digital dystopias

This page highlights digital dystopias, visions from left and right about digital technology as the death of whatever the author holds sacred: books, television, spelling, short hair.

It covers -

• introduction
• the techno-apocalyptic
• retro-chic
• computer anxiety
• stupefaction

     introduction

Bertolt Brecht proclaimed that "Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear". The obverse of the digital euphoria highlighted on the preceding page of this guide is an anxiety about new technologies, econonomic/social developments or merely the pace of change.

Digital nightmares encompass a wide range of themes, often embodying underlying anxieties that are evident over the past millennium. They include -

• the death of privacy, whether at the hands of the state - often characterised as the panoptic or surveillance state - or private (usually transnational) organisations
• erosion of individual autonomy, in particular through adoption of automated decision systems and robot production technologies
• loss of physical integrity, including use of biotechnology and loss or manipulation of identity
• weakening of governments and local communities through globalisation and creeping takeover by international entities such as the United Nations or ICANN
• 'homogenisation' of culture, usually through the action of a handful of media conglomerates underpinned by new technologies and tools such as copyright
• internet-related extinction of particular industries (eg Napster as the first barbarians at the gate) or civil society (the internet as the sewer from hell, sapping moral fibre in the absence of resolute censorship)
• disasters that range from collapse of the global financial system or destruction of nuclear power plants and water systems through attacks by cyberterrorists to updates of past end-of-the-world tales (flesh-eating viruses, flesh-eating zombies, global warming flooding New York ...)
• alienation from nature and erosion of relationships, eg as people communicate by mobile phones rather than face-to-face, play computer games rather than sniffing the flowers, read Matt Drudge rather than Wordsworth and lose their souls online in a virtual rather than real world

Dystopias are seductive because they supply a coherence - however spurious - for making sense of the world. They are also a call to action - armageddon secures more interest than a neighbourhood squabble in shades of grey - and an entertainment, as preachers, authors and publishers have found throughout recorded history. They are also a lament for technological innovation as the god that failed.

     the techno-apocalyptic

For fans of the techno-apocalyptic there is a deliciously extreme view in Paul Virilio's Open Sky (London: Verso 1997) and The Information Bomb (London: Verso 2000) or work by Slavoj Zizek. French philosophy may not be dead but it sure smells that way. 

Paul Levinson's The Soft Edge: A Natural History & Future of the Information Revolution (London: Routledge 1998) is another 'Third Wave' tract from the author of Digital McLuhan: A Guide To The Information Millennium (London: Routledge 1999).

Derrick de Kerckhove's The Skin of Culture: Investigating The New Electronic Reality (London: Kogan Page 1997) is a 'Release 2 point something' for the McLuhanite left: a "manifesto of psychotechnology" to use the words of Pierre Levy.

Levy is the author of jargonfest Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World In Cyberspace (Cambridge: Perseus 1997) another 'Jack Derrida meets the Internet' tract, replete with babble such as

the utterance results in a finished product that is finalized rather than an open-ended dynamic of voice composition and message negotiation.

Uh huh. An hour with Pierce or Saussure might be better value.  Other readers might find more sustenance in The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: Uni of Chicago Press 1963) by Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver and in Andrew Odlyzko's The history of communications and its implications for the Internet (PDF).

Geert Lovink's Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press 2002) echoes 1920s Frankfurt School anxieties with a fashionable warning that the net is "being closed off by corporations and governments intent on creating a business and information environment free of dissent" -

a stage of numbed 'massification,' a climate dominated by online surveillance, zero privacy, viruses and filters, information overload and a diffuse paranoia about the online Other.

Fibreculture echoed that alert and works such as Todd Gitlin's Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (New York: Holt 2002), McKenzie Wark's zany A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2004), Branden Hookway's Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World (London: Princeton Architectural Press 1999) or Steve Talbott's Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines (Sebastopol: O'Reilly 2007) and The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst (Sebastopol: O'Reilly 1995), claiming that

We suffer today from data-sickness, from the becoming-disease of information. The great epidemics of centuries past have been complemented by epidemics of signification propagated by media, the mimetic rivalries of desire are replaced by the replicating mechanisms of viral culture and the vampire of capital gives way to the parasite of empire. Are there any seeds for a new health, for creative potential, germs of resistance to be extracted from an ecology in which the divisions between nature and culture, matter and information, biological life and art are becoming indiscernible?

It is not clear how anxiety about information overload can be easily reconciled with enthusiasm for blogging, hailed as ending the tyranny of 'big media'.

Lovink calls for

the injection of political and economic competence into the community of freedom-loving cyber-citizens, to wrest the Internet from corporate and state control

and protect "core Internet values".

Others have fretted less about civil society or the mediasurus and more about the supposedly imminent collapse of the infrastructure. Hannu Kari gained attention for his 2004 Internet Is Deteriorating And Close To Collapse: What Can We Do To Survive?’ presentation (PDF). Particular infrastructure vendors have less amusingly forecast meltdown unless users acquired their servers and switches.

Of course if the damned digits do not kill you Hubbert's Peak or other nasties will. For a forecast of the imminent collapse of industrial civilisation see Joel Kovel's The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (London: Zed Books 2002) and James Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Grove 2005)

the world will enter The Long Emergency, a horizonless era of conflict, withering global economic relations, and energy starvation - with plummeting standards of living

or Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2003) by Kenneth Deffeyes. There is a more elegant rendition in Mike Davis' Dead Cities (New York: New Press 2002) and Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Vintage 1997). Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) is somewhat more optimistic.

Online chiliasm is discussed in more detail here.

     retro chic

Among the jeremiads Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil - Second Thoughts On The Information Highway (Doubleday: New York 1995) and High-Tech Heretic: Reflections by a Computer Contrarian (Doubleday: New York 1999) reach the entirely unsurprising conclusion that a life does not necessarily equal being online and indeed that the non-digital world, unlike Broadway, is alive and well.

There is somewhat more bite in Resistance to New Technology: Nuclear Power, Information Technology & Biotechnology (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1995) edited by Martin Bauer.

Sven Birkerts' romantic The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in An Electronic Age (Boston: Faber 1994) is an upmarket version of Barry Sanders' potboiler A Is For Ox: The Collapse of Literacy & The Rise of Violence In An Electronic Age (New York: Vintage 1995): television = moral collapse + spiritual impoverishment. If only it was that simple.

Birkerts frets, like Clive Hamilton, that

My core fear is that we, as a culture, as a species, are becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth - from the Judeo-Christian premise of unfathomable mystery - and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness.

Chellis Glendinning proclaimed that

Neo-Luddites have the courage to gaze at the full catastrophe of our century. The technologies created and disseminated by modern Western societies are out of control and desecrating the fragile fabric of life on Earth.

Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites & Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age (New York: Perseus 1996) by Kirkpatrick Sale suffers from oxygen starvation and compares unfavourably with the great EP Thompson. Ted 'Unabomber' Kaczynski carried the war to 'the enemy' with a parcel bomb or two.

Neil Postman's Building A Bridge To The 18th Century: How The Past Can Improve Our Future (New York: Knopf 1999) - come back, dead white males, all is forgiven - builds on the sentiments in his Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture To Technology (New York: Vintage 1993) and Richard Sclove's Democracy & Technology (New York: Guilford 1995).

Postman tugs the heart strings but, we think, looks decidedly self-indulgent when viewed from the perspective of Leo Marx's The Machine In The Garden: Technology & The Pastoral Ideal In America (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1967), Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press 1977) and the essays in Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology & the American Future (Cambridge: MIT Press 1989) edited by Joseph Corn.

Judy Wajcman memorably claims in Feminism Confronts Technology (University Park: Uni of Pennsylvania Press 1991) that the problems are attributable to boys and their toys. Technology, it seems, is gendered, with 'masculine' technologies opposed to 'women's technologies': "horticulture, cooking and childcare."

There are more insights (and entertainment) in Talking Back To The Machine (New York: Copernicus 1999), a collection of essays for the Association For Computing Machinery edited by Peter Denning, Computerization & Controversy: Value Conflicts & Social Choices, (San Diego: Academic Press 1996) edited by Charles Dunlop & Rob Kling and Technology, Pessimism & Postmodernism (Amherst: Uni of Massachusetts Press 1994) edited by Yaron Ezrahi.

The Age of Access: The New Culture Of Hypercapitalism Where All Of Life Is A Paid-For Experience (New York: Tarcher 2000) is another diatribe from dyspeptic-by-numbers Jeremy Rifkin. In 1992 the world would end because we were eating beef, the end of work was in sight in 1995, next was biotech, now apparently it is the internet. It is echoed in Affluenza (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 2005) and Growth Fetish (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 2003) by Clive Hamilton & Richard Denniss, fashionable laments against modernity.

Theodore Roszak's The Cult Of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise On High Tech, Artificial Intelligence & The True Art Of Thinking (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1996) is characteristically overstated.

We recommend instead Dan Schiller's Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999) and paper Ambush on the I-Way: Commoditization on the Electronic Frontier.

A supplementary profile explores film, fiction and sociological studies about web-centred dystopias and conspiracy theory.

     computer anxiety

A dour conclusion from the social sciences over the past century is that although the expression of emotions varies over time and place, ambient levels of anxiety appear to have remained constant.

In the 'digital era' few people in advanced economies appear to have an abiding belief in witches - although works such as Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt (New York: BasicBooks 1995) by Debbie Nathan & Michael Snedeker suggest a disturbing credence - but anxiety has clustered around the net and computing.

It has been claimed that around 30% of the US workforce suffers from 'computer anxiety' and 5% of the overall US population from 'debilitating computer anxiety'. Estimates vary widely, with claims that up to 58% of US higher education students "feel or have felt some level of computer anxiety".

Mark Brosnan's Technophobia: The Psychological Impact of Information Technology (New York: Routledge 1998) reports that between 25% and 35% of school age children and seniors in advanced economies have an irrational fear of computers; other authors suggest that up to 85% of the public have "expressed some level of computer anxiety".

We wonder whether there are similar levels of anxiety about telephones, cars or even toasters. A 2005 study by Adrian Angold claimed that one in 10 preschool children "could be suffering from anxiety, depression or other mental illnesses", supposedly "the same rate of mental health disorders as teenagers, and not much less than adults".

Computerphobia: How to Slay the Dragon of Computer Fear (Wayne: Banbury 1984) by Samuel Weinberg & Mark Fuerst similarly estimates that up to 5% of people are "severely computerphobic", with reactions such as nausea, sweaty palms, dizziness, and high blood pressure. (Reading our bank statements on old-fashioned cellulose induces similar responses.)

One response might be to encourage hardware and software designers - or workplace process engineers - to heed the suggestions in Donald Norman's The Invisible Computer (Cambridge: MIT Press 1998) and other writing about human-centric computing.

Alarmists about phobias and palpitations might benefit from works such as Rita Kohrman's intelligent Computer Anxiety in the 21st Century: When You Are Not In Kansas Any More (PDF) or past diagnoses of 'railway spine' - going faster than 30 mph induces insanity? - explored here.

Broader points of reference are provided in American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York Uni Press 1994) by Peter Stearns, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) by Carol Stearns & Peter Stearns, Dark Light: Electricity & Anxiety From the Telegraph To The X-Ray (Orlando: Harcourt 2004) by Linda Simon, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History (Chicago: Chicago Uni Press 1986), John Corrigan's Business of the Heart - Religion & Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2001), Tom Lutz' American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 1991) or An Emotional History of the United States (New York: New York Uni Press 1998) edited by Peter Stearns & Jan Lewis.

Questions about electro-smog or electrosensitivity are highlighted here.

     stupefaction

Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) (New York: Tarcher 2008) announced that

the dawn of the digital age once aroused our hopes: the Internet, e-mail, blogs, and interactive and ultra-realistic video games promised to yield a generation of sharper, more aware, and intellectually sophisticated children ... we assumed that teens would use their know-how and understanding of technology to form the vanguard of this new, hyper-informed era. That was the promise. But the enlightenment didn't happen. The technology that was supposed to make young adults more astute, diversify their tastes, and improve their minds had the opposite effect.

As other pages of this site note, such disappointed expectations - and associated media brouhaha - are perennial: they have been expressed in relation to television, radio, print and even writing.

There have been broader laments regarding video games, comics, film and even telephones (the 'death of writing', the work ethic and defence to white protestant males).

That is evident in works such as David Sheff's Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children (New York: Random 1993) and pop responses such as Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead 2005) by Steven Johnson.

The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007) by Tara Brabazon offers a somewhat more nuanced view than Bauerlein, arguing that ills relate to how technologies are used - and whether educators are prperly resourced - rather than technology per se.





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