The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World

by Nick Harkaway

  Reading is the definitive activity of the age that created the brain we have. It is also a path to empathy, and therefore to connection; it is central to who we have been and to many of the beliefs we hold to be a core part of us. To whatever extent we are being changed by digital technology, reading is one of the principal ways of retaining a connection to the present way of being human, and the skill of following someone else’s linear narrative, which is as important as being able to construct one’s own. We need to be able to choose which one is more appropriate in a given setting, just as, in some contexts, a pencil is better than a laptop, or vice versa.

  If you really want to push your sense of time in a new direction, though:

  2 Bake sourdough bread

  Sourdough is not like the fast yeast you can buy at most supermarkets, or even the more traditional live baker’s yeast: you take a couple of weeks to get a sourdough starter up and running, because you let the natural yeast in the air and the flour grow. Then, when you make the dough, it takes longer to rise than ready-bake yeast loaves. Dried yeast tends to be a single fast-growing variety, not terribly flavoursome. Sourdough is a gallery of strange yeast beasties, and you have to give them some time to do their thing. The end product is splendid, though; it’s like the difference between orange squash and freshly squeezed orange juice. Making sourdough is about as far from the efficiency of the chargeable unit as you can get: you’re working to a pre-modern schedule, not an industrial one. The dough is ready when it’s ready, and you have to get used to checking on the starter, then putting it back. If you’re like me, your mouse-finger will twitch: you’ll want to use the ‘Hurry’ button or the fast forward, skip to when you can do the next bit. Sourdough time would delight Einstein; it’s relative. It isn’t precise, professional time or digital clock time. It’s biological time.

  In making sourdough, you’re also stimulating your fingers and your nose. You’re acquiring a new skill – good for keeping older brains young. You may find you are applying decision-making and problem-solving, too; both have definitely featured in my bread-making. So now you’re hanging digitally acquired skills – those aspects of your brain are apparently trained by working with digital technology, remember – on an analogue peg. Look: your life just got integrated. (Cool.) And you’ve joined a community. You are part of a line of bakers which begins so long ago they had no concept of the clock or the calendar and comes all the way to the present. There almost has not been a period in human history in which we did not make bread. At some point, it is likely that almost every generation of your family – unless you are a king or a queen – did this same thing. You are also part of a contemporary community of bread-fiends who will help you out when things go wrong, and who will come to you for advice. The easiest way to find them, of course, is online, which binds a profoundly non-digital experience to your electronic desktop, and vice versa. Distinctions between on- and offline become blurry, because the technology and the social world both want them to.

  Having carved out a sense of time as something malleable rather than something rushing past:

  3 Learn to dance

  Dancing is a string of sensations and created instincts, practised possibilities. Once again, it’s a skill that must be learned, which improves physical coordination and gives you a sense of your physical body. It works with balance, with timing, with touch and hearing – it’s immanent and to some extent irreducible. It is a pursuit you do in the time and place where you are doing it. You really do, in every sense, have to be there. It is an activity which after a certain point can drop you into a profound and almost meditative calm. You can’t do it while texting, while emailing, or even while worrying about work. It is a single-focus activity, which excludes fretting, stressing and multi-tasking. There is only one positive outcome – good dancing – and a negative one is easy to spot. It also counts as play, in that it is a pointless activity with no obvious reward other than itself. The act of dancing belongs to you and your dance partner alone. More than that, though, some dances – especially one of my favourites, the Argentine tango – teach following and engagement at a high level, and even decision-making. You simply can’t do them unless you are really, significantly paying attention to the dance and the person you are dancing with.

  In tango, each step is led by one partner and followed by the other, and the lead-follow relationship can be inverted during the dance by a skilled pair. Tango is one of the most sophisticated non-verbal dialogues I’ve come across. It’s easy to do badly, with the physical equivalent of poor grammar and shouting (awkwardness and shoving). It’s much more difficult (and rewarding) to do well, with subtle cues and elegant phrases. With some styles of dance, you might be tempted to skim-read your partner’s intention – salsa and Ceroc are both led, but led in patterns, so that you indicate to your partner which of a variety of moves you propose, and you’re then on track for that sequence and can relax – but with tango, that option is closed. Like Theodor Adorno’s infuriating prose, tango demands your attention. You’re making decisions about where to go and what sort of dance this is, and choosing your own responses to the music and your partner’s cues.

  As with tango, so too with some martial arts. The focus on following and understanding has to be enormous. Like Monty Roberts, a martial artist (or a tanguero) must learn how a given person works through movement. The notion of following is at the heart of t’ai chi, the Chinese soft-form martial art which most people regard as a form of moving yoga or interpretive dance practised by the elderly. In fact, t’ai chi can be as much a combat style as aikido or karate. The key to its use is the ability to move with your opponent, maintaining contact with them so as to be able to feel the lines of resistance in their body and the tipping point of their balance. The t’ai chi practitioner in turn should be almost completely relaxed (one of the training manuals proposes that a master’s arms should be like iron bars hinged with elastic) so that an attempt to throw them or control their balance can be nullified – not by resistance, but absorption. I tried for six years to lock the elbow of one of my teachers, and never managed it once. It was like trying to put handcuffs on a trout. By contrast, he seemed to know where I was going to move before I had consciously decided it myself, reading the transfer of weight in my feet through the contact with my wrist or shoulder, or even simply the position of my hips.

  This kind of following is different from the kind needed to make social media interactions authentic – it’s physical, obviously – but the attitude of mind, the decision to pay attention, the openness to subtle signals from a partner, and the preparedness to accept those directions and move in synchrony, are the same. If you follow well, you open yourself to the world, to social engagement and to new information and changes in direction.

  Armed with all that:

  4 Learn to play on your computer (or your phone)

  Of course. Why? Well, aside from the simple answer that computer games are fun – even if you don’t think of yourself as that sort of person, the sheer variety and ingenuity of the games milieu almost guarantees there’s something out there for you, from quirky, cartoonish fun to strange, almost lyrical things that are half test of skill and half artform – games are at the heart of electronic life. The grammar of the digital world, not just literally, in the sense of human language, but in terms of design and style, derives in many cases from games. More, sophisticated games require a sophisticated pattern of enquiry, hypothesis, testing and re-envisioning of the game reality; essentially, learning how to learn about and affect the world you are interacting with.

  As Steven Johnson points out in Everything Bad is Good for You, this is the basic scientific method, but it’s also the basic skill for understanding and acting in our own world, whose levers and rewards are often unclear. Games teach decision-making, of course – prioritization under stress, logistics, even blind guessing, because sometimes you just have to – but they also can be enormously relaxing. (Say after me: ‘There’s nothing wrong with
just playing.’) The simple, constrained universes of basic games, where the victory conditions are known, the problems are finite and predictable, and the rewards arrive in reliable patterns, are a great way to dump a boatload of worry for half an hour. That may even be why some people end up devoting too much time to them, because they’re just easier to handle than the real world. Used in moderation, however, that simplicity is a blessing.

  At the same time, learning to play in the digital world makes you comfortable with the technology, brings it into your life rather than making it an external and possibly inimical force, while at the same time teaching you another useful skill: recognizing when to ignore it. When the time comes to put the game down, you put it down and walk away. Of course you do – it’s just a game. And that habit is worth a mint, because you can, with a little tweaking, do the same with intrusive phone calls and emails. Yes, that can wait until tomorrow. No, I do not need to talk to that person. Anyone who needs me knows how to find me, so I’m switching off. You don’t have to run from technology to own it; in fact, the faster you run, the faster it comes up behind you.

  These days, games can also be social. Some of them are based around social networks. Others require cooperation; once again, something that isn’t always necessary or encouraged in the offline world. In shared online universes, you meet and then play alongside people almost immediately, which requires a measure of trust and cooperation. It can also mean taking charge or following orders, and engaging with and understanding the position of another person in a short space of time. Which brings up the wider sense of the word ‘play’ I used earlier: the human social life, the non-professional, non-reward-based side of who we are and what we do.

  Take some time to colonize the digital space with your life. Make it belong to you. Social networks, as I’ve said, are not just great piles of people blithering at one another and talking inconsequential nonsense. Of course, those conversations take place, but those conversations take place everywhere, from train carriages to pubs to the green rooms of theatres. You don’t have to listen to them. Services like Twitter, which allow a rapid progression from initial contact to interesting conversation, are opportunities to encounter other people and take in their thoughts; that is, after all, all they are in the Twitter context: thoughts written down and passed to you. Allow yourself to find the people who are not like you, or to discover that people with whom you share one interest have wildly different perceptions on other issues.

  Obviously, you’ll have to consider carefully which services to use and what to put on them; you’ll have to ask how much of your data – your extended self – you want to make available to the wider world and the companies that study that kind of available information. But unless you propose to live entirely on cash, generate your own heat and power, and grow your own food, that’s going to happen to some extent. It seems better to me to be in the mix, getting a sense of how it’s all happening, and influencing the pattern. Find and make use of online tools that illuminate how you behave and what effect it has – there’s a search engine now that will tell you how to buy equivalent products to the obvious high street and designer brands that have a far smaller carbon footprint – but the specific tools may be less important than the business of being in the digitally mediated conversations that are taking place all the time now, which follow events and form opinions and ultimately protest or endorse what has been done.

  Once you’re present in the online stew, you can find the arenas you care about and discover how to make a difference to that specific issue – or create a way. That’s the whole point: not that there are pre-existing discussions you can sign up to, but that together we can create tools which actually have an effect. 38 Degrees, the re-taskable online campaigning organization, is an evolving prototype, but the more people choose to involve themselves, the more significant the movement becomes. Be aware of received wisdom, bias towards people who agree with you and away from those who share uncomfortable truths, and try to form an opinion based on your own understanding rather than a desire to be in the majority or aligned with the most charismatic. Learn to be a helpful, engaged part of the smart crowd.

  For centuries, the idea of democracy has relied on a public sphere of debate that would inform the decisions and understanding of the electorate, but the existence of such an area has been uncertain at best. Now it’s there, and you can choose to be part of it.

  Learn that you are one of many, and understand that that is not a statement of insignificance, but the reverse.

  blindgiant.co.uk/chapter9

  10

  Coda

  AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, Great Britain was still the dominant power in the world. Women did not get the vote here until 1918, and even then the franchise was only extended to the over-thirties. In 1901 – the year Queen Victoria died – the life expectancy of a male child was forty-five (a girl could hope for four years more). A new invention, the telephone, was spreading across the UK, with the first municipal exchange opening in Glasgow.

  Since then, the franchise has been extended to anyone over the age of eighteen. Two world wars, the arrival of labour-saving devices such as the washing machine, and the stalwart campaigning of the feminist movement have changed the face of British society, although in the fine detail equality is still shaky. Our attitudes to religion, gender roles, the nature of family life, the definition of marriage, the place of children, the position of the UK in the roster of nations, the way we eat, and the value of traditions have all changed, and will continue to do so. The medical definition of death itself has shifted in our favour. It would be insane – and rather worrying – if we didn’t feel that the world was changing around us. It is. The touchstones on which my parents’ generation relied to locate themselves in the world have faded. The ‘job for life’ is now so rare that it barely occurs in political discourse. Who we trust, what we value, and what we know about ourselves are constantly revised. So many things we were taught to believe were fixed turn out to be in motion.

  The digital world offers ways to locate one’s self in a broad context, a web of connections and understandings, flexible, adaptable and supportive. As old ways of finding a place fade away, new ones arise – new ones that I find hugely hopeful. Which is good, because it only gets stranger from here.

  In 2008 Yukiyasu Kamitani of ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, demonstrated a new use for functional magnetic resonance imaging. An MRI scanner is the big, metal cylinder that in one particularly memorable episode of the medical drama House sucks the metallic ink from the tattooed skin of a patient. It provides an image of the invisible parts of the human body, like an X-ray. The technique is notable because it provides good images of soft tissue, which is much harder to see on X-rays, and does not make use of ionizing radiation, too much of which can cause cancer. This new use, however, was rather more than just notable. To me, at least, it’s staggering.

  According to New Scientist magazine, ‘Software developed by Kamitani’s team analyses the scans to find patterns of activity [in the brain] that are associated with certain pixels being blacked out. It then uses this information to discover signature patterns of brain activity for each pixel.’ In other words, Kamitani was able to take an image of what a test subject was looking at directly from the brain.

  The images extracted in 2008 were simple 10 × 10 characters, blocky and awkward as the numerals on an early digital watch. They were live, rather than remembered, and were derived from the visual cortex. This wasn’t mind-reading, it was more like stealing cable television from the trunk under the road. The next step is to find out whether it’s possible to refine the image, or to derive an image of something someone is thinking of, rather than directly apprehending. Kamitani himself acknowledges that this leads directly into some stark issues of privacy and law.

  My first reaction is to worry about the justice system; under what circumstances might a court be permitted to order the accused to submit
to a scan of this kind? And how reliable would it be? Would there be a scientific way of telling the difference between the memory of an imagined scene and a genuinely remembered one? Would it be a matter of interpretation? How long would it take the tabloid press to demand that certain people – alleged or convicted sex offenders, say, or terror suspects – be ‘trawled’ for recollections of recent criminal activity? And if them, why not random passengers at air terminals? And if, on being trawled for dangerous intent, you happened to think of something else you felt guilty about, should that then be admissible in court?

  Lest you think me fanciful, one project bringing this kind of technology to security (the Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behavioural Analysis) already exists. In the UK, the historic ‘right to remain silent’ has already been watered down so that a jury may draw adverse inference from a refusal to answer questions. It’s also an offence – punishable by two years in prison – to refuse to give up the key to encrypted data. The path to court-mandated scanning is open.

  Even if the technique only ever allows for images to be derived from the present activity of the visual cortex, a more sophisticated iteration with colour images and better definition raises the possibility of a person becoming, effectively, a CCTV camera. Might it be possible to achieve something similar with sound? In which case a human may become a live surveillance device. Or, perhaps equally disturbing: a machine might read the visual cortex of people in the street to determine which of a variety of advertisements they choose to spend time looking at. Combined with facial recognition and already existing software to determine age, gender and ethnicity (or even simply attempt to connect them with existing social network profiles) the system might gather data for more targeted selling – even targeted ads further up the street. And those are the obvious applications and consequences; the more rarefied ones – such as, perhaps: what might such a system learn about our unconscious triggers, our emotional states? How far might politics be manipulated by the live collection of data from the electorate during the election season? – will come upon us unawares.