MEGANETS: HOW DIGITAL FORCES BEYOND OUR CONTROL COMMANDEER OUR DAILY LIVES AND INNER REALITIES – David B. Auerbach (2023)

I’ve always been impressed by the writing on David Auerbach’s blog. His article The Bloodsport of the Hive Mind: Common Knowledge in the Age of Many-to-Many Broadcast Networks should be obligatory reading: it’s a very sharp and original analysis explaining some of what ails our current society – antivaxxers, conspiracy theories, etc. I’ve been equally impressed by his year-end lists: the sheer volume and range of books Auerbach reads is impressive.

So when I learned that this software engineer who used to work for Microsoft and Google wrote a book on the digital forces that are transforming our societies, I eagerly waited for the publication date.

For reference, let me quote a big chunck of the blurb on Amazon:

“Auerbach’s exploration of the phenomenon he has identified as the meganet begins with a simple, startling revelation: There is no hand on the tiller of some of the largest global digital forces that influence our daily lives: from corporate sites such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit to the burgeoning metaverse encompassing cryptocurrencies and online gaming to government systems such as China’s Social Credit System and India’s Aadhaar.

As we increasingly integrate our society, culture and politics within a hyper-networked fabric, Auerbach explains how the interactions of billions of people with unfathomably large online networks have produced a new sort of beast: ever-changing systems that operate beyond the control of the individuals, companies, and governments that created them.

Meganets, Auerbach explains, have a life of their own, actively resisting attempts to control them as they accumulate data and produce spontaneous, unexpected social groups and uprisings that could not have even existed twenty years ago. And they constantly modify themselves in response to user behavior, resulting in collectively authored algorithms none of us intend or control. These enormous invisible organisms exerting great force on our lives are the new minds of the world, increasingly commandeering our daily lives and inner realities.

Auerbach’s analysis of these gargantuan opaque digital forces yield important insights such as:

• The conventional wisdom that the Googles and Facebook of this world are tightly run algorithmic entities is a myth. No one is really in control.
• The efforts at reform – to get lies and misinformation off meganets – run into a brick wall because the companies and executives who run them are trapped by the persistent, evolving, and opaque systems they have created.
• Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are uncontrollable and their embrace by elite financial institutions threatens the entire economy.
• We are asking the wrong questions in assuming that if only the Facebooks of this world could be better regulated or broken up that they would be better, more ethical citizens.
• Why questions such as making algorithms fair and bias-free and whether AI can be a tool for good or evil are wrong and misinformed.

Auerbach then comes full circle, showing that while we cannot ultimately control meganets we can tame them through the counterintuitive measures he describes in detail.”

For a more in-depth look at the book’s content, do read the Guardian interview with Auerbach, here. Well-worth your time.

While I enjoyed reading Meganets, the book has a few problems too.

Let’s start with the smallest issue: there’s a fair amount of repetition. While I get that non-fiction books tend to have a more chapter-based approach, even within chapters Auerbach repeats certain things to the point it bugged me a few times. It’s a minor complaint though, so let’s not dwell on it.

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More crucial is the fact that Auerbach doesn’t really deliver on the promise of his subtitle: he hardly provides an explicit exploration of how the current form of the internet shapes our inner realities, and also much of its influence on our daily lives is only implicitly described. So do not expect a psychological or sociological study, let alone a scientific one.

A sentence like “With every passing day we intuitively sense a loss of control over our daily lives, society, culture, and politics, even as it becomes more difficult to extricate ourselves from our hypernetworked fabric.” is never quantified or backed up with research or data. I can easily give an anecdotal, equally intuitive counterexample: I for one do not feel a loss of control over my daily live, not at all, and I’ve been an active meganet user as long as these meganets have existed.

Likewise, consider this passage:

“Modern society has so long been accustomed to national or international figures (politicians, celebrities) who speak to silent millions that we still have yet to come to grips with the very unsettling fact that it is now amorphous groups who lead and the celebrities and influencers who follow. The most successful cybercelebrities are, in fact, those who either happen to represent an existing trend or those skilled at going with the flow on which they are carried.”

It is presented without backing from any scientific source. I’m not saying there has been no shift, but I’m not so sure about it, and even if such shift did occur: how big is it? Could you really frame it like Auerbach does here? I can easily imagine that Martin Luther, Lenin, Martin Luther King or Tatcher also tapped into already existing sentiments among the amorphous population. Moreover, consumers, voters and religious believers have always been amorphous groups with significant influence on society – for consumers & religious tribes that even has been the case before the onset of modern society and democracy.

Instead of a scientific study, much of Auerbach’s text is a history and analysis of the aspects of the current internet that are relevant to ‘meganets’, most importantly the spectacular rise of recorded data, the exceptional exponential scaling of computer technology, Facebook & the metaverse, Google’s search engine and its business model of monetizing it, cryptocurrencies, MMORPGs like World of Warcarft, the effects of somebody like Elon Musk on Twitter, a chapter on China’s Social Credit System and India’s Aadhaar, and one about why AI won’t help taming these meganets, but will make them even more uncontrollable.

I have to say his basic analysis – on the reasons why these meganets have become impossible to control – is well argued, in a detailed, clear and utterly convincing manner, and so I do feel I have a much better grasp on why the things described in the blurb above are indeed the case.

Based on that strength alone, and because it is such an important, wide ranging topic, I have no problem to recommend Auerbach’s book. It’s accessible, written for a fairly broad audience. That said, I think most academics or IT professionals will benefit from reading Meganets too. It’s really an eye-opener, and that in itself is no mean feat, especially not on a topic that is so broadly discussed in the media and the culture at large.

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But a few times – and I really found this baffling, if I’m honest – Auerbach also writes sweeping sentences that assert things as fact while they are at best tentative & speculative. To me this is the book’s biggest problem. I’ll discuss two examples to give you a sense of what I’m talking about.

“The meganet has devastated and nigh obliterated not one but two modes of human social existence – private and public – in favor of a set of semipublic, medium-sized associations.”

“Devastated and nigh obliterated” is an overstatement if there ever was one. Part of that might come from a lack of precise definitions: what does Auerbach exactly mean with the ‘private’ and the ‘public’? Most of the meaningful parts of my own life still is very private – and again, I have been an active meganet user for ages. Sure, my phone tracks some my movements, and my browsers know some of what I buy & read online, but to claim that the mode of my private existence has been nigh obliterated seems wrong. Similar remarks could be made about the public mode, and likewise, people organizing in “semipublic” associations have existed for ages: in villages, in the workplace, in political parties, in church groups. Again, as above, I’m not saying Auerbach has no point whatsoever, meganets undoubtedly influence social life, but I think it deserves much more careful study and nuanced wording than in the sentence I quoted.

A final example, about meganets’ effect on language.

“Consequently, meganets and deep-learning applications will evolve increasingly toward applications that avoid or minimize human language. Numbers, taxonomies, images, and video already increasingly dominate meganet applications, a trend that the metaverse, with its emphasis on commerce and games, will only accelerate. In turn, such forms of data will increasingly dominate our own lives online and eventually offline. The vitality of human language, with its endless implicit context and nuances, will decline. Those more easily grasped forms of data will condition the deep-learning networks that guide the meganet, while much of the linguistic data will simply be thrown away because there will be no deep-learning network sufficiently competent to process it. (…) We will increasingly read text constructed by entities with no grasp on what any of it actually means. So too will deeper meaning slowly drain away from language.”  [my bold]

While I can understand Auerbach’s logic, I’m not sure AI’s grip on processing language won’t become way better in the future, and I’m not sure the question if AI will “grasp” meaning in the sense of truly understanding it is crucial. I think it is more significant whether these AIs will simply ‘work’ as heuristic language processing tools, not whether they’ll achieve some form of comprehending sentience.

But even if Auerbach is right and AIs will not advance significantly further on this conceptual front, I think it is very, very bold to claim that human language will become less vital because of that, let alone that our languages will slowly lose “deeper meaning”.

I’m not saying information technology will have no impact on language and language use, as it already has. But I think our primal communication system (oral interpersonal communication and internal speech, the latter both subvocalized and in more unconscious forms) and our social skills & needs are robust enough to remain “vital” – whatever that means. I also think the complexity of interpersonal & broader social relations and the complexity of reality (and our relation to it) will remain robust and complex enough for humans to have a need for “deep” forms of language – again, whatever “deep” means. That won’t mean every human will be a philosopher or avant-garde writer, but that’s not the case today either, and I doubt meganets will have a significant impact on the distribution & spread of such people within populations.

In the final chapter, Auerbach doubles down on his thoughts on the matter:

“Individualized forms of human communications will fade, replaced by standardized means of expression devoid of nuance and creativity. We will find ourselves speaking and writing more robotically, using dumber and more utilitairian means of verbal expression. It will become more difficult to differentiate computer-written texts from human-created ones not because AI will gain some brilliant capacity for human thought and expression but because human thought and expression will increasingly become as predictable and superficial as AI-generated text.” [my bold]

It’s a near certainty ChatGPT and its ilk will have big effects on language teaching and language production, but I’m not convinced by Auerbach’s Skynet level of semantic doom. I know I have linked to articles on the coming semantic apocalypse by R. Scott Bakker before, but Scott & David aren’t really talking about the exact same thing. (If you haven’t, do read that Bakker article, it hasn’t lost any potency.)

Luckily, Auerbach does admit that “Predictions are always a dicey business, and when it comes to a phenomenon that explicitly defies our complete understanding, we find ourselves unable even to gain sufficient perspective to analyze the present situation, much less guess at the future.” So part of my problem with passages like this might just be a style issue: replace all the “will” with “might” or “could”, and a big part of my annoyance would fade. Auerbach’s choice to refrain from caution in his predictions might be a deliberate choice, but it transforms a few parts of his book into prophecy instead of prudent analysis.

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One final quibble. In chapter 4 Auerbach puts quite a lot of emphasis on gamefication. But again the problem is that the notion of a ‘game’ is not clearly defined. That leads to passages like this, where Twitter is seen as a game too: “The distance between gathering gold in World of Warcraft and garnering retweets on Twitter is not so great: both are games of status and acquisition, whether you are acquiring attention or powerful weapons.”

Not that I do not agree, but the problem is that framed like this life in general – also offline life – is a game, whether you are acquiring real estate, degrees, hugs & kisses, scalps, citations, children or young trophy wives. Auerbach uses ‘game’ in such an inflated way that the term becomes a conceptual free-for-all. I think the question needs a sharper focus: will the rise of meganets make a conceptual difference because of this gamification, or are they just an iteration of much larger trends that have been around for ages: the stock market as a game, the massive ties between the real economy and sports, Las Vegas, economic wars? Or, rephrased: is this gamification really a big deal because of the notion of gamification itself? To be clear, these are not rhetorical questions: Auerbach musings provide interesting food for thought, and further exploration.

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So, concluding, I cannot but recommend this book, caveats above. It is an important topic, and, judging by our actions, society as a whole seems delusional about its possible negative effects. We are merely on the brink of all the changes meganets will bring, and what may come must give us pause.

 

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