Google and the Culture of Search

Pynchon’s 1984 essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” is, on the face of it, a confident declaration of human exceptionalism. Published in the same year as Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” which rejects the rigid boundaries between technology, nature, and the human, the essay lingers on “the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery.” Luddite rage against the machine, for Pynchon, testifies to an “abiding human hunger” for meaning that the modern disenchantment with nature forces us to wrestle from “amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents.” Only near its end does the essay anticipate the posthuman erosion of the borders between technology and human life: if the insistence on the miraculous used to be a placeholder for the human that “den[ies] to the machine at least some of its claims on us,” in the coming computer age our machines may themselves become operators of the miraculous, as it seems “the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer’s ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good.” It is here, Pynchon writes, that Luddites finally come to share common ground with a “cheerful army of technocrats.” If this seems to spell an end to Luddite resistance, Pynchon’s use of the term “army” – followed by a reference to “a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s” – points to a residual violence besetting the coming entanglement of human life, nature, and technology. That entanglement has in the meantime received a name. In 2000 the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen adopted ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer’s term “the Anthropocene” to name human life’s irreversible impact on the chemical and climatological makeup of the planet. With the help of its technological and fossil-fuel–driven prostheses, human life has become a geological agent that warrants recognition as a geochronological unit in its own right. Although the Anthropocene Working Group’s 2016

Pynchon’s Posthuman Temporalities

Another Apocalypse: Digital Ecologies and Late Pynchon

Pynchon after Paranoia

Pynchon’s Twenty-First-Century Paratexts

Given the state of contemporary American culture, it should come as no surprise that Thomas Pynchon’s novel Bleeding Edge (2013) revolves around technological change: all of the published responses to the novel refer to this phenomenon in some way. What these interpretations fail to appreciate, however, is that this novel is not just about media technology or even the Internet more specifically; it is about the effect of the search engine. To that end, this article uses a media-historical analysis to argue for the search engine as the prime motor spurring the reorganization of Pynchon’s technique and his take on popular culture in the novel.

David Haeselin

Papers

Welcome to the Indexed World: Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge and the Things Search Engines Will Not Find