Journal tags: faith

I think of myself of as an optimist. It makes me insufferable sometimes.

When someone is having a moan about something in the news and they say something like “people are terrible”, I can’t resist weighing in with a “well, actually…” Then I’ll start channeling Rutger Bregman, Rebecca Solnit, and Hans Rosling, pointing to all the evidence that people are, by and large, decent. I should really just read the room and shut up.

I opened my talk Of Time And The Web with a whole spiel about how we seem to be hard-wired to pay more attention to bad news than good (perhaps for valid evolutionary reasons).

I like to think that my optimism is rational, backed up by data. But if I’m going to be rational, then I also can’t become too attached to any particualar position (like, say, optimism). I should be willing to change my mind when I’m confronted with new evidence.

A truckload of new evidence got dumped on my psyche this week. The United States of America elected Donald Trump as president. Again.

Even here I found a small glimmer of a bright side: at least the result was clear cut. I was dreading weeks or even months of drawn-out ballot counting, lawsuits and uncertainty. At least the band-aid was decisively ripped away.

Back in 2016, I could tell myself all sorts of reasons why this might have happened. Why people might have been naïve or misled into voting a dangerous idiot into power. But the naïveté was all mine. The majority of America really is that sexist.

This feels very different to 2016. And hey, remember when we woke up to that election result and one of the first things we did was take out subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post to “support real journalism”? Yeah, that worked out just great, didn’t it?

My faith in human nature is taking quite a hit. An electoral experiment has been run three times now—having this mysogistic racist narcissistic idiot run for the highest office in the land—and the same result came up twice.

I naïvely thought that the more people saw of his true nature, the less chance he would have. When he kept going off-script at his rallies, spouting the vilest of threats, I thought there was an upside. At least now people would see for themselves what he’s really like.

But in the end it didn’t matter one whit. Like I said in a different context:

To use an outdated movie reference, imagine a raving Charlton Heston shouting that “Soylent Green is people!”, only to be met with indifference. “Everyone knows Soylent Green is people. So what?”

I never liked talking about “faith” in human nature. To me, it wasn’t faith. It was just a rational assessment. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe I need some faith after all.

I wonder if my optimism will return. It probably will (see? I’m such an optimist). But if it does, perhaps it will have to be an optimism that exists despite the data, not because of it.

Cennydd points to an article by Ev Williams about the pendulum swing between open and closed technology stacks, and how that pendulum doesn’t always swing back towards openness. Cennydd writes:

We often hear the idea that “open platforms always win in the end”. I’d like that: the implicit values of the web speak to my own. But I don’t see clear evidence of this inevitable supremacy, only beliefs and proclamations.

It’s true. I catch myself saying things like “I believe the open web will win out.” Statements like that worry my inner empiricist. Faith-based outlooks scare me, and rightly so. I like being able to back up my claims with data.

Only time will tell what data emerges about the eventual fate of the web, open or closed. But we can look to previous technologies and draw comparisons. That’s exactly what Tim Wu did in his book The Master Switch and Jonathan Zittrain did in The Future Of The Internet—And How To Stop It. Both make for uncomfortable reading because they challenge my belief. Wu points to radio and television as examples of systems that began as egalitarian decentralised tools that became locked down over time in ever-constricting cycles. Cennydd adds:

I’d argue this becomes something of a one-way valve: once systems become closed, profit potential tends to grow, and profit is a heavy entropy to reverse.

Of course there is always the possibility that this time is different. It may well be that fundamental architectural decisions in the design of the internet and the workings of the web mean that this particular technology has an inherent bias towards openness. There is some data to support this (and it’s an appealing thought), but again; only time will tell. For now it’s just one more supposition.

The real question—when confronted with uncomfortable ideas that challenge what you’d like to believe is true—is what do you do about it? Do you look for evidence to support your beliefs or do you discard your beliefs entirely? That second option looks like the most logical course of action, and it’s certainly one that I would endorse if there were proven facts to be acknowledged (like gravity, evolution, or vaccination). But I worry about mistaking an argument that is still being discussed for an argument that has already been decided.

When I wrote about the dangers of apparently self-evident truisms, I said:

These statements aren’t true. But they are repeated so often, as if they were truisms, that we run the risk of believing them and thus, fulfilling their promise.

That’s my fear. Only time will tell whether the closed or open forces will win the battle for the soul of the internet. But if we believe that centralised, proprietary, capitalistic forces are inherently unstoppable, then our belief will help make them so.

I hope that openness will prevail. Hope sounds like such a wishy-washy word, like “faith” or “belief”, but it carries with it a seed of resistance. Hope, faith, and belief all carry connotations of optimism, but where faith and belief sound passive, even downright complacent, hope carries the promise of action.

Margaret Atwood was asked about the futility of having hope in the face of climate change. She responded:

If we abandon hope, we’re cooked. If we rely on nothing but hope, we’re cooked. So I would say judicious hope is necessary.

Judicious hope. I like that. It feels like a good phrase to balance empiricism with optimism; data with faith.

The alternative is to give up. And if we give up too soon, we bring into being the very endgame we feared.

Cennydd finishes:

Ultimately, I vote for whichever technology most enriches humanity. If that’s the web, great. A closed OS? Sure, so long as it’s a fair value exchange, genuinely beneficial to company and user alike.

This is where we differ. Today’s fair value exchange is tomorrow’s monopoly, just as today’s revolutionary is tomorrow’s tyrant. I will fight against that future.

To side with whatever’s best for the end user sounds like an eminently sensible metric to judge a technology. But I’ve written before about where that mindset can lead us. I can easily imagine Asimov’s three laws of robotics rewritten to reflect the ethos of user-centred design, especially that first and most important principle:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

…rephrased as:

A product or interface may not injure a user or, through inaction, allow a user to come to harm.

Whether the technology driving the system behind that interface is open or closed doesn’t come into it. What matters is the interaction.

But in his later years Asimov revealed the zeroeth law, overriding even the first:

A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

It may sound grandiose to apply this thinking to the trivial interfaces we’re building with today’s technologies, but I think it’s important to keep drilling down and asking uncomfortable questions (even if they challenge our beliefs).

That’s why I think openness matters. It isn’t enough to use whatever technology works right now to deliver the best user experience. If that short-time gain comes with a long-term price tag for our society, it’s not worth it.

I would much rather an imperfect open system to a perfect proprietary one.

I have hope in an open web …judicious hope.