Via Arts & Letters Daily and NewStatesman:
Like every other era, the internet age has its own class of booster gurus. They are the “cybertheorists”, embedded reporters of the social network, dreaming of a perfectible electronic future and handing down oracular commandments about how the world must be remade. As did many religious rebels before them, they come to bring not peace, but a sword. Change is inevitable; we must abandon the old ways. The cybertheorists, however, are a peculiarly corporatist species of the Leninist class: they agitate for constant revolution but the main beneficiaries will be the giant technology companies before whose virtual image they prostrate themselves.
Points:
- “Cybertheorists’ jargon often betrays an adolescent hatred of the world in which they find themselves.”
- “The cyber-credo of ‘open’ sounds so liberal and friendly that it is easy to miss its remarkable hypocrisy. The big technology companies that are the cybertheorists’ beloved exemplars of the coming world order are anything but open.”
- “…cyber-thinkers have run with the wisdom-of-crowds notion to a place that bears little resemblance to reality as we know it, high-fiving each other among the rubble of reason in a fatuous kind of hi-tech, misanthropic herd-worship.”
- ”Cybertheorists, in any case, daren’t attempt to distinguish information from knowledge, because to do so would require them to perform the kind of intellectual triage that their rhetorical success depends crucially on avoiding.”
- “…cybertheorists celebrate what they euphemistically refer to as the sharing of music and films by people who didn’t buy them, conflating it with sharing as the practice of retweeting a link and with the Oprah-era sense of sharing that denotes emotional revelation.”
- “…cybertheorists have adopted a term of presumptive virtue and sprayed on to it a newly etiolated and instrumental meaning. Social is now a commercial technique to persuade users of digital services to reveal more to potential advertisers about their ‘networks’ of friendship and business contacts and to ‘connect’ such users more intimately with brands by means of a ‘Like’ button – and soon, as recent reports of in-house experiments at Facebook suggest, a ‘Want’ button.”
- “What sells, to the cyber-fanatic’s intended audience, is ludicrous utopian fantasy, silicon Panglossianism.”
