The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [68]
David Gelernter, a Yale computer scientist, barely survived an encounter with an explosive package sent by the Unabomber; his eyesight and right hand are permanently damaged as a result. But Gelernter is hardly the technological utopian Ted Kaczinski believed him to be.
“When you do something in the public sphere,” Gelernter told a reporter, “it behooves you to know something about what the public sphere is like. How did this country get this way? What was the history of the relationship between technology and the public? What’s the history of political exchange? The problem is, hackers don’t tend to know any of that. And that’s why it worries me to have these people in charge of public policy. Not because they’re bad, just because they’re uneducated.”
Understanding the rules that govern a messy, complex world makes it intelligible and navigable. But systematizing inevitably involves a trade-off—rules give you some control, but you lose nuance and texture, a sense of deeper connection. And when a strict systematizing sensibility entirely shapes social space (as it often does online), the results aren’t always pretty.
The New Architects
The political power of design has long been obvious to urban planners. If you take the Wantagh State Parkway from Westbury to Jones Beach on Long Island, at intervals you’ll pass under several low, vine-covered overpasses. Some of them have as little as nine feet of clearance. Trucks aren’t allowed on the parkway—they wouldn’t fit. This may seem like a design oversight, but it’s not.
There are about two hundred of these low bridges, part of the grand design for the New York region pioneered by Robert Moses. Moses was a master deal maker, a friend of the great politicians of the time, and an unabashed elitist. According to his biographer, Robert A. Caro, Moses’s vision for Jones Beach was as an island getaway for middle-class white families. He included the low bridges to make it harder for low-income (and mostly black) New Yorkers to get to the beach, as public buses—the most common form of transport for inner-city residents—couldn’t clear the overpasses.
The passage in Caro’s The Power Broker describing this logic caught the eye of Langdon Winner, a Rolling Stone reporter, musician, professor, and philosopher of technology. In a pivotal 1980 article titled “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Winner considered how Moses’s “monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time, became just another part of the landscape.”
On the face of it, a bridge is just a bridge. But often, as Winner points out, architectural and design decisions are underpinned by politics as much as aesthetics. Like goldfish that grow only large enough for the tank they’re in, we’re contextual beings: how we behave is dictated in part by the shape of our environments. Put a playground in a park, and you encourage one kind of use; build a memorial, and you encourage another.
As we spend more of our time in cyberspace—and less of our time in what geeks sometimes call meatspace, or the offline world—Moses’s bridges are worth keeping in mind. The algorithms of Google and Facebook may not be made of steel and concrete, but they regulate our behavior just as effectively. That’s what Larry Lessig, a law professor and one of the early theorists of cyberspace, meant when he famously wrote that “code is law.”
If code is law, software engineers and geeks are the ones who get to write it. And it’s a funny kind of law, created without any judicial system or legislators and enforced