We are powerless against porn in a new digital era

Legal, cultural or policy frameworks may apply in the real world, but are hopeless as we increasingly step more into virtual life

It’s a curious thing, for anyone with a sense of the historic, to be living midway through a genuine revolution. Few people would now dispute that our often painful transition to a digital era is likely to be as significant as the industrial revolution or the Reformation. But from our mid-point, what’s fascinating is the sense of powerlessness in the face of this rapid change. It’s as if we’re waving stop signs at a tsunami.

Take porn. For all the internet’s immeasurable benefits, it is a sad but undeniable fact that it is awash with the stuff. The digital superhighways are not clogged with brilliant creative nuggets, but with quivering flesh and exaggerated moaning. We complain about supply, and brush over the demand; the seemingly insatiable appetite of the average browser for filth.
But what to do about it?

The government is consulting with internet service providers to try to force them to take action. The idea is that we will have to opt-in for our digital kicks. The problem, as any tech-head will tell you, is that it’s nearly impossible to block porn effectively. Automatic filters use keywords or triggers based on images. But this would block perfectly legitimate sites. Sex. Cock. There – I’ve just blocked the Guardian from the ISP of the future.

Let’s imagine that the perfect filtering system is conjured up. How long would it take the average 15-year-old to work out a way round it? As long as it takes to type “avoid ISP block” on Google.
Such action is technically unworkable and morally suspect – some pornography is legal and handing the power to censor it to bureaucrats is dangerous. But, in common with the Daily Mail’s irate readers, I would rather my children did not, while innocently surfing, stumble across the Big Bad Wolf shagging Little Red Riding Hood.
It’s an emotive, flashpoint issue.

But it’s also part of a wider conundrum. As our lives increasingly migrate online, we are living in two worlds simultaneously; and they are entirely antithetical to each other. One has borders, one does not. In one, you are expected to pay for goods and services, in the other you are not. In one you are tangible and rules of polite social discourse apply; in the other, anything goes – the mean-spirited nastiness that permeates social media thrives on anonymity and distance.

All our legal, cultural and policy frameworks are designed to work in real life; but as the porn issue illustrates, they are hopeless in virtual life. This did not matter even in the very recent past, when the phrase “virtual life” applied to a few geeky trailblazers. But now, when we’ve all got one foot in each world? We’re lost and confused in our attempts to contain virtual life with real-life fixes.

Revolutions have their own momentum. The hungry Parisians who stormed the Bastille had no notion of the terror to come. The industrial revolution was slow-burning and far-reaching, and the sometimes violent actions of the displaced workers were an understandable reaction to their fears.

At the risk of being excessively deterministic, we seem to be at the stage in this revolution of a panicked kickback – a media-based equivalent of the Luddites smashing up the machinery. We pick on one emotive element of a wider, complex shift and try to take control of it: hence the porn panic.

The so-called neo-Luddites are on the rise. One fear they espouse is that rapidly advancing technology is cannibalising middle-class jobs, in the same way that industrial advances destroyed artisan and agricultural jobs.
This theory has some validity. Professor David Autor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found increasing polarisation in the job market in the US.

There is growing demand for highly skilled, well-paid jobs, and unskilled low-wage jobs, and anyone caught in the middle is suffering. He blames this shift in part on technology, which is automating mid-level but routine jobs.
Economists point sagely to the Luddite fallacy. This is the notion that technology may destroy jobs, but it will also create them.

But the Luddite fallacy is coming under scrutiny as artificial intelligence advances at speed.
Martin Ford, in his book The Lights in the Tunnel about technology’s role in future economies, argues that we are entering a phase of mass, and structural, unemployment due to the automation of routine jobs. If he is proved right, then how will our consumer-led economies and their symbiotic political systems cope with that fundamental shift?

Is he wrong? I don’t know, and more to the point neither does anyone else. Revolutions are best unpicked with hindsight – a problem when you’re living in one. Meanwhile, the futurists dream, the neo-Luddites moan, the politicians stutter and the rest of us muddle along, hoping things will turn out OK. We can’t even stop our kids watching porn. We’re riding a revolutionary wave, and no one is steering. Not even Google.

Source. Thegaurdian