Technologies, especially in the communications space, have been a blessing during the lockdown, permitting moderate productivity for some, and gifting mild entertainment for many.
But questions about technology will not resolve themselves in Covid’s twilight. When we emerge, what will we do with technology? Will it be used to further liberate human ingenuity to solve genuine problems, or will it be corralled by the powerful and lock the majority into what James Bridle, in his book of the same title, calls a “New Dark Age” (Verso, 2018).
The future Übermensch
Monumental data volumes are accumulating. Our current optical and magnetic storage forms will crash by the end of the century. William Gibson’s 1980s science fiction novels were prescient in predicting the use of humans to store data. And not just via skin patches or implants but using the human genome editing technology, CRISPR-Cas9, to encode data permanently into our cells.
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Such nanotechnologies are already established. We don’t read much about this, partly because the biotech science is ultra specialised, and partly because the ethics are murky, even Frankensteinian. Historian and futurist Yuval Noah Harari, in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Jonathan Cape, 2018), warns of an imminent fissure in humanity, in which the wealthy purchase enhanced genetics — eugenics on digital steroids — while those without CRISPR access remain biologically lower caste. This combination of nanotech, biotech and big data is birthing a potentially terrible beauty.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is too conceptually enormous to grasp. What is a quantum computer? What does a “neural network” mean, and what could be its capability?
The current answer is that even scientist-technologists don’t know. Supposedly benevolent players in the field, such as OpenAI, cofounded by SA-born tech pioneer Elon Musk, aim to mimic, match and eventually surpass the neural networking capabilities of the human brain for purposes of progress. But the risk of existential harm emanating from AI is real. “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all,” Stephen Hawking noted in his posthumously published book Brief Answers to the Big Questions (Hodder & Stoughton, 2018).
Technological capitalism
“An internet built about consumption is a bad place to live,” writes Lizzie O’Shea in Future Histories (Verso, 2019). Computer and cellphone technologies enable companies such as Amazon to record almost everything about our purchasing habits; Google tracks our searches, e-mail trails and YouTube views; Facebook holds our personal information. These companies possess the marketer’s Holy Grail: an immutable connection to a consumer.
Dozens of hazier corporations also do this, often more unscrupulously. How many of us, even experienced online surfers, know what a cookie is and how it traces us?
This is called surveillance capitalism, black-ops data mining and marketing obfuscated as a customer-centric relationship in which we choose the mode of interaction. In reality, we are obliged to acquiesce to get ordinary things — communicating, shopping — done.
So we absent-mindedly ignore the extent of privacy invasion and eventually it becomes normal. But, as Harari cautions, “someone has privileged access to your brain, and it’s not you”.
Dystopia or utopia?
George Orwell’s 1984 rings true when we acknowledge how technologies track us and understand how digital tools can entrap us. But social theorist Neil Postman saw deeper, fearing instead the prophecy within Aldous Huxley’s 1932 book Brave New World. Orwell feared the distortion or concealment of truth; Huxley foretold its irrelevance, disappearing not in the control, tyranny and fear of 1984 but frittered within a senseless culture, dulled by pleasurable monotonies and trivialities. Today, our use of memes, emoticons and reaction GIFs sums up how Huxley and Postman were right.
But bubbles can pop, and visions of utopia can easily mutate. The US National Security Agency (NSA) has “the greatest surveillance capabilities that we’ve ever seen in history”, confirms CIA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, prompting O’Shea to warn “we need to scrutinise the way the state and capital work in partnership to discipline us by building bars not with steel but with silicon ... before we find ourselves in a digital dystopia”.
Technology is not neutral
Excessive influence in using and shaping technological innovation is in the control of elite politicians and technology capitalists. We need to remember what they want: power and wealth.
If you doubt this, consider a shadowy but hugely profitable Silicon Valley company called Palantir Technologies. Founded by tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Palantir’s revenues flow exclusively from data mining, surveillance or development for the US military, law enforcement, and immigration and intelligence services. Thiel admitted, more than a decade ago, that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible”.
Polarising technology
“Accelerationism” is a specific strategy adopted by alt-right extremists that calls for hastening technological change precisely to cause social instability as a forerunner to radical right-wing change, even terrorism. Starkly, “modern technology [is used] to achieve anti-modern goals”, writes Julia Ebner in her scintillating, eye-opening book Going Dark (Bloomsbury, 2020).
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Ebner went undercover to investigate disinformation, doxing, fake news and extremism on the web. Nauseatingly, Europe’s biggest trolling army, according to Ebner, is the neo-Nazi Reconquista Germanica.
Also galling is the audacity of Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which between 2015 and 2017 trolled propaganda to reach a third of Americans. The US House of Representatives intelligence committee has published a list of nearly 4,000 troll accounts on Twitter linked to this Russian “agency”.
The combination of authoritarian or extremist ideologies with cutting-edge technologies represents an awful, ironic twist to Facebook’s mission to “connect people” when it started just 15 years ago.
Surveillance state
Surveillance capitalism infiltrates harmoniously, inconspicuously. State surveillance is overt, even sanctioning. The Chinese government’s comprehensive censorial control now extends to a social credit system, a disciplinary mode of surveillance and monitoring. A key component of this is facial recognition software, linked to all-pervasive cameras and gigantic databases.
Facial recognition software is increasingly used by police forces worldwide. Private security establishments, too, implement the technology in many US cities, businesses, even schools. In Johannesburg, private company Vumacam plans to install, imminently, 15,000 surveillance cameras with registration-plate-matching functions and what it calls “crowd analytics” capabilities.
Johannesburg University journalism professor Jane Duncan has slated the city’s plan: “A private mass surveillance network ... is a recipe for disaster. There is something fundamentally wrong-headed about allowing an initiative where such incredibly sensitive information — that rightfully should require a warrant to access — can be accessed for money.”
Her comments are apt given that enactment of the Protection of Personal Information Act has been derailed by Covid-19, pended just as the government announced that cellular communications companies have agreed to provide geolocation data to help pinpoint people’s whereabouts, supposedly as a tool to fight the virus’s spread.
Technology extends and amplifies human qualities and flaws. Despite our immense scientific and technological progress, half of the world’s population does not have access to the web; indeed, 14% of adults remain illiterate. These statistics reflect our cognitive dissonance, a failure to grasp that technology has utterly failed a billion people. It’s time for us to make the effort to apply a moral, human-centric approach to what we do with technology.
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