You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (3 page)

Some of the more wild-eyed eccentrics in the digital world had guessed that it would happen—but even so it was a shock when it actually did come to pass. It turns out that even an optimistic, idealistic philosophy is realizable. Put a happy philosophy of life in software, and it might very well come true!

But not all surprises have been happy.

This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result.

The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web’s early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature.

The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone’s-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people.

Part of why this happened is that volunteerism proved to be an extremely powerful force in the first iteration of the web. When businesses rushed in to capitalize on what had happened, there was something of a problem, in that the content aspect of the web, the cultural side, was functioning rather well without a business plan.

Google came along with the idea of linking advertising and searching, but that business stayed out of the middle of what people actually did online. It had indirect effects, but not direct ones. The early waves of web activity were remarkably energetic and had a personal quality. People created personal “homepages,” and each of them was different, and often strange. The web had flavor.

Entrepreneurs naturally sought to create products that would inspire demand (or at least hypothetical advertising opportunities that might someday compete with Google) where there was no lack to be addressed and no need to be filled, other than greed. Google had discovered a new permanently entrenched niche enabled by the nature of digital technology. It turns out that the digital system of representing people and ads so they can be matched is like MIDI. It is an example of how digital technology can cause an explosive increase in the importance of the “network effect.” Every element in the system—every computer, every person, every bit—comes to depend on relentlessly detailed adherence to a common standard, a common point of exchange.

Unlike MIDI, Google’s secret software standard is hidden in its computer cloud
^*
instead of being replicated in your pocket. Anyone who wants to place ads must use it, or be out in the cold, relegated to a tiny, irrelevant subculture, just as digital musicians must use MIDI in order to work together in the digital realm. In the case of Google, the monopoly is opaque and proprietary. (Sometimes locked-in digital niches are
proprietary, and sometimes they aren’t. The dynamics are the same in either case, though the commercial implications can be vastly different.)

There can be only one player occupying Google’s persistent niche, so most of the competitive schemes that came along made no money. Behemoths like Facebook have changed the culture with commercial intent, but without, as of this time of writing, commercial achievement.
^*

In my view, there were a large number of ways that new commercial successes might have been realized, but the faith of the nerds guided entrepreneurs on a particular path. Voluntary productivity had to be commoditized, because the type of faith I’m criticizing thrives when you can pretend that computers do everything and people do nothing.

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their designs, such as the comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.

Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.

The way we got here is that one subculture of technologists has recently become more influential than the others. The winning subculture doesn’t have a formal name, but I’ve sometimes called the members “cybernetic totalists” or “digital Maoists.”

The ascendant tribe is composed of the folks from the open culture/Creative Commons world, the Linux community, folks associated with the artificial intelligence approach to computer science, the web 2.0 people, the anticontext file sharers and remashers, and a variety of others. Their capital is Silicon Valley, but they have power bases all over the world, wherever digital culture is being created. Their favorite blogs include Boing Boing, TechCrunch, and Slashdot, and their embassy in the old country is
Wired
.

Obviously, I’m painting with a broad brush; not every member of the groups I mentioned subscribes to every belief I’m criticizing. In fact, the groupthink problem I’m worried about isn’t so much in the minds of the technologists themselves, but in the minds of the users of the tools the cybernetic totalists are promoting.

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

When I refer to the tribe, I am not writing about some distant “them.” The members of the tribe are my lifelong friends, my mentors, my students, my colleagues, and my fellow travelers. Many of my friends disagree with me. It is to their credit that I feel free to speak my mind, knowing that I will still be welcome in our world.

On the other hand, I know there is also a distinct tradition of computer science that is humanistic. Some of the better-known figures in this tradition include the late Joseph Weizenbaum, Ted Nelson, Terry Winograd, Alan Kay, Bill Buxton, Doug Englebart, Brian Cantwell Smith, Henry Fuchs, Ken Perlin, Ben Schneiderman (who invented the idea of clicking on a link), and Andy Van Dam, who is a master teacher and has influenced generations of protégés, including Randy Pausch. Another important humanistic computing figure is David Gelernter, who conceived of a huge portion of the technical underpinnings of what has come to be called cloud computing, as well as many of the potential practical applications of clouds.

And yet, it should be pointed out that humanism in computer science doesn’t seem to correlate with any particular cultural style. For instance,
Ted Nelson is a creature of the 1960s, the author of what might have been the first rock musical
(Anything & Everything)
, something of a vagabond, and a counterculture figure if ever there was one. David Gelernter, on the other hand, is a cultural and political conservative who writes for journals like
Commentary
and teaches at Yale. And yet I find inspiration in the work of them both.

The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists—and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. I’m thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions.

Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird.

The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on—portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud’s calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians.

Premature mystery reducers are rent by schisms, just like Marxists and Freudians always were. They find it incredible that I perceive a commonality in the membership of the tribe. To them, the systems Linux and UNIX are completely different, for instance, while to me they are coincident dots on a vast canvas of possibilities, even if much of the canvas is all but forgotten by now.

At any rate, the future of religion will be determined by the quirks of the software that gets locked in during the coming decades, just like the futures of musical notes and personhood.

It’s time to take stock. Something amazing happened with the introduction of the World Wide Web. A faith in human goodness was vindicated when a remarkably open and unstructured information tool was made available to large numbers of people. That openness can, at this point, be declared “locked in” to a significant degree. Hurray!

At the same time, some not-so-great ideas about life and meaning were also locked in, like MIDI’s nuance-challenged conception of musical sound and UNIX’s inability to cope with time as humans experience it.

These are acceptable costs, what I would call aesthetic losses. They are counterbalanced, however, by some aesthetic victories. The digital world looks better than it sounds because a community of digital activists, including folks from Xerox Parc (especially Alan Kay), Apple, Adobe, and the academic world (especially Stanford’s Don Knuth) fought the good fight to save us from the rigidly ugly fonts and other visual elements we’d have been stuck with otherwise.

Then there are those recently conceived elements of the future of human experience, like the already locked-in idea of the file, that are as fundamental as the air we breathe. The file will henceforth be one of the basic underlying elements of the human story, like genes. We will never know what that means, or what alternatives might have meant.

On balance, we’ve done wonderfully well! But the challenge on the table now is unlike previous ones. The new designs on the verge of being locked in, the web 2.0 designs, actively demand that people define themselves downward. It’s one thing to launch a limited conception of music or time into the contest for what philosophical idea will be locked in. It is another to do that with the very idea of what it is to be a person.

If you feel fine using the tools you use, who am I to tell you that there is something wrong with what you are doing? But consider these points:

• Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors.
  This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world.
  

• Finance was transformed by computing clouds. Success in finance became increasingly about manipulating the cloud at the expense of sound financial principles.
  

• There are proposals to transform the conduct of science along similar lines. Scientists would then understand less of what they do.
  

• Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
  

• Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.