Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter and use it to promote free speech around the world. I’m all in favour, especially if it helps to break us out of the culture wars. The founder of Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla is politically tolerant and once said that his six sons were mostly educated online, via Youtube and Reddit. So he has definitive ideas about how human brains should or shouldn’t interact with technology.
Some are sound: he has suggested that children be taught “from a young age” about the many cognitive biases we are prone to, like the placebo effect and confirmation bias. And he imposed an interesting regime on his technology-addicted children: “The rule is they have to read more [books] than they play video games.” Our political classes could benefit from a similar approach to Twitter.
Other aspects of Mr Musk’s technophilia are less far-sighted, for example, the school he set up for his own children and those of SpaceX employees in California does not teach languages on the basis that real-time translation software will soon be available.
This mistakes the direct utility of education with the utility of its effect on the brain. Learning languages undoubtedly expands the capacity of people’s brains, likely with multiple positive knock-on effects we cannot predict.
By and large, however, a Musk-owned Twitter would probably be an improvement – except in one potentially important way. His biggest company, Tesla, relies for a large portion of sales, most of its growth and a lot of its production on China, whose government is known for punishing billionaires in one forum if it can’t get at them in another. What will Mr Musk do if Beijing takes umbrage at some trend or meme on Twitter and decides to punish Tesla for it? Mr Musk claims he’s not in business for the money. If his hostile takeover of Twitter is successful, we may soon find out how true that is.
E-book misery
Techno-utopians like Mr Musk believe we are well on our way to a better world thanks to the computerisation of everything. I have my doubts. I recently needed to get hold of some books quickly, so I broke with habit and bought several electronic books to read in Amazon’s “Cloud Reader”. I soon discovered why I never normally read this way.
The books take ages to load, even after just a short interruption, and there’s a delay in hopping between parts, breaking the flow of one’s thoughts in the middle of an idea. Even worse, the display position of odd and even pages is not consistent. One day you are reading a passage on the left of your screen; the next day, the same passage is displaying on the right.
When I remember a fact or phrase from a book, my memory of it is inseparable from its position on the page. If I want to find it again quickly without scrolling through a list of search results, it has to be in the same place on the display as it is in my mind’s eye. Finding it displayed differently messes up the whole process of encoding the memory.
Most disconcertingly, I have the uneasy feeling that my “library” might simply disappear one day. Even if I worked out how to download it (I’m sure there is a way), who knows if the file format will still be accessible in a decade? Yes, books can be lost or damaged, but for the most part, I can pick up the same copy of Locke or Nietzsche that I struggled over at university and find in them not just the text, but the same notations, bookmarks and memories of the thoughts I had when I read them.
The strange interplay of spatial memory and touch with intellectual processing, the mysterious operation of creative flow and the stolid reliability of physical objects are all features of the real world that we are very far from replicating in the virtual one. Tech fanboys discount this stuff because they hate to admit that although technology can make things better, it can also make them worse.
