Are Our Smart Devices Making Us Dumber?
Smart devices have become smarter than we are. We are growing dependent on the virtual reality of social media, slaves to the machines that watch us from inside our pockets and bags.
In the 1970s, the creators of the World Wide Web made an alliance with intellectuals who wanted to believe they were part of the zeitgeist and naively contributed with their books and articles to the cause of the corporations that own the web.
Evgeny Morozov, explains in The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, that there was a mistaken belief that the providers of the internet were freedom fighters, that we and they were a collective doing things in new ways to build a new, more open society.
How wrong we were. It has taken a long time to realise that when you take a closer look at those multi-billion dollar companies, Facebook, Google, Twitter, you don’t see a freer, smarter, more progressive society, but a mirror image of Wall Street, big oil, big pharma, the Pentagon and state of the art capitalism.
While our smart devices become smarter, we become dumber. The silver, sensual, silky finished tablets and laptops that we love and can no longer live without reflect the interests and financial imperatives of the companies that make them.
The reason why like Pavlov’s dog we go back time and time again to Facebook and Tinder is because the systems have been designed to create this dependency. It is a business model, a strategy. The more clicks we click, the more LIKES we collect, the more respected and appreciated we want to believe we are. We may know deep down that this is groundless, even damaging, like drink, drugs and pumping diesel fumes into the atmosphere, but still we go back for more.
How this translates into hard cash is the vaguely obscure side of the business model. But let us not forget that, according to Forbes, Facebook is now worth $45 billion; Google has $364 billion; Tinder, a start-up in 2013, is worth $5 billion; and Apple tops the charts with $598 billion. To put this into perspective, the gross national product of Belgium is $471 billion, and Nigeria, Africa’s most densely populated country with 173 million people has a GNP of $938 billion.
Smart Devices & Addiction
The leading web providers and manufacturers of smart devices are not benign, collaborative companies, but mega-corporations making mega bucks from our clicks, flicks, likes and personal data. Like fast food chains, online blackjack and porn, social media is addictive and all addictions have consequences: our irrational dependency and the replacement of ‘deep’ thought with the ‘shallow’ thought required for distraction and undemanding entertainment.
Being constantly plugged into social media makes us feel anxious about ourselves and our friends, our place in society. We invest our energy in constant updating, which affects how we feel about ourselves and the relationship we have with our real and virtual friends that, over time, glosses into one. Facebook updates your personal phone with private telephone numbers of Facebook ‘friends’ while depositing your private number on their smart devices.
I have personally had strangers call to ask me for temporary loans to overcome fleeting problems; others to meet for an ‘innocent’ chat over coffee. As really ‘bad’ rap has come to mean really ‘good’ music, an ‘innocent’ coffee obviously carries some Orwellian intention.
Smart Devices & Start-Ups
Our personal information hovers in digital space, easily plucked, a valuable asset we give away to giant companies that in turn sell it or use it to show us what we don’t have and must need. Start-ups in Silicone Valley create problems we didn’t know we had in order to sell us the tools to create solutions.
Data is a precious commodity: your insurance company needs information on the likelihood of you falling sick; banks want to know if you can afford the mortgage or car payments. Smart new algorithms can analyse the data on your smart devices to predict your needs and, like a virtual servant, will remind you of doctor appointments, friends’ birthdays, flight check-in times.
You don’t need to think when you have smart devices thinking for you. The machine in your pocket already knows exactly where you are. New programs can turn it off and on at will and take photos without you ever knowing. This is not science fiction, it is capitalism in its purist form. As Evgeny Morozov points out, without making a political point, it was Marx who said that capitalism would eventually destroy itself.
If we accept the commercialization of our data, we are one step away from allowing the air, commercially polluted, to be commercially cleansed and sold back to us. This has already happened with that other life essential: water, with corporations freed from government restraints setting up contracts to commercialize the rainfall, as occurred in the Bolivian city Cochabamba, leading to riots that led eventually to a U-turn, the events captured in the compelling 2010 film Even The Rain, directed by Iciar Bollain.
When Shell Oil destroyed the pristine coast of Ogoniland with arbitrary petroleum dumping, the Nigerian government supported the corporation by rounding up and executing Ogoni protestors including Ken Saro Wiwa, an acclaimed novelist. For Shell Oil and General Sani Abacha, the military dictator, profit was more important than people.
The same can be said for the companies that make our smart devices, design apps, provide the internet and entice us with the non-stop entertainment of social media.
What is the answer? Some questions have no answer. It is up to you, the individual, to decide who you are beyond the confines of digital space and what you want to reveal through your shiny smart devices to the corporations that are always watching. We must, more than ever, learn to think for ourselves.
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