Philosophical commentary on tech black boxes and democracy

apprehensible, the Rabbis said, only by its movements. Are we back at the first chapter of Genesis and its absolute prohibition against eating from the tree of knowledge. Or, from the Talmud, “For him who reflects about four things - what is above, what is below, what is before and what is behind - it would be better not to have come into the world.”!7° We want to reflect about what goes on inside the machines. Can we? Should we? How does Dare to know face off against these impenetrable systems. It is little surprise that places like Silicon Valley often leave a visitor with the feeling of a town where work is done in rooms within rooms within rooms. To drive along the dulled, anodyne asphalt stretch of road that runs in front of Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park almost hurts your head: Inside the offices on revolutions are dreamed, debated and funded. And it looks, for the most part, like a row of mildly prosperous dental practices. The real import of the work is, on the outside at least, nearly totally muted. The corporate structure of the most powerful tech companies are padded with this sort of deadening fustian too. Founders control the majority of voting stock; shareholders are more like lucky “users” than owners. Control, security and speed in decision-making are secured from the inside, free of exploit risk or interference. The companies are like computers. Of course the founders know where real powers sits. But this shouldn’t distract us from the human energy breathing in the code itself. The programs are “permeated by all the forms of contestation, feeling, identification, intensity, contextualization and decontextualization, signification, power relations, imaginings and embodiments that comprise any cultural object,” the computer science historian Adrian Mackenzie has written.171 Each of the parts of a black box is a black box. The famous billionaires of our technology age operate for the most part as their systems do. Their tight, well- engineered clusters of machines produce fortunes from connectivity, even as they obscure some of the deeper nature of the connections that are essential to their success. They are themselves at times obscured, human black boxes in a sense. “Linux is just an enabler,” the genius programmer Linus Torvalds once observed about the code language that undergirds much of the connected world. “It’s a solid base, but like all good, solid bases, it really is something that should be almost entirely hidden and out of people’s minds.”!” It is a hard paradox for us. The work of the black boxes, of connected systems or protocols such Linux is miraculous. It is wonderful in so many ways. And the roots of it are, and seem like they have to be, obscure. But this cuts very fast into the arteries of a healthy democracy. “Democracy,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his famous post-war book The Vital Center, “has no defense-in-depth against the neuroses of industrialism.” It’s easy to see how the system might also have a weakened immunity to the subversive forces 170 Or from the Talmud: See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), 21 171 The programs: Adrian Mackenzie, Cutting code: Software and sociality, (New York: Peter Lang 2006) 5 172 “Linux”: Andy Meek, “Linux creator explains why a truly secure computing platform will never exist” on bgr.com Sep. 25, 2015 118 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018350