technology

Obiter Scripta, no. 124

By in alan watts, obiter scripta, technology No Comments

Some people predict that it’s only a matter of time until our ordinary telephones disappear and are replaced by individual devices about the size of a pocket watch—one side will have a TV screen and speaker; the other will entail a set of buttons you can use to activate various functions or dial world information for any given individual. And if that person doesn’t answer, it will mean that they are dead. Under such circumstances, absolutely no one can get lost anymore.

—Alan Watts, Just So: Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe

I had noticed over the last few weeks that my phone seemed to be slow to receive emails, and I was having problems getting texts to go through to certain people. I didn’t think much of it, because a smartphone is little more than an mp3 player to me. Today, though, I rebooted it and promptly received five voicemails and a couple texts that had apparently been in limbo for who knows how long. I know full well that various corporate and political actors would love to eliminate the possibility of true “private time,” and that the little surveillance devices we all carry around make it easier for them to do so, but it still pleases me to see how, for no particular reason, things just sometimes stop working as expected, introducing just that little bit of unpredictability into events again.

Unbanked

By in crime and punishment, technology, the geist of the zeit No Comments

A deeper concern is what happens when private institutions like corporations, universities, and media exercise the same power without even the pretense of accountability. If the large financial institutions want to, they can act as gatekeepers to society and would be held accountable only by the market, to which they also hold the keys. Given that institutions are heavily dependent on each other, if the institutions that hold important positions in the global financial web decide to freeze someone out, they can do so with the push of a button. Worse yet, we can imagine a scenario in which a system of freeze-outs could be automated based on people’s credit scores, purchasing histories, political donation patterns, key words in social media postings, carbon footprints, or political activism. It’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a citizen of a democracy wakes up one day to find themselves unable to participate in the digital economy, where almost all financial transactions take place, due to an automated system which flags them as being undesirable in some way.

Corporations and government have always exercised tremendous power, of course. Government has a monopoly on the use of force, using the policing powers to enforce laws. Corporations have always exercised enormous power via market share, advertising, lobbying, and other financial instruments. But never before have they been able to lock ordinary citizens out of social participation with the flip of a switch.

This push-button tyranny is real, and it represents a greater abuse of power than any that has been exercised before within the boundaries of liberal democratic government. It is new, it is breathtaking, and it is very dangerous.

— Michael Young, “We Will Delete You”

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There is power in information, and progressives seek to use their political advantage in states such as New York and California to lean on technology firms to impose an Orwellian blackout on wrongthink — removing unpopular voices and views from social media, cutting off verboten institutions and communications from the digital infrastructure, and, if it comes to it, manipulating GPS services to simply erase unwelcome charities and businesses. If you ever were bewildered by the old Stalinist practice of airbrushing photos to remove figures who have fallen into disfavor, this is the same sensibility at work.

It is easy to see the kind of politics practiced by Letitia James et al. descending into any number of dystopian scenarios. If we are all using self-driving cars in 20 years, you can be sure that the Letitia Jameses of the future will try to control where those cars will go — and where they won’t. Progressives already have weaponized the financial system against their political enemies — here, again, Letitia James is a major offender — and you can be sure that in a cashless society they will simply try to exclude wrong-thinking businesses, if not entire wrong-thinking industries, from the system. (Sturm Ruger & Co. makes a legal — and excellent — product, but it has been unbanked three times because of left-wing political pressure.) And it is not as though weaponizing travel would be unprecedented: You already can have your passport taken away over a relatively small tax debt — even if the debt is the subject of an ongoing dispute.

The Internet was supposed to be a decentralizing power, but, in many cases, the rise of ubiquitous information technology has had a centralizing effect that must be guarded against and, where possible, counteracted — because it is liable to be exploited by those who believe that justice requires that their fellow citizens be something other than free.

— Kevin D. Williamson, “America on Parole“

Thank You, Willis Carrier

By in technology No Comments

Charles C.W. Cooke:

During the 1911 New York heat wave, baked city-dwellers did everything they could to cool down. They slept outside — on their apartment’s fire stairs or in Central Park. They soaked their clothes in water. They even licked large blocks of ice that, despite being covered in flies, the saliva of hundreds of random children, and whatever had come off the back of the horse that dragged it there, were deemed preferable to the alternative. This summer, with them in mind, let’s resolve to hear no more of this silliness, and instead to recite an ancient prayer each and every time we get up from the couch to set the thermostat to a livable 70 degrees: Thank you.

I don’t have anything to add that I haven’t said before. I just wanted to shout Amen. July 17th should be a national holiday.

The Revolt of the Public

By in books, media/propaganda, technology, the geist of the zeit, waiting for the barbarians 4 Comments

Like a python with a bellyful of pig, I’m going to be digesting Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium for a very long time. This is one of those books I loved so much I almost feel wary of it now — isn’t it suspicious to find oneself in such overwhelming agreement with an author? Has he really presented such a useful and accurate perspective on world events, or am I just abandoning myself to the debauchery of confirmation bias? Whatever the case, it’s always a delight to find that someone else thinks the same thoughts I think, only better and more clearly.

First published in 2014, this edition added an updated chapter from 2018 which considers Trump and Brexit. I only wish there could be another update analyzing last year’s virus and woke riots in relation to his thesis as well, but I suppose I’ll have to check his blog for that. Speaking of which, he writes:

My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age. The result hasn’t been a completed revolution in the manner of 1789 and 1917, or utter collapse as in 1991, but more like the prolonged period of instability that preceded the settlement of Westphalia in 1648. Neither side can wipe out the other. A resolution, when it comes, may well defy the terms of the struggle. None is remotely visible as I write these lines.

If my thesis is true, we have entered a historical period of revolutionary change that cannot achieve consummation. Institutions are drained of trust and legitimacy, but survive in a zombie-like state. Governments get toppled or voted out, but are replaced by their mirror images. Hierarchies are brought low, but refuse to yield the illusion of top-down control. Hence the worship of the heroic past, the psychology of decadence — the sense, so remarkable in a time of radical impermanence, that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Sometimes he describes what appears to be a dialectical historical process, in which an age of widespread affluence and education paradoxically produces an equally widespread miasma of nihilistic anger. Other times, his focus is more personal and psychological, as when he attributes nihilism to “radical ingratitude” — an inability to hold realistic expectations of both human nature and of the ability of technology, government, etc. to “solve” the tragic dimension of human existence. Again, events seem to be moving too fast to be included in revised editions. In the last year alone, the utter beclowning of mainstream media, public health officials, and elected representatives has been almost too painful to watch. “Rebels” of both the right and left live in fantasy role-playing worlds of cool costumes and worn-out slogans, and have nothing to offer but condemnation and destruction. The response to this upheaval from hapless elites is to double down on demanding respect for their dwindling authority and attempting in vain to censor and control “misinformation.” But if we are in fact living through the most radical changes in media, technology and mass society since Gutenberg, the ripple effect is likely to go on for decades or longer. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to manage to avoid the twenty-second century equivalent of Europe’s religious wars.

Obiter Scripta, no. 105

By in books, foolosophy, obiter scripta, technology, writing No Comments

Plato suggests that how we process and articulate our ideas is inseparable from what we end up thinking and doing, that philosophical excellence is as much a matter of dialectical engagement as it is about arriving at a substantive vision. It is hardly surprising that he mistrusted writing as much as he did, seeing it as more likely to dull the mind than invigorate it. The written word is a medium that is peculiarly susceptible to enabling shallow cleverness rather than nourishing genuinely intelligent thought.

— Johnny Lyons, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin

I read around a hundred books a year, yet I increasingly agree with old Plato here. I appreciate the way that podcasting can be a medium for in-depth, invigorating conversation, yet I only listen to podcasts occasionally. To some extent, that’s because if I feel like listening to something, I’d rather it be music. I can’t listen to a podcast while working, because concentrating on a conversation uses the same part of the brain I need to concentrate on my work. Ultimately, though, it’s probably just habit. I know my way around the world of books. Who has time to explore the million-and-one podcast options out there?

It’s Not the Future That I Can See, It’s Just My Fantasy

By in fresh hell, technology, unintended consequences No Comments

A little over three years ago, some brilliant seer gazed into the future and reported back:

Nowadays, I’m sure there are brilliant minds working hard to figure out how we can implant SIM cards in our frontal lobes so that we can keep up with the Kardashians without having to go to all the exhausting labor of manipulating our pocket computers with our fingers, like savages.

Well…

Yes, yes, the “initial aim” is always something unobjectionable and beneficial. What’s actually interesting is trying to imagine all the ways in which humans will inevitably harness new technologies to serve the same old ends of hedonism, power struggles, and violence. Musk seems to believe that the best defense against the possibility of hostile AI is for humans to become cyborgs by means of wires implanted in our brains, allowing us to interface with technology at the speed of thought. Did I say interesting? I meant horrifying.

Memex

By in technology 2 Comments

Have you sometimes marveled at my ability to connect disparate ideas? Have you ever admiringly wondered how I manage to pull oblique references and quotations from memory? Well, I appreciate the compliment, even if I had to put the thought in your head myself. The short explanation would be that I’m just a genius that way. But even genius requires a lot of structures, systems, and sheer labor to appear effortless. The truth is, I often experience a distant relative of staircase wit, where I belatedly realize that something I casually read in passing weeks ago is now especially germane to a point I want to make, but I have no clear recollection of where I saw it, and I don’t remember enough direct quotes or keywords to make a Google search, or even a browser history search, useful. You have no idea how many total hours I’ve spent over the years while working on posts simply groping in the dark to find a precise link or quotation again.

The Lady of the House introduced me to a browser add-on called Memex which I’m already finding amazingly useful. Obviously, there are lots of ways to save links and notes from your online browsing. I have a “reference” folder in my email where I have things stored. I have a notepad app on my phone where I save epigrams, snippets of poetry, song lyrics, and other striking phrases that I’d like to use as post titles someday. I even have a private site that I use as sort of an online attic for storing links and pasting excerpts. But what I like about Memex is that it’s a perfect amanuensis — always immediately at hand to take dictation, but completely unobtrusive otherwise. The toolbar hides in the right margin of your screen, unless you put your cursor over there to make it pop out. It automatically indexes the sites you visit, so if all I remember is an author’s name, or an isolated word or phrase, I can search from the dashboard and find which page it was on. For example, I just searched for “Yuval” as a test, and saw the link to the New Atlantis where I read Yuval Levin’s article (and also saw that he must have had an article linked on RealClearBooks, which I visited earlier). My browser history, by contrast, doesn’t bring up any results; it only keeps a record of URLs visited.

Another example: last week, Patrick Kurp quoted a passage from Evelyn Waugh. Shortly after that, I saw a different article that used the same quotation, with an additional line that struck me as especially relevant: “There is no more agreeable position than that of dissident from a stable society. Theirs are all the solid advantages of other people’s creation and preservation, and all the fun of detecting hypocrisies and inconsistencies.” For a few days, that simmered in my brain stew, until I decided that I would probably want to keep that reference on hand for future use. Somehow, though, I couldn’t find where I had seen it. I thought it had been in a post on National Review, but a search there didn’t turn anything up. In just a few days, I’d somehow managed to lose track of it. My browser history was again no help. I didn’t remember enough of the passage verbatim, just the basic idea of being a dissident in a…wealthy? secure? civilized? society. Finally, I managed to string enough keywords together to find it in a Google search. Then I  highlighted the text, as you normally do to copy and paste, but in this case, it also brought up Memex’s tiny little taskbar underneath the passage with its “highlight” and “annotate” buttons. By using the highlighter, it saved both the link and the relevant text as a note on my dashboard. Now, even if I totally forget about that quotation, I can always think, “Hey, didn’t Evelyn Waugh once say something incisive about spoiled, privileged cultural critics…? What was that again…?”, and with a quick search in Memex for “Waugh” or “dissident,” I can have it right there. So now, anytime I see something that strikes me as even remotely worth noting, I can summon my little digital assistant and trust that it will be safely stored away.

Anyway, if that sounds useful to you, give it a try. I really like it.

Nostradumbass

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, technology 4 Comments

From the concluding paragraph of William Bernstein’s Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History, published in 2013:

For the first time, a significant fraction of the world’s citizens can be in instant communication with one another and send words, pictures, and videos across the planet. The coming decades will see, in China and elsewhere, the political, social, and cultural fallout from this explosion in human communication. Most of these changes should be as positive as they will be unpredictable.

Should be, eh? As the kids like to say these days: this certainly aged well. Though I suppose “the coming decades” offers enough of an extended timeframe to make any prediction appear valid. I often wonder where people get this idea that communication itself will be a net positive for human relations. Have they never heard of the narcissism of small differences? Is there any hatred more intense than that which festers between family members, friends or neighbors?

Worthless Words

By in books, technology, the geist of the zeit, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Claire Berlinski:

Western populations have suffered a profound degradation of reason, intellect, and moral integrity. The symptoms of this are many and flagrant. Among the most telling: Americans are rapidly losing both passive and active vocabulary. Both declined at a fairly steady pace postwar until the advent of e-mail and the text message; vocabulary loss then accelerated.

Reading skills have been lost. Only a small minority of Americans now have the ability to read and understand a book—book-reading now is the purview of the personality type drawn to endurance sports—which means most of us are functionally illiterate for democratic purposes. Those who can’t read at book length cannot follow a sustained, linear argument. The brain is highly plastic, and we have changed ours in a way that makes it much harder for most of us to think beyond 140 characters—slogans, not arguments—even as we have created in the Internet such a riveting system of rival entertainment that reading a book now requires exceptional personal discipline whereas once it required only the desire to be relieved of boredom.

That last part gets to the heart of it, I think. The effect of the Internet on book-reading has been like the effect of European diseases upon isolated native populations. The few of us who still read at length, for pleasure, are like the fraction of American Indians who managed to survive smallpox, cholera and whiskey. Many of those who formerly thought of themselves as dedicated readers didn’t have mental immune systems capable of resisting exposure to the bacilli of social media and digital cameras. Articles like the one in yesterday’s post are a modern form of ghost dancing — a delusive, futile attempt to cope with the tragic loss of an entire way of life. But no matter how the English majors wail and beat their breasts, the ghosts of Henry James and Marcel Proust are not coming back to roll up the fiber optic cables and wash all the smartphones into the sea. It’s time to stop lamenting and get on with the hard work of preserving what remnants we can through an uncertain future.

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