Flourescent Locusts

Posted on September 5, 2002 in The InterNet

Teresa from In Sequence spotted a poster on her way to work:

“Then it hit me: I’m not going to be famous, I won’t get to be a rock star, I am going to be stuck on the payroll doing work that doesn’t interest me for a very long time.”

I read in E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class that weavers before the Industrial Revolution used to set books on their looms. Our ancestors who lived in the neighborhood of Birmingham had more intelligence and insight that we give them credit for. The stupid worker was a product of factories where their gaze was fixed firmly on spindles and getting their hands caked with oils. Machines were a awesome thing to watch as they spun the wool faster than ever before, rolled out cloth with an uniformity of design never before seen, and performed mutilations upon the unwary hand, the likes of which had never been seen in fields or workshop of earlier times. But you couldn’t read there: the noise and the attention that had to be paid to the iron locusts as they devoured raw materials and shat out the perfect designs that were all the rage for middle class Victorians. Our ancestors, who knew Milton and solved calculus problems on slates, were run out of their homes and into alien mills where the champings of the mechanisms chewed away their very ability to think.

All hail the InterNet as a medium through which the working classes may once more participate in the life of the mind, exchange ideas, and take part in the national debate. But there are signs — fell signs — that those with the money to manipulate have put money into bits of cleverness that “dumb down” the content we view or make it annoying to read and write. Pop-up ads suck the will to learn about the world by hitting us with distractions and causing confusions. We would sooner not visit the web than see one, two, or sometimes three new windows appear on our task bars. Many people find their sites via television and look no further than the market sites. Other media program them to look for such things — the idea of using the InterNet as a tool for intellectual improvement instead of merely material gain dies as new gimmicks in new colors jump out of the screen, blocking the content we came to see.

Pop-up ads are the flourescent locusts of our modern age, chewing away at our desire to hunt out new views. “If this is the InterNet,” newcomers say as the whores and treasures of Mammon get injected into their heads through their pupils, “then no thank you!” They go back to their televisions where pretty much the same information comes to them over a long straw. It is not clear to me what gets sucked where: the entertainments into the mind or the mind into the entertainments.

Despite the incursions by the corporate media, the InterNet remains a great folk revolution where we teach each other. I believe that a popular uprising against control of our minds is incipient. A subversive poster that Teresa saw on the street can find it’s way into this information highway, be shared, and commented on here. Many subversives who would not work with the tools of terror — private, factional, or state — have a home here, revealing their findings and insights to an open world. We are the true revolutionaries of whom Richard Wright spoke, when he referred to those who, unlike big business and special interests of all varieties that thunder after money, choose to live a life of the mind and the spirit instead. We are the threat that a tyrant should fear, he argues, because we live life on our own terms. A smart dictator would not only monitor us but destroy us. So we have good reason to be wary.

But the public life that exposes us also protects us. We set our views out before the world, knowing that though the secret police of John Ashcroft may be watching, that our disappearance, too, will be noted and commented upon.

Our ancestors, who lost their books when they dismantled their looms and sold them for firewood, would be pleased by the Net. Against all odds, we who use it every day build a circle of friends and try our ideas in a manner that feels as good as play.

For another folk revolutionary I have discovered recently, read Bitch at Work.