You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (13 page)

But in terms of economics, digital Maoism is becoming a more apt term with each passing year. In the physical world, libertarianism and
Maoism are about as different as economic philosophies could be, but in the world of bits, as understood by the ideology of cybernetic totalism, they blur, and are becoming harder and harder to distinguish from each other.

Prior to industrialization, every civilization relied on large classes of people who were slaves or near-slaves. Without technological progress, all the well-meaning political and moral progress in the world wasn’t enough to change the conditions of the lives of ordinary people.

Slaves powered even the precocious democracy of ancient Athens. It was only the development of functioning machines, which seemed to amplify mere thoughts into physical actualities, that made slavery obsolete.

I’ll go further than that. People will focus on activities other than fighting and killing one another only so long as technologists continue to come up with ways to improve living standards for everyone at once. That isn’t to say that technological progress guarantees moral progress. However, expanding wealth is necessary if morality is to have any large-scale effect on events, and improving technology is the only way to expand wealth for many people at the same time.

This hasn’t always been as true as it is today. Colonialism and conquest were ways to generate wealth that were distinguishable from technological improvement, though the military and technological domains have always been tightly correlated. The discovery of fresh natural resources, like a new oil field, can also expand wealth. But we can no longer count on forms of wealth expansion outside of technological innovation. The low-hanging fruit have been plucked. Only extreme inventiveness can expand wealth now.

Machines allowed large numbers of people to rise from slave status to skilled-worker status. Nonetheless, one persistent dark side of industrialization
is that any skill, no matter how difficult to acquire, can become obsolete when the machines improve.

In the nineteenth century, workers started to wonder what would happen when machines became good enough to function autonomously. Would capitalism have to be retired in order to grant sustenance to the masses of people who were no longer needed to run the machines? Could a fundamental economic transformation of that kind happen peacefully?

So far, each new wave of technological change has brought with it new kinds of demands for human labor. The automobile sent buggy-whip manufacturers into oblivion but employed armies of mechanics. The transformations of labor continue: a sizable number of the employed people in the world are currently tending the untidy bits of the world’s computers one way or another. They work at help desks, for enterprise support companies, and in IT departments.

But we are already approaching the endgame for at least some aspects of the coexistence of people and machines. Robots are starting to get better. The semiautonomous rovers on Mars have outperformed all expectations, cute little Roombas are sweeping our floors, and you can buy a car that parks itself.

Robots are even more impressive in the lab. They perform combat missions and surgery and, ominously, fabricate products from raw materials. There are already affordable homemade hobbyist models of small fabricating robots that can create household items on demand right in your house, based on plans downloaded from the net.

One of our essential hopes in the early days of the digital revolution was that a connected world would create more opportunities for personal advancement for everyone. Maybe it will eventually, but there has been more of an inverted effect so far, at least in the United States. During the past decade and a half, since the debut of the web, even during the
best
years of the economic boom times, the middle class in the United States declined. Wealth was ever more concentrated.

I’m not saying this is the fault of the net, but if we digital technologists are supposed to be providing a cure, we aren’t doing it fast enough.
If we can’t reformulate digital ideals before our appointment with destiny, we will have failed to bring about a better world. Instead we will usher in a dark age in which everything human is devalued.

This kind of devaluation will go into high gear when information systems become able to act without constant human intervention in the physical world, through robots and other automatic gadgets. In a crowdsourced world, the peasants of the noosphere will ride a dismal boomerang between gradual impoverishment under robot-driven capitalism and a dangerously sudden, desperate socialism.

There is, unfortunately, only one product that can maintain its value as everything else is devalued under the banner of the noosphere. At the end of the rainbow of open culture lies an eternal spring of advertisements. Advertising is elevated by open culture from its previous role as an accelerant and placed at the center of the human universe.

There was a discernible ambient disgust with advertising in an earlier, more hippie like phase of Silicon Valley, before the outlandish rise of Google. Advertising was often maligned back then as a core sin of the bad old-media world we were overthrowing. Ads were at the very heart of the worst of the devils we would destroy, commercial television.

Ironically, advertising is now singled out as the only form of expression meriting genuine commercial protection in the new world to come. Any other form of expression is to be remashed, anonymized, and decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness. Ads, however, are to be made ever more contextual, and the content of the ad is absolutely sacrosanct. No one—and I mean no one—dares to mash up ads served in the margins of their website by Google. When Google started to rise, a common conversation in Silicon Valley would go like this: “Wait, don’t we hate advertising?” “Well, we hate
old
advertising. The new kind of advertising is unobtrusive and useful.”

The centrality of advertising to the new digital hive economy is absurd, and it is even more absurd that this isn’t more generally recognized. The most tiresome claim of the reigning official digital philosophy is that crowds working for free do a better job at some things than
paid antediluvian experts. Wikipedia is often given as an example. If that is so—and as I explained, if the conditions are right it sometimes can be—why doesn’t the principle dissolve the persistence of advertising as a business?

A functioning, honest crowd-wisdom system ought to trump paid persuasion. If the crowd is so wise, it should be directing each person optimally in choices related to home finance, the whitening of yellow teeth, and the search for a lover. All that paid persuasion ought to be mooted. Every penny Google earns suggests a failure of the crowd—and Google is earning a lot of pennies.

If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.

The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.

It’s true that today the idea can work in some situations. There are a few widely celebrated, but exceptional, success stories that have taken on mythical qualities. These stories are only possible because we are in a transitional period, in which a few lucky people can benefit from the best of the old-and new-media worlds at the same time, and the fact of their unlikely origins can be spun into a still-novel marketing narrative.

Thus someone as unlikely as Diablo Cody, who worked as a stripper, can blog and receive enough attention to get a book contract, and then have the opportunity to have her script made into a movie—in this case, the widely acclaimed
Juno
. To think about technologies, however, you have to learn to think as if you’re already living in the future.

It is my hope that book publishing will continue remuneratively into the digital realm. But that will only happen if digital designs evolve to
make it possible. As things stand, books will be vastly devalued as soon as large numbers of people start reading from an electronic device.

The same is true for movies. Right now, there are still plenty of people in the habit of buying movies on disk, and of going out to movie theaters. This is the way culture works these days. You have to deliver it through some kind of proprietary hardware, like a theater or a paper book, in order to charge for it.

This is not a sustainable solution. The younger you are, the more likely you are to grab a movie for free over the net instead of buying a disk. As for theaters, I wish them a long, healthy continued life, but imagine a world in which a superb fifty-dollar projector can be set up anywhere, in the woods or at the beach, and generate as good an experience. That is the world we will live in within a decade. Once file sharing shrinks Hollywood as it is now shrinking the music companies, the option of selling a script for enough money to make a living will be gone.

In the early days of so-called open culture, I was an early adopter of one of our talking points that has since become a cliché: All the dinosaurs of the old order have been given fair notice of the digital revolution to come. If they can’t adapt, it is due to their own stubbornness, rigidity, or stupidity. Blame them for their fate.

This is what we have said since about our initial victims, like the record companies and newspapers. But none of us was ever able to give the dinosaurs any constructive advice about how to survive. And we miss them now more than we have been willing to admit.

Actually, as long as we put the blame on them, it is okay to admit that we miss the declining “mainstream media.” A popular 2008 blog post by Jon Talton blamed newspapers for their own decline, in keeping with the established practices of the revolution. It ended with this stereotypical accusation, which I’ll quote at length:

Of course, I’ve selected just one little blog post out of millions. But it is highly representative of the tenor of online commentary. No one’s ever been able to offer good advice for the dying newspapers, but it is still considered appropriate to blame them for their own fate.

An important question has been raised by this rant, and it would be taboo to ask it in online circles if it weren’t gift wrapped in blanket attacks on the dignity of our victims: Would the recent years of American history have been any different, any less disastrous, if the economic model of the newspaper had not been under assault? We had more bloggers, sure, but also fewer Woodwards and Bernsteins during a period in which ruinous economic and military decisions were made. The Bush years are almost universally perceived as having been catastrophic: the weapons of mass destruction illusion, the economic implosion. Instead of facing up to a tough press, the administration was made vaguely aware of mobs of noisily opposed bloggers nullifying one another. Sure, bloggers uncovered the occasional scandal, but so did opposing bloggers. The effect of the blogosphere overall was a wash, as is always the case for the type of flat open systems celebrated these days.

If some free video of a silly stunt will draw as many eyeballs as the product of a professional filmmaker on a given day, then why pay the filmmaker? If an algorithm can use cloud-based data to unite those eyeballs with the video clip of the moment, why pay editors or impresarios? In the new scheme there is nothing but location, location, location. Rule the computing cloud that routes the thoughts of the hive mind, and you’ll be infinitely wealthy!

We already see the effect of an emerging winner-take-all social contract in students. The brightest computer science students are increasingly
turning away from intellectually profound aspects of the field and instead hoping to land a spot in the new royalty at the center of the cloud, perhaps programming a hedge fund. Or the best students might be hatching plans to launch a social networking site for affluent golfers. One Ivy League engineering school unofficially banned that idea as a model business plan in a class on entrepreneurship because it had become so commonplace. Meanwhile, creative people—the new peasants—come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.