There be Dragons

 

I took delivery of this month's Wired magazine this morning, and although I'm still at the skimming stage - I don't do cover-to-cover, unlike my son, who will consume the Guardian newspaper, in its entirety, front to back - one article has already spiked my interest: 'The Great Divide', by Paul Ford. This piece uses a data-processing metaphor to explain category differences between types of human behaviour and interaction: batch processing versus event-driven processing. Batch processing harks back to the days of punched-card driven computing, where a program would be fed into a computer as a batch of physically punched cards, to deliver the end results of the said computation in a similarly crude 'old-school' manner: a bit like any physical processing activity, such as machining a billet of metal into something useful - on a lathe or milling machine, for instance. Even modern CNC (computer-numerically-controlled) engineering essentially uses batch-processing: take your design, programme the steps necessary to realize it into the machine, and run it from start to finish: end of process with finished object.

Event-driven processing is something that we all interface with daily, though most of us are probably completely unaware of the fact: all of our interactions with all of our devices, whether laptops, home computers, tablets, phones; even the bloody central heating and the ubiquitous 'smart speaker' are event-driven. These devices sit there waiting for you to interact with them, possibly - and in most use-cases - chuntering data back and forth to remote computers, in the service of Christ-knows-what profit-making scheme. As soon as you click, touch, swipe, shout or otherwise interact with whatever device you are using, something happens: usually these days to instigate a process of interrogation and reinforcement that targets and profiles you as a stereotype and feeds you exactly what you want to see/read/hear, whilst offering specifically tailored inducements to hand over your hard-earned cash to the corporate entity you're engaging with via the apparently innocuous interface you happen to be using.

It's a very subtle and clever thing: the machine appears to be under your control, awaiting your every command before doing whatever you ask, but the whole experience is illusory and very insidious: there is a covert imperative behind most of what you perceive as 'your' playground: profit. Your 'agency' is heavily mediated by the commercial entities that provide you with these 'affordances'. Those of us who have many, many years of experience with this stuff - as I've said before, I was a very early adopter of personal computers, the internet and mobile communication technology, and was involved in producing software for some time - know exactly what is technically and commercially possible, and can see the pitfalls that lie before us. Unfortunately, those who have never known an unconnected world, and don't have any perception of what's 'under the hood' of it all, are especially vulnerable to the wiles of the unscrupulous. There be dragons out there, and they ain't cuddly ones, either...