There's a bit of me tempted to simply copy and paste this article from the Guardian, with proper credit, of course (or maybe not; I haven't quite decided what I would have done) as it's the sort of thing I think, even if expressed in a far more erudite and articulate way than I can generally muster. (Feel free to disagree, of course).
For those of you for whom even an online newspaper article is tl;dr, here's my brief reading of what itself a short excerpt from The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore, published by Allen Lane a couple of months ago:
We have a choice between a computopia of wisdom and enlightenment enabling all to live together in harmony, or the compudystopia of government by machine. The exponential growth in both processing power and digital data to process, controlled by the vested interests of those already holding power, has pushed us towards the latter future, accelerated (ironically) by our liberal democracy's reluctance to regulate.
And I thought I was curmudgeonly.
There's an angle to this which is in the article (and, I'm sure, in the book, which I haven't read), but appears consequential rather than as a contributory factor in getting us to where we are. That is the particularly human trait of reverting to knuckle-dragging savagery when online.
Lepore quotes John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:
“Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone...You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather … You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear … Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.”
And that's the problem. For every hippy thinking Cyberspace is one long meditative retreat, where we will settle our differences with reasonableness, finding common ground to grow flowers to stuff down the barrels of guns wielded by The Man, there are a dozen Neanderthals ready to punch your face in. The Man is delighted Cyberspace lies outside any mature jurisdiction because that means He can do whatever the fuck He wants.
Ghengis Khan is reckoned to have overseen the slaughter of ten million plus. Take a moment to think what that means for respect for human life. He had none - but, then again, life was nasty, brutish and short anyway. Now we've swung so far the other way we find it hard to even say somebody's died, reverting to euphemisms like nuns discussing erotica. But we remain Genghis Khan-ish online, masked and armoured behind usernames and avatars, essentially sending others who are kinda-us-but-not-us into battle, to troll with false facts and conspiracies. We have little respect for others' digital dignity. Even hippies only agree with other hippies.
The internet has not made us this way. What the internet has done is to allow us to shed the trappings of modern 'civilisation', which force us into being 'civilised' because that offers the best return (if I don't kick you when you're down, hopefully you won't kick me when I'm down), and revert to type. And type has more to do with our lizard brains than the single transferable vote and giving the winning coalition's policies time to bear fruit. We've not lost our safety wheels, we've lost our safety valve.
I think Lepore thinks we've gone too far down the road towards a compudystopia. I'm not convinced a computopia was ever even possible. Given several millennia of evidence, like dropping a fridge off a high tower, in my view it was only ever going to go in one direction.
My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms
Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.
Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
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