Boing Boing » Aengus Anderson

Let's Bring Digital Liberties into the Big Conversation

Aengus Anderson — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:15:17 +0000

We've been CISPA'd again.

For a second year the US House has passed the embarrassingly vague Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, a bill that could scatter your personal information like a tornado hitting a trailer park. Echoing last year, the Obama administration has threatened to veto CISPA if it fails to incorporate privacy controls, but we shouldn't have to rely on presidential intervention or the Senate's questionable wisdom to save us. Though Congress is gifted in the arts of incompetence and believes digital liberties only matter to basement-dwelling teens, we cannot entirely vilify the House, either. If there's one thing our representatives actually represent about us, it is our ignorance of technology.

Since you are reading Boing Boing, it is very likely that you live in the midst of the digital liberties conversation. You probably know why CISPA is a flawed bill, how it continues the tradition of other dangerously flawed bills like SOPA, and that there are truly insane examples of cyber-law on the books already. If I had to guess, I'd say you might be up to speed on lawsuits against NSA surveillance and follow the work of people like James Bamford and Laura Poitras. Maybe you have given money to groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Fight for the Future. Maybe you work for them. If you're here, you understand that digital liberties matter and have ramifications for everyone, everywhere. They are not a hobby issue for the tech community.

This is why I want to issue a friendly challenge to you: push digital liberties into the big conversation.

The status quo isn't good enough. Yes, we have an incredible array of talented organizations fighting for our digital liberties through the courts, political system, and public sphere. These groups helped unleash the widespread outrage that defeated SOPA and have brought unlikely allies together to resist congressional stupidity, but promising signs can lull us into missing a crucial point: digital liberties are a non-issue for most Americans. If we want to stop bills like CISPA from becoming annual events, we need to make digital liberties visible to people who don't read Boing Boing or Wired and have never heard of Demand Progress or the Center for Democracy and Technology. Website blackouts and hashtags won't reach this audience. Instead, we need to explain how digital liberties fit into the broader ecosystem of ideas.

I issue this challenge not as an expert in digital liberties, law, or technology, but as an audio producer. I spend my time interviewing Americans and following our intellectual trends for a project called The Conversation. The project is an odd mixture of documentary, oral history, philosophy seminar, and confession booth—essentially a series of long, unstructured, and interconnected conversations about the future. The Conversation's format has allowed me to ask interviewees about subjects outside of their specialties, see who is talking to whom, and learn what people are concerned about.

Equally interesting, I've learned what people are not concerned about. Of fifty-five interviewees, only James Bamford addressed digital liberties, and I had invited him to join The Conversation for exactly that reason. A few, like media theorist Douglas Rushkoff and biohacker Tim Cannon, were well-versed in questions of privacy and cyber-security but, because of time constraints or priorities, did not weave them into our conversations. Elsewhere, digital liberties were invisible, even when civil liberties or other aspects of the internet (like social networking) were on the table. The isolation of digital liberties was accentuated by the dense web of connections between other topics: environmentalists, economists, lawyers, scientists, artists, and theologians all seemed to have some working knowledge of each other's fields and concerns.

The Conversation isn't a perfect barometer of American thought, but all of the interviewees are thoughtful, curious, informed, and engaged in conversations about the future. In other words, they are the very sort of people who should be aware of digital liberties. But if a core-sample of our most versatile thinkers don't know about what is at stake, how much can we expect from the casually engaged citizen?

It is worth asking why digital liberties are invisible to so many Americans. Are they dauntingly hard to understand, the perfect combination of technical and legal esoterica? Or do they appear to lack the existential bite of climate change or an economic collapse? Are we so fearful of foreign hackers that we would trade our privacy for the promise of security? Perhaps we take digital liberties for granted or, worse, think they're a lost cause.

We know digital liberties are not a lost cause, but our situation is precarious and there are many legislative battles to come. CISPA could die in the Senate, but its successors will continue to stagger towards us like zombies. To stop these bills at their source and achieve a representative, fair, and genuinely secure future, we have to seek natural allies outside of the tech and civil liberties communities. Few issues could generate a more powerful coalition, but the burden falls upon us to show how digital liberties affect everyone, from the environmental activist to the apolitical suburbanite, the performance artist to the research scientist. Making these connections will be a challenge of language and framing, but it is a challenge we can meet—and if we want to push digital liberties into the big conversation, we need to start now.

Test Driving the Apocalypse

Aengus Anderson — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 21:00:29 +0000

On December 21, instead of waking up to fire and brimstone, I woke up and read Mitch Horowitz's “Once More Awaiting 'The End.'” Horowitz looks at our apocalypse fetish and sees a society so jaded with the present it dreams of a break from routine, even if that break is a disaster. He also points out that, as we daydream about crisis, we are doing remarkably little to address real—literally real—issues. I like Horowitz's analysis, but there is more to our fixation on zombies, Mayan calendars, and novels about the Rapture than a desire to escape ourselves.

Behind much of the apocalypse talk and the questionably-ironic zombie preparation classes at REI is a sense that something fundamental is out of balance. It may be impossible to articulate but, on a low level, we feel a sense of disquiet.

I began thinking about disquiet as I was working on two sprawling radio projects. After recording long conversations with nearly four hundred strangers about the past and present, I began to hear a common refrain rise out of the clamor: the future was scary. Nobody could agree on the cause, but they shared a narrative structure.

Trespass. Punishment. Redemption—maybe.

The trespass could be anything from capitalist excess to withering family values, but in both cases, it resulted from hubris. Punishment always came in the form of collapse, whether environmental or economic, abrupt or incremental. If the story continued, redemption could look like a Norman Rockwell painting, Star Trek, or a massively depopulated planet of sustainable farms.

If I had been seeking our common humanity, I found it in a primal sense that we are about to enter the punishment phase.

It was tempting to dismiss the disquiet about the future as a timeless part of human nature. Maybe, as Horowitz suggests, it came from our desire for an external event to unleash personal change. Or as a reaction against living in a world of constant change. We could even chock it up to our myths. From Genesis to Prometheus, Greek legend to Hollywood extravaganza, we have a long, masochistic love affair with the narrative of overreach and punishment. This is, after all, the same narrative that rolls Cassandra out of bed in the morning, generation after generation, and she's usually wrong.

Usually.

But this nagging doubt made me take the disquiet seriously. The Americans I met were level-headed, not Cassandra-like. For them, anxiety stemmed less from feeling personally stifled than from a belief that the biggest systems supporting us were cracking at the foundations. There was a consensus that the economy was rigged, money had eroded the democratic process, and, for a large minority, environmental problems were escalating. Optimism about personal lives was mirrored by pessimism about broader change.

It is easy to say that every historical moment is unique and people always feel they inhabit pivotal moments. This is true in many ways, but attributing the disquiet to biology or psychology drags our moment outside of history and prevents us from seeing fundamentally new issues when they arise. We are more interconnected than at any point in the past and our tower of seven billion is propped up by a frail scaffolding of man-made and natural systems. As individuals, we are dwarfed less by God and Nature than by the immense scale and inertia of our own civilization. The stakes are high, the responsibility is ours alone and, perhaps for the first time, we're starting to feel it.

The Mayan calendar did not resonate because most people expected an irate Mesoamerican god to knock on the front door with a jaguar hat and a flamethrower. Instead, collapse fantasies are an excuse to confront a visceral fear that, back in reality, we have created a civilization too complex to pilot and with limited time before it strikes the rocks.

Gloomy fatalism is useless, but our apocalypse fetish could be like the strange behavior of an animal sensing the first shivers of an earthquake. If we only seek explanations within and frame our behavior as timeless, we risk overlooking problems in the world we have created outside.

(Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Occluded_mesocyclone_tornado5_-_NOAA.jpg, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 50279388@N03's photostream)