Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Starting in the 1990s, Internet search (as well as cable TV) provided access to old pictures and sounds that we’d never had before, and then all at once, from 2005 to 2007, comprehensive new digital archives of the old opened up and transfixed us—first the astounding YouTube, then the endless streams of Pandora, Spotify, and online Netflix. When the future arrived, it let us sink further and further into uncanny dreams of the past. As Reynolds writes, “We’ve become so used to this convenient access” to old music and images “that it is a struggle to recall that life wasn’t always like this, that relatively recently one lived most of the time in a cultural present tense, with the past confined to specific zones, trapped in particular objects and locations.” If you’re young, and have grown up only since the Internet has been dissolving the distinctions between past and present and old and new, the sci-fi writer and futurist William Gibson says, “I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory.” What’s more, I think digital technology has made it so easy for anybody to create and distribute songs and pictures and videos and stories, and for everyone to consume them, that the resulting democratic flood of stuff—each of the 100 million cover versions and impersonations and fan fictions that are nominally brand new—can fool us into thinking the culture is more fertile and vibrant th...