CW@60: Reflections of an accidental technology anthropologist

The Eureka moment

Until September 2019, that is, when I stumbled blinking out of the world of networks and broadband, and into the world of cyber security.

Security professionals unlucky enough to be interviewed by me will recall I like to throw in a very particular question: what was your lightbulb moment – when did you realise cyber security was cool?

For many, particularly older Millennials of a similar vintage to myself, it’s the day their computer caught a virus from a floppy disk swapped in the playground. However my lightbulb moment – and I’m sure he won’t mind me saying it – was a conversation with Don Smith of what was then the Secureworks Counter Threat Unit, now part of Sophos.

In October 2019, I found myself at the top of the Gherkin in London for a media roundtable event where Don and his colleagues shared new intelligence on a notorious ransomware gang called GandCrab, whose members had some months earlier announced their “retirement” from the ransomware scene.

Not so, Don explained. Although in their goodbye message the GandCrab crew boasted melodramatically of ransomware being proof that you can do crimes and get off scot-free, behind the scenes the ringleaders were already working on a new strain of ransomware, which was to become known as REvil, or Sodinokibi.

Just a few months later, REvil made national headlines in the UK following the ultimately terminal hack of currency services business Travelex, then in the summer of 2021, its hit on Kaseya brought it global notoriety.

“Do you not sometimes get the feeling that technology is, frankly, a bit out of control?”

Alex Scroxton

My fascination with cyber criminal gangs and cyber professionals – the difference between them is often more a matter of luck than anything else – stems from their motivation, their subculture, their laptops covered in stickers, the socioeconomic conditions that breed them. It’s all classic social anthropology.

Standing in the way of control

The application of social science to technology is a question I’ve flirted with in interviews, but this is Computer Weekly, and social anthropology has never been our core mission.

The question I want to ask is, why shouldn’t it be? Why aren’t we doing anthropology in technology? As a Computer Weekly reader who is very probably a technology professional, you might reasonably ask why technologists should care about that?

Don’t fret. I’ve got an answer. Let’s start with another question though. Do you not sometimes get the feeling that technology is, frankly, a bit out of control?

Consider datacentres and artificial intelligence (AI). Since 2024 I have lived in Washington DC and just across the Potomac River, in the city’s suburban hinterland, there are hundreds of datacentres. Even if you’ve never been to northern Virginia, you’ll be familiar with the names of these places – Ashburn, Reston, Sterling – you see them on the Cloudflare dashboard or DownDetector whenever there’s a big outage. And for good reason, over two-thirds of global internet traffic touches these hyperscale facilities.

However, datacentres do not make particularly good neighbours. For the people who live here, their presence is already leading to spiralling electricity bills and the threat of regional water scarcity, and the advent of AI only serves to compound these problems.

The uncomfortable truth at the heart of the capitalist system is that it only works if it continues to expand and make money - fundamentally, AI is just the latest means by which this is happening. But it is a bubble, it will pop, of that we can be assured.

Absent this correction, it is my belief that technologists – and I include very many extremely smart people working at the companies I cover every day in this – are trying to do too much too soon with AI, applying it to any and all possible tasks, even those it has no business doing, without stopping to consider the human impact.

Consider the vast amounts of AI-generated slop threatening to overwhelm the World Wide Web. Horrible art. Dodgy videos. Soulless music. Garbled half-truths. Dangerous advice. Outright misinformation.

I don’t need it. You don’t need it. Nobody really wants it. AI slop not only endangers core human faculties, such as the ability to create for ourselves or think critically, but it is rapidly rendering the web basically unusable.

Wasn’t the web meant to be a digital utopia, heralding the sort of future seen in Star Trek? Its creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, deliberately decided never to patent or charge royalties for it, foreseeing it as a free, open and universal platform.

Thirty-six years later, with the web chopped up and monetised and surveilled by tech companies and governments, with addictive, parasitical social media platforms sowing division and hatred that has led to the radicalisation of millions, I think we can agree it is a long way from the vision of its creator.

I have read stories about the path we are walking today, and it doesn’t lead to Star Trek but to 1984 and Brave new world.

I don’t seek to blame Sir Tim for this, nor do I seek to suggest social scientists could necessarily have solved the problems the web created, but I can’t help but wonder at what might have come to pass had there been a few more anthropologists involved.

What fools these mortals be

We humans are amazing creatures. There is nothing else like us on our home planet, and there may be nothing like us anywhere else.

This is a daunting realisation, but I find comfort in the idea of life actually being the consciousness of existence itself – that is to say, we are the universe and the universe is us. Carl Sagan perhaps articulated this best when he said: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

In the beginning, the universe sought to know itself through art, through belief, through custom, through ritual – the things social anthropologists get excited about.

In those days, because it did not yet know any better, the universe made up stories to explain why the seasons changed and why the moon and the sun came and went as they did. These stories live on in lore, myth and religion.

But the universe is curious, and in time it figured out that these were just stories. It learned what planets and stars actually are, and about gravity and magnetism. It learned to harness steam, then electricity, then the atom. It created Sir Tim and through him the web. It built itself our world.

Let there be no doubt - technology will continue to shape our world and enhance the universe’s knowledge of itself. Nobody knows where it will end up and that’s why we keep pulling on things like AI, because something new will be on the other end of the rope. Slop and carbon emissions aside, it’s actually very exciting.

Barring accidents or illness, there’s a decent chance I’ll still be alive in 2066, and if I am lucky enough to be able to reflect on 100 years of Computer Weekly, my hope will be that in the intervening years the leaders and visionaries of the technology industry have become more reflective on this connection, on the nature and interplay of humanity and technology, and perhaps learned a little humility.

Because I look now at these men – and they are all men and we all know their names – and I see amoral, greedy people who would happily ride roughshod over life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the sake of a big cheque.

Well, I don’t accept the visions of these foolish mortals. I want the utopian version of the universe, not the dystopian one. And if we can reconnect humanity and technology, I believe heaven on earth is achievable.