The Digital Illusion

In order to be a realist, I must sometimes be a little dark. When one trusts in realism enough, one can burn through the indulgences of darkness. It often turns out that there is light waiting on the other side. Ours is a confusing time. In the developed world we have enjoyed affluence for long enough to have a hard time appreciating it. We especially love our gadgets, where we can still find novelty – but we also have strong evidence that we would be peering over the edge of a precipice if we opened our eyes more often.

It pains me to intone the familiar list of contemporary perils: Climate change first of all; population and depopulation spirals utterly out of sync with our societies; our inability to plan for the decline of cheap fossil fuels; seemingly inescapable waves of austerity; untenable trends of wealth concentration; the rise of violent extremisms in so many ways in so many places… Of course all of these processes are intertwined with one another.

What is the role of someone like myself who is associated with the rise of digital technologies? Aren’t digital toys just a flimsy froth that decorates big dark waves? Digital designs have certainly brought about noisy changes to our culture and politics.

This is just the sort of positive option that my colleagues and I had hoped might come about through digital networking. But the practical hopes for digital networks have also been accompanied by a symbolic, almost metaphysical project. Digital technology has come to bear the burden of being the primary channel for optimism in our times.

This, after so many Gods have failed. What an odd fate for what started out as a rather sterile corner of mathematics! Digital cultural optimism is not insane. We have seen new patterns of creativity and perhaps have even found a few new tendrils of empathy transcending what used to be barriers of distance and cultural difference. This sort of pleasure has perhaps been over-celebrated by now, but it is real. For a trivial but personal example, how lovely that I now am in touch with oud players around the world, that I can rehearse a concert over the ‘net. It really is great fun.

I just mentioned some of the good stuff, but we have also famously used digital toys to acquiesce to cheap and casual mass spying and manipulation; we have created a new kind of ultra-elite, supremely wealthy and untouchable class of technologists; and all too often we now settle into a frenzy of digitally efficient hyper-narcissism.

But the practical hopes for digital networks have also been accompanied by a symbolic, almost metaphysical project. Digital technology has come to bear the burden of being the primary channel for optimism in our times.

I still enjoy technology so much that I can hardly express it. Virtual Reality can be fun and beautiful. And yet here I am, so critical. To avoid contradictions and ambiguities is to avoid reality. It is a question pondered by online commentators many thousands of times a day. To render opinions on Internet culture can seem as useless as dripping water from an eyedropper onto a sidewalk in a rainstorm.

Anyone who speaks online knows what it’s like these days. You either huddle with those who agree, or else your opinion is instantly blended into grey mush by violent blades. Thesis and antithesis, one hand and the other, no longer lead to a higher synthesis in the online world. Hegel has been beheaded. Instead there are only statistical waves of data, endlessly swirled into astonishing fortunes by those who use it to calculate economic advantages for themselves.

If a book is only a type of manufactured object made of paper, then it can only be celebrated in the way we might celebrate clarinets or beer. We love these things, but they are only particular designs, evolved products with their own trade fairs and sub-cultures.

Being an author forces one into a humanising form of vulnerability. The book is an architecture of human dignity. A book in its very essence asserts that individual experience is central to meaning, for each book is distinct. Paper books are by their nature not mushed together into one collective, universal book. We have come to think it is normal for there to be a single Wikipedia article about a humanities topic for which there really can’t be only one optimised telling; most topics are not like math theorems. In the print era there were multiple encyclopedias, each announcing a point of view, and yet in the digital era there is effectively only one. Why should that be so?

It is not a technical inevitability, despite ‘network effects’. It is a decision based on unquestioned but shoddy dogma that ideas in themselves ought to be coupled to network effects. (It is sometimes said that the Wikipedia will become the memory for a global artificial intelligence, for instance.) Books are changing. Some of the metamorphosis is creative and fascinating. I am charmed by the thought of books that will someday synchronise to virtual worlds, and by other weird ideas. But too much of the metamorphosis is creepy. You must now, suddenly, subject yourself to surveillance in order to read an eBook. What a peculiar deal we have made!

In the past we struggled to save books from the flames, but now books have been encumbered with duties to report your reading conduct to an opaque network of hightech offices that analyse and manipulate you.

Is it better for a book to be a spying device or ashes? Books have always helped us undo problems we bring upon ourselves. Now we must save ourselves by noticing the problems we are forcing upon books. But what do we man by peace? Certainly peace must mean that violence and terror are not used to gain power or influence, but beyond that, peace must also have a creative character.

Most of us do not want to accept some sort of static or dull existence, even if it is free of violence. We do not want to accept the peaceful order that authoritarian or imposed solutions claim to offer, whether digital or old fashioned.

In the past we struggled to save books from the flames, but now books have been encumbered with duties to report your reading conduct to an opaque network of hightech offices that analyse and manipulate you.

It might work at first, but there’s a phony and patronising quality to that approach. I don’t believe we know everything we need to know yet about solutions to the long-term puzzle of peace. That might sound like a negative comment on first hearing, but it is actually an overtly optimistic statement; I believe we are learning more and more about peace as we go. My darkest digital fear concerns what I call the ‘pack switch’. This is a thesis about a persistent aspect of human character that is opposed to peace. People are like wolves, according to this theory; we are members of a species that can function either as individuals or in packs. There is a switch inside us. We are prone to suddenly fall into pack thinking without even realising it.

If there is one thing that terrifies me about the internet, this is it. Here we have a medium which can elicit ‘flash mobs’ and routinely creates sudden ‘viral’ popularities. So far, these effects have not been evil on an epochal level, but what is there to prevent that? When generations grow up largely organised and mediated by global corporate cyber-structures like proprietary social networks, how can we know who will inherit control of those designs?

Traditional definitions of ‘peace’ are often only of peace within the pack or clan, so clannishness might be the most pernicious of our sins. It undermines us at our core. Hive identity is almost universally perceived as a virtue. The Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament lists a set of sins, including lying, murder, pride, and so on, but also ‘sowing discord among brethren’. Similar injunctions exist in every culture, political system, or religion I have studied.

I do not bring this up to suggest an equivalency between all cultures or creeds, but rather a common danger within us, in our nature, that we all face and must learn to deflect. Becoming a loyal part of a pack is confused with goodness again and again, even – especially! – when the people fancy themselves to be rebels. It is always pack against pack. It is as true for those who identify with pop styles or a particular approach to digital politics, as it can be for traditional ethnicity, nationality, or religion. Within digital culture, one can be vilified for not adhering strictly enough to the dogma of the ‘open’ movement, for instance.

Again and again, our crude ‘sins’ like greed or pack identity obsession emerge rudely but stealthily from our carefully cultivated patterns of perfect thinking – in fact, just when we think we’re close to technical perfection. The lovely idea of human rights is being confounded by gamesmanship during our present algorithmic era. After generations of thinkers and activists focused on human rights, what happened?

Becoming a loyal part of a pack is confused with goodness again and again, even – especially! – when the people fancy themselves to be rebels.

Corporations became people, or so said the Supreme Court in the United States! A human right is an absolute benefit, so sneaky players will connive to calculate multiples of that benefit for themselves and their packmates. What are we to do with our idea of human rights in America? It's been inverted. For another example, it is just when digital companies believe they are doing the most good, optimising the world, that they suddenly find themselves operating massive spying and behaviour modification empires.

Were I not so close to those events, were the impact more muted for me, I might be more ready to pretend that I understand them more fully, as so many scholars pretend to do. In all honesty I still find it terribly hard to understand the Nazi era, despite much reading. At the very least, the Nazis certainly proved that a highly technical and modern sensibility is not an antidote to evil. In that sense, the Nazi period heightens my concerns about whether the Internet could serve as a superior platform for sudden mass pack/clan violence.

I don’t think outright repudiation of pack/clan identity is the best way to avoid falling into the associated violence. People seem to need it. Countries more often than not resist losing identity in larger confederations. Very few people are ready to live as global citizens, free of national association. There’s something abstract and unreal about that sort of attempt to perfect human character. The best strategy might be for each individual to belong to enough varied clans that it becomes too confusing to form coherent groups in opposition to one another.

Back in the digital beginning, decades ago, I held out exactly this hope for digital networks. If each person could feel a sense of clan membership in a confusing variety of ‘teams’ in a more connected world, maybe the situation would become a little too tangled for traditional rivalries to escalate.

This is also why I worry about the way social networks have evolved to corral people into groups to be well-targeted for what is called advertising these days, but is really more like the micromanagement of the most easily available options, through link placement. I always feel the world becomes a slightly better place when I meet someone who has ties to multiple sports teams and can’t decide which one to cheer at a game. Such a person is still enthused, but also confused: suddenly an individual and not part of a pack. The switch is reset.

Back in the digital beginning, decades ago, I held out exactly this hope for digital networks. If each person could feel a sense of clan membership in a confusing variety of ‘teams’ in a more connected world, maybe the situation would become a little too tangled for traditional rivalries to escalate.

That kind of reset is interesting because it is a change in outlook brought about by circumstances instead of the expression of ideas, and that type of influence is exactly what happens with technology all the time. In the past an idea in a book might have been persuasive or seductive, or might in some cases have been forced into belief and practice by the means of a gun or a sword held near. Today, however, ideas are often implicit in the computer code we use to run our lives. Privacy is an example. Whatever one thinks about privacy, it’s the code running in faraway cloud computers that determines what ideas about privacy are actually in effect.

I don’t think outright repudiation of pack/clan identity is the best way to avoid falling into the associated violence. People seem to need it. Countries more often than not resist losing identity in larger confederations. Very few people are ready to live as global citizens, free of national association. There’s something abstract and unreal about that sort of attempt to perfect human character. The best strategy might be for each individual to belong to enough varied clans that it becomes too confusing to form coherent groups in opposition to one another.

Back in the digital beginning, decades ago, I held out exactly this hope for digital networks. If each person could feel a sense of clan membership in a confusing variety of ‘teams’ in a more connected world, maybe the situation would become a little too tangled for traditional rivalries to escalate.

This is also why I worry about the way social networks have evolved to corral people into groups to be well-targeted for what is called advertising these days, but is really more like the micromanagement of the most easily available options, through link placement. I always feel the world becomes a slightly better place when I meet someone who has ties to multiple sports teams and can’t decide which one to cheer at a game. Such a person is still enthused, but also confused: suddenly an individual and not part of a pack. The switch is reset.

Back in the digital beginning, decades ago, I held out exactly this hope for digital networks. If each person could feel a sense of clan membership in a confusing variety of ‘teams’ in a more connected world, maybe the situation would become a little too tangled for traditional rivalries to escalate.

That kind of reset is interesting because it is a change in outlook brought about by circumstances instead of the expression of ideas, and that type of influence is exactly what happens with technology all the time. In the past an idea in a book might have been persuasive or seductive, or might in some cases have been forced into belief and practice by the means of a gun or a sword held near. Today, however, ideas are often implicit in the computer code we use to run our lives. Privacy is an example. Whatever one thinks about privacy, it’s the code running in faraway cloud computers that determines what ideas about privacy are actually in effect.

The concept of privacy is multifaceted, widely varying, and always hard to define, and yet the code which creates or destroys privacy is tediously – banally – concrete and pervasive.

Privacy is hardly a personal decision anymore, which means it’s no longer even something that can be thought about in the old sense. Only fanatical scholastics waste time on moot questions. The only useful thinking about privacy is that thinking which leads to changes in the code.

And yet we’ve mostly ‘outsourced’ our politics to remote corporations, so there is often no clear channel between thinking and coding, meaning between thinking and social reality. Programmers have created a culture in which they expect to outrun regulators. We ask governments to tip toe into the bizarre process of attempting to regulate how cloud-based corporations channel our communications and coordinated activities with one another.

But then programmers will sometimes contravene whatever the company has been forced to do, rendering government action into an absurdity. We have seen this pattern with copyright, for instance, but also in different ways with issues like the right to be forgotten or in certain arenas of privacy, particularly for women online. (Current architectures and practices favour anonymous harassers over the women they harass.)

In each case, many of the most creative and sympathetic activists don’t want people to be able to contravene the ‘openness’ of the network. But at the same time many digital activists have a seemingly infinite tolerance for gargantuan inequities in how people benefit from that all-seeing eye.