It's Time to Accept the Digital World

This is the third part of a three-part piece. For part 1, click here. For part 2, click here.

In the first parts of this series, we talked about the future of politics and the Internet and the first three axes that will shape that outcome.

Now let's take a look at the last three axes. These are the questions and issues that will determine what the future digital world will look like.

4th axis: Means and End

What really worries me in this regard is a major difference between corporations and states that has become apparent through recent developments. Despite all the talk of the all-powerful multinational, corporations still can be regulated by states and international institutions, like the EU-Commission. The EU-Commissioner for competition policy, Joaquin Almunia, has been fighting for competition on the Internet since the opening of the first Google investigation in November 2010 – with some success at least. If Google should turn out to become the new General Electric of the digital age, like the Economist wrote a few weeks ago, then some governments will be alerted and become active.

But who is fighting to limit the power of the state in pursuit of liberal and democratic values, human rights and the autonomy of the citizen on a global scale? True, we do have international organizations, like the “Electronic Frontier Foundation”, co-founded by John Perry Barlow, or the “Electronic Privacy Information Center” in Washington. They’re all doing a great job. But they are still running up against giants.

The social media protests against the fake election in Iran 2009, the Arab Spring in 2011, and the Twitter-protests against the winter Olympics in Sochi, all demonstrate that impressive resistance can break through via social media. And afterwards? No free elections, no human rights, no cultural diversity, if the state, its government and its institutions choose another course.

In the digitalization of our world the state is a means and an end of control in one entity. There are no checks and balances built into the digitally enhanced state and its government, or, if there are, they can be easily ignored. What technology makes possible, states will do. The modern state was created in the 19th century to tame the market for the sake of democracy. In the 21st century the digital market has been increasingly used to tame democracy for the sake of control. The nightwatchman state has turned into a digital Leviathan with trillions of eyes to watch its citizens. A great means of surveillance and an “architecture of oppression” (Alan Rusbridger, NYRoB 11/2013). But for what end?

5th axis: Nationalism and Globalism

Let me sketch out an end that might seem paradoxical at first sight, but convincing on second thought. We conceive of the Internet as a global technology, platform or medium. But that is not at all a given fact. One of the worst consequences of the NSA-scandal might be the Balkanization of the Internet. For two reasons:

(1) Governments in China, Iran, Saudi-Arabia, even Turkey, as we learned as of last week, take some effort to shape their parts of the Internet as closed shops. With some success. The term “Chinese walls” has become a catchphrase not just in the original meaning but also in the sense of direct censorship on the Internet.

(2) Companies in Europe have begun to turn the discomfort of internet users in their countries into a business model: data can be stored on national or European servers, the market for encryption software has boomed since summer 2013, the market share of alternative search engines as well. Edward Snowden has long earned the marketing award of the Association of the European IT-industry “Digitaleurope”. Unfortunately, he would not be able to attend the award ceremony, unless it took place in Moscow.

Seriously: Pay for your privacy – that’s the new market approach after NSA. In Europe as well as in the US we have a heated debate on inequality. In terms of privacy that might just become the very truth as privacy can turn into a human right we might need to pay for. And that means: You have money, you’ll be blessed with privacy – you don’t have money, you’ll just go transparent.

Back to the renationalization of the Internet: what would happen if this came true? We would presumably need a visa to enter networks of other countries, we would need to negotiate free information trading agreements, and we would need to spend a lot of time and money to organize our private and professional information networks. The open, free, and neutral network, which Tim Berners Lee and others created with the Internet and the World Wide Web would be gone. And with it all those opportunities for participation, individual entrepreneurship, and community building ; and all those hopes for the Internet as the speakers’ corner for those discriminated against. We would be subverting the integrity of the internet itself.

The Internet will probably not collapse of technological flaws. It will collapse due to human decision making. There is no such thing like neutral technology. All technology is social. It becomes what we make of it. Currently, we are turning it into a platform of broad surveillance, and, by this, we seem to be aiming at making us the tools of our tools.

6th axis: Culture and Counterculture

To prevent this from happening – like: whatever will follow will follow automatically from now on – a mental checkup might be helpful. Try to reconsider what makes us human. Individual autonomy could come to one’s mind. The very fact that a human being exists purposeless, and there is no better way to describe what makes humanity that precious. A human being is not a means to an end, not a mere token on a playing field for military strategists (though we do have examples in far and near history that teach us contrary lessons), a human being can be but does not have to be rational, we are not an arithmetic problem and can’t be solved by one. We are not the result of algorithmic clustering and sometimes unpredictable. And that’s what is great about us.

We are the ones who can become aware of our own ignorance, if we want to. And we can fall victim to the ignorance of our ignorance, if we allow this to happen. If the Internet is not simply a technological achievement, but a social, a civilizing, a human one, then we need to open our eyes and ears and reactivate our reasoning. Then we need to ask for the culture of the networks we have long started to live on. My answer is: the culture of the networks needs to be a “counterculture” (Leon Wieselthier). It needs to be based on a broad sense of human engagement on an individual and collaborative scale. It needs people who point us to the social and governance flaws of the networked society. There is enough Central Intelligence Agency, but we need more Citizen Intelligence Activism.

This morning at the conference I had a very precious moment. That was when one woman in the audience asked the panelists about their position on Edward Snowden. And while there was a heavy debate before, in this very moment it seemed as if courage and outspokenness had silently sneaked out of the room. To be very frank about it: I am thankful that Edward Snowden has opened our eyes in some regards on what is happening to our network culture. If we don’t know about the range of wiretapping, if we have no idea about the legal basis and if the rule of law does play a role anymore, that is a major game changer for a liberal society. Who does not want the game to change that way, needs to speak up or maybe even just not play along.

In the style of Dave Eggers’ fascinating novel “The Circle”:

• Sharing insight is caring.
• Secrets are the lifeblood of our culture.
• Privacy is freedom.

This will mean “the end of hypocrisy”, as Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore have pointed out in an article for “Foreign Affairs”. We all know about national secrets, we know about the operational modes of intelligence agencies, we know about conflicts of interest even between friends or allies on a global scale. It’s not about being na?ve. It’s not about being too good for this world. It’s not about political altruism. It is simply about a binary decision: Do we want to join forces to keep at least parts of the Internet and our digitally networked societies a civilized space? Do we still want to be on the good side or act along the new digital axis of evil?

If the USA and Europe won’t agree on basic liberal and democratic standards in a digital world: who is supposed to agree on that? If we not agree on certain standards of accountability even when it comes to intelligence services and join forces to secure network freedom, the Internet won’t keep the promises of more participation, of democratization and individual freedom. It will simply turn into the technological infrastructure for broad surveillance, for mass market business opportunities, for renationalization of communication circles on a global scale. It will turn into a living enactment of the movie “The Matrix”. We might all feel safe and in a convenient state of living. But we are not. We will be deprived of the basic condition that makes life a wonderful gift: the autonomy of the individual human being.

I guess you all remember one of the key scenes of “The Matrix” where Neo discusses with Morpheus how to discriminate reality from the virtual enactment of the Matrix. Morpheus opens his hand and offers two pills – a blue and a red one. If Neo will take the blue pill, he will be taken captive by the ignorance of illusion for the rest of the time. If he should decide to go for the red one he will embrace the painful truth of the real life. And only then will he be able to do something about it, to change this virtual prison into a free space of human living.

As of today no one has offered us a choice of pills. But we will need this to happen soon. Otherwise the Internet as a realm of the next level of civilization will be lost. Those offering the pills to us someday soon should be our friends. If not I just really hope they won’t be our enemies.