Program or Be Programmed

by Douglas Rushkoff

  Young people, in particular, are developing the ability to get the gist of an entire area of study with just a moment of interaction with it. With a channel surfer’s skill, they are able to experience a book, movie, or even a scientific process almost intuitively. For them, hearing a few lines of T. S. Eliot, seeing one geometric proof, or looking at a picture of an African mask leaves them with a real, albeit oversimplified, impression of the world from which it comes. This works especially well for areas of art and study that are “fractal” or holographic in nature, where one tiny piece reflects the essence of the whole.

  By recognizing that our engagements through and with the digital world tend to reduce the complexity of our real world, we lessen the risk of equating these oversimplified impressions with real knowledge and experience. The digital information gatherer tends to have the opposite approach to knowledge as his text-based ancestors, who saw research as an excuse to sit and read old books. Instead, net research is more about engaging with data in order to dismiss it and move on—like a magazine one flips through not to read, but to make sure there’s nothing that has to be read. Reading becomes a process of elimination rather than deep engagement. Life becomes about knowing how not to know what one doesn’t have to know.

  Ironically, perhaps, as our digital experiences make us more simple, our machines are only getting more complex. The more complex our technologies become, and more impenetrable their decision-making (especially by our increasingly simplified, gist-of-it brains), the more dependent on them we become. Their very complexity becomes the new anxiety, replacing the adman’s storytelling as the predominant form of social influence. While digital technology liberated us from our roles as passive spectators of media, their simplifying bias reduced us once again to passive spectators of technology itself. For most of us, the announcement of the next great “iThing” provokes not eagerness but anxiety: Is this something else we will have to pay for and learn to use? Do we even have a choice?

  With each upgrade in technology, our experience of the world is further reduced in complexity. The more advanced and predictive the smart-phone interface, the less a person needs to know to use it—or how it even makes its decisions. Instead of learning about our technology, we opt for a world in which our technology learns about us. It’s our servant, after all, so why shouldn’t it just do what it knows we want and deliver it however it can? Because the less we know about how it works, the more likely we are to accept its simplified models as reality. Its restaurant recommendations substitute for our personal knowledge of our neighborhood; its talking maps substitute for our knowledge of our roads (as well as the logic or lack of logic in their design); its green or red stock tickers substitute for our experience of wealth and well-being.

  Again, this is only a problem if we mistake our digital models for reality. Restaurant recommendations, mapping functions, and stock tickers are ways of understanding worlds—not the worlds themselves. But the latest research into virtual worlds suggests that the lines between the two may be blurring. A Stanford scientist testing kids’ memories of virtual reality experiences has found that at least half of children cannot distinguish between what they really did and what they did in the computer simulation.[2] Two weeks after donning headsets and swimming with virtual whales, half of the participants interviewed believed they had actually had the real world experience. Likewise, Philip Rosedale—the quite sane founder of the virtual reality community Second Life—told me he believes that by 2020, his online world will be indistinguishable from real life.

  I doubt there’s a computer simulation on the horizon capable of accurately representing all the activity in a single cubic centimeter of soil or the entire sensory experience of clipping one toenail, much less an entire social world of thousands of human users. But even if such a prediction were true, our inability to distinguish between a virtual reality simulation and the real world will have less to do with the increasing fidelity of simulation than the decreasing perceptual abilities of us humans. As we know even personally, our time spent looking into screens harms our eyesight, wearing earbuds harms our hearing, and crouching over a keyboard harms our ability to move.

  Digital simulations also have their own effect on our perceptual apparatus. The sound-file format used in most digital music players, MP3, is really just an algorithm. The MP3 algorithm takes digital audio files (themselves just numbers) and reduces them even further to save space. The algorithm was developed to simulate the main features of sound that reverberate in people’s ears. The MP3 algorithm has a way of creating the sensation of bass, the sensation of high notes, and so on. Listening to these files in lieu of music, however, seems to strain or even retrain our hearing. As new and disturbing studies in Germany have shown,[3] young people raised on MP3s can no longer distinguish between the several hundred thousand musical sounds their parents can hear.

  This shouldn’t diminish the brilliance and importance of these simulation technologies, or the many ways computer scientists have learned to approximate reality through them. While they are poor substitutes for the full spectrum of nature, they are great models for particular systems that we would have no way to isolate from their contexts in the real world. A weather system can be studied purely in terms of pressure zones, a financial market can be analyzed through the axes of supply and demand, and a digital map can represent the world in terms of wealth, violence, or real-time births.

  Because digital simulations are numerical models, many choices about them must be made in advance. Models are necessarily reductive. They are limited by design. This does not negate their usefulness; it merely qualifies it. Digital reduction yields maps. These maps are great for charting a course, but they are not capable of providing the journey. No matter how detailed or interactive the map gets, it cannot replace the territory.

  * * *

  2. See my interview with Jeremy Bailenson in the Frontline documentary Digital Nation at www.frontline.org, or read Jeremy Bailenson and Kathryn Y. Segovia, “Virtual Doppelgangers: Psychological Effects of Avatars Who Ignore Their Owners,” in W.S. Bainbridge (ed.), Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual, Human-Computer Interaction Series (London: Springer-Verlag, 2010), 175. (http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2010/bailenson-ow-virtual-doppelgangers.pdf).

  3. See Todd Oppenheimer, The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology (New York: Random House, 2003).

  V. SCALE

  One Size Does Not Fit All

  On the net, everything scales—or at least it’s supposed to. Digital technologies are biased toward abstraction, bringing everything up and out to the same universal level. People, ideas, and businesses that don’t function on that level are disadvantaged, while those committed to increasing levels of abstraction tend to dominate. By remembering that one size does not fit all, we can preserve local and particular activities in the face of demands to scale up.

  Tom, the owner of a small music shop in upstate New York, decided it was time for him to finally get his business online. He hired a local college student to build him a website, complete with a shopping cart and checkout. He soon discovered that his online transactions were less expensive than the ones he did in real life. For web customers, he didn’t have to maintain a physical store—and didn’t even have to purchase stock or pay shipping. One of the big delivery companies took care of fulfillment, and sent orders directly from the manufacturers to Tom’s customers.

  Tom began encouraging his walk-in customers to use the site, going so far as to put a laptop on the counter of the store. After a few months, he gave up the physical shop altogether and—at the advice of supposedly net-savvy friends like me—Tom spent his time writing a music blog to characterize his business and share his expertise online.

  Along came “shopping aggregators”—programs that sweep through the net for the best prices on any product—and there went Tom’s margins. His prices were good, but he couldn’t compete with the chain stores. When his offerings showed up in the same li
st as the other stores but just a couple of dollars higher, even his loyal customers went elsewhere. People still read his blog, but bought from his cheaper, bigger competitors. The fact that he was no longer a live human interacting face-to-face with another community member didn’t help matters. What’s the difference between one web page and another, anyway? It’s all in the same browser window.

  Tom’s error wasn’t just that he closed down his sustainable local business; it was that he couldn’t scale. On the net, everything is occurring on the same abstracted and universal level. Survival in a purely digital realm—particularly in business—means being able to scale, and winning means being able to move up one level of abstraction beyond everyone else. The music retailers that could scale effectively survived the net; the companies that went up a level and aggregated those music retailers triumphed.

  The net has turned scalability from a business option to a business requirement. Real world companies have always generally had the choice of whether they want to remain at the “mom and pop” level, or to become a chain or franchise—essentially going into the business of business. Beginning the 1970s, shopping malls and big box stores changed the retail landscape, putting the pressure of internationally scaled competition onto local businesses. By the 1990s, migrating to the net seemed to many like a way to fight back: No website seemed to be intrinsically advantaged over another. Now the smallest players could have the same reach as the big boys.

  But as Tom learned, going online also denied him his remaining competitive advantage, the human relationships and local connections he enjoyed in the real world. Instead, going online forced him into the electronic mall itself—a place where he was no longer capable of competing on any level. Even his store’s blog and recommendations were consumed as if they were completely disconnected from his own stock and cash register. The fact that his insights could be searched and retrieved by content aggregators didn’t help keep his expertise associated with his own merchandise.

  Because the net is occurring on a single, oversimplified and generic level, success has less to do with finding a niche than establishing a “vertical” or a “horizontal.” Going vertical means establishing oneself as the place to do everything in a particular industry: the one-stop place for hardware, or cycling needs, or home electronics. Going horizontal means to offer a service that applies to every category’s transactions, like the company that made the credit card transaction software for Tom’s music website. In either case, “scaling up” means cutting through the entire cloud in one direction or another: becoming all things to some people, or some things to all people.

  The craftiest online businesspeople have come to realize that neither of those strategies is perfect. Both vertical and horizontal businesses face competition from their peers in an increasingly commodified landscape. It’s almost impossible to establish a foothold that can’t get undercut by a tiny shift in the price of one component. So instead of going into business, these players become search engines, portals, or aggregators, rising one level above all those competing businesses and skimming profit off the top. In an abstracted universe where everything is floating up in the same cloud, it is the indexer who provides context and direction.

  Of course, this logic dovetails perfectly with a financial industry in which derivatives on transactions matter more than the transactions themselves. Once the financial world came to understand that its own medium—central currency—was biased in the interests of the lender and not the producer, every business attempted to get out of the business it was actually in, and scale up to become a holding company. Thus, great industrial companies like General Electric shed their factories and got involved in capital leasing, banking, and commercial credit. Meanwhile, those who were already in banking and credit moved up one level of abstraction as well, opening hedge funds and creating derivatives instruments that won or lost money based on the movements of economic activity occurring one level below. Even craftier speculators began writing derivatives of derivatives, and so on, and so on.

  The existing bias of business toward abstraction combined with the net’s new emphasis on success through scale yielded a digital economy with almost no basis in actual commerce, the laws of supply and demand, or the creation of value. It’s not capitalism in the traditional sense, but an abstracted hyper-capitalism utterly divorced from getting anything done. In fact, the closer to the creation of value you get under this scheme, the farther you are from the money.

  But new theories of net economics abounded, each one depending on another misapplied principle from chaos math, systems theory, or even biology. The emergent behavior of slime mold becomes the justification for the consciousness of the market and fractal geometry is misused to prove that the economic behavior occurring on one level of society is mirrored on all the others. All of these new perspectives relied on the very same digitally determined axiom that everything can and should be abstracted from everything else.

  What all this abstraction does accomplish here on earth, however, is make everyone and everything more dependent on highly centralized standards. Instead of granting power to small businesses on the periphery, the net ends up granting even more authority to the central authorities, indexers, aggregators, and currencies through which all activity must pass. Without the search engine, we are lost. Without centrally directed domain name servers, the search engines are lost. Further, since digital content itself needs to be coded and decoded, it requires tremendous standardization from the outset. Far from liberating people and their ideas from hierarchies, the digital realm enforces central control on an entirely new level.

  On a more subtle level, the abstraction intrinsic to the digital universe makes us rely more heavily on familiar brands and trusted authorities to gain our bearings. Like tourists in a foreign city sighing in relief at the sight of a Starbucks or American Express sign, users tend to depend more on centrally defined themes and instantly recognizable brands. They are like signposts, even for the young people we consider digital natives, who turn out to be even more reliant on brand names and accepted standards for understanding and orientation than are their digital immigrant counterparts. Activism means finding a website, joining a movement, or “liking” a cause—all of which exist on a plane above and beyond their human members. Learning, orienting, and belonging online depend on universally accepted symbols or generically accessible institutions.

  Likewise, achievement is equated with becoming one of those universal symbols oneself. The digitally oriented activist is no longer satisfied with making something real happen where she lives but, rather, dedicated to building the website that solves the problem for everyone. Everyone wants to have his or her model of change scale up, to host the website where the most important conversation takes place, or aggregate the Twitter feeds of all the people one level below.

  This tendency is only natural when working on a platform biased toward abstraction.

  In fact, all media are biased toward abstraction in one way or another. By allowing us to describe events that had already taken place or those that had happened to other people, speech disconnected the doer from the deed. Text, meanwhile, disconnected speech from the speaker. Print disconnected text from the scribe, and the computer disconnected print from paper. At each level of disconnection, these media became more abstract.

  Language is an abstraction of the real world, where sounds represent things and actions. It requires a tremendous amount of agreement, so that the same words mean the same thing to different people. Text is an abstraction of those sounds—with little squiggly lines now representing the mouth noises that compose the words that represent real stuff. Over time, the way those letters look is standardized so that the written language becomes increasingly universal and applicable.

  Of course, the written word separates the speaker from his words. A person can put his words down on paper and be gone by the time it is read. He is at once more accountable for having written down his message or promise, and less
accountable for not having to be there in the flesh with the reader. It is easier to lie. On the other hand, text is more durable. It creates a record, a standard, and something to refer back to later. The invention of text allowed for contracts, the law, codes of ethics, and even the Bible—a written agreement or “covenant” between people and their new, highly abstracted God. In fact, the God of this new text-based civilization achieved all creation through spoken words.

  The printing press standardized text, depersonalizing the writing process, disconnecting the author from the page itself, but allowing for books to “scale” to mass consumption. Thanks to printing, the single author can reach everyone—even though neither he nor the ink from his pen come into contact with them.

  Finally, the digital age brings us hypertext—the ability for any piece of writing to be disconnected not just from its author but from its original context. Each link we encounter allows us to exit from a document at any point and, more importantly, offers us access to the bits and pieces of anyone’s text that might matter at that moment. In a universe of words where the laws of hypertext are truly in effect, anything can link to anything else. Or, in other words, everything is everything—the ultimate abstraction.

  Of course this can be beautiful and even inspiring. The entirety of human thought becomes a hologram, where any piece might reflect on any other, or even recapitulate its entirety. From a Taoist perspective, perhaps this is true. But from a practical and experiential perspective, we are not talking about the real world being so very connected and self-referential, but a world of symbols about symbols. Our mediating technologies do connect us, but on increasingly abstracted levels.