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

[Richard Brooks]

I enjoyed reading Byron Tau's "Means of Control." In it a WSJ
journalist discusses tech, data, and surveillance. He had
a lot of things I was not totally aware of. I would say his
big point is that the US government realized that you do
not need a warrant to buy data from data brokers, which
lead to lots of companies competing to be as invasive as
possible.

Hard to be optimistic, when the Western  vendors seem to
be intent on being more Orwellian than the authoritarians.
I also got the impression that the market will sell to anyone.

The idea of China using TikTok to spy on Americans always
seemed kind of irrelevant. Why would they invest money
in an app, when they can buy the data already?

On 4/28/24 22:33, Kate Krauss 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 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
>

-- 
R. R. Brooks
Professor
(He/Him/His)
College of Engineering Computing and Applied Science
https://www.clemson.edu/cecas
Clemson University

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