A Craving for Tyrants

The story began when I rode along with a woman who was taking orders from a voice-prompted GPS navigation system adhered to her top dash. It told her how far she'd have to go after taking a right turn while she dutifully followed the path laid before her in an empty parking lot.

Two things are wrong here: one is computer related, and the other is a human condition. GPS technology like all technology is fundamentally unintelligent. The GPS navigation system gives directions whether the driver is on the highway or at the bottom of a lake. This lack of awareness demonstrates that it simply cannot contextualize outside of its interpretation of a geosynchronous satellite signal and the available information it has on the desired destination. And it shouldn't. This provides entry into the second issue, people's desire to follow orders dumbly. That is because some tasks are conjunctive tasks. Driving can be one. For some, piloting a vehicle and reading and interpreting directions are two distinct chores, requiring more than one person to coordinate the task of driving to a new destination correctly. In the defense of this habit it is a very effective means of accomplishing more than you normally could. In the interplay between participants some give orders some take and each assumes a distinct role with a set of tasks. It's magical. Words like transcendence and jamming come to mind as outcomes of group work and group play. But enough kindness has been given to the desire for group work to discuss something underlying group dynamics: power.

Power is a property of groups. As I define it, power and its sister, influence, operate within the contingencies of affiliation, support, and ultimately meaning that manifest in shifting loyalties, changing agendas, and the individuation of group members. At a further level of remove the ways that power and influence manifest themselves among people is through the coordinating medium of symbol use, most notably communication. Lewis Mumford's survey of human development that he carries out in 'The Myth of the Machine' demonstrates that the gift of command and coordination are essential traits of hunting party leaders. The better that a leader carries out the task of coordinating hunter's movement and attacks the more successful the hunting party is and the more successful their village will be. In this simple vignette power becomes an optic, a hole through which one may sometimes see all the way through the fabric of a given reality to an idealized future organized around this usage of power. In essence, power begets ideologies, which in turn beget persistent attitudes towards things, which in turn help to establish practical realities. Power and its effective utilization to increase energy, food, water, and resource collection gives power a second property: its mythologization as luck, destiny, caprice, or God's will.

Magical thinking begets magical practices. And so the leader of the hunt can become enshrined in religious practice such that this person occupies two simultaneous planes of existence one before us and the other divine. Leaders become the focus of worship as only to remember their divinity long after their deeds have been forgotten. Rituals bleed into memorials and the persistent feature of our existence is this preoccupation with leadership and order. Leadership and coordination brought us very far from a humble hunting and gathering existence. The society we keep together requires immense skill, a lot of energy, an increasing reliance upon expertise and specialization, and most of all a near identical veneration of the modes for keeping the whole thing working.

Our time and our society is modern. This is the little myth that we tell about ourselves. But we are the same people who hunted and gathered for hundreds of thousands of years. And so with our science comes the same mythic practices. One is simple enough to understand, the need for a desirable interface for participating in the creation of our society. In the past that was through group order. Today it is through a job and a career identity. Yet we still crave the presence of others, and our technologies offer up a saccharine version of humanity through connectivity and social media. Our petroleum-fueled consumer society has effectively erased many of the reasons for coordinated action. Modernity's true measure may come in its ability to allow a one-to-one relation between people and their feature-laden environment through the near total extinction of the everyday and mundane conjunctive task. In its stead is the isolated consumer living a nearly unbroken relationship with mediated others through a small gesture-based interface for communicating and information retrieval.

We aren't that far removed in evolution from our hunter gatherer forbears. In fact, we're almost identical. But our self-made environment has changed considerably. That hunting party leader, the living god, and the elaborate rituals that support them have been shattered into countless functional objects we utilize for navigating our environment and reproducing a meaningful existence through group affiliation. By virtue of the relationship established on the hunt we now take orders from computer algorithms and interfaces. The same order, the same task differentiation, but now the leader is simply a string of code for interpreting data and acting according to a program. Our tyrants are dumb. Their speech terse. Our technological tyrants are an evolving expressions of our desire to lead and, more importantly, to be led.

The myths and the rituals may change but one aspect of our lives remains, the desire to reduce uncertainty in practical affairs. Leadership--even in its denatured form as a commanding male British voice barking directions from a little black box on the dash--is one such means of reducing uncertainty.