Personal computer algorithms: Revisiting the Modern Gnosticism thesis (part iii)
Computers are getting better all the time, right! Well, nooo. Not really. At least, not for me, and in more ways than one.
Before going further, two qualifying remarks. First, I use a Mac since 1985, practically every day, so I cannot be said to lack experience. Second, the issue is serious, as the justification of our rulers, namely that we are progressing each day, with stunning discoveries and improvements marking each year if not months only applies, supposedly, to biotechnology and telecommunications technology – in the other areas little terribly new happened over the past half century or so in terms of ‘basic scientific-technological discoveries’, as those who follow such developments argue. Now, developments in biotechnology are quite controversial, as anybody is certainly aware of it. So, if even in telecommunication technology such improvements are questionable, then the self-justification of modernity through scientific-technological progress is becoming ever more treacherous.
New generation computers and mobile phones are hailed practically every year. Nobody would question that in terms of speed and memory computers used in these days are incomparably better than not just those of 1985, but even of 2005. However, this means evaluating technology in its own terms, ignoring what all such changes, for various reasons, made to disappear or – using a quite problematic term of economic theory, but at least making the point even to those who can only reason in such manner – what was the ‘opportunity cost’ of such telecommunication technological progress. But my point here is that compared to about ten years ago, the new computers know precious little more. This is not even surprising, as it is well known that any innovation runs its S curve, meaning that after a slow start it suddenly starts to pick up, seemingly accelerating into infinity, but then eventually the growth rate is flattening, and a ceiling is reached.
Well, that is fine, but it does not explain why, in my view, the new computers, from the experience of a ‘normal’ user, are definitely worse than they were, say – in my case – about eight years ago. The reason is that the inflated discourse about accelerated progress must be maintained, even if this is not true, and so technological innovation – which anyway almost always can be described as a ‘trick’ – is replaced by mere tricks; especially – following the hyper-new buzzword – through automatised algorithms. And the result, even here, as everywhere else, as I started to argue in my previous articles, is to increase the annoyance, nervousness, and stress level of ‘normal’ users; apart from promoting depersonalisation.
Let me offer again a few concrete examples, which should be familiar enough to anyone using the most recent Mac laptops, and probably most of the other similar computers.
The jumping cursor
The possibility of shifting the cursor in a personal computer to any line within a document is one of the most appreciated improvements of such computers over typewriters or handwritten manuscripts. In truth, even this progress has its drawbacks, as pre-computer documents preserved the progress of thinking which is erased by the computer, and which occasionally, at least for some, renders thinking and writing more problematic. Leaving this issue aside, what is specific in the latest generation of Macs is that the cursor starts to jump on its own. What it means is that one is writing a text, and then, out of the blue, the cursor moves up or down on the page, jumping several words or lines, and so the text typed appears completely out of place. It might happen that the new text is just inserted into the previously written text, but might simply delete a small or even large segment of the text, which is much more annoying.
The reason for this, I was told, is that the new keyboards are extra sensitive, so if my fingers, or even a piece of my shirt or sweater touches them, or the main pad, they interpret this that I would like to shift the cursor. Or, this is their algorithm. I asked these friends to eliminate this ‘improvement’, but they said this is not possible. The new computers are built with such a facility (when I wrote this word ‘facility’, the cursor jumped after ‘fac’, placing ‘ility’ into the line above, then – another brilliant algorithm! – the ‘I’ became capitalised, so I had to stop writing, shift ‘Ility’ back into the line I intended, altering the capitalisation – which for this article even serves as a handy illustration, but in general it simply interferes with the writing process, and confuses one’s thoughts – ‘interference’ and ‘confusion’ being two central mode of operations of trickster logic), supposedly in ‘our interest’.
Here I need to digress into who this ‘us’ is. As, consequence of an economistic ideology that is become more virulent literally by the day, it is not in ‘our’ interests, us users, teachers, pensioners, employees, teenagers, that such developments are made, but strictly in order to make more money, for which we are tricked in every imaginable way; and often, increasingly, we are just told the facts that were decided over and above our heads, like in the case of the unilateral changes in contracts imposed on use almost bimonthly by mobile phone companies. If any users are aimed with such changes, who express a vocal interest and are listened to, they are what could be called as the computer nerds, or people who literally spend every minute of their waking life in front of a screen, and who therefore follow and cherish every nonsensical innovation that we others are not aware of and hardly can cope with.
Here we reach and extremely important aspect of modern technology, in particular the increasing use of automatic algorithms: that they simply don’t leave you in peace. You cannot stop moving. You must run with the crowd – which in this case is not even a numerical majority, just the crowd of computer nerds. Technology in our days most decisively is not a tool that helps you, but which makes you dependent on its services, without which you simply cannot survive, and then it keeps changing and spins your head until you do not resign yourselves to giving up your character, identity and independence and accept to serve it, by running after it. You are forced to organise your life around increasingly non-sensical and self-moving technological changes, that not only are self-moving but that move you. So beware, kind reader, as even in these days you already hardly have any choice, and soon you’ll have even less: strictly following the slogan ‘free to choose’ – so appealing, until one realises that it is based or built on the destruction of kindness and benevolence.
Hitting the wrong keys
One of the main new features of the ‘new generation’ MacBook Airs is the extremely sensitive keyboard – central also for the ‘jumping cursor’ feature discussed previously. The underlying idea is to save the trouble of ‘hitting’ the keys – a mere touch is sufficient. At least, this is what – evidently – Apple thinks we all need. Well, I certainly did not need them, and for a number of reasons – which I believe have their general relevance.
To start with, previously it was impossible to print two letters at the same time. In the ‘antediluvial’ times of typewriters, if one by accident hit two keys, they got tangled up, and it was usually simple to continue writing. However, even that was a kind of meaningless and troublesome technological interference with one’s writing, as when writing by hand it was impossible to write down by accident two letters at the same time, and so writing followed one’s train of thoughts smoothly. It was by no means accidental that many writers and thinkers refused to use typewriters, and the victory of technology was certainly not due to ‘free choice’; rather, after a time, through policies of editors, publishers and schools, among others, it was imposed that hand-written texts were no longer accepted. At every level of its progress, technology uses and requires violent, constraining force.
Still, one must go on, and can accommodate oneself, using and abusing the adaptivity characteristic to our species, so all of us, or almost, switched first to type-writers, and then to computer keyboards. What can be done? But now, almost unnoticed, a further change has been introduced by Apple, the ultrasensitive keyboard, which is capable of the miracle of writing down both keys hit at the same time! So now, in contrast to typewriters or ‘older’ computers, both characters can appear on the screen, following a minimal mis-touch. Such a thing of course is completely meaningless, as nobody wants to hit two keys at the same time, it is just an error; consequence of the – not needed, and meaningless – extra sensitivity of the keys. This is because writing down two letters is much worse than writing only one, as in this case the obstacle to the train of thinking is greater: one must not only correct one’s movement and hit the right key, but must delete the wrong letter. And actually, the problem – the fragmentation of thinking – is even greater, as the supersensitive keys are combined with another ‘helpful’ feature, automatic corrections: so one does not simply have to delete one letter, but change the entire word back to what one originally intended. And beware you all: the touch-board is on its way, with potentially infinite problems of mishitting the keys!
A further, non-negligible problem with the new touch-sensitive keyboard is that – as the keys are no longer concrete and physical entities – they cannot be removed individually, in order to clean the board under them. Dust thus accumulates inside the keyboard, so you must take it to the Apple store, to clean the entire keyboard – at a quite substantial fee. Another victory for Apple, and loss for us – another standard Apple trick to make money, like the frequent and completely meaningless changes in the battery recharger, or now the ‘innovation’ with the USB key sockets. At a more general level, another victory for modern rationalism, and its crusade to convince us all that we humans are not benevolent at all, rather use every possible opportunity to extort money from others, furthering their own private interests. QED.
Automatic corrections, in a more general sense
Let me now review in some detail another major innovation, automatic corrections. In principle, what could be better? We all make mistakes – let’s not forget that from the perspective of ‘technology’ the specific feature of us humans is that we make errors, while machines never make errors (at least, not the way we do, which of course is all the worse) – and so our kind laptops guess our intentions and correct our mistakes automatically. Except that, of course, they cannot read our minds (luckily!! What will happen in the unlikely case that they actually will do so? The havoc that that would unleash is the underlying theme of the greatest films of all times, Tarkovsky’s Stalker), and so they only ‘guess’, according to the algorithm implanted in them (again, and always, the new magic word!), and so the correction might be wrong. Thus, and again, we have to stop and correct the error.
But why do we need to stop? Why can’t we just go on, and correct typos at the end? This is a crucial point, as in general the fragmentation of life is a central and most pernicious aspect of modernity, perhaps first analysed by Georg Simmel, so important among others for Voegelin (Othmar Spann, one of Voegelin’s thesis advisors taught him Simmel), and the fragmentation of thinking is one of the worst aspects of such fragmentation. Now, automatic corrections, far from helping us by mending our errors, “automatically”, actually do considerable harm either by hiding our errors; or by calling attention to them.
Let me elaborate on both points in some detail.
First, by replacing a typo with a grammatically correct but unintended word, algorithms seriously mislead us into not noticing the error. To give a direct and particularly relevant example, the subtitle of the originally published first part of this series of articles was incorrect: I did not intend to “revise” Voegelin’s “Modern Gnosticism” thesis, but to revisit it. However, I evidently made a typo when writing down the word, the computer “automatically” corrected intended “revisiting” to “revising”, and I failed to notice simply because my mind knew what I intended, and so when reading the subtitle, I read “revising” as “revisiting”. Whatever are the personal idiosyncrasies of the case, it can be generalised to a considerable extent: automatic corrections actually help to render our own errors invisible for us.
Second, previously, an uncorrected typo remained a typo, we probably did not notice it when writing, and so could leave the correction to the stage of re-reading, when anyway corrections were necessary to be made, for a number of reasons. Now, however, the feature of automatic corrections meaninglessly and unnecessarily calls immediate attention to such errors, forcing us to look into the matter and correct the typo, at the price of interrupting our train of thinking. There are various ways of such “calling to attention”: by underlining the word with red; some updates suggest various alternative corrections, to which again we must turn our attention; or – if we do not turn off the voice – actually “beeping”.
At this stage, one can say: all granted, but it is possible to turn off such features as automatic corrections. Well, yes, but – and a very strong “but”. Because, to start with, automatic corrections now are an inbuilt feature of many programmes, one is getting used to it before noticing it, developing a kind of dependency, so it becomes all but impossible to turn it off. Second, such turning off is also difficult, and is part of the way in which computers require you to invest more and more time into learning how to use them – though for normal mortals, not computer nerds, it is impossible to keep up with such – otherwise, at any rate, and again, meaningless and unnecessary – changes. Turning off automatic corrections is tricky to do, and one must do it separately in Word and in various other word processing and email programmes, different in different computers one might be required to use, for e.g. in libraries, so there is no easy solution at all. Technology forces you to follow its ways, does not leave you in peace; once you manage to navigate a word processing or email programme it changes it, presumably for the better, but this simply does not make sense. Why is it that we humans never change our language, except for adding a few words, even when often it is cumbersome (and certainly modern grammatical codification – a prelude to modern algorithmic thinking – often purposefully made it unnecessarily cumbersome: see especially French)? Because language is transmitted from generations to generations, and it simply makes no sense to change it. Computer technology is a kind of language, especially when the issue is writing with computers; and so such changes should be as minimal and only necessary as possible. In our world, always in mad search for novelty, the opposite is the case. But it does not alter the fact that all this is meaningless and pernicious.
The ultimate result is the radical fragmentation of the writing process; a regular interference with the process of one’s thinking. One might say that this can be ignored, so one should not look at the cursor while one is writing, in order to avoid the distraction and fragmentation of attention. But this actually does not work, as all this is now connected with the curse of the jumping cursor, and so if we do so, the cursor might have shifted several times, and so the text we wrote for ten minutes might have become totally unintelligible – one might need more than ten minutes in order to figure out which segment of the written text belongs where in one’s own train of thinking. And such fragmentation, as everywhere, is a major instrument of depersonalisation.
Email addressing, or how technological changes promote generalised and unobserved rudeness
Every letter starts by addressing the person to whom the letter is written. There were multiple forms of such addressing, and it was always a delicate matter what to use, as the more one wanted to use a unique and personal way of addressing, the more it became affected and phony – best visible in the way lovers tried to express their deepest feelings when addressing their loved ones. Still, there were a number of accepted ways in which, at the start of such letters, one could express properly one’s respect and recognition.
Even here, technological standardisation had its effects in emails, as after a time practically the only possibilities left were starting with “Dear XYZ”, or, and increasingly, “Hi XYZ”. This was until a new practice became widespread, as always – sorry! – at first in North America: starting simply with a first name, or – even worse – with the full name. The reason might have again been to save time; or to do away with meaningless gestures of politeness (but, unfortunately, such gestures are never meaningless; here, as almost always, the problem is us, moderns: in any culture the use of such gestures is an unmistakeable measure of civility). At any rate, the result in unambiguous, and underlies the missile-like character of a message (interestingly enough, the etymology of ‘message’ is indeed ‘missile’): it sounds like a shout; so is the height of indiscretion and impoliteness. Persons using such ways of addressing would never greet their friends or acquaintances in this manner in the streets or in a bar – except if they try to call out their attention from a crowd. But email messages are not read in a crowd, rather in the privacy of one’s own computers, so such ways of addressing cannot be justified in any way.
Actually, such shouts do have their precedent, and a most uncomfortable one: this is exactly the way in which recruits are addressed in an army. There, the sergeant never addresses someone as “Dear John” or “Hi Mark”, rather shouts at the person, of course not even using first names – except perhaps ironically.
A full article should be written about the way technology promotes, surreptitiously, a military or militarised way of life in contemporary everyday conduct.
Prefabricated responses
Since a few years – it can certainly be dated with precision, doing research, I believe starting with gmail, but now almost everywhere – there appeared on the screen suggestions concerning ‘quick answers’: ‘thanks, fine!’, ‘OK’, ‘agreed, thanks’, and the like – everybody is familiar with the development. The aim, no doubt, is again to ‘help’ us, especially – a central magic term of modernity, at least since Benjamin Franklin! – to save us time. However, whatever the intentions – and, to repeat myself, given that modern rationalism is based on doubting and critiquing, just as on instrumentalising everything and assuming the pursuit of personal interests behind every act, such good intentions by no means can be taken for granted – behind such suggestions, or simple tricks, the actual benefit they offer, in terms of ‘saving time’, is minimal, as the difference in time between writing down ‘thanks, fine!’ and moving to cursor to the pre-set option and clicking on it is at most split seconds, and not always clear in which side. The negative impact of following such technique, however, is enormous, truly incommensurable, as in this way a crucial element of one’s personality is lost – the way one is expressing oneself is the simple and trivial aspects of everyday life. By hitting such ready-made answers, one loses the personal character of expressing oneself – thus, step by step, loses one’s personality.
Email messages are certainly highly technicalized and standardized means of ‘communication’, and yet, behind every such message, there appears the personality of the writer, indelibly expressed behind the words. Whenever I read an email message from a person I know, I do not simply ‘imagine’ the person behind the words, but when reading the message, I as if hear the words of the person – just as behind the characters of Dickens, according to Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, through the particular expressions and dialect they use, there shines up an entire, living personality. In fact, this is why reading email messages from persons one does not know is so treacherous, as these are indeed mere words, through an electronic means, and therefore one is completely at a loss what they might mean and signify. But the personality of those one knows is still present behind every single message.
This applies both for good and bad. The messages of one of the worst persons (in all possible senses) I encountered in my academic character could be recognised just by looking at them from a distance, as “his/her” (better make no allusion even here!) every message looked like a missile from a shotgun: the first line in large font, identifying the addressee (the literal target); followed by a series of one-line sentences, separated by lines. The content, of course, fully conformed to the form. But, of course, the more important thing is that every message from my friends and good colleagues inevitably carried their personality; such messages did not simply contain ‘information’, but brought with them the aura of their presence.
Automatic responses at one level cut all this out, rendering life not ‘easier’ and more ‘useful’, rather deprived of its colours and liveliness; at the next level, they undermine the very personality of the senders; just like it is always with acts dictated by ‘rational choice’, as Alessandro Pizzorno kept repeating in a series of crucial articles demonstrating, without much effect, the untenability of such an approach, they do not merely suggest ways to ‘rationally’ optimise behaviour and maximize effects, but end up forming and transforming – or rather deforming – the very persons who deploy such modes of thinking and acting.
The article could be continued by the forced updates, the meaningless privacy clausulae into which we must consent (a priceless word of modern trickster logic!) if we want to use any search engine or indeed any site, or the various other ways in which through computers and algorithms a kind of control is secured over us – not clear by whom – that the old totalitarian secret polices did not even dare to imagine. But this article must stop here.
In conclusion
In the modern world everything hangs together, though in a most paradoxical way – as such unity is provided by depersonalised and depersonalising fragmentation, and then the ever more forced integration and unification of such fragments. This is the very heart of Davos thinking where – as a most paradoxical revaluation of values – Hayekian neo-liberalism, problematic as it was itself, turned into its opposite, without it being noticed by its followers and agents; and where neo-liberalism and neo-conservativism, American-style globalisation and Brussels-led Europeanisation, a surreptitious sovietisation promoted by increased central planning and venture capitalism, the uniformization of “best-practice” policies and processes and rampaging multinationals build upon each other, animated by the same – utterly mad – principle of “creative destruction”.
One of the most important discoveries of Voegelin – and one that so far has not yet received its proper echo – was that the idea of “permanent revolution” was not invented Trotsky, but by two French liberals, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, and a full century earlier. The probable reason why even Voegelinians are afraid to take up this point is that it demonstrates the complicity of radical liberalism and socialism, dated back to shortly after the French Revolution – and best represented in its mature form by the thinking of Joseph Schumpeter. Understanding fully what this means probably indeed requires a “Tocqueville for the 21st century” (Michel Serres).
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