The Information Super-Sewer
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_information_super-sewer_20100214/
Posted on Feb 15, 2010
By Chris Hedges
The Internet has become one more tool hijacked by corporate interests
to accelerate our cultural, political and economic decline. The great
promise of the Internet, to open up dialogue,
break down cultural
barriers, promote democracy and unleash innovation and creativity, has
been exposed as a scam. The Internet is dividing us into antagonistic
clans, in which we chant the same slogans and hate the same enemies,
while our creative work is handed for free to Web providers who use it
as bait for advertising.
Ask journalists, photographers, musicians, cartoonists or artists what
they think of the Web. Ask movie and film producers. Ask architects or
engineers. The Web efficiently disseminates content, but it does not
protect intellectual property rights. Writers and artists are
increasingly unable to make a living. And technical professions are
under heavy assault. Anything that can be
digitized can and is being
outsourced to countries such as India and China where wages are
miserable and benefits nonexistent. Welcome to the new global serfdom
where the only professions that pay a living wage are propaganda and
corporate management.
The Web, at the same time it is destroying creative work, is forming
anonymous crowds that vent collective rage, intolerance and bigotry.
These virtual slums do not expand communication or
dialogue. They do
not enrich our culture. They create a herd mentality in which those
who express empathy for “the enemy”—and the liberal class is as guilty
of this as the right wing—are denounced by their fellow travelers for
their impurity. Racism toward Muslims may be as evil as anti-Semitism,
but try to express this simple truth on a partisan Palestinian or
Israeli website.
Jaron Lanier, the “father of virtual reality technology,” in his new
book “You Are Not a Gadget,” warns us of this frightening new
collectivism. He notes that the habits imposed by the Internet have
reconfigured how we relate to each other. He writes that “Web 2.0,”
“Open Culture,” “Free Software” and the “Long Tail” have become
enablers of this new collectivism. He cites Wikipedia, which
consciously erases individual voices, and Google Wave as examples of
the rise of mass collective thought and mass emotions. Google Wave is
a new communication platform that permits users to edit what someone
else has said in a conversation when it is displayed as well as allow
collaborators to watch each other as they type. Privacy, honesty and
self-reflection are instantly obliterated.
Tastes and information on the Internet are determined by the crowd,
what Lanier calls the hive mentality. Music, books, journalism,
commercials and bits
of television shows and movies, along with inane
YouTube videos, are thrust onto our screens and into national
consciousness because of the statistical analysis of Internet crowd
preferences. Lanier says that one of the biggest mistakes he and other
computer scientists made when the Internet was developed was allowing
contributions to the Internet to go unpaid. He says decisions such as
this have now robbed people, especially those who create, of their
ability to make a living and ultimately the capacity for dignity.
Digital collectivism, he warns, is destroying the dwindling vestiges
of authentic creativity and innovation, including journalism, which
takes time, investment and self-reflection. And while there are a few
sites that do pay for content—Truthdig being one—the vast majority are
parasites. The only income left for most of those who create is earned
through self-promotion, but as Lanier points out this turns culture
into nothing but advertising. It fosters a social ethic in which the
capacity for crowd manipulation
is more highly valued than truth,
beauty or thought.
While the severing of intellectual property rights from their
creators, whether journalists, photographers or musicians, means that
those who create lose the capacity to make a living from their work,
aggregators such as Google make money by collecting and distributing
this work to lure advertisers. Original work on the Internet, as
Lanier points out, is “copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and
turned into bricks in someone else’s fortress to support an
advertising scheme.” Lanier warns that if this trend is not halted it
will create a “formula that leaves no way for our nation to earn a
living in the long term.”
“Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get
nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth,” Lanier
says. “The body starts consuming itself. That is what we are doing
online. As more and more human activity is aggregated, people huddle
around the last remaining oases of revenue. Musicians today might
still be able to get paid to make music for video games, for instance,
because games are still played in closed consoles and haven’t been
collectivized as yet.”
I called Lanier in San Francisco. He began by saying that he was not
against the Internet, but against how it has evolved. He has sounded
his warning, he said, because he fears that if we fall into an
economic tailspin, the Internet, like other innovative systems of mass
communication in human history, could be used to exacerbate social
enmity and lead to an American totalitarianism.
“The scenario I can see is America in some economic decline, which we
seem
determined to enter into because we are unable to make any
adjustments, and a lot of unhappy people,” Lanier said. “The
preponderance of them are in rural areas and in the red states, the
former slave states. And they are all connected and get angrier and
angrier. What exactly happens? Do they start converging on abortion
clinics? Probably. Do they start converging on legislatures and take
them over? I don’t know, maybe. I shouldn’t speak it. It is almost a
curse to imagine these things. But any intelligent person can see the
scenario I am afraid to see. There is a potential here for very bad
stuff to happen.”
And yet the utopian promoters of the Internet tell us that the hive
mind, the vast virtual
collective, will propel us toward a brave new
world. Lanier dismisses such visions as childish fantasy, one that
allows many well-intentioned people to be seduced by an evolving
nightmare.
“The crowd phenomenon exists, but the hive does not exist,” Lanier
told me. “All there is, is a crowd phenomenon, which can often be
dangerous. To a true believer, which I certainly am not, the hive is
like the baby at the end of ‘2001 Space Odyssey.’ It is a super
creature that surpasses humanity. To me it is the misinterpretation of
the old crowd phenomenon with a digital vibe. It has all the same
dangers. A crowd can turn into a mean mob all too easily, as it has
throughout human history.”
“There are some things crowds can do, such as count the jelly beans in
the jar or guess the weight of the ox,” Lanier added. “I acknowledge
this phenomenon is real. But I propose that the line between when
crowds can think effectively as a crowd and when they can’t is a
little different. If you read [James] Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of
Crowds,” he, as well as other theorists, say that if you want a crowd
to be wise the key is to reduce the communication flow between the
members so they do not influence each other, so they are truly
independent and have separate sample points. It brings up an
interesting paradox. The starting point for online crowd enthusiasts
is that connection is good and everyone should be connected. But when
they talk about what makes a crowd smart they say people should not be
talking to each other. They should be isolated. There is a
contradiction there. What makes a crowd smart is the type of question
you ask. If you ask a group of informed people to choose a single
numeric value such as the weight of an ox and they all have some
reason to have a theory that is not entirely crazy they will center on
the answer. You can get something useful. This phenomenon is what
accounts for price fitting in capitalism. This is how
markets can
function. If you ask them to create anything, if you ask them to do
something constructive or synthetic or engage in compound reasoning
then they will fail. Then you get something dull or an averaging out.
One danger of the crowd is violence, which is when they turn into a
mob. The other is dullness or mundaneness, when you design by
committee.”
Humans, like many other species, Lanier says, have a cognitive switch
that permits us to be individuals or members of a mob. Once we enter
the confines of what Lanier calls a clan, even a virtual clan, it
possesses dynamics that appeal to the basest instincts within us.
Technology evolves but human nature remains constant. The 20th century
was the bloodiest in human history because human beings married the
newly minted tools of efficient state bureaucracies and industrial
slaughter with the dark impulses that have existed since the dawn of
the human species.
“You become hypersensitive to the pecking order and to your sense of
social status,” Lanier said of these virtual clans. “There is almost
always the designated loser in your own group and the designated
external enemy. There is the enemy below and the enemy afar. There
become two classes of disenfranchised people. You enter into a
constant obligation to defend your status which is always being
contested. It is time-consuming to become a member of one of these
things. I see a lot of designs on line that bring this out. There is a
recognizable sequence, whether it is pianos, poodles or jihad; you see
people forming into these clans. It is playing with fire. There are
plenty of examples of evil in human history that did not involve this
effect, such as Jack the Ripper, who worked alone. But most of the
really bad examples of human behavior in history involve invoking this
clan dynamic. No particular sort of person is immune to it. Geeks are
no more immune to it than Germans or Russians or Japanese or
Mongolians. It is part of our nature. It can be woken up without any
leadership structure or politics. It happens. It is part of us. There
is a switch inside of us waiting to be turned. And people can learn to
manipulate the switch in others.”
“The Machine Stops,” a story published by E.M. Forster in 1909, paints
a futuristic world where people are mesmerized by virtual reality. In
Forster’s dystopia, human beings live in isolated, tiny subterranean
rooms, like hives, where they are captivated by instant messages and
cinematophoes—machines that project visual images. They cut themselves
off from the external world and are absorbed by a bizarre
pseudo-reality of voices, sounds, evanescent images and abstract
sensations that can be evoked by pressing a few buttons. The access to
the world of the Machine, which has replaced the real world with a
virtual world, is provided by an omniscient impersonal voice.
We are, as Forster understood, seduced and then often enslaved by
technology, from the combustion engine to computers to robotics. These
marvels of humankind’s ingenuity are inevitably hijacked by modern
slave masters who use the newest technologies to keep us impoverished,
confused about our identity and passive. The Internet, designed by
defense strategists to communicate after a nuclear attack, has become
the latest technological instrument in the hands of those who
are
driving us into a state of neofeudalism. Technology is morally
neutral. It serves the interests of those who control it. And those
who control it today are ravishing journalism, culture and art while
they herd the population into clans that fuel intolerance and hatred.
“A common rationalization in the fledgling world of digital cultures
back then was that we were entering a transitional lull before a
creative storm—or were already in the eye of the storm,” Lanier writes
in his book. “But we were not passing through a momentary calm. We
had, rather, entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to
believe that we will escape it only when we kill the hive.”
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