The Blind Giant (9 page)

And yet, you could spend a lifetime doing so. From fish to cocoa to cars to wood, everything has a narrative, and not all of those narratives are happy ones. That was fine while we could imagine ourselves isolated from ill-doings far away, but nowhere is far away any more. The chain of connection from our homes to the war zones of the Middle East and Africa is horribly short. Once more, the hearth is touched by things which belong in other spaces. The television news brought the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s to the living rooms of Britain. Images of starvation in another hearth space came home to the fireplaces and buttered crumpets of the UK, and the response was huge. But now it seems everywhere is broken, and it’s too much to take in, because the net of connection implicates the lifestyles of the industrialized nations in the suffering of others. The hearth itself, which is supposed to be a place of refuge from the world, seems to be purchased at the cost of pain in the world. Every decision – even what fruit to buy, what brand of tea, or whether to eat beef or chicken, what it means to buy from a given supermarket – is part of every other, and all of them seem to have disproportionate knock-on effects in unpredictable places. The simplest
questions have acquired nuance, controversy and multiple interpretations. We are at sea.

And the ship has a hole in it. Writers such as Dan Ariely have shown us that we can’t even trust our own basic rationality. In
Predictably
Irrational
, Ariely discusses how we make irrational choices about
pricing in predictable ways: having seen an ‘anchor’ number, we judge everything against it – even if the anchor is nothing more than a vehicle registration. An absurdly high anchor will cause us to think of even a substantial lower price as acceptable and a normal one as a bargain (many restaurant menus these days have one super-expensive item because it makes the next price down look acceptable).

More generally, some of us desperately seek to block out facts that unsettle us – the same instinct which inspired my friend to lob her trusty Nokia off Westminster Bridge – hence the global and increasingly absurd market for
climate change denial. Heralded as heroes are such curious characters as Australian geologist Ian Plimer, whose book
Heaven and Earth
relied for its ability to ‘debunk’ the idea of global warming on a theory that insists that the sun is largely made of iron.
Michael Ashley, Professor of Astrophysics at New South Wales, lamented ‘the depth of scientific ignorance’ in Plimer’s book, ‘comparable to a biologist claiming that plants obtain energy from magnetism rather than photosynthesis’. And yet the appetite for such unlikely claims remains unaffected. Huge numbers of us are apparently anchored to an idea of the world the way we want it to be. Recognizing the truth is painful, so we don’t. Of course, if you’re sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting ‘lalalala’ about climate change, any number of topics – from ocean acidification to fish stocks to international development – will abruptly become part of your information overload noise problem.

Everything in our world is in doubt, bringing on a sort of lifestyle dissonance – the extended hearth encompasses
uncomfortable and inconvenient truths. We are increasingly aware that the food we eat is bad for us; that the money we earn and spend feeds into and comes out of a banking system whose goal is not stewardship but lottery win success, and whose excesses can create and then abruptly annihilate enormous sums; that the planet itself is not a fixed point but a collection of vital systems we are woefully overtaxing; that our national wealth derives not (or not only) from virtue but also from a privileged post-colonial position which we have adeptly exploited, but which now brings us danger and violence; that our governments sell or facilitate the sale of guns, execution drugs and manacles to states whose actions we publicly oppose in exchange for the oil we need to continue the cycle.

Every action of our lives carries a tacit burden of complexity; and digital technology possesses the ability to bring it to the forefront: to report it live, to bring to our notice obscure but poignant crises, to connect us to matters far away and make the problems of people we do not know seem close. Objects can be tagged (virtually or physically), their narratives made explicit, the stories of those who created them in sweatshops can be hovering at your shoulder as you buy. Your neighbours are no longer the people who live next to you but whoever you talk to online; people who share your interests and dreams may as well be in Karachi as in Paris, London or New York. The evictions of the Occupy Wall Street protests have made global villains of heavy-handed police officers who a few years ago would barely have been remembered six months later by those they arrested. If you had been following a Pakistani IT contractor named
Sohaib Athar on Twitter at around 9:30 pm GMT on 1st May 2011, you would have read his grouchy discontent about loud helicopters over his house. Athar didn’t know it at the time, but he was tweeting live coverage of the US raid on
Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound.
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What would have been, as recently as 2005, a military action in a
foreign land, became something happening just down someone’s street.

In a digital world, nothing is simple any more. The world is slippery and hard to pin down. Everything is out of control.

This feeling that we’re not in the driving seat of our own lives – of discomfort with a world that is rushing past us, with the pace of change and with the impossibility of affecting its course – is not new. Anthony Giddens wrote in
The Consequences of Modernity
in 1990 – safely before the digital avalanche began – that many of us have a sense ‘of being caught up in a universe of events we do not fully understand, and which seems in large part outside of our control’. A decade earlier, American doctor
Larry Dossey coined the term ‘
time-sickness’ to describe the effects of the increasingly rapid pace of life in the 1980s. Dossey’s work isn’t viewed with unalloyed approval by the medical community, but that doesn’t change the fact that he identified a perception that ‘time is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it, and that you must pedal faster and faster to keep up’ which resonated – and continues to resonate – with a lot of people.

Ten years before Dossey,
Alvin Toffler wrote about it as ‘
future shock’, which he defined as ‘the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time’. This phenomenon has existed as long as I’ve been alive, and I suspect you can find it in every decade. I remember, when I was at school, seeing a tablet from an ancient civilization (I think it was Sumer) lamenting that things were better in the old days when children really respected their parents. Perhaps it’s inevitable, an artefact not of changes in society but in the life of commentators: we start out young and rich in leisure time, then form stable relationships and get proper jobs, then have children, and gradually have less
and less time devoted to ourselves and more to external – if beloved – things.

Of course, if events are increasingly complex, or if their complexity is increasingly apparent to us through better access to information, seeking understanding of them would be increasingly time-consuming and difficult, and hence, also, gaining control of them.

Giddens also discusses theorist
Jean-François Lyotard’s idea that the post- or late modern era is what follows the collapse of grand narratives, over-arching notions of human development and the human place in the world which have been our context for as long as humanity has been capable of abstract thought, but which are vulnerable to the inquisitorial mentality of Enlightenment analysis. Ask enough questions about a grand narrative, and it comes down to a viewpoint, rather than a fundamental truth. Religious prophecies, Marxist historical materialism – even
the Enlightenment itself, with its untested and unfalsifiable belief in the idea that rationality and science would lead inexorably to a better world – have given us ways to locate ourselves in the universe, to understand what we are. With them gone or fading, we have nothing left between us and the raw world. We are like a man who has worn orange spectacles for years, and, removing them, has discovered the rest of the spectrum.

It’s worth considering the idea that we look at the digital technologies we have made and blame them for the changes in our society because we need a fresh narrative. The
Cold War which provided a backdrop in my early life gave way to the
War on Terror, perhaps itself an attempt to create a simple, bi-polar worldview. But the War on Terror is problematic, fraught with the discovery of our own ill-doings and undermined by the invasion of an unrelated nation –
Iraq. Worse yet, even a cursory examination of its causes takes the investigator back into the realpolitik compromises of the Kissinger era, when we chose to
endorse strongmen over democrats who might lean towards Moscow, and when we backed the mujahideen in
Afghanistan against the Soviets, incidentally creating the basis of many of the organizations which today are opposed to our versions of democracy. The iconic image which undercuts the storyline we are encouraged to accept – that Bad Men came out of the desert and did Bad Things to our Free World – is the now-infamous picture from 1983 showing
Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands enthusiastically with
Saddam Hussein.
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The world we live in is governed not by a single narrative, but by a multitude, a Babel of opinions and priorities, of manifest destinies and lofty goals, corporate agendas and private conspiracies. And it is the nature of the Internet and the social media realm that they reflect this. They are not a separate place, but a statement of our world’s identity. The bewildering complexity of the Internet and of our communications is a map of us, and the fact that it seems to intrude is as much because we have reached out to the world as because the world has come to us.

The feeling of information overload we have – in some ways quite understandable, because the world is more complex, richer in conceptual information than ever before – is derived not from digital technology, but from our encounter with a world whose patterns and tides are increasingly apparent to us through the lens of that technology, and which carries a weight of history and increasing complexity which we are now beginning to appreciate. It’s not that computers made the world more difficult to understand. It’s that the world – which, yes, is shaped in part by our technology and our scientific understanding – is difficult to understand, and now we know. As we extend ourselves into the world, we are vulnerable, and we need to develop coping strategies. But we need to be there, because the alternative is a hermetic, head-in-the-sand existence which refuses to engage with real problems and lets them pile up.

That being the case, what are the real battlegrounds of the digital world and the society which sustains it?

T
HIS IS THE
High Baroque period of the digital culture. Everything that can be is being digitalized, the weight of commerce and received wisdom (at least some received wisdom) asserting that this is progress, and very much for the best. Digital technology is going into everything: water bottles, car keys, pets and running shoes. You can wire your house so that it can report to you on its energy use, humidity and security. You can buy a library of digital books, and query the author directly via Kindle’s built-in @author feature. Queues form outside Apple’s flesh-and-blood stores for the release of each iteration of its products as if Megan Fox and Jack Nicholson were working the red carpet. Users become tribal over
iOS (Apple’s mobile system software) and
Android (Google’s competitor with the smiling robot face): which is better, which is faster, which ecosystem is more authentic? We habitually replace our desktops every three to five years because the capabilities of the new machines are so far in advance of the ones we have (whose capabilities most of us do not use) that the software no longer fits into the impoverished motherboards of the older computers.

We’re like the proverbial man with a hammer: every problem looks like the kind you can solve by hitting things. Commercially and culturally, we are herded towards shiny consumer devices – and stampeded, it sometimes seems, to new formats that replace last year’s new format, accumulating a plastic and silicon junkyard of defunct devices and those infuriating proprietary chargers,
none of which fit other almost identical products, each of which costs some ridiculous amount of money to replace when you leave them in a hotel.

It is not sustainable.

We live in a world of finite resources, and our digital toys and tools entail, just as much as the auto industry, our dependence on petroleum from unstable and oppressive regimes, and rare earths from what are presently called ‘failed states’. A fine example of the latter is
coltan, the mineral from which we derive tantalum, a material vital for the production of electronic capacitors and hence for mobile devices and computers. Coltan mining has been implicated in strife in Congo since the 1960s. A UN report from 2004 states: ‘Illegal exploitation remains one of the main sources of funding for groups involved in perpetuating conflict.’ The report is accompanied by a stark triangular diagram: coltan exploitation, conflict and arms trafficking are locked in mutual facilitation. The centre of the triangle is simply ‘impunity/insecurity’.
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