[D66] LARB Digital Revolution

[Jugg]

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/los-angeles-review-of-books-digital-editions-the-digital-revolution-debating-the-promise-and-perils-of-the-internet-and-algorithmic-lives-in-the-last-years-of-the-obama-administration/

Debating the Promise and Perils of the Internet and Algorithmic Lives in
the Last Years of the Obama Administration

By Michele Pridmore-brown, lareviewofbooks.org
View Original
August 26th, 2017


You can download the full edition of The Digital Revolution here.
https://lareviewofbooks-org-cgwbfgl6lklqqj3f4t3.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Larb_DigitalRevlolution_r2.pdf

Introduction

PLENTY OF RAPTUROUS CLAIMS have been made about the internet as an agent
of democratization and innovation. Many more claims have been made about
its Pandora-like perils, and how these herald our individual and
collective downfalls, whether by taking away our jobs, exposing our
darkest selves, or turning us into mindless automata disappearing into
“click-bait rabbit holes.” The internet has allegedly enabled a new kind
of populism, as well as political gridlock and the infelicities of the
2016 US presidential election. Clearly, it is the stuff of paradox — and
possibly, as historians like Yuval Harari and others suggest, of
Faustian bargains.

Like the commercial and industrial revolutions before it, this
particular revolution opens up social spaces that alter how we affiliate
and think. On the plus side, we can now communicate and connect with
others like never before — not just with the approximately 150 embodied
others whom anthropologists contend most people knew in the past, but
with thousands and indeed millions of digital others. But it’s much
harder to trust them, and to trust “information.” It is easier to “hide”
— and also harder, which, depending on where you sit, or lurk, is a good
thing, or not. Surveillance is more total, even while it’s more
self-inflicted — and pleasurable; we love Netflix “knowing” us so well,
and so we happily expose more of ourselves to get more of what we want.
This is part of the Faustian bargain.

The LARB Science and Technology section has been capturing scholarly and
popular views on the digital revolution in a series of essays and
reviews that insist on historical perspective — on the longue durée.
They were all written in the last years of the Obama administration,
before the Trump one; they were first published on the LARB website and
are now collected in this volume. They express what experts in their
respective fields got right — and what they may have gotten wrong. They
examine the stakes. In some cases, our contributors dismantle their
colleagues’ arguments, especially when those arguments express a certain
knee-jerk zeitgeist (e.g., the digital age is deskilling us or making us
stupid). Internet philosopher David Weinberger of Harvard University,
for instance, takes on the argument that the net is turning us into
passive knowers. On the contrary, he counters, the net is transforming
knowledge in ways that reveal the flaws inherent in past ways of
knowing. “Networked-knowing” is, in his view, a positive phenomenon — it
replaces the manufactured or “curated cohesion” of past knowledge
regimes. As for the claim that the net reinforces echo chambers (and
false news), he plays the contrarian again, countering that those
chambers are now, thanks to the net, shot through with holes that
anyone, including a teenager trapped in an otherwise airless cult, can
follow just by clicking her finger.

The fact that no echo chamber is impervious to “information” from the
outside certainly seems like a good thing. The fact that there’s quite
possibly no algorithm or security system that isn’t potentially “leaky”
or hackable is perhaps a less good thing, but part of the same digital
coin. Our purported doom and salvation lie in the same places.

In an essay he wrote for LARB in 2014 and included here (see “The
Manipulators”), journalist and blogger Nicholas Carr, author of several
influential books on technology and culture, claimed that we may look
back on 2014 as the year the internet “began to grow up” and the public
was called upon to guide the technology rather than the other way
around. He made this claim seven years after the launch of the iPhone
and “tech boom” of 2007, as identified by journalist Thomas Friedman —
when Facebook, Twitter, and “the cloud” took off, and when, in
Friedman’s opinion, connectivity and computing got so fast and cheap and
ubiquitous that they vastly outpaced social institutions. Writing in
2014, Carr thought that “we” would concertedly rebel against so-called
corporate surveillance creep, and against being lab rats — as in the
OkCupid and Facebook social engineering experiments of that year, which
he addresses in his article here.

Clearly, we haven’t rebelled. Or, to use Carr’s metaphor, the internet
has not “grown up” — and neither have we, its creators and users. On the
contrary, “it” has only gotten better and more efficient at pressing our
buttons.

In his 2016 book The Master Algorithm, computer scientist Pedro Domingos
emphasizes that, in the digital age, “growing up” means knowing our
algorithms. A responsible citizen is, in other words, a digitally savvy
citizen. But, as sociologist Michael S. Evans counters in his review
entitled “Algorithms: The Future that Already Happened,” we can already
be managed — tracked, nudged, fixed — faster than we can respond. In
addition, being technically knowledgeable simply isn’t expedient in our
daily lives. Nor is “obfuscating” our digital tracks (in this regard,
see Evan Selinger’s review: “Internet Privacy: Stepping Up Our
Self-Defense Game”). What we really need, quips Michael Evans, is a
“data reset button” — so that we can start over every few years on a
digitally fresh playing field in the manner of a five-year plan or
Biblical Jubilee.

A pause button might be more feasible if equally unlikely. But Evans has
a point even if he is half-joking. And, of course, that’s another
paradox of sorts. In the digital world, there is no absolute forgetting
— at least for now, even as, on an individual level, we are forgetting
more and more in a process dubbed “cognitive offloading”; the internet
is of course not just our aide-mémoire, but transforming our memories
and how we think. Is it transforming us even more profoundly than the
commercial and industrial revolutions did?

An impossible question perhaps, but in his illuminating essay entitled
“Algorithmic Life,” Berkeley historian and sociologist of science
Massimo Mazzotti suggests, like Carr above, that we’re at a threshold
moment. As happened with the word “technology” in the middle of the 20th
century, our uses of the word “algorithm” are capturing new and
unexpected processes of change. He explains how algorithms naturalize
ways of doing things. They naturalize specific cultures. They’re tools
for doing, as he puts it, and tools for thinking. For these reasons he
calls them “emblematic artifacts” that, like the clock and computer
before them, shape how we understand ourselves and act within the world.
They’re like “powerful rhetorical arguments” in their ability to create
and normalize social worlds. For Mazzotti, being a grown-up means
understanding their “sociotechnical ecologies” — even as, thanks to
innovations in machine learning, they increasingly defy our ability to
comprehend them. It means asking questions about “the process,” and
understanding whose worlds they’re making and whose biases they’re
reinforcing.

In other essays and reviews, contributors take on particular aspects of
the digital revolution. Literary scholar Dennis Tenen of Columbia
University addresses the voluntary surveillance paradox alluded to
earlier with respect to Netflix — but he uses the prison context as a
point of departure. Legal scholar Frank Pasquale, author of the
important 2015 book The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that
Control Money and Information, denounces the “false promise” of
“disruption.”

In a new afterword to TechGnosis, published with LARB in 2015 under the
book’s subtitle “Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information,”
the genre-defying writer Erik Davis reflects on “the contemporary urge
to ‘gamify’ our social and technological interactions,” and deconstructs
net-enabled “enchantment” cum “weirdness.” Berkeley information scholar
Geoff Nunberg addresses Nicholas Carr’s latest book Utopia Is Creepy (a
compilation of his essays and 2005–2015 blog posts) to plumb the
technological uncanny, but insists it’s in fact banal. He describes how,
in 1964, he took a year off from college and worked in the General
Motors Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair escorting VIP guests on the
Futurama II ride. Humans were stick figures in the new technological
corporate-sponsored imaginary. For Nunberg, we’re those stick figures —
even as we’re ostensibly being ever more empowered and enhanced. “What’s
most striking,” about the sensor-saturated world of the future, he
observes, isn’t just the creepiness of new devices that watch and sense
our every move, but “how trivial and pedestrian they can be.” The future
isn’t more exciting, just more “efficient,” he concludes.

Professor of Culture and Media at The New School, McKenzie Wark
addresses the artist’s escalating practical dilemmas in an age when new
digitally enabled entities are taking an growing cut of the creative pie
— at the very moment, in other words, when unsponsored against-the-grain
creativity seems most important.

In separate essays, both the aforementioned legal scholar Frank Pasquale
and philosopher Evan Selinger address automation’s likely effect on
jobs; Pasquale expertly dismantles some of the hype around a jobless
future and Selinger thoughtfully considers, by way of a review of Martin
Ford’s 2015 book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a
Jobless Future, whether a techno-optimistic “bubble” is indeed, as
claimed by Ford, impeding smart discussion of the perils of automation.

Contributor Eli MacKinnon uses the occasion of the republication of
Andrew Hodges’s biography of Alan Turing to look back on the
“jailbreaking” life that spawned the digital revolution. Another
contributor, Julie Carpenter, asks what’s “fair” in war. A human-robot
interaction researcher, she looks to both past and future, examining how
age-old moral dilemmas are amplified when fleshly bodies meet digital
realities in 21st-century militarized spaces.

Collectively, these essays thus address the digital revolution from a
variety of disciplinary and ideological perspectives. They extol and
debunk. They query, rather than take for granted, terms like
“disruption,” “echo chambers,” “algorithm,” “efficiency,”
“gamification,” “threshold moment,” and even old standbys like the words
“revolution” and “technology” — all of them the currency of the digital
age. They make legible the entanglement of societal values with
technologies, as well as the eternal return of the same motifs
(progress, utopia and dystopia, emancipation, millenarianism, or the
term Faustian bargain referenced earlier). They look to historical
antecedents, in other words, for what seem like de novo developments.
Perhaps most importantly, they also, at least in some cases, dare to
think about how we might, while we still can, go about shaping our
digital futures. To close with Mazzotti’s point at the end of his essay:
algorithms are now “the doors onto our futures”; we should at least be
self-conscious about which ones we’re opening.

Michele Pridmore-Brown is a scholar with the Center for Science,
Technology, Medicine and Society at UC Berkeley and the Science Editor
at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Julien Crockett is the associate editor for both the Science and Law
sections at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a writer based in Los
Angeles.