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In Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano (1952) we are introduced to a society where manual labor has been fully automated. Managerial work of various kinds remains for the educated and intelligent. A scarce amount of maintenance on the machines that accomplish the actual work supporting society give a few others something to do. For the rest, unless they are crazy enough to expend energy on creating art or poetry, there is no pressing need to work. Most of society can live in their suburban homes with regular deliveries of new goods.

This creates a social problem. The formerly employed workers have nothing to do. The result is not a leisurely utopia, but a culture rife with social pathology. It becomes apparent that large swaths of society need something to keep them busy. How do the mangers keep the formerly employed busy? Reconstruction and Reclamation.

The “Reeks and Wrecks,” as they are known, are armies of former laborers who now set about doing menial tasks. A stop sign has been knocked down by a careless driver? A team of twenty or thirty Reeks and Wrecks will be dispatched to reconstruct it. Some aluminum cans have been littered along the highway? A dozen or so otherwise idle fellows will reclaim them and return them to the factories where the machines they used to operate will turn them into spare parts or raw material for new products.

I am teaching “Intro to Music Technology” this semester. Most of our class will be very practical, learning basic fluency with a number of different applications, but this being Higher Education I though it appropriate to spend a little time thinking about the effects of technology on creative work.

Reflecting on my current relationship with tech has got me downright nostalgic. Like most 30-somethings, my first computer experiences were on a desktop PC in the “computer room,” tinkering with MS Paint or playing solitaire and pinball. My brothers and I would all pile on the swivel chair to shepherd our characters across the Oregon Trail or down the Amazon (which we installed from a disc that came in a cereal box).

We were duly amazed when the desk-occupying CRT monitor and floor-filing computer tower were replaced with this:

All at once we had access – not to the internet, but to creative software. This was in the apogee of the Steve Jobs era when Apple was for the creatives. What is in the middle of the dock that comes preloaded on this iMac? iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand. We suddenly had creative tools that were almost perfectly engineered to be accessible to amateurs while still giving enough capability to create whatever we could think up. It was truly (for us at least) a bicycle for the mind.

The internet came somewhat later when we finally got a broadband internet connection. Around 2003-ish (if memory serves) this was the height of the blogspot era when everyone you knew who was online was probably writing a blog. They were definitely reading them.

We followed the logic of our available technology at the time and used the internet to broadcast our creative work. We all had blogs. We figured out how to post videos online before youtube. Starting with the blogspot templates, some of us learned some crude coding so we could customize our websites in ill-advised ways.

In fact, the blog editor invited this kind of tinkering. The html was right there, you just had to start typing. The designers of this technology left an open invitation: be creative, make it your own. Create your piece of the internet as you see fit.

As I’ve experienced it since these heady days, the internet has been on a steady march toward automation since. Even the first version of facebook I participated in (c. 2008) was insanely (and inanely) chaotic compared to today’s unified experience. Before the Timeline, we had a Profile that could be customized in many ways (though even this paled in the customization possible [and expected!] of a MySpace page).

I’ve begun to think of these late stages of Web 2.0 we’re in as an automated factory. Everything is automated within the high walls of our online mega corporations, where slaking the data-thirst of The Algorithm is the business model. They don’t need your thoughts on this or that, they only need the next set of pixels that will arrest attention for a few seconds longer and teach the machine what it is you really want to see so it can be delivered in an ever-narrowing form of pure attentional lust.

Distribution is automated. Create the right content and the machines will show it to an audience. It will in fact “go viral,” a label that used to be reserved for a once-a-year or so phenomenon. Virality is a daily occurrence on the newest platforms. It’s the business model.

Manufacturing is (mostly) automated. “Content creation” would seem to be the area where creativity still shines through. With billions of individuals inhabiting these environments, you would think you could come across something unique or even shocking in its creativity. This is the great deceit though. You may create the content, but to be successful (to be seen by an audience, the essential value of social media) you must capture the attention of the means of distribution. Without that you will not be seen, and to not be seen is the great failure of social media. (As Wilde might have it, even worse than being seen in increasingly embarrassing ways. “Cringe” is an entire sub-genre where people have made themselves famous. If capturing attention is the value it’s better to be famously embarrassed than alone with your dignity.) In Alan Jacobs’s phrase, we are constantly directed “towards the frivolous or the malicious.”

Distribution rewards content conformity. The designers want it this way, that’s why they have provided the creative tools right within the app. You don’t have to go to any other photo-editor where you might be tempted toward originality (or worse, leave the compound and spend time on a device offline where they cannot make money on you). Have you tried this new filter that makes you look like a deer? You should try it. It’s fun. Everyone is doing it and it makes you unique.

As Vonnegut shows in Player Piano, with automation comes idleness and with idleness disaffection. What I haven’t understood until recently is that I was a pretty fulfilled factory worker before. I was making stuff. Like the most skilled machinist who used to delight in lathing perfect parts with tight tolerances, until on his last day of work his actions were programmed into the machine and it now continues to make his perfect parts day and night. It need only stop for occasional maintenance, while he has permanently stopped in front of his television.

What to do? Well, I have decided to enlist in the Reeks and Wrecks of Web 2.0. Reconstructing a piece of the internet that was a channel for individual creativity rather than mass-attuned virality. Reclaiming a bit of space where I can create, because if you aren’t creating something you are likely going to be replaced and spend your days watching algorithmic feeds.

The point is decidedly not to build an audience, but rather a project of repairing my own broken attention and wresting it away from the consumption of frivolity. Out here in the internet wilds maybe we can find some small shards of value. Reconstructing a blog and reclaiming what tiny turf I can make by hand in whatever way I want seems like a way forward.

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