Internet Walden: Introduction—Why We Should Be Free Online
This is an extract from an article originally published on Wonk Bridge.
Goodness, truth, beauty. These are not common terms to encounter during a discussion of the Internet or computers; for the most part, the normal model seems to be that people can do good or bad things online, but the Internet is just technology.
This approach, I think, is one of the gravest mistakes of our age: thinking or acting as though technology is separate from fields like philosophy or literature, and/or that criticisms from other fields are either irrelevant or at best secondary to technicalities. This publication, serving the Digital Humanities, is part of a much-needed correction.
I say that technology can be just or unjust in the same sense that a law can: an unjust law doesn't possess the sort of ethical failing available only to a sentient being, rather, it has an ethical character (such as fairness or unfairness) as does the action that it encourages in us. We should accept the burden of seeing these qualities as ways: towards or away from goodness, truth and beauty.
Such a way is akin to a method or a path, like for example mediation or the practice of empathy: it's not necessarily virtuous in itself, but the idea is that with consistent application one develops one's virtue, or undermines it. My claim is that this is especially true for the ways in which we use technology, both as individuals and collectively.
In Computer Lib, Ted Nelson describes "the mask of technology," which serves to hide the real intentions of computer people (technicians, programmers, managers, etc.) behind pretend technical considerations. ("We can't do it that way, the computer won't allow it.") There's another mask, that works in the opposite way: the mask of technological ignorance. We wear it either to avoid facing difficult ethical questions about our systems (hiding behind the fact that we don't understand the systems) or as an excuse when we offload responsibilities onto others.
This essay concerns itself primarily with three ways: the secondary characteristics that lend themselves to our pursuit of goodness, truth and beauty, specifically in the technology of communication. They are, freedom, interoperability, and ideisomorphism; the latter is a concept which I haven't heard defined before, but which can be summarized thus: the quality of systems which are both flexible enough to express the complexity and nuance of human thought and which have features that lend themselves to the shape of our cognition. (Ide, as in idea, iso as in equal to, morph as in shape.)
We should care about freedom, because we require it to build and experiment with systems in pursuit of the good; interoperability, because it forces us to formulate the truth in its purest form and allows us to communicate it; ideisomorphism, because it allows us to combine maximal taste and creativity with minimal technological impositions and restrictions in our pursuit of beauty. For details on these ways, please read on.
I won't claim that this is a complete treatment of the ethical character of machines, my subject is machines for communication, and the best I can hope for is to start well.
In short, bad communications technology causes and covers up ethical failures. Take off the mask. We have nothing to lose but convenient excuses and stand to gain firstly, tools that act as force-multipliers for our best qualities and, secondly, some of the ethical clarity that comes from freedom and diverse conversation, and, if nothing else, a better understanding of ourselves.