Digital Humans/Organic Robots

When I finally picked this book up at BookXcess, where there were hundreds of copies, I recognised the title (we had featured a short review of the book in our Bits & Bytes pages) and Lepore was a name I came across in my shortlived New Yorker subscription.

The subtitle of the book was pretty grandiose: "how one data company invented the future".

The feeling I got on reading the first few chapters (we take the reduction of humans into bits of information and computer simulations and behavioural science for granted now) was surprise at the opposition by students to the whole concept. That so many people objected, that they said it was immoral, that people didn't go into the era of digitalisation blindly and unthinkingly was, well, heartening.

Simulatics, the company featured here, didn't have it their own way. In fact, they encountered reverse after reverse, losing out to the actual advertising agencies (who saw what they were doing and developed their own versions but with better data to go on), and although they were major supporters of the Democrats and claimed credit for the success of the Kennedy presidential campaign, Simulatics didn't even succeed in politics. The backlash to Kennedy when Simulatics' involvement in his campaign became known was enough to dry up all future business that way. Besides, Kennedy was assasinated.

But when LBJ took over, the true evil of this method of measuring humanity and its reactions with a computer, of reducing thinking, breathing organisms into bits and bytes comes to the fore. The Vietnamese aren't even real people. Simply data points.

This book is interesting overall, but the blood and guts of the chapter on the Vietnam war, 'Armies of the Night' is the reason to buy it and get stuck in it.

Take this bit: 

Cuc found the questions she was supposed to ask the villagers inane. "All of us want certain things in life," she was supposed to say to her interview subjects, reading from the Simulatics questionnaire. "When you think about what really matters in your own life, what are your wishes and hopes for the future? In other words, if you imagine your future in the best possible light, what would your life look like then, if you are to be happy?"

Most people answered, "We wish for peace."

"But what does that mean?" Cuc was supposed to ask. "What is peace? Is peace being with us, or is peace being with the Viet Cong?"

They would not say. The only thing they would say is what they thought the interviewers wanted them to say. What else could they say?

Cuc Thu Duong believed it to be useless. Simulatics researchers landed, they interviewed, they climbed onto a helicopter or scrambled back into an army truck. They were strangers. No one would speak frankly to a stranger. They learned, she thought, absolutely nothing.

Lepore is clearly angry. Isn't this ridiculous, she all but screams! Don't the rest of you find this as ridiculous and dehumanising as I do?

Check out this other excerpt which comes after a bit about Walter Slote, a New York psychoanalys  mostly famous for sleeping with his patients, who was flown to Saigon to psychoanalyse Vietnamese dissidents -- a 26-year-old Vietnamese student leader being held against his will in a pagoda outside Saigon, a captured Vietcong leader imprisoned at the Police Interrogation Center who told Slote that he was being tortured (Slote asked him about his dreams and about sex), a senior Buddhist monk (no sex there) and a 56-year-old intellectual (a French-educated mathematician turned writer) who had been imprisoned for years by the Diem.

Vietnamese men, women, and children, were dying, starving, being shot, bombed, burned, and napalmed. American soldiers were being shipped home in boxes, coffins, and bags. And the US government was paying an Upper West Side Freudian analyst to explain that the Vietnamese, as a people, had Oedipal issues.

I remember in 2021 when Malaysia announced the digital blueprint and we had to cover that super boring document extensively. Many people we interviewed said it was stupid and pointed out the shortcomings but we had to fudge over those bits.

But perhaps it wasn't the particulars or details that mattered so much as what it represented and the direction we were going.

Digital was the new black. The panacea to all evils. The one-size-fits-all solution, we, idiots who had never run a business, advocated glibly because it would made someone, somewhere, some money.  

All businesses were supposed to go digital or die. Traditional businesses that had survived for decades based on the quality of their offerings, who were finding it harder than the rest to "digitalise" their products (my favourite restaurant, Mum's Place, being a prime example...its excellent dishes suffered a major diminution in quality when packed for takeaway, the only option available to restaurants for quite some time) quietly shut down. Wait it out? For how long? It seemed like this pandemic and even more, these restrictive conditions would last forever.

For me, digitalisation was just...boring. Soup without salt. It took all the soul out of life.

And the cookie-cutter creatures and products it churned out.

Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake!

Anyway, the book is enjoyable.

You should read it.