The False Promises of the Digital Revolution

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Preface

The sketch of the water fountain in the Alhambra in southern Spain, the totem pole of a Northwest indigenous culture, and Michelangelo’s painting of Jonah in the Sistine Chapel may all seem incongruous with the main themes of a book critical of the digital revolution. If the cover of the book were larger I would have included the iconic images of other cultures’ moral and conceptual world views. But these three iconic images are enough to make the point of what is being overlooked by the combination of computer scientists, corporations, and the military that are pursuing their goal of creating a global monoculture that relies on super-computers to make data-based decisions about how people should live their lives. The architectural beauty of the Alhambra is representative of one of the high points in the development of Muslim culture, just as the totem pole is representative of indigenous cultures that achieved an understanding of how to live in sustainable relationships with their bioregions. Michelangelo’s painting is a reminder of the Judeo-Christian traditions that are still very much alive. The central place it occupies in the sketch is not meant to suggest that it as more important than the other two iconic images.

These current worldviews, as well as those of cultures in other parts of the world, led to the development of languages that enabled people to understand relationships, make moral decisions, acquire a sense of self-identity, and to engage in activities that are the source of personal meaning (sometimes at the expense of others––including the natural environment). Over generations, each has created a cultural commons (in effect, a gift economy) that has enabled succeeding generations to survive in local ecosystems sometimes barely adequate to support more than a subsistence existence. Other cultures that existed in less restrictive ecosystems have developed the arts, a high level of ethno-science and ecologically informed technologies, and an expanded consciousness of life possibilities that extend beyond that of just surviving. The cultural commons of many of the world’s cultures have also carried forward traditions of exploitation of others, including the environment.

The main point here is not to extol the virtues of different world views. Rather it is to highlight that the world’s cultures are not being taken into account by the computer scientist/futurist thinkers who have fashioned a mix of Social Darwinism, market liberalism, and messianic progressivism into a theory of development that envisions not only the disappearance of all oral traditions that are the basis ← vii | viii → of intergenerational knowledge that sustains the world’s diversity of cultures but also the end of human life itself as the world moves into the post-biological era of evolutionary development. The majority of computer scientists working on specific advances in digital technologies, some highly useful while others are putting us on the slippery slope leading to a police state, are probably not even aware of the Social Darwinian/market liberal ideology promoted by the leading futurist thinkers in their field. They nevertheless continue to share the same silences of the computer visionaries: namely, that it is unnecessary to take account of how their inventions will transform the cultures into which they are introduced. The general failure of computer scientists to consider what is being lost that is essential to civil and ecologically sustainable cultures can only be attributed to the narrow education that most computer scientists receive. Unfortunately, their highly specialized education leads them to equate technological innovations with the myth of progress that has been for the last 500 or so years the dominant driving force in Western cultures. The narrowness of their education also accounts for their indifference to considering the cultural non-neutrality of technologies such as print and computers.

The iconic images on the front cover are intended as a reminder of what needs to be given attention now that the margins of survival are being rapidly reduced as a result of changes in the viability of natural systems, the increased pressure to acquire and exploit natural resources, and the loss of intergenerational knowledge that provided alternatives to a money and thus consumer-dependent existence. The main focus of this book is to challenge the myth that technologies, especially print and digital technologies are culturally neutral, and to make explicit the Darwinian/market liberal ideology that is being used to justify a colonizing agenda that will lead to a world monoculture where data will replace the world’s diversity of cosmologies. These foci account for the silences in my own analyses. I am hopeful that others begin to address these silences. That is, the next step is to clarify how the digital revolution, for all its important contributions, still perpetuates a new regime of “Truth” that can easily be transformed in the same way that the National Socialists of Germany also relied upon technology and Social Darwinism to destroy those who were deemed unfit and thus impediments to the forces of progress.

We now have important studies about how the digital revolution is degrading the democratic process by undermining the traditional role of in-depth journalism, the opportunities for employment as robots become more cost effective and more widely used, and are altering the quality of social relationships and an historically informed consciousness. We also have studies of how societies that have ← viii | ix → become more dependent upon digital technologies have become more militarized and have eroded the privacy rights of its citizens.

Now needed are ethnographic studies of how the introduction of digital technologies are changing the belief systems and patterns of intergenerational support systems within cultures in different regions of the world. These studies should also focus on the loss of wisdom traditions that are the basis of the cultures’ patterns of moral reciprocity and living ecologically sustainable lives. The urgency of carrying out these studies results from the possibility that the colonizing forces within the digital revolution maybe moving at such a rate that the generation within these different cultures who are still capable of remembering and practicing their culture’s wisdom traditions may be dying off, only to be replaced by the digital generation that has lost touch with the orally based knowledge of local contexts and face-to-face patterns of mutual support and cultural self-sufficiency.

Ray Kurzweil, a leading computer scientist/futurist thinker, predicts that by 2040 most work will be done by robots. Environmental scientists who study global changes in weather patterns are predicting that by around 2040 about 40 percent of the world’s population will not have access to adequate supplies of water. How will the digital transformation of the world’s cultures enable them to address these twin crises? This is only one of the major questions that now needs to be addressed.

Acknowledgments