Algorithmic Big Brother is Watching

Evgeny Morozov

Big Brother is watching. He has always been watching. During the Inquisition, he was the Catholic Church. When the women’s movement was getting its legs, it was NOW. Now in our computer age, it’s not a religious organization or political interest group guarding its rights against language pirates, it’s algorithms. “Thanks to Silicon Valley, our public life is undergoing a transformation,” wrote Evgeny Morozov, the author of the soon to be released To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism in a recent Times Op-Ed piece (“You Can’t Say That on the Internet,” NYT, 11/16/12) “Accompanying this digital metamorphosis is the emergence of new, algorithmic gatekeepers, who, unlike the gatekeepers of the previous era—journalists, publishers, editors—don’t flaunt their cultural authority. They may even be unaware of it themselves.” Autocompletion is one of the areas which Morozov singles out and he uses George Carlins 7 words to illustrate his point. “See how many of those words would autocomplete on your favorite Web site, “ he comments. “In my case, YouTube would autocomplete none. Amazon almost none (it also hates ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’). Of Carlin’s seven words, Google would autocomplete only ‘piss.’” Relax, at least it’s value free, might be one response to such algorithmic choices. Algorithmic censorship may turn out to be our first experience of the A.I. universe. Indeed, it’s not what the algorithm does, but what it doesn’t do that’s   the problem. Anyone who has ever received an automated telephone questionnaire from their insurance company, which provides yes and no’s but no maybe’s, will understand. Kafka foresaw it before there were any computers, in The Trial. It’s the tyranny and triumph of information, a dehumanized lynch mob made up of bits of data, determining our fate.

Eye in the Sky

In a recent story, the Times’ John Markoff described the creation of a fully automated data base which some weird sounding government agencies are supporting(“'Government Aims to Build A "Data Eye In the Sky'” NYT, 10/10/11). Markoff pointed out that Isaac Asimov had anticipated this kind of collaboration between "mathematics and psychology to predict the future" when he coined the term “psychohistory” in his Foundation series back in l951. The term “cyberspace" emanated from William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the concept of the web was prefigured in Samuel Delaney’s novels so we shouldn’t be surprised at Asimov’s prescience. Markoff quotes someone named Thomas Malone, identified as director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at M.I.T. and  mentions Intelligence Advanced  Research Projects Activity or Iarpa, “part of the office of the director of national intelligence.”  Does this sound like something to worry about? Is such tech speak tantamount to the 'banality of evil'?  Should we be assured when we’re told that this system would be fully automated?  Is there such a thing a value free data collection? “The automated data collection system is to focus on patterns of communication, consumption, and movement of populations,” Markoff reported. “It will use publicly accessible data,  including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic web cams and changes in Wikipedia entries.” There has always been a certain ambiguity about Big Brother? Was Orwell referring to a human entity or a  collective consciousness? Even Wikipedia, which puts forth the dichotomy, can't seem to decide. Was he anticipating some sort of artificial and transcendent intelligence, resulting from the kind of “data eye in the sky” that is being talked about—a more evolved form of the military industrial complex that we might term the academic/intelligence complex?  Or was he simply envisioning the E-Z pass?

East of Eden

In the prelapsarian world, nakedness was not met with self-consciousness. Innocence prevailed and men and women defecated and urinated like cosmopolitan dogs, unashamedly leaving their piles or lifting their legs against corner lampposts. The invention of shame and modesty are not products of sin but of consciousness, of the thinking “I.” Why does the awareness of the self lead to the need to cover it up on both literal and metaphorical levels? What secrets does the “I” possess? Here is the point where sin comes in. Desire in Homo sapiens is partially an invention of consciousness, and leads to longing of the kind that Eve suffered when she was tempted to eat the forbidden fruit. Actually, nudity is only a subterfuge, a warning signal about the dangers of self-revelation. For instance, sexual arousal, in the surging of blood through the penis, the vagina’s lubricity, or the hardening of nipples, provides knowledge to the extent that it reveals what someone is thinking, or, more accurately, feeling. Perhaps this is the knowledge that hangs from the tree wherefrom Eve plucked the forbidden fruit. Human beings are possessed of a highly developed cerebral cortex, which provides the neural substrate for the notion of Orwell’s Big Brother. “Big Brother is watching” refers to none other than Freud’s superego, serving as night watchman over desire-producing faculties. Thought is the crime that nakedness scurries to cover up.