The Blind Giant

by Nick Harkaway

  But you don’t get these things online, except as they are conveyed through text. The New Yorker cartoon has it right: online, no one knows you’re a dog. Except that, in fact, there are some ways to tell things about people through text; there is a language of context that goes with Internet discourse. Email addresses, for example, can yield basic or even fairly complex information if you know how to read them: a .edu suffix means an American educational institution; .ac.uk means a British one. A Gmail address is generic, but a Gmail address with a common name without numbers – john@gmail.com – suggests a very early adopter of the Gmail service, someone who was already immersed in the Net in 2004. Apple’s paid-for addresses have changed from mac.com to me.com, so someone who still uses a mac.com address is probably older than twenty-five and a little bit stubborn (like me). Other domains such as aol.com and .gov addresses tell other stories. Other services – blogs and Twitter pages – can have similar clues and cues.

  Initially, you register these things consciously, but as with reading – and probably body language – the observations rapidly become almost unconscious. Just as a church can be read (although not perhaps to the degree implied by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code) and clothes convey tribal messages about status and mood, so a Twitter profile tells you something about the style of engagement of a user and who they are. I tend to assume that people who have many followers but choose to follow very few others, for example, are essentially disengaged and have not really understood the inherent contract of a level social playing field that Twitter implies.

  It’s interesting also that the University of Buffalo study6 I mentioned earlier suggests that it’s possible to empathize quite genuinely with fictional characters in text – well, yes, we all knew that, but it is now scientifically sound as a supposition – which in turn implies that a genuine emotional bond can be formed with a person via digital media. Again, when you spell it out, the first reaction is: well, yes, of course you can. But if that’s the case, then what’s the hang-up about the reality and authenticity of online communication? It’s different, yes, and we should be alert to that difference and aware that we’re exercising the cognitive part of the brain rather than the bits that deal with offline life. But it’s hard to see why it should be thought of as lesser.

  There is, though, a definite tendency to consider anything that happens in the offline, analogue world as real and authentic (a sense that probably owes a certain amount to the early adoption of ‘IRL’ – ‘In Real Life’ – by Internet communities such as the WELL) and anything that happens online as unreal and probably inauthentic. I think partly this is because we are fundamentally analogue creatures; we are not cognitive homunculi riding in the control room of a giant fleshy robot, much as we occasionally imagine that we are. The sense of sight being in the head, along with the ears, nose, mouth and brain, sometimes gives us an exaggerated sense of the extent to which the ‘I’ is vested in the uppermost 13 per cent of the body. It’s not true. We are tactile, physical creatures, our moods and perceptions created by our whole bodies (in one experiment – and I love this, because it’s utterly alarming – researchers found that ‘people whose frown muscles had been frozen with Botox took longer to read sad or angry sentences than they did before receiving the treatment’).7 The direct apprehension of things is really what persuades us they’re real. We say ‘I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes’ despite knowing that our eyes can be deceived by half a dozen tricks. We court the dissonance when we go to see professional magic shows; we know the magic isn’t real, that it’s a trick, but we enjoy the sense of bafflement and impossibility.

  As the world embraces digital things, though, that simple posture – online fake, offline real – becomes more problematic. We’ve already looked at relationships mediated by the machine, but it goes beyond that. Online objects such as the currencies of various virtual worlds have real world value, for example; they represent work, time spent and are (artificially) scarce. Gold in Blizzard’s online game, World of Warcraft, can be bought on a black market from gold sellers who obtain it by hiring cheap labour, often in South-East Asia, to sit and play the game for hours to accrue the virtual currency. WoW gold can be moved around the world and traded for conventional money such as euros or dollars. Items inside the game have a value in WoW gold, and in effort, and hence also in money. Some virtual universes have experienced in-game con tricks, thefts and so on; all part of the game, and yet at the same time also the removal of real monetary value from one person and its transferral to another person. How should we think of these events? And how should we think of the transfer of a digital Vorpal Sword between users in different countries if it has a value in real money? Is it subject to import tax?

  But it’s also important to ask whether there is any reason to assume that the more natural mode of communication – face-to-face – is inherently the superior one. The mediated form of communication allows people to express themselves from behind a translucent barrier. The mild anonymity of the Net frees many. The lack of consequences can make people bolder, less inhibited about seeking friendship. Casual meetings are easier, and interaction can yield more serious relationships: a genuine meeting of minds. I cannot help but wonder whether the suspicion of this kind of meeting (an idea celebrated until it was actually possible, and now regarded with scepticism) derives from that same cultural perception I described earlier which sees the mystical journey, which cannot be expressed in words but must be experienced immanently, as far more important than the cognitive kind.

  I believe that a balance is necessary: I think there’s much to be gained from satisfying the various aspects of the human self. But I think it’s mistaken to say that one is superior to the other, just as it’s ridiculous to claim that fish are superior to birds. An ostrich under thirty foot of water is in trouble, yes, but so is a tuna on a mountain top. Each of them in its element is immensely successful. In the context of human life, though, we need both access to the immanent experience, through our senses, and the chance to think, read and analyse with our cognitive selves. Pattern and presence are both significant, and the reality is that in our own internal context they may actually be indivisible.

  The issue of pattern and presence is also part of the wrangles over copyright. When I was ten, commercial content like music was indivisible from the medium on which it was purchased (usually vinyl, although cassettes were the coming thing, much derided by music purists as low-fi) and people never really considered – and companies never sought to educate them – whether they were paying for the physical object or for access to the content via a storage medium. That confusion was thrown into sharp relief by the arrival of tape-to-tape machines and the dawning realization among record companies that people were taping songs from the radio. In the popular perception, when you bought a copy of an album, it was then no one’s business what you did with it. You could see this as a notion of ‘exhaustion of rights’, but I think that’s over-complicating it. Purchase carried an item from the public world of rules and exchange into the private world of the hearth. Once brought into the hearth, the object was then subject to hearth rules, not public ones. If you chose to use your vinyl as a coaster, the record company could not come in and tell you that was wrong. Why should they do so if you then chose to record that album on to a cassette so that you could listen to an inferior recording on your new (enormous) Sony Walkman? It was none of their business what you did in your private space.

  That discussion was never properly resolved: the kind of legislative clarity that would produce some kind of sanity seems to be completely beyond elected assemblies: the process almost immediately becomes a festival of self-interested lobbying and ridiculous demands, and those of us who are neither red-toothed zealots of IP protectionism nor freevangelists seeking a world where intellectual property is deemed to be held in common go unheard in the din.

  The problem is that the content industries as they exist (or possibly as they existed until rec
ently, although the change is far from wholehearted) are largely premised on the idea that their products are both rivalrous and excludable, i.e. that an item that I have cannot also be possessed by you, and that it is relatively simple to prevent me from getting access to it in the first place unless I pay. This set the scene for a showdown. On the one hand, content licensees and vendors – who are often, by the nature of the industries involved, not content creators – set their teeth against the reality of the present day, namely that it is simply impossible, in any reasonably private and democratic society, to police content to the degree that would be required to secure intellectual property absolutely; on the other, organizations such as the Pirate Party are apparently unable or unwilling to outline a way for creators to make a living in a world where their primary skill no longer produces anything that can be sold. (I interviewed Andrew Robinson, then leader of the Pirate Party UK, for FutureBook in 2010. I asked him how creatives would make a living in the new world.8 He replied: ‘This is an interesting point, is it the job of politicians to look purely at what is morally right or wrong when making laws, or should we also be expected to devise new business models to replace ones that have been made obsolete by technology? In a way, it’s odd that the Pirate Party is expected to extrapolate our moral position into business practices; however it’s very easy to do so. Simply put, the middlemen will have a much smaller role, and the public will deal directly with the creators of content. File sharing will be understood by content creators as an indispensable source of free advertising.’ Which is interesting, but still doesn’t tell me specifically how anyone earns a crust in an environment where people don’t feel they need to pay for content.)

  In the meantime, the popular understanding of what is and is not okay, either legally or ethically, is confused by the shouting, and rests on knee-jerk reactions and inaccurate perceptions. For example, many buyers of books believe that the bulk of the cost of a paper copy is physical and therefore reason that the electronic version should be massively cheaper. While there are considerable savings in the production of an electronic book, and many publishers have yet to take full advantage of the digital workflow, it’s also true that a large part of book production cost is human: paying editors and writers and so on. So yes, you are indeed paying for intangibles, but those intangibles are people. Moreover, the high price of an ebook during the period of the hardback publication is nothing to do with the physical cover – obviously – but a tariff for early access, something that publishers have failed to communicate largely because the idea of explaining pricing decisions to consumers remains alien: the old media industries are not at all used to having to make a case for themselves. They are continually playing catch-up.

  The most recent example of this in my life is Amazon’s free ebook lending system, where the company ‘lends’ readers one ebook at a time for an indefinite period. In fact, in many cases, Amazon is buying the ebook from the publisher at full price and passing it on without charge to the consumer. The only reason I can see for doing this is to create and corner the market in ebook lending, then turn around to publishers and demand terms for access to a thriving industry. In other words, Amazon is purchasing itself yet another arena in which to be massively dominant. The problems with companies owning a given market outright are too obvious and well-known to enumerate, but that is potentially the price to the consumer of the ‘free’ ebook scheme.

  While some may feel ambiguous about paying for pattern – the most common interpretation of ‘information yearns to be free’ these days is that anything that can be digitized should be given away – almost everyone now uses their own pattern as currency. We trade our personal data to sites such as Facebook in exchange for services that are notionally free at the point of use. But in fact, they’re not. The currency of the Internet, as we already know, is attention. Facebook is not free: you pay for it with your data, which is then traded on to get attention – and not just your attention, specifically, although ads will be targeted and tailored directly to you, but the attention of the group or groups you represent, the cross-referenced, modelled, Platonic you.

  The peril of this kind of ‘free’ lies in the clouding of what’s actually taking place. What price would you put on your personal data if I just flat out asked you to sell it to me? Obviously, some of it is relevant to the security of your bank account and your credit card, so you might have to go to the trouble of changing your pass phrases, a considerable aggravation. Then there’s the creepy factor: the idea that I might plug you into a machine and learn secrets, or just truths, about you; that I might then be able to influence you in subtle ways to do things you might feel weren’t really in your interests. I’d know details about your friends and family by implication, too. So for comparison: what value would you put on Facebook’s service if you had to pay for it directly? A pound a month? Ten? You surely would not expect to pay more for it than you do for your broadband connection. Let’s set an arbitrary figure of £200 a year, which seems astronomically high to me. Is that value lower or higher than the price you’d put on your personal data, considering what might be done with it?

  Beyond the point of individual discomfort with the exchange of information for services is the issue of what happens to a market where the whole point of most pricing strategies is to prevent the consumer from getting an accurate understanding of what a product costs relative to what it is worth. Our economic system, and indeed our version of liberal democratic capitalism, rely at root on the admittedly overstretched and tarnished notion that the market makes good decisions about price based on the collective, rational self-interest of those buying and selling. If one side of that equation is deprived of information – deliberately and for the express purpose of preventing them from making decisions as they otherwise would – the paradigm of our society is broken; weight and influence are accorded to products that are not the best they could be, and to the companies that make them. The deliberate creation of pricing strategies that occlude the reality of the transaction undermines the basic assumptions of our system. (You might say: ‘Fantastic! We’re undermining the system from within, man! We’re letting the inherent contradictions of the machine tear it apart!’ In which case, great. But you need to have a plan for how to prevent the eventual collapse of the machine from killing a lot of people.)

  It’s something we don’t often consider, but in our kind of society, buying is voting. That’s to say that the decision to purchase your groceries from, for the sake of argument, your local Tesco is an endorsement not just of your nearest supermarket and their stock, but of every action taken by the Tesco company anywhere in the world. Every purchase made at Tesco increases their turnover, raising their profile, and therefore also their influence in any lobbying they may undertake. It also represents a lost sale to their competitors large and small, because you won’t go and buy food for that week from them and you would have had to buy food somewhere. As the company’s market share increases, Tesco is able to be more robust with suppliers, too, demanding better rates. For the company it’s a virtuous cycle; for others, that’s not so clear.

  It may mean that the Tesco style of doing business becomes the only viable one, a complaint made about chain supermarkets in general quite often in connection with the revitalization (or destruction) of local community town centres (a government report commissioned in 1998 found that ‘when a large supermarket is built on the edge of the centre, other food shops lose between 13 and 50% of their trade’).9 The savings created by economies of scale may be balanced by intangible or hard-to-measure costs, either environmental (as goods are moved to central depots and then out again around the country) or social (as small grocers and local businesses fail to compete with the giants around them). They may not be local: the buying power of major chains can affect the national markets of other countries. Farmers needing to meet a price point may seek and receive greater subsidies from the government, further unbalancing the already bizarre economics of global agriculture.r />
  If this seems familiar and grindingly depressing, of course, it is. This is the problem of connectedness we discussed earlier: how is it possible to encompass all these variables and arrive at a right action that is also one you can actually carry out and live with? It may sound great to refuse to buy from supermarkets, but it can involve considerable extra effort and expense, and even then, you aren’t guaranteed to have done the right thing. But note well: this isn’t a problem resulting from digital technology, but rather from the nested structures of globalization and the inherited consequences of empire and colonial history. That’s not an instruction to hang your head in shame because you carry a European or American passport: rather it’s an acknowledgement that the issues are complex, that they did not spring from nowhere, and that they are locked in and hence hard to deal with in a positive way. All that’s changed is that our technology has begun, inevitably, to make us aware of them, and of the reality of the faceless people around the world and two doors down who suffer in consequence of them.

  There’s another aspect to the discussion of services that are notionally free at point of use. When you pay for a service in personal data, you aren’t a consumer. You are not, as media theorist Douglas Rushkoff observes pointedly, Facebook’s customer.10 You are the commodity in which the company behind the service trades. Rushkoff suggests that users fundamentally do not trust Facebook, because they know there’s a tension between what they want the service to do and what the service provider needs from it. And it’s certainly true that in my experience of using the service, it is set up to avoid giving me perfect control of my data. When the new Instant Personalization service was rolled out recently – a service that allowed Facebook to pass data to partner websites to allow them to customize their services for Facebook users – it was impossible to switch off before the service went live. In the run-up to the launch, the option to disable Instant Personalization was visible (buried deep in the site’s somewhat arcane privacy settings interface, where many users never venture anyway) but not alterable. To turn it off, you had to wait until after it was switched on.