Bryan Appleyard The Digital Generation (RSA Journal Winter 2011) discusses the points of view of cyber skeptics and cyber utopians – on the role, value and ethics of ‘immersive’ technologies. Especially relevant to our theme is his discussion of the ‘design ethics’ of gadgets and systems, and visions (commercial and political) of machines and information systems that can ‘change our lives from within’. Exploring the proliferation of these ‘tools for conviviality’ , Appelyard also comments:
‘All these new machines emerge from a particular culture at a particular time and they involve particular choices. In turn, these choices depend on the rhetoric used by the people who will profit by making such machines. That rhetoric is currently intimate and radical, involving a claim that machines can change our lives from within. This is an imperious claim that should remind us that machines are not intrinsically democratic, and nor are they necessarily the realisation of the hippie/yippie dream of a global community.
Bryan Appleyard describes the sceptics, who do not take the utopian versions of the internet and the machines that feed off it and are fed by it:
‘In the past couple of years, a counter-wave of scepticism has emerged…MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has raised concerns about the way the gadget makers feel justified in taking over the lives of our children. She provides chilling evidence of children for whom connectivity has become a new form of anomie and even, paradoxically, intense loneliness.
In his book The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser says the internet is no longer the window on the world we thought it was; instead, it has become a mirror. Increased personalisation of searches means we get Google results that are tuned to our known preoccupations. The more we search, the less we learn.
From writer Nicholas Carr, among others, comes the anxiety that machines are changing the way we think, shortening our attention spans and making us incapable of prolonged contemplation. Some commentators, such as neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, argue that they are actually altering the structure of the human brain.
But the most fundamental critique of the direction in which new technologies are taking us comes from a Silicon Valley apostate. Jaron Lanier was one of the creators of artificial reality, but, in 2006, he lost his faith. Far from freeing the world by letting a billion flowers bloom, he said the internet was creating a “hive mind”: not a thoughtful mass of independent individuals, but a blind collective driven by a desire to extirpate the human and hand all power to the internet. He accuses the internet prophets of “digital Maoism”.
Lanier highlights the increasing number of ‘meta’ sites available – Google, Wikipedia, Digg and Reddit – many of which aggregate from other aggregators. Much of what we read on the internet, he says, consists of “what a collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algorithms derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously”.
Furthermore, says Lanier, the internet is destroying the creative middle class. By forcing down the price of music, books and newspapers, big cyber suppliers such as Apple and Amazon have effectively been throwing people out of work and casting doubt on the future of the very things they are selling.
The core of Lanier’s critique raises a much more profound question about our relationships with these new products. If we cannot tell whether we are talking to a machine or a human, he says, then we must credit the machine with intelligence. The assumption is that machines will eventually win because they have become smarter. But they might also win because humans have become dumber: after all, says Lanier, “people degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time”.
There is something both ominous and paradoxical in his critique. As Appleyard makes clear, there is something in the design-aesthetic and ethics of the brand experience of being a user of the software that is ‘intimate’. Intimate in the sense that it evokes trust, engenders ‘affect’ that leads you to think and feel ‘this is just for me’; but also, there is a prospect of global, political union in the implications for the design of the ‘society-of-the-future’. Surrender you identity, and the machine will shape your future. As Appleyard mentions, in his book The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born scholar, pours well-researched scorn on the political claims of the boosters. Tyrants, he points out, quickly learn how to use the internet. Moreover, net revolutionaries had better make sure they win: internet and mobile communications are written in ink, not pencil, and an oppressive regime will easily be able to trace the identities of its opponents.
This form of intimacy is a species of possession – I become dependent on the devices to which I am addicted.
Slingshot