Why don’t the worthy orators come as usual
to make their speeches, to have their say?
Because the barbarians are to arrive today.1
In the poem, the barbarians do not arrive, and the people, who have already surrendered, are regretful that they don't.
Even if the digital barbarians don’t rape, pillage, and burn cities, and do not dress in skins (God forbid) or bristle with glaring weapons (God forbid), they do often follow a style of dress and comportment that they call “edgy,” and that is nothing if not deliberately provocative, aggressive, and nihilistic—a continuous declaration of irony. That they know the world is horrible and purposeless proves that they are wise. The vast bulk of this army may be just a bunch of wacked-out muppets led by little professors in glasses, but they will do more damage to the underpinnings of civilization than half a million Visigoths smashing up the rotted, burning cities of Rome—because there are so many of them; they are so pervasive and penetrant; their powers are amplified by the machines to which they have given themselves; and they go so steadily and quietly about their business, almost unnoticed, like termites in the wood before an apparently solid house collapses into a foamy heap.
Often overlooked is that though the barbarians of ancient times were not cultivated, in almost every case they had fastened upon one or more technical innovations that enabled them to defeat the superior civilizations they then were able to sack. The Huns and Scythians had revolutionary tactics, the Parthians their fleeing shots, the Mongols their special bows and their techniques of mobility. Even Hannibal, not quite a barbarian except perhaps in the Roman view, and ultimately unsuccessful, had his elephants. Small but powerful technologies were sometimes the ruin of older civilizations that failed to recognize them. And now we have, more powerful than any engine, bow, or gun, the digital and all it brings.
We worship, nationwide, worldwide, in front of its hundreds of millions of altars. Even the tiniest of these, that fit in our ears or that we can barely operate with our thumbs, easily exercise their discipline over us. We sit, immobile, staring, waiting for the screen to fill, waiting for responses that channel our own. No longer the curved line, the flowing ink, but each letter in a box of sorts (a key), and always the same on the screen in its consistent font. The machine has its laws, and will accuse us of committing an “illegal operation,” arresting our activity until we submit—“OK?”—with no option to disagree. It requires your consent, but you cannot refuse your consent: not exactly an encouraging political model. Over the years, it is gathering and keeping day by day vast amounts of intelligence that mostly we give it without thinking or protest even when we know of the intrusion. Whole generations have become accustomed to such violations and freely compromise their privacy as if there were no such thing. (This is not new. Charles de Gaulle, in 1934: “Machines of precision and speed, all beautifully geared and handled by experts, cannot fail to excite the interest of the young. It will give them, besides, that kind of prestige which machinery confers upon those who serve it.”2) The machine knows about us even what we ourselves do not—how many lemons we buy a year, what channels we linger on and for how long, the intensity of our language in the letters we write, the patterns of our comings and goings, the clues to our sentiments, how much money we have, our blood chemistry, what we spend, to whom we speak and when.
More and more, the machine chooses among the preprogrammed options it presents to us, correcting our grammar (so often incorrectly) “as we go,” informing us when we write Potemkin that we really mean pumpkin, “reading” our mail, and taking up our time with false promises to save it. The machine has a destination, if not of its choosing then not of ours either, and we are becoming secondary to it, obedient expediters and facilitators. We model ourselves after it, willingly or unconsciously, and in so doing we have left much behind of which we should never have let go, and lost very quickly much of what best defines our culture and even our intrinsic nature. This is the source of the barbarism that comes in a steady, relentless flood.
But there is not an ounce or an iota of it that cannot be made to disappear simply by an act of will—the will to do without, the will to have less, the refusal to model human nature after the mechanical. Does such willingness exist? How shall we educate ourselves? Upon what shall we model ourselves? Who is servant, and who is master?
CHAPTER 2
DEATH ON A RED HORSE
The First Targets of the Barbarians Are Copyright and the Individual Voice
My third-grade classroom was on the second floor of a rustic shingled building within the grounds of what once had been a great estate. In the mid-fifties the school still reverberated with the presence of Woodrow Wilson, Paderewski, Isadora Duncan, and other visiting notables in an age that had been put to rest by the war. Though beset with nuclear anxiety, the nation was at once
