The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World

by Nick Harkaway

  Several nations now consider Net access to be a human right, because the dialogue taking place online is adjudged sufficiently fundamental to the society we now have that deprival of it is a form of disenfranchisement. It makes for great tabloid headlines, and it strikes me as a contingent right rather than a fundamental one, but there’s an element of truth in the position. To be out of the loop now is to be to some extent out of the greatest discussion ever conducted. It is to be unrepresented in the creation of a new public sphere, a space where new identities and self-perceptions are being made.

  If the development of writing and the spread of literacy were part of the creation of the modern mind, allowing individual humans to see themselves as complete and separate from their environment and the institutions of their time, then the development of digital technology does something similar for our understanding of ourselves as part of a larger group entity. It’s not that humanity is on the road to becoming a gestalt organism in which we are no more than unconscious cells, like the tiny individual animals that make up the body of a Portuguese man o’ war. Rather, it’s that we are aware of ourselves both as discrete persons, and as contributors to the interplay of forces that goes to make up the body sociopolitic. A fully functioning body of this kind can, of course, achieve remarkable things, such as the NHS, or the US space programme. It is a mistake to think of such involvement as a kind of appalling servitude; there’s no implied diminution of the self in being a part of something greater; in fact, the evidence suggests that the reverse is true. It’s entirely in keeping with being human and how human-ness developed. Certainly it may be necessary to meet the challenges we have set ourselves and which the wider world will set for us.

  It may also be true that the arrival of digital text alters how we think about the world in general. A world constructed on static, printed text is a world of received truth, hierarchical arrangements of society and laws that are, if not unalterable, at least securely fixed. It requires radical social pressure to force those in power to change the rules. By contrast, a world where text is editable and fluid is a world where laws can be rewritten not only by parliaments, but at the behest of the general population. Regulations are no longer understood as divine edicts, but as the written product of other human beings subject to the approval and rewriting of us all. This produces a culture that can seem over-indulgent towards its own sense of entitlement, but it’s also a culture that understands that law is made by consent, not decree, and that a political system constructed on the idea of representation in the seat of power should require representatives actually to be responsive to the desires and opinions of those for whom they stand rather than be benignly paternalistic.

  What makes the biggest impact is perhaps the timescale of it all, not least because other timescales are also shortening. Just as medical research regularly uncovers possibilities that would have seemed miraculous even twenty years ago, so social change that was previously generational can be effected on a scale an individual human being can understand and appreciate – and aim for. Seeing one’s own part in the pattern is not disempowering, but the reverse. And the ability to see where we’re going – or at least where we are now – affords the chance, for the first time in human social history, to start making real decisions.

  blindgiant.co.uk/chapter6

  7

  The Old, the Modern and the New

  I’VE BEEN AROUND the UK publishing industry effectively for my entire life. I sat in on discussions about book jackets and paperback royalties and the rest from before I could walk. I have had a worm’s eye view of some very interesting moments. Mercifully, I don’t remember specifics, but I do have a sense of the arc of the modern publishing story, and it seems to me that it is a useful microcosm of the wider context as culture, politics and society have moved through three fairly distinct stages (albeit with my perpetual caveat that nothing is clear-cut any more, if it ever was, and there are pockets of the old in the new and vice versa) or styles of doing business which you could think of as personal, professional and participatory.

  In the old days – by which I mean the time when my mother’s corduroy trousers were my personal Pillars of Hercules, demarking the edges of the known world – publishing was a family industry. It was deeply embedded in local culture and social life, to the extent that publishers fretted that a given book might be too racy for the family shareholders, who would have to own up to printing something so filthy as Lady Chatterley’s Lover to their friends at the bridge club. D.H. Lawrence’s book was written in 1928, but was banned in the UK for over thirty years; even after that, you could still get ostracized for pushing the envelope of social acceptability. Publishing lived in pre-emptive fear of a collection of almost Wodehousian aunts and spinster sisters. The industry in Britain was essentially upper middle class, white, and based not just in London but in a particular area of the city, although Edinburgh also boasted a number of independent presses. It was premised on the taste and judgement of a vanishingly small number of people, who effectively defined ‘good’ writing for the rest. You could see the defining feature of this style of working as personality: the identity of a publishing house was defined by the managing editor, who was in today’s term curating a selection of works that accorded with his (almost always) understanding of what was good and intelligent and worth putting out there.

  Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, the operating environment changed. Publishing started getting treated as a business. Giants emerged and bought up the small houses, and a corporate culture was imported, although with only partial success. Publishing became a hybrid as the demands of business culture – making money, trimming excessive running costs, publishing on a regular schedule, making the maximum amount of money out of a given property – were grafted on to the long-lunch lifestyle of old publishing. Contracts, which in the 1960s could be a single page release, became lengthy legal documents. Serious marketing practices were brought in, and a publicity machine capable of some impressive hype was born. Celebrity biographies that might previously have been considered coarse and pointless were all the rage. The Net Book Agreement was killed so that huge chains – essentially the supermarkets – could take advantage of economies of scale and bulk purchase to sell books more cheaply.

  But the relaxed culture proved resilient. Publishing is still partly what it was; when I mentioned my Aunt Theory recently in conversation, one publisher from a major imprint flinched slightly and said not much had changed in that regard. Where Hollywood studios spend millions on testing movies before release and working out the demographics of their audience, it’s unusual for a print publisher to research who is buying a given book, or to test it in advance in any formal way. The focus group simply isn’t a part of the landscape. Publishers were and are also unlikely to buy merchandizing rights, which movie studios will always do so that they can capitalize on every aspect of a film property – a lesson learned hard at the hands of one George Lucas, who waived his director’s fee on Star Wars in exchange for the rights to the T-shirts and the toys, not, as he freely admits, because he thought they’d be a goldmine, but because he wanted to be able to publicize the film. As you might imagine, he more than recouped his loss leader.1

  But the book trade has been, if not a little sniffy about that kind of exploitation, then at least less adventurous. There are working hours in publishing, but they are not measured in the way law firms budget the time of their fee earners and partners. When my wife was a commercial lawyer, her day was broken into a sequence of chargeable units, and she accounted for each unit at the end of every month so that she could bill her clients. A unit was six minutes. (Something to bear in mind if you should have cause to hire a lawyer: don’t spend six minutes talking politely about the weather every time you call – it may appear on your bill.) This extreme version of payment by time – made possible by the mechanical clock, of course – imposes the professional imprint on the mind from the moment of waking to the last thought at nigh
t. Six minutes is a short enough period that no hole in the schedule need be wasted in idleness. All but the smallest gap can be converted into money. The day becomes a sequence of slots and increments to be managed, each fragment can be owned by or charged to someone, and the division between fragments is rigid and precise. Publishing – understandably, perhaps – hasn’t gone that far. All the same, the ethos of the post-1990 house is professionalism.

  While everyone was still struggling with the shift to mainstream business practice, another revolution took place. The flying saucer of digital technology crashed into the waving cornfield of the book world and set quite a lot of it on fire. It took a while for the industry to accept this was happening, because books were protected by their design and by the fact that the paper book is actually a refined and usable technology with much to recommend it. When my first novel The Gone-Away World came out in 2008, ebooks were still considered to be a possible but not definite future. It was hard to get anyone to pay any attention to them, although almost everyone would acknowledge that they might become something at some point. Perhaps in a decade or so. If the wind was blowing in the right direction. Now, of course, they’ve arrived, and the industry is playing a certain amount of catch-up; not just with the implications for the supply chain and the arrival of large, scary new kids on the publishing block in the form of Amazon, Google, Apple and others, but also with coming to understand that the heart and soul of the Internet is participation.

  Publishing is traditionally a business which sells to other businesses – books go from publisher to wholesaler to bookseller. Actual publishers rarely dealt directly with consumers. Digital technology’s arrival has inevitably meant a lot of walls coming crashing down, and suddenly, whether they want to or not, publishers are in a relationship with the general public, with all the strangeness, frustration and waywardness that entails. It is publishers who must deal with reported (and unstoppable) violations of intellectual property, and whose existing business habits are scattered to the four winds by the arrival of the Net. The most obvious example is probably hardback and paperback publication. Customarily, books are published in two or sometimes three formats: hardback at a premium price for those who just can’t wait or who want a display edition for their shelves; and later paperback, which can be two releases: a soft-backed edition using pages printed to the same pattern as the hardback’s, followed by a mass-market edition in a smaller size.

  Where in all this does the ebook come in? At the same time as the hardback, cutting into paperback sales? If so, should it be at a hardback price or a more superficially rational level? Or later, forcing the market to wait and increasing the chances that people will pick up an unsanctioned copy from a file-sharing site?

  At the same time, of course, not only are other companies getting in on the act, but the whole wide world now has access to the ability to put material on the Net and even get it printed and call itself a publisher. And it’s true: being able to put together a document for public consumption and make it available does make you a publisher – in exactly the same way that owning an aeroplane makes you an aviator. All the same, the publishing skies are much more crowded, and the traditional top-down, broadcast pattern of publishing is being replaced – in some cases slowly and very much against the will of the main characters – by a more blurred distinction between publisher, commentator and consumer, and between publisher, wholesaler and retailer. What was once a clear set of relationships is now crosshatched with connections and interactions, as society at large knocks on the door of publishing’s cultural village and demands to be let in, or worse, builds houses right outside without asking.

  With this in mind, consider the broader history of the UK: until quite late in the twentieth century, we had a politics essentially amateur in nature. Aristocrats and middle-class intellectuals and working men (and, more rarely, women) campaigned and were sent to parliament to do what they could. They did not take a brief on each individual issue from their constituents, but went with an understanding of the ethos they were to represent – the ethos on which they had been elected. This was a genuine ‘representative’ process. Democracy was served by uniting electorate and MP in a mutually understood shared identity, though inevitably interpretations differed on specifics, and of course the current flowed in two directions: politicians imprinted their own identities on their parties and on the nation. The most extreme example must be Winston Churchill, whose diaries of his life are not merely a day-to-day account, but a self-portrait written with an eye to the creation of a historical narrative which still heavily influences our understanding of the events of his life. ‘I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion’s roar,’ Churchill said in a speech in 1954. Well, perhaps; but looking at the sequence of events surrounding Britain’s entry into the Second World War one might also say that he roared the lion rather than vice versa.

  At a certain point, however, the same transition that affected the publishing world touched our political class: they became professionalized. It was no longer enough that a politician compose their own speeches, make their own off-the-cuff remarks; Tony Blair’s Labour Party was controlled centrally so that everyone was ‘on-message’ and everyone was reading from the same page. The party was to function in a unified fashion, and going off-piste was robustly discouraged. In government, the apparat continued to function in this way, and became so famously exacting in its use of ‘spin’ and publicity management techniques that it spawned the popular television show The Thick of It, whose dominant personality was a vituperative spin doctor cum political executioner rumoured to resemble Blair’s Communications Director Alastair Campbell. The glossy, sound-bite politics of the spin era have been disparaged by almost everyone, but the style of superficial engagement works with conventional media and has not greatly altered.

  More recently, digital technology has begun to make a mark on the political arena as well, as people realize they can reach out to their MPs and to government in general and make their voices heard. Websites allow those who might not under other circumstances have access to Hansard or their representative’s voting record to see not only what positions an MP is taking but also how often they attend debates, and offer basic guidance on how to approach MPs. The web-based organization 38 Degrees has become a sort of clearing house for crowd-driven collective action. A system of electronic petitioning has been created as part of the government’s digital presence, which carefully pledges that a petition with 100,000 signatures ‘could’ be debated by the House of Commons.2

  Meanwhile, aside from the Occupy movement, which expresses the frustrations of many at the shortcomings of government, the perceived lack of responsiveness in our leadership has created numerous local and single-issue campaigns, rejectionist movements and new parties: during the 1990s the professional political class lamented the inertia and apathy of the electorate as evidenced by low turnouts at elections, and launched consultation exercises whose principal purpose always appeared to be to explain to objectors to any given policy why they were wrong, rather than actually holding out any genuine possibility of change. Now, though, the electorate increasingly expects participation, not just on election day but constantly. (And, interestingly, it is ‘expects’ rather than ‘demands’; you demand what you don’t have, but expect what you consider to be natural.) The ubiquity of communications media means that political information and participation can take place anywhere, at any time. Inevitably, there are suggestions that voting should be made possible online. If it is, at what point does parliament become superfluous?

  We’re nowhere near that moment yet, but consider: if you can poll the electorate electronically, and get a higher turnout than you would at a polling station, and if you can do so rapidly and easily and know that the culture of your country is such that people are actually paying attention to the issues, why would you bother to persist with representative democracy? (The tempting answer is: because people can’t be trusted to balance the budget and respec
t international treaties or human rights law, and there is undeniably some truth in that. But at that point you have to acknowledge that you’re living in a paternalistic republic, not a democracy.)

  The participant culture can be difficult for those with a more conventional understanding of the flow of power and prestige to appreciate. Bloggers, Twitter power-users and the others who stand at the intersection of a large number of online lives can have a reach and heft that is hard to see until it materializes (in the words of author and blogger John Scalzi: ‘The Internet is looking for an excuse to drop on your head’). Stephen Fry’s access to this kind of power is more easily understood; he was a celebrity before Twitter existed, and because he is also a lover of all things technological and adept at communication and pithy commentary, that status has translated into a significant and engaged online following. Fry has to be careful what websites he recommends, lest the immediate response from around the world when he mentions something overwhelm smaller servers. And not just smaller ones: his appeal on behalf of a death row inmate in China briefly caused the Foreign Office web presence to go offline.

  But traditional media, politicians and companies can be surprisingly rash when it comes to dealing with the indigenous powerhouses of the Internet. Sometimes, they just don’t seem to recognize the magnitude of what they’re dealing with. Recently, for example, a PR company contrived to offend the Bloggess, writer of the eponymous website, blogger on several sites apart from her own, and someone with a Twitter following of around 170,000. It’s also worth noting that she follows around 15,000, which to my eye implies someone who communicates avidly and will therefore have generated influence and loyalty among those followers. Earlier, I touched on the semiotics of email addresses and the hidden information they provide if you know how to read them. This is much the same; if you had shown me the Bloggess’s Twitter page and her website, I would have taken about eight seconds to respond that this was someone with the approximate reach on specific issues of a minor national newspaper in the UK, and probably a somewhat higher level of personal trust.