Approaching its 10 year anniversary, Jaron Lanier’s warning of the erosion of personhood couldn’t be truer.

“The defining idea of the coming era is actually the loss of an idea we never had to worry about losing before. It is the decay of belief in the specialness of being human.” ~ from The End of Human Specialness

After watching The Great Hack, a documentary covering the Cambridge Analytica scandal that painfully illustrated the commodification of individual political persuasion, I remembered a short article written by Jaron Lanier, the tech philosopher, titled The End of Human Specialness—Lanier’s contribution to a series of articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2010 asking what, “The defining idea of the next decade,” will be. Lanier goes on to describe a human as simply a component, or a node, hooked into an emerging global computer.

This was written in 2010, during the early days of social media, before people totally bought into its power, before the leader of the free world used it to announce policy 280 characters at a time (or to talk trash to teenagers).

This was also written before we had evidence that intelligence agencies around the world would use it to implement disinformation campaigns in foreign countries in an attempt to create division among citizens ahead of public voting or to organize protests or riots. Corporations would tap into the social media computing network to identify vulnerable and persuadable citizens in order to act in accordance with their client's wishes, which usually came to persuading an individual to vote a certain way, or in some cases, to not vote.

Free will is already a contentious issue amongst philosophers, neuroscientists, and a plethora of other academics. The concept is central for many toward the notion of individualism. The actions of the powerful who have leveraged the global computing landscape to act in their best interest have perhaps conducted one of the largest-scale experiments in free will in our civilization’s history:

Hypothesis: If one provides individual x with certain information over time, one can get x to take action y with a high degree of probability. Individual x will not question the information.

Result: Brexit, and getting a reality TV star with a history of sexual misconduct allegations to become and remain the President of the United States through the #metoo movement.

One could argue that we’re living in an Orwellian world, never quite sure who we are at war with. Again, we can look at the actions of the reality television star President who has cozied up to the Russian President (for the non-history buffs, in American culture Russia = enemy), complimented the North Korean dictator, and has taken massive criticism for starting a trade war with China. Trump has been vilified in the media for taking on China despite the fact that the export mega power holds 1.5 million people in internment camps because of their faith and political ideology, spies on their citizens, and is accused of spying on other country’s citizens. In a nutshell, China is a country democratic countries should challenge. However, both Trump’s actions and criticism towards him tends to be inconsistent.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

But in 1984 it was government media that brainwashed its citizens. Today, it’s us, the nodes hooked into the global computing system known as social media, spreading misinformation amongst the populous. Of course, governments, politicians, corporations, terrorists, supremacists, activists, health gurus, religious icons, sports stars, and countless others take their shot at loading the global computing system with more information aimed at influencing others. The very purpose of this piece of writing is to do the same. However, as Lanier states, “Power accrues to the proprietors of the central nodes on the global computer.” The likes of Facebook and Google should be held accountable for the negative aspects of this cultural shift.

Lanier’s concise reflection of social media technology in 2010 wasn’t that of misinformation, it was actually an attack on reflecting information, live-tweeting events for instance, rather than getting to digest and critically analyze a given situation. This only further muddies the information waters — especially when we actively share superficial thoughts and give them far more value than their worth.