solution to a tricky programming problem demonstrates mastery over code. (The fact that humor also often serves to unmask the ridiculous pieties of the powerful is undoubtedly also part of its appeal.)
Systematization is especially alluring because it doesn’t offer power just in the virtual sphere. It can also provide a way to understand and navigate social situations. I learned this firsthand when, as an awkward seventeen-year-old with all the trappings of geek experience (the fantasy books, the introversion, the obsession with HTML and BBSes), I flew across the country to accept the wrong job.
In a late-junior-year panic, I’d applied for every internship I could find. One group, a nuclear disarmament organization based in San Francisco, had gotten back to me, and without much further investigation, I’d signed up. It was only when I walked into the office that I realized I’d signed up to be a can vaser. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t imagine a worse fit, but because I had no other prospects, I decided to stick out the day of training.
Canvasing, the trainer explained, was a science as much as an art. And the laws were powerful. Make eye contact. Explain why the issue matters to you. And after you ask for money, let your target say the first thing. I was intrigued: Asking people for money was scary, but the briefing hinted at a hidden logic. I committed the rules to memory.
When I walked through my first grassy Palo Alto lawn, my heart was in my throat. Here I was at the doorstep of someone I’d never met, asking for $50. The door opened and a harried woman with long gray hair peeped out. I took a deep breath, and launched into my spiel. I asked. I waited. And then she nodded and went to get her checkbook.
The euphoria I felt wasn’t about the $50. It was about something bigger—the promise that the chaos of human social life could be reduced to rules that I could understand, follow, and master. Conversation with strangers had never come naturally to me—I didn’t know what to talk about. But the hidden logic of getting someone I’d never met to trust me with $50 had to be the tip of a larger iceberg. By the end of a summer traipsing through the yards of Palo Alto and Marin, I was a master canvaser.
Systematization is a great method for building functional software. And the quantitative, scientific approach to social observation has given us many great insights into human phenomena as well. Dan Ariely researches the “predictably irrational” decisions we make on a daily basis; his findings help us make better decisions. The blog at OkCupid.com, a math-driven dating Web site, identifies patterns in the e-mails flying back and forth between people to make them better daters (“Howdy” is a better opener than “Hi”).
But there are dangers in taking the method too far. As I discussed in chapter 5, the most human acts are often the most unpredictable ones. Because systematizing works much of the time, it’s easy to believe that by reducing and brute-forcing an understanding of any system, you can control it. And as a master of a self-created universe, it’s easy to start to view people as a means to an end, as variables to be manipulated on a mental spreadsheet, rather than as breathing, thinking beings. It’s difficult both to systematize and to appeal to the fullness of human life—its unpredictability, emotionality, and surprising quirks—at the same time.
David Gelernter, a Yale computer scientist, barely survived an encounter with an explosive package sent by the Unabomber; his eyesight and right hand are permanently damaged as a result. But Gelernter is hardly the technological utopian Ted Kaczinski believed him to be.
“When you do something in the public sphere,” Gelernter told a reporter, “it behooves you to know something about what the public sphere is like. How did this country get this way? What was the history of the relationship between technology and the public? What’s the history of political exchange? The problem is, hackers don’t tend to know any of that. And that’s why it worries me to have these people in charge of public policy. Not because they’re bad, just because they’re uneducated.”
Understanding the rules that govern a messy, complex world makes it intelligible and navigable. But systematizing inevitably involves a trade-off—rules give you some control, but you lose nuance and texture, a sense of deeper connection. And when a strict systematizing sensibility entirely shapes social space (as it often does online), the results aren’t always pretty.
The New Architects
The political power of design has long been obvious to urban planners. If you take the Wantagh State Parkway from Westbury to Jones Beach on Long Island, at intervals you’ll pass under several low, vine-covered overpasses. Some of them have as little as nine feet of clearance. Trucks aren’t allowed on the parkway—they wouldn’t fit. This may seem like a design oversight, but it’s not.
There are about two hundred of these low bridges, part of the grand design for the New York region pioneered by Robert Moses. Moses was a master deal maker, a friend of the great politicians of the time, and an unabashed elitist. According to his biographer, Robert A. Caro, Moses’s vision for Jones Beach was as an island getaway for middle-class white families. He included the low bridges to make it harder for low-income (and mostly black) New Yorkers to get to the beach, as public buses—the most common form of transport for inner-city residents—couldn’t clear the overpasses.
The passage in Caro’s
On the face of it, a bridge is just a bridge. But often, as Winner points out, architectural and design decisions are underpinned by politics as much as aesthetics. Like goldfish that grow only large enough for the tank they’re in, we’re contextual beings: how we behave is dictated in part by the shape of our environments. Put a playground in a park, and you encourage one kind of use; build a memorial, and you encourage another.
As we spend more of our time in cyberspace—and less of our time in what geeks sometimes call meatspace, or the offline world—Moses’s bridges are worth keeping in mind. The algorithms of Google and Facebook may not be made of steel and concrete, but they regulate our behavior just as effectively. That’s what Larry Lessig, a law professor and one of the early theorists of cyberspace, meant when he famously wrote that “code is law.”
If code is law, software engineers and geeks are the ones who get to write it. And it’s a funny kind of law, created without any judicial system or legislators and enforced nearly perfectly and instantly. Even with antivandalism laws on the books, in the physical world you can still throw a rock through the window of a store you don’t like. You might even get away with it. But if vandalism isn’t part of the design of an online world, it’s simply impossible. Try to throw a rock through a virtual storefront, and you just get an error.
Back in 1980, Winner wrote, “Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time.” This isn’t to say that today’s designers have malevolent impulses, of course—or even that they’re always explicitly trying to shape society in certain ways. It’s just to say that they can—in fact, they can’t help but shape the worlds they build.
To paraphrase Spider-Man creator Stan Lee, with great power comes great responsibility. But the programmers who brought us the Internet and now the filter bubble aren’t always game to take on that responsibility. The Hacker Jargon File, an online repository of geek culture, puts it this way: “Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas.” Too often, the executives of Facebook, Google, and other socially important companies play it coy: They’re social revolutionaries when it suits them and neutral, amoral businessmen when it doesn’t. And both approaches fall short in important ways.
Playing It Coy
When I first called Google’s PR department, I explained that I wanted to know how Google thought about its enormous curatorial power. What was the code of ethics, I asked, that Google uses to determine what to show to
