Mosco and Myth

I’ve been reading Chapter 4 of Vincent Mosco’s 2017 book Becoming Digital: Toward a Post-Internet Society. I’ve been strongly influenced by his work, starting with The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (2004). This piece made me wonder whether or how myths different from beliefs, and why so many tech myths are either utopian or apocalyptic.

Mosco builds this chapter around two visions he calls myths:

• “the myth of the singularity or the belief that people are slowly merging with machines and that it is our fate to take the next evolutionary leap and create a genuine transhumanism.” Mosco argues that “as myth it tells a compelling story: technology, especially digital technology, is powerful, benign, and irresistible.”

• “the belief that inert, inorganic things can come alive, register emotions in the case of the tattoo, open secure locks and login to computers in the case of the chip implant”; he argues that the objects of the Internet of Things are like tribal totems, having “magical qualities that embody the sublime.”

He summarizes his findings as follows: “Left in the hands of Big Tech, ours is increasingly a world where daily life, as consumers and as workers, is increasingly quantified and commodified. The tendency is both voluntary and forced.”

Mosco suggests that for proponents of the singularity “technology is a force or a thing that stands opposite to and ultimately controls us. It holds power independent of our capacity to give it form and direction.” This is certainly mythic: it ascribes godlike powers to a greater-than-human force. Mosco aligns himself with the critics of technological determinism like Raymond Williams and David Noble who “see technology as an instrument of human making.” For them, technology is instrumental and anthropological – a tool used by people. I suspect that Mosco not only decries the beliefs he calls myths for being false, but even more so for being mythic, that is, for claiming (or creating?) powers for technology as a greater-than-human entity. 

As the chapter progresses, he mentions other mythic claims:

• The “digital world myth of the ‘doer’,” invoking Fiverr’s “In Doers We Trust” advertising campaign, which “profiles people who give up everything, endure every hardship, to succeed as ‘doers.’”

• “the widely accepted view that computers hold the key to thinking and learning”

• He also refers to earlier examples of technology myth (cf. also The Digital Sublime): “To assert that the telegraph would bring world peace, that the telephone would speed gender equality, that radio would build a world community, and if not radio, then television, was to make a myth of communication technology.” This is myth as false belief, not myth as socially significant story.

Mosco’s myths don’t seem to be stories. Who are the characters? What’s their motivation? What’s the narrative arc? When I try to find a plot, the best I can do is something like this: 

Big Bad Tech is creating a world in which hapless individuals are increasingly quantified and commodified. People have very little choice in the matter; the few alternatives are shrinking. Unless we act, the result will be a more commercial and less democratic post-Internet society.

This is a vision of the apocalypse with a call to action. Structurally it’s very similar to the prophecies of utopia that Mosco denounces. He claims that the singularity myth portrays technology as “powerful, benign, and irresistible”; the only difference is that for him, it’s powerful, malign, and (almost) irresistible.

He builds his argument against the “Next Internet” on trends toward the quantified self and commodified self. 

• The quantified self: “[meaning] quantitative readings of bodily activities, [but also] in the critical sense of reducing the self to a quantity by turning personal identity into nothing more than a statistical reading, at the expense of the qualitative, subjective, and otherwise unquantifiable dimensions of life.” He quotes Byron, and this is very much a Romantic rebellion against quantification.

• The commodified self: “an increasingly key component in a social process of turning people, places, and things into marketable products. Specifically, commodification is the process of taking goods and services which are valued for their use, for example …, and transforming them into commodities which are valued for what they can earn in the marketplace, for example ….” This is placed in the larger context of “the general commodification process throughout society.” 

He makes his case using anecdotes and historical references. These might be stories, but they don't seem to coalesce in a mythos:

• The 2017 FBI warning to parents that sensor-equipped toys could put privacy and safety of children at risk;
• the content moderators at Microsoft who sued the company, claiming that exposure to images of “indescribable sexual assaults” and “horrible brutality” led to severe PTSD; 
• the Fiverr “In Doers We Trust” advertising campaign; 
• the Lyft driver “who, although nine-months pregnant and experiencing the onset of labor contractions, kept picking up fares.”

However, there’s some sense of a narrative arc in his claim that “there is nothing one can do to guarantee an escape from the inherent precariousness of the digital world. As a consumer or worker, there is no easy way to flee the quantified and commodified self.” Mosco argues that the Next Internet accelerates the trends of quantifying and commodifying the self, and there is no way to escape it. The Big Five (GAFAM, I presume) “appear to leave little choice,” and the alternatives offered by public service institutions like schools, libraries, and the postal service, are “shrinking.”

The 19th and early 20th century technology myths Mosco adduces about communication tech bringing about world peace and gender equality are all utopian. But he ignores equally powerful contemporary negative images, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, fears that telegraph networks would become tools of organized crime and even that evildoers could use the telegraph to crash the entire U.S. economy (MacDougall, “The wire devils,” 2006), or that the complexity of modern industry rendered it vulnerable to aerial attack (Sherman, Air Warfare, 1926). And more recently, one could pair dreams of the singularity and animated objects with movie nightmares like The Day After (1983), the Terminator franchise (1984, ’91, 2003, ’09, ’15, ‘19), and Ex Machina (2014).

Some questions that arise for me:

1. Are myths different from beliefs?
2. Are the “quantified self” and “commodified self” myths?
3. Why are so many tech myths are utopian or apocalyptic?