-
Tools for Conviviality?
RSA Journal, 20 December 2011
The seventies, a grim, strife-torn and now much derided decade, is in urgent need of reassessment. Once we get beyond the bloated trade union, bosses, the hyper-inflation, the ineffectual politicians, the violence, the bleakness, something much more interesting emerges – the first tentative sketches of the world in which we now live.
In September 1970 a 3000-word essay by Milton Friedman appeared in the New York Times Magazine. It was a very cleverly structured attack on the idea of the “social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system.” Business men who argue for such responsibilites are, says Friedman, preaching “pure and unadulterated socialism” and they are “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”
In 1973 Ivan Ilich published Tools for Conviviality, an attack on the way elite groups were creating economic growth at the expense of human flourishing. Also in 1973, Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society which forecast – and advocated – a move to a service and information economy. And, finally, in 1975 Steve Jobs started going to meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in a garage in Menlo Park, California, or at the nearby Oasis Bar and Grill.
Friedman’s amoral company whose sole purpose was to use every possible legal means to reward its shareholders was the, in retrospect, surprisingly exotic and dangerous concept that was to dominate most of the next four decades. Bell’s thesis feels obvious if quaint now that everybody is yearning for a return to industrial productivity. Illich is due for a rebirth now that left wing philosophers like Jean-Claude Michea – as well as quite a few right-wing commentators like Charles Moore, Peter Oborne and Dominic Sandbrook – are questioning the validity of the Friedmanite settlement if not capitalism in general. But Jobs in that garage is the image that really leaps across the decades. What did he want to make and why?
Of course, we now know the answers to the first of those questions – iMacs, iPods, iPhones and iPads – but his early death at the age of 56 has denied us an introspective old age that may have answered the second. If psychology is unavailable, however, context certainly is and it is that seventies context, in which what we make and why was being so intently discussed, from which sprang Jobs and the defining industries of our time.
But Jobs in that garage is the image that really leaps across the decades. What did he want to make and why?
The social and political ncontext of the garage was hippie or, perhaps yippie. Hippie defines the lotus-eaters of Woodstock; yippie the more aggressive political types who emerged after the disruption of the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. Yippies wanted to “stick it to the Man”, the Man being the government, the corporations, or simply “the System”, a term which embraced all manifestations of oppression. To a group of people wishing to bring computing to the masses, both the Man and the System were IBM, a monopoly that saw computers as big, expensive, few in number and all made and programmed by IBM.
(This is not to say that Jobs was a hippie, a yippie or any other denomination, only that his ambitions at the time – like all ambitions at all times – were defined by the rhetoric by which he was surrounded. Jobs was all about what might be described as narcissistic auto-marketing; he was the ultimate user of all he produced and, it was said, the only market research he ever did was in a mirror. It is this self-identification with his customers and his social and political climate that makes him such an important and effective figure.)
Sticking it to IBM involved making cheap(ish) personal computers which is what, in 1976, Apple, the company founded on April 1st by Jobs and Steve Wozniak, proceeded to do. As Microsoft, founded a year earlier, was also about to undermine the grip of IBM by seizing control of the operating system, ‘it’ was about to be well and truly stuck to The Man.
All of which is to say that many of the products which we now crave to connect, entertain and embrace us originated in a politically dissident, anti-establishment culture. That culture was one in which the nature of capitalism was being hotly debated, the twin poles of the debate being Friedman’s amoral company and Illich’s tools for conviviality.
Scroll forward forty-five years we can see that Friedman triumphed until 2008 when corporate amorality – particularly among the banks – was exposed as immorality. This has led to a revival of the seventies debate about the nature of capitalism.
Meanwhile, the Menlo Park garage has become Apple’s Cupertino campus, the home of a $300 billion company. Not far away is the ‘Googleplex’ of Google, a $200 billion company. Up in Seattle is Amazon, a $100 billion company and, back in Silicon Valley, there is Facebook worth perhaps $50 billion. The ‘alternative culture’ which aspired to a global communality of peace and love now rules corporate America. The yippies have become The Man.
Their products are now as seductive to us all as were those first personal computers to the geeks of the mid-seventies. They are, overwhelmingly, made in China and, especially in the case of Apple’s, they are designed with a breathtaking refinement so potent that they have created a new category of product porn. Videos on YouTube show Apple products being ‘unboxed’, a striptease show intended, I assume, to reconnect the viewer with the first dopamine rush of purchase. One of Jobs’s most brilliant auto-marketing coups was the creation of a product delirium which cause new devices to be reported on the TV news and inspired people to queue overnight outside Apple stores. Jobs, the ultimate user, partook of this delirium – he liked to describe Apple gadgets as “insanely great”.
The ‘alternative culture’ which aspired to a global communality of peace and love now rules corporate America. The yippies have become The Man.
This delirium – not just for Apple’s devices but also for all the other smartphones and computers as well as internet services like those provided by online retailers like Amazon and social network sites like Facebook – is more significant than it may at first seem. It is a symptom of the fact that these are truly unprecedented products. The buyers expect them to change their lives, all of their lives, and the sellers expect them freely to give them these lives so that they may profit from the information through advertising and marketing.
On the face of it, these gadgets of connectivity represent the ‘tools for conviviality’ of which Illich dreamed and the realisation of the yippie programme to put the highest possible technology in the hands of the masses. Idealistic, even utopian claims have been made for the efficacy.
Clay Shirky, perhaps the most prominent spokesman for the internet generation, speaks of the ‘epochal’ transfer of powers from ‘various professional classes to the general public’. What had once been an audience has become ‘a mass of pro- tagonists’. ‘We now have,’ he writes, ‘communication tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities’.
‘We are living,’ he writes elsewhere, ‘in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.’
In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki showed that the crowd could be cleverer than the experts so the assembled crowd of the internet should be capable of finding new solutions to old problems. The publisher Tim O’Reilly has spoken of the internet as providing “an architecture of participation”. During the failed Green Revolution in Iran in 2009-2010, it was widely claimed that Twitter in particular and the internet in general had been decisive in undermining the regime by spreading information and images of its brutality around the world.
Then there is the ever quotable imperiousness of Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google. Schmidt is the most provocative of the internet prophets in his insistence, first, on the inevitable ubiquity of the new machines – children in the future, he says, will have only two states “asleep or online” - secondly, on their moral stature – “computers make us better humans” – and, finally, on their authority – “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
Then there is the Arab Spring. After Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, was harassed and humiliated by the police, he set fire to himself in protest and, eighteen days later, he died. Thanks to the internet, Bouazizi’s self-immolation set the whole region on fire. The Tunisian and Egyptian governments both fell, Bahraini leaders clung on thanks to massive concessions to the protesters and Libya and Syria became the latest territory to be subjected to the human penchant for massacres. Young, technologically adept people were on the front line.
Thanks to satellite TV, they saw different ways of life in other countries, they imagined change in their own and, using the internet and mobile phones, they organised. Facebook and Twitter were the tools of revolution – grateful Egyptians started to name their children Facebook. A Google executive, Wael Ghonim, emerged from eleven days of police detention to become both a hero and a leader of the revolt. In Libya, an internet shutdown was subverted by protesters who crossed the border into Egypt bearing flash drives from which they uploaded videos of state brutality. This, surely, was dramatic evidence that the crowd, democratic and wise, had been empowered and these new gadgets were far more than toys or labour-saving devices.
This wave of cyber-boosterism – involving, as it does, prophecies of peace and, if not love, then at least absolute global connectivity – is, at one level, an echo of the hippie/yippie dreams of the sixties and seventies. That, after all, is the generation which has been in charge during the development of the internet and which has, as a result, constructed the new commanding heights of the world economy. But, in constructing those heights, the generation has been subjected to the new pressure of shareholder value. Much of the boosterism has to be seen as gadget advertising and a necessary adjunct to the system which combines American technology and design with Chinese productivity..
Over the last couple of years a counter-wave of scepticism has emerged. In his book The Net Delusion, for example, Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born scholar, pours well-researched scorn on the political claims of the boosters. Tyrants, he points out, quickly learn how to use the internet and, a further twist, he suggests net revolutionaries had better make sure they win – internet and mobile communications are written in ink, not pencil, and the identities of their opponents will easily be traced by an oppressive regime.
MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has questioned the way the gadget makers feel justified in taking over the lives of our children. She provides chilling evidence of children for whom connectivity has become a new form of anomie and even, paradoxically, intense loneliness.
Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble has pointed out that the internet is no longer the window on the world we thought it was. it has become a mirror. Increased personalisation of searches means that we get Google results that are increasingly tuned to our known preoccupations. As a result, the more we search, the less we learn.
From writer Nicholas Carr – and many others – comes the anxiety that these machines are changing the way we think, shortening our attention spans and making us incapable of prolonged contemplation. This is accompanied by suggestions – notably from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield – that they are indeed altering the structure of the human brain.
But the most fundamental critique of the direction being taken by the new technologies comes from a Silicon Valley apostate. Jaron Lanier was one of the creators of artificial reality, but, in 2006, he lost his faith. Far from freeing the world by letting a billion flowers bloom, he said the internet was creating a “hive mind”, not a thoughtful mass of independent individuals but a blind collective driven by a desire to extirpate the human and hand all power to the internet. He accuses the internet prophets of “digital Maoism.”
Lanier identified this process in the increasing number of ‘meta’ sites – Google, Wikipedia, news and blog aggregators Digg and Reddit, which aggregate from other aggregators, and, most notably, popurls.com, the supreme meta- site. ‘We now are reading,’ writes Lanier with wry dismay, ‘what a collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algo rithms derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously.’
In addition, says Lanier – in his 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget – the internet was destroying the creative middle class. By forcing down prices of music, books and newspapers, big cyber- suppliers like Apple and Amazon were throwing people out of work and, ultimately, casting a shadow of doubt over the future of the very things they were selling.
But the core of Lanier’s critique raises a much more profound question about our relationships with these new products. He evokes the Turing Test, a thought experiment developed by the mathematician Alan Turing. Put simply, if we cannot tell whether we are talking to a machine or a human, then we must credit the machine with intelligence. The assumption is that machines will eventually pass because they have become smarter. But, Lanier says, they might also pass because humans have become dumber - after all, ‘People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.’
My own thought here coincides with Lanier’s. It first struck me while struggling with a ‘call tree’ – those corporate answering machines that keep offering you ‘options’ and assuring you that ‘your call is important to us’ – that the machine was actively engaged in a project to simplify me, to make me machine readable. If I had been talking to a human, a whole series of subtle signals would have been exchanged between us. But the machine only wanted a few signals, each carefully devised to fit me into one of its files. To play the game, I did indeed have to degrade myself to make the machine seem smart.
‘People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.’
Once you notice this, you see it everywhere – in banks, shops, airports and so on – and you also notice that it has changed the few humans you do encounter. They are no longer free agents, they are computer peripherals who are simply there to plug the gaps in the software.
Perhaps the most extreme way in which these gadgets are adapting us to their purposes is through the theft of our identities. Facebook is now famous for its ability to seduce users into disclosing personal information and then making it extraordinarily difficult to prevent these intimate details being used and disseminated. Google does the same thing, though less noticeably, and the move to ‘cloud computing’ – the storage of information in remote server farms – will accelerate and intensify this process. These information stores are now worth billions, if not trillions. One company is now said to have 1500 data points on 97 per cent of the population of the United States. This is all being done in the name of selling through highly targeted advertising and marketing. But the information is also being used by political parties and, soon enough, it will be used for social control of one form or another.
The gadgets we now make and use are, in other words, far from being the innocent consumer ‘offers’ of the past. They are intended to be highly manipulative and to control as much of our attention and time as possible. They aim to be, in one of the buzz words of the new media industries, maximally ‘immersive’. Their ultimate commercial and potentially political purpose is the creation of a surveillance society on a scale that would have glazed over the eyes of George Orwell.
Do we – will we – care? Or should we? There is a perfectly respectable argument, put by Shirky and many others, that connectivity offers a higher form of human life, one that involves wider sympathies and fewer conflicts. In its most extreme form this becomes a utopian faith in The Singularity, the moment – which will, according to Ray Kurzweil, occur around 2045 – when our technologies converge and we build our last machine, a super-intelligent computer that will solve all our problems and take us into the post- or trans- human realm. In this version of the future what we are, in fact, manufacturing is our future selves.
The Singularity is, of course, an absurd sci-fi fantasy based on an excessive faith in the direction and pace of technological innovation and an ignorance of history. But the broad movement towards our deep involvement with our ever more intimate and demanding gadgets is well under way. How we engage with this is the problem. There has been some talk of ‘cyber-ethics’ and a few technologists have begun to express some doubts about the nature and impact of their designs. For example, Patti Maes, an MIT coimputer scientist, has called for gadget designers to take on the ethical issues of their devices.
‘As designers of tools and products,’ she says, ‘and technologies we should think more about these issues.’
But ethical concerns would not have stopped people smoking, only the threat of death did that and, dubious mobile phone stories apart, nobody has yet shown that these new devices cause cancer – though they are certainly at least as addictive as cigarettes. In the end the best hope is that we can, once again, stick it to The Man by deciding that it is in our best interests to live with machines as servants and not masters, to retain our sense of self and society in spite of the tidal wave of connectivity and information theft. Then we can indeed claim to have built tools of conviviality and the strife of the seventies will not have been entirely in vain.
Leave a Reply
- For Marie Colvin
- Caption Contest 1
- The Crowds at Abbey Road
- Fox Talbot’s Dream Square
- Fred the Shred’s Head is not the Answer
- Smart Yeast Points to the Apocalypse
- Borgen: The Snowstorm Paperweight
- Debt is Gambling
- Dealing with the Dawks
- Littlejohn WAS Right
- Rupert Sheldrake’s Alternative Science
- A Capital Fellow: John Lanchester
- Tom Morris and the Death of Klinghoffer
- Daldry’s 9/11
- Richard Sennett’s Togetherness
- 4Chan and Anonymous
- Geoff Dyer: The Hatchet Man
- The Prince and the Canaletto
- Chad Harbach and the Yips
- Netflix’s Elephants
