Raging against the internet machine

• Tags:
• Web 2.0,
• Lee Siegel,
• Social Networking

David Meyer ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 29 May 2008 15:19 BST

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...any giant corporations in the culture business. But, as an independent musician doing your own thing, can you get the audience to pay to hear you without this admittedly corrupt apparatus?

Commerce is great — without commerce you wouldn't have culture — but it belongs in its own realm. I don't want to see the entire culture entrepreneurialised. Business is now unquestioned in America. The 1950s was a golden age in American music; in Greenwich Village anyone could do anything. You could create abstract expressionism and cool jazz and these people were not plugged into the system. But, because they were not on this militantly egalitarian medium, they weren't forced to get down and grovel in the trough with everyone else. If you invite everyone to the table, it is hard for a sensitive voice to get heard.

Someone is always going to be the gatekeeper. There is always a hierarchy. The web is parcelled up between great giants, like Google and News Corp. Even on blogs, you have the alpha voices who have to be acknowledged by the smaller, better voices. I think that, going back to my perhaps pathetic ideal of post-war culture in the 1950s, the reason it worked there is you had this whole system of critics and clubs talking about music — social groups that radiated outwards. On the web you lose the social glue.

What people don't realise is that character is as much a part of it as talent. And part of character is knowing how to move through the world among other people. You can only do that with other people; it is very hard to do it in the abstract. With billions of voices, there is no real way of judging them.

Do you not think that the internet is simply in its early stages and the way things are now is just a phase?
It will definitely change; it's in the infant phase of its development. The sheer restlessness of society will change it. The economic downturn will make people less tolerant of frivolity and other people's narcissism, and want reality. But no change will happen while people who [promote this change] are called 'douchebags' and 'fucktards'. The discourse has to become more sophisticated. There has to be a real dialogue and there have to be critics of this thing. Ideally they should appear on the web itself. I think that will happen and I think there will be a market for it.

Have you considered setting up such a forum online?
I'd love to, if I could attract people who could support that kind of venture. Speaking as a former blogger, it can just devour your time and your life. It would be nice to have some kind of web magazine that posed these questions to the web, but also in a satirical way at times.

The future of the web lies on the web. The best aspects of the web and print culture will fuse and create something. You already see it, often sponsored by big, established media institutions, but smaller organisations will arise that do the same thing, that have all the length and reflectiveness of the traditional print medium. People won't be so quick to link to other things and truncate their thoughts. There's so much opinion-mongering on the web.

So much comes down to 'I agree' or 'I don't agree'; it's the way you argue that matters. I'd like to see style become more of a presence on the web.

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