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Thursday January 16, 2025

Kurt Vonnegut Describes the Internet ... in 1965

Now I remember why I haven't re-read Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” in decades and decades: Everyone in it is kind of awful. You get the feeling that even Mr. Vonnegut doesn't like them, and you never want to get that feeling from an author. Eliot Rosewater, the main character, yes, is sympathetic, but he's also dealing with severe mental problems—triggered by the death of his mother, along with service in World War II, along with having wealth and fame he feels he didn't earn. Which he didn't. So there's that. But everyone else is just small and awful.

That said, a passage near the end blew me away. It's a description of a Kilgore Trout science fiction novel entitled “Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass,” about (shades of ST:TOS's “Where No Man Has Gone Before”) an intergalactic group coming to the edge of the universe and trying to figure out if there was anything else “in all that black velvet nothing out there.” Its main character, Sgt. Boyle, an English teacher, was the only Earthling on the expedition. Vonnegut writes:

The thing was that Earth was the only place in the whole known Universe where language was used. It was a unique Earthling invention. Everybody else used mental telepathy, so Earthlings could get pretty good jobs as language teachers just about anywhere they went. The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time—to start thinking in terms of projects.

That's what blew me away. That description of telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything,” which then “produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information,” well good god if that doesn't describe this thing that we're all on, this disaster of the world wide web and social media and all of it. He's describing the effects of the internet. In 1965. 

Time to start using language again. Time to get unstuck.

Posted at 08:05 AM on Thursday January 16, 2025 in category Books