Consider this statement, a witticism of sorts: “The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it”. IP, the packet delivery protocol of the internet, does indeed route around “damage”; but this is really a statement about social behaviour, “the internet” as a set of attitudes and practices. It’s a witticism because it deliberately confuses the two levels: the technology of internet routing, and the tendency of users of the internet to circumvent attempts to restrict what they can send to each other (this tendency is not unmixedly benign: the ongoing arms race between spammers and the makers of spam-filtering software is one of its more aggravating expressions).

The social tendency to circumvent censorship exists in part because the technology facilitates it, so the two “levels” are not unconnected; the witticism forms a short-circuit between them, making the connection explicit through hyperbole. This kind of ironic technological determinism is a well-established mode of geek humour, and points to a half-credited belief in the power of technological innovation to disrupt social patterns and drive new kinds of behaviour. I say “half-credited”, because the same geek humour returns endlessly to the topic of ineradicable human stupidity (exemplified by the fabled user who employed the CD-ROM tray on their PC as a cup-holder), the frustration of seeing elegant systems reduced to rubble by the dumb primates who use them.

Humanists tend to think of technology as the shadow cast on matter by social praxis; consider for example McLuhan’s insistance that in objectifying and worshipping technology we are indulging a narcissistic fascination with our own reflection. However, the myth of Prometheus says that human mastery of technology is the mastery of something expropriated, something of non-human origin (or of no origin whatsoever, an arche-writing incapable of being definitively assigned to “the human”). According to this perspective, technology is not an organic extension of the human body, but a partially-ingested foreign body capable of affecting us in unpredictable ways. It may even be up to something we don’t quite understand, something a bit beyond us, instrumentalising us in the process of its own self-organisation.

For humanists, “artificial intelligence” will always be a derived, second-order intelligence, capable only of a mimesis of real (human) intelligence. But there’s something a bit ambivalent about Djikstra’s saying that the question of whether machines can think is akin to the question of whether submarines can swim: on the one hand, it invites a Mcluhanite reading (a submarine is a vessel for swimmers, a convenience that enables them to swim deeper, faster, further etc. than they could using their own bodies unaided), but on the other it points to the radical inhumanity of machine intelligence, the fact that it is as unlike human thinking as a submarine’s propulsion is unlike human swimming.

When I propose that we, users of the internet, should interpret Facebook as damage and route around it, I’m appealing to “the internet” as the embodiment of a Promethean attitude towards technology as simultaneously emancipatory and disorganising, an unfolding process with a trajectory of its own that goes against the grain of human wishes. Facebook’s role in this picture is to figure as the embodiment of “ineradicable human stupidity”, of dumb ape reactivity.