I wrote this back in 2017, for a Technical Communications course. It was well-received and somewhat prophetic; bootstrapping futurist dogmas from tech savants such as Lanier and Kurzweil... both who deftly predicted the Singularity and our current arrival to it. Never have words such as these been more prescient... we explore the tension between individual identity and collective digital consciousness in our increasingly networked world. Drawing on the works of technology critics like Jaron Lanier, Sherry Turkle, and others, it examines how our social interactions and sense of self have been transformed by digital platforms and suggests possibilities for preserving human autonomy in an age of technological determinism.

Endearing Foibles: Digital Maoism and the Pseudo-Collective Self

Introduction: The Vanishing Human Element

The endearing foible, to coin an English term, is an aspect of an imperfect human interaction that creates a positive sense of value. Increasingly, in today's modern, socially networked society, we notice that these foibles become less and less capturable. Sense of self becomes a perfected, collaborative pursuit. The rugged individual gives way to Marxism, and further to digital Maoism.

Where once we yearned for individual liberty, Moore's Law (and the inexorable fall towards the technological singularity) has now seemingly pushed us towards a cybernetic totalism, wherein we give up ourselves to not only the machine, but to the human networks they provide (MySpace, Wiki, Facebook, et. al.). From these personal compromises with the network, a capitalized deus ex machina¹ seems to emerge.

Alongside these Orwellian notions, technobabble, and talk of God Programs, we find critics such as Turkle (Growing up Tethered) and Penny (Cybersexism), who seek to temper the subjective online experience with active moderation both via the end-user and the politics of regulation; claiming these new social paradigms (especially as pertains our youth) as morally suspect, innately narcissistic, and a boil on the current generation's social mobility.

To bookend these claims, we find modern computing specialists such as Jaron Lanier (One-Half a Manifesto et. al.), who seek to bring culpability to these digital systems themselves, along with the capitalistic structures that build them; showing the collective self as demonstrably flawed. Perhaps somewhere between all of these ideologies, there lay a compromise?

Digital Maoism and the Collaborative Self

Lanier's cybernetic totalism, primed with his sense of "Digital Maoism" (countered in part by the Tumlin paper) is seemingly supportive of Turkle and Penny's claims of lack of adolescent autonomy, sense of self, and degree of separation. However, there is an underlying element of Darwinism and the inevitable Technological Singularity that pervades the internet and its social mediums.

These new evolutionary constructs (both technological and moral), considered without generational bias, must subjectively be taken into account when responsibly charting the new ethics necessary for proper use of the internet by the masses and a more comprehensive, complete strategy towards a responsible Web 2.0; wherein we may fully embrace the technological and social advances inherent without sacrificing the human experience to nefarious institution.

The Approach of the Singularity

We may begin to explore this hypothesis by defining what is actually meant by the term Singularity. Quoting Von Neumann via Ray Kurzweil (2005):

"The ever-accelerating progress of technology... gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue" (p. 10).

What are the implications? "Our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits" (Kurzweil, 2005, p. 9).

These distinctions of Moore's Law mean that the inevitable march towards closeness, achieved via technology, is one that cannot be curtailed except via fairly draconian measures. Historically, this closeness was depicted via base philosophies of 6-degrees of separation.

As the modern internet was perfected in the 90's, these degrees of separation were empirically proven via experiments such as Dodds' "An Experimental Study of search in Global Social Networks"; a modern take on Milgram's Small-world experiment, wherein results suggest "that if individuals searching for remote targets do not have sufficient incentives to proceed, the small-world hypothesis will not appear to hold, but that even a slight increase in incentives can render social searches successful under broad conditions" (Dodds, 2003).

This particular experiment was able to prove the level of separation between individuals to be down to between 3-5 degrees, based on a simple email chain (in the year 2003); wherein a person was given a target individual to search for via personal contacts alone. More interestingly, network structure and communication hubs were found not to be the sole deciding factor. Personal incentives such as professional relationship, geography, and occupation seemed to make the search easier.

This brings an element of Randian, ethical egoism into our social networking that would be realized at its current apex via systems such as Facebook; wherein there is a definitive, underlying social importance to our connectedness. This, as Lanier depicts in his work "Who Owns the Future," leads to the monetization of the internet ego, where "your lack of privacy is someone else's wealth" (Lanier, 2013, p. 108).

The Totalist Trap

This social media effect of Moore's Law on our information systems is hence clear and profound. To embrace this singularity, as Lanier claims in his seminal "One Half a Manifesto", is to give unto the premise of cybernetic totalism. The component beliefs being (Lanier, 2000):

• That cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality.
• That people are no more than cybernetic patterns.
• That subjective experience either doesn't exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect.
• That what Darwin described in biology, or something like it, is in fact also the singular, superior description of all creativity and culture.
• That qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of information systems will be accelerated by Moore's Law.
• Biology and physics will merge with computer science, resulting in life and the physical universe becoming mercurial (to be human after that moment will be either impossible or something very different than we now can know).

Lanier (essentially responding to the Singularity), having no prior knowledge of systems such as Facebook, correctly predicts the subjective experience being honed out for a new online collectivism; one based mostly on a marriage of machine intelligence with biology.

Digital Maoism and the Networked Self

This collectivism is lined out more succinctly and contemporarily in his treatise on "Digital Maoism" (Lanier, 2006). This Maoism (with reference to China's Mao Zedong) is depicted as a more refined, digitized, version of classical Marxism. Now, the peasantry (rather than the middle class) is empowered by Moore's Law's effect on our social media.

No longer, in this modern case, is a traditional Marxist view relevant, as the voice of the industrial/working class has been gobbled up by the mob, the monetized social media (big data), and said underlying cybernetic totalism. Refined social progress has now in fact become a morass of ill-educated noise... amplified and tethered by the Collaborative Self (Turkle, 2011).

This sense of self is muddied further by large, multinational corporations whom control every datapoint via telecom hardware, throughput, and extensive, nearly psychometric machine intelligence. One need go no further for a prime example of this than Cambridge University's psychometric prediction API, appymagicsauce.com.

These "Siren Servers," as defined by Lanier, are "elite computers, or coordinated collection of computers, on a network; characterized by narcissism, hyper-amplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry" (Lanier, 2013, p. 54).

The Surveillance Economy

As summarized by Andrews in "George Orwell...Meet Mark Zuckerberg," Lanier essentially agrees with the Orwellian notion of Big Brother and "behavioral advertisers increasingly dictating a person's online and offline experiences" (Andrews, 2011, p. 334). The ideal price of this information minimizing the inherent creepiness (Lanier, 2013, p. 321).

In this way, "stereotyped characterizations" become economically driven and self-fulfilling rather than simply reflective. This newfound Maoism, in essence, has cost us individuality and creativity; the cybernetic totalist "hive mind" lacking responsible stewardship, censorship, and moderation.

To coin the difference, older sites like MySpace may have actually revealed more about a persona, whereas newer paradigms such as Facebook or Wikipedia seek to make voices faint and trace. Must we find a balance between this totalism and responsible moderation of our networks?

Tethered Identities

Turkle's tether to the internet's social mediums is largely based on the premise of adolescent autonomy. One can assume an extension of this applies, however, to all users of modern social networking. She believes in today's users as being woefully narcissistic, as much as Lanier believes this to be created and perpetuated by the machine itself and Andrews believes it to be a more ethereal omnipotence in charge of it all.

This collaborative sense of self, identity work, and personal avatar perhaps having ultimately (to return to Biology) been brought about by the protean human (Turkle, 2011, p. 242); wherein we accent connection and reinvention via a "fluid and many-sided" self, embracing and modifying ideas and ideologies that flourish when provided with things diverse, disconnected, and global.

Assuming the deep psychologies inherent (presentation anxieties included), it is no wonder the Singularity seems to have accelerated the human social experience. An acceleration which most definitely seems to have left the older, less supple-minded generations behind; as further evidenced by the scathing, reactionary articles such as Penny's "Cybersexism" and Rivers' "The Issue Isn't Sex, It's Violence".

Though there is clear generational bias with regard to actual need of these new social toolsets (especially by our impressionable youth), before we can begin to brainstorm solutions to our internet growing pains, we must first do-so from a point of un-biased non-reactionary objectivity. The grim stances of folk such as Penny, Rivers, and Turkle when taken objectively may seem harsh, but there is also an absolute wisdom contained in their words: we must be cautious and considerate.

Finding a Balance

To summarize a scholarly rebuttal to Digital Maoism (the wiki world particularly), "collectivism has added a revolutionary dimension to the world of online information. It is both exciting and daunting; so many more people can contribute ideas or review information for accuracy, yet we now live in a world where encyclopedias have risk disclaimers" (Tumlin 2013).

Perhaps this scholarly rebuttal of Lanier's wiki world underlies a deeper social context; that today's net-based society lacks any real risk. Ideas and even people can be easily localized, parsed, and replaced. There is no fear of failure, no possible "fall" from any distance (Zizek 2017).

Indeed, as noted philosopher Slavoj Zizek surmises, in the vein of human sexuality, "endearing foibles are imperative" and "one must pay tribute to a perverse superego." I share these beliefs, as does Lanier to an extent, but these beliefs must take shape over a framework of a responsibly constructed network relatively free of hate, sexism, rampant capitalism, and over-regulation.

Conclusion: A New Digital Ethic

The librarian, as a resource, now becomes Watchman (in the proverbial superhero sense) rather than simple purveyor. Our regulatory constraints become doorways to ultimate socio-academic acceptance and inclusion, rather than pariahs to democracy (by giving any hateful, un-inclusive voice a pulpit).

In a sense, perhaps our lessening need of official categories for one another, relying ever more on the machine to categorize us automatically, we will be brought ever closer together. The divisive boundaries that divide our ideas forever demolished and the need to counteract the collaborative avatar now being irrelevant.

At this point, at the edge of the singularity, we will have evolved the collective ethics necessary to fully realize and integrate with the social, machine intelligence we have invented; without compromising our individualism, humanity, or utility... to the angry, faceless mob.

References

Andrews, Lori. "George Orwell…Meet Mark Zuckerberg." I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy. New York: Free Press, 2011.

Dodds, Peter Sheridan, Muhamad, Roby, and Watts, Duncan J. "An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks." Science, Vol. 301, Issue 5634, 08 Aug 2003, pp. 827-829.

Kurzweil, Ray. (2005). The Singularity Is Near. New York: Viking.

Lanier, Jaron. "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism." Edge.org, 26 May. 2006.

Lanier, Jaron. "One-Half a Manifesto." Edge.org.

Lanier, Jaron. (2013). Who Owns the Future. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Lanier, Jaron. (2010). You Are Not a Gadget. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Markel Tumlin, Steven R. Harris, Heidi Buchanan, Krista Schmidt, & Kay Johnson, (2007) "Collectivism vs. Individualism in a Wiki World: Librarians Respond to Jaron Lanier's Essay 'Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism'", Serials Review, 33:1, 45-53.

Penny, Laurie. "Cybersexism." Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies, and Revolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Rivers, Caryl. "The Issue Isn't Sex, It's Violence." Viewpoints, edited by W. Royce Adams, Cengage, 2014, pp. 358-361.

Turkle, Sherry. "Growing up Tethered." Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

Zizek, Slavoj. "Synthetic Sex and Being Yourself." Big Think.