threadnaught

Program or Be Programmed,
originally uploaded by jpob.

A talk by Douglas Rushkoff on 12th March 2010

[This isn't a word-perfect record -- if I got anything jarringly wrong, please comment!]

Online, things get extreme very fast and change a lot in a short space of time. There’s an overwhelming sense that we’re trying to operate society on obsolete social code, on the basis of legacy systems we don’t even remember that aren’t appropriate for what we want to get done. If we don’t understand these old systems, we have no chance of recognising the new programs that are layered on top. Understanding of this places people into one of two camps: the programmers, and the programmed. Grokking programming bias is really important because it helps us manage ourselves in context – the most important thing is to recognise that programming bias exists in the first place.


How much of our outdated social code is the result of bias of the media, and how much is due to the bias of the programmers? How can we tell the difference? We won’t know until we understand how our technologies work, and how they work on us. Essentially, if you’re not a programmer, then you’re one of the programmed. A metaphor for this: a kid gets a videogame and plays it til he gets stuck, and then goes to get cheat codes – beginning to play outside the original context of the game. His role shifts from player to cheater. If he really likes the game he goes online and finds out how to mod it, becoming an author. If his mod becomes popular, he gets programming job offers and creates his own stuff. This process sees him move from being passive to increasingly more active – stages our civilisation has moved through in terms of media.

In a civilization of readers, we get a nation of readers and an elite class of writers. Now we have a nation of bloggers that are largely blind to, and don’t think about, the biases they’re operating within. Facebook is biased towards reducing humans to a consumer profile. Google is biased towards the extraction of value from content creators. At each stage when we get a new medium, civilization seems to be one iteration behind. Programming is bigger than the printing press – it’s as big as text. What does it give us? Automaticism? Conclusion: the Book as a medium is over, and biases of written culture are giving way to the biases of digital culture. To underline the biases for digital media, Rushkoff assigned commands for them.

1) TIME — Thou shalt not be always on. Asynchronous conversations (e.g. those on the Well) allow lots of time to think, like chess by mail. These conversations are therefore richer for being online than they would have been in real life. Once we turn an asynchronous medium into one that’s always on, we ‘fry our nervous systems’ and start exhibiting stress factors that arise from the always on-ness of tech – like phantom thigh vibration syndrome (physical sensation of ringing phone).

2) DISTANCE – Thou shalt not do from a distance that which would be better done in person. There’s a lack of understanding about short and long distance biases, and a fetishism that has us using long-distance tech in short-distance situations: students running a UN simulation in Second Life while sitting in a classroom! This is pretty common, and recognizing the biases will help us learn to use the most appropriate methods and tech for each situation.

3) SCALE – Exalt the particular. Not everything scales, should scale or needs to scale. The popular belief that the only way to make money online is to scale up aggregation of what other people are creating exacerbates Jack Welch-style hypercapitalism (the parts of your business that work are imperfect and should be sold off; the goal is to become more like a bank), and it doesn’t have to be this way.

4) DISCRETE – You may always choose none of the above. Everything is a choice, digitally. The real world is analogue, not digital, and analogue recordings of our world are physical artefacts of real events that have occurred; a digital copy is a symbolic representation of an event through metrics. Digital is symbolic as text is symbolic. The problem with digital metrics is that any metric we haven’t thought of is gone until someone realises it’s been left out. Online life occurs in a digital environment of forced choice: you start to believe that the options are pre-existing conditions of the universe, but they aren’t — they’re the choices given in the program that you’re involved in. You don’t want to live ’snap-to-grid’, but that’s the only way to relate through the digital. “Withholding choice from the available options isn’t death, but life.”

5) COMPLEXITY – Thou shalt never be completely right. The net tends to prematurely reduce the complex; everything is one level deep. Wikipedia seems deep and complex to us now, but in the old days an encyclopedia was a joke! It’s hard to explain this without seeming anti-folksonomy, but that’s not necessarily the case – moving through pathways to get to the cherry is how we learn, and it’s not a worse approach, just different. Philip Rosedale has remarked that within 10 years Second Life will be indistiguishable from reality: if this were true, it would be because our perceptual apparatus will have devolved to the point where we can’t tell the difference! Our perceptual apparatuses are declining: kids raised on mp3 have 20% less ability to make auditory distinctions than previous generations because their brains have been trained differently. These are choices, and recognising this frees us to use digital simulations as models with chosen parameters.

6) OUT OF BODY – Thou shalt not be A/anonymous. The non-corporeal nature of the internet is great for some types of users (political dissenters, torrenters [ha ha]), but it’s bad for community and the social contract. We have to work against the tendency of the net to equalize us through anonymity, otherwise we become parts of polarised mobs with no sense of the consequences of our actions. Conditions of anonymity nerf us in important ways: they allow us to sidestep the prejudices that pervade our real lives, and they negate our ability to communicate non-verbally. Reportedly 80% of communication is non-verbal, so online we use 20% of the communication capability that we have – we focus on language, which is desocialising and solipsistic. We can see from blogs that allowing anonymous comments leads to worse remarks/content because of lack of accountability. Radical but powerful view: it’s liberating to adopt a strict sense of identity online, for everything.

7) CONTACT – Remember the humans. Content is not king in a communication environment –, contact is. ‘Social marketing’ is an oxymoron; it reduces multiplicity of connections down to one. There are humans responsible for the value you receive – it’s important to remember that we don’t have to give everything to the hive for free. There’s a difference between offering stuff we do for free to others and delivering it to Google, a corporation that’s happy to extract value from us. You’re allowed to do what you want, and it’s okay to not deliver everything for free (so that corporations can profit).

8) ABSTRACTION – As above, not so below. Everything doesn’t happen at different levels in the same way. Media abstracts: abstraction is what symbol systems do, but in this case it leads to a chaos systems assumption about the real world that can be modelled in computers but doesn’t exist in the real world. Spending time in abstracted space makes the games seem real when they’re not – don’t make equivalencies between abstractions and the real world – abstractions don’t work with real people.

9) OPENNESS – Thou shalt not steal. When there’s no social contract, openness can continue until there’s nobody left to give anything away. If Google succeeds in bringing the free tv model to everything there’ll be nothing left to advertise, and Google will eventually eat its tail! Getting something for free is not open source – having the world being open to Google is the same sort of thing as wanting the third world to be open to the world bank. Nothing is free.

10) END USERS – Program or be programmed. Everything in the digital realm is programmed. You’re either creating software or you ARE the software. We think ‘what can the tech do for us’ rather than ‘what can we make it do’. If we start living in a world where everything is a product we consume rather than something we use to create value, we’re doomed. Ignorance of programming is unhelpful. Kids are being taught to be users, not programmers. We accept black-boxness of devices (e,g, MS Wizard – mysterious processes, stay away!!) . User and coder move increasingly far apart under the false premise that the farther the distance, the easier things are.

We celebrate our new-found agency in the digital age but remain one step behind the programmer. This is an amazing moment where we can program money, society – but we have to understand 1) the programs and 2) the mean sets, codes, symbols and how we relate to them. We can’t understand how to work with them if we don’t understand the technology we’re using to express and codify them; but, if we don’t create a society that’s aware of programming and that devices are being programmed in certain ways, we’ll end up being just users and the used.

Q&A

Q: How do we implement these commands? A: We need to start sharing our ideas and info about how biases apply to what we use. Europe and Korea are teaching programming to school kids, ut the US isn’t. When we create a nation of dumb users, we end up not having anyone left to realise what’s happened and why it’s important.

Other parts of the world have a different perception of programmers. We think of it as grunt work to outsource, we distance ourselves from it; but the people who do this work are the new Masons.

Q: How does this differ from the old arguments about literacy and cold war concerns about the fitness of US youths when it comes to science and technology? A: The only way it’s different is in the definition of literacy. Literacy today means to program, but the old definition is ‘to be able to make an extended linear argument through an 18th century novel’, which is not an up to date literacy for a digital world.

Audience comment: When the web was young it was decentralised, but now it’s centralised (like Facebook). Geeks, when you’re thinking about making stuff, consider decentralisation. A: People adopt client side stuff because they think they’re going to get something. The future is perceived to be in digital/private currencies, and this will do to the central bank what Craigslist did to Hearst. It has to happen in a decentralised way.

Q: In terms of staying true to your real life identity, how do you see the future? A: Facebook is pushing for to be the verification agent of online identity, and verifiability is going to be something either we or they pay for. This verifiability will help with the adoption of digital currencies too.

END! Visit http://pbsdigitalnation.org for more fun discussions.