If you at last must have a word to say, Say neither, in their way, “It is a deadly magic and accursed,” Nor “It is blest,” but only “It is here.” — Stephen Vincent Benét (John Brown's Body)
Throughout the industrial revolution, the advancement of automated machinery has forced us to confront complex questions about the meaning of skill in work, quality in craftsmanship, and the essence of creativity in expression. The highest (and least functional) form of these mechanical masterpieces is the automata, usually a set-piece produced singly for the socialite elite of the time. In E.T.A. Hoffman's Sandman (1816), the main character falls completely in love with a mechanical woman simply because her clockwork sigh seems to indicate she enjoys listening to his poetry. Technology, serving as a perfectly personalized reflecting pool, enables us to fall in love with ourselves. Technology controls the language we use to describe and define our own humanity. The clockwork mechanisms that drove all of these early automata is an early metaphor through which we understood our own biological identity; An understanding that orients what contemporary medicine and culture perceives of the dichotomous operations of the body and inhabitation of the soul. Once the courtiers heard the gossip that the automata-woman tended to sneeze more than it yawned - sneezing all but disappeared from public gatherings, to avoid the mere suspicion of being mechanical. Where there were once gears; digitalism: computer hardware and software give us an idiomatic analogue for our consciousness.
The "test" of whether or not something is digital in nature is an idea that has its roots in a Victorian Parlour game, in which two participants communicate, while a third tries to determine the gender of each participant solely based on the messages. Alan Turing applied this game to a user-computer relationship, raising the question: how differentiable from human is a computer-generated response?
"In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to “access” information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The world has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences." ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
As biological beings, we have always been reassured by the various detectable deficiencies of our creations. However we now live in a world in which so many types of computer-generated text or imagery so often passes the Turing threshold for the average user that it has changed the way we will interpret information forever. With the present unending deluge of information from every source everywhere, we have no assurance that the truth is bring presented - even in prior cases where "unquestionable proof" such as photographic evidence could once reassure us. Our language and society will adapt to disconnect such things as a photograph from undeniable proof of an event. Automated information processing (arguably the beginnings industrial revolution of the information age) has become automated information generation.
It has become cheaper and cheaper to produce words, imagery (still and moving), of any shape or kind, in order to bolster any point. Propagandists rejoice as prolefeed slowly transmutes from the smutty print novellas within Orwell's 1984 to personalized realtime hallucinatory imagery - Tantalus' desire reified in 3D, with a subscription in between. Our modern affliction, the alienated distance between the self and the digital self can best be described...
"My riches make me poor. O I wish I could leave my own body! Strange prayer for a lover, I desire what I love to be distant from me. Now sadness takes away my strength, not much time is left for me to live, and I am cut off in the prime of youth. Nor is dying painful to me, laying down my sadness in death. I wish that him I love might live on, but now we shall die united, two in one spirit." — Narcissus in Metamorphoses (Ovid)
There are two major effects to understand.
There is a diffusion of the definition of the self throughout the technologies we use daily.
"When the developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a program as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program." — Jaron Lanier 2010
This hits at the heart of the argument I proposed earlier that the technology of the day is always used as a (typicaly morbidly incorrect) metaphor to treat the diseases of the body and mind. By encouraging the anthropomorphism of the computer we are actually shrinking the definition of the human spirit that exists outside of pure logic and circuitry. This surrender of the ego to the digitally projected self is encouraged over and over by engagement loops in social media and gaming contexts. We would rather take a selfie than look in the mirror because the pocket mirror we all own ensures our blemishes subside, and our face subtly shifts and changes to fit the beauty ideals of the day. We could become anything in virtual worlds and yet we are given only the magic to make ourselves appear a few steps closer to a vague and unattainable ideal. We are as Narcissus, our minds and freedoms held hostage in return for muted and metered affirmations allowed by the technocratic elite - while they reap the rewards of slowly pushing culture in whatever direction they want. We praise the machine because the collective machine (intermittently) praises us in return.
Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload. — Richard Saul Wurman, What-If, Could Be (Philidelphia, 1976)
Information always contains a perspective inherent within the means of delivery, language. Language slowly evolves over time, forever influenced by cultural pressures - sometimes in ways that are designed, sometimes accidental or emergent. Generally, we can depend on computers to search catalogued data, endlessly supplying every type of information that we demand. The methods by which we are able to discern fact from fantasy in the digital realm are becoming more digital themselves - the algorithmic snake is eating its tail. We may find that each of us lives in the digital world as international neighbors, but that each of us is trapped in a well of our own formed by the bounds of our algorithmic preference. By the light of only a few midday minutes we may be told fanciful stories projected upon the floor, but none are allowed the full picture. A personalized filter on reality which has no sense of culpability, no thought of empathy, and no conception of humanity. A filter that can be nudged and changed slowly as to not excite the frogs who, at least for now, fancy their new hot tubs. You cannot be a curious wanderer if there is no walkable virgin ground to tread upon. There is no more surfing the information highway, there is a delivery of approved material to digitally segregated users.
If you want the computer to have general intelligence, the outer structure has to be commonsense knowledge and reasoning. — John McCarthy
It takes monumental perspective shifts to break free of our inherent illusory sensory deceptions to see the projections on the cave wall as they are whole: an entire system of control. We cannot all be responsible in this way to independently upturn the tables and understand the totality of the machine, so we must find a way to take control of our data and the perspectives we display to each other. Communication itself is a natural human demand and we should work to expand the bandwidth and meaningful nature of this trade of information instead of being led to believe that a human is not a critical component of communication. The amplification of interpersonal communication is the ultimate destiny of computers in whatever form they will take over the next fifty years. We cannot let the Dream Machine become merely a content delivery mechanism (like TV), despite the obvious desires of advertisers. We owe it to the problems we dare to solve, the people we dare to save, and the world we dare to build to not falter in the pursuit of this ultimate ideal, leaving only a hollow echo ringing within the gilded cells we now happily inhabit.
Competing for time in my mind Selling morale by instilling doubt until I’ve run out of brains to fill so I blow them out