Efficiency, meanwhile, is an alien sort of god. Human life is in many ways blazingly inefficient. Some rather extreme examples: we spend ages trying to meet people we like, randomly zinging through bad and better relationships, learning skills and habits and empathies that either improve or (sadly) reduce our chances of meeting someone with whom we can be happy. Likewise, we pick our professions if not at random at least with a healthy degree of chance and irrationality. How much more efficient would it be to mechanize, centralize or mediate these processes? Vastly. Is it desirable to do so? That’s less obvious.
What effect would it have on us as a society and as individuals to have a vast database of personality types and physical preferences and know that at a certain point the Love Authority would let us know we had a viable match? Would it be acceptable to us to have our future professional life dictated by strenuous testing? People already use dating and headhunting services so it hardly seems like too much of a stretch for these things to become the norm, or to use them retroactively: according to the system, that nice guy you met the other day has a low, low percentage chance of becoming a good husband. Probably best to ditch him. By the way, your dream job doesn’t really match your level of competence or education or even your personality. Think again! Or more: surely the traditional methods of child-rearing and care are both inefficient and fraught with poor practices: how would we solve that?
I have unfairly biased the case against efficiency. It does not imply these totalitarian ways of being, it merely creates them if you move efficiency into inappropriate spaces. And yet at the same time, I haven’t: the ethos of time-saving and resource-saving runs clear and hard through Google’s approach to many areas which are almost as complex and bound up with our society as it stands as these, and while the world may be diffusely ‘better’ if we accept them, it’s not obvious by what mechanism or on what timescale, and nor is it clear what the adoption will do to us more generally. What will we turn into if we accept the premise that efficiency is best? The faith seems to be teleological: blow away the old, tangled nonsense and usher in a new foundation and the world will automatically fall into a better configuration. People will step forward to make it so. Never mind that this seems to my untutored eye to be a little optimistic – break the ugly vase and a new one will replace it – it ignores the fact that the very decision to do that, to tear down what’s there rather than phasing it out or improving it, is itself a part of the message.
A company with this kind of weight sets patterns not only by what it does but by the style of its action. Google’s internal ethos is notionally fairly flat, anti-hierarchical, cooperative. It’s all about fostering creativity, nurturing innovation. The campus has buses, masseurs and chefs. It’s family friendly. From the inside, Google is paradise. On the outside, however, it sometimes operates what appears to be a scorched earth policy; the attempt to make a run around the edge of the copyright laws of the United States for the Google Book Settlement may have been intended as something for the greater good, but part of it was the decision to avoid seeking a major change in the law in Congress. Consider that for a moment: this was an attempt to make law without reference to the body elected by the people and appointed to that task by the constitution of the United States. The scale of the ambition is breathtaking. It should also be terrifying.
It’s not unusual for companies to attempt to lobby Congress, or national parliaments in other countries. But to attempt to make the centre of law-making, one of the three core parts of the US government, an irrelevance to the reality is to seek to change the nature of that country at a fundamental level. Once again, put that attempt into the context of another brand. Ask what it would mean if the private security company once known as Blackwater were to attempt this, or the oil giant BP. Influencing law is one thing; rendering irrelevant the founding documents of a nation – especially a nation with the economic and military might of the US – is another. But that is precisely the measure of Google’s self-perception: a government that isn’t doing what Google regards as right is an impediment to progress. A law-making body that has failed, again and again, to produce a reasonable re-evaluation of intellectual property (IP) law (and the US Congress has, sadly, not done well in its attempts to reform IP in a rational way) is simply not worth respecting. Like the Net itself, the company interprets the blockage as a system failure and routes around it.
I occasionally find myself asking if Google is itself a war economy – if it must continue to expand away from its core to support itself, just as expansionist states used to have to – making it the digital image of one of those acronymed organizations that tried to reshape the developing world in the image of the industrialized north-west during the seventies and eighties, insisting on westernized, fertilizer-dependent agriculture techniques, industrial harvesting and so on, only to discover that intercropping was more important than it appeared to prevent pests, soil erosion and disease. It seems fanciful, and I dismissed it until I watched Roger McNamee’s TEDx talk from Santa Cruz in July 2011.
McNamee, author, guitarist and co-founder of an investment partnership, suggested that Google is overvalued because index search (i.e. Google’s kind of searching) has peaked: from 90 per cent of all search activity in 2008 to just over 50 per cent in 2011, the heart of what Google does has been shunted away from its central position. Google’s core is undermined by its own success: ‘The index became full of garbage. In fact, the entire web became full of garbage.’ If McNamee is right, then the energetic expansion into fields other than search is not merely an expression of Google’s self-perception, but a necessity. ‘What it cannot do,’ McNamee suggests, ‘is recover its position as the dominant player on the Internet … [Google’s] form of commoditization has been tremendous for Google and horrible for almost everyone else, and I believe … it is over.’2 In other words, Google has no choice but to apply its engineering ethos in a broader context. Recently, Google has been taken to task by other Internet companies for seeming to privilege search results from its own social network, Google+, over those of Twitter, Facebook, and so on. The offended parties have gone so far as to create software which will re-rank Google results to show how they would look without the apparent bias. If this really does represent a drift away from Google’s original central idea – letting the Internet determine the importance of websites – it demonstrates that the company is capable of a radical change of identity, discarding an aspect of its self-perception which one might assume was fixed. It also raises the possibility that this is a retrenchment triggered not by the original ethos, but by a dawning awareness of commercial vulnerability.
Debating the sustainability of Google and the Internet commerce models is a task for a battalion of analysts with access to the company’s numbers. For myself, I believe Google is a positive force – just – with some serious institutional blind spots regarding the value of the existing ecosystems of the areas into which it moves. The point is this: that the efficiency ideology of Google and the ebullient creative share-alike culture of the Free Software Foundation, along with the problem-solving, results-based philanthropy of Bill Gates and the idealistic legal-societal battles of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are brothers under the skin. They all stem from a common root and they share a common idea of better living through technology.
These groups and individuals and their ideas are in fact the children of the Enlightenment – the great surge of science which turned the medieval world into the modern one, and which created, and was created by, a culture beginning to place its faith in reason over religion, and which in turn fell in upon itself when it became apparent that it, too, was ultimately premised on nothing but faith, albeit a faith in reason. This was the original attempt by proponents of technology to transform mankind’s lot, and these are its inheritors, for good and ill. It is not only the technology of the Internet that is inherently disruptive, but the heart’s blood of the organizations that create, define and deploy it. They draw on a shared ideal
of positive transformation, of beating the negative lock-in of inherited inefficiency and unfairness by radical – overwhelming – reshaping. Of all these, Google is the most extreme: arguably the last great Enlightenment project.
And that’s where the trouble starts. The disruptive effect of digital technology – and digital age companies – on many industries, and the way in which they are altering how we arrange our lives, appears to produce in many a sense of inundation and panic. That sense chimes with the nightmare image of the networked world in which digital technology has somehow swallowed us whole and made us less than we are. There are various components to the nightmare, some more and some less real. There are concerns regarding the law and privacy; there are economic and commercial issues; there are questions of power and legitimacy and worries about the effect on the brains both of children and adults; but the first layer of fear – or perhaps, at this point, it would be fairer to call it discomfort – about the effect that new media and mobile devices are having on our lives as individuals and as societies is summed up in two words: information overload.
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Information Overload
INFORMATION OVERLOAD IS a sort of buzz phrase at the moment. I hear it everywhere, the way I used to hear about stress and the work–life balance. To a certain extent, it’s just a statement of the modern condition: when people feel the world is getting on top of them, they call that feeling by whatever name is current. I occasionally wonder what they called it in the seventeenth century, when Newton was alternating between science and alchemy and half the population believed that Armageddon was imminent. Was there a term for apocalypse fatigue, the feeling of disappointment and relief and post-traumatic stress which arose from the End never actually arriving? Did people experience culture shock from hearing about the Laws of Motion? It’s easy to see this as a sort of paradise syndrome, a complaint for those who have little to complain about, and it’s tempting to dismiss it out of hand and go on to the rather scarier claims made about digital technologies. But information overload is not just hot air, any more than stress or indeed the work–life balance. It’s just that people often use the term without really asking whether it’s what they mean, or where the blame for the malaise truly lies.
The metaphors are almost all about drowning. It seems we are sinking in a flood of information, a tide making it impossible to breathe or to think. While war-on-terror prisoners are bombarded 24/7 with loud, discordant noises and music to stop them sleeping and weaken their grip on reality (one man said it was worse than the period he spent having his genitals slashed in a prison in Morocco, because he could feel his mind slipping away) we have arranged to bombard ourselves, in a much smaller and less aggressive way, with signals which interrupt our thoughts. And there is some justification for the fear that we are somehow intruding on our relationship with ourselves; it is possible to present the brain with too much stimulation, to paralyse us with loud noises and bright lights. We tense when we hear sudden thunder, and a flashbang grenade can make even trained combatants useless for a few moments. We can be overwhelmed by options and possibilities, too, from that trivial indecision at breakfast (‘What kind of egg? What kind of egg?’) to strategic paralysis in a military context (about which, more later). Technology commentator and author Nicholas Carr’s concern about distraction in the midst of concentration stems from an experiment showing that reading a hypertext document does, apparently, produce a different form of cognition and consideration from reading a plain text, a form in which what is written is constantly judged, the brain flickering between perception and analysis.
And too much information can be a problem in a less abstruse way, as well: as writer Malcolm Gladwell explains in Blink, a very simple diagnostic chart exploring simple criteria is a better guide to whether a patient is having a heart attack than a more profound examination of all the possible symptoms. The chart boils down to a combination of whether the patient has a bad electrocardiogram and is suffering from unstable angina, has fluid in the lungs, and has a systolic blood pressure lower than 100. If the answer to all four is yes, then the patient is in big trouble and needs immediate assistance. Mixed combinations of these factors lead to diagnosis of intermediate or low risk. And that’s it. You don’t even have to know why these things are significant. You only have to know that statistically speaking, they are. The chart, when first applied at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, turned out to be 70 per cent better at determining when patients were not having a heart attack than even experienced doctors. More important still, it was between 10 and 20 per cent better at spotting patients who were seriously at risk, raising the accurate diagnosis of serious heart attacks from 75 to 89 per cent to over 95 per cent. The problem, it would seem, was that the doctors were simply looking at too many factors, trying to encompass too much.
The advertising industry is well aware of the feeling of intrusion, despite, or perhaps because of, being a major culprit. Advertisements for holidays feature empty beaches and deserted romantic restaurants; cars are sold with ads which set the silence of the ride and the tranquillity of driving in contrast with the chatter and howl of a modern office – at the end of a long day, open roads and wildernesses beckon. Bubble baths and glasses of wine sell chocolate; running shoes are for running alone through the forest, not pounding the treadmill at a gym, though perhaps a majority of us will never take them out of doors. Aspirational imagery is frequently about carving out a space for the self, a space that is defined by quiet.
It’s hardly rocket science to say that people – some people constantly and most of us from time to time – feel invaded by telemarketing, meaningless fliers through the door and spam email; by the phone calls from utility companies offering us new pricing plans we don’t understand to replace old ones we never got to grips with, which we are assured will save us money and effort but which we are distantly certain will ultimately cost us more in some roundabout way. We groan inwardly at a call from the office which intrudes upon what ought to be our private time; at least, ought to be so by the standards of work and family life which were operative before the advent of the mobile communications device. And we blame, inevitably, the phone which makes the call possible rather than the culture which surrounds our job. The external pressure of communication, of the world which demands a share of our attention, we blame on technology.
The key word is ‘attention’ once again; there’s a battle taking place, in which various media and industries compete for our attention. Leisure time is limited, so obviously assorted media want us to listen to their music or play their game, watch their movie. But at the same time, we each of us have a variety of other slots in which various entities are seeking primacy: banking, phone and Internet connection, TV and so on. Many of these know that they will not get our attention – our focus and engagement – at work, so they call when they know we will be at home. And in doing so they intrude on something very important and fundamental.
The feeling of information overload seems to consist of a small parcel of sins, of which the first is noise – and not just ordinary clatter and bustle. It is a noise of the mind, the relentless howl of the exterior world, possible only because technology is an open pipeline into our lives, and more specifically into the hearth: the place which is set aside for the things that matter. The word ‘hearth’ – the old word for a fireplace, which evokes notions of the duty of a host to a guest and vice versa, and which proposes an almost medieval life of wood ovens and pre-industrial simplicity – has a primal feel which is I think entirely appropriate to this discussion. This is very much a personal, instinctual thing.
It need not be a literal fireplace, but consciously or not we take the notion of ‘hearth and home’ very seriously. We really dislike anything that threatens the sanctity of the hearth, even by doing something as innocuous as crossing the threshold by phone or email without permission. Ask yourself how annoyed you get about telemarketing calls, or – a step up – how irritating it is to have a guest
who outstays their welcome. More seriously, consider how much stress you feel about mortgage payments, or renovations, and, by contrast, look at how many people were prepared to get themselves into vast, irredeemable debt in order to secure a permanent home. Look at the power of the political pledge to enable us to buy our own homes, and at the number of revolutions and wars begun with the promise of land. The hearth is where we do our real living, it is what gives meaning to the hours we spend working and administering. It is our most profoundly personal place, a definitive statement of our identity as well as a component of it. It’s our reward: the ‘life’ part of the work–life balance and the centre of domestic fulfilment. It is – or time spent there is – to some extent the thing preserved by philosophies of ‘slow’ evolved to combat the hectic pace of modern life. The hearth is where we play, in the broad social and philosophical sense of the word; it is where our humanity is initially learned and ultimately asserted. Intrusion into the private space of the hearth is the most unsettling and unwelcome of invasions.
The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World Page 5