READINGS
[Manifesto]
THE SERFDOM OF CROWDS By Jaron Lanier, from You Are Not a Gadget, published in January by Knopf. Lanier, a computer scientist, popularized the term “virtual reality.” His “Moving Beyond Muzak” was published in the March 1998 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
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he central faith embedded in Web technologies whereby users not only consume information but widely generate it is the idea that the Internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature. The designs guided by this perverse kind of faith leave people in the shadows. Computers will soon get so big and fast, and the Internet so rich with information, that people will be obsolete, either left behind like the characters in Rapture novels or subsumed into some cybersuperhuman something. Silicon Valley culture has taken to enshrining this vague idea and spreading it the only way technologists can: in the design of software. If you believe the distinction between the roles of people and of computers is starting to dissolve, you might express that—as some friends of mine at Microsoft once did—by designing features for a word processor that are supposed to know what you want—for example, when you want to start an outline within your document. You might
have had the experience of Microsoft Word suddenly determining, at the wrong moment, that you are creating an indented outline. The real function of this feature isn’t to make life easier for you. Instead, it promotes a new philosophy: that the computer is evolving into a life-form that can understand people better than people can understand themselves. If you believe this, then working for the benefit of the computing cloud over that of the individual puts you on the side of the angels. People degrade themselves all the time in order to make machines seem smart. Before the 2008 stock-market crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before the bank makes bad loans; we ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’s bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology good, but every manifestation of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic artificial intelligence projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? The fragments of human effort that have flooded the Internet are perceived by some to form a hive mind or noosphere—terms used to describe what is thought to be a new superintelligence. A significant number of AI enthusiasts, after a protracted period of failed experiments in
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tasks like understanding natural language, eventually found consolation in the hive mind, which yields better results because there are real people behind the curtain. Wikipedia, for instance, works through what I call the “oracle illusion,” in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. From an engineering point of view, the difference between a social-networking site and the Web as it existed before such sites is a small detail. You could always create a list of links to your friends on your website, and you could always send emails to a circle of friends announcing whatever you cared to. All the social-networking services offer is a prod to use the Web in a particular way, according to a particular philosophy. If you read something written by someone who used the term “single” in a custom-composed, unique sentence, you will inevitably get a first whiff of the subtle experience of the author, something you would not get from a multiple-choice database. The benefits of semi-automated selfpresentation are illusory. Enlightened designers leave open the possibility of metaphysical specialness either in humans or in the potential for unforeseen creative processes that we can’t yet capture in software systems. That kind of modesty is the signature quality of being human-centered. An individual who is receiving a flow of reports about the romantic status of a group of friends must learn to think in terms of the flow if it is to be perceived as worth reading at all. Am I accusing all those hundreds of millions of users of social-networking sites of reducing themselves in order to be able to use the services? Well, yes, I am. I know quite a few people, most of them young adults, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook. Obviously, their statements can be true only if the idea of friendship is diminished.
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he wave of financial calamities that took place in 2008 was cloud-based. No one in the pre–digital-cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to himself in the way we routinely are able to now. The limitations of organic human memory and calculation put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion. In finance, the rise of computer-assisted hedge funds and similar operations has turned capitalism into a search engine. You tend the engine in the computing cloud, and it searches for money. In the past, an investor had to be able to understand at least something about what an investment would actually accomplish. No longer. There
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are now so many layers of abstraction between the elite investor and actual events that he no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of his investments. True believers in the hive mind seem to think that no number of layers of abstraction in a financial system can dull the system’s efficacy. The crowd works for free, and statistical algorithms supposedly take the risk out of making bets if you are a lord of the cloud. But who is that lord who owns the cloud that connects the crowd? Not just anybody. A lucky few (for luck is all that can possibly be involved) will ow n it. Entitlement has achieved its singularity and become infinite.
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he Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order. In each case, human creativity and understanding, especially one’s own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the crowd, in the algorithms that remove the risks of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any mere person to understand. A hedge-fund manager might make money by using the computational power of the cloud to create fantastical financial instruments that make bets on derivatives in such a way as to invent the phony virtual collateral for stupendous risks. This is a subtle form of counterfeiting, and it is precisely the same maneuver a socially competitive teenager makes in accumulating fantastical numbers of “friends” through a service like Facebook. But let’s suppose you disagree that the idea of friendship is being reduced. Even then one must remember that the customers of social networks are not the members of those networks. The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear in any significant way. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the cloud lords to lure hypothetical advertisers —we might call them messianic advertisers —who could someday show up. The hope of a thousand Silicon Valley startups is that firms like Facebook are capturing extremely valuable information called the “social graph.” Using this information, an advertiser might be able to target all the members of a peer group just as they are forming their habits, opinions about brands, and so on. Peer pressure is the great power behind adolescent behavior, goes the reasoning, and adolescent choices become life choices. So if someone could crack the mystery of how to make perfect ads using the social graph, an advertiser would be able to design peer-pressure biases in a population of real people who would then be primed
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COURTESY THE ARTIST AND FREY NORRIS GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO
Lecture on Prolonging the Interim, a watercolor with collage by Mary Anne Kluth, whose work was on exhibit last fall at Frey Norris Gallery, in San Francisco.
to buy whatever the advertiser is selling for their whole lives. The situation with social networks is layered with multiple absurdities. The advertising idea hasn’t made any money so far, because ad dollars appear to be better spent on search-specific placements and on relevant Web pages. If the revenue never appears, then a weird imposition of a database-as-reality ideology will have colored generations of teen peer group and romantic experiences for no business or other purpose. If, on the other hand, the revenue does appear, evidence suggests that its impact will be negative. When Facebook has attempted to turn the social graph into a profit center in the past, it has created ethical disasters. A famous example was 2007’s Beacon. This was a suddenly imposed feature that was hard to opt out of. When a Facebook user made an online purchase from a variety of participating retailers, the event was broadcast to his friends. The
motivation was to find a way to package peer pressure as a service that could be sold to advertisers. But it meant that, for example, there was no longer a way to buy a surprise birthday present. The commercial lives of Facebook users were no longer their own. Personal reductionism has always been present in information systems. You have to declare your status in reductive ways when you file a tax return. Most people are aware of the difference between reality and database entries when they file taxes, yet you perform the same kind of self-reduction in order to create a profile on a social-networking site. You fill in the data: profession, relationship status, and location. In this case digital reduction becomes a causal element, mediating between new friends with whom most information is exchanged online. That is new. It might at first seem that the experience of youth is now sharply divided between the old world of school and parents and the new world of
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social networking on the Internet, but actually school now belongs on the new side of the ledger. Education [Poem] has gone through a parallel transformation, and for similar reasons. Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepreBy G. C. Waldrep. Published in 2009 in the New England Review. sents reality. Demand more from information than it That was the spring the bees disappeared, we didn’t know can give and you end up where they went, where they’d gone, where they were going, it was a with monstrous designs. rapture of the bees, only the weak, the young, the freshly dead Under the No Child Left left behind, a rapture of bees, my neighbor with the ducks had begun to walk Behind Act of 2002, for exlike a duck, Follow follow follow Sam he sang as he walked, and they followed, ample, U.S. teachers are it was that simple, of course I thought of the Piper, although forced to choose between this procession was more benign, my neighbor’s I mean, though he intended teaching general knowledge to have each for dinner, eventually, and he did not name them, and “teaching the test.” The best teachers are thereby as we don’t name bees, because we don’t see clearly enough often disenfranchised by to distinguish them as persons, person in the grammatical sense, first second the improper use of educaor third, which is why we refer to them in the collective, usually, tional-information systems. they breed, they swarm, they milk their honey for us W hat computer i zed in the collective, and they vanish collectively, is this then the true analysis of all the country’s rapture, was the one true God after all a god of bees, and now she is taking school tests has done to them home, is this any more comforting than all the other proposed explanations, education is exactly what pesticide, fungus, mites, electromagnetism, even the infrasound the giant Facebook has done to windmills make, that sends the bats and raptors friendships. In both cases, to their deaths, all invention gone awry, hive after hive life is turned into a datasuddenly empty, as if they’d all flown out less than purposefully, casually, base. Both degradations and somehow forgotten to come back, held up at the doctor’s or the U-Haul are based on the same dealer’s, swarms of them, hundreds, thousands vagabond philosophical mistake, in some other landscape, or rising, we shall meet them in the air, which is the belief that at the post office to mail a letter to a woman who might or might not be my love computers can presently represent human thought because a rate change had caught me with insufficient postage or human relationships. I had to wait, the clerk was preoccupied with a sort of crate These are things computmade of wire mesh, through which I could see bees, Resistant the clerk said ers cannot currently do. as she filled out the forms and sent them, registered parcel post, somewhere Whether one expects comelse, only then did she sell me the stamp I needed, puters to improve in the future is a different issue. In a less idealistic atmosphere it would go without saying that software should be designed only to perform tasks that can be sphere. At the end of the rainbow of open culsuccessfully carried out at a given time. That is ture lies an eternal spring of advertisements. not the atmosphere in which Internet software Advertising is elevated by open culture from is designed, however. When technologists deits previous role as an accelerant and placed at ploy a computer model of something like learnthe center of the human universe. Advertising ing or friendship in a way that has an effect on is now singled out as the only form of expresreal lives, they are relying on faith. When they sion meriting genuine commercial protection ask people to live their lives through their in the new world to come. Any other form of models, they are potentially reducing expression is to be remashed, anonymized, and life itself. decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness. Ads, however, are to be made ever more here is, unfortunately, only one entity contextual, and the content of the ad is absothat can maintain its value as everything else lutely sacrosanct. No one dares to mash up ads is devalued under the banner of the nooserved in the margins of their website by
THEIR FACES SHALL BE AS FLAMES
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whitening of yellow teeth, and the search for a lover. All that paid persuasion or thought I needed, or hoped to need (there is a season ought to be mooted. Every penny Google earns sugwhen one hopes to need), and I thought about what it would be like gests a failure of the to mail a crate of bees, Resistant, to my love, if I had a love, and have them crowd—and Google is vanish en route, the mesh crate arriving dusty, empty, one or two earning a lot of pennies. broken, desiccated bodies rattling lightly around inside, like seeds in a gourd, If you want to know or like a child you’ll never have, that is, the possibility of that child, the rattling what’s really going on in a blood of it, a different sort of vanishing, we would all like to believe society or ideology, follow in the act, that Houdini was a man, only a man, as he proved in the moment the money. If money is and by the precise circumstance of his death, and the fact of his body, flowing to advertising inlifeless but extant, rattling around the arcade, the park, the amusement pier stead of to musicians, jourof disturbing coincidences, while in Missouri another hobbyist beekeeper nalists, and artists, then a walks out to her tomblike hives on a spring morning society is more concerned to find nothing there, just boxes, empty boxes, a sort of game with manipulation than a child might invent, this rapture, same sort of funny story with truth or beauty. If a child will invent, when shown a photograph, This is the policeman, content is worthless, then and this is the woman with two heads, and this, which looks like a modest people will start to become empty-headed and contentred house in a suburb, this is really the ghost of the bees, less. The combination of a small ghost, a modest ghost, like the ghosts of the locusts and the elms, hive mind and advertising not a ghost to trouble us, until (in the photograph) the house spreads its wings has resulted in a new kind and vanishes, as houses do, or as houses will when the rapture extends of social contract. The bato architecture, the god of small houses having, first, existed, and then wed sic idea of this contract is the bee god, so that we are left sleeping alone again, and out of doors, in spring, that authors, journalists, as one more source of sweetness is subtracted from this world musicians, and artists are and added to another, perhaps, as we would like to think, one of the encouraged to treat the more comforting ideas, a sort of economics, a grand fruits of their intellects and accounting, until what angel of houses or of bees blows what trumpet, imaginations as fragments and we fall as mountains upon the insects, devour them as seas, to be given without pay scorch the houses as with fire, we become the ground that hollows beneath to the hive mind. Reciprocthem and the air they fly through, their wormwood star, as all the bees of heaven ity takes the form of selfwatch from heaven and all the houses of heaven lean down promotion. Culture is to for a closer look, and the smoke drifts upward, and we are the smoke, we are become precisely nothing but advertising. only the smoke, inside of which my neighbor walks, with his ducks, and sings, At the time the Web and they follow, and my hive lazes, drowses as if they or it were dreaming was born, in the early us, as if they or us were touchable, simple as a story, an explanation, 1990s, a popular trope was any fiction, as if they thought of us, or were praying, or were dancing, that a new generation of or were lonely, as if they could be, or would be touched. teenagers, reared in the conservative Reagan years, had turned out to be exceptionally bland. The members of “Generation Google. The centrality of advertising to the X” were characterized as blank and inert. The new digital hive economy is absurd, and it is anthropologist Steve Barnett saw in them the even more absurd that this isn’t more widely phenomenon of pattern exhaustion, in which recognized. The most tiresome claim of the a culture runs out of variations of traditional reigning digital philosophy is that crowds designs in their pottery and becomes less creworking for free do a better job at some things ative. A common rationalization in the fledgthan antediluvian paid experts. Wikipedia is ling world of digital culture back then was often given as an example. If that is so, why that we were entering a transitional lull before doesn’t the principle dissolve the persistence a creative storm—or were already in the eye of advertising as a business? of one. But we were not passing through a A functioning, honest crowd-wisdom system momentary calm. We had, rather, entered a ought to trump paid persuasion. If the crowd is persistent somnolence, and I have come to so wise, it should be directing each person optibelieve that we will escape it only when we mally in choices related to home finance, the kill the hive.
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