The Blind Giant: How to Survive in the Digital Age

By Nick Harkaway
John Murray: London (2013)
Sb, 280pp
ISBN 9781848546431

Once in a while you come across a book which so encapsulates what you have been thinking that you cannot help but say to yourself “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking!”. Such a moment arose when I was reading Nick Harkaway’s book “The Blind Giant: How to Survive in the Digital Age”.

Son of author John le Carré, Nick Harkaway is an experienced novelist and technology commentator and blogger.  He is the author of the novels ‘The Gone–Away World’ and ‘Angelmaker’. Prior to becoming an author he worked in the film industry.  ‘The Blind Giant’ is Harkaway’s first piece of non–fiction and offers a compelling and engaging look at digital culture and how it shapes and is shaped by human beings.

His experience of writing fiction shines through and helps bring colour and creativity to the style and tone of his exploration of digital technology. For example, he kicks of the book by painting two scenarios – one a nightmare vision of the future, dystopian, tech–led society where “consciousness itself, abstracted thought and a sense of the individual as separate from the environment” is all but gone. In contrast to this is his vision of “happy valley” which is just as compelling and attractive. These two scenarios act like book ends at either end of a bookshelf, helping to frame the author’s thinking and ideas. Harkaway demonstrate a good grasp of the subject matter and is nowhere better reflected than in the explanatory note at the beginning of the book. He recognises that the future is all about fast and disruptive innovative change which means that much of what he committed to paper is probably going to be out of date by the time it is read by the reader.  This being the case, his aim in writing the book is not to give a detailed analysis of the issues but rather help to join the dots and offer a survey of what is happening and why. From here the reader can explore and debate the issues further – not least through the book’s website www.blindgiant.co.uk where readers are encouraged to continue the debate in a forum or in posts about each chapter.

Today and not tomorrow

Something I wholeheartedly agree with Harkaway on is the critical need to engage in debating the questions presented by technology today and not tomorrow.  Lulling ourselves to sleep with the notion that it is ‘just’ science fiction and that it will never happen is not helpful. The fact that Harkaway is an established and respected science fiction author and someone well acquainted with imagining the future should be evidence enough not to dismiss out of hand what he is saying. One of my “That’s–exactly–what–I’ve–been–saying” moments occurred as I read the following passage:

Understanding is important. It’s important to us as individuals because if we can’t grasp the nature of our world we’ll make lousy decisions about it and feel utterly out of control. That feeling in turn has adverse practical consequences in terms of stress, adverse economic consequences because it makes us unwilling to invest, borrow, or lend, and adverse political consequences because it makes us likely to focus on issues immediately touching upon us at the at the expense of vital but more distant ones” (p. xiv)

If The Blind Giant does nothing else, I hope it helps spurs many to engage with issues which may not immediately touch upon us, but that we are well placed today to help shape and direct in preparation for tomorrow.

I am not sure whether it is his storytelling ability to draw the reader into the text, or his grasp of the core details of a range of complex issues that makes the book what it is.  What is certain is the ease with which he is able to weave together issues which seemingly are unrelated but soon become starkly so. Topics such as neuroscience sit alongside discussion of social media and its impact on the Arab Spring and the phenomena which he calls “peak digital”: “the brief and impetuous flowering of digital technology during which we inhabit a fantasy of infinite resources at low market prices”. 

Structure

The book is structured into three parts, each consisting of 3–4 chapters all of which are well constructed, easy to follow and not too long. Part I tends to look to the past and present, addressing subjects such as information overload, identifying the disruptive effect of digital technology and how it compounds issues of law, privacy and justice. The question of space and social interaction is one of the aspects picked up in part II, as the author looks at work, play and sacred space. The phenomena of the ‘crowd’ both in terms of problem solving and problem causing are tackled here.  Finally Part III looks to how we engage with technology and what it means to be human in the digital world. Harkaway offers some useful and creative pointers (who would have imagined soda bread making an appearance in a book on the digital age?!) and tools to help us engage and question the future.

Naturally technological

So what is Harkaway’s take on all of this? As a prolific user of social media and the like you could be mistaken for assuming that he would be extremely pro–technology. In actual fact he arrives at a place somewhere between overt pessimism and blind optimism.

In questioning what it means to be human in the digital age, his frames his response by an understanding of technology as a human endeavour. In wanting to better ourselves and the world in which we live, we have developed technology therefore forming part of how we express our humanness.  This does not necessarily mean that all technology is under our command and will continue to be our servant; we have to choose and proactively decide how to use it as a servant or face the consequences of us becoming the servant of technology. Hence the book compels us to engage with the question as to how the human remains in the process of engaging with new and emerging technologies.

The book serves as an alarm clock to wake us from our techno–slumber. Some may recall Bill Joy’s article in Wired magazine entitled “Why the Future doesn’t need us” in which he argues emerging technologies provide a much greater danger to humanity than any technology before it has ever presented. Expressing concerning about increasing computer power, Joy’s fear is that computers become more intelligent than we are, leading to such dystopian scenarios as robot rebellion. Harkaway is clearly not coming from the same angle as Joy. To start with, I suspect Harkaway would be all too ready to acknowledge Joy’s stronger position to comment on computational power et al, given Joy’s position as Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems. Nevertheless, while acknowledging Joy’s fears Harkaway is more optimistic due to the fact that it is precisely because of the scenarios Joy describes. Owing to the immense computational power available to us it is imperative that humans engage with the questions that new technologies pose in order to shape the future, as opposed to the future shaping us. In Harkaway’s own words: “The hard truth is: get involved, or get sidelined. The future is not set. It’s being made right now”. 

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