Make Them Dance - Lessons from history for the online future - Part Three

From abolition ... to cyberspace

A series of shifting narratives

The journey to abolition was, beneath the good intentions and sheer determination of William Wilberforce and his supporters, and the defiance, deflections and reluctant - not to mention highly lucrative - eventual surrender of their opponents - a conclusive transformation of the narrative.?

The critical Parliamentary votes, once the see-saw tipped in favour of initially abolition and then emancipation, were in each case landslides.

The moral imperatives for abolition were then - and are even more so today - crystal clear. It was ignited, and certainly for those long eighteen years between 1789 and 1807, sustained by the deeply-held religious convictions of Wilberforce and his fellow Evangelists. And the rise of the discourse on human rights, manifested and magnified through the intellectual shift among the elite of The Enlightenment, and the social and political shifts of the American and French revolutions, provided an ever-rising tide, one that would have lifted any and all such issues higher into the public consciousness.

It’s easy to look back on the many years before those hard won - and very costly - victories over the awful slave trade, and ask, “What on earth were they thinking?” We have all asked ourselves - and indeed too often been asked - when our decisions and actions have gone awry: “What on earth were you thinking?” But when have we ever been able to sit down, either in the heat of the moment, or in later tranquillity, to make a coherent and cogent, prioritised list of the reasons why we’d assumed what we assumed, and done what we’d done?

This is the territory of our underlying narratives. They determine how we frame the world, how we relate what we see to what we feel, and what we should do about it.They are not - and this is one of their distinctive and most important attributes - made up of conscious thoughts.

In fact, they replace thinking, by taking the form of emotional and behavioural short-cuts. Until relatively recently, they were often better than thinking. This “soft code” of our narratives has enabled us to take fast and often surprisingly effective action in emergencies, when to stop and have a think would perhaps be fatal.

Such narratives lie, we could say, in a kind of no man’s land between our animal instincts and our rational mind.

What is most urgent to grasp here is that, while such unconscious or semi-conscious narratives are not made up of logically sequenced patterns of thought, they do contain, buried within their scripts, assumed trade-offs. Summoning these into the light and making them conscious has been, of course, the work of the transactional analyst. “If I am a good boy and don’t say no to Daddy or Mummy …."

But they have also become the source of our worst vulnerability. Why is that?

We are, we could say, forced to dance to the tune of others’ manipulations of our own shared and individual hidden narratives. Until circumstances, eventually and hopefully not too late, compel us to look deeper. That inquiry, as it turns out, is far less to do with “what we’re thinking”, than it is about “what we’re not thinking”.?

Until we surface the narratives that hide - conveniently, often usefully - under the surface of our awareness, we are navigating across an unfamiliar landscape, using maps and compasses that seem to be ours, but far too often serve the interests of others.

The term “controlling the narrative” is all-too-familiar to observers of political behaviour. What this apparently innocuous phrase actually means, when the PR speak is stripped away, is the manipulation and control of human beings. It’s about playing with people’s wiring.

It’s never been easier to do this than it is today. Russia, China, Trump, Brexit.

While there are thousands, perhaps millions of stories in circulation, there is very little informed discourse. Stories - which we could define here as “narratives loaded with emotion” - are used to plant and activate narratives. When we say that these days politics is all about the media, we no longer just mean that the battles are fought on the pages of broadsheets or tabloids. Today’s networked media is hardwired into us, bypassing debate or even conscious consideration.

Which brings us, neatly, to the Surveillance Capitalists.

Human rights in cyberspace

This changes everything

One of the more obvious of the many effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a pronounced shift of both life and work into the online world.

Not just ecommerce - Amazon’s reported revenues, at the height of the crisis, of eleven thousand dollars per second deserve a passing raised eyebrow - but every activity that can possibly be performed in cyberspace is regularly happening there.?

Old habits, it’s turned out, won’t necessarily die hard. While most of us looked forward to having a degree of digital vs physical choice, when the so-called ‘new normal’ emerged from the chaos, it’s clear that - just as the more privileged came to enjoy the generally cleaner air, more visible wildlife and slower pace that lockdown ushered in, and would now like to retain those unexpected benefits - when the tide rolled back, more than some of these new preferences have remained.

We’ll be spending a lot more of our lives in cyberspace, a location already familiar, in one shape or another, to many of us. And yet one that has, till now, been more threaded through the routines of our physical lives, than another, optional place to plant our feet and live in.

While this particular future is far from evenly distributed, the COVID-19 effect - and of course, the global explosion of BLM’s righteous rage following the death of George Floyd - renders the message of The Age of Surveillance Capital, a timely and courageous tour de force by Harvard’s Shoshana Zuboff, even more poignant and urgent than when it was published in early 2019.

The debate - frustrating to many, irrelevant, at least so far, to the vast majority of the billions who have come to rely on Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon - about the dubious sources and worrying implications of the unimaginable wealth and power accumulated so very rapidly by, among many other beneficiaries, Messrs Page, Brin, Zuckerberg, Bezos and of course, Musk, has raged back and forth across critical subjects such as their systemic abuse of privacy (absolutely yes) and the urgent need for government regulation (yes again).

Ms Zuboff, however, has a bigger agenda and a far more pressing argument. The Age of Surveillance Capital - just like that extraordinary three and half hour speech in Parliament in May 1789 - squares up to something both old and new, familiar yet unfamiliar.?

She reframes the dominance - not just of their chosen markets, but of actual human experience and agency - and the practices of (primarily) Google and Facebook as causing a crisis of human rights that, until recently, just like the slave trade and slavery before Wilberforce, has been hard to see, hard to untangle when we can see it, and, apparently, very hard to care about, even when it’s untangled for us.

The ostensibly benign experiences of the billions of so-called ‘users’ enjoyed by Google, Facebook and Amazon (among a familiar handful of other giant corporations) can’t in any sense be compared to the horrific experiences of those eleven million slaves. That said, the implications for human freedom, laid out implacably, step by carefully-researched step, in Surveillance Capital, are profound and now demand our urgent consideration.

Ms Zuboff’s task is to change the public narrative about the surveillance trade, by marching us through a sequence of exquisitely expressed and impeccably evidenced accounts of the hidden trade-offs and the resulting endgames.