We Once Saw Technology As Liberating
by Jean-Louis Gassée
Two former techno-optimists from very different backgrounds walk into a Paris restaurant and commiserate about lost dreams and the Surveillance Society.
Normal readers often struggle with the learned disquisitions of Michel Serres, the French philosopher who has authored more than 70 books covering topics such as Leibniz’ mathematical models, Carpaccio’s paintings, parasites (both biological and social), and the origins of physics. (To be precise, Serres is more of an epistemologist than a philosopher…but don’t go away.)
In person — and I’ve known him for more than three decades — Serres isn’t what you’d expect from his resume and prolific output. He’s accessible and fun, a popular speaker on French radio and at corporate events where he makes his audience feel intelligent. As a dining and walking companion, he’s unfailingly sanguine and loquacious, regaling his companions with anecdotes from his years in the “Royale” (French Navy), his interactions with the likes of Michel Foucault, and his years teaching at Johns Hopkins and Stanford (where he was a Professor of French, that's how we met).
We found we were both optimists, we both saw that life on Earth was getting better every year: There were fewer wars, diseases were eradicated, advances in technology — both mechanical and digital — meant increased leisure and comfort. The cover of one of his latest books, C’était Mieux Avant, depicts the lovely pre washer-dryer era:
Having lived through WW II and the latent danger of post-war Soviet occupation in East Berlin just hours — 600 miles — from Paris, Serres has no patience for uninformed Good Old Days nostalgia:
“Things were better before? Good question. As it happens, I was there. I can give you an expert account. It starts like this: in the Old Days, Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Staline were in charge… all lovely people. Before, wars and state crimes left behind tens of millions of dead people. You’ll love the long tale of those fun days.”
(From the intro to C’était Mieux Avant, translation mine)
I can’t verify his numbers, but Serres claimed that at the turn of the 20th century, more than 25% of the French adult population was beset with tuberculosis or syphilis, or both.(For more data on humankind’s improved days, see ourworldindata.org, Max Roser’s labor of competent love.)
In “Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millenials” (in French: La Petite Poucette), Serres professed tolerance — optimism even — for the “addiction” to texting and tweeting. As a Financial Times book review (behind a paywall) sees it:
“What is unusual about Mr Serres is that he thinks this texting, tweeting, Instagramming world is not stupid. In fact, it is better than the one it is replacing. He considers the information revolution as consequential as the invention of writing (which brought us scriptural religion) and the Gutenberg press (which liberated us from memorisation and brought us Protestantism).”
In our dinners and walks, Serres commended my exposition on our attraction to personal computers. As I saw it, once upon a time, we invented the alphabet and numerals, a creation that allowed us to generate symbol strings that encode sacred texts, mathematics, laws, literature… But we quickly became frustrated: Our central nervous system lagged behind the power of our invention. We can’t store long texts in our brains, or extract cube roots in our heads. It felt as if the gods were laughing at us.
So we invented the printing press and the abacus, machines that became extensions of our brains. Eventually, we created the computer, an indefatigable engine that we use to manipulate and store the symbol strings that once overwhelmed us. Although early versions were massive (the ENIAC, considered by many to be the first real digital computer, weighed 50 tons) and confined to universities and governments, the technical progress of just a few years gave us computers we could lift with our arms, our minds and our credit cards.
The Personal Computer era had begun, Steve Jobs’ “bicycle for the mind”. I was thrilled, it was liberating. The Personal Computer expanded the reach of our minds and bodies, it democratized the access to knowledge.
In 1986, I added a chapter to the US edition of my book The Third Apple in which I fantasized sitting under a tree (an apple tree, of course) reading a “book” that wirelessly connected me to 10,000 Libraries of Alexandria… Less than a decade later, the Internet did more than fulfill that dream.
For years, in our conversations, Serres and I basked in the glow of technology’s life expanding powers, especially as smartphones — our very personal computers — reached an ever expanding share of the world’s population.
That was then.
A few days ago in Paris, I had lunch with our optimistic philosopher and found out that we had separately sobered up. Our computers were still useful and fun but, now, we also saw them as tools of the Surveillance Society. We had both come to the conclusion that “social networks” made polarization more prevalent, an arson accelerant for the expression of anger, hate, insults, and threats.
What caused our synchronized U-Turn?. Michel doesn’t use Facebook and, as a result, wasn’t too excited by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But people in his social circle, in and out of French government, gave him apocalyptic descriptions of the tight surveillance net we’re caught in. They also drew war game scenarios of cyber attacks on infrastructure, fake news campaigns at election times, or incitements to social unrest against ethnic groups and during labor actions (France is the world champion of the latter).
For my share of the discussion, I brought a Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran ) post titled Want to freak yourself out? I’m gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it. In the post, the author painstakingly and painfully documents the extent that companies track everything we do. See the following for a mere taste:
And then we have credit scoring companies such as Experian and Transunion, or Palantir founded by our friend Peter Thiel…the list of data capture, storage, and brokerage enterprises goes on and on.
Where do we go from here? Do we old hermit crabs go back to our shells?
There might be hope in Europe, a market with roughly as much economic power as the US, where the new General Data Protection Regulation comes on line May 25th, so this might not be an entirely incurable state of affairs. How Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many others will abide by (or skirt) the new European privacy strictures is sure to make for interesting observations and comparisons with ruthless US practices.
In the meantime, I look forward to an upcoming lunch or conferences where our epistemologist will discuss the history and future of privacy, and its consequences on politics and mating rituals.
— JLG@mondaynote.com
