Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us - Hardcover

1

A SIMPLE IDEA OF ARCHITECTURE

“Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated instruction diffused—public burdens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in Architecture.”1
—JEREMY BENTHAM

 
The Inspection-House
If this was a picture, you’d have seen it before. History, you see, is repeating itself. With our new digital century comes a familiar problem from the industrial age. A social tyranny is once again encroaching upon individual liberty. Today, in the early twenty-first century, just as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this social threat comes from a simple idea in architecture.
In 1787, at the dawn of the mass industrial age, Jeremy Bentham designed what he called a “simple idea in architecture” to improve the management of prisons, hospitals, schools and factories. Bentham’s idea was, as the architectural historian Robin Evans noted, a “vividly imaginative” synthesis of architectural form with social purpose.2 Bentham, who amassed great personal wealth as a result of his social vision,3 wanted to change the world through this new architecture.
Bentham sketched out this vision of what Aldous Huxley described as a “plan for a totalitarian housing project”4 in a series of “open”5 letters written from the little Crimean town of Krichev, where he and his brother, Samuel, were instructing the regime of the enlightened Russian despot Catherine the Great about the building of efficient factories for its unruly population.6 In these public letters, Bentham imagined what he called this “Panopticon” or “Inspection-House” as a physical network, a circular building of small rooms, each transparent and fully connected, in which individuals could be watched over by an all-seeing inspector. This inspector is the utilitarian version of an omniscient god—always-on, all-knowing, with the serendipitous ability to look around corners and see through walls. As the French historian Michel Foucault observed, this Inspection House was “like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”7
The Panopticon’s connective technology would bring us together by separating us, Bentham calculated. Transforming us into fully transparent exhibits would be good for both society and the individual, he adduced, because the more we imagined we were being watched, the more efficient and disciplined we would each become. Both the individual and the community would, therefore, benefit from this network of Auto-Icons. “Ideal perfection,” the utilitarian figured, taking this supposedly social idea to its most chillingly anti-social conclusion, would require that everyone—from connected prisoners to connected workers to connected school children to connected citizens—could be inspected “every instant of time.”8
Rather than the abstract fantasy of an eccentric Englishman whose experience of life, you’ll remember, was no more than that of a boy, Bentham’s radically transparent Inspection-House had an enormous impact on new prison architecture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The original Oxford jail where I had breakfasted with Reid Hoffman, for example, had been built by the prolific prison architect William Blackburn, “the father of the radial plan for prisons,”9 who built more than a dozen semicircular jails on Benthamite principles. In Oxford, Blackburn had replaced the medieval “gaol” in the city’s castle with a building designed to supervise prisoners’ every movement and control their time down to the very minute.
But Bentham’s simple idea of architecture “reformed” more than just prisons. It represented an augury of an industrial society intricately connected by an all-too-concrete network of railroads and telegraph lines. The mechanical age of the stream train, the large-scale factory, the industrial city, the nation-state, the motion picture camera and the mass market newspaper did indeed create the physical architecture to transform us into efficient individual exhibits—always, in theory, observable by government, employers, media and public opinion. In the industrial era of mass connectivity, factories, schools, prisons and, most ominously, entire political systems were built upon this crystalline technology of collective surveillance. The last two hundred years have indeed been the age of the great exhibition.
Yet nobody in the industrial era, apart from the odd exhibitionist like Bentham himself, actually wanted to become individual pictures in this collective exhibition. Indeed, the struggle to be let alone is the story of industrial man. As Georg Simmel, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century German sociologist and scholar of secrecy, recognized, “the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.”10 Thus the great critics of mass society—John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville in the nineteenth and George Orwell, Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault in the twentieth century—have all tried to shield individual liberty from the omniscient gaze of the Inspection-House.
“Visibility,” Foucault warned, “is a trap.”11 Thus, from J. S. Mill’s solitary free thinker in On Liberty to Joseph K in The Castle and The Trial to Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-four, the hero of the mass industrial age for these critics is the individual who tries to protect his invisibility, who takes pleasure in his own opacity, who turns his back on the camera, who—in the timeless words of Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis—just wants to be let alone by the technologies of the mass industrial age.
Our Age of Great Exhibitionism
Yet now, at the dusk of the industrial and the dawn of the digital epoch, Bentham’s simple idea of architecture has returned. But history never repeats itself, not identically, at least. Today, as the Web evolves from a platform for impersonal data into an Internet of people, Bentham’s industrial Inspection-House has reappeared with a chilling digital twist. What we once saw as a prison is now considered as a playground; what was considered pain is today viewed as pleasure.
The analog age of the great exhibition is now being replaced by the digital age of great exhibitionism.
Today’s simple architecture is the Internet—that ever-expanding network of networks combining the worldwide Web of personal computers, the wireless world of handheld networked devices like my BlackBerry Bold and other “smart” social products such as connected televisions,12 gaming consoles13 and the “connected car”14—in which around a quarter of the globe’s population have already taken up residency. In contrast with the original brick and mortar Inspection-House, this rapidly expanding global network, with its two billion digitally interconnected souls and its more than five billion connected devices, can house an infinite number of rooms. This is a global Auto-Icon that, more than two centuries after Jeremy Bentham sketched out his Inspection-House,15 is finally realizing his utilitarian dream of allowing us to be perpetually observed.
This digital architecture—described by New York University social media scholar Clay Shirky as the “connective tissue of society”16 and by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the new “nervous system of the planet”17—has been designed to transform us into exhibitionists, forever on show in our networked crystal palaces. And, today, in an age of radically transparent online communities like Twitter and Facebook, the social has become, in Shirky’s words, the “default” setting on the Internet,18 transforming digital technology from being a tool of second life into an increasingly central part of real life.
But this is a version of real life that could have been choreographed by Jeremy Bentham. As WikiLeaks founder and self-appointed transparency tsar Julian Assange said, today’s Internet is “the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen,”19 with Facebook, he added, being “the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US Intelligence.”20
But it’s not just Facebook that is establishing this master database of the human race. As Clay Shirky notes, popular21 geo-location services such as foursquare, Facebook places, Google Latitude, Plancast and the Hotlist, which enable us to “effectively see through walls” and know the exact location of all our friends, are making society more “legible,” thus allowing all of us to be read, in good Inspection-House fashion, “like a book.”22 No wonder, then, that Katie Rolphe, a New York University colleague of Shirky, has observed that “Facebook is the novel we are all writing.”23
Social media is the confessional novel that we are not only all writing but also collectively publishing for everyone else to read. We are all becoming Wiki-leakers, less notorious but no less subversive versions of Julian Assange, of not only our own lives but other people’s now. The old mass industrial celebrity culture has been so turned upside down by social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter that celebrity has been democratized and we are reinventing ourselves as self-style...