The Inner Troll

A summary of:
Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Allen Lane: London.
Chapter 3: The Noosphere is Just Another Name for Everyone's Inner Troll

The "noosphere" is a term that represents the "global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the internet" (45). The problem is that while we are designing for this noosphere, it are seemingly allergic to it. It turns us into trolls, i.e. it tends to bring out the worst in us: "...the user interface designs that arise from the ideology of the computing cloud make people - all of us - less kind" (61). This is evidenced by instances of cyber bullying and internet wars. Does this not raise red flags? If something else in our lives was so poisonous, we would be told to disengage from it entirely. But when it's technology, we are supposed to accept it, and with it, our new, horrible selves.

One reason for this is because the noosphere is designed for anonymous individuals. "Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely" (48). In short, we are reducing ourselves in order to be able to use various internet services (53).

Consider this: "If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form" (48).

More specifically, it is "transient anonymity, coupled with a lack of consequences" that is so toxic (63). For example, there is more responsible behavior in Second Life because of the effort required to create one's avatar. In other online environments, users can shed their identities and adopt new ones to avoid consequences of poor behavior.

Another reason is that the noosphere idolizes the "hive mind," granting it elevated status above the individual (48). I would suggest that essentially we have adopted this logical fallacy: argumentum ad populum, whereby the truth of something is determined according to how popular it is. Such is the logic behind Digg or Wikipedia. Yet at the same time, we are not organizing these crowds responsibly, which is creating to mob behavior (59).

One manifestation of this the enshrining of evolutionary thinking within technological development. In contrary, Lanier writes, "Enlightened designers leave open the possibility of either metaphysical specialness in humans or in the potential for unforeseen creative processes that aren't explained by ideas like evolution that we already believe we can capture in software systems. That kind of modesty is the signature quality of being human-centered" (52-3).

And yet another reason the noosphere is be-trolling us is because "the idea of friendship is being reduced" (53). We relate to one another the way we are used to bureacracy treating us (69). "What computerized analysis of all the country's school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do" (69). (I would ask, though, if Lanier would think it would be okay if computers had progressed to the point of being able to represent human thought or relationships. Is this something we should work towards? - improving technologies along these lines? I would suggest that this is wrongheaded. I think the key is to get it straight in our heads once and for all that humans and technology are not the same thing. We are not machines. The moment this distinction becomes blurred - e.g. by computers acquiring hitherto uniquely human skills - we threaten our humanity.)

There is a danger in voicing one's longing for a return to what was good about earlier technology, as it causes one to be labeled a Luddite and then dismissed as being overly romantic or just afraid of change. But there are things that really should remain sacrosanct. For example, authorship is useful. "Updike used the metaphor of the edges of the physical paper in a physical book to communicate the importance of enshrining the edges between individual authors. It was no use. Doctrinaire web 2.0 enthusiasts only perceived that Updike was being sentimental about an ancient technology" (46).

The key thing to remember is "The net doesn't design itself. We design it" (55). We can design it better! We should look to those moments in history when design could have gone another way, the technological forks in the road, and consider what might have happened had we gone left instead of right (68).

And we have to consider the consequences of not doing anything. "How can we ever know what we might be losing" (70)? Will we end up designing our next generations as a bunch of pack animals with no sense of identity or individual responsibility (64)? At that point, will it be too late? After all, who will be left to challenge the dominant design?