Technological zombification is much more than phone addiction, it’s more in line with being the only human left in the zombie apocalypse.
Digital platforms invade, classify and divide us. Our favorite platforms have taught us to look at one another as fundamentally different, incompatible and by extension: Less than human.
The individualist mindset tech helps perpetuate is partly responsible with the problems of our time: Online outrage, tech addiction, the rise of mental health issues, narcissistic tendencies and a general need to tag the other as an outcast worthy of fear or hatred.
Are this the inevitable consequences of tech innovation? If all tech is fundamentally synthetic, are we destined to mimic our cold, artificial and inhumane machines? If this is what progress looks like, could we change our ways without leaving behind our advancements? And if we have come to the point of reducing our humanity so much that we think of others as less than human, or as zombies to fight against, could we get our humanity back?
As individuals we’re beings, together we’re human. Throughout our evolution we have learned to become a collective species, we need each other. We can only express and or perform our humanity in relationship with other people: Language, self-awareness, love, among other distinctly human actions only work in company. Our humanity begins to fade when our relationships and connections do.
The average startup’s goal is to please investors, therefore anything that compromises productivity becomes an obstacle to “autocorrect”, for example: Worker small talk.
Uber drivers, whom Uber considers not wage-worthy employees but independent gig contractors, work within an app that doesn’t allow for drivers to talk to one another, it’s simply not an option on the app menu. This design choice boosts productivity by dissocializing workers and lowering their empathy.
A cab driver inside an environment that prioritizes productivity over anything else becomes only useful as long as he keeps the car towards the set destination. When self-driving technology allows for it, the workers will be rendered unnecessary. The attention economy accelerates this need for dehumanization.
For many digital platforms our humanity is merely an obstacle. Another dehumanizing technique is to treat us like users. Accepting our roll as users means to accept ourselves in terms other than our humanity.
Becoming a user unlocks a new option for social interaction, we obtain anonymity. Many people find it so easy to give up one’s own morality and to look at other people as unconscious usernames or non-player characters to be defeated in a kind of videogame, all thanks to the mask of anonymity, a game were your social status is not part of the game.
Cyberbullying differs from traditional bullying in its power structure and the relationship between bully, victim and repercussions. Face to face harassment always puts the aggressor in risk, but online there is none, no social or authority driven consequences, if the bully simply changes his username.
The systemic categorization of people as users separates the categorized from their identity and from other people. Only as scattered and distant individuals we can begin to justify bigotry: Intolerance seems justifiable if the outgroup has been stripped of their humanity, moved to a distant place by distant screens and diluted their identities by abstraction and categorization.
But tech hasn’t always brought us apart, the atomization we experience has more to do with the industrial revolution than with the digital revolution. The antihuman values are part of the legacy code, not the original design.
Digital media and technologies are based on highly humane values like connection, collaboration and creativity. The big-name brands and products like Google, Facebook and Amazon are actually built with volunteer made and maintained code, open source style.
The father of the Internet itself Tim Berners-Lee has publicly stated his humanitarian goals:
“The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy.”
(Berners-Lee, T. 1999)
To the visionaries that built our digital landscape technology was simply a tool and not the solution itself. Steve Jobs has famously described computers as “a bicycle of the mind” (Jobs S. 1990), the destination of this bicycle can be steered with a simple turn of the handlebars.
If the values of the industrial revolution taught tech how to trap us with the Net, then an unconscious decision took place. Without thinking about it, the engineers and designers behind digital platforms gave for granted industrial inhumane values and implemented them into their programs.
The consequences of perpetuating the status quo meant to tear us apart form one another. We lose our humanity with division, this helps drive the worst of us: Harassment, racism, the end of trust and untimely our own dehumanization.
Our division is reflected in the common reactions of our time: Blocking people, trending a topic, to follow or “cancel” whoever we deem worthy, to capture and analyze user data, to separate, to build a wall.
This individualistic mindset was accidental. The Web and digital technologies as a whole have the power to connect us. All is not lost. Let’s be conscious about our code, which will unconsciously take us wherever we point its front wheel.
Hopefully this bicycle of the mind takes us closer to one another, closer to being human.
References used:
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Berners-Lee, T. (1999) Weaving the Web. USA: Harper.
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Jobs, S. (1990) Steve Jobs — The lost interview (rebroadcasted in 2012). USA: Magnolia Pictures.
Image used:
“World of Warcraft Addict Series 3/9” by vectorlyme, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.