“Dystopian – an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives. Utopian – a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions.” Websters Dictionary

“Need for Speed” / Amin Bhatia from the album Virtuality

________________________

John Fraim

A paradox of our Digital Age is represented by two views of the Internet by cyber-utopians and cyber-dystopians. Cyber-utopians have almost a religious zeal in the emerging cyber world. For them, the future will not only be different, but it will be better. It will be better because, unlike the futures we once imagined, we’ll design and engineer the Digital Age future to be better. At the other end of the spectrum, are the cyber-dystopians, who don’t celebrate the new future but rather fear it.  

Utopians in the Early Internet Years

During the beginning years of the Internet, the cyber utopians were predominant. Perhaps the greatest of all cyber-utopians was Ray Kurzweil. No one was as influential in preaching the posthuman gospel than Kurzweil. It was Kurzweil who coined the term singularity to describe “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots.

Other leading cyber-utopians were Nicholas Negroponte and Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine. They were perhaps the most “wild-eyed optimist” of cyber-utopians writes Peter Fallon in his book Propaganda 2.1. In his book What Technology Wants, Kelly not only champions machine intelligence, but anthropomorphizes the internet, referring to it as a sentient being, an “intelligent superorganism. Kelly’s view echoes the ideas of the twentieth-century French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who believed evolution is a divinely directed process with a clear and unambiguous direction, of ever-increasing organization and complexity, whose fulfillment is the fulfillment of all creation – the Omega Point. You know these people. You might have been one of them at a time in your life.

Dystopians Are Now Dominant Today

While cyber-utopians were dominant during the early years of the Internet, it is cyber-dystopians who are now dominant. They are at the other end of the spectrum from the cyber utopians worried about what our digital age will bring us. One of these prophets of digital doom is Andrew Keen a Silicon Valley insider who rethought his early fascination with the internet and now calls it “the greatest seduction since the dream of world communism.” Keen’s 2015 book, The Internet Is Not the Answer, is a scathing critique of a world created by utopian speculation about the (false) promises of the internet. Among his economic charges, he notes that rather than promote economic fairness, the Internet has become a central reason for the growing gulf between rich and poor with the hollowing out of the middle class.

Rather than making us wealthier, the distributed capitalism of the new networked economy is making most of us poorer. Rather than generating more jobs, the digital disruption is a principal cause of our structural unemployment crisis. Rather than creating more competition, it has created immensely powerful new monopolists like Google and Amazon. Rather than creating transparency and openness, Keen says the Internet is creating a panopticon of information-gathering and surveillance services in which we, the users of big data networks like Facebook, have been packaged as their all-too-transparent product. Rather than creating more democracy, it is empowering the rule of the mob. Rather than fostering a renaissance, it has created a selfie-centered culture of voyeurism and narcissism.

Another leading cyber-dystopian is author and former academic Nicholas Carr. “The Net is, by design, an interruption system,” he says in The Shallows. The Net is “a machine geared for dividing attention,” he says. Referencing McLuhan’s “medium is the message,” Carr posts a warning about the dangers of attending too closely to the content of a medium at the expense of our awareness of the effects of the medium itself on our thought processes. “Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.”

Peter Fallon notes that of all the recent cyber-dystopian literature The Shallows is perhaps the most trenchant and significant, and certainly the one most grounded in empirical science rather than personal anecdote and conjecture. Carr relies on recent studies in the neurosciences to support his argument that the internet is changing the very structure of our brains— changing them in a way that literate people in a (once) literate environment could only characterize as damaging them. This growing body of theoretical and empirical research supports the argument that the act of reading imposes upon the developing human brain a need to reorganize its functions, remapping neural pathways and allowing new types of thought previously impossible. The internet threatens to undo much or even most of that.

The crux of Carr’s argument might be summed up in this passage from chapter 7 in Carr’s The Shallows titled “The Juggler’s Brain.” Carr writes, “The Net is, by design, an interruption system … a machine geared for dividing attention.” Referencing McLuhan’s “medium is the message,” Carr posts a warning about the dangers of attending too closely to the content of a medium at the expense of our awareness of the effects of the medium itself on our thought processes. “Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.”

Peter Fallon notes that of all the recent cyber-dystopian literature, The Shallows is perhaps the most trenchant and significant, and certainly the one most grounded in empirical science rather than personal anecdote and conjecture. Carr relies on recent studies in the neurosciences to support his argument that the internet is changing the very structure of our brains— changing them in a way that literate people in a (once) literate environment could only characterize as damaging them. This growing body of theoretical and empirical research supports the argument that the act of reading imposes upon the developing human brain a need to reorganize its functions, remapping neural pathways and allowing new types of thought previously impossible. The internet threatens to undo much or even most of that. The crux of Carr’s argument might be summed up in this passage from chapter 7 in The Shallows, “The Juggler’s Brain” where Carr writes:

Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators, and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.

* * *

There are other cyber-dystopians that Fallon does not mention. This is not surprising since the growing number of critics is hard to keep up with. One of these critics is former Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff. Her 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, offers an examination of the unprecedented new power called “surveillance capitalism,” a global architecture of behavior modification. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”

Zuboff observes that the threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture of a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Zuboff lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society as a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.

AI as the Mixture of Utopian and Dystopian

The paradoxical utopian and dystopian history of views about the Internet can be seen in the mixed feelings about the growth of artificial intelligence. The attitude of the tech community is largely utopian. Yet general culture has experienced a change from a dominance of early utopians to dystopians. This new view can be seen in the growing number of dark, dystopian, apocalyptic films and tv series.

General culture seems to be using the expression “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” In effect, many were “fooled” by early utopian promoters of the Internet. The emergence of AI arrives with much promotion from its tech promoters. But the general populace has learned that many of these early utopian promises did not happen and they are not going to be fooled again.

________________________________

The above is adapted from John Fraim’s book review of Propraganda 2.1 by Peter Fallon appearing in the Canadian New Explorations Journal of Spring 2023. 

See our post on the new text to video AI called Sora.