Techno-skeptics slowly powering up
Digital dissenters laud technology, lament its fallout
Astra Taylor’s iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade.
Taylor, 36, is a documentary filmmaker, musician and political activist. She’s also an emerging star in the world of technology criticism. She’s not paranoid, but she keeps duct tape over the camera lens on her laptop — because, as everyone knows, these gadgets can be taken over by nefarious agents of all kinds.
Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the Internet as a democratizing force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state,” and the near monopolization of digital platforms by huge corporations.
Last month, Taylor and more than 1,000 activists, scholars and techies gathered at the New School in New York City to talk about reinventing the Internet. They dream of a co-op model: people dealing directly with one another without going through a data-sucking corporate hub.
We need a movement, Taylor told the conferees at the close of the two-day session, “that says no to the existing order.”
Of the myriad critiques of the computer culture, one of the most common is that companies are getting rich off users’ personal data.
Some digital dissenters aren’t focused on the economic issues, but simply on the nature of human-machine interactions: Because of their devices, people are constantly distracted. They’re rarely fully present anywhere.
Other critics are alarmed by the erosion of privacy. Revelations in 2013 by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden incited widespread fear of government surveillance.
Some dissenters think technology is driving economic inequality. There are grave concerns that robots are taking the jobs of humans. And the robot issue leads to the most apocalyptic fear: that machine intelligence could run away from its human inventors, leaving people enslaved by the machines they created.
Some countries are taking aggressive action to regulate new technologies. The South Korean government has decided that gaming is so addictive that it should be treated similarly to a drug or alcohol problem. Meanwhile, the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” law forces companies such as Google and Yahoo to remove embarrassing material from search engine results if requested to do so.
One of the tech world’s top advocates in Washington, D.C., is Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, which receives about two-thirds of its funding from tech companies.
Atkinson worries that books by people such as Astra Taylor will create a thought contagion that will infect Washington policymaking. In his view, there are two types of Luddites: the old-fashioned handwringers who are spooked by anything new and innovative; and the “soft” Luddites — he would put Taylor in that category — who say they embrace technology but want to go slower, with more European-style regulations.
“It’s the emergence of soft Luddites that I worry about, because it has become the elite conventional wisdom in a lot of spaces,” Atkinson said.
The dean of the digital dissenters, meanwhile, is Jaron Lanier, 55. He’s a musician, composer, performer and pioneer of virtual reality headsets that allow the user to experience computer-generated 3-D environments. But what he’s most famous for is his criticism of the computer culture he helped create.
He believes that Silicon Valley treats humans like electrical relays in a vast machine. Although he still works in technology, he largely has turned against his tribe.
“I’m the first guy to sober up after a heavy-duty party” is how he describes himself.
Lanier has written books saying everyone essentially works for Facebook, Google, etc., by feeding material into those central processors and turning private lives into something corporations can monetize. He’d like to see people compensated for their data in the form of micropayments.
Other tech critics have rolled their eyes at that notion, however. Taylor, for example, fears that micropayments would create an incentive for people to post click-bait material.
Much of today’s tech environment emerged from the counterculture — the hackers and hippies who viewed the personal computer as a tool of liberation. But the political left now has a more jaundiced relationship with the digital world.
The same technologies that empower individuals and enable protesters to organize also make it possible for governments to spy on their citizens.
Then there’s the question of money. Progressives are appalled by the mind-boggling profits of the big tech companies. The left also takes note of the gender and racial disparities in the tech companies, and the rise of a techno-elite.
Most painful for progressives has been the rise of the “sharing economy,” which they initially embraced. They feel as though the idea was stolen from them and perverted into something that hurts workers.
They say that companies such as Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit are creating a “gig economy” — one that, although it offers customers convenience and reasonable prices, is built on freelancers who lack the income or job protections of salaried employees. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, an investor in Uber and Airbnb, owns The Washington Post.)
Taylor and other tech skeptics do not yet form an organized, coherent movement. As such, Andrew Keen, author of “The Internet is Not the Answer,” is glum when talking about what the technological resistance might accomplish.
“No one’s ever heard of Astra Taylor,” he said.
The world is not about to go back to the Stone Age, at least not willingly. One billion people may use Facebook on any given day. Jaron Lanier may not like the way the big companies scrape value from people’s lives, but they are participating in that system willingly — if perhaps not entirely aware of what is happening to their data.
Taylor’s smartphone with the cracked screen, for instance, has been in heavy use. She knows these gadgets are addictive by design. But she also has trouble living without one.
“I need to learn to turn it off,” she said.