program or be programmed by douglas rushkoff

7/29/2019 Program or be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff

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one's computing happened on a laptop. In the march towardincreasing abstraction, whatever we had previously will seemlike the real thing.

By recognizing the abstracting bias of digitaltechnologies, however, we can use it to our advantage. Thesame way Benjamin would have the printed art book inspire usto visit the original work in its real world context, our digitalabstractions work best when they are used to give us insightinto something quite real and particular.

In just one example, consider the impact of fantasybaseball on the real game. Fantasy baseballfirst developedon an IBM computer in the I 960sis a game where aparticipant's roster of baseball players score points basedon their statistics over a real baseball season. It's a truly"derivative" game, in that fans create their own fantasy rostersof players, irrespective of their real teams, and in that winningand losing in the fantasy game is on a level fully abstractedfrom the baseball happening in the real world. Like any digitalsimulation, the experience of fantasy baseball is empoweringto its participants. In fact, the game only became a massphenomenon as free agenting and Major League players'strikes soured fans on the sport. As baseball became a business,the fans took back baseball as a gameeven if it had to happenon their computers.

The effects didn't stay in the computer. Leveraging thetremendous power of digital abstraction back to the real world,

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Billy Bean, coach of the Oakland Athletics, applied these samesorts of statistical modeling to players for another purpose: toassemble a roster for his own Major League team. Bean didn'thave the same salary budget as his counterparts in New Yorkor Los Angeles, and he needed to find another way to assemblea winning combination. So he abstracted and modeledavailable players in order to build a better team that went fromthe bottom to the top of its division, and undermined the waythat money had come to control the game. Since that time,many fantasy baseball players and digital statisticians havebeen hired to run the front offices of Major League teams.i'l

So while the dangers of living and working in aninherently abstracted environment are very real, so too are thebenefits. Abstraction has been around since language, perhapseven before. Money, math, theology, and games would allbe impossible without abstracted symbol systems, acceptedstandards, and some measure of central authority. The digitalrealm is no different in that regard.

Yet digital abstraction does occur still one further levelremoved from what we think of as reality. While games andmath might be abstracted representations of our world,our digital simulations are abstracted representations ofthose games and mathematics. In a world as filled withrepresentations as ours, it is easy to get so entranced by signs

Hopefully, my former NewSchool media studies student lake Kalos w illwrite a book on this, the subject of his excellent unpublished paper.

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that we lose sight of the here and now . As the postmod ernistswould remind us, we have stuff, we have signs for stuff, andwe have sym bols of signs. W hat these philosophers feared wasthat as we came to live in a world defined more by sym bols,we would lose touch altogether with the real stuff; we wouldbecome entranced by our simulated reality, and disconnectfrom the people and places we should care about.

As we watch people wearing headphones and staringinto smart phones, ensc onced in their private digital bubblesas they walk dow n what we re once public streets, it is hard notto agree with those pessimistic assessments of our pro cessioninto simulation.

Wh at the postmodernists may have underestimated,however, was the degree to w hich the tools through whichthese symbolic worlds are createdand ways in which theymight be appliedwould remain accessible to all of us. Andhow willing we may still be to use them. Just as the fram ersof the Constitution and the Talmudic scribes before themunderstood, abstract codes of laws are fineso long as w e'rethe ones w riting them.

VI. IDEN TITY

Be Yourse l f

Ou r d ig i ta l exper iences a re ou t -o fbody. Th is b iases us towa rddepersonal i zed behav ior i n an env i ronment where one 's ident i tyca n be a l i ab i l i ty . But the nwre anonymous ly we engage wi thothers , the less we exper ience the human repercuss ions o f wha twe say a nd do . By res is t ing the tempta t ion to engage f rom theappa ren t s a fe t y o f anony m i t y , we rem a i n ac c oun tab l e andp res en t and m uc h m ore l ike l y t o b r ing ou r hum an i t y w i th us i n tothe d ig i ta l rea lm.

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When signing onto the WELL, an early, dial-in digital bulletinboard based in the Bay Area, participants were welcomed withthe statement: You Own Your Own Words. To most people, thismeant a confirmation of copyrightthat everything we postedon the bulletin boards belonged to us, and couldn't be publishedby someone else without permission. To others, including me,You Own Your Own Words served as an ethical foundation:You, the human being on the other side of the modem, areresponsible for what you say and do here. You are accountable.

Given that the WELL was developed by farsightedcultural pioneers such as Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant, KevinKelly, and Howard Rheingold, we shouldn't be surprised thatthey sought to compensate for some of the disconnectiononline between people and their words. And that's why,from the very beginning, I decided to be myself online. I'veonly used one name on the Internet: Rushkoff. I figuredthe only real danger was from government, corporations,or some other "big brother" out there using what I postedagainst me in some future McCarthy hearings. Even if thatwas the case, if a whole lot of us got in the habit of standingbehind everything we said, it would be hard for anyone to getprosecuted or persecuted for what they said or believed. Thisis America, after all.Turns out my staunch approach to identity online hadn'tmade me vulnerable to the authorities so much as to theanonymousor, as they like to call themselves, Anonymous.

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Just last year, I wrote an article defending theexistence of a notorious bulletin board where young hackersoften congregated and organized against companies andorganizations they believed were preventing free speechonlineor were simply being evil in one way or another.Sometimes they did creative pranks, like replacing videofootage, and other times they simply crashed websites bycreating programs that overtaxed the enemies' servers. Aftera misunderstanding with their own Internet provider, the sitewas shut down for a short time. An online war ensued, andmany authorities and journalists called for the BBS to be shutdown. I lurked on the site for a month or so, ended up seeingsome particularly raunchy and even illegal stuff, but wrote apiece defending its existence. They are an unwieldy bunch,but sometimes it's reassuring to know that there's still a wild,uncontrollable side to the Internet.

Well, the online magazine for which I wrote the pieceframed it a bit too sensationally (another product of digitalbiases and the desperate quest for "page views"), and the kidson the BBS decided I had written a hit piece. Minutes after mypiece was posted, they decided I needed to be taken down.It was as if'! had poked at a hornets' nest: It didn't matterwhat my intentions were, the hive had been provoked. Andso dozens of anonymous young hackers went at mepostingevery personal fact they could find, crashing my websiteand the website of the online magazine, making automated

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phone calls to phone numbers associated with me, and soon. Although most of the information, photos, and phonenumbers they posted were inaccurate, a whole lot of peopleended up having photos of their homes and private numbersposted online. It wasn't pretty. The anonymous attackersdemanded the piece be unloved. Not that this would end theirassault, but it might turn their main attention elsewhere.

How could a group purportedly dedicated to free speechonline end up forcibly censoring an essay defending their freespeech in the first place? By operating anonymously.

In a hostile, depersonalized net environment, identity isone's liability. What were the kids' weapons against me? Myname, my address, my home. What does putting a picture ofsomeone's house online really imply, after all? We know whereyou live. We can get you, the real youwhile you have no ideawho we are.

But more than simply protecting them from retribution,the anonymous status of people in an online group engenderscrowd behavior. They have nothing to fear as individuals,and get used to taking actions from a distance and fromsecrecy. As a result, they exacerbate digital technology's mostdehumanizing tendencies, and end up behaving angrily,destructively, and automatically. They go from being people tobeing a mob.

The way to dampen the effects of this problem is not toretreat into anonymity ourselves, but to make being real and

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identifiable the norm. A s in the real world, the fewer peoplewho know each other, the More dangerous the neighborhood.

Of course we should all keep our bank accounts andpersonal information private; but our posts, our participation,and socializing? That really should be coming from us; 'Ourselves.The less we take res ponsibility for what we say and do online,the more likely we are to behave in ways that reflect ourworst naturesor even the worst natures of others. Becausedigital technology is biased toward depers onalization, wemust make an effort not to operate anonymously, unlessabsolutely necessary. We must be ourselves.

There are certainly instances where anonymity shouldbe maintained. Dissidents in Iran, for example, can be killedfor what they say. While posting anonymously confirms theapparent authority of the government to censor throughexecution, it can also help keep an activist alive. But of coursethere is also great political power in standing up for what onebelieves in and hoping many others join in. Every openly gayperson makes it easier for the rest of us to be open about oursexuality as wellto be more who we are, not less. Likewise,the millions of people protesting peacefully in the streets ofEastern European dictatorships were masses of individuals, notanonymous mobs. Their identities and collective personhoodwere their power.

Digital technology allows for similar collective activitybut it is not biased that way Our digital activity occurs out of



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body. Whether sending an email, typing a comment to a blogpost, or controlling an avatar in a video game, we are not inthe computer, at a discussion, or in the fantasy world withour friends. We are at home or the office, behind a computerterminal or game console. We are operating out of our bodiesand free of our identities.This can promote an illusion that we may act withoutpersonal consequences. If we choose to maintain ouranonymity as well, we are more likely to lash out from theseeming safety of obscurity As website moderators wellunderstand by now, the more anonymously people are allowedto post to a thrum, the more quickly conversations will devolveinto "flame wars" or just plain abuse. Requiring that peopleregister to make comments invariably raises the level ofconversation as well as the level of civility

This isn't just because being identifiable means the usercan be traced and caught. While the notion of repercussionsmay dampen the most aberrant or illegal behavior, it alone isn'tenough to explain how differently people act when they havean identity In fact, the civilizing effect is nearly as powerfuleven when the identity of the user has been created for thespecific online environment. For instance, when a gamerhas been working with the same character over a period ofmonths, he comes to care about that character as an extensionof himself. Even if his real world identity has never beenassociated with the character, his real world time has been

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invested in making the character a member of the communityThe player has something at stake. Similarly, many bulletinboards award reputation points to users whose posts have beendeemed valuable by other members. These points can takeyears to acquire. Like an eBay "seller rating," the more dine ithas taken to acquire a reputation in an online environment, themore it matterseven when it is entirely out of body.

Of course, the original hope of virtual communityenthusiasts was that the disembodied nature of onlineinteraction might help people overcome long-held prejudices.People couldn't actually see one another, so they often madeassumptions about the race, age, gender, and education ofother participants. Professors got into extended dialogueswith strangers onlinewho turned out to be laypeople orteenagers, while people of color were treated as equals inbusiness communities for the first time. Such anecdotes areencouraging, for sure, but they may represent less a triumphover prejudice than a detour around it. We are treatingthe stranger as an equal because we have made the falseassumption she is just like us. It's not that we see through ourprejudices; we simply don't see the person.

Our experience online is less that of the unprejudicedintellectual than that of the autistic living with Asperger'ssyndrome. While a lot has been argued back and fbrth aboutwhether computer use or gaming might cause spectrumdisorders, direct observation alone has revealed that our


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digital behaviors closely mirror those of Asperger's sufferers:a dependenc e on the verbal over the visual, low pickup onsocial cues and facial expressions, apparent lack of em pathy,and the inabi l ity to make eye contact . This describes any of usonline, typing to one another , comm only misunderstandingeach other's messages, insulting one another unintentionally,or seeking fruitlessly to interpret someone's real meaning byparsing his words repeatedly.

According to b est est imates,m only 7 percent of humancommu nicat ion occurs on the verbal level . Pi tch, volume, andother vocal tone account fbr 38 percent , and body movem entssuch as ge stures and facial expression account for a whopp ing55 percent . As we ha ve al l experienced, the way a personmakes eye contact can mean a w hole lot more to us thanwhatever he is saying.

But online, we are depending entirely on that tiny 7percent of what we use in the real world. Absent the cueson which w e usually depend to feel safe, establish rapport,or show agreem ent , we are left . to wonder what the personon the other end really means or really thinks of us. Ourmirror neuronsthe par ts of our brains that enjoy and arereinforced by seeing someone nod or smile while we aresharing somethingrem ain mute. The dopamine we expect4.Me le Koney a and A l ton Ba rbou r , Louder T h an Words: NonverbalCommunicat ion, In terpersonal Communicat ion series , (Columbus, Ohio:Merr i l l , 1976).

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to be released when som eone agrees wi th us doesn 't f low. Weremain in the suspicious, protective crouch, even when thesituation would warrant otherwiseif only we were actuallythere. Imagine l iving in a world where you were deaf ' , dumb,and blind, and had to rely on the text coming at you in orderto figure out what people meant and how they felt about you.Then, to this add not knowing w ho any of' the other peoplereally are.

Living in a 7 percent social reality has real effects. AsM ITresearcher Sherry Turkic has discovered, 1 5 1 teens online rarelyif ever apologize to one another. When they are caught havingwronged someone, they confessbut they never say they'resorry. It 's as if the factual statement of guilt matters m ore thanhaving any feel ing about i t . Sorrow goes out w i th the other 93percent.

As if desensitized by all this disembodim ent, youngpeople also exhibit an almost compensatory exhibitionism.Kids on social networking sites and video channels shareexplicit photos of themselves, not just for money or item son their "wish lists" but simply to get noticed. They seemnot to knowor to earethat everything they post remainspermanent , ready to haunt them as they seek jobs or spousesin the future. We m ight find some solace in the sensibility ofthe net ' s most techno-progressive young people , who tend to

S. She r ry Tu rk le , Alone Together: W hy We E xpect More f rom Technology andLess f rom Each Other (New Yo rk : Basic Books, 2011) .



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believe that the loss of privacy and collapse of identity they'recurrently wrestling with online is preparationa trial runfora human future in which people enjoy full telepathic powers.They believe that they are getting a taste of what it is like to seeinside other people's heads now in order to be able to handlethe full sharing of all thought in some evolutionary future.We'll see about that. Less speculatively, all this over-sharingonline is also a predictable reaction to spending so much timein a disembodied realm where nothing seems to stick, andnothing registers on a fully felt level. The easiest response is topump up the volume and intensity.

Sadly for young people, the digital realm is permanent.This robs from them the free experimentation that definesone's adolescence. While parents might not relish ponderingwhat happens between teens in the back seats of their cars orbehind the bleachers on a Friday night, this experimentation

_isn't being recorded in a database likely to outlast whateverwas chiseled onto the walls of the Parthenon.

And this permanence, once fully realized andexperienced, only pushes the more cynical user to increasinglayers of anonymity. After all, if every comment we maketo blogs or articles might be used by a future employerto evaluate our suitability for a job, we might as well saynothingat least not with our name attached.

But caving in to this sentiment has real costs: the civilityof the net, the integrity of our self-expression, andperhaps

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most significantlythe openness of our society. Once wesurrender to the status of the anonymous. our resentment athaving to do so will seep into our posts. We become even lesspresent than we are to begin with, less responsible for what wedo, and less likely to sense the impact we are having on others.We become yet more anonymous actors in a culture where it'shard enough not to antagonize the people we knowmuchless those with whom we interact namelessly and facelessly.

On the other hand, maintaining a strict sense of identityonline is liberating, even empowering. We realize that nothingwe commit to the net is truly off the record, and learn notto say anything we aren't proud to see quoted, shared, andlinked to.

We don't put words into the digital realm unless we arewilling to own them.

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program or be programmed by douglas rushkoff

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