Re-reading a classic text
The Cult of Information is not Theodore Roszak’s most well-known work. I picked up a copy in 1998 or 1999 at the Dawn Treader in Ann Arbor without knowing that he had also invented the word “counterculture” and indeed had done some of the earliest writing on it in the United States in the 1960s.
Cult attracted me, I expect, in part because even as a teenager I felt pulled in two directions simultaneously by the social and technological changes I was living through and anticipating. In my family I was the technological one: I had built the family computers and worked for the local ISP and made websites and felt myself part of a community on USENET and so on; I was also deeply suspicious, even at the time, of the net social value of this technological upheaval. As a young person who was “good at computers” in the mid-1990s I had read a lot about how the information superhighway was going to change the world, always for the better and shinier and more convenient. I wasn’t sure I wanted the world that I was being sold.
One of my earliest blog posts was about how, to the extent writing will have moved from paper to HTML, we will have created Orwell’s Memory Hole; how for example a corporate IT person could in principle remove from a corporate website all public information about an executive who had become involved in a scandal, or a manufacturer’s claims about the use and safety of a product that proved to be defective or dangerous. (To be sure, the information economy has evolved features that mitigate against this sort of thing, but in those days people were printing web pages out to read offline.)
In any case, Cult appealed to a sense in me that we were on the cusp of a future in which information, and the power that attends it, would flow very differently to how it has traditionally flowed. It is twenty-five years since I picked it up at the used bookstore and thirty since the publication of the second edition; time enough has passed that I think it a worthwhile enterprise to re-read the book and to write through that re-reading, and how better to do that than through an old-school blog? I hope you will come along with me.