‘The “it” is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape. I’m putting it way too heavily here but in a less emphatic and less defined way this is what it is. Somewhere there are people who understand it and run it but those are technologists, and they speak in an inhuman language when describing what they do. It’s all parts and relationships of unheard-of things that never make any sense no matter how often you hear about them. And their things, their monster keeps eating up land and polluting their air and lakes, and there is no way to strike back at it, and hardly any way to escape it.
That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESSPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it’s for you don’t know, and why it’s there, there’s no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, “Get out.” You know there’s an explanation for all this somewhere and what it’s doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn’t what you see. What you see is NO TRESSPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange incomprehensible shapes.’
That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESSPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it’s for you don’t know, and why it’s there, there’s no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, “Get out.” You know there’s an explanation for all this somewhere and what it’s doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn’t what you see. What you see is NO TRESSPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange incomprehensible shapes.’
This excerpt is from ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry Into Values’ by Robert M. Pirsig © 1974
I guess if he were writing the book now Robert Pirsig may have a hard time describing the Internet as malevolently as he did the technological badlands of the early 1970s. The most obvious reason being that, well it’s kind of invisible right? Like the wind, or electricity, you can just sit in the right hotspot and you’re a part of it. Technology is no longer the roaring plume of smoke on the horizon, or the toiling worker and his unidentifiable machine à la Metropolis; it is quiet and it is inclusive. At least that is the intention, and it seems to be the defining aspect in determining the difference between the ‘old technology’ and the Internet. Now, the individual can at once be the ant and the master in Pirsig’s vision, not just one or the other. On offer is the ability to both build and tend to the machine, fuel it and feed from its product.
It is for this reason, I suppose, that it seems difficult to understand why anybody would feel the kind of ambivalence towards the Internet that Pirsig did for modernity some thirty years ago. I have reservations about it at times, and the longer I don’t go near it, the scarier it becomes. There’s nothing like somebody mesmerised by their iPhone to really creep you out when you haven’t checked your email in a week. I guess it’s kind of like the way the City seems a lot bigger when you’re not a part of it, maybe that’s what keeps some people away, but after a while everybody craves a bit nightlife. That’s what it’s like for me anyway. Anybody else have a guilty relationship with the Internet?
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