Writing in a Networked World
Part One: What's it All About?
Right now I’m teaching an upper-level college seminar for English and Writing majors called Writing in a Networked World. The class is an extension of this Human in the Post-Human World project, in the sense that one way of being human is being a writer, and one way in which the world has become post-human is that is has become networked beyond human capacity.
Writing in a Networked World is a special case of being Human in the Post-Human World.
As part of the course, I’ve decided to write in response to the same assignments I’m giving my students, because 1) practice what you preach 2) what’s good for the goslings is good for the goose 3) this is a difficult subject that we’re all figuring out as we go along, and so it’s helpful for me to model at least one approach to the topic, and 4) I just really want to — the question of what it means to be a writer in this networked world is the all-encompassing question of my life, art, and future.
I have to imagine it is for my students too: we are writers, we are compelled to create and share through words; the impulse is clear. And we have a clear vision of what “being a writer” meant in past decades, but it’s less clear today. To what extent is “writing” tied up with “media”? To what extent is it tied up with “economics”? To what extent is it tied up with “technology”? And how does this web of writing-media-economics-technology interact with the universal human nature that writing (whether from today or from ancient times) claims to appeal to?
So let us begin with a short selection of fictions (including one poem) that “problematize” the relationship between the individual and their “networks,” aka, their societies. These are fictions in which writers are not just entertaining but also exhorting their readers to think differently about the mesh and fiber that makes up their society, and to seriously consider rebelling against it.
The oldest piece we read was “The Machine Stops” by EM Forster.
It’s kind of amazing that Forster wrote “The Machine Stops” all the way back in 1909. It’s a futuristic vision of a planetary human machine where each person lives in a little hexagonal room like a bee slotted into the cell of a hive. They are isolated but connected, ever-connected, in fact, through what we today would simply recognize as video screens. They share their “ideas” and give “lectures” of up to 10 minutes in which they make mountains out of obscure molehills and claim bold absurdities, like the exceptional value of 10th-hand knowledge and inferiority of 1st-hand experience.
Reading of how they live, we can hardly blame them: how can you have “perspective” on anything when you live alone in a hexagonal cell and all your knowledge comes (10th-hand) through screens? When they tire of being audience or lecturer, they push buttons to obtain hot baths, meals, and other comforts. They almost never encounter another human being in the flesh, nor can they leave the machine: the surface of the planet Earth is toxic, the machine is where they are safe.
“The Machine Stops” was Forster’s only adventure into science fiction. He was better-known for writing novels about the connections among people, like Howards End (“Only Connect!”), A Passage to India, and (posthumously) Maurice, a novel of gay erotic passion, which he wrote and set prior to the first World War, but which was not published until after his death in 1970. Each of these (marvelous) books is about the connections among people, their complexity, their difficulty, their irresistability. “The Machine Stops” is nothing like them.
I mean, the story is not entirely out of Forster’s realm; but instead of showing us human connection as layered and fraught, the story just sort of chops human connection away all together, and shows what’s left: impatient, easily-disgusted egomaniacs, prone to magical thinking and vicious complaint. You might even call it “Bizarro-Forster” — a fun-house mirror version of his vision in which everything that matters has been lost.
Yet before the Machine stops, these people believe they are happy. They are in fact disgusted by the thought of living any other way. With no other physical object for tenderness or affection, they caress the user manual, a thick book they keep at their bedsides. They almost take to worshiping the Machine like a god — although they deny this, because they believe religion is foolish and science is smart; if you refer to their pro-Machine devotions as “religious,” that just ticks them off!
But of course they are devoted: their life is possible because of The Machine, which Forster imagines as an all-encompassing yet mostly background facilitator of all human activities — one giant “internet of things.” The Machine organizes, sorts, connects, and provides. It makes all human social activities possible. And when the machine “stops,” there is no way for the humans to survive. Entirely dependent, this human society literally falls apart. I mean, spoiler alert, this story does not end well for the human race.
It’s a tale of doom, because resistance is mostly unimaginable and, even when it is momentarily imagined (even pursued!), it ends up being entirely impossible.
“The Machine Stops” may have once seemed a fun-house fantasy, but today it feels like a tale of warning: the vast web of embodied human relationships that we have evolved for will tug on us, stretch us, and it is hard, yes, to deal with all these people, but if we give it up, if we outsource it, or automate it, we are doomed.
Is the role of the author to warn us of doom? If so, is the role cursed, Cassandra-like? We prophesy futures that are read, enjoyed, set down, and then mindlessly enacted? Is the role of the author like the role of the one character in “The Machine Stops” who attempts to leave the machine and see the world: is the author the person who pushes outside the boundaries, sees what is there, and tells the others? (Only to be condemned and ignored?)
Later in the 20th Century, in the 1960s and 70s, other authors would imagine stories in which characters have more success in resisting their various “machines.”
The “Manifesto” of Wendell Barry’s “mad farmer” recommends change as resistance — as soon as the advertisers, bosses, and government agents figure you out, change. Never be who they think you should be. Leave false information and stay true to the things that make you human. The poem is not a future-fantasy, it is set in its present, referring to the kind of computer punch cards that were current in early 1970s. And it’s remarkably optimistic — the poem waves like a flag of hope the possibility of freedom. The poem believes the “Machine” can be outwitted.
Other authors were less hopeful, and continued to couch their fears in science fiction fantasy worlds. In Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” the comforts of a glorious, lively, wonderful society come at the cost of a single child who will be tortured forever1. There is no way to resist this system except to leave, and that is a mere gesture of one’s own moral qualms; you can choose not to participate in this bargain, but that doesn’t stop the child from being abused.
The story reads more like a philosophical thought experiment than a story — at certain points she tells you to make up your own details, whatever would be most appealing to you, to construct the perfect utopian world, so she can reveal its cost and ask, “would you walk away? Or would you accept the child’s suffering as the price of paradise?” The answer falls deep into a well of ethics and morals, and sets utilitarian rationalism against empathy and basic decency. But the child will suffer still. Is this the role of the author? To confront the reader with uncomfortable questions about which nothing can be done?
Where LeGuin’s vision emphasizes the delights and comforts of comportment to the system, Harlan Ellison’s world in “‘Repent Harlequin!’ said the Ticktockman” focuses on the punitive2 nature of the machine: comply or be destroyed. The Harlequin of the story, before he is captured, is an agent of frivolity as much as chaos, raining down jellybeans on workers to jam their moving sidewalks and make them late for their shifts. He represents not only the human drive for freedom but our desire to live lives that are not efficient and optimized, lives that contain room for silliness. When the Harlequin is captured, he is not killed but “converted” into a compliant citizen, as an example to the others. In Ellison’s vision, the machine kills unreliable humans, breaks the defiant humans, and frightens everyone else into timid timeliness. As the hive-like Borg from Star Trek like to say when they assimilate entire planets of people into their cyborg collective: resistance is futile.
I see the Harlequin as a kind of “writer” in this story — he wants the world to be different, and he uses his creativity to invent a character and change the narrative. But then he is crushed, destroyed: is this what we face, as writers in the networked world? Will we be turned from adventurers to mere “lecturers”? Cowed into keeping silent and “walking away”? Or forcibly deprogrammed by the economic machine that cannot allow such inefficiencies in its system?
When we write, we want readers, we want to be read. To find an audience, we need a network — we need the network, the human network. But the network is fraught: the network is the thing that might try to crush our uniqueness, muddy our individuality (Barry); the network is the thing that wants to utilize us and monetize us (Ellison); the network is the thing that gives us gifts of technology as though they come without cost, when the costs are in fact high, tho maybe borne by someone else (LeGuin).
The human network was once an organic body, like the forests of the world with roots intertangled and visited by the same roaming bears, birds, and bugs. But as soon as humans invented machines, we began to re-imagine and re-create the human network as something more orderly, more powerful, something capable of size and speed far beyond us. This machine began mediating many of our most important relationships, organizing our groups, and reshaping our identities according to its logics of efficiency.
In its ruthless idiocy, it propagates cycles and demands simplicity: on/off, 1/0, yes/no. It has distorted our sense of ourselves and of the world, so we will lose sight of truth or reality as a “first-hand” thing, and we will begin to blather like Forster’s “lecturers.” And, rewarded for our blather by hits, likes, and applause, we will descend deeper into echo chambers of irrational, unhelpful faux-connection, until the whole thing falls apart. The human network, when more machine-like, undermines the role of the writer in the world, because the writer wants the network to re-see itself anew, and the machine craves order. The writer wants to climb out of the machine and see what it looks like from above, the writer wants to shower it with jelly beans and fuck it up, the writer wants to resist, cultivate independence, live for things other than what the machine says to live for. But too often the writer sees how much they are up against, and walks away.
Be destroyed; Be punished; Be gone; Be change: these are the four compass points of these fictional worlds. If you want to enjoy the temptations, the external pleasures of Omelas, you must give up your innocence; if you want to survive the punishments of the Ticktockman, you must give up your volition. If you don’t want to give up these things, you must Be gone; you must Be punished.
If you want to believe you are important and special, safe and in control — even though you live in a vast hive of humans which has destroyed the natural environment of the Earth — you must give up everything to The Machine, and its fate is your fate — if it stops, so do you. You will Be destroyed.
The best path is clear: Be change. Join Wendell Barry’s Mad Farmer revolution, and do nothing the machine would have you do. You might fail, but you’ll fail in possession of your soul.
Each of these pieces tells a story of a world in which people can only maintain their humanity by actively resisting their society’s dominant forces — and success is usually deemed unlikely. But this lesson is essential if we hope the human spirit will survive today. These stories were published in 1909, 1965, and 1973 — long ago, in the 20th Century, before being part of a digitally connected and algorithmically mediated global network was our reality. Today, technology advances so quickly it might seem that all our problems are new, but it’s clear that the machine has been “building” for a long time, and even its earlier stages were objectionable to some of the writers who lived in them.
What about the world in 1909 made EM Forster imagine The Machine of his story? So many people locked away in their comfortable little beehive-like cells, speaking to one another through screens, selfish in their habits (how can you be anything but selfish when your self is your whole world?), and seeking acclaim for their ideas — this sounds like today’s social media influencer: living in their bedrooms, speaking to the world. Yet Forster felt some version of this in 1909. That suggests that the seeds of what we think of as “online problems” already existed, before the technology did.
Perhaps he saw the seeds of this vulnerability in a certain aversion to public spaces and “common” recreations, in the desire for private coaches and homes with more rooms, so each inhabitant could have their privacy. Perhaps it was in the long letters people would write to one another from across town (at a time when postal delivery came several times a day) — all that careful composition, managed presentation, when they could have simply met for a chat.
Humans desire the company, challenge and stimulation of other human minds, but we also have competing desires for safety, control, and acclaim. These desires existed then and exist now too — but today technology can make things happen it could not before. Today the Amazon worker lives under the regime of the Ticktockman, and the TikTok or Insta influencer seeks acclaim much as Forster’s lecturers did within their Machine; everyone with a smartphone is kind of living in Omelas, knowing that this device of joy, connection, and delight comes at some great cost to someone we can’t see, someone somewhere else, who must suffer, because if they ceased to suffer, all the wonders would cease.
Only Wendell Barry’s poem suggests a way — so here’s a handful of my favorite excerpts, but really you should go read the whole thing:
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
This is what is required of us if we want to resist the Machine and continue being a writer in an increasingly mechanized networked world: don’t be logical, work for a world you’ll never see, know the darkness and insist on joy, be tricksy like the fox, never let the manipulators learn to read you. Be human. Be strange. Write it, not for acclaim but for truth — and for silliness! And because it’s the right thing to do.3
Star Trek Strange New Worlds actually made an episode based on this story: Season 1 Episode 6, “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach.” The futuristic alien world of delights requires a single, exceptional child to suffer and die (and then be replaced by another kid, who suffers and dies, and then another, and so on, forever) so that the whole society can enjoy its advanced technologies. The story even includes some who have “walked away” by leaving to subsist on a small moon where they are regarded as an extremist sect.
I previously wrote about BF Skinner’s objection to the “Literature of Freedom and Dignity” — which he identifies as an enemy of well-ordered, well-functioning behaviorist societies — in a piece about the television series Severance. Skinner believed that most of the literature in our culture (in his view, perversely and counter-productively) celebrates the individualist, the outsider, the rebel. Skinner would view each of these stories as harmful anti-behavioral-engineering propaganda. You can read about his views in his book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, a book Shoshana Zuboff refers to as “Toward Slavery and Humiliation.” (I recommend reading it: I doubt you’ll agree with a word of it, but it is interesting.)
You may be asking, “what’s with the all the pumpkin photos?” Well, this piece is long and long pieces are easier to read if they’re broken up with some pictures. And I just went to this event in Ames where they had over 1000 pumpkins on display. Also, it’s October. And last but not least: JELLY BEANS!
Catching up on some TBR (incl. Substacks)...
The Forster story is a read hidden gem. Wow. The prescience! Thank you for the heads up...
Stunning, Amy. I was moved to tears. I'm going to read Wendell Barry's poem in its entirety now. Then I should probably have it tattooed on my forearm.