“This is why we can’t have nice things” — Prophecy and Progress in Player Piano

If you haven’t read Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, here’s a book report on a crazy little book with political, cultural, technological implications.

In most of his books and short stories, Kurt Vonnegut uniquely captures the human experience — the humor, the absurdity, the love, the logic, the horror, and the beauty — in a way few authors have been able to do.

Vonnegut was a modern prophet. He could see humans for what we are and could anticipate where our drives and desires would tend to lead us. He told stories about ourselves that felt at once depressing, true, and hilarious.

Player Piano was written in 1952 (here’s the original NYT review), but tcould have been written this year. Vonnegut saw the potential and the existential threat of ENIAC, the world’s first true computer, and of what human beings would do with this technology.

Before IoT, before Google, before Big Data, Kurt intuitively knew where this story goes: The elite always eat the poor and vulnerable, technology will save and murder us, the masses do what masses do, and progress is inevitable and insatiable.

The future is Darwinistic, with a twist: Survival of the fittest, technologically savvy, or most connected. Pick one or die.

Chuck Klosterman reminds us: You can’t fight progress. Progress always wins. Vonnegut agrees but also warns us of this fact.

As people were feeling the Bern this summer (only to be Wasserman-Schultzed…) and Trump was screaming protectionism and other b.s., what we weren’t really talking enough about is how do we stay human? The revolution in Player Piano largely succeeds. And then people fall immediately back into the same trap that tyrannized them in the first place.

So it goes.

People on the left and the right are frustrated because they have been adversely affected by inequality, made obsolete by technology or trade deals, or know they are unprepared for the progress breathing down their necks.

How do we take the best technology and progress have to offer, but refuse to cede our souls to it? Is it possible to have a 65" TV but not watch 20+ hours of TV per week? Is it possible to have 24/7 access to the Internet, but not become shallow, porn-addicted egotists?

I want to believe it’s possible. But Vonnegut reminds us: People will do what people do.