#cyber utopia

[fakeosphere]

Evgeny Morozov: The End of Cyber Utopia

[yonkon]

I've been reading with much enjoyment all the articles on the ongoing "Twitch Plays Pokemon" experiment. Sure, no one might be calling it an experiment (yet), but it is clearly a social experiment of epic proportions. And the experiment is looking to answer the age-old question: can technology facilitate the establishment of spontaneous order in human society? This question carries the potential of completely rewriting social theory and political philosophy as the possibility of technology allowing people to overcome uncertainty will open the doors towards building communities without formal institutions. The end of states. The end of history.   

This is reminiscent of another experiment done in the past, conducted by Loren Carpenter in 1991, where a large group of people, without instruction, began collectively playing a game of pong. It was a social experiment that highlighted the vision of the internet utopians in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s (see the whole documentary here). 

Of course, just because thousands of people are able to play Pokemon together doesn't mean that our society is ready to burst forth into a state of anarchy. As the internet utopians of the 1990s discovered, the world is less rational and orderly than is prescribed within the boundaries of algorithm and logical output. 

Perhaps society is ready to meditate on this matter again - with Anonymous, Wikileaks, etc. challenging the way we think about intelligence and statecraft, the world has taken leaps since the early days of the internet. Edward Snowden has definitely brought the power of the internet to promote popular democracy to the forefront. But as Evgeny Morozov commented on cyber-utopians:

What you don't hear about is the distinction between digital renegades and digital captives, which I think is a much more important one because we need to know how exactly technology influences civic engagement

The world is complex and because it is, the question of spontaneous order is extremely fascinating and worth ruminating. But we must be ever wary of falling into the dangerous trap of ideological absolutism.

over and out