Via Telekomunnisten
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In his March 16, 2013 opinion column on CNN.com,
Bruce Schneier called the Internet a “surveillance state”. In the
piece, Schneier complains that the Internet now serves as a platform
which enables massive and pervasive surveillance by the state. State
sponsored and ordained surveillance, however, is not synonymous with the
Internet. Schneier’s use of the word ‘state’ is ill-advised, his
goading conclusion thereby misses the mark.
The Internet is not a State. States can do something to limit the
invasiveness of web-based services used in the public and private
sectors alike, but they won’t, because any vision of infinite prosperity
based on digital-age intellectual property rights and patents relies on
the current content-control model of value extraction (of which
Internet use, more accurately web use, is the most mass-culture
manifestation) not only persisting but becoming ever more prevalent.
Web-based service providers such as Facebook and Google are not the
Internet, but rather are web-based platforms built on the Internet. The
superior user-experience of such services accrues a dedicated user base
for basic communication functionalities. The design idiosyncrasies of
these platforms define popular culture.
However just because certain service providers have become dominant
does not mean that the techniques or strategies they employ are
fundamentally superior. These have become dominant because they have
evolved a business model which ensures a generous ROI. Without
exception, the leading platforms ensure value for their investors by
trading in user data.
There are myriad ways to use the Internet, there are myriad different
paradigms for Internet-enabled communication, collaboration and other
social activities which can and are being explored. Whether or not they
can “compete” with the Googles and Facebooks, depends today entirely on
whether they can produce sufficient “surplus value” to satisfy
investors, thereby to attract sufficient funding to produce superior
user experience. In all the world wide web there is not a model for
this which is not centered on the harvesting and analysis of user data.
Since much of the world already finds itself on the ‘client’ side of
automated services for much of their waking life, the competition is on
to deliver the “highest quality” of such service, anticipating client’s
predilections and desires. In other words, as everybody knows, the old
customer service saw recurs, “please excuse the inconvenience, we are …
to serve you better”. The qualms one has about permitting unmitigated
and unmonitored access to one’s social life are discounted as a mere
inconvenience one must endure so that the machines can “serve us
better”.
The state likewise asks us to put up with the invasion of
privacy in order to provide us with such things as “security” and
“democracy”. If we look closely at those two commodities we are being
offered in exchange for our private sphere, we may not be so sure of the
fairness of the deal. “Security” for one, may come in myriad forms, but
the form of “security” which is offered to us is one determined through
lobbying by security companies, which, no surprise, promise to offer us
better service the more we open up our lives to data collection.
The Internet is not a ‘state’, it can be ruled over by states, but in
principle, it belongs to all humanity. The Internet is not an ephemeral
service, it is a network of very real, material computers which are
located indisputably in specific real material buildings at specific
real material locations, under nominally specific local, regional,
national and international jurisdictions, right now. There is nothing
fundamentally abstract about the Internet, it is as hard to fathom as
the electricity grid on which it is practically dependent.
States can produce and maintain infrastructure like
electricity grids and networked computers connected in the Internet.
They can, but, today, the tendency is for states to delegate private
entities to do this. This is said to be more efficient. Popular dictum
is that the price to pay for such services is privacy. States have
traditionally been moderate in exacting that price for fear of incurring
the wrath of the populace. Private entities which belong to no
particular state, when and if they incur such wrath, pretend it is up to
the state to moderate their behaviour. Privately, the actors for state
are discouraged to regulate for fear of inhibiting “prosperity”.
Therefore, states are increasingly impotent to rule over
the Internet. The Internet has become a surveillance system used by
private companies and their clients, the states, alike “to serve you
better”. Behind this innocuous promise, the knowledge about private
citizens is used to hone customized media designed to compel users to
purchase anything from clothes to security to ideology. The big-data
industries will build the patented processes which transform data mined
from users into patented automated services. This is advertised as the
keystone of the 21st century economy. In the perpetual panic of
austerity finance capitalism, who would dare embolden the state to
emperil the perceived slim auspices of escape from financial ruin the
surveillance/data-collection industry-driven economy offers us?
But the Internet is not a surveillance state. The Internet, as
described in the article, has come to be used as a most efficient
technology for pervasive data surveillance. States use surveillance
technologies when they are available to the degree that the laws permit.
Today’s laws permit private companies to do things with surveillance
data the state traditionally cannot without going through lengthy
legislative approval processes. It is through the obligation to produce
profits that private companies have been permitted to transgress legal
limits on invasion of privacy. The private companies have thus played a
vanguard role in loosening up legal restrictions protecting individual
privacy.
Surveillance at work has long been accepted as integral to
taylorist notions of efficiency and productivity. Now that the work
place has extended to be almost indistinguishable with daily life, the
fact that surveillance has followed along seems unsurprising. While
mobile computer were advertised to liberate us from the cubicle, it has
made for an environment where one’s employment is perpetual, again, it
is no surprise then that surveillance technologies have followed.
As business rationale and strategies evolve, as the
boundaries between work time and leisure time dissolves, enterprise
ethics entrench themselves in every aspect of social life, and
surveillance has followed, if only so that the instruments on which one
coordinate’s one work-leisure hybridity can “serve you better”. So the
prevalence of surveillance is a consequence of the interspersal of
productive labour time in life time. Ironically the call from the left
to integrate and acknowledge so-called affective labour
will have as the main notable outcome that these activities will become
subject to data-acquisition monetization and surveillance.
Bifo noted in a recent speech
that in 1977 he was (radically) militating against the traditional
career-work regime, where people spent their entire adult lives working
for a particular company. Now it is not without some bitterness that he
notes, bursting the worker out of the workplace has resulted in today’s
worker having to work for numerous companies all the time.
The government’s own performance is measured through
massive-scale data acquisition. This data-acquisition is
indistinguishable from surveillance, the surveillance permits the
government to detect, intervene with, and if necessary terminate its own
practices which are determined to be inefficient, or
counter-productive. Therefore the government, in order to prove to the
citizens that it is doing a good job, exploits all the opportunities for
surveillance opened up by vanguardist capital.
But the Internet is just a network of computers, which
provides functionalities. It is not a state. The state could, in
principle, elect not to use the Internet for surveillance, and could
restrict the data-collection activities of private service providers. I
have outlined above why this is unlikely, but it is possible. Private
capital would likely take revenge on such a government, and the citizens
would likely come to disdain its decision. Under global capital there
really is little alternative for states to “keeping up with the
Joneses’” surveillance service industry. Massive pervasive surveillance
is understood simply as a precondition to prosperity.
“Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.”-Bruce Schneier
One wonders who Bruce Schneier refers to with the pronoun “we” in his parting shot. Certainly prominent organisations such as EFF in the USA and Open Rights Group in
the UK have been working for years to help web users appreciate and
understand the latest online privacy concerns, among other burning
issues of the digital age. And there are thousands of initiatives around
the world working to criticize and raise concerns about the egregious
asymmetries of power on the web. High-profile conferences and actions
are organised, excellently researched publications are made available,
yet these initiatives get only muted coverage in the mass media.
The problem is not for lack of trying, besides whatever
bias the corporate-controlled mass media outlets may exercise, it is
also due to the fact that these critical organizations rely on people
to contribute voluntarily, in their spare time. In other words, dissent,
alternative viewpoints, proposals and even services
cannot compete. The industry or economy which sees its success as
contingent on ever more pervasive data-collection from individuals is
unlikely to finance critical initiatives to the extent that these might
hire more paid staff, and thereby make their contributions more
attractive, accessible and appreciated. The state may step in here and
subsidize such critical organizations to some degree, but only under
severe admonishment from the dominant web-service industries.
Networked-service and networked-content businesses with
their increasingly data-acquisition-oriented profit models have become
extremely important and influential in national economies. If Bruce
Schneier is sincere about protecting online privacy, he had better look
not to the state, but to the capitalist conditions of the production of web services which compel corporations to develop, implement and constantly improve the invasive practices that offend his sensibility.
