Two visitors walk through Japanese artist Hiro Yamagata's Quantum field X3 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Techno-sceptics sense that human needs are getting lost in the tech frenzy. Picture: Jose Simal Two visitors walk through Japanese artist Hiro Yamagata's Quantum field X3 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Techno-sceptics sense that human needs are getting lost in the tech frenzy. Picture: Jose Simal
Dismayed by the rise of the surveillance state, many dissenters are unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out, writes Joel Achenbach.
Astra Taylor’s iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry, and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade.
Taylor, 36, is a documentary film-maker, musician and political activist. She’s also an emerging star in the world of technology criticism. She’s not paranoid, but she keeps duct tape over the camera lens on her laptop computer – because, as everyone knows, these gadgets can be taken over by nefarious agents of all kinds.
Taylor is a 21st century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the internet as a democratising force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state”, and the near-monopolisation of digital platforms by huge corporations. Last month Taylor and more than 1 000 activists, scholars and techies gathered in New York City for a conference to talk about reinventing the internet.
They dream of a co-op model: people dealing directly with one another without having to go through a data-sucking corporate hub.
“The powerful definitely do not want us to reboot things, and they will go to great lengths to stop us from doing so, and they will use brute force or they will use bureaucracy,” Taylor warned the audience. A movement was needed, she said, “that says no to the existing order”.
The dissenters have no easy task. We’re in a new Machine Age.
Machine intelligence and digital social networks are now embedded in the basic infrastructure of the developed world. Much of this is objectively good and empowering. We tend to like our devices. We like our connectivity. We like being able to know nearly anything and everything, or shop impulsively.
But there’s this shadow narrative being written at the same time. It’s a passionate, if still remarkably disorganised, resistance to the digital establishment.
Techno-sceptics, or whatever you want to call them, sense that human needs are getting lost in the tech frenzy. They sense that there’s too much focus on making sure that innovations will be good for the machines. Of the myriad critiques of the computer culture, one of the most common is that companies are getting rich off our personal data. Our thoughts, friendships and basic urges are processed by computer algorithms and sold to advertisers.
The machines may soon know more about us than we know about ourselves.That information is valuable. A frequent jibe is that on Facebook, we’re not the customers, we’re the merchandise. Some digital dissenters aren’t focused on the economic issues, but simply on the nature of human-machine inter- actions. This is an issue we all understand intuitively: we’re constantly distracted. We walk around with our eyes cast down upon our devices. We’re rarely fully present anywhere.
Other critics are alarmed by the erosion of privacy. The Edward Snowden revelations incited widespread fear of government surveillance. That debate has been complicated by the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, because national security officials say terrorists have exploited new types of encrypted social media. Some dissenters think technology is driving economic inequality.
There are grave concerns that robots are taking the jobs of humans. And the robot issue leads inevitably to the most apocalyptic fear: that machine intelligence could run away from its human inventors, leaving us enslaved – or worse – by the machines we created. But something different is going on now, and it simply has to do with speed. The first commercial internet browser hit the market in 1994. Google arrived in 1998. Twitter appeared in 2006, and the iPhone in 2007.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is all of 31 years old. Our technology today is so new that we haven’t had time to understand how to use it wisely. We haven’t quite learnt how to stop ourselves from texting and driving. Some countries are taking aggressive action to regulate new technologies. Washington’s political establishment, however, has largely deferred to Silicon Valley.
The tech world doesn’t want more government oversight and regulations. But there’s a new voice among the dissenters: Pope Francis. The pontiff’s recent encyclical “On Care for Our Common Home” contemplates the mixed blessings of technology. After acknowledging the marvels of modern technology, Francis sketches the dangers, writing that technological development hasn’t been matched by development in human values and conscience. The pontiff is saying, with his special authority, what many others are saying these days: machines are not an end unto themselves.
Remember the humans. The dean of the digital dissenters is Jaron Lanier. He’s a musician, composer, performer and pioneer of virtual-reality headsets that allow the user to experience computer-generated 3D environments. But what he’s most famous for is his criticism of the computer culture he helped create. He feels Silicon Valley treats humans like electrical relays in a vast machine. Although he still works in technology, he largely has turned against his tribe. “I’m the first guy to sober up after a heavy-duty party” is how he describes himself. Lanier’s humanistic take on technology may trace back to his tragic childhood: he was 9 when his mother was killed in a car accident in El Paso.
He later learnt that the accident might have been caused by an engineering flaw in the car.
He made his first major move as a digital dissenter when he published an essay, “One Half a Manifesto”, that began with a bold declaration:”For the last 20 years, I have found myself on the inside of a revolution, but on the outside of its resplendent dogma. Now that the revolution has not only hit the mainstream, but bludgeoned it into submission by taking over the economy, it’s probably time for me to cry out my dissent more loudly than I have before.” Lanier later wrote two books lamenting the way everyone essentially worked for Facebook, Google, and so on, by feeding material into those central processors and turning private lives into something corporations could monetise. He’d like to see people compensated for their data in the form of micropayments.
Other tech critics have rolled their eyes at that notion, however. Taylor, for example, fears that micropayments would create an incentive for people to post click-bait material. Lanier’s broadest argument is that technological change involves choices. Bad decisions will lock us into bad systems. We collectively decided, for example, to trade our privacy for free internet service. “It’s a choice. It’s not inevitable,” he says.
Much of today’s tech environment emerged from the counterculture – the hackers and hippies of the 1960s and 1970s who viewed the personal computer as a tool of liberation. But the political left now has a more complicated, jaundiced relationship with the digital world. The same technologies that empower individuals and enable protesters to organise also make it possible for governments to spy on their citizens. What used to be a phone now looks to many people like a tracking device.
Then there’s the question of who’s making money. Progressives are appalled by the mind-boggling profits of the big tech companies. Most painful for progressives has been the rise of the “sharing economy”, which they initially embraced. They say that companies such as Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Amazon Mechanical Turk are creating a “gig economy” – one that, although it offers customers convenience and reasonable prices, is built on freelancers and contractors who lack the income or job protections of salaried employees.
But dissidents do not yet form an organised, coherent movement.
Fact is, people are participating in a system willingly – if not entirely aware of what is happening to their data.
The Washington Post
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