The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World

by Nick Harkaway

  I’m far from being the first person to identify and emphasize the value of the engaged state. Robert Pirsig’s novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance discusses something very similar. Pirsig identifies moments of disengagement as ‘quality traps’. When you make a poor decision, force a screw and strip the thread because you were in a hurry and not really concentrating, that’s a quality trap. The smooth focus that Pirsig proposes we should all try to inhabit all the time has been lost, and the consequence of a heedless, careless interaction with the world is frustration.

  Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi also wrote extensively about what I would identify as the deep engagement of creative work in Flow: ‘When all a person’s relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, that person’s attention is completely absorbed … All the attention is concentrated on the relevant stimuli … one of the most universal and distinctive features of optimal experience takes place: people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic …’ But importantly, ‘Although the flow experience appears to be effortless … it requires … highly disciplined mental activity. It does not happen without the application of skilled performance.’

  Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’ is almost certainly the most concentrated sort of engagement; I don’t propose that we all constantly push ourselves to the level of focus required to drive a Formula One car or write a novel. In any case, judging by my own experience, that state is not something that can be maintained at all times and nor is it entirely desirable to do so; the absoluteness of it makes it a perilous friend if you’re walking through a crowded marketplace or driving a car (unless that activity is what you’re concentrating on). I find that when I’m working at that level I lack what fighter pilots call ‘situational awareness’; more colloquially, I could keep working through a small earthquake so long as the power to my computer remained uninterrupted, and if the power did fail I might well just go and find a pen.

  But the basic tenet of focus, of the application of the attention of the mind to a task, an activity, is the same. It’s what differentiates interactions that are real and worthwhile from those that are essentially a waste of time, or, at least, the kind of thing with which our days are filled and which we generally forget: tying shoelaces, brushing teeth and so on. We don’t engage with those activities in general because we don’t see that they have value; they’re mechanical actions rather than ones we need to get to grips with and understand. (As a matter of interest, engaging properly with either one of those examples yields fascinating information: shoelaces lead backwards into history and sideways into fashion and the mathematics of knots, and tooth-brushing touches biology, chemistry, advertising, body mechanics … Pirsig would probably say that was the point: an open appreciation of the world around yields understanding and wonder.)

  Engagement is also important because it is in part a determinator of whether we grant someone the privileges of the hearth. That’s more than simply a question of whether you allow them into your house; it’s a question about whether you’d give them a key to your house. Granting someone access to the hearth – to the place where we play and where our families live – is a gesture of trust and an acceptance of them into a different order of our personal understanding of the world. Inside the hearth circle, there is a code of behaviour, a reciprocal relationship of guest and host, of co-equals, and of mutual obligation. It goes beyond ‘Netiquette’, the much debated code of online politesse. Hearth rules are exacting yet soft, more understandings than codified laws, requiring attention and even empathy.

  In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely describes an example that intrigues me. At a day care centre in Israel, there was apparently a problem with tardy parents. The centre, in an attempt to ameliorate this, imposed a fine for lateness. Not only did this not solve the problem, it actually exacerbated it: the change from social obligation – hearth rules – to commercial transaction made parents much more willing to show up late, because now there was a straightforward cost that could be met by paying the fine rather than a sense of anti-social behaviour. The host–guest relationship was annulled and replaced with a simple transactional one, in which transformation, people in cooperation became representatives of two separate financial interests bound in a contractual relationship. In the new situation, the only obligation upon the parents was to pay their bills, after which it was up to them to extract the most good from the service. What had been cooperation between individuals on an informal, hearth basis in which everyone knew what was and was not acceptable, but it was not codified, became tension between (fractionally deindividuated) representatives of two teams. Reversing the process seems to be very difficult; when the fine was discontinued, behaviour got even worse: now there was neither a social penalty nor a financial one, so parents just turned up when they wanted to.

  The lesson is that hearth rules and social obligations are a more powerful, if more diffuse, way of defining boundaries than we might usually expect. In a strictly professional setting, people will perform the minimum necessary action to satisfy obligations. By contrast, social obligations under the rules of the hearth require a higher standard of compliance: essentially, doing the job to a standard you yourself would be happy with. Hearth rules also tap into the curiously powerful phenomenon of gift-giving, which according to research that appeared in Science magazine in 2007 is itself inherently pleasurable: ‘even mandatory, tax-like transfers to a charity elicit neural activity in areas linked to reward processing. Moreover, neural responses to the charity’s financial gains predict voluntary giving. However, consistent with warm glow, neural activity further increases when people make transfers voluntarily. Both pure altruism and warm-glow motives appear to determine the hedonic consequences of financial transfers to the public good.’1 If you’re covered by the rules of the hearth, of gifting and personal connection, you’re protected somewhat from the predatory side of human nature and benefit from what appears to be a hard-wired (if contextual and conditional) generosity.

  Given that the hearth provides that kind of protection, it might seem that taking advantage of hearth rules was an ideal online strategy for content owners, and in a way that’s true; but if you come at it from that perspective, authenticity will start to be a problem. To borrow from Csikszentmihalyi once more – he’s talking about the emancipation of consciousness, but it applies equally here – engagement ‘cannot be institutionalised. As soon as it becomes part of a set of rules and norms, it ceases to be effective.’ You can’t, in other words, fake it. You have to be real.

  One of the best examples of people who understand this is Cory Doctorow. Doctorow communicates freely and personally with a huge following, uses social media aptly and elegantly and in such a way that it’s clear he is genuinely interested in the conversations in which he participates. He makes digital versions of his novels available to download on his website without digital rights management restrictions, on the basis that obscurity is a greater enemy of a writer than piracy. He also asks those who download his work free to buy physical books as presents or archive copies if they like them. A large number do exactly that. People feel that they’re part of Doctorow’s social circle; default would not be a matter of taking money from a faceless corporate entity, but rather from the man himself, with whom many have interacted, and who has trusted them with the keys to his hearth.

  In doing this, Doctorow shifts the ground of his work from a straightforward commercial enterprise to one that is bound up with social responsibility and personal obligation. In a limited but entirely genuine way, he opens his doors, offers himself as host, and his readers and visitors accept a role as guest, and obey the imperative of the hearth by reciprocating. At the same time, of course, his request that readers buy physical books as gifts as a way of recompensing him for free downloads plays to the pleasure of giving. It’s a virtuous circle, and one that is sufficiently powerful that I feel a measure of unhappiness at breaki
ng it down like this: clinical analysis is not 100 per cent compatible with the ethos of the hearth, belonging to a cooler tradition. On the other hand, while I have met Cory and read his writing (I bought a paper copy) I haven’t yet got to know him, so I don’t feel entirely within the hearth circle yet, and therefore perhaps I’m not really transgressing.

  Both sides of the copyright debates online could profitably pay attention to this example. On the commercial side, we need to understand that there is literally nothing worse than a harsh deterrent that cannot by definition be enforced. It shifts the positions to their most adversarial – prompting deindividuation and increasing the likelihood that people will ignore the rules – but as in the case of the day care centre or indeed the capital punishment debate it fails to provide a sufficient reason not to act. The present strategy in the content industries is so counter-productive as to be almost painful to watch: a desperate attempt to turn back the clock to the pre-digital age by making digital files less copy-able and the penalties for copying them more unpleasant, thereby throwing away any goodwill and creating the worst kind of system of faceless aggression and impersonal disengagement, while inevitably being unable to punch hard enough to make a difference to the availability of unsanctioned file copies of content. Governments and parliaments have so far quite rightly refused to allow constant warrantless surveillance in the name of television companies. (It was at once uplifting and depressing to see the resistance to the Stop Online Piracy Act in the United States in early 2012 – the former, because a digitally coordinated populace used the machinery of the conventional democratic state to oppose a ridiculous law; the latter because they did so to preserve the digital status quo rather than, for example, to demand the repeal of the more alarming aspects of recent anti-terror legislation which have rolled back historically hard-won freedoms in the name of questionable increases in national security.) Once again, I come back to the point that there has to be a limit on enforcement strategies, because the alternative is an Orwellian state. That being so, the ‘crushing litigation’ strategy is over before it begins, and we would do better to recognize that and move on.

  In the meantime, while many would argue – rightly – that file-sharing can popularize a product and make the creator’s name, it has to be said that it can also run together with wasteful and ungenerous behaviour. Developer GAMEized created an app for iPhone called FingerKicks. The initial indications were that the game was doing well. Two weeks after the initial release, players using the software, measured through Apple’s GameCenter – the online gaming hub built into the phone’s operating system – numbered around 16,000. Legitimate downloads, though, were only 1,200; the other players were all using copies that hadn’t been paid for. The game was priced at 99 cents. Needless to say, the company did not recoup its investment.

  One way to solve this problem is simply to adopt a different pricing model – for example, one which allows free download but requires payment to play or to access the full product – a subscription or an incremental payment strategy. While that works, it also dodges the issue – it’s not a nudge, but an armlock, and it hints at a society where anything which isn’t nailed down will be appropriated. It’s easy to laugh at developers, or writers or musicians, who say that after a certain point they’ll just do something else – but it might be kinder and wiser to wonder at what point they might in fact do so – or, more immediately, at what point they will simply have to turn their talents away from that particular way of working to another where they can actually make money, creating a sort of tragedy of the commons in which a hostile environment deprives us of content – artworks, music, novels, television – we really want. This discussion fragments with depressing speed into mirror-image counterpoints, one side claiming that creatives are financially better off under the digital models, the other side responding that they are not. I suspect that both are true in different situations, but once again, the more important thing is that the outcome of the encounter between philosophies is not set. We can still influence – by ingenuity and entrepreneurship and by legislation and debate – the shape of the cultural market in years to come.

  The tragedy of the commons, incidentally, is worth revisiting in connection with this discussion, not least because it brings a dose of reality to all concerned. In the classic version, a shared resource is gradually destroyed by the collective actions of the group. Because no one takes time to maintain it, and everyone seeks to extract the maximum benefit from it, the resource is eventually depleted past the point where it can recover, and the community as a whole suffers. I vastly prefer this way of looking at the issue to the ridiculously shrill approach still taken in many copyright advocacy infomercials, which use the term ‘piracy’. Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the derision it receives. Unsanctioned file-sharing is not piracy, it’s littering. Each individual action is of no consequence whatsoever, but the overall result is akin to what GAMEized have experienced: a product can become popular and yet there’s no benefit whatsoever to the maker. There is, therefore, no financial motive to make anything similar (or at least, not with a similar pricing model) again, and considerable impediments to doing so, as the process of developing an app or generating content is expensive and labour-intensive. The creative environment is stifled.

  The same applies to books, music and film; the maker puts a great deal of time and self into a project. To find that people are prepared to take it and use it enthusiastically, but balk at paying even a modest fee, is massively dispiriting and sets up the stark divide between maker and user once more, creating an oppositional, hostile relationship of mistrust. At some point, the Ultimatum Game once again becomes relevant: sooner or later, it’s simply so upsetting to be part of the situation that people quit. People generally think that doesn’t happen, but I’ve actually done it: I left the movie industry because I couldn’t, in the end, put up with what felt like a corrosive working environment. It was making me too unhappy. I wrote The Gone-Away World as a sort of last gasp at writing: if it hadn’t been well received, I would probably have gone back to university to train as a lawyer. The only way I can see to deal with this situation is to de-professionalize the relationship, creating an environment that fosters engagement between consumers and creators. I don’t mean that the relationship cannot involve financial transaction; rather it seems to me that content creators and content owners must have an appreciable identity, a presence that can be encountered and understood in terms of its place in the world and the people who are a part of it. Companies can do this too; there’s no a priori reason why a company’s ethos cannot be strong and welcoming rather than abstract and seemingly uncaring. The time when a company was an expression of a single individual has mostly gone, but if an organization can develop a coherent, consistent and responsive identity it can be trusted and engaged with.

  Google and Apple both benefited from a perception of a unique and positive character in their early days; Microsoft, by contrast, suffers from the opposite. All are now encountering resistance because their responses cannot be sufficiently substantive to satisfy the demand for engagement. Like politicians, they have to be wary of what they say, and their hedges and plays for time read like what they are. A personal friend who hedges is doubly unattractive; honesty and openness, on appropriate topics, are part of the hearth relationship. (The first time I saw a strategy like this given life was years ago, in an article about a US realtor. He had chosen to blog his days, including his mistakes. His competition thought he was mad, but his customers enjoyed the openness. They knew he made mistakes – everyone does – and now they knew what those mistakes were. Similarly, in the confrontation between the unnamed PR company and the Bloggess, the company could at any time have reversed
its fortunes with an appropriate apology, turning enmity into appreciation. Quite often in life we are more impressed by those who deal well with mistakes than we are by those who claim to make none.)

  For many industries and institutions, publishing included, this kind of venture – enjoyable though it would be, I don’t propose that everyone admit to their blunders – will mean a change of attitude regarding the place of the end-user. For most publishing companies, consumers have historically been someone else’s problem. Communicating with individuals was an unnecessary chore best left to booksellers. Once again, it’s the broadcast mentality. Now, however, it seems to me that there’s an opportunity to use the heritage of each imprint as an independent house to engage with the readership, to create or reveal the identity and history of the various companies – many of which are genuinely fascinating and moving – and allow a natural engagement wherein people united by a particular sense of taste can find and follow a publisher with interests and styles that meet it.