In the same week that Andrew Keen came to Brazil to launch his “The Cult of the Amateur“, a book discussing how Web 2.0 has been destroying Western culture and values, distributed collective intelligence showed that it — not “artificial stupidity” — is the foundation of networked digital culture.
After all, it was the practices and spaces for action of network culture that mobilized more than 30,000 people to sign a petition to rehabilitate Alan Turing’s memory and led the British prime minister to apologize publicly, on behalf of the government, for the inhumane and prejudiced treatment inflicted on Turing.
Alan Turing
A mathematician, Turing is considered the father of computing and artificial intelligence. The political dimension of his research is difficult to measure. Turing deciphered the code of the Enigma encryption machine, which Nazi Germany used to send encrypted military messages during the war. As a recent article in Folha aptly recalled, this enabled the United Kingdom to intercept messages, locate German submarines, attack them and turn the course of the war.
But Turing was openly homosexual, and for this “crime” he was removed from his work, publicly humiliated and sentenced in 1952 to undergo hormonal treatment with estrogen, which deformed his body and damaged his health. In 1954, he died by suicide.
It is hard to disagree with Keen about the superficiality and volume of nonsense dumped onto the Internet every day, but it is rather deterministic to “blame” Web 2.0 tools for this process. The channels merely receive the garbage produced outside the Internet and directed into it.
The issue therefore remains how to devise strategies that encourage creative and critical uses of media and social networks, rather than ways to downplay their predominance.
This is where the importance of the petition to restore Turing’s honor and memory lies. Its significance extends far beyond the official apology. It points to more thoughtful uses of networks and their resources, and to the potential of smart mobs in action — in this case, against the idiocy of prejudice.
On that subject, I reproduce here Vange Leonel’s column in Revista da Folha about the life — or rather the end of the life — of the brilliant Alan Turing, since the magazine’s content is restricted to Folha or UOL subscribers.
A further note: on Wikipedia, the Alan Turing entry has already been updated to include the apology made by Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the 11th.
Disenchanted hero
by Vange Leonel (at: http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/revista/rf1309200919.htm)
“He should have been knighted and celebrated as a savior of his country. Instead, this eccentric, stammering, gentle genius was ruined for a ‘crime’ committed in private that harmed no one.”
These are the words of biologist Richard Dawkins, who a few weeks ago signed a petition demanding a public apology from the British government for the conviction of mathematician Alan Turing. The “crime” Turing committed in 1952 was a “homosexual act.” As punishment, the mathematician underwent hormone treatment — chemical castration — that left him depressed. Two years later, at 41, he took his life by eating a poisoned apple.
This disenchanted-princess suicide brought a hero’s life to an end. Turing was responsible for breaking the code of Enigma, the machine the Germans used to transmit encrypted messages during World War II. Without fear of exaggeration, Dawkins himself argues that Turing “contributed more than Eisenhower or Churchill to defeating the Nazis.”
But that was not all. Turing is now considered the inventor of the computer and the author of seminal studies on artificial intelligence. Computer scientist John Graham-Cumming, who wrote the petition, says his goal is symbolic: for people to know who Turing was, how much he contributed to today’s computerized world, and how prejudice can cut brilliant minds short.
Vange Leonel is a singer and writer and contributes to this column every other week.
vangeleonel@uol.com.br