Inhumanity of web interfaces

 People think that masturbation is evil, because it is the surrogate of sex, not the real thing. It's alienating because it detracts from what makes us human. Then Facebook is a surrogate for human interaction. It should also be considered evil in the same way?

I thought that if the industrial age was alienating in the sense that it drew us away from our natural selves, maybe this internet, networked age was even more alienating in that it drew us even further than the industrial age ever did?

That was something that came to my mind when I was on the MRT the other day. I saw people sitting on a row of seats. Every single one of them was masked. And every single one of them was gazing at their smart phones. I am not really sure what for. I had my smart phone with me, and I wasn't going to ....

The way that people interacted with each other through the internet ... Marshall McLuhan once said that the medium is the message. Then you have to ask how interactions in real life are different from interactions over the internet. People tend to treat each other worse over the internet. And yet, you could directly interact with somebody across the world over the internet and you could actually learn a little more about them instead of thinking about them like they were some faceless inhuman.

In the pre-internet age, you could pick up a newspaper to read, and it would be a physical object. There would be an editor who curated all the articles for you, and it would be some kind of organic whole, and it was a view of the world that was largely ideologically coherent and consistent. These days, your curator would be Facebook's Artificial Intelligence. A machine was trying to predict what you were going to read. It would be such a big mess: a hodgepodge of articles that hardly had anything to do with each other, or maybe even different versions of the same article over and over again, to the extent that you may have read the same thing 10 times without noticing that you did. Then the world would be divided between news items that you hardly had any inkling about, and news items that completely skipped your attention.

When you listened to music, you used to buy albums. Not only did artists put a certain amount of thought into the music, they put some thought into making the album an experience that you'd want to spend up to an hour on. Not only did the songs tell certain stories, but the cumulative experience of a whole album was part of an even larger experience. You wouldn't imagine listening to Pink Floyd's “Dark Side of the Moon” on random shuffle. All the songs were designed to segue nicely into each other, and delve into Roger Water's impression of Syd Barrett's fractured soul. Even the packaging of the album was designed so that the cover was part of the art of the album.

I miss how music seemed to be a tangible physical object, although you could say that it only began in 1877 with the invention of the phonograph, and that the CD was the final manifestation of music as a physical product. It made things more tangible.

Facetime has also changed. It used to be that you only knew people in your village. Then you moved to a city and lived in a physical space where there were more strangers than acquaintances, by accident of geography. Then you had the phone, which allowed you to interact with somebody in real time without having to be in the same room as the other person. Then you had email and instant messaging, which allowed this to take place on a computer with an internet connection. And fast forward to today, when your smart device had transformed into a handheld computer, to the extent that people have even forgotten that it was supposed to be a portable phone. People have basically forgotten that the primary purpose of your handphone was that it was supposed to be a portable telephone, and it became more about surfing the internet on the move.

Before the internet, economics meant that you used money to pay for goods and services. Today, the coin of the realm is for these devises to hijack your attention. Instead of goods and services being the primary actor, it was the connection to the goods and services which was the primary actor. It was less and less that you interacted with a physical shop. Instead, your handphone or the portal that your handphone was on became the shop window. IT used to be that advertisements were salesmen masquerading as documentaries. Advertisements were meant for the mass market, and they looked like TV productions, with the attendant levels of production quality. Now, what you had was a bunch of crappy youtube videos, and they looked like some kind of tout was right in front of you: because ads today are targetted, you didn't have to disguise this aspect of yourself as being a tout.

Consider the late 20^th century: advertising followed the logic of the mall. Shopfronts looked like glossy magazines. People had the time and space to refine the look into something that was almost to the level of the work of art. Now, everything is bespoke, and many a time, this looks like something better. Often it is not. Very often, you are being sold some kind of a gimmick, and you're sold some narrative that's engineered for people to lap it right up.

The logic of advertisement has become the logic of porn. Attention grabbing gimmicks have become almost de rigueur. Content on the internet has followed Gresham's law, with the bad driving out good.

There are people who tell you the truth, there are people who lie to you but tell you the truth about lying to you, and there are people who lie to you and then gaslight you about it.

David Bowie belonged to the second category. He was on some level honest about how he was supposed to be a plasticky showman. But at the same time, he was giving some kind of wry commentary about the stage as a medium. David Bowie was a series of shadows, and he was never too far away from the theatrical. HE loved the stage and the stage loved him back, and he did have some kind of a humanity, but I found that he was hard to love: he had so many facets that you didn't know which one to hold on to, and all you're left is a many-headed hydra.

In many ways, I found that David Bowie was emblemic of the information age. IT's so multi-faceted that it's a little hard to love it. And perhaps that's the problem with being middle aged – you've seen so many things in your life that it's hard to find something to hold on to, and love.

Finally, I go to one of the main drawbacks of artificial intelligence. The GPT natural language models have been praised for generating remarkably realistic pieces of text. But a lot of it looks and feels uncanny. (And speaking of uncanny, artificial intelligence is uncanny because it resembles human intelligence a lot and yet does not reach up to that level. It thus comes across as very narrow, maybe a little autistic, very unnuanced, child-like).

In spite of the tremendous computing power underlying many of these language models, the fact is that every word goes through an embedding: the words are transformed into some very high dimensional vector, and the vector supposedly embodies the sum total of all the meaning of the word. That sounds a little crazy. When you think of the word cat, it could trigger a lot of things, a lot of meanings: you could remember it as a concept, you could remember coming across one at some point in the past, you might associate it with an image, as a subclass of animal, as a quadruped. But instead, the embedding just gives you a high dimensional vector.

It could theoretically contain a lot of information, and obviously, the real meaning is in the context of how all other words are defined. But language models only represent words. The only thing the computer can learn meanings from is other words. The knowledge embodied by this artificial intelligence is not the multi-media real life experience that you or I have. The computer only sees a large corpus of text, and it knows nothing outside of this large corpus of text. There is no way that the language model can be perceived as being intelligent.

Perhaps this mental limitation has the ability to shape our brains, and after a long time of scrolling through content that has been curated by AIs, we start thinking down to their level. We start fixating on very superficial meanings of words, we get triggered by certain patterns, we lose the ability to reckon with things on a much deeper and profound level.

And maybe that is the complaint that I have about the ontological world of the internet and the hyper-network of sentient beings. It is a medium that subsists on a very thin layer of experience. It's either words (which is thin), or images or videos (which are thin). Occasionally there are recordings, but this is rare (and as a musician, I complain that internet as a medium is biased against music).

Now, one could argue that books have an even thinner experience, but books don't draw you into such an elaborate rabbit hole. You know that you cannot live your entire life on a book, pay your bills through a book, read your mail through a book, whatever. The insidiousness of the smartphone / PC medium is that more and more of your life will take place through this very narrow portal, and your brain will suddenly develop this terrible tunnel vision.

One of the conversations I had with my boss at a former job was that I was reading too much humanities stuff. I was working in the field of UX, and it's not something that's unartistic. Yet I felt as though it were wrong on some level. UX was porny. It was about "customer is always right". It's about being responsive, about offering a kind of delight that was skin-deep. It could be profound, it could be very thoughtful, but it just violated some kind of instinct that I had, that things had to be a little more deep and a little more permanent. That life was about more than just surface niceties. In the end, I felt that I was asked to give up values that I held dear, and conform to an aesthetic that I didn't always agree with.