Technology: rights or responsibilities? - Part VIII
By Dr. Andy Farnell
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What is responsibility?
Continuing this series on technology, rights and responsibilities, I want to look closer at the idea of "responsibility".
The contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han says;
"Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing." – Byung-Chul Han
I've been out looking for them. Usually I start by asking a half-dozen people what they think some concept means. With "rights" you can hardly shut folk up once they start thinking and talking. With "responsibility" I mostly got silence and a bewildered, blinking expression. Some even told me they were "not comfortable" with the idea of responsibility. And not just young people, but those my own age seemed quite taken aback at the question. It seems we live in an age not just where responsibility is a thin concept but where irresponsibility is positively celebrated.
I'm not the only one. The UK government very politely asked Elon Musk to explain his stance on free speech versus violent incitement, and he responded like a petulant teenager who was asked to clean up his room. He took any challenge to doing whatever he likes (and calling that "progress") as a personal "threat". Any psychologists reading will recognise the dire signals. "Responsibility" requires us to put our ego aside and genuinely think of others. It requires a degree of empathy and inter-subjectivity. It requires the Kantian morality rooted in the biblical (and universal religious) Golden Rule, of asking; "Would I like others to treat me this way?". In the context of digital technology however, we can hardly blame Musk. He merely continues a tradition of entitlement started in the US some half a century ago. Silicon Valley has always used the world's network as its own personal laboratory petri dish to experiment with social control in what is really a continuation by other means of COINTELPRO. "Social Networks" are the sanitised and 'acceptable' form.
Responsibility is "time consuming"? There is more to it. To the ideological capitalist (believer in the time-money continuum) it is therefore also "money consuming" and so "inefficient". It's "inconvenient", and for a certain segment of Western society today, mild inconvenience is the worst imaginable thing that can happen to them.
For many, "freedom" is freedom from responsibility. Push people enough and they'll come up with a few suggestions (in rough order of frequency):
- not getting too drunk and driving
- caring for children
- looking after pets
- voting
- reporting crimes
- paying taxes
When stuck, I often turn to Wordnet and linguistic databases to situate a word or concept. Here we find that "responsibility" (in noun form within its verb tree with respect to "giving", "taking" or "assuming") is primarily a human attribute or personality trait of 'good character' or virtue. It applies to a domain or province of things of import - to care and to have accountability over that domain. As a bare noun it is the object or thing for which one is responsible.
Looking to philosophy, as with rights, we find a partition of moral versus legal responsibility which strengthens our intuition that all rights have corresponding responsibilities. We ask what it means to be responsible, and what is a person responsible for? Many important writings on responsibility address that second aspect from the perspective of Law. It is a comparatively modern term (18th century) that covers political, social and moral ground. In the 19th and 20th century the tone shifts from collective responsibility to individual questions of free will, blame and accountability. Enough etymology.
Responsibility is often in opposition to immediate self advancement. It is often cast as a "burden" or "yoke" that must be borne for some later, greater benefit. Again, this is where responsibility goes against the short-termism of contemporary capitalism and child-like inability to defer gratification (convenience). It is the virtue of a mature intelligence that can see ahead, plan, sacrifice tactically for the strategic win. This makes responsibility perfectly compatible with a Utilitarian ethic, if one is able to put short term personal gain aside.
Confusion with adjacent ideas like "duty" and "obligation" abound. An objection I got from other hackers is that talking of technological responsibility feels too much like collectivism or some kind of totalitarian social pressure. In my mind it evokes the opposite; taking responsibility is uniquely self-empowering. I also heard that it felt like experiencing blame. So, we can not ignore that digital technology is steeped in Libertarian and Anarchistic values which must be unpicked and addressed, and that it exists within the Anthropocene milieu of guilt that makes many people decidedly prickly about any perceived accusation.
Richard Stallman was quick to point out to me that he feels it's unfair and no fault of Software Freedom activists to have society's failure to avoid dystopian technofascism pinned on them. Software Freedom is just one small effort which opens the door and allows the possibility of responsible technology. It does not promise or ensure anything unless we walk through that door and seize technological responsibility.
Importantly, the idea of social responsibility is that everyone must fulfil their civic duties. This makes most sense to me as a proponent of civic cybersecurity. But what is civic duty? For this I return to the Greeks and fundamental notions of the Demos and Polis. It is our obligation to the Polis. Individuals can discharge social responsibility even when that goes against norms, laws and opinions of everybody else. Social responsibility sits above democracy in this way. In other words, sometimes you have to just do the right thing because it is the right thing (in a Kantian sense) even (maybe especially) where the crowd or ersatz "leaders" are woefully wrong.
During an interview with Christian Have recently, ex-head of cyber at the Danish police and intelligence agency, we found a strong resonance around the idea of alienation as modern Cassandras. Those who think about European and British security increasingly find ourselves in a similar role to "climate activists 40 years ago". There are so many reasons why the world will not, or can not hear our words. They are the same reasons that Truman Smith and Dorothy Thompson struggled with their message. Responsibility here, as it was for climate scientists in the half-century between 1950 - 2000, is to doggedly persist against the grain and against accusations of "alarmism".
At some point the "narrative flips" and there's a cascade of opinion change. In reality people's opinions have not changed, but they gained confidence to express what they really think. As with child abuse scandals like in churches, or with Jimmy Savile, or sexual predators as in the Mohamed Al Fayed case, all of the victims are party to a spiral of silence. Each thinks that they are unique and everyone else is 'normal' and so they are gas-lighted by Asche conformity which undermines their confidence to "speak out".
At some point enough people are ready to openly complain, a tipping point is passed and, like a flock of birds taking off, the entire group flip. Something like this is now happening in tech. The mood has changed. Prominent figures in computer security and even the US government have openly said "Big-Tech is the cybersecurity problem". The Russians? The Chinese? The North Koreans? Yes, partly, but all enabled by our own shitty half-baked corporate technology that is intrusive and unfit for purpose. This can no longer be ignored. We've endured 20 or more years of putting massive individual profit before security, dignity and humanity, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Big-tech betrayed Western values.
But my point here is that this is not responsibility. It is following the herd. If everybody leaves "X-formerly-known-as-twitter" and Facebook to jump on the latest "BlueSky" or whatever, nothing will change. Only if the new communications platforms become radical forums for the debate on technology and responsibility will there be hope. Otherwise, whatever replaces Zuck and Musk will become the same enshitified mess.
It matters little that computer scientists find ourselves in this bind today. We are few. Our voices are easily drowned by less technical but ambitious people who whip up the world into frenzied infomaniacs. Unless the cause of responsible technology use is taken up by ordinary users of tech, we are sunk. Looking at India, China and North Korea today it feels our wish to see technology enable democracy rather than fascism sits on a knife-edge.
While the law also recognises a domain of "corporate responsibility" I personally think the whole conceit is a joke. At best it's a set of vacuous euphemisms to, as Orwell would say, "make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
As individuals with power, as CEOs, CTOs, CISOs and thought leaders we can bring our personal morals to work. We can even go against boards, shareholders, marketing people and choose to put profit in second place. We can take a humane stand against weak conceits like "efficiency" and "convenience". But an organisation is incapable of responsibility. The analogy of an organisation as a mind-writ-large only stretches so far. A commercial organism has no amygdala. It fears no meaningful consequences. There is no corporate death penalty and fines. no matter how large, are merely rows in the accounting spreadsheet.
This was where I think Ian Levy erred in his brilliant talk at Cambridge. Despite technical savvy, admirable honesty and, like Ross Anderson, a talent for decapitating bullshit with the ninja spinning-backick of Science!!, I think he showed a psychological blindspot when suggesting that somehow we could use shame as a way to steer companies toward better civic cybersecurity. It is clear to me that enshitified hyper-capitalist monopoly tech companies have no capacity for "shame". That is what people mean when they liken corporations to psychopaths. It's not some empty "lefty" trope.
Groups and organisations have no essential feelings. Indeed they act to suppress feeling. That is a very dangerous problem that we have not really visited since Nuremburg at the end of the 1940s. Organisations provide a justification framework for all sorts of immorality and are rarely capable of introspection. Institutional self-reflection invariably ends with whitewashing, for example; the Jean Charles de Menezes case, or well meaning but ineffective recommendations (Macpherson report). Look at the dire consequences for those who let the Solarwinds and Crowdstrike IT catastophes happen…. {tumbleweeds}.
To take things seriously we must be able to feel certain things, and for this central reason no "AI" can ever be responsible. As Sherry Turkle points out, "AI" can never care no matter how cleverly it is made to simulate that. It does not take a cynic to note that the corporate mission embraces "AI" so eagerly not because it yields labour efficiency but because it offers moral armour. Decisions made by non-persons are one more layer of misdirection away from the corporate barbican toward the walls and portcullis. For the same reason autonomous weapons are a get-out from the responsibility not merely to win at war, but to fight well.
Can human society develop and progress with responsibility? Musk, Zuckerberg and the Silicon Valley 'bro' culture have been leading us in the opposite direction for a long time now.
The tragedy of our time is not hate. Hate is weak. It is merely corrupted love. Indeed love and hate are close companions. Our terrible enemy is indifference. Technologically magnified and sustained indifference is the product of "AI" and "algorithms" (a sad debasement of the actual computer-science meaning) which displace real experience, expertise and judgement with superficial slop and half-baked expedient heuristics.
The important emotions for human progress at the present time lie in a complex cluster encompassing designators like; honour, guilt, shame, embarrassment, love, and pride. But we have to look to individuals for that.
We must:
- have the capacity to love (humanity and kinship)
- feel pain if we harm others (mens rea or shame)
- feel bad if we do not live up to our values (guilt)
- feel authentic pride at achievement of responsibility
So, consider the examples of paying taxes and voting. Many people resent paying taxes or voting, even though they are party to a social contract and enjoy the fruits of a prosperous and peaceful society. But to take responsibility for doing something, even though you don't want to, and even though it seems against your immediate self-interest, even though it makes you angry to do so because some of your taxes will always be spent unjustly, is the high bar we must aim to jump. That is responsibility.
Most of us find it easier to fall back on claiming compulsion. If you pay taxes only because you fear the violence of government, that is not really "taking responsibility", it is capitulating. Voting invokes responsibility too. For many traditional minorities, women or blacks, it invokes honour. It is an insult to those who fought for democracy to abstain. Responsibility and respect for others are thus intimately bound.
We encounter similar dynamics around technology. We refuse to take tecnological responsibility because we can claim "compulsion". We pretend "there is no choice". If you don't commit some expedient act that you know is wrong, then "someone else will", or you will "be left behind" (in the race toward indignity).
We capitulate easily to the network effect that says; to participate in a modern society and be 'normal' and connected to friends we must give up on all morality and principles. That is the "price" we must pay for the fruits of modern "convenience". Even though we now fully understand that many of the things we're building will hasten ecological collapse, exacerbate inequality, and feed fascism, we fail to take the leap of responsibility to ourselves and our children.
Cory Doctorow describes this stuckness as having our "love leveraged against us". It is in fact an ancient trick known as blutkitt in which we are bonded to a malign or abusive identity by the shame of leaving and therefore betraying a common inadequacy, disgrace or guilt. We're "all in this mess together".
We stay glued to banks, insurance companies and IT providers not just, as is commony held, because of rational "switching costs", but because of misplaced loyalty that has a mechanism more akin to Stockholm syndrome.
Social media makes us feel disgust at ourselves, yet it keeps us pinned down under the gaze of the others. Alcoholics will recognise the intense peer pressure of drinking buddies who collude to excuse one another. The paradoxical escape is to take the road less travelled and realise that sometimes the greatest act of love is to walk away from what you desire, or what you believe other people think you should do.
Moral purpose cannot be found within an organisation. So-called "corporate social responsibility" (CSR) is a sham of greenwashing, paying out "charitable conscience money", gender-washing, and other moral theatre. Besides, political scientist Wendy Brown sets out how "corporations" no longer exist as such, since global financialism has abstracted them into mere symbols of exchange for the stock market whose entire value boils down to "reputation" (PR and deception).
So responsibility is something that falls to us all as individuals, as actors with actual moral capacity, or to small groups dedicated to action.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." – Margaret Mead
In a world of systematic organisational failure the term "activists" has really become a synonym for those who step-up to the challenge of responsibility where the competence of those formally charged with some duty fails. Often the situation demands that they are "outsiders", for example Medecins Sans Frontiers or International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement work where no recognised goverment body can operate disinterestedly. I believe this is now the situation for civic cybersecurity, where no body yet exists to offer digital security against the BigTech-State alliances forming in countries like India, China, and now the USA.
We asked the question "What are people responsible for?" and that leads to the question "How are people responsible for technology?". We do not have space here to explore the whole of Heidegger, Mumford, and Postman, but suffice it to say that "technology" fulfils many functions other than simple utility. Our relationship with it is social, moral and spiritual. It shapes how we see the world. It is part of our self development and our ability to help others grow and develop. Technology belongs to the people and is an intrinsic part of human life. It cannot be factored out, separated-off or delegated to mere "industry".
This "oneness with technology" is an argument widely held in anthropological theories. Humans co-exist with technology to the degree that we are technology. Therefore, to fail to take responsibility for technology is to fail to take responsibility for ourselves. This is where our thinking radically departs from the technological determinists like Veblen and their pessimistic disciples like Kaczynski for whom technology was an irresistible external force to blindly submit to or reject in favour of primitivism.
Basically, this is where we've gone badly wrong with technology. We've stumbled into a state where we see technology as "other", as "not ours". It has become a cargo cult of mystery and magic that giant god-like powers deign to throw a few crumbs beneath their banquet table. This is not merely an inequity of wealth, or even power, but a fully schizophrenic split for humanity.
The more we cry for "rights" to this or that technology the happier that makes power, because power profits from the relational asymmetry in which it gets to "give" (and define) technology. This is the essence of Modi's flavour of techno-authoritarianism seen in India. So then, we have a responsibility to technology above and beyond any parochial sources of technology. Just as we are "forced to be free" we are forced to take responsibility for technology to stop it being weaponised against us.
In a world where technology has been hijacked to leverage our love, care and socialbility against each other, then ironically responsibiilty - to the extent that it is going against immediate self-interests - compels us to take "anti-social" actions. Quitting Facebook or Linked-in or Twitter (currently known as X) is not a challenge to take despite it alienating friends, but because it alienates those freinds. It alienates them from harms by subtracting some small value (of yourself) from the network. Even if they misunderstand it, it is a powerful expression of love toward them. Taking responsibility is doing the one thing that you can do, but which others cannot. It is "From each according to his ability…". To be able to help others, perhaps leading by example in a way that they cannot see, is something to be proud of. Leaving Big-Tech social media and enshitified tech is something to do because you love your friends and want better for them too, so you quitting means that they don't have to make the hard decision". I think that tipping point has happened with X-formally-known-as-twitter, Facebook/Threads and the other horrible Internet prisons run by sad little Tech-bro oiks. It's the responsible "sacrifice" to make.
