The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking

Ted Roszak

One-line summary:

Overview/Main Points

The computer has gained cultlike status largely due to "brainwashing" by the software makers, technocrats, and others who have a vested (commercial or political) interest in seeing it succeed. The brainwashing has taken these primary forms:

The "information society", "information economy", etc. Shannon's work on information theory has muddied the meaning of the term from its original connotation of something like "semantically useful fact that fits into a larger context" to "anything you can encode digitally". No one knows what information is, but people continue to believe that having access to more of it is a panacea. Similarly "knowledge".
The confusion that computers somehow mimic what people do, leading to the AI prognostications of human-level AI by the end of the millennium. This is reinforced through the misunderstanding by the public of such misleading statements as "computers never make mistakes" and "computers can perform computations much faster than a human". Presumably this reinforces the power of the "technical elite" and is daunting and dehumanizing to "the rest of us".
The notion, completely unsupported by statistics, that being "computer literate" (whatever that means; it used to mean programming, now it can mean anything up to and including bad edutainment) is essential or even useful for the job market, or that it is a generally useful skill in the same sense as reading or writing. In fact, "computer literate" people often end up in the computerized equivalent of mind-numbing minimum-wage temporary jobs anyway. Computer literacy in and of itself solves nothing economically.

Computers can be called a "mature technology" because they are now creating problems as significant as those they solve. This includes concentration of power in the hands of the wrong people. For example, the stock market crash of 1987 was triggered by programmed sell-offs; most money in the market today is made not from the "real economy" (manufacturing, services, etc.) but the "information economy", which is nothing more than the ethereal "derivative" financial products that can only exist in a world where minute-by-minute tracking of enormous volumes of data is possible.

Relevance

Flaws

The book is riddled with technical shortsightednesses, occasional misunderstandings about some aspect of computers' purported abilities (misunderstandings not unlike those the author laments), and a view of the computer science community that is far too shallow and simplistic -- a community of "freakish minority" hackers (author's quote) who, like the huckster "data merchants", have been blinded to all but the Godlike power they feel from programming, and have used the computer to supplant real-life experiences from personal interaction (email) to creating art to running simulated physics experiments instead of real ones in order to provide clean, synthetic results that match the theory.

The truth is that people have always been suckers for cults and advertising and mass media, and have historically been sheep more often than they have been independent thinkers, so what the author is pointing out is ways in which the computer is just the most recent instance of this unfortunate fact of life. Like many inventions before it, it "solves" some problem only at the expense of creating some new ones (downsizing and a demoralized workforce; an artificial "paper economy" in the stock market; an "underclass" in America's schools where many disenfranchised students, disillusioned by the way in which they have been introduced to computers, become technological refugees). This insight is the author's self-stated basis for the subtitle "Neo-Luddite Treatise...".

For all its flaws, the book makes important messages about the large-scale social effects of the computer revolution. Those of us who would claim to care need to know what we're getting into. Joe Bob says check it out.

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