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From the cyber enthusiasts to the internet sceptics, everyone has an opinion about the role new technologies should play in our lives. How we can make the most of their potential while retaining our unique identity as humans?

By Bryan Appleyard

The 1970s, a grim, strife-torn and now much-derided decade, are in urgent need of reassessment. Once we get beyond the bloated trade unions, the hyper-inflation, the ineffectual politicians, the violence and the bleakness, something much more interesting emerges: the first tentative sketches of the world in which we now live.

In September 1970, a 3,000-word essay by Milton Friedman appeared in the New York Times Magazine. It was a cleverly structured attack on the idea of the "social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system". Businessmen who argue for such responsibilities are, says Friedman, preaching “pure and unadulterated socialism" and are "unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades".

In 1973, Ivan Illich published Tools for Conviviality, an attack on the way in which elite groups were creating economic growth at the expense of human flourishing. In the same year, Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which forecast – and advocated – a move to a service and information economy. And, finally, in 1975, Steve Jobs started going to meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in a garage in Menlo Park, California, or at the nearby Oasis Bar and Grill.

Friedman’s amoral company, whose sole purpose was to use every possible legal means to reward its shareholders, became, in retrospect, the surprisingly exotic and dangerous concept that was to dominate the business world for most of the next four decades. Bell’s thesis – that everyone is yearning for a return to industrial productivity – now feels logical, albeit quaint. Illich is due for a rebirth now that left-wing philosophers such as Jean-Claude Michéa – as well as quite a few right-wing commentators, such as Charles Moore, Peter Oborne and Dominic Sandbrook – are questioning the validity of the Friedmanite settlement, if not capitalism in general. But Jobs in that garage is the image that really leaps across the decades. What did he want to make, and why?

Of course, we now know the answer to the first of those questions – iMacs, iPods, iPhones and iPads – but Jobs’ early death at the age of 56 has denied us an introspective old age that might have answered the second. If psychology is not available, however, context certainly is. Jobs’ creations, along with many of the defining industries of our time, came out of the 1970s, a time when we make, and why, was the subject of so much discussion.

The social and political context of the garage was hippie or, perhaps, yippie. Hippie defines the lotus-eaters of Woodstock; yippie the more aggressive political types who emerged after the disruption of the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. Yippies wanted to 'stick it to the Man', the Man being the government, corporations or simply ‘the System’, a term that embraced all manifestations of oppression.

To a group of people who wished to bring computing to the masses, both the Man and the System were IBM, a monopoly that saw computers as big, expensive and few in number, and all made and programmed by IBM. Sticking it to IBM involved making cheap(ish) personal computers, which is exactly what Jobs and Steve Wozniak proceeded to do after co-founding Apple in 1976. As Microsoft, founded a year earlier, was also about to undermine the grip of IBM by seizing control of the operating system, ‘it’ was about to be well and truly stuck to the Man.

All of which is to say that many of the products that we now crave to connect and entertain us originated in a politically dissident, anti-establishment culture in which the nature of capitalism was being hotly debated. Scroll forward 45 years and we can see that Friedman’s thesis of corporate amorality triumphed until 2008, when this approach to doing business was exposed as immorality, particularly among the banks. This has led to a revival of the 1970s debate about capitalism.

Meanwhile, the Menlo Park garage has become Apple’s Cupertino campus, the home of a $300bn company. Nearby is the ‘Googleplex’ of Google, a $200bn company. Up in Seattle is Amazon, a $100bn company and, back in Silicon Valley, there is Facebook, which is worth $50bn. The ‘alternative culture’ that aspired to a global communality of peace and love now rules corporate America. The yippies have become the Man.

Their products are now as seductive to us all as were those first personal computers to the geeks of the mid-1970s. They are overwhelmingly made in China and, especially in the case of Apple’s, are designed with a such a breathtaking level of refinement that they have created a new category of ‘product porn’. Videos on YouTube show Apple products being 'unboxed', a striptease show that is intended, I assume, to reconnect the viewer with the first dopamine rush of purchase. One of Jobs’s most brilliant auto-marketing coups was the creation of a product delirium that means new devices are reported on the news and people queue overnight to buy them. Jobs, the ultimate user of Apple products, partook of this delirium, often describing them as "insanely great".

This delirium – not just for Apple's devices, but also for the many other smartphones and computers on the market, as well as for online retail services such as Amazon and social-networking sites such as Facebook – is more significant than it may at first seem. It is a symptom of the fact that these are truly unprecedented products. The buyers expect them to change their lives and the sellers expect them freely to give them these lives so that they may profit from the information through advertising and marketing.

The cyber utopians

On the face of it, these gadgets of connectivity represent the ‘tools for conviviality’ of which Illich dreamed and the realisation of the yippie programme to put the highest possible technology in the hands of the masses. Idealistic, even utopian, claims have been made for the efficacy of such tools.

Clay Shirky, who is perhaps the most prominent spokesperson for the internet generation, speaks of the "epochal" transfer of powers from "various professional classes to the general public". What was once an audience has become a “mass of protagonists”. Shirky argues that we now have “communication tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities” and that we are living “in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race”.

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki shows that the crowd could be cleverer than the experts. The assembled crowd of the internet should, therefore, be capable of finding new solutions to old problems. Publisher and open-source advocate Tim O’Reilly claims that the internet provides an “architecture of participation”. After the (albeit failed) Green Revolution in Iran in 2009–10, it was widely claimed that the internet – and, in particular, Twitter – had been decisive in undermining the regime by spreading information and images of its brutality around the world.

Then there is the ever-quotable imperiousness of Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google. Schmidt is the most provocative of the internet prophets in his insistence, first, on the inevitable ubiquity of the new machines (children in the future will, he says, have only two states, “asleep or online”), secondly, on their moral stature (“computers make us better humans”) and, finally, on their authority (“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next”).

The Arab Spring provides further evidence of the power and pervasiveness of technology. After Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, was harassed and humiliated by the police, he set fire to himself in protest and, 18 days later, died. Thanks to the internet, Bouazizi’s self-immolation caused anger and violence throughout the region. The Tunisian and Egyptian governments both fell, and Bahraini leaders only clung on after massive concessions to the protesters. Libya and Syria have since become the latest territories to be subjected to massacres.

Young, technologically adept people were on the front line throughout this period. Thanks to satellite TV, they saw different ways of life in other countries, they imagined change in their own and, using the internet and mobile phones, they organised themselves. Facebook and Twitter were the tools of revolution; grateful Egyptians even started to name their children Facebook. A Google executive, Wael Ghonim, emerged from 11 days of police detention to become both a hero and a leader of the revolt. In Libya, an internet shutdown was subverted by protesters who crossed the border into Egypt bearing flash drives from which they uploaded videos of state brutality. The crowd, democratic and wise, had clearly recognised that the new gadgets at their disposal were not just toys or labour-saving devices.

This wave of cyber-boosterism – involving, as it does, prophecies of peace and, if not love, then at least absolute global connectivity – echoes the hippie/yippie dreams of the 1960s and 1970s. That, after all, is the generation that was in charge during the development of the internet and that has, as a result, constructed the new commanding heights of the world economy. But, in doing so, that generation has been subjected to the new pressure of shareholder value. Much of the boosterism has to be seen as gadget advertising and a necessary adjunct to a system that combines American technology and design with Chinese productivity.

The cyber sceptics

In the past couple of years, a counter-wave of scepticism has emerged. In his book The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born scholar, pours well-researched scorn on the political claims of the boosters. Tyrants, he points out, quickly learn how to use the internet. Moreover, net revolutionaries had better make sure they win: internet and mobile communications are written in ink, not pencil, and an oppressive regime will easily be able to trace the identities of its opponents.

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has raised concerns about the way the gadget makers feel justified in taking over the lives of our children. She provides chilling evidence of children for whom connectivity has become a new form of anomie and even, paradoxically, intense loneliness.

In his book The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser says the internet is no longer the window on the world we thought it was; instead, it has become a mirror. Increased personalisation of searches means we get Google results that are tuned to our known preoccupations. The more we search, the less we learn.

From writer Nicholas Carr, among others, comes the anxiety that machines are changing the way we think, shortening our attention spans and making us incapable of prolonged contemplation. Some commentators, such as neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, argue that they are actually altering the structure of the human brain.

But the most fundamental critique of the direction in which new technologies are taking us comes from a Silicon Valley apostate. Jaron Lanier was one of the creators of artificial reality, but, in 2006, he lost his faith. Far from freeing the world by letting a billion flowers bloom, he said the internet was creating a “hive mind”: not a thoughtful mass of independent individuals, but a blind collective driven by a desire to extirpate the human and hand all power to the internet. He accuses the internet prophets of “digital Maoism”.

Lanier highlights the increasing number of ‘meta’ sites available – Google, Wikipedia, Digg and Reddit – many of which aggregate from other aggregators. Much of what we read on the internet, he says, consists of “what a collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algorithms derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously”.

Furthermore, says Lanier, the internet is destroying the creative middle class. By forcing down the price of music, books and newspapers, big cyber suppliers such as Apple and Amazon have effectively been throwing people out of work and casting doubt on the future of the very things they are selling.

The core of Lanier’s critique raises a much more profound question about our relationships with these new products. If we cannot tell whether we are talking to a machine or a human, he says, then we must credit the machine with intelligence. The assumption is that machines will eventually win because they have become smarter. But they might also win because humans have become dumber: after all, says Lanier, “people degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time”.

My own thought here coincides with Lanier’s. It first struck me while struggling with a ‘call tree’ – those corporate answering machines that keep offering you ‘options’ and assuring you that “your call is important to us” – that the machine was actively engaged in a project to simplify me, to make me machine readable. If I had been talking to a human, we would have exchanged a whole series of subtle signals. But the machine only wanted a few signals, each carefully devised to fit me into one of its files. To play the game, I had to degrade myself to make the machine seem smart.

Once you notice this, you see it everywhere – in banks, shops, airports and so on – and you realise that it has changed the few humans you do encounter. They are no longer free agents, they are computer peripherals who are simply there to plug the gaps in the software.

Perhaps the most extreme way in which these gadgets are adapting us to their purposes is through the theft of our identities. Facebook is now famous for its ability to seduce users into disclosing personal information and then to make it extraordinarily difficult to prevent these intimate details from being used and disseminated. Google does the same thing, though less noticeably, and the move to 'cloud computing' - the storage of information in remote server farms – will accelerate and intensify this process. These information stores are now worth billions, if not trillions, of dollars. One company is said to have 1,500 pieces of information on 97% of individuals in the American population. This is all being done in the name of selling, through highly targeted advertising and marketing. But political parties are also using this information and, soon enough, they will use it for social control.

The gadgets we now make and use are, therefore, far from innocent. They are highly manipulative and are designed to control as much of our attention and time as possible. They aim to be, in one of the buzz words of the new media industries, maximally ‘immersive’. Their ultimate commercial – and, potentially, political – purpose is the creation of a surveillance society on a scale that would have shocked even George Orwell.

Servants or masters?

Do we, or will we, care? And should we? There is a perfectly respectable argument, made by Shirky and others, that connectivity offers a higher form of human life, one that involves wider sympathies and fewer conflicts. In its most extreme form, this becomes a utopian faith in ‘the Singularity’. This is the moment (due to occur in 2045, if we believe Ray Kurzweil) when our technologies converge and we build our last machine, a super-intelligent computer that solves all our problems and takes us into the post- or transhuman realm. In this version of the future, the things we manufacture become our future selves.

The Singularity is, of course, an absurd sci-fi fantasy based on an excessive faith in the direction and pace of technological innovation and an ignorance of history. But the broad movement towards our deep involvement with ever-more intimate and demanding gadgets is well under way. How we respond to this is the challenge. There has been some talk of ‘cyber ethics’, and a few technologists have begun to express doubts about the nature and impact of their designs. MIT computer scientist Pattie Maes, for example, has called for gadget designers to consider the ethical issues of their devices.

But ethical concerns would not have stopped people smoking; only the threat of death did that. Dubious mobile phone stories apart, nobody has yet shown that these new devices are harmful to our health, though they are certainly at least as addictive as cigarettes and, like all addictions, they change people’s lives.

It is not enough, therefore, either to pretend that this is business as usual or to shrug and say that nothing can be done because this is our destiny. All these new machines emerge from a particular culture at a particular time and they involve particular choices. In turn, these choices depend on the rhetoric used by the people who will profit by making such machines. That rhetoric is currently intimate and radical, involving a claim that machines can change our lives from within. This is an imperious claim that should remind us that machines are not intrinsically democratic, and nor are they necessarily the realisation of the hippie/yippie dream of a global community.

Now, in short, is not the time to succumb to the fatalism of the market or the strange impulse to hand over our destinies to machines. We must, once again, stick it to the Man by deciding that it is in our best interests to live with machines as servants and not masters, and to retain our sense of self and society despite the tidal wave of connectivity and information theft. Then we can indeed claim to have built tools of conviviality, and the strife of the 1970s will not have been entirely in vain.

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Bryan Appleyard is a journalist and author. Bryan Appleyard’s book, The Brain is Wider than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don’t Work in a Complex World, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Image: Getty