By Patricia H. Kelso*

Democracies are notoriously slow in responding to danger. They dither and dawdle until an advancing peril is not only at the door but ringing the bell. When they finally get around to it, however, democracies can mobilize quickly, efficiently and carry the day. 

The Orwellian tendencies of electronic technology, particularly the Internet, have long been evident to a few. Their early warnings were ignored by a public fixated on the next new thing from Silicon Valley and the euphoric hype emanating from the industry and its boosters. But now we are having second thoughts. We are asking questions about the dark side of the electronic future. We are not sure whether this future will include democracy. 

True, the western political systems, although called democracies, are combinations of political democracy and economic oligarchy. They could be described as systems where the many have the vote and the few have the money. The citizens of a quasi-democracy, however, may especially need accurate facts and information in order to retain the modest political power they possess. 

From Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the 15^th century to the computer and the Internet of today, technology has been improving the means of disseminating information. Throughout this history powerful individuals and institutions have tried to control the information communicated — the content of the information and those who have access to it. To control the dissemination of information is to control what people know, learn and think. Thought control is not only a perk of power but a vital means of holding on to it. 

As the Gutenberg Revolution began to replace handwritten manuscripts with relatively cheap printed books, the dominant power of the day, the Roman Catholic Church, redoubled its efforts to control the dissemination of knowledge and information. But despite the Index, persecution of heretics and clerical threats of hell, books proliferated throughout Europe and the world. The Renaissance happened, then the Reformation, then the Enlightenment. Revolutions revamped the political order. The Common Man emerged from the long feudal night. Democracy was rediscovered. Voilá, the modern world! Marshall McLuhan credits Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type for creating it. 

If printing created the modern world, what world will the computer and the Internet create? How will electronic technology affect democracy and the constitutional rights and freedoms which we take for granted but which history warns us are rare and brief?

Printing and the Internet are radically different media. They have different histories, tendencies and social effects. Printing is decentralized; its products flow outward to who knows where. It is democratic. Anyone with the requisite skills can set up a printing press or access one. But the Internet is centralized. It processes and disseminates information through gatekeepers, the powerful companies, especially social media. Its users, unlike the readers of books, have names and identities. These users leave tracks in the form of data. Describing the Internet as a web suggests a spider at the center, as does its product, Spidergram, the surveillance chart. The spider owns the web and the insects caught in it. 

Printing and the Internet differ in another important respect. Printing is a mechanical process. Press, ink and paper are the product of human brains and hands. But only the infrastructure of the Internet is attributable to humans. It is designed to access and utilize a sub-particle of electricity to transmit information. Electricity is an element of nature. In a democracy, natural elements essential to life — water, fire, gas, electricity, atoms — may be utilized, subject to regulation, but not exclusively owned or monopolized. 

Only the infrastructure itself, invented and created by humans, is ownable. The electronic infrastructure is a physical construction. It is designed to access, capture and utilize a natural element. It is like the pipes and storage tanks of, say, a municipal water system or the cables and wires of a telephone exchange. There is another similarity: the computer and the Internet have become essentials of modern life; they are now a perquisite of citizenship and of civilization itself. Not to have access to the electronic world is to be denied participation in one’s society. It is felt to be a form of deprivation, like being without indoor plumbing, a telephone, radio or television. 

In short, the Internet now provides an essential public service. It has become a utility.  Access to utilities is a democratic human right. 

Electronic technology, however, was not invented to bolster either democracy or constitutional rights. The investigative reporter Yasha Levine reminds us in his book Surveillance Valley that the Internet was developed by the American military in the aftermath of World War II. The Cold War was heating up; the military wanted new technology in order to spy on foreign governments and possibly subversive U.S. citizens. The military wanted to find out what people all over the world were thinking, doing and might do. The rationale as usual was national security. 

The Internet took years to develop at the cost of many billions of dollars. American taxpayers paid this cost through contracts approved by the U.S. Congress. Under Capitalism, if you own the apple tree, you also own the apples the tree produces. And if you finance the development of a thing, you own the thing developed. So the American public ended up owning the Internet, right? Wrong! The public was not even aware that the Internet was being privatized. The Government did it on the sly. The beneficiaries of taxpayer largesse included IBM, MIT and AT&T; also several new companies which the Government founded as privatization vehicles for the new technology. These companies are now the darlings of Wall Street. We consumers know their names by heart. We should, because we pay them every month to utilize electronic services, including the Internet. 

The Surveillance State

Marshall McLuhan gave us a metaphor for the electronically connected world of the future: global village. In a small community, everyone knows everyone and lives are an open book. Neighbors know whose bathroom light switched on at 3 A.M. and who does not show up at church. Secrets are few. Everyone lives in fear of the mythical gossip-monger, Mrs. Grundy. 

But what if Mrs. Grundy were a government agency equipped with the latest see-all, hear-all snoop technology?

In East Berlin there is a small museum devoted to life as it was when East Germany was part of the Soviet empire and controlled by the Stasi. American visitors might laugh at the crude listening devices, as large and intrusive as telephone receivers, which the Stasi inserted into walls, furniture, automobiles and restaurant cubicles in order to eavesdrop on the private conversations of East German citizens. A German film, The Lives of Others, depicts the personal and social costs of living in a surveillance society, where the Government uses your deepest, most personal secrets to dominate and manipulate you. But electronic technology infinitely multiplies the surveillance power that the Stasi had then. 

Jean-Louis Gassée, former Apple computer executive, describes the social media platform Facebook as a “surveillance machine.” In an article on Peter Thiel and his dark web Palantir, Forbes magazine comments: “All human relations are a matter of record, ready to be revealed by a clever algorithm. Everyone is a spidergram now.” 

The surveillance state is on a collision course with democracy. We cannot have both. 

Is Democracy Necessary?

We humans did not evolve in democracies. Our instincts, habits and moral sense were formed over eons in small authoritarian hierarchies organized from the top down. This is the kind of society most of the world’s people live in today. Democracy is an acquired taste. 

The Global Village now emerging will be composed of billions of inhabitants, a community of strangers electronically connected. Eventually it will include almost everyone on the planet: young and old, literate and illiterate, educated and unschooled, city-bred and tribal, rich and poor. This new electronic world in theory will be value-free. The Internet has no cultural, racial, sexual, religious or political bias. It is a machine to which Krantzberg’s First Law of Technology applies: “Technology is neither good nor bad. Neither is it neutral.” In other words, technology is inseparable from the human beings who designed it and make use of it. 

The inhabitants of the Global Village are humans. Most are under authoritarian rule. They represent many different interests, traditions and customs which they cherish or consider divinely ordained. They also have long histories of wars, conflicts, feuds and rivalries with other members of the electronic community with whom they are now in instant and intimate contact. 

So how will diversity on a global scale work out?

In the Surveillance State there is no such thing as privacy. Today’s world is only partially connected. Westerners who value privacy and can afford it may still flee to big cities like New York, London or Paris. But most of the world’s billions live in villages under repressive governments. They have never experienced the privacy which the Industrial Revolution gave to the West and which the electronic revolution now threatens to take away. Privacy, like Democracy, may be an acquired taste but once acquired it is hard to give up. 

How will privacy fare when the Global Village encompasses the entire planet? When big cities, small towns, rural farmsteads, trailer parks and homeless camps are all connected by electronic technology? The Global Village will have no privacy, no place to escape Big Brother. 

But what if electronic technology has made Big Brother redundant? Your cell phone monitors you 24 hours a day; your computer likewise. Street cameras photograph you as you pass by. Facial Recognition technology identifies your unique visage from caches of official photographs going back to when you were a kid in camp. 

As for social media companies, surveillance is their reason for existing. Scooping up your most intimate data to sell to advertisers is their business model, the source of their profits and their founders’ wealth. 

The U.S. Government developed the Internet to surveill. Surveill is a euphemism for spy on. Why, then, are we surprised that the Internet is being used for the purpose for which it was explicitly designed? Or that American citizens are among those who are surveilled?

There is another social problem created by the Internet: anonymity. Users may conceal their identity or assume any identity they choose. Imagine the Internet as a masked ball to which the entire world is invited. People in masks behave differently from those with open faces. This is a sensitive problem particularly for Americans because the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects anonymous writing and speech. 

How will people earn a living when Artificial Intelligence and its robot offspring finish the job the Newcomen engine began, namely, substituting a force of nature for the labor power of beasts of burden and human beings? In the mid-17^th century, the Newcomen engine, the first steam engine, was set to work draining water from English copper mines. We do not know the fate of the 500 men who previously did that job with buckets. Were they deployed in other jobs or did they attack the Newcomen engine like the Luddites did the power loom when it destroyed their elite crafts in the textile industry? 

These concerns are not theoretical. They are already affecting our economic and political life. And they will be addressed, but not solved, by governments and the courts.

Might these problems have technical solutions that could align them with democracy?

The hackers, cyberpunks and other romantics — the pioneers of electronic technology before the government took over — believed that they were working for the common good. They were anti-authoritarian peaceniks, spiritual siblings of those who had opposed the Vietnam War. They were dedicated non-conformists and philosophical anarchists who believed that the best government was none or that which governed least. They dismissed society’s power hierarchies as “The Man.” So how did these free spirits end up working for their anathema? How were they co-opted by the Pentagon?

The short answer: economic power. Brilliant and original ideas require money to morph into commercial products. Those who have brilliant ideas are usually poor. Enter the outside investor! The angel! But as the Internet had no practical potential except as a surveillance tool for the Government, the Government took on the role of venture capitalist. Money was no problem — taxpayers have deep pockets. And the new companies created by the Government through selective privatization collected the personal information that the government could access at will. In a way, they served as the government’s front men. And there was frosting on this cake! Individual users would subsidize their own surveillance! As users and customers, they now pay the government-created front companies to collect the personal data they themselves supply! 

But who owns this data? The individual who provides it or the company that collects it? Our answer to this question will determine the future of democracy in the electronic age. Did the Stasi “own” the information its agents collected from spying on East German citizens? It certainly made use of it! But thieves make use of the property they steal. Ownership is legal possession. What is the legal status of spying? Do people as individuals own their personal information, i.e., is it intellectual property? Does selling data without permission of its owner constitute theft?

What would the Internet pioneers — those free spirits who disdained both The Man and the military — think of the Internet as it exists today? What if their second-generation descendants could reprivatize the Internet? Might they invent a way to do it so that it serves a democratic society? Is it possible to rescue our democracy from the Surveillance State? 

Democracies are notoriously slow in responding to danger. But when they finally get around to it, democracies can mobilize quickly and efficiently. Democracy can carry the day. 

* © 2018, Patricia Hetter Kelso