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

[Doug Schuler]

I'm still planning to send an introduction to the list but since this seems
so relevant I thought I'd pass it on straight away.

My piece on "Neither an Optimist nor a Pessimist Be" was published a decade
or so ago in a now defunct magazine called Internet Revolution.

https://www.publicsphereproject.org/sites/default/files/Neither%20an%20Optimist%20nor%20a%20Pessimist%20Be.pdf

I still stand by it, but I must confess it seems to be getting harder not
to fall into the pessimistic side...

Thanks everybody!

— Doug






On Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 7:34 PM Kate Krauss <katiephr at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 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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>


-- 
Douglas Schuler
douglas at publicsphereproject.org
Twitter: @doug_schuler

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