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-- DavidKellam - 11 Mar 2017
The true wild west of the internet, upon which a cult generation of tech-obsessed young Americans constructed the future of humankind, is over. It was overrun by the online gold rush and replaced with corporate and government invigilators that have bred a generation indifferent to the notions of personal freedom and privacy.
What we have overlooked is the extent to which a newfound transparency of our internet identities has affected how we browse the infobahn, and thereby the way that we select and perceive its content. Being observed affects human work product in dynamic ways, namely, by forcing conscious and subconscious conformity to the perceived ideas of those doing the observing. This is known as the Hawthorne Effect. We are aware that our online identity is established and transparent, and have submitted to the idea of an internet auditor watching how we access information. The result is the type of behavior modification that has been observed in countless Hawthorne studies.
Because internet monitoring comes in a variety of forms, users do not always associate their perceived observer with a certain ideology, and therefore it is likely that our behavior, though undeniably altered, is done so in a chaotic way. However, when this random behavioral influence transforms into a guided one, humanity as we know it will cease to exist. The collective consciousness that we are seeing emerge from the online echochamber will become our hivemind, and its queen, an abstract being alive in the underground cabling of Google Fiber.
As the role of the internet continues to grow in influence, it will become more clear what this “queen” believes. Her beliefs will continue to spread on social media; they will be fashionable; otherwise aimless voters will conform their beliefs; and politicians will respond, themselves invariably enamored by the convenience of gleaning social knowledge directly from their newsfeed. In other words, when social media makes the collective opinion more visible, we will know, generally, the beliefs of the entity that is monitoring our behavior. Once we know these beliefs, the Hawthorne Effect will become specific and our online pursuit of knowledge will be done in the shadow of what we believe our omniscient queen requires.
The instant gratification of getting immediate information is unlikely to disappear. It is equally unlikely that the average person ever realizes that this information is authored by those who are most inclined to indulge in conformity to online collective consciousness. However, anonymity will help to remove the Hawthorne Effect as it relates to the way we treat this information. When we are anonymous, we are more comfortable seeking out and transmitting alternative information that we believe might conflict with the fashionable ideology of our would-be online spectators and we can develop and share opinions without the conscious or subconscious pressure of conformity. Without this pressure, we can cultivate our beliefs with far less outside influence, which leaves room for personal experiences to shape the way in which we view the world. We could once again relate to society as we have for thousands of years: through independent thought.
Whether it be from observation by the prevailing government ideology or from observation by corporations upon whom we project our perception of the collective ideology, we must be free from oversight. The unfortunate reality is that we have about thirty years to accomplish this because newer generations have no frame of reference with which to understand the value of composing a worldview free of the effects of observation. Any movement to combat the monitorization of the internet must necessarily consist of people who have lived in a time of online anonymity, or at least perceived online anonymity, yet the only people alive who meet these standards are those who have been computer-conscious between the early days of Dennis Ritchie and the 2000s. That is not to say that anonymity was truly present during the entirety of this period, but the perception of anonymity was more lucid. This is in part due to computer-knowledgeable Americans who were aware of the early limitations of data storage and management, and in part because technology did not dominate such a tremendous part of daily life until the entrepreneurial app rush began in the mid-2000s.
Today, apps monitor where we are, who we are with, and even our heartrate. We allow these apps to store the information and often publish it online. The collective consciousness of information transmission will soon become the collective consciousness of behavior, and the next generation to reach adulthood will have never lived without it. The convergence of new technology with the internet has made this more apparent, but for many who can still remember and appreciate a life with anonymity, it is too late in their careers to devise a movement capable of combating the momentum of this assault on personal autonomy. There is hope, however. The millennials who latched onto the internet in the 90s and early 2000s are beginning their careers. They can still relate to a life without a smart-phone informant in their pocket, and thus undoubtedly the last generation that remembers a state of being to which we can return. Furthermore, they are the last generation with members who learned to understand computers as they were before Apple streamlined operating systems to the point that efficient use was possible with virtually no understanding of software.
The “wild west” of the internet did not end with the advent of telephones and automobiles, as did its historical namesake, but instead through a capitalist landgrab of ideas. In pursuit of the available profit from the emerging frontier of internet, corporations saturated the consumer market with apps that have dulled our sensitivity to privacy violations. There are few of us left with the experience and technical understanding necessary to fight the devastating inertia of online groupthink that we and our children face, and unless we act within the window of our lifetime, the fabric of the human experience as we have always known it will become unsalvageable.
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