#55: Gutenberg Galaxy Brain
Constant technological change, which is pretty much a perpetual condition by now, means seeing a lot of familiar things vanish, often before we're ready—"disruption" is just a more novel way of describing a particularly rapid and aggressive version of what the new has always done to the old. In The Hunchback of Notre Dame (published in 1831 but set in the 15th century), Victor Hugo wrote that the printing press would "kill" architecture—books would relieve cathedrals, statues, and bas-reliefs of their collective role as a medium of mass communication, leaving buildings to perform their more prosaic functions, such as shelter and defense. Today, it's almost impossible to imagine relying on the built environment as a primary source of information transmitted by the church or the state (Frank Gehry's jagged metallic abstractions do seem like they're trying to tell us something, it's just unclear what, or from whom), but we have another opportunity now to understand how jarring the transition to print was, because it's finally getting its own turn to be killed by something else.
That assailant, of course, is the internet, the "disruptiveness" of which has invited direct comparisons to the printing press for a while. Antonio García Martínez wrote last week about how Facebook and Snapchat are ushering in a "post-truth era," arguing that one benefit of print's long reign was that editors, publishers, peer reviewers, and other human gatekeepers would more or less stabilize societal narratives and limit the semantic volatility that we're currently experiencing. The web and social networks, he continues, discard all that human ingenuity for algorithms, those nebulous scapegoats for so many recent problems, with the end result that "Mark Zuckerberg, or really, his News Feed algorithm, is now editor-in-chief of the world's content." Literate society, in Martínez's view, rested upon responsible people who stopped malicious information from spreading; in our post-literate society, stuff just happens, but due to algorithms instead of deities or cosmic forces.
It's not as simple as Martínez suggests, though. People are still the root cause of harmful online communication, and people are a problem from which no medium has ever been safe (algorithms aren't just digital; publishing has its own "algorithms"). Something else has changed drastically, though: Pure information is too malleable and too unstable. The real gatekeepers of widely-held "truth" haven't traditionally been people, but rather the physical objects in which the messages are embedded. The "fake news" crisis (and most of Facebook's problems) arose because of targeting—the internet's novel ability to show everyone something different, without acknowledging that each individual's version of reality is tailored specifically to him or her. Books and newspapers are hard to tweak and don't facilitate sophisticated targeting; in that they are one step closer to the cathedrals and monuments that formerly did all the talking. In his great essay about the role of sermons in society, Kevin Simler observes that a well-executed sermon creates a powerful network effect known as common knowledge: Everyone who attends the sermon knows that everyone else has also heard it. In their own ways, published text and public architecture always did the same. Much of the internet, amazingly, accomplishes the exact opposite, fomenting an individualized, hypertargeted experience that undermines common knowledge as we understand it. Facebook taught the world how network effects work, but that doesn't mean it can't also destroy them.
Reads:
The unsettling emptiness of Memphis International Airport: The former Northwest Airlines hub feels abandoned after losing most of its traffic following the airline's merger with Delta (thanks for sending, Dan).
Paul Ford on how GitHub represents a different way of seeing the world: "The way you truly win big in software is to take something deeply abstract, weird, and confusing, then put an interface on top that makes it look like the most normal thing in creation."
Until next time,
Drew