—Garrett Andrews, online comment on my October 21, 2015, column on NYTimes.com
Love does not win unless we start loving each other enough to fix our [expletive] problems.
—Comedian Samantha Bee, commenting on the Orlando massacre on her TBS show, Full Frontal, June 13, 2016
I have been on the road selling different books ever since I published From Beirut to Jerusalem in 1989. I’ve given several hundred book talks to different audiences. So what’s the best question I ever got from someone in the audience on any book? That’s easy to answer. It was at an event at the Portland Theater, in Portland, Oregon, in 1999, when I was promoting The Lexus and the Olive Tree. A young man stood up in the balcony and asked me this question: “Is God in cyberspace?”
I confess, I didn’t know how to answer his question, which was asked with the utmost sincerity and demanded an answer. After all, mankind had created a vast new realm for human interaction. (If the supernova is somewhere between Heaven and Earth, who is in charge there? Amazon or God on high?) The question seized me. So I called one of my most cherished spiritual mentors, Rabbi Tzvi Marx, a great Talmudic scholar whom I had gotten to know at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and who now lives in Amsterdam. I hoped to enlist his advice on how I should respond.
I thought Rabbi Marx’s answer was so good that I slipped it into the paperback edition of The Lexus and the Olive Tree and then more or less forgot about it. But the more I worked on the conclusion of this book, the more I found myself reflecting on that question, as well as Rabbi Marx’s answer. Indeed, I occasionally took the opportunity to pose the same question to religious leaders and others. When I asked the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, “Is God in cyberspace?” he joked at first that God must be in cyberspace because every time he is in the London subway, “I hear people saying into their cell phones, ‘Oh God, why doesn’t this work!’”
Here is how Rabbi Marx originally answered: He began by suggesting that whenever I get the question “Is God in cyberspace?” I should start by responding: “That depends what your view of God is.” If your view of God is that he is, literally, the Almighty, and makes his presence felt through divine intervention—by smiting evil and rewarding good—then He sure as hell isn’t in cyberspace, which is full of pornography, gambling, blogs and tweets trashing different people from every direction, pop and rap music with suggestive lyrics and four-letter words, not to mention all manner of hate speech and now cybercrime and recruitment by hate-filled groups such as ISIS. Indeed, it used to be said that the most oft-used three-letter words on the World Wide Web were “sex” and “MP3”—the once essential protocol for the free downloading of music—not “God.”
Rabbi Marx added, though, that there is a Jewish postbiblical view of God. In the biblical view of God, He is always intervening. He is responsible for our actions. He punishes the bad and rewards the good. The postbiblical view of God is that we make God present by our own choices and our own decisions. In the postbiblical view of God, in the Jewish tradition, God is always hidden, whether in cyberspace or in the neighborhood shopping mall, and to have God in the room with you, whether it’s a real room or a chat room, you have to bring Him there yourself by how you behave there, by the moral choices and mouse clicks you make.
Rabbi Marx pointed out to me that there is a verse in Isaiah that says, “You are my witness. I am the Lord,” adding that second-century rabbinic commentators interpreted that verse to be saying, “If you are my witness, I am the Lord. And if you are not my witness, I am not the Lord.” In other words, he explained, unless we bear witness to God’s presence by our own good deeds, He is not present. Unless we behave as though He were running things, He isn’t running things. In the postbiblical world we understand that from the first day of the world, God trusted man to make choices, when He entrusted Adam to make the right decision about which fruit to eat in the Garden of Eden. We are responsible for making God’s presence manifest by what we do, by the choices we make. And the reason this issue is most acute in cyberspace is that no one else is in charge there. There is no place in today’s world where you encounter the freedom to choose that God gave man more than in cyberspace. Cyberspace is where we are all connected and no one is in charge.
So, as I wrote in the paperback edition of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, I started telling anyone who asked “Is God in cyberspace?” that the answer is “no”—but He wants to be there. But only we can bring Him there by how we act there. God celebrates a universe with such human freedom because He knows that the only way He is truly manifest in the world is not if He intervenes but if we all choose sanctity and morality in an environment where we are free to choose anything. As Rabbi Marx put it, “In the postbiblical Jewish view of the world, you cannot be moral unless you are totally free. If you are not free, you are really not empowered, and if you are not empowered the choices that you make are not entirely your own. What God says about cyberspace is that you are really free there, and I hope you make the right choices, because if you do I will be present.”
The late Israeli religious philosopher David Hartman added an important point: In some ways cyberspace resembles the world that the prophets spoke about, “a place where all mankind can be unified and be totally free.” But, he went on, “the danger is that we are unifying mankind in cyberspace but without God”—actually, without any value system, without any filters, without true governance. And that is why I found myself re-asking this essential question: Is God in cyberspace? The concerns that people were raising twenty years ago have all been borne out today—only a million-fold—thanks to the age of accelerations.
Because when we weaken all top-down authority structures and strengthen bottom-up ones; when we create a world with not only superpowers but also super-empowered individuals; when we put so many distant strangers into proximity; when we accelerate the flow of ideas and innovation energy; when we give machines the power to think, alter DNA to remove diseases, and design plants and new materials; when Greeks not paying taxes can undermine bond markets and banks in both Bonn, Germany, and Germantown, Maryland; when a Kosovar hacker in Malaysia can break into the files of an American retailer and sell them to an Al Qaeda operative who can go on Twitter and threaten the U.S. servicemen whose identities were hacked; when all of this is happening at once, we’ve collectively created a world in which what every single person imagines, believes, and aspires to matters more than ever, because they can now act on their imaginations, beliefs, and aspirations so much faster, deeper, cheaper, and wider than ever before.
If there was ever a time to pause for moral reflection, it is now. “Every technology is used before it is completely understood,” Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New York Times Book Review on January 11, 2015. “There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is the right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose.”
To put it bluntly, we have created a world in which human beings have become more godlike than ever before. And we have created a world with vast new territories—called cyberspace—that are law-free, values-free, and, seemingly, God-free. Put those two trends together and you understand why I found more people in recent years asking me about values and, I guess, in their own ways, whether God was governing in cyberspace. In their own ways they were asking that we rethink ethics and how we nurture the right values in a world in which we are more godlike as a species and there are more realms that seem to be God-free, values-free, and law-free.
In short, they were looking for moral innovation. And who can blame them?
We as a species have never been to this intersection before. That we are becoming more godlike in our powers is indisputable. Today, “if you can imagine it, it will happen,” argues Eric Leuthardt, the neuroscientist. “It is just a matter of how much it will cost. If you can imagine mass chaos or a mass solution to poverty or malaria, you can make it happen more [easily] tha
n ever before.” The scalability of individual behavior is both a problem and a solution today. “Individual behavior can now have global consequences. My behavior scales to the world now—and the world scales to me.”
Think about biology. “In the past only Mother Nature controlled the evolution of the species, and now man is inheriting that capability at scale,” notes Craig Mundie. “We are beginning to manipulate the biology on which all life is based.” For instance, today people are asking: Should we wipe out that species of mosquito that carries the Zika virus, because the technology exists to do that through computing and data collection? It’s called a “gene drive.” MIT Technology Review reported on February 8, 2016:
A controversial genetic technology able to wipe out the mosquito carrying the Zika virus will be available within months, scientists say.
The technology, called a “gene drive,” was demonstrated only last year in yeast cells, fruit flies, and a species of mosquito that transmits malaria. It uses the gene-snipping technology CRISPR to force a genetic change to spread through a population as it reproduces.
Three U.S. labs that handle mosquitoes, two in California and one in Virginia, say they are already working toward a gene drive for Aedes aegypti, the type of mosquito blamed for spreading Zika. If deployed, the technology could theoretically drive the species to extinction.
The supernova facilitates the use of synthetic biology to create organisms that did not exist before, it’s imbuing existing ones with attributes they did not have before, and it’s eliminating organisms that were problematic or nonproductive that Mother Nature herself evolved. All of that used to be Mother’s Nature’s work through natural selection. Soon, though, you’ll be able to play this game at home.
To be sure, ever since 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when an American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic weapon on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, triggering the nuclear arms race that followed, we’ve been living in a world in which a single government could conceivably destroy the whole planet. But now the same applies to people. It used to take a person to kill a person. Then one person could kill ten people. Then one person could kill thousands. Now we are approaching a world where it is possible to imagine a single person, or small group, being able to kill everyone. That used to take a country or an organization. Not anymore. How long before you read that ISIS has acquired 3-D printer technology and designs to put together a suitcase bomb with a little fissile material? How long before some terrorist or disturbed loner tries to get hold of a virus, like Ebola, and tries to turn it into a bioweapon? In March 2016, it was reported that ISIS militants were plotting to take a Belgian nuclear scientist hostage in order to get access to Belgium’s nuclear research facility.
And yet, at the very same time, we are approaching a world where, acting together, we could sustainably feed, clothe, and shelter every person, as well as cure virtually every disease, increase the free time of virtually every person, educate virtually every child, and enable virtually everyone to realize their full potential. The supernova is enabling so many more minds to work on solving all the world’s great problems. “We are the first generation to have the people, ideas, and resources to solve all of our greatest challenges,” argued Frank Fredericks, founder of World Faith, a global interfaith movement.
That is why I insist that as a species, we have never before stood at this moral fork in the road—where one of us could kill all of us and all of us could fix everything if we really decided to do so.
Therefore, properly exercising the powers that have been uniquely placed in the hands of our generation will require a degree of moral innovation that we have barely begun to explore, in America or globally, and a degree of grounding in ethics that most leaders lack.
“Maybe this is overly romantic, but I think leadership is going to require the ability to come to grips with values and ethics,” remarked Jeffrey Garten, the former dean of the Yale School of Management:
Education will need a strong dose of liberal arts. How will we think about privacy or genetic experimentation? These are areas where there’s no international framework at all. In fact, there’s barely a national framework. China has embarked on large-scale genetic engineering in certain animals. Where is that going? What should be the legal and ethical principles on which such activity should be based? And who has the wherewithal to even establish the right principles? How do you balance technological progress with this sense of humanity? You’re not going to get that if you went to MIT and all you did was study nuclear physics. This is the supreme irony. The more technological we get, the more we need people who have a much broader framework. You’ll be able to hire the technologist to make the systems work, but in terms of the goals, that takes a different kind of leader.
Amen.
I’ll Have Some Beer with That ISIS Video
That we are creating vast new ungoverned spaces—free from rules, laws, and the FBI, let alone God—is indisputable. Consider a couple of unusual news stories that broke in the last two years. The first concerned the exposure of the fact that YouTube was running commercial advertisements before videos posted by ISIS and other terrorist groups.
On March 3, 2015, CNNMoney.com reported: “Jennifer Aniston lauds the benefits of Aveeno, Bud Light shows off beer at a concert, and Secret sells its freshly scented deodorant. Pretty standard commercials, but what’s different is the content that comes after. In this case, they’re all followed by ISIS and jihadi videos.”
When YouTube sells advertising slots to companies, the ads are automatically inserted by algorithms before a video plays. As CNNMoney noted, “Advertisers don’t directly control where their ads are placed although they can specify the demographics they’d like to target.” The story quoted the legal analyst Danny Cevallos as saying, “From a contract perspective, these corporations that are paying lots of money to get YouTube clicks may not be that pleased when they find out that their video is placed right before an ISIS recruitment video.”
There probably aren’t a lot of beer drinkers among ISIS followers. Maybe the algorithm detected that a lot of young men were coming to these sites and assumed there would be a lot of beer drinkers among them! However it happened, the advertisers were not aware or amused.
After reviewing one of the videos, a vice president of consumer connections at Anheuser-Busch told CNNMoney, “We were unaware that one of our ads ran in conjunction with this video.” YouTube removed the ISIS-related video in the wake of the CNNMoney report.
The website Bustle.com picked up the story from there:
The way that advertising works on YouTube is this: After the brand pays for a slot, the video site’s algorithm will randomly place the ad before a video, but neither YouTube nor the company will know which video exactly unless they watch it. Even though companies can’t request specific videos for their ads, they can request certain demographics to target. It’s certainly a mystery, then, how ads for Bud Light, Toyota, and Swiffer ended up airing before videos produced by ISIS, because it’s safe to assume none of these companies chose to target extremist militants between the ages of 18 and 55 who want to incite terror on the world.
Or consider this story from Sydney, Australia. On December 24, 2015, the mobile taxi-booking app Uber had to apologize for instituting surge pricing during a terrorist incident at a café, in which three people plus the gunmen were killed during a sixteen-hour siege. BBCNews.com reported that after a gunman took over the café and people started fleeing from the area by foot and by car, Uber’s “surge pricing” algorithm “raised fares by as much as four times its normal rate.”
On the day of the Martin Place siege in Sydney, Uber came under heavy criticism on social media for raising its fares, so it started offering free rides out of the city.
It also said it would refund the cost of the rides that had been affected by the higher fares …
“We didn’t stop surge pricing immediately. This was the wrong decision” [Uber said in a blog post] …
The c
ompany said that its priority was to help as many people get out of the central business area safely, but that was “poorly” communicated, and led to a lot of misunderstanding about its motives.
Uber has defended its surge pricing strategy in other cities, but reached an agreement with regulators in the U.S. to restrict the policy during national emergencies.
What all these stories have in common is that the algorithms were in charge—not people, not ethics, and certainly not God. What all of these stories also have in common is the fact that a number of technological forces came together to create an exponential step change in the power of men and machines—much faster than we have reshaped ourselves as human beings, much faster than we have been able to reshape our institutions, our laws, and our modes of leadership.
“We are letting technology do the work that human beings should never abdicate,” argued Seidman. “Someone made the decision to let the YouTube algorithm put these commercials on these videos. But that was never a job of technology before.” That was always the job of people. “Technology creates possibilities for new behaviors and experiences and connection,” he added, “but it takes human beings to make the behaviors principled, the experiences meaningful and connections deeper and rooted in shared values and aspirations. Unfortunately, there is no Moore’s law for human progress and moral development. That work is messy and there is no linear program for it. It goes up and down and zigs and zags. It is hard—but there is no other way.”
This is especially challenging as cyberspace enters the home. Recall the November 2015 story from Cañon City, Colorado, where more than one hundred students in the local high school were caught trading nude photos and hiding them in secret photo-vault smartphone applications. After taking nude pictures of themselves and sharing them, the students used “ghost apps” on their cell phones to store and hide them. Ghost apps look like any normal application—one of the most popular is a calculator—so if your parents or a teacher get ahold of your phone, that is all they would see. But if you type in a secret code on the keypad, you are transported to a hidden page where you can store pornography, videos, and sexting messages. It sounds like something that Q might have installed on James Bond’s cell phone ten years ago. Now every high school kid has it. Private Photo Vault is among the most downloaded photo and video apps on the Apple App Store. This is a technology designed to keep out parents, police, and anyone peddling sustainable values.
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