New Scientist has an article on ‘Mashup Sites’, sites “created by merging data from two or more websites”. It was this interesting observation that caught my eye:
A hacker could feed false data to a crime location mashup, for example, perhaps to help raise property prices in a particular area by making it appear crime-free. A prankster could create bogus traffic jams on a mashup map, diverting traffic in such a way that queues are actually made worse.
This is simply using the content of the digital electric medium to manipulate people in a way similar to how governments and corporations can manipulate entire societies to go to war or to consume. However, the age old terms of propaganda and advertising are inadequate to explain today’s realities of manipulation and the ability of the “masters of the universe” to create other realities because today’s medium combines not only the old ones of TV, radio, and books into one, but also the actual active, participating minds of its users. I’ll explain this a bit more (I hope) but I’ll refer to this type of technique as “social hacking”. A good example of what I’m referring to (with a business twist) would the popular TV series Lost, which is completely viral new media using The Lost Experience, an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that utilizes fake books and websites to create an immersive world in conjunction with the TV show. It’s no longer just a show, it’s another reality.
As the digital-electric medium as a whole morphs to whatever tomorrow brings, the power to manipulate social groups, cities or countries can belong to sole individuals, which is one reason why governments have such paranoia regarding hackers accessing restricted or sensitive information (or having criminal intent, depending on your outlook or their intent). But tomorrows buzzword will probably be “sockers” and the threat they pose to the civilized world because they will use the content of the medium to manipulate groups of people or societies. A forerunner to what I’m talking about is probably The Yes Men, hacking the business world to expose the WTO for what they are. How is what they do actually possible? Because today’s electronic medium represents the autoamputation of our mind, and tomorrow’s Internet of Things will be the autoamputation of reality. In other words, our minds and reality are becoming the content of the medium itself, and this has profound implications for us.
I’ve been busy recently reading McLuhan’s classic, Understanding Media, and was struck by his description of how we “autoamputate” pieces of ourselves whenever we’re faced with a new medium, what he called the Narcissus effect where “men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves”.
With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. It could well be that the successive mechanizations of the various physical organs since the invention of printing have made too violent and superstimulated a social experience for the central nervous system to endure.
By and large the Internet is increasingly populated with its users’ thoughts and memes. The phenomenon of blogging is an excellent example, with a variety of tools now springing up to demonstrate moods of bloggers, the CIA using blogs to trawl for intelligence and trends; the internet carries our collective mind-reflection. Web 2.0 is essentially a branding exercise whereby we tag our words with their meanings creating our own individual dictionaries of terms. This collection of thoughts and ideas creates a constant battle for memes to survive and gain wider acceptance, much like the functioning of the human brain.
I read in the UK Metro paper a month or two ago about your own virtual avatar that stayed online for 24hrs a day, learning your behaviour to mirror your tastes, finding things you like so that when you logged back on you had your own stuff waiting for you. I found it fitting, because it demonstrates how we as people are becoming the content of the medium. Roger Clarke, Visiting Fellow of the Department of Computer Science, Australian National University, writes in his book Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-Lost that the “various experiences of using the Internet have” something “in common”: “the participants indulge in a ‘shared hallucination’ that there is a virtual place or space within which they are interacting.” This represents a seperate reality that is largely one of our mind within the environment of electric technology itself. With electricity in its veins, the medium is beginning to form a digital “mind” comprised of all its users’ thoughts, speech, feelings and so on.
This electric medium may not be what we call sentient, but it does behave like a living organism. In some ways, it is like a parasite, requiring our constant attention, needing us to feed on the earth’s resources: for example, it takes roughly 1.8 tons of raw materials to make a computer, and about 1.4kg for a single memory chip. Today’s internet can keep functioning, even when parts of it fail, as it was designed it to. Like cells in our bodies responsible for healing, we help systems to start again, evolve anti-virus defences to run through the veins. Recently New Scientist reported how our body’s immune system was leading to development of an “intrusion detection system for networks”. This sytem works using “an alternative model of how the immune system works, called danger theory. According to this, the immune system does not attack foreign molecules whenever it detects them, but only if they start to cause trouble”. It is getting its own functioning healing system, thanks to us.
The relationship between us and this parasite is symbiotic, and the medium gives wealth, power, social status, and knowledge. It is obvious that these benefits cannot be just available to anyone unless properly defined. The risks to existing power are enormous. The fact that bloggers are beginning to usurp traditional media is a serious problem. Therefore China’s great firewall exists to prevent foreign cultures out as well as unsavoury ideas. The US government refused to hand of the Internet to UN for precisely the opposite reason whereby it is predominantly English and Americanized; it serves as an excellent social hacking vehicle to spread its culture and message. As the US Army War College Quarterly journal Parameters explained “One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims:”
“Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.”
The US also refused on business grounds: Ambassador David A. Gross, explaining the US position, stated that “We want to make sure the private sector leads and the Internet continues to be a reservoir of great innovation, and that governments continue to focus on enabling the growth of the Internet, and not of controlling its use”. (I especially liked the “not of controlling its use” tagged on the end when it’s clear in the first part what the intentions are).
Lastly, Western big business is increasing attempts to gain control of the digital electric medium in the same way it did with radio and television. Chomsky points out:
The state of the Internet right now is rather like the state of the electronic media back in the 1920s. In most countries, radio or a large part of it was handed over to the public interest. So you get the BBC or Canadian Broadcasting and that’s as democratic as the society is. There was a struggle about that in the USA. Church groups, unions and others wanted a similar system. But they were overwhelmed by private power. And radio was mostly handed over to huge corporations.
Later, with television, there was no struggle at all. They just handed it over to private power. Now, you’ve got the Internet. Like all the rest of modern technology, it’s funded by the public. It comes out of the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation and so on. Just like computers and the rest of electronics. The public pays the cost, then you hand it over to private power.
Even with print, there was a large, independent press in both England and the USA earlier this century. In England, it was on the scale of the commercial press. They were gradually overwhelmed by corporate power. So with the Internet, we have to wait and watch. Will corporate power be able to do what it wants? They’d like to turn it into a home shopping service and a way of addicting even more people, even more totally. Well, a lot of the public has different ideas. A struggle will take place and you can’t predict the outcome.
While it’s true you cannot predict the outcome, we can see the trend, and the risks. Increasingly, the electric, digital medium needs to be overwhelmingly a business tool, linked to wealth, in the safe hands of the ruling elite. Why? Because, while there is a wealth tier in access to the medium, as shown by the technology gap between the developed and developing world, there is another tier in the content itself: the “official” record and then the alternate record. You could probably view this as being a contrast between big business media, and blogging or alternative media. In many ways, it’s no longer the traditional business media that have control of the content, but just people, either individuals or groups. In IT and Dataveillance Roger Clarke writes:
There may already be a tendency toward two- tiered societies, in which the official documentary level of government facts and statistics bears only an approximate relationship to the real world of economic and social activity. If uncontrolled dataveillance were to cause the citizens of advanced Western nations to lose confidence in the fairness with which their societies are governed, it would be likely to exacerbate that trend.
An increase in the proportion of economic activity outside mainstream society would prompt, and be used to justify, a further increase in the use of mass surveillance. Assuming that world politics continues to be polarized into an East-West confrontation, it would be very easy to justify tighter social controls since any sign of serious weakening in the moral fiber and integrity of the West would be destabilizing. Since “mastery of both mass communications and mass surveillance is necessary for an elite to maintain control” [57, p. 176], IT will be a major weapon whereby ruling groups seek to exercise control over the population.
Substitute East with al-Qaeda, and you’ll find a remarkably accurate description of what’s happening in the Western world.
There are also other signs in the battle for control of the medium, evident in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD Digital Rights Management technology, or the battle for Net Neutrality. The big question for me, however, is: if the medium really is the message, does a battle for control matter? Roger Clarke quotes JB Rule‘s 1984: The ingredients of totalitarianism which says:
“Orwell foresaw–and made unforgettable– a world in which ruthless political interests mobilized intrusive technologies for totalitarian ends. What he did not consider was the possibility that the development of the intrusive technologies would occur on its own, without the spur of totalitarian intent. This, in fact, is what is now happening”
This is possible, perhaps not because of tyrranical intent, but because of the structure of the medium itself and its ability to order humans. Our minds have been autoamputated already. The Internet of Things – which is surely coming – requires the autoamputation of our reality. If the forms or tagged ideas of reality must become the content of the medium because of what the medium is, then it matters very little who controls the medium: the medium will control us, like the hive controls the ant. Unless some fundamental changes are made to the actual medium rather than the content, the net effect (excuse the pun) will always be the same: The medium as environment, mind, body and, ultimately, soul.