Infinite Lock-In, part 10

Why worry about lock-in here and now? How is it affecting relationships and politics?

Previously, citing Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, I introduced the idea of lock-in, and then I spelled out its significance to the world of Quibble. I described how the Singular — the forebears of Ones — chose to go Within, abandoning qualities of a worthwhile life in a grab for the stars. I hinted at how the myopia of the Infinite — the tech overlords who designed a scheme for transhuman transcendence and sold it to the Singular — foreclosed the possibility of freedom for the Ones.¹ And I brought a few threads together to pinpoint what’s wrong with anyone — scientists, futurists, technologists, entrepreneurs, whoever — “null-hypothesizing” answers to questions not in their purview as they chart our path towards the future’s technologies.

I don’t believe I’ve taken anything away from the experience of Quibble by revealing its technological back story. I hope I haven’t. I’m going on faith that what makes the novel worth reading doesn’t hang on just one mystery.

The Brittle Now

I’d like to bring the argument back down to earth and remind you of what’s at stake, here and now. I think the best way to start is quoting Lanier again. First, let’s recall the primary problem he identifies with lock-in:

Lock-in removes ideas that do not fit into the winning digital representation scheme, but it also reduces or narrows the ideas it immortalizes, by cutting away the unfathomable penumbra of meaning that distinguishes a word in natural language from a command in a computer program.²

This isn’t just about the future. Lanier claims lock-in is harming our lives right now: “What happened to musical notes with the arrival of MIDI is happening to people.” He offers the example of our lives on social media:

The most effective young Facebook users [or users of any social media] ... tend their doppelgängers fastidiously. They must manage offhand remarks and track candid snapshots at parties as carefully as a politician. Insincerity is rewarded, while sincerity creates a lifelong taint. Certainly, some version of this principle existed in the lives of teenagers before the web came along, but not with such unyielding, clinical precision.

The frenetic energy of the original flowering of the web has reappeared in a new generation, but there is a new brittleness to the types of connections people make online. This is a side effect of the illusion that digital representations can capture much about actual human relationships.

The binary character at the core of software engineering tends to reappear at higher levels... What is communicated between people eventually becomes their truth. Relationships take on the troubles of software engineering.

Anyone who’s been unceremoniously blocked or unfriended online over reasonable discussion or benign behavior knows on a gut level what Lanier means.

In part 1, I alluded to social media algorithms’ power to shape our lives and direct our politics. I said it exemplifies how we’ve become the victims of the cybernetic totalists’ myopia. You likely thought of the information silos and bubbles of opinion we’re all living in now, but I also meant the “new brittleness to the types of connections people make online.” If you’ve noticed how people are now self-sorting into even deeper silos and bubbles — conservatives et al on X, liberals et al on Bluesky³ — you’ve seen this brittleness in action on a large scale.

Remember, Lanier published Gadget in 2010. Social media was still rather young. AI was nowhere in sight. Troll farms and disinformation campaigns weren’t even a speck in our eye. The brittleness of online connection has only gotten worse since 2010, as we’ve acquiesced to “the new normal” and, in some quarters, guardrails of moderation have been pared back or taken down altogether.⁴

We used to call the web the Information Superhighway. Now, there’s a lot of suspect “information,” which seems to travel faster than the truth. There’s a lot of road rage, too. The two problems appear to be feeding each other.

Nowadays, two familiar types of digital citizen exemplify brittleness. These two types are so familiar, in fact, that we have derogatory slang for them.

First, there are “snowflakes.” Entitled, egotistical, and easily offended, these folks are so convinced they’re right that they can’t tolerate viewpoints which differ from their own. They fly off the handle at the least provocation. Indeed, they seem to be looking for the chance to lose their tempers.

And then we have “edgelords,” provocateurs angling for dominance in the attention economy. These folks publish the most extreme opinions and the most inflammatory rhetoric they can think up. They’re out to shock people in order to trigger reactions and boost their own signal, and as long as that purpose is served, they don’t care how much they fray the Internet’s social fabric.

Snowflakes are ruled by their emotions and usually ignorant of it. Edgelords are very intentionally taking advantage of that. If it doesn’t matter much to snowflakes what they appear to be arguing for, just as long as they have something — or someone — to argue loudly and self-righteously against, neither does it matter much to edgelords which positions they take or how untenable the positions may be, just as long as they piss off snowflakes, whose reactions guarantee they’ll get all the attention they want. Edgelords are predators, and snowflakes are their natural prey.

But what really exemplifies brittleness is the combination of snowflake and edgelord in the same person.