Sven Birkerts believes that technology is leeching the spiritual out of human experience.
Critic Sven Birkerts speaks slowly and searches carefully for his words. He seems almost embarrassed by the antidigital-firebrand role for which he is becoming known. But it's a role he has sought out. It's tough work, his sigh seems to say, but someone's got to do it. Birkerts's opposition to electronic culture - he fears we are making a Faustian bargain, gaining efficiency and connectedness at the price of our souls - is summed up forcefully in his new book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in An Electronic Age (Faber and Faber). Just how antidigital is Sven Birkerts? In the attic study he and his wife share in their home just outside of Boston, Birkerts's typewriter is at one end, as far away as possible from a desktop PC. Birkerts and his wife stagger their hours in the study so that she is not disturbed by the noise of his typing - nor he by the spectacle of her word processing.
Why is he so adamantly antiWired? That's what Harvey Blume wanted to find out.
Wired: You have staked out a radically antidigital, antiwired position. What do you fear most about the new communications technology?
Birkerts
: The erosion of presence, the loss of immediacy of engagement, whether person-to-person or person-to-environment. The opposite of presence to me is virtuality, simulation. I see the polarity as central to our time.
When did the changes that worry you begin?
We've had labor-saving devices and inventions all along, of course. What's happening now is that the innovation is coming at a more rapid pace than ever before. We had the telephone, already a great mediation device, both imposing and reducing distance between people. We got used to it. TV came along, causing a kind of crisis in the culture. We accommodated. But at some point in the last 20 years, these things came at such a rate we gave up on accommodation and simply began to accept. We just breathe in technology these days - the whole panoply, everything from phones to answering machines to e-mail to computers to fax. It's not that these things are necessarily evils. But we don't have the chance to grow into them, to learn their meaning and their measure and their shortcomings, because they are coming at such a rate and in such multiples.
If you were around in 1900, would you have been one of those people, like Mark Twain, who opposed the phone?
Probably. That may be my disposition. Today I'm being driven to a greater sense of dissent just because there's a greater sense of acquiescence everywhere I look. That angers me, drives me to make stronger, more strident assertions to the contrary. In 10 years, I'll probably be walking around in a pelt, with a beard, barefoot and screaming, and they'll lock me away and that will be the end of it.
Why do you think that working with a computer is so much worse than working with a typewriter?
Software represents the tool-making, calculating, analytical side of ourselves. And yet when you sit down to write at the screen - I'm talking about certain kinds of writing - you're trying to break through to the other side.
Don't you think it's fascinating that at the very moment we are learning to write code - code that is comparatively simple - we are also beginning to understand ourselves as DNA-coded beings?
There's a fine line between understanding ourselves as coded and fiddling with the code. When we begin messing around with it too much we eventually exceed some threshold and wind up in an environment where we understand nothing. Having demythified all our myths and demystified all our mysteries, we're going to find the spiritual residue of ourselves in grave condition.
You're good at pointing out the dark side of connectivity. It's true every new technology casts a shadow - the automobile, for example, brings pollution and dependence on oil - but can't you see any of the liberating impact of computers?
Yes.
Yes? Did I hear yes?
Yes, I think there's a steady, inevitable overcoming of human provincialism. We're becoming schooled to larger perspectives. Though it's not always easy to believe, we're going to be more tolerant of diversity and difference. We will grasp a sense of global living in a way we never could before.
You wrote: "By degrees - it is happening year by year, appliance by appliance - we are wiring ourselves to a gigantic hive." But human culture is so fantastically complicated it's hard to imagine us living like social insects, electronic or not.
Pretty soon, every household will be a centered unit that pulls all its elements together into one great communicating pipe organ. At the same time, there has to be a flattening of the human. It's essential to the hive life, which challenges the old terms of what it means to form a life. As everything else in our society becomes streamlined, it becomes harder to resist the trend. Over the generations, people will have increasingly similar lives.
If it's a hive, who is the queen? Is the queen electronic?
There is something in us, possibly our own DNA, that recalls animistic ritual - the fear of night, of the gods who come back in different form on the big screen. If somebody comes along who's a persuasive demagogue and really commands the wires, commands the codes, and is an irresistible presence, I can imagine some dangerous scenarios. I can also imagine a spiritual leader tapping in and turning those same desires in the other direction. So it's a gamble. Electronic Church or electronic Reich? It could be either.
Some people do better on the phone than in person, don't they? They're more comfortable, less embarrassed. Why not think of viewing online interaction as another possibility for communication?
You're arguing for pluralism: we can have the old but we also can have the new, whereas I say that the new makes it harder to have the old. We're compelled by invisible collective pressures to move in the direction society is going. I feel I almost have to physically resist going online. There are so many compulsions and expectations to my daily life: Can you send me the disk? Can you do it now? Can you do it tomorrow? Not going online has become a point of principle for me.
So staying offline is an experiment you perform on yourself, a kind of performance art?
A kind of performance art. I've gone in five years from being seen as slightly retrograde to being seen as positively a crank. Five years from now, if I'm still not online it's going to be seen as grandstanding.
You're going to need a doctor's note. What use can Wired readers make of your objections? Besides junking their machines, that is.
I don't want people to junk their machines. If I have a mission in talking about this, it is to bring the question out, bring it forward. The last words in my book are "Refuse it." I sound like I'm speaking for the world. But I'm speaking only for myself. I don't tell anyone else to refuse it, only to think about it.
