How to Be Alone

by Jonathan Franzen

  The United States as a whole resembles an addicted individual, with the corporate id going about its dirty business while the conflicted political ego frets and dithers. What’s clear is that the tobacco industry would not still be flourishing, thirty years after the first Surgeon General’s report, if our legislatures weren’t purchasable, if the concepts of honor and personal responsibility hadn’t largely given way to the power of litigation and the dollar, and if the country didn’t generally endorse the idea of corporations whose ultimate responsibility is not to society but to the bottom line. There’s no doubt that some tobacco executives have behaved despicably, and for public-health advocates to hate these executives, as the nicotine addict comes eventually to hate his cigarettes, is natural. But to cast them as moral monsters—a point source of evil—is just another form of prime-time entertainment.

  BY SELLING ITS SOUL to its legal advisers, Big Tobacco long ago made clear its expectation that the country’s smoking problem would eventually be resolved in court. The industry may soon suffer such a devastating loss in a liability suit that thereafter only foreign cigarette makers will be able to afford to do business here. Or perhaps a federal court will undertake to legislate a solution to a problem that the political process has clearly proved itself unequal to, and the Supreme Court will issue an opinion that does for the smoking issue what Brown v. The Board of Education did for racial segregation and Roe v. Wade for abortion.

  Liggett’s recent defection notwithstanding, the Medicare suits filed by five states seem unlikely to change the industry’s ways. Kluger notes that these cases arguably amount to “personal injury claims in disguise,” and that the Supreme Court has ruled that federal cigarette-labeling laws are an effective shield against such claims. Logically, in other words, the states ought to be suing smokers, not cigarette makers. And perhaps smokers, in turn, ought to be suing Social Security and private pension funds for all the money they’ll save by dying early. The best estimates of the nationwide dollar “cost” of smoking, including savings from premature death and income from excise taxes, are negative numbers. If the country’s health is to be measured fiscally, an economist quoted by Kluger jokes, “cigarette smoking should be subsidized rather than taxed.”

  Ultimately, the belief that the country’s century-long love affair with the cigarette can be ended rationally and amicably seems as fond as the belief that there’s a painless way to kick nicotine. The first time I quit, I stayed clean for nearly three years. I found I was able to work more productively without the distraction and cumulative unpleasantness of cigarettes, and I was happy finally to be the nonsmoker that my family had always taken me to be. Eventually, though, in a season of great personal loss, I came to resent having quit for other people rather than for myself. I was hanging out with smokers, and I drifted back into the habit. Smoking may not look sexy to me anymore, but it still feels sexy. The pleasure of carrying the drug, of surrendering to its imperatives and relaxing behind a veil of smoke, is thoroughly licentious. If longevity were the highest good that I could imagine, I might succeed right now in scaring myself into quitting. But to the fatalist who values the present more than the future, the nagging voice of conscience—of society, of family—becomes just another factor in the mental equilibrium that sustains the habit.

  “Perhaps,” Richard Klein writes in Cigarettes Are Sublime, “one stops smoking only when one starts to love cigarettes, becoming so enamored of their charms and so grateful for their benefits that one at last begins to grasp how much is lost by giving them up, how urgent it is to find substitutes for some of the seductions and powers that cigarettes so magnificently combine.” To live with uncontaminated lungs and an unracing heart is a pleasure that I hope someday soon to prefer to the pleasure of a cigarette. For myself, then, I’m cautiously optimistic. For the body politic, rhetorically torn between shrill condemnation and Neanderthal denial, and habituated to the poison of tobacco money in its legal system, its legislatures, its financial markets, and its balance of foreign trade, I’m considerably less so.

  A few weeks ago in Tribeca, in a Magritte-like twilight, I saw a woman in a lighted window on a high floor of a loft apartment building. She was standing on a chair and lowering the window’s upper sash. She tossed her hair and did something complicated with her arms which I recognized as the lighting of a cigarette. Then she leaned her elbow and her chin on the sash and blew smoke into the humid air outside. I fell in love at first sight as she stood there, both inside and outside, inhaling contradiction and breathing out ambivalence.

  [1996]

  THE READER IN EXILE

  A few months ago, I gave away my television set. It was a massive old Sony Trinitron, the gift of a friend whose girlfriend couldn’t stand the penetrating whistle the picture tube emitted. Its wood-look veneer recalled an era when TV sets were trying, however feebly, to pass as furniture—an era when their designers could still imagine them in a state of not being turned on. I kept it in inaccessible places, like the floor of a closet, and I could get a good picture only by sitting crosslegged directly in front of it and touching the antenna. It’s hard to make TV viewing more unpleasant than I did. Still, I felt the Trinitron had to go, because as long as it was in the house, reachable by some combination of extension cords, I wasn’t reading books.

  I was born in 1959, on the cusp of a great generational divide, and for me it’s a toss-up which is scarier: living without electronic access to my country’s culture, or trying to survive in that culture without the self-definition I get from regular immersion in literature. I understand my life in the context of Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson, not David Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld. But the life I understand by way of books feels increasingly lonely. It has little to do with the mediascape that constitutes so many other people’s present.

  For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing, here in the anxious mid-nineties, the final tipping of a balance. For critics inclined to alarmism, the shift from a culture based on the printed word to a culture based on virtual images—a shift that began with television and is now being completed with computers—feels apocalyptic. In much the same way that Silicon Valley dreams of the “killer application” that will make PCs indispensable to every American, alarmists seek a killer argument that will make the imminence of apocalypse self-evident.

  One recent attempt at a such an argument is a book called A Is for Ox, by the literary scholar Barry Sanders, who takes as his starting point two dismal trends: rising violence among youth and falling verbal SAT scores. In answer to the well-documented fact that children don’t read and write the way they used to, Sanders refreshingly declines to give the explanation that Barney has murdered Mother Goose. TV still plays the villain in his cosmology, but it works its evil less by displacing reading than by replacing verbal interaction with parents and peers. No matter how high the quality of the programming, an excess of passive reception stunts a child’s oral development and prepares her or him to be frustrated by the seemingly arbitrary rules of standard English. Computers and video in the classroom only compound the estrangement from spoken language. Frustration turns to resentment: kids drop out of school and, in the worst case, join violent gangs of what Sanders calls “post-illiterates.” It’s his thesis that without a literacy rooted in orality there can be neither a self, as we understand it, nor self-consciousness. Interpreting the past, entertaining choices in the present, projecting a future, experiencing guilt or remorse—these are all, according to Sanders, activities foreclosed to the soulless young gangsters of today and to the fully computerized society, neither oral nor literate, of tomorrow.

  The problem with Sanders’s argument, as a killer, is that he has to finger too many culprits. He lays the blame for the national crisis in literacy as much on the decline in the quality time parents spend with their children as on the video input that has filled the vacuum. Young gangsters, he notes, not only are addicted to images but also come from impoverished, unst
able homes. So are we facing a technoapocalypse, or is it plain old-fashioned social dysfunction? Every mother I know restricts her children’s TV intake and sows resistance to it by encouraging reading. Like the readers of this essay, my friends and I belong to that class of well-educated “symbolic analysts” which Labor Secretary Robert Reich believes is inheriting the earth. Sanders’s generalizations about “young people today” apply only to the segment of the population (admittedly a large one) that lacks the money or the leisure to inoculate its children against the worst ravages of electronic media. What he describes as the self-immolation of civilization is in fact only a partitioning; and the irony of this partitioning is that those with the greatest access to information are the ones least tethered by the wires that bring it.

  ANYONE WITH A TASTE for such ironies will enjoy Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, a guide to Tomorrowland for those who believe that technology has created no problems that better technology can’t fix. Negroponte is the director of the Media Lab at M.I.T., and Being Digital is a compilation of his monthly columns in Wired magazine, the graphically adventurous “bible” (as I’ve seen it called) of the cyberworld. Wired attempts to celebrate the in-ness of the in crowd while leaving the door open for newcomers, and it manages the trick by selling both vision and inside dope. Negroponte’s specialty is vision. He’s the in-house oracle.

  Leaders of government and industry flock to Negroponte for advice, and as a consequence, much of Being Digital is about (how else to put it?) resource allocation. Should developers of virtual-reality equipment spend their finite computing power on heightening video resolution, or on improving the equipment’s reaction time to a user’s head and neck movements? Go with the speed, says Negroponte. Should Wall Street invest in high-volume electronic pipelines or in TV technology that uses existing pipelines more efficiently? Go with the smart, small machine, says Negroponte.

  Perhaps because the title Being Digital seems to promise the articulation of a new way of being human, it took me a while to realize that the book is not about the transformation of a culture but about money. The first question Negroponte asks of a development like virtual reality is whether there’s a market for it. If a market exists, someone will inevitably exploit it, and so it’s pointless to ask “Do we need this?” or “How might it harm us?”

  “The consumer” is a cheerful omnipresence in Negroponte’s book, a most-favored arbiter.

  Being Digital is awash in references to a world of moneyed internationalism—to the luxury hotels the author stays in, to his lunches with prime ministers, to transpacific flights, Burgundian vintners, Swiss boarding schools, Bavarian nannies. The ease with which jobs and capital and digital signals now cross national boundaries is matched by the mobility of the new informational elite, those lucky symbolic analysts who, like many a ruling class before them, are finding that they have more in common with the elect of other countries than with the preterite of their own. It’s a revelation, when you notice it, how free of nationalism Being Digital is, how interchangeable the locales. In a brief aside, Negroponte complains that people lecture him about life in the real world—“as if,” he says, “I live in an unreal world.” He’s right to complain. His world is as real as the ganglands that Barry Sanders evokes. But the two worlds are growing ever more unreal to each other.

  High above the clouds, the sun always shines. Negroponte paints a tomorrow of talking toasters, smart refrigerators, and flavorized computers (“You will be able to buy a Larry King personality for your newspaper interface”) that is Jetsons-like in its retention of today’s suburban values. To find clues to a deeper transformation, you have to read between the lines. Negroponte has a habit, for example, of reducing human functions to machinery: the human eye is “the client for the image,” an ear is a “channel,” faces are “display devices,” and “Disney’s guaranteed audience is refueled at a rate that exceeds 12,500 births each hour.” In the future, “CD-ROMs may be edible, and parallel processors may be applied like sun tan lotion.” The new, digital human being will dine not only on storage devices but on narcissism. “Newspapers will be printed in an edition of one . . . Call it The Daily Me” Authors, meanwhile, as they move from text to multimedia, will assume the role of “stage-set or theme-park designer.”

  When Barry Sanders looks at young people, he sees lost, affectless faces. Negroponte sees a “mathematically able and more visually literate” generation happily competing in a cyberspace where “the pursuit of intellectual achievement will not be tilted so much in favor of the bookworm.” He espouses a kind of therapeutic corporatism, defending video games as teachers of “strategies” and “planning skills,” and recalling how his son had trouble learning to add and subtract until his teacher put dollar signs in front of the figures. The closest Negroponte comes to recognizing the existence of social dysfunction is in his description of the robots that in the near future will bring us our drinks and dust our empty bookshelves: “For security reasons, a household robot must also be able to bark like a ferocious dog.”

  IT’S EASY TO FAULT Negroponte’S resolute ahistoricism; harder, however, to dislike an author who begins his book by confessing, “Being dyslexic, I don’t like to read.” Negroponte is nothing more and nothing less than a man who has profited by speculating on the future and is willing, like a successful stockbroker, to share his secrets. Apart from offering a few misty assurances (“Digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony”), he doesn’t pretend his revolution will solve problems more serious than the annoyance of having to visit Blockbuster in the flesh to rent a movie.

  In a culture of false perspective, where Johnny Cochran can appear taller than Boris Yeltsin, it’s difficult to tell if the Internet is legitimately big news. Russell Baker has compared the hyping of the Net to the hyping of atomic energy in the fifties, when industry pitchmen promised that we would soon be paying “pennies” for our monthly utilities. Today’s technology boosters can’t offer ordinary consumers as measurable a benefit as cheap electricity. Instead, the selling points are intangible—conveyed through the language of health and hipness.

  Digital technology, the argument goes, is good medicine for an ailing society. TV has given us government by image; interactivity will return power to the people. TV has produced millions of uneducable children; computers will teach them. Top-down programming has isolated us; bottom-up networks will reunite us. As a bonus, being digital is medicine that tastes good. It’s a pop-cultural pleasure we’re invited to indulge. Indeed, some of the best television these days is funded by IBM: nuns in an Italian convent whisper about the Net, Moroccan businessmen sip mint tea and talk interfacing. This is both advertising and luscious postmodern art. Of course, the aim of such art is simply to make the giving of our dollars to IBM seem inevitable. But popularity has become its own justification.

  If I were fashioning my own killer argument against the digital revolution, I’d begin with the observation that both Newt Gingrich and Timothy Leary are crazy about it. Somewhere, something isn’t adding up. Douglas Rushkoff, in Media Virus!—his book-length exploration of the media counterculture—quotes a skeptical New Age thinker as offering this bright side to the revolution: “There’s no longer a private space. The idea of literate culture is basically a middle-class notion—it’s the gentleman in his book-lined study with the privacy for reflection. That’s a very elitist notion.” Robert Coover, writing in a similar vein in a pair of essays for the Times Book Review, promises that hypertext will replace “the predetermined one-way route” of the conventional novel with works that can be read in any number of ways, and thus liberate readers from “domination by the author.” At the same time, Speaker Gingrich’s own clutch of New Age authors advertise the electronic town meeting as the perfect antidote to tired Second Wave liberalism. Where Wall Street sees a profit for investors, visionaries of every political persuasion see empowerment for the masses.

  That news of this better future cont
inues to arrive by way of print—in “the entombing, distancing oppression of paper,” as a Wired columnist put it—may simply be a paradox of obsolescence, like the necessity of riding your horse to the dealer who sells you your first car. But Negroponte, in explaining his decision to publish an actual book, offers a surprising reason for his choice: interactive multimedia leave too little to the imagination. “By contrast,” he says, “the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader’s imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the color, sound, and motion come from you.”

  If Negroponte took the health of the body politic seriously, he would need to explore what this argument implies about the muscle tone of our imaginations in a fully digital age. But you can trust him, and the hard-core corporate interests he advises, not to engage in sentimentality. The truth is simple, if unpretty. The novel is dying because the consumer doesn’t want it anymore.