Читать книгу Your Choice - Christopher Peterka - Страница 11

Fast forward five hundred-odd years, and you find yourself in the dormitory of a pale American graduate at Harvard University. Here, on 4^th February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, aged 20, launches a website for his fellow students, and calls it The Facebook. The rest is proverbial history. Except that’s not quite it…

You can’t possibly credit Mark Zuckerberg with inventing the Internet, the Internet was already there and very much in use. You can’t even say he invented the social network, there were other people who had tried comparable things before, and not without success. But what Facebook—it soon lost the definitive article—did was transform the way we use social networks and, far more to the point, the way these networks use us.

There’s no doubt that Facebook brings us closer together: it turns the world into a village where you can maintain superficial contact with anyone about anything, any time. That’s the beauty of it: you don’t have to make a phone call, or write emails, or pop round to know that Ali has a new job, Ming a new boyfriend, that James and Tony have split up, and your auntie Debbie is doing well after her fall, thanks. Whether you trek to Tibet or traipse around Tuscany, we can all take part in your adventures. And that’s grand.

For many of us, who have friends and family all over the world, Facebook first, and then other sites with similar functionalities though perhaps slightly different priorities, have become the village well where you bump into people and exchange a few words, update each other, share your triumphs and disasters. Exchange tips and get the gossip. Similar on Weibo, Instagram, QQ, Foursquare, or Jiepang.

[WHAT MATTERS IS WHAT THESE TECTONIC SHIFTS DO TO US AS HUMAN BEINGS.]

There are obvious parallels between the print revolution and the digital revolution, and some less obvious ones too. And we really need to widen the scope now, from social networks to the Internet in general, and to the way we use digital devices. Because as Gutenberg did not single-handedly instigate the Reformation, so Zuckerberg is not the inventor of the Digital Age. We’re clearly using them as figures representing their era; and we take none-too-subtle advantage of the fact that their names so agreeably chime.

How their names chime with any of us may well depend on who we are and when we were born. We, the people writing this book, were both born long ago enough to have experienced a world without the Internet. Our generation is uniquely placed because after us—anyone born since the turn of the millennium, for certain—will simply not know what that was like, life offline. Even for us, it’s become hard to imagine, and we’ve been there.

So maybe our perception of someone like Zuckerberg is different to yours. And depending on where you grew up and went to school, the name Gutenberg may not have meant anything to you at all until just now. It doesn’t matter that much. What matters is what these tectonic shifts do to us as human beings.

That is one of the main questions this book asks and formulates in different ways: what does the technology we have do to us, and who do we become in the culture we create with it? Because that’s what we do with technology: we create culture. The culture that prevailed before the printing press conquered Europe was categorically different to the culture that this technology made possible. And the culture that we live in today is as categorically different to the one our parents knew. When we say ›categorical‹, we are not exaggerating. These are different categories, different dimensions, different orders of magnitude.

So the comparison between the print revolution and the digital revolution in many ways stacks up. Both ushered in new eras that made us think, talk, behave, interact, learn, teach, agitate, do business, find partners, conduct our friendships and relationships in new ways. But there are also some major differences. ›Obviously, there are differences,‹ you might say ›After all, we’re talking about two totally different types of technology, five hundred years apart.‹ Yes. And beyond these obvious differences, there are subtler, and no less important ones, too.

We say that Gutenberg’s invention marks a moment of liberation for us, the people. It’s not totally uncontroversial to say so, and there are ways of arguing that the ignorance most of us lived in before, with its simplicity enforced by circumstances, provided its own kind of unencumbered bliss. But knowledge is better than ignorance. You’re freer if you can make your own decisions about your life and choose how you want to spend your days, and with whom, than if you can’t. The print revolution facilitated this. It made people more independent, it emancipated us from the control of very strict authority. It gave us ways to express ourselves.

Has the digital revolution made us freer? This is a big question that we can’t answer in one paragraph or two, not even in one chapter or two. Clearly you can argue that it has: like printing, it has democratised knowledge and learning. Certainly it has given access to university courses, lectures, literature old and new, and brought simple day-to-day information to millions who didn’t have it before. It’s no coincidence that one major undertaking to make important texts freely available online is called Project Gutenberg.

As people will be quick to point out, the Internet has taken power out of the hands of newspaper and mass media owners and editors and given rise to blogs, independent news sites, and platforms that are known to have played their part in movements such as the Arab Spring in 2011. Twitter is often cited as an important instrument of change. If Gutenberg’s printing press made it possible for people who had never before held a book in their hands to buy one, print on demand and online platforms make it possible for anyone who feels like it to publish their thoughts, be they factual or literary. Truthful, or lies.

[HOW LONG CAN YOU GO WITHOUT CHECKING YOUR PHONE?]

None of which is new: the fact that we have fake news and propaganda, misinformation, and deceit is not the big issue, even though it is clearly an issue. The big issue is that at the same time as making us freer in many respects, the digital revolution has also made us dependent. More than dependent: addicted. It has made us literally, physically, hooked.

Think about it: how long can you go without checking your phone? You may have long since given up on Facebook, but can you do without WhatsApp or WeChat? Never even mind the specific apps: how long do you think you can function without any access to the Internet at all? Seriously?

You may ask—and we hope you do—›Why should I?‹ Because that’s exactly the point. We have become part of the network. We have plugged ourselves in, and we like it here. We may not like the idea of it much, but the pull of the network is greater than our willpower to do without.

And so we may resent the fact that Zuckerberg calls us »Dumb Fucks« for trusting him with our data, but we trust him with it anyway, because we like to know what’s happening in our circle of friends. We feel queasy about ordering everything from Amazon, but the convenience is so compelling, we do it all the same. Google? We know they mine us for what we’re worth, but really, what is the alternative? And that’s the actual question that is creeping up on us now: what is the alternative? Because it’s long gone beyond just being ›in touch‹ with what our friends are doing, or having the convenience of the toaster we ordered today arriving tomorrow. That’s brilliant, of course, but can you exist in our digital age, without the smartphone, without online banking, without being able to use the Internet, at all? Again, you may say, ›Why would I do that‹ And again it’s a fair question, but so is the question: are we still free?

There is another troubling flip side to all this: a full-on flattening of the landscape where individual, differentiated voices are increasingly hard to hear, and where few players absolutely monopolise the scene. Google. Apple. Facebook. Amazon. Tencent. Alibaba. GAFATA. Half a dozen corporate entities that control most Internet traffic. And don’t think they don’t control it: the vast majority of us use one search engine, one social network, one online store, for the vast majority of our time online, for the bulk of our purchases. And these are not just surface behaviours. Everything you do is tracked, recorded, monitored, monetised. And used against you. That’s a bit paranoid, you may think. But you’d be wrong. It’s not just targeted advertising and data mining that we are talking about here, but again the potential for—and in parts of the world systematic implementation of—the deep tech state: the Chinese Social Credit System is well underway. By the time you read these lines, its first implementation phase will be complete and fully operational.

Meanwhile, our ›time online‹ has become our time generally. Those of us born before 1980 can recall ›going on the Internet‹. We can sing you the little beep tune modems used to make. Now, we’re never offline. You may not always be looking at your device, but your device is always looking at you: it knows where you are; it tells you when there’s something happening that it thinks you should be aware of; it makes sure you are aware of it, because it wants you to check in. Yes, it may be a dead piece of kit and have no ›will‹ of its own, but it behaves as if it did, because it’s programmed to. All the apps you have on your smartphone make up its central nervous system, and that’s geared to tap into yours as directly, as continuously, and as viscerally as is technologically possible.

These corporate behemoths, how did they grow so big, so fast? By making sure you rely on them. All the time. If your smartphone is the first thing you pick up in the morning and the last thing you put down at night, that doesn’t come about by fluke. Or by astonishing good fortune on the part of the smartphone manufacturers and app developers. It happens by design.

So if you feel addicted to your phone, that’s because you are. You are systematically being hooked to your apps because that’s where revenues come from. It’s not a conspiracy and it’s not a devilish plan by a megalomaniac mastermind, it’s pure commercial imperative: the more time you spend with your phone, the more you are exposed to advertising; the more you interact with your apps, the more information you impart; the more you share, the more accurately your profile can and will be calibrated. And by now, even GAFATA—just like a really good drug dealer—is looking after you, supports you in a managed, stable, and therefore sustainable addiction. With screen time analyses, mindfulness apps, and the occasional reminder to take a deep breath. It’s kind, it’s caring. And it’s also insidious.

And when we say that you’re addicted, this is not a metaphor: you are literally being drugged on your own dopamine. Every time you receive a news item, an update, a new video clip or picture, your pleasure sensors are activated and you release a tiny bit of intoxicating substance into your system. The reason you can’t put down your phone at night is that it’s physically enjoyable to use it. Not because of its haptic qualities—no matter how smooth the casing—but because the apps stimulate your brain into producing hormones that feel nice. True: we’re simplifying things a little here. The neuro-chemical processes are a tad more complex than we make them sound here for ease of use. The principle though is correct: our smartphones are physically, physiologically addictive, because they are designed to be.