Martyr of the Information Age

Is every person just an organic chemical algorithm, an individual circuit plugged into a system through which a universe of information flows? Has the flow of information become the 'new religion' that is destined to subvert the value of the human being as the ultimate arbiter of western society? These are two of the provocative questions posed in the last section of Harari's book Homo Deus. At any other time I might have considered these notions outlandishly speculative, but what brought them home to me was my 16 year old daughter. I thought of her world - I say 'her' world, instead of the world she is growing up 'in' because there is an important distinction. And I compared it to the era in which my eldest daughter, now 26, grew up. The 10 year difference in age might be eons, technologically speaking. My eldest had a cellphone at the age of 13 and grew up with the internet. She dipped into the use of cellphone applications and social media. It was still relatively new technology, something to use. A tool. My youngest daughter is her smartphone. She barely exists outside it. Her life mirrors Harari's notion that human beings will increasingly come to see themselves as not just plugged into their technology, but as a component of an informational system and inseparable from it. Future generations will not be able to distinguish their individual existences, their selves apart from it, he speculates. Harari mentions Aaron Swartz a computer programmer and 'hacktivist' (best known as an early developer of Reddit) who committed suicide in 2013 at the age of 26 because he was being criminally pursued for hacking into MIT computers and uploading academic articles onto the internet. He calls Swartz the first martyr of a digital age religion called Data-ism. (sidebar: I was surprised to learn that the term Data-ism was coined by David Brooks, one of my favourite contemporary thinkers and writers, especially on society, politics and spiritual themes.) I thought about Swartz, killing himself at the age 26, and wondered how my 16 year old daughter would define herself in 10 years. Would she, as Swartz apparently did, think that life wasn't worth living separate from a system of free informational flow, a system that according to Harari has erased the barrier between the public and the private and will inevitably know you better than you know yourself. A system that will eventually make most major decisions in life for you, because you will begin to trust the expertise and efficacy of the technology more than you trust your own faulty undependable abilities. I'm not sure about this dystopic view, but what I do see is that my daughter is surrendering herself, she is gradually willingly being subsumed in this new world, because it's the only world she's ever known. The future Harari writes about, the one that I see taking hold of my daughter, goes against the very essence of everything I have been trying to do as a parent: To empower my children as individuals with a sense of their own uniqueness and value. A little over 150 years ago Marx was concerned that the Industrial Age had turned human beings into cogs of the means of  production of a capitalist machine. Are we heading toward a similarly de-humanizing eventuality in the Age of Information? Harari apparently thinks so. I am heartened to think that although Marx got some things right, he also got plenty wrong.