It’s not just newspapers or internet giants like Twitter or Facebook; we are all in the communications business. We’re not the talking naked apes we once were. Now we are a species with interconnected tongues and brains, linked by clouds of computers and thinking machines. The same primate thumbs that enabled us to become toolmakers have now become our primary language devices. No thumbs means no phone, no communication.
We have become self-victims of information overload and the only self-defense we know is more and more self-censorship. We hide in political silos and only talk to people we agree with. We turn off differing views and we paint them into opposite corners. We shrug our shoulders when we’re told it’s time to make a difference. We’re tired of trying to separate fake news from real news, so we self-censor and turn off all the news.
If only we could climb back up in the trees and start over. Perhaps we’re not the smart apes we thought we were. How else can we explain living in times where machines constantly tell us what to do? Google algorithms have replaced our own brain waves.
Face it, most of the time we don’t think for ourselves. If GPS says turn left we do it, even if it leads us to a dead end. Our phones talk to us even when we don’t ask anything. We shop, eat, play, bank, exercise, pretend, friend and protest by what we see on our mobile screens. Thumb talk is dumb talk.
Once upon a time it was safe to hide on Facebook and share “likes” with each other. But that was before we found out the Russians infiltrated us and poisoned our Trump-Clinton election. Facebook has 3 billion users and it has lost control over real facts and validated sources.
Here at this newspaper, we have inherited new jobs. Every week we are forced to chase down Facebook errors and Nextdoor rumors and try to set the record straight. Why can’t Facebook’s billionaire Mark Zuckerberg do his own job? Maybe because he’s already admitted he can’t control all his thinking machines. Google’s motto is “do no harm.” That sounds a lot like a tag line promoting last summer’s Planet of the Apes movie.
“We need a focused, high-level conversation about the deep ways in which computers and their ilk are transforming how we do business, how we work, and how we live,” writes Tim O’Reilly, of Sebastopol’s O’Reilly Media & Associates in his new book, “WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us.”
“Just about everyone’s asking WTF? ‘What the F***?’ but also, more charitably, ‘What’s the future?’” O’Reilly asks.
O’Reilly sees a communications universe dominated by profiteering, inward-looking corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.
It’s a universe where consumers want on-demand access and free delivery. This 24/7 deluge of unfiltered data leaves the internet’s homo sapiens living in a jungle of unending social conflict and rising political turmoil. Everybody’s busy self-censoring and turning each other off. We’re letting the machines and not our brains do all the thinking. Not Zuckerberg, not Google and right now, not anyone, can restore truth-based, fact-checked communication.
How many more Las Vegas massacres, Charlottesville hate marches, NFL kneel downs, immigration deportations, cancelled Free Speech weeks and divisive Trump tweets will it take before we realize that self-censorship is not the answer?
In O’Reilly’s WTF thesis he is calling for a new economy that will be “something to marvel at rather than to fear.” We need better ways to engage our communication technologies and “use them to do things that were previously unimaginable,” he writes.
No matter how we use our thumbs and machines, we won’t create a more human future while we censor ourselves and keep ourselves divided.
