By Christopher DeMarcus (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 6, 2013
Why is it that we believe almost all problems have technological solutions, often to be solved by some sort of network upgrade or smart phone app?
Technology has become a holy commandment in our culture. We used to pray at the altars of gods, now we take our deepest questions to the search box of Google, or put our darkest secrets on public display with Facebook.
Google is God. Surfing is soul-searching.
Of course, we know churches can be corrupt. All human institutions are at the risk of becoming brutal and oppressive regimes. George Orwell taught us that lesson in Animal Farm. The book is not about the Russian revolution as much as it is about oligarchy everywhere; porcine communism is only the set dressing.
Like a corrupt church, Google isn’t holy. In many ways Google, which is a for-profit product and service, has become its own dogmatic ideology. It has become the core focus of our purpose and our reasoning. What would Jesus do? He’d Google it!
Orwell once wrote in a newspaper article, “It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life.” This is the kind of non-partisan thinking we need: Marx was an atheist.
Newspapers used to tackle issues of deep faith, political theology, and economic critique. What do we have as status quo media today? We have blogs about oatmeal and complaint columns about hockey teams. We can, for the moment, access great papers like The New York Times and The Guardian. But Google’s task isn’t to push you to quality news. Its task is to push you into what’s popular, what sells ad space, and what it thinks you should know.
The evidence is clear: good news is dying – replaced by gong-show pundits and dramatic clowns. The baboonery has spilled over to CBC and National Post, who need to keep it quick, simple, and stupid to compete for their media market share.
We search the data, looking for meaning, but only find simple facts amongst the advertisements, like looking for meaning in a phone book.
Contrary to the contemporary zeitgeist, Marx was scientific in his pursuit to describe economy. His critique of capitalism is as much quantitative as it is qualitative. He was a man of science, of progress. The Marxist tradition of logic against ideology needs to be deployed to examine why we have become tools of our tools. Is there a purpose in our technology beyond the task of pushing money from bank account to bank account? Is there a purpose of our smart phones beyond shallow pleasures? Marx would think our reliance on internet corporatism is a distraction from the real, scientific truth. Google’s “do no evil” slogan is myth in itself.
Technology has become the leading force in conditioning and motivating us. Facebook is narcissistic because it’s the network’s job to promote—and gain data from—the self. Not because the people are already self-absorbed. The networks and apps shape us more than we shape them.
Smart-phone games are designed to keep you engaged in the frivolous. Data is collected by the gaming company as you play. They know how long you played a level, how much engagement you gave it, and can extrapolate that information to make you play it more and more. Is that the kind of goal we want to reach with science: designer distractions?
This brave new world might be great for a game designer, but it’s bad news for the end user.
But if you just Google it, you’ll find a way to the next level. See, isn’t Google great? Yes, Google is great and Google is good. Let’s thank him for all our Candy Crush food.
