something incredible is underway in this easy movement from machine to reality.1° The New Caste takes these moves, this easy slip from their keyboards and programs to our lives, for granted. They adjust code and networks and formulas; they watch the effects on us. They do it again. The idea that such a move is natural, comfortable even, reveals a new and important temprament. It draws a line betweent the people writing the code and those who are snapped about in the world they are coding.
Do you know who decided what you see when you search? Do you understand what the data on your phone reveals about you? Who will snip at and work on your DNA? Your children? Are you trading stocks against some invisible high-velocity connected master who will always be one profitable nanosecond ahead of you? In this sense, network power involves something very much like the intentional creation of concealment. Your Internet search results, for instance, contain a sharp tension. Yes, data from all over the planet, from all of history sits rather amazingly in front of you. But that bit of computer code deciding what you see is engaged ina kind of digital book burning: It’s making whole sections of knowledge invisible even as it is unearthing an ever more precise answer for whatever question you have. What don’t you see? - is a question that hints not only at what is left out of your search horizon, but generally at the way in which connected systems establish necessary gates. Part of a Seventh Sense, then, is the ability not merely to look at the virtual world and know how it becomes insidiously real, but also to feel that all the connected points of the real world - markets, weapons, social movements - must be pulled upon by code and links and networks. “Any technology depended upon,” as The Critical Engineering Manifesto, says is “both a challenge and a threat.”©? Human experience is, we know, unboxable, uncontainable - our joy, hopes, sense of freedom, these all defy boxing. Yet here, all around us, are containers that affect our every choice. Who knows what happens inside all the difficult boxes?
The creeping, essential opacity of power now reveals a twisted puzzle, a really fresh aspect of this New Caste and the revolution they are making: As much as they are in the business of making knowledge widely and instantly available, they are also madly black boxing our world. This breeds a sly, unintended (I think) tension with Kant’s Enlightenment admonition to “Dare to Know.” Would you like to Dare to know why your computer is secure? How your genetic information will be studied and used? How encryption works? Mostly the answer to is: You can’t know. It’s too complex - and, anyhow, if we told you it would make the whole system less secure. There is nothing disingenuous here: You likely wouldn’t understand. It is too complex. You'd be lost at the first turn into strange technical language, where simple words like “object” or “edge” have specific, essential, different meanings. And telling you would, in fact, expose you and everyone else to all sorts of risks. It’s as if we’ve returned to that famous debate of millennia past, the one lingering between Athens and Jerusalem: Could the world be known and atomized and understood as the Greeks would have it? Or was mystery, inscrutability and opacity the nature of truth,
168 This seems in a way: See, for instance, Bret Victor in his speech, “Inventing on Principle” at CUSEC 2012 Turing Complete Conference available online. 169 “ Any technology depended upon”: The Critical Engineering Manifesto, as above.
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