How did we get here? … Teh Internet Is Serious at the Royal Court in London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
Who saw it coming – a future that reanimated a dystopian past? Who could have believed, in the 1960s, that half a century on from Harold Wilson’s speech about the “white heat of technology”, young men in Britain would be looking at public beheadings on their laptops and, liking what they saw, resolving to join a crusade in the Middle East, a jihad against the infidel? Not me, that’s for sure.
In the 1960s, in our family, a telephone was something possessed by pathetic show-offs with more money than sense. We got along just fine without one. Now, I am indignant when my iPhone says “No service” or “Not delivered”. I am contemptuous of patches of retrograde air, air that is not crammed with all the information in the world, all of it sitting there patiently waiting for the few keystrokes that might summon it.
How did I get from there to here? I have only the vaguest idea. It all happened so fast – so fast that I do not know which of two things to be amazed at. Should I be amazed that information technology has changed the world so much? Or should I be amazed that it has changed the world so little?
I went to the theatre this week. Lots of people do. It has never been more popular. This play, Teh Internet Is Serious Business, was at the Royal Court. Its author, Tim Price, told the story of the defunct hacking group LulzSec and offered a dramatic interpretation of cyberspace in the process. What a strange thing – that this ancient artform should be recruited to animate life behind a screen. What a strange thing anyway, that in a world full of people with phones clamped to their ears, there are flocks of folk turning up at one of the increasingly few places where using a phone is seen as an inexcusable solecism. At the theatre, in the 21st century, one stands astride the old Elizabethans and the new.
We new Elizabethans talk all the time about internet communities. But I do not suppose I am the only one who, when I picture an “internet community” in my head, sees a beaten male in a mucky old chair, grim face illuminated by the flickering light of the tool that drives his fantasies. New technology – new prejudices.
No such people appeared in Price’s play, only their fantasy selves. Online, the people from LulzSec lived in an anarchic land of non-stop festival protest, where wayward cleverness was harnessed to mock and damage a corporate world too arrogant to see how pathetic its own defences were. The play is set in a garish, metaphorical playground full of frustrated children, angry at a world that seems indifferent to their views, desperate to wield power themselves.
If only these smart kids had been adult and mature, the play invites one to think, what great lives they could have had in our sophisticated modern world. Instead, presumably, the people who were identified and convicted as members of Lulzsec are in their mucky old chairs right now, their faces in harsh shadow because they are banned from using the internet.
Except that perhaps the trouble with the guys from LulzSec was that they were not quite childish enough. Visit Digital Revolution, the Barbican Centre’s exhibition that boasts of being “the most comprehensive presentation of digital creativity ever to be staged in the UK” and you can quite easily form the impression that games and play are all that technology has to offer.
If the Lulzsec guys had been content to spend their time playing Call of Duty, exchanging videos of kittens or binge-watching dramas on Netflix, they would presumably have been considered normal, productive members of society. Their big problem was that they wanted to be active, not passive. They were not happy simply to be consumers, because they did not think much of what they were being asked to consume or why they were being asked to consume it. Their idea of “digital revolution” was rather more radical than assembling a collection of gaming consoles through the ages, of which there is quite a bit in the Barbican’s show.
Not, of course, that play really is all the internet has to offer. One can sit at home all day, gathering news of a world in crisis, then hotly debating whether there should be “boots on the ground in Iraq” or whether it is OK to bomb Syria without Syria’s permission. It is easy to feel involved in such debates. It is easy to feel like your opinion matters. It is easy to feel that, with your band of online conspirators, you are changing the world. Except that there is truth in the contemptuous word “clicktivism”. Once it was said that knowledge was power. Now that knowledge is there for anyone’s taking, it has become clear that only power is power, and that it is still acquired by humans in the way that humans have always acquired it – through violence.
Maybe technology allows human beings to know much, much more about their fellow human beings than is wise. Our vanities, our prejudices, our foibles, our failures of understanding, our anger, our hatreds – the internet seethes with it all. Does all that in itself shake our faith in our idea of humans as developed, refined and civilised? What is civilisation, after all, but the collective and settled expression of our ability to move away from savagery?
Yet it is obvious, on the internet, that collective and settled is in short supply. One person’s idealism is another person’s stupidity. One person’s concept of responsible behaviour is another person’s concept of cowardice. One person’s notion of sophistication is another person’s notion of ignorance.
If you are looking for someone to despise, someone to perceive as different to you in all the wrong ways, then the internet is a good place to look. Only one place beats it for that – the real world, where people hurt, torture and kill other people like they always have, then do one thing that is new – post it proudly on the web.
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