The
Information Super-Sewer: The Great Promise Of The Internet
Exposed As A Scam
18 February 2010By 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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