Tim O'Reilly's WTF? A book that tells us how to keep the technology baby and
throw out the Big Tech bathwater
https://boingboing.net/2017/12/02/love-the-sin-hate-the-sinner.html
(via Instapaper)
Tim O'Reilly has his finger on the pulse of technology and the people who make
it in a way that is unmatched by anyone in the world; the publisher of the
world's best-loved computer books, the host of technology's best-loved
conferences, the convenor of the most important conversations about tech and
its people, O'Reilly is literally uniquely situated to understand the arc,
trajectory, and possible destinations of technology and its impact on real
people, which is what separates his breakout business book, WTF?: What's the
Future and Why It's Up to Us, from rest of the field.
I clearly remember the first time I met Tim O'Reilly: it was the inaugural
meeting of the Intel Peer to Peer Working Group, in 2000, convened to create
order out of the explosive chaos of P2P startups that had sprung up in the wake
of Napster's runaway success (Napster at the time was the fastest-adopted
technology in the history of the world).
We all sat there, us hopeful entrepreneurs, engineers, and hangers-on, and
listened as Intel laid out the game plan. They would create a pyramid with a
few incumbent technology giants at the top, paying six-figure dues and getting
the final say in the group's disposition. The rest of us would pay five figures
for the privilege of sitting silently in the back row and listening while the
big guys decided what we'd do.
We were lulled into a kind of hypnotic paralysis. I remember thinking that it
sounded terrible, but everyone else was going along with it, and after all,
what did I know about how standardization of a new industry worked? Maybe this
was how it was supposed to be.
Then Tim O'Reilly stood up and tore into Intel. The promise and excitement of
P2P was the deconstruction of hierarchy, the power of anyone to talk to anyone
about anything without permission or interference from anyone else, an
evolution in the internet's own pluripotent "end-to-end" principle. Why was
Intel imposing mainframe, command-and-control thinking on a system that
promised the abolition of such a thing?
It was like being woken from a dream. I remember looking over at Tim and
flashing on the Norman Rockwell painting, "Freedom of Speech," and realizing
that goddamnit, he was right, this was bullshit. He was right, and that speech,
I believe, killed the plan Intel had to control and tame the P2P world.
We live in a curious moment, now, when our technology, our institutions, and
our heroes are unraveling, and their darkest aspects are overshadowing all the
benefit they've brought us. From Louis CK to Google, from the Democratic Party
to cryptography, from GMO to geoengineering, we are in the midst of a
reckoning, and forced to confront the uneasy contradictions that we can no
longer paper over. That's where WTF? comes in.
Recall that so much of what we love has always had a dark side lurking in it.
Mark Twain's young girls and Lewis Carroll's younger girls; Gandhi's deplorable
treatment of his wife; Orwell's naming names to the secret police; Walt
Disney's rabid, far-right union-busting; and so on.
Historically, we've treated these deeply flawed people as having only two
possible states: shameful and banished, or papered over and angelic. The cost
of acknowledging the sins of these people was to give up their works: you
couldn't honor Gandhi's principled work if you admitted his misogyny, so you
buried the misogyny to preserve the principle. This meant that the survivors
and victims of monstrous deeds had to have their pain weighed against the
legitimacy of the works of the people who inflicted it.
It's a false dichotomy that works in the abuser's favor. If the cost of
acknowledging Louis CK's rapey behavior is denying the merit of his comedy,
then a survivor of that behavior has to convince us not to merely condemn CK --
she has to convince us to reframe our history with his work. The reality is
that Louis CK made good art and did terrible, unforgivable things. The
unforgivable things doesn't change the intrinsic merit of the work (though it
obviously taints our view of it), and the path to confronting the behavior is
much more direct and easier to traverse if we acknowledge this.
The same is true in business and technology. The convenience of Amazon and
Uber, the pleasures of Facebook, the miraculous knowledge-augmentation of
Google, the design of App Stores, the brilliance of Netflix -- they are all
real, and true. And also real and undeniable are the abuses of these companies:
deliberately addictive technology that abuses our mental health; tax evasion,
monopolism, and Zuboffian Surveillance Capitalism with all that entails.
The question is, can we have one without the other? The answer from Facebook,
Twitter, Google, Amazon, Comcast, Apple, Uber, et al is no. If you want to be
able to switch from hailing cabs by waving your arms and praying to pressing a
button; if you want to be able to search all the world's knowledge; if you want
to keep in touch with friends (or foment revolution); if you want rollicking
political debate, etc, etc, then the price you pay is all the baggage of
late-stage capitalism: extreme wealth inequality, labor abuses, waste,
surveillance, control.
Tim O'Reilly's history with computers and the internet pre-dates the rise of
these grotesqueries, the financialization of the tech sector. He writes
beautifully about the passion, the excitement, and the tremendous progress that
technologists (from every walk of life) have brought to the tech sector, and
cleanly cleaves the technology from its economic and political context. He
dares to assert that we can love the sin and hate the sinner. That the reason
tech went toxic was because unethical people made unethical choices, but those
choices weren't inevitable or irreversible.
The progressive insistence that the baby is inseparable from the bathwater
works to the favor of big business and big tech. If technology's critics insist
that you have to choose between Facebook and surveillance and manipulation,
they affirm Facebook's own position. But if critics insist that Facebook has
deliberately, cynically married something wonderful with something terrible,
they invite people to join their case and fight for a good Facebook, rather
than demanding a kind of antitech hairshirt that insists that you have to give
up, not demand better.
WTF? is a book about technology as it was, as it is, and as it could be. It is
told from the perspective of someone who has been personally present at the
most important moments in the fast-paced history of tech, and who played a
significant role in those moments. It's a rare and important piece of criticism
that inspires even as it dissects. Please do read this book.
WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us [Tim O'Reilly/Harperbusiness]
(Image: Brian Solis, CC-BY)
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