The engineers’ worldview and the fiction that is created as a critique to engineers’ creations forms an Ouroboros of destruction in the name of engineers’ own job security. Engineers’ work begets fiction, begets new engineering projects, begets fiction again, which in turn begets position papers about the possibility of it all going wrong. Each step requires additional funding, that cannot wait because the latest threat is already overdue. Charlie Brooker makes a Black Mirror episode about it, and then another engineer reads dystopia as a new product idea and so on. The engineers are still operating the siege engines, but they are also the ones building things back up, all the while warning us of the new siege engines they’re building. Perhaps, instead of such fictions, we should have more stories about engineers coming to terms with the consequences of their creations.
All of this might be less worrying if there was a robust and popular movement against this authoritarian engineering establishment that manufactures its own worst enemy. What we have instead are people who prescribe block chains and disconnection sleepaway camps. The former conflates encryption and privacy tools with confronting the corrupting influence of power. The latter clutch their pearls at teenagers and wax nostalgic about conversations and deep thinking.
When the TSA announced plans to require passengers to remove books and other reading materials my friend and colleague Nathan Ferguson shared the announcement on Facebook with the note, “this is why you need strong encryp— oh, wait.” The program was short-lived and only affected a few airports but the joke is telling nonetheless: privacy advocates have spent so much time hyping and developing encryption technologies that we are in danger of ignoring the politics that make encryption necessary in the first place. That 1997 Wired article bemoaned the fact that malevolent software was “easy to duplicate, hard to restrict, and often frustratingly dual-use, civilian or military.” The same can be said in the opposite direction. Every time a new privacy invention is produced under the auspices of individual privacy, that technology is no doubt also useful to the powerful entities that we want privacy from.
As for the pearl-clutchers, we would do well to interrogate their class allegiances. As I argued a year ago in an essay about Sherry Turkle’s body of work, critics who write about the importance of disconnection generally show “a dedication to a fairly conservative worldview where the pace of work and the environment in which it takes place should be set exclusively by bosses acting as wellsprings of morality.” Busy parents and lonely kids are often the biggest targets of invective for finding escapism or connection on screens while corporate bosses are celebrated for mild changes to governance structures so as to require in-person meetings instead of Skype calls.
Equally important is to reckon with the trends in our culture that give us people like James Damore, the former Google engineer who wrote a memo decrying Google’s diversity initiatives as a “politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.” He was quickly fired and —irony of ironies for someone that describes himself as “centrist with libertarian inclinations—has taken the issue up with the National Labor Relations Board. The memo’s contents should surprise no one with a cursory knowledge of Silicon Valley’s culture. And here I am not necessarily talking about the retrograde gender politics per se, but the science he brings to bear to defend his positions.
Rather than consult anthropology and sociology to study an issue that is distinctly social and cultural, the links that pepper his ten-page manifesto are mostly evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and sociobiology. The very premise of his memo is that biology trumps society in the formation of individuals. This is an idea that is shared by both the reactionary right that has welcomed him as a righteous cause célèbre and the ostensibly liberal left whose popular views on society and individual behavior are pulled from similar fields. The mainstream liberal is fed a steady diet of Radiolab, The TED Radio Hour, Hidden Brain, Invisibilia, Note to Self, and Freakonomics Radio, all of which heavily favor the same sort of logic—humans behavior is largely determined by biology and best studied using statistical analyses using big data—that Damore used. Damore, like the Unabomber, only differs from the Silicon Valley consensus in that he has a different take on the same set of basic premises.
