The Oldest Questions
“Are we all going to be working for a smart machine, or will we have smart people around the machine?” The question was posed to me in 1981 by a young paper mill manager sometime between the fried catfish and the pecan pie on my first night in the small southern town that was home to his mammoth plant and would become my home periodically for the next six years.
On that rainy night his words flooded my brain, drowning out the quickening tap tap tap of raindrops on the awning above our table. I recognized the oldest political questions: Home or exile? Lord or subject? Master or slave? These are “eternal themes of knowledge, authority, and power that can never be settled for all time. There is no end of history; each generation must assert its will and imagination as new threats require us to retry the case in every age.
Perhaps because there was no one else to ask, the plant manager’s voice was weighted with urgency and frustration: “What’s it gonna be? Which way are we supposed to go? I must know now.
There is no time to spare.” I wanted the answers, too, and so I began the project that thirty years ago became my first book, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. That work turned out to be the opening chapter in what became a lifelong quest to answer the question “Can the digital future be our home?
It has been many years since that warm southern evening,but the oldest questions have come roaring back with a vengeance. The digitalrealm is overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have hada chance to ponder and decide. We celebrate the networked world for the manyways in which it enriches our capabilities and prospects, but it has birthedwhole new territories of anxiety, danger, and violence as the sense of apredictable future slips away.
When we ask the oldest questions now, billions of peoplefrom every social strata, generation, and society must answer. Information andcommunications technologies are more widespread than electricity, reachingthree billion of the world’s seven billion people.1 The entangled dilemmas ofknowledge, authority, and power are no longer confined to workplaces as theywere in the 1980s. Now their roots run deep through the necessities of dailylife, mediating nearly every form of social participation.
Just a moment ago, it still seemed reasonable to focus ourconcerns on the challenges of an information workplace or an informationsociety. Now the oldest questions must be addressed to the widest “possibleframe, which is best defined as “civilization” or, more specifically,information civilization. Will this emerging civilization be a place that wecan call home?
All creatures orient to home. It is the point of origin from which every species sets its bearings. Without our bearings, there is no way to navigate unknown territory; without our bearings, we are lost. I am reminded of this each spring when the same pair of loons returns from their distant travels to the cove below our window.
Their haunting cries of homecoming, renewal, connection, and safeguard lull us to sleep at night, knowing that we too are in our place. Green turtles hatch and go down to the sea, where they travel many thousands of miles, sometimes for ten years or twenty.
When ready to lay their eggs, they retrace their journey back to the very patch of beach where they were born. Some birds annually fly for thousands of miles, losing as much as half their body weight, in order to mate in their birthplace. Birds, bees, butterflies… nests, holes, trees, lakes, hives, hills, shores, and hollows… nearly every creature shares some version of this deep attachment to a place in “which life has been known to flourish, the kind of place we call home.
It is in the nature of human attachment that every journeyand expulsion sets into motion the search for home. That nostos, finding home,is among our most profound needs is evident by the price we are willing to payfor it. There is a universally shared ache to return to the place we leftbehind or to found a new home in which our hopes for the future can nest andgrow. We still recount the travails of Odysseus and recall what human beingswill endure for the sake of reaching our own shores and entering our own gates.
Because our brains are larger than those of birds and seaturtles, we know that it is not always possible, or even desirable, to returnto the same patch of earth. Home need not always correspond to a singledwelling or place. We can choose its form and location but not its “meaning.Home is where we know and where we are known, where we love and are beloved.Home is mastery, voice, relationship, and sanctuary: part freedom, partflourishing… part refuge, part prospect.
The sense of home slipping away provokes an unbearableyearning. The Portuguese have a name for this feeling: saudade, a word said tocapture the homesickness and longing of separation from the homeland amongemigrants across the centuries. Now the disruptions of the twenty-first centuryhave turned these exquisite anxieties and longings of dislocation into auniversal story that engulfs each one of us.
Excerpt From: Shoshana Zuboff. “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”Â