The Internet of Us (10 page)

The Real as Virtual

The problem of distinguishing the real from the unreal, or the true from the untrue, is hardly the result of the digital age. What's new is how the problem manifests itself.

Take a coin out of your pocket and hold it in your hand before you. Now look at the coin: what shape does it look like? If, like most people, you say “round,” then I suggest you look again. Unless you are holding the coin directly in front of your face, chances are you are seeing a more elliptical shape. This is confirmed if you make a realistic drawing of the coin. A child might draw a circle, but a more skilled artist would draw the ellipse. Why? Because that's what we are perceiving. But if so, then we have a puzzle. The coin is circular. What we perceive is not circular. Therefore, what we perceive is not the coin.

This is the sort of argument that persuaded Locke to hypothesize that what we directly perceive are not the objects themselves but our perceptions or representations of them: our “ideas” of them, as he put it. Locke argued that this was the only way to explain how we sometimes get the world wrong. Optical illusions (like the shape of the coin) are one example.

Locke also used the “idea” idea to explain the fact that our perceptions are often relative. Here's another of his experiments, one which you may have done as a child. Take three bowls of
water, one hot, one cold and one lukewarm. Put your right hand in the cold, your left in the hot, and then put both in the lukewarm. We know the result: the middle bowl will feel hot to the hand that was in the cold water and cold to the hand that was in the hot water. So, what is it that we perceive? Locke's answer, following Galileo, was that all substances had two types of “qualities.” Their primary qualities were those aspects that were really “in” the objects, as Locke put it—those properties that they had independently of anyone perceiving them. Locke's favorite examples were size, shape and extension in space, but today we might say that mass is the prime primary quality. Secondary qualities, on the other hand, were not “in” the object. Instead, Locke said, they were really just the powers that objects had, by virtue of their microstructure, to cause in us certain perceptions or ideas. Colors, smells, tastes and feelings like warmth and cold were like this, he said. Thus to say a fire engine is red is not to say that it has some inherent redness in it: there are no “red” particles that compose it. Redness and other “secondary” qualities are defined by
reference to how we perceive them.

Locke believed that all knowledge is mediated through our perceptions. Our perceptions are like goggles permanently strapped to our head. Sometimes, when our vision is clear, our perception represents the world as it really is. For Locke, this meant that our ideas are caused to actually resemble the objects outside our minds. But of course, our vision
isn't
always clear—which raises an obvious question, one made famous by Locke's contemporary George Berkeley. If we are always trapped within our perceptions, how can we ever tell which of those perceptions
reflect things as they really are and which are the products of our own minds? No amount of careful checking and experiment will help, noted Berkeley, for according to Locke's own view, we can't step outside of our perceptions. We can't assume the view from nowhere.

Whether or not we agree with the details of Locke's philosophy today, it is clear that Berkeley's challenge is not going away. Indeed, in some ways, it seems more difficult than ever to tell the difference between what is real and what is subjective.

One reason for this is that the Internet is a
construction
. That's partly because the World Wide Web is obviously something we've made—a literal artifact. By a literal artifact, I mean something that has been intentionally brought into being by human activity directed at that very purpose. The servers, cables, and circuits that compose the physical backbone of the Internet are all literal artifacts. But so are the packets of information that compose the body of the Internet itself. Websites, user interfaces, jpeg files, movies on Netflix, cookies, are also literal artifacts. They are, in a clear sense, as real as anything is. But the way in which informational objects are real, and the manner in which they are constructed, is very different. That's because, as the philosopher Luciano Floridi has noted, informational objects are abstracted in that they are “typified.” To talk about a music file is to talk about an object that isn't identical to any of its “tokens.” That's because digital copies are indistinguishable; you can create many “copies” of a digital file simultaneously. Being all born at the same time, as it were, each is in one sense not a “copy” at all—each has equal claim to being the original.

Floridi takes this to mean that we have expanded our ordinary
conception of what is real, from what is material (something you can kick) to include “objects and processes that are
dephysicalized
in the sense that they tend to be seen as support-independent.”
⁴
But actually, we were familiar with dephysicalized objects prior to the digital revolution. After all, what is a piece of music itself? Beethoven's Fifth or Jay Z's “New York” are more abstract than even the digital files that encode them: destroy all the computers and someone could still hum the tune. Yet even if we haven't expanded our conception of what is real per se, it is clear that we've constructed some new kinds of real things. And given that our digital form of life is composed of these kinds of things, we might say that our digital form of life is literally constructed in a deeply different way than previous forms of human life.

One consequence of this fact is that it is harder to see what is and isn't constructed. Locke's view of the world requires a distinction between what is “out there” (primary qualities) and what is at least partially dependent on us (secondary qualities). But as Floridi has noted, the division between “onlife” and “offlife” is increasingly difficult to make out. Watches, glasses and phones are no longer mechanical things. They are gateways to the Internet. The difference between “brick and mortar” stores and online merchandising is similarly blurred. Already you can go into a “smart” dressing room that remembers who you are, and which has a touchscreen mirror. Thermostats, refrigerators, children's toys, tools and washing machines can be (and are) connected digitally to the Web, sending and receiving information, emails, locations, updates. This is the Internet of Things. As Floridi notes, “With interfaces becoming progressively
less visible, the threshold between
here
(
analogue, carbon-based offline
) and
there (digital, silicon-based, online
) is fast becoming blurred, although this is as much to the advantage of
there
as it is to
here
.' ”
⁵

But the blurring of the distinction between online and offline isn't just due to things like smart watches. For the Internet is not just the Internet of
Things
. It is also composed of social artifacts. And these emerging social constructs are intertwined with the literal constructs. One comes along with the other.

Here's what I mean. Not all literal artifacts are social artifacts. Humans make bullets and bombs, but they aren't an inherently social kind of thing (quite the opposite, in fact). Whether something is a gun, or a chair, depends on whether it serves a certain function, and each has been invented by humans to serve those functions (to kill something in the one case, to provide a seat in the other). But those functions aren't themselves necessarily defined in terms of social factors, institutions or the like. Social artifacts, on the other hand, are partly constituted by, and therefore defined in terms of, social practices.
⁶
These social practices can be regulated or unregulated. Unregulated: being cool. Being cool is something that is generally cool to be. But what makes something cool is a matter of how people are perceived against a social matrix—that is, against a whole host of expectations and assumptions about how people “should” act or dress. Coolness is constructed, and constructed by social expectations. And yet being cool (or not) is a difference that can make a difference—to people's happiness in social groups. The same is the case, obviously, with more regulated social roles. What constitutes my being a husband is defined in terms of
social factors: I'm a husband because I meet certain legally defined expectations and institutions. You can't define “husband” and “wife” without referring to these legal conditions. And yet again, whether one gets to be a husband or not—whether you can marry someone of the same sex, for example—is something that matters to us, that seems as real and as important as anything else. The same could be said for economies, markets, governments, money, professions, religions, laws. Such things not only would have not come about without social practices, they are constituted by social practices; you can't define them without referring to various structured ways humans have of doing things. And in each case, they matter, and we accordingly treat them as part of our reality just as much as we do the concrete parts of the world.

Social constructs can change. When they do, the changes can take us by surprise or go against our preconceptions. That's because our concepts of socially constructed artifacts, like any concept, can become embedded—or perceived as being indispensable for explaining reality. The concepts of race and gender were traditionally embedded in this way, and for many people still are. Thus, when we change how we think about them, we upset expectations and prejudices.

In the digital world, literal artifacts and social artifacts are being created in a feedback loop. Life in the infosphere is both changing and being formed by certain social constructs, and these social constructs are themselves the result of life in the infosphere. Some of these changes are matters of degree (the expansion of “friend” to include “Facebook friend”). Other changes are more radical and are generally the result of changes
in expectations and assumptions—changes that are themselves brought on by changes in technology. An obvious example is our concept of property. What is it to “own” music (or writing) now, or anything that is put on the Web? Should anything on the Web be open to sharing without compensation to its original creator? (One might think this question itself is outmoded—based, after all, on older assumptions and expectations.) The concept of property is a social construction par excellence, but it is one that is very much in transition. Another example—and one that we will talk about in the next chapter—is the nature of privacy. Entering the brave new world of the Internet of Us, we are quickly becoming used to having less and less privacy, and that is changing how we understand privacy itself.

Our digital form of life is changing even our identities and how we shape them. That's relevant here because some aspects of our identity are clearly social artifacts. Our identities in the psychological sense involve a number of factors, including, as the philosopher Owen Flanagan puts it, an “integrated system of past and present identifications, desires, commitments, aspirations, beliefs, dispositions, temperamental traits, roles, acts, and actional patterns.“
⁷
Together, these aspects form what we mean when we talk about our “self.”

Typically, we think of the factors that make up the self as vulnerable to influences from the “outside”—including what other people say and do in your company. Who you are is a product of who others are, and vice versa. But how we think about ourselves, how we self-represent, matters to who we are. How you define yourself at a certain time—kind, clever, embarrassed, etc.—can come into conflict with other self-representations, and
that conflict can initiate change in your overall self-conception. What's more, your self-representation can change how you react in future situations, which can itself loop back to further self-representations, and so on. It is these facts that have suggested to philosophers such as Flanagan and Daniel Dennett that the self is not just a construction, but a narrative construction. I am the product of the story I and others tell about myself, whether I know that or not.

If that is so, then we are stories that are increasingly constructed online in social networks. For an increasingly large number of people, particularly people born after the mid-nineties, who and what you are is partly defined by your online activities. In the early days of Web 2.0, this fact was less appreciated: people would post pictures of themselves doing things (drinking, partying) that would later cause them embarrassment or the loss of a job opportunity. But people are more aware of this now: a college student can pay to have his online identity “scrubbed” so as to appear more respectable—more like he might aspire to be in his own self-representations. We are conscious of the stories we tell each other and ourselves.

Online identity creation is interesting in its own right. But it is also a particularly useful example of how our digital form of life is constructed. And that fact might in turn seem to be the final nail in the coffin of objectivity. If our digital form of life obscures the very difference between what is primary and secondary, between what is made and what is found
, even in the case of ourselves
, then what is the point of talking about objectivity and truth? If the real is virtual, then how important can truth be?

Interlude: To SIM or Not to SIM

Suppose that in the future you can choose between living as a SIM and continuing your current life. Once you make the choice, the company helpfully makes you forget that you ever made a choice at all. Scenarios like this are the fodder of science fiction (Philip K. Dick alone is responsible for several books on this theme), but they've also been used by philosophers.
⁸
We can use them here to investigate how much we still value the idea of truth.