By WILLIAM SALETAN
Published: February 11, 2011
nyt.com

Humanity is migrating to cyberspace. In the past five years, Americans have doubled the hours they spend online, exceeding their television time and more than tripling the time they spend reading newspapers or magazines. Most now play computer or video games regularly, about 13 hours a week on average. By age 21, the average young American has spent at least three times as many hours playing virtual games as reading. It took humankind eight years to spend 100 million hours building Wikipedia. We now spend at least 200 million hours a week playing World of Warcraft.

Elias Aboujaoude, a Silicon Valley psychiatrist, finds this alarming. In “Virtually You,” he argues that the Internet is unleashing our worst instincts. It connects you to whatever you want: gambling, overspending, sex with strangers. It speeds transactions, facilitating impulse purchases and luring you away from the difficulties of real life. It lets you customize your fantasies and select a date from millions of profiles, sapping your patience for imperfect partners. It lets you pick congenial news sources and avoid contrary views and information. It conceals your identity, freeing you to be vitriolic or dishonest. It shields you from detection and disapproval, emboldening you to download test answers and term papers. It hides the pain of others, liberating your cruelty in games and forums. It rewards self-promotion on blogs and Facebook. It teaches you how to induce bulimic vomiting or kill yourself.

In short, everything you thought was good about the Internet — information, access, personalization — is bad. Aboujaoude isn’t shy in his indictment. He links the Internet to consumer debt, the housing crash, eating disorders, sexually transmitted infections, psychopathy, racism, terrorism, child sexual abuse, suicide and murder. Everything online worries him: ads, hyperlinks, even emoticons. The Internet makes us too quarrelsome. It makes us too like-minded. It makes us work too little. It makes us work too much.

In part, this grim view stems from Aboujaoude’s work. He sees patients with online compulsions. He believes in the Freudian id — a shadowy swirl of infantile impulses — and perceives its modern incarnation in what he calls the “e-personality,” a parallel identity that hijacks your mind online. In the physical world, your superego restrains your id. But in the virtual world, where you can instantly fulfill your whims, the narcissism and grandiosity of the e-personality run wild.

To Aboujaoude, the Internet is a mechanical alien, “a new type of machine . . . that can efficiently prey on our basic instincts.” It converts children into bullies “almost automatically.” It turned Philip Markoff, the accused “Craigslist killer,” who committed suicide in jail, into a serial assailant. Lori Drew, the woman whose online impersonation of a teenage boy supposedly drove a girl to suicide, seemed normal until “the Internet made her fleeting dark wish . . . take on a life of its own.” Again and again, computers get the blame.

Jane McGonigal, the author of “Reality Is Broken,” sees the Internet differently. She’s a game designer. To her, the virtual world isn’t a foreign contraption. It’s our own evolving creation. She agrees that bad online games can addict people, make them belligerent, distract them from reality and leave them empty. But this is our fault, not the Internet’s. When virtual life brings out the worst in us, redesign it.

If Aboujaoude is the Internet’s Hobbes, McGonigal is its Rousseau. In the rise of multiplayer games, she sees a happier picture of human nature — a thirst for community, a craving for hard work and a love of rules. This, she argues, is the essence of games: rules, a challenge and a shared objective. The trick is to design games that reward good behavior. The Internet’s unprecedented power, its ability to envelop and interact with us, is a blessing, not a threat. We can build worlds in which nice guys finish first.

The point isn’t just to enhance virtual reality. It’s to fix the real world, too. McGonigal offers several examples, some of which she helped create. Chore Wars, an alternate-reality game, builds positive attitudes toward housework by rewarding virtual housework. Cruel 2 B Kind invites players to “kill” competitors with smiles or compliments. The Extraordinaries hands out missions like one in which the player must GPS-tag a defibrillator so its location can be registered for later use. Groundcrew assigns players to help people with transportation, shopping or housekeeping.

The premise is that since games motivate us more effectively than real life, making them altruistic and bringing them into the physical world will promote altruistic behavior. But is this motivating power transferable? What draws us to virtual worlds, McGonigal notes, is their “carefully designed pleasures” and “thrilling challenges” customized to our strengths. They’re never boring. They let us choose our missions and control our work flow. They make us feel powerful. They offer “a guarantee of productivity” in every quest. And when we fail, they make our failure entertaining.

Reality doesn’t work this way. Floors need scrubbing. Garbage needs hauling. Invalids need their bedpans washed. This work isn’t designed for your pleasure or stimulation. It just needs to be done.

McGonigal points to studies suggesting that games that reward socially constructive behavior promote such behavior in real life. But the only outputs measured by these studies are self-reported values, self-reported behavior in the real world, and objectively measured behavior in games. Where’s the reliable evidence that this data translates to people’s doing more real work? Projects like Groundcrew, McGonigal concedes, have produced “modest if any results so far.” Hundreds of thousands of people play Free Rice, a game designed to feed the hungry, but the rice comes from advertisers, not players. Thousands sign up every day for Folding@home, a game to cure diseases, but all these players contribute is processing power on game consoles.

If reality is inherently less attractive than games, then the virtual world won’t save the physical world. It will empty it. Millions of gamers, in McGonigal’s words, are “opting out” of the bummer of real life. And they aren’t coming back. Halo 3, for example, has become a complete virtual world, with its own history documented in an online museum and Ken Burns-style videos. McGonigal calls this war game a model for inspiring mass cooperation. Two years ago, its 15 million players reached a long-sought objective: They killed their 10 billionth alien. “Fresh off one collective achievement, Halo players were ready to tackle an even more monumental goal,” McGonigal writes. And what goal did they choose? Feeding the hungry? Clothing the poor? No. The new goal was to kill 100 billion aliens.

Game designers can’t be counted on to arrest this trend. McGonigal says the game industry wants to help users avoid addiction so that they’ll remain functional and keep buying its products. But we’ve heard that argument before from the tobacco industry. Addiction, as a business model, is too addictive to give up. She says Foursquare, a game that rewards you for going out with friends and “checking in” at restaurants, promotes sociability. That would be nice, but the game’s Web site devotes a whole section (“Foursquare for Business”) to commercial exploitation.

The Internet isn’t heaven. It isn’t hell, either. It’s just another new world. Like other worlds, it can be civilized. It will need rules, monitoring and benevolent designers who understand the flaws of its inhabitants. If Aboujaoude is right about our weakness for virtual vice, we’ll need all the McGonigals we can get. The point isn’t just to enhance virtual reality. It’s to fix the real world, too. McGonigal offers several examples, some of which she helped create. Chore Wars, an alternate-reality game, builds positive attitudes toward housework by rewarding virtual housework. Cruel 2 B Kind invites players to “kill” competitors with smiles or compliments. The Extraordinaries hands out missions like one in which the player must GPS-tag a defibrillator so its location can be registered for later use. Groundcrew assigns players to help people with transportation, shopping or housekeeping.

The premise is that since games motivate us more effectively than real life, making them altruistic and bringing them into the physical world will promote altruistic behavior. But is this motivating power transferable? What draws us to virtual worlds, McGonigal notes, is their “carefully designed pleasures” and “thrilling challenges” customized to our strengths. They’re never boring. They let us choose our missions and control our work flow. They make us feel powerful. They offer “a guarantee of productivity” in every quest. And when we fail, they make our failure entertaining.

Reality doesn’t work this way. Floors need scrubbing. Garbage needs hauling. Invalids need their bedpans washed. This work isn’t designed for your pleasure or stimulation. It just needs to be done.

McGonigal points to studies suggesting that games that reward socially constructive behavior promote such behavior in real life. But the only outputs measured by these studies are self-reported values, self-reported behavior in the real world, and objectively measured behavior in games. Where’s the reliable evidence that this data translates to people’s doing more real work? Projects like Groundcrew, McGonigal concedes, have produced “modest if any results so far.” Hundreds of thousands of people play Free Rice, a game designed to feed the hungry, but the rice comes from advertisers, not players. Thousands sign up every day for Folding@home, a game to cure diseases, but all these players contribute is processing power on game consoles.

If reality is inherently less attractive than games, then the virtual world won’t save the physical world. It will empty it. Millions of gamers, in McGonigal’s words, are “opting out” of the bummer of real life. And they aren’t coming back. Halo 3, for example, has become a complete virtual world, with its own history documented in an online museum and Ken Burns-style videos. McGonigal calls this war game a model for inspiring mass cooperation. Two years ago, its 15 million players reached a long-sought objective: They killed their 10 billionth alien. “Fresh off one collective achievement, Halo players were ready to tackle an even more monumental goal,” McGonigal writes. And what goal did they choose? Feeding the hungry? Clothing the poor? No. The new goal was to kill 100 billion aliens.

Game designers can’t be counted on to arrest this trend. McGonigal says the game industry wants to help users avoid addiction so that they’ll remain functional and keep buying its products. But we’ve heard that argument before from the tobacco industry. Addiction, as a business model, is too addictive to give up. She says Foursquare, a game that rewards you for going out with friends and “checking in” at restaurants, promotes sociability. That would be nice, but the game’s Web site devotes a whole section (“Foursquare for Business”) to commercial exploitation.

The Internet isn’t heaven. It isn’t hell, either. It’s just another new world. Like other worlds, it can be civilized. It will need rules, monitoring and benevolent designers who understand the flaws of its inhabitants. If Aboujaoude is right about our weakness for virtual vice, we’ll need all the McGonigals we can get.

Perhaps only in France could the novelist who was also author, in Vichy France, of antisemitic rants, be considered a candidate for state-sponsored celebration.

Every year, the French government publishes a list of cultural events and personalities to be commemorated over the next 12 months. Compiling it is a lengthy and carefully-considered process. A High Committee of National Celebrations draws up a provisional list, which is then submitted to the Culture Ministry and, once approved, published in book form. Some 10,000 copies of the Recueil des Célébrations nationals 2011 were printed last autumn ahead of last week’s launch. Frédéric Mitterrand – the culture minister lui-même – had even penned a foreword, proving beyond a shadow of doubt that the project had received his imprimatur. However, when word got out that Louis-Ferdinand Céline was to feature alongside the likes of Blaise Cendrars, Théophile Gautier, Franz Liszt and Georges Pompidou, all hell broke loose.

Serge Klarsfeld, the country’s most famous Nazi hunter and Holocaust memorialist, expressed his indignation in the name of the Association of Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France. The Republic, he argued, shouldn’t celebrate “the most antisemitic” Frenchman of his day – a time, lest we forget, when antisemitism was so rife that it led to state-sanctioned Jewish persecution under the Vichy regime. Mitterrand’s decision, two days later, to remove the novelist from the list was logical in light of this backlash, but also somewhat surprising since he must have known that his inclusion would prove controversial in the first place (was he protecting Sarkozy, whose favourite author happens to be Céline?)

Far more surprising, however, was the reaction of the French intelligentsia, who were almost unanimous in their defence of the author of Journey to the End of the Night. Literary heavyweight Philippe Sollers accused the Culture Ministry of “censorship”. Frédéric Vitoux, a member of the prestigious Académie française who wrote a biography of Céline, likened this decision to the airbrushing of history under Stalin. Pop philosopher Alain Finkielkraut feared that some people would draw the conclusion that a “Jewish lobby” was dictating policy to the French government. Bernard-Henri Lévy, another celebrity philosopher, claimed that the commemoration of Céline’s death should have been an opportunity to try to understand how a “truly great author” can also be an “absolute bastard”. Even more surprising, perhaps, was the fact that Serge Klarsfeld himself felt the need to declare that he rated Céline as a “great writer” before going on to describe him as a “despicable human being”.

France is a place where authors and artists are granted a special status – a kind of poetic licence or artistic immunity. In fact, the country continues to view itself, and sometimes to be regarded as, the natural second home of all artists. It is this very liberal attitude which attracted many members of the Lost and Beat generations after the second world war, and that still attracts outsider writers such as Dennis Cooper. Some of the greatest works of contemporary fiction in English – Joyce’s Ulysses, Nabokov’s Lolita or Burroughs’s Naked Lunch – were available in France when they were banned or considered unpublishable in Britain or the US. A telling culture shock occurred on live television, in 1990, when a journalist from Quebec told Gabriel Matzneff that only in Paris would he be feted for writing – however exquisitely – about his amorous liaisons with underage partners (of both genders). Anywhere else, she argued, he would probably end up in prison. The journalist was subsequently depicted as a philistine, unable to appreciate the subtlety of Matzneff’s feelings or the beauty of his style. Baudelaire once wrote that “literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality” and, for better or worse, this has clearly become France’s official artistic credo.

Trying to account for this “exception française” is no mean task, but I suspect it has something to do with the elevation of art to the status of surrogate religion during the second half of the 19th century. A similar phenomenon was taking place all over Europe, of course, but it probably had more resonance against the backdrop of the ongoing struggle between Republicanism and Catholicism. Both Flaubert and Baudelaire were prosecuted for public obscenity, but when French MPs called for the banning of Jean Genet‘s The Screens in 1966 (for political reasons, this time), the culture minister (and novelist) André Malraux immediately stepped in to defend the inviolability of artistic freedom. By then, artistic creation was largely considered as a value in itself, beyond morals and politics; even beyond good and evil.

The dominant French view on literature was probably best expressed by Oscar Wilde, who ended his life in exile in Paris: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Not quite, though, in this case. No one is denying Céline’s talent as one of the greatest French writers of the 20th century – probably the greatest, with Proust. Is it possible, however, to distinguish the author of antisemitic tracts from the genius novelist; the man from the artist?

— From guardian.co.uk

She looked at him helplessly. He seemed serious. But he had seemed serious when he spoke of putting on his gems and lemon, etc. She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.

— Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“I greatly fear,” said Wylie, “that the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech’s daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.”

“Very prettily put,” said Neary.

— Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“And your whiskers?” said Wylie.

“Suppressed without pity,” said Neary, “in discharge of a vow, never again to ventilate a virility denied discharge into its predestined channel.”

“These are dark sayings,” said Wylie.

— Samuel Beckett, Murphy

I had spent so much of my childhood sunk into a cross-eyed, nose-picking turpitude of shame and self-loathing, scrunched up in the corner of a sweating leather chair on a hot summer day, the heat having silenced the birds . . .

— Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story

Smithers had thwarted my earlier attempt to take candy from a baby, but with him out of the picture, I was free to wallow in my own crapulence.

— Mr. Burns

No, no, no — those were the words I repeated to myself, not with force but as a Jesus prayer of listless grief. Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds — oh, if that were the Devil I would fear him.

— Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story

The Rebranding of Indolence as ‘Emerging Adulthood’

Is knowledge naught to you
Unless another knows that you know all you do?

— Persius (quoted by Montaigne in “Of Solitude”)

Psychologically, I’m very confused. . . . But personally, I don’t feel bad at all!

— Klara (Margaret Sullivan), The Shop Around the Corner

Considered in their specialization and technicality, superior activities leave a ‘technical vacuum’ between one another which is filled up by everyday life. Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground. And it is in everyday life that the sum total of relations which make the human — and every human being — a whole takes its shape and its form. In it are expressed and fulfilled those relations which bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a certain manner which is always partial and incomplete: friendship, comradeship, love, the need to communicate, play, etc.

— Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life

[Everyday life is a concept] some people are averse to confronting because it . . . represents the standpoint of totality; it would imply the necessity of an integral political judgment. . . . Everyday life is the measure of all things: of the fulfillment or rather the nonfulfillment of human relations; of the use of lived time; of artistic experimentation; of revolutionary politics.

— Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life”

Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further: we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.

— Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism”

Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels. “I should think not,” he said; “he took himself along with him.”

Why should we move to find
Countries and climates of another kind?
What exile leaves himself behind?

[Horace]

If a man does not first unburden himself and his soul of the load that weighs upon it, movement will crush it still more, as in a ship the cargo is less cumbersome when it is settled. You do a sick man more harm than good by moving him. You imbed the malady by disturbing it, as stakes penetrate deeper and grow firmer when you budge them and shake them. Wherefore it is not enough to have gotten away from the crowd, it is not enough to move; we must get away from the love of crowds that is within us, we must sequester ourselves and regain possession of ourselves.

— Montaigne, “Of Solitude”

The soul’s at fault, which ne’er escapes itself.

[Horace]

Every metaphysical element is the germ of a disease that expresses itself in the separation of knowledge from the realm of experience in its full freedom and depth. The development of philosophy is to be expected because each annihilation of these metaphysical elements in an epistemology simultaneously refers it to a deeper, more metaphysically fulfilled experience.

— Walter Benjamin, “In epistemology”