And if so, how should we think about what we do with it?
Innovation is not a single thing, a eureka (Greek for I have found) moment. There are many factors that go into taking a discovery to making an impact. Bringing something new to the world means standing on the shoulders of giants across generations and working with many people.
Rather, innovation is a process where you match the right kinds of questions and the right strategies or resolve. But we should not confuse the objectives with the issues we're actually ready to tackle. As it often happens when considering technology the solution without probing too deeply into what is the right question, you have unintended consequences.
San Kriss points to a superb insight about what happens when you write a book. A book is a form of media that communicates a message. This will be useful to discuss the point Kriss makes through it. On Damage, The Internet is Made of Demons:
‘‘Maybe the sustained intellectual activity that comes with writing a book reveals the connections instead: the way things all seem to hang together in an invisible net. Theodor Adorno describes thought as a kind of hypertext, a network, a web:
Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow.
So when I say I can’t entirely agree with the book’s thesis, this might be the internet itself speaking through me—but still, I can’t entirely agree.’’
And here's the point: the Internet is a break from the past in significant ways. I think it's worth pondering.
The way digital media has changed communication is significant.
But not for the reasons you might number. Communications media ceased to mediate. Instead of talking to each other directly, though, we talk to technology. Kriss says, ‘‘we start talking to the machine.’’
It's true isn't it? You've probably experienced a version of ‘‘someone is wrong on the Internet.’’ Where the someone is not as important as setting the record straight on the Internet. In the process of proving someone wrong, you stop caring about someone as a person.
Most of the time, it's not even a well-constructed argument that bulldozes a person. Because the screen protects you from caring, and the frictionless technology enables speed and ease, not constructive thought. In fact, you are talking to the machine. If you paused and reflected, as you would looking someone in the eye across from you, you likely would not engage in a version of the troll.
With The Technocrat’s Dilemma in The New Atlantis Alexander Stern makes a similar point from a different perspective: That of the believers in the definite power of technology.
The technocratic response to misinformation and conspiracy theory only exacerbates the problem and further validates the most extreme reactions. Instead of responding with humility and transparency, technocrats and their media partners attempt to reassert epistemic control. They refuse to admit mistakes, they appeal to authority and credentials instead of evidence, and they attempt to shut down dissenting voices instead of taking up their challenges. They lump legitimate critiques together with the most outrageous disinformation, with the implicit message that more deference is needed, rather than more debate. As a result, their crusade for truth begins to look more and more like censorship and scapegoating from an establishment doing everything in its power to deflect responsibility for the cascading crises.
Stern's ‘‘misinformation as a problem of 'information literacy' that must be solved by experts” does get us closer to understanding the issues. Ask the wrong question and you misdiagnose the problem. Perhaps that happens because with the rise in importance of knowledge to work, and a thriving service industry based on knowledge, we have too many solutions in search of a problem.
So we have the technology as medium that is not just a tool, but a powerful influence on how we perceive the world. Which itself constructs news beliefs that drive behavior. All those prompts do change your mind, too. Who hasn't tried to say something about current news because you can spin what’s happening as ‘‘advantageous to my business.”
On the Internet, we're all visionaries is a fake democratization of technology. Of course, humankind aspires to elite status. Evidence ranges from how nature is treated as a possession without a voice to the attempted quantification of species going extinct in monetary terms, without regard to a fuller conception of value.
And we have the technocratic mindset that considers communication ‘‘a matter of optics and control,” rather than an attempt at educating the public and empowering the voice of communities as individuals.
But as more and more of the Internet is less than open and transparent, optionality has its costs. ‘‘Throughout the entire history of what we call media, we have consumed its contents on producers’ schedules,” says Doc Searls. The very idea that education and public commons should be just the province of non-profits clashes with the intent of the B-Corp movement, and that of Environmental, Social, and (Corporate) Governance (ESG) aspirations.
B-Corp certification is itself a clever move to package a concept that is much older, the legacy of Italian entrepreneurs like Adriano Olivetti. Make no mistake, marketing is a powerful force in all this. Pity that the businesses and individuals that most invest in it are not those we need the most to shine. They are often bootstrapped and overlooked as a result.
Given all this, is the Internet a significant break from the past? And if so, how can we ask significantly better questions about and on it consistently? There's value in making things to experiment and discover. But thinking is also very much part of exploration.
My advice stands: Don't just do something, stand there. And ponder the costs of actions to culture and society. Because sometimes actions are problems masquerading as solutions.