Thursday 27 December 2012

The merchants of cyber-bollocks

Are you tired of self-appointed cyber-gurus? The digital quacks who claim to have seen the future and insist everyone must fit into their dystopian dream?

Steven Poole exposes these charlatans in a scathing piece in the New Statesman:
As did many religious rebels before them, they come to bring not peace, but a sword. Change is inevitable; we must abandon the old ways. The cybertheorists, however, are a peculiarly corporatist species of the Leninist class: they agitate for constant revolution but the main beneficiaries will be the giant technology companies before whose virtual image they prostrate themselves.
Cybertheorists’ jargon often betrays an adolescent hatred of the world in which they find themselves. Jay Rosen, a prominent ‘future of news’ cyber-guru, takes care at every opportunity to sneer at publishing institutions by pasting to them the epithet ‘legacy’: ‘legacy newsrooms’, ‘legacy media’. Another favourite cyber-adjective is ‘disruptive’. For most of us, disruption is annoying, but for cyber-swamis the more disruptive of established practices technology becomes, the more exciting it is.
One target of Poole’s ire is cyber-thinkers who abuse the notion of the ‘wisdom of crowds’:
Cyber-thinkers have run with the wisdom-of-crowds notion to a place that bears little resemblance to reality as we know it, high-fiving each other among the rubble of reason in a fatuous kind of hi-tech, misanthropic herd-worship. It can now seriously be proposed that there are occasions when “the smartest person in the room is the room”, as the subtitle of the cybertheorist David Weinberger’s book Too Big to Know, published last January, claims. Its weirdly self-undermining idea (perfect for a Ted talk) is that books are outdated and useless ways of organising ‘information’ and that the sum total of information is now so overwhelming that we may as well throw up our hands and concede that ‘the network’ knows better than we do.
If Weinberger’s thesis were correct, then his book would be disposable, because a random cohort of bloggers could be expected to come up with something far superior in a couple of weeks. Weinberger’s book is also cyber-typical for its pseudo-democratic hatred of any kind of expertise, and its cartoonish intellectual history, in the service of pretending that our age is utterly novel. “The internet,” he opines grandly, “enables groups to develop ideas further than any individual could.” So have writing and talking, since time immemorial.
The intellectual weakness of cyber-thinkers is encapsulated in a single sentence:
Cybertheorists... daren’t attempt to distinguish information from knowledge, because to do so would require them to perform the kind of intellectual triage that their rhetorical success depends crucially on avoiding.
Exposing the cybertheorists as clothing-deficient emperors was long overdue. As Poole explains:
Cybertheorists love to apply the adjective ‘smart’ to one another but, as a group, they are the most prominent anti-intellectual cadre of our day – little Pol Pots of the touchscreen and Twitter.

1 comment:

  1. I don't know about you, but I still subscribe to a hard copy national railway timetable because I am never sure that the enquiry websites are getting the right answer: I like to see the hidden wiring so to speak.

    ReplyDelete

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