Infinite Lock-In, part 3

Is the belief in cybernetic totalism going mainstream? If it does, why worry?

Ones and Zeros

Jaron Lanier’s essay “One Half a Manifesto” is nearly a quarter of a century old, but the concerns he raises in it are still current. In fact, they only continue to grow more current. Living as we do on the Internet in the twenty-first century, not only have we become the victims of the cybernetic totalists’ myopia — for instance, in how we let the algorithms of social media shape our lives and direct our politics¹ — but we’ve actually begun to adopt their assumptions. We’ve begun to value bits over people.

Here’s a passage from You Are Not a Gadget in which Lanier considers the proposals of two elite technologists and takes them both to task:

Ever more extreme claims are routinely promoted in the new digital climate. Bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments. . . .

Kevin Kelly says that we don’t need authors anymore, that all the ideas of the world, all the fragments that used to be assembled into coherent books by identifiable authors, can be combined into one single, global book.² Wired editor Chris Anderson proposes that science should no longer seek theories that scientists can understand, because the digital cloud will understand them better anyway. . . .

The antihuman approach to computation is one of the most baseless ideas in human history. A computer isn’t even there unless a person experiences it. There will be a warm mass of patterned silicon with electricity coursing through it, but the bits don’t mean anything without a cultured person to interpret them.

Kelly’s notion — replacing authored books with one global book — reminds me of a scene at the grand academy of Lagado in Gulliver’s Travels. As you may recall from my critique of the transhumanist project of immortality, Gulliver is gullible, Swift’s dupe. Everything he encounters in his travels seems to promise humanity a glorious future. One professor shows Gulliver an apparatus for creating new literature, a mechanical computer with an exhaustive dictionary of words written on wooden blocks. With a turn of its handles, the computer rearranges the blocks randomly, putting the words in a new order. The professors’ pupils read the blocks and dictate any vaguely sensible phrases to a quartet of scribes. The professor tells Gulliver that

Perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge, by practical and mechanical operations. But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness; and he flattered himself, that a more noble, exalted thought never sprang in any other man’s head. Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study. . . .

Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labour; and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials, to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences . . .

Of course, this is all perfect nonsense. Monkeys at typewriters.