“Team Human” talk

A recent talk reinforced my preference for data-driven arguments over sermonizing about the present Information Age.

The talk was led by Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist from New York. He was promoting his most recent book of many titled Team Human. I had read his book Program or Be Programmed from 2011 and appreciated the practical tips on digital skepticism, awareness and deliberateness. I read his book Present Shock as well but I did not find it as memorable. In addition teachers and professors had shown me Merchants of Cool, his PBS documentary in at least three separate courses. I was very struck by the influence of brands on adolescents portrayed in this film and I adopted an abiding mistrust of corporations ever since.

I say all this to make it clear that I am open to the message of caution around digital media and the internet, and that I was schooled by people who promoted skepticism of the reach of media and technology. I look around me at people absorbed in their phones. I see them idling in their vehicles, glued to the screen while spewing exhaust fumes for the rest of us to breathe. I struggle to read a single sentence when a TV is blaring in the other room for five hours straight. I feel loneliness and wonder if the inherent bias of the many programs encountered in daily life led me there. I am struck by how hourly work, career development, socializing, entertainment, personal development and independent learning all seem to be screen-based. I too wonder if something important has been lost. And I when I hear someone watching noisy dumb videos in a public bathroom stall, I wonder, “Can’t we even shit without watching a goddamn noisy screen?”

Among the topics in Rushkoff’s freewheeling talk were “nudges.” Behavioral economists and casinos laid the foundation for these programmed prompts that push us toward the behavior the designer wants without fully taking away our choice. In a benevolent kind of nudge, you can even install an app that prompts you to do a nice thing for a colleague. He pointed out that ideally the nudge to do something nice should come from within, not from a pinging device.

He said that most people put less thought into letting an app into their mind than they do about installing it on their phone. He reminded us that in a free digital service, it is the user who is the product and it is their information that is being served up to third party companies.

He remarked correctly on the easily manipulated lefties who mobbed the MAGA hat kid on Twitter as if they had no control over their reaction to the 20 second clip.

He mentioned visiting a publisher in France who took him to her apartment to cook lunch during the middle of the workday. He marveled at how in France, employment is regulated to benefit the people, not the other way around. He mentioned visiting Italy and finding three generations of families chatting and lounging in the streets late into the evening.

He speculated that the rich, powerful people in charge of global business and finance were not stopping the current social justice movement, even though they could, because they are coming to see themselves, along with the rest of humanity, as the indigenous people who are close to being overrun by a vastly superior artificial intelligence. This, he said, is why they were not stopping the social justice movement.

I share these concerns. I want the people around me to live up to their full potential. I want to feel warm pride for those around me. This is difficult to do with someone who is expressionless and pawing at his or her phone chasing the next hit.

But I find that nudges are more annoying than destructive. When I encounter pop-ups in my browser that require a moment or two extra to search for the small, grayed-out X to dismiss it, I don’t mind. I have a readability browser extension that helps me get around this anyway. I can seek out that little X or just click the button to translate the page into a readable, ad-free article, saving me a half a second and allowing me to actually read. This is an example of a user learning to use improved tools in order to counteract another technology.

In addition, a lot of people break free from their phones quite easily. One can only scroll for so long before getting bored, putting it down, and doing something else. Even the immersive worlds of World of Warcraft and Fortnite do not grip a person forever.

I thought also of my late aunt. On her deathbed I expressed appreciation for the unfailing cards she sent to my immediate family and to a huge network of others on birthdays and other special occasions. In between painkiller-induced moments of nodding off she explained her system: she had an elaborate indexing and calendar device, and she recruited her husband to seal, stamp and mail the cards. Does this make it less special? No, it just means there was technique behind her caring art. I and many others appreciated those cards and we said so in her many remembrances. There is nothing wrong with being nudged to help a colleague or call Mom. Even if the nudge comes from an app.

Putting thought into one’s app consumption is good advice. I think people are becoming more aware of the extent to which they are tracked. I recently deleted most apps because of my phone’s performance issues. Now my main apps are email, calendar, maps, notepad, podcasts, weather, Wikipedia, and the camera. These apps are extremely useful, but I do not get drawn into them like the infinite feed-style (aka slot machine) apps like Reddit Sync, Feedly and Google Assistant.

I agree with the warning about being the product of a free service. I did not know this when I first installed Facebook in 2005. But I suspect younger people are aware of the rules of the game. They, like me, can pretty easily opt out of the mobile app, leave their phone behind, change their browser to delete all cookies on exit, and install an extension such as Disengage to counteract this kind of tracking and info collection. I doubt most people feel betrayed or victimized. And it’s clear greater protections are here (Europe’s privacy laws that now extend to US web pages) and more are on the way.

The MAGA hat kid episode is worth mentioning because it reminded me how fucking stupid Twitter is. Even if you try to show the right moral stance on Twitter, you’re still on Twitter. You are reacting quite predictably to the latest Twitter noise. Whatever side you are on, you are colored by the medium. Perhaps authors nowadays have to be on Twitter due to agreements with their publisher. But Rushkoff’s extemporaneous comments suggested that the issues foremost in his mind are put there by his Twitter feed.

The points about France and Italy were just anecdotal. Perhaps Rushkoff does not realize that people in France have been demonstrating in the streets for months about their declining standard of living. There are many exceptions to the 35-hour workweek. Unemployment is at 9% and youth unemployment is at 21%. And as for the Italy anecdote, I am sure visiting a boutique quarter of an ancient city as a tourist gives you a nice impression. That doesn’t mean they enjoy the good things in life that the rest of us have somehow lost.

The speculation about rich powerful people such as those who meet in Davos restraining themselves from stamping out social justice activism struck me as myopic. First of all, suggesting that a small group of people control world events is in the style of Alex Jones (globalist elite) and far-right claims of global Jewish power networks. There is no such thing. Second, the social justice activism of today appears intense when you are plugged into Twitter and other video feeds. But it is not out of the ordinary, and it is progressing at pretty much the same rate as ever.

I do agree that as humans we should accelerate the march of progress. But it’s not because we will need to prove our worth to a superior synthetic being anytime soon. We should do it for ourselves.

I am also forever marked by the book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker and I find it to be an immunizing force against the anecdotal pessimism and hand-wringing of Rushkoff. I read this book last summer and thanks to my Kindle (another screen-bearing device) I highlighted 51 passages that I can now summon with ease. A few are highly relevant:

• But perhaps the biggest impetus to romantic militarism was declinism, the revulsion among intellectuals at the thought that ordinary people seemed to be enjoying their lives in peace and prosperity.

• This version of historical pessimism may be called root-causism: the pseudo-profound idea that every social ill is a symptom of some deep moral sickness and can never be mitigated by simplistic treatments which fail to cure the gangrene at the core. 9 The problem with root-causism is not that real-world problems are simple but the opposite: they are more complex than a typical root-cause theory allows, especially when the theory is based on moralizing rather than data.

• One rationale for this apparent paternalism is that life, health, and freedom are prerequisites to everything else, including the very act of pondering what is worthwhile in life, and so they are worthy by their very nature.That takes us back to subjective readouts, which tend to be inflated by the Availability and Negativity biases and by the gravitas market ( chapter 4 ). 8 Those who sow fear about a dreadful prophecy may be seen as serious and responsible, while those who are measured are seen as complacent and naïve.

• There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors.

• Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas.

• First, the claim that humans have an innate imperative to identify with a nation-state (with the implication that cosmopolitanism goes against human nature) is bad evolutionary psychology. Like the supposed innate imperative to belong to a religion, it confuses a vulnerability with a need.

• Because the cultures of politics and journalism are largely innocent of the scientific mindset, questions with massive consequences for life and death are answered by methods that we know lead to error, such as anecdotes, headlines, rhetoric, and what engineers call HiPPO (highest-paid person’s opinion).

• Science, of course, transcends national boundaries (as Chekhov noted, “There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table”), and its ability to promote anyone’s interests comes from its foundational understanding of reality.

I hate to divide the world into two camps, but I do agree that Rushkoff falls in with the historical pessimists. He seemed to place himself on the side of humanity, and digitally-oriented people on the side of transhumanist Singularity evangelists. As if teaching coding in school is anti-human.

He also is part of a tradition that does not place much weight on data. Instead anecdotes and moral exhortations populate his books. Underneath it all is unease about the mixing of the sacred and the profane that has a place, but a small place, in most people’s day to day lives.

If there was one thing that irritated me about the talk, it was when Rushkoff complained about how universities these days “just want to teach Excel and JavaScript.” This annoyed me. If I had taken one 8-hour Excel class, it would have been more valuable to me than my entire semester of 18th century French literature. Teach the fucking kids to code. They have more practical concerns than the typical media theorist. I know a manager, whose salary I would estimate at $90 000 per year, whose job is partly to make simple templated Microsoft Word documents. This can be done by an 8th grader, but simple computer skills were just not taught in schools until recently. Plus, how can you rail against the media and technology giants while criticizing the teaching of coding in schools? It boggles the mind. With his unease and moralizing, I wonder if this man should be a rabbi instead of a professor. He did quote the Torah a couple of times…

I would like to see a follow-up with the teenagers portrayed in Merchants of Cool. I suspect they turned out fine, despite the way the documentary suggested they were being manipulated and controlled by huge corporations. They probably are well-adjusted adults with more practical things on their minds than the effect of branding and marketing on their lives. To put a finer point on it, will anyone today feel permanently marked by Twitter or Facebook 20 years from now? A few, like the MAGA hat kid, might be, but I think the platform will be just a footnote in the history of networked individuals. There are more interesting things on the way that will replace our blinking and flashing apps.

Several national medical societies came out with screen time guidelines a few years ago. In general they recommended seriously restricting screen time among kids and especially among infants. They did this as a precaution before high-quality evidence was in. Recently the evidence showed little effect of screen time on health, or showed it to be just one part of a mix of health and wellness-influencing behaviors. The societies were right to be cautious in their recommendations due to the newness of the screen time issue. As better evidence came in, they loosened their recommendations to reflect the new studies. And perhaps they realized the screen time issue was not so new, when you look back on 90 years of kids watching television. This is the approach Rushkoff should take. Data-informed caution with flexibility and openness and greater sensitivity to the challenges that the younger generations face.

Hearing pro basketball highlights while you are shitting is a minor annoyance. Seeing someone fall down while chasing a Pokemon is dumb, but not an affront to humanity. There are problems with internet ubiquity and networked lifestyles, but nothing that threatens the human team.