Zadie Smith thinks you should read Amusing Ourselves to Death

Yes, this is a book review

Back in September I went on a walk down to the beach to read some drafts of a new paper I was writing, and on the way I flipped on an interview with the essayist and novelist Zadie Smith on the Ezra Klein show. The interview was supposed to be about her new book, “The Fraud,” but at some point the conversation drifted toward Smith’s use of a flip phone and then that “a couple of years back, [she] got very into reading the media theorists from the rise of the television age, like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman.” In certain academic circles, like STS and media studies, names like McLuhan and Postman are legion. And yet, within the general public, they remain quite obscure.

For instance, you probably have heard in passing McLuhan’s quip that “the medium is the message.” This is the idea that generally the form of a communication medium (e.g., TV, print, internet) shapes how messages are perceived and understood, often more significantly than the content itself.

Even fewer people today have heard of Neil Postman, which is why I was surprised in this interview to hear Zadie Smith, of all people, say that she thinks “Neil Postman is a prophet and a genius.”

One of Postman’s major arguments in Amusing Ourselves to Death is that, echoing McLuhan, is that what TV actually does, especially political TV, is reset the public’s expectations around what politics should be. I can’t remember if it was Zadie or Ezra, but in the interview it came up that TV would:

…is going to make politics a space dominated by entertainers. And like here we literally are, right, with a reality television superstar running for president, having already been president once before with his primary capacity being his mastery of the sort of television and attentional sphere.

Smith said that she “gives [Amusing Ourselves to Death] to everybody all the time. It blew my mind.” I just finished it for the first time and, I have to say, it is absolutely phenomenal, and I think Smith’s use of the term “prophetic” is apt.

The book is haunting. I found myself highlighting a passage on nearly every page, thinking like, “this is gold, I can’t believe he wrote this in the 80s.” I don’t really want to reveal a whole lot of the content of the book, in part because the argument of the book itself is that, like, people should read more books and spend more time savoring lines of argumentation. Nonetheless, here are a few of my favorite clips.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.

What is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology—no Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion, and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.

We have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.

I had this funny conversation the other day with my partner, Laura. I had to preface it with, like, “This is sort of American exceptionalist, but…” The point I was trying to make is that, like, Americans are further along the path where social media totally transforms (destroys) the public sphere. Like, “American politics looks insane right now, but just wait until all you precious Europeans have your public discourse ravaged by Meta and X!” I think there’s something to this, but I think the other side is that the United States is particularly susceptible to the threats of technological disruption. We are particularly a technologist and progressive culture.

Sure, here in Spain everybody has a phone. Indeed, the old man sitting next to me at this Work Cafe just got the same Cantabrian Emergency Test alarm that we all got. The whole fucking cafe erupting into momentary panic. He didn’t know how to turn it off. Everybody here has phones, but there is, actually, far less of what Zadie Smith observed about the NY Subway: “So when I get on a train in the morning and I look down a carriage and I can look down half a mile of carriage, there isn't a single person who is looking up from their phones. It's total.”

Meanwhile, Meta (lol, Facebook) and Alphabet (lol, Google) and X (lol, Twitter) continue to build their undersea cables, enshrouding the third world in fiber optics. These technologies (read: ideologies) are coming for our whole species. As Postman himself admits, there is no going back. While he prefers the printed word to the television, Postman does not advocate for, like, everybody to stop watching TV (or now, using our phones). He is merely a prophet. Indeed, Neil Postman is dead. We will never know what he thinks of Donald Trump, but we might be able to infer his position from his opinion of Richard Nixon:

I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to anyone, not even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying.