The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World

by Nick Harkaway

  Feedback is a simple enough notion, and easy to implement, but it has profound consequences. That sense of complexity we experience, of a world out of control, doesn’t come from digital technologies, but from the access they afford us, and the dawning realization that many of our actions have consequences far beyond the venue where we do them. The difficulty now lies in finding responses that produce the results we want; and there, too, feedback is helpful. Just as you visually check the position of your hand when trying to manipulate something very small, so we can guide our response with real-time feedback, and make sure it’s achieving what we hope for.

  And observe, you are put to a stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanise them.

  John Ruskin

  One area of the digital realm I’m uncomfortable with is the design of our actual devices and their lack of uniqueness or narrative. John Ruskin argued in 1853 that machined perfection of form in physical objects was an assault on the human soul. The human was flawed, Ruskin said, and we should accept that and cherish it. For him, the precise lines of industrial processes were unwholesome, speaking of objects rather than people, and diminishing the value of man.

  A hundred years later, machine-made items, endlessly replicable, were popularized in the austerity period following the Second World War. They were supposed to be democratic: art for everyone, not just for the wealthy. This was art the ordinary people could keep and inhabit: a concept iterated a thousand times being just as splendid as a one-off masterpiece. Art nouveau – the successor to Ruskin’s Arts and Crafts movement – had by then itself been pilloried as a death of the individual. The influential architect Adolf Loos described in 1900 a perfect artisan dwelling place that echoed every aspect of its owner, leaving him essentially with nothing to do but die: he had been perfectly expressed by his home, so there could be nothing more to add to the story of his life.

  Loos’s thinking, like Ruskin’s, embraced art and culture both, and his perception was that the removal of ornamentation was a sign of cultural progress. The process of purification in modernism was evidence of evolution, where art nouveau was ‘erotic and degenerate’. Loos might well have approved of the seamlessness of our present technological devices: led by Apple, the makers of smartphones have eschewed physical ornamentation of any kind, reaching instead for industrial design. The original iPhone was a smooth aluminium and glass lozenge; the more recent model, the iPhone 4, is black plastic and glass. In a major concession, Apple has also produced the iPhone in white. Aside from the touch screen, there is one main button, a volume control, and an off switch. The phone absolutely cannot be physically customized; that is to say, opening it voids the warranty. It is as much an extension of Apple’s identity into its users’ as it is a personal item – and that is true of the software that operates it too, blending the technology of the device into a recognizably bland shopfront for selling content. The late Steve Jobs said in an interview that he didn’t like to talk about design: ‘it’s not really how they look, it’s how they work’, and yes, the function of the iPhone absolutely overrides its physical form. But that, in itself, can be read as a message too: that existence alone is not important, that you should be judged on what you do. Worth is instrumental, not inherent.

  Actions are important, of course, and this is not to mount an assault on Apple; Sir Jonathan Ives’ designs are profoundly elegant, and the system inside is superb; a single iPhone, as a unique object, is a gorgeous and immensely useful tool. It’s the spectacle of millions of units, each the same as the last, each not so much an identity as a vector for the transmission of identity in either direction, which becomes disturbing, and evokes Ruskin’s concerns.

  Each phone being identical is important because it means that (unlike with Google’s competing Android platform) software developers can work in the knowledge that everyone will be running their apps on the same device. The screen will be the same size, the same accelerometer will be installed, the same chips. It also means that a lost or damaged phone can be replaced and – once the backed-up data is transferred – the new phone will to all intents and purposes be the old one. It’s a practical issue, not obviously an ideological one. The upshot, though, is the same: we carry interchangeable devices, and we are encouraged to see their smoothness as a virtue and to think of their lack of identity as an identity in itself, or at least, to see identity – which you might also think of as a style of being – as something that can be assembled out of pre-made parts rather than expressed uniquely and organically. From Adolf Loos to Bruce Mau to Apple to us: does the homogeneity of pure design diminish the human? What does it mean that you buy your device from an Apple Store, which is an abstract entity in physical form, the physical instantiation of Apple’s online presence and even its system self, rather than from a unique local vendor? If a given technology carries a message, does the design of our technology imply interchangeability and uniformity – and does that, in turn, imply it about us as individuals?

  It sounds a rather fanciful question, but the anonymity of our technology is glaring when you consider how it might otherwise have been. In 1996 novelist William Gibson wrote in Idoru about artisan laptops:

  ‘I like your computer,’ she said. ‘It looks like it was made by Indians or something.’

  Chia looked down at her sandbenders. Turned off the red switch. ‘Coral,’ she said. ‘These are turquoise. The ones that look like ivory are the inside of a kind of nut. Renewable.’

  ‘The rest is silver?’

  ‘Aluminum,’ Chia said. ‘They melt old cans they dig up on the beach and cast it in sand molds. These panels are micarta. That’s linen with this resin in it.’

  The textureless lines of our technology lack any sense of play in their construction, of the uniqueness and history of Gibson’s fictional devices. The exteriors of the Nexus S, the iPhone, the Kindle, the Vaio – all these are functional and industrial. There’s no space in them for a sculptor’s joke or a designer’s concession to light or local materials. And while that may not seem important – after all, surely what’s inside them matters far more – it continues a mood that permeates the industry as a whole, in which standardization is preferable because it makes the whole process easier – perhaps even makes it possible – for the company and its machines.

  The human is secondary; even, actually, in terms of ergonomics. The structures of portable computers are not friendly to prolonged use by humans: they cause cramp, RSI and back pain. There have been occasional attempts to shift this: IBM briefly made a laptop with a fold-out keyboard of ergonomic design, but it was flimsy and the model was dropped. No one has ever made a laptop that did not put the screen at the wrong height for a human typing on the keyboard. Yes, of course, there are conflicting constraints of portability. But the ingenuity that has been applied to other seemingly insurmountable problems is absent. The designs are convenient for a non-human mass-production and distribution system, and that convenience is then packaged as being something desirable, something to be aspired to.

  The same was true to an extent in the austerity years, but it’s hard to argue with that in the context. Beauty of any sort was hard to come by in the fatigued post-war environment, and the understanding of it had been newly and appallingly altered by the discovery of the Nazi Holocaust. Theodor Adorno, the influential cultural critic, wrote in 1951 that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz was impossible. The clean, unornamented lines of period furniture and houses were a reflection of that sense that embellishment and frivolous beauty were out of place. The functional cleanness of modern design bowed to a need, quite above and beyond the fact that there wasn’t the time or the wealth to do anything else.

  We’ve
moved on from that problem into a new one. The successors of Marcel Breuer and Eileen Gray are IKEA and MFI, turning out replicas of revivals of copies and converting homes into airport lounges. Modernism isn’t a design ethos any more, it’s an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role. It’s ironic that the iPhone and its competitors should come from one of the most identifiable and unique personalities of the modern age, Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011, and whose life has reshaped the digital landscape at almost every turn. The iPhone’s inner self is like Jobs: versatile, adaptable and intriguing, but its exterior is everything its creator wasn’t: sheer, stark, easily mass produced. The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences; handwork is just an awkward approximation of computer-assisted cutting. Precision is good, and the narrative of an object’s creation in the hands of a workman is a bizarre sideshow, not really the point of the object.

  Is it too much of a stretch to connect that idea – that what an item really is, really means, is a product of how it is used – with the sense of disconnection and hopelessness that organizations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation identify as part of the social problems that led to the UK riots? ‘Through our research, we know that people in some places feel absolutely powerless … they believe their aspirations are frustrated and that whatever their effort they will not be recognised … [they] are worried about living in a culture that has increasingly defined status through material possessions …’5 Does our technological culture tacitly propose that nothing is of value (as opposed to financial worth) of itself; its significance is determined not by its substance, but by what it can do? In which case if your prospects are not good, you are unlikely to achieve any value, or any discrete identity of your own, and the world has no place for you. In this picture, the specific self is without value: only the connection really means anything. Not that Apple and Google are responsible for this; rather that they incidentally lend strength to it, just as TV and film once contributed to the perception that smoking was a trait of the rebel.

  You may argue that this issue is nebulous. But certainly, what our technological design lacks is the concept at the heart of this book: a sense of self. Our devices do not express who we are, except to brand us as belonging to a particular group of users, consumers and commodities. Loos has, for the moment, won his battle. The hand that assembled my desktop’s components assembled a thousand like it and never made any impact on how they look or function; the designer who created it never touched the one I work on; the human narratives that could be in our technology are brushed away to make a perfectly artificial product with no history. We deny their origins, perhaps even are uncomfortable with them – the sweatshop labour, the mines where the coltan comes from – and we shut down a part of ourselves to avoid seeing. William Gibson’s fictional sandbenders have history, and they reflect aspects of an unequal world. From the technology in the real life, you could imagine everything everywhere was like an Apple Store. We buy an illusion of silvery modernity and progress, a ghost of the designs of Le Corbusier stripped of his idealistic ‘Open Hand’ (a gesture of peace and reciprocity), over something that tells us the story itself and affords us the understanding of another life. The commercial culture surrounding our present style of technological design encourages us, however slightly, to choose not to see.

  In other words, on some level – however slight – the design and manufacture of our devices deindividuate us and disengage us from the living world. In exchange for that deficit, though, we get access to the feedback system that is developing in the social Internet, to discussions and vibrant conversations that reaffirm who we are even as they challenge it.

  The twentieth century was the century of mechanization, of speed and of industry. It was a time of rapid social change, confusing and bewildering alterations in the relationships between nations, between individuals and society, between individuals and one another. The fundamental tenets of Western capitalist civilization were questioned, reaffirmed, questioned, redefined and so on. Social order in the form of the Church, the legitimacy of the state and the notion of family were scrutinized and in some ways found wanting. Gender roles were reassessed, and the ‘supermum’, juggling job and family and finding a path through the whole thing, became the standard for women to aspire to – never mind that it was precisely this juggling act that men were and are notably unable to achieve. In the 1990s, the complexity of the post-Cold War world became apparent. Twenty-four-hour news arrived, the environmental crisis became increasingly evident and then was assailed as a confidence trick, the notion of peak oil was mooted again. The world became difficult to understand without the massive blanket of nuclear pressure to homogenize and override its many aspects. Simple things – actions, beliefs, situations and perceptions which required no examination – were harder and harder to find. Even those cherished abstract systems, supposedly infinitely transferable, began to show holes as modern agricultural techniques applied without local knowledge in some ‘third world’ countries caused famine rather than feast, and not every model of industry proved instantly replicable in a new cultural context.

  There’s no question that the arrival of always-on digital technology has added in some ways to this sense of bombardment, in large part because it makes us available even when we are not out in public, in part because it connects those different cultural contexts, allowing them – forcing them? – to rub shoulders. However, looking at what digital technology does, and the changes its use causes in us, there’s another way of seeing it: it’s not the problem, it’s the response.

  Look again at the study Nicholas Carr points to which says that playing computer games and reading documents online foster an editorial and problem-solving faculty: what do those skills imply but an ability to cope with a world that was already becoming saturated with information, already out of control? The engaged use of digital technology teaches skills and creates architectures in the brain that are helpful in dealing with problems we already had when it became part of the world in the 1990s. Digital technology provides ways of using all the time we have, of being in more than one place at a time. It lets us adapt rapidly to changing situations: to call from the roadside to say we won’t make a given appointment because we’ve broken down, or to exchange information in a more serious crisis such as the London riots. It’s a way of managing time and space and of overcoming distance. It allows us to find people who are like us whom we otherwise would never know, which puts us back in a social context that we as humans actually do need, and which the nature of our society in the aftermath of the Enlightenment’s application of doubt to its central pillars renders difficult. Digital brings its own problems – our weaknesses are adaptive, as well as our strengths – but it is a strategy we evolved to resolve a set of crises we already had, and which are still playing out, rather more than it is the cause of a new one.

  Imagine for a moment that the sense data you experience all the time – your sight, hearing, sense of balance and so on – arrived ten minutes late. You wouldn’t, for a start, be able to walk; the human method of locomotion requires that we fall forward and catch ourselves all the time. Balance is crucial (ask anyone who’s ever had Labyrinthitis). You probably wouldn’t be able to stand; even tiny variations in your posture would cause you to fall before you realized they’d taken place. Conversation and debate in real time would be almost impossible unless you were supremely gifted at synchronizing with the other person. It’s not clear that you’d continue to think in the same way as you do no
w; gradually you would become isolated, your priorities would shift. In the modern world, you’d be able to continue to function as a human being by using a computer to relay messages to others, but until the 1990s you’d have been reduced to writing letters to communicate with others in a linear way. You might easily go mad.

  And yet this is the situation in which our society has been up to this point. The feedback from our collective actions has been too slow to understand and too late to do anything about. The vast collective strength we have has been rendered almost useless by the slow speed of our senses. Only when we have been enraged or assailed, when the state of affairs has been so unequivocal that we’ve been able to recognize it and hold fast to that understanding, have we been able to bring to bear even a fraction of the strength we have. In other words, the giant has been blind.

  Digitization changes that in a remarkable way: we are abruptly able to appreciate what’s happening in something approximating real time. Our whole society is suddenly in the position of the motorist seeing the sign displaying his speed. We’re not used to the flow of feedback information, so it feels too fast, too much, too raw, at least when we don’t know what to do with it. Often, the statement of a problem arrives without a solution attached, and we don’t yet have a developed instinct towards solving it; that is, after all, what we have been taught to expect from our governments, though their track record is less than perfect. Increasingly, however, solutions are presented: collective actions such as the Riot Wombles or protests like the Occupy movement. As we get better at understanding that the solutions must come from us, and at creating them from the ideas of a crowd, remarkable things are possible.