Electronic Loneliness

"Change the world; stay at home." Such is the adage of the social 
ergonomists who distill a political constitution out of the 
user-friendliness of consumer electronics. The pliability of society 
having been examined from every angle, the private is now assumed to 
contain a reservoir of diligent self-regulation just waiting to be 
tapped. Post-sociologists disguised as trend-tasters project all their 
reborn enthusiasm onto the homestead. Concerned for the army of stranded 
white- and blue collar workers, they seek methods to lift them from their 
state of anomie and unproductivity through home terminals. Individual 
enthusiasm for technogadgets is transformed into hope for an economic 
revival. Home installation of new media appears to have provoked a 
working condition. The combination of data highway and enhanced 
television leads to an irreversible return of the cottage industry in the 
form of virtual looms. The idea is that the countryside will flourish 
again, traffic jams disappear, the environment be saved and the family be 
restored. And who in his or her right mind wouldn't support just that?

In the age of the shop floor, open-plan office, canteen and conference 
room, there was still a political work climate. It was still a matter of 
spatial proximity and visible hierarchical relationships within a broad 
technological circuit that encouraged the integration of specializations. 
The commitment to material production induced compulsory solidarity. This 
lay at the basis of twentieth-century corporate dreams, from Fordism and 
Taylorism to Japanese management techniques and New Age. The labor unions 
saw to the pacification of ever-latent labor unrest. Thus, in the postwar 
West there arose a configuration which guaranteed the manageability of 
social dynamics, a permanent reorganization which ultimately resulted in 
industrial underutilization. When, in an analogous development, 
socialist/communist passion slipped out of the picture, the social 
question shifted from the factory gates to the individual doorstep. The 
home thus became the object of fantasy for political economists and other 
social visionaries.

Today, those who take early retirement are simply unmotivatible and are 
in fact written off. These grey masses belong to the industrial past; 
they make inroads on the last resources of the welfare state and are 
otherwise ignored. Yet it is they who consciously dedicated their active 
lives to interior design. The postwar generation discovered the home as a 
leisure object and mirror image of the self. Renovation and redecoration 
became their life fulfillment and relational therapy: an open kitchen for 
an open marriage. What mattered was the order of purchase and correct 
arrangement of refrigerator, hi-fi set, bedroom suite, floor lamp, 
motorbike, lawnmower, awning and washing machine. A special place was 
reserved for the means of communication: the car outside and the TV set 
indoors. The home was a sanitorium where you got the right treatment, a 
shelter for the practice of family ideals. The fatal turn came with the 
belated insight that we had all been working towards a realized Utopia 
where no one could survive for long. The whole collection of luxuries 
turned into dead capital. The social function of the family reception 
room gave way to the active temporary arrangement of support functions 
geared towards the individual. The excess of stuffy knickknacks has been 
replaced by a carefully selected mix of sanitary objects. This 
combination of stylized and functional ambiance prepared the home for its 
current transformation into workplace.

Visions of home telework are on a par with wishful thinking about robots, 
artificial intelligence and organ transplants. They appeal to a future 
stage of development, as yet unknown but imaginable. Working at home 
terminals creates a work situation that lacks all the traditional 
attributes (physical exertion, collegiality, competition, movement, 
noise, dirt). Everything which used to make work such a nuisance seems to 
have disappeared. Machine operation by the few guarantees the prosperity 
of the many at home. But the internalized urge to work cannot bear this 
seeming idleness which is scarcely recognized as such by unemployment 
statistics. A sense of urgency must be created, a feeling that we've all 
got to work together to prevent a social regression to decadence, crime, 
and entropy. The delightful promise is that the masses will have 
something to do again and can thus be kept at bay. At home, we are 
invaded by science fiction: Spaceships lodge in the living room and the 
impression is that everybody is on a virtual journey into space. From 
"We're here to go" to "We're here to stay": Don't call us, we'll call 
you.

Video games, 800 numbers, interactive media and home shopping have 
created the right mood and acquainted us with the necessary tactile 
skills to work at a distance for cash. Now, all we have to do is 
stimulate the decision makers to equip the telesector with the required 
technological and ideological infrastructure. We can support them by 
articulating our commitment to create a perspective on economic 
activities within a positive climate of collective individuals. The axiom 
of self-realization is casually slapped onto telework: You cannot become 
a full person unless you make yourself useful. No identity without 
activity. Pep talks, training and performance evaluations have to prepare 
the individualized masses for digital piecework.

Telework is not an institution but a constitution, a frame of mind to 
nourish the new work effort. It is a matter of psychology before anything 
else: What used to be called apathy, being glued to the TV set, has 
become a first requirement for job performance. Isolation must be 
conditioned to this end: Individuals are locked up in niches where they 
are at one with the network. We are urged to keep our minds on the 
screen, for it is all we have. No flourishing family life or professional 
adultery awaits us; even the promised outlet of virtual sex is a dead 
end. All we are left with is the bill. Since chance meetings have been 
ruled out, dating services bring us video presentations and careful 
matching and screening techniques to line up desire with the matching 
package. No sooner have visiting rights been settled, then our all too 
human imperfections rear their heads to pose an acute obstacle before the 
affair has even begun. By and large, the other is unbearable. The other's 
ever-absent radiance and perfection form a social basis for boredom and 
apathy. Intercourse is stifled, and the tele-existences remain otherwise 
invisible and meaningless to one another. Martin Buber, where are you?

Traditionally, the home has always been the abode of children and their 
grandparents, but there is no room for that any more. It's just that 
people have other things on their minds. By all practical standards, the 
telehovel has become intolerable of children. In this empty, coated 
environment, there is no room left to create a world of your own. Visits 
have been cancelled and are generally frowned upon; they can only disrupt 
the programmed order of the day. Little people are firmly caught in a 
monitored development scheme. Ever since their moment of conception, they 
have been clones of a cultural ideal. They are made for perfection. And 
woe to them who fail to live up to this investment in their 
opportunities. Play has become education, as exemplified by computers. 
For example, Nintendo education lays the medial foundation for future 
generation gaps. Those who have already grasped computers at age four 
will never experience the 'Net as the domain of rebellion. So they hang 
around on the streets, the ultimate forbidden territory (weapons, drugs, 
sex, fashion, joyriding). Outside is still the domain of the informal, of 
indefinite chance: fighting over nothing, making out, long waits, 
breakaways, accidents.

The parents, meanwhile, remain chained to their home terminals, forever 
unable to break free. They find their peers in miscellaneous media and 
use them to share their despair. Locked inside a perfect world, they 
simply cannot imagine that anyone would have it any other way. The 
primary socialization of people into ill-behaved adolescents, with all 
the accompanying biological deviations, makes the media into meaningless 
institutions that neither exercise authority nor manage to inspire. It is 
the same as with other toys: After the initial thrill they are simply 
tossed aside. Modern parents lose their last anchor, now that even 
computers no longer offer a solution. There is no way back, now that the 
family as a network has been disrupted. The family was never functional 
to begin with. If anything, it resembled a hedonistic pack, unable to 
think of better pastimes than harassment, gossip, fooling around, blood 
and mayhem, ambitious plans, bad eating habits, excessive drinking and 
disenchantment.

Actually existing electronic loneliness cannot be expressed in 
metaphysical or psychiatric terms. It is not a matter of profound 
melancholy but of shallow artificiality. Desolation is a fatal production 
factor, a trap one stumbles into by reckless thinking and believing in 
daydreams. Only organized tourism is still considered a way out: the 
assembly of a collection of psycho-physical experiences, from meditation, 
repentance, exhaustion, ecstacy, fasting and pilgrimage to heroic relief 
campaigns. But none of these sensations can help one brace oneself for 
that highly personal confrontation with the machine. Pulling the plug on 
the 'Net means suicide. There is no future without the 'Net, and there 
are no alternative scenarios left. Nothing seems to prevent the advance 
of enclosures. We have finally left the age of despair. Get serious. 
Emotions have settled within the archeological layers of consciousness, 
in an age in which the history of attitudes is being recorded. The 'Net 
as the ideal merry-go-round for self-styled identities will neither 
create revolutionary situations nor bring the world to an end. Cybernetic 
emptiness need not be filled, nor will it ever be (with desire, disgust, 
nor unrest). Finally, telematic energy will disappear into the flatland 
of silence. Commands may still flicker on the screen, but it is you who 
has disappeared.
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