Web 3: The End Of Humanity
by Ian R Thorpe.
2011-03-16
CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribute, non commercial, no derivs.
KEYWORDS: science, technology, internet, medium, media, web, web 2, web 3, Austin, SxSW, nerd, geek, facebook, google, reality, virtual, fantasy, cyber, life, online satire, humour
The SxSW festival in Austin, Texas used to be a music, specifically a rock festival. Then like Glastonbury commercial interests began to muscle in. Gradually the musicians were all but driven out and now the nerds have taken over. Nerds can be identified by several characteristics; one, though it is easy to be deceived by their bad haircuts and body odour issues they are not chaotic, shambolic people but dangerous control freaks; two, once they have hold of a bad idea they will cling to it more tightly than a pit bull clinging to a postman's leg; three, given a sniff of power they turn into world domination freaks; four, they do not recognise the line between good business practice and fascism; five, neither do they recognise the line between reality and fantasy.
Reading up on this years SxSW I find that for many nerds and geeks
(a lesser species like donkey are to horses or gekkos to investment bankers) the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has now become so blurred it may as well not exists.
South by Southwest Interactive, a component of the festival rather than a sideshow, is probably the world's biggest gathering of nerds, geeks and Bond villains who, operating from a high tech headquarters in the magma chamber of an extinct volcano somewhere in the Pacific Caldera or venture capitalists as the mainstream media likes to call them, plan to take over the world and turn us all into unthinking automatons.
These people plan to change the way you live, the way you think. They hate being human and would rather be robots and they want you to be a robot too. When they speak it does not sound anything like a human conversation.
WTF is your "user experience". If they mean spending a bit of time browsing the web why not just say so? Is "the gamification of healthcare" an attempt to write a zap the cancer tumour adventure or do online diagnosticians compete to empty you bank account? Since when have real people talked of "geofencing"? Or "design thinking"? Or "open source government"? What is "content strategy"? It all starts to sound like a corporate brainstorming session in which all the participants are just coming down from a mega-acid-trip.
One of the world's leading content strategists tried to explain his area of special skill. "Well, from one perspective, I guess," he said, "it's kind of everything."
Here lies the main obstacle to understanding where technology is heading to at breakneck speed. The nerds who are driving the juggernaut don't even understand themselves when they talk in such jargon. Their goal is that all human activity will take place online, that our computers will change from being tools we use to being extensions of ourselves and eventually to being our selves. Remember while computer scientists have been claiming for forty years they were on the verge of building a machine that is consciousness can think for itself (and for forty years failing at every attempt because they don't understand human consciousness) the nerds of the gaming consoles and gadgets industry which these days passes for information technology already believe that our machines are smarter than us.
The Intensity of the twentysomethings who prowl the Austin Convention Centre, juggling coffee cups, iPad 2s and the festival's 330-page schedule of events, can seem vaguely intimidating. They are no longer content with transforming that part of your life you spend at your computer, or even on your smartphone. They want you control your life, or your biosphere experience as they might put it.
While such talk may seem like delusions of grandeur on their part it is actually the root of their shared psychosis. These people are truly convinced they have brought about the final dissolution of the boundary between "life online" and "real life", between the physical reality and the virtual reality. Reality is online, gaming, cybersex, facebook friendships are reality to them.
Obviously these people need urgent psychiatric help, but while mere mortals are willing to pay for the nonsense they create. businessmen will indulge their fantasies and pay them good money to continue to inhabit their lonely, individual bubbles of unreality.
We've been hearing about this development, this moment in history when digital would supersede real since the late eighties when a Xerox technologist Mark Weiser coined the term "ubiquitous computing". He referred to the point at which technology, devices and networks would become so pervasive that "technology recedes into the background of our lives". In other words he predicted a better world in which our reliance on the machines would be total, where we would be happy to let machines make decisions for us. Weiser predicted this would herald an era of calm, peace and serenity. He was well wrong there. Control freaks are never calm and serene, they know they cannot be calm and serene until they control everything including all the other control freaks. And if one single control freak did ever gain control of everything the moment the goal was achieved paranoia would set in.
Almost ten years ago nerd propagandists started using the term "mobile" to refer to the end of computing as a desktop-only affair. The technically savvy would access the web and work, browse, continue their online experience while on the move (not a good idea while driving or walking in an area with trees or lamposts but a nerd would not be likely to know such places exist) The advent of the truly ubiquitous internet may be thrilling to nerds and their mini - me geeks but it should be deeply sinister to grounded individuals who reside in physical reality.
When the lines between reality and virtuality dissolve on a medium as devoid of privacy and security as the internet, on a medium that make it so easy for fascistic corporations to exercise control over 70% of the available information (this figure is incorrect but it is what Google claim) both sides of the debate about internet privacy and security are left without an argument.
We will not be able to say the internet of the future is a force for good or bad, only that it is. Like God it will be so remote and so beyond understanding we will only be able to say "It Is". But it is not God, it is a machine and some group will control it.
But who will control the internet of the future? How do we protect ourselves if those people are not benign? Quis custodiat custodes?
This article has already shown the nerds have created something even they do not understand. "Big ideas are like locomotives," says Tim O'Reilly, a computer book publisher and legend among webheads and geeks. "They pull a train, and the train's gotta be going somewhere lots of people want to go." It sounds like a grand metaphor but is really a banality. We understand this when we learn O'Reilly is shilling an idea he calls "sensor-driven collective intelligence", but since he coined the term "Web 2.0" (and nobody ever knew what that meant, it being a new, nerd approved label for something that had been around a long time, he seems resigned to people labelling his new brainchild "Web 3.0"
Also O'Reilly reveals his own lack of understanding of human nature if he is not aware that when offered a free ride there are many people who will jump on any train without asking the destination. Maybe The Rise And Fall of The Third Reich should be dramatised for TV to help raise awareness of that.
Web 2.0 promised to be the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet was fulfilled – ordinary users would create content instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia. It was a false promise of course, instead of delivering a creative paradise it gave us a Pandemonium of trolls, spammers, phishers, malware merchants, sex scams and bad poetry. Web 3.0 is proclaimed as the point we stop resenting those clowns and start regarding the madhouse of the cybersphere are normality. The GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, this may seem cool but when you realise that linked to a service like Foursquare it can inform some very disturbed individuals of your movements and location. Facebook had no qualms about 'sharing' with your 'community' details of your purchases, what websites you visited and more, only backing off from putting information about our bowel movements online in the face of a user rebellion. Your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, our quality of life has changed and not for the better.
"Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications," O'Reilly has written. "Motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we're looking at, and how fast we're moving . . . Increasingly, the web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an 'information shadow', an aura of data, which when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mindbending implications."
Bloody scary ones too for sane people. if you don't know exactly what private information is being shared with whom. Marissa Mayer, a Google vice-president, claimed at SxSW that credit card companies can predict with 98% accuracy, two years in advance, when a couple is going to divorce, based on spending patterns alone. She meant this to be reassuring: Google, she explained, didn't engage in such covert data-mining. (There were also many sightings of flying pigs in Austin throughout the festival.)
The thing that should really worry us is that O'Reilly in common with Zuckerberg, Google crypto - nazis Page and Brin, Bill Gates, Biz Stone and a host of others cannot see why anybody would not want such details put online. These people have obviously had very restricted social lives in fact the phrase 'emotional cripples' springs to mind.
Do we want future generations to be like them or like what they dream of being, like the Borg in Star Trek, many individual bodies with one mind and one single purpose. Do they really hate being human so much they would destroy everything that makes life so wonderful, diverse, surprising, painful, so enriching?
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