The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World

by Nick Harkaway

  At the time, an eerie unanimity appeared across the political spectrum: these were crimes without causes, a groundless wickedness to be condemned without hesitation or discussion. It was to be understood that seeking the origins of this phenomenon was futile, and any attempt to analyse what was going on amounted to an apologia. Although some journalists and commentators have now broken away from this line, our political class by and large has not. From the government and from the opposition the position was clear: these events were to be discussed without reference to the past or the present context. This was a lightning outbreak of immorality, something like a plague of demonic possession except that those involved had simply revealed themselves to be rotten from the outset.

  This position was reinforced when the rioters, when interviewed, were unable to explain their actions. The BBC found two teenaged girls and asked why they were looting a shop. ‘We’re showing the police we can do what we want,’ one said. The interviewer responded by asking why they were destroying a small local shop in their own community. ‘It’s the rich people,’ she said, but seemed entirely at a loss to understand either the question or her own answer. ‘They own shops. We’re showing the rich we can do what we want.’ Her friend didn’t speak. (And to be honest: how on earth were they supposed to understand what was happening to and around them? The psychological mechanics of popular discontent and group violence are complex and obscure. Short of discovering some kind of rioting John Stuart Mill setting fire to a burning car, an autodidact of the social science of rage and bewilderment, the BBC was surely never going to get any kind of answer other than ‘we’re angry and upset’. Certainly, nothing the rioters themselves could have said would answer the retributive fury that was building all around them, unless they’d been able to produce evidence of grotesque abuse at the hands of police and merchants on a par with something from the bad days of Kosovo. That fury and the demands for heavy sentences are entirely understandable, if not necessarily wise as a matter of policy. What happened was ugly. But that is not the same as saying that the riots cannot or should not be understood.)

  Our main parties have a vested interest in separating the riots from the social history of the UK. Margaret Thatcher famously told Britain that ‘there is no such thing as society’, and it’s hard to miss the relevance of that dictum to what happened. The British style of policing relies heavily on consent, on a connection to other people and on a mass investment in the idea of community which is jeopardized by the hyper-individuality the Thatcher era espoused. Tony Blair’s Labour Party, and later Gordon Brown’s, presided over the last decade and a half; if social conditions and the financial crisis are to blame for any of this, Labour – which courted business and finance even more assiduously than the Conservatives have traditionally done – cannot evade its share of responsibility for them.

  The Cameron–Osborne response to the financial crisis, meanwhile, has seen bankers regain their explosively impressive bonuses while the institutions they control continue to refuse to lend to small businesses. (By way of an extreme comparison, consider the German response to the crisis: the former CEO of the bank IKB, whose handling of the bond market appears to have been honest if in the end massively over-trusting of the US ratings agencies Moody’s and S&P, was sentenced to prison and asked to return his salary. That salary, incidentally, was Є805,000, which is a lot of money, but barely makes a mark on the earnings of comparable UK CEOs.)

  Both Labour and the Conservatives have also leaned on an idea of increasing prosperity as the natural order of things; like Icelanders before the 2007 crash, Britons have been encouraged to believe that they will grow wealthier each day, that credit will always be cheap, that the shops will always be full of discounted items and freebies, that a comfortably affluent lifestyle of increasing luxury is within reach of – even, is a natural right of – everyone in the country.

  I don’t see this background as irrelevant to what happened. The rioters were disengaged from their world to the point of destroying it for reasons they themselves could not express. They were alienated from themselves, too, heedless of consequences they knew must come, but somehow they didn’t care or could not apply those consequences to themselves. They became, briefly, almost psychopathic, in that one of the distinguishing marks of psychopathy that can be measured in a magnetic resonance imaging scan is an inability to anticipate future suffering. So what happened to them? How did the nation lose its head?

  In the 1930s US Depression there was a powerful sense that obeying the rules did you no good; being a law-biding citizen, working hard and saving, had turned out not to lead to the American Dream, which at the time was solidly middle class: a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a community of like-minded fellows around you, kids going to good schools and then on to college and growing more prosperous in the next generation, and any one of them might one day be President. The key was a notion of bettering oneself; but in the 1930s, the Dream was abruptly very far off, and a nightmare took over: no matter how hard you worked you might not make enough money to feed your family. You might slip down rather than climb up the social ladder. Certainly that white picket fence was nowhere in sight.

  The point here is not absolute deprivation, though there was a fair measure of that, both in 1930s America and in 2011 UK, despite the cry that ‘these kids have BlackBerries, they’re not poor’: as asinine a statement as I can imagine when there are people all around the world with cellphones who are otherwise living in conditions we would consider unthinkable. Rather, the issue is relative deprivation, the gap between the way people believe – or have been led to believe – their world will be, and the way it is. If you cannot get the things you have been told are natural to you, you will become angry, or, perhaps, in another cultural context, depressed and withdrawn: maybe that’s part of why Japan, whose economy has already suffered a blow like the one we are now experiencing, produced its hikikomori. Be that as it may, in the UK situation at present, and unquestionably also in the US, where the Occupy camps are still going strong, there is a perceived issue of fairness. The concept is deeply rooted in us: there are experiments in Game Theory that show how deeply. One of them is called the Ultimatum Game.

  In the Ultimatum Game, two players have to determine the split of a pot of money. One player offers a given split, and the other can accept or reject the proposal. If the second player rejects the split, neither one of them gets anything. Although the results can be variable, a surprising amount of the time the second player will reject a split that seems unfair even though the net gain of doing so is (inevitably) less than that of acceptance of even a bad deal. In other words, there is some evidence to show that people will reject an unfair settlement simply because it is unfair, rather than because it is not sufficiently advantageous. Turning the game around, there is a simpler version that does not technically qualify as a game, because the second player has no options within the structure. In the Dictator Game, the first player can simply dispose of the amount as they see fit. The second player can do nothing to affect this result. All the same, many of those cast as dictators do share the money.

  Returning to the broken American Dream of the Depression era, the 1930s produced the gangster as we understand him now, and the expression of him in the media bled into the reality until the two were not separable. Cultural critic Robert Warshow described him in his screen incarnation as a creature bent on violence and crime as an end in itself, a man who does badness because it’s what defines him. The gangster’s salient feature, though, is that he won’t accept – cannot accept – being part of a herd of persons who live without hope despite doing everything right. His response to the Depression is to rebel, to rewrite the rules in his own favour. He recognizes something fundamental about our capitalist democratic society, and something that is perhaps more obvious about the United States, which possesses a written constitution: we ourselves make the rules. They can be rewritten by us. Situations like the Depression are not, emphatic
ally, inhuman. They are the product of human action, and it is against these humans, in the form of policemen and judges and bank managers, that the gangster – like the girl interviewed by the BBC – rebels. He chooses to stand above the rest, screaming defiance, and ultimately gets cut down by the larger group, or, at least, by the representatives of the supposed silent majority that has chosen the opposite course.

  It’s hardly an unfamiliar narrative in these recession days. And it makes sense, as well, in the context of the Arab Spring. An intolerable situation made people brave, or so numb that an ordinary greengrocer became a self-immolating martyr. The psychological effect of a societal dissonance was to make individuals behave – and think and feel – in a way that under less pressurized circumstances they would not have. The phenomenon is called ‘deindividuation’. It is said to be a consequence both of the influence of wicked regimes and, in another way, of the anonymity and apparently consequence-free environment of the Internet.

  The classic deindividuation study was done with Hallowe’en sweets: children who felt their individual activities could not be traced to them were likely to take more sweets from a bowl than those who knew they were observed and thus roped into the norms of sharing, generosity and moderation. It’s obvious enough from one’s own experience. But the most famous and interesting deindividuation story is the one they made the film about: the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, which was conducted in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo. It has never been repeated because it went so well it nearly turned into a catastrophe. The strangest, saddest and bleakest thing I read in preparing this book was Zimbardo’s account of what happened. His horror comes across as a fracture in his life, like a bereavement: ‘I wish I could say that writing this book was a labor of love; it was not … it was emotionally painful … Time had dimmed my memory of the extent of creative evil in which many of the guards engaged, the extent of the suffering of many of the prisoners, and the extent of my passivity in allowing the abuses to continue for as long as they did.’

  In the experiment, male students were selected to participate on the basis of having no negative personality traits – no narcissists, no sadists and so on. In other words, they were selected for not being dangerous monstrous bastards. They were then split into two groups, prisoners and guards. They were given uniforms and sent down to a basement level to live for two weeks in character. The experiment was halted after six days when it became apparent that the well-adjusted, hand-picked guards were becoming frighteningly violent with the prisoners. The ordinary, decent students had turned into dangerous, monstrous bastards.

  Theorists highlight a number of factors: anonymity and participation in a group, diffusion of blame, hierarchy giving orders to subordinates whose defined job was not to think but to act. Students in the SPE apparently believed that if they stepped over the line, the experimenters would stop them before they went too far. Let me reiterate: these were people who should have known, without a shadow of doubt, where the line was and what ‘too far’ meant. They should not have needed a safety net to prevent them from administering a serious beating to a fellow student in an experiment. But they did. They had surrendered that aspect of the self to the rules of the game they were playing as they perceived it.

  I cannot help but see deindividuation in the professional ethos I’ve discussed elsewhere in this book; in the claim that functionaries must act in accordance with decisions taken by higher-ups, that it’s ‘not their job’ to make ethical decisions. I also wonder about people working in the banks during the sub-prime days. Reading journalist and former bond salesman Michael Lewis’s extraordinary journeys through the US and European financial systems (The Big Short and Boomerang), it’s hard not to think that those traders, many of whom knew on some level that the market could not possibly work this way for ever, were under the influence of a deindividuating situation in which they saw themselves as absolved of responsibility by the system in the same way as Zimbardo’s students. It simply was not part of their assigned role to object, so they didn’t.

  The effect has been linked since the Stanford experiment with some of the really appalling moments in human conduct in the modern world, such as the Vietnam My Lai massacre and the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. One of the early projects that points to deindividuation – though it actually dealt with blind obedience – was performed by Stanley Milgram in 1963. Milgram put subjects in the position of thinking they were administering electric shocks to a test subject in another room. Under the guidance of experimenters, and despite the increasingly desperate pleas from a stooge in the other room claiming to be in mortal agony or even to be dying, 65 per cent continued the test to the very end, administering what was supposed to be a 450-volt shock to the (non-existent) test subject on the other end of the wire. In the shadow of the Nazi Holocaust, Milgram’s experiments are telling and bleakly fascinating. With Milgram in mind, look again at Philip Zimbardo’s reference to his own behaviour. One feels he was affected both by an internal version of Milgram’s experiment in which he was both researcher and subject, and by the deindividuation affecting the test groups: they were anonymized and distanced by their roles as prisoners and guards, he by his as disinterested and objective observer.

  So deindividuation is a huge phenomenon: a societal force, a shaper of revolutions and of horrors. It is also attributed to situations where individuals feel downward pressure and stress upon them that they cannot sustain; the self melts into the larger group as a defence against a situation that it does not understand and in which the individual feels there is no right course, no survival strategy. In other words, it’s an aspect of how people living under regimes that have no compunction about torturing and killing dissenters cope, and how they eventually come out of the shadows and rebel, despite knowing objectively that many of them will probably die. They become part of something larger, and that larger entity is angry and cannot effectively be punished or destroyed.

  The same force is also at work, apparently, in the way people act online. Anonymized and disconnected (in the face-to-face sense) from the people with whom they interact, Internet users can become spiteful and splenetic to a degree that would never be permitted in a physical social context, or, if it were, it would be profoundly uncomfortable and might devolve into violence. This can be seen as another aspect of the crowd phenomenon: self-reinforcing certainties unchecked by social brakes derived from actual presence.

  French psychologist Gustave Le Bon proposed at the end of the nineteenth century that this kind of anonymity resulted automatically in a kind of lowest common denominator of human behaviour, a disinhibition. (Eben Moglen would no doubt counter that anonymity, and perhaps that very disinhibition, is a vital aspect of the liberty of the individual. If you feel there may be adverse consequences to expressing your opinion, your free speech is muffled and democracy suffers – as indeed does the wisdom of the crowd.) It seems that loss of contact with the world and of understanding of the self’s place in it can lead to a kind of inability (or unwillingness, which in this context becomes the same thing) to regulate one’s own behaviour. In the digital arena, where norms are either contested or not established, where there is an apparent anonymity, and where ultimately everyone is speaking not from their buttoned-up, outside-world self but from the unmoderated hearth, the private kingdom, the normal constraints seem not to apply.

  It has to be acknowledged that there are profound differences of degree here. Those living under the kind of regime that was prevalent in the Middle East undergo an extreme version of this process, an absolute bewilderment that leads to the kind of wild, appalling demonstrations of pain that culminate in self-immolation. In the case of the UK riots, a growing sense of abandonment and contempt seems to have been a major factor, a hopelessness that I think does strongly mirror the US 1930s’ experience, and will do so ever more if the situation worsens and persists, as now seems likely.

  By comparison, the deindividuation of Internet use is mild, and perhaps somewh
at differently constructed – but still very real. Net users feel anonymous because they are physically alone and can choose screen names and so on (and because the general awareness of how exposed a given user is on the Internet is quite low). The lack of a physical component means there are no obvious adverse consequences to anything that happens, which implies that there will be no blame. It’s even possible that the constant barrage of legalese, far from restraining users, actually liberates them: if there are rules aplenty and structures to prevent you from doing things, that means that anything that is possible must be acceptable. Further, the world is formed neatly into teams, and the enemy is faceless not only because it is removed by distance and invisible, but also because it is structural: governmental or corporate. These are classic conditions for a low-level deindividuation.

  The consequence appears to be a sort of ongoing digital nuisance: the kind of language you’d expect someone rather ill-tempered to use in heavy road traffic appearing in what ought to be the enlightened debating space of news website comments pages; cyberbullying; unlawful file-sharing. And yet it stands in stark contrast to the idea of social media as something positive, a medium allowing genuine connection and self-determination. Possibly this is because the situation is less monolithic and – once again – more patchworked. Some aspects of online life lead to deindividuation, and in those areas people behave badly. Others do not, and encourage and reward good behaviour.

  But in any case, are social media really that important? Aren’t they just a replacement for physical encounters? And most significantly: can they really help us deal with massive problems?