30 The Nation. October 28/November 4, 2019
Throughout the book, she highlights the
many issues that have sparked increasing
public consternation with Big Tech of late,
from its lack of diversity to its stupendous
concentration of wealth, but these are framed
in the end as unfortunate side effects of the
headlong rush to create a new and bril-
liant future. She hardly mentions the rev-
elations by the National Security Agency
whistle-blower Edward Snowden of the US
government’s chilling capacity to siphon us-
ers’ most intimate information from Silicon
Valley’s platforms and the voraciousness with
which it has done so. Nor does she grapple
with Uber, which built its multibillion-dollar
leviathan on the backs of meagerly paid driv-
ers. The fact that in order to carry out almost
anything online we must subject ourselves to
a hypercommodified hellscape of targeted
advertising and algorithmic sorting does not
appear to be a huge cause for concern. But
these and many other aspects of our digital
landscape have made me wonder if a techni-
cal complex born out of Cold War militarism
and mainstreamed in a free-market frenzy
might not be fundamentally always at odds
with human flourishing. O’Mara suggests at
the end of her book that Silicon Valley’s flaws
might be redeemed by a new, more enlight-
ened, and more diverse generation of techies.
But haven’t we heard this story before?
If there is a larger lesson to learn from
The Code, it is that technology cannot be sep-
arated from the social and political contexts
in which it is created. The major currents in
society shape and guide the creation of a sys-
tem that appears to spring from the minds of
its inventors alone. Militarism and unbridled
capitalism remain among the most powerful
forces in the United States, and to my mind,
there is no reason to believe that a new
generation of techies might resist them any
more effectively than the previous ones. The
question of fixing Silicon Valley is insepara-
ble from the question of fixing the system of
postwar American capitalism, of which it is
perhaps the purest expression. Some believe
that the problems we see are bugs that might
be fixed with a patch. Others think the code
is so bad at its core that a radical rewrite
is the only answer. Although The Code was
written for people in the first group, it offers
an important lesson for those of us in the
second: Silicon Valley is as much a symptom
as it is a cause of our current crisis. Resisting
its bad influence on society will ultimately
prove meaningless if we cannot also formu-
late a vision of a better world—one with a
more humane relationship to technology—
to counteract it. And, alas, there is no app
for that. Q
B
en Lerner’s first two books of fiction—
Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04—
stand at a cautious remove from the
novel form. Reading them, you some-
times suspect they don’t want to be
novels at all. Often classified as “autofiction”
because of the close correspondences be-
tween their protagonists and their author,
they might more aptly be understood as “po-
et’s novels.” This is not simply because Ler-
ner is a poet—he brought out three highly
lauded volumes of poetry before publishing
Leaving the Atocha Station—and not just in
the mildly pejorative sense that book review-
ers sometimes use the term, to censure pre-
tentiousness. They’re actually about poetry:
Significant stretches of them are devoted to
analyses of poems, statements of poetics, or
defenses of the poetic undertaking.
Nothing is more important to Lern-
er or his narrators than poetry, and yet
they’re aware that nothing, in the 21st
century capitalist culture they inhabit, is
less important to everyone else. Indeed,this lack of social importance is a perverse
point of pride. “If I was a poet,” muses
Adam Gordon, the narrator of Leaving the
Atocha Station, “I had become one because
poetry, more intensely than any other prac-
tice, could not evade its anachronism and
marginality and so constituted a kind of
acknowledgment of my own preposterous-
ness, admitting my bad faith in good faith,
so to speak.” For Adam, “poet” is more of
an identity category, an orientation toward
capitalist society, than it is a profession or
practice. In point of fact, Adam doesn’t
even like poetry all that much. “Although
I claimed to be a poet,” he confesses, “I
tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only
when I encountered them quoted in prose,
in the essays my professors had assigned
in college, where the line breaks were re-
placed with slashes, so that what was com-
municated was less a particular poem than
the echo of poetic possibility.”
This fictional admission lays out the basic
terms of Lerner’s formal cosmology. Poet-
ry represents possibility, utopia, the virtual;
prose stands for the existent, the immanent,
the actual. The novel, it seems, enables a kind
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM ROBINSONTHE SPREAD
Ben Lerner at the crossroads between poetry and fiction
by EVAN KINDLEY
Evan Kindley teaches at Pomona and is the author of
Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture.