Modern tech has various ways to correct user error or improve some given outcome: Grammar autocorrect, photo filters, watch-next recommendation systems, snap to grid, file compression and viral media. But from experience we know that the technologies’ idea of what’s right or wrong with what you typed isn’t always aligned with what you tried to say.
The introduction of market competition on digital platforms, disguised as the attention economy, is the main pushback against humane values. Our agency — the free will that makes us human — is often treated by out technologies as a corner to cut, an error to correct, an outcome to optimize and it will ultimately rob us of what makes us different from unconscious machines.
Our surroundings have an impact on both individual and collective means, this is why old-fashioned technologies — like traditional advertisement or archaic computers — had only a passive impact on people, they were innocently persuasive.
All tech is an illusion. Not because we live on a simulation or other crazy conspiracies, but because all tech seeks to solve a practical problem unique to humans. For a techno-solution to work it must present itself as human comprehensible, it’s synthetic and plastic but it looks for sympathy and understanding. Tech must pretend to be something more than the sum of its parts; in this way all technologies are illusions. A new watch or a new car don’t make you a better person unlike the persuasive technologies of advertisement may lead you to believe.
Digital technologies are illusions as well, merely computerized simulations. The audio from a voice call pretends to be more than just sine waves, pictures are simply a grid of pixels and the computer desktop is just a visual metaphor.
This medium trickery has one main thing in common, they assume that living and experiencing are synonymous with capturing enough pixels, data points and audio samples: A pixel isn’t an image but if you capture just enough pixels it might trick your brain into seeing the full image.
The illusion of achieving “the full picture” is still just an illusion, because there’s always something missing: The human touch of experience. If our surrounding technologies treat us like something inherently less than human, then how will we treat others?
All technologies also have an invisible purpose, an implicit social, political and economic agenda. An app may have its own purpose, but it still runs on top of an operating system with an agenda of its own. Tech’s hidden values are the very same presuppositions of the society in which they were created: The status quo.
These values are the same values that presuppose that capturing equals experiencing and prioritize pretending over “being”, their execution on society’s hardware is what’s making us act less like free agents and more like cold robots. Our technologies simply prefer synthetic over organic and autocorrect us for it.
We treat each other like robots to the extent that now we must prove our humanity: Prove you’re not a robot.
“Everywhere I went online this year, I was asked to prove I’m a human. Can you retype this distorted word? Can you transcribe this house number?” (Read, 2018).
The operating system running beneath it all is (to put it bluntly) the economic system that rules the market. This is why the attention economy happened, the market needed to expand so it found our attention as the next natural resource to mine. The invisible values of the attention economy are presuppositions of the free market, were the big fish eat the little ones, it just happens that the smallest and most basic of fish is our humanity.
Just like the industrial revolution displaced workers in favor of machines, the attention economy will autocorrect human behavior to a more passive, unconscious and mechanized state of being.
With the incentive to compete the human touch becomes secondary, for example, how can a local indie band compete against the highly produced and enhanced K-pop groups? It simply can’t compete. The free market of attention prefers over produced music: Autotuned vocals and instruments synced to a metronome over the subtle inflections of the human voice and feel-based rhythm.
In the same vein, how can a family photo compete for likes against a digitally beautified selfie? In the race for attention our humanity is simply an obstacle to overcome, a bug to fix.
The type of content we freely put out also reflects our dehumanization:
“YouTube, which plays host to weeks’ worth of inverted, inhuman content. TV episodes that have been mirror- flipped to avoid copyright takedowns” (Read, 2018).
Youtubers make videos that the algorithm wants, bloggers obsess over search engine optimization, users work around word or content restrictions by carefully coding their language. Now thanks to our media and technology environment we act less human.
Social media platforms that adopt the attention economy lead us to this Darwinist mindset, were we voluntarily give up our humanity in order to compete within the market.
Just as our surroundings impact us collectively our tech impacts us individually. But the direction tech is nudging us towards is determined not only by the programmer’s intentions, but by the operating system beneath it all.
The embedded values of tech are economic free market values, were agency and humanity are in the way of competition. To autocorrect humanity means to apply filters, compression and abstraction to people to slowly push us away from what makes us human and towards cold & predictable behavior.
But we’re not like machines! We can embrace ambiguity and reject binary, back and white thinking; we can truly live and experience the world instead of just capturing enough data points, we can act freely and with agency instead of blindly following the instructions written in lines of code.
We’re human, let’s act like it.
Reference used:
Read, M. (2018). How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. USA: New York Magazine, The inteligencer. Gathered from: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
image used:
Lance Roggendorff 2013, Flickr, CC BY 2.0.