An inspiring, if somewhat zealously expressed, thought for the day from Wired magazine’s Kevin Kelly:
Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.
Contrast this antidote to fanatical techno-pessimism with Nicholas Carr’s equally cynical response:
… if there’s a higher consciousness to be found, then by all means let’s get elevated. My problem is this: When we view the Web in religious terms, when we imbue it with our personal yearning for transcendence, we can no longer see it objectively. By necessity, we have to look at the Internet as a moral force, not as a simple collection of inanimate hardware and software. No decent person wants to worship an amoral conglomeration of technology.
And so all the things that Web 2.0 represents – participation, collectivism, virtual communities, amateurism – become unarguably good things, things to be nurtured and applauded, emblems of progress toward a more enlightened state. But is it really so? … Might, on balance, the practical effect of Web 2.0 on society and culture be bad, not good? To see Web 2.0 as a moral force is to turn a deaf ear to such questions. …
Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It’s a set of technologies … that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn’t care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn’t care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn’t care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn’t care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let’s can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.
Carr’s response, however eloquent, misses the point. The web isn’t a mere collection of neutral and ‘amoral’ technologies: it’s a transnational application of those technologies by human agents for specific ends — moral and immoral — where those agents are motivated by desires and productive of consequences whose ethical qualities can be described and evaluated according to traditional methods. Kelly’s point was not that a particular internet meme or group of technologies is by its nature ethical (that would, as Carr notes, be a bare claim); it was precisely that the effects of global information convergence are in fact likely to endear beyond our age. This seems a defensible claim because, although itself remarkably fragile, the internet is stability-promoting, democracy-enhancing and self-propagating. But to claim that a technology is historically significant isn’t to make a claim that the technology is inherently ethical or being applied in ethical ways.
