Gifts Outright

Suppose you want to master or own or control another human being. This is a very common thing that human beings want to do. It can manifest itself at the social and political level as slavery, but it’s evident in much more subtle ways as well, say for example the relationship between parents and their children. Part of what it means to be a parent is to be aware of the dangers of trying to own one’s children. Ownership of children would mean controlling everything about those children, making of them an image of oneself and denying to them, implicitly or explicitly, the capacity to develop as free human agents before God with their own idiosyncratic characters. And we’ve all seen, I suspect, and done a version of that. But it’s a question of how much one does it. There are extreme cases where one sees parents who really are caught in the habit of trying to own their children, control them, make them into themselves, make them utterly subservient. Another common example occurs in intimate or romantic relationships. The same desire, what Augustine would call the “concupiscence for domination,” is apparent there too. What we want from other people in our intimate or romantic relationships is not them—what we want is simply an object to fulfill our own desires.

I would say that the experiments of modernity with respect to radically remaking political orders or revolution and genocide provide larger instances of this lust for mastery. One way to achieve mastery is to remove everything except yourself. If you are all that’s left, you’ll be in charge. But to do that is almost an ideal type of the desire for mastery that is characteristic for sin. And so if you look at the great genocides of the twentieth century, they’re all informed by that in a way. In a sense, they all begin when someone says, “Things are really bad; things have gone wrong; the way to set it straight is to gain complete control over it, to restart it.” That will almost always mean killing everybody. And there are a lot of examples of that.

Those attempts at mastery can all become habitual, and the interesting feature of such attempts at mastery is that they inevitably fail. The desire to have mastery or control over a lover or a child, for example, precisely removes that person from being a lover or a child and it tries to make them something that by definition they’re not; it fails as an enterprise.

What makes Facebook such an important company is that it forces us to acknowledge the frivolity of our entire way of life, by showing us that much of it can be delivered digitally into our lives without a lot of “serious” old economy industrial foundations, and at a fraction of the cost, using far less by way of resources.

Sure, some aspects cannot be digitized, like food. But games, entertainment, a lot of social interaction — yeah, we can digitize and radically lower the cost of all that. Say it with me now: “low-calorie guilt-free consumerism.”

By digitizing much of the frivolous banality in our lives that currently takes expensive physical infrastructure, gasoline and tens of millions of jobs to sustain, Facebook is showing us the true value of the fading American industrial economy itself. When you consider that the Facebook universe (the main company and everything else that depends on it, like Zynga games and bloggers who promote their wares on Facebook in order to drive traffic to Amazon via affiliate links) of perhaps $200 to $500 billion dollars is supplying a portion of our demand for frivolous banality that used to take several trillion dollars to supply before, you realize that you’re getting a huge bargain.

Cheap frivolity for all, just as we got cheap grain for all and cheap transportation for all in earlier revolutions.

Just as mechanical means of reproduction, such as photography, multiplied and distributed an original work or art, likewise do digital technologies, social media most explicitly, multiply and distribute the self. But in so doing they dissolve the aura that attends the person in the flesh and consequently elicit a quest for authenticity.

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“To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility.” In an age of digital reproduction, the self we are reproducing is increasingly constructed for maximum reproducibility. We live with an eye to the reproductions we will create which we will create with an eye to their being widely reproduced (read, “shared”).

Benjamin also noted the historic tension “between two polarities within the artwork itself … These two poles are the artwork’s cult value and its exhibition value.” When art was born in the service of magic, the importance of the figures drawn lay in their presence not necessarily their exhibition. By liberating of the work of art from the context of ritual and tradition, mechanical reproduction foregrounded exhibition. In the age of digital reproduction, mere being is incomplete without also being seen. It hasn’t happened if it’s not Facebook official. The private/public distinction is reconfigured for this very reason.

It works like this: My agent sells my book IDEA to a publishing house. The house pays an “advance”: a sum of money upfront that I can live on while I research and write the book. It’s not much money — in fact it’s an embarrassing amount of money and I also am fortunate enough to receive financial support from my spouse.

Without that assistance, I couldn’t do what I do. Period. Again, it’s not much money, and it’s the ONLY money I earn from my books. (If I were lucky enough to write a bang ‘em up bestseller, I’d earn more than the advance, but I’m not that lucky. Er, um, not that talented a writer.)

The self-publishers, in my opinion, have a distorted view of “books” and of “publishing.” In their minds, every writer is cranking out novels that don’t require much time to research and write, and the lag time between creation and payoff is short.

So I ask them: What happens when the agents, editors, and publishing houses go away? Who will write non-fiction then?