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Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents

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Rogers Brubaker discusses the ambivalence of digital hyperconnectivity, which opens up many new and exciting possibilities, yet at the same time threatens human freedom.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 12, 2024

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This video video explores the concept of "digital hyperconnectivity," which describes the state of being where everyone and everything is constantly connected through digital platforms. This video video phenomenon began to emerge prominently in the mid-2010s with the wide adoption of smartphones and social media. Hyperconnectivity is characterized by near-universal mobile and broadband access, advanced cloud computing, extensive data extraction, and rapid advancements in artificial intelligence.

The author describes hyperconnectivity as a "total social fact," impacting every aspect of life, including our self-perception and social interactions. It has transformed human culture into a continuous stream of digital content, reshaped economic transactions, and concentrated power in the hands of large tech companies. While earlier media revolutions also caused significant changes, the speed and scale of transformations enabled by hyperconnectivity are unprecedented.

This video video critically examines the promises of digital connectivity, including abundance, decommodification, and democratization, arguing that these are often exaggerated. It suggests that while digital culture provides extensive access to cultural products and participation, it often leads to superficial engagement and increasingly commodifies experiences.

Moreover, the text highlights the dual nature of hyperconnectivity, which has created new opportunities for individual empowerment but has predominantly strengthened organizations capable of data extraction and surveillance. The author concludes with a pessimistic view, illustrating how hyperconnectivity has fragmented public discourse, intensified political polarization, and given rise to new forms of control and manipulation, ultimately favoring centralized power rather than dispersing it.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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What I mean by digital hyperconnectivity

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to exaggerate only slightly, is that everyone

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and everything is connected to everyone

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and everything else everywhere and all the time.

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Hyperconnectivity in this sense is a relatively recent

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phenomenon, is consolidated only around the middle

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of the last decade when smartphone

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and social media use became nearly universal.

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Now, of course, digital connectivity as opposed

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to hyperconnectivity, has a much, much longer history.

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But hyperconnectivity for me is something much more specific

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and much more recent.

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It evolves,

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near universal mobile broadband connectivity,

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a sophisticated cloud computing infrastructure

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and immense apparatus of data extraction

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and the incredibly rapid leaps in artificial intelligence

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that were enabled by using all that extracted data

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to train machine learning algorithms.

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What does the hyper in hyperconnectivity mean?

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Well, one way to get at this is to think about the who,

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what, where and when of digital connectivity.

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So in terms of the who

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and what, the scale of connectivity is simply staggering.

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Facebook may be passe and uncool,

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but it connects 3 billion people while WhatsApp

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and Instagram connect o over 2 billion each.

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And it's almost two obvious to say,

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but it's worth remembering that a billion,

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a thousand million is a very large number

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and frictionless instantaneous connectivity on this truly

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planetary scale is something new in human history,

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and it's not just people who are hyperconnected

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on a planetary scale.

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More and more digital connectivity involves connections

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between things, not just the smart devices in our homes,

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but the hundreds of billions of network sensors

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and tagged objects that communicate with each other.

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So that's the who and the what of hyperconnectivity.

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But the hyper and hyperconnectivity is also about the where

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and when of connectivity.

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The anywhere, anytime logic

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of hyperconnectivity has broken down the boundaries

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between previously distinct spheres of life, between home

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and the outside world, between private

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and public, between work and play.

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But connectivity is not just anywhere

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and anytime in the vision of Silicon Valley,

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it should be everywhere

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and always, in other words, connectivity will become

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ambient, which means

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that it will be diffused throughout the environment rather

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than dependent on devices like smartphones as it is today.

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I, I was led to write the book by my sense

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that digital hyperconnectivity changes everything.

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Hyperconnectivity is what I call a total social fact.

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Borrowing the phrase from anthropologist Marcel Moss,

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it leaves no sphere of life.

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Untouched hyperconnectivity reaches deep inside the self,

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reorganizing our attention, disrupting our rhythms,

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reshaping our ways of thinking, seeing

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and feeling it recasts social interactions,

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stretching them over space and time, gamifying them

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and channeling them into platform friendly surveillance,

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enhancing forms and formats.

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It converts the whole of human culture into

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an unending stream of digital content served to us

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by personalized algorithms.

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It has revolutionized economic life by enabling

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frictionless transactions, creating new markets,

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and concentrating immense economic, cultural,

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and political power.

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The power to reorganize social

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and economic life in the hands of the giant tech platforms.

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And it has fragmented the public sphere,

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intensifying political polarization

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and strengthening populist challenges

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to mediating institutions.

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Of course, earlier revolutions in media

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and communications technologies also occasioned far

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reaching transformations.

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You could think, for example, of the rise

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of the printing press or of the cultural

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and political consequences of the rise of television.

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Yet the planetary scale, the pervasiveness

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and above all the speed

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and suddenness of the transformations occasions

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by digital hyperconnectivity are truly unprecedented.

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The digital revolution has built on

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and subsumed previous revolutions in media

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and communication technology.

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It has absorbed and re-articulated existing media forms.

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It has combined print, photography, recorded sound, film,

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telephone, radio, television, gaming

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and computing into a single omnimed system.

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And this has enabled digital hyperconnectivity

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to become a universal infrastructure of contemporary life

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and infrastructure, not only of communication,

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but of sociability knowledge, culture, entertainment,

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news, politics, commerce, governance and more.

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Hyperconnectivity has thus become what I call

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meta infrastructure.

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It's an infrastructure on which almost all other

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sociotechnical infrastructures depend,

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and this is what gives Hyperconnectivity its pervasive reach

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and its transformative power.

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And it was the challenge

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Of trying to understand this transformative power

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as a whole that made me want to write the book.

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Humans are by definition tool using animals,

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and our technologies have been transforming our ways

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of living and our ways of thinking

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and feeling for the whole of the human species.

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But hyperconnectivity has been transforming the nature

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of the self extraordinarily quickly and profoundly.

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It has introduced radically new ways of knowing the self.

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Now, self knowledge is probably a universal cultural ideal,

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but what does it mean to know oneself

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and how do we arrive at self-knowledge?

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Different cultural

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and religious traditions have given different

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answers to these questions.

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Digital hyperconnectivity allows

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for a radically new kind of answer.

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It holds out the prospect of knowing the self

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through numbers rather than through words,

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through objective data, rather than

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through subjective introspection, through tracking

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of behavior rather than through plumbing, the depths

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of the soul, many people have become enthusiastic

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participants in the so-called Quantified Self Movement.

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These enthusiasts are eager

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to adopt the latest self-tracking technologies.

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But in a broader sense, all of us

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who use social media have become

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quantified selves whether we like it or not.

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And these, this is

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because all activities on social media platforms have be,

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have become relentlessly quantified

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and fed back to the user in a series of numbers.

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And these numbers have powerful effects on how we understand

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and evaluate ourselves.

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There's a lot of evidence, for example,

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and psychologists,

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Jonathan Haidt has been doing interesting work on this

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subject, that the relentless quantification on Facebook

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and especially Instagram may be harming the mental health

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of young people, especially adolescent girls

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who are constantly comparing themselves

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to others on social media

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and feeling bad about themselves when others seem

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to be having more fun or looking more attractive

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or getting more likes.

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Now, of course, social comparison wasn't

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invented by social media.

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It's a universal part of social life,

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but social media makes social comparison salient

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and inescapable,

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and it tends to function as a result, as a gigantic machine

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for manufacturing envy.

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And there's evidence that social media may be contributing

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to depression

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and anxiety who are susceptible to this kind of feedback.

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I'm not a big social media user myself,

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but when my book came out, I started posting regularly

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on Twitter for a couple of months on matters related

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to digital technology,

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and I felt myself becoming a quantified

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self against my will.

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It's hard to resist being hyper aware of digital metrics

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and being drawn into a comparative

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and competitive struggle for attention.

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So every time I checked the metrics, which I have

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to admit was embarrassingly, often

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I was participating in these new ways of knowing

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and evaluating the self.

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I was becoming the very kind of quantified self

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that I had written about in my book.

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Digital Enthusiasts pulled out a threefold promise about

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digital culture, what I call the promise of abundance,

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the promise of decommodification

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and the promise of democratization.

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Their excitement about the sheer abundance

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of digital culture is totally understandable.

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It's thrilling to have an infinitely rich

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and varied universe of cultural products at one's fingertips

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anytime and anywhere.

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Enthusiasts also celebrate the fact

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that much digital culture is freely available without a

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price tag attached to it.

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So the utopian idea

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that digital culture should be freely shared rather than

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bought and sold remains powerfully attractive.

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And enthusiasts are excited about the democratization

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of digital culture,

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about the new ways in which ordinary people,

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not just cultural elites

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or professionals, can participate in the production

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and circulation of culture.

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But we have to look critically at these celebratory accounts

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of abundance, decommodification and democratization.

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Digital cultural abundance is certainly exhilarating,

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but it's also flattening

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and homogenizing culture is converted into content,

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and that blurs together as it flows

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through the same conduits

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and across the same interfaces in an endless stream.

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Yeah, we encounter more culture than ever,

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but we engage it more superficially drawn

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by the perpetual lure of the new.

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We come to know less and less about.

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More and more we find ourselves chronically distracted

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and we lose our capacity for sustained engagement.

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As for Decommodification, I think that's hugely outweighed

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by Remodification.

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Yes, Wikipedia is a shining example

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of collaborative non-market oriented cultural production,

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but it's a lonely island in an immense sea of monetization.

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As the volume of cultural content increases, attention

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becomes an ever scarcer resource

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and a resource that's pervasively, measured

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and monetized.

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Even amateur cultural production is increasingly oriented

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to trying to capture some of that measurable

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monetizable attention.

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So digital culture has ultimately not been

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de de commodified.

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Instead, culture

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and commerce are locked in an advertiser and embrace.

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Now the question of cultural

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democratization is more complicated.

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It's true that ex inexpensive user-friendly digital tools

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for manipulating text images

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and sounds, you could think of Photoshop

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or Garage band, have a dramatically broadened access

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to the means of cultural production.

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But the question is not only how many people

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engage in cultural production, it's how they engage.

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We're told that AI tools will help everyone express their

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creativity in music and art, for example.

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So AI image generators like Open AI's Dolly,

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have gotten an enormous amount of attention,

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and the AI music company Amper promises to let everyone

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create their own original music in seconds.

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But what does it mean

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to create when you're creating your own original

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music in seconds?

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Is creativity going to be reduced to simply editing

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and tweaking AI generated music

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or coming up with a clever prompt for an image generator?

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My own view is that a genuine democratization

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of cultural creativity would promote the development

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of skills and capacities rather than minimize the

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need for such skills.

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Well, what about, you might ask,

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what about the democratization of cultural consumption?

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Some would argue that hyperconnectivity has made cultural

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consumption more democratic since digital technology cuts

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out cultural gatekeepers

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and simply gives people what they like and what they want.

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But in my view, this kind of cultural populism

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in which popularity is the sole criterion of value

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is not truly democratic.

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A democratic politics of culture, as I understand it,

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would not just fine tune algorithms to feed people precisely

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what they already like it would seek rather

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to promote learning, growth, discovery, and development.

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From the 1980s through the middle of the last decade,

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digital connectivity seemed to be full

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of democratic promise.

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It seemed to favor horizontal

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and multi-directional public communication rather than

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vertical and unidirectional mass communication.

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This new ecology of public communication, it was thought,

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would promote more participatory forms of citizenship.

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It would bring previously excluded groups into the polity,

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and it would contribute to the undermining

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of authoritarian regimes.

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Now, this story got many things right?

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Citizenship has indeed become more participatory

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as ordinary citizens have joined public conversations in new

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ways and in unprecedented numbers.

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Social media and messaging apps have indeed fostered new

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kinds of horizontal social movements

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and have made it easier for previously marginalized groups

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to be seen and heard.

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But the optimistic narrative got other things badly wrong.

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Instead of making politics more transparent,

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hyperconnectivity has fragmented the public's sphere

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and made politics more opaque.

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It has eroded the sense of a shared public world.

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Opaque and proprietary algorithms determine who sees what,

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and private platforms regulate who can say what.

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Both developments contribute

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to privatizing the public's sphere.

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So private platforms wield enormous, opaque,

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and largely unaccountable power over public discourse

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and encrypted messenger services have allowed political

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campaigns, especially in the developing world,

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to spread rumors and mobilize fear

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while avoiding public accountability.

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Since the middle of the last decade, the digital dream

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of renewing democratic citizenship has been challenged

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and partly overshadowed by the digital nightmare

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of undermining democratic citizenship by short circuiting,

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reasoned deliberation, nurturing conspiracy theories,

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intensifying polarization, incentivizing the mobilization

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of outrage and incubating extremism.

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Hyperconnectivity makes some kinds

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of political participation very easy,

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but it makes other kinds of participation very hard.

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So digital platforms make it easy to sign a petition

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or join a pile on or express outrage,

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and they make it easy to organize and coordinate protests.

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But these platforms make it very difficult,

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maybe even impossible to discuss issues in a complex

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and nuanced way or to craft compromises

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or to build durable organizations.

17:09.395 --> 17:12.725
Democracy requires public deliberation,

17:12.865 --> 17:16.325
and hyperconnectivity has been terrible for deliberation.

17:16.795 --> 17:20.365
Democracy also requires trust in institutions,

17:20.665 --> 17:24.965
and hyperconnectivity has accelerated the erosion of trust.

17:26.135 --> 17:27.875
As for authoritarian regimes,

17:28.565 --> 17:32.575
they were indeed initially unprepared for the nimbleness

17:32.635 --> 17:36.495
and creativity of digitally mediated opposition movements.

17:36.915 --> 17:37.935
But that was long ago.

17:37.935 --> 17:40.375
They have long since learned to monitor

17:40.995 --> 17:42.895
and counter such movements,

17:43.115 --> 17:45.935
and the most sophisticated such regimes led

17:45.935 --> 17:48.335
by China have entrenched their power

17:48.445 --> 17:51.005
through massively enhanced capacities

17:51.225 --> 17:52.325
for digital surveillance.

17:52.625 --> 17:56.365
So the political picture is unbalanced, a pretty bleak one.

17:56.725 --> 18:01.005
I conclude the book by considering three dystopian visions.

18:01.385 --> 18:03.245
Two of them come from classics

18:03.385 --> 18:06.405
of 20th century fiction Orwell's, 1984,

18:06.945 --> 18:09.045
and Huxley's Brave New World.

18:09.675 --> 18:12.245
Both of these are visions of dictatorship,

18:12.585 --> 18:13.965
but as media theorist

18:14.105 --> 18:16.205
and cultural critic, Neil Postman

18:16.845 --> 18:19.325
emphasized their visions are very different,

18:20.005 --> 18:22.705
or Orwell's was a brutal dictatorship of fear.

18:23.655 --> 18:27.615
Huxley's, a gentle dictatorship depended on pleasure

18:27.775 --> 18:29.455
conditioning and distraction.

18:30.115 --> 18:33.935
Now, postman was writing in 1985 in a cultural

18:33.935 --> 18:36.375
and political landscape dominated by television,

18:36.755 --> 18:38.015
and his point was

18:38.015 --> 18:41.695
that Huxley's vision was much more relevant than Orwell's.

18:42.315 --> 18:45.645
In today's context of ubiquitous digital surveillance,

18:45.795 --> 18:48.045
there's been a renewed interest in Orwell,

18:48.585 --> 18:51.925
but Orwell's grim vision formed by his response

18:51.985 --> 18:56.605
to 20th century totalitarian regimes probably has limited

18:57.125 --> 19:00.365
relevance today since today's systems of surveillance,

19:00.475 --> 19:02.565
even though they're much more sophisticated

19:02.905 --> 19:06.445
and pervasive than any that Orwell could have imagined,

19:06.745 --> 19:08.765
are configured in very different ways

19:08.945 --> 19:10.885
and employed for very different purposes.

19:12.145 --> 19:15.745
Huxley's Brave New World, by contrast, doesn't have much

19:15.745 --> 19:17.385
to say about surveillance,

19:17.725 --> 19:20.785
but its emphasis on a ceaseless flow

19:21.245 --> 19:25.105
of immediate gratifications, engrossing experiences

19:25.525 --> 19:28.025
and compelling distractions is a more,

19:28.135 --> 19:29.625
more relevant than ever.

19:30.485 --> 19:35.305
Now, both 1984 and Brave New World focus on the state.

19:35.805 --> 19:39.305
The third dystopian vision that I discussed is not driven

19:39.365 --> 19:43.465
by the state, but instead it focuses on an economic logic.

19:44.025 --> 19:46.145
I take this vision not from fiction,

19:46.605 --> 19:48.465
but from Shoshana's Zuboff recent

19:48.535 --> 19:50.145
book, surveillance Capitalism.

19:50.965 --> 19:54.225
The core mechanism for zuboff is the extraction

19:54.245 --> 19:57.665
and analysis of digital behavioral data from every aspect

19:57.665 --> 20:00.305
of our lives online and off.

20:01.255 --> 20:02.705
With the help of machine learning,

20:03.015 --> 20:06.025
this data generates an endless stream of marketable

20:06.245 --> 20:10.105
and actionable micro predictions about our future behavior.

20:10.685 --> 20:13.745
And these fine-grain predictions enable surveillance,

20:13.745 --> 20:17.745
capitalism, both to know our behavior and to shape it.

20:18.485 --> 20:21.265
Now, if you abstract from the particulars

20:21.285 --> 20:25.985
of these three dystopian visions, then you can read Orwell,

20:26.445 --> 20:29.705
Huxley, and Zubov as suggesting how Hyperconnectivity

20:30.305 --> 20:34.905
enhances what I call technologies of control, technologies

20:35.125 --> 20:38.705
of distraction, and technologies manipulation.

20:39.605 --> 20:41.545
It enhances technologies of control

20:42.005 --> 20:44.545
by providing an infrastructure for unilateral

20:44.765 --> 20:46.905
and authoritarian modes of governance,

20:47.635 --> 20:49.125
both public and private.

20:50.065 --> 20:52.165
It enhances technologies of distraction

20:52.425 --> 20:56.205
by providing an infrastructure for capturing, diverting,

20:56.585 --> 20:58.485
and retaining our attention.

20:59.595 --> 21:02.175
And it enhances technologies of manipulation

21:02.555 --> 21:05.655
by providing an infrastructure for sophisticated forms

21:06.155 --> 21:09.775
of behavioral nudging, a 21st century version

21:10.235 --> 21:13.615
of the scanner idea of behavioral modification,

21:14.275 --> 21:15.815
but embracing the entire planet.

21:16.965 --> 21:21.535
This dystopian picture of intensified control, intensified

21:22.615 --> 21:26.095
distraction, and intensified manipulation is obviously

21:26.405 --> 21:27.455
very one-sided.

21:27.875 --> 21:29.815
So I try to balance it in the book

21:29.955 --> 21:34.575
by also analyzing more individually empowering aspects

21:34.595 --> 21:35.655
of hyperconnectivity.

21:36.255 --> 21:37.375
I discuss, for example,

21:37.515 --> 21:41.695
how hyperconnectivity creates new ways of exploring the self

21:41.795 --> 21:44.255
and even emancipating the self, for better

21:44.355 --> 21:48.095
or worse, from forms of social control rooted in family

21:48.315 --> 21:49.375
and local community.

21:50.235 --> 21:53.615
Hyperconnectivity obviously provides new possibilities

21:53.675 --> 21:56.055
for sustaining friendships, families,

21:56.695 --> 21:58.355
and love relationships at a distance.

21:58.815 --> 22:02.075
And Hyperconnectivity has opened up new avenues of popular

22:02.715 --> 22:05.235
participation and initiative in culture,

22:05.955 --> 22:07.355
economics, and politics.

22:07.775 --> 22:12.075
Yet, even though Hyperconnectivity has empowered individuals

22:12.175 --> 22:13.755
in these and other respects,

22:13.815 --> 22:17.555
it has more profoundly empowered organizations,

22:18.005 --> 22:21.395
especially the organizations that are in a position

22:21.495 --> 22:24.715
to extract and analyze data on an enormous scale

22:25.505 --> 22:27.285
in its early phases.

22:27.605 --> 22:31.045
A few decades ago, digital connectivity probably contributed

22:31.345 --> 22:34.925
to the decentralization and dispersion of power,

22:35.465 --> 22:38.165
but the transition to hyperconnectivity

22:38.475 --> 22:42.365
that was consolidated about a decade ago has brought about

22:42.425 --> 22:47.005
an immense recentralization and concentration of power.

22:47.345 --> 22:50.605
So in the end, my account is a fairly pessimistic one.

Understanding Digital Hyperconnectivity's Impact

00:00:00 - What I mean by digital hyperconnectivity to exaggerate only slightly, is that everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else everywhere and all the time. Hyperconnectivity in this sense is a relatively recent phenomenon, is consolidated only around the middle of the last decade when smartphone and social media use became nearly universal. Now, of course, digital connectivity as opposed to hyperconnectivity, has a much, much longer history.
00:00:37 - and much more recent. It evolves, near universal mobile broadband connectivity, a sophisticated cloud computing infrastructure and immense apparatus of data extraction and the incredibly rapid leaps in artificial intelligence that were enabled by using all that extracted data to train machine learning algorithms. What does the hyper in hyperconnectivity mean?
00:01:09 - what, where and when of digital connectivity. So in terms of the who and what, the scale of connectivity is simply staggering. Facebook may be passe and uncool, but it connects 3 billion people while WhatsApp and Instagram connect o over 2 billion each. And it's almost two obvious to say, but it's worth remembering that a billion,
00:01:39 - and frictionless instantaneous connectivity on this truly planetary scale is something new in human history, and it's not just people who are hyperconnected on a planetary scale. More and more digital connectivity involves connections between things, not just the smart devices in our homes, but the hundreds of billions of network sensors and tagged objects that communicate with each other.
00:02:12 - But the hyper and hyperconnectivity is also about the where and when of connectivity. The anywhere, anytime logic of hyperconnectivity has broken down the boundaries between previously distinct spheres of life, between home and the outside world, between private and public, between work and play. But connectivity is not just anywhere
00:02:43 - it should be everywhere and always, in other words, connectivity will become ambient, which means that it will be diffused throughout the environment rather than dependent on devices like smartphones as it is today. I, I was led to write the book by my sense that digital hyperconnectivity changes everything. Hyperconnectivity is what I call a total social fact. Borrowing the phrase from anthropologist Marcel Moss,

Transformative Power of Digital Hyperconnectivity

00:03:15 - Untouched hyperconnectivity reaches deep inside the self, reorganizing our attention, disrupting our rhythms, reshaping our ways of thinking, seeing and feeling it recasts social interactions, stretching them over space and time, gamifying them and channeling them into platform friendly surveillance, enhancing forms and formats. It converts the whole of human culture into
00:03:49 - by personalized algorithms. It has revolutionized economic life by enabling frictionless transactions, creating new markets, and concentrating immense economic, cultural, and political power. The power to reorganize social and economic life in the hands of the giant tech platforms. And it has fragmented the public sphere, intensifying political polarization
00:04:18 - to mediating institutions. Of course, earlier revolutions in media and communications technologies also occasioned far reaching transformations. You could think, for example, of the rise of the printing press or of the cultural and political consequences of the rise of television. Yet the planetary scale, the pervasiveness and above all the speed and suddenness of the transformations occasions by digital hyperconnectivity are truly unprecedented.
00:04:53 - and subsumed previous revolutions in media and communication technology. It has absorbed and re-articulated existing media forms. It has combined print, photography, recorded sound, film, telephone, radio, television, gaming and computing into a single omnimed system. And this has enabled digital hyperconnectivity
00:05:24 - and infrastructure, not only of communication, but of sociability knowledge, culture, entertainment, news, politics, commerce, governance and more. Hyperconnectivity has thus become what I call meta infrastructure. It's an infrastructure on which almost all other sociotechnical infrastructures depend, and this is what gives Hyperconnectivity its pervasive reach
00:05:55 - And it was the challenge Of trying to understand this transformative power as a whole that made me want to write the book. Humans are by definition tool using animals, and our technologies have been transforming our ways of living and our ways of thinking and feeling for the whole of the human species. But hyperconnectivity has been transforming the nature of the self extraordinarily quickly and profoundly. It has introduced radically new ways of knowing the self.

Digital Hyperconnectivity and Self-Knowledge

00:06:32 - but what does it mean to know oneself and how do we arrive at self-knowledge? Different cultural and religious traditions have given different answers to these questions. Digital hyperconnectivity allows for a radically new kind of answer. It holds out the prospect of knowing the self through numbers rather than through words, through objective data, rather than through subjective introspection, through tracking
00:07:04 - of the soul, many people have become enthusiastic participants in the so-called Quantified Self Movement. These enthusiasts are eager to adopt the latest self-tracking technologies. But in a broader sense, all of us who use social media have become quantified selves whether we like it or not. And these, this is because all activities on social media platforms have be,
00:07:35 - and fed back to the user in a series of numbers. And these numbers have powerful effects on how we understand and evaluate ourselves. There's a lot of evidence, for example, and psychologists, Jonathan Haidt has been doing interesting work on this subject, that the relentless quantification on Facebook and especially Instagram may be harming the mental health of young people, especially adolescent girls who are constantly comparing themselves
00:08:05 - and feeling bad about themselves when others seem to be having more fun or looking more attractive or getting more likes. Now, of course, social comparison wasn't invented by social media. It's a universal part of social life, but social media makes social comparison salient and inescapable, and it tends to function as a result, as a gigantic machine for manufacturing envy.
00:08:38 - to depression and anxiety who are susceptible to this kind of feedback. I'm not a big social media user myself, but when my book came out, I started posting regularly on Twitter for a couple of months on matters related to digital technology, and I felt myself becoming a quantified self against my will. It's hard to resist being hyper aware of digital metrics
00:09:08 - and competitive struggle for attention. So every time I checked the metrics, which I have to admit was embarrassingly, often I was participating in these new ways of knowing and evaluating the self. I was becoming the very kind of quantified self that I had written about in my book. Digital Enthusiasts pulled out a threefold promise about digital culture, what I call the promise of abundance,

Digital Culture: Abundance and Critical Engagement

00:09:39 - and the promise of democratization. Their excitement about the sheer abundance of digital culture is totally understandable. It's thrilling to have an infinitely rich and varied universe of cultural products at one's fingertips anytime and anywhere. Enthusiasts also celebrate the fact that much digital culture is freely available without a price tag attached to it. So the utopian idea
00:10:11 - bought and sold remains powerfully attractive. And enthusiasts are excited about the democratization of digital culture, about the new ways in which ordinary people, not just cultural elites or professionals, can participate in the production and circulation of culture. But we have to look critically at these celebratory accounts of abundance, decommodification and democratization.
00:10:44 - but it's also flattening and homogenizing culture is converted into content, and that blurs together as it flows through the same conduits and across the same interfaces in an endless stream. Yeah, we encounter more culture than ever, but we engage it more superficially drawn by the perpetual lure of the new. We come to know less and less about. More and more we find ourselves chronically distracted
00:11:17 - As for Decommodification, I think that's hugely outweighed by Remodification. Yes, Wikipedia is a shining example of collaborative non-market oriented cultural production, but it's a lonely island in an immense sea of monetization. As the volume of cultural content increases, attention becomes an ever scarcer resource and a resource that's pervasively, measured
00:11:49 - Even amateur cultural production is increasingly oriented to trying to capture some of that measurable monetizable attention. So digital culture has ultimately not been de de commodified. Instead, culture and commerce are locked in an advertiser and embrace. Now the question of cultural democratization is more complicated. It's true that ex inexpensive user-friendly digital tools
00:12:21 - and sounds, you could think of Photoshop or Garage band, have a dramatically broadened access to the means of cultural production. But the question is not only how many people engage in cultural production, it's how they engage. We're told that AI tools will help everyone express their creativity in music and art, for example. So AI image generators like Open AI's Dolly,

Democratization and Challenges of Digital Creativity

00:12:52 - and the AI music company Amper promises to let everyone create their own original music in seconds. But what does it mean to create when you're creating your own original music in seconds? Is creativity going to be reduced to simply editing and tweaking AI generated music or coming up with a clever prompt for an image generator? My own view is that a genuine democratization
00:13:24 - of skills and capacities rather than minimize the need for such skills. Well, what about, you might ask, what about the democratization of cultural consumption? Some would argue that hyperconnectivity has made cultural consumption more democratic since digital technology cuts out cultural gatekeepers and simply gives people what they like and what they want. But in my view, this kind of cultural populism
00:13:56 - is not truly democratic. A democratic politics of culture, as I understand it, would not just fine tune algorithms to feed people precisely what they already like it would seek rather to promote learning, growth, discovery, and development. From the 1980s through the middle of the last decade, digital connectivity seemed to be full of democratic promise.
00:14:24 - and multi-directional public communication rather than vertical and unidirectional mass communication. This new ecology of public communication, it was thought, would promote more participatory forms of citizenship. It would bring previously excluded groups into the polity, and it would contribute to the undermining of authoritarian regimes. Now, this story got many things right? Citizenship has indeed become more participatory
00:14:59 - ways and in unprecedented numbers. Social media and messaging apps have indeed fostered new kinds of horizontal social movements and have made it easier for previously marginalized groups to be seen and heard. But the optimistic narrative got other things badly wrong. Instead of making politics more transparent, hyperconnectivity has fragmented the public's sphere and made politics more opaque.
00:15:33 - Opaque and proprietary algorithms determine who sees what, and private platforms regulate who can say what. Both developments contribute to privatizing the public's sphere. So private platforms wield enormous, opaque, and largely unaccountable power over public discourse and encrypted messenger services have allowed political

The Dystopian Impact of Hyperconnectivity on Democracy

00:16:02 - to spread rumors and mobilize fear while avoiding public accountability. Since the middle of the last decade, the digital dream of renewing democratic citizenship has been challenged and partly overshadowed by the digital nightmare of undermining democratic citizenship by short circuiting, reasoned deliberation, nurturing conspiracy theories, intensifying polarization, incentivizing the mobilization
00:16:35 - Hyperconnectivity makes some kinds of political participation very easy, but it makes other kinds of participation very hard. So digital platforms make it easy to sign a petition or join a pile on or express outrage, and they make it easy to organize and coordinate protests. But these platforms make it very difficult, maybe even impossible to discuss issues in a complex
00:17:06 - or to build durable organizations. Democracy requires public deliberation, and hyperconnectivity has been terrible for deliberation. Democracy also requires trust in institutions, and hyperconnectivity has accelerated the erosion of trust. As for authoritarian regimes, they were indeed initially unprepared for the nimbleness
00:17:36 - But that was long ago. They have long since learned to monitor and counter such movements, and the most sophisticated such regimes led by China have entrenched their power through massively enhanced capacities for digital surveillance. So the political picture is unbalanced, a pretty bleak one. I conclude the book by considering three dystopian visions. Two of them come from classics
00:18:06 - and Huxley's Brave New World. Both of these are visions of dictatorship, but as media theorist and cultural critic, Neil Postman emphasized their visions are very different, or Orwell's was a brutal dictatorship of fear. Huxley's, a gentle dictatorship depended on pleasure conditioning and distraction. Now, postman was writing in 1985 in a cultural
00:18:36 - and his point was that Huxley's vision was much more relevant than Orwell's. In today's context of ubiquitous digital surveillance, there's been a renewed interest in Orwell, but Orwell's grim vision formed by his response to 20th century totalitarian regimes probably has limited relevance today since today's systems of surveillance, even though they're much more sophisticated and pervasive than any that Orwell could have imagined,

Hyperconnectivity: Control, Distraction, and Empowerment

00:19:08 - and employed for very different purposes. Huxley's Brave New World, by contrast, doesn't have much to say about surveillance, but its emphasis on a ceaseless flow of immediate gratifications, engrossing experiences and compelling distractions is a more, more relevant than ever. Now, both 1984 and Brave New World focus on the state. The third dystopian vision that I discussed is not driven
00:19:44 - I take this vision not from fiction, but from Shoshana's Zuboff recent book, surveillance Capitalism. The core mechanism for zuboff is the extraction and analysis of digital behavioral data from every aspect of our lives online and off. With the help of machine learning, this data generates an endless stream of marketable and actionable micro predictions about our future behavior.
00:20:13 - capitalism, both to know our behavior and to shape it. Now, if you abstract from the particulars of these three dystopian visions, then you can read Orwell, Huxley, and Zubov as suggesting how Hyperconnectivity enhances what I call technologies of control, technologies of distraction, and technologies manipulation. It enhances technologies of control
00:20:44 - and authoritarian modes of governance, both public and private. It enhances technologies of distraction by providing an infrastructure for capturing, diverting, and retaining our attention. And it enhances technologies of manipulation by providing an infrastructure for sophisticated forms of behavioral nudging, a 21st century version of the scanner idea of behavioral modification,
00:21:16 - This dystopian picture of intensified control, intensified distraction, and intensified manipulation is obviously very one-sided. So I try to balance it in the book by also analyzing more individually empowering aspects of hyperconnectivity. I discuss, for example, how hyperconnectivity creates new ways of exploring the self and even emancipating the self, for better
00:21:48 - and local community. Hyperconnectivity obviously provides new possibilities for sustaining friendships, families, and love relationships at a distance. And Hyperconnectivity has opened up new avenues of popular participation and initiative in culture, economics, and politics. Yet, even though Hyperconnectivity has empowered individuals in these and other respects, it has more profoundly empowered organizations,

Hyperconnectivity: Recentralizing Power Dynamics

00:22:47 - to extract and analyze data on an enormous scale in its early phases. A few decades ago, digital connectivity probably contributed to the decentralization and dispersion of power, but the transition to hyperconnectivity that was consolidated about a decade ago has brought about an immense recentralization and concentration of power. So in the end, my account is a fairly pessimistic one.

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