The Missing Magic

I read this morning that Tim Berners-Lee is going to auction the original code he wrote when he invented the world-wide-web.  The code will be packaged up in a non-fungible token and sold, no doubt to one of the egregiously wealthy folk who have ridden his invention to enormous fortune.  Berners-Lee is surely one of the least rewarded pioneers of our modern economy.  After all his creation, now used by an estimated four billion people a day, is absolutely central to the functioning of the digital world.  Unlike the more heralded and less deserving pioneers of our age he never derived an income directly from his invention, instead it was put into the public domain by CERN, his employer at the time.

The auction of an NFT seems an entirely appropriate way for Berners-Lee to gain from his invention, but it brings to mind just how lacking in mystery or magic the current digital revolution is when compared with its industrial predecessor.  NFTs are simply bits of data locked up with a unique identifier and stored on a blockchain.  They are artifacts only tangible when realized in some other medium.  The code has to be made manifest for us to “see” them.  Whilst the official purpose of locking up data in an NFT is to establish provenance, the real-world purpose is to create collectibles.

In an intangible world where information reins supreme and where physical “stuff” is less important, establishing value is truly difficult.  Anyone who can access data can use it.  It doesn’t deteriorate with use.  It can be copied.  It can multiply endlessly.  It defies the basics of traditional value-creation by doing all this.  Pinning it down and tagging it as unique is a slippery problem.  Collecting data as something of unique value is hopeless unless you can put it in a box where no one but you can access it.  In which case it largely loses its purpose.  Hence NFTs.  The data is tagged.  We will always know that this particular piece of code in the Berners-Lee NFT is original.  The billions of copies of it that might exist are, well, merely copies.  They might appear identical.  They might produce precisely the same result.  But they will each have less value.

This sleight of hand is necessary because of the features of our digital world.  We need to work hard to stand out.  Intangibility is abstract.  It is elusive.  It slips through our fingers.  This is not the world of industry.  The belching steam and smoke of the industrial revolution is nowhere to be found.  The great machines that inspired and bewildered us in the past are rusting away somewhere.  The magic of the machine with its awesome power working in front of us is replaced by the low hum and occasional blinking light of a computer doing … something.  Who knows what?

In the days of the original machines we didn’t have to work hard to establish their authenticity.  Their brute existence was sufficient.  We knew them because they stood before us.  The great houses of industry we called factories became hives of activity.  Workers endlessly feeding the machines became the battleground between capitalism and democracy.  There was a front line.  There was a demarcation between us and them.  The owners and their machines on one side.  Us on the other.  There was a clarity in this confrontation.  Beyond which was an understanding that these machines were the engines, literally, that pulled us out of the horror of the Malthusian immiseration that had bedeviled humanity since its origins.

The sheer brutality of the great engines of industry inspired both fear and awe.  We came to associate them with our escape from dearth.  They became iconic in our struggle to rid ourselves of the tragedy of scarcity.  They symbolized progress.  They begat change.  They revolutionized civilization.  But they did it with such a tangible physical presence that none of us could avoid.  Machines set us free.  Perhaps none more than the steam and internal combustion engines.  Our world became mechanical and we were absorbed and motivated by it.

Even the gentler electrical revolution brought a swathe of machinery doing work that we could easily understand.  The washing machine stands out.  It reduced hours of drudgery to almost nothing.  It set in motion a revolution within what we call the family.  It was a step along the path to the breakdown of traditional allocations of domestic work.  The products of this electrical revolution still had a tangible presence.  Our homes became filled with them.  We still lived in a world of manufacturing and “stuff”.

But now?

Our digital world is experiential.  It is infused not with stuff but data.  It is entertainment rather than production.  We are asked to imagine it rather than dwell in its physicality.  It is invasive rather than intrusive.  It cannot be escaped by leaving the factory or driving to the country because we take it with us..  Rather than challenging us with its brutality it insinuates itself invisibly everywhere.  We radiate information into its insatiable maw and become a product ourselves to be bought and sold without our knowledge.  It, in this sense, owns us rather than us owning it.  There is no magic in a machine that coldly communicates your every thought with its peers around the world.  There is no magic in that soft hum or the various lights that blink to alert you to its surveillance of your life.  There is simply a sinister presence.

We may now realize the environmental limits on our production of stuff, but the magic of the power manifest on those old industrial machines surely overwhelms anything on offer in our digital age.

I suppose any period of revolutionary change can unsteady the nerves.  Who knows what will happen next?  The message of those original machines was lost in the confusion and social upheaval they brought along with them.  Alienation became the watchword of the critics of the time.  Alienation from what?  Destitution and scarcity?  From an imagined bucolic past that was permanently one step away from starvation?  The magic of machines ended that.  If that is alienation, then all well and good.

And now?

As the harnessing and harvesting of information dominates and replaces the harnessing and harvesting of energy as the motive force of economic progress we are adrift in a different alienation.  Where once machines substituted for the effort needed to break the economic problem, now their successors are substituting for thought.  They are not distant.  They are not practical.  They are not mechanic.  They are imminent, abstract, and, worse, intangible.  The margin between us and them is eroding.  Gone is our ability to revel in awe at the power or to wonder at the work being done.   That is the past.  The work has been done.  Now it is the thinking is being done.

What is left for us?

There is no magic in having nothing to do.