Technology: rights or responsibilities? - Part II
By Dr. Andy Farnell
Back to Part I
Outline
This thesis on technology and responsibility proceeds, albeit incoherently, through several stages. First from the very idea of "rights" and the fundamental duty of the State to protect citizens from arbitrary private power. Next to situate this in terms of "civic cybersecurity" and the growing realisation of security organisations that contemporary threats are not just cybercriminals and hostile foreign states but billionaire megalomaniacs and unruly corporate giants who have set digital technology on a dangerous trajectory. A marriage of convenience between these factions needs a swift divorce if the State is to stay on the "right side of history" in coming years.
I then move on to examine the debasement of science and (as Noam Chomsky predicted) the utter failure of Academia to rescue it (and itself) from moral dereliction. After mentioning my personal experience of academic decay in the field of computer science, and the wider cultural shift from valuing knowledge to valuing convenience which I've witnessed over 50 years, I'll conclude with a reprise of the unyielding bugle-call to "take back tech", but this time under the banner of personal and social responsibility for the future rather than our own parochial wish for gratification.
Who wants digital rights?
First let's talk about personalities and motives. We often begin computer security classes with a breakdown of the types of hacker, from the curious teenager DDOS-ing fellow gamers from their bedroom to international cybercriminals and state intelligence actors. Rarely do we extend that analysis to every corner of computer use and misuse, including developers, business founders, and the end-users themselves. That would seem an interesting exercise if we are to really understand cybersecurity and digital rights. Of all the people out there using devices for work, chatting, entertainment, where do they fit in their scheme of usage and attitudes around rights, ownership and boundaries with technology? From such a study I think we would quickly conclude that cybersecurity must concern itself with preventing the violation of rights as much as the violation of laws and technical protections.
Rights?
But what are rights and how can they possibly extend to unreal electronic realms? What happens when your digital rights conflict with mine? Can there be natural rights around information? Surely well-meaning ideas like the "right to be forgotten" are impossible demands in practice, whereas the "right to repair" is almost a nonsense for the opposite reason; namely that it is a self evident natural right impeded only by the existence of egregious over-reaching "intellectual property" laws. Even if certain "technology rights" existed, what use are mere legal rights in a world where the rule of Law is continually being weakened, where arbitrary private authoritarianism is on the rise and de-facto law is determined by technical factors in far away lands or even out in space? Rights are a super complex can-o-worms, so it might be worth quickly tracing the history of rights.
Modern ideas of rights really appeared in the late 1940s after the Holocaust in response to the realisation that laws alone could neither restrain nor define human conduct. That is of course something Sophocles' Antigone dug up the bones of in the Greek period. Pivotal in the 1940s was the testimony of Hermann Goering at Nuremberg, who shocked and deeply challenged established thought with his dogged insistence on the rational, legal and procedural basis of eugenics and genocide. Goering died unrepentant, satisfied that he had "served order" to the last. This resurfaced a contradiction at the heart of social contract theory that had been around since the 19th century. It upended our comfortable satisfaction with society based solely on the primacy of procedural, positivist logic.
To understand this is to grasp the oscillation between "legal" and "natural" concepts of rights which have existed in tension since humans could think. Greatly simplified, this comes from differing interpretations of social contract by Rousseau and Hobbes, differing accounts of human reason by Locke and Hume, and differing ideas about individual sovereignty arising from Mill and Bentham. One major turning point is the demise of 13th century Feudalism leading to documents like the Magna Carta that define legitimate government as having a duty to protect rights above private power interests. Again in the 18th century the United States yields and inflection in the time-line with its Declaration of Independence containing the famous words "self-evident and unalienable" with origins in Natural Law. Prior to this the British had been on a distinctly positivist trajectory into "legal rights" which generally tend toward a tyranny of those with the power to make laws.
With that philosophy out of the way - if you want to see beyond the academic and philosophical takes on jurisprudence, social contract, constitutions and documents like the UDHR - then I highly recommend George Carlin's pragmatic commentary on what "rights" really mean. In practice, rights are limited by what you are prepared to defend, physically if necessary - and certainly using technical means. In other words, "rights" are as extremely political as you can get, since they ultimately concern the life of law (jurisprudence), social contract, and the right of the people to fight wars and take revolutionary action against defective social apparatus or hostile concentrations of power within society.
Having seen that "rights" exist in a quantum state between natural and legal types we should notice that despite highfalutin international treaties and conventions this century has seen a drift away from natural rights again. The resurrection of 13th century Feudalism as technological neo-feudalism has dealt a serious blow to rights of all kinds.
The "laws of the internet", and so called "cyber-law" as a recognised branch of law, and the conceit of "cyberspace" itself as a realm or place may indeed be a grave mistake. Thinkers like William Gibson, J. P. Barlow, and Lawrence Lessig may have done us a disservice in its cultural construction. There is a very real danger of forgetting reality is simply a bunch of people individually sitting at computers and a great deal of wire connecting us all together. A natural, political or technical event may render it all a useless pile of junk in an instant.
Philosophers of technology as diverse as Debord, Einstein, Ellul, Freud, Fromm, Heidegger, Kaczynski, Marcuse, Mumford and Postman have sounded alarms over the insane subtext of "the technological society" as a project to shoehorn reality into something smaller, weaker, less durable, and less flexible. Such systems and their systemantics (Gall) are the one-dimensional vanities of the systematisers Nietzche mistrusted as having "a lack of integrity".
In plainer words; the Internet, AI and-all-that, is seriously over-rated if we take a moment to sober up and consider the big picture of human evolution. We have a lot on our plate right now. An Internet is a nice utility that exists to the extent we let it, engage with it, and defend it, but as McLuhan and Postman explained it's become an ideological battlegound in itself. We're now approaching the point where, as the charm wears off, our love may rapidly turn to hate. What were rights become encumbrances. There is nothing physical, legal or effective that would stop people turning en-masse away from "online".
Fear of "missing out" no longer has a hold on people like in the 2010's. We're more circumspect of bandwaggons and hype, and realise that with technology what we're mostly missing out on is life. Such a cultural paradigm shift, a great "logging-off", could spread very rapidly across the globe, and to not recognise the possibility of such upheaval is dangerously naive. We should anticipate that vendors and bureaucrats will employ more and more aggressive means to keep people dependent on technology, and to induct children into a "techno-socialised" mindset.
For example in Finland and Estonia, which have wholly embraced the "digital state", good internet connectivity is deemed a "right". While this may seem progressive, as Mr. T. (Laurence Tureaud) put it, regarding his success as a film and TV actor; (I paraphrase) "My ancestors from Africa wore chains as slaves. Today my chains are made of gold. But I am still a slave". Eve Ensler noted how we often neglect our right to be free from technology, free from security. Be careful what you wish for as a "right".
