How the internet is using us all

Perris, California Photograph: ORear/Corbis. All Rights Reserved.

If the origins of Western civilization are linked to ancient Greece, the future of
human existence is pegged to Silicon Valley. The Valley is not merely a byword
for technological innovation and economic growth: it is the lush seedbed for a new
ideology of the twenty-first century, one that fills the void left by the Cold War. This
ideology revolves around the internet. Its fundamentalist narrative has been spun
over several decades from such diverse strands as free-market economics, technomysticism, anarchist leanings and utopian longings, and has now assumed a
prominent place in everyday conversation alongside the technologies that inspired
it. The internet ideology provides a quasi-religious vision of how human
relationships will be transformed, material abundance created, and transcendence
attained through humanmachine interactions. Its prophets cite its decentralized
and open structure as the model for a free, egalitarian and transparent world order.
Their holy writ is Moores Law, which suggests that computers will evolve
exponentially, doubling their prowess every two years or so. Their eschatology is
the Singularity, which predicts that machines will outstrip humans in the near
future, and benevolently uplift (or simply upload) mere mortals to nerd Nirvana.
In the interim, the messy stuff of ordinary existence will be tamed by quantifying it
into the bits and bytes of Information Theory, and transformed into profitable Big
Data for the Information Economy.
The internet ideology is easy to mock but difficult to reject. It doesnt really
matter if some dismiss it as cyber-utopian, or ignore it while enjoying the
internets practical benefits, or find aspects of it, such as the Singularity, ridiculous.
(Sceptics are welcome to take a ten-week, $25,000 course at Singularity University
in Silicon Valley, the mission of which is to educate, inspire and empower leaders
to apply exponential technologies to address humanitys grand challenges.) The
internet ideology is difficult to dislodge because it is not simply an immaterial ideal;
it is materially embedded in a global infrastructure made up of machines,
software, private businesses and public institutions. This infrastructure influences
how we think and behave, and once locked in may be difficult to change. Evgeny
Morozov and Jaron Lanier fear that the internet ideology has insidious
consequences, despite its utopian intentions: as Lanier remarks, Its not a result of
some evil scheme, but a side effect of an idiotic elevation of the fantasy that
technology is getting smart and standing on its own, without people. Both propose
alternative visions, insisting that they are cyber-realists rather than cyberpessimists. Their problem is not with the new technology, but with the way it is
currently being deployed in narrowly instrumental and commercial ways.
The internet ideology provides a quasi-religious vision of how human relationships
will be transformed

The world of Internet theory still awaits its Woody Allen, writes Morozov, who at
least qualifies as its H. L. Mencken. Whereas Mencken skewered the banal
platitudes of the Booboisie, Morozov punctures the messianic pretentions of the
Geeks of Silicon Valley and beyond. Books on technology are not known for their
humour, but Morozov is enjoyably sardonic: To Save Everything, Click Here is
perhaps the funniest and most savage critique of cyber-culture yet
written. It is also frequently persuasive. Morozovs bark is accompanied by bitingly
revealing studies and statistics to support his observations. His previous book, The
Net Delusion (2011), questioned the popular assumption that the internet will
inevitably promote a more democratic and participatory world. His new book
lambasts the internet as a modern icon, querying whether it is meaningful to speak
of an Internet at all.
Morozov has established a niche for himself as an internetoclast, who aims to
replace the millenarian hype surrounding information technology with more sober
and humane alternatives. His targets are the entangled outlooks he calls
solutionism and Internet-centrism. Solutionism is the belief that all problems
can be fixed through reason and quantification. It is reductionist, worships
efficiency and utility, and abhors ambiguity and complexity. Solutionism has had a
lengthy pedigree in Western culture and destructive consequences in human
history, including the Soviet planners dream of engineering human souls to
produce a workers paradise. Morozov was raised in Belarus during the waning
years of the Soviet Union and is understandably sensitive to the solutionist outlook.
He readily spots authoritarian analogues to seemingly innocent internet initiatives.
Thus the current vogue for Gamification, which turns everyday activities into
computer games that reward successful performance with points and badges, has
for him an unpleasantly familiar ring:
I remember the penchant that Soviet managers had for gamification: students
were shipped to the fields to harvest wheat or potatoes, and since the motivation
was lacking, they too were assigned points and badges.
In its zeal to create a frictionless future by erasing nuance and imperfection, says
Morozov, solutionism usually makes matters worse.
Solutionism in todays world has been vastly enabled by Internet-centrism, which
envisions the internet as far more than a network of networks governed by
common protocols. The internet becomes an autonomous entity with its own
inherent logic and development, extolled as the template to emulate:
It is this propensity to view the Internet as a source of wisdom and policy advice
that transforms it from a fairly uninteresting set of cables and network routers into
a seductive and exciting ideology perhaps todays ber-ideology.
In fact, if this ideology sounds like a religion, its because it is. Its proselytizers
declare that the internets distributed, non-hierarchical design naturally favours
transparency, sharing, freedom, egalitarianism and populism. They seek to

reconfigure life by eliminating its bugs with the shiny tools they have developed,
all in the name of an Internet Revolution that blesses radical schemes. Shifting
from the mode of Mencken to that of Edmund Burke, Morozov responds that not
all bugs are bugs; some bugs are features. He defends the imperfections and
compromises essential to human flourishing, which are threatened by a
perfectionist creed embedded in, and enforced by, ubiquitous technology.
Those who question the internet ideology are typically denounced as Luddites who
will soon be left behind in the dustbin of history. Aside from collecting trash,
however, history is rarely found in the millenarian conception of the internet:
Technological amnesia and complete indifference to history remain the defining
conditions of contemporary Internet debate. (Morozov is generally unimpressed
with the few histories that have been written.) He concedes that ours is a
profoundly transformative moment, but notes that all revolutions contain important
elements of continuity as well. If we want technologies to be more responsive to
our needs, we need to understand their origins and presuppositions, which are
historical. Rather than being unique, let alone autonomous, the internet harbours
long-standing technocratic predilections that must be exposed and challenged.
Those who question the internet ideology are typically denounced as Luddites
Morozov would replace the essentialist understanding of the internet with more
limited, contextual and empirical evaluations of individual technologies. He uses
quotation marks when referring to the Internet to highlight its constructed rather
than ontological nature. Even critics of the internet, he finds, have been entranced
by internet-centrism into making thinly supported generalizations that divert us
from more constructive engagement. Has the Internet really made us stupid, as
Nicholas Carr famously argued in The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our
brains (2010)? Elements of it, such as Twitter, can certainly distract us with ideas
reduced to soundbites but what of other elements, such as Instapaper, which
allow us to save lengthy writings to read without distraction later?
Much of Morozovs book refutes the clichs of internet-centrism, using an
impressive array of evidence drawn from the social sciences, history, philosophy
and literature. (On the other hand, rational-choice theory and other approaches
based on models very much like those that failed to predict the collapse of the
Soviet Union are lampooned throughout.) Morozov argues that the internet
ideology influenced by the deep coffers of Silicon Valley prevents informed
deliberation about the appropriate means to attain particular ends. There are no
intrinsic properties of the internet that preclude others; control and centralization,
no less than the current shibboleths of freedom and dispersion, can be legitimate
means for pursuing democratic ends, depending on the circumstances.
Morozov also insists that the internets reliance on quantification distorts social and
political processes. Data is assumed to reflect reality, yet the algorithms employed
by Google, Twitter and other sites are selective rather than objective measures,
and can be manipulated to game the system. Algorithms have also become

increasingly common in police work, journalism, education and other domains, but
because many are proprietary, they are not subject to public scrutiny. (He suggests
that third parties be allowed to audit them for biases.) They are also used to tailor
media content to specific audiences. The filter bubbles that ensue can produce a
fragmentation of political discourse, transforming the public sphere into a
honeycomb of blooming, buzzing confusion.
None of this is conducive to moral deliberation and ethical behaviour, which internet
technologies are said to undermine further through social engineering. The
prevalence of cameras and sensors in our wired environment, alongside social
networks such as Facebook, result in unprecedented monitoring of our lives. We
not only lose privacy, but the information that we provide online could yield
feedback that limits our freedom. For example, new self-tracking devices enable
individuals to monitor their vital measurements; might health insurers reward
those who share this data, and penalize those who dont? Gamification, in
Morozovs view, is a form of behaviourism that undermines moral agency. Through
realistic games, individuals might reduce their energy consumption, lose weight,
or perform other commendable actions but many do so for external rewards
rather than from intrinsic physical or ethical considerations. Most, he suspects, are
unaware of broader arguments for energy efficiency or the multiple causes
of obesity, and would cease their behaviour should rewards be withdrawn.
B. F. Skinner, not Marshall McLuhan, is the real patron saint of the Internet.
Solutionism will never go away, Morozov asserts an odd conclusion given his
attention to historical contingency. After all, the modern faith in instrumental
reason is influenced by culture and education, and has not always been as
pervasive as it is now. He believes that solutionisms power to shape contemporary
thinking will be reduced if we curtail its principle abetter, internet-centrism. And
technology itself could be designed to encourage critical deliberation rather than
curtail it. Engineers are trained to make technology function invisibly, but Morozov
argues that they ought, instead, to provoke thinking about the systematic relations
between society and technology. Drawing on the theory of adversarial design, he
would have them create products that behave unpredictably, challenging users to
consider the underlying origins, purposes and costs of technology. Perhaps visuals
could appear on browsers illustrating what Google does with personal information,
or a percentage of online newspaper articles could go black when a newspapers
stock declines. If solutionism is unavoidable, the best course is to develop a selfreflexive solutionism that stimulates thought and offers other possibilities.
Technology itself could be designed to encourage critical deliberation rather than
curtail it
But would consumers really relish erratic appliances that can disrupt our
information consumption habits? And what of the resources already available
to combat the ideologies Morozov exposes? Informed deliberation online certainly
hasnt disappeared, and theres no reason to assume it cannot coexist with, and
temper, the behaviourist features and simplistic attitudes he decries. By providing

information as well as venues to practise critical expression, the web encourages

ruminators no less than solutionists. Morozov doesnt give enough credit to
ordinary users abilities to challenge reductionist agendas, or to think for
themselves. Thus he has a low opinion of amateur reviewing on the web, fearing
that the populist platform of internet-centrism will result in amateurs replacing
professionals: ordinary people . . . are mostly interested in reviewing their own
experience, not in making sense of a given work. But Amazon reviewers, to take
one example from a panoply, can be remarkably discerning. Morozovs concerns
might also be allayed by the ironic and sceptical attitudes that are pervasive in
mass culture and the internet. While they are not unmixed blessings, these
attitudes do undercut the pious certainties of solutionism and internet-centrism.
Morozovs nominalist approach to the internet is one of his most original
contributions, but sometimes his arguments would benefit from the nuance he
demands from others.
Morozovs description of internet-centrism as a quasi-religion emanating from
California might sound fanciful, but Jaron Lanier corroborates it in Who Owns the
Future?. A Silicon Valley computer scientist, Lanier pioneered virtual-reality
technology in the 1980s, and confesses that he was a member of the apostolic
generation that crafted the internet credo of freedom, abundance and spiritual
evolution for all: I am not writing about some remote them but about a world I
helped to create. (These ideas were actually presaged by East Coast hackers and
West Coast hippies in earlier decades, but the emergence of personal computers in
the 1980s gave such notions a new focus and momentum.) He attests that Moores
Law is Silicon Valleys guiding principle, like all Ten Commandments wrapped into
one, and that discussions of immortality and the Singularity are so ambient in
Silicon Valley culture that they become part of the atmosphere of the place.
Lanier now repents of his earlier faith, though not in the humanistic potential of
technology. Like Morozov, he believes that the foolish utopian scenarios of the
internet ideology conceal systemic flaws in the direction that networked
technologies are taking. We urgently need to think more holistically about their
long-term effects, because digital technologists are setting down the new grooves
of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything.
Information only appears to be free on the internet. In reality, ordinary users
provide personal information to companies, and receive services in return
Whereas Morozov focused on the philosophical presuppositions of the internet,
Lanier explores its economic dimensions. He, too, finds totalitarian tendencies
hidden behind the appealing ideology of freedom and individual empowerment.
Information only appears to be free on the internet. In reality, ordinary users
provide personal information to companies, and receive services in return a form
of barter. The companies, however, turn this information into actual money by
repackaging it as Big Data and selling it to advertisers. They are becoming
fabulously wealthy, while users content themselves with treats discounted
books on Amazon, free music on Pandora, and so on. The monetary value that

people provide to the information economy is both off the books and in the
pockets of internet corporations.
This results in a growing disparity of wealth, and also of power. A few large
companies, such as Google and Facebook, can amass more data from users than
others, becoming Siren Servers that monopolize the information economy. As the
service and manufacturing sectors of the economy become redefined in terms of
digital information, Siren Servers will destroy jobs without replacing them in their
market-driven quest for efficiency. Health care, education and even transport
should Google and Stanford succeed in automating driving will go the way of
the music industry, which was substantially downsized by digitization.
Manufacturing as well is likely to become a victim, should 3D printing become a
viable reality. Finance has already embraced Siren Servers and ingeniously
exploitative algorithms, which Lanier blames for the financial crisis of 2008. He
predicts that digital networks will continue to disrupt the economy, in the process
wiping out the middle class and fomenting revolution even a socialist backlash.
Yet the master planners of Silicon Valley and its satellites are blissfully oblivious of
their destructive impact, enchanted by their faith in unremitting progress and
universal abundance through technological transformations.
As much as he admires Karl Marxs diagnoses of economic exploitation, Lanier, like
Morozov, wants to avoid communism. (My wife grew up with it in Minsk, Belarus,
and I am absolutely, thoroughly, convinced of the misery.) He argues that
capitalism, and the middle class on whom it depends, can be preserved only by
monetizing all information not just that sold by Siren Servers to advertisers, but
also that provided to the Servers by ordinary people. If an individual contributes
information that results in some profitable enterprise, that person would receive a
micropayment, re-establishing a degree of parity in the information economy. We
would have to pay for much online information, but we would also be paid in turn.
Lanier leaves to the future most of the details of how such a dauntingly complex
system would be administered, but he thinks it technologically feasible.
What is most striking about Laniers diagnosis and remedy are not the specifics: his
forecasts will inevitably miss certain marks, and perhaps the entire target. (Nor,
unfortunately, is this stimulating book well written or organized; it is divided into
very short sections and reads like a series of blog posts.) The value of Who Owns
the Future? rests in Jaron Laniers willingness to rethink the Internet and its core
mantras such as information wants to be free and propose radically different
solutions, just as Evgeny Morozov advocates. Both demonstrate that there is a
hidden cost to our digital cornucopia, which the internet ideology would have us
believe amounts to pennies from heaven.
Michael Saler is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His
most recent book, As If: Modern enchantment and the literary prehistory of virtual
reality, was named one of the best books of 2012 by the Huffington Post.