Digital Dystopia and Our Misery

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Robert Oppenheimer, 1945

Oppenheimer quoted a sentence in the Bhagavad Gita when he witnessed the attempted detonation of the atomic bomb in Jornada del Muerto. Fear and great regret spread as soon as he realized that his efforts so far would only result in mass extermination. In the name of justice, innocent people must be sacrificed. Even the American generals insisted that we could only stop the savagery of fascism in this way, and Oppenheimer could do nothing but obey it. “Physicists are well aware of their great sin; it’s a memory they can’t deny,” said Oppenheimer two years after World War 2.

The fear of science and technology does not end there. In 1949 George Orwell published 1984: a timeless novel that predicts that one day we will know a sophisticated world with paradoxical logic. This book’s appearance caught the audience’s attention with its predictions that seemed ridiculous but also scary. Some people even compare Orwell’s dystopia with Aldous Huxley’s version of dystopia in Brave New World. Nevertheless, it is not the justification between the two that is important to debate or even wait for; we still have another dystopian prophecy two decades later.

Right in 1984, we got acquainted with a literary genre that was quite phenomenal: Cyberpunk. It is one of the children of science fiction which focuses on conditions where technology is so advanced. Still, life is so miserable (high-tech, low-life). All of this begins with the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, which imagines a life where humans are forced to live in two worlds (real and virtual) without being able to have dual consciousness. Neuromancer, which also describes how humans in the future will have to live in hardship amid the onslaught of highly advanced technology, once again generates fear and laughter like 1984. At that time, it might still be challenging to imagine how the predictions of these writers became a reality that attacked our daily livelihood.

On the other hand, academics that are already passionate about this topic make a new study: Cyberculture. One study focuses on the relationship between everyday life and the contribution of technology to it. A technodeterminist view that assumes that all developments in life are determined by technology also emerged (one of the justifications for this is the role of printing presses, steam engines, electric generators, and computers in the progress of the times).

The most tantalizing thing for intellectuals is Donna Haraway’s view: finally, we must recognize the term nature-culture to confirm that technology and nature are inseparable. Culture (along with technology) always emerges from nature, whether in the sense that all the raw materials come from nature or humans need nature to start creating technology. The union between the natural and the sophisticated later created the concept of Cyborg: human and machine all at once. This study’s results can easily be seen in cyberpunk works such as Blade Runner, Akira, Matrix, Alita: Battle Angel, Ghost in The Shell, and many more. Nevertheless, the biggest question is: will we face such a world?

A decade after Neuromancer appeared, we found that the internet had taken over the world. Humans can quickly obtain various information just by opening their computer. Shortly after, Web 2.0 services appeared. It allows internet users to create content on its site — no more one-way communication controlled by the server. The internet seems to be a world full of freedom with this innovation. Everyone has the right to make anything and like everything in their minds. Authoritarian power is being questioned with the emergence of free spaces for this audience. No wonder we often witness significant events triggered by the habit of people reading and discussing in cyberspace. We slowly discover a second world like in Neuromancer, but with freedom.

Not quite there; The economy is changing rapidly with the advent of the internet and its digitalization. We find many new jobs with his presence. All things that smell analogue are starting to be abandoned, and one can obtain them all through cyberspace. We no longer need someone to go to the office because they can work in front of the screen. Big industries are starting to get many threats because of the emergence of creative people who can make things quickly. Slowly the world of consumption and production knows no boundaries because Web 2.0 allows us to be both simultaneously.

Moreover, national boundaries are increasingly unclear, so people from third-world countries can easily access jobs from developed countries. A more accessible way of working accompanies their income. Again, the question is, are we completely free?

In the late 2000s, we got another new thing from the internet: social media. It has finally changed not only the way we get knowledge or make money but also socialize. Our relationships with others are not sufficiently proven in the real world but by following, adding, and interacting in cyberspace. The development of gadget technology is increasingly supporting it; it allows humans to finally be online at any time and continue to live the lives of two different worlds. Borrowing Luciano Floridi’s term, we live an onlife life (online and offline) where the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds are blurred. The bitter thing is: that one must live this all with a single consciousness.

Given all these technological developments, we must begin to acknowledge the existence of a binary opposition that we believe between natural knowledge and civilization. That the sophisticated is always better than the obsolete or primitive. We believe technology always brings progress and luxury to life as it was created: to make it easier for us to face all problems. However, is it true?

The strangest reality of information technology and our daily life is that many of them we get for free. Every day we can access anything with just internet credit or free wifi, and all of that is not pirated content. We can read the news freely without having to bother buying newspapers. We can call friends without the need to go or call expensively. We can also listen to a variety of music without the need to buy a cassette in the store. Then, if it is free, don’t we pay them anything?

Of course, there is, and one of them is information about ourselves and all our habits. Perhaps Huxley and Orwell’s predictions were starting to look right here. What we do in cyberspace is free labour that we provide to various companies. We give all the data free to make them understand what information and items we need. Undoubtedly, there will be advertisements for the products we need one day. With a large number too. They will no longer see us as humans but as mere data. It is just a matter of what we click on every day and statistics that show the patterns of our activities on the internet. Supervision is one of the primary modes in what we call Surveillance Capitalism. Furthermore, remember that we no longer need to avoid panopticons everywhere in the form of watchtowers, police, or CCTV. Every day we meet panopticons in the form of smartphones and other devices.

Enough here? Nope. One thing to realize since the advent of the internet is that information is becoming more accessible. Still, it is also becoming more and more abundant. We do not know how much news is on Twitter’s timeline in one day. Alternatively, even we cannot access our friends’ news thoroughly on Instagram. Time is constantly sacrificed to access information, but the problem is that it is unlimited and ever-increasing. So the current economic style is not an information economy because it is scattered everywhere without needing to be searched. What becomes rare when information starts to explode is attention. Thus, the attention economy is what we deal with daily. We are dealing with various parties who demand our attention in various ways. No doubt, even if big companies like Google or Facebook develop attentional engineering so that our eyes are never distracted from the screen. Every day we are constantly distracted by our own devices. There is no longer a world where people can linger focused on their activities. Also, throw away all the notion that what we do on the internet is full of freedom: almost everything has been directed by attention engineering.

Freedom to work? I think this is the most ridiculous. Maybe millennials are a generation that can work flexibly: it is as simple as waking up and staring at a screen to earn money. Nevertheless, what is never realized from it all is its vulnerability. Precarious. We all face a new working class that is more vulnerable than the proletariat. Borrowing a term from Guy Standing, this class is a precariat. It is a class that has no guarantees in its life. We never know whether freelancers can get a pension. We never know if they can keep working odd jobs like that. Furthermore, again, there is no guarantee for his life. Never mind paying for insurance; imagining that next year, you can get a project or not is so difficult.

Precariat platforms like Upwork exacerbate this vulnerability. Humans from third-world countries are often trapped by the freedom of working hours and standard wages of developed countries. Nevertheless, this signifies that they can work all day long and are employed because the wages are cheap. Problems will arise when a more reliable but cheaper worker appears: the worker will suddenly lose his job. So, what must be done is to race to the bottom; people compete to apply for lower wages amid crazy competition. Another problem, this platform is more violent than that. If a worker is seen inactive for a few days, he can lose his reputation and job opportunities. This means: that in addition to having to work for lower wages, he also has to work constantly. Thankfully, this case has not happened much in Indonesia.

Then the matter of our stupidity and intelligence with the extended mind. Google seems to have become part of our bodies. Whatever things we ask, Google can always answer it. Just try to mention one by one: home addresses, difficult questions at school, holidays, current events, celebrity gossip, historical facts, even our weton and neptu. We lazily make Google (and other devices) smarter through the data they retrieve, and we get dumber and more reckless for being too lazy to think, memorize, or even realize what we are doing. We no longer need to look for someone who can write about unique knowledge because Google has already done that for us. Then, what is the use of thinking for today’s humans?

The frightening projection of all these technological advances is the powerlessness of humans and nature. We have seen how nature is being destroyed because science is used arbitrarily for our greed. We will slowly find everyday humans increasingly vulnerable, weak, and stupid because of their creation. Oppenheimer’s fear of technology that will destroy the world instantly seems unquestionable, at least until the Third World War occurs.

After all, until now, weapons of mass destruction have not produced the effects of the atomic bombs many years ago. Even more fearful is the paralysis that evolving technology has promised. We will see laziness and stupidity as part of everyday life that slowly constructs our dystopia. Our desire to continually be the most sophisticated is at the root of the fruit we are about to reap: our unwillingness to recognize that all this progress is another form of a darkening world.

Is there a solution?

Maybe, in your dream.