★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
A selection of my favorite passages from the book
• I want to say: You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
• The World Wide Web was flooded by a torrent of petty designs sometimes called web 2.0. This ideology promotes radical freedom on the surface of the web, but that freedom, ironically, is more for machines than people. Nevertheless, it is sometimes referred to as “open culture.”
• It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering.
• Antihuman rhetoric is fascinating in the same way that self-destruction is fascinating: it offends us, but we cannot look away.
• Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it’s even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?
• Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.
• If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?
• What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.
• An individual who is receiving a flow of reports about the romantic status of a group of friends must learn to think in the terms of the flow if it is to be perceived as worth reading at all. So here is another example of how people are able to lessen themselves so as to make a computer seem accurate.
• Without an independent press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and unreliable,
• What is crucial about modernity is that structure and constraints were part of what sped up the process of technological development, not just pure openness and concessions to the collective.
• I have tried to learn to be aware of the troll within myself. I notice that I can suddenly become relieved when someone else in an online exchange is getting pounded or humiliated, because that means I’m safe for the moment. If someone else’s video is being ridiculed on YouTube, then mine is temporarily protected. But that also means I’m complicit in a mob dynamic.
• 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.
• 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.
• Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.
• The time has come to ask, “Are we building the digital utopia for people or machines?”
• The United States still has top universities and corporate labs, so we’d like the world to continue to accept intellectual property laws that send money our way based on our ideas, even when those ideas are acted on by others. We’d like to indefinitely run the world’s search engines, computing clouds, advertising placement services, and social networks, even as our old friend/demon Moore’s law makes it possible for new competitors to suddenly appear with ever greater speed and thrift.
• There are so many layers of abstraction between the new kind of elite investor and actual events on the ground that the investor no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of investments.
• According to the new ideology, which is a blending of cyber-cloud faith and neo-Milton Friedman economics, the market will not only do what’s best, it will do better the less people understand it.
• Even if a robot that maintains your health will only cost a penny in some advanced future, how will you earn that penny? Manual labor will be unpaid, since cheap robots will do it.
• Perceptions of fairness and social norms can support or undermine any economic idea.
• First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first-order expression.
• At the time that the web was born, in the early 1990s, a popular trope was that a new generation of teenagers, reared in the conservative Reagan years, had turned out exceptionally bland. The members of “Generation X” were characterized as blank and inert. The anthropologist Steve Barnett compared them to pattern exhaustion, a phenomena in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs in their pottery and becomes less creative.
• whole point of connected media technologies was that we were supposed to come up with new, amazing cultural expression. No, more than that—we were supposed to invent better fundamental types of expression: not just movies, but interactive virtual worlds; not just games, but simulations with moral and aesthetic profundity.
• Computers can take your ideas and throw them back at you in a more rigid form, forcing you to live within that rigidity unless you resist with significant force.
• The convenience factor is real, but part of the reason is that Wikipedia provides search engines with a way to be lazy.
• It is awkward to study neuroscience, for instance, if you assume that the brain is linked to some other entity—a soul—on a spirit plane. You have to treat the brain simply as a mechanism you don’t understand if you are to improve your understanding of it through experiment.
• A smell is a synecdoche: a part standing in for the whole.
• If we had infinite brains, capable of using an infinite number of words, those words would mean nothing, because each one would have too specific a usage. Our early hominid ancestors were spared from that problem, but with the coming of the internet, we are in danger of encountering it now. Or, more precisely, we are in danger of pretending with such intensity that we are encountering it that it might as well be true.
• In the future, I fully expect children to turn into molecules and triangles in order to learn about them with a somatic, “gut” feeling.
FuzzyRants 