The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World

by Nick Harkaway

  Being a consumer, a customer, implies a measure of control over the nature of the relationship. The provider of a service sets out to please the customer; unhappy customers generally mean that a company is doing less well than it could. Customers assume – and receive – a certain level of care. The service is set up to make things work well for them. The commodity, on the other hand, gets the minimum necessary attention to keep it in a marketable state. More, companies will always try to get more and more out of their resources; it’s the natural momentum of capitalism. Perhaps the best way to change your understanding of who’s on top in the context of companies that use this business model is to compare them with livestock farms. The farm animals might imagine that they are the beneficiaries of the farmer’s efforts. Pigs get mash and a place to live; cows get open fields, barns when it’s cold and plenty of hay. They even get medical care and, in extreme cases, massages. They are, of course, not the customer. For some of them, this will become apparent when they are brought into a narrow pen and emerge as sausages. For others – cows on dairy farms, for example – the prognosis is less stark. They will simply live a life of ease from which others will profit.

  It’s impossible, in this society, to go through life without ever being treated as a commodity. And it’s not as if commodification renders a person powerless. I’m writing this page in the week of 4 July 2011. The News of the World newspaper, founded in 1843 and with a circulation in April of 2.6 million, will cease to exist on Sunday. The reason: the massed disdain of the British public. The paper has been caught hacking the mobile telephones not just of celebrities and politicians (an invasion of privacy that interested the readership only in passing, and which was by and large settled by out-of-court payments) but of murder victims and their families, possibly compromising evidence in ongoing investigations and – in the case of Milly Dowler – causing loved ones to believe that she might still be alive. The final straw was the discovery that the paper had also intruded on the private grief of the families of dead British servicemen. Campaigns appeared, on Facebook and elsewhere, boycotting the paper, and advertisers withdrew. What was a going concern a month ago is now a ruin because the readers used their status as a commodity and simply refused to be sold any longer. The shockwaves from this very public self-destruction are still bouncing around: there are rumours of investigations in the United States, and the Murdoch news empire is for the moment greatly weakened.

  In the general run of things, however, power flows in the opposite direction: in tiny, essentially useless amounts from each person to a central pool where storage and analysis can transform it into money and significant influence. We tend to assume that that power is benign, especially in the case of Google, whose playful animations, goofy logo and renowned ‘Don’t be evil’ motto have made it the most trusted commercial brand in modern history. We cannot assume that that will always be the case. Google is, after all, a corporate entity, subject – impossible as it may seem now at the height of its strength – to takeover, and to changes of policy. Or to being broken up; Google has brushed up against anti-trust legislation any number of times recently. If you feel comfortable with Google having all that information, let me ask again whether you feel equally happy with it in the hands of News International (the parent company of Fox News), the agri-giant Monsanto, or BP?

  Accepting commodification has other downsides, one of which is that it probably contributes to a phenomenon called deindividuation, which is a strange and powerful thing I’ll come back to later. Another is what Eli Pariser writes about in The Filter Bubble: the creation of a bubble of information that confirms what you want to believe is true. When you’re a commodity, it’s in the interests of those who sell you to streamline you, make you more predictable and thus a more appealing target for marketing. Pariser’s warning is compelling and important: increasingly, the search results I see online are different from the ones you see. Google results, since 2009, are personalized according to various datapoints the company has about you when you search. The broadest ones are things like physical location, but your search history is a factor, too. As Pariser puts it, as of 2009, a search for a contentious topic like ‘proof of climate change’ will return different answers for a sceptic or an environmentalist. The danger is that our online interactions become not so much an encounter with the wider world, but with our own preconceptions: a feedback loop that simply confirms everything we want to believe.

  That’s a problem for more than just research. It implies the gradual segregation of society along pre-existing lines of entrenched opinion. Rather than a broadening of debate and interaction, it suggests a fossilization – and that’s a disaster – another degrading of the collective ability to make good decisions on which our democracies rely.

  One of the grand benefits of digitization is the ability to tap into the phenomenon known as ‘the wisdom of crowds’. Tasks that are difficult or tedious for an individual or a small group can be tackled by a crowd in a short period of time. Crowds can be inventive and powerful problem-solvers. The most dramatic instance of this recently – though it’s not quite a classic example – has been the production of an accurate model of an enzyme by players of the online game Fold.it. The Mason-Pfizer monkey virus retroviral protease that had eluded scientists for fifteen years was successfully modelled in ten days by gamers working in teams and against one another.

  The idea that groups can solve problems has become a commonplace: the idealized expression is the ‘guess the weight of a cow’ game mentioned in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds. An issue is placed before the group (the weight of a cow at a county fair), each member of which brings to the problem their own unique perspective and expertise (farmers, vets, butchers, fishermen, children, cooks and so on having different perspectives). The amalgamation of their thoughts is performed mathematically (by averaging or a more complex approach such as Bayes’ Theorem, the bad guesses at either end of the spectrum cancelling one another out), and very often the end results are excellent to the point of being spooky. It would be reassuring to think that our parliamentary systems work this way, but they don’t. Crowd wisdom is fragile, and requires quite exacting conditions of behaviour to be met or it goes very, very wrong. Participants must not communicate with one another too much. They must think about the issue, rather than hewing to an established ideological or theoretical position. The process of haggling and horse-trading that is central to the political arena is disastrous: personalities and popularity skew the results. Habit and tradition are fatal. Debate and consensus can be ruinous: the system needs your raw response, not what you arrive at after an hour talking to someone you find attractive or intimidating, and certainly not the position you adopt if you’re offered a cabinet post in exchange for supporting someone else’s position. Recent research in Switzerland suggests that too much discussion can ‘promote information feedback and therefore trigger convergence’, resulting in overconfidence in false beliefs.11

  In other words, personalized search results actually have the potential to wreck our ability to make good decisions as a group before we ever have a chance to exercise it. This is the kind of technology that might make the difference between the dream world and the nightmare: it has the potential to create an increasingly ignorant population basing their decisions on decreasing amounts of information and greater and greater amounts of shared opinion. Worse, it may actually limit our ability to come up with new ideas. Many researchers believe that creativity is stimulated by the collision of ideas from different arenas or schools of thought, the clash creating new perspectives, narratives and solutions. Inside the filter bubble, the likelihood of that kind of collusion is vastly reduced. And so, too, is the possibility of coming to understand the point of view of someone radically different from oneself.

  One of the great promises of the Internet, that it would introduce us to people unlike ourselves, is shorn away in favour of a tight, suburban circle of prejudices and comforting nonsense. It’s a mas
sive false step. But at the same time, perhaps it shunts us away from asking questions of search engines and back towards other people. Services like Twitter, where you can essentially put the power of the crowd to work for you directly, unmediated by Google’s algorithms, can also answer questions and, if you choose, you can include among those you follow people who infuriate and challenge you. Human beings – as the Fold.it experiment shows – can achieve remarkable things by being human to the greatest extent possible. Twitter, if you elect to use it in a way that opens up your world rather than shutting it down, will also point you to the news stories you might otherwise miss, the opinions you don’t share, the values you don’t endorse. But that decision comes from you. As with much of this discussion, it is a matter of choice: a consequence of your own decisions about who and what you want to be. But to make that decision, you first have to be aware that it exists.

  blindgiant.co.uk/chapter5

  6

  Tahrir and London

  CHOICES AND THE Internet were at the heart of the news in the UK in 2011. The revolutions in the Middle East – now called the Arab Spring – and the riots that kicked off in London in the early summer both spoke to questions of identity and to the role of digital communications media in life and politics. Both were trumpeted as the product of a new connected age, impossible without the mobile phone and the Internet, and I think it’s clear that they would not have happened as they did without those technologies. But what happened in either case, and why, is unsurprisingly a little more complex – and nuanced – than the news industry and the political commentators acknowledged at the time.

  In mid-December 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit seller brutalized by police, went to the local governor’s office in the town of Sidi Bouzid and set himself on fire. He died eighteen days later. His action marked – perhaps triggered – the beginning of revolutions not only in his own country but across the Middle East. At the time of writing, the outcomes of several of them are in doubt. The most well-documented for my purposes, and perhaps the most complete – though revolutions stand or fall not only in their moments of high civil unrest but also perhaps more so, later, when the conflicting drives, needs and political agendas of the revolutionaries must be matched and melded into something that resembles a state that caters to all – is Egypt.

  Egypt’s revolution, in early 2011, crystallized around a similar event: the killing of Khaled Said in June the previous year, allegedly because he had evidence of criminal activity by police. A local act of wickedness became symbolic of the status of every citizen. This is a classic revolutionary pattern: in an environment saturated with discontent but held in stasis by force and fear, one more thing precipitates a transformation, a sudden and massively powerful shrugging off by the population. Iconic images and narratives of oppression become universal experiences, shared references telling a story of sorrow, desperation and anger.

  The Boston Tea Party is perhaps the standout of the American revolutionary narrative. In the context of the Russian revolutions of 1917, the most famous such rallying point must be the mutiny on board the battleship Potemkin, immortalized by Sergei Eisenstein’s propaganda film of the same name. The mutiny, which was part of the failed uprising in 1905, was triggered when members of the crew were threatened with punishment for refusal to eat food containing maggots. As with Mohamed Bouazizi and Khaled Said in their countries, the situation aboard the Potemkin resonated with the whole of Russia. In the 1917 February Revolution that eventually toppled the tsar, food was – inevitably – back at the heart of popular discontent. Russian casualties in the First World War were in the millions, the weather had been appalling, and with so many young men away fighting, famine was imminent. Soldiers mutinied when ordered to suppress demonstrations largely composed of women demanding bread and peace. The Potemkin’s maggots were a perfect metaphor for the state of the nation.

  The Egyptian revolution is relevant here because Khaled Said’s name became a totem first of all on Facebook: a page was created which asserted that ‘We are all Khaled Said’. As the crisis grew and grew, it happened live on Twitter. The activists and citizen journalists of Egypt and their supporters overseas used Twitter to get news out all the time, to let one another know what was happening, to coordinate on the fly – until they were face to face and no mediated communication was necessary. They used Facebook to gather and – somewhat – to coordinate. Above all, perhaps, they used social media to let others know that they existed, that they shared outrage and pain – and hope. That they had now decided that this was where they drew the line, even in the face of the administration’s secret police, the Mukhabarat. Before there is a physical revolution, there is a mental and emotional one, which occurs in private: ‘I will no longer suffer this.’ Through Twitter, Facebook and other social media services, the online community of Egypt let one another know that they had reached that point, and did so in public, to some extent nailing their colours to the mast.

  It is a mistake, though, to call this a ‘Twitter revolution’. The country was seething with a sense of injustice, and had been for years. The poor of Egypt, without access to the digital communications media, were every bit as much a part of the revolution as their middle-class compatriots. The working class, who from 2006 onwards had been participating in strike actions in protest against the regime, were there, too, and their refusal to work in January heralded the beginning of the revolution. The long offline organization by activists was at least as impressive as that which took place in the final days online. Leaflets were distributed, guides to revolution that listed things you might need, places to meet, and how to deal with teargas. Many of them featured desperate pleas not to put the material online where it could be intercepted by the security forces.1

  Social media have the effect of creating a powerful sense of mood, allowing a community to reflect upon itself. There is an effect – not always entirely beneficial – of amplification, as we look at the amount of support for our position and feel more assured. The Swiss research into crowd wisdom I mentioned in the last chapter has ascertained that this may cause crowds to make less good decisions with greater confidence, but in the case of revolution, perhaps that irrationality is necessary to drive immediate self-preservation into second place and assert instead an overriding need for change which requires drastic action. Some writers on rapid social change – including American academic Ted Gurr – have suggested that revolution occurs when the variance between the way we believe the world should be and how it actually is becomes too pronounced to ignore. Social media, spreading the narratives of Khaled Said and others, no doubt intensified and even speeded up this process, drawing more and more people into the discussion and letting them know they were not alone. But the conditions that lay beneath all this were ghastly and bleakly ubiquitous. The advent of a popular uprising requires a seed, which can be almost anything, and – to extend the metaphor – a growing medium. But the urge is there all along.

  Social media are a great tool for spreading the word, and thus the seed – though they are far from being the only way – but the revolution was on the streets of Cairo, Suez and Alexandria, not behind computer screens. As Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns point out in their excellent introduction to Tweets from Tahrir, it’s convenient to the West, with its decades-long complicity in Hosni Mubarak’s regime, to imagine that all that was necessary to remove him was a few days of unrest organized through US-based websites. It would be more honest to acknowledge that Egypt’s overnight sea-change was years in the making, and that while social media may have shaped it, even precipitated it, they did not make it. Like all revolutions, it happened because it could no longer be prevented.

  The same is true of what happened in the UK. It came on like a sudden storm and grew into something utterly unexpected – except by any number of community workers who had been warning of something like it for months. By the end of August 2011 the riots were winding down in London, though elsewhere in the country it seemed they w
ere just starting up. Sparked by the shooting by police of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, these thunderclap outbreaks of looting and violence had spread around the capital and around the country. They had their own Twitter hashtags – keywords that allow users of the service to access other messages using the same terms – creating an instant network of wreckers and thugs. But so, too, did the spontaneous, self-organizing clean-up crews, the Riot Wombles, named for the 1960s children’s book series The Wombles, in which orange-skinned, pointy-nosed creatures living in burrows help the environment by collecting and re-using junk. Later studies seemed to show that more people used the social media for amelioration than did for mayhem.

  And indeed, though the riots were initially seen as a phenomenon of ‘feral youth’ (I cannot tell you how much I object to the use of the term ‘feral’ to describe a human being; a brief look at the OED will tell you why), the subsequent trials skewed towards adult offenders, with the largest single age group being 18–20-year-olds.2 Of a sample of 1,715 (alleged) rioters, 364 were 10–17 years of age, while 890 were 18–24. A further 318 were 25–34, with the rest older. Many rioters were also already, in the quaint phrase, well-known to law enforcement. The image popular with newspapers of untamed tweens in revolt during the riots seems less than entirely accurate.