(2024-11-26) Guinn David Bowies Alien

Rusy Guinn: David Bowie's Alien. This is Part 1 of a subscriber-only preview of my upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. We will release the first five chapters through the end of the year.

David Bowie: I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.
BBC: It’s just a tool though, isn’t it?
Bowie: No, it’s not. No, it’s an alien lifeform.
David Bowie, from a 1999 interview

On the surface, Bowie’s internet prediction doesn’t seem all that impressive

When we watched late ‘90s David Bowie predict that the internet would be big, we weren’t exactly watching Ziggy Stardust prophesying Tim Berners-Lee’s hypertext project at CERN from a green room in Nagoya in 1973.

Still, in a moment when our imagination about the internet was dominated by prospective commercial applications, Bowie saw something that most people missed. Where others saw a tool, he saw an alien

The alien force he described was one that would transform the relationship between those who transmitted ideas and symbols and art, and those who received and consumed and interpreted them. Bowie’s alien was not the internet after all. It was social networking.

He goes on to present the entirely terrestrial argument that social networks would not simply extend, improve, or modify the communication of human ideas and invention through present media. Instead, social networks would transform how human ideas and invention were communicated into an entirely new and unfamiliar thing with unpredictable consequences.

Many technologies seem alien to us at first, of course

The alienness of social networks is a different kind of different. I will argue in this book that it has only three analogs in human history: the emergence of symbolic communication, spoken language, and written language. These developments are not only alien because they are unfamiliar; they are alien because they are alienating. They create distance between the versions of ourselves that existed before and after them. When humanity adopts a new mode of transforming thought into language, it changes something fundamental about what it means to be human. It changes how we tell and understand stories. It changes how we think. It changes how much of our thought is truly our own. (alienation)

the alien is not the medium through which we communicate as individuals. The alien is the modality through which we communicate as a species.

a change in the dominant modality of human communication necessarily changes the very structure and source of the thoughts that lead to any communication

When that changes, it cannot help but to also affect thinking that never escapes our lips, hands, pens, or keyboards. Once humanity knows writing, it doesn’t abandon the spoken word. But it can never structure its thoughts or behave the way it did before, even when telling a story aloud. Once you are part of a writing society, you can never again think as someone who only knows the spoken word. Once you are part of a network society, you can never again think as someone who only knows the written word.

In writing about the adoption of written language in Orality and Literacy, the late Jesuit priest and philosopher Walter Ong described this as ‘restructuring human consciousness’.

the most powerful and alienating feature of each such transformation in human consciousness, is the engine for the steady march toward the externalization of human consciousness

Consciousness is a complicated and controversial term. It is also vulnerable to all manner of transcendental woo. So let me be as precise as it is possible to be about a topic that resists precision. When I use the term consciousness, I mean an emergent property of the individual human brain which represents the continuous synthesis of sensory inputs, memories, our capacity for abstract thought, and our subjective perception of our own identity and experiences to arrive at working theories about what we think to determine what we will do.

In simpler terms, let us define consciousness as how our brains put together what we see, what we can imagine, what we remember, who we are, and how we feel to create an inner voice that tells a continuously changing story about our life and our world.

What I mean by consciousness is simply the inner voice from which we derive the will to think, speak, and act.

When I say that these language modalities bring about the externalization of human consciousness, I mean that we take part of that inner voice and replace it with an outer voice. That is, we replace some of the stories our brain creates with the stories that other people tell us. This book is about how these stories change when humanity moves from symbols to speech to writing to networks, and about how they remain the same.

Most importantly, this book is about how social networks are creating a stable modality of deeply abstracted, continuous, omnidirectional, mass-distributed, infinitely accessible, and irresistibly human stories that live forever in an ever-present outer voice.

The evolution of the anatomically modern human brain makes us not only willing but eager to make that outer voice a more significant part of every decision, every calculation, every act of cognition, and every act of identity we undertake. It must also be about how human symbols, languages, and story have themselves evolved even more rapidly to suit the way the human brain learns and grows at various stages of our lives.

Social networks do not merely externalize consciousness. They outsource consciousness.

transformation of an unrelenting outer voice into what we are hard-wired to perceive as a part of our inner voice. The result is that over time, ‘part of our inner voice’ is precisely what that outer voice becomes.

This is not a story about how connecting billions of human brains and creating infinitely accessible memory for their ideas might kick off a transhumanist revolution.

This is not a story about the engineering of a dopamine economy or the growing mistrust in news media. This is not a story about cancel culture.

The story of the outsourcing of consciousness is the story of the upheaval of 70 millennia of the public square, about an alien force changing how we spoke, wrote, and communicated. How we formed ideas, attached ourselves to ideas, internalized the meaning of ideas, and acted based on those judgments. The story of the outsourcing of consciousness is about our relationships with words, ideas, and stories themselves. Therefore, it must be about loneliness[[ and innovation, about alienation and connection, about unity and fragmentation.

possible to consider what individual human brains can do to recapture some of that autonomy of mind. Reshoring consciousness, if you will.

To do this we must explore several topics. We must understand how our brains evolved, how language emerged, and how stories organized themselves into patterns of their own. We must understand the distinctions between the evolutionary impulse to encode our consciousness into the stories we tell and to decode ideas from the stories we hear. We must understand how to distinguish between cognitive universals, locally powerful cultural stories, and culturally inert recurring Narrative elements. We must understand what it is about symbolizing, speaking, writing, and networking that have the capacity to alter human consciousness in the first place. If we are to do all of this, then we should begin where any true story about storytelling must: dick jokes and Hamlet.