Thomas Pynchon’s fourth novel Vineland (1990) is unusual among his works in that it describes a period of relative political calm, though a calm with more than a hint of surrender. His second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), set in California in the summer of 1964, depicts a moment in American history pregnant with possibilities for social and political change. Vineland, by contrast, though also set in California, takes place in the 1980s against a more sedate, reactionary background. The novel begins in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan’s landslide re-election, an event that symbolizes the seemingly total victory of the forces of conservatism. The primary theme of the novel is how the progressive energies of the 1960s were dissipated over the following decade and a half. How did the radicals of 1968 become the passive suburbanites of 1984?

One answer Pynchon offers is that the revolutionary potential of the sixties was suppressed by the heavy hand of the law. Through a combination of seduction, blackmail, threats and outright violence, the agents of the state successfully neutralized those judged to be a danger to the existing order. The character in Vineland who exemplifies the oppressive apparatus of government is Brock Vond, a vicious federal prosecutor who infiltrates and brings down a student protest movement at the fictional College of the Surf, renamed the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll by the protesters. Vond is convinced of the fundamental infantilism of the dissidents, whom he believes secretly yearn for an authority figure to keep them ‘safe inside some extended national Family’, and relishes using force to discipline the unruly protesters, like so many misbehaving children.

Vond’s successful quashing of the student uprising represents the destruction of the utopian ideals of the decade. The defeated radicals spend the years that follow in various purgatories, existing in a kind of suspended animation, simply marking time without hope of dramatic change or improvement. Weed Atman, the protest leader who is murdered as a result of a plot instigated by Vond, becomes a Thanatoid (a kind of living dead), living among other ghosts of the era, most notably Vietnam veterans, dwelling bitterly on the past. Frenesi, a leftist filmmaker and Weed’s lover who conspires with Vond to frame and betray Weed, enters witness protection and assumes a new identity. Zoyd Wheeler, a musician and doper who marries Frenesi and fathers a child with her, flees to the small town of Vineland in northern California, far from the drugs and drama of Los Angeles, where he is sustained by government welfare payments.

Pynchon suggests that these former radicals, dispersed by the intervention of the state, are kept passive not only through government cheques but also through television or, as he calls it, the Tube. Weed and the Thanatoid community spend ‘at least part of every waking hour with an eye on the Tube.’ Frenesi watches cop dramas routinely, motivated in part by her attraction to men in uniform. Collectively, the generation of 1968 seem to have given up the fight and surrendered to the mass entertainment industry. As Isaiah Two Four, the boyfriend of Zoyd’s daughter Prairie, who is himself the child of hippies, puts it, ‘Whole problem ‘th you folks’s generation … nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it – but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like ‘th Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars – it was way too cheap’.

The eighties, then, in Pynchon’s presentation of the decade, is suffused with the deadening influence of the Tube, defined by ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘Hawaii Five-O’ rather than by any great social movement or political cause. The sixties, by contrast, is remembered as a time before television, when people could savour the moment and experience something genuine. As Zoyd recalls, the ‘mellow sixties’ were a ‘a slower moving time, predigital, not yet so cut into pieces, not even by television.’ The consequence of the mass ownership of televisions, Pynchon suggests, has been to create a nation of lotus-eaters, wasting away in front of the Tube and passively accepting the status quo, all governed by Ronald Reagan who, as Pynchon notes, was once ‘of the Screen Actors’ Guild’.

If the sixties generation were corrupted by television, their children were practically raised by it. Frenesi’s parents, veterans of the film industry, remark that their grandchild Prairie, while a baby, used to ‘smile and gurgle and rock back and forth, so cute, like you wanted to climb inside the television set’. Yet Pynchon hints that Prairie’s generation will feel the full force of a new technology, one which might even have to power to displace television: computers. The eighties, as he shows, were when computers began to enter everyday life, displaying seemingly miraculous powers to an unfamiliar public. As a shop clerk explains to a customer in the novel ‘The computer … never has to sleep, or even go take a break. It’s like it’s open 24 hours a day.’ In perhaps the most memorable passage of the novel, Frenesi muses on the quasi-divine nature of computers and their vast stores of information, coded in binary:

If patterns of ones and zeroes were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level, at least — an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name — its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of history of the world. We are digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to sort of a standard gospel tune, And the only thing we’re good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

Pynchon explores the full implications of computers – and the internet – in his 2013 novel Bleeding Edge. That novel, set in New York in 2001, is populated by geeks, hackers and tech billionaires who belong to the same generation as Prairie and so grew up at the time when computers were entering the mainstream of American life. Bleeding Edge presents computers and, to an even greater extent, the internet as a technologies which, unlike television, have anarchic, liberating and even utopian potential, all the while observing grimly that they can serve the darker forces of government surveillance. He records the ways in which, already by 2001, digital technologies were profoundly changing American society into something new, not keeping it fixed in torpor as televisions had done. Thus, while Vineland, California stands for the television-induced quiescence of the 1980s, the inventions of Silicon Valley, California represent a new lease of life for the American Republic and a revival, in a new guise, of the revolutionary energies of the sixties.