Free The Blind Giant by Nick Harkaway Page B

has a hole in it. Writers such as Dan Ariely have shown us that we can’t even trust our own basic rationality. In
PredictablyIrrational
, Ariely discusses how we make irrational choices aboutpricing in predictable ways: having seen an ‘anchor’ number, we judge everything against it – even if the anchor is nothing more than a vehicle registration. An absurdly high anchor will cause us to think of even a substantial lower price as acceptable and a normal one as a bargain (many restaurant menus these days have one super-expensive item because it makes the next price down look acceptable).
    More generally, some of us desperately seek to block out facts that unsettle us – the same instinct which inspired my friend to lob her trusty Nokia off Westminster Bridge – hence the global and increasingly absurd market forclimate change denial. Heralded as heroes are such curious characters as Australian geologist Ian Plimer, whose book
Heaven and Earth
relied for its ability to ‘debunk’ the idea of global warming on a theory that insists that the sun is largely made of iron.Michael Ashley, Professor of Astrophysics at New South Wales, lamented ‘the depth of scientific ignorance’ in Plimer’s book, ‘comparable to a biologist claiming that plants obtain energy from magnetism rather than photosynthesis’. And yet the appetite for such unlikely claims remains unaffected. Huge numbers of us are apparently anchored to an idea of the world the way we want it to be. Recognizing the truth is painful, so we don’t. Of course, if you’re sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting ‘lalalala’ about climate change, any number of topics – from ocean acidification to fish stocks to international development – will abruptly become part of your information overload noise problem.
    Everything in our world is in doubt, bringing on a sort of lifestyle dissonance – the extended hearth encompassesuncomfortable and inconvenient truths. We are increasingly aware that the food we eat is bad for us; that the money we earn and spend feeds into and comes out of a banking system whose goal is not stewardship but lottery win success, and whose excesses can create and then abruptly annihilate enormous sums; that the planet itself is not a fixed point but a collection of vital systems we are woefully overtaxing; that our national wealth derives not (or not only) from virtue but also from a privileged post-colonial position which we have adeptly exploited, but which now brings us danger and violence; that our governments sell or facilitate the sale of guns, execution drugs and manacles to states whose actions we publicly oppose in exchange for the oil we need to continue the cycle.
    Every action of our lives carries a tacit burden of complexity; and digital technology possesses the ability to bring it to the forefront: to report it live, to bring to our notice obscure but poignant crises, to connect us to matters far away and make the problems of people we do not know seem close. Objects can be tagged (virtually or physically), their narratives made explicit, the stories of those who created them in sweatshops can be hovering at your shoulder as you buy. Your neighbours are no longer the people who live next to you but whoever you talk to online; people who share your interests and dreams may as well be in Karachi as in Paris, London or New York. The evictions of the Occupy Wall Street protests have made global villains of heavy-handed police officers who a few years ago would barely have been remembered six months later by those they arrested. If you had been following a Pakistani IT contractor namedSohaib Athar on Twitter at around 9:30 pm GMT on 1st May 2011, you would have read his grouchy discontent about loud helicopters over his house. Athar didn’t know it at the time, but he was tweeting live coverage of the US raid onOsama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. 2 What would have been, as recently as 2005, a military action in