Is the Internet “the first social environment created for the asocial individual”?
That’s what Lee Siegel argues in his new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. Siegel believes that the web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused “self-expression” with art. Even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity. Join Lee Siegel, Nicholson Baker, Heidi Julavits, and Paul Holdengräber, moderator, in a blistering and wide-ranging discussion of Siegel’s critique of the Internet and the social and cultural conditions from which it sprang. About Lee Siegel Lee Siegel is the author of the essay collections Falling Upwards and Not Remotely Controlled.
