Posts Tagged ‘connectivity’
“We’ve created an entire global generation of people who were raised within a context in which the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture, is manipulation”*…
… and in some cultures, Nathan Gardels observes, that that phenomenon is picking up pace, as the ruling parties of the world’s two largest nations are fusing high-tech tools with old-fashioned patronage and local wardens…
The more we know or learn through connected networks, the more is known and learned about us.
The same apparatus that enables unprecedented connectivity enables unprecedented surveillance.
Such systems are invasive by design, recording and storing every digital transaction from an online purchase to chatbot queries to uploaded photos in giant databases that are searchable, not least by snooping governments, aggressive marketers and the large language models of Big Tech.
The other side of the coin of connectivity is sousveillance, the capacity of citizens and consumers to monitor authorities, professions and businesses from below to expose abuse, corruption, complacency, incompetence, dissembling or outright lies. (One recent example that springs to mind is the fracas over pro-Palestinian encampments on the U.C.L.A. campus where journalists and students correlated online personal data with facial recognition tools to identify violent counter-demonstrators while law enforcement dawdled.)
Information gathered through connective surveillance is also a means for tracking the pressing concerns, discontent or shifting attitudes of publics that out-of-touch private companies disregard at the risk of their consumer appeal and unresponsive governments or ruling parties ignore at the peril of losing popular legitimacy.
Inundated by junk emails and pop-up ads, most of us are all too familiar with how surveillance capitalism works. But something more is going on in China and India, where the state and ruling parties are wiring a new kind of body politic for the digital age by combining connective capacity with the old stalwarts of allegiance and control — local wardens and the spoils system of patronage…
[Gardels explains the all-too-effective efforts of the Chinese and Indian governments and comes to an alarming (at least to your correspondent) conclusion…]
… To the extent that what we may call “autocratic connectivity” remains an adaptive two-way street where feedback from below is heard and heeded, such a system appears politically sustainable without the liberal freedoms so cherished in the West.
If it works in the two largest nations on the planet, others may see it as their future as well…
Eminently worth reading in full: “‘Autocratic Connectivity’ In China and India,” from @NoemaMag.
* Jaron Lanier
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As we muse on manipulation, we might send persuasive birthday greetings to Carl Hovland; he was born on this date in 1912. A psychologist, he was a pioneer in the study of pioneered in the study of social communication and the modification of attitudes and beliefs. Hovland was the first to record the “sleeper effect,” the observation that individuals exposed repeatedly to what they know is propaganda– e.g., a political smear ad, paid for by an opponent), forget over time that the message is propaganda. (Note that, while the effect has been widely acknowledged and studied, it has been notoriously difficult to reproduce, leading to some doubt over its existence.)
Hovland also developed the social judgment theory of attitude change. He thought that the ability of someone to resist persuasion by a certain group depended on his/her degree of belonging to the group. And he collaborated closely with Irving Janis who would later become famous for his theory of groupthink.
“The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes”*…
For some, the prospect of further advances in AI and related tech (robotics, connectivity, et al.) conjures a future of existential risk, a Terminator-like dystopian future in which humans fight with “machines” for primacy. For others (among whom your correspondent numbers himself), AI (better understood as “augmented” than “artificial” intelligence) has real promise– but also dangers of a different (and very human) sort. Those technologies, dependent as they are on capital and specific/rare expertise, could fuel further concentration of wealth and power, could usher in an era of even greater inequality. Noah Smith is here to argue that my fears may be misplaced, that augmentation may narrow the skills gap and help reduce economic polarization…
On the app formerly known as Twitter, I’m known for occasionally going on rants about how it’s good to be normal and average and middle-class. To some degree this is because I believe that the only successful society is an egalitarian one where people don’t have to be exceptional in order to live good and comfortable and fulfilling lives. But some of it is also a reaction against the messages I was inundated with growing up. It seemed like every movie and book and TV show was telling me that nerds like me were special — that because we could do physics or program computers or even just play video games, we were destined to be exceptional. In the late 80s and 90s, it felt like we were on the cusp of a great shift, where the back-slapping jocks who had dominated American society in earlier times were on the verge of losing power and status to the bespectacled freaks and geeks. The Revenge of the Nerds was coming.
It wasn’t just fantasy, either. Over the next thirty years, the nerds really did win the economic competition. The U.S. shifted from manufacturing to knowledge industries like IT, finance, bio, and so on, effectively going from the world’s workshop to the world’s research park. This meant that simply being able to cut deals and manage large workforces were no longer the only important skills you needed to succeed at the highest levels of business. Bespectacled programmers and math nerds became our richest men. From the early 80s to the 2000s, the college earnings premium rose relentlessly, and a degree went from optional to almost mandatory for financial success.
The age of human capital was in full swing, and the general consensus was that “Average Is Over”. And with increased earnings came increased social status and personal confidence; by the time I moved out to San Francisco in 2016, tech people were clearly the masters of the Universe.
The widening gap in the performance of the nerds versus everyone else wasn’t the only cause of the rise in inequality in the U.S. — financialization, globalization, tax changes, the decline of unions, and other factors all probably played a role. But the increasing premium on human capital was impossible to ignore.
That trend lasted so long that most Americans can no longer remember anything else. We’ve become used to the idea that technology brings inequality, by delivering outsized benefits to the 20% of society who are smart and educated enough to take full advantage of it. It’s gotten to the point where we tacitly assume that this is just what technology does, period, so that when a new technology like generative AI comes along, people leap to predict that economic inequality will widen as a result of a new digital divide.
And it’s possible that will happen. I can’t rule it out. But I also have a more optimistic take here — I think it’s possible that the wave of new technologies now arriving in our economy will decrease much of the skills gap that opened up in the decades since 1980…
An optimistic take on technology and inequality: “Is it time for the Revenge of the Normies?” from @Noahpinion. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Aristotle
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As we contemplate consequences, we might spare a thought for Joseph Glidden; he died on this date in 1906. An Illinois farmer, he developed and patented the design of the first commercially-feasible barbed wire in 1874 (an earlier, less successful patent preceded his)– a product that would transform the West. Before his innovation, settlers on the treeless plains had no easy way to fence livestock away from cropland, and ranchers had no way to prevent their herds from roaming far and wide. Glidden’s barbed wire opened the plains to large-scale farming, and closed the open range, bringing the era of the cowboy and the round-up to an end. With his partner, Isaac L. Ellwood, Glidden formed the Barb Fence Company of De Kalb, Illinois, and quickly became one of the wealthiest men in the nation.
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