His actual choice—starting an organization called the Center for Humane Technology and then obsessing over language—seems, in one way, remarkably unambitious. If you really believe that the most powerful companies in the world are destroying the human species, shouldn’t you counterattack with more than a sharpie and a thesaurus?

Harris doesn’t buy that argument. For one thing, he’s good at language, so why shouldn’t he focus on it? More importantly, he believes in its power. Pressed on this point, he recalls a moment back at Stanford. “We studied the power of language semiotics and Alfred Korzybski and people like him,” he says. “And they have this concept that something doesn’t exist until there’s a language symbol for it. I used to think of that as a kind of a poetic thing. But I’m really convinced now that language actually does create things, and it creates momentum and pressure. That’s why we’re focused on it.”

He believes this phenomenon was at play over the past two years. Yes, the world began to question Silicon Valley in part because of the election of Donald Trump and in part because our addiction to our devices seemed so obvious. But the sense of alarm also spiked because people had language that allowed them to name the icky feelings they had about what their phones were doing to them and to society. They had language that helped them center their thoughts and thus their critique.

Harris is sometimes called the conscience of Silicon Valley, but it’s more accurate to say that he’s the spokesperson for the conscience of Silicon Valley. His campaign has been run without writing code, without hiring engineers, and without Harris getting arrested on a picket line by the Menlo Park police. Oddly, his critics sometimes embrace him more tightly than his allies. And he’s completely comfortable with this role. All he wants is the perfect phrase.

But will this new phrase catch on? Will there be network television specials soon about “human downgrading,” and will Zuckerberg appropriate it for one of his periodic essays? Perhaps. It’s clever and original. It plays on some of the themes expounded by Yuval Noah Harari in his best-selling books, without sounding exactly like Yuval Noah Harari. It twins nicely with the fears that people have about being rendered obsolete in a world of near-infinite Moore’s law upgrades. It sounds both existentially threatening and manageable.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com