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

[kaiser kuo]

Here's a piece I wrote back in 2020 about the narrative flip in the U.S. —
how we went from seeing China as a mere copycat incapable of innovation to
the ten-foot-tall technological threat that was going to out-compete the
U.S. and had to be stopped; and how (at the same moment) we went from the
techno-utopian view that tech would bring down authoritarian regimes to the
notion that tech was going to keep those regimes firmly ensconced in power.
I placed that narrative flip in roughly the year 2016.

https://thechinaproject.com/2020/10/13/fear-of-a-red-tech-planet-why-the-u-s-is-suddenly-afraid-of-chinese-innovation/

It fleshes out my ideas much further, though the piece is brief. I'd
appreciate any thoughts on it!

All the best,
Kaiser

On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 10:32 AM Isaac M <isaac.mao at gmail.com> wrote:

> Great to see everyone is still here; we are not alone, and we haven't
> given up. Cheers!
>
> As time has shifted and technology has evolved, we've found ourselves
> catapulted into a new AI age, seemingly overnight. Despite these, our
> mission remains as crucial as ever, just more daunting.
>
> This is why we can no longer afford to be techno-pessimists. We need to
> proactively envision solutions to the challenges ahead and establish a
> robust security fabric for all:
>
> - Philosophical Preparation: We need the arts, ideas, and
> interdisciplinary connections more than ever. Venues for debate, like this
> channel, are essential for timely discussions and idea exchange.
> - Governance Pressure: It's crucial to monitor and regulate the AI arms
> race between major tech companies and governments to ensure accountability
> and transparency. AI-powered-weapons? No, no, and no.
> - **Personal Empowerment**: We must enhance civil technologies that expand
> outreach and connect individuals, forming strong networks that dilute
> centralized control by homogeneous algorithms. It's vital to protect and
> preserve the best of humanity—our professionalism, journalism, and all the
> beautiful aspects of our culture—before they are eroded by technological
> advances.
>
> AI has the potential to be immensely powerful and beneficial, but only if
> we steer it correctly. The existential concerns we face are not between
> algorithms and humans, but among humans themselves. We must keep the door
> to the future wide open—not as a hidden passage, but as a gateway
> accessible to all, empowering individuals to adapt and thrive.
>
> Let's watch it and propel it, with the best breed of open techs.
>
> On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 2:07 AM Michael H. Goldhaber <
> michael at goldhaber.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> A few thoughts in relation to recent posts:
>>
>>
>> Things related to the Internet seem much more complex than surveillance
>> issues, privacy issues, and the effects of profit making. As I as I wrote
>> years ago, the mere facts that attention is both scare and desirable for
>> individuals that will lead to all sorts of societal problems and ill. Thus,
>> shortened attention spans, and with that simplified thinking desires to be
>> part of the larger group, the value of producing lies, of sounding angry,
>> feeling disrespected, and seeking autocracy to correct that would all have
>> been problems even without corporate or government surveillance desires.
>>
>>
>> No doubt, the Internet also has led to beneficial social movements, such
>> as opposing climate change, protecting nature, opposing racism, and sexism
>> and advancing LGBTQ rights, even these are often taken up
>> over-simplistically.
>>
>>
>> The question has also been raised here about whether autocracies can
>> innovate. obviously they can, but there may be limits to their ability to
>> do it because of the lack of free speech between for example, scientists
>> who are trying out new ideas.
>>
>>
>> A perhaps perverse example that supposedly has shown this was the failure
>> of autocracies to invent the atomic bomb, even though Germany was the
>> center of nuclear physics before Hitler, but in both NaziGermany and Japan,
>> scientists decided the bomb was impossible. The Soviet Union also fell
>> behind in many kinds of innovation, despite their huge scientific and
>> technical communities.
>>
>>
>> Of course, autocracies are excellent at copying and perhaps going a
>> couple of steps ahead. Meanwhile, it’s true that the huge tech monopolies
>> in the US now do their best to stifle outside innovation. And do we really
>> need AI? If we do, it’s interesting to ask why China appears to have fallen
>> behind in this area, as well as in aspects of chip design.  Is it possible
>> that one reason is the heavy censorship of the Chinese internet, so that
>> “scraping” it is less productive?
>>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Michael via iPhone, so please ecuse misteaks.
>>
>> On Apr 29, 2024, at 7:33 AM, Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> 
>> Kaiser
>> (thanks Kate for reposting)
>>
>> the statement in your post that most resonates with me  is
>> *Several things can be true at once*.
>>
>>
>> Several seemingly discordant facts can often be true all at once and may
>> be referred to as paradoxes
>>
>> I discuss how surveillance from multiple unknown agency can be used
>> subtly to manipulate and drive
>> individuals behaviours through psychological abuse , Very common,
>> virtually undetectable
>>
>> https://sites.google.com/view/psyabu/home
>>
>>
>> personal information can be found everywhere, not only on social media,
>>
>> Is surveillance legal or illegal? Who are these people asking question
>> to family and friends, maybe disguised as friendly media who want to
>> publish a feature or offer you a nice
>> job, instead gathering, distorting and selling your personal information
>> to unknown buyers?
>>
>>
>> There are hidden networks of people operating legally (say law
>> enforcement agencies or family and friends)
>> gathering information about us for legitimate purpose (as they may say,
>> they care about you and take an interest)
>> and among them there are individuals who can access and sell private
>> information to unknown sources for unknown reasons
>> (the deviated agency)
>>
>> Multiple unknown agencies can gather intelligence about specific
>> individuals by tapping into every possible source of information
>> including friends and family for different reasons. Some may even do so
>> for benevolent reasons. Some may blatantly sell information for money or
>> other benefit.
>>
>>
>> P
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 29, 2024 at 4:34 AM 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
>>> <http://I%20remember%20reading%20an%20essay%20by%20an%20internet%20pioneer%20that%20talked%20about%20the%20implications%20of%20online%20surveillance;%20that%20was%20the%20first%20time%20I%20saw%20that%20things%20could%20go%20bad%20on%20the%20internet.>
>>> 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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