T

he internet has lowered the price of information without raising the value of knowledge. Social media are dangerously antisocial: our fondness for cruelty has led us back to the days of mobs and public executions. As for the arts, “How,” in Shakespeare’s words, “with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?” We might ask the same of the future of liberal democracy, when reason, tolerance, and privacy are abandoned.

Virginia Heffernan is qualified twice over to explain the Internet and its discontents. An early adopter of computers in the 1980s, she now comments frequently on matters digital for the New York Times. In Magic and Loss, she tries to “make sense of the new world we are living in . . . to truly fathom the high-velocity and rapacious new medium that has both re-created and shattered traditional forms.” Her method combines autobiography with the theoretical tools of her third qualification, a Ph.D. from Harvard in English literature.

Heffernan gives a vivid account of entering the great sea of entertainment, and of the revolutionary thrill of overturning the hierarchies of value: “A new spell had been cast, on a separate part of my brain.” She loses interest in reading novels by Mantel or Updike and becomes obsessed with a YouTube video in which a teenage Korean guitarist perpetrates a heavy-metal violation of Pachelbel’s Canon. She is happily adrift in a new world: “Now that digitization has changed even knowledge and ethics, the values instilled in me as the daughter of a Latin-besotted college professor in New England have turned slightly old-fashioned, like the notion of fame in Beowulf or honor in Sir Walter Scott’s novels.”

Heffernan also provides a candid account of the loss that follows the magic. In the digital realm, “loss” is less an emotional term than a technical one, used by audio engineers to denote the tinny, thin sound of the MP3: “In the name of being fast, portable, cheap, and extensive, digital music forfeits depth.” She remains optimistic: In the “arid metallic clicks, snips, squeaks, and creaks” on the soundtrack of The Hurt Locker, she hears a “kind of sonic Cy Twombly painting” and an intimation that “music is successfully reconstituting itself for the digital age.”

It probably is. But reconstitution is the lowest of standards—as in the slurry of liquefied, mechanically separated leftovers that is sold as “reconstituted meat.” Heffernan knows this. The “magic” of the Internet, she observes, is an illusion that substitutes “consumer-end experience” for “reading experience.” Multiple acts of passive consumption replace the kind of focused chewing that nourishes the imagination and sustains a creative culture.

Yet instead of advising the intellectual equivalent of Slow Food, Heffernan tells us to forget about all that gourmet stuff and embrace the junk diet. The indigestion that follows is the price of Dr. Nietzsche’s cure: “We need to risk the pain and scrap our old aesthetics and consider a new aesthetic and associated morality.” Heffernan admits that the new aesthetic is a fiction, given that its morals are those of profit and entertainment. Still, she takes the hypnotic surface for an accurate reflection of reality and leaps into the screen’s shallow pool.

The Internet is the great masterpiece of human civilization. As an artifact it challenges the pyramid, the aqueduct, the highway, the novel, the newspaper, the nation-state, the Magna Carta, Easter Island, Stonehenge, agriculture, the feature film, the automobile, the telephone, the telegraph, the television, the Chanel suit, the airplane, the pencil, the book, the printing press, the radio, the realist painting, the abstract painting, the Pill, the washing machine, the skyscraper, the elevator, and cooked meat. As an idea it rivals monotheism.

This remarkable conceit conflates ideas and their expressions, means and ends, price and value, reality and sales pitches, and technology and its products. Who would call a pyramid, made from a handful of sand, a highway to nowhere, or a monotheism predicated on human sacrifice a masterpiece? Stonehenge and the Easter Island heads are not the same as the Magna Carta or a Chanel suit. We understand the context of Magna Carta’s origins, and we can read the documents in which its legal meaning has been construed and debated. We could say the same for a Chanel suit. We cannot say the same for Stonehenge or the Easter Island heads. We do no know who built them, or why. The ideas that impelled their creation are unknown, and their physical images are hieroglyphs yet to be deciphered.

The root of this disastrous confusion is that Heffernan takes artifacts—historically significant objects—for the facts of art. This, as much as the magic of the Internet, leads her to equate reality, the total of what can be known, with realism, a highly selective aesthetic impression. And that leads to the insupportable sales pitch that the Internet is a massive, collaborative work of “realist art.”

Heffernan derives this from the falsest of syllogisms: People make art; people made the Internet; therefore the Internet is art. Heffernan never defines “art,” and she limits her definition of realism to a story about the fifth-century BCE painter Zeuxis, none of whose works survive. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, one of the casualties of the wonderful world of the Internet, defines Realism in the arts as “the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life” through the “close observation of outward appearances.” In which case, the Internet is neither realist nor art, nor even “realist art,” in any sense of the phrase since the French first coined it in the 1840s. The Internet is inaccurate, sloppy, and unedited. The most lucrative parts of it, such as Facebook and Instagram, are often tools for embellishing and falsifying the depiction of contemporary life.

As Heffernan admits, the only digital products that emulate art, realist or otherwise, are apps and games. She compares digital experience to an American city. The “almost fascist elegance of some of the sexiest apps” resembles that of affluent, private suburbs. The rest of the Web is “chaotic-ghetto” disorder. The ghetto is “malarial and boggy,” a place of “me-me-me clamor,” with thugs looking to “mug” people who wander in from the suburbs. “Bullies, hucksters, and trolls roam the streets. An entrenched population of rowdy, polyglot rabble dominates major sites.”

Marshall McLuhan predicted that the subjective appeal of electronic media would dissolve objectivity into what Stephen Colbert dubbed “truthiness.” Nietzsche anticipated this and said the result would be a kind of “Western Buddhism”—the ultimate nihilism. Heffernan admits as much. Thirty pages in, she ditches her argument. The “teeming commercial metropolis” of the Internet is “crammed with links, graphics, ads, and tarty bids for attention.” There goes realism. “As a design object, it’s a wreck.” And there goes art. And any semblance of an argument.

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