Bricks in your wall

Intro You might know Another brick in the wall, or at least have heard about it: it’s the title of a song in three parts from the album The Wall by Pink Floyd, and also from the film that it inspired. The lyrics tell the story of someone who isolates himself behind an imaginary wall to which he keeps adding more and more bricks as his life develops between childhood traumas, rage and desolation. (Don’t be scared off by this cheerful intro, keep reading just a bit more.) So why are these Goonder folks talking about a 1979 progressive rock album, you may ask yourself. Well, it’s because we couldn’t come up with a better metaphor than The Wall to capture several things, namely: why the Internet, something so revolutionary, so promising, something that was going to change the world for the better and turn it into a utopia, has brought us this dystopia in which it seems that we live today? Why do the big technology companies, which started out with the goal of giving everybody free and absolute access, have become the most effective tools in history for manipulation and absolute control? And why use Goonder, what is the point of adding another app on the fourth screen of your phone, do you want to put another brick in your wall? Now it would probably be a good idea to stop reading this. Moreover, you will almost certainly feel much better if you don’t keep reading. Or to say it with another Pink Floyd metaphor from The Wall, you might prefer to go ahead with your life Comfortably Numb. Another brick in the wall, Part I  (Daddy, what d'ya leave behind for me?!) There was a time in the 90s when it seemed that the Internet was going to change everything for the better. Immediate and free access to all the knowledge accumulated in the world, lack of borders in a new global community, decentralization of communications... all these new possibilities that we suddenly had were going to mean more freedom for all, less concentration of power in the elites, a more just, more advanced, better society. The future was there, within reach, since the speed of change was going to be breathtaking: in less than a generation we would advance a thousand times more than in the last 150 years. Companies that were born of that effervescence, like Google, dared to put corporate slogans such as “Don’t be evil”, imagining that if we can all access the same information through a neutral algorithm, the imbalances would be quickly diluted. You can get a better sense of the spirit of the time reading this article published in Wired in 1997 (The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 - 2020), about the bright future that awaited us, thanks to successive waves of technological changes. The authors, Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, announced in the subtitle that “We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world.” So what happened? More or less, the same thing that had happened after the last scientific and technological revolution of that size. For dozens of years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, the common vision of the people was that the future would be much better thanks to technology. Trains had brought distances closer, the telegraph had revolutionized the access to information, the telephone had connected the people, electricity had abolished the night... we could go around the world in 80 days! Soon we could fly! However, instead of the bright future, what came next were two world wars and a great depression in between. And if that wasn’t enough, Hiroshima showed the world what scientific progress and technology could really mean. Actually, the Wired article did state the analogy: “One hundred years ago, the world went through a similar process of technical innovation and unprecedented economic integration that led to a global boom (..) Indeed, the 1890s have many parallels to the 1990s - for better or worse. The potential of new technologies appeared boundless. An industrial revolution was spurring social and political revolution. It couldn't be long, it seemed, before a prosperous, egalitarian society arrived. It was a wildly optimistic time. Of course, it all ended in catastrophe.” And despite this, the conclusion drawn by the authors was that if we had learned the lesson, this time it couldn’t go wrong. As it happened, this time everything went wrong much faster: 5 years after the publication of the article, the dot-com bubble exploded. And 10 years later the whole economy exploded, making it quite clear that the world was not going towards any utopia. Of course, not everyone shared the optimistic vision of Wired at that time. This is an excerpt from an interview with the writer David Foster Wallace from 2000: “Personally I think the Internet is nothing more than an inordinate avalanche of information and entertainment, an accumulation of sensations with very little discretion when it comes to helping the consumer to choose, find or discern among the options that are available, in the midst of a truly raging maelstrom of capitalist fervor. This is true not only because of the way in which the internet operates, but also because of the way in which it is invested in. (...) Everyone is infinitely more interested in the economic and material aspects of the Internet than in the ethical and aesthetic, the inherent moral and political dimensions. (...) It's really just an exaggeration of everything we've had so far.” This idea of ​​how we operate and invest in the Internet, and how the interest in its economic possibilities prevails over the moral and political ones, is one of the main keys to understanding what came shortly after. But to talk about that, maybe it's better that we jump to the present. Another brick in the wall, Part II  (We don’t need no thoughts control) The news came out rather quietly a few months ago: Google had removed its famous motto “Don’t be evil” from the last place where it was officially written, the Code of Conduct for its employees. Beyond the comments of the readers, some of them really funny, by the way (“If they lie about being evil, it may be used against them in court. It’s just to cover their legal bases.”; “The Pentagon only deals with companies with strong pro-evil credentials so...”; “Watch out, Bezos, they’re coming for your spot!”), the truth is that, at that point, more than news, it was an anecdote. Google, and then Facebook, created two almost monopolistic empires worldwide by offering free instant knowledge and social validation, two things that today may seem given but were really difficult to get just 20 years ago. In order to achieve this, they first relied on a classic advertising business model. Thanks to increasingly complex algorithms, then they could exploit the data of their users, selling it to third parties who wanted to use it. Come think of it, those endless terms and conditions that you accept without looking could be summarized in a single line: “You understand that, in order to give you this free service, I have to turn you into my product. That ok? Cool. Press accept and you're done.” And what happens when you become their product? The answer isn’t simple, if you take into account that these companies-empire have as captive products a large part of the world population. And it gets really complicated when their CEOs, those new rock stars, get all excited with their toy and think it’s a super cool idea to do an experiment to control emotions, as Robert Booth tells us in this article for The Guardian. And why not, if they only have to answer to: a) their consciences, if they have not previously outsourced them; b) their boards, which by definition are only interested in profits; and c) some political committee from time to time, where they finally get to wear that tie that their girlfriend once gave them as a birthday gift. The last complications so far have been all over the news lately: manipulation of the elections in the United States, and of many other political issues in the rest of the world. If you want to have a good picture on the subject, please read the following pieces, in chronological order: “Inside the two years that shook Facebook—and the world” (by Nicholas Thompson y Fred Vogelstein for Wired); “Can Mark Zuckerberg fix Facebook before it breaks democracy?” (by Evan Osnos for The New Yorker); and “A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military” (by Paul Mozur for The New York Times.) But if you really want to be scared, see this TED talk by Jaron Lanier in which he explains why it is so much faster, cheaper and efficient to manipulate your behavior based on negative stimuli. Inevitably, therefore, those who can get the most out of these tools are those who benefit by appealing to our worst instincts. Jaron's conclusion is devastating: “We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.” Before you go looking for a rope or a very sharp razor, you have to know that there are also positive examples: you could read this piece by Andrew Marantz for The New Yorker, about the efforts of Reddit looking for a balance between the limits of freedom of speech and the consequences of massive exposure without filters. Or this manifesto by Anil Dash in Medium, in which he asks for more self-criticism in the tech industry, besides that coming from the outside (journalists, activists). He warns: “The oil and steel barons of the past were seen as high tech innovators and valuable job creators for a while, until their excesses and abuses earned them a serious backlash.” In fact, what Anil is asking for has been happening for some time: a few executives, investors and front-line personalities in the tech industry are speaking up about the harm that social media sites can do to civil society, and expressing support for new privacy laws. PR guys in Silicon Valley must be very busy these days. But real change seems still far from gaining momentum. We now finish this part of the wall with two quotes. The first one was written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in The Leopard: “Everything must change so that everything can stay the same.” The line alludes, in a very cynical way, to how elites conform to the revolutions, using them for their own benefit. The second is by Doris Lessing in Prisons we choose to live inside: “Yet I think we may very well see countries that take it for granted they are democracies losing sight of democracy, for we are living in a time when the great over-simplifiers are very powerful.” This line does not require any additional comment, beyond that it was written in 1985. Wow, this really reminds of the ending line from that Woody Allen monologue: “I wish I could think of a positive point to leave you with… Will you take two negative points?” Lol. Another brick in the wall, Part III  (I have seen the writings on the wall) Have you ever watched that famous Apple ad, titled “1984”? They broadcast it at the ’84 Superbowl, and it was directed by Ridley Scott, who had just done Alien and Blade Runner, no less. At this point it has become a cult piece, like seemingly everything that comes from Cupertino. In just a minute we were announced that, thanks to the introduction of the Macintosh 128k, the world in 1984 was not going to be like the one in Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's novel. The message, not very subliminal, was more or less that using this new personal computer you will be free; no one will be able to manipulate or control you because Big Brother will be destroyed. The world will be better, thanks to Apple. Anyway. We don’t want to bore you with more of the same, so we just dare to suggest to Apple that for the release of the next iPhone, they should call again Ridley Scott to shoot a new version of the ad, and title it "Ooops!". Precisely because of the unstoppable boom of the mobile phone use (and much more specifically, since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007), those human-zombies in the Macintosh ad no longer have to look at Big Brother in large screen. Now each one has a small screen (ok, not so small lately) to enjoy the contents that are so graciously offered to us. Of course, we have accepted the terms and conditions without looking. And the sad reality is that we have left Nineteen Eighty-Four behind. Now the Big Brother is not inside the screen but inside us. In his essay The Privatization of Stress, Mark Fisher says that “the insatiable urge to check messages, email or Facebook is a compulsion, akin to scratching an itch which gets worse the more one scratches. Like all compulsions, this behaviour feeds on dissatisfaction (…) What’s remarkable here is the banal content of the drive.”  How are we using all these technological possibilities that were going to make us free? Are they helping us create the prosperous and egalitarian society that was expected? Not really. We are mainly using technology to build walls (and this is where the metaphor breaks down). Personal walls in which we project illusions of ourselves through contents that almost always come from somewhere else, from some other wall. Stuff that we like or that make us laugh or with which we feel we agree without thinking much about it. Stuff that makes us feel good because it gives us place in a group. Some of this stuff banal, as Mark Fisher says: kittens on YouTube, likes to your holiday pics, memes on the rival team losing another match, gifs of John Travolta... But there is other stuff that is not at all banal. It’s that stuff that Jared Lanier talked about, which is perfectly thought out and (thanks to the study of your data) bespoke to manipulate your behavior, based on negative stimuli. Stuff that seeks to polarize societies instead of building them; stuff that appeals to the “moral operative systems”Michael Ignatieff speaks about in The Daily Virtues, exploiting the instinctive preference that any member of a community has for “us” over “them”, selling you that generosity and tolerance are in fact a betrayal to “us”. If you see the drift that politics are taking around the world, it is undeniable that this “other stuff” is being very successful, and this is largely due to the efficiency of technology. Futures don’t just happen: we build them. And the use of technology in the future that we are building is perhaps the great topic of our time.  You can read a lot about it in this extensive interview by Mathias Döpfner to the writer and historian Yuval Noah Harari for Business Insider. Harari says: “the worst-case scenario is that we might have digital dictatorships with all power concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite that monitors everybody all the time. Humanity might actually be divided into a caste of superhumans and an underclass of useless people. The latter will be people who have no economic value and no political power.” This underclass of useless people would be the overwhelming majority. But then, he adds: “I think that one of the big lessons we learned in the 20th century is that technology is not deterministic. The same electricity served the Third Reich and communist Germany and liberal, democratic united Germany. The electricity doesn't care what you do with it. The same applies for AI and biotech. We can use them to build paradise or hell. It's up to us.” Precisely. It’s up to us. Us in the tech industry, on the one hand. And it’s also up to you, on the other hand, in the way you decide to use the technology that we offer you. We sincerely hope that Goonder will not turn out to be yet another brick in your wall, but a tool for you to start knocking it down, or at least an alarm clock to wake you from being so comfortably numb. You have many tools at your service, applications of technology that are designed to help shaping a more just and equal society. To the extent that all of us, manufacturers, service providers and users, contribute to create a general framework of good use of technology, we can build that society. It will always be better than having to call Ridley Scott to shoot “Ooops!” © Goonder 2018