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These unfortunate designs are more oriented toward treating people as relays in a global brain. Deemphasizing personhood, and the intrinsic value of an individual’s unique internal experience and creativity, leads to all sorts of maladies, many of which are explored in these pages.
These unfortunate designs are more oriented toward treating people as relays in a global brain. Deemphasizing personhood, and the intrinsic value of an individual’s unique internal experience and creativity, leads to all sorts of maladies, many of which are explored in these pages.
Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction.
Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomenon that towers above individuals. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.
Who would have guessed (at least at first) that millions of people would put so much effort into a project without the presence of advertising, commercial motive, threat of punishment, charismatic figures, identity politics, exploitation of the fear of death, or any of the other classic motivators of mankind.
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.
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.
If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?
I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.
you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.*
It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments.
Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavor of personhood.
If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive.
The mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is what drives many technologists to reject the notion of quality. They want to live in an airtight reality that resembles an idealized computer program, in which everything is understood and there are no fundamental mysteries.
Unfortunately, history tells us that collectivist ideals can mushroom into large-scale social disasters. The fascias and communes of the past started out with small numbers of idealistic revolutionaries. I am afraid we might be setting ourselves up for a reprise. The recipe that led to social catastrophe in the past was economic humiliation combined with collectivist ideology. We already have the ideology in its new digital packaging, and it’s entirely possible we could face dangerously traumatic economic shocks in the coming decades.
Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.
human creativity and understanding, especially one’s own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the crowd, in the big n, in the algorithms that remove the risks of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any mere person to understand.
I long to be shocked and made obsolete by new generations of digital culture, but instead I am being tortured by repetition and boredom.
What makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion.
If you grind any information structure up too finely, you can lose the connections of the parts to their local contexts as experienced by the humans who originated them, rendering the structure itself meaningless.
People can make themselves believe in all sorts of fictitious beings, but when those beings are perceived as inhabiting the software tools through which we live our lives, we have to change ourselves in unfortunate ways in order to support our fantasies. We make ourselves dull.
If the computing clouds became effectively infinite, there would be a hypothetical danger that all possible interpolations of all possible words—novels, songs, and facial expressions—will cohabit a Borges-like infinite Wikipedia in the ether. Should that come about, all words would become meaningless, and all meaningful expression would become impossible. But, of course, the cloud will never be infinite.
Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.
At these companies one finds rooms full of MIT PhD engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks.
At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication appears to lie a playhouse in which humankind regresses to nursery school.
It can be hard to understand or connect with other people, even in the best of circumstances: that’s the human condition. Any little bit of awareness across the mysterious interpersonal chasms that separate you from another person is a triumph,
You can’t reasonably expect to arrange for that magic moment when everyone and everything in your life can get out of the dominant social network at the same time. To get out, you therefore must sever part of your life. So if you get in deep enough, you get trapped. Stop calling yourself a user. You are being used.
