The global tsunami of mental misery is ever-more-closely tied to rising human interaction with digital technology. Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff explains why in his recently-published manifesto, “Team Human.” In short, our natural collaborative instincts have been undermined and toxified into an unnatural anti-sociability, caused by (and also causing) digital dependencies.
How Human
Collaboration Can Beat Screen Addiction
Such digital demonization must be reversed
for humans to survive. Whether you think Rushkoff is right or wrong, what other
discipline of scientist (besides media theorist) is there to understand our
communications problems, and to pose it specifically enough so we might have
hope to solve it?
Cryptographers
Enter cryptographers because they are, in essence, media theorists too but of a much more powerful sort. Rushkoff is a traditional media theorist, who studies “the media” directly. His tribe examines various media (books, TV, the internet, Facebook) via historical examples and then publishes the results through similar outlets. It seems straightforward enough. Other media theorists using that approach have been Ray Bradbury, Michel Foucault, George Orwell and Marshall McLuhan.
The superpower of a media theorist is direct
domain expertise through evidence of how media actually operate in the real
world. The super-weakness (or Kryptonite) is the reliance on the data — historical
examples — on which their own work proves to be systematically biased and untrustworthy.
The super-lesson of media theorists is, in Orwell’s words, “He who controls the
past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past.”
Or more pithily, “History is written by the victors.” Hats off to theorists
like Rushkoff, who have to fight fire with fire, and muck with muck. Media
theory is slippery, the hardest sort of theory there is.
Fortunately, there are other ways that humans communicate and miscommunicate besides “the media.” Studying those ways might address our problems more effectively. For example, you could understand brains as signal-processing instruments and then calculate how nervous systems establish trust in mathematical terms, as Criscillia Benford and I have done. You could be a magician or a medium (pun intended) who understands how to fool humans in real-time, and how easily we can be fooled. Or you could be a cryptographer who understands communication as a general mathematics process of code-making and code-breaking. In that case, your results would be statistical, bulletproof and guaranteed.
Cryptographers are the ones responsible for ATMs, data encryption and Bitcoin. They do the numbers so carefully that their results are guaranteed by the unchanging laws of mathematics and statistics. When they understand a communications channel or encoding/decoding protocol, their understanding is as reliable as anything in science.
Alice
and Bob
A typical cryptography dilemma involves
communicating between A and B (usually denoted as Alice and Bob). Alice and Bob
want to communicate privately. That means they don’t want outsiders to
eavesdrop and certainly don’t want outsiders to rewrite their messages
surreptitiously. The name that cryptographers have for such maleficent
manipulation of messages between Alice and Bob is a “man-in-the-middle attack”
(MITM). In their lexicon, MITM is the mathematical term for a particular kind
of hostile communications exploit, in this case exactly the kind of thing that digital
media do between humans.
It’s already obvious that digital media companies
read our messages. That’s how Facebook and Google admit to making money in the
first place. It’s less obvious how they write, rewrite and reorder our
messages, at least until you consider how much people rely on auto-response,
auto-correct and spam filters. And digital media read and rewrite not at
random, but in ways specifically calculated to take money and attention from
us. That is, they mess with our messages in part against our interests. That
means digital media act like a “man in the middle” when we communicate, making
those communications — in cryptographic terms — presumably not trustworthy.
Cryptographers calculate code-breaking, so applying their term has a kind of heft that traditional media theory could never have. Banks listen to cryptographers. The Pentagon listens to cryptographers. Bitcoin listens to cryptographers. Even venture capitalists listen to cryptographers, if they listen to anyone.
The only problem is that cryptographers
typically solve different problems, using different assumptions. Cryptographers
typically want trust to be perfect, then try to change the codes and channel to
hit that goal. Compared to that, a human’s digital dilemma is inverted: We
already have a faulty channel we can’t fix, a bunch of media corrupted by
specific biases toward profit and power, so we need to find a way to use those
damaged media in the most trustworthy way possible. This isn’t the kind of
problem cryptographers usually solve, but I’m sure they and their mathematical
tools are up to the job.
Faking
It
So, perhaps, in an ideal world, an official
cryptographer or two could restate the “Team Human” problem, the problem of
fake media, as something like this: Suppose many Alices want to communicate
with many Bobs through media channels in which a man in the middle is
guaranteed to selectively amplify and filters messages, in secret, as
advertising and profit-driven media must do for business reasons. Given this
breached channel, what is the best strategy by which Alice and Bob can still
communicate with and trust each other?
Worldwide, ever-more important decisions — those
about politics, business, personal finance, medical care and so on — are being
made through digital rather than real-life media channels. Because so many
digital interactions are already faked or fake-able, the channel is clearly not
trustworthy and seems to be getting worse. Humans need a fail-safe, fail-over
plan to maintain trust. Who better than the caretakers of mathematical trust to
set it right?
So, if you know an actual cryptographer,
please forward this article. If you yourself are an actual cryptographer,
please consider this request: Uniquely among professions, you have both the
tools for calculating what has gone wrong with human digital communication and
the respect for suggesting a fix or two. We humans have been hacked. Please
help us un-hack ourselves.
*[Big tech has done
an excellent job telling us about itself. This column,
dubbed Tech Turncoat Truths, or 3T, goes beyond the hype, exploring how digital
technology affects human minds and bodies. The picture isn’t pretty, but we
don’t need pretty pictures. We need to see the truth of what we’re doing to
ourselves.]
The views expressed in this article
are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial
policy.
