In response to Lee Siegel's claim that the excesses of the internet might one day transform us into a culture of digitally-shackled pod-people, Salon writer Louis Bayard contends:

what inoculates us is not our cultural credentials but the basic exigencies of life. We are too riven, too much in the world to become pod people. We may wince at the same mean-spirited rants Siegel objects to, but most of us find ways to ignore them and incorporate the rest into the weave of our lives -- just as we did with the radio and television, just as we are doing with the iPhone and the iPod. Virtual Land isn't where the majority of us live, not permanently; it's just one of the dozens of course corrections we make between waking and sleeping.

As I sit at my computer for the third of today’s five waking hours, I can’t help but sympathize with both sides of the argument. I agree that we might never be “locked” into a type of virtual cubicle, but I do imagine that our lives will continue to become increasingly connected, to the point where our time awake is our time online; where our phones, our televisions and even our minds are somehow continually connected within a global network. Sounds scary, I know. But perhaps, as Luke says, such a connection is not so bad. Given a revolution, an attempted totalitarian takeover, or an all out culture-war, the internet provides a free information trade platform like no other in the history of human-kind. It’s hard to imagine an oppressive ideology gaining any real global foothold with the sort of connectivity and information flow we have gained as a result of the web. And it really just gets stronger every day.

Of course, who knows what might happen if the internet is effectively used as a global propaganda machine. With the right person in power, with the right ideas and at the right time in history, a whole world of people might log on simply to be told what to think. The dissenters— the underclass of free-thinkers— might be relegated to the darkest corners of the net, where the web pages look like old CompuServe login screens and the bandwidth crashes regularly. Net-neutrality, what? American Idol is on.

Fuck it, I’m moving to the country.


22nd Century Housing Development: