Stranger Than We Can Imagine (38 page)

People were no longer constrained by where they lived and who they knew. In the twentieth century a security analyst in Hawaii such as Edward Snowden would have had difficulty making contact with someone like Glenn Greenwald, the Brazil-based journalist noted for his work for the
Guardian
newspaper in London. But thanks to the internet, contacting him was trivial.

In the hierarchical world, cultures of corruption built up inside institutions because the constricted flow of information meant that those involved were safe from external observation. Now that information has been freed to flow in all directions, those cultures of corruption are exposed. In the twentieth century, President Nixon’s link to the burglary at the Watergate Hotel was considered a major scandal. It required a huge amount of journalistic and legal process to deal with. Such a tiny scandal seems almost an irrelevance now, and the press and regulatory bodies are swamped by the mountains of institutionalised scandals they need to process.

The level of personal autonomy and freedom that the individualism of the twentieth century gave us is still with us in the twenty-first century. What has changed is that we can no longer expect to avoid the consequences of our actions. In August 2010, a forty-five-year-old woman in Coventry stopped to stroke a cat on a wall and then, in a moment of madness that she was unable to explain, picked the cat up and dropped it into a wheelie bin. The incident was caught on CCTV, spread virally round the internet, and the woman was very quickly identified. She was prosecuted, had to leave her job, and was subject to a global outpouring of anger and hatred which included Facebook pages calling her ‘worse than Hitler’. Had the incident occurred before the network age, none of that would have happened. The woman would have walked away from the bin and continued with her life. No consequences would have resulted from her actions, with the exception of the consequences encountered by the cat.

The network has not just reorganised the flow of information around our society. It has imposed feedback loops into our culture. If what we do causes suffering, anger or repulsion, we will hear about it. Where once we regulated our behaviour out of fear of punishment by our Lord and master, now we adjust our actions in response to the buzzing cloud of verbal judgements from thousands of people. We are still free to choose our own path through society, in a way that we never were in the days of emperors, but we do have to take responsibility for our choices. This is bad news for libertarians who believe that there should be no limits placed on our freedom to place cats in bins, but it may prove to be good news for society as a whole.

If we are honest, it has been something of a shock to have what other people think revealed so publicly. Those raised in the twentieth century were perhaps unprepared for the amount of cynicism, tribal hatred and cruelty that you encounter every day on the internet. Many fear that the network itself is strengthening all this negativity, and that the echo chamber it provides is entrenching division. Yet at the same time, the more those parts of our psyches
are placed in the light of transparency, the more we acknowledge, understand and recognise them for what they are. The young generation who grew up online can dispassionately avoid becoming sucked down into negativity through a shrug and an awareness that ‘haters gonna hate’.

There are attempts being made to stop this process and shut down this flow of information. Organisations ranging from the Chinese Communist Party to Islamic states and American corporations have attempted to gain control of parts of the internet. These are, notably, all organisations with hierarchical structures. The original internet, free to access and neutral about the data it carries, might not survive long. In a similar way that the freedom and the lawlessness of the oceans became subject to international law and control in the eighteenth century, to the benefit of empires, so the internet as we know it may be replaced by a ‘Balkanised’ conglomeration of controlled networks.

It is not yet certain that this will be the future. Attempts to control the network are exposed by the transparency of the network itself. They also serve to reduce the legitimacy of the institutions attempting to gain control. Any attempts to disguise these actions and impose secrecy within an organisation affect that organisation’s internal flow of information. This makes it less efficient, and therefore damages it. The wave of transparency will not be easily avoided.

Imagine that the people of this planet were points of light, like the stars in the night sky. Before the twentieth century we projected a constricting system onto these points, linking them in a hierarchical structure beneath a lord or emperor. This system informed our sense of identity, and governed how we orientated ourselves. It lasted for thousands of years. It may have been unfair and unjust, but it was stable.

At the start of the twentieth century that system shattered and those points were released to become free-floating, all with different perspectives. This was the postmodern relative world of individuals where, as Crowley put it, ‘Every man and every woman is a star.’
Here was the twentieth century in all its chaotic glory, disjointed and discordant but wild and liberating.

But then a new system imposed itself on those free-floating points of light, just when we were least expecting it. Digital technology linked each of those points to, potentially, every other. Feedback loops were created, and consequences were felt. We could no longer be explained simply in terms of individuals. Now factors such as how connected we were, and how respected and influential we might be, were necessary to explain what was going on.

Money is, and has always been, important. But the idea that it was the
only
important thing was an oddity of the twentieth century. There had always been other social systems in place, such as chivalry, duty or honour, which could exert pressures that money alone could not. That has become the case again. Money is now just one factor that our skills and actions generate, along with connections, affection, influence and reputation.

Like the New Agers who saw themselves as individuals and, simultaneously, an integral part of a larger whole, we began to understand that what we were connected to was an important part of ourselves. It affected our ability to achieve our goals. A person that is connected to thousands of people can do things that a lone individual cannot. This generation can appear isolated as they walk the streets lost in the bubble created by their personal earphones. But they can organise into flashmobs in a way they never could before.

In the words of the American social physicist Alex Pentland, ‘It is time that we dropped the fiction of individuals as the unit of rationality, and recognised that our rationality is largely determined by the surrounding social fabric. Instead of being actors in markets, we are collaborators in determining the public good.’ Pentland and his team distributed smartphones loaded with tracking software to a number of communities in order to study the vast amount of data the daily interactions of large groups generated. They found that the overriding factor in a whole range of issues, from income to weight gain and voting intentions, was not individual free will but the influence of others. The most significant factor deciding whether you
would eat a doughnut was not willpower or good intentions, but whether everyone else in the office took one. As Pentland discovered, ‘The single biggest factor driving adoption of new behaviours was the behaviour of peers. Put another way, the effects of this implicit social learning were roughly the same size as the influence of your genes on your behaviour, or your IQ on your academic performance.’

A similar story is told by the research into child development and neuroscience. An infant is not born with language, logic and an understanding of how to behave in society. They are instead primed to acquire these skills from others. Studies of children who have been isolated from the age of about six months, such as those abandoned in the Romanian orphanages under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu, show that they can never recover from the lost social interaction at that crucial age. We need others, it turns out, in order to develop to the point where we’re able to convince ourselves that we don’t need others.

Many aspects of our behaviour only make sense when we understand their social role. Laughter, for example, creates social bonding and strengthens ties within a group. Evolution did not make us make those strange noises for our own benefit. In light of this, it is interesting that there is so much humour on the internet.

Neuroscientists have come to view our sense of ‘self’, the idea that we are a single entity making rational decisions, as no more than a quirk of the mind. Brain-scanning experiments have shown that the mental processes that lead to an action, such as deciding to press a button, occur a significant period before the conscious brain believes it makes the decision to press the button. This does not indicate a rational individual exercising free will. It portrays the conscious mind as more of a spin doctor than a decision maker, rationalising the actions of the unconscious mind after the fact. As the Canadian-British psychologist Bruce Hood writes, ‘Our brain creates the experience of our self as a model – a cohesive, integrated character – to make sense of the multitude of experiences that assault our senses throughout our lifetime.’

In biology an ‘individual’ is an increasingly complicated word to define. A human body, for example, contains ten times more non-human bacteria than it does human cells. Understanding the interaction between the two, from the immune system to the digestive organs, is necessary to understand how we work. This means that the only way to study a human is to study something more than that human.

Individualism trains us to think of ourselves as isolated, self-willed units. That description is not sufficient, either biologically, socially, psychologically, emotionally or culturally. This can be difficult to accept if you were raised in the twentieth century, particularly if your politics use the idea of a free individual as your primary touchstone. The promotion of individualism can become a core part of a person’s identity, and something that must be defended. This is ironic, because where did that idea come from? Was it created by the person who defends their individualism? Does it belong to them? In truth, that idea was, like most ideas, just passing through.

In the late eighteenth century the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a new type of prison called a panopticon. Through the design of this building and a complicated series of mirrors, a single watchman at the heart of the prison would be able to observe any prisoner he wished. Although this meant that at any one time almost all the prisoners were unobserved, each prisoner had no way of knowing if and when they were being watched. As a result, they had to act under the assumption that they were always being looked at. For Bentham, the power of the panopticon would come not through its efficiency, but from the effect constant potential observation would have on the consciousness of the prisoners.

This digital generation, born after 1990, have grown up in a form of communal panopticon. It has altered them in ways that their parents don’t always appreciate. The older generation can view the craze for ‘selfies’, for example, as a form of narcissism. Yet those self-portraits are not just attempts to reinforce a personal concept of the individual self. They exist to be observed and, in doing so, to
strengthen connections in the network. The culture of the ‘selfie’ may seem to be about twentieth-century individualism, but only when seen through twentieth-century eyes. Those photographs only become meaningful when shared.

In Sartre’s 1943 philosophical book
Being and Nothingness
there is a short section entitled ‘The Look’. Here Sartre attempts to deal with the philosophical nature of ‘the other’ by imagining an example which owes much to the multiple-perspective relativity of Einstein. Sartre talked about looking through a keyhole at another person, who is unaware that they are being observed, and about becoming completely absorbed in that observation. Suddenly the watcher realised that a third person had entered the room behind them, and that they themselves were being observed. Sartre’s main point was concerned with the nature of objectification, but what is striking is how he described the awareness of being observed. For Sartre, being observed produces shame.

Compare this to the digital generation. Watch, for example, footage of the audience at a music festival, and note the reaction of the crowd when they suddenly realise that they are being looked at by television cameras. This is always a moment of delight and great joy. There is none of the shame that Sartre associated with being observed, and neither is that shame apparent in that generation’s love of social media and seeming disregard for online privacy. Something has changed, therefore, in the sense of self which our culture instils in us, between Sartre’s time and the present.

The millennial generation are now competing with the entire planet in order to gain the power that the attention of others grants. But they understand that the most effective way to get on in such an environment is to cooperate. This generation has intuitively internalised the lessons of game theory in a way that the people of the 1980s never did. They have a far greater understanding of consequence, and connections, than their grandparents. They understand the feedback loops that corporations are still not beholden to. It is no coincidence that when they organise, they do so in leaderless structures such as Occupy or Anonymous. They are so used
to the idea that people come together to achieve a particular goal, and then disband, that most of what would technically be classed as their ‘organisations’ are never even formally named.

The great multinational companies that were built in the past were based upon new inventions or the control of a limited natural resource. More recent major corporations such as Google or Facebook are created by someone sitting down and writing them into existence. Programming is not about the manipulation of physical objects. It is about the manipulation of intangible things, such as information and instructions. For all the formality and structure inherent in its language and grammar, there have always been aspects of art and magic in coding. Reading and writing can pass information across space and time, but that information is essentially frozen and unable to do anything itself. Programming is like writing in a living language. It is text that acts on itself, and performs whatever tasks its author wishes it to undertake. Code never tires and is incredibly accurate. Language has become enchanted.