Scott Butler

Technology and the Future of Our Society

As long as humans have been inventing new methods of communication, we’ve worried

about how they would affect our humanity. In ancient Athens, a primarily oral culture, the

philosopher Socrates viewed writing as the greatest threat to our history. He believed it would

“introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it”. The invention of the printing press

in the 1440’s sparked fears that religious teachings would be undermined by the false prophets of

fake bibles. In the 18th century the invention of the telephone led to fears that we would eliminate

all face-to-face interactions and the very fabric of society would be torn apart. When radio and

television broadcasts came along in the 20th century people feared we would become a nation of

zombies unable to tear ourselves away from these new technologies. For every advancement in

technology there has always and will always be fear-mongering luddites, but history has proven

time and time again that these new technologies allow our species to advance far beyond what

was previously thought possible. Today we again find ourselves on the precipice of knowledge

never before thought possible, again we hear the familiar fear of the unknown, and again those

fears are based on emotions not facts.

Dave Egger’s The Circle is a book with a message about as subtle as a neon billboard in

Times Square and two-dimensional characters that are only capable of the most extreme possible

interpretations of their own views. Egger’s asserts that an online Megacorporation à la Google

will eventually use the data they’ve collected to enact a totalitarian regime “This is it. This is the

moment where history pivots. Imagine if you could have been there before Hitler became

chancellor. Before Stalin annexed Eastern Europe. We’re on the verge of having another very

hungry, very evil empire on our hands.” This is fine when it’s contained in its own fictional

universe, but people with very little understanding of data collection seem to think this is a likely

outcome of today’s society. The only possible way to come to that conclusion is by relying on a

slippery slope fallacy, if we allow companies to collect some data, they’ll collect all the data, if

they collect all the data they’ll use it for nefarious purposes. The problem with this reasoning is

that it avoids engaging with the issue at hand and instead shifts attention to extreme

hypotheticals. Because no proof is presented to show that such extreme hypotheticals will in fact

occur, this fallacy has the form of an appeal to emotion fallacy by leveraging fear. In effect the

argument at hand is unfairly tainted by unsubstantiated conjecture. But let’s take a step back and

look at how companies collect data. Early on the protagonist is distraught when data collected on

here is reduced into a digital footprint logged on an ever-growing network of storage. “Having a

matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you?” But that’s not how data-

targeted advertising works. The data collected on you is bundled with the data of people in

similar demographics and sold as 3rd party data to advertisers. Advertisers don’t about Scott

Macdonald’s interests, they care about the interests of white males 45-64 with Household

Income over $100k in Westchester County.

Does the idea that companies are gathering data still bother you? Think about the

incredible wealth of knowledge at your fingertips, everything we as species have worked to

understand about the world around us is a click away. Before the internet existed how much

would this be worth to you? How much is it worth to you now? Many people don’t understand

the business model of the internet, they assume everything is free because they’re somehow

entitled to it. A webpage creates content, that content generates traffic, that traffic views ads on

the webpage, and the advertisers pays the webpage. You pay for the content you view by seeing

ads that are targeted based on the data collected from people in your demographic. If that bothers

you there is a simple solution, get off the internet.

Another major problem with the book is that it views social media through a myopic lens,

only seeing the narcissistic self-indulgent side. Early on the protagonist’s foil compares social

media with junk food “You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You

know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after

some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.” But eating junk food and

spending all day consuming meaningless information are both choices. I could just as easily

choose to track my diet using an online calorie-tracker to make sure I eat a balanced ratio of

macronutrients, while getting a free Ivy League education from Wharton, MIT, Stanford, Yale,

or any of the other hundreds of institutions that provide free Massive Open Online Courses. New

technology gives people the power to choose, if they choose to waste their time that’s a result of

their own personal shortcoming, not the technology that makes it possible.

People will always fear new technologies but data collection is not only benign, it’s

beneficial to our society. Data mining helps banks detect fraudulent credit card transactions,

manufacturers can detect faulty equipment and determine optimal control parameters,

government agencies can analyze records of financial transaction to build patterns that can detect

money laundering or criminal activities. The first microprocessor was patented over 40 years

ago, think about how far we’ve come, think about how far we’ll go. When our descendants learn

about this period in time, they’ll view the ability to store and sort through petabytes of data as a

watershed moment in our society’s advancement. (What you should fear is the economic

upheaval we’ll experience when the majority of current jobs are made obsolete by automation,

but that’s another essay for another day.)