In recent weeks the head of the most influential social network, Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg, has had his hands full. First he appeared before the US Congress, and now he has travelled to Brussels to explain to European officials in the European Parliament, before the eyes of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of his users, the problems Facebook is struggling with. Specifically, the talk was once again about how the massive leak of users’ personal information in the Cambridge Analytica affair could have happened, and about its alleged politically motivated misuse by certain Russian actors.
During the 80-minute hearing we could hear the controversial British politician Nigel Farage, who declared that without the Facebook platform Brexit or the election of Donald Trump would not have been possible. What caught my attention, however, was the speech of the Belgian politician Guy Verhofstadt and its rhetorical qualities. The leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe asked Zuckerberg whether he wants his legacy to be remembered “as one of the three big internet giants, together with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who have enriched our world and our societies” or “as the genius who created a digital monster that is destroying our democracies and our societies?” Verhofstadt went on to ask Zuckerberg whether he would be able to fix Facebook. Regardless of what Zuckerberg may wish and what the political establishment orders, my view is that at its current size Facebook cannot be “fixed”, not even on a purely theoretical level.
I base my view on the findings of current theoretical thinking about technology in the postphenomenological current of the philosophy of technology and on the theory of extended cognition in cognitive science. Both perspectives deal very closely with the types of interaction with technology and with the nature of the relationship between human beings and technology in general.
The standard story, under the influence of Karl Jaspers and others, told until recently that technology is a neutral instrument, whereas the human being is the element that breathes life and functionality into technology. Technology is thus a passive object and the human an active agent. This view of technology follows, often unconsciously, a historical position we inherited from the 17th century from the French philosopher René Descartes, who liked to separate the body from the mind and the so-called subject from the object. Under the cloak of Cartesian thinking, a person comes into contact with technology in such a way that both sides of this interaction have firmly predetermined properties and goals, entirely independent of the contextual, cultural or social factors of the situation in which the interaction takes place. It was no surprise that such a view of technology existed. Following on from Cartesian teaching, the human being, under the influence of the so-called cognitivist dogma, was himself seen as a machine, perhaps a somewhat slower computer, for which the body and perception are useful only as input data or as the output of some action. Susan Hurley called this depiction of the human the “sandwich” paradigm of the mind, for perceptions are merely input data into the mind and action is an output from the mind into the world, while cognition is “stuck” in the middle between them. Everything relevant to the human mind and to the use of technology supposedly takes place in the depths of our heads; all we need to do is follow a predetermined plan.
This caricature of the human being and of our relationship to technology was, of course, attacked by a number of theorists, women and men alike. Among them were the philosopher John Searle with his Chinese Room thought experiment, and the anthropologist Lucy Suchman, who in her work, influenced by phenomenological philosophy, arrived at an entirely different view of the human being. Instead of people acting according to pre-structured plans, Suchman successfully showed, in an experiment with a complicated photocopier, that people act ad hoc in real time in response to the concrete situation and make use of the resources they have at hand, thereby helping to launch the research programme of situated action/cognition.
In 1998 the pair of philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers then published the groundbreaking paper Extended Mind Thesis, in which they pointed out that instead of the computer metaphor we should look at the human being as a natural-born cyborg. With their theory of the extended mind/cognition, Clark and Chalmers argue, using the example of a person suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, that a notebook or an iPhone can non-trivially serve as a real substitute for our memory. If an artefact performs a function which, were it to take place in the head, we would otherwise call part of the mind, then this artefact really is part of our mind. With this principle of “parity” they simply say that besides the dispositions of the physical body, our thinking is also shaped by artefacts and the environment, for there is no reason to privilege only what is in the depths of our heads as the sole thing that makes up our mind.
The theory of the extended mind, together with the theories of embodied, embedded and situated cognition, is currently among the hottest topics in contemporary cognitive science. The idea that technology could fundamentally influence, indeed even constitute, our minds is not new, however. The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, cybernetic theories, Marshall McLuhan or the computer pioneers Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart all claimed that technology, to a certain extent, has an important influence on our thinking. Yet never has this vision of the human as a natural-born cyborg been so publicly accepted (even though criticism exists) as in contemporary cognitive science.
From a slightly different angle, the Dutch philosopher of technology Peter-Paul Verbeek and the physicist and feminist Karen Barad speak about our relationship to technology.
Verbeek follows on from his American mentor Don Ihde with the radical ontological claim that neither the human being nor technology are entities with firmly fixed properties. It is only the interaction between them that first changes and then crystallises the concrete nature of the human being and of technological artefacts. Verbeek builds on the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, who wrote in his magnum opus Being and Time that technology acquires its meaning and function in relation to other technology, but also to the concrete situation and the way it is used. This does not mean that technology is an entirely amorphous and contextually constructed object. It of course also has its physical properties, which make certain affordances, that is, the possibilities of use it offers, more likely than others. Yet an entirely ordinary PET bottle can be a container for liquid, but also a flowerpot and a symbol of sustainable gardening. If a bottle can metamorphose like this depending on context, what then of a digital platform such as Facebook?
Karen Barad offers a philosophically somewhat more ambitious project, yet one very similar to Verbeek’s work. Barad introduces the neologism intra-action, by which she points to the natural entanglement of all entities, not only of technology and the human, whose identity emerges in the course of intra-action with other entities.
What all these briefly sketched theories of contemporary philosophy of technology and cognitive science have in common is that they see the human being, on both the cognitive and the ontological level, as part of a cybernetic, bio-technological organism. Such a description is not merely metaphorical, but entirely real. That is why Andy Clark can afford to say that we are natural-born cyborgs.
After this theoretical block, let us return to the Facebook affair. Promising to remove Facebook’s problems and assuring the US Congress and the European Parliament that similar excesses will not happen again is a Sisyphean task. If Facebook were a fledgling social network with a few hundred users, its social dimension would be minimal and Zuckerberg’s optimism that this “digital monster” can be tamed by legislation or engineering would be realistic. But Facebook’s problem is not Russian hackers; it is the fact that it is simply too big and too popular. Facebook redefines our cognitive and social properties, for it has become an inseparable part of our lives. I think we have never before had a comparably widespread technology that is not only used by most of the planet, but rather influences several layers of contemporary society at once. Electricity, the internet or the Web seem to be other suitable candidates for this post, but their true power lay in offering creative engineers and designers a potential platform for creating something even more influential: the outsourcing of our socialisation into a digital Simulacrum.
It is precisely the enormous success of Zuckerberg’s social network that means that, as part of a bio-technological symbiosis with the human being, Facebook is exposed to ever new possibilities of how it can be used, but also misused. This problem will only multiply if Facebook has ambitions to add new features that once again radically change our minds and society. Whatever the best engineers at Facebook may think, they will never be able to implement in their product protocols restrictive enough to keep their monster under control.
Verhofstadt is right that Facebook has been apologising to its users from the very beginning. Facebook’s problems have long ceased to be in the technical domain, and so traditional engineering approaches to problem-solving fail. And although it would certainly do no harm if Facebook hired more sociologists and philosophers, at its size it is too tied to society, and society to it. The problem, after all, is not that the engineers do not know the cure for a given disease, but the fact that they do not know about the disease until the very last moment, so as to be able to prepare for it. Perhaps the only option would be to drastically reduce the platform’s functionality. Or to switch off all functionality and gradually ask users, in an opt-in form, to switch the given feature on. But that is not a likely scenario for this corporation’s business strategy.
So far Facebook has been used by terrorists for recruitment and spreading propaganda, by alleged Russian trolls and agencies for the purpose of installing Donald Trump in the White House, and last but not least all third-party developers could keep more information about users than they should have.
Perhaps at the last moment Facebook will be saved by a deus ex machina in the form of an all-knowing and all-seeing Artificial Intelligence. Until then they have no choice but to wait, with gritted teeth, to see whether another scandal turns up. Since that is more than likely, “Zuck” should have a tie ready and a shirt ironed.