YouTube, j'accuse!

From here, it only gets sillier. We learn that Match.com has taught us how "to perform ourselves, and package ourselves, and sell ourselves to each other." As if the actual experience of dating hadn't taught us. To gauge the Internet's warping of TV, Siegel drags out "American Idol," surely one of our lowest-tech programs (you phone in your votes, for God's sake) and a direct descendant, as Siegel acknowledges in passing, of old-time talent shows like "Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour."

When he can't find sufficiently subversive real-world examples, Siegel channels "Reefer Madness" visions of purest pulp. "Perhaps your husband is, at this very moment, shut away in his office somewhere in your home, carrying on several torrid affairs at the same time under his various aliases: 'Caliente,' 'Curious,' 'ActionMan.' When he emerges from his sequestered lair, red-faced and agitated, is it because he has been arguing for moderation with 'KillBush46' on the political blog Eschaton, has failed in his bid to purchase genuine military-issue infrared night goggles on eBay, or has been desperately masturbating while instant-messaging 'Prehistorical2'?"

Can you really IM and jack off at the same time? Oh, never mind ... They're here! You're next! And are you any closer to listening? To put it more plainly, if you had to choose someone to preserve civilization from the rabble, would he or she be touchy, impulse-bound and hyperbolic? Or cool, deliberative and Apollonian? In short, would your savior be anything like Lee Siegel?

Any defense of an established culture, if it is to ward off the incursions of the new, must enact the old in some unanswerable way. Through its very performance, it has to cordon itself off from the modernity it's opposing. Siegel's prose, by contrast, draws from the same well of hysteria as the enemy -- most notoriously and least surprisingly when he is writing about the Internet.

On two separate occasions, from his New Republic pulpit, he has linked bloggers to fascism, citing in particular their "hatred of the processes of politics" and their "knockabout origins." "Knockabout origins"? That passes beyond Burke into Burke's Peerage. And outside the Beltway, there aren't many people keener about political processes than Siegel's bête noire, Daily Kos. (It's the processes themselves that Siegel doesn't care for.) None of that has prevented him from proclaiming the blogosphere "hard fascism with a Microsoft face," a coinage he handily compressed into "blogofascism." It's fair to say that, once you've so carelessly flung that tinder into the conversation, you are no longer on the side of reason or culture.

Again and again, Siegel ropes himself with his own lasso. The blogosphere, he warns us, is ruled by a "lust for recognition." A phrase that grows only funnier when you recall Siegel's 2003 Slate diary entry, which consists of the author studying himself -- very closely -- in a mirror. "Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel," he chants. "Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel." Remember the name now? Just in case you forget, there's a signature gash of red in every Siegel article. Reviewing "The Almost Moon" recently in the New York Times Book Review, he finished off his dissection of Alice Sebold's much-pilloried book by calling it an "insult to the timber industry." That's quite a line; three people quoted it to me within a day of its appearance. But what does it mean, exactly? Wouldn't the insult be to the tree? What of the glue makers? The publishing-software manufacturers? Were they insulted, too? In "Against the Machine," after citing a not particularly reprehensible passage from Internet chieftain Tim O'Reilly, Siegel adds: "If your toaster could write a sentence, it would write one just like that." He gets our attention, yes -- and then the questions resume. Why a toaster? Because it's soulless? Capable of burning the person who uses it? Full of bread crumbs?

Siegel, in other words, has a habit of reaching for the invective nearest to hand, without much regard for the implications. Which places him, cheek by jowl, with the blogo-barbarians pounding on the gates.

There is, finally, an unexamined arrogance in many sociological critiques, and Siegel's is no exception. The Internet, he tells us, is killing off our society -- except for his little corner of it. He alone -- OK, maybe a few of his smart friends, too -- have the taste, character, fortitude to inoculate themselves against the Internet's excesses.

But what inoculates us is not our cultural credentials but the basic exigencies of life. We are too riven, too much in the world to become pod people. We may wince at the same mean-spirited rants Siegel objects to, but most of us find ways to ignore them and incorporate the rest into the weave of our lives -- just as we did with the radio and television, just as we are doing with the iPhone and the iPod. Virtual Land isn't where the majority of us live, not permanently; it's just one of the dozens of course corrections we make between waking and sleeping.

But maybe I wouldn't say that if I were an intellectual. For instance, I see a double latte; Lee Siegel sees end time. "The old-fashioned café," as he recalls it, "provided a way to both share and abandon solitude, a fluid, intermediary experience that humans are always trying to create and perfect." And now? Thanks to our laptops, we are "socially and psychologically cut off from [our] fellow caffeine addicts," deprived of "the concrete, undeniable, immutable fact of our being in the world."

It's the usual Siegel pattern: A prelapsarian fantasy (the days of wine and old-fashioned cafes) gives way to an equally unrecognizable dystopia. At my local coffeehouse, the customers, in between tending to their projects -- dissertations, law-school exams, books, kids -- converse with each other, flirt with the baristas. We crack jokes, we comment on the music. We know each other's names, we ask after each other's families. It is no great challenge to raise our heads from the prosceniums of our laptops. It's why we're there in the first place. Even without the cultural gatekeepers to push us out the door, we've come looking for the flesh and blood, the lived life, of other people.

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