Positive Liberty

From the intimate to the anonymous, computers are ruining us. The last stage of the computer revolution will consist of our learning where the machines do not belong, and I’ve got two candidates right here.

My father has been a curmudgeon-in-training since before I was born. Retired, he’s now sliding into that role with gleeful abandon. “You know what computers are?” he asked me recently. Then, without waiting for an answer: “They’re the new television. Everyone said that TV would make people smarter, and closer, and happier, and better citizens. But it did just the opposite. It turned everyone into stupid, isolated, dreary, ill-informed couch potatoes. And now computers are doing the same, but worse.”

These are big words coming from someone who has never owned a computer–and who pledges that he never will. While I don’t share his pessimism, I think he’s completely right to blast the optimists.

At least in theory, nothing is more neutral than the Internet: Here, all your interactions are exactly you make of them, because it is possible for you to project yourself, in whatever form you consciously choose, to whatever audience might be out there: Here, your inside is your outside.

True, “Positive Liberty” is a persona I’ve adopted, and I’m exactly the same person in real life. But I’ve chosen this persona more or less deliberately, to reflect what I truly believe. It’s altogether different from choosing one’s house, or clothing or even one’s hairstyle, where you must work with what you’re given in life. Here, it’s as much or as little as you want. It’s whatever you want.

Think about that the next time you find boorishness on this, the most plastic of media: The person behind those words could have chosen differently–and they did not. They chose to be what they are, unlike the passive viewer of a television program, who might be excused for happening upon something idiotic. The Internet is exactly what we wish we were. God help us all.

Case in point: Online chatrooms, instant messages, and SMS. At a conference this week I learned that in terms of raw data generation, SMS and similar media now surpass all others. They’re bigger than books, newspapers, movies, radio, or TV. They’re even bigger than phone.

The text-based chat promises instant contact, but it delivers only basest and most banal of human emotions: reflexive acknowledgement, lust, rage, and the occasional spam. Oh, and stupid jokes. When was the last time that anyone wrote a genuine love letter?

I used to think that the lust factor of text messaging was primarily a gay phenomenon, because quite frankly gay chatrooms are filled with very little else–and straight chatrooms didn’t seem to exist. Then I discovered Yahoo! Games, which (especially if you play video pool) seems to be little more than a cruising ground for horny heterosexual teenagers.

Now, I play traditional Mah Johng–the antique four-player strategy game, not the solitaire version–and even there, I get seventeen-year-old females asking me for my intimate details. Yikes. I can only imagine what I’d find in the world of heterosexual chat if I ever went looking for it. By contrast, we gays are discreet indeed.

Text-based chat is at its best with one individual whom you already know very well. But even then it gives all the excitement of a 20-minute conversation–packed into three and a half hours, and stripped of vocal nuance.

Good old-fashioned voice phone has it all over SMS, and I suspect that the latter only prevails because we can politely ignore our interlocutors when they become tiresome. Oh, and it’s cheaper.

In turn, we’ve cheapened our human relations. We’ve reduced them to a set of crude and interchangeable glyphs. Someday, someone will look at the SMS phenomenon and see it as proof of our barbarism, like the Neanderthal in the Far Side cartoon, who carved a magnificent piano in stone–only to pound his head on the keyboard.

On the other side of human relations, there is a realm where crude and interchangeable glyphs are precisely what we want: These are called elections, and computers have done their level best to ruin them as well.

The Athenians were among the first to practice a really successful democracy. They had two simple and foolproof methods of voting: In one, the assembly divided into two groups, and the leaders did a head count. In the other, they used the ostracon, a piece of broken pottery on which a voter scratched the name of the individual they wished to elect–or, as the name suggests, the person they wished to ostracize:

(Original image from The Ohio State University can be viewed here.)

As a great philosopher said in a completely different context, “These were sane rules, and it would have been better if they had not been changed.” The move toward paperless elections may seem sleek and modern, but tampering becomes infinitely easier the moment the controls become invisible electromagnetic blips. We could do a recount of an Athenian election today, provided only that the potsherds were gathered up again and counted.

Will we ever have the same accountability from a system whose inner workings cannot be examined by the average voter? Elections will only be transparent when anyone capable of voting is also capable of verifying the vote. Anything more difficult than that isn’t democracy anymore: It’s election by a college of technocrats.

Now, I am not accusing anyone in particular of fraud. Absolutely not. But then, I still lock all the doors before I go to bed. It doesn’t do to put temptation in the way of another. The evidence suggests, at least, that our current technocrats will not necessarily abuse their privileges. Yet we have no way of knowing whether they will always be so honest.

Even an electronic device that created a paper trail would not in my view be acceptable: Just as a computer can deliberately mis-register votes, it is a simple matter to program a computer that will count one way and print another. There would be endless disputes, and those holding the papers would inevitably be accused of forgery. Let us scratch our votes on discarded Pepsi bottles, like the ancients did, sooner than fall for this modern nonsense.

In the meantime, let’s learn to write love letters, too.