Our Rage Against the Modern

The NSA debate may be interpreted as a revolt against modernity. Likewise, Islamism and Putinism clearly show that people fear what is new. It would be better if the world made the effort not only to condemn, but also to understand.

Charlie Chaplin as “the Little Tramp” worked on an assembly line and had to tighten two screws at the same time. The assembly line constantly ran faster; Charlie eventually missed one screw, fell into the conveyor belt’s transmission and became part of the machinery himself, where he finally went crazy and ended up in an asylum. Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film “Modern Times” was an indictment of the monotonous, mechanical and alienating nature of working with machines.

For a long time, the silent film was considered communist propaganda. The FBI persecuted the director for allegedly anti-American subversive activities; the film wasn’t permitted to be shown in Germany for 20 years after its original release.

It’s a brilliant film. Nonetheless, it was about as effective in slowing the technological revolution as the Luddites were at halting progress when they attacked and destroyed threshing machines and mechanized looms a century earlier.

Without automation, no industrial revolution; and without shadow, no light: 100 years ago, one-third of all U.S. workers were employed in the agricultural sector. Today that has fallen to 2 percent; thanks to mechanization, they produce more food than was dreamed possible back then. The industrial revolution was followed by the digital revolution and the old rule — more yield from less effort — applies once again: When Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion two years ago, the photo and video sharing app had 30 million customers and employed a staff of 13. Meanwhile, the Kodak Company — which had declared bankruptcy a short time earlier — employs 145,000 workers.

A lot is changing rapidly and drastically: the music world, the publishing and health sectors, travel agencies, shipping, the wars on crime and poverty, banking and weapons technology (nearly every nation in the world will have armed drones and cyber warfare centers within 10 years). And many people again react in near panic. “Big data” via eBay, Amazon, Walmart and Facebook has already revolutionized the relationship between businesses and customers. It plays a role in political elections and disease control.

The fact that intelligence services like the NSA are able to collect trillions of pieces of data annually by skimming global communications is only a small — albeit an easily scandalized — slice of this revolution.

Many more people are likely to be affected by Google Glass. While the Russian intelligence services go on the offense in monitoring and releasing private telephone conversations to the public (“Fuck the EU!”), their Chinese colleagues prove almost every day that they weren’t exactly born yesterday, either. In 2011, their spies hacked private email traffic inside the Australian government for nearly a whole year, during which time they had control over the entire system. Many people are conservative and are instinctively unnerved by change.

“Big Data” Predominantly Results in Angry Protest

It usually starts small — who doesn’t recall the outrage caused by 5-digit zip codes, private television networks, extended open hours for stores or no-smoking areas? — and also generally results in equally strong pushback. The radical Islamist movement was born out of the confrontation with Western democracy, emancipation and liberalism. Similar structural motives may be found in the American tea party movement. And the currently controversial Putinist movement in Russia can be attributed to a Western Christian desire for protection against a supposedly effete Western immorality.

And “Big Data” outrage as expressed in the NSA debate is predominantly nourished by pushback against progress, the digital revolution itself. It is propagated by intellectuals who first and foremost don’t understand the world, but nonetheless want to condemn it. Rather than intellectually question how “Big Data” changes the relationship between those who possess the data and those who deliver it, how the private sphere and data privacy should be redefined in the digital age, and how it redefines national sovereignty, the issue is angrily dismissed. The political scientist Thomas Meyer coined the term “revolt against modernity,” a phenomenon that takes place when the loss of dogma (the private sphere) and certainties (data privacy) can no longer be reconciled. Charlie, the Little Tramp, was fortunately let out of the asylum after being cured.