Tech gods drag the future back to the swamp

THERE is an obvious thing about the tech gods which is rarely discussed, but which is probably quite important: from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg to Paddy Cosgrave, many of them are what you might generically call “public schoolboys”.

Before they set about creating a new world, they inherited all the advantages of the old one — the finest education, the confidence that comes from belonging to the affluent classes, the… eh, the network.

Indeed it is possible to see the development of social media as some kind of a gargantuan exercise in old-fashioned networking, which is understood most profoundly by those who were already coming from that culture.

And like those ancient systems of advancement, it is driven not by any great moral energy, but by pathological ambition — when you see Zuckerberg being questioned about various controversies, he seems quite comfortable with banal statements about bringing the whole world together and teaching it how to sing and so forth.

But when it comes to Facebook’s enabling of the worst people in the world to do their worst, there is clearly something that Zuckerberg is not getting. Instead this potentate of the age comes across like some traffic cop waving every vehicle through, just keeping it all moving.

There is that weird detachment which is attributed by some to his “nerdish” disposition, but which could just as easily be the detachment of the rich kid who has never been personally affected by any such unpleasantness and who is unlikely ever to be affected, no matter how ugly it gets for the multitudes — so he hears it, but he’s not feeling it.

These guys have always been protected in so many ways, a bit like the Old Etonians who are running the Brexit show, who will not be experiencing any of the hardship that their abysmal project would bring to the little people.

And when we turn to the decision of Paddy Cosgrave to invite Marine Le Pen to speak at the Web Summit, we may be looking at something older still, something beyond the mere carelessness of the ruling classes — older verging on the prehistoric, because despite all its claims to be inventing the future, this is showing us that our friend the “Web” can be a deeply primitive phenomenon.

Of course, Cosgrave uninvited the “wrongheaded” Le Pen, for whatever reason — but his first instinct was to invite her, and this is the interesting part.

Now I suppose a man can invite anyone to his summit that he damn well likes, but in offering a spot to someone as “wrong-headed” as Le Pen, he didn’t seem to anticipate the response — which was as strange in its own way as Enda Kenny’s government not anticipating that a Web Summit at the RDS might need a bit of fast wifi.

I have seen it compared to a student wheeze of the kind that Cosgrave or his ilk might have contemplated when he was head of the Philosophical Society at Trinity — some crude desire for publicity. But it’s more interesting than that. It echoes this attitude of the tech gods in general, that it is not their place to be censoring the opinions of others, however wrongheaded or even blackhearted they may be.

“Who are we to judge?”, seems to be their position.

Well, let us tell them who they are: they are among the most privileged and highly educated people who have ever lived. Yet somehow in relation to these issues of bad politics in general they seem to lack the sophistication of the lowliest organ of the “old” media — the one which forced itself to make all sorts of judgments all the time, due to this very rough idea they had of this vague concept they called “the common good”. And who were mostly able to restrain themselves from giving a “platform” to these hooligans of the far-right, given what was already known of that brutal creed.

Over centuries it developed, this idea, this instinct that some things were so wrong-headed, there was no “debate” about it — fascism or even the hint of fascism was one of these things. And it became accepted among civilised people that no-one in that ballpark should be asked to make any contribution of any kind to anything, except to go away and die. Thus in our faltering way did mankind endeavour to rise from the primaeval swamp.

But the public schoolboys mustn’t have been paying attention, because they have refrained from making those calls in the service of some ideal of limitless communication — ultimately in the service of themselves.

Floating freely above a world of petty restrictions and liability, they have succeeded in presenting themselves as avatars of the future, even as they enable the most backward of savages to promulgate their heathen gibberish.

Marine Le Pen wasn’t too far off winning the last presidential election in France — she got to the play-off stages, as it were. If it wasn’t for Macron coming out of nowhere, we might now be looking at France, Britain, and America fallen to the far right, Italy and a lot of other places getting there, with Germany alone of the great powers precariously representing some version of what used to be known as liberal democracy — in the era since World War II this would be as near as you can get to the end of civilisation as we know it.

If we are not to relapse into barbarism, we need the tech gods to stop babbling about “the need for debate and discussion of this phenomenon” — a phenomenon which you may be sure will not be encouraging any such debate or discussion if it succeeds.

We need them essentially to do the right thing — and to do it first time, not “based on advice we have received and the large reaction online overnight”.

Because it might stay fine for them, no matter what happens, but they could be wrong about that too.

‘Fascists shouldn’t be asked to make a contribution, except to go away and die...’