\/p>\n

On the negative side, well, my lower half-head, the one that\u2019s still thinking lead-pencil thoughts, the slow and easy stuff, the calm cool breeze oh what a lovely day dreams \u2013 you don\u2019t really need to hear what it has to bitch about the Internet.\u00a0 You can probably guess.<\/p>\n

In a fine article, \u201cVicious Cycles: Theses on a philosophy of news,\u201d in Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/em>, Greg Jackson writes the following about our addiction to so-called \u201cnews\u201d (the Internet):<\/p>\n

When we turn away from the news, we will confront a startling loneliness.\u00a0 It is the loneliness of life.\u00a0 The loneliness of thinking, of having no one to think for us, and of uncertainty.\u00a0 It is a loneliness that was always there but that was obscured by an illusion, and we will miss the illusion\u2026. And we will miss tuning in each day to hear that voice that cuts boredom and loneliness in its solution of the present tense, that like Scheherazade assures us the story is still unfolding and always will be.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know whether we can give it up.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nor do I.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. Website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Internet is a double-bind because we are damned if we do and damned if we don\u2019t. News, writing, and information of all sorts are now often not available any other way. The era of paper newspapers is coming to an end. This was meant to be. Other sources of fact and fiction have gradually been eliminated, while the content on the Internet has been dramatically increased and progressively censored.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1282],"class_list":["post-161077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}