Like It or Not, We’re Already Cyborgs
To privacy activists Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag, we don’t need brain implants to become cyborgs; we’re already jacked in. And we need a Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights.
By S.C. Stuart
Have you ever felt uneasy about how Big Tech follows you around? For some, this is just a function of modern digital life. But for others, like privacy activists Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag, it’s an erosion of civil liberties.
To them, we don’t need brain implants to become cyborgs. We’re already jacked in thanks to GPS-enabled smartphones, fitness trackers, social networks, and more. It’s why Balkan and Kalbag created Ind.ie, a nonprofit social justice design company-best known for building the Better web blocker-and crafted the Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights.
We spoke with Balkan and Kalbag from their home in Ireland. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.
The Guardian newspaper called you both “punk rock internet DIY rebels,” which sound like a T-shirt worth printing. How did that feel? Or does it detract from your serious intent regarding ethical design and social activism?
[Aral Balkan] We want that T-shirt! Surveillance capitalism is a serious subject, but one of our greatest challenges is that it’s so prevalent that it recedes into background noise. Us humans are great pattern matching computers and thus we are both attuned to overcompensating for great deviances from the norm (e.g., a terrorist bombing) and to tuning out constant stimulus (e.g., the “background noise” of world hunger and disease which kill many orders of magnitude more people every year). So if a snazzy headline in a mainstream publication means more people are made aware of this issue, we’re all for that.
When did you both realize you’d become cyborgs tethered to personal tracking devices and decided to do something about it?
[AB] It was clear that human beings have been cyborgs for some time now. People have been augmenting and extending their biological abilities using technology from before the time of digital technologies. If you store a thought in a paper diary and that means you get to remember it, you’ve just extended your mind using a piece of (admittedly analog) technology. When you wear contact lenses, you improve your ability to see using technology. The difference today is that your diary is read by Google, Inc. if you keep it in Google Docs and Alphabet, Inc. would see what you see if Google ever makes a smart contact lens with a camera in it.
[Laura Kalbag] Anyone who uses digital networked technology today is a cyborg whether they know it or not. This is not to say that people must be forced to use these technologies-far from it-we’re being descriptive here, not prescriptive. In fact, we must protect the right to not use technology. We may not give much thought to this particular civil liberty, but it too is being eroded by schemes such as mandatory fitness trackers at work to qualify for health insurance.
When did this situation start to concern you?
[AB] As we began to understand the business model of corporations such as Google and Facebook-we call it “people farming”-and realized they were basically factory farms for human beings… and that we were the livestock. The Snowden revelations were a real eye opener and a direct impetus for the founding of Ind.ie, our not-for-profit organization.
Explain the thesis behind the Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights.
[LK] If we extend our minds and our selves using digital networked technologies, and those aspects (or shards) of ourselves are owned by corporations, what do we become?
[AB] As an example, if I had enough data about some inanimate object like a teacup, I can take a 3D printer and create a replica of it. Think about what I can do if I have enough data about you, and the right algorithms by which to analyze that data.
That’s a scary thought.
[AB] I don’t want to 3D print you, but I can create a simulation of you. And the better my simulation, the more valuable a proxy I have for manipulating your behavior in line with my corporate goals. In the past, owning people’s bodies was legal. We call that slavery. And we abolished it. Today, owning everything else about you that makes you who you are is legal. What do we call that? Slavery 2.0? And isn’t it time we understood the risks that this toxic business model poses for our freedom and for democracy itself and abolish it before it’s too late?
So what’s the solution?
[AB] If we are serious about tackling this issue, we need nothing less than constitutional reform. If we extend our biological selves using digital networked technology, we must extend our understanding of what constitutes the boundaries of the self to include those technologies so that we can protect the whole person under human rights law. That’s all the Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights is. It hacks the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to update it with a definition of what it means to be a person in the digital networked age.
The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically Article 12, protects personal privacy. Are you hoping people realize that-even now we’re all “cyborgs” this statute still covers our newly extended bio/digital selves-rather than press for new regulations?
[AB] Exactly. We do not need new “digital rights.” We must apply the human rights we already have to the extended definition of what it means to be a person in the digital networked age. It might sound like nitpicking but it’s not. The difference is crucial.
[LK] In our experience, the groups that push for a new set of “digital rights” do so because they know they have the opportunity to craft those as lesser rights than the ones you already have.
You were both based in Brighton, aka the Silicon Seaside, but left the UK in protest of 2016’s Investigatory Powers Bill.
[AB] Well, the IP Act makes it impossible for anyone based in the UK to create private communication tools. They haven’t banned encryption per se, but they mandate backdoors on all communication technologies. All of the Five Eyes countries are implementing some version of this in concert.
You’re now in Ireland.
[LK] Nowhere is perfect, but we are very much enjoying our life in Ireland at the moment, even if we are in the hornet’s nest of surveillance capitalism in Europe. It’s beautiful and green, the people here are very friendly, and [our dog] Oskar is happy to have a garden to play in.
Finally, what’s in your keynote at Think About! Conference in Germany this week?
[AB] All of the things we just mentioned here! And demonstrations of where we are with our new Hypha project, which is building a bridge from the centralized web to a peer-to-peer network, towards a vision of a post-cloud internet. For example, we just released one of the early modules- Indie Web Server -which is a personal web server that we are using to create the web node in Hypha. So we’ll be demonstrating that.
What’s the one action you hope people will take after reading this interview?
[AB] There are a number of things you can do: Take a look at switching.social for alternatives and stopgaps to surveillance capitalists. Tell your elected representatives that you care about this issue and that privacy is important for you. If you have kids, and their schools use Google and Facebook products, tell them to stop normalizing surveillance capitalism, and call out surveillance capitalists at conferences and events.
[LK] And help fund the alternatives, like us at Ind.ie, Purism, and Framasoft.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com on May 23, 2019.
