You may not have heard of New York-based tech writer and software engineer David Auerbach, but you are almost certainly familiar with his work. In fact, it’s possible you’ve used one or two of his innovations today.
He has had stints working at both Microsoft and Google. “Really arcane backend server stuff,” he tells the Listener on Zoom from his home. While at Microsoft in 1999, he introduced smiley face emoticons to Messenger. And then, as the title of a blog he once wrote had it, “I Built That ‘So-and-So Is Typing’ Feature in Chat. And I’m not sorry.” Yes, he’s the three-blinking dots guy. “Unlike emoticons, this was done alongside some other people. But my name is on the patent,” he says.
Since then, he has written widely, perceptively and often critically, mainly on internet and tech issues. Much of his work can be found at his website, davidauerba.ch. But it’s his early hits that people remember and talk to him about.
The musical analogy is one with which he would be comfortable. Before we even start the interview about his new book, the ominously titled Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities, he has something he needs to say.
“I’ve been a close follower of New Zealand music for a long time. I’ve heard a lot of bands from Dunedin and Christchurch. I saw the Chills in New York last October. I’d last seen [Martin Phillipps] 25 years earlier. And actually, I don’t know if you know Bailter Space, but they’re playing here next week.”
So far, so Flying Nun fanatic, but how did he get to be a software engineer and respected commentator?
“I always loved computers,” he says. “I programmed from a young age. At the same time, I was very aware of how they didn’t capture the world. And I was also into literature and philosophy.”
So saying, he disappears, returning moments later to display a book called The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy.
“Things like that impact my thinking. If I have a unique sensibility to offer, it’s out of that eclecticism.” (He also blogged his reading of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time over three years.) He says at the core of his work is “a significant interest in how reality is represented both to ourselves and on computers, and how the representation of it around computers is changing how we think of reality”.
Which brings us back to his book and the Meganet. What is a Meganet?
“It’s a combination of computer networks and the millions of people who are constantly connected to them and updating them and shaping them, such that they evolve faster than any group of people can control or observe.”
In other words, networks responding to users’ feedback are constantly altered by that feedback in ways that are out of the hands of the network owners. “You’re never stepping into the same Meganet twice, because by the time you look at it again, thousands and thousands of other people have already been shaping it.”
The Meganet, he says, is distinguished by volume, velocity, virality: it’s big, it’s fast and it’s contagious.
Although one person’s influence on Facebook has only a small impact, the social network has so many people using it so much of the time that collectively they have a massive effect.
We also see the phenomenon at work in the stock market: “a spontaneous group of people can send a stock soaring through the roof without any change in the fundamentals”.
For the people who are supposed to be in charge of these entities, “ultimately, there’s no easy way to exert top-down control, because there’s so many more inputs than there used to be”.
By the time Facebook identifies a problem and decides to do something about it, the problem has moved on. Consequently, “if you’re setting some broad target, like preventing misinformation, we don’t have the ability to filter everything on the internet in time to determine whether it’s misinformation or not. You’re not going to be able to take it all down once it’s out there.”
Which must be a problem for the people whose job titles suggest they are in charge. Auerbach believes they’d rather be thought evil than unable to control their products.
“I published something on Substack about this. OpenAI [developers of ChatGPT] published their safety statement, and they literally admitted a lack of control over their system. ‘We work hard to prevent foreseeable risk before deployment. But there’s a limit to what we can learn in a lab. That’s why we believe learning from real-world use is a critical component … of safe AI systems.’”
In other words, says Auerbach, they will try to keep an eye on things, but ultimately, “we are all guinea pigs”.
All about status
Alongside this, and bearing out the notion that Meganet is “commandeering” our lives, is the trend to model online behaviour on gaming. This may sound incongruous, especially if you are not a big Minecraft person, but perhaps you have a Fitbit, or a sleep monitor, or a diet app or a Spotify account?
“Exercise is being turned into a game,” says Auerbach. “‘Here’s your goal. Have you met the goal?’ Everything can be counted, ranked and assessed, and games give you a way to do it. That’s great, because humans are status-seeking animals.”
The Meganet has the capacity to enable this in all sorts of areas. “Your friend has travelled this much, or has watched these shows.” So, you’re inspired to emulate them to keep up. “It’s fostering competitive atmospheres that encourage people to do whatever the creators of the structures want them to do … Sometimes the aim is simply information collection. Sometimes the goal is to create incentives to buy goods.”
And, moving right along to the next level, a lot of these goods are virtual goods. At this point, the Meganet intersects with the virtual reality of the Metaverse.
Amazon and a few other big online retailers have a near monopoly on physical goods, says Auerbach, so the Metaverse is seen as a way to create a new market.
“You have online virtual real estate in the Metaverse. People are buying houses in the Metaverse. You can’t live in them. The only value these things have is whatever humans attribute to them socially. But, historically, that’s been pretty powerful. People buy all sorts of useless stuff for social status.”
Especially super-wealthy people. The notion of owning a house you can’t sleep in is hardly new to them – the super-wealthy are notorious for owning lavish homes in exotic locations that they never live in.
And this intersects with the gaming model. “‘Oh, I’ve got a virtual pet. It’s gonna race yours’, or ‘Bet on my virtual pet.’ The idea being that as long as tangibility isn’t that important, you suddenly can start creating a lot of goods.”
On a less-affluent level, many of us are proud of our virtual possessions, such as a perfectly curated My Library section on Spotify that consists of music you don’t own in physical form.
This observation prompts Auerbach to note, “I’ve got one hell of a collection of New Zealand music from the 80s and I’ve got everything by Bill Direen that I’ve been able to track down.”
The collection is “mostly CDs, though some of it is on vinyl, some vinyl rips [digitally recorded vinyl] acquired from other fans, and some streaming via Bandcamp”.
Which leads into a digression about Chris Knox, which leads to the story of how Auerbach met the late Hamish Kil-gour, co-founder of the Clean, in New York. Auerbach belongs to a food co-op where “you have to work a few hours a month to get shopping privileges. I didn’t recognise him, but I was on checkout duty and I saw his ID. ‘You’re Hamish Kilgour? Holy crap!’”
Echo chambers
Somehow, the conversation is wrenched back to his book. Between the CDs and the vinyl and the socially aware shopping, it’s clear that, no matter where his head is, this software engineer keeps his feet firmly planted in the real world.
What does he mean when he says the Meganet is “creating new types of human organisation and interaction”?
“It gets back to things like the stock market. You have the capacity for spontaneous groups of people to coalesce in ways that weren’t possible before. We still haven’t got our heads around this. We still think there’s someone leading it, but there’s not. Algorithms assist this by showing people what they like and what they engage with, so that’s going to naturally bring people closer to other people who already agree with them.”
The likely outcome is that this sophisticated communications medium is going to impede communication. “It’s leading more towards mutual incomprehensibility. You’re dealing so much with people who speak your language and feel the way you do.” And if you communicate only with people who speak like you and share your assumptions, “when you meet someone who doesn’t, it’s just incomprehensible”. There’s not even enough common ground to have differences, “because you aren’t even speaking the same language”.
He says there’s a tension that comes from having everyone around you in agreement and then occasionally being reminded there are people outside this group who “don’t even agree with any of it. On a pretty regular basis, I’m reminded there are people who literally don’t agree with me on the nature of reality. That’s tremendously anxiety provoking.” So anxiety provoking, he says, that we don’t have the time or energy to assess it. We shut out the difference.
We’re now at the end of the book’s subtitle, which says the Meganet has commandeered our “inner realities”. How exactly?
“Let’s take AIs. They’re going to be producing a lot of content, and their content is going to be shaped by the majority voice. So, you’re going to see an increasing amount of homogenisation.
“There’s going to be more pressure to use a more limited and less flexible language.”
Collections of hashtags
The hashtag itself is a model for how we perceive reality. We are starting not just to think in hashtags, but to see others as collections of hashtags: #metoo, #blacklivesmatter, #Maga. “These labels become powerful. That is our inner reality – we now see people more as collections of labels than how we saw them in pre-internet days. There are all these signifiers and they have all these assumptions built into them in a single word or phrase.”
What can be done to fix the problem, or at least reduce the potential harms?
There are no obvious, let alone guaranteed, solutions, but Auerbach is cautiously optimistic. He notes there have been partially successful efforts, such as Facebook’s ban on political advertising. “There are limits to the degree to which we can actually wipe out the bad stuff. Preventing viral explosions of really ugly stuff could be more achievable. The most frustrating thing is that a lot of efforts don’t seem to be leading anywhere.
“Some of the mechanisms of limiting viral spread would not be difficult. TikTok has done that. When it had that explosion of pro-anorexia content, it stopped enforcing rigid recommendations [to] ‘give people more of what they want’. Sometimes, giving people what they want is not a good thing.”
Co-ordinated response
One of Auerbach’s aims in writing the book was to reframe the problem. Once we know what’s going on, it will be easier to see what, if anything, can be done to fix it, like monitoring our own behaviour and online habits. “We can do things that make our own lives better, but these trends require a more organised and large-scale intervention.”
However, there are limits. “Getting people to behave in ways that don’t seem to necessarily make a big difference, like saying, ‘Oh, before I forward this, what could be the effects?’ That’s a huge burden to put on anyone. That’s going to take some larger organisation and co-ordination between entities and, even then, it could be difficult.”
If giving people what they want sets up an endless cycle of self-reinforcing echoes of agreement, how do you break the cycle? What do you give them instead? Who should have the responsibility for deciding what to give them?
“That’s really tricky.” Rather than pointing people towards particular content, “ultimately, you probably just want to say, ‘Let’s have it non-directed. Let’s show people [something] that’s somewhat out of their wheelhouse, that’s randomly picked.”
Speaking of exposing people to things they normally wouldn’t encounter, even though it’s late in New York and the author is tired, he is keen to get in one last word: “I want to put in a plug for my favourite New Zealand band. It’s the Terminals, who aren’t as well known as others, but they mean the most to me.”
Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities, by David Auerbach, (Public Affairs, $64.25)
