The car, the automobile, starts to replace public transportation in around 1910, and by 1950, it’s succeeded. So there's no more public transportation in America - it’s ruined. What is left is only for poor people, so it's crappy. The automobile separates each individual into an atom, a moving atom. It breaks up communities, it creates this highway-suburb system that further breaks up communities, actually physically. It breaks up communities economically, and it actually breaks up things physically, just by separating. You can jump in your car and drive away! At the same time, you have radio and television coming in, which, instead of public entertainment, you now have also separate atomized modes of entertainment. The television and the triumph of the automobile in about 1950 corresponds with the commercial appearance of television in about 1950. So it really works out very nicely… there's just so much the human spirit can do when it's wrapped up from birth, from the moment of birth, in a technocratic sphere, where meaning is transferred to the inorganic on a regular basis, in education, and culture, and the home - in all aspects of what we used to call the social. And in this sense, the internet is not a change - it's an intensification. Just as the internet and genetic manipulation, biotechnology, this is the next pair - the next matched pair - that actually commodify life, the inner, the interior, or life itself - the imagination, instead of just the attention. Life itself, the body itself, rather than just the so-called needs of the body. Each of these technocratic movements plunges us deeper and deeper into this state of alienation, to use an old Marxist word as loosely as possible - separation might be a better term. And you can object to this as much as you like, you can weep and moan about this as much as you like, but it doesn't change the basic situation. You can go online and complain about the fact that you have to be online. I know very few people - in the 90s there were thousands of them, now it’s hard to find them - people who are politically enthusiastic about the internet, and who still think of it as a somehow force of liberation. These people are getting fewer and fewer. Mostly, I find when I talk to people, they're saying "Oh, I hate this shit, but I have to do it! I have to do it, it's my job." Most people are now working at this, it's their job, there's nothing liberating about that for fuck’s sake. It's over, the liberating part is over. In 1995, I remember we all said, "This is the year of the internet, this is it!" The last year of the internet is what we meant, because the experiment was over; the returns were in. The corporate reality had taken over. The fact that you can still use the internet to run an end game around the media - like happened with the torture stuff from Iraq - it doesn't seem all that significant to me. Ultimately, some British journalist or some European journalist would have blown the story anyway, whether there was an internet or not - it might have made a difference of a few days. Every time something like this happens on the internet - "Oh, it's a great triumph for electronic freedom!" - very few people believe that anymore, I think. It’s just another gadget by now.
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