With developments in print and communications technology led by Google’s search engines, the Internet, Rights to Information Acts and now WikiLeaks, there is hardly any piece of information that can be kept under wraps. In fact, there has been information overkill in the last decade. But hardly anyone has bothered to ask: What is the problem to which this surfeit of information is the answer? The technology may be dazzling but is there really a place for it? If the answer is more information faster, then it’s a waste of time. Our problem now is: how to deal with the mass of information we’ve already got? More importantly, how is Google’s ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge and how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern companies, institutions and states?
Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies at Virginia University, deals with these problems in his latest book Globalisation of Everything — And Why We Should Worry (University of California Press, £18.95), to raise ethical questions on information gathering and its dissemination throughout the world. In many ways, Vaidhyanathan’s work can be described as “google bashing” because it is “harmful and dangerous” but it goes beyond that to attack “blind faith in technology and market fundamentalism”. Not surprisingly, it is classic “Marxist false consciousness” stuff and “consumer blindness” that Vaidhyanathan speaks of based “on false idols and empty promises”. “Googlisation of Us”, for example, sees consumers as “ignorant sheep led to cyber slaughter, tricked by the smokescreen of free online services and freedom of choice”.
“The whole damn digital bourgeois class of modern tech capitalists is out to sedate us using the false hope of consumer choice. Celebrating freedom and user autonomy is one of the great rhetorical ploys of the global information economy… We are conditioned to believe that having more choices – empty though they may be – is the very essence of human freedom. But meaningful freedom implies real control over the conditions of life.”
By the time we come to chapter 3, Vaidhyanathan puts his cards on the table. “Living so long under the dominance of market fundamentalism and techno-fundamentalism, we have come to accept the concept of choice… So comforted are we by offers of ‘options’ and ‘settings’ made by commercial systems such as Facebook and Google that we neglect the larger issues. We weave these services so firmly and quickly into the fabrics of our daily social and intellectual lives that we neglect to consider what dependence this might cost us.
And many of us who are technically sophisticated can tread confidentially through the hazards of these systems, forgetting that the vast majority of people using them are not aware of their pitfalls or the techniques by which users can master them. Settings only help you if you know enough to care about them. Defaults matter all the time...”
Many in India would agree with what Vaidhyanathan has to say about consumer capitalism and the overwhelming role that technology plays to make it work. But can you do without technology when it has become an integral part of life? Vaidhyanathan doesn’t dodge the question but his solution is: centralisation or “a command economy” that would “identify a series of policy challenges, infrastructure needs, philosophical insights and technological challenges with a single realisable goal in mind: to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible”.
The professor needs to be reminded that centralised planning had been tried in the Soviet Union and it did not work because modern economies had become far too diverse and sophisticated to be guided by a command structure. His case for a centralised vision boils down to his fundamental distrust of market processes, matched by his implicit faith in the technocratic elite that would chart a more sensible path forward.
The post-Google agenda is described as the Human Knowledge Project that would consider “questions of organisation and distribution at every level: the network, the hardware, the software, the protocols, the laws, the staff, the laws” and a whole lot of other paraphernalia. Who wouldn’t want this, even assuming that the whole world would agree on the priorities and provide the money for it?
The dream of building a future that is fair and would work is based on the assumption that it would be possible to straighten the crooked timber of humanity. This is a big “if”. Man is essentially an irrational creature influenced by what he feels rather than what is good for him. Austrian-British economist Friedrich von Hayek had warned in The Road to Serfdom (1944): “To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.” It’s a lesson that many countries and cultures have learned at great expense, but one that many dreamers like Vaidhyanathan still ignore.