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

[Lorelei Kelly]

nice piece Doug!  I am def on the side of the meliorists and all the others
doing the actual work.

On Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 11:22 PM Doug Schuler <
douglas at publicsphereproject.org> wrote:

> 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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-- 

*Lorelei KellyResearch Lead, Congressional Modernization
<https://beeckcenter.georgetown.edu/project/modernizing-congress/>*



*Founder, Georgetown Democracy, Education + Service (GeoDES)*
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