John seabrook: deeper: no flame, no gain

It’s typical for a journalist to have spotted the niche. They are, by trade, the imperialists of ideas, bulldozing in and stripping natural assets. Thus, Deeper finds pioneer Seabrook taking first steps into a land without maps. The success of this simple piece of genre-mangling is obvious, given the high-profile that British publishers Faber And Faber have awarded the book. Like many travelogues, however, Deeper tells us more about the tastes of the visitor and the problem is that this author views the landscape with flawed vision. He has no option but to inscribe what he sees with his own myopia. At its most extreme, the concept of travel is a kind of pornography, a fantasy of escape, where invention is endless, boredom deferred eternally and everything is airbrushed or just plain dirty.

Travel incurs comparison between us and them, one way of living is pitted against another and whatever form it takes, travel of the mind always has the same destination: Utopia. Seabrook knows the drill and he”s feeling philosophical about it: “When you start out on-line, it seems as though politics, ethics, and metaphysics – all the great disciplines of mankind – are reduced to their original elements, and are yours to remake again.” It”s a telling statement. That weighty parenthesis about “the great disciplines” buys wholesale into an Enlightenment language of Progress but is tempered with the middling political correctness of “mankind”. An earlier age would have gone for “Man” with a capital aitch. Deeper, as a whole, makes a similar swoop from the loftiest liberalism into a gulf of neither-one-thing-nor-the-other. Perhaps Seabrook views this fall from idealism as tragic. I would agree, but find it nothing to boast about. The key word, in this statement of intent, is “yours”, for there is both something possessive about Seabrook’s view of Utopia, and something individualistic.

The reason that new technology has captivated public imagination, however, is due to its metaphorical richness. The web, the net, cyberspace are names that contain a new set of social relations totally unlike the man-against-the-elements myth of the pioneer. The language of the new technology is prophetic and communicates a reality that has yet to come into being. It doesn”t need Seabrook with his High Chaparral talk. It is already evolving. Deeper, on the other hand, is always looking over its shoulder for inspiration, whether it be The Pilgrim’s Progress or classical literature. Translating the metaphors of the on-line experience in this way impoverishes them. Moreover, it misses the mark. Seabrook’s chosen images are of a flat expanse rather than the polydimensions of cyberspace.

Seabrook’s metaphors and model of Utopia are loaded with political resonance, but he never really questions them. For someone who claims to be searching, he spends little time trying to articulate what he seeks. Perhaps this is why Deeper sinks into a pool of disillusionment. This isn”t to say that we are left in any doubt as to what this Utopia is all about. In one telling passage, Seabrook comments on a lecture by Bill Gates: “What was interesting about his idea for living was the image of the individual bathed in his own cone of light, absorbed in this personalised soundtrack, swaddled in technology: it expressed Gate’s dream of an entirely personal relationship to computers. But if my experience was any indication, the new networked world was not going to be a world in which you got to listen to your own personalized soundtrack. It seemed more likely to be a world in which other people forced you to listen to their music.” Oh, the same old trash has moved into the neighbourhood!

This is an opinion with no basis in the reason that Seabrook likes to celebrate. As such, Seabrook is telling us that there is no escape, because men will always find original ways to sin. Deeper is subtitled A Two-year Odyssey in Cyberspace and, in fashioning himself after Odysseus, Seabrook is really only looking for home. The metaphor of the net, however, promises no such finality. Instead it proposes something a more paradoxical paradise – an endless, shifting discussion which, made up of so many voices, will never settle. Seabrook wants to arrive, escaping the sea of opinions that rock his boat, and ultimately his privilege and certainty. The book has a habit of dressing up in gown and mortar board with pointless footnotes and index, for example, or Seabrook’s garden fence philosophy. It is an attempt to lend the book some authority which the author has no claim to. Seabrook also has an irritating habit of universalising his opinions: “One of the great misunderstandings that the world has about believers in progress is that we are optimists… [W]e have no real faith, except in what can be proved by reason.”

“In the end,” he states with smug finality, “it doesn’t really matter whether the on-line world represents progress or not… It has no moral purpose that I can discern, but, like me, most people will not be able to refuse it, so you may as well advance confidently and hopefully in the only direction that makes any sense – deeper. It’s not progress, but it’s a movement of some kind. Maybe you will meet with success unexpected in common hours, or maybe you will find yourself in a high-tech airplane that has just been blown in two by a high-tech bomb, afforded twenty-four seconds of terror before hurtling into the kind of impact that will instantly make you a foot shorter.” Yes, Mr Seabrook, or maybe a warthog will eat your head. We don”t need a book to tell us that the future may be one thing, the other thing, both, or neither. This kind of tweedy response will get us nowhere. The world is changing and we need voices that are hip to the change and will help us to navigate. Ultimately, Seabrook has not written a book about the effects that technology has on his personal habits so much as confessed to the collapse of his idealism. His attempts to universalise this evade responsibility. For all the cod-philosophy, Seabrook never goes deeper because he cannot – the inside of his Utopia is empty.