The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World

  A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, MAY 2012

  Copyright © 2012 Nick Harkaway

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by John Murray Publishers, a division of Hachette UK, London, in 2012.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Jason Booher

  Vintage eISBN: 978-0-345-80372-6

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  To

  everyone who has ever taught me:

  thank you

  Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon.

  Daniel Deronda

  Explanatory Note

  Throughout The Blind Giant, you will find printed hypertext links (for anyone new to the digital world and thinking about taking their first steps, those are the messy strings of letters and characters.) If you click on these links or type them into your web browser, you will find yourself at the book’s website, where you can share a fragment of the text with friends and invite discussion, or dive into whatever conversations may already be under way. From time to time, you may also find additional thoughts from me or from others on the topics covered in the book: the pace of events is so fast, and the debates so intense, that in the month or so since I finished editing the main text I’ve seen four or five things I wish I could have included. Some of these have fractionally changed my opinions and others have confirmed them. Thoughts on paper are fixed, but the world moves on.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Explanatory Note

  Introduction: Dreams and Nightmares

  Part I

  1. Past and Present

  2. Information Overload

  3. Peak Digital

  4. The Plastic Brain

  Part II

  5. Work, Play and Sacred Space

  6. Tahrir and London

  7. The Old, the Modern and the New

  Part III

  8. Engagement

  9. Being Human in a Digital World (Or Any Other)

  10. Coda

  For Further Discussion

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Nick Harkaway

  Introduction

  Dreams and Nightmares

  THIS IS THE nightmare world, the place where all the bad things are:

  A child sits goggled in a chair, senses open to a tsunami of babbling media: violent games, meaningless shotgun blasts of movies and TV shorn of context and plot, semi- and outright pornographic images, musical mash-ups and plagiarized, bastardized art. The child cannot concentrate on lessons in school or build relationships in the real world and is as a consequence completely emotionally shut off. This is all they are interested in: plugging in to a pleasure machine. Real life is boring. The child’s health, unsurprisingly, is poor, limbs flaccid and body weak.

  The child’s parents carry cellphones and rarely make eye contact with one another because they are emailing and texting. Often they sit in separate rooms because they are always connected, trivially, in the Cloud. If they read books on their devices, or newspapers, they do so in a shallow, fragmented and distracted way, partially assimilating content without thinking about it, echoing it without considering it. They don’t bother to learn things or try to understand them, any more than the child, because they know they can find everything through search engines. They have long since stopped trying to keep track of what their offspring is consuming, or even what laws are being broken. The monitoring and filtering software they installed a while ago has proven inadequate to restrain or protect junior.

  On the other hand, both they and the child are watched at all times by dozens of corporations and banks, not to mention the local council, the police, the government and several intelligence agencies from various nations. There’s no reason to suspect them of anything – beyond the endless downloading – but they are watched anyway as a matter of course. Their buying habits, political beliefs, lifestyle, sexual preferences and religious convictions are all recorded. From time to time, a software system somewhere sends them information about a product they will want, and – accurately assessed by the system – they do indeed buy it, mostly without really thinking about it. This places strain on their financial situation, but they are barely aware of that because banks and credit companies are watching their incomings and outgoings and know just when to offer them loans. These loans are now compounded and unrepayable, the interest alone sufficient to tie them to their present social and commercial classification, keep them working hard at the jobs they have rather than risking the job market, even when the terms of their contracts become draconian.

  Finally, when stress, poor diet and lack of exercise take their toll, these people become sick, and are treated according to a system of quotas devised by a machine at a healthcare provider. The machine knows that there are various ways to treat them, and selects the one which is an acceptable compromise between patient care and healthcare-provider profit. Actuarial sub-systems calculate the likely length of their lives and encourage them towards habits which will not put too great a strain on the corporate or public purse. There is no discussion of whether this is the best solution from their point of view, because they don’t ask. If the machine proposes it, it must be.

  Outside, in the city in which they live, everyone is the same. When they meet, they do so in order to video it and put the video online. They live entirely in reflection of themselves. They don’t engage politically because they’re only really interested in the next gadget. Their libidos are ruined by images of physical perfection and moral depravity which have replaced their natural sex lives. They have become isolated from one another and society as a whole, each living in his or her own technological bubble, opinions reinforced by news articles and clips culled to agree with their prejudices and uninformed preconceptions – of whatever residual political stripe. The problems of the world around them are irrelevant, except where they impinge directly on their own lives, and in these rare cases they often believe bizarre, xenophobic theories of conspiracy to avoid consideration of their own culpability in the way everything works. They are sheep, herded by commercial interests; government is reduced to the role of debt collector, corporate enforcer and policeman.

  Through these wretched Eloi move sinister Morlocks: terrorists and child abductors and sexual stalkers whom the police are powerless to identify, so deftly do they manipulate the digital environment. All that open data, shared in exchange for games and trinkets, heedless of the possible risk, makes the population an endless, soft-shelled smörgåsbord to predator entities of all kinds. This in turn engenders paranoia and a fear of the outside world. People stay in more, demand more surveillance rather than less, yield their rights and their privileges in exchange for a delusion of security.

  The situation is locked in, self-reinforcing. ‘Lock-in’ is the bane of technological and systems-based societies, a condition in which a
historical choice such as driving on a particular side of the road, made for what were then good and sufficient reasons (allegedly because a right-handed swordsman on horseback would always keep his weapon between himself and an oncoming stranger), is so embedded or buried in subsequent choices and infrastructure (the way we learn to drive, the way our cars are made, the way our roads are constructed) that changing it becomes impossible even if rationally in the modern context it might be better to do so. Thus something is locked in, because while we might wish to break out of it, we cannot do so without also unravelling everything that has been constructed on top of it, and many of those things are hugely profitable and hence powerful and able to defend themselves. They refuse to be undermined, even while the individuals within them might privately recognize the need. The petroleum industry could be seen as the perfect example of lock-in: it and its dependent transport and manufacturing industries fighting tooth and nail to preserve a dominance in world affairs and commerce which must eventually crash, and which in any case is wrecking our planet’s ecology.

  In this present example, the lock-in is more than usually secure, because unbiased news – through which the people might otherwise come to understand their situation – is all but dead, because no one pays for it. Journalism is balkanized: there are remnants of the old media, paid for by advertisers who demand their own slant on the facts; bloggers whose opinions they cannot separate from the truth; unchecked misinformation and infomercials; propaganda campaigns by oil companies demanding the right to drill everywhere and subsidies to do it; the food industry eroding standards to include more and more high-fructose corn syrup, which suppresses satiation and keeps consumers eating. High-quality film and TV are things of the past; theatre has ultimately become commercially unviable. All that remains is an endless circle of mash-ups of mash-ups, derivative works made more and more so by the multiple layers of meaningless repurposing. Rare new works are not cherished and certainly are not paid for; they are just meat dropped into a piranha tank.

  The technofetishism of this nightmare society is such that little by little the actual humanity of the people in it is fading away. Their brains are adapting; they are learning to be aspects of their own machinery. Consciousness itself, abstracted thought and a sense of the individual as separate from the environment – all these are withering away. In the end, at best, all that will be left is machines which remember us fondly. More likely is that the whole of our world will simply slow down and stop like an old-fashioned clock with no one to wind it, leaving a giant junkyard planet rapidly overgrown with weeds.

  By way of contrast, this is the digital dream world, where everything that could possibly go well, has:

  Shining, healthy people move through a sunlit space filled with birds, plants and slick technology. They are very fit, because they monitor their own health and pay attention to what they eat. Informed by a mass of expert opinion and scientific testing checked against the real world in one vast crowd-sourced human experiment, they know the pattern of their own DNA and the risks that are peculiar to them. They take steps to make sure they do not increase genetic predispositions to cancer or Alzheimer’s; they work out and eat well, knowing the precise benefit of each effortful hour. They are rewarded for their efforts not only by a longer, better quality life, but also by their healthcare provider, which offers rebates on insurance or tax for a healthier lifestyle. Their employers, knowing that healthier people are happier and more productive, make facilities for exercise available and do not object to their workforce taking the time to use them.

  The space around them is vibrant because the city itself is alive: filters and molecular technologies and even micro-organisms have been integrated into the fabric of buildings to clean the streets and the air, making the entire place carbon-negative. Even the stones are networked and augmented to understand the needs of those walking on them, to measure traffic flow and suggest alternative routes in the event of congestion. Each block communicates with the next so that the street knows when it requires repair, when the infrastructure of pipes and cables beneath the ground is failing. Air quality is tested and if necessary improved, and when it gets dark, lights come on so that there are no dark, alarming corners or grimy alleys. The people never get lost, never worry that they’ve wandered into a strange neighbourhood, because they know exactly where they are – the city tells them. In any case, there are no really bad neighbourhoods any more. Opportunity, communication and familiarity have made financial and ethnic tensions fade away.

  Through this paradise, the inhabitants and visitors walk, greet strangers in the street as friends because – thanks to their always-on, augmented-reality link-up – they actually do know things about one another at first glance. No one has to ask ‘Where do you work?’ or ‘What do you like to eat?’ because those facts are discernible, coded on their skin or clothing markers, or just gleaned by software from face-recognition profile tools. Instead, people talk about matters of substance, continuing conversations they’ve been having online, or finding shared interests to make a connection. In groups, they discuss politics, ethics, science and literature. They are voracious, interested in everything. They remember what they need, but store great quantities of information in digital form – on wearable computers or in the Cloud, the shared digital storage and processing space which is accessible to everyone – for later access and perusal. Detail is always available, but trying to hold it all in the mind is futile and takes up attention needed for actual synthesis and creation – although there are rumours of actual extensions to the brain itself, in a few years.

  In the meantime, a casual chat may rapidly lead to a new business venture or an artistic project: each person feels able to exercise his or her talents. There are no barriers to innovation; the culture has adopted an approach which – in the old vernacular – ‘comes from yes’. Requests for copyright clearance and licensing are flashed around the world, processed under standard terms and agreed immediately so that new sales channels can open, new exploitations of old material can be begun while the energy is there. Digital start-ups happen in a day, are deemed successful and swallowed by larger entities in a week, and become as commonplace as a corkscrew (or discarded as a nice thought without stamina) in a month. There is no stigma attached to failure, and many well-respected innovators have never created an uncomplicated hit, but their work has led others to produce something brilliant, and this contribution is understood and rewarded as vital. No one is considered a plodder or a hack. Everyone has a role to play.

  Even projects that work with actual physical objects can be up and running in a matter of hours, courtesy of 3D printing technology, which allows designers to create a prototype object from a digital sketch in mere moments, printing it in layers with machines costing less than a microwave oven: complex mathematical shapes are easy, and printed circuits and moving parts can be managed by those with the right skills. The time slip between concept and creation has been reduced to hours, or days; true unemployment is low, and no one is regarded as unskilled, because everyone is learning new skills all the time. This climate of innovation and distributed manufacture has produced a thriving, decentralized economy. The ‘lottery culture’ of the one big score in business has been replaced by a far healthier knowledge that hard work and a good idea will ultimately provide a decent life.

  Friendship, too, is easy to come by. Trusting the systems around them and the assessments of those they already know, people are relaxed about making new acquaintances. They see no distinction between friends discovered online and those met in the flesh, frequently converting one form of relationship into another. There is no question of ‘digital’ and ‘real’; this is a society that is quite at ease with the differences between physical and mediated communication, and has learned how to read the semiotics of the second as readily as the first. At the same time, the technology has improved to allow more accurate impressions to form from voice, eyeline and body language when meeting someone online.


  Almost the only feature in the social whirl which remains tricky is romance. You can find someone with matching interests without difficulty, but the precise combination of body chemistry, wit, compatibility and hitting upon the right moment in two lives (or more) is more elusive. Sometimes what look like impossible matches come off, and perfect partnerships go nowhere from the start. It’s perversely reassuring, and the subject of a lot of comedy: human love is still essentially as opaque as it ever was. Even so, the divorce rate is down: everyone expresses themselves more freely, sex is less a taboo topic and more something you discuss with a specific group – those who go on and on about it tend to rate nothing more than a yawn – and fewer people make ill-advised leaps into serious relationships, so misunderstandings are rarer. Committed relationships, in various forms, are actually more stable than they have been for decades.

  Many administrative and commercial matters are managed from moment to moment – and very few companies or government departments are ever unavailable, at any hour of the day or night – but even now it’s easier to have a degree of scheduling so that everyone has a shared sense of time: it helps social cohesion. So midway through each afternoon, the whole society pauses in what it is doing to vote in a series of plebiscites, each individual drawing on his or her own expertise and experience to answer today’s pressing questions: a perfect, ongoing participant democracy in which reason prevails, moderated by compassion and goodwill, and the strong, measured centre holds sway. Anyone doing something too engrossing to participate – be it surgery or scuba – need not vote, but frequent abstention is considered odd. No one has to vote on everything, but it is generally accepted practice to vote on issues in which you are disinterested as well as those that directly affect you, because the network of connection and consequence is such that nothing takes place in isolation. With access to all the information in the world, both curated and raw data, people are well able to make informed choices and, through their combined intelligence, solve problems which seemed intractable to the old style of government which relied on notionally expert leaders. No one goes hungry, no one is alone, no one is unheard.