Recent years has seen the advent of a particular book, that we might call “the tech memoir”. These range from being somewhat alarmist (How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell), nerdy (Bitwise by David Auerbach) and critical of corporations (Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner). Mael Renouard contributed to the genre in 2016 in French, an effort that last year was translated into English.
What separates Renouard from most other tech memoirs is that he comes to these issues from a more literary viewpoint, as he spends his days translating and writing novels (as well as teaching philosophy). I enjoyed his circuitous reminiscences of the intersections of his literary life and his internet use.
Reading the book made me realise that the web has (incredibly enough) been part of mainstream life for going on 25 years now and it’s no longer just computer world insiders who write about it anymore. The literary sensibility that Renouard uses gives rehashed arguments a new spin. Like this little aphorism:
”Who hasn’t gone on the internet looking for past loves and friends not seen for years? Time lost in search of lost time.”
He also is no stranger to coining neologisms, like “Googlemancy”, a kind of supernatural divination with the aid of the today ubiquitous Internet search engine Google. He notices how his Internet use changes his relationship to memory, and how he discovers in himself a new “impulse to share” which he didn’t have before the advent of the share button.
The Internet and its accompanying technologies (cellphones, laptop computers) have changed the playing field for literature, argues Renouard. He notes that a writer like Patrick Modiano “has become impossible since the coming of the the Internet”. Technological change also affects our relationship to images, text messages, paper books, scrolls, libraries. Renouard experiences new situations like hard drive failures (“as I am writing this book my computer broke down”) and how they play into the literary process.
The essays are peppered with lots of references to philosophy (a selection: Derrida Deleuze Bergson Hegel Badiou Malebranche Leibniz Debord Duns Scotus Nietzsche) as well as a fair share of Greek mythology. Particularly notable is a chapter of inspired imaginary meetings of figures from antiquity which conjured up possible internet logs of Augustus Caesar and others (it sounds hokey, but it is well written). A related ploy is the recurring “psychopathology of digital life”, a play on Freud‘s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Other thinkers he plays with are Ray Kurzweil, Chateaubriand and Proust. Just try this little madeleine on for size:
The recollection machine has strange effects. I don’t know why each time I listen to excerpts from Einstein on the Beach on YouTube, and in particular “Knee Play No. 2,” I remember an evening I spent with my father at the Comédie Française in November 1996—I had never heard Philip Glass and Bob Wilson’s opera until I saw it staged in Paris in January 2014. Similarly, I ask myself why it is that whenever I listen to the instrumental version of “Last Dance in Copacabana” by Superfunk, I am beset by images of my first trip to Greece, in 2000—maybe I heard it in a bar at the time without paying it any attention, or maybe it was part of the distant sounds echoing from the island’s only nightclub, now shut down. But I do know that I can retrieve voluntarily, with infallible efficacy, these involuntary associations that have the strength and charm of Proustian recollections.
page 23
Renouard gets into a lot of stuff in this book, and I’ve only mentioned a few of them. Most of it is in the interesting category of things you’ve experienced yourself, but haven’t yet really recognized the noteworthiness of. An example of this is his excursus on the phenomenon of autocorrect when texting. Pretty brilliant.
Summing up, I’ll leave you with my favorite passage of the book. This is where Renouard describes meeting an old man who has become addicted to the attention of Internet platforms. He had previously spent ten years “deciphering the manuscripts of Husserl”, and now he is haggard-looking on Boulevard Saint-Michel constantly checking for notifications and “likes”. It’s written as a 19th century short story, but it very much describes our current situation. It ends thusly:
My presence no longer interested him very much. I watched him take the photograph and post it. He worked at incredible speed. The first likes appeared at once; his eyes lit up. For an instant, he ceased to be the lost man whose silhouette had startled me on the boulevard Saint-Michel. I pretended to have an appointment and got up to leave; he silently bade me goodbye with a wave of his hand.
page 114
Kinship of all Species 