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The latest shovelful appeared in an AP story last in week, in which a Purdue professor claimed not only that the Unabomber's assessment of our current cultural plight was right on, that technology is out of control and people are justly terrified by it, but that the Unabomber was a kind of innocent, a deToqueville from another planet.
Speaking with the Indianapolis Star/News, Michael Weinstein said the Unabomber's manifesto is a "must read" because its observations come from someone on the outside looking in.
"He's like Mork," Weinstein said, referring to the Robin Williams character in the 1970s sitcom, Mork and Mindy. "He sees things we can't see because we're too involved."
When I read that, I knew I had to learn more about Prof. Weinstein. Who was this man who saw so clearly through to the mortal sin of our times, communication technology, yet showed mercy to the venial sin of blowing people's body parts off via Parcel Post?
By chance, it happens that Weinstein has a book to sell, titled Culture/Flesh: Explorations of Postcivilized Modernity (Rowman Press), whose thesis is that people are fiddling with their own natures in order to cope with encroaching technology -- doing things like gulping tranquilizers, sleeping in hyperbaric chambers, and flagpole sitting.
"For all my academic life," Weinstein told the Star-News, "I have basically written to defend the flesh, the human being -- the weak and finite and frail and limited human being -- against the intimidation of culture. When I read the Unabomber's manifesto, I saw a kindred spirit."
What is interesting about Prof. Weinstein is that, while trashing the data culture, he has no qualms about promoting himself through it. Alta Vista, the World Wide Web search engine, lists 15 pages of links to him and his writings, with titles like Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class and The Hyper-Texted Body, or Nietzsche Gets a Modem.
And what writing it is. Consider this passage from the e-zine Ctheory, an online journal that Weinstein and Canadian sidekick Arthur Kroker contribute to:
"The virtual class has driven to global power along the digital superhighway. Representing perfectly the expansionist interests of the recombinant commodity-form, the virtual class has seized the imagination of contemporary culture by conceiving a techno-utopian high-speed cybernetic grid for traveling across the electronic frontier."
Here's another big gulp:
"Like a mirror image, the digital superhighway always means its opposite: not an open telematic autoroute for fast circulation across the electronic galaxy, but an immensely seductive harvesting machine for delivering bodies, culture, and labor to virtualization."
It goes on like that endlessly, page after page after page, like Marshall McLuhan struggling to uncap a bottle of Metamucil.
But I have to call a time-out here. The first draft of this column went on to hold Prof. Weinstein up to a lot of ridicule. It's already pretty mean, but it got lots worse. It was unfair because he is not a public figure and he is just speaking his mind, a revered tradition in the marketplace of ideas.
It was as I was drifting off to sleep last night that I asked myself, "Does it matter if he's right? If technology really is evil, is he still such a goofball?"
In fairness, the answer is no. It is true that the commercial powers of computer and network technology would love to have everyone walk in their sleep down to Computer City or Best Buy and buy the latest upgrades of everything, and become dependent on the Net for their information about the world.
And if people just needed a convoluted phrase to snap them out of their trance, then Prof. Weinstein is just the person to spark a revolution away from the herd mentality that made Windows 95 such a hit.
But I disagree Microsoft and Apple Computer and Intel are hungry for our flesh, that their great ambition is to make us consuming, net-surfing slaves.
Sure, they'd like our buying habits to go their way. They would like to dominate their markets. So do the makers of every product, from cellulose mop heads to anti-tank guns. But despite the advertising millions spent to turn us into chip-upgrading sheep, we computer users retain our humanity and our prerogative to say No, thank you, to the latest wall of hype.
If you don't believe it, ask the brand managers of the IBM PCjr, Apple Newton, and Intel Pentium Pro if buyers are helpless zombies.
God love him, Prof. Weinstein believes he and other enlightened outsiders like Kaczynski alone can see the grand conspiracy tightening around us, and the rest of us are too much flesh and not enough brain to figure it out for ourselves. Perhaps it is the terrible loneliness of his calling that makes him write like he does.
If the electronic establishment is as rotten as Weinstein says, it has been brilliant in sidelining the two great friends of humanity who could have rallied it to its own defense, but now cannot. Ted Kaczynski, because he's in stir, and Prof. Weinstein, because he's in Lafayette, Indiana.
Mork from Ork? Nah, too easy.
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