The Internet of Us Read online

  Locke believed that all knowledge is mediated through our perceptions. Our perceptions are like goggles permanently strapped to our head. Sometimes, when our vision is clear, our perception represents the world as it really is. For Locke, this meant that our ideas are caused to actually resemble the objects outside our minds. But of course, our vision isn’t always clear—which raises an obvious question, one made famous by Locke’s contemporary George Berkeley. If we are always trapped within our perceptions, how can we ever tell which of those perceptions reflect things as they really are and which are the products of our own minds? No amount of careful checking and experiment will help, noted Berkeley, for according to Locke’s own view, we can’t step outside of our perceptions. We can’t assume the view from nowhere.

  Whether or not we agree with the details of Locke’s philosophy today, it is clear that Berkeley’s challenge is not going away. Indeed, in some ways, it seems more difficult than ever to tell the difference between what is real and what is subjective.

  One reason for this is that the Internet is a construction. That’s partly because the World Wide Web is obviously something we’ve made—a literal artifact. By a literal artifact, I mean something that has been intentionally brought into being by human activity directed at that very purpose. The servers, cables, and circuits that compose the physical backbone of the Internet are all literal artifacts. But so are the packets of information that compose the body of the Internet itself. Websites, user interfaces, jpeg files, movies on Netflix, cookies, are also literal artifacts. They are, in a clear sense, as real as anything is. But the way in which informational objects are real, and the manner in which they are constructed, is very different. That’s because, as the philosopher Luciano Floridi has noted, informational objects are abstracted in that they are “typified.” To talk about a music file is to talk about an object that isn’t identical to any of its “tokens.” That’s because digital copies are indistinguishable; you can create many “copies” of a digital file simultaneously. Being all born at the same time, as it were, each is in one sense not a “copy” at all—each has equal claim to being the original.

  Floridi takes this to mean that we have expanded our ordinary conception of what is real, from what is material (something you can kick) to include “objects and processes that are dephysicalized in the sense that they tend to be seen as support-independent.” 4 But actually, we were familiar with dephysicalized objects prior to the digital revolution. After all, what is a piece of music itself? Beethoven’s Fifth or Jay Z’s “New York” are more abstract than even the digital files that encode them: destroy all the computers and someone could still hum the tune. Yet even if we haven’t expanded our conception of what is real per se, it is clear that we’ve constructed some new kinds of real things. And given that our digital form of life is composed of these kinds of things, we might say that our digital form of life is literally constructed in a deeply different way than previous forms of human life.

  One consequence of this fact is that it is harder to see what is and isn’t constructed. Locke’s view of the world requires a distinction between what is “out there” (primary qualities) and what is at least partially dependent on us (secondary qualities). But as Floridi has noted, the division between “onlife” and “offlife” is increasingly difficult to make out. Watches, glasses and phones are no longer mechanical things. They are gateways to the Internet. The difference between “brick and mortar” stores and online merchandising is similarly blurred. Already you can go into a “smart” dressing room that remembers who you are, and which has a touchscreen mirror. Thermostats, refrigerators, children’s toys, tools and washing machines can be (and are) connected digitally to the Web, sending and receiving information, emails, locations, updates. This is the Internet of Things. As Floridi notes, “With interfaces becoming progressively less visible, the threshold between here (analogue, carbon-based offline) and there (digital, silicon-based, online) is fast becoming blurred, although this is as much to the advantage of there as it is to here.’ ”5

  But the blurring of the distinction between online and offline isn’t just due to things like smart watches. For the Internet is not just the Internet of Things. It is also composed of social artifacts. And these emerging social constructs are intertwined with the literal constructs. One comes along with the other.

  Here’s what I mean. Not all literal artifacts are social artifacts. Humans make bullets and bombs, but they aren’t an inherently social kind of thing (quite the opposite, in fact). Whether something is a gun, or a chair, depends on whether it serves a certain function, and each has been invented by humans to serve those functions (to kill something in the one case, to provide a seat in the other). But those functions aren’t themselves necessarily defined in terms of social factors, institutions or the like. Social artifacts, on the other hand, are partly constituted by, and therefore defined in terms of, social practices.6 These social practices can be regulated or unregulated. Unregulated: being cool. Being cool is something that is generally cool to be. But what makes something cool is a matter of how people are perceived against a social matrix—that is, against a whole host of expectations and assumptions about how people “should” act or dress. Coolness is constructed, and constructed by social expectations. And yet being cool (or not) is a difference that can make a difference—to people’s happiness in social groups. The same is the case, obviously, with more regulated social roles. What constitutes my being a husband is defined in terms of social factors: I’m a husband because I meet certain legally defined expectations and institutions. You can’t define “husband” and “wife” without referring to these legal conditions. And yet again, whether one gets to be a husband or not—whether you can marry someone of the same sex, for example—is something that matters to us, that seems as real and as important as anything else. The same could be said for economies, markets, governments, money, professions, religions, laws. Such things not only would have not come about without social practices, they are constituted by social practices; you can’t define them without referring to various structured ways humans have of doing things. And in each case, they matter, and we accordingly treat them as part of our reality just as much as we do the concrete parts of the world.

  Social constructs can change. When they do, the changes can take us by surprise or go against our preconceptions. That’s because our concepts of socially constructed artifacts, like any concept, can become embedded—or perceived as being indispensable for explaining reality. The concepts of race and gender were traditionally embedded in this way, and for many people still are. Thus, when we change how we think about them, we upset expectations and prejudices.

  In the digital world, literal artifacts and social artifacts are being created in a feedback loop. Life in the infosphere is both changing and being formed by certain social constructs, and these social constructs are themselves the result of life in the infosphere. Some of these changes are matters of degree (the expansion of “friend” to include “Facebook friend”). Other changes are more radical and are generally the result of changes in expectations and assumptions—changes that are themselves brought on by changes in technology. An obvious example is our concept of property. What is it to “own” music (or writing) now, or anything that is put on the Web? Should anything on the Web be open to sharing without compensation to its original creator? (One might think this question itself is outmoded—based, after all, on older assumptions and expectations.) The concept of property is a social construction par excellence, but it is one that is very much in transition. Another example—and one that we will talk about in the next chapter—is the nature of privacy. Entering the brave new world of the Internet of Us, we are quickly becoming used to having less and less privacy, and that is changing how we understand privacy itself.

  Our digital form of life is changing even our identities and how we shape them. That’s relevant here because some aspects of our identity are clearly social artifacts. O
ur identities in the psychological sense involve a number of factors, including, as the philosopher Owen Flanagan puts it, an “integrated system of past and present identifications, desires, commitments, aspirations, beliefs, dispositions, temperamental traits, roles, acts, and actional patterns.“7 Together, these aspects form what we mean when we talk about our “self.”

  Typically, we think of the factors that make up the self as vulnerable to influences from the “outside”—including what other people say and do in your company. Who you are is a product of who others are, and vice versa. But how we think about ourselves, how we self-represent, matters to who we are. How you define yourself at a certain time—kind, clever, embarrassed, etc.—can come into conflict with other self-representations, and that conflict can initiate change in your overall self-conception. What’s more, your self-representation can change how you react in future situations, which can itself loop back to further self-representations, and so on. It is these facts that have suggested to philosophers such as Flanagan and Daniel Dennett that the self is not just a construction, but a narrative construction. I am the product of the story I and others tell about myself, whether I know that or not.

  If that is so, then we are stories that are increasingly constructed online in social networks. For an increasingly large number of people, particularly people born after the mid-nineties, who and what you are is partly defined by your online activities. In the early days of Web 2.0, this fact was less appreciated: people would post pictures of themselves doing things (drinking, partying) that would later cause them embarrassment or the loss of a job opportunity. But people are more aware of this now: a college student can pay to have his online identity “scrubbed” so as to appear more respectable—more like he might aspire to be in his own self-representations. We are conscious of the stories we tell each other and ourselves.

  Online identity creation is interesting in its own right. But it is also a particularly useful example of how our digital form of life is constructed. And that fact might in turn seem to be the final nail in the coffin of objectivity. If our digital form of life obscures the very difference between what is primary and secondary, between what is made and what is found, even in the case of ourselves, then what is the point of talking about objectivity and truth? If the real is virtual, then how important can truth be?

  Interlude: To SIM or Not to SIM

  Suppose that in the future you can choose between living as a SIM and continuing your current life. Once you make the choice, the company helpfully makes you forget that you ever made a choice at all. Scenarios like this are the fodder of science fiction (Philip K. Dick alone is responsible for several books on this theme), but they’ve also been used by philosophers.8 We can use them here to investigate how much we still value the idea of truth.

  Imagine again that in the future, computers are able to run programs that create entire SIM worlds, indistinguishable “from the inside” from real ones. Suppose that these super-engineers travel back in time and offer you three choices (maybe they are Matrix fans and so offer you different color pills). They warn you that once you make the choice, you can’t go back: it is a permanent long-term deal.

  Choice 1 is to continue with your life just as it is now. Your friends are friendly and your lovers love you (or not, as the case may be). Choice 2 is to live the exact same life you are living now but as a SIM. How they do this is up to them—perhaps they “transplant” your brain patterns into a SIM, or perhaps they keep your body alive and just make your actual brain experience a SIM-life. Either way, they’ll fix it so you don’t know you are living in a SIM world, but you will be. Choice 3 is just like choice 2, with one very important exception: here some of your friends and lovers really despise you. But you will never discover that fact, nor will you remember ever having that information; their deceit will be perfect. From the inside, all three lives will be indistinguishable; where the first causes you joy, the others do as well; where the first causes you pain, the others do as well, and so on to the grave.

  Not much of a choice, really. Forced to choose, almost all of us will prefer the first life over the second two. Perhaps some may be ambivalent; they’ll flip a coin. Presumably no one will actively prefer the third over the first, since it involves a double deception. Either way, our reaction tells us something about how deeply we dislike deception. If you are ambivalent, then deception matters less to you than it does to others. One door is as good as another. Others of us, however, will find this attitude odd, even repugnant. We don’t want just to seem to have friends and lovers, we want actual friends and lovers, even if there were no discernible experiential difference between the one case and the other. Moreover, we want to want to be that way: we care about not being deceived. We would no more wish to be ambivalent about which of these choices to make than we would wish to willingly enter into a deception.

  Our attitude toward such choices also tells us something about our attitudes toward truth. The fact that we prefer not to be deceived—even when the deception is undetectable—suggests that our preference for believing whatever is true over not doing so remains even when it would have no effect on how we experience life.9

  But—you might be eager to ask—what if the super-scientists offer you the option of a SIM life that is all you’ve ever dreamed? In this SIM life, you can be whatever you want (famous athlete, successful novelist, rock star, all three, etc.). It would be like living in a video game. Call this choice 4.

  How attractive choice 4 appears to people depends on how you frame it. I’ve found that answers vary depending on whether we are told we can just “try it” for a short time or whether it is a permanent choice.10 Most people would be willing to try out a SIM super-life, especially if there were no negative consequences (just as most people would try certain drugs if there were no negative consequences). Some would choose it eagerly, and for longer times—especially if their “real” life is filled with pain. But most of us would still be wary if the choice was permanent. It would be a pleasurable experience, but it would be a bit like living life on an artificial high. Nothing would be earned, and the “knowledge” and “wisdom” we’d gain over our SIM life would be figments of a computer generation. That suggests that while truth is hardly our only value, we still value it overall.

  But whose truth, exactly?

  Falsehood, Fakes and the Noble Lie

  When the monologist Mike Daisey got up in front of an audience at Georgetown University in 2012, he was in the midst of a media firestorm. Daisey was the author of a brilliant, funny and very biting show called The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. In the show, which has no official script, Daisey—a self-confessed techno-geek of epic proportions—describes his awakening to the facts about the production of the Apple products he loves so much, in particular his iPhone. He talks about how, posing as a businessman, he was able to get into the plant in China where all such phones are made—an operation of staggeringly immense and dehumanizing size. He gives graphic details about the conditions in which the Chinese factory laborers work, building and tortuously assembling each phone, and most of its component parts, by hand.

  Daisey’s show was affecting. It demonstrated just how willfully ignorant most of us are about how our digital toys are made. It provided a look behind the wizard’s curtain. But it also contained some falsehoods. A few months before the Georgetown speech, Daisey had given a performance of the monologue on NPR’s popular This American Life radio broadcast. The producers asked whether the show’s claims about conditions in the Chinese plants would live up to journalistic standards. Daisey said they would. But subsequent investigation by reporters turned up inaccuracies: Daisey said he’d talked to people that his translator said he had not spoken to, for example, and that he’d visited places and personally witnessed certain events that he had not. The events in question weren’t large in scale—they were more on the order of small details. But the errors were enough to prompt This American Life to do an entire “retraction” epis
ode.

  In his subsequent Georgetown speech, Daisey admitted that he had misrepresented some facts about what he had seen, and that he had collapsed others, so as to better present them in a dramatic form. He had, in short, taken quite a bit of narrative license. He apologized for misleading Ira Glass at NPR, and for misleading the people who had listened with the expectation that the show was a piece of journalism. But he did not apologize for making the piece. Indeed, he asserted that his point in making it was precisely to expose what is indeed an extremely important truth—a moral truth that had been largely hidden from consumers. He was sacrificing certain small truths in order to expose one big truth.

  The Mike Daisey story fascinates for lots of reasons. It has all the makings of a classic tragedy: a hero in pursuit of a noble truth, brought down by hubris; a touching and philosophical speech in the denouement. But it is also interesting precisely because it isn’t isolated. A common theme, often voiced by the person caught faking details, is the “sacrificing small truths for one big truth” idea. And folks aren’t always apologetic. The writer John D’Agata even goes so far as to suggest, in The Lifespan of a Fact, that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is illusory. D’Agata, in writing what the rest of us call nonfiction articles, attempts, he says, “to reconstruct details in a way that makes them feel significant even if that significance is one that doesn’t naturally occur in the event being described. . . . I am seeking truth here, but not necessarily accuracy.”11