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

[Julian Oliver]

It is a good question.

As I see it, excesses of optimism or pessimism manifest as dangerous
addictions, drivers of a depleting procrastination at scale. We often hear of
a paralysing pessimism, but a glut of optimism is no less disabling. To quote
the climate scientist Kate Marvel, "We need courage, not hope" in this era, to
get out of bed and work in earnest to improve the given reality as it presents
itself. 

This however is at odds with a first world exceptionalism born of decades of
relative peace and stability where comfort, ease - happiness - have come to be
considered a fundamental right. And yet when things so evidently are not going
well at all, our planet and societies on the brink, we are wise to put our
expectations and entitlements aside; we ought to muster the courage to look
the situation in the eye and confess it.

Vast centralisation of our communication infrastructure(s) is well underway,
power is being taken away from whole populations, basic rights trampled upon
en masse. Personal data is being captured, mined and weaponised`. Systemic
racism now expresses itself in complex ML and surveillance tooling under the
guise of 'computational neutrality'. Pessismism and optimism are each luxuries
in the face of these threats. 

Sometimes, things are not going to be OK - history generously shows us that it
is perfectly possible to lose it all - at least without a concerted effort to
bring about positive change. Only then can there be a sufficiently urgent
response, action.

Cheers,

Julian


..on Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 10:33:43PM -0400, 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

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