Culture

Society of the Spectator

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

You’ve likely heard or read about Ingrid Loyau-Kennett. She is the woman who calmly conversed with the two men who had just murdered a British soldier on the streets of London  for the nearly 20 minutes it took police to arrive on the scene. If you’ve not, you can read about the whole incident in this profile of Loyau-Kennet that appeared in The Guardian (link via ayjay).

I was particularly struck by the closing paragraphs:

Loyau-Kennett is deeply concerned, she says, about the direction modern society is headed. “I prefer the values of the past than the non-values of today, where most people don’t seem to give a damn about others.” The events of last Wednesday have magnified her feelings. She has particular disdain for some of the people who stood by recording on their phones, refusing to offer help.

“It annoyed me to see those people with mobile phones filming,” she says. “They were doing it for money, with the idea of selling the footage. I was annoyed at what must be in their heads that they just wanted to watch and record the unhappiness of others. And then there was the stupidity of the mothers who had stopped there with their kids. The man could have reached them in five seconds if he’d run at them. It would never cross my mind to show a heavily bleeding body to my kids.”

If people were scared, she ponders, why didn’t they just run away? That’s an understandable reaction, she says. “It’s a horrible mentality that some people have these days. I think we have this culture now – maybe started by things like soap operas – where we have this unhealthy curiosity about other people’s lives. You shouldn’t just be there watching like it’s on TV. By only watching they are actually interfering. Do something useful. Don’t just stand there. Move away.”

Thoughts? What do we make of her analysis? Is this a symptom of what Debord famously called the “society of the spectacle”? Or better, is this a symptom of the evolution of the society of the spectacle into the society of the documenting spectator?

The Ethics of Ethical Tools

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 13 Comments

In a passage I’m rather fond of, T.S. Eliot wrote of “the endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment.” How one reads those few words might reveal a good bit about that person’s posture toward technology. If you read it triumphantly, then odds are you are on the whole at peace with the world wrought by modern technology. Eliot, naturally, intended them a bit more gloomily. Endless invention and endless experiment partake in our growing ignorance that brings us nearer to death and no nearer to God. It prompts his well-known series of questions,

“Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Whatever you make of the relative merits of endless invention and endless experiment, the former at least is built into the technological project. Melvin Kranzberg captured this reality in the second of his six laws of technology. Reversing the cliché, Kranzberg’s second law reads, “Invention is the mother of necessity.” “Every technical innovation,” he explains, “seems to require additional technical advances in order to make it fully effective.”

And that is a relatively cheery way of putting it. We might simply say that technology creates as many problems as it solves. Naturally, we then turn to additional technologies to solve those problems. Endless invention, endless experiment – for better and for worse. All of this said, consider Blokket.

Blokket is a stylish pouch woven of nylon and silver thread designed to block cell phone signals. (That its name happens to sound as if it were a profane Nordic expression of exasperation is a felicitous coincidence as far as I can tell.)  As one write-up puts it, “once you slip your smartphone in, there will be no calls, texts, or notifications to alert you to activities happening outside arm’s reach.” In the same article, Chelsea Briganti, one of the lead designers, explains Blokket’s usefulness: “Blokket helps people engage in the present moment by providing interludes of relief from technology.”

I don’t know about you, but my initial response to this was decidedly … mixed. As I’ve written before, I’m very much on the side of those who urge us to give our attention, so far as we are able, to those fellow human beings in our immediate presence. Moreover, that attention can be as delicate and tenuous as it is precious.

There are, of course, perfectly reasonable extenuating circumstances. If, for example, your dear friend, who has been out of touch for weeks, is calling from Burkina Faso where she is an aid worker, then, please, by all means take the call. If, while we are talking baseball over beers, your ailing grandmother, wherever she might be, wants to hear the sound of your voice, please do oblige. If, while we are hiking the Appalachian Trail, I am bit by a rattlesnake, then, yes, I release you to check your smartphone for the appropriate first aid protocol. All of that should go without saying.

But otherwise, I’m of the party that finds the recent Facebook Home ad campaign … what is the word … grotesque. Or, as Evan Selinger more eloquently put it, “Social media — including self-indulgent interfaces like Home — only gets in the way of us being genuinely responsive to and responsible for others if we let it undermine ethical effort in maintaining meaningful connections. It only diminishes our characters and true social networks if we treat Selfish Girl as a role model rather than a tragically misguided soul.”

Attention is a precious resource these days, and we need to be better at directing it ethically rather than self-servingly or even efficiently. Incidentally, making that point is a perfectly good excuse to include a short film rendering a relevant portion of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College address (see below).

So I am naturally inclined to appreciate a product that markets itself as an aid to the humane deployment of attention. Good for them. Of course, another response soon arises from the more cynical recesses of my consciousness. Do we really need to buy what amounts to a fashion accessory in order to behave like minimally decent human beings? Are we so pathetic that we have to enlist the help of ethical props in order achieve the mere baseline of civilized action? Isn’t this merely the aestheticization and commodification of decency?

Well, maybe. As my cynicism subsides, I consider the fact that we are rarely as good as we want to be. Many seem not to want to be good at all, but that is a separate problem. I know, from my own experience, that when the moment comes to act on the principles I embrace, I don’t always follow through. I know what is right in the abstract, but when it comes time to act concretely, I appear to forget. Of course, I am not really forgetting. I am simply heeding other motives and desires, which at that moment override my desire to act generously or selflessly.

Our wills are divided. Certain philosophers have talked about this reality in terms of desires and second order desires. Second order desires are understood to be desires about our desires. Applied to the present case, we may find ourselves desiring to momentarily ignore the person we are with in order to check our smartphone for no good reason. But our better self wishes that we didn’t feel that desire. Our better self knows better and it rues that urge to do otherwise. That better self expresses the second order desire that we would not desire to fiddle with our smartphone at all. But alas we do, and our better self does not always win the battle of our divided wills.

This is not a new problem. St. Paul complains in one of his letters, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate … I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

The most famous illustration is typically drawn from Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus both knows that he should not heed the Siren’s song and that, when the moment comes, he most likely will. So he takes precautions: he plugs the ears of his crew, and then he has them tie him to the mast of his ship. In other words, while his better, wiser self is in charge he makes provisions to bind his weaker self.

A more recent illustration was supplied offhandedly by tech critic Evgeny Morozov in an interview. Here is how he describes the lengths to which he must go in order to moderate his use of the Internet:

“I have bought myself a type of laptop from which it was very easy to remove the Wi-Fi card – so when I go to a coffee shop or the library I have no way to get online. However, at home I have cable connection. So I bought a safe with a timed combination lock. It is basically the most useful artefact in my life. I lock my phone and my router cable in my safe so I’m completely free from any interruption and I can spend the entire day, weekend or week reading and writing. … To circumvent my safe I have to open a panel with a screwdriver, so I have to hide all my screwdrivers in the safe as well. So I would have to leave home to buy a screwdriver – the time and cost of doing this is what stops me.”

Morozov’s safe is another instance of Odysseus’ mast. Other examples could be easily supplied. Perhaps you have a few of your own. We wish that we had the strength of will to simply act how we know we ought to act, but alas we do not (and this for a whole host of reasons). The whole notion of a sense of duty, now rather regrettably out of fashion, was premised on the honest recognition that, apart from a sense of duty, we would not always spontaneously act in the most morally appropriate fashion.

Without digressing too much further, though, it would seem that if the choice is between, on the one hand, acting decently with the help of some extension of our will or ethical prosthetic, or, on the other, not acting decently at all, then let us embrace the extension of our will. Buy yourself a Blokket and slip your phone inside straightaway.

Yet … I can’t quite still that little voice inside of me that says, “Wouldn’t it be better still if you would just become the sort of person that didn’t need such extensions of the will?”

I think the answer to that question is, probably, yes. The question arises from that nagging sense that extensions of the will, well-intentioned and effective though they may be, feel as if they are a waving of the white-flag of moral surrender. But it need not be that at all, and this is where the write-up I cited earlier registers an important point. It appears that when the design company field tested Blokket, they found that, in the article’s words, “using the pouch actually helped to create new habits; users found themselves comfortably making the decision to keep interactions face to face and in the flesh.”

This warms my Aristotelian heart.

Simplistically stated, Aristotle’s theory of virtue is premised on the cultivation of habits that then become inner dispositions. In other words, if you know what the right thing to do is, but you don’t always act on that knowledge, then figure out a way of making that action habitual – by an extension of the will for example – and when that habit is internalized, you will then act on it instinctively as a matter of character.

Within this framework then, extensions of the will are not so much white flags of moral surrender as they are training wheels that will eventually be discarded.

That is all very neat and tidy. In the trenches of our moral lives, it is admittedly quite a bit messier than that. But all in all, it is not a bad way (even if it is incomplete) to think about our moral formation. If nothing else, something like Blokket is a step in the direction of mindfulness. That silly little pouch will at least make us conscious of the stakes. It is a token to remind us of what we know is the better way to be with others. We may not always choose that way – how hard is it to slip the phone out of the pouch anyway – but at the very least we will have a small obstacle to arrest the automatic and unthinking selfishness that is, for many of us, our habitual default.

[UPDATE: The video I refer to above has apparently been taken due to copyright issues. Here is a link to the audio of commencement address on which the video was based.]

Resisting the Tyranny of Productivity

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 10 Comments

Briefly, an additional thought on the Programmable World (in which ubiquitous wireless sensors make objects and machines “smart”): The envisioned Programmable World, as Bill Wasik has called it, is a tremendously sophisticated time- and labor-saving technology. Just think of all that we will not have to worry about or do when machines “talking” to each other will automatically do it for us.

But … the promise of time- and labor-saving technology is rarely fulfilled. See Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave for a book-length validation of that claim.

Really, the effect of such technologies is to instill in us the ideals of efficiency and productivity. And that just gets tiresome. In an earlier post I wrote that the Programmable World would enable us to sleepwalk through life. Allow me to take that back. The Programmable World will encourage us to speed-walk through life. But really, the two are not so different – sleep walking and speed walking. In both cases, you’ve taken leave of the present.

So here, free of charge, is your inoculation, for today, against the tyranny of efficiency and productivity.

Pieter Brueghel, The Harvesters (1565)
Pieter Brueghel, The Harvesters (1565)

The Transhumanist Logic of Technological Innovation

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 8 Comments

What follows are a series of underdeveloped thoughts for your consideration:

Advances in robotics, AI, and automation promise to liberate human beings from labor.

The Programmable World promises to liberate us from mundane, routine, everyday tasks.

Big Data and algorithms promise to liberate us from the imperatives of understanding and deliberation.

Google promises to liberate us from the need to learn things, drive cars, or even become conscious of what we need before it is provided for us.

But what are we being liberated for? What is the end which this freedom will enable us to pursue?

What sort of person do these technologies invite us to become?

Or, if we maximized their affordances, what sort of engagement with the world would they facilitate?

In the late 1950s, Hannah Arendt worried that automated technology was closing in on the elusive promise of a world without labor at a point in history when human beings could understand themselves only as laborers. She knew that in earlier epochs the desire to transcend labor was animated by a political, philosophical, or theological anthropology that assumed there was a teleology inherent in human nature — the contemplation of the true, the good, and the beautiful or of the beatific vision of God.

But she also knew that no such teleology now animates Western culture. In fact, a case could be made that Western culture now assumes that such a teleology does not and could not exist. Unless, that is, we made it for ourselves. This is where transhumanism, extropianism, and singularity come in. If there is no teleology inherent to human nature, then the transcendence of human nature becomes the default teleology.

This quasi-religious pursuit has deep historical roots, but the logic of technological innovation may make the ideology more plausible.

Around this time last year, Nick Carr proposed that technological innovation tracks neatly with Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs (see Carr’s chart below). I found this a rather compelling and elegant thesis. But, what if innovation is finally determined by something other than strictly human needs? What if beyond self-actualization, there lay the realm of self-transcendence?

After all, when, as an article of faith, we must innovate, and no normative account of human nature serves to constrain innovation, then we arrive at a point where we ourselves will be the final field for innovation.

The technologies listed above, while not directly implicated in the transhumanist project (excepting perhaps dreams of a Google implant), tend in the same direction to the degree that they render human action in the world obsolete. The liberation they implicitly offer, in other words, is a liberation from fundamental aspects of what it has meant to be a human being.

hierarchy of innovation

The Programmable Island of Google Being

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 10 Comments

Bill Wasik in Wired, on the emerging Programmable World:

“Imagine a factory where every machine, every room, feeds back information to solve problems on the production line. Imagine a hotel room (like the ones at the Aria in Las Vegas) where the lights, the stereo, and the window shade are not just controlled from a central station but adjust to your preferences before you even walk in. Think of a gym where the machines know your workout as soon as you arrive, or a medical device that can point toward the closest defibrillator when you have a heart attack. Consider a hybrid car—like the new Ford Fusion—that can maximize energy efficiency by drawing down the battery as it nears a charging station.

… At his house, more than 200 objects, from the garage door to the coffeemaker to his daughter’s trampoline, are all connected to his SmartThings system. His office can automatically text his wife when he leaves and tell his home A/C system to start powering up …

For the Programmable World to reach its full potential, we need to pass through three stages. The first is simply the act of getting more devices onto the network—more sensors, more processors in everyday objects, more wireless hookups to extract data from the processors that already exist. The second is to make those devices rely on one another, coordinating their actions to carry out simple tasks without any human intervention. The third and final stage, once connected things become ubiquitous, is to understand them as a system to be programmed, a bona fide platform that can run software in much the same manner that a computer or smartphone can. Once we get there, that system will transform the world of everyday objects into a design­able environment, a playground for coders and engineers. It will change the whole way we think about the division between the virtual and the physical. This might sound like a scary encroachment of technology, but the Programmable World could actually let us put more of our gadgets away, automating activities we normally do by hand and putting intelligence from the cloud into everything we touch.”

In fact, if this indeed sounds to you like a “scary encroachment of technology,” Wasik’s word of assurance offers little consolation. The fact that the gadgets are unseen, activities are automated, and cloud intelligence saturates our environment means that the encroachment will be effectively total precisely because it will be invisible and, as they say, frictionless.

In a clever piece, also in Wired, Matt Honan imagines Larry Page as the master of his own island, a cross between Dr. Moreau and the Ricardo Montalban character on Fantasy Island:

“You are with my Google Being. I’m not physically here, but I am present. Unified logins let us get to know our audience in ways we never could before. They gave us their locations so that we might better tell them if it was raining outside. They told us where they lived and where they wanted to go so that we could deliver a more immersive map that better anticipated what they wanted to do–it let us very literally tell people what they should do today. As people began to see how very useful Google Now was, they began to give us even more information. They told us to dig through their e-mail for their boarding passes–Imagine if you had to find it on your own!–they finally gave us permission to track and store their search and web history so that we could give them better and better Cards. And then there is the imaging. They gave us tens of thousands of pictures of themselves so that we could pick the best ones–yes we appealed to their vanity to do this: We’ll make you look better and assure you present a smiling, wrinkle-free face to the world–but it allowed us to also stitch together three-dimensional representations. Hangout chats let us know who everybody’s friends were, and what they had to say to them. Verbal searches gave us our users’ voices. These were intermediary steps. But it let us know where people were at all times, what they thought, what they said, and of course how they looked. Sure, Google Now could tell you what to do. But Google Being will literally do it for you.

“My Google Being anticipates everything I would think, everything I would want to say or do or feel,” Larry explained. “Everywhere I would go. Years of research have gone into this. It is in every way the same as me. So much so that my physical form is no longer necessary. It was just getting in the way, so we removed it. Keep in mind that for now at least, Google Being is just a developer product.”

Not only is this a snarky critique of Page’s recent comments, it also pairs nicely with the Programmable World piece.

What’s the goal of the Programmable World anyway?  Is it that all of us in the developed world (because, of course, whole swaths of the human population will take no part in this vision) get to sleepwalk through our lives, freed from as many decisions and actions as possible? Better yet, is it the perpetual passive documentation of an automated life which is algorithmically predicted and preformed for me by some future fusion of Google Now and the Programmable World.

I’m fairly confident nothing quite so dark is really on the horizon for us, but I do wonder about the ideology driving this rhetoric and these imagined futures. What makes any of this attractive? What desires do these potential technologies answer to?

For some people at least, the idea seems to be that when we are freed from these mundane and tedious activities, we will be free to finally tap the real potential of our humanity. It’s as if there were some abstract plane of human existence that no one had yet achieved because we were fettered by our need to be directly engaged with the material world. I suppose that makes this a kind of gnostic fantasy. When we no longer have to tend to the world, we can focus on … what exactly?