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This long essay, to be published in parts, tries to make sense of the liberogenic hope and
potential of computer and communications technology in a framework that also makes sense
of the dangers. I return to a an essay from the adolescence of liberalism Benjamin Constant's
1816 "The liberty of ancients compared with that of moderns" to argue that the liberating
hyperindividualism of the web is also the source of its greatest dangers. It is now more urgent
than ever for us to reclaim our ability to decide all together on our common futures: we need
to exercise our collective freedom to preserve our modern liberty.
Contents1
* Mill and Constant
* SchemaThe ancient, the modern and the networked
o Arguments and Forces
* Modern/Liberogenic: cheap communication
* Ancient/Libero Genic: Every web site is a republic
* Coming next: Tyranny
* Bibliography
Mill and Constant
Newspapers and railroads are solving the problem of bringing the democracy of England to
vote, like that of Athens, simultaneously in one agora.
John Stuart Mill, de Tocqueville on Democracy, 1840, p165.(Mill, 1840)
Will the technology optimists always be with us? Each age of technology brings with it the
hope that the ills of modernity will be cured. The railway that Mill pinned such hopes on also
ferried troops to the front 75 years later for carnage on an unprecedented scale. The newspaper
and other mass media that would bring Athens to England would also stir up the passions that
ushered in the totalitarianisms of the the twentieth century. Is it different this time, with the
Internet? It might be. But the forces of social and technocratic tyranny are well poised to turn
the new networks into chains. This paper tries to describe the lay of the battlefield ahead.
When Mill hopes to bring Athens to England, he is pointing back to the basic dilemma of
modernity expressed 30 years earlier by Benjamin Constant (Constant, 1816) in his analysis of
the liberty of the ancients and the moderns.
Constant applauds the freedom of the modernsthe ability to get on with one's own life and
projects without interference of the sovereignbut worries on two counts that we will miss the
political freedom of the ancients:
1. an instrumental reason: the private and individual freedoms that thrive in modern mass
society are dependent for their continued existence on a proper, wise delegation of power to
representatives of government. However the very desire to get on with our private affairs saps
the will to hold power to account. The powerful will naturally take advantage of such political
disengagement and our modern freedoms will eventually be undermined.2
2. an intrinsic reason: participation in public life and collective decisions is part of the good
life.3Participation in a free political realmthe common determination of collective goods and
behaviours through discussionis not just a means to private welfare, but itself a condition of
a good life.
The issues identified by Constant are certainly with us still. Modernity in the West has hugely
expanded the private realm of freedom, but the government of mass society has tended to
destroy the meaningful exercise of selfdetermination in collective lifethe ``freedom of the
ancients".
John Stuart Mill expresses the refrain of the modern technolibertarian. The railway and the
printing press accomplish Constant's request that we need to find social organisations that
merge the two freedoms.4The railway reduces distance; the printing press carries wisdom and
discussion. The agora, the public forum in which the citizens of Athens participated in
collective decisionmaking, is reconstituted in virtual form.5
Today we have the same question: are the Internet and the blogoshpere at last the solution to
Constant's request that we cure mass society of its publicrealm emptiness without abandoning
the gains for individuals of Enlightenment modernity? Should we now see the Internet as
essentially a technology of freedom? Will the freedom of the networked be, at last, the
synthesis of the freedom of the ancients and of the moderns?
The alternative view is as desperate as this one is hopeful. Just as Mill saw the potential of the
railway for freedom and selfrealisation, SaintSimon, keen to use the new technologies to
replace the "government of men by the administration of things", prefigures a manipulative,
bureaucratic attitude to mass society.6Will the new networked world be an instrument of
SaintSimonian technocracy or will it create an arena for Millian liberty? I will argue that
liberty does not as it were come for free. It will not just drop out of the technological
developments of the age. Every technology pits tyranny against freedom, and every
technology requires the battle to be fought again.
SchemaThe ancient, the modern and the networked
The dangers to freedom are summarised in the the top row of table 1. The ancients had no
checks on the power of society; mores and law were fused. Here is Constant again:
Similarly ostracism, that legal arbitrariness, extolled by all the legislators of the age;
ostracism, which appears to us, and rightly so, a revolting iniquity, proves that the individual
was much more subservient to the supremacy of the social body in Athens, than he is in any
of the free states of Europe today.
(Constant, 1816) Society gave power to the individual, but also had absolute power over
including or excluding the individual. Collective power was bought at the cost of individual
rights and certainties. One of the most troubling aspects of the wired world, with its assault on
privacy and its technologies of manipulation, may recreate and amplify this aspect of the
world of the ancients.
At the same time, centralised, personalised databases, whether they are governmental or civil,
give bureaucracy great power over the individuals. These are modern concerns, classically
expressed in Kafka (1925) and Orwell (1949). The industrial processing of information brings
this modern abuse of power frighteningly within the reach of our states and companies.
Avoid the top, encourage the bottom.
The lower part of table 1 represents technologyoptimism. The networked world offers a
myriad of new opportunities for participating in collective spaces, some new and some old but
newly enhanced by technology. Wikipedia has brought encyclopaedic knowledgegathering
into the public realm (openDemocracy is working at doing the same for news analysis and
commentary); Flickr has brought photographers from all over the world into the creation of a
public photo archive; YouTube hosts any number of niche communities that provide a public
space for performance. In the digital age, Andy Warhol might have said, everyone can be
famous to 15 people (Weinberger, 2002). This creates opportunities for the sort of socially
rich, collectively oriented selfrealisation and selfdetermination that Constant saw that
modernity had destroyed.
At the same time, that quintessential freedom of the moderns, the expansion of the realm of
unrestricted private choice is being expanded by new goods and services, some very cheap,
many free, and many seemingly free (more later on the indigestion that the Web2.0 "free"
lunch is likely to cause).
Arguments and Forces
Lines of battle. (The weight of the line represents my assessment of the scale of the danger)
The remainder of this article is an elaboration of the forces depicted here . Briefly, these are
the effects I will cover:
Finkielkraut, Warner
These are all thinkers who have described the way in which technology is changing
sometimes for the worse, they claim our thoughts, individuality and identities. The tyranny
of the group is moulding us as never before. These are interesting speculations, but I argue
that they are not the fundamental vector of tyranny.
Sunstein (2007)
argues that the new economics of knowledge dissemination fragments society into non
communicating shards; solipsistic communities that grow apart and potentially find it
increasingly hard to cohabit as any habit of compromise is lost. We thus are moving from the
freedom of the moderns, with its ``broad tent'' political institutions like parties and
newspapers, to an ``unfreedom of the ancient'' with its warring city states squaring up across
the Peleponese.
Zittrain (2008)
sees that the Internet, once the fertile ground for all sorts of creative, ``generative''
communities organised on Athenian grounds and delivering the social goods of ancient
freedom, is in danger of becoming the ``first selfclosing open system" under the weight of
insecurity, theft and other bad user experiences. Governments will be tempted to regulate,
corporations will reduce the freedom of users that created the realm of pure possibility that
the Internet briefly was.
Kafka (1925), Orwell (1949) and McNealy
Technology is being used to realise the nightmares of the database state. In some
countriesChina, Russia, Iranthe process is advanced. In the West, it has gone much further
than most of us realise. These are not just government databases, but the use by governments,
criminal organisations and some corporations of all sorts of overlapping databases of personal
and quasipersoanl information. We are building a world in which Jozef K.'s paranoia will
become a natural state of mind for many. We are willingly contributing, in the name of
convenience, security or out of sheer ignorance, to the databases that could be used to enslave
us. Imagine the world of the Stasi as decribed in Donnersmarck (2006), with information
willingly autosubmitted and efficiently processed.
Get over it!
Hope
In all this gloom is the hope, expressed in NetTopians like Anderson (2007), Benkler
(2006) and Lessig (2000) who argue for the transformative potential of the Internet. ``The
Wealth of Networks" will allow for the fusion of the freedom of the old and the new:
alienation and anomie, the diseases of the freedom of the moderns, will be banished by the
flexibility and abundance of the virtual world; social tyranny, the disease of the ancients, is
banished by the endless multiplication of identities and affiliations that we can now enjoy.
Modern/Liberogenic: cheap communication
, anthropologist for Nokia, says the cellphone has come as close to being a modern cultural
universal as money and keys. He explains this by the ultimate safety it provides, a fundamental
component of the freedom of the moderns.
Keys, money, cellphone.
Chipchase ought to give more weight to the ability the cellphone has provided to move around
mass society while never being more than a thumbtwiddle from our friendsthe private
realm of family and friendship has become portable.7
There have been previous massive changes in the cost and technology of disseminating
information, and these have had profound effects on society and the progress of freedom.
In 1557, in reaction to the printing revolution introduced to the West by Gutenberg,8Pope Pius
IV published the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the titles that printing had let into minds
to corrupt them. Pius IV had it right that printing would revolutionise religion and
fundamentally weaken the church, but had it wrong that he could stop it. Or take the mass
circulation dailies and weeklies that appeared in the nineteenth century after papermaking
and steam presses cut the cost and time required to publish fast and in huge quantities.
Governments quickly imposed selective taxes on printed material (like the Stamp Act of 1765,
with the riots this caused in the Americas) designed both to raise revenues and silence
sedition. They could do the first, in the short term, but not the second.
Net brain syndrome.
The printing pressthe epoch that some are already calling the Gutenberg parenthesiscan be
argued to have destroyed the authority of the Church, created the Protestant individual, made
the industrial revolution and organised mass social movements. The technology of the press
and later of broadcasting impose large fixed costs of production, so encouraged the
development of mass markets.9
Changing production functions in the transformation of information are likely to be significant
social events because knowledge is itself such an important input to the creation of social
behaviour. We would expect the networked computer to have very broad social impacts
similar changes in the costs of ball bearings would be big news, but probably not socially
transformative in the same way.
The almost zero fixed costs of information dissemination and retrieval; the almost zero
marginal cost of serving an additional copy of the informationthe first round effect of this is
to create "The Long Tail": the micromarkets for informational goods and services that were
previously ruled out by marketsize constraints.
Ancient/Libero Genic: Every web site is a republic
The Internet itself has grown in an admirably Aristotelian way (Curzon Price, 2008). Intended
from the beginnings of ArpaNet as a network so decentralised it would allow the basic
functioning of government even after a targeted nuclear strike, the Internet invented rules for
its operation as it went along. Experts who needed to get a job done formed ad hoc
committees and established de facto standards. The Unix gurus who were the head of
computer systems at the big American Universities, in the major research establishments and
in a few earlyadopting corporations formed an aristocracy of nerds who built an open,
scaleable network architecture that became the Internet we know.
Zittrain (2008) tells the story of the development of this ``generative" technology. At every
turn, the ad hoc groupings made decisions that maximised the flexibility of the network. The
principles of experimentation, procrastination``make constraining decisions as late as
possible"and contribution rule in this world. Academic institutions provide the "infant
industry environment" in which systems that rely in their early stages on expert users all
providing good will that allows the Internet to stabilise, open itself outwards and become the
phenomenon of general scalability we saw in the 1990s.
There is a profoundly nonmarket aspect to this development of open systems. The market,
with Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL tried to deliver closed, controlled and safe networks. The
French State, with its Minitel, did the same. The American academe provided the world with a
remarkable interconnected hierarchy of public goodsfrom the most basic protocols like
TCP/IP to the machines that could operate the network (Stanford University Netowork, SUN)
to the complex software that bundled all this together (Berkeley Standard (Unix) Distribution,
a version of which this Apple still runs on today) and the millions of lines of useful code,
much of it developed under the watchful eye of Richard Stallman, the austere high priest of
the free software movement, at MIT, that provided enduser functionality.
This is (Zittrain, 2008):
The generative Internet and PC were at first perhaps more akin to new societies; as people
were connected, they may not have had firm expectations about the basics of the interaction.
Who pays for what? Who shares what? The time during which the Internet remained an
academic backwater, and the PC was a hobbyistÕs tool, helped situate each within the norms
of Benkler's parallel economy of sharing nicely, of greater control in the hands of users and
commensurate trust that they would not abuse it.
That culture of expertled generative development has extended into the domain of web
applications with projects like Wikipedia. A selfselected and selfappointed group of under
5,000 editors, factcheckers, conflict resolvers and coders have created a compendium that
will rank with the Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie as a great achievement of human
culture. Under the aegis of openaccess, transparency and the power of selfdetermination,
Wikipedia is its own republic. It levies voluntary taxation from users; its aristocracy makes
critical decisions about the common good. It gives away what it makes, since making it, and
having it used and perceived as useful, is its own reward. Benkler (2006) finds in this sort of
project ``The Wealth of Networks", and these are enabled in all sorts of new spaces by the
technology of near zero cost information dissemination. openDemocracy, for example, has
staked its ground as being the global Public Service provider of news analysis and
commentary.
Coming next: Tyranny
So much for the good news. And it is very good. But in the next parts of this article, I will
consider the threats to modern and ancient liberties posed by technology. Kafka, and Orwell
in their distinct ways describe the worst of it. But Zittrain's and Sunstein's vectors are real and
provide opportunities for the complex forces of modern tyranny.
Bibliography
Anderson, C.: 2007, The emerging world of ``free'', Video.
Benkler, Y.: 2006, The wealth of networks, Yale University Press.
Constant, B.: 1816, The liberty of ancients compared with that of moderns, Essay.
Curzon Price, T.: 2008, From zittrain to aristotle in 600 words, openDemocracy .
Donnersmarck, F. H. v.: 2006, Das leben der anderen, Film.
Kafka, F.: 1925, The Trial, Project Gutenberg EBook.
Lessig, L.: 2000, Code and other laws of cyberspace, Basic Books.
Mill, J. S.: 1840, DE TOCQUEVILLE ON DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, Online Library of
Liberty.
.
Orwell, G.: 1949, 1984, Secker and Warburg.
Sunstein, C.: 2007, Republic.com 2.0, Princeton University Press.
Weinberger, D.: 2002, Small pieces, loosely joined, Perseus Books.
Zittrain, J.: 2008, The Future of the Internet (and how to stop it), Princeton University Press.
.
Footnotes
... networked1
Many thanks to all the people who have commented on early drafts of this paperSelina
O'Grady, Graeme Mitchison, Victoria Curzon Price, Anthony Barnett, Jonathan Zittrain,
David Hayes, Jeremy O'Grady, Stefaan Verhultz. This paper owes a great deal to a seminar
funded by the MacArthur foundation in March 2008, "Credibility in the New News" in
London. Many thanks to Kathy Im and Elspeth Revere for making that gathering and space for
thinking possible. I presented a version of this paper to the Annual Meeting of the Mont
Pellerin Society in Tokyo in September 2009. It was a personally emotionally charged
occasion, being the child of two members of the society while feeling uncomfortable with
most of the positions taken by its members. On the question of the authoritarian state,
however, we were on common ground at least at some level of abstraction.
...2
This is just the agency problem that the subprime crisis has made so familiar but applied to
politics rather than finance. The gigantism of modernitydriven often by apparently genuine
economies of scaleproduces freedomdestroying loss of control. That loss of control should
be factored as a cost into any analysis of the economies of scale that are justifying the move to
gigantism. Technology can certainly be gigantisms's friend.
...3
Constant writes that human beings are called to ``selfdevelopment [...] and political liberty
is the most powerful, the most effective means of selfdevelopment that heaven has given us.
Political liberty, by submitting to all the citizens, without exception, the care and assessment
of their most sacred interests, enlarges their spirit, ennobles their thoughts, and establishes
among them a kind of intellectual equality which forms the glory and power of a people.''
(Constant, 1816)
...4
``Sirs, far from renouncing either of the two sorts of freedom which I have described to
you, it is necessary, as I have shown, to learn to combine the two together". (Constant, 1816).
...5
Every technology seems to call forth its wild optimists. Here, for example, Arthur C Clarke
on the telegraph and the satellite:
A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible indeed, inevitable the
United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United
Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.
Arthur C. Clarke, First on the Moon, 1970
...6
Constant anticipates the position:
From the fact that the ancients were free, and that we cannot any longer be free like them,
[some thinkers] conclude that we are destined to be slaves. They would like to reconstitute the
new social state with a small number of elements which, they say, are alone appropriate to the
situation of the world today. These elements are prejudices to frighten men, egoism to corrupt
them, frivolity to stupefy them, gross pleasures to degrade them, despotism to lead them; and,
indispensably, constructive knowledge and exact sciences to serve despotism the more
adroitly.
...7
I am toldand would love to find a referencethat Karl Popper thought that mass society
would be civilised only once instant communication between any members became possible.
...8
Note, from Korea, and not from China as often misstated. The Chinese bureaucracy
encouraged the printing of a small number of classic texts. These could be produced quite
easily with fixedtype technology. It was the Koreans who first introduced moveable type, the
invention which allowed the printer to reuse and reassemble the plates used by the press. The
Gutenberg revolution was one of movable typejust as Zittrain (2008) argues that the true
revolution of the networked PC is its myriad, decentralised repurposability, which he calls
``generativity".
...9
The capital costs of the Internet are huge too, but they are general purpose and, often by
regulation, open accessthe same telephone line is used for all the content that passed down
it.
part 2
Preamble1
Contents
* The clouds gather
* The tyranny of society
* Modern/LiberoPhobic: Kafka and Orwell
o What about Hobbes?
o How Web2.0 technology contributes to the Kafka effect
* Bibliography
The clouds gather
The story told by Zittrain (2008) and Benkler (2006) is of the netowrked computer as a tool of
the freedom of the ancients. It is hard not to be taken up in the enthusiasm. The wired world
enhances both the freedom of the ancients and the freedom of the moderns. How can we not
be at the point that Mill thought the railway and the printing press had brought? The world,
and not just England, can now become that mythical Athens that Mill so desired, surely?
Zittrain (2008), however, is not a Millian optimist. His very ambiguous title tells it all: ``The
Future of the Internet (and how to stop it)". Stop what? The Future or The Internet? Zittrain
(2008)'s is the forecast that, soon, the Internet could end up as the first "selfclosing open
system". The impetus for closure comes, for Zittrain, from the wrongheaded approach to
solving the problems that open systems inevitably, he argues, throw up: 2
The selfclosure of generativity.
Zittrain (2008) argues that companies will be tempted to ``lockdown" open systems in the
face of malware, spyware and privacy breaches. Governments will be called on to regulate,
imposing privacy laws (which they will exempt themselves from, naturally). The Internet will
be balkanised as telephone companies create ``safe havens", networks that bar the use of peer
topeer filesharing, privilege one sort of traffic over another, and generally tether the
appliances and software to avoid the ills and risks of openness. The game consoles and smart
phones are a Trojan horse. Sony and Microsoft have designed their gaming platforms to be
walled gardens of computing. The iPhone and other ultraportable computers are an alliance
of consumer electronics with telecoms monopolies, none of whom seem to want to make the
business ``mistake" IBM made in outsourcing and opening the critical pieces of the PC.
This is a story of how the Internet moves from being a privileged domain for the freedom of
the ancients to being a battleground for the liberophobia of the moderns. He describes the
tendency towards a move from the bottom left quadrant to the top right. Zittrain's own schema
is of a move from ``emergent hierarchy" to ``topdown polyarchy" as a principle of
organisation.
Keeping my distance from a useful taxonomy.
Zittrain's solution for countering this trend is to return, as often as possible and with as much
imagination as possible, to the expert selfregulation that solved the Internet's problems in the
past (Curzon Price, 2008). Before government regulation, let us find ``communitarian"
solutions. Zittrain, for example, suggests that we try to address real privacy concerns in the
same sort of way that the early web controlled crawlers with robots.
As we travel with phones, making payments, with store cards we leave a trace through the
ether as surely as any clicktrace through the web. Early on in the history of the web,
automated servicesfor example indexing servicesstarted crawling web servers
automatically for information. How could a webmaster signal that content should not be
indexed? For example, on openDemocracy.net, we want our editorialised articles to be
indexed, but not our freeform forum discussions. When a Google search returns an
openDemocracy address, we want it to be for a piece of content that we have vetted, as part of
our brand management.
The solution to the problemthe creation of the robots.txt de facto standardis described by
Zittrain (2008) :
Controlling crawlers with robots.
This could be a template to decentralised, emergent, locational privacy protection. My own
personal "robots.txt" could instruct cellphone operators, ticketing agents, credit card
companies, what information about my comings and goings was sellable and what not. I could
specifiy who it could be shared with, and with what degree of anonymity. I would want my
medical record available to hospital emergency rooms in extremis, but not to my employer, for
example.We should as much as possible try to stop the accumulation of information by
inventing the right expressive means to do so. Such ``easy wins" should not be passed over.
Zittrain (2008) sees the emergence of "robots.txt"style solutions as the victory of hierarchic
bottomup organisations versus polyarchic topdown organisations (Curzon Price, 2008). His
exhortation is that we should, wherever possible, look for solutions to information processing
problems that live in the ``hierarchical / emergent" corner of his taxonomy.
The tyranny of society
The tendency of the Internet to move from ancient freedom to modern control is not the only
worry with the ancient spirit of the modern networked technology. Constant was clear in
identifying the tyranny of society that had also come with the freedom of collective,
discursive selfdetermination. The counterpart to the freedom of collective determination is
that the collective can call you to arms, ostracise you, even put you to death without recourse
or rights. When the group is small and the community tightknit, its power extends far beyond
law, and can be a real source of oppression.
You won't need to remind Star Wars kid of this, still suffering depression (surely the modern
form of exile) after the largest schoolyard humiliation in history. The unfortunate boy filmed
himself using the school video camera doing a Star Wars light sabre routine with a
broomstick. A mixture of narcissism, hubris and, most of all, the dramatic irony for the
audience of knowing that this person did not know he would be watched by millions ...He did
not delete the sequence; some peers posted the video on the web; the public shaming of the
notoriety may never leave him.
There are many other anecdotes which illustrate the way in which the recreation of tight
community is also a loss of the protection of anonymity.3
Painfully learning the new rules.
Is this new tyranny of the wired communities a passing phase? Something that we will learn
to navigate once the unfamiliarity of the new spaces passes?
When cameras became a cheap mass consumer good, just before World War I in the UK, there
was a national privacy scare. Anyone was at risk of being captured in a private act. And the
risk is with us still, of course, although a combination of copyright, libel and pressprivacy
laws allow us mostly to navigate the new contours of privacy. David Cameron, the leader of
the UK's opposition, had to spend a good deal of family money to buy the copyright of a
photograph taken of him during his student days as a member of Oxford's notorious
Bullingdon club. Employers regularly check Facebook and MySpace to find the real person
they are about to employ. In a mirror image of the Bullingdon club example, celebrities are
exactly the people who cultivate their private lives as a business model: they generate
monopoly private information in order to sell it to an eager public. There was an eighteenth
century version of this trade: an enterprising late eighteenth century theatre entrepreneur in
London took the muslin curtains off the boxes in his newly launched theatre. The mob
crowded in, not so much to see the spectacle but more to rubberneck at the much more
attractive soapopera of the wealthy in their boxes. But the business model was not right: the
wealthy got nothing much from the sale of their privacy and left for more traditional venues.
``Hello" and ``OK" would perfect the model by buying monopoly access to the lives of the
``Pipol" [People] (as, in a lovely inversion of meanings, celebrities are known in France).4
The similarity between the patter on a facebook feed and the gossip of "Hello" is striking . It
seems to me likely that the popularity of exhibitionism is quite likely in part due to the
exhibitionism of our celebrity heroes. Their status is measured by the columninches devoted
to them, so the democratisation of printspace leads to a proliferation on ``microHello"
publications. Facebook is to ``Hello" as the academic blogosphere is to the opinion columns
of the ``mainstream media". Doing what the stars do, be it intellectual or social, makes us all a
bit more like them. The whole point of MySpace and Facebook is that they are public, and
give each the opportunity to be a bit more like the role model in the abandonment of privacy.
And just like the academic blogger versus the WSJ columnist, the main difference is the first
do it for free.5
``Hello" is the Pipol's Facebook.
Poles apart
A closely related danger to freedom from the tyranny of communitypossibly to the
institutions of liberal democracy that have more or less upheld freedom for 150 yearsis the
argument made by Sunstein (2007) that the new facility for niche information provision also
fragments communities, allowing each of us to live in narcissistic halls of mirrors where we
face no great challenges to our views and opinions. There is the possibility of a radical
communitarianisation of news and opinion that will eventually, argues Sunstein, undermine
the ``broad tent" institutions that forced us as nations to seek compromise and agreement. This
is a story of the Balkanisation of politics because the economics of the production of
knowledge and opinion no longer forces us to share costs with those we might disagree with.
Sunstein (2007) produces many examples of the danger. My colleague Felix Cohen made this
short film about the community of "Vaccine Deniers" on YouTube to illustrate the danger. The
power of the example, of course, comes from the potential public health externality created by
the development of these credible but not beliefworthy communities.
Vaccine denial: echo chamber with externality.
Nozick (1974), in the ``Utopia" part of the book, considers what an individualistic approach to
communityformation might be. He asks us, as a thought experiment, to consider a world in
which each individual can will into being all other individuals; individuals so willed can
either opt to stay in the world imagined by others, or exit to another world of their own
willing; the process is imagined to continue until a stable configurationif there be oneis
found. If there is an equilibrium, then by construction we have a world in which ``none of the
inhabitants of the world can imagine an alternative world they would rather live in" (Nozick,
1974)[page 299] which has the stability property of being arrived at in this Utopian way.
When wondering how far this Utopian construction might be from a feasible realisation,
Nozick points to the limitations that include the fact that groups impinge on other groups; that
it is costly to discover groups that one wishes to join, and one might stay in suboptimal
groups for fear of not finding a better solution; that communities might actually try to restrict
the freedom of choice of members in order to perpetuate themselves.
The first and the last of these ``failures" of Nozick's individualistic communitarianism are the
most troubling in the context of the recommunitarianisation of knowledgemaking. The first
is a concern, in our context, that the beliefmaking of one group will affect another group. The
vaccine deniers are a case in point. Sunstein (2007) provides evidence that the last point is a
danger: that the ``hall of mirrors" entraps people into solipsistic world views and amplifies the
differences between groups.
Communities create poles.
Mark Hunter, a professor of media a INSEAD, argues that the commercial future of news is
represented by both Rupert Murdoch and Michael Moore. Both of them know how to give an
audience a sense of itself. The quickest way to do this is through polarisation, the exaggerated
invention, even demonisation of the ``other". As the fixed costs of community creation
disappear (a printing press, a distribution network), society can fragment into many non
communicating shards. The return to ancient Greece was not meant to also repeat the
Peleponesian wars. Posner makes the argument that this communitarianisation of news might
be a good thing: it avoids the deadhand of orthodoxy stamping out the diversity of views that
it is socially best to express, even if only to better monitor.6
The argument, however, relies on there being nottoogreat a feedback between the
encapsulation of a community in a publication, or blog, or forum, and the path that this
community takes. The strength of the worry Sunstein raises comes from this dynamic effect:
the types of communities you end up with are dependent on the technology used to keep them
together and define them. The Rwandan massacre, for example, would not have been possible
without Radio Mille Collines. The Kenyan violence of January 2008 was made possible by
SMS.
Letting off steam?
There is a resurgence in the tyranny of the group just as there is in the power of collective self
determination. The two are inextricable. Liberal Whigs have to hope that re
communitarianisation does not have to be Balkanisation. It is as if the ``National" phase of the
evolution of the just society was a dryrun for its global version. Recommunitarianisation,
with global communications technologies, is part of the unpicking of the unitary Nation State,
with the adherence to the tribe returning to many overlapping communities, some digital, and
the functions of the State being spread both above and below the old Nations. The economics
of communitymaking are an important part of this largescale historical process. To make it a
historical evolution, and not another return, we should keep our eyes open to the the new
forms of the ancient social tyrannies.
Modern/LiberoPhobic: Kafka and Orwell
We have considered two types of danger so farfirst, the privacy and Sunstein (2007) effects
point to the transformation of ancient liberties into modern communotyrannies;
second,Zittrain (2008) and Curzon Price (2008) point to the sliding from the new communo
freedoms to the modern stifling technocracies of government and other natural monopoly.
Possibly more dangerous than all of these are the forces that transform modern individualistic
freedoms into the hypermodern nightmares imagined Kafka (1925) and Orwell (1949). This
is the story of the harnessing of technology into a database State. A little like nuclear power,
so attractive in the 1950s and 1960s, accumulates waste that today appears to pose small risks
of very large harm, so centralised databases are stockpiling a resource which has a small
probability of becoming highly noxious.
The behaviour, identity, past and reputation of each us is now reproduced around large
numbers of statelevel and corporate databases creating dangerous concentrations of
personally identifiable information (PII).7 The dangers are of two basic types, call them
Kafkaesque and Orwellian.8
The Orwellian, in which the State accumulates information for direct purposes of control, is
the most obvious and dramatic. Take the example of the hapless mechanic from Stokeon
Trent .
An innocent's arrest and DNA forever more on the record
Darren's credit ratings, job prospects and life chances have been permanently affected by his
record on the UK arrest and DNA databases. As technocracy would have it, this information
gets shared between more and more government agencies and even in some cases to private
sector subcontractors of government. Of course, the data also gets lost and may find its way
into the public or criminal domain. The impacts on lives and liberty of such Orwellian events
are clear, and our ability to influence through policy is also clear.
The UK, together with many states since the start of the ``War on Terror" (WoT) have
increased the powers of surveillance available to it. There are real threats, and some
surveillance is necessary to protect citizens. But it is important to understand the Orwellian
habits that very naturally come to a State. Here is an example from Scotland:
In Falkirk, which used Ripa [the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act] 380 times,
citizens could be spied on for noise nuisance, littering, if they were suspected of driving a taxi
without a licence, for breaching the smoking ban and if their expense claims were thought to
be exaggerated.
(The Sunday Herald, July 18 2008)
Jozef K., the antihero of The Trial, never knows who is accusing him or what he is accused
of. He has no control over the information that is disseminated about him or any means of
recourse. The story of Jozef K. has become the archetypal story of alienation, one in which
the modern atom has no understanding of the forces at work at him. The case of Mr Bunce , a
story, with a somewhat happier ending, hints at a modern version of the story where the
information and crime have escaped your controlit certainly shows a very concrete example
that those who have nothing to hide might nevertheless be caught up in nightmarish
informationtraps. The police knock on the door. You are accused of having bought
paedophilic pornography over the web. You are innocent, and unlike Joseph K. you certainly
understand the accusation here, but what have you done that relates to it? Why are you being
accused? What piece of information about your life has been disseminated which leads to this
point?
A modernday Job
Mr Bunce comes out of this sounding like a saint: his salary quartered, his family forgiven for
disowning him ...but many others would remain more resentful.
Commercial databases are increasingly the repository for Privately Identifiable Information.
The case of Yahoo's Chinese blogger debacle is an example of commercial datagathering
being put to State use.
Corporate and State databases cooperate, 1
Information flow from state to corporations is increasingly common. For example the UK
government's "Tranformative Government" agenda includes offering corporate access to the
National Identity database (for example, for background checks on criminality). Sub
contractors to government have ways of accessing datawhere this can go from multinationals
running IT systems to small operations running local authority wheel clamping services. The
film of the useful UK Department of transport web page on Who we share information with
and why provides a small glimpse into the complexity of the multiway flow of information.
Can every outfit identified as a worthy recipient of information be counted on here to have a
careful, responsible attitude towards the data? How much will lead to stories like that of
Darren, Bunce or Shi Tao?
What your driving says to whom (follow link to film)
What about Hobbes?
The accumulation of evermore personal databases creates threats that are both Orwellian and
Kafkaesque. A common response in this age of the War on Terror is that a Hobbesian state,
one that takes seriously its duty to ensure the safety of its citizens, needs to employ the
necessary means against an enemy that has found modernity's Achilles heal. An enemy that
has learned to take advantage of the open society will prompt countermoves from the
primitve, Hobbesian state, that will close some of the loopholes. Hence the justification for
extensive surveillance as well as ``collateral damage" in innocent lives destroyed.
A report by the Mail on Sunday on CCTV surveillance by police in Shenzhen and Leeds
illustrates the point. In Leeds, police prove the innocence of a supposed wifebeater with
CCTV footage ...a petty thief is caught after the police thought they would have to let him go
...in Shenzhen, crime rates are down 10% and detection rates are up thanks to a stateoftheart
surveillance system. Here comes the downside:
antigovernment demonstrators are identified and picked up for questioning and images
of those still ``at large'' are posted on public information pillars ...9
The Hobbesian state has its attractions. But we have a sort of ``surveillance trap'': how to
ensure that information is used only for the good purposes of fighting crime, and not for the
bad purposes of manipulation and discrimination?
It is very hard for a modern mass state to carry out extensive Hobbesian information
processing without also, to some groups, becoming Kafkaesque. Take the (hypothetical)
example of a young male Muslim roundedup in a terrorism prevention operation. He is
innocent (known to him, unknown to us), and has been arrested because he is a friend of
someone who is not. During interrogation, it becomes clear that the State has a huge amount
of information about this person. He is eventually released without charge. He returns to his
community knowing that the authorities follow him closely and that he is now on a national
DNA database, and that his arrest is a fact viewable by all manner of official departments (and
even private sector companies). When he does not get a job; when his mortgage is refused;
when he is burgled ...a suspicion has to fall on the involvement of the state. Is this a state he is
likely to cooperate with? is he likely to inform against a genuine threat that he knows about?
The Kafkaesque State is the one that creates subcultures of mistrust in which real threats can
find protection and thrive.10
We can view the Kafka effect as an externality of information acquisition. As long as the
process of acquiring information generates "false positives"cases where the informational
inference is incorrectthen it will invite false positives in the other direction: inferences by the
citizen that the state is involved in shaping outcomes even when it is not. So the often well
intentioned process of collecting information for Hobbesian purposes produces a sideproduct,
the false positive, which creates a paranoid sensitivity. Philip K Dick offers a particularly
gruesome twist to the basic plot in Dick (1956), where information processing by the state has
got the point of forecasting and preventing crime. The Kafkaesque impact of information
collection is pernicious: if a state gives you reason to believe that it is falsely and obscurely
accusing you, then your trust in that state evaporates. Any Hobbesian justification for
freedomreducing measures should always account for the ultimately freedomdestroying loss
of faith in the State that the Kafka effect produces.
Of course, the same piece of technology in Leeds is less of a worry than it is in Shenzhen,
because civil liberties are more respected in England than in China. Trustworthy states should
be allowed to take Hobbesian advantage of technology, and if we want more surveillance, we
should start by making, through politics, more trustworthy states.
How Web2.0 technology contributes to the Kafka effect
We are building corporate databases of personal information on an unprecedented scale. Much
of this is coming from the advertisingfinanced "free lunch" of Web2.0 technologies and
services. The advertising model on which these services rely for information might in itself be
benign despite the possibility of deep but hidden effects of advertising. However, there is the
clear possibility that highly targeted advertising may contribute to a background belief in a
Kafkaesque state. When my email offers me a link clearly suitable to my current state, I
become habituated to the notion of being watched.
However, the databases it creates will themselves be irresistible to State agents. The
psychological irresistibility of the free lunch is accumulating a large and risky liability like
the promise of nuclear power "too cheap to meter" has created a stockpile of nuclear waste
whose risk we will always have with us. It creates a datamine that acts a a magnet to states and
organised crime. As I will argue in the conclusion, the worst of it is that the model that
accumulates personal information in exchange for web services is not even necessary to
provide the services that we are now enjoying for free.
To understand the process by which these databases are being accumulated, consider the ill
fated case of Gator . Gator was an application that offered to fill in web forms for you. Very
nice functionality. But Gator alsoand not very transparentlyrelayed all information about
web surfing back to HQ. HQ knew the browsing history, purchase history, inferred sexual
preferences, film tastes and much else about its users. The Gator client watched and told all
that happened between keyboard and screen. Gator could have been much more malicious
than it was with all this information. In fact, its team of crack statisticians applied themselves
to the simple task of predicting which of an available number of advertisements a given user
at a given browsing moment was most likely to click through. So, if I was booking a holiday to
Hawaiias I remember doing when I last had Gator installed in 2003as soon as my flight
was booked, Gator served me an offer for a condo and a car; Gator's statisticians had built up
quite a profile of me, and could offer sunsuits for the children, prescription goggles for the
snorkelling, a guide book and a birdwatching tour for my wife (how had they figured that one
out?).
Gator was achieving clickthrough rates with its profiling that were ten times what Google
could offer. Gator's accounts managers could offer corporate customers highly complex
advertising campaigns: ``if a middle class mother has been looking at car websites and
arrives at GM, make the home page from soft green tones and emphasise safety; if it is a
rugged young male, serve up the Hummer ..." (precrunch, all this).
Friendly alligator
All inoffensive, even helpful, you might think. But it is easy to imagine some more
problematic cases.11
The corporate databases that Web2.0 is creating can be agents of Kafka and Orwell effects
just as much as government databases. Already today, the large websites have entire divisions
devoted to dealing with the subpoenas served by courts. The information exists, and will be
used in accordance with the laws of the land ...as Chinese bloggers have found to their cost.
The battle field
If our old liberties and rights did a goodthough restrictedjob in the late 18th Century, with
State power where it was, they certainly need reinforcing with state power where it is today. In
the UK, for example, Habeas Corpus has been restricted to a huge extentpolice can hold
suspects without charge for 28 days, moving to 42. And this in an environment where
discovering information about suspects can be done at the crosstabulation of a handful of
databases. If it took 24 hours to charge a suspect in the past, the increased efficiency of
information gathering would suggest that it should now take less time to charge, not more. It is
hard to avoid the conclusion that the War on Terror has been a boon to the institutional
interests of technocracy (see (Barnett, 2008)).
Coming next
How the logic of the Web2.0 free lunch will cause indigestibly large corporate databases of
quasipersonallyidentifiable information to be accumulated; the Kafkaesque effect of these;
their Orwellian potential. And how to pick the battles ahead.