The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine (review)

In this essay, which expands in a more systematic way on some of the ideas already defended in his previous book USERInfoTechnoDemo (2005), Peter Lunenfeld puts the stakes very high. Well known as one of the best analysts of digital culture, he opens here a certain number of historical, cultural, political and ideological questions that make this book a real must-read for all those looking for new answers to the problems that modern technoculture has been facing since the end of what he calls 89/11 ("eighty-nine eleven," the years of transition between the fall of the Wall of Berlin to the Twin Tower attacks). Despite the author's modesty, he emphasizes participative and collaborative action and thinking throughout The Secret War between Downloading and Uploading. Without a doubt, it is a book whose political importance can be compared to that of McLuhan, Adorno and Dewey. Readers of this book, which proposes an inspiring blend of metaphorical short-cuts and more classic argumentation, may intuitively remember McLuhan's "the medium is the message"). Adorno comes to mind given the highly personal tone of Lunenfeld's style. One will think here of Minima Moralia as much as of the texts on the culture industry. Dewey (and behind him the American pragmatist tradition of critical inquiry) is also present for this book. Indeed, one of the many good surprises is that Lunenfeld revives Dewey. The title of the book is a perfect synthesis of what it is all about.

Lunenfeld not only argues that our culture is a technoculture (culture and machine have become exchangeable terms) and that this culture has now become a digital culture (the machine of our age is the computer). He also holds that the currently dominant device, the personal computer, is far from a simple continuation or remediation of previous machines. It is radically different from the machines that created and structured the previous periods of our culture (photography in the second half of the 19th century, cinema in the first half of the 20th century and television in its second half), or at least virtually different. The problem with the computer is, indeed, that it allows for two possible uses, downloading (reception, consumption) and uploading (creation, participation), whose necessary balance is now dramatically disturbed to the sole profit of the former. We use the computer mainly as a downloading device, thus continuing and exacerbating what Lunenfeld considers the major failure of television culture: its exclusive focus on dissemination and on passive reception by its users, who suffer in various degrees a disease termed "cultural diabetes."

In the television age, 24/7 quantity has wiped out the search for quality, and the cultural and ideological consequences of this tendency are utterly deleterious: on the one hand, the reduction of culture to entertainment; on the other hand, the incapacity to invent new and hopeful answers to the problems and threats coming from all those, both from the left and the right, who challenge the heritage of the Enlightenment's secular and optimistic culture. From the left: Lunenfeld is targeting the negative self-criticism of modernist culture, its refusal to counter the anti-universalist stances of contemporary obscurantism, its refusal to recognize the deleterious effects of the vanishing of high culture and its difficulty in finding positive models for future action and creation. From the right: here the author gives a thorough critique of all forms of—mostly theocratically inspired—anti-pluralism, outside the West but also within our Western technoculture.

At the same time, The Secret War between Downloading and Uploading takes very seriously the radical condemnation of modern civilization as a purely market-driven and amusement-oriented zombie or couch potato culture. Yet the answer Lunenfeld suggests is not a return to a mythical past, to a unified, patriarchal and theocratic society, but an attempt to rethink the...