Botched Little Animals

We should own what we make.

Anatomy of a Laboratory Mouse

I was reading a recent interview with the music critic Simon Reynolds — I reviewed his book Retromania years ago — when I stopped short at this:

In one of his blogs, [the late English writer Mark Fisher] talked about going to the countryside and how amazing it was. He said, ‘It really opened my eyes. I now see birds as marvellous little machines’. And I thought, why not see machines as botched little animals?

Yes, I said. Yes.

Ever since the rise, in the seventeenth century, of the mechanistic view of nature, we have been quick to use technological metaphors to explain the phenomenon of life. Declared Descartes, “There is no difference between the machines built by artisans and the diverse bodies that nature alone composes.” The human brain itself — that mysterious maker of metaphors — has through the ages been portrayed as (a) a hydraulic pumping system, (b) a clock, (c) a telephone switching network, (d) a digital computer, and, now, (e) a large language model. In constructing machines, we also construct ways of seeing the world, and ourselves.

Technological metaphors simplify — they put slippery nature in our grip — but they also distort. Maybe, as Reynolds suggests, it would be more illuminating to take the opposite tack: to use the living world as a source of metaphors for our own creations. From this view, we can see ourselves as imperfect artificers, creators of machines whose inevitable flaws reflect our own shortcomings. We make botched little animals because we’re botched little animals ourselves.

We build all these systems and we complain about them as if they’re out of control, as if they’re controlling us, but we build them. You look at the internet, it’s all boiling with human emotions — mostly, unfortunately, the ugliest kind. All these machineries and technologies and mediation systems are all fueled by humanity, they didn’t just spring out of nowhere.

In the course of writing Superbloom over the last few years, I found myself losing patience with the prevailing critique of social media and the internet, the one that portrays the technology as something imposed on us by an imperious external force (progress or capitalism or Big Tech or what-have-you) and that in turn depicts us as the hapless, helpless victims of that force’s exploitative and manipulative powers. The problem with this line of inquiry is not that it’s invalid — it’s valid, and it’s necessary — but that it’s incomplete. It skirts around our own complicity. It too easily separates our botched little animals from our botched little selves.

One of the central arguments of the book is that the commercial internet, and social media in particular, is a machine fine-tuned to sense our desires and fulfill them. If “the algorithm” manipulates us, it does so by giving us what we want. The machine’s manipulative power is secondary to, and dependent on, the pleasure it provides.

The moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre stressed the importance of distinguishing “between what we desire and the choiceworthy” and “between what pleases those others whom we desire to please and the choiceworthy.” Making such distinctions has always been difficult. Digital media, with its hyperactive solicitude and its automation of the act of choosing, makes them more difficult than ever — and more important than ever. Because technology is a repository of human desire, a full critique of any machine needs also to be a critique of human desire. We’re the machine’s makers before we’re its victims.