When you perform an online CAPTCHA task (reading a distorted alphanumeric string or counting the traffic lights in a gridded photo in order to prove that you’re not a robot), is there a smile on your face? Do you feel an evanescent pride, a flush of human chauvinism, at having made short work of a request that would bewilder a machine? Don’t rest on your laurels. If you are like many internet users, you have no idea that by completing the CAPTCHA, you are helping to refine Google’s powerful image recognition technology. You have been training your own replacement all along.
This microtransaction is, as Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User demonstrates, our relationship to the internet in microcosm. The net giveth, and the net taketh away—but it seldom warns us before doing the latter, and we seldom notice until after the damage is done. It is not unlike Lurking itself, which is such a pleasurable trove of startling facts and penetrating insights that only after finishing it does one stop to whisper, “Uh-oh.”
Lurking is not only a history of the internet but also McNeil’s memoir of how her own life and identity have been influenced by her usage of it. Though the first internet message was sent, McNeil tells us, “over a packet-switching network” way back in 1969, it was not until 1991 that AOL began to take America online and the World Wide Web came to nonspecialist attention. Google was born in 1998, Wikipedia in 2001, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. Technologies and services that today seem as indispensable as the wheel or the road, as ubiquitous as electricity and refrigeration, are bounded by the living memory of one young lifetime.
Others may write histories of the effects of this explosion on economics, politics, the sciences, and so on. McNeil is here to show us what it did to individuals, often viewed by the industry as interchangeable “users.” “Life online is powered by traits and conditions in opposition,” McNeil writes, “anonymity and visibility, privacy and transparency, real and fake, centralized and decentralized, physical and digital, friend and stranger, autonomy and constraint, with an operational clash of values between human ambiguity and machine explicitness.”
To say that this tension is destabilizing is to put it mildly. Life online can go from Dave & Buster’s to the Stanford prison experiment in the blink of an eye. In her chapter on anonymity, McNeil recalls that although early internet communities, such as Echo, a Greenwich Village-based online bulletin board, were not exactly “peaceful,” neither were they bottomless pits of trolling, harassment, threats, and doxing. Some online pathologies have worsened over time, likely because millions now living cannot remember a time when such events were unusual. Perhaps, McNeil suggests, people are more cautious navigating an experience for the first time.
The way we relate to the internet has evolved as well. The search engine, including the search engine, Google, turns each of us into bees in a hive mind, an infinite labyrinth of communicating chambers. We need never be lonely or bored, for we can ask the internet for any book, movie, image, map, or person—any piece of information at all. Inadequately explored here is how Google has tricked us into thinking we are gods as well. With so much knowledge at our command, we feel smarter and may easily present ourselves to the public as more knowledgeable than we really are. (This is especially an occupational hazard of journalism and commentary.) Intellectual humility has been a casualty of advances in “search.”
Privacy, too, is largely gone, mostly because so many of us never wanted it to begin with. McNeil plainly hates Facebook—both for profiting from our exhibitionism and our desire to classify ourselves and for enabling these impulses. She hates it for conducting unannounced psychological experiments on its users, for violating privacy, and for making it “next to impossible for users to quit.” The service is so tied in with other apps, its use so frequently required in other areas of life, that it deserves to be called “coercive.” But we let this happen. It would be tonic for us to look at the world we’ve made and hate ourselves more often.
McNeil’s analysis is handicapped to some degree by tunnel vision. For instance, her account of the threats to civilized discourse and harmonious community building on the internet is mostly confined to those that target women and the Left, including “trolls on 4chan, far-right conspirators, men’s rights activists, white supremacists, abusers”—all of whom McNeil would like to deplatform. That even a morally unassailable position can be taken in a trollish and abusive way, that the Left can be just as vicious and punitive as the Right, that well-meaning people can become milk drunk given the smallest sip of online power—these seem not to trouble her.
The problem with calling for suppression and censorship is not that your side might one day lose the whip hand: It’s that you shouldn’t argue with a whip in your hand in the first place. Yet it should be clear to anyone who has spent 10 minutes on Twitter that much online behavior is play, a form of blood sport—not what we smugly call “discourse.” Often, the subjects being debated are beside the point, proxies for pecking-order battles about intellect and status. No amount of tut-tutting about etiquette will change the fact that as much as we value discussion, even spirited discussion, we love gladiatorial combat even more.
Lurking makes sure to remind us that, as tech skeptics are fond of saying, “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.” Yet since this is a book about identity, it is worth looking at that bit of wisdom from another angle. Individuals are more than their data, their preferences, or their social network presences. If you resent “the algorithm” simply because it is making someone money, you are still living on its terms. We should resist surveillance and try to thwart the more nauseating attempts to monetize our experiences, but perhaps a more meaningful victory would be to cultivate a selfhood no data set could hope to contain. I am not a robot, indeed.