We shape the world and the world shapes us.
We have become voluntary rats in the digital
maze of the long and dirty tail of ecommerce.
Social creatures one and all, we are joyfully
and miraculously threading ourselves together
into digital networks of every description,
sharing creativity, information and meaning
across past boundaries, both real and arbitrary.
But we at the same time we are mindlessly taking
the bait set out by a new breed of high-tech trapper.
We gladly nibble on surreptitiously scattered
crumbs of implicit intimacy, savor self-centered
flirts and innuendo, willingly devour disingenuous
praise, and recklessly rise erect to the ecstatic
schadenfreude of exposing the misstep, the
mistake, the fall. And so, every click becomes
a trail, with scents and scat eagerly scooped up,
tested, mapped and then charted in exquisite
detail by the digital trapper’s department of
behavioral analytics.
Coyote knows how to cover his tracks. We
however have much to learn. We are having
too much fun to take the time to watch those
who are watching us. Social creatures, one and
all, yes. And now we are free to roam the labyrinth
of electronic wonders we hold in our hands. But
freedom necessarily has two sides. One is effortless
and enjoyable: the freedom to, to do and think and
consume what we like. The other side—equally
necessary and essential—is the hard and
unglamorous work of vigilance. This is the freedom
from side. Freedom from sets limits. As a highway
sets a speed limit of 100 k for all without exception.
As an economy sets limits on the interest charged
for borrowed cash. Or as a digital network sets
ipso facto limits by virtue of its essential common
ground of shared protocol.
Vigilance and surveillance share the same root,
vigilare, ‘to keep watch,’ as in keeping a nightwatch
as one’s comrades soundly sleep. At present, we
are not being vigilant enough, watchful enough of
those who are watching us. They are watching us
for two reasons, both of which have to do with
control. Just as we are social creatures, one and all,
we are also eager to control for self-advantage,
either for reasons of political power, or for financial
gain, or, most dangerous of all, both at once. We
would do well to remember that Benito Moussolini, no
friend of freedom, is said to have defined fascism
as the state when economic power and political
power are separated by no more than the breadth
of a cigarette paper. Vigilance is needed to ensure
that our track of both digital delights as well as
our unwanted and best forgotten detritus do not
become both fire and tabac of those who wouldn’t
think twice about smoking us alive, and then
stamping out real freedom like a discarded butt
under their blackshirt boots.
The raven follows the coyote in a web of mutual
benefit, without either one trying to control. What
is missing in the digital realm is a clear sense of
the idea of limit, of freedom from as well as
freedom to. We need to be more vigilant. Vastly
more vigilant. For freedom is Culture’s greatest
creative artifact, and just as Nature’s fundamental
asymmetry is that creation is slow, and destruction
fast, we can lose our cultural electronic freedoms
with the flip of a switch. Intelligent limit needs to
be given articulation and structure as the shared
ground of common sense, and as simple,
universally applicable and disinterested, law.
[Why are there so few new documentary films on
the REAL backrooms of digital, social networks?]