The Crowdsourcing Scam--Why do you deceive yourself?

[KoKo]

Jacob Silverman--"The Baffler"

In 1968 a Norwegian science fiction writer named Tor Åge Bringsværd published a peculiar short story called “Codemus.” The story has achieved the kind of retrospectively prophetic quality that makes sci-fi such a useful imaginative map for navigating our relationship with technology. (It also happens to be a good story, clever and light on its feet in its portrayal of a looming techno-fascism.) Bringsværd’s tale is about a thirty-eight-year-old man named Codemus who lives in a thoroughly automated society. “In the efficient society everything goes as planned,” goes one of the story’s mantras. “In the efficient society everything goes the way it should.”

“Codemus” is set sometime in the fifth decade of the twenty-first century, and its manically efficient society displays the kind of sterilized exactitude that we might associate with sci-fi’s New Wave period, when writers were less focused on space travel and ray guns than on questions of politics and personal freedom. A worldwide computer network, much like the Internet, provides information freely, although people have access only to end-user terminals (here Bringsværd seems to have envisioned a version of the cloud). Everyone has been equipped with a “little brother”—a digital assistant that we might recognize as a smartphone, right down to its sinister double-duty as a tracking device. Little brothers wake their owners up, tell them when to go to work, guide them on their commutes, and bring them home. They are at once companions, fonts of information, communication tools (everyone talks on them while walking in public), and draconian taskmasters hiding behind the scrim of technological sophistication and awesome computing power. To disobey one’s little brother is to violate a central directive of this efficient society.

Codemus always follows his little brother’s commands, but one day, the gadget decides to rebel. Little Brother (Codemus refers to his affectionately, affording him the dignity of capital letters) fails to wake up Codemus for work. Little Brother later decides to take Codemus, who is still under the spell of his machine, out to the park. Not much happens; they bask in the sun and try to start up a conversation with a park employee, who is immediately spooked. This mild encounter represents a grave offense on a day when park visits aren’t scheduled. Soon Codemus is a fugitive, pursued by police and bloodhounds through the city’s monorail system. Shadowed by the authorities at every stop, Little Brother demands that Codemus leave him behind. “They’ve got a fix on me, naturally,” Little Brother says, presaging an era when communication and surveillance would become synchronized processes. “I’m leaving a regular wake of radio waves behind us.”

Codemus doesn’t want to abandon his gadget-cum-companion, but eventually he acquiesces and dumps Little Brother. Soon fear, confusion, and emptiness take hold. Codemus has no idea who he is or what he’s supposed to do. “A human is a social entity,” goes another of the story’s aphoristic mantras, and Codemus is now alone. He is utterly, metaphysically lost. He decides to give himself up and falls into the arms of his pursuers. The story ends with Codemus “led back to the flock,” given a new little brother, and returned to the cool embrace of the efficient society. His purpose, such as it is, is restored.
We may not live in the dystopian society forecast by Bringsværd, but many of its elements are recognizable in ours. The smartphone has become the universal prosthetic. Its widespread adoption has helped create a surveillance climate in which everyone is his own little brother and everyone may be tracked at all times. Indeed, Codemus’s world resembles nothing so much as the handiwork of the visionary engineers at Google. There’s the same trademark ethos of all-consuming paternalism, the same seamless use of cloud computing and data collection as a bastion of social order, the same embrace of efficiency as a supreme value. There’s even the same promotion of automated transport free of human interference. Little Brother is like a hopped-up version of Google Now, the search giant’s personal assistant that spends all day rifling through your data, reminding you when you have meetings, when you should leave for your next appointment, how you should get there, what news might interest you, and so on ad infinitum.

Let’s step back for a moment—or rather, float upward a bit, and imagine a bird’s-eye view of this society, one in which harried workers are sent to and fro by way of commands conveyed to them through personal computing devices. They don’t know why they are doing these things, nor what sort of calculus informs all their data-charged activity. But still they follow the commands, which come with the computer’s imprimatur of mathematical precision and authority. They move between tasks with all the attention and care of worker bees; accomplishing the job without hesitation is all that matters. They live and work in conditions of closely choreographed banality.

Much More...at

http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/crowdsourcing-scam

[enlightenment]

1. Very interesting article.

Fundamentally, I agree with the author's take - though it is hard for me, as an academic, to reject the idea of crowd-sourced projects that advance and/or preserve the arts and sciences.

I don't think that all crowd-sourcing isolates crowd members from one another, though some certainly do. Those that I participate in have active give and take forums with comments, questions, answers, speculation and the like. No, I have never met the others in the crowd in RL - but I am very aware that they are there.

I suspect it is the type of crowd-sourced projects in which I engage. I don't get any sense of competition (if I do, it is only with myself) or feel any desire to meet some unspecified goal.

On the other hand, I have long viewed the "gofundme" and similar sites with horror - not because of what they are asking, but because they are such absolute proof that our society is not so far removed from the turn of the last century, when charity was the only relief available. It's not wrong to ask - but it is wrong that we have to in order to get the help we need.

[daredtowork]

3. Yes, this is the fundamental wrong

This is exaxtly the privatized or "faith-based" charity the GOP wanted. The problem is this style of funding allows discrimination to creep back in, manifests in a fragmentary way and thus leaves many "gaps in the system", and vastly favors out-going personalities with existing webs of community support.

This style of giving caters to the1%: it is designed to make them feel good about being charitable as they promote whatever they want.

However, what poor people actually need is reliable help meeting their basic needs for food and shelter until they either have a job or a REGULAR source of fixed income. Only gonernment INFRASTRUCTURE can address those needs in a non-discriminatory way.

One thing I've been calling out Hillary on is the need for a potential President to champion this issue and launch an initiative to repair Bill Clinton"s "Welfare Reform as we Know It". Until Hillary does this, I will continue to regard her as a Third Way shill

[bemildred]

2. Notice how "efficiency" is used as a euphemism for unquestioning obedience.

Nobody ever asks: "efficient for what?" What is being minimized?

Thinking. Asking questions. Wanting to understand. That is what it is so urgent to fend off.

[greyl]

4. Amazing likeness of modern times.

One of 50 stories in The World Treasury of Science Fiction that can be grabbed from Amazon for a couple bucks.

From the article:

Here is where Tor Åge Bringsværd’s story deviates from reality. Yes, Codemus lived in a fully administered society where surveillance technology, automation, and the iron god of efficiency had coalesced into something irreproachable and frightening. But there was one aspect of his life that today seems too strange for fiction: he had a job that provided for all of his needs.

http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/crowdsourcing-scam