The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [66]
The infinitely expandable universe of code provides a second benefit: complete power over your domain. “We all fantasize about living without rules,” says Siva Vaidyanathan. “We imagine the Adam Sandler movie where you can move around and take people’s clothes off. If you don’t think of reciprocity as one of the beautiful and rewarding things about being a human being, you wish for a place or a way of acting without consequence.” When the rules of high school social life seem arbitrary and oppressive, the allure of making your own rules is pretty powerful.
This approach works pretty well as long as you’re the sole denizen of your creation. But like the God of Genesis, coders quickly get lonely. They build portals into their homespun worlds, allowing others to enter. And that’s where things get complicated: On the one hand, the more inhabitants in the world you’ve built, the more power you have. But on the other hand, the citizens can get uppity. “The programmer wants to set up some rules, to either a game or a system, and then let it run without interference from anything,” says Douglas Rush-koff, an early cyberbooster-turned-cyberpragmatist. “If you have a program that needs a minder to come in and help it run, then it’s not a very good program, is it? It’s supposed to just run.”
Coders sometimes harbor God impulses; they sometimes even have aspirations to revolutionize society. But they almost never aspire to be politicians. “While programming is considered a transparent, neutral, highly controllable realm ... where production results in immediate gratification and something useful,” writes NYU anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, “politics tends to be seen by programmers as buggy, mediated, tainted action clouded by ideology that is not productive of much of anything.” There’s some merit to that view, of course. But for programmers to shun politics completely is a problem—because increasingly, given the disputes that inevitably arise when people come together, the most powerful ones will be required to adjudicate and to govern.
Before we get to how this blind spot affects our lives, though, it’s worth looking at how engineers think.
The Empire of Clever
Imagine that you’re a smart high school student on the low end of the social totem pole. You’re alienated from adult authority, but unlike many teenagers, you’re also alienated from the power structures of your peers—an existence that can feel lonely and peripheral. Systems and equations are intuitive, but people aren’t—social signals are confusing and messy, difficult to interpret.
Then you discover code. You may be powerless at the lunch table, but code gives you power over an infinitely malleable world and opens the door to a symbolic system that’s perfectly clear and ordered. The jostling for position and status fades away. The nagging parental voices disappear. There’s just a clean, white page for you to fill, an opportunity to build a better place, a home, from the ground up.
No wonder you’re a geek.
This isn’t to say that geeks and software engineers are friendless or even socially inept. But there’s an implicit promise in becoming a coder: Apprentice yourself to symbolic systems, learn to carefully understand the rules that govern them, and you’ll gain power to manipulate them. The more powerless you feel, the more appealing this promise becomes. “Hacking,” Steven Levy writes, “gave you not only an understanding of the system but an addictive control as well, along with the illusion that total control was just a few features away.”
As anthropologist Coleman points out, beyond the Jocks-and-Nerds stereotypes, there are actually many different geek cultures. There are open-software advocates, most famously embodied by Linux founder Linus Torvalds, who spend untold hours collaboratively building free software tools for the masses, and there are Silicon Valley start-up