You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (12 page)

I would prefer not to judge the experiences or motivations of other people, but surely this new strain of gadget fetishism is driven more by fear than by love.

At their best, the new Facebook/Twitter enthusiasts remind me of the anarchists and other nutty idealists who populated youth culture when I grew up. The ideas might be silly, but at least the believers have fun as they rebel against the parental-authority quality of entities like record companies that attempt to fight music piracy.

The most effective young Facebook users, however—the ones who
will probably be winners if Facebook turns out to be a model of the future they will inhabit as adults—are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves.

They tend their doppelgängers fastidiously. They must manage offhand remarks and track candid snapshots at parties as carefully as a politician. Insincerity is rewarded, while sincerity creates a lifelong taint. Certainly, some version of this principle existed in the lives of teenagers before the web came along, but not with such unyielding, clinical precision.

The frenetic energy of the original flowering of the web has reappeared in a new generation, but there is a new brittleness to the types of connections people make online. This is a side effect of the illusion that digital representations can capture much about actual human relationships.

The binary character at the core of software engineering tends to reappear at higher levels. It is far easier to tell a program to run or not to run, for instance, than it is to tell it to sort-of run. In the same way, it is easier to set up a rigid representation of human relationships on digital networks: on a typical social networking site, either you are designated to be in a couple or you are single (or you are in one of a few other predetermined states of being)—and that reduction of life is what gets broadcast between friends all the time. What is communicated between people eventually becomes their truth. Relationships take on the troubles of software engineering.

It seems ridiculous to have to say this, but just in case anyone is getting the wrong idea, let me affirm that I am not turning against the internet. I love the internet.

For just one example among many, I have been spending quite a lot of time on an online forum populated by oud players. (The oud is a Middle Eastern string instrument.) I hesitate to mention it, because I worry that any special little place on the internet can be ruined if it gets too much attention.

The oud forum revives the magic of the early years of the internet. There’s a bit of a feeling of paradise about it. You can feel each participant’s passion for the instrument, and we help one another become more intense. It’s amazing to watch oud players from around the world
cheer on an oud builder as he posts pictures of an instrument under construction. It’s thrilling to hear clips from a young player captured in midair just as she is getting good.

The fancy web 2.0 designs of the early twenty-first century start off by classifying people into bubbles, so you meet your own kind. Facebook tops up dating pools, LinkedIn corrals careerists, and so on.

The oud forum does the opposite. There you find Turks and Armenians, elders and kids, Israelis and Palestinians, rich professionals and struggling artists, formal academics and bohemian street musicians, all talking with one another about a shared obsession. We get to know one another; we are not fragments to one another. Inner trolls most definitely appear now and then, but less often than in most online environments. The oud forum doesn’t solve the world’s problems, but it does allow us to live larger than them.

When I told Kevin Kelly about this magical confluence of obsessive people, he immediately asked if there was a particular magical person who tended the oud forum. The places that work online always turn out to be the beloved projects of individuals, not the automated aggregations of the cloud. In this case, of course, there is such a magical person, who turns out to be a young Egyptian American oud player in Los Angeles.

The engineer in me occasionally ponders the rather crude software that the forum runs on. The deep design mystery of how to organize and present multiple threads of conversation on a screen remains as unsolved as ever. But just when I am about to dive into a design project to improve forum software, I stop and wonder if there really is much room for improvement.

It’s the people who make the forum, not the software. Without the software, the experience would not exist at all, so I celebrate that software, as flawed as it is. But it’s not as if the forum would really get much better if the software improved. Focusing too much on the software might even make things worse by shifting the focus from the people.

There is huge room for improvement in digital technologies overall. I would love to have telepresence sessions with distant oudists, for instance. But once you have the basics of a given technological leap in place, it’s always important to step back and focus on the people for a while.

THUS FAR
, I have presented two ways in which the current dominant ideology of the digital world, cybernetic totalism, has been a failure.

The first example might be called a spiritual failure. The ideology has encouraged narrow philosophies that deny the mystery of the existence of experience. A practical problem that can trickle down from this mistake is that we become vulnerable to redirecting the leap of faith we call “hope” away from people and toward gadgets.

The second failure is behavioral. It naturally happens that the designs that celebrate the noosphere and other ideals of cybernetic totalism tend to undervalue humans. Examples are the ubiquitous invocations of anonymity and crowd identity. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that these designs tend to reinforce indifferent or poor treatment of humans. In this section, a third failure is presented, this time in the sphere of economics.

For millions of people, the internet means endless free copies of music, videos, and other forms of detached human expression. For a few brilliant and lucky people, the internet has meant an ability to spin financial schemes that were too complex to exist in the past, creating dangerous, temporary illusions of risk-free ways to create money out of thin air.

I will argue that there are similarities and hidden links between these two trends. In each case, there are obvious short-term benefits for some people, but ultimately a disaster for everyone in the long term.

I’ll discuss “free culture” first. The disaster related to free culture is still in its early stages. Low-bandwidth forms of human expression, like music and newspaper-style reporting, are already being demoted into a sorry state. High-bandwidth expressions, like movies, are on their way to meeting the same fate.

The ideology that has overtaken much of the cloud-computing scene—exemplified by causes like free or open culture—has the potential to ruin a moment that has been anticipated since at least as far back as the nineteenth century. Once technological advances are sufficient to potentially offer all people lives filled with health and ease, what will happen? Will only a tiny minority benefit?

While the relative number of desperately poor people is decreasing, income differences between the rich and the poor are increasing at an accelerating rate. The middle zone between wealth and poverty is being stretched, and new seams are likely to appear.

Medicine is on the verge of mastering some of the fundamental mechanisms of aging. Drastic differences in people’s wealth will translate into unprecedented, drastic differences in life expectancy. The developed world might start to know how the most abject, hungry, and ill people in the poorest parts of the world feel today. Middle-class life expectancies could start to seem puny compared to those of a lucky elite.

What would happen if you discovered one morning that while a few of your acquaintances who had made or inherited a lot of money had undergone procedures that would extend their life spans by decades, those procedures were too expensive for you and your family? That’s the kind of morning that could turn almost anyone into a Marxist.

Marx was all about technological change. Unfortunately, his approach to correcting inequities spawned an awful series of violent revolutions. He argued that the playing field should be leveled before the technologies of abundance mature. It has been repeatedly confirmed, however, that leveling a playing field with a Marxist revolution kills, dulls, or corrupts most of the people on the field. Even so, versions of his ideas continue to have enormous appeal for many, especially young people. Marx’s ideas still color utopian technological thinking, including many of the thoughts that appear to be libertarian on the surface. (I will examine stealth technomarxism later on.)

What has saved us from Marxism is simply that new technologies have in general created new jobs—and those jobs have generally been better than the old ones. They have been ever more elevated—more cerebral, creative, cultural, or strategic—than the jobs they replaced. A descendant of a Luddite who smashed looms might be programming robotic looms today.

Abraham Maslow was a twentieth-century psychologist who proposed that human beings seek to sate ever more exalted needs as their baser needs are met. A starving person might choose to seek food before social status, for instance, but once a person isn’t hungry, a desire for status can become as intense as the earlier quest for food.

Maslow’s hierarchy is rooted in the ground, in agriculture and subsistence, but it reaches upward to lofty heights. Sometimes it is visualized as a pyramid, with the base representing the basic needs of survival, like food. The next layer up represents safety, then love/belonging, then esteem, and, finally, as the pyramidion, self-actualization. Self-actualization includes creativity.

Historical improvements in the economic status of ordinary people can be correlated with a climb up Maslow’s pyramid. One consequence
of ascending the ramp of technological progress, as happened rapidly during industrialization, was that large numbers of people started to make a living from meeting needs at ever higher elevations on Maslow’s hierarchy. A vast middle class of teachers, accountants, and, yes, reporters and musicians arose where there had been only a few servants of the royal courts and churches before.

The early generations of Marxists didn’t hate these elevated strivers, though they did seek to flatten status in society. Mao brought a different sensibility into play, in which only toil within the foundation layer of Maslow’s hierarchy was worthy of reward. The peasants, working in the fields much as they had for millennia, were to be celebrated, while high-altitude creatures, such as intellectuals, were to be punished.

The open culture movement has, weirdly, promoted a revival of this sensibility. Classical Maoism didn’t really reject hierarchy; it only suppressed any hierarchy that didn’t happen to be the power structure of the ruling Communist Party. In China today, that hierarchy has been blended with others, including celebrity, academic achievement, and personal wealth and status, and China is certainly stronger because of that change.

In the same way, digital Maoism doesn’t reject all hierarchy. Instead, it overwhelmingly rewards the one preferred hierarchy of digital metaness, in which a mashup is more important than the sources who were mashed. A blog of blogs is more exalted than a mere blog. If you have seized a very high niche in the aggregation of human expression—in the way that Google has with search, for instance—then you can become superpowerful. The same is true for the operator of a hedge fund. “Meta” equals power in the cloud.

The hierarchy of metaness is the natural hierarchy for cloud gadgets in the same way that Maslow’s idea describes a natural hierarchy of human aspirations.

To be fair, open culture is distinct from Maoism in another way. Maoism is usually associated with authoritarian control of the communication of ideas. Open culture is not, although the web 2.0 designs, like wikis, tend to promote the false idea that there is only one universal truth in some arenas where that isn’t so.