Citizen Ex: Exploring our emerging algorithmic citizenship

James Bridle’s latest project for The Space and Southbank Centre, Citizen Ex, explores a different way of thinking about citizenship, based not on our country of origin, but on the physical location of the websites we visit.

Broadly speaking, the traditional model of citizenship is founded on our place of birth and/or where our parents come from. Networked technology, with its much more fluid conception of what constitutes both international borders and personal identity, is complicating this idea. It is producing a new version of citizenship extrapolated from our online movements, which bounce from place to place with every click.

Bridle uses the term ‘algorithmic citizenship’ to describe this phenomenon, which exposes us to a complex web of legislative, jurisdictional and regulatory regimes beyond those of our ‘home’ state. Such a change offers a challenge to the very definition of citizenship as it becomes increasingly subject to the design and structures of systems architecture, something typically overseen by private organisations which bear no direct responsibility for the creation of shared civic values or public policy.

Key to an understanding of algorithmic citizenship is its link with the slightly broader concept of ‘algorithmic identity’, which is derived from the systems that track us as we navigate networks, and the mass of data this offers up for analysis and commercial exploitation. This new identity is determined to a large extent by the interplay of code and algorithms that are weighted toward maximum efficiency, economic extraction and surveillance, and has little to do with notions of social cohesion, democratic expression or personhood.

It is also a fluid concept, which changes as we move about the network, and is subject to the logic written into the systems involved. The real-time data captured is used to target specific content and advertisements that tally with the various categorisations into which the identity fits at any given moment. As the scale and scope of algorithmic oversight grows, many believe we are effectively losing control over defining who we are online, especially when it comes to determining the meaning of the various categories into which our identities are packaged. This can have very serious implications for our ‘real’ lives.

Patterns of online behaviour that, for whatever reason, fall into the ever more broadly defined categories deemed suspicious by the authorities, are the most obvious example of this. But the issue is far subtler than that. The technological devices we’ve made, the connecting architectures and the code that animates them, mediate our relationship to the world in many profound, but often invisible, ways. This has consequences for how we gather information, interact with one another, form opinions and define our common goals, and relates to the way in which the design and operation of networked information technologies mirror existing power structures and serve established interests.

The formation of online identity, the processes of self-determination and cultural formation become prone to compromise, defined in larger and larger part by the protocols of targeted content delivery, algorithmically defined search and data-scraping social media interfaces. More and more oriented toward the consumption of online material, we become participants in the information-mining and surveillance mechanisms that power the system.

This in turn has a knock on effect for ‘citizenship’, which also becomes subject to the reconfiguring effects of the network. This ecology does not determine citizenship in the traditional manner; rather, it constitutes what legal scholar Julie Cohen calls a “new regulatory landscape” in which “there is no countervailing set of rules broadly distributing responsibility for promoting human flourishing and enabling the practice of citizenship.”

In a recent article, Bridle himself refers to purported NSA methodology, which determines an individual’s status as either ‘citizen’ or ‘foreigner’, and thus whether they can be surveilled or not, by means of algorithm:

“… the arbiter of citizenship is not a passport, ID card or birth certificate but a set of behaviours and attributes classified by a fixed system. A certain day’s gathered criteria might assign us the required 51% confidence to be afforded the protection of the state; another trawl of data might relegate us to 49%, leaving us adrift once again. The rights and opportunities that supposedly flow from our citizenship status thus become as unstable and arbitrary as those of stateless persons.”

This new interpretation of citizenship as a statistical process constitutes a radical shift away from historical precedent, and begs the question of exactly what is a ‘citizen’ in a digital world where surveillance is ubiquitous and transnational, and how rights and obligations are constantly affected by such a shift.

Created as a browser plug-in, Citizen Ex shows us the true physical locations of the sites we visit and the territories that govern our actions as we traverse the web. In this reality, every mouse click leaves a trace, as our personal data is collected and stored in locations around the globe. It is with this information that governments and corporations construct a notional vision of our lives. This is our ‘algorithmic citizenship’ — the way we appear to the network.

This programmatic fluidity is far removed from the true complexity of human identity. It reduces it to something calculable, which has profound implications for our understanding of privacy, citizenship and the self. The fact is that individual choice about what is public and what is private is being eroded, just as the citizenry as a whole are transformed into tradable data objects.

It’s a reality that philosopher Michael P. Lynch articulates with particular lucidity. He says:

“The storage of our incidentally collected data treats us as means, not as ends. And that is another reason such programs should worry us. A government that sees its citizens’ private information as subject to tracking and collection has implicitly adopted a stance toward those citizens inconsistent with the respect due to their inherent dignity as autonomous individuals. It has begun to see them not as persons, but as something to be understood and controlled. That is an attitude that is inconsistent with the demands of democracy itself.”

In highlighting the jurisdictional chaos of navigating the network, Citizen Ex shows us one aspect of this new reality. It also opens the door to a far murkier world of which, as the matrix grows about us, we should all be aware.

Citizen Ex is a co-commission by The Space and Southbank Centre. It was one of the featured atworks at the Web We Want Festival in London, May 2015.

Words: Ben Murray @tracysface