Why Kurt Vonnegut thought Bill Gates was the enemy of human pride
According to American humanist writer and essayist Kurt Vonnegut, the ancient Greeks had a hilariously dour saying regarding life’s fair get-out clause: if you don’t like it, you can leave at any time. It’s a gallows statement perfectly in keeping with his cool view of humanity, a man who quipped to Rolling Stone months before his death in 2007 that he sought to sue the makers of Pall Mall cigarettes for false advertising: “And do you know why? Because I’m 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson (tobacco company) promised to kill me.”
Underneath Vonnegut’s sardonic humour and knotty existentialism was an undimmed hope for humanity’s best self, borne from his anti-war stance following service in the Second World War to his developing socialist analysis toward the end of his life. Forever plagued by nagging doubts about society’s wayward trajectories, a fierce Luddism emerged as a reactionary counter to technology’s rapidly innovative pace as the 21st century arrived.
There’s a sound material basis for technology’s critique and appraisal. From the 19th-century automated machinery that threatened textile workers’ conditions and livelihoods to today’s AI digital death grip on the creative industries, capitalism and its class oppression do little to mitigate the human and social cost of rapacious industrial development.
No one can argue against the emancipatory landmark of the washing machine, however. Liberating women from the drudgery of household work, a new era of agency was ushered in for Western women now free to pursue productive endeavours in academia, the workforce, or simply take more time for leisure. It was an invention that helped to break down the brutal, derogatory mechanisms of the patriarchy. So, it’s clear that tech can be a liberator for progressive change, too.
It’s the instruments of mass media Vonnegut held a lifelong aversion to. Loathing the computer more than he did the TV, the digital age’s shaping of culture caused concern regarding its effect on people’s souls. “I can regret the loss of human experiences, it’s so much about human beings and what they can do is now being discounted, and certainly for people of the past, there was a great adventure of people with any sort of mind of becoming, of finding out what this thing is here, right here, this, what’s inside our skull,” he told journalist Marc Allan in 2000.
He added: “And now, Bill Gates is saying, hey, you don’t have to ‘become’ anymore, your computer is gonna ‘become’. Just wait till next year when you see what these computers can do. And so, there’s less to be proud of all the time as a human being.”
Technology has become a vehicle of escapism. While one could take advantage of life’s no-strings-attached ‘exit’, now a universe of online spaces exists like a cyber parallel to real life at the instant disposal of the unhappy and adrift—no need to mortally leave anymore. Pride comes from learned experience. You can take pride in becoming a pianist or a runner, but those pursuits are now often waylaid by the pull of pointless machines.
Yet the internet’s fundamental paradigm shift has also brought democratising access to information, the arts, and the means to educate oneself. Gates or Steve Jobs have built online avenues for human flourishing and social organising, but they’re also billionaires who helped maintain the wealth disparities, crippling mobility and living standards to nihilist collapse.
Ultimately, never underestimate the rejuvenating power of touching grass in the fresh air and talking to people in the flesh, in all their glorious, complex and messy humanity. “Electronic communities build nothing,” Vonnegut proclaimed in 2005’s A Man Without a Country. “You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something.” So, remind yourself to take your eyes off the screen once in a while.
