‘Technology is not the problem' by Timandra Harkness

I've met Timandra and seen her debate - she’s not prone to groupthink. In this case she’s cocked her critical eye at technology and uncovers something both interesting and disturbing. Among the piles of books telling us that tech is mad, bad and dangerous to know, at last a book that is both level-headed and actually attends to the business of the actual cause of our massive, global use of social media, not simplistic moralising. That cause is – ourselves.

It is pointless to rant and rail against tech. We want it, use it and it is not going away. In a welcome antidote to the usual moralising rants, Timandra sets off to ask some simple but serious questions; How did we get here? Why does it matter? Where do we go from here?

There’s some great historical detail, such as the Walkman as the turning point on ‘personalisation’ and a full explanation on how the social context of the self is made fuller by social media. I liked the term ‘genre fluidity’ when making the point about the expansion of personalisation.

Nice that we get the solid results from experts like Chris Bail at Duke University, who has studied social media in detail and show that social media does not radicalise, that echo chambers are a bit of a myth and that exposure to fake news was a tiny effect at 1%. Also that Russian bots had no significant effect on elections, that Cambridge Analytica had no discernible effect and that it was Obama who started data-driven, social media personalisation in elections. People are in such a rush to retweet that they rarely look at the research.

She points towards the simple idea that “we are stars in our own channels”.  The political has become the personal and there is no common grounding in parties among fickle youth. She is good at uncovering the history of data collection, especially the surprising Hollerith story, which I have also written about. You’d think data gather was invented in 2000. No the Americans, correction IBM, sold data collection technology to Hitler in the 1930s through the Hollerith Machine.

I didn’t know about the ‘Youmuseum’ in Amsterdam (I now plan a visit), used to explore the idea of us being pilgrims of ourselves, along with the unpacking of ad auctions (which few know about), the usefulness of personal targeting. I did know about the fact that we love to use tech when we’re in what Marc Auge called ‘non-places’ - on the train, in cafés, airports and so on. A huge point is that personalisation can satisfy the personal without having any negative effects on others. We like to have agency and technology gives us agency, albeit at a distance.

When discussing mental-illness she is right to express caution on mistaking correlation with causation and cites evidence that those who use social media, actually have more offline social interaction. The idea of banning social media like smoking is rightly ridiculed.

Her conclusion is simple and right. It is WE who want exposure, that’s why we spend money on clothes, bags, brands, makeup, jewellery, cars and tattoos. WE need a sense of belonging, and affirmation through our storied selves. I know I liked the book as I made a ton of notes (always a good sign) and kept finding myself having those internal dialogues one has with oneself when stimulated by ideas on the page. 

The most dangerous technology is the mirror. This is the dirty secret exposed by the book – that we project our obsession with ourselves, annoyance with others and our yearning to be something and find meaning in life through technology. Don’t blame the mirror. Technology is a means to an end… that end is US.