Author: David Newhoff

David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.

The web is not a panacea.

Web

Whether you’re a democrat or a republican, I would hope that you can look at the US invasion of Iraq with analytical detachment, and  as such, I believe it is both fair and relevant to identify President Bush as having a crusader’s mentality.  For better or worse, I happen to think he legitimately believed that the relatively simple job of toppling Saddam Hussein would lead to democracy flourishing like flowers in fresh soil, and this is why he failed to heed voices warning of events that ultimately came to pass.  I raise the subject not to rehash criticism of that administration but to suggest that we might be wary of leaders, political or commercial, bearing panaceas.  And that brings us to this article from last week’s Guardian, an extraction from the book The New Digital Age:  Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, co-authored by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, Google’s Executive Chairman and Director of Google Ideas, respectively.  Ominously titled Web censorship:  the net is closing in, the excerpt is ostensibly a warning against state-run censorship of the internet in nations already known to be deficient in the civil liberties department.  And while some of the analyses and predictions are thought-provoking, the underlying premises and ultimate purpose of the article inspire a frisson similar to the one I felt the day Dick Cheney said, “I believe we’ll be greeted as liberators…”  And then?

The assumption of the piece is that an “open” internet breeds democratic reform but that balkanization through state censorship will fulfill this odd prediction:  “What started as the world wide web will begin to look more like the world itself, full of internal divisions and divergent interests,” write Schmidt and Cohen.  Really? Divergent interests, you say?  Even in the era of Googletopia, diversity will persist and result in cultural divisions ranging from benign philosophical differences to sectarian violence, tribal warlords, and inhumane states? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the global, free flow of information, if it’s possible to maintain the infrastructure, but if you think American exceptionalism can be blindly arrogant at times, what Schmidt and Cohen are selling, techno-exceptionalism if you will, is something potentially more insidious.

What President Bush believed we could do with a taste of democracy, Schmidt and Cohen seem to believe can be done with information technology. In fact the assumption of all techno-utopian views tends to treat information as though, if left pure, it can only be used one way and ultimately for the greater good.  Just looking within our own already-free society, it’s pretty clear that “information” isn’t even necessarily information. An American in Idaho can be indoctrinated to jihad via YouTube without setting foot in a Mosque, let alone the Middle East.  Authorities estimate an 800% increase in domestic extremism over the last decade, and guess how these groups connect with one another. The design of Web 2.0 can be a terrible tool for data quality because it favors the crowd, favors what’s popular (i.e. trending), and is built almost exclusively on an economy of ad impressions, which means the money doesn’t need to promote a well-researched article about Syria in favor of page views on GirlsinYogaPants.com.  So, the web already does “look like the world itself,” even without government imposed balkanization, and the world just might continue to be as complexly imperfect, brilliant, and idiotic as it ever was despite the record-breaking views of Gagnam Style.

Schmidt and Cohen write about “walled gardens,” which is tech-speak for limited web environments that can be relatively benign or insidiously watched by state or corporate entities.  Facebook is a walled garden that hundreds of millions of us use daily, and it is a pretty good example of voluntary disconnection that commands a substantial amount of our web-based attention here in freedom-loving USA.  After all, isn’t Facebook something of an expanded version of social cliques that have formed naturally for centuries without technology’s assistance? Other than knowing what friends and loved ones are up to, which is nice, I would argue that using a walled garden like Facebook for information is simply bestowing the role of curator to personal acquaintances whose “filters” we trust in a given context.

Of course, the more narrow that context happens to be, if you and your friends share some extreme view like American law needs more Old Testament in it, the walls in your garden will naturally close in without any help from a state supervisor. The web can be a tool for expanding one’s world view, but it is very often an even more powerful tool for substantiating pre-existing biases. So it is a naive evangelist who believes that the web is somehow the new “city on a hill” (speaking of the Bible).  Thus, Schmidt and Cohen begin to sound a bit like the digital age incarnation of Massachusetts Bay Colony founder John Winthrop, vowing to establish a foothold for the gospel whence enlightenment shall blossom, while glossing over the inherent imperialism in the enterprise.

No, I don’t want to see Iran build a “halal internet,” which would be its own version of the “great firewall of China,” but I have to question the motives of Google executives implying that this is the fulcrum on which the fate of that nation balances.  Iran managed to become the best educated, most progressive-leaning country in the Middle East before the Internet, and the forces that stand as a barrier to democratic reform are likely not due to a lack of available information or even contact with the outside world. We might just have to accept that Iran’s fate is not entirely ours to determine and that it’s a segment of the market Google doesn’t get to own. Yet.  Moreover, with the article’s final, dire words that an Iranian wall would “change the internet as we know it,” are we meant to infer that the censorship itself might spread to us and our fellow democratic societies?  Certainly, this is the belief among many out there, and it is bizarre to say the least when my fellow progressives put more faith in a multi-billion-dollar corporation to protect free expression than they do in one another.

But that’s the sleight of hand, isn’t it?  The masters of the web have convinced people that free expression hardly existed without this technology, while outside the walled gardens we find an illusion of an open web that is actually more circumscribed than many realize. Search results aren’t based on pure, boolean logic but are based on a number of factors ranging from paid positions to data mining us users, so Google algorithms can “help” us find what they assume we’re looking for. Or as a default, it seems to want to find what some seventeen year-old boy is looking for, which might explain why a search on the word “admiral” yields the top suggestion Ackbar.  And, of course, Wikipedia comes with everything.  Meanwhile, as Google pursues an agenda of consuming and monetizing every bit of data in human experience, violating privacy, trampling on intellectual property rights, and from time to time, just being evil, this one-world technological evangelism pushes us toward the day when we finally vest in a corporation the power of a state and the Information Age becomes a true Tower of Babel.  And it will be the well-meaning progressives who helped us do it.

If I had Eric Schmidt’s money and resources, and I really cared about the developing world, I can think of many places to start that are more pressing than the architecture of the internet in China or Iran.  Freedom can’t thrive on information and expression alone; it requires economic prosperity, security, and a universal belief in human rights. Off the cuff, I think of child slaves in the Cote d’Ivorie harvesting most of the world’s cocoa or the dangerous conditions of garment workers supplying the West, or the surprising number of homeless living in the New Jerusalem of Silicon Valley.  By contrast, fussing over hypothetical restrictions on Twitter just sounds dumb.

It’s Always Amateur Hour in the Digital Age

Photo by GlobalIP
Photo by GlobalIP

When the 1991 Gulf War put CNN on the map, that was the beginning of the end.  Ted Turner’s experiment in 24 hour news had found a spectacle — a popular and relatively safe war — that defined the model for how a network can fill a round-the-clock broadcast, even without news to report, and certainly without depth or context.  From the soiling of sleep-deprived Bernie Shaw at the al Rasheed Hotel to young Wolf Blitzer’s insipid repetition of the question, “Will we carpet-bomb Baghdad?” at the Pentagon briefings, CNN was, in my estimation, the true vanguard of the of the inevitable rise of the amateur, who now dominates the digital age.  I would argue that we can draw a line that begins with that Gulf War coverage and ends (or at least pauses) with the Redditors who contributed to the online lynch mob chasing the wrong man as events were unfolding in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing.

Take the worst aspects of 24 hour news — the false value of the scoop, the show business cult of personalities, the general egomania, the political biases — add performance-enhancing drugs, and you get Social Media.  For one thing, both the design and the dynamics of Web 2.0 are dominated by the sensibilities of males 18 – 24, which is the same demographic whence most terrorists, anarchists, and other extremists come.  Okay, most of this demographic is comprised of decent people, but there’s no getting past the fact that males 18 – 24 can be the dumbest creatures on Earth because they’re mostly made of testosterone and ego.  And when we give these beings tools like Reddit and a mission in the form of a thread called “findbostonbombers,” we shouldn’t be surprised when it fosters a virtual posse, who indeed spent many hours pursuing and harassing the family of an innocent young man.

Sunil Trapathi was found dead this week from an apparent suicide, although it is important to note that his taking his own life has not been linked to the online pursuit.  Trapathi, a solid student at Brown University, apparently suffered from depression and had been missing; and his disappearance may have been a factor in the initial rumors that snowballed into the swarm of media and private citizens harassing Trapathi’s parents both at home and on the Facebook page they had created in an effort to search for their son.  So, these careless Redditors and the news “professionals” who followed their lead didn’t contribute to Trapathi’s death, only to his family’s pain and suffering coincident with his death.  In light of the outrage and near martyrdom following the suicide of Aaron Swartz, it may be time for certain Redditors to do a little soul searching AFK, as it were, on the potential for the righteous crowd to do great harm.

Of course, the irony that jams hard in the throat in this case is that Reddit and its users are highly vocal advocates of the “open web” and are not shy about using incendiary, uninformed language to lambaste precisely the kind of surveillance techniques used by trained professionals to track the right guys.  There is literally no end of ill-considered, mathematically impossible, fear-mongering out there on the subject of privacy invasions and government overreach; and while I certainly advocate staying on top of our government, this does not mean that every lummox with a keyboard is suddenly a qualified analyst in forensic criminology.  And I believe if the majority of the people involved in the forum chasing Trapathi were honest with themselves, they’d have to admit that their motives were probably part ego, part cool-factor — what we might call social-media overreach. But this appears to be an underlying orthodoxy of the next generation vis a vis the Web — that nobody in a position of experienced authority actually knows anything, and that the almighty crowd, connected through technology is superior to other systems of social order.  It is a mindset that we might say puts the hack in hacktivism.

Executives at Reddit have publicly apologized for these events, although I’m not sure why, as this is inconsistent with their baseline position and indeed the position of nearly every major stakeholder in the dynamics of Web 2.0.  Not unlike the NRA, the general attitude from Reddit, from Google, from Twitter, etc. is that their technologies are merely tools, and that people will use them as they see fit. “You cannot blame the road,” they will say, “because you were hit by a truck.”  And I couldn’t agree more.  People will use these tools as they see fit, and these tools are well designed to ensure that self-righteous vigilantism, bullying, and, yes, even the messages that inspire young men to make bombs are now part of  everyday life.

Whose Future Is It?

Compressorhead, the all-robot band that plays hits by AC/DC, Motorhead, and The Ramones, represents another step toward a technological future in which machines continue to perform tasks as well as (or better than?) humans.  Many a techno-utopian  envisions a world in which human labor, including creative and performing arts no longer represents economic or social value.  Naturally, the prospect of a robot that can unfailingly impersonate virtuoso musicians leads to the inevitable assumption that this technology will eventually converge with Artificial Intelligence and produce a robot that can compose as well as perform.  This then raises the philosophical question about the present and future role of the artist or performer in society.  After all, what is the experiential difference between listening to two identical-sounding guitar solos played either by man or machine?  Nothing except of course the entire purpose of art — and just maybe the entire purpose of living.

Much of the discussion about our technological future is predicated on the central theme as to how much autonomy we want to cede to our machines?  While it’s reasonable to accept that a doctor-supervised robot can perform a delicate surgical technique without the human fallibility that causes hands to shake, current research into the use of IBM’s Watson in the work of diagnosis and prognosis begs the question as to what the human doctors of the future might do.  Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch just launched a campaign against the use of autonomous weapons capable of making battlefield decisions to kill a human target. And as Google works with other technologists to develop the driverless car, I have my own doubts about the prospects of its reliability given the rate of failure of ordinary MP3 players. These and other stories, of course, imply a progression toward the technological singularity, and it’s hard to avoid the sense that we might cross that event horizon without making a conscious, collective choice to do so.

It’s true that we mortals are imperfect, born of imperfection itself by the miracle of chance, composed of detritus from exploded stars.  We are finite, fallible, and fragile; but through experiencing one form of expression or another, we seek exaltation, we connect to one another, and we continually redefine what it means to be human for as long as we’re here. I believe this is why it’s exciting to watch an Olympic athlete perform a feat impossible for most of us but still achievable by a being who is one of us.  If we could not sense the fragility of our own joints or know the blunt, unforgiving nature of gravity, the flight of the figure skater would be a mundane exercise in high-school physics. It may be true that the capacity to build a machine that might replicate the subtle and complex motions of a skater is a human triumph in itself, but the ultimate value of such an endeavor must be something other than the android athlete. Once the novelty of the shiny object wears off, we will be no more excited to watch this object do a quadruple Lutz than to watch a forklift load a truck.  So it is with art.

Art absent the human hand serves no particular purpose.  If this were not the case, the world wouldn’t need Rostropovich and Yo Yo Ma, let alone the range of compositions for cello that come from a diversity of human imperfections. While many popular works, particularly in film and music, are so formulaic, they could arguably be the products of an algorithm, even these works often contain within them component features of extraordinary human creativity (e.g. great design in an otherwise lame movie) and so remain safely on this side of the event horizon.  The future, however, in which the robot wakes to compose and then perform its own songs is a tipping point when art becomes the expression of the robot condition.  Thus do our machines become our masters as we see in so many sci-fi, cautionary tales.

I remember a radio interview with Pete Townsend at least 15 years ago, in which he described breaking his hand and said that he would likely never be able to play with the speed and agility he once had.  And I suppose, with a few keystrokes, the lead guitarist of Compresorhead, Fingers, can be programed to reproduce Townsend’s intro to “Pinball Wizard” just as Townsend played it as a young man.  Hell, Fingers could even be programmed to smash its guitar at the end of the song, creating a bit of android satire.  Of course, what Fingers doesn’t have is a grandmother who shouted at him as a teenager to stop playing that terrible rock-and-roll and so inspired the first smashing of his first guitar.  And in this act is a glimpse into the significance of the cultural revolution in the U.K., where a generation of fatherless kids grew up in the gray rubble left by WWII and burst forth in a profusion of color and sound, themes that reverberate throughout nearly all the music of The Who.  It isn’t just about the data and the mechanics that produce the sounds.

This week Senator Goodlatte announced the start of the months long process to overhaul the copyright laws of the United States, and in his statement, he refers to the ongoing need to update and revise copyright to adapt to changing technologies.  But nowhere does the senator even imply that the basis for intellectual property rights has lost a fraction of value.  It’s safe to say that technology will continue to evolve according to the acceleration predicted by Moore’s Law, but this does not mean that we must inevitably relinquish control to our machines.  Preserving the basis for copyright and intellectual property law is about keeping the human in the human condition.

Photo by: Zyabich