Our Digital Future: Is Big Tech Dangerous? (Part One)
This is Part One of an extended version of an article originally published with Quillette.
Is the web out to get us, or is it a force for autonomy and flourishing? Is it another instrument for the governing elite to channel the masses for political or business purposes? Is it a means for our baser nature to entrench everlasting fake news stories, political narratives, and even whole ideologies?
In her tome Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff details what she regards as the dangers of losing our freedom, dignity, and democratic control to business by being “conditioned”, “tuned”, “nudged” and otherwise shaped in unconscious ways to serve big-tech and its business associates. Echoing many of her fears, the popular documentary The Social Dilemma portrays algorithmic tracking of our behaviour by Facebook and Google as a Frankenstein monster. The documentary has the endorsement of the historian Yuval Noah Harari, best known for his Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. He argues that the web has become a tool to further reinforce the survival of fake news, to which he thinks humans already have a strong proclivity. Who is going to tame this Frankenstein?
Apparently, the self-styled visionary Tristan Harris has arrived and, through his organisation, the Center for Humane Technology (CHT), will ensure that governments and wannabee superstates such as the European Union can properly regulate our digital future. In a striking dirigiste proclamation, the CHT says it is dedicated to radically reimagining our digital infrastructure:
“Our mission is to drive a comprehensive shift toward humane technology that supports our well-being, democracy, and shared information environment.”
In a piece in the Financial Times, Harris writes:
“For example, the EU wants a Green Deal — but how can it achieve that if a majority of YouTube climate change videos oppose the scientific consensus, as one 2019 study showed?”
My answer to the CHT is that the web is still a resource for the blooming of individuals through collaboration and expression, but only if we have free entry into the digital market. The global networking that the web unleashed still enables a sole voice to make a big difference. But two things obscure what this means to contemporary eyes: 1) the idea that the web is a sort of democracy, and 2) our myopic perspective on the long-term progress we’ve made since the advent of the printing press in the ability of ordinary people outside the established order to express themselves.
Democracy versus Free Entry
It is misleading to characterize the web as a quasi-democracy. At its best, political democracy is associated with free speech and assembly and, as Karl Popper rightly emphasised, it ought to be a means of removing bad rulers and bad rules. But the core of democracy — its ultimate authority — is the rule of the majority. Now, the really desirable potential of the web is the exact opposite of majoritarian rule: the non-rule of any section of the public, minority or majority.
Its genuine promise lies in the free entry of any expression that can be represented or hosted in the cybersphere: a belief, an argument, a debate, a proposal, a news report, a work of visual art, music, a poem, or ongoing cooperation of some kind. More than that, the web stands for a transformative and sometimes disruptive networked-social life, bringing about inventive ways of connecting and sharing [Sean Fanning, inventor of Napster], or protesting against entrenched state authority [Wael Ghonim, who galvanized pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt in 2011]. The web still stands in contrast to the more traditional and rigid hierarchical centres, modes, and procedures of the old-guard, whose authority is in sharp decline. Free entry and the outsized impact of Wael Ghonim are the opposite of majority rule.
Gaining Some Perspective: The Continued Gutenberg Revolution
The other source of obscuration comes from the fact that we tend to have a myopic picture of the past. We have forgotten just how limited the alternative sources of expression and news were only a few decades ago. More precisely, we have forgotten how costly and restricted the entry into the field of mass communications was. Up to the present, for example, how much would it have cost you to set up a radio broadcast station or TV-channel?
Let’s look at radio. Because transmission power is the key minimum requirement, to cover most of England and Wales, the radio transmitter at Droitwich in 1946 required 200kw. If you can afford Droitwich’s current 500kw of power — roughly £50,000/month — that would enable you to also reach parts of Ireland, Sweden and Italy. Furthermore, even if you had the money, you’d be forcibly sanctioned by the license-fee-bequeathing government and its circle of anointed friends and associates. In the UK, until recently, the BBC had a monopoly, both in radio and TV. In contrast, today you can transmit a regular YouTube podcast from your phone to the world, and the old-style channels of news and communication — newspapers, radio and TV — are collapsing before the eyes of the elite, largely because of the new media. Without this perspective, the puritanical censoriousness conducted by the tech-giants seems daunting and inescapable, whereas really, it may be just the grasping death-throws of the state-backed elite.
The Fear and Allure of Unconscious Influences
Like the attraction of a horror movie, many people seem to both fear and relish being told that they are pawns of unconscious forces beyond their control. Even some scientific types enjoy a well-written astrological reading, especially if it’s clothed in a Jungian interpretation of our unconscious. We toy with the idea — perhaps savouring the belief for a moment — that our destinies are written in the stars and archetypes of wisdom are calling us from the depths of our minds. It sells books, forms the core of many urban legends, and can propel those who purvey such undignified portraits of the human mind into the public arena with millions clamouring for their guidance through the dark territory of the unconscious.
In the 1960s, subliminal advertising horrified, fascinated, and outraged us. Vance Packard popularized subliminal advertising in his 1957 bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders. Packard accepted uncritically the debunked story of marketing consultant James Vicary, who supposedly conducted a successful demonstration of subliminal advertising at a movie theatre. Vicary claimed that during a movie, he repeatedly exposed the cinema audience to messages flashed on the screen for a mere 1/3,000 of a second, urging them to buy popcorn and Coca-Cola, reportedly increasing sales. Subsequent research is mixed, but it seems that the effect of subliminal advertising is marginal at best, relies on pre-existing motivations in the same direction, requires controlled conditions, and vanishes if people become aware of such attempts even if they don’t know what the supposed subliminal message is. [Brandon Randolph-Seng and Robert D Mathers, “Does Subliminal Persuasion Work? It Depends on Your Motivation and Awareness”. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, September / October 2009.]
In the early twenty-first century, our alleged unconscious irrational biases usurped the limelight. We had the rise of “behavioural economics” — as if economics was not previously about behaviour. Human mentation was emphasised as inherently flawed and frail and could benefit from some benign, gentle “nudging” in the right direction.
After the advent of Google, Facebook, and other social media, the subtle and ubiquitous influence of social media algorithms reached center stage, unconsciously determining or nudging our opinions on products and politics by harnessing our biases. Is The Social Dilemma right to present this as a Frankenstein monster?
Know Thyself — At Least Better Than an Algorithm or Parrot
You tell your friends on Facebook that your grandfather was an accomplished pianist — he had the “touch” — and you plan to take up piano lessons. A day later, while watching YouTube videos, Google repeatedly recommends piano lessons and reviews of piano sales outlets.
We are told by Harari, a historian who backs the message of The Social Dilemma, that an ominous significance of the bias-tracking algorithms of Facebook and Google is that the algorithms know you more than you know yourself. This, to some, is an affront to our conception of ourselves as self-aware agents with free will. Knowing our proclivities in more detail than ourselves, they could in principle derail or circumvent our democratic procedures for governing society. Isn’t it obvious that each of us ought to know ourselves better than others do, certainly better than an algorithm?
Before you rush to endorse that view, consider this anecdote by the great zoologist Konrad Lorenz of a rather canny grey parrot called Geier:
“Geier was certainly no beauty, but he redeemed himself by his speaking talents. He said “good morning” and “good evening” quite aptly and, when a visitor stood up to depart, he said, in a benevolent bass voice “Na, auf Wiedersehen” [Well, Goodbye!]. But he only said this if the guest really departed… he was tuned in to the finest, involuntarily given signs; what these signs were, we never could find out and we’ve never once succeeded in provoking the retort by staging a departure. But when the visitor really left, no matter how inconspicuously he took his leave, promptly and mockingly came the words “Na, auf Wiedersehen”!”
— King Solomon’s Ring. Konrad Lorenz
Is it impossible for a Facebook or YouTube algorithm to be just as entertaining and useful as Geier? Of course, the Facebook algorithm “notices” patterns of your viewing and buying habits better than you in some respects and, like Lorenz’s attempt to deceive Geier, maybe you’d be hard-pressed to fool it. But if the algorithm does recommend books or lessons that are useful, then we have a win-win situation. There are many situations in which someone else notices something about you that you may have overlooked. Arguably, the benefit of a debate relies on a division of labour in which I tell you your errors if you tell me mine. In an ordinary conversation between friends, there is often mutual “ribbing”, in which our silly ideas or behaviour — sporting rainbow-dyed “Mohican” haircuts, overzealous diets or lack thereof, dominating the conversation with details of your train-watching hobby, wearing medical masks on walks in the open countryside — may be ridiculed and mocked to everyone’s entertainment and sometimes enhance self-awareness. Perspicuous algorithms are only ominous if we have not freely and deliberately outsourced to them the tracking of our behaviour. Tracking-algorithms are not unattractive as such, and so all we need here is more free entry of competitors who would offer that sort of contract, or even — as with the Parler app — no tracking, but simple advertising.
The producers of The Social Dilemma prescribe a number of voluntary, person-centred strategies for dealing with the baneful influence of Social Media. However, if the background to all their thinking is that the role of the state is to fix our problems and set the citizenry on the path to virtue — which it is for the makers of The Social Dilemma — then it’s unsurprising that the problem of “fake news” and the insidious influence of Google and Facebook is presented as ultimately a problem for the state to fix. This is just one of the main presumptions of the team that gave us The Social Dilemma.
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Ray Scott Percival is author of the book The Myth of the Closed Mind and director of the documentary Liberty Loves Reason. He organised the Annual Conference on the Philosophy of Sir Karl Popper for 10 years, and served as associate editor on the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems. He has published in New Scientist, Nature, National Review, and other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @Ray_S_Percival.
