The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [65]
Which begs an important question: Why would the engineers who designed these systems want to build them this way?
6
Hello, World!
SOCRATES: Or again, in a ship, if a man having the power to do what he likes, has no intelligence or skill in navigation [αρετης κυβερνητικης, aretēs kybernētikēs], do you see what will happen to him and to his fellow-sailors?
—Plato, First Alcibiades, the earliest known use of the word cybernetics
It’s the first fragment of code in the code book, the thing every aspiring programmer learns on day one. In the C++ programming language, it looks like this:
void main()
{
cout << “Hello, World!” <<
endl;
}
Although the code differs from language to language, the result is the same: a single line of text against a stark white screen:
Hello, World!
A god’s greeting to his invention—or perhaps an invention’s greeting to its god. The delight you experience is electric—the current of creation, running through your fingers into the keypad, into the machine, and back out into the world. It’s alive!
That every programmer’s career begins with “Hello, World!” is not a coincidence. It’s the power to create new universes, which is what often draws people to code in the first place. Type in a few lines, or a few thousand, strike a key, and something seems to come to life on your screen—a new space unfolds, a new engine roars. If you’re clever enough, you can make and manipulate anything you can imagine.
“We are as Gods,” wrote futurist Stewart Brand on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, “and we might as well get good at it.” Brand’s catalog, which sprang out of the back-to-the-land movement, was a favorite among California’s emerging class of programmers and computer enthusiasts. In Brand’s view, tools and technologies turned people, normally at the mercy of their environments, into gods in control of them. And the computer was a tool that could become any tool at all.
Brand’s impact on the culture of Silicon Valley and geekdom is hard to overestimate—though he wasn’t a programmer himself, his vision shaped the Silicon Valley worldview. As Fred Turner details in the fascinating From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Brand and his cadre of do-it-yourself futurists were disaffected hippies—social revolutionaries who were uncomfortable with the communes sprouting up in Haight-Ashbury. Rather than seeking to build a new world through political change, which required wading through the messiness of compromise and group decision making, they set out to build a world on their own.
In Hackers, his groundbreaking history of the rise of engineering culture, Steve Levy points out that this ideal spread from the programmers themselves to the users “each time some user flicked the machine on, and the screen came alive with words, thoughts, pictures, and sometimes elaborate worlds built out of air—those computer programs which could make any man (or woman) a god.” (In the era described by Levy’s book, the term hacker didn’t have the transgressive, lawbreaking connotations it acquired later.)
The God impulse is at the root of many creative professions: Artists conjure up color-flecked landscapes, novelists build whole societies on paper. But it’s always clear that these are creations: A painting doesn’t talk back. A program can, and the illusion that it’s “real” is powerful. Eliza, one of the first rudimentary AI programs, was programmed with a battery of therapistlike questions and some basic contextual cues. But students spent hours talking to it about their deepest problems: “I’m having some troubles with my family,” a student might write, and Eliza would immediately respond, “Tell me more about your family.”
Especially for people who’ve been socially ostracized due to quirks or brains or both, there are at least two strong draws to the world-building impulse. When social