YouTube, j'accuse!

Controversial critic and disgraced blogger Lee Siegel rages against Internet culture and blogofascism.

By Louis Bayard

Read more: Books, Internet, Reviews, Book reviews, youtube

Jan. 16, 2008 | In the climactic sequence of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," Kevin McCarthy staggers into the road like an Old Testament prophet, waving his arms, shouting dire warnings of pod people. "They're here!" he roars, as the cars' headlights arc around him. "You're next!"

Substitute the figure of culture critic Lee Siegel, and you have a pretty fair picture of "Against the Machine," a brief but highly charged polemic about the Internet's podification of our culture. This isn't to denigrate Siegel's argument but to suggest its rhetorical pitch -- and to question whether he is the right one to make the argument.

Certainly there's no questioning his C.V. According to Wikipedia (an institution he despises), Siegel has been book critic for the Nation, art critic for Slate, staff writer for Talk and Harper's magazines, contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, senior editor at the New Republic ... on and on he goes, a culture unto himself, weighing in on all things great and small. He has even managed to have an opinion about baseball caps, which -- I never knew this -- signify "a lazily defiant casualness ... a hopelessness about the possibility of originality ever to fly in the face of hierarchy."

Siegel's Olympian perch began to sag a little in September 2006 when, stung by anonymous reactions to his New Republic culture blog, he decided to pose as a reader himself under the handle "sprezzatura." Slamming all his detractors ("immature, abusive sheep") and dousing the blogmaster with incense ("Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than [Jon] Stewart will ever be ... You couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces"), author and sock puppet were quickly sniffed out by other readers. Siegel was suspended, and his blog was cast into the ether.

More grievously for someone of his self-regard, he became, depending on the generosity of your perspective, either a laughingstock or a poignant symbol of high culture sucked into the mire of the low. Siegel himself dismissed the episode as a mere "prank." Given more time, he has recast it as a fortunate fall. "In good American fashion," he writes now, it earned him a Deborah Solomon interview in the New York Times Magazine (how many culture critics get that?) and "the opportunity to write the book on Web culture that I'd long wanted to write."

And yet, for all his eagerness to rise above it, his back story dog-ears each page, and the suspicion lurks that this is not so much a vanity project as a wounded-vanity project. Sprezzatura wants to get some more licks in.

And to do it in the guise of public service. Those anonymous assassins, it turns out, weren't just hurting Siegel (and, he reminds us, his mother), they were ripping holes in our cultural fabric. The subtitle of Siegel's book is "Being Human in the Age of the Mob," and it's worth noting the Burkean scowl of that "mob." Siegel may have liberal credentials, but he is making, at bottom, a conservative argument: in favor of gatekeepers and cultural elites, against the cacophony of untrammeled opinion.

In the same way that Edmund Burke regarded the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution, Siegel regards Gawker and YouTube. And when he writes that "the Internet is possibly the most radical transformation of private and public life in the history of humankind," he doesn't mean "radical" in a nice way (any more than Burke did). Bad times are a-brewing. The "borders of truth" are eroding. Knowledge is "devalued into information." Americans are producing, not enjoying, their own leisure. Our interior lives are being "packaged like merchandise," and "the sources of critical detachment are drying up, as book supplements disappear from newspapers and what passes for critical thinking in the more intellectually lively magazines gives way to the Internet's emphasis on cuteness, novelty, buzz, and pursuit of the 'viral.'"

A thinker no longer has any space to think, says Siegel. "Ads pop up, spam comes in. If you are a blogger, you are being linked to. Search engines pick up on what you post. E-mail waits to be opened. You are being asked questions. (Can Pretty Boy Save Boxing? Should Paris Go to Jail? Do You Know Your Credit Score?) Gradually, on e-mail, on your blog, on eBay, on Jdate.com, by hook or by crook, the ghosts in your machine -- other people -- throng closer to you."

And if Siegel isn't willing to exorcise the ghosts, he's willing to get exercised about them. It would be wrong to view his anger simply in personal terms or to deny him a rhetoric commensurate with that anger. For he is, above all, serious about what he does. He believes in the act of criticism, at no small cost, and his most eloquent writing has been a protest against irony in all its incarnations (Jon Stewart, Dave Eggers, Larry David). Irony, after all, is a tacit admission that nothing matters too much, and in Siegel's world, everything matters, and the critic, in some way, matters most of all.

This is an unfashionable proposition, and it is to Siegel's credit that he is so willing to make it. Unlike, say, the New Yorker's Anthony Lane, he's not afraid to make a fool of himself. He leaps without looking, trusting in the safety net of his taste. Which means, of course, he often lands on his ass. (And occasionally crawls up somebody else's. In one article, he likened Oprah to Christ.) All the same, there's nothing penny-ante about Siegel, even when he fails. He ranges widely, he reads closely. The strongest parts of "Against the Machine" are his dissections of Alvin Toffler and like-minded futurists, whose rhetoric has proven all too assimilable with corporate profit.

It's when Siegel has to gather exhibits for the prosecution that he gets in trouble. No one is safe from his "J'accuse." He criticizes Method acting because it made movie actors' faces more accessible and "easily habitable," which is just one step away, it seems, from digitally interacting with them in video games. (The Method never took root in England. Does that mean kids there don't play video games?) An especially large paddle is reserved for Malcolm Gladwell. Not for Gladwell's real offense, which is building castles of pseudo-science in the quicksand of anecdote, but because his book, "The Tipping Point," made popularity the sole criterion for success and, somehow, laid the groundwork for "homo Interneticus." I never figured a book could have that kind of power. If it did, Gladwell would have killed off Mr. Interneticus with "Blink," which privileges instinct over groupthink.

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