I hurt my back last week. I was carrying a heavy box and pivoted at the waist to try to manuever something else, and my back really didn’t like that. I probably would have been okay if I weren’t still recovering from an earlier back injury that resulted from leaning to move a bag of mulch.
By itself, this isn’t very interesting. “Middle-aged man’s body doesn’t work as well as it used to” is hardly newsworthy; “lift with your legs, not with your back” is not revolutionary advice. What’s more surprising to me is how quickly and easily the injuries happened. The box and bag were heavy but well within the limits of what I thought I could handle, and the actions only took a few seconds each, but the resulting injuries were felt for days or weeks. Engineers design their vehicles, machinery, and tools with safety tolerances to ensure that they’ll be able to withstand the forces upon them, and yet I suspect even a high school physics student could calculate the forces and leverage that I placed on my joints and realize that it wasn’t going to end well for me. It’s surprising how easily my strength to act exceeds my strength to handle the results of my actions.
Wendell Berry is an American novelist, poet, farmer, and Christian. As an environmental activist, he’s spoken out against nuclear power, coal power, mountaintop removal coal mining, and industrial farming. In his essay “Damage,” he describes one of his efforts to improve his farmland:
I have a steep wooded hillside that I wanted to be able to pasture occasionally, but it had no permanent water supply.
About halfway to the top of the slope there is a narrow bench, on which I thought I could make a small pond. I hired a man with a bulldozer to dig one. He cleared away the trees and then formed the pond, cutting into the hill on the upper side, piling the loosened dirt in a curving earthwork on the lower.
The pond appeared to be a success. Before the bulldozer quit work, water had already begun to seep in. Soon there was enough to support a few head of stock. To heal the exposed ground, I fertilized it and sowed it with grass and clover.
We had an extremely wet fall and winter, with the usual freezing and thawing. The ground grew heavy with water, and soft. The earthwork slumped; a large slice of the woods floor on the upper side slipped down into the pond.
The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge. The fault was mine.
I was careful to get expert advice. But this only exemplifies what I already knew. No expert knows everything about every place, not even everything about any place. If one’s knowledge of one’s whereabouts is insufficient, if one’s judgment is unsound, then expert advice is of little use.
With a palpable sense of guilt, he goes on to reflect on how he caused “a lasting flaw in the face of the earth… that wound in the hillside, my place” that can heal only “in the course of time and nature.” He reflects on how art and culture can make a “map” or “geography of scars” such as the one on his hillside, reflecting the past damage caused by our lack of wisdom, in hopes that future people can learn wisdom and learn their limitations from them. He concludes by quoting poet William Blake:
Blake gives the just proportion or control in another proverb: “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” Only when our acts are empowered with more than bodily strength do we need to think of limits…
But a man with a machine and inadequate culture-such as I was when I made my pond-is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.
As I sat nursing a sprained back muscle, I questioned Berry’s reading of Blake; I’m not even convinced that I can be trusted with my own bodily strength. But this helps prove Berry’s broader point: if we can’t necessarily be trusted with our own bodily strength, then what makes us think we can handle a bulldozer, a power plant, an industrial farm?
It’s popular to hate on social media nowadays. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that it’s helped make us “uniquely stupid” and contributed to rising polarization; Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen accused Facebook of prioritizing their own profits and growth over their users’ well-being; recent research provides further evidence that Facebook is harmful to users’ mental health; and so on. And that’s before getting into the more partisan debates and accusations (“They spread misinformation and conspiracy theories!” “They’re censoring our free speech!” “They’re helping the far right!” “They’re pawns of the far left!”); the constant scrutiny, critiques, and foibles of their tech billionaires founders and would-be owners; or various cybersecurity concerns (such as the recent Twitter whistleblower, Peter “Mudge” Zatko, or concerns over the Chinese Communist Party’s involvement in TikTok).
The root problem might be more fundamental than that, though. On a recent podcast, author Cal Newport describes what he calls “Twitter’s cybernetic curation distribution algorithm,” with “the effect of all of these individuals making retweet/non-retweet decisions, all pushing and pulsing through a power law graph / topology graph… [that] does a really good job of centering or surfacing things that are interesting or engaging or would catch our attention.” When I hear “cybernetic,” I’m enough of a sci-fi geek that I start thinking of these guys:
In sci-fi such as anime, literature, and tabletop or video games, cyborgs are humans who’ve replaced significant parts of their bodies with high-tech equipment. Sometimes this is done to replace body parts damaged by trauma. Often, though, it’s done to enhance their abilities beyond normal human capacity – heightened strength and durability, electronic senses, built-in weaponry, and so on. (I don’t have much need for built-in weaponry, but a cybernetic spine would have saved me some pain.) In many fictional works, the replacements often come with downsides, such as a reduced sense of touch, or a psychological sense of alienation from other humans; some works do this as part of a Serious Examination of What It Means To Be Human, while more gaming-oriented settings might do it just to discourage players from tricking out their characters with every piece of cybernetic gear possible.
Speaking more realistically and more technically, “cybernetic” is defined as “control and communication in the animal and the machine” (Normal Weiner). As applied to Twitter, Cal Newport’s point seems to be that Twitter is the result of interaction between the “animal” (humans decisions and actions to tweet, reply, and retweet) and the machine (Twitter’s servers sharing people’s tweets with each other and analyzing tweets to decide what are most interesting / relevant / shareable / viral, based on what people have revealed of their interests).
Just like a sci-fi cyborg, the result is strength well beyond normal human capacity: an endless stream of engaging, sometimes addicting, content; the ability to view in real time the shared thoughts of society’s elites, friends, strangers from around the world; the potential to have thousands or millions of people interact with what you have to say. And, just like a sci-fi cyborg, there are downsides: a reduced sense of touch and a sense of alienation from the people on the other side of the screen, as facial expressions and nuance and gestures are stripped away, as complex thoughts and discussions are crammed into 280 characters, as the platform’s incentives push people to forget the humanity of those they’re interacting with and engage in increasingly extreme behavior to get likes, go viral, and fit in with their similarly incentivized online peers.
And, if Wendell Berry is right, if we scarcely have the wisdom to handle a bulldozer or a power plant – if our own musculature can exceed what our strengths can sustain – then what hope do we have of handling the power law graph / topology graph of a cybernetic curation distribution algorithm?
Our online world is changing so rapidly; how can we possibly have a chance to build up Berry’s geography of scars to learn our limitations there?
Plenty of solutions have been proposed: Give up social media, get more government involvement, put the right person in charge. Many of these solutions are, I think, a bit facile. Maybe we should start smaller: Practice the humility of recognizing the limits of our wisdom. Don’t overexert our strengths – don’t do something just because we can. Be sensitive to the damage that our strength may be causing to others or to our environment. Be human more. Be cybernetic less.