The internet: the tool to cleanse public life
Corruption invades every aspect of life. Every. Corruption is the cancer that eats away at society, the elephant in the room; the biggest problem the world faces. Corruption is at the root of all our problems, from first to last: it isn’t just the cause of all that is wrong; it prevents the mechanisms required to do something about from functioning.
Corruption corrodes, one by one, all efforts to stop it; its powerful stench pervades all structures and institutions, all businesses and governments: in companies that carry out practices their boards know are wrong—and in many cases illegal, and whose clients, if they knew what was going on, would run a mile—but that allow them to increase the profits the markets demand and that are embedded in their very concept of survival.
Corruption is to be found in the political parties that receive hidden “donations” from businesses, and that guarantee the adjudication of contracts when they take power; in governments that long ago abandoned any illusion of representing the electorate, instead dedicating themselves to handing out contracts to their biggest benefactors.
All the problems facing the world today are directly related to corruption. We live in a sick world, one in which everything we do is is spied on, reported, recorded, and analyzed without our consent. Things are much worse than we could ever have imagined: corruption reaches everywhere, to the extent that governments can demand that companies supply them with the algorithms and codes we use, just as they do in the worst dictatorships. This is something that violates all established norms, that goes against the law, as well as logic and common sense. And when these practices are uncovered, nothing happens: the evidence mounts, but it is enough to deny everything, even when doing so borders on the irrational.
And when we try to do something about it, our elected representatives, who are in the pay of the companies that create the technology used to spy on us prevent us from doing so. And they dare call this democracy.
I live in Spain, a country mired in corruption, the victim of an economic crisis caused principally by large amounts of undocumented money in the wrong hands. Spain is a partyocracy, a caricature of a real democracy, in which two political parties that rely on institutionalized and systematic corruption take turns at running the country, manipulating the electoral laws to marginalize the vote of anybody who thinks differently, and undermining the separation of powers by appointing the judges who should be investigating them, hushing up scandals until the statute of limitations runs out: nothing changes, and nobody ever goes to prison or resigns; a country where a significant majority of the population believes that the number one problem is the corrupt politicians who run the place.
That’s Spain, but things are just as bad, if not worse, in the United States, where presidents betray the trust invested in them, and break each and every promise they made, organizing deranged surveillance systems to find imaginary enemies and that track everything thing we look for, read, or think, and where we go, even when our cellphone is turned off, able to send a missile with milimetric precision to any location, again without any kind of public supervision. This is a system that protects itself by imprisoning anybody who endangers it for life, putting them on a wanted list, and making them an example so that the rest of us know that our lives will be destroyed if we question the system and expose what is going on in our name. The truth is that in Spain, we’re little more than beginners. This is not a Spanish problem; it is something universal, inherent within the system, perhaps even part of human nature.
The only threat to corruption is transparency. The only threat to corruption is called the internet, a difficult-to-control network that has eliminated all barriers to publication and free expression; a network that permits information to be leaked, a network that produced Wikileaks, and that has shone the light of transparency into the darkest corners. Which is why the corrupt are so keen to control a network that exposes what shouldn’t be seen.
It is essential to protect a system that is kept secret, where classified information is hidden, and that operates in the dark; a system that is now beyond question, because “we all know this is how things are”. If you talk about it or you expose it, you are just another dreamer, likely to prompt pitying looks from the rest of society, a kind of hippie naïve enough to think you can change things that cannot be changed, because that is the nature of the system.
But we cannot accept this. We can change things, and we must change things: some people have been trying to do so now for many years. We need a new puritanism, we must demand, at the top of our voices, transparency in everything. We are already seeing some examples: ISPs who refuse to accept certain policies, researchers who protest against the people who award them prizes, companies that exercise freedom of choice and that refuse to deal with those that don’t. We need to learn from what is going on, and purge the system. To do this we need to use all the means at our disposal: the rules governing the market, competition, popular pressure, fashion, the vote… any means is valid to end this widespread and institutionalized corruption, and which at the moment seems impossible to do away with. Fatalism will get us nowhere: if the problem is rooted in human nature, we have to accept that and implement effective controls. If we do not act, we must accept that things will get worse, and that we are prepared to live in an ever filthier pigsty. And what is worse, because of the internet, we will not even be able to pretend otherwise. The first step is to believe that we can bring about change.
