You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (4 page)

It might seem as though I’m assembling a catalog of every possible thing that could go wrong with the future of culture as changed by technology, but that is not the case. All of these examples are really just different aspects of one singular, big mistake.

The deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits. Since people will be inexorably connecting to one another through computers from here on out, we must find an alternative.

Next to the many problems the world faces today, debates about online culture may not seem that pressing. We need to address global warming, shift to a new energy cycle, avoid wars of mass destruction, support aging populations, figure out how to benefit from open markets without being disastrously vulnerable to their failures, and take care of other basic business. But digital culture and related topics like the future of privacy and copyrights concern the society we’ll have if we can survive these challenges.

Every save-the-world cause has a list of suggestions for “what each of us can do”: bike to work, recycle, and so on.

I can propose such a list related to the problems I’m talking about:

• Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
  

• If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don’t yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
  

• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
  

• Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
  

• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
  

• If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.
  

These are some of the things you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others.

There are aspects to all these software designs that could be retained more humanistically. A design that shares Twitter’s feature of providing ambient continuous contact between people could perhaps drop Twitter’s adoration of fragments. We don’t really know, because it is an unexplored design space.

As long as you are not defined by software, you are helping to broaden the identity of the ideas that will get locked in for future generations. In most arenas of human expression, it’s fine for a person to love the medium they are given to work in. Love paint if you are a painter; love a
clarinet if you are a musician. Love the English language (or hate it). Love of these things is a love of mystery.

But in the case of digital creative materials, like MIDI, UNIX, or even the World Wide Web, it’s a good idea to be skeptical. These designs came together very recently, and there’s a haphazard, accidental quality to them. Resist the easy grooves they guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!

There was an active campaign in the 1980s and 1990s to promote visual elegance in software. That political movement bore fruit when it influenced engineers at companies like Apple and Microsoft who happened to have a chance to steer the directions software was taking before lock-in made their efforts moot.

That’s why we have nice fonts and flexible design options on our screens. It wouldn’t have happened otherwise. The seemingly unstoppable mainstream momentum in the world of software engineers was pulling computing in the direction of ugly screens, but that fate was avoided before it was too late.

A similar campaign should be taking place now, influencing engineers, designers, businesspeople, and everyone else to support humanistic alternatives whenever possible. Unfortunately, however, the opposite seems to be happening.

Online culture is filled to the brim with rhetoric about what the true path to a better world ought to be, and these days it’s strongly biased toward an antihuman way of thinking.

The true nature of the internet is one of the most common topics of online discourse. It is remarkable that the internet has grown enough to contain the massive amount of commentary about its own nature.

The promotion of the latest techno-political-cultural orthodoxy, which I am criticizing, has become unceasing and pervasive. The
New York
Times
, for instance, promotes so-called open digital politics on a daily basis even though that ideal and the movement behind it are destroying the newspaper, and all other newspapers.
^*
It seems to be a case of journalistic Stockholm syndrome.

There hasn’t yet been an adequate public rendering of an alternative worldview that opposes the new orthodoxy. In order to oppose orthodoxy, I have to provide more than a few jabs. I also have to realize an alternative intellectual environment that is large enough to roam in. Someone who has been immersed in orthodoxy needs to experience a figure-ground reversal in order to gain perspective. This can’t come from encountering just a few heterodox thoughts, but only from a new encompassing architecture of interconnected thoughts that can engulf a person with a different worldview.

So, in this book, I have spun a long tale of belief in the opposites of computationalism, the noosphere, the Singularity, web 2.0, the long tail, and all the rest. I hope the volume of my contrarianism will foster an alternative mental environment, where the exciting opportunity to start creating a new digital humanism can begin.

An inevitable side effect of this project of deprogramming through immersion is that I will direct a sustained stream of negativity onto the ideas I am criticizing. Readers, be assured that the negativity eventually tapers off, and that the last few chapters are optimistic in tone.