Digitopia

Has your mobile phone turned you into a Pavlovian dog? George Dyson, author of Turing’s Cathedral and Darwin Among the Machines, explains that nations, alliances of nations and national institutions are in decline; while a state perhaps best described as Oligarchia is on the ascent.

All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail. The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?

Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines. Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.

Two things then happened. As computers proliferated, the humans providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines. Vast fortunes were made by those who had a hand in this. 

Then something changed. There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around. 

Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, published in 1953, chronicling the arrival of benevolent Overlords who bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth. It does not end well. The digital revolution has come full circle and the next revolution has begun. None dare speak its name.

The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalogue or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. This is why it is a winner-take-all game. 

We imagine that individuals, or individual algorithms, are still behind the curtain somewhere, in control. We are fooling ourselves. The new gatekeepers, by controlling the flow of information, rule a growing sector of the world. What deserves our full attention is what is happening as these powers escape into the wild and consume the rest of the world.

The next revolution will be the ascent of analogue systems over which the dominion of digital programming comes to an end. Nature’s answer, to those who sought to control nature through programmable machines, is to allow us to build machines whose nature is beyond programmable control.