The Media Apiori and Delusion in "Leave the World Behind"

This essay was written at the end of my junior year at the University of Denver. This was the final essay for an advanced seminar titled "Anti-Social Media" taught by Dr. Aleksandr Prigozhin. As we came to understand human society as entirely media-based all throughout history, we also dissected Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind. In this essay, I find connections between theories on media, identity, and the novel.

Download this essay as a PDF:

the media apriori.pdf

Download PDF • 74KB

"While we are the inventors of our own technology, humanity as we know it was not the same when technology first came into existence, meaning that our influence over media’s evolution (and its influence over our own evolution) cannot be cleanly removed from one another."

The concept of society being “media all the way down” is one that is intimidating to the average person. Leave the World Behind is one such novel that applies this concept to our modern idea of escapism, idealizing distance from modern connective media and, consequently, the rest of society. The main characters of this story are Amanda and Clay, a couple with two children who live in Brooklyn and rent a remote luxury Airbnb in Long Island. Their illusion of disconnection is broken when there is a blackout and they struggle to survive true isolation rather than a romanticized version of it. The utopian scene of “disconnection” quickly becomes apocalyptic when they are truly ripped away from almost all modern technology, including running water and medicine. Though it is easy to interpret this in a technologically determinist way, it instead functions as a commentary on how humanity and media are intertwined forces that act in conjunction with one another instead of one controlling the other.

Mark Seltzer’s True Crime applies the concept of Williams’s The Technology and the Society to the media apriori. A quote from True Crime that exemplifies this well is “The locked room of the classic detective story is nothing but a scale model of the closure of the social order, an order that makes itself from itself.” In a discussion post about Williams’s piece, I mentioned that the question of whether technology is dictated by society, or the other way around, is similar to the chicken and the egg dilemma. This is a literal application of something “making itself from itself.” Reading True Crime made me realize that the answer to both dilemmas is the same.

While one could reasonably conclude that the egg must have come first because female sex cells have existed for far longer than chickens, one must also understand that when the chicken first came into existence, it was not the same as a chicken is 10,000 years later and its eggs likely were not, either. Similarly, technology and humanity are deeply entwined and integral to one another. While we are the inventors of our own technology, humanity as we know it was not the same when technology first came into existence, meaning that our influence over media’s evolution (and its influence over our own evolution) cannot be cleanly removed from one another.

Amanda and Clay are an example of how technology is so inherent to human nature that it is difficult to grasp it as something of our own creation, or even fully recognize its full relevance in our life. To invent and to use technology is what humanity has evolved around, and technology is a mold of our evolution. It is so necessary for people to invent that we forget that our inventions do not function independently of us but are our own creations that give us momentum and have their fate determined by us just as much as we evolve with technology as a conduit. They are faced with reality over image when they notice a seemingly small herd of deer outside of their house that is actually numbered in the thousands. The deer are no longer an image that seems artificial to the couple, they are a real threat. Wild flamingoes also appear on their lawn in a more on-the-nose display of common artificial and ornamental lawn flamingoes juxtaposed with real wild birds. The next morning, their son’s teeth fall out. The scenery is nightmarish. This further accentuates the feeling of unreality of losing all connection to the rest of society outside of screens. Much like birds that are not native to New York suddenly appearing in their lawn along with thousands of deer and the nightmare-esque situation of Archie’s teeth falling out, it is incredibly difficult to imagine a society where people are truly isolated from all media. They are faced with real interactions with nature and disease when they are commonly viewed in a way that feels false and safe. This can be shown in Amanda’s racism. “His wife felt it important, not to do the moral thing, necessarily, but to be the kind of person who would. Morality was vanity, in the end.” Amanda even uses a piece of fictional media to justify her racism. Similarly, the illusion they’ve submitted to of luxury and isolation is also vapid.

We discussed in class how the concept of our society being media all the way down is terrifying and unthinkable for many people. Mentioning this in our course caused me to make new and important connections that I would not have previously considered. Often, older generations are comfortable with the technology from their youth but scared of any technology that is not ingrained in them from the beginning. This is not only seen in the modern day as Gen X fears the modern internet but loves the television. It goes back so far as Plato being against the written word out of fear that it would make memorization extinct.

The intertwined nature of society and technology and the comfort of “natural” media versus the uncanniness of “unnatural”, or new, media is something I had never considered before. The unpredictability of media is what makes older generations cautious, but the truth of how reliant we are on media is still something that remains unaddressed because of the discomfort it brings. The quote, “They had asked themselves questions when they decided to have children — do we have the money, do we have the space, do we have what it takes — but they didn’t ask what the world would be when their children grew,” shows that Amanda and Clay neglected considering the evolution of media and the world before they had children and had been given reason to worry in the face of unpredictability.

Fakeness, and the illusion of fakeness, in Leave the World Behind drives the story. When world events and tragedy are fed to people purely through a screen, when deer are seemingly few in number and safely visible from a window, and when the wilderness is well-cultivated and conflicts take place where people cannot see them, people have an illusion of safety. As exemplified by the quote, “People weren’t that connected to one another. Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife or worrying about the mortgage,” nothing about daily life changes for the privileged, and that allows them to ignore the uncomfortable reality of the media apriori.