COVID-19 Part III: The evolving tech dystopia, and a ray of hope in rebellion
The pandemic has accelerated and deepened several nefarious agendas that were in train before the novel coronavirus appeared. Among them are a censorial zeitgeist, and increasing intrusions of surveillance technology and artificial intelligence into our lives and democracy.
The turn toward a paradigm of great power struggle is entwined with an elite-led public relations crusade against “disinformation,” “foreign propaganda,” “fake news,” and even “hate speech,” serving to manufacture consent for escalating censorship of online political expression. COVID-19, like various other major social events before it, has been exploited by political and media elites to further deepen and validate this censorship drive. To borrow a particularly evocative paragraph from the Atlantic,
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.
But who determines what a society’s “norms and values” are? If recent experience is any guide, this duty will fall to institutions linked to western intelligence agencies, including the heavily state-connected and -funded Atlantic Council, corporate media, and the FBI. Since 2016, a privatized system of censorship — managed by social media and search firms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter — has asserted itself online, designed to circumvent constitutional protections of free expression.
Major cultural events are quickly converted to fodder for this agenda. The ongoing anti-racist protest movement in the U.S. has become the occasion for corporate advertisers to collude in a campaign of economic coercion, chiefly targeting Facebook, under the umbrella of #StopHateForProfit. But read the publicity of some of the companies involved in this scheme, and you’ll find their targets are not only hate speech, but “misinformation,” “propaganda,” and “offensive material” as well. (Offensive to whom? one might ask.) According to Nicole Perrin, an analyst with the firm eMarketer: “We’re kind of going back to a much earlier mindset where advertisers seem that they are not comfortable advertising with user-generated content where they don’t have greater control over things that are said.”
In other words, corporations are leveraging their economic clout to assert more control over the terms of online discourse. They will decide on our behalf what content is too objectionable for us to see or even learn about.
Late last month, more than 2000 community threads on the platform Reddit were summarily purged, likewise under a rationale of stamping out “hate” in response to the current political moment. Among the victims were popular leftist and gender critical forums.
Intelligence agencies within the Five eyes alliance, and law enforcement agencies like the FBI and Canada’s RCMP and Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), have long monitored social media and communications devices as well, while targeting individuals and groups associated with the political left: environmentalists, campaigners for migrant rights and racial justice, anarchists and socialists, and Indigenous activists.
The pandemic has arisen in, and in turn contributed to, a technological and economic climate conducive to extreme mass surveillance. The revelations of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks gave the public a window into the terrifying extent of warrantless government espionage, including exploitation of technology (televisions, mobile phones, computers) to both track user locations and surreptitiously record conversations, and facial recognition technology.
Snowden has warned that tools unrolled in the course of the pandemic may be exploited to violate privacy rights. A recent report by Amnesty International reveals that states in the Persian Gulf are already doing so. Privacy concerns have also led to conflict and delayed rollouts of contact tracing applications in, among other countries, the U.K. and Norway.
Privacy goes hand in hand with the question of personal data: where it goes, who can access it, who in effect “owns” or controls it, and how long it is retained. For the future of public health care systems, much rides on the fate of patient data as well. In May, the British government announced a deal in which tech giants Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, along with AI firms Palantir and Faculty, all linked to U.S. intelligence agencies, would gain access to the data of patients who’ve interacted with the National Health Service. The supposed purpose of this is to allow the state, in cooperation with the tech firms, to track the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic within the U.K. But the terms of the deal are opaque, and the dangers of improper sharing, exploitation, or theft of patient data are considerable.
As journalist Whitney Webb reports, a U.S. government agency published a report last year laying out the ways the U.S. could develop an even more advanced and pervasive surveillance architecture than the existing one, incorporating artificial intelligence and 5G technology, and control over personal data. The authors’ rationale is — what else? — to enable the U.S. to maintain a technological advantage over China.
Chris Darby, the current CEO of the CIA’s In-Q-Tel, who is also on the NSCAI, told CBS News last year that China is the U.S.’ main competitor in terms of technology and that U.S. privacy laws were hampering the U.S.’ capacity to counter China in this regard, stating that:
“[D]ata is the new oil. And China is just awash with data. And they don’t have the same restraints that we do around collecting it and using it, because of the privacy difference between our countries. This notion that they have the largest labeled data set in the world is going to be a huge strength for them.”
In discussions of the new internet censorship and the new-and-improved surveillance infrastructure by U.S. elite planners and their amanuenses in the press, a common theme emerges: China enjoys an inherent advantage because its government is (at least theoretically) relatively unencumbered by legal protections of freedom of expression and privacy, such as those set out in the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. In other words, if the U.S. is to maintain its hegemonic position on the world stage, its citizens will need to be persuaded to forgo such niceties.
New frontiers of digital surveillance by Silicon Valley firms and state agencies — already joined at the hip — are opening with the advent of the Internet of Things and AI technologies like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa. In this brave new world, corporations and intelligence agencies will have the ability to monitor not only people’s daily interactions and movements, but their habits and biometrics as well: what time the lights go off at night, how often the refrigerator door opens and closes, how fast a private automobile is traveling, and heart rate and body temperature, among other physical attributes that can yield insight into a person’s emotional state. Snooping and data collection by private firms also facilitates algorithmic filter bubbles, irrationally influencing the decisions of both consumers and voters, undermining what remains of democracy.
As the pandemic rages, western opinion leaders like Tony Blair have begun advocating the use of “health passports” and digital identification that could give border guards and law enforcement de facto access to personal medical histories. Time will tell whether this idea catches on.
Alongside the intensification of censorship and privacy violations is a disquieting abdication of concern about these issues by much of of what passes for the western left. Nominal progressives have both cheered on censorship by tech giants in the name of protecting vulnerable groups and suppressing “disinformation” and alleged foreign meddling, and acquiesced in the machinations of the U.S. surveillance state — as long as they perceived Trump and his associates as its targets.
The faux scandal of Russiagate embodied abuses of police and surveillance authority and various forms of shady (at times even illegal) conduct by state officials, who justified their malfeasance as part of a heroic struggle to defend democracy against Trumpism. Liberals, centrist legacy media, and many who identify with the left fully bought into this narrative. It led them to overlook, and at times even defend, the malign activities of these “heroes” without regard to a broader principle at stake: if the FBI, NSA, CIA, and other state bodies are prepared to improperly surveil political associates of an elected president, such as Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, in order to undermine specific aspects of his policy agenda, what regard should we expect them to have for the rights of the average citizen, or for the will of the voters?
Among Russiagate’s patent absurdities is that, while they were noisily accusing the president of treason and of being compromised by Russia, many elected Democrats repeatedly approved massive budgets and renewed authority for the Pentagon, the police, and the spy agencies. Some consequences of these political choices are now manifest in the use of force and snooping on protests that have erupted following the Memorial Day police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Wages of rebellion
By the time video of the brutal killing of Floyd spread on social media, America was a tinderbox, home to a citizenry perilously near its breaking point. And the circumstances of Floyd’s death were such as to provoke outrage in any decent person — a smug-faced police officer kneeled on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, eventually suffocating him, ignoring the victim’s repeated protests that he couldn’t breathe.
There is a long history of both police violence especially against black, Latino, and Indigenous people in the U.S., and many such incidents in the past have triggered uprisings involving both peaceful protests and riots. One of the key distinguishing features of the current upheaval is the multiracial character of its participants, and the fact it has spread to countries around the world, including large, sustained rallies in various European and African countries. They’re demanding justice for not only Floyd, but other victims of lethal police and vigilante violence as well: among others Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Adama Traoré. Deaths of civilians at the hands of police in the U.S., Canada, and other countries have continued since the protests began.
Over the last decade, Black Lives Matter has developed into both a rallying cry and a tapestry of loosely-associated fora for activists to connect and organize. Undoubtedly, this network has been instrumental in mobilizing large numbers in cities around North America after Floyd’s death.
The force the police and state security forces have mobilized against peaceful protesters is striking too, especially contrasted with their relative lassitude toward rioters, looters, property vandals, and individuals who’ve taken advantage of the prevailing confusion to commit violent crimes. Trump’s ordering the military and secret service to tear gas a peaceful assembly near the White House, clearing a path for himself to orchestrate a stupid photo opportunity at nearby St. John’s Church, is an iconic example. The Trump regime has also ordered security forces to surveil the protests using helicopters, airplanes, and drones, along with the vast electronic surveillance apparatus the state is certainly using.
The uprising has nonetheless won impressive victories so far, and has great potential to extract further concessions, especially if it sustains a presence in the streets. But perhaps the most remarkable success has been its impact on political discourse.
The signature demand of the protesters is defunding or outright abolition of the police, a slogan that’s been highly effective at drawing attention to a conspicuous symptom of neoliberal political economy: the growth of the coercive apparatus of the state, including highly funded, militarized, systematically violent law enforcement. It also highlights how lavish spending on policing absorbs resources that could instead be directed to community services and social welfare programs. Important and overdue questions have also been raised about circumscribing the role police play in society. For example, many incidents to which police respond — such as situations involving mental health crises — could be handled more safely and effectively by mental health professionals.
These eminently reasonable concepts were absent from the public debate just a few weeks ago; today, they’re coalescing into serious policy proposals. The uprising and its organizers deserve full credit for that shift.
One pitfall of a focus on “defunding” is that doing so wouldn’t necessarily improve anything absent more comprehensive reforms. As Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report have noted, budgetary planners can deploy all manner of sleights of hand to supposedly reduce police expenditures without meaningfully altering the facts on the ground. Likewise, many municipalities will be left with little alternative to austerity as tax receipts drop amid the pandemic-depression; in this scenario, cuts to the police force would be part of a raft of cuts across the board. Municipal or state police could eventually give way to private security forces with a similar mandate, but there’s no reason to expect the latter would be inherently less brutal.
As protecting citizens and their property from crime are basic duties of any functioning government, the need for policing in some form is inevitable, constraining the prospects for abolition as well. Floyd’s home town of Minneapolis is noted for a governing council proposing to “abolish” the municipal police; yet the council’s vision for a post-police future could include a department of law enforcement tasked with public safety and violence prevention, and involving peace officers — in other words, something resembling a police force.
If resources are to be reallocated from policing to other areas, the question of who will make such decisions and how is critical. As Ford writes, an effective solution would involve community self-determination in all areas of concern, and not limited to policing:
Absent community control, defunding of police will only result in a shrinkage of the domestic army of occupation, not a change in the lethally oppressive relationship, and any social services that receive new funding will be answerable only to the legislators that had previously starved the community of services.
Abolition of the police begins with community control, in which community representatives not only hire, fire and oversee the cops, but decide the nature of the policing that is necessary and acceptable. Community control is a prerequisite to communities policing themselves to the greatest degree possible.
Indeed, communities should control, not just the police, but much of the rest of their neighborhoods’ vital services and resources. The right to self-determination is not confined to the criminal justice system.
In Part IV of this series, I’ll elaborate on the response to the protest movement by the political establishment, primarily in the U.S., and the attempts by the power elite to either neutralize it or steer it in a direction favourable to its own interests. I’ll then discuss the political landscape, and why popular movements today are a sine qua non of our collective liberation.
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