Arrested Pulse

Dear God,

I know I haven’t prayed to you since, like, 1978, but I just finished reading Mark Andrejevic’s iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era and I wanted to ask You to do me a Big Favor.

Please, God, I ask that you inspire a legion of digitally-entrenched techies to read this book and then rise up, fists in the air, and loudly trash every single sentence in it. I want to hear them declare in a stentorian voice heavy with ethos that Andrejevic just doesn’t understand the technology of which he writes, that this idea he has of data-mining by corporations and government intelligence agencies, amassing information that includes every single hyperlink we’ve accessed, every little word we typed into Google, every film we watched on Netflix or book we’ve bought on Amazon, is absolutely crazy.

I ask this of Your Eminence because, God, I have sinned. I have been to blogs, to video-sharing sites, and to various web pages where I bore witness to things that I shouldn’t have. Like that time I linked to an Islamicist web site and watched the video of an American captive beheaded. I know that was wrong and that I should never have clicked that link, but, You see, I was tempted by all the hype. I mean, even CNN Headline News showed stills from the clip. And I wasn’t thinking clearly. And in those days everyone who was someone was declaring that we were living in an “Information Age,” that it was my democratic right to partake in the flow of this information no matter how dicey it was because, well, that was the nature of the World Wide Web! Open, free, liberatory, with all the old taboos and restrictions tossed to the side!

And I bought into it, God. I clicked the link and watched this vile snuff film! O the Horror! O what evil lurked in my shameful little heart of darkness! According to Andrejevic, that mistake is now on my digital record, recorded by the processes of a kind of Superpanopticon -— a database of databases administered by the Total Information Awareness Office (176) -— which has also been consistently monitoring my blog, where I have laid out all the sordid details about the U.S. Navy’s sting operation against gay enlisted personnel in 1919; where I have rendered a literal reading of Genesis 19 in order to prove that you, God, don’t hate fags as claimed by the homophobic activists of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, but in fact that You hate straights!

All that stuff-—I don’t mean it. I'm just, you know, playing around with democracy, throwing a few cents into the talk pot, trying to get some conversations going.

I mean, ideally, isn’t that what the internet is supposed to be all about -— before naysayers (and no doubt closet Satanists) like Andrejevic came out with their evil evil books? What’s wrong with wanting to be a cybercelebrant? I want to have faith in my iCulture, God. I want to rejoice at my individuation as a consumer, as one who can have power and control over some of the products I purchase (24). "Nostalgia for a lost sense of community"? — that’s the whole reason I’m on Facebook cuz I certainly ain’t got no life otherwise! The evidence keeps coming to me in the form of cybernetic feedback -— not as Andrejevic describes it (“active participation in self-manipulation.” Puh-leeez! 255)-—but as confirmation that I inhabit, thanks to digital technology which I find to be so sublime, a global village, a vast interconnected neighborhood where one day, to quote Your Book, “the upright will see and rejoice, but the wicked [Andrejevic, et al] will shut their mouths” (Psalm 107:42).

I saw those Satan-produced Tom Cruise movies Vanilla Sky and Minority Report and noted the bad rap they give to, for one example, biometrics. This Andrejevic character makes it sound like the closer technology gets to our skin, the sooner we’ll end up in pods in a machine-controlled matrix (39). This guy has no sense of humor. He takes all the fun out of postmodernism (too many pages to cite for that one!). He makes MySpace and Facebook out to be nothing more than steps in a stairway down, down, down into the dungeons of a control-society that is nothing more than an online “private enclosure” owned by those “unscrupulous few” who power the mechanisms of control (264). He then takes the sweet, cuddly idea of interactivity, which has warmed the hearts of so many of us cybercelebrants, and thrashes it. He just can’t stop frothing venom when it comes to that subject!

So the short of it, God, is this: I want a revolution -— a restoration of a previous way of thinking or governing, as James Beniger points out (see Andrejevic, 31) -— that will bring me back, back, back to where I once belonged. I want my happy mythologies about how “participatory consumption can be creative and fulfilling” (29) restored. I want to celebrate the “Information Age” again. I want to sing the praises of interactivity and the New Democracy, which is Right and Good, that results from it.

So I ask that you inspire legions of techies to rise up against Andrejevic's nasty little book, declare it heretical, yank it from book shelves everywhere and throw it into the flames of hell (a ritual burning would be sufficient) where it belongs.

Thank you, God, for listening.

Amen