Big Tech Blindsight

The emotional invisibility of Big Tech mystifies me. Why don’t I get more worked up about it? I can only speak for myself since I don’t have any survey data, but I suspect it’s not just me.

When I walk in the dry country in summer, I’m profoundly aware of rattlesnake risk even though I’ve only encountered one once. On the other hand, I’m indifferent to the surveillance and manipulation of Big Tech advertising, something I’m exposed to every day. Unaffected on the surface, at least. I’m writing this because when I pause to think about it, it does bother me. It’s as if I suffer from big tech blindsight. (Blindsight is the phenomenon of blind people responding to visual stimuli despite lacking awareness of having seen anything.)

The privacy paradox is a similar cognitive/emotional dissonance. People profess to worry about their loss of privacy online, but they’re unwilling to spend any money to protect against it. For example, Gerd Gigerenzer says that when he asked Germans over 18 how much they would be willing to pay for social media if they could keep their data private, 75% weren’t willing to pay anything.

Big Tech blindsight may be related to difficulties with group agency, the phenomenon that “suitably organized collectives can constitute intentional, goal-directed agents in their own right, over and above their individual members” (List & Pettit, 2006). There is certainly unease about corporate personhood, even though legal personhood was granted to guild-like organizations as early as 800 BC (Wikipedia). The emotional impact of Big Tech may depend on whether we perceive it as acting on us, i.e., on whether we think of tech companies as agents. Floridi and Sanders argue that perceived agenthood depends on how one chooses to describe and analyze a system and its context. If that’s the case, our default set of observables may render tech agenthood invisible. (I’m not yet persuaded by Floridi and Sanders’ claim.)

It may be hard for us to conceive of and respond to agents that don’t behave like humans or that are not at a human scale. We use the human body as a metaphor for group agents, e.g. corporation from the Latin corporāre “to form into a body” (Merriam-Webster). Even deities are usually represented as human-like. This suggests that we may be blind to agents that are not human-like.

Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), an image of the body politic

I have déjà vu about this topic. A couple of years ago I had failed to find any significant myths about digital tech (Tech/Myth Project Snapshot: July 2020). I hazarded several explanations for this lack of success, including looking in the wrong places, looking through the wrong lens, having the wrong expectations, digital tech being too young for myths to have formed or too domesticated to inspire awe, or even that secular modernism makes it hard to form myths. Using the wrong observables and thus missing group agency is a version of using the wrong lens.

I have also started to doubt the claim I’ve been parroting that myths are a way to personify social forces. I still buy the claim that gods are human traits or archetypes writ large. But perhaps humans don’t really develop myths to about social forces as such. Gods don’t personify social forces but are mostly scaled up versions of the people, and the urges and motivations, that keep society running. For example: Zeus is the patriarch, Demeter the matriarch, Athena the savvy power broker, Hephaestus the craftsman; Dionysus represents intoxication, Aphrodite lust, Hermes trade. On the Norse side, we have Odin the warlord, Thor the warrior, and Loki the trickster. Hephaestus and Loki don’t help us understand technology as a social force—they help us understand technologists.

“Capitalism” offers a potential counter-example. There is a well-developed rhetoric around social forces like capitalism and markets that treats them as characters. Groups like the proletariat, bourgeoisie, progressives, and patriots are held up as heroes and villains. So are these mythic characters? Are these coherent perceptions of group agents? I’m not convinced, but I don’t have a reasoned argument to justify my doubts.