Bruce Sterling, a hero to many of us, who study media critically, has recently gained traction among the New York Times reading crowd thanks to Virginia Heffernan’s blog post this past week on “connectivity as poverty.”
She was echoing the sentiments expressed by Sterling at a panel at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX, that the poor relish their connections and connectivity (the capacity to connect) because they have nothing else. Here’s how Heffernan describes it:
Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.
Though Heffernan thinks that Sterling’s position is Nietzschean, which I can see, I ultimately think that the position is far more evocative of Marx.
Now some (or many) of you may think, Who cares? Let me briefly lay out the stakes. If Sterling’s stance is Nietzschean, that is to say, “a disdain for regular people,” than there would be a kind of implicit alternative within Sterling’s position. Now granted, I’m taking Sterling at Heffernan’s word (and thus may be misrepresenting him), but Nietzsche’s “disdain for the regular person” is not so much an antipathy but more so a phobia for what he frequently calls “slave morality.” Slave morality can be defined orienting one’s actions (thus developing his her ethics) by taking on the conditions and assumptions of the dominator. In other words, it is the trap of attempting to act ethically within the dominator’s rules. It becomes a trap, in which the slave actively invests in his own domination via ethics. (The most glaring example of this, according to Nietzsche, was Christianity. You can see why.)
Now, I’m not so sure Sterling is coming from such a place. In fact, as I noted earlier, I see him being more classically Marxist. The idyllic life of solitude imagined by Sterling is straight out of ideals of the Enlightenment–culture, leisure and most importanty autonomy (leaving the free-thinking, rational being time and space to think). Marx, at the end of “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848) quotes from The German Ideology, which so strikes a hauntingly similar note to Heffrenan’s characterization of Sterling.
to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
Marx’s argument is that the human being, in a truly utopian-socialist society, would be free to do whatever s/he pleases without it becoming obligatory, and thus alienating, as wage-labor ultimately will be. Despite what people may think of when they hear “communism” or “socialism,” which is some idea about forced sharing, the vision of Marx is completely embedded in the Enlightenment discourse of individual self-realization and expression.
One of Heffernan’s major points of unease about Twitter is that it has become less “mesmerizing” and far more “encroaching.” Or even,
Suffocating. Twitter may now be like a jampacked, polluted city where the ambient awareness we all have of one another’s bodies might seem picturesque to sociologists (who coined “ambient awareness” to describe this sense of physical proximity) but has become stifling to those in the middle of it.
In other words, she argues that Twitter has taken away some aspect of individual freedom.
The vibe of Twitter seems to have changed: a surprising number of people now seem to tweet about how much they want to be free from encumbrances like Twitter.
Freedom from knowing about someone’s kid who has a fever. Someone who is afraid of being laid off. Basically, Twitter strips us away from not having to deal with other people’s (excuse my language) shit. And indeed, she’s right when she says that if she did indeed have a personal assistant (a wish someone expressed on Twitter), then it would probably be to on Twitter for her, “to do “Twitterwork” as she put it, to subsidize her having to deal with other peoples’ neuroses.
But isn’t that precisely what wealth in the US has always been about–the privilege to live above everyone else’s day-to-day grumblings? It seems that Heffernan (and perhaps even Sterling) are upset not only at social networking’s “instrusiveness” but also it popping our bubbles, which had been rather untroubled by the problems of others. According to them, Twitter has turned into a media of radical engagement, even to the point of our own distaste, which in my book, is not such a bad thing.
