World Order (47 page)

For all the great and indispensable achievements the Internet has brought to our era, its emphasis is on the actual more than the contingent, on the factual rather than the conceptual, on values shaped by consensus rather than by introspection. Knowledge of history and geography is not essential for those who can evoke their data with the touch of a button. The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook.

In the Internet age, world order has often been equated with the proposition that if people have the ability to freely know and exchange the world’s information, the natural human drive toward freedom will take root and fulfill itself, and history will run on autopilot, as it were. But philosophers and poets have long separated the mind’s purview into three components: information, knowledge, and wisdom. The Internet focuses on the realm of information, whose spread it facilitates exponentially. Ever-more-complex functions are devised, particularly
capable of responding to questions of fact, which are not themselves altered by the passage of time. Search engines are able to handle increasingly complex questions with increasing speed. Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before.

The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:

Where is the Life
we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at least in the foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance. As ever more issues are treated as if of a factual nature, the premise becomes established that for every question there must be a researchable answer, that problems and solutions are not so much to be thought through as to be “looked up.” But in the relations between states—and in many other fields—information, to be truly useful, must be placed within a broader context of history and experience to emerge as actual knowledge. And a society is fortunate if its leaders can occasionally rise to the level of wisdom.

The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking—the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future. And style propels the reader into a relationship with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and aesthetics.

Traditionally, another way of acquiring knowledge has been through personal conversations. The discussion and exchange of ideas has for millennia provided an emotional and psychological dimension in addition to the factual content of the information exchanged. It supplies intangibles of conviction and personality. Now the culture of texting produces a curious reluctance to engage in face-to-face interaction, especially on a one-to-one basis.

The computer has, to a considerable extent, solved the problem of acquiring, preserving, and retrieving information. Data can be stored in effectively unlimited quantities and in manageable form. The computer makes available a range of data unattainable in the age of books. It packages it effectively; style is no longer needed to make it accessible, nor is memorization. In dealing with a single decision separated from its context, the computer supplies tools unimaginable even a decade ago. But it also shrinks perspective. Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool.

In the same way, the Internet has a tendency to diminish historical memory. The phenomenon has been described as follows: “
People forget items they think
will be available externally and remember items they think will not be available.” By moving so many items into the realm of the available, the Internet reduces the impulse to remember them. Communications technology threatens to diminish the individual’s capacity for an inward quest by increasing his reliance on technology as a facilitator and mediator of thought.
Information at one’s fingertips
encourages
the mindset of a researcher but may diminish the mindset of a leader. A shift in human consciousness may change the character of individuals and the nature of their interactions, and so begin to alter the human condition itself. Did people in the age of printing see the same world as their medieval forefathers? Is the optical perception of the world altered in the age of the computer?

Western history and psychology have heretofore treated truth as independent of the personality and prior experience of the observer. Yet our age is on the verge of a changed conception of the nature of truth. Nearly every website contains some kind of customization function based on Internet tracing codes designed to ascertain a user’s background and preferences. These methods are intended to encourage users “
to consume more content
” and, in so doing, be exposed to more advertising, which ultimately drives the Internet economy. These subtle directions are in accordance with a broader trend to manage the traditional understanding of human choice. Goods are sorted and prioritized to present those “
which you would like
,” and online news is presented as “news which will best suit you.” Two different people appealing to a search engine with the same question do not necessarily receive the same answers. The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized—losing its universal character. Information is presented as being free. In fact, the recipient pays for it by supplying data to be exploited by persons unknown to him, in ways that further shape the information being offered to him.

Whatever the utility of this approach in the realm of consumption, its effect on policymaking may prove transformative. The difficult choices of policymaking are always close. Where, in a world of ubiquitous social networks, does the individual find the space to develop the fortitude to make decisions that, by definition, cannot be based on a consensus? The adage that prophets are not recognized in their own time is true in that they operate beyond conventional conception—that is what made them prophets. In our era, the lead time for prophets might
have disappeared altogether. The pursuit of transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying privacy, inhibits the development of personalities with the strength to take lonely decisions.

American elections—especially presidential elections—represent another aspect of this evolution. It has been reported that in 2012 the election campaigns had files on some tens of millions of potentially independent voters. Drawn from research in social networks, open public files, and medical records, these files amounted to a profile for each, probably more precise than the target person would have been capable of doing from his own memory. This permitted the campaigns to choose the technology of their appeals—whether to rely on personal visits by committed friends (also discovered via the Internet), personalized letters (drawn from social network research), or group meetings.

Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates’ main role may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined? If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost—or else the cultivation of these qualities may take so much of a president’s first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the United States.

Thoughtful observers have viewed the globalizing transformations ushered in by the rise of the Internet and advanced computing technology as the beginning of a new era of popular empowerment and progress toward peace. They hail the ability of new technologies to enable the individual and to propel transparency—whether through the publicizing of abuses by authorities or the erosion of cultural barriers of misunderstanding. Optimists point, with some justification, to the startling new powers of communication gained through instantaneous global networks. They stress the ability of computer networks and “smart” devices to create new social, economic, and environmental efficiencies.
They look forward
to unlocking previously insoluble technical problems by harnessing the brainpower of networked multitudes.

One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because “
people who try to perpetuate myths
about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners. With more data, everyone gains a better frame of reference.” It will be possible to temper national rivalries and resolve historical disputes because “with the technological devices, platforms and databases we have today, it will be much more difficult for governments in the future to argue over claims like these, not just because of permanent evidence but because everyone else will have access to the same source material.” In this view, the spread of networked digital devices will become a positive engine of history: new networks of communication will curtail abuses, soften social and political contradictions, and help heretofore-disunited parts cohere into a more harmonious global system.

The optimism of this perspective replicates the best aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s prophecy of a world united by democracy, open diplomacy, and common rules. As a blueprint for political or social order, it also raises some of the same questions as Wilson’s original vision about the distinction between the practical and the aspirational.

Conflicts within and between societies have occurred since the dawn of civilization. The causes of these conflicts have not been limited to an absence of information or an insufficient ability to share it. They have arisen not only between societies that do not understand each other but between those that understand each other only too well. Even with the same source material to examine, individuals have disagreed about its meaning or the subjective value of what it depicts. Where values, ideals, or strategic objectives are in fundamental contradiction, exposure and connectivity may on occasion fuel confrontations as much as assuage them.

New social and information networks spur growth and creativity. They allow individuals to express views and report injustices that might otherwise go unheeded. In crisis situations, they offer a crucial ability to communicate quickly and to publicize events and policies reliably—potentially preventing the outbreak of a conflict through misunderstanding.

Yet they also bring conflicting
, occasionally incompatible value systems into ever closer contact. The advent of Internet news and commentary and data-driven election strategies has not noticeably softened the partisan aspect of American politics; if anything, it has provided a larger audience to the extremes. Internationally, some expressions that once passed unknown and unremarked are now publicized worldwide and used as pretexts for violent agitation—as occurred in parts of the Muslim world in reaction to an inflammatory fringe cartoon in a Danish newspaper or a marginal American homemade movie. Meanwhile, in conflict situations, social networking may serve as a platform to reinforce traditional social fissures as much as it dispels
them. The widespread sharing of videotaped atrocities in the Syrian civil war appears to have done more to harden the resolve of the warring parties than to stop the killing, while the notorious ISIL has used social media to declare a caliphate and exhort holy war.

Some authoritarian structures may fall as a result of information spread online or protests convened via social networking; they may in time be replaced by more open and participatory systems elaborating humane and inclusive values. Elsewhere other authorities will gain exponentially more powerful means of repression. The proliferation of ubiquitous sensors tracking and analyzing individuals, recording and transmitting their every experience (in some cases now, essentially from birth), and (at the forefront of computing)
anticipating their thoughts
opens up repressive as well as liberating possibilities.
In this respect, among the new technology’s
most radical aspects may be the power it vests in small groups, at the pinnacle of political and economic structures, to process and monitor information, shape debate, and to some extent define truth.

The West lauded the “Facebook”
and “Twitter” aspects of the Arab Spring revolutions. Yet where the digitally equipped crowd succeeds in its initial demonstrations, the use of new technology does not guarantee that the values that prevail will be those of the devices’ inventors, or even those of the majority of the crowd. Moreover, the same technologies used to convene demonstrations can also be used to track and suppress them. Today most public squares in any major city are subject to constant video surveillance, and any smartphone owner can be tracked electronically in real time. As one recent survey concluded, “
The Internet has made tracking
easier, cheaper, and more useful.”