Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

In the new circumstances of the Cold War, the US military searched for a way to remain operative even if their command centre had been nuked and they were effectively headless. The answer was to ditch the hierarchical structure and design their information systems as a network. Every part of it should be able to contact every other part. Information needed to move from one part of the structure to another, and if the infrastructure along that route had been vaporised under a mushroom cloud, then that information should be able to find a different route to its destination.

  In 1958, as a direct response to Sputnik, the US founded an agency within the US Department of Defense known as the Advanced Research Project Agency, or ARPA. In the 1960s ARPA began working on a computer network called ARPANET. It had not originally been designed specifically to remain operative in the event of a nuclear strike, but as the years progressed people came to think of it in those terms.

  The ARPANET worked by parcelling up the information that had to flow between separate computers into standardised chunks known as ‘packets’. Each packet was marked with its intended destination, but the route it took to get there was decided along the way and was dependent on the amount of traffic it encountered. A message from Los Angeles to San Francisco, for example, would be split into a number of packets that would set off across the network together, but they might not all take the same route to their destination. It was like a convoy of vehicles which got separated at busy traffic junctions, but which were still all able to make their own way to where they were going. When all the packets arrived in San Francisco they were recombined into the original message. When the speed of information flow was measured in milliseconds it did not matter if part of that data had come via the far side of the continent while the rest had taken a more direct route.

  In the eyes of the ARPANET, geography was irrelevant. What mattered was that every node in the network was reachable from everywhere else. ARPA studied problems such as network efficiency and packets that got lost en route, and in time the ARPANET evolved into the internet we know today.

  In the 1990s the internet reached beyond military and educational institutions and arrived in people’s homes. A key factor in this was the 1995 release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system, which drove the growth of PC sales beyond the business world. Windows 95 was the first time that a software release was a major news story outside the specialist technology press. It arrived with great hype and a hugely expensive advertising campaign soundtracked by The Rolling Stones. Windows 95 was far friendlier than its predecessor, Windows 3.1, and did not require the same degree of specialist knowledge to use. It was also much better at running games.

  What came next occurred so fast that most people didn’t realise what had happened until years later. In the three years between the arrival of Windows 95 and the release of its successor, Windows 98, almost every aspect of the contemporary internet arrived in the mainstream. It may have been in embryonic form, but it was all there.

  There was email, and a form of instant messaging known as IRC. There were webpages written in HTML, and web browsers with which to view them. There were communities to provide discussion forums, and there was music available in the form of mp3s if you knew where to look. There was a considerable amount of porn, as you might expect, and the first online shops. A few people began to put their diaries online, which seemed shocking in the context of twentieth-century ideas of privacy. These grew into the blogs we know today. Audio was first streamed in real time across the internet in 1995, thanks to software called RealAudio, and video followed in 1997. Interactive animation appeared online following the development of FutureSplash Animator, which later evolved into Adobe Flash.

  To modern eyes, the internet of the 1990s would seem incredibly slow and unsophisticated. Yet at the point we entered the new millennium, all the concepts behind our current technology were already in place. We just didn’t know what their impact would be.

  The fact that everything became connected, potentially, to everything else, changed the way information flowed through our society. It was no longer the case that reports had to be passed upwards while orders were passed down. Every member of the network was free to do what they wished with the information that flowed their way. The result was an unexpected wave of transparency, which has washed over all our institutions and cast light on the secrets hidden within their structures.

  In Britain, that process began in earnest with the MPs’ expenses scandal. A culture of fraudulent expense claims had long been considered normal among British Members of Parliament, with MPs claiming taxpayers’ money for everything from moat-clearing at country estates to a £1,645 house for ducks. This was exposed in 2009 and became a major scandal, with a number of politicians from both the Houses of Lords and Commons being either suspended, forced to resign, or prosecuted under criminal charges. Although much of the corruption was petty by historic standards, the scandal symbolised the growing distrust of authority and the public’s desire for accountability. At the time, the story appeared to be simply good journalism by the Daily Telegraph newspaper, making use of the Freedom of Information Act. It soon proved to be the start of something far bigger.

  The coming wave of transparency hit every institution in society. Corruption was uncovered in police forces. South Yorkshire Police, for example, were revealed to have altered numerous witness statements in a cover-up surrounding the deaths of ninety-six people at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield in 1989, and to have fabricated evidence against ninety-five striking miners for political reasons in 1984. South Yorkshire Police looked like a model of probity compared to London’s Metropolitan Police Force, who instructed undercover spies to ‘smear’ the family of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and who regularly accepted bribes from journalists. The Fleet Street hacking scandal revealed the institutional level of corruption in British newspapers, most notably those owned by News International. Rebekah Brooks, the editor of the Sun, was charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. She was eventually cleared, but it was still a shock to see such a powerful figure tried in court. Decades-old paedophile scandals suddenly came to light, most notably that of the late television personality Jimmy Savile. Savile’s decades of child and sexual abuse prompted a major police investigation that revealed abuse by many well-known entertainment and establishment figures and the extent to which this was hushed up by institutions where the abuse took place, including the BBC and children’s hospitals.

  The public exposure of institutionalised corruption was not just a British phenomenon. The Catholic Church was revealed to be covering up child abuse within its ranks on a frankly unimaginable scale. Fraud was rampant in the banking world, as shown by the casual way bankers regarded the illegal rigging of an interest rate known as LIBOR for their own profits. There have been calls for transparency concerning everything, from corporate tax strategies, to the results of clinical trials, to the governance of international football.

  In 2006 the website Wikileaks was founded. It revealed illegal activities in areas ranging from Peruvian oil to Swiss banking before causing a global political firestorm with the release of US war logs and diplomatic cables. The fact that no institution was safe from the sudden wave of transparency was evident when the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released up to 1.7 million classified security documents, revealing the extent to which the NSA and GCHQ were operating without proper legal oversight and, essentially, spying on everyone. Snowden, like Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, was the product of a network culture in which the very fact that government secrets existed was reason enough to demand their exposure. Like the parliamentary expenses scandal, the establishment’s desire to cover up the story was as damaging as the details that were leaked. By the time the constant outpouring of twenty-first-century institutional scandals had reached that most secretive of worlds, the security services, it was clear that something significant was occurring.

  The reason for this wave of transparency was the arrival o
f the network. Previously, if an allegation had been made against Jimmy Savile, for example, that allegation was a lone piece of data which created cognitive dissonance with his fame and career. Even though there had always been rumours about Savile, a single allegation did not appear plausible to the eyes of the relevant authorities. It would not be properly investigated, not least because of his charity work and perceived power. But in the networked age, anyone who took an interest in such a lone piece of data could use the search algorithms of Google to discover other, previously isolated, pieces of data. When it was known that one child has made an allegation against Savile, it was easy to dismiss that as false. But when it was known that hundreds of different, unconnected children had made strikingly similar allegations, then the situation suddenly looked very different. Previously, victims did not come forward because they did not think that they would be believed. That they were willing to come forward in this network culture indicates that they recognised something had changed.

  These investigations no longer needed to originate with professional journalists or regulatory bodies. Anyone with an interest or a grudge could start to collate all those separate claims. They could also connect to other concerned citizens who had stories to tell. Websites like the Everyday Sexism Project, which catalogues behaviour towards women on a day-to-day basis, showed how separate, often disregarded incidents were part of a serious, significant pattern.

  People were no longer constrained by where they lived and who they knew. In the twentieth century a security analyst in Hawaii such as Edward Snowden would have had difficulty making contact with someone like Glenn Greenwald, the Brazil-based journalist noted for his work for the Guardian newspaper in London. But thanks to the internet, contacting him was trivial.

  In the hierarchical world, cultures of corruption built up inside institutions because the constricted flow of information meant that those involved were safe from external observation. Now that information has been freed to flow in all directions, those cultures of corruption are exposed. In the twentieth century, President Nixon’s link to the burglary at the Watergate Hotel was considered a major scandal. It required a huge amount of journalistic and legal process to deal with. Such a tiny scandal seems almost an irrelevance now, and the press and regulatory bodies are swamped by the mountains of institutionalised scandals they need to process.

  The level of personal autonomy and freedom that the individualism of the twentieth century gave us is still with us in the twenty-first century. What has changed is that we can no longer expect to avoid the consequences of our actions. In August 2010, a forty-five-year-old woman in Coventry stopped to stroke a cat on a wall and then, in a moment of madness that she was unable to explain, picked the cat up and dropped it into a wheelie bin. The incident was caught on CCTV, spread virally round the internet, and the woman was very quickly identified. She was prosecuted, had to leave her job, and was subject to a global outpouring of anger and hatred which included Facebook pages calling her ‘worse than Hitler’. Had the incident occurred before the network age, none of that would have happened. The woman would have walked away from the bin and continued with her life. No consequences would have resulted from her actions, with the exception of the consequences encountered by the cat.

  The network has not just reorganised the flow of information around our society. It has imposed feedback loops into our culture. If what we do causes suffering, anger or repulsion, we will hear about it. Where once we regulated our behaviour out of fear of punishment by our Lord and master, now we adjust our actions in response to the buzzing cloud of verbal judgements from thousands of people. We are still free to choose our own path through society, in a way that we never were in the days of emperors, but we do have to take responsibility for our choices. This is bad news for libertarians who believe that there should be no limits placed on our freedom to place cats in bins, but it may prove to be good news for society as a whole.

  If we are honest, it has been something of a shock to have what other people think revealed so publicly. Those raised in the twentieth century were perhaps unprepared for the amount of cynicism, tribal hatred and cruelty that you encounter every day on the internet. Many fear that the network itself is strengthening all this negativity, and that the echo chamber it provides is entrenching division. Yet at the same time, the more those parts of our psyches are placed in the light of transparency, the more we acknowledge, understand and recognise them for what they are. The young generation who grew up online can dispassionately avoid becoming sucked down into negativity through a shrug and an awareness that ‘haters gonna hate’.

  There are attempts being made to stop this process and shut down this flow of information. Organisations ranging from the Chinese Communist Party to Islamic states and American corporations have attempted to gain control of parts of the internet. These are, notably, all organisations with hierarchical structures. The original internet, free to access and neutral about the data it carries, might not survive long. In a similar way that the freedom and the lawlessness of the oceans became subject to international law and control in the eighteenth century, to the benefit of empires, so the internet as we know it may be replaced by a ‘Balkanised’ conglomeration of controlled networks.

  It is not yet certain that this will be the future. Attempts to control the network are exposed by the transparency of the network itself. They also serve to reduce the legitimacy of the institutions attempting to gain control. Any attempts to disguise these actions and impose secrecy within an organisation affect that organisation’s internal flow of information. This makes it less efficient, and therefore damages it. The wave of transparency will not be easily avoided.

  Imagine that the people of this planet were points of light, like the stars in the night sky. Before the twentieth century we projected a constricting system onto these points, linking them in a hierarchical structure beneath a lord or emperor. This system informed our sense of identity, and governed how we orientated ourselves. It lasted for thousands of years. It may have been unfair and unjust, but it was stable.

  At the start of the twentieth century that system shattered and those points were released to become free-floating, all with different perspectives. This was the postmodern relative world of individuals where, as Crowley put it, ‘Every man and every woman is a star.’ Here was the twentieth century in all its chaotic glory, disjointed and discordant but wild and liberating.

  But then a new system imposed itself on those free-floating points of light, just when we were least expecting it. Digital technology linked each of those points to, potentially, every other. Feedback loops were created, and consequences were felt. We could no longer be explained simply in terms of individuals. Now factors such as how connected we were, and how respected and influential we might be, were necessary to explain what was going on.

  Money is, and has always been, important. But the idea that it was the only important thing was an oddity of the twentieth century. There had always been other social systems in place, such as chivalry, duty or honour, which could exert pressures that money alone could not. That has become the case again. Money is now just one factor that our skills and actions generate, along with connections, affection, influence and reputation.

  Like the New Agers who saw themselves as individuals and, simultaneously, an integral part of a larger whole, we began to understand that what we were connected to was an important part of ourselves. It affected our ability to achieve our goals. A person that is connected to thousands of people can do things that a lone individual cannot. This generation can appear isolated as they walk the streets lost in the bubble created by their personal earphones. But they can organise into flashmobs in a way they never could before.

  In the words of the American social physicist Alex Pentland, ‘It is time that we dropped the fiction of individuals as the unit of rationality, and recognised that our rationality is largely determined by the surrounding social fabric. Instead of being actors in markets, w
e are collaborators in determining the public good.’ Pentland and his team distributed smartphones loaded with tracking software to a number of communities in order to study the vast amount of data the daily interactions of large groups generated. They found that the overriding factor in a whole range of issues, from income to weight gain and voting intentions, was not individual free will but the influence of others. The most significant factor deciding whether you would eat a doughnut was not willpower or good intentions, but whether everyone else in the office took one. As Pentland discovered, ‘The single biggest factor driving adoption of new behaviours was the behaviour of peers. Put another way, the effects of this implicit social learning were roughly the same size as the influence of your genes on your behaviour, or your IQ on your academic performance.’

  A similar story is told by the research into child development and neuroscience. An infant is not born with language, logic and an understanding of how to behave in society. They are instead primed to acquire these skills from others. Studies of children who have been isolated from the age of about six months, such as those abandoned in the Romanian orphanages under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu, show that they can never recover from the lost social interaction at that crucial age. We need others, it turns out, in order to develop to the point where we’re able to convince ourselves that we don’t need others.

  Many aspects of our behaviour only make sense when we understand their social role. Laughter, for example, creates social bonding and strengthens ties within a group. Evolution did not make us make those strange noises for our own benefit. In light of this, it is interesting that there is so much humour on the internet.

  Neuroscientists have come to view our sense of ‘self’, the idea that we are a single entity making rational decisions, as no more than a quirk of the mind. Brain-scanning experiments have shown that the mental processes that lead to an action, such as deciding to press a button, occur a significant period before the conscious brain believes it makes the decision to press the button. This does not indicate a rational individual exercising free will. It portrays the conscious mind as more of a spin doctor than a decision maker, rationalising the actions of the unconscious mind after the fact. As the Canadian-British psychologist Bruce Hood writes, ‘Our brain creates the experience of our self as a model – a cohesive, integrated character – to make sense of the multitude of experiences that assault our senses throughout our lifetime.’