In the tradition of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget , a rousing, sharply argued--and, yes, inspiring!--reckoning with our blind faith in technology Can technology solve all our problems? Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many of our most famous journalists, pundits, and economists seem to think so. According to them, "intelligent machines" and big data will free us from work, educate our children, transform our environment, and even make religion more user-friendly. This is the story they're telling us: ...
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In the tradition of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget , a rousing, sharply argued--and, yes, inspiring!--reckoning with our blind faith in technology Can technology solve all our problems? Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many of our most famous journalists, pundits, and economists seem to think so. According to them, "intelligent machines" and big data will free us from work, educate our children, transform our environment, and even make religion more user-friendly. This is the story they're telling us: that we should stop worrying and love our robot future. But just because you tell a story over and over again doesn't make it true. Curtis White, one of our most brilliant and perceptive social critics, knows all about the danger of a seductive story, and in We, Robots , he tangles with the so-called thinkers who are convinced that the future is rose-colored and robotically enhanced. With tremendous erudition and a punchy wit, White argues that we must be skeptical of anyone who tries to sell us on technological inevitability. And he gives us an alternative set of stories: taking inspiration from artists as disparate as Sufjan Stevens, Lars von Trier, and Fran???ois Rabelais, White shows us that by looking to art, we can imagine a different kind of future. No robots required.
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Curtis White is an extraordinarily wide-ranging intellectual analyst of the culture we live in, the culture we have created-or the culture we have ALLOWED to be created. His knowledge is deep, his reading broad, and both his analyses and condemnations invariably incisive and telling. White, though, is not only a critic and analyst, but he is also, and has been from the start, a writer, and in fact a writer knocking at the very doors of meaning and authenticity-take a look at Memories of My Father Watching TV (1998) if you'd like to hear and experience the wry and elegant understatement of that knocking.
So it's not a surprise to find White commenting on literary matters along with his analyses of more general cultural matters (thirty or forty years ago, he writes, "was the last time our culture had some degree of health"). In an analysis of Spike Jonze's movie Her (2013), he asks a couple of questions that can have meaning only in a society gone culturally dead. First, White asks, "Why did the critical reception of the film miss the satire and focus only on the romance?" And then comes the clincher: "Worryingly, if it is intended as a satire, does it remain a satire if there is no one capable of getting the joke?"
I haven't read a more on-the-mark analysis of intellectual collapse and literary failure in America since I read A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit (2006). As does that book, White himself well understands the difference between "art" and "reality," the difference between "fiction" and "reality," or between "stories" and "reality." And this understanding sets him apart from Americans in general, a population uniformly ever less capable of understanding any such distinctions at all.
The world hasn't changed, says White, in that the world itself "remains 'made of stories.'" But what HAS changed is immeasurably important and immeasurably destructive: "What goes away, under the unrelenting hostility of mainstream literary culture," White says, "is the self-awareness [emphasis in original] that the world is made of stories."
So? Well, here's the so: "Without this self-awareness, we are more likely to accept the prevarications of ideologues."
Not many living among us today will ever be heard saying that main-stream literature in America is made up of lies; or that those who write that literature are therefore themselves liars; or that those who publish it are the same.
Want to see and know what's real and true? Want to understand the robots instead of BEING one of them? Read Curtis White.
