how to think about the future

‘The Long Run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the Long Run we are all dead.’ - The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

It has become almost a cliché to talk of Keynes’ distinction between risk that can be calculated accurately and what he called ‘irreducible uncertainty’. John Gray in the London Review of Books devotes a long essay to this distinction. And it is equally commonplace for commentators to quote passages in the General Theory, out of context, to suggest that Keynes was inimical to mathematics in general.

But few people now pay attention to one of his most extraordinary books, the ‘Treatise on Probability’, published in 1921. The Treatise (TP) is important for at least two reasons: on the one hand it is, in its own right, and by any measure, a powerful and profound contribution to mathematics and logic, and on the other hand it also plays a central role in his more famous economic theory, especially in relation to his ideas about uncertainty.

What Keynes shows in the TP is that probability can only be calculated to the precision of a single number answer in certain cases. In many more cases it can only be described in terms of what he calls an ‘interval estimate’ between points. So, some probabilities may be calculated as a single number (or ‘point estimate’), a decimal between 0 and 1 where 0 is no probability at all and 1 is what we know to be true (Boolean algebra), but some can only be calculated between ‘bounds’ or ‘intervals’ such as 0.2-0.5 or 0.6-0.8. Keynes further demonstrated that, where two probabilities can only be calculated as intervals and where those intervals overlap, they cannot be compared. Sufficient uncertainty exists about the exact nature of the likelihood of the propositions being true that we cannot tell whether one is more likely than the other.

But Keynes also makes an even more fundamental leap. Instead of defining probability simply as the likelihood of a proposition being true, he introduces a new set of variables. He represents probability as the likelihood of the proposition being true combined with information bearing on the proposition. A relationship he categorizes algebraically as a/h where a is the proposition itself and h is the available information relevant to the proposition. In other words, he describes for the first time in mathematical terms the complex relationship between likelihood of an outcome and the unknown (and perhaps unknowable) information bearing upon this outcome. He criticizes the Bayesian or classical idea of the Principle of Indifference, showing that it holds only when we do not know anything that might impact upon the relative probabilities of an outcome which is apparently equiprobable.

Keynes also saw the importance of ‘non-linearity’ in the calculation of probabilities, and the relationship between this insight and the insights made in the General Theory about economic prediction is all too obvious. Probability need not be continuous, depending on the conditions of our knowledge about a proposition or outcome. Factors that we know nothing about might affect the truth of a proposition or the likelihood of a certain outcome, and unless we know and can calculate the likelihood of those factors with any certainty, we cannot rely on the continuity of probability for the proposition itself.

This may seem obvious, but that is probably my fault for describing it wrongly. In essence, Keynes redefined our understanding of mathematical and statistical probability fifty years before anyone else caught up with him. He used terms no-one else had ever used because he had to invent them to describe his theory. He built on the work of George Boole and presented a strong challenge to the then dominant view of mathematical probability, just as he would do, 15 years later, to the economic consensus.

Not only does this demonstrate that he was a highly sophisticated mathematician, but it also underscore his views about uncertainty, knowledge and risk. Keynes understood that some risks could not be calculated or compared because they relied on assumptions about the future which had no basis in probability, they ignored the non-linear nature of some risks, and they assumed that financial risks, in particular, could be calculated with an actuarial and statistical precision that was simply wrong. Thus the famous passage in the General Theory:

“Too large a proportion of recent “mathematical” economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.” (GT, Book 5, Chapter 21)

Here, Keynes is not criticizing mathematics, or even the application of mathematics to economics per se. He is making a more specific point about the liability of recent economic tracts to put mathematics before logic, and to lose the wood for the trees. And he is also, I think, talking very particularly about the models of probabilistic causation used by these writers to predict economic events or uphold economic propositions which, when examined purely in deductive terms, or from experience, prove to be untrue.

In 2008, a large part of the destruction of capital on Wall Street could ultimately be attributed to risk models adopted by the major banks that simply ignored the insights Keynes provided in the General Theory. No matter how complicated the equation, some risks will always be incalculable, and some uncertainties will always be irreducible because the future is simply unknowable. But also because factors may bear on these risks that we cannot foresee and have no way of calculating. And because probability may be non-linear or discontinuous in its distribution. In fact, all of this is a vast simplification of Keynes, but if only our bankers and economists today had a millionth of his sophistication, indeed if they had only bothered to read what he wrote, just on this subject quite apart from his more famous works, the global economy would not be in such a dire position today.

I am indebted to Michael Brady’s excellent essay ‘Keynes, Mathematics and Probability: A Reappraisal’

Yet another triumph for the BBC’s Storyville documentary series was George Carey’s ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door – Space Race’, broadcast last week – a quite amazing film about the birth of the Russian space program and the ideas that prefigured it and were inspired by it. And it is a fascinating portrait of some of the early pioneers and thinkers who began Russia’s race for the stars. Most people are familiar with the broad outlines of America’s entry into the space race, the Apollo missions, the Right Stuff, Chuck Yeager and all that, but few know about the origins of the Soviet space industry and the curious combination of ideas that gave birth to it (the film is still on iPlayer at the time of blogging, so go and watch it. It is astonishing and moving, especially the interview with Tamara Filatova, Yuri Gagarin’s niece).

Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov is the philosophical great-grandpapa of the Russian dream of space exploration. He believed in the perfectibility of the human race through evolution, and thought that we would one day conquer death and bring about the resurrection of the physical body through science, and live forever. He also thought that we would extend human presence throughout the solar system and beyond. His ideas about human evolution, and in particular the idea that humans should take control of the process and direct it towards their own goals (i.e. achieving greater intelligence and conquering physical limitations) have led directly to the ‘transhumanist’ movement in Russia, and are echoed, albeit in a less poetic way, in the work of the famous proponent of the ‘Singularity’ Ray Kurzweil.

Fyodorov not only believed that we must overcome the natural decrepitude and entropy of the body as a biological system, but that we would also one day be able to ‘regulate nature’ so that natural disasters such as volcanoes, earthquakes and so on no longer threatened the human population. Fyodorov is identified with the Cosmists, who advanced ideas about the proletariat conquering space and venerated the machine and technological progress. They saw the rise of the proletariat classes as a universal and inevitable phenomenon that would soon extend into the cosmos thanks to the ever-growing power of machines. A kind of intergalactic Marxist/Leninist tide of worker-explorers flooding across the universe waving the banner of Russia.

But Fyodorov goes much further and is much more radical than the other Cosmists. His ideas concern the very fundamental questions of what it is to be human, what the nature of a human being is or can be, and the purpose and direction of life itself. This is the origin of Transhumanism in the 20th century and has led to whole genres of science fiction, scientific speculation, and the development of experiments and technology to explore the reality of these concepts. The contemporary efforts to preserve life indefinitely through cryogenics follow on from Fyodorov’s writings. There are now scientific institutes in Russia which carry on research into these ideas, attempting to allow humans to communicate directly with cosmic intelligences by ‘tuning’ themselves in, a complicated process of spiritual preparation or clearing. The subject attempts to develop a new awareness, a new kind of sensitivity through which they can receive or respond to the faint communications of other minds.

Fyodorov’s ideas directly inspired another great figure in the history of Russian space science, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. As a young, dyslexic boy studying in the Chertkov Library in Moscow, Tsiolkovsky met Fyodorov (who was at the time the Library’s chief cataloguer), and the philosopher took the boy under his wing and helped him to learn about mathematics. Tsiolkovsky went on, in 1903, to publish a paper that explained in detail what would be needed to propel a rocket into Earth orbit – Изслѣдованіе міровыхъ пространствъ реактивными приборами (The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reactive Devices [Rockets]). It was the first time anyone had looked at the problem so closely, or even cosidered it a realistic scientific question. His paper was published a few months before the Wright Brothers, in Massachussetts, made the world’s first powered flight.

Tsiolkovsky’s paper did not at first attract any great praise or reaction. The unprecedented nature of his achievement was not recognised. He remained an obscure figure until a follow-up paper, published in 1911, attracted more attention from the Soviet establishment and he was elected to the Academy of Sciences. He continued to research and write about the practical problems of rocket propulsion, and in the 1920s published further papers which set out important calculations about the need for fuel, velocities, reaction mass and so on, which are now fundamental to any space launch. One of the students who was inspired directly by Tsiolkovsky’s work was the young  Sergey Korolyov, who would go on to become the Russians’ chief rocket scientist and design the launcher for Yuri Gagarin’s historic first flight into space in 1961.

Tsiolkovsky, like Fyodorov before him, also held much wider philosophical views about human progress and space exploration. In 1928 he published a book called ‘The Will of the Universe. The Unknown Intelligence’ in which he claimed that humans would colonise and explore the entire galaxy. He believed that the basic physical constituents of the universe and space also had mental properties, that the cosmos itself has a kind of soul with which it might be possible to commune, and he imagined incorporeal beings whose intelligence far exceeded humans inhabiting distant realms of space. But unlike Fyodorov, Tsiolkosky’s vision of eternal life was not of a coherent physical existence, but rather a joining with the stuff of the cosmos, a re-cycling of ‘happy atoms’ into new shapes, new forms of life.

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, the rover Curiosity, launched this week to the Red Planet. With the help of a hovering crane it will touch down in the basin of Gale Crater in approximately 8 months’ time. It is the largest robot ever sent to another world. On board there are instruments that will allow the study of rocks, surface samples, high resolution images, gas spectrometry and other types of experiment. The rover will be capable of moving approximately 100m per day in good conditions, and if it lands in the right place will be able to study millions if not billions of years of Martian geology. Together with the ESA’s Mars Express, and the continuing mission of NASA’s previous Opportunity lander, this will give us our most sophisticated picture of Mars by far.

The ‘Roadmap for Space Exploration’, a strategy co-published by 12 of the world’s space agencies, lays out a clear vision for future exploration until the early 2030s. It calls for the development of a range of new technologies, including advanced in-space propulsion systems, more efficient rocket launchers and better radiation shielding for spacecraft to allow future human missions. Our progress in the exploration of space has been tantalisingly slow so far, but there are increasingly signs that this process will accelerate. There is now a political commitment to concerted exploration efforts, and in the private sector spaceflight is becoming a reality. Once the cost of getting to space and reaching orbit gets lower, I think we are likely to see a rapid increase in the advancement of robotic and human exploration.

You don’t have to be Ray Kurzweil to believe that by the end of this century we may be on the brink of a new era of space travel and possibly even permanent habitation on other planets. We are still far from the enormous dreams of men like Fyodorov and Tsiolkovsky, but our determination to explore and push the boundaries of human knowledge has never been greater. Our pursuit of space exploration today does not have the same philosophical and spiritual corona surrounding it. We are inspired by science, by the pursuit of verifiable knowledge, but not by the dream of overcoming death or coming into closer relationships with matter and energy, praying to the angels of the cosmos. And we tend to draw a neater distinction between science and philosophy than those early prophets of the space age did. But we should not lose sight of their visions and their teachings because they still have the power to revive our desire for flight, our dream of visiting the edges of the galaxy and finding out what our human nature truly means.

Yes, there have been far too many uncritical paeans to Steve Jobs already, some bordering on the hysterical, but here are 5 simple things that, whatever your stripe, you’d have to admit he got right.

1. Profit is more important than market share

Many eulogies to Steve Jobs talk about his pursuit of perfection, of his disdain for cheap, affordable devices, almost as if he was Wittgenstein or Kant, paring away at human knowledge searching for some essential truth and would settle for nothing until he found it. But more fundamental than any desire for quality is the calculation that profit is more important than market share. As long as Apple was highly profitable, it would have the cash to invest in research, new products and technologies and new routes to market. Who cares how many phones you sell if you sell them for next to nothing?

2. The user experience is everything

Everything Apple made under Jobs was designed to be delightful and simple to use. Everything was designed with the user in mind. Every design decision was about making the experience better and more intuitive for the user. Start by asking, ‘What do I need? And what would I use it for? And how can I make it as enjoyable to use as possible?’

3. The details are not the details

Jobs was notorious for his obssession (certainly latterly) with every aspect of product design – to the extent that he almost scared people with his attention to detail. It paid off. The details are not the details.

4. Sell the experience

Steve Jobs certainly knew how to sell things. The basic idea is to associate your product with cool things and beautiful people and fun. Make people think they too can be beautiful, cool and fun if they own your products, then they will tear at each other’s throats to get into your shops and buy stuff. Jobs was intimately involved in Apple marketing campaigns and of course contributed in his own not quite inimitable – Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook have both given passing impressions recently – way.

5. People don’t know what they want five years from now

Market research is important, but you don’t get to be a ‘path-breaking innovator’ or a ‘genius’ just by focus-grouping a bunch of slack-jawed Sunnyvale mopes. You have to use your intuition to guess what will be important and desirable in the future, to spot trends before they become established. The best way to do this, according to the Book of Jobs, seems to be to ask yourself, ‘What would be insanely cool?’ and then make it.

(Warning, this is highly wonkish. And I have no idea what inspired it. I just felt it needed to be written.)

The political debate (behind the scenes) at the moment is all about Communitarianism. This is a relatively new branch of political philosophy that has emerged as a response to Liberalism as it developed in the middle of the 20th century, and specifically to the ideas of people like John Rawls and Isaiah Berlin. It’s very fashionable at the moment with influential ideologues like Maurice Glasman and Philip Blond who have the ears of ministers and party gurus. Therefore it is a very important shaping force in the formulation of policy. And it needs to be understood and criticised.

Communitarianism represents something of a ‘Third Way’ (not like Blair and Brown’s Third Way, which was little more than a pragmatic fudge – as we now know – the idea that by treading a middle path between deregulation of industry and moderate fiscal expansion you could pay for the necessary infrastructure investment through the proceeds of increased growth). No, an actual ideological Third Way which looks to take away power both from the centralised State and Capital and distribute it instead to organised groups of citizens.  Maurice Glasman has been closely involved with London Citizens, for example, and sees this group as a model of how distributed power handed back to communities could be effectively harnessed for social good.

Philip Blond (of Red Tory fame) on the other hand, comes from a totally different perspective. His idea is much more in line with the traditional small Statism of the Notting Hill set and people like Nick Boles, Francis Maude, Michael Gove and Oliver Letwin. In this group, Communitarian ideas are simply a veil for a further attack on the State, presenting local people and ‘close to the ground’ decision making as much more efficient and democratic than the bureaucracy of Whitehall and even of local authorities.

But let’s take a look at some of the intellectual foundations of this idea. Michael Sandel is one of the most prominent philosophers today associated with Communitarian thought, and his version of this set of ideas is largely critical of Rawls’ ‘Theory of Justice’, one of the most important works of liberal philosophy of the 20th century (and one which many so-called liberals today have not read or even heard of – they still think of a liberal as someone whose closest intellectual godfather is John Stuart Mill. I’ve got nothing against Mill, he’s very important, but times change, and ideas develop). Sandel and fellow thinker Charles Taylor have argued that Rawls’ classic formula of the ‘Veil of Ignorance’ rests on a depiction of the individual self that is too separate, too disconnected, from the community and the family to which he belongs. That Rawls’ thought experiment can only remain an experiment because in reality each of us is formed by, and only exists as, a set of connections (see Bakhtin again).

I disagree with this position and actually I think that Rawls’ idea of how we must arrive at a consensus about political authority is very strong. I don’t think that the Communitarian argument, as advanced by Sandel and Taylor, actually weakens Rawls’ argument in any sense, because Rawls is asking each of us to perform the same thought experiment, to imagine an ideal scenario. That was the point, because only by thinking in this abstract, idealised way can we arrive at the necessary agreements.

Anyway, whether you agree with Sandel or not is not really the point. Even if you do, you would have to see that the ideas put forward by people like Philip Blond and Maurice Glasman are incredibly shallow and weak versions of his arguments. They are a kind of pop-philosophy version of Communitarianism.

Glasman himself is more deeply influenced by the Hungarian thinker Karl Polanyi, whose major work was ‘The Great Transformation’, published in 1944. Polanyi’s main arguments are loosely grouped under the term ‘Substantivism’, but his ideas about the ways in which economic activity is embedded in the social and political context of the community are analogous in many ways to Sandel’s Communitarianism. Where Sandel enphasizes the individual’s connections with community, family and society, Polanyi talks about the place of markets in society and the conflict between what he calls the ‘Self-Regulating Market’ and man’s social nature.

There is a similar appeal in both of these philosophies, an appeal based on the notion of a return to traditional values, of the human scale, of the organic popular movement, of the homely authority of the people, of going back to a simpler, less atomised and less alienated (to throw in some Marxist terminology) time. There is a desire to re-establish the connections between people, to strengthen communities, to give capitalism a more human aspect. At least there is, I think, on the part of the progressive left. On the right, I am more suspicious that these ideas are simply a convenient way of masking deeper objectives, objectives of strengthening private capital against the counterweight of an active and interventionist state.

In this way, there is a danger that Glasman’s Blue Labour movement, and people like James Purnell’s hasty adoption of the red flag of Keir Hardie and the history of the Labour movement, actually plays directly into the hands of the conservative right’s agenda. If Labour, for instance, decides not to stand up for the state but instead to promote the increasing re-distribution of power to communities, they will, unwittingly perhaps, be strengthening the control and influence of capital. I believe that the state is the only effective force that can balance the enormous power of global private capital. And in many ways, as we know to our cost, it has proved too weak over the last twenty or thirty years, and too apt to be seduced or bought outright by the financiers.

Although there are attractive features about the Communitarian/Substantivist ideal, I simply can’t see how the kinds of groups and community organisations they advocate can provide a proper check on corporate power. Liberalism, in its classic form (at least if you take Locke’s view) and in its more recent updating by Rawls and Berlin, not to mention its application in practical political economy by Keynes and social reforms by Beveridge, recognises the vital importance of balance between the state and the private sector and private capital. That recognition came after centuries of struggle, oppression, and gradual progress. The danger of a new political Communitarianism and other assaults on Liberalism is that they have not taken that history into account and they will simply reduce the power of democratic political institutions to protect people from the rampant power of private capital.

I’ve been asked to talk tomorrow at the Alphaville festival of post-digital culture, alongside Patrick Hussey from Arts and Business. I’m very flattered to have been invited, especially to be speaking with such an illustrious colleague. And since I was, I’ve started to think a bit about what ‘post-digital’ means. It’s a phrase you hear more and more often these days in geek circles.

I suppose I take ‘post-digital’ to mean the condition of being fully reconciled to the disruption brought about by digital technology, and in particular the Web. It is much the same, in that sense, as ‘Postmodernism’, which really means the condition of having overcome the ‘shock of the new’, the culture of high modernism, and having absorbed its lessons. Being post-digital, we are, to repeat my previous post, through the future-shock and over the nostalgia (largely – we can still be nostalgic, in increasingly kitsch ways, for modernism and for ‘digital’). ‘Digital’ in this sense, and lord knows it is rapidly becoming the most bandied-about and meaningless term in the dictionary, refers to the technologies that have disrupted our industries, our communications and our patterns of behaviour.

Being ‘post’ anything usually leads to a period of self-reflexivity and a prevailing irony about ‘progress’ that undercuts conscious artistic ambition. There’s a danger that this urge leads to a degeneration, a period in which the only statements are jokes, in which Rorty’s ‘contingency’ is so much to the fore that it is impossible to be naive. So, we look back on the period of disruption and shock and criticise it as an abnormal era, an era of extremes and wild hopes that could never be fulfilled, however deeply influential it really was (which we can only ascertain from a greater perspective, at a greater distance). This trend is evident already in many people’s analysis of the ‘digital’ era, and especially the so-called Web 2.0 period. I do it myself, all the time, pricking the bubble of technological utopianism that blew up in the early-mid naughties and whose chief inflaters were people like Kevin Kelly and Chris Anderson. 

The fact is, that, insofar as it is meaningful to talk about the ‘digital’ in this way, we are still very much intellectually in its grip. And will be for at least the foreseeable future. But what is noticeable is that instead of simply evangelizing about the wonders  of the Web or shying away from it, sticking our fingers in our ears and whistling and hoping it will all go away, the questions are getting much more sophisticated and more practical. Instead of asking what is an API and why do I need one? people are much more likely to be asking, what is the right way to build open APIs, how will the use of each social network help me to fulfil specific goals? and so on…

In other words this stuff is just normal now. It’s becoming just as much a part of the planning process as print marketing, or programming. Or, to put it more accurately, digital questions are being considered at the same time as, and alongside those other fundamental questions. They are intertwined with them. The process of entering the ‘post-digital’ realm then is really a process of acceptance and integration, or digestion. Something that was first viewed as radical, alien and even threatening has now been internalised. Nixon declared ‘we are all Keynesians now’ (would that we still were), but it seems more appropriate now to say that ‘we are all (whatever the collective noun for Vint Cerf’s disciples is) now’.

But in addition to this sense of being ‘okay’ with the arrival of disruptive technologies, I think the term ‘post-digital’ also implies a whole set of other attitudes and characteristics, largely born out of the rhetoric about ‘democratisation’ that has reared its head again since the Arab spring. Notions of real political progress and transparency have been elided with much more superficial ideas about the scalable nature of open platforms and widespread use of social networks in this catch-all term. Post-digital implies a certain allegiance to the ideas of openness, interconnectedness and community that sprang up in the early days of the Web.

It implies a lack of attachment to existing hierarchies and infrastructures that have defined 20th century industries and distribution systems, a capacity for being fleet-of-foot, nimble, interested in process and criticality as well as social engagement (from an artistic point of view), and, interestingly, multiple or collective authorship. It seems to be, at its most engaged, against, or rather critical of, the mass media, the production line, the institution. Yet it is still entranced or persuaded by long-cherished ideas of individual artistic genius and talent.

Anyway, this may all be navel-gazing, but it’s the stuff that’s swirling round in my brain at the moment, and some of it is probably likely to exit through my cake-hole tomorrow. So watch out.

‘Culture is the formation of attention’ – Simone Weil

One of the things that is changing most dramatically in the way that people now experience art and culture online is the amount of time they are prepared to commit to it. The Web, because of its interconnectedness and its vastness, makes it easy to move from one thing to the next, to compare and contrast, to graze from one site to another, to another, to another. It does not make it easy to concentrate on just one thing for long periods of time. The on-demand model of content distribution and the box-set have removed the need to wait for anything. There’s no need to go through a whole week waiting for the next instalment, no need to delay your gratification. You can have it now. And why shouldn’t you?

And of course protesting that it is just good for the soul to have to wait occasionally is a feeble argument. But if I cannot wait, if I cannot bear the suspense, or resist the temptation, does that mean that I will no longer be able to commit myself to something that might take a long time to unfold? Does it mean that I will be less prepared to make the investment in a novel or a thesis, or something that requires sustained attention? And will there ever be, therefore, online texts or narratives that can sustain that same degree of concentration, that can hold me for as long as a good book? Until there are, perhaps we cannot really speak of an online culture. We have learned to invest effort in reading long novels or watching feature-length films or visiting exhibitions at least partly because we have been taught that it is worth putting in that effort, going through the pain barrier, for the sophisticated rewards we get from these cultural experiences.

I was reading Matt Locke’s blog over on Storythings when this question really came into sharper focus. Or rather these questions, because there are at least two: how do you grab people’s attention? and once you’ve got it, how do you hold onto it? I think the first question is much easier to answer, and has been addressed in various ways by marketers, promoters, experts in social media and advertising and so on. You can quite easily (assuming you have money or access to ‘celebrities’ or other influencers) get people interested in something. But in order to sustain their interest for a long time, in an online narrative or work of art, there are many different considerations, most of which haven’t yet been fully understood.

Anything that is online has to hold its own against the galaxy of other sites, links, videos and nuggets of information that are just a click away. The competition for attention is overwhelming. And yet people do devote long periods of time online to gaming, playing in virtual worlds and artificial environments, and so on.

A great novel holds our attention for all kinds of reasons, reasons that are very complex, some to do with structure and plot, some to do with voice and character, some to do with what Wallace Stevens called ‘the surface of things’, and so on…. We want to find out what happens next, but we also simply enjoy entering the imaginative world of the story and deepening our relationship with the characters. The writer has learnt how to enthral us, drawing on a huge tradition of literary works that demonstrate what can and can’t be done, what works and what doesn’t.

I think the anxiety I feel about this is a misplaced anxiety, for much the same reason that the anxiety about the possible death of print (much overblown) is misplaced. It is misplaced because I am expecting the same thing from the internet as I get from books and other existing cultural forms – the exhibition, the feature film, the concert. I have got over the future-shock of disruption, but I am still trapped by nostalgia. The fully-realised forms of artistic work that the internet will allow have not been created yet. The thing that I am worrying about is in fact this reluctance to let go of the cultural expectations that I have grown up with. I want novels because that is what I am used to. There is a distictive pleasure in a novel that I do not want to relinquish. And, more than that, I want it to be preserved so that other people will enjoy it, too.

I don’t think there’s any real danger of the novel dying out as a form of storytelling in the near future. For me it does serve some particular need that I have to experience a story in a particular way (and the rapid growth in ebook sales seems to confirm that there’s really no end in sight for ‘long-form’ writing just yet). I relish the well-crafted sentence. It is too deep now for me to break or forget that addiction. It is sensual. I have trained myself to read novels. The question I should be asking, though, is more like this: ‘will the internet provide new ways of telling stories that can capture my attention and hold it for long periods, and which provide similar cultural rewards and pleasures to those of a well written novel, or a play, or an exhibition of paintings or sculptures?’

I have an enormous confidence that it will, in time, do just that. But in order for the artists who will make those works to invent their new stories, or their new installations or images, they will have to free themselves of the expectations and the conventions of the existing forms. Or at least they will need to understand how those conventions and expectations can be adapted to these new kinds of work. Perhaps the ‘novels’ of the future are really going to be much more like video games, in terms of their presentation, but they will be marked by the knowledge of writers about characters, stories, speech, relationships, and so on. Instead of the kinds of games we have now, things like Grand Theft Auto or even LA Noire, we will see more work like Dear Esther, by Dan Pinchbeck.

And perhaps one day soon writers will really start to see how stories can be told in a way that links many different sites, platforms and media all together, in a web rather than a teleologically straight line. These stories, perhaps inspired by the ‘Garden of Forking Paths’, will start to make full use of the networked, immersive nature of the Web, to understand its grammar. In fact, this process has already begun, the first steps have been taken, and we get closer and closer to the moment when the first great storyteller of the internet emerges. It may even have happened already, known to some small coterie or network of friends or admirers, but not yet broken through to a wider audience and consciousness.

I do know this: when those stories start to arrive I won’t be able to put them down. And I will start to overcome my baseless fears about the death of the novel.

Update – I was re-reading this post yesterday and it occurred to me that I hadn’t properly developed one of the central points I was trying to make. In retrospect it seemed to be staring me in the face. I said that the internet is full of distractions, which makes it harder to concentrate on one individual story. But what I didn’t go on to say, and should have, is that that implies that in order successfully to hold a reader’s attention, online stories may have to cut the reader off from those distractions. Or rather, shutting out some of those distractions puts the storyteller at an advantage when it comes to holding the attention online.

Try watching a show on iPlayer (it actually works even better on ITVplayer, but that’s so buggy I don’t want to put you through it) in the normal/windowed player. Now try watching it  in full screen. This isn’t rocket science, by any means, but it just becomes very clear how the experience of paying attention to content within a frame, within a page, within a tab, within a browser window, which may also have many other tabs open at the same time, is very different from watching it when it’s all there is to look at.

Apple seems to be moving  ever closer to the edge-to-edge approach with its screens, removing or shrinking the bezel at the edge of the glass so that all you can see is the film, or the photo, or the app you are working in. They did this with the transition from Quicktime 7 to Quicktime X (incidentally culling several advanced and useful features at the same time). But the point is Apple has understood that if you want people to become engrossed in something, you have to make that the only thing they can see, or hear, or touch. (I wonder, idly – and does one ever wonder in any other adverbial way? - whether it is this single consideration, this desire for pristine, immersive visual presentation, above all others, that was the genesis of the iPad and continues to drive the development of iOS? Who knows?).

So although I think the very best stories will always hold their own, always grip us and draw us in, we make it a lot easier for them to capture our full attentions if we also block out the surrounding noise, hide the forking paths that our browsers hold open for us, leading perhaps to something just a little bit more exciting, or more tempting, or greener.

Okay, I know, it’s a very pretentious title. But what am I supposed to call it? That’s what this post is about.

At trade fairs and conferences, and everywhere I go these days I notice more and more how corporations use language to describe themselves, and there’s a very specific vocabulary and register that they all employ. It has a kind of deadening effect, because it just sounds like dull blather. It is as if they are deliberately trying to limit the scope of language, to rein it in, so that their spokespeople and employees can only use certain words and phrases and styles. So that they can only parrot the ‘values’ and idealised self-image of the company in words that have no weight and no connection to the world.

And of course that is exactly what they are doing, and this is a well-developed phenomenon. But it goes beyond ‘house-style’ and ‘Plain English’ these days, until it infects every pronouncement, every statement, every single sentence that every employee utters. And the truly worrying thing is that unless you are on your guard against it all the time, unless you fight it and care passionately enough about preserving your own, unrestrained language it can even make its way into your personal life, and from there into your thoughts. Before long, the language in which the corporation enfolds itself replaces, supplants the language you would naturally use to describe your experience of that company or your feelings about it.

Forcing your employees to use a house style or branding guidelines or ‘plain English’ is already an attempt to control their thoughts, a horrible and insidious effort to restrict their creative use of language which ought to be made illegal. But the further encouragement of a culture in which everybody talks the same way and thinks the same way is not just damaging to individuals, it is dangerous because it encourages institutional thinking, destroys innovation and traps people in a straitened world of unimaginative repetition. Isn’t the very idea of a corporate ‘culture’ oxymoronic, if not thoroughly tasteless?

Corporate speak obscures meaning, to the outsider, but has a very precise meaning for initiates. It is a mixture of the grandiloquent and the banal. What I mean by that is that it aggrandizes the corporation, gives it a virtually human or even spiritual status, as though it is somehow more than simply a legal and financial entity, flatters the power of the corporation (as if it should only be spoken about in a certain way, using certain words), while at the same time making it seem utterly normal and therefore inconsequential. It says ‘thou shalt not question’, or rather ‘thou need not question’, because it is so pre-ordained, so fundamental, and so lacking in danger or deviancy or passion.

It co-opts words which previously had their own, quite different definitions, and turns them into something else. I am not just talking about the use of euphemisms. That has been going on forever (and not just in business). It is the development of a whole new idiolect, and a new lexicon, and a new way of thinking, that suddenly becomes damningly apparent when you are in the middle of a big sales conference.

And I am not just talking about the use of jargon. There has always been jargon. Some of it is funny because it is plainly ridiculous or unnecessary, some of it is boring, but jargon, at bottom, has a specific technical use.  As long as it is used appropriately, it isn’t such a problem. The real problem is the deliberate (but sometimes involuntary because unanticipated) control over all uses of language that our companies and institutions want to exert over their employees and their customers. It is the corporation’s attempt to limit the ways in which you can think about it or speak about it. This is the very essence of branding.

Some of the more intelligent companies have tried to soften their image by returning corporate phrases to simpler, more authentic-sounding ones - e.g. ‘Human Resources’ to ‘People’, ‘marketing’ to ‘engagement’… But this is only a transparent attempt to gain control of the language again, in a subtler way. It could be compared to the way in which brands in the 1980s and 90s adopted the iconography and language of the various subcultures. It’s a camouflage, but not a very good one. It makes them look smooth, sophisticated. Capital transforms itself into any shape that pleases consumers. It is the ultimate shape-shifter, but if you look closely you will never be fooled by it. There is a deathly, fake quality to it. It is like somebody who tells a joke but doesn’t quite time the punchline right.

So, in semantic terms, there is an ongoing re-definition of the meanings of words and phrases to suit only the corporate environment, and a continuous corruption of personal language to turn it instead into sales speak. The signified has changed, even if the signifiers haven’t. Cliché suddenly infects your conversations because you have been trained, consciously or not, to describe things in a particular way, to use certain nouns and phrases (and usually to excise all adverbs), to employ certain images or figures of speech. If you work in a large corporation or a bureaucracy the effect is pronounced, but simply by imbibing advertising and ‘messages’ all the time you catch the virus anyway.

In syntactic terms, the structure of sentences and phrases is also under attack. You are constantly encouraged not to write complex sentences, not to use the passive voice, not to entertain ambiguity. You are supposed to use dashes when you should use full stops, to use commas where there should be colons, not even to use capital letters. You are told to use only certain phrases or to coin them only in a way that has been approved for its ‘consistency’.

And in terms of pragmatics, you can only speculate as to the impact this has on the ability to think, speak and write in an original or interesting way. How can you escape received ideas if your entire vocabulary is built out of them?

Shakespeare writes: ‘The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen/Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.’ But how will we imagine or uncover the form of  ’things unknown’ if we have no room to think? Resist the clinging nonsense of business language, plain English, branding books and sales pitches because if you don’t you may soon find that you are unable to think imaginatively and say what you want to when it really matters.

So many provisos before I start this post:

- first, it has very little to do with technology or with the future in any obvious way, but rather than start a new Posterous or Tumblr just for this braindump I thought I’d put it here

- second, I am keenly aware that (to my discredit) I know almost nothing about the lives of marginalised and poor young people, and that I am not qualified to speak about them or what motivates them. One thing I do think I know something about, though, is the English language and the ways in which it is used. So I am going to consider mainly the use of political language in relation to these events. Where I do make comments about the rioters/looters, I will try to defer to the opinions of those who actually know something about them – e.g. teachers, people who work with children and teenagers, social workers, etc…

- third, this is not about scoring points, not about raising one ideology over another – ideologies are broken (they have their uses, but they are broken, and break down, in the face of real problems). If I seem to be trying to score points for one ‘side’ or another, feel free to ignore everything I say on the subject. I’m actually not interested in ‘winning’ some imaginary political debate. I’m interested in trying to imagine how we can prevent these things happening again. There are lessons to be drawn (painful lessons) for both Left and Right, and if we fail to be humble and admit that we need to study these events and learn from them, I fear what may come next

- fourth, nothing I write should be interpreted as a justification of, or an excuse for, the riots, the looting or the appalling violence that has been carried out and that has damaged properties and put lives at risk.

- fifth, I am not dealing here with the protests following the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham last Thursday night. Those protests, and the reaction on all sides to Mr Duggan’s death, needs to be separated (though there are links) from a broader discussion of the riots that have taken place since and seem (on the face of it) to have little to do with protesting his killing

Our children and young people are the future of this country. It is incredibly sad and depressing (and a little terrifying) to see so many of them rioting, looting and rampaging through our city centres. It makes me angry to think of the damage they have done, and it appals me to think of the pain and suffering they have inflicted through their selfishness and greed on hard-working and innocent people.

But I start from this premise: without trying to understand why this might have happened, we cannot hope to prevent it from happening again.

If you do not agree with that premise, you will probably take issue with most of what I am about to write. I state the premise quite clearly at the beginning because I want my reasoning to be transparent.

The rhetoric of ‘mindless criminality’ and ‘criminality, pure and simple’ is designed to do several things: to refuse the rioters any explanation for what they do, to simplify (and therefore ignore) the problems that are the background to this behaviour, and to refuse to try to understand any cause these riots may have. It reassures people who want to see the violence and looting go away as quickly as possible. Politicians who use this type of language are doing so in an attempt to present themselves as sources of authority, moral rectitude, and ‘robust’ discipline. Changing the terms of debate from political ones to moral ones also defuses some of the dangers of this situation for them. If people are asking questions about the moral decay of our society, they will not be asking questions about the effectiveness of current policies and the government.

They seek to cut off the terms of debate, to appear dynamic and decisive (qualities that always poll well), not to get bogged down in detail. Detail, in our age of telegenic slogans, memes and permatanned TV sprites, is the devil. Just ask Obama and the Democrats. Watching the President trying to explain the long-term cost reduction benefits of the Affordable Healthcare act was like watching Richard Dawkins explain zygotic fission to a cow. Reducing moral complexity to simple absolutes, to binaries, is a political sure thing. It sounds good. It looks good. It is in fact nonsense.

Moral relativism is used as a slur against liberal politicians as if they are really people who believe in the moral equivalence of all things: drinking tea and blowing up children. In fact all it means is that you don’t subscribe to the idea of categorical imperatives, that you believe there is a continuum of moral goodness. But most of all it means that you are prepared to ask why things happen, not just to believe that they emanate from some absolute ontological pole. Questioning is vital, and we are currently in danger of being led down the path of action without reflection. That is what I’m afraid of. If we don’t ask why, and find out, we will never be able to make things better. If we act in a mood of anger and revenge, before asking why, we risk making things even worse.

But there is another, equally impotent and vapid, language that is appropriated by politicians of the Left to try to get away from confronting a difficult problem. This is the language of the victim, and it denies personal responsibility for acts of criminal damage and violence, and too often covers over a lack of appropriate policy responses to anti-social behaviour and crime. Children need to be given guidance, and they need to have boundaries set for them. Not out of a tyrannical desire to dominate or control them, but for their own good, to prevent them coming to harm or encountering real danger. If they aren’t given this sense of respect for legitimate authority, they may continue to test limits until their behaviour gets them into serious trouble.

The Left does not help itself by ignoring these problems, by simply looking to explain these events in terms of deprivation and exclusion without also acknowledging the role of personal responsibility and discipline. All of these things, or the lack of them, play a role. In scenes reminiscent of the debate over immigration in which the Labour party I believe has been too complacent about growing concern in certain areas over levels of immigration linked to lack of jobs, we have seen many figures of the Left talk easily about the combination of poverty (financial, spiritual, emotional) and lack of opportunity, and inequality, that creates the circumstances in which young people feel compelled to act out, to commit crimes and attack the police.

There is much evidence, not least in ‘The Spirit Level’ by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, that more equal societies (in terms of income distribution) have lower rates of crime. But it is a temptation we should resist to believe that only by reducing income inequality can we prevent riots and criminal behaviour. The Left needs to develop not only a credible way of talking about discipline and responsibility, but also appropriate policy responses to reassure the public that they can be trusted to deliver improved security and safety. Simply blaming ‘the cuts’ feels like an exercise in naked political opportunism. I disagree with the government’s fiscal policy very strongly, and I think cuts will have a severe impact on many poor and deprived communities, but we cannot feasibly lay the blame for these riots at the door of the Treasury alone.

But even within this discourse of personal responsibility there are many nuances. How much easier it is to talk about ‘taking responsibility for your actions’ and ‘moral correctness’ when you have never been faced with any difficult moral choices or any real hardships in your own life. I should know, being serially privileged myself. Too many people on the Right, I find, do not have a keen enough sense of the difficulty of growing up poor, in a depressed neighbourhood, with parents who don’t care about you or who simply are too mired in their own problems to support you.

And again, on the Left, too few have real sympathy with the aspirational self-employed small business owners or entrepreneurs who risk their entire livelihoods and their families’ financial stability on a small venture they only sustain through their hard work every day of the week, sometimes every day of the year. Aren’t these people ‘entitled’ to be treated fairly, to be safe from the threat of gangs and home made petrol bombs?

Nii Sackey, whose excellent charity Bigga Fish works with young people in Hackney, and whose offices were smashed up in the violence on Tuesday night, gave this very interesting interview to Sky News. Nii, who actually works with young people every day and hears their concerns and what is going on in their lives, was able to walk the fine line between explanation, seeking the causes of the violence, and condoning the wrongdoing. It must be doubly frustrating, and ironic, for him, having spent so much time and energy trying to give people better opportunities and prospects, to see the damage done to his property. But he was not interested just in revenge or recrimination. He stood back from that and tried to explain, with great dignity, what he thought might be going on.

Watching Newsnight last night I was truly astonished by the conversation between Michael Gove and Harriet Harman. They both sought to attack each other, using disingenuous arguments and polished phrases, never once trying to talk about what had actually happened on the streets of London or Manchester or Birmingham. It was as if the only thing that concerned them was their self-presentation, their reflected image in the camera’s glozing eye, in the newspaper columns and pointless instapolls. This was truly frightening because it revealed a political class that has become so utterly detached from ordinary people and their lives that it has simply ceased caring about them. Everything is advantage or disadvantage, up or down, blue or red (or murky green).

True authority depends on respect, just as good policing relies on consent. Leaders gain authority by earning our respect. Tyrants impose authority on their people by exerting force and instilling fear. I hope that our politicians think about how they can earn our respect by working with us, trying to understand what has happened, and help us solve our problems.

This week, many of our leaders have looked like alien beings, be-suited technocrats photoshopped into the picture at the last minute, airbrushed sylphs flitting into our vision just long enough to deliver a prepared soundbite. They don’t look natural standing beside ‘real’ people. They look awkward, distant, as if they don’t quite fit. Occasionally they have had to be whisked away, for fear of being confronted by the voters, the people, and asked embarrassing or difficult questions. These are not leaders, they are cowards.

For real leadership, we need to look to men like Tariq Jahan, the father of Haroon, murdered in Birmingham, whose extraordinary dignity and courage should be an example to us all. He called for calm, for reflection, for an end to the violence. We should listen to him.

via James Bridle (whose blog, booktwo.org you should read religiously if you don’t already) I picked up the term ‘hauntology’. Like all concepts originating in the work of Jacques Derrida it is slippery, not to say labile. But Derrida, despite the flimsiness of some of his grander claims, does seem to have put his finger on something for once. A useful (though badly-spelled) definition can be found here – http://bit.ly/qaZ5lV

“The phrase is coined by Derrida (not Delueze) in his Specters of Marx during which he reflects on the persistance of the concept of (utopian) revolution despite its apparent eradication from the scene of politics and history… As such the concept of social and political revolution takes on a ghostly aspect – present and not present…” sic

Hauntology, playing on the French pronunciation of ‘Ontologie’, and like many Derridean terms more or less concerned with the state of simultaneous being and not-being, has more recently been applied to music instead of politics, to describe new compositions that make use of forgotten techniques or sound effects to create a ‘spectral’ sense of the past in the present. In particular to re-create sounds that were, when first invented, an attempt to be ‘futuristic’. At its simplest, then, hauntology is another form of nostalgia, a nostalgia for ideas of the future that have been rendered obsolete by the march of time and the quote-unquote “End of History”.

But hauntology is not simply about revisiting the past, it has a very specific tenor, a feeling of supernatural revenance, as if the sound or idea in question really has ‘come back from the dead’ or lingered on between heaven and earth, refusing to die:

“…the concept is deployed towards a music that employs certain strategies of disinternment – a disinternment of styles, sounds, even techniques and modes of production now abandoned, forgotten or erased by history…

(I take it the author means ‘disinterment’, as in un-burying, rather than ‘disinternment’, which presumably means some kind of release from prison…)

[it]… is like encountering a revenant – a return in figurative form of a glimpse of a future that never was, a visionary dream that was envisioned once but which slipped out of collective memory.”

But hauntology interests me particularly because I am fascinated by the ways in which our ideas of the future either wither or persist. They tell us something about the way our imaginations work, and about what we really mean when we say ‘the future’ or ‘futuristic’. Certain sounds and concepts quickly age or seem dated. Fashions, computer hardware, advertising, all of these things have short sell-by dates. When we see computer terminals from the 1970s in films, for instance, they look positively pre-historic. They don’t just look out of date. They look spectacularly backward. Something about the rate of progress of our design of this technology means that it almost immediately looks obsolete and becomes passé.

On the other hand, architecture and furniture designed in the 1920s and 1930s as part of the Bauhaus school and its descendents, the designs of people like Walter Gropius and Mies van Der Rohe all the way up to the 50s, still has a powerful hold on our imaginations and looks ‘futuristic’. Even drawings by Frank Lloyd Wright for buildings like the ‘Illinois’ look extraordinarily daring, bold and fantastic still.

I think that when we use the term ‘futuristic’ to describe an aesthetic, we really mean something else. The meaning of ‘futuristic’ in this sense is actually a collection of concepts related to simplicity, efficiency, geometrical cleanliness and abstraction. It is a lack of visual ‘noise’ and in this way it is connected to the imagery of the classical era. Egyptian monumental sculpture and architecture often has this quality of gigantic, simplified form. Perhaps this accounts for some of the persistence in our culture of the mythology of Egypt’s links with alien civilizations and spacefarers. Anyway, the point is that what we think the future looks like has certain common elements that don’t seem to change very much, despite the progress of our own present designs.

Some future aesthetics we have to excavate from the past because they only felt futuristic for a short time, in the cultural context in which they were made (and now they seem hopelessly outdated), while others don’t ever need rescuing because they still speak to our basic feelings of what the avant-garde, the advanced and space-age should be like. There is a permanent future, one that is, as Eliot put it: ‘perhaps… contained in time past’ and time present. It is a bright, abstract shape, and it haunts us just as much, and just as permanently, as the ghosts of the recent past.

Oh, and talking of aesthetics, ones that hover between the spectre of the past and the gleaming vision of the future, here’s Mr Bridle (and the Really Interesting Group) again – http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/

I’ve been reading (very belatedly) Jaron Lanier’s book, “You Are Not a Gadget”. And while I don’t necessarily agree with the main thrust of his argument, as a provocation, and as a corrective to some of the wilder thinking about technology (what Jaron calls ‘Cybernetic Totalism’ and ‘Digital Maoism’) it is a very impressive and thought-provoking work. It’s one of the first books I’ve read that raises some really valid and profound criticisms of our relationship with computers, and argues for a fundamentally humanistic approach to design and technology.

In the first section of the book, Jaron argues (and here I am going to have to paraphrase him wildly) two things: that large and complex programs and software often simplify and reduce the possibilities for human expression, and that instead of trying to design software and systems that are better and more responsive to our needs, we try to become more stupid and shallower so that we can use the machines. We admire our own creations so much that we debase ourselves to their level of ‘artificial intelligence’ rather than celebrating our own emotional and moral sophistication.

There are several reasons why I find this argument unconvincing. One is because of the sheer complexity of biological matter, especially the brain. In his excellent book ‘Bright Air, Brilliant Fire’, the neuroscientist Gearld Edelman explains that the human brain contains over a hundred billion neurons, or individual nerve cells. But each of these neurons is connected to the other neurons that are densely packed in around it. Each neuron may have  thousands of connections or synapses. But the truly staggering complexity only emerges when you consider that experience may trigger combinations of synapses in an essentially infinite variety of ways. The physical and chemical makeup of the brain constantly changes, in a way that no computer currently can. So, even at a purely physical level, the sophistication of the human brain is way beyond that of any computer. And not only that, but the combination of processes in the brain give rise to a consciousness, and self-consciousness, a mind, that no computer has.

This gives me great confidence in the capability of our minds not to be ‘dumbed-down’ by computers or by Web 2.0 applications, as Jaron seems to think they are. He cites Facebook, and the way in which our friendships become little more than hyperlinks, as evidence that we are narrowing and devaluing our humanity. But the very term ‘facebook friends’ has developed as an ironic response to this phenomenon. We know, when we ‘friend’ people on Facebook, that we are doing so not to replace a real friendship, and not even to give the illusion of friendship, but simply as a way of keeping in touch with people we can’t actually be with then and there, because it is convenient, because it makes long-range and instant communication possible. If Facebook does diminish our real friendships it is only because it makes it possible for us now to maintain contact with a much larger number of people, and therefore less easy to divide our time between all the members of our social group. But that is not to say that any of us now think of swapping a few photos on Facebook or sharing status updates as a real relationship. It is just a stand-in, a cipher, for friendship, and a way of staying in touch with people we never could before. But we recognise this instinctively.

There’s also quite a lot of dyspeptic stuff about the growing culture of re-mixing and sampling, and the threat this poses to the creation of original work. This is the resurgence of an argument popularised by Andrew Keen in his ‘Cult of the Amateur’, that this kind of activity will somehow undermine ‘real’ artistic originality, and that our aesthetic tastes and creative instincts will be dulled because all we will have is an ever growing roster of YouTube Hitler parodies. I’m afraid I just don’t see this. Yes, there is a lot of mundane stuff being made, mainly for the re-mixer’s own amusement. But this is not the work of recognised artists. It is not replacing or threatening invention and originality, artistic exploration. These things are made by different people, by people who previously had no way of responding to or participating in the work. Now they can quite easily re-mix other people’s work for amusement or for any purpose and create their own derivatives. But that doesn’t mean that artists or filmmakers or musicians are losing the desire to create truly new things.

More convincing is his argument that software design often tends towards the interoperable, the common denominator, rather than the highest standard of mimesis or intuitive experience. So, the story of MIDI, and how it describes music in a relatively crude way, is revealing about the processes by which software comes to be widely accepted, and replicated, and before we know it gets ‘locked-in’. It is harder to say whether a prevalence of low quality MIDI or mp3 digital files will erode our appreciation of music, whether we will come to think of all music as simply a tinny treble sound from a pair of badly insulated headphones. I rather think not. And judging by the sums of money people are still prepared to pay for custom built speakers, earphones, and to see music live, in concert, it seems the death of the audiophile has been much exaggerated.

I think that the sheer complexity and sophistication of our minds, and our bodies, will prevent us from being lulled by poor quality recordings, by choppy re-mixes, by poorly designed software and crappy social networks. Yes, we use them, because they make music portable, instant, they make our friends and acquaintances partially accessible at a distance, but they don’t come close to replacing the experience of hearing a band live, of having dinner with a friend, or viewing an artistic masterpiece in a gallery.

‘Cybernetic Totalism’, is the idea that every system is, or can be faithfully represented as, a regulatory system of feedback, control and adjustment. This idea has been very powerful, without doubt, in the fields of computer science, social sciences, environmentalism, and finance. What Jaron criticizes is the belief, the faith, in cybernetics as a means of explaining, and modelling, all systems. Here he is at his most convincing and brilliant. But if his criticisms sometimes feel revelatory, it is also because this belief in a simple way of representing a complex world seems so far-fetched when it is actually subjected to scrutiny. The thought experiment he asks us to perform is to imagine that every neuron, every synapse, could be represented by a transistor, or by a microprocessor, or an artificial version of itself. And then to ask ourselves, if this model brain were constructed faithfully, down to the last detail, would it still give rise to consciousness, to a mind, to a soul? The Cybernetic Totalists are apparently convinced that it would. But this seems a hopelessly naive conclusion. It is a certainty based on a radically reduced understanding of the complexity of the philosophical problem.

‘Digital Maoism’, the idea that the “collective is all-wise”, that the aggregated knowledge of the community must always be a better guide, a truer source of knowledge, than the application of an individual intelligence, seems equally far-fetched when it is examined closely. But of course these ways of thinking do not develop as the result of a dialectic process. They come into being through a series of misunderstandings, conflations, and wild enthusiasms. They are inflated by sudden gusts of PR and the fickle breeze of VC funding. They are easy ideas to cotton onto, and to disseminate. They are in fact nuggets of ideas. They are not fully formed, not coherent. But they are not Straw Men, either. Lanier is right to warn us of the dangers of falling into these simplistic patterns of thought. He is right to re-charge our critical faculties. Because the danger of accepting these convenient falsehoods is that we resign our ability to design something better, to question the way things are, and to improve the world around us.

He quotes Alan Turing, and gives a fitting description of his contributions to the field of computer science, cryptanalysis and mathematics: “he gifted us with wild leaps of invention, including much of the mathematical underpinnings of digital computation”, before going on to interpret the meaning of the Turing test in a novel, and important, way: “what the test really tells us, however… is that machine intelligence can only be known in a relative sense, in the eyes of a human beholder.” In other words, we can never discover whether a machine has a soul, or a mind, like ours because, as the test demonstrates, a sufficiently well programmed computer can trick us into believing that it is human, or intelligent, when it is not. This is a strong critique of the field of Artificial Intelligence as it is thought of today, and an important refrain in the book – that self-consciousness is a mystery, one that we should treasure and appreciate. We should not debase it for the convenience of our machines.