Written by Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@ora.com) Last Updated: January 30, 1997
It is not particularly odd to list common questions about technology and human responsibility. The odd thing would be to answer them!--or, rather, to propose a set of *canonical* answers.
The answers put forth here most definitely are not canonical. Think of this FAQ instead as a template, for which you must substitute your own answers. This is not to suggest a rootless relativism, but only to acknowledge what holds true in all matters of moral responsibility: every individual must knit his own pattern into the overall, harmonious fabric of truth, beauty, and goodness.
Portions of the following are adapted from the author's book, "The Future Does Not Compute -- Transcending the Machines in Our Midst," with kind permission of the publisher, O'Reilly & Associates. Other portions are adapted from a work in progress called "Daily Meditations for the Computer-entranced." Yet other portions are completely off-the-wall.
The Challenge of Intelligent Tools
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Technological Neutrality and Human Freedom
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The Net and Personal Psychology
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Education
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Media
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Information
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Community, Business, and Economics
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Censorship
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Privacy and Security
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Computer Applications and Hardware
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Responses to the Challenge of Technology
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THE CHALLENGE OF INTELLIGENT TOOLS
Yes--but not, as the old science fiction chestnut suggested, because the computer might turn traitor and rebel against its masters. The real danger is that the computer will seduce us-- seduce us into becoming like it. It does this by mimicking human intelligence--but only those aspects of our intelligence that run mechanically and unthinkingly. By willingly meshing our lives with the technological surround, abandoning our own highest functioning, we learn to sleepwalk in synchrony with our machines.
We don't *have* to sleepwalk, but as one social function after another is transferred to the computer, the invitation is a seductive one, calling for the conscious exercise of personal responsibility in resistance to it.
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If you fall into a financial crisis and apply for a loan, not even a personal interview is any longer necessary. It is a "transaction," captured by transaction processing software and based solely upon standard, online data. Everything that once followed from the qualities of a personal encounter--everything that could make for an exceptional case--has now disappeared from the picture. The applicant is wholly sketched when the data of his past have been subjected to automatic logic. Any hopeful glimmer, filtering toward the sympathetic eye of a supportive fellow human from a future only now struggling toward birth, is lost in the darkness between bits of data.
In other words, the human being as a unique and incalculable individual begins to disappear between the cracks of automated logic.
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Certainly. For example, the computer's ability to calculate and analyze complex data vastly exceeds our capability. The cautionary note that goes along with fact has to do with the one-sided tendencies that have progressively taken hold of our culture since the dawn of the scientific era--tendencies to substitute analysis and calculation for understanding and meaning. Computers, you might say, are the near perfection of our one-sidedness. That is why they present us with risk on every hand--but certainly not with intrinsic "evil." One- sidedness can be brought into balance through proper effort.
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The common assumption is that those who worry about computer risks must uncritically embrace earlier technologies. This is false. The computer can be seen as extending the risks of the printing press further in the same direction: the word becomes still more detached from the human speaker and objectified as "information." Where once we could take unhealthy pride in the wealth of knowledge stored on our bookshelves, now we can take pride in what our databases and access tools give us, as if this afforded understanding. The word becomes an object to be massaged by word-processing software, automatically stored and forwarded, analyzed, and scanned, all without any depth of penetration by either an originating or receiving consciousness. But without such penetration, the word is dead.
There is no way to escape the difficult challenge of using technology responsibly, regardless of which technologies we choose.
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Not really. The computer is a vastly more potent tool than, say, a hammer. It is true that, if I take everything for a nail and let the hammer run riot in my hands, I have forsaken responsibility. But I am not likely to mistake a hammer for a thinking device. Computers are highly adaptive, universal machines, and when we bring to them a willingness to sacrifice our own functioning to that of our tools, we risk sacrificing, not just one particular capacity, but the entire field of human responsibility.
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One of the primary gifts of many tools is their resistance to human mastery. In overcoming this resistance we advance as human beings. The painful results of my indiscipline with my hammer invite inner growth, which is an enduring legacy. After all, which is of more lasting value: the cabinet I build with nails and eventually leave behind, or the inner mastery I gain through struggling with myself, hammer in hand--a mastery I will carry as healing capacity wherever I go in an overwrought world?
By claiming to be master of all tools, the computer challenges us to contend for our own mastery on all fronts. Failing the challenge, we lose ourselves; rising to the challenge, we gain ourselves. The computer is our hope if we can accept it as our enemy; as our friend, it will destroy us.
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No, it increases the risks. Currently, phone answering systems ask us to punch numbers or pronounce single words, thereby routing us to a human operator who can deal with our substantive concerns. With better voice recognition software, that operator will become a software agent that attempts to hold a conversation with us. If you thought the number-punching phase was irritating, wait until you have to communicate the heart of your business to a computer with erratic hearing, a doubtful vocabulary of 400 words, and the compassion of a granite monolith!
In other words, as software advances, it is applied to more critical activities, where the risks are greater. The technical opportunity to become friendlier at one level is at the same time an opportunity to become unfriendly on a more decisive level. We must be more awake, more alert to our machine-transcending responsibilities, when dealing with the more advanced software, precisely because the advanced capabilities invite us to let go of yet higher human capacities.
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There are many risks, some of which we'll touch on later. A primary concern is the pervasive habit of skimming induced in us by computers. One user boasted of being able to read, assess, and discard a screenful of text in about a second. How much attention can he direct toward the human speaker who uttered the words? Words that stand alone, separate from the person attempting to express himself, are words that have already been cut off from any depth of meaning. We assess screenfuls of text at breakneck speed only by skittering over the logical surface of the words, without any contemplative assimilation.
The correlative act of responsibility is to bend our consciousness toward the speaker. Try to find a sympathetic connection with him, and to understand who is expressing himself in the words. Of course, it is a symptom of the information age that the speaker often cannot even be identified, and that most of the verbal flood inundating us hardly seems worth giving that sort of respect to. But it is far healthier to seek escape from the flood than to accept it with a habit of trivial regard. We end up trivializing each other, while worshiping dead words (called "information") that we pay no attention to.
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TECHNOLOGICAL NEUTRALITY AND HUMAN FREEDOM
Yes, only people can do bad things. But every technology already embodies certain of our choices. A gun, after all, was pretty much designed to kill living organisms at a distance, which gives it a different nature from, say, a pair of binoculars.
The computer takes this much further, since its whole purpose is to bear our meanings and intentions with a degree of explicitness, subtlety, intricacy, and completeness unimaginable in earlier machines. Every executing program is a condensation of certain human thinking processes. At a more general level, the computer embodies our resolve to approach much of life with a programmatic or recipe-like (algorithmic) mindset. That resolve, expressed in the machinery, is far from innocent or neutral when, for example, we begin to adapt group behavior to programmed constraints.
So we meet ourselves--our deepest tendencies, whether savory or unsavory, conscious or unconscious--in the things we have made. And, as always, the weight of accumulated choices begins to bind us. Our freedom is never absolute, but is conditioned by what we have made of ourselves and our world so far. The toxic materials I spread over my yard yesterday restrict my options today.
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When it comes to human behavior, we cannot both see a pattern of causation and remain trapped in it exactly as before. The seeing itself is a decisive new element in the pattern. The more fully we understand how our artifacts dictate social structures and behavior, the more we are in a position to alter the terms of the dictation.
The strict determinist's only hope for truth is the hope that the truth has wholly eluded us--that we stand subject to determination by powers we can never penetrate with understanding. In other words, it is the paradoxical hope that we can never know ourselves to be determined.
But it also needs saying that every act we undertake in the world, every reshaping of the stuff of the world, is a weight upon the future. Actions have consequences. The solvent dumped in my yard last year affects my gardening possibilities this year. Everything I do today constrains me tomorrow. The intelligent machinery we have previously programmed and set in motion continues to run on by itself according to those past determinations, binding us every more tightly and inviting us to abdicate our freedom in the current moment.
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Perhaps you and I can only alter things in a minuscule way. But whatever that small arena of possibility, it is the *only* arena within which our distinctively human activity takes place. Precisely so far as we do not strive to affect things, we've abandoned our humanity; we are sleepwalking with our machines.
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THE NET AND PERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY
We do not conquer our prejudices by putting all foreignness out of sight. The things we prefer to keep out of sight are, in fact, the things that will subsequently rule us most effectively from our subconscious. The roots of prejudice lie in the human being, and cannot be eradicated with a trick of technology. Certainly we cannot be more fully human toward each other by being less human, less there, less in view.
Moreover, we discriminate against each other quite as easily on the basis of belief and other intangibles as on the basis of appearance. As long as anything of the other person remains, there's something to discriminate against. If prejudice easily "disappears" across the Net, it is because the person himself easily disappears. But getting rid of the other person in this way begins to sound suspiciously like "termination with extreme prejudice."
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More like the opposite. The oft-stated notion that, because we can readily escape bad scenes with a click of the mouse, we are freer to be vulnerable is just nonsense. To be vulnerable is, by definition, to be at risk. One woman was quoted on this matter as saying, "Online I can go to a singles bar, and if anything starts going wrong, Poof!, I'm outta there." Some vulnerability. Some community.
It's true that the wounded soul may sometimes need shelter from the normal buffetings of life, and we sometimes hear that the Net provides such shelter. But we should at least realize that the shelter is a symptom of life not yet fully engaged rather than a testimonial to our grandest victories.
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Certainly, as more and more of our activities are carried out via the Net, that's going to be where we meet people, and some of those meetings will lead to real friendship and marriage. But this doesn't tell us much about the overall effects the electronic media are having upon relationships.
The error most people make here is to assume that strong emotion is a sign that people are making deep, human contact. The usual reality is nearly the opposite of this. I may react with explosive feeling when my car won't start on a cold morning, but this isn't a sign that I've got a good relationship going with the engine. If anything, my reaction makes it even more difficult to hear what the engine may be "telling" me. Much the same goes for the so-called Net flame. The flamer generally isn't communicating with anyone at all. He's completely wrapped up in himself.
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If a square foot or two of screen presents us, as is so often said, with the entire world, then that world is hugely reduced and abstract, leaving us to "fill in the picture" from our subconscious. The blankness of the Net, the distance between conversants, the shifting personas, the dizzying succession of far-flung connections, the pitifully narrow channel for shared activities--perhaps even the hypnotic qualities of the computer screen itself--all powerfully invite us to project ourselves into the electronic ether under the illusion that we are getting to know each other.
One classic expression of psychological projection is head-over- heels infatuation. We need not be surprised, therefore, at the unsuppressed infatuational energy--the downright frenzy--amid which the Internet has burst upon the national scene over the past few years. It has not been a time of clear-sighted assessment.
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Know thyself. This, of course, is exactly what the infinite, distracting capabilities of the Net tend to prevent us from doing.
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It doesn't *make* us do anything, but the temptation toward scattering is powerful. Just consider the frantic concern for up-to-the-minute recency (as if any sort of profound wisdom is dependent upon having this week's data); the daily flooding of mailboxes; the habit of skimming newsgroups and messages at breakneck pace; the fragmentation of the workday by continual email intrusions; the empty chasing of linkage trails, increasingly prevalent in both the writing and reading of hypertext documents; the widespread encouragement of fear about "missing the party"; and the lottery-like hope of discovering "great finds" on the Net.
A stance of responsibility can only resist these invitations to scatter ourselves in cyberspace. We must ask, "How can we recollect ourselves, find our own centers, and subordinate the online carnival--so far as we choose to deal with it at all--to our deeper, consciously pursued purposes."
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EDUCATION
As far as the use of computers is concerned, you can hardly prevent this. As I once heard Joseph Weizenbaum say, kids absorb this stuff through their pores. They no more need special, computer-literacy education in the primary grades than they need toaster-literacy or automobile-literacy courses. You can't keep them from learning it. In fact, it's mostly the teachers who are racing around madly trying to figure out what to do with all these machines we're bequeathing them; as often as not, it's the kids who save the day.
There are, of course, class differences in this regard; some kids have readier access to computers than others. But the point is that this access is not necessary for primary school children in the first place. Certainly the software they learn today will not be the software they need on the job.
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The critical thing is not to make sure they know how to surf the Net, but rather to help them understand the nature of the technology: where does it come from historically, what aspects of the human being does it express, what are the basic principles of its operation, what are the strengths and limitations of the algorithmic (recipe-like) thinking that constitutes all programming, how does the computer begin to alter social relationships....Actually, computers themselves need play only a limited role in these investigations; students can learn a great deal simply by working with algorithms and even acting out the internal operations of computer.
These, of course, are not the subjects that policy-makers are attending to in their mania to wire every classroom.
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It may become so if we insist on using it to replace all other sources of information.
But the decisive point is this: the problems of education have never in recent history resulted from an information bottleneck. We were an information society long before the computer arrived; our problem has been coping with a surfeit of information-- selecting from it, evaluating it, making sense of it. The only way to make sense of information is to rise above it in the experience of meaning--a journey that requires imagination more than anything else.
See also question 28.
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A favorite gambit here is to invite students to program some laboratory's robot across the Net. One research organization, for example, lets students drive a robot called "Nero" around the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussauds, London.
But such arrangements do not make scientists into teachers. If one scientist can efficiently spread himself around a lot of classrooms, it is precisely because he doesn't really have to be there. It is no accident that robotics should be a common focus, because the real effect of these projects is to direct children increasingly toward instrument-mediated information. A thousand children cannot all interact with the scientist personally; what they can do is interact with software.
So the students come away with a few scattered, undigested facts about the operation of remote-controlled vehicles, and no knowledge at all about the more approachable engineering principles--including the principles of computing--upon which modern society is based.
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The interface between a student and her Net pal is undeniably thin, one-dimensional, remote. As valuable as it may nevertheless be, it is not the missing key for teaching global citizenship. It scarcely counts beside the much more fundamental sources of social understanding. The girl, of course, will learn whatever she does of friendship from peers who sweat, bleed, taunt, curse, tantalize, steal, console, and so on.
It I need to find out whether she will become a good world citizen, don't show me a file of her email correspondence. Just let me observe her behavior on the playground for a few minutes- -assuming she spends her class breaks on the playground, and not at her terminal playing video games.
A high-school computer instructor wrote to me that "students who think it is cool to have a pen pal in Malaysia won't talk to the black students who locker next to them....I have run a telecom project for students in TAG classes for the last two years and I have yet to see any of the TAG students, who spent weeks `talking' with students in Kuala Lumpur, say so much as a word to the Southeast Asian students in the ESL program."
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There is a modest but growing body of research about the influences that make people choose careers as environmentalists, naturalists, ecologists, and so on--careers suggesting a concern for the natural world. Louise Chawla of Kentucky State University, having recently reviewed this literature, reports a remarkable consistency regarding two of the dominant influences: wild places directly experienced (usually at a young age), and adult mentors.
The crucial requirement for the child to develop a love for nature is not that he be exposed to novel, high-impact screen images, but rather that he actively discover within himself a connection to the phenomena he is observing. High-impact images create a hunger for "more and better," but, if anything, put the child at an even greater psychological distance from the natural world than before.
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It is perfectly reasonable for the more advanced language student to look for opportunities to correspond with language natives. It is worth noting, however, that this opportunity has long been available--without massive capital outlay--courtesy of the postal system. Students who send and receive one email message per day can just as easily send and receive one letter per day. That email has suddenly given new life to the idea is certainly owing to the computer's glamor. But if glamor is the substance of the new educational paradigm, then we're in trouble.
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This is to forget the primary purpose of education: to help us achieve our fullest humanity. This achievement should, in the end, determine what sorts of jobs are created, rather than the existing jobs determining what sort of human beings we try to raise. Responsibility requires us, before we introduce the computer into the classroom, to have a clear picture of the child and a clear picture of what it means to educate the child, along with an understanding of how the computer relates to these pictures. The existence of such clarity is not evident today.
Educators are now subjected to an intense fear of being left behind, but are offered no coherent notion of what is ahead and why. Don't forget the earlier mania for computer-aided instruction, which died away with scarcely a trace. So, too, did the fad for computer literacy through programming in BASIC. Now it's the Internet. Have we this time learned something profound and new about the true nature of education?
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Media
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While watching TV, we at least had to get up now and then and confront others, if only at the supermarket checkout stand. Increasingly, the computer enables us to reduce even this activity to a kind of passivity. The question of responsibility here: in what ways, and with what parts of myself, do I choose to engage the world and the rest of society?
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It certainly allows us to do some things we couldn't do with television. But you have to compare the right things. The computer's interactivity should not be compared to television (it will not, for example, redeem the soap opera or sitcom), but rather to those various, more active engagements we once could not avoid, but now can replace with a more passive activity while sitting in front of a screen. There's where the substitution occurs. And it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the local town hall meeting, for example, when shifted to the computer from the old, face-to-face format, will be nudged in the same direction that television had already nudged politics.
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INFORMATION
Neil Postman has been reminding us repeatedly that "if a nuclear holocaust should occur some place in the world, it will not happen because of insufficient information; if children are starving in Somalia, it's not because of insufficient information; if crime terrorizes our cities, marriages are breaking up, mental disorders are increasing, and children are being abused, none of this happens because of a lack of information."
Nobody seems to be listening. Yet Postman is right, insofar as information is thought of as something given, something we can "access," store, and process -- so far, that is, as we view it in the manner of a program. Meaning, by contrast, cannot be accessed. It can only be entered into -- and then only through the exercise of those neglected faculties standing at the opposite pole from our activities as information processors.
See also question 20.
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We are forever being told that the next advances in technology-- more elaborate filters, information rating schemes, personalized software agents ("knowbots") that roam the Net gleaning information precisely targeted to our interests--will finally enable us to ride the crest of the information flood rather than drown in it.
What we forget is that the arms race between the powers of information proliferation and the powers of information management is an endlessly escalating one. The logical finesse with which we manage information is the same logical finesse that generates yet more information and outflanks the tools of management. Software agents are quite as capable of mindlessly flinging off information as of mindlessly collecting it.
Surely there is only one escape from the mindlessness: to realize that the essential contest is not between information management and information inflation, but between the obsession with information (well managed or otherwise) and the habit of quiet reflection. It is not an overload of information so much as a deficit of meaning we suffer from, not a lack of proper filters so much as the loss of mental focus--an inadequate power of sustained attention to what is important.
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COMMUNITY, BUSINESS, AND ECONOMICS
Every means of communication can be used for deepening community. Some of the American POWs in Vietnam apparently formed deep connections on the basis of not much more than occasional tapping on walls.
But while everything is possible, not everything is equally easy. Restrict the internal communications of a corporation to wall- tapping, and competitive failure will be much more certain than the deepening of community. In general, the narrower the communication channel, the harder we have to work to communicate meaningfully.
The current upshot of the matter is this: in a society that has long been fleeing what vestiges of community remain to it, a medium that makes our exchange even more indirect and automated does not show much promise of improving things overall. If you want to avoid coming to terms with someone, will you typically find it easier to meet him face-to-face, to call him on the phone, or send him an email message?
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If, as many think, the large, powerful corporation is the big, bad wolf, you and I are the ones who huff and puff and inflate this wolf to monstrous proportions. I'm not aware that the hundreds of thousands of employees in the wolfish corporations are very much different in their work ethic, moral values, and general purposes from those of us in most other corporate settings. We willingly merge ourselves into one seamless operation, from board member to janitor. The Apple Computers and Microsofts and Time Warners of our society continually progress, or try to progress, from challenging Big Brother to *being* Big Brother -- all as a result of a "natural" evolution to which most of us yield ourselves in our own corporate and consumer contexts every day.
Where, then, does the bad of the big bad wolf arise? Only from that same pattern of "innocent," half-awake behavior that is to be found in nearly every corporation. A System can only sustain itself in the presence of a drowsy people willing to be Systematized.
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Edward Tenner, in Why things Bite Back, put it this way:
Where some find inventiveness percolating up and correspondingly rewarded, others find discipline and punishment raining down and privacy trampled underfoot. If networks appear to open channels previously barred--and it's not clear how having to put ink on paper ever prevented sending a message to top management--they also make it possible to read files surreptitiously, monitor activities, and even trace message traffic to discover clusters of malcontents.Maybe we need to be looking for a third possibility. See next question.
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The digital logic upon which networked technology is erected wants to be universal, ever more rigorous, more tightly woven. Logic, that is, wants to be articulated with logic, until there is perfect, overall consistency. Such logical consistency--with all its coercive possibilities with respect to the evolution of human social structures--is quite compatible with a kind of fragmentation and centrifugal movement. This suggests that there are anti-human potentials of technology we haven't yet learned to recognize--potentials that are neither centralizing nor decentralizing in the traditional sense--or are both at the same time.
The beehive may give us a relevant picture. Its intricate (and subhuman) unity seems to arise from nowhere. "Even the queen bee cannot be regarded as the visible guardian and guarantor of the totality, for if she dies, the hive, instead of disintegrating, creates a new queen" (Herman Poppelbaum). There is no totalitarian center of the hive, and yet the logic of the whole remains coherent and uncompromising. It is an external logic in the sense that it is not wakeful, not self-aware, not consciously assenting; it moves the individual as if from without.
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Censorship
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The apparently incompatible facts belong together. To adapt various family, educational, and communal functions to a faceless, unstable, unrooted, and unruly medium such as the Net is to guarantee rising demands for censorship, lest the existing institutions simply disappear into the anarchic cauldron of cyberspace. There is an indisputable validity to these demands, as also to the insistence upon their danger. And there is the expected technological arms race between would-be censors and would-be defenders of unbridled speech--an arms race that, unavoidable as it may be, tends more and more to destroy the kind of contexts where we can learn to combine freedom with respect for the other.
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Telling parents that they should be responsible for their children's Net exposure says nothing at all about the urgent issues. After all, parents should also be responsible for their children's exposure to mortar shells in a war zone; but most of us would take that to mean: get the children out of this zone if at all possible, and if not, at least do what you can to work toward an end of the war. What, then, does taking responsibility for the Net mean? That is the question, and it requires much more of a radical mindset than is implied by simplistic, "put parents in control" rhetoric.
It is intolerable to have congressional representatives (of all people!) setting cultural standards of decency. But it is also intolerable to commit ourselves, our society, our children to a medium in which it is virtually impossible for cultural standards -- or anything recognizable as culture itself -- to arise at all. The Net is, in its fundamental manifestations to date, as corrosive of culture as anything yet conceived by man.
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One critical place where we require freedom of expression is in the schooling of our children. Parents should be able to place their children in a school that reflects their deepest convictions about what is true and good and beautiful, about the developmental needs of their children, and about the sort of cultural heritage their children ought to enjoy.
Imagine a school system where every parent supposedly had this right to choose a school, but where all schools were jammed into one vast, open, chaotic building, with teachers and students indiscriminately scattered around. If parents had little choice but to submit their children to such a system, then, far from being free and uncensored, it would actually force an ugly and artificial homogenization, removing all the freedom and diversity that should belong to education.
The fact is that freedoms are meaningless apart from cultural traditions, reasonably stable institutions, boundaries that allow the flowering of different value systems, places that overflow with the intensity of enfleshed human presence -- in general, apart from a real cultural topography that offers some predictability and constancy, as well as healthy evolution. But all these requirements are exactly what the Net tends to destroy.
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All meaningful human activity emerges within a matrix of needs and constraints that none of us is fully able to control. It is as true to say that these give us something to be free about--give us challenges against which to exercise our freedom--as it is to say that they restrict our freedom. Remove that matrix and you may think yourself free, but you are really just adrift.
Much good will continue to arise as governments increasingly respect human rights. But remember that something else has been going on as well: those various contexts in which a complementary weave of rights and responsibilities gave concrete form to our lives--contexts, for example, provided by family and local community--have long been eroding. As a result, we are being thrown back upon ourselves as isolated, self-determining, rights-bearing individuals, disconnected from any social matrix that would enable us to connect meaningfully and responsibly to our neighbors. We are bound to face many insoluble conflicts as unrooted individuals and groups bump into each other. There will be no pure solution to these conflicts from the side of free speech or the side of censorship.
What is discouraging is to hear the gurus of cyberspace beating the drums for freedom and fulminating against the evils of repressed lawmakers, while scarcely whispering a word about any new wellsprings of responsibility we might draw upon to give form and substance to our inviolate freedoms. If government is of limited help in this sphere (it is), and if the ever more weakened family and community no longer mediate a powerful sense of responsibility to us, and if the workplace is intent upon computing the bottom line as an end in itself, what sources can we draw upon? The question does not seem to arise, and many are willing to go the obvious next step, enshrining the anarchic individual adrift in cyberspace as the new ideal.
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Privacy and Security
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Privacy is inseparable from a certain willingness to lower one's eyes and to hold sacred what one knows about the other person. When it has become a mere drive toward anonymity, it necessarily vanishes as a meaningful standard for our life together, signaling instead our disconnection.
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Most of us are daily in positions where someone could easily walk up to us, pull a gun or knife, and kill us. In most social environments, we don't worry about that, and the crime rarely occurs. We are "exposed," so to speak, but the prevailing mores of society are such that it turns out not to be a risky exposure.
On the other hand, when the risk of the crime becomes too great, we have little choice but to minimize our exposure. As a society we may then start conceiving the challenge as a wholly technical one--how to wall ourselves off from each other, devise new alarm systems, beef up police forces, and so on. Actions of this sort may become necessary, but we should realize that they are signs of a losing battle and may actually worsen the underlying causes of the problems. Again (see question 38), the decisive battle is not the technical one.
Healthy public and private spheres exist only by virtue of each other, in a complex and delicate balance.
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We must strengthen our non-data interactions and institutions so that their additional muscularity and resilience can anchor the centrifugal and dissipative forces of our online, more or less data-like projections of ourselves. Where else can we learn what needs respecting about each other, if not from a knowledge of the other person in particular and of the requirements of a healthily functioning community in general?
It is possible--although it will be a tremendous stretch--for us to extend our gestures of human respect to the abstract, placeless, and timeless data representations of other people. But it isn't conceivable that we will succeed in this greater challenge while failing the lesser and more familiar one. We cannot--as programmers, application users, corporate employees, consumers--enlarge our respect for persons to embrace data when we are forgetting what respect for persons means in the first place.
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Computer Applications and Hardware
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In fact, as long as we are driven to desire the latest technology for its own sake (which is very much part of the human side of the problem), memory improvements and all the technical innovations they stimulate can only worsen our situation: the pace of change accelerates, new inventions proliferate, and every cutting-edge toy we play with is now twelve months instead of twenty-four months away from the inadequacies of its obsolescence. Clearly this shrinking time interval tells us more about our prospects for satisfaction than does the increasing density of integrated circuits.
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RESPONSES TO THE CHALLENGE OF TECHNOLOGY
Certainly we must adapt. The question is whether we will exercise all the responsibility we possibly can for the shape of the changes we're adapting to. Apart from such a resolve, the advice to adapt is reprehensible and anti-human. The good citizens of Nazi Germany learned to adapt all too well.
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Neither the uncritical, pro-technology stance nor the violently anti-technology stance is a matter of wakefulness. Mastering the machines in our lives is as different from smashing them as it is from yielding passively to them.
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Look for the signs. The surest indication that we are allowing technology to lead us toward disaster is the conviction that it is leading us toward paradise.
To believe, for example, that the automobile's (or the computer network's) ability to shrink distances has anything whatever to do with the varying sorts of inner distance and connection that community weaves between people is to have lost sight of community. Any technology in the hands of a people that has lost sight of community will prove an instrument for the destruction of community, simply because the destruction hinges in the first place on the lost sight, not on the technology.
In other words: technological pessimism is justified precisely to the degree we feel technological optimism.
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