“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
>> That feeling all users experience when you realize the metaphor you asre working in is bogus. When the computer fails you and you remember that there are a hundred translations between input and output. Codes and translations we don't have the time or patience to do ourselves. Intellectual labor that we've surrendered to a device.
The map is not the territory; the force-amplification benefits of technology also includes an imperfect model of reality.
> the poor Babel fish
From the same video essay:
>> The joke at the center of Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is about metaphor shear. The answer to an important question lost on its long journey from input to output. A computer glitch so huge, so strange and so embarrassing that its programmers have to make a computer the size of a planet to file a bug report.
>> The most advanced software in the world of Black Mirror is people. So many of Brooker's stories use perfect copies of people rendered as software. Easy to download, and very easy to abuse. Of course, this technology already exists. There are already other people on our devices, rendered as text and avatars. Individual contact abstracted through one hundred layers of metaphor shear. Sometimes, that shear makes it to easy to commit inhuman acts.
Your CPU has a case for a reason. It won't work very well if you pop it open and touch its surface. Computers also don't work that well if they are not electrically isolated or grounded from things like electrostatic discharge.
Networks have firewalls and/or authentication mechanisms for a reason. Without them they get compromised by black hat hackers and malware.
It's not that this kind of "high modernism" denies human nature. It's that it denies something fundamental to life itself and to the maintenance of any complex system: boundaries. No form of complex structure can persist without boundaries-- usually multiple nested levels of boundaries. Removing all boundaries just causes things to collapse down to a lower level of complexity/structure.
Shouldn't we replace "populace" with "social media networks (via the algorithms they create)" in that sentence?
No, it's giving it to a new powerful group, specifically, Facebook. Just as Stalin stated, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how,” so, too, is it true of social media; power doesn't lie with the people who can press “Like” (etc.), it lies with the people who select and continuously tweak based on observed effect the algorithm by which Likes and similar actions are used to shape the flow of information to and between users.
Interesting. So no matter how much apparent power is gained by people connecting politically on social media, the "(wo)man behind the curtain" who controls the platform and it's algorithm will by default always be more powerful?
Anyway, while I agree with api's comment about losing boundaries (or more accurately: having to find a new way of setting them with the improved ease of communication and tracking), I think that blaming the Babel fish is a bit of a "shooting the messenger, not the message" problem. Removing barriers to communication also reduces the ability to ignore things that have to be addressed.
edit: clarified what I meant a bit
Well, yes: the printing press ultimately caused Europe to end up in a hundred years of sectarian warfare that killed millions. I'm not eager to repeat that.
Part of that must have been the "fake news" of its day, like [blood libel][0], but that already existed before the printing press. The other part was a reduced ability to hush up bad things. Addressing that ultimately led to major upheavals of existing power structures, and a lot of bloodshed.
For me, a more worrisome part of the internet is the effect homogenisation, as described by McLuhan in The Gutenberg Man[1]:
> McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. Apropos of his axiom, "The medium is the message," McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay, to a tyranny of the visual.
> He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, domination of rationalism, automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standardisation of culture and alienation of individuals.
> Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view".
Another interesting tangent is (mis)communication's effect on the evolution of trust, but I don't feel like writing out a whole essay about that, so I'll refer to Nicky Case's "Evolution of Trust" and hope that the connection is obvious[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel