[liberationtech] Techno-utopia -> techno-pessimism: Are we *too* glum now? Need your thoughts.

[Kate Krauss]

Are we too techno-pessimistic?

I pulled out this message from the introductions thread because it didn't
get a lot of attention when first posted, but it's fascinating --thanks,
Kaiser!

I feel ill-equipped to discuss this but I'll get the ball rolling.
*Folks on this list? I'd love to hear what you think about Kaiser's post
(which is pasted below mine). *
By 2013 and the Snowden revelations, tech activists were realizing how much
both the US government, and as we already knew, platforms like Facebook
were surveilling our lives. (Snowden also revealed how hard the NSA and
GCHQ were going after Tor.  And they didn't get it, ha.)

I had also seen, previously, pervasive, all-encompassing surveillance in
China of my activist friends. (They've stopped monitoring your phone calls
and they're sitting in your kitchen--not good). So for me it was all of a
piece, and I didn't have to imagine what could go wrong if governments
conducted unchecked surveillance. And it motivated me to work on these
issues.

Meanwhile, in the wider US, in late 2015 Trump launched his presidential
campaign by demonizing immigrants, then loudly criticized and sanctioned
China's trade practices, and later he blamed COVID on China. And by the
middle of the pandemic, Asian people in Philly were afraid to walk down the
street. So a lot of racist Americans who didn't know much about technology,
IP, or China, were mad at China. And there are always China hawks that
sincerely or exploitatively go after China in DC. But those are different
groups, obviously, than are on this list.

The people I know who care about online privacy and digital rights believe
(and feel free to speak for yourselves) that if you want privacy and human
rights, you have to defend them, whether by building online privacy tools,
censorship circumvention tools, or decentralized communications platforms,
or educating people in avoiding surveillance, or blurring out your house on
Google maps. You have to take action.

I myself also think it's important to change laws and regulations, but you
still need the technology. I remember that Griffin Boyce and others
developed tools <http://I remember reading an essay by an internet pioneer
that talked about the implications of online surveillance; that was the
first time I saw that things could go bad on the internet.> that made the
Stop Online Privacy Act impossible to enforce. Another lesson from SOPA:
Collective action can get the goods. (Thank you, Aaron Swartz.)

So maybe we are techno-optimists and techno-realists at the same time?

Mainstream Americans are still inured to a lack of privacy, and that is
very dangerous. However, they are now suspicious of Facebook--and maybe
that's a good thing.

This doesn't mean that Chinese companies are always  A+ and never steal IP.
I went to a lecture in 2018 or 2019 where a Chinese scholar presented
her research studying Chinese companies--and some of them lacked research
departments because they were "borrowing" IP. Several things can be true at
once.

Other people on the list: What do you think?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: kaiser kuo <kaiser.kuo at gmail.com>
LT <lt at lists.liberationtech.org>

Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:20:43 -0400
Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Liberation Tech would like a word.
Thanks, Kate, for stepping up to revive this effort — and for the low-key
shout-out!

I've written and spoken quite a bit on the seemingly sudden swing from the
politically techno-utopian idea still present in this listserv's name to
the techno-pessimism that seems so pervasive in discourse on the
relationship between technology and authoritarian politics. We've gone, as
I've often said, from believing that the spread of digital technology
sounded the death knell for authoritarian governments to believing instead
that tech is the loyal handmaiden of authoritarians, who've become adept at
using them to suppress dissent and other nefarious ends. To an extent, I
get why this has happened — the failure of the later color revolutions and
the Arab Spring, when we too-eagerly appended the names of various American
social media products to these revolutions (the "Twitter Revolution," the
"YouTube Revolution," the "Facebook Revolution"); the Snowden revelations
about Prism; Russian meddling and Macedonian troll farms; Cambridge
Analytica, etc). I suppose some humility about it was needed, but have we
(i.e. the national or "Western" conversation) overcorrected? I'd be curious
to hear from list members with experience in different geographies to get
their sense of how things have played out in the last decade. I put the
inflection point at roughly 2016: that's when I started sensing the
dramatic narrative shift.

And I'm curious whether people think that's related to, or completely
independent from, another narrative shift that seems to have been
simultaneous when it comes, specifically, to China: At about that same
moment, the narrative went from this disparagement of China's ability to
innovate (blaming, in most cases, the lack of free information flows and
academic freedom, and positing a relationship between innovation and
political freedom) to a pervasive sense that China was out-innovating the
U.S. and was an unstoppable juggernaut ready to eat our lunch. Obviously
this latter narrative continues and has been made worse in recent years.

Thanks! Once again, Kate, thanks for your efforts!!

- Kaiser
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