Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

I introduce a précis of this book with a bit of trepidation, but here goes: Bill McKibben records 24 hours worth of programming from every single one of Fairfax, Virginia’s 93 television stations. Then he watches all of them, eight hours a day, for basically a year. On another day he heads off into the mountains and writes about that. Compare and contrast.

I hesitate because this will give you at least one immediate idea, namely that McKibben is a wanker or condescending, or both. Thankfully McKibben himself was well aware of both possibilities, and avoided them studiously.

It’s a fun book, profound, and a quick read. If you’ve read David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Plurum” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), you’ll have one of the threads, namely a look at TV’s involution. In “E Unibus Plurum,” Wallace noted that television shows increasingly only referred to other television shows: you don’t need to know anything about the culture of the outside world to understand all of the jokes. Wallace, at some level, thought this was cute. He was singularly unwilling to say that television is crap; instead, he took television to be a great object for scholarly study. McKibben has no problem calling out the low quality of most television.

He goes well beyond that, into a lot of thoughts about TV that never would have occurred to me — certainly not as eloquently as he put them. For instance, television has shrunk history: if it occurred before the era when things could be televised, it might as well not exist. The History Channel makes some exceptions, but they’re few and far between. We’re expected to know about as far back as the Nixon-Kennedy debate, and that’s it.

Or take nature videos. They’ve done a great deal of good for the environmental movement, but they’ve convinced people that nature is either a) cute and cuddly, b) so ugly that it wraps back around and becomes cute, or c) red in tooth and claw. Real nature is boring: lions spend most of their time sleeping, not shredding flesh. Television has made it hard for us to appreciate a quiet moment in the woods. McKibben’s time on top of a mountain is an attempt to bring some of that back.

He makes a rather disturbing claim midway through: for all our economic progress, that progress has changed almost nothing in the lives of Americans in the last 40 years. At the beginning of the 20th century,

People learned to talk across long distances on telephones, to travel easily and routinely. School became standard, even in remote areas. The occupations divided and specialized, replacing self-sufficient ways of life. Appliances transformed the home. Birth control allowed limits on reproduction. Easy refrigeration changed the way we thought about food. Most people’s bathrooms moved indoors. People washed their bodies daily, not weekly. Medicine eliminated most childhood deaths, and made all lives healthier and more secure. Radio and then television spread a universal culture. Farming mechanized to the point where most people were freed from the soil.

What are the big life-changing innovations from the 1960’s to now? We’ve been reduced to little technological fixes and excessive convenience:

An ad, endlessly repeated, touts Glassmates, which makes it easier to remove fingerprints on glass and spots on mirrors. “Every day I clean them. Spray on the cleaner, scrub with one paper towel, dry with another. Three messy steps,” overcome with a single blow — these are the kind of dragons we have left to slay.

Yet this is, again, what our economic logic forces: companies must grow, even if there’s really nothing we need to buy. The stock market demands a rate of growth that exceeds the mere rate of births. Advertising tells you that you need a larger car, more stuff in your house, a smaller, blacker iPod to replace the one you bought a year ago, and Glassmates. Or “Frank ‘n’ Stuff”:

“While developing Frank ‘n’ Stuff we designed, built and patented a system where we could put a perfect tunnel of chili or cheese in every wiener….”

I don’t know if McKibben is right that we’ve reached a point where valuable technological innovation is rare, but it’s certainly a compelling point. In fact, the biggest innovation that’s arrived since Missing Information came out is the Internet, and it’s not clear that the net fundamentally alters McKibben’s story. Certainly there are those of us who believe that the net is a force for great good and great social change, and that it differs fundamentally from television. Really what this book calls for, though, is silence. McKibben thinks that we should spend more time building meaningful lives and meaningful communities. That involves unplugging. Whether it’s unplugging the TV or the computer seems immaterial to the argument.

(Many thanks to Jessamyn West for recommending this book to me, back in 2005 or 2006.)