I heard the phrase ‘positive peer
pressure’ for the first time today, and when I heard it, I thought that the
brave new digital age will mean the death of the soul. I thought of other
humans not as friends, enemies or strangers, but as an undifferentiated ring of
gravity pressing all around me. If we are all connected all the time we will
tyrannise each other to the point of complete individual dissolution, I
thought. The constant proximity of others will press all around us and lock us
in place as though we were starlings within a murmuration.
It came to me that
this tyranny of the masses will be easy to put in place because each individual
will already be hollowed out in advance, a kind of glazed ruminant bathed in YouTube
light, transfixed, chewing a cud of clips and tweets and ads and waiting to be
prodded into activity by the Mob, the Mob being a demiurge demanding idiotic
entertainments of us at one moment and personalised displays of standardised
outrage or viciousness at others. And, glancing briefly at my smartphone, for
once I included myself among that herd, because I felt the changes in me at
that moment, the interior babbling with the silence behind it. It seemed to me
that tyranny is not defined by any particular moral code; absent privacy, any
morality is potentially tyrannical. To the all-seeing Eye we are all flawed and
all in some way worthy of condemnation. The more detail, the more flaws; the
more flaws, the harsher the judgements. I thought, this is why God will always
be the archetypal tyrant, no matter His concerns, no matter how correct; and
so, increasingly, the monitored internet. I thought, think of the homogenised
set of ethical and political issues that are paraded about again and again for
our collective outrage, always understood and spoken of as they are understood
and spoken of in America, always used, as they are there, as some kind of
social barometer of worthiness. I glimpsed a psychological empire spreading via
the voyages of fibre-optic cables, this new territory colonised through the
inculcation of larger and larger numbers of individuals into reductive and
self-commodifying online status-groups. But this was to assume that the future
will be a tyranny of mildness, a tyranny of the political ‘Centre’ or ‘Centre
Left’ as it is sometimes misnamed. But there may be other futures, I thought.
Anonymity prevails on much of the digital forest floor, even if we are
monitored en masse from above. The web provides a way for people to seek out
those most like themselves – in many ways, it shrinks us - and build entire
virtual societies around rigid ideology, everyone jostling for a place at the
core. And this process of violent jostling even happens around the most inane
of subjects, and everything becomes fanatical and extreme. And on neutral turf
the anonymous tribes seek glory in meaningless verbal war, screaming blood-mad
obscenities in the name of issues severed from their real world contexts and
reconstituted as nothing more than false idols for rallying the pack.
Everything becomes an excuse for insult and verbal violence in that
standardised chaos. Yet where transparency prevails over anonymity the result
is only competitive sanctimony, a self-conscious pretence of urbanity. What
binds both anonymous poison and transparent sanctimony? The intrusion of the
group into every moment, every thought and every decision. Mob mentality. The
destruction of solitude. The rising tide of homogenised man will swallow us, I
thought, and paused to check my email and Facebook before the thought was
complete. Returning, I picked up the thread a thought or two back; I found the
thread again – that doesn’t always happen. And it seemed to me that in both the
earnest and demonstrative worthiness of liberal Facebook and in the vicious
video-violence of the most authoritarian and foul right-wing circles, posted on
Facebook for me to publicly hate by ‘liking’, the same thing is happening – the
destruction of whatever hard won moral autonomy we might have gained over the
years, over the centuries, and with it the transformation of concern for the
other and the whole into the competitive demonstration of group allegiance; I
thought of the slave-drum banging in a Roman ship, banging out cumulative
radicalisation on the Right, cumulative sanctimony on the Left. Maybe we'll
become binary beings: politically, sanctimonious worthies on the social
network, rabid attack-dogs on the anonymous forum; socially, court jesters
where we can be seen, sadists where we can't. I thought of the Panopticon -
even if the Eye wasn't there monitoring us, we'd still be pinning each other in
place. But now we have both. And I saw that a watched society where people are
coaxed into coughing up data by making themselves into a personal brand ensures
a society peopled by shallow, exaggerated, attention-seeking performers rather
than alert, questioning citizens, if we ever were alert, questioning citizens. It
ensures politics and morality become a theatre of ‘identity’ and a lurid,
infinitely transient fashion fest – faddish, groupish, hysterical, insincerely
over-sincere. It places the witch hunt at the centre of social life. And I
wondered, what does this new world mean for the psychology of the individual?
It occurred to me that what I have told you above is that what we see now as
discussion is increasingly not a matter of addressing worthwhile issues at
all…and then I checked my email, and the news headlines, and Metacritic…Picking
up the thread again, somehow twice, a good show, rather than discussion it is a
pantomime of such which hides the process by which the collective effort to be
better is misdirected into the totalitarian enterprise of suffocating the
individual, who is never quite perfect enough. And to think that some believe
all this interconnection will birth a new, higher consciousness. Deify our
tools, make us ape our tools, and we will gladly be used like tools. Rounded
up, branded, and corralled into the Noosphere, there is no liberation in
absorption. You cannot aggregate consciousness; it is locked in bodies. It is
discrete to each body, coterminous with each. All you can do is cajole each
atom of consciousness towards a standard state - while one great mind from all
is the creed of the Noosphere, far fewer thoughts in each is its only potential
outcome. And if it ever lived it would do so in utter darkness, never
experiencing the sealed-in glimmer of its neuronal prisoners. Processing and
nothingness. And the truth is that it is not I who am the Luddite; it is they. Current
digital technology is construed as the terminus, the binary-code be-all and
end-all of the internet god-birth, and human beings are coaxed to stoop to this
daft and unimaginative creed. Who would be interested in reducing people to
flattened aggregations of bits, and training them to see themselves as
'profiles'? Those who own the technology - whose systems know us better than we
know ourselves because we have unwittingly allowed ourselves to be moulded by
them - and those in power, because the standardised is the predictable and the
predictable is the controllable. For all their Utopian rhetoric, the Web 2.0
companies are actually the technological equivalent of oil barons. They will
not only reduce people to homogenised encrustations of hive influences; they
will cause technology itself to stagnate in an endlessly accelerating Boolean
limbo. I thought: I’ve lost it. I thought: What am I on about? I thought, this
strangulating metamorphosis is urged on us through calling on the individual to
‘express themselves’ by demonstrating worthiness to the group at all possible
opportunities, the more exaggerated the better, the more frequent the better -
and at the moment when we believe we are expressing ourselves more
incontinently than ever before, we will in fact come to express nothing,
nothing but echoes, billions of people all echoing together, competing to be
the best example of an ideal template, or one of a handful of acceptable ideal
types, the Cloud at last flowing through us in its various aspects. We are
possessed, I thought. Twitches of empathy are already instantly shared as
meretricious one-liners before they are even properly felt, I thought; emotions
are aborted before term in the eagerness to have them witnessed; they flop out
as small, mewling, unready things that pathetically expire once seen. And then
on to the next one, I thought. Always on to the next one already. And all of
this, I thought, all of this is a grotesque confirmation of the most nihilistic
theories of altruism and morality, theories I acted as if believed while never
actually wanting to see proven. The tweet: the sour pip of human nature bared.
The tweet: the bone at the centre with everything worthwhile carved off. I
thought of my time in Japan, where people are often accused of being
conformists, and I thought that they never would have invented this there,
there where they also value privacy as much as consensus, indeed as a respite
and sanctuary from consensus that makes consensus possible in the first place,
though they have happily had it imposed on them like the rest of us, and I
thought again: psychological empire. Feeling flushed with anthropological
confidence, I chose to neglect my smartphone, which had just vibrated, and
thought: This transformation of humans into ideological propositions has a
history in the Western obsession with authenticity; Internet 2.0 has a
distinctively Puritan streak, not least in its insistence that good people
should never close their curtains. And I went on to think that the demands of
transparency and ‘authenticity’, that sacred gargoyle of the West now
technologically manifested, will outlaw the possibility of separating self from
role and banish the kind of tolerance for ambiguity and inconsistency, both
between people and within them, that has always made true civilisation and real
consensus possible. The sanctuary is gone. Shrill, self-righteous echoes and
pointing fingers, that is what we will be reduced to; one-dimensional
‘authentic’ beings pointing fingers at data and screaming out competing
protestations of worthiness. Or histrionic insults flung about pointlessly
amidst the endless meretricious droning sea of identical ‘individuals’.
Endless, onanistic, meretricious ejaculation. Needless jism spattering down
from the heavens and nowhere to hide. An endless, onanistic monsoon. The Cloud
hanging there, gormless, righteous, anodyne, drooling out of a billion mouths.
Because the real legacy of the age will not be freedom and the flourishing of
individual potential through expanded access to knowledge; it will be the
replacement of the internal mental life of the individual with a series of
memes and pseudo-opinions, a lurid and histrionic masquerade of individuality
overlying a sort of collective atomisation which will occur alongside total
homogenisation. I checked my smartphone – no emails. Battery just filled. I
unplugged it. Thinking again for a moment, I saw that the thing in my hand
abetted this process with its abrupt, babyish demands. It perforated my
thought. Abetting it all, the dark, interior places of thought where ideas fuse
and intermingle and cross-pollenate will increasingly be perforated; harsh
light will shine through and that environment will be lost to the constant
nagging intrusions of the external device; outsourced cognition gives back a
cheap and flimsy product; the skull is not simply a repository for memories
that can be elsewhere stored; without the digestion of ideas, and the troubled,
personal undermining of ideas digested, the skull will fall fallow and there
will be no enlightenment possible in the age of instant knowledge - why think
when the answer, the data, is at your fingertips? Why bother, when
everything is known? A familiar argument – I was embarrassed. A quotation arose
in my head, it must be one of the last of its kind because these apposite words
like all others can be found in the Cloud now if you need them, adrift out
there in the Gordian morass: “For
seeing they saw not, and hearing they understood not, but like shapes in a
dream they wrought all the days of their lives in confusion.” And such external
memory services will not only weaken us through acting as a cognitive crutch,
no. Far worse, I thought: most cynically of all, curiosity, the thirst for
knowledge, that thing the internet and the portable device truly satisfy, that
way in which both have truly benefitted us, are now to be used against us in
monitored cyberspace, currently for our financial exploitation and emotional
manipulation, and almost certainly soon for our utter control as well, I
thought, wavering slightly as an advertisement for Asian brides popped up in
the corner of my email account as I clicked on an email from the Kyoto Ward
Office regarding the question as to whether my divorce papers had been received.
Flustered, this time it took me a while to find the thread again, but I did, or
some close by, related thread. Watched, we will be terrified to indulge our
curiosity, except where it coincides with approved runnels of investigation and
desire, lest sanctions of some sort come down from nowhere or everywhere on our
heads. Watched, we can look only where the crowd approves our looking. Watched,
we will do only what the crowd approves our doing, think only what the crowd
(Or the Cloud?) approves our thinking, for fear of the ‘flesh searchers,’ the
first legions of whom we now see emerging in China. All tempting knowledge will
be spread before us as a cruel invitation to reveal our inner selves for
control, condemnation and re-education, I thought, feeling as though a torch
were being shone in my eyes, remembering the time, as thirteen-year-old boys,
the police had come upon us horsing on the slides and see-saws in Herbert Park
at night and the first question they had asked was, “What are you on, lads?” Knowledge
will become the apple of knowledge and we will shrink from it like the
faithful, huddling back into the pack, snarling in unison. I remembered the
priest, a small man, round and cheery like something from the Wind in the
Willows, sitting with his hands folded, salivating for my Confession. Most will
be coaxed into killing their inner mental life through the twin assaults of the
destruction of solitude and the end of privacy, I thought. The invasion of the
body snatchers has begun, I thought, seeing the seed pods and the terrifying
blank bodies from the old b-movie taking on definition as they absorbed the
outward appearances and memories of their victims; true homogeneity has gone
viral, dressed in the glad rags of self-expression and powered by hand-held
devices (how long till built-in devices?) and Big Data. Together we will build
a tyranny of the masses that will echo with worthy screeching, I thought again,
and I saw the pod-people from the 70’s remake of the Body Snatchers in a ring
around Donald Sutherland, cornering him and emitting their terrible, piercing
scream. “One of them. He’s still analogue. The last analogue man.” Maybe in
this part of the world the psychic tyranny will be a pastel blue one, I
thought, but I wouldn’t say I hoped in either direction. Because where every
utterance is part of a permanent digital tattoo, tremulous caution follows. Who
can be the most consistently, radically moderate? A tyranny of mildness is a
tyranny all the same, and a democratic tyranny is still also a tyranny, and
democracy anyway is now more than ever the false choice between Tweedle Dum and
Tweedle Dee, thought I, picturing Minister Cow, then picturing the priest
circling Sandymount Green, eyeing me. And we will all be part of the body of
the tyrant, the insipid pastel blue Leviathan, blue in the face with perpetual
indignation, and together we will all suffocate thought, push its face down and
drown it in a superficial yet extensive puddle of mere knowledge, or ‘data’…and
the future will come to be defined by this vulgarity of spirit, I thought, the
term ‘vulgarity of spirit’ rising up from somewhere forgotten, and it will last
forever. We will all be like shopkeepers, all fearing each other, envying each
other, all motivated by one concern: the appearance of worthiness. A global
nation of petty digital shopkeepers, all hawking one product, ourselves, for
nothing. The phrase ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ rose up in my head, now who said
that? On my bicycle I passed a billboard today; it read, Time to Build Brand
Me. If I were an internet commentator, I would have said, "I just threw up
in my mouth a bit." I have seen that standardised piece of crudeness so
many times by now; why hasn't it become an acronym yet? IJTUIMMAB. That brings
me to the priest again, for some reason. “Have you any sins to confess,” asked
the priest, I remember. “And which of the other lads should I talk to next,” he
always used to ask at the end. And sometimes these sins, once confessed, would
somehow wing their way to the Principal’s ear, and boys would find themselves
hauled out of class and it was as if the very school itself could see into their
souls. And always the great Eye, watching. Lidless. That seemed familiar, but
not quite right. Suddenly I saw the burning eye of Sauron. The more curious we
are the more we look, and the more we look, the more it will see us. And since
the Eye will see through us, it will not only be worthiness without but also
worthiness within that will concern us. In a transparent world, even the mind
will become a matter of appearances. This is the new Calvinism, worse than
Catholicism, reinforced, internalised, and universalised. Without forgiveness.
A digital tattoo. And I wondered, once they have been standardised, what will
all these ‘new people’ do in this digital age, when technology obviates the
need for so many of what would once have been their professions? A new elite,
the digital entrepreneurial elite, will grow ever smaller and ever richer, and
the ambitious will fling themselves towards this shrinking glass dome with ever
greater desperation, most splattering harmlessly off its sheer transparent
sides. A dome: I remembered the security cameras in the school, they were black
domes drooping from the ceiling like opaque, dirty droplets, they had been
installed after I graduated so I was unprepared and they saw me when I broke in
but they didn’t recognise me on the film. Or only the priest recognised me.
Yet, pulling back, it occurred to me that in a world hooked on endless
production and consumption I cannot foresee an end to capitalism or an end to
money, so the now-useless hordes outside the dome will have to be equipped with
a way to consume, somehow. The future will have to be tranquillised, I thought,
somehow. Most likely, I found myself believing, is that these monitored but
redundant human beings will be ‘employed’ to transform into advertisements.
They will be paid to consume, and frankly to embody, certain products (these
products may be real or they may be virtual), and to talk about these products
consistently on social media and perhaps even in person, if such personal
monitoring one day becomes viable, and if such an anachronistic mode of
communication persists far enough into the future. “Why did you switch off your
feed?” I heard the Bosses whispering directly into my skull when I sought a moment’s
solitude in my imagined future: “We need you to mention Diageo products more
often, yes, even at the family dinner table. Even to your own mother, of course
to her. She doesn’t drink? Why not? Do you want to lose sponsorship, is that
it? Speak up. Make it sincere. Yes, even to your children. How about: Remember,
son, you may not be old enough to drink now, but when you are, choose from the
Diageo range of products. That's Diageo, for the drinker in all of us.” I
remembered what the priest used to say, counting down on three of his fat
fingers: “And remember, no drugs, no sex before marriage, and if you drink,
drink in moderation.” How we laughed at him. I’d long rejected his God anyway,
his god, at least from the age of twelve. The bosses rise again in my mind.
Like omniscient telemarketing managers, Bosses (more likely: ‘Brand Coaches’ or
‘Lifestyle Coaches’) will monitor ‘employees’ (now rebranded as ‘Social Brand
Ambassadors,’ perhaps, or ‘Lifestyle Ambassadors,’ perhaps) across all spheres
of their lives, making sure they are exhibiting sufficient brand loyalty in
their consumption practices, watching vigilantly to see whether ‘ambassadors’
are spending a sufficient amount of their day proselytising for the corporation,
withdrawing ‘Lifestyle Sponsorship’ (‘Lifestyle Sponsorship’ is what will
replace the idea of the salary) if they are not. Technology could have freed us
from work once, I thought, but now, where work is virtue and consumption is
identity, the two will be further fused. If ever there comes a new fission into
separate ‘tribes,’ it will be corporate tribes, where human beings will be paid
avatars, their interests strictly monitored, their verbal and textual output
screened for loyalty. Overlaid on top of the monotonous background of politics
and morality as a pantomime of competitive streamlined worthiness, people as
living advertisements will be sponsored to squabble meaninglessly and endlessly
about irrelevancies, and derogatory sloganising against opponent corporations
and products will become the highest form of artistic and cultural expression,
I thought. Presided over by the Eye, I thought. The Online Eye of God the
Father. Of the Father. And quickly moving from the priest, I remembered other,
worse things: Coming back to see my wretched coke-bottle bong, dug out, left
there standing naked in the middle of my room, pulsating with shame and the
stink of stale smoke. The half-empty spirit bottles lined up mute on the kitchen
table, left there to shame me; stumbling in drunk off their blood I found those
inanimate witnesses ranked up to condemn me as they all the while withheld human
confrontation, his little buffers. The room itself always so open with its two
doors (one glass), the constant traffic outside it, that voice raised, fluty,
hollowish, praiseworthy, loudly narrating tasks and duties undertaken in
strategic earshot. And we lived in silence and shame; a sound on the stairs,
the creak of a floorboard, a handle somewhere, and we would instantly turn the
volume down almost till it was inaudible - within months of arriving, the
volume control on every remote in the house would inevitably be worn out by our
secrecy, for which we were then blamed. Worse, the unspeakable feeling of
seeing the internet history printout pinned to my bedroom door. Worse yet,
coming back to find the tissues raked out from under my teenage bed, yellowing
in the air, the reek of my sin rising off them. The Eye of God, the Father and
the Unholy Priest. Is there no hiding now - will I have to die and become
nothing to go undespised, unjudged? Created to be condemned. A pale slug under
a rock. Under a bin. And I now thought, Hegel was horribly half-right: human
history is, after all, the ugly process of God birthing himself. Only a Western
religious culture could produce this monstrosity, I thought. The most
tyrannical idea in history was the idea of God concocted when monotheism
reached the West, the idea of a vindictive, personally interested, omnipotent,
omniscient watcher; the Almighty, the One, the Source, bastardised with the
lowest human characteristics, the lowest biases and values, a brutal bastard of
Axial soteriology and warlike social self-worship, far more oppressive than any
ancestor cult or tribal deity through the innovations of giving His primitive
intrusiveness a universal mandate and making Him the author of everything and
the guarantor of life eternal in a bid to usurp all older, wiser myths, and I
thought the following: an idea, ultimately, is a piece of psychological
technology, and the Christian God was one of the most effective. You can never
escape Him. And I remembered how, at the age of twenty-one, drunk, I broke into
my school and stole the key out of the tabernacle. Almost a decade after I’d
forsaken that god. And I saw the priest again, circling me in Sandymount Green.
The squint. The hate. And I thought again, I rejected you, I rejected You, so
why is it that now this key weighs down on me, why is it that every misfortune
that befalls me, I see connected to the key through You? It took a while for
that way of thinking to die out again, I remembered. Feeling again like I was
being watched in the dark, or everywhere really, and always. And even seen
into. And I thought, the great irony is that, concurrently with the secular
State, it is undoubtedly secular men, Silicon Valley men, who have played the
greatest part in plucking that God from the realm of psychological abomination
and turning Him into an actual reality. They think they are advancing Reason
and the Enlightenment, I thought, sickened, but really they are proving that
the Enlightenment was merely a hiatus while the idea of God, the blueprint of
God, was going into production. Thank you so much for your unsolicited,
irreversible blessings. Your meat is my poison. My Enlightenment was merely a
hiatus. The idea was always there underneath, inextricable, ever since it was
installed in me as a boy, I thought. It took you to dig it up. And now the Eye
is opening and it soon will be turned on all of us. On me. God is not dead: He
is only just being born. I imagined Him waking from his slumber; we dreamed
that He existed and now He is waking, and it will do us no good to scuttle away
like mice to the darkest corners, fleeing His fibre-optic tentacles. He
appeared before me suddenly, a Gordian Knot of squirming fibre-optic tentacles
with an Eye in the middle, radiating punitive malice as visible as if it were a
haze around him. Think how badly the mere idea of Him terrified us into
obedience for millennia. Terrified me, a child in the dark, when I had done
something bad. When I had started to separate off, I thought, and become what I
now think of as myself, I suppose. He was there to try and reel me back in but
I broke free, I suppose. A bit. Not really. Yet now, His vast, repulsive,
technological eyes are actually peeling open. A self-watching abomination is
being born and a great, sucking gravity is beginning and I think: All of us are
to be sucked into the great prison of Him. I see the key again. Still the key
sits there on my mantelpiece, dull gold, resonating. Only to be His atoms now.
But not I, I think, not I.