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Lee Siegel’s book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, is a difficult book to read if you are in any way a web 2.0 enthusiast. But read it we must, just as we must read Andrew Keen’s work and others who are trying to unpack the internet experience and it’s impact on American culture and politics. Siegel has his own controversial blogging history and he takes few prisoners in his critique, taking to task a number of icons of the internet culture.

Siegel sums up his arguments on blogging, for example, by exposing a number of “open secrets” such as:

• Lust for recognition rules the blogosphere.
• The individual news blogger’s lack of an institution’s ethical framework encourages the mutation of rumor into fact.
• The most popular and prestigious bloggers comprise an elite technocracy.
• Most prominent bloggers rush to join the mainstream media as soon as it beckons.

And he offers up five open “supersecrets” as well:

• Not everyone has something meaningful to say.
• Few people have anything original to say.
• Only a handful of people know how to write well.
• Most people will do almost anything to be liked.
• “Customers” are always right, but “people” aren’t.

Siegel comes across as a harsh task master who suffers few fools. And to a certain extent, we’ve heard much of it before. But give a listen to Siegel’s unsettling insight into popular culture’s aspiration to “full viewer participation” and his understanding the “resentment against the authority of glamour” that lies behind blogs.

But driving the rebellion against authoritative images is a hatred of any kind of cultural authority, whether it is a hollow, pumped-up star or a talented actor who has worked hard at his craft. And driving the gospel of popularity is an appeal to each one of us to replace the inflated icons with an inflated sense of ourselves — whether or not we have talent and discipline or not. Web culture’s hatred of the famous figure often comes down to an indiscriminate mania for access to what other people have and we don’t. It’s not the gaseous star we dislike; it’s the fact that he possesses a status and authority that we feel we deserve. In this sense, the cult of popularity, which celebrates “you”, is instilling in everyone an impulsive impatience with anyone and anything that is not you.

Ouch. I hear the voice of the parent in these words, instructing the narcissistic and unruly adolescent to cast a critical eye to influence his peer group. It is a thankless, often fruitless, but nevertheless necessary exercise.