We lived, without knowing it then, on the other side of the digital chasm. I know the first time I heard the word “internet”: on a trek through Ness Woods in Northern Ireland. My father, self-taught and insatiably curious, told us about an invention that will “spread like a web across the planet, changing everything”. One of the requirements of parenthood is to be not only a rock but also a punchbag as your child tests their boundaries and pushes their luck. My sister and I, two diminutive harpies, immediately began teasing him about his crystal-ball predictions, which he weathered with his usual stoical roll of the eyes.
What fools we were.
Though Generation X were the last of the analogue humans, we had grown up with computers. But the internet was vast, exponentially so, and would impact every aspect of life. It was, to my young mind, an ecumenopolis, a colossal world city, incandescent with possibility. My first visit to an internet café was mind-blowing, as jerry-built as it was in retrospect. Long-used to relatives heading off to Boston and beyond and vanishing, it was astonishing to communicate with complete strangers in real-time, with ease and at little expense, on the other side of Earth.
It was an intoxicating force. But the rapturous delirium could not last.
The internet was to cause a rupture even deeper than the printing press, manned flight or mass electrification. And yet my feeling is that the real divide was not before and after the internet; but rather before and after its transformation from an ever-expanding cosmos of potential and its contraction into the global village where we’re now trapped. An expansionist universe collapsing into neo-feudalism. This is the story of how the market eats everything including our wildest dreams — and it does so because of a language trick that we cannot resist.
In pre-modern times, charlatans preyed upon superstitions, reading portents in comets or flogging bones. With the emergence of modern science came alchemists promising elixirs of youth or the transmutation of lead into gold. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to all manner of swindlers boasting mechanical and medical cure-alls. Oscilloclasts would cure any malady through radiowaves. Daffy’s Elixir could ease everything from the Vapours to King’s Evil. Coca-Cola was enough to dispel morphine addiction. Some innovators believed in their products, even when the costs were severe — the quietening syrups that sent Victorian babies into permanent sleep or revitalising Radium cures that caused jaws to crumble. Medicine shows are seen as the high-water mark of this tendency: travelling fairs of confidence tricksters who would alleviate locals of their money and naivety. Then they disappeared, absorbed into the unholy pan-global entity of 21st-century advertising.
It is difficult to accept, gazing down from the lofty heights of progress on the sinners and dupes of the past, that we reside in the Golden Age of charlatanism. We like to think we’ve developed a thick skin towards commerce — but objects are the least of our worries. It’s no longer a question of being sold dubious products.
Today’s corporations now deal in intangibles: lifestyles, philosophies, diets, self-image and ambition have all become marketable assets. They are promising us shortcuts to status, vital in an age of precarious hustling, as well as quick fixes to our innumerable economic, political and spiritual deficits. They’re selling the grift — or rather the prospect of escape from it. They’re delivered to us not by the outdatedly gauche media of billboards and television, but directly injected into social media, attuned via algorithms to our tastes and inadequacies.
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