Rock the Internet Blues! (Part 2/3)
A critical view of the evolution of the Internet from civil society
Daniel Pimienta & Luis Germán Rodríguez Leal, June 2020
pimienta@funredes.org & luisger.rodl@gmail.com
This article is dedicated to the members of the virtual community MISTICA, which disappeared from cyberspace in 2007, and to Michael Gurstein who dedicated his life to empowering citizens in community networks and with whom we shared parts of that reflection in the corridors of a meeting shortly before of his physical disappearance in October 2017.
ABSTRACT:
Starting from an analysis of the differences between virtual communities and social networks, a critical description is developed of how the Internet has evolved in the last 20 years towards a situation marked by the end of dialogue and the obsessive promotion of visions centered on egocentric interests. The historical singularity from which this situation was triggered is identified in Google’s decision, in the early 2000s, to make advertising the focus of its business strategy and how it transformed, with the help of others Technology Giants (TG), users in user-products and then agents of their own marketing, with the use of their egomation. The paper investigates the role played by civil society specialized in global information society issues, where it has presented little resistance to the changes that have arisen along the way. In addition to representing a divorce with the shared initial utopias, this evolution is a threat with important repercussions in the non-virtual world, including the weakening of the democratic foundations of our societies. After showing some dystopian perspectives, some concrete guidelines are proposed to change course, highlighting the most important measure: that of declaring a digital emergency that contemplates massive education programs to insert citizens in the ethical challenges, the potentialities and risks of the global knowledge society and especially in what information literacy means.
Keywords: Internet, virtual community, social network, technological giants, digital emergency, information literacy, global knowledge society, information ethics, multi-stakeholder, egomation.
Contents
Abstract
Introduction
The end of dialogue
The way we get here
The opinion society and the “social contamination” via the Internet
The role of civil society
Governments ot TG: the cognitive bias
The digital emergency
Conclusions
References
(This part of the article covers the titles indicated in bold)
The opinion society and “social contamination” via the Internet
As the number of visits and “likes” became the absolute criterion of “ virtual success”, everybody publishes opinion on everything and the opinion that generates more commotion has a superior presence, above that of competent persons on the subject. As Umberto Eco observed with humor and lucidity in 2015[1]:
The Social Networks allow a number of idiots the right to express what they used to say inside a pub, a glass in hand, without disturbing many people, however, now they have as much right as a Nobel Prize. It is the invasion of the idiots.
Unfortunately, it was not only the invasion of what Eco calls idiots (imbecilli in Italian), but also of those who disseminate as many conspiracy theories as necessary to support and motivate racist and hate speeches which would not resist to reason. While Google already knows that dog perfectly, the paradox is that other more rabid dogs can display their teeth and their slime, feeling protected by an apparent anonymity. The number of dogs that invaded and contaminated digital communication platforms with their rabies is such that the marginal cost to overcome to bring them to justice is apparently out of reach of police and judicial systems not prepared for that.
The tools certainly do not condition the uses and, in fact, nothing prevents a WhatsApp or Facebook group from supporting a quality virtual community; there certainly are, with valuable contributions. However, a trend of behavior induced by information illiteracy and technical laziness contribute to consolidate a situation where the common users are behaving as products. This means dedicating themselves in the digital world, mainly, to self-promote and self-market, a way to self-indulge in frank coherence with the economic model that manipulated them. The global knowledge society evolves into the egomation society, sister of the opinion society of mother of the disinformation society, the one where fake news prevails.
And it is not about questioning the approach of the business model only because of the deterioration in the quality of the services it generates or because of suspicion of the enormous financial benefits obtained using the egomation of users-products without their explicit consent. An increasing number of people take the behaviors observed in the virtual sphere as an unquestionable norm and use them as a guideline to shape their behaviors in the real world. Somehow the virtual world has polluting effects on the non-virtual world.
To take an example from those times of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has gone to the extreme of broadcasting beliefs (unproven approaches) as if they were scientific truths (supported by rigorously and verifiable arguments). Thus, with a survey, involving people who do not understand medicine or biomedical research, they “demonstrate” in France that such medicine is suitable to combat the disease. The promoter of the treatment fostered a deep egolatry towards him in the SN as he appeared to offer a universal remedy to a population in dire need. When questioned by a journalist about his perception of the prudent medical recommendation by the Minister of Health, he answers that you only have to measure our respective popularity with a poll to find out who had the medical reason. This media famous scientific no longer uses the references of his peers to weigh the quality of his scientific production, but rather the number of hits he has on YouTube and the “likes” he accumulates on Facebook. The physician becomes influencer and guru only through the grace and work of his positioning in the SN.
The fate of the Internet in the western world is determined by Google (with the entire conglomerate under the mantle of Alphabet) along with initiatives owned by companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft[2]. Together they constitute that framework that makes the TG the actors that shape the evolution of the global knowledge society, above the actions of heads of states and governments. Under the control of the respective non democratic governments of China and Russia there are similar companies that act as a counterweight to their power. In them, governments reserve relevant weight in decisions because their operation openly becomes part of the official infrastructure for political control, as well as engines of economic activity.
As dialogue ends, democracies become more tense and fragile. The acceptance that in a representative democracy system the majority decides who will exercise power on behalf of the people (while respecting minorities) is cracking and active minorities ignore the mandate by vote and claim, in the name of a participatory democracy, certainly longed for but still poorly defined, to seize power relying on polls and successes in the SN.
Another symptom of this new trend in which what happens on the Internet is displaced as a norm for behavior in the real world is the confused belief that freedom of expression has priority over all laws because if on the Internet I can defame, insult and threaten death without taking the risk that the corresponding laws apply to me so I can physically approach the person I am assaulting and, in the name of freedom of expression, insult and threaten them at their home.
Democracy has lost a lot on this path and there is still a way to go. If we don’t react now, fate may be even worse. Along this path, the extraordinary potential for the generation of knowledge using digital platforms would end up being pitifully wasted and reduced to the limited possibilities of the archaic BBS (Bulletin Board Systems).
The role of civil society
Civil society concerned by the issues surrounding information and communication technologies (ICT) played a key role at the beginning and throughout the WSIS process. At that time, it clearly and objectively influenced the setting of the agendas for international organizations and, indirectly, for many governments. Simultaneously, in the kitchens of Google, the soup was prepared that would come to supply the substance to the evolution of digital platforms and before which civil society took a short view, remaining oriented only towards public policies for the sector. And it turned out that, within the same WSIS process, the anesthetizing pill emerged to moderate civil society actors on the issue of Internet governance: the multi-stakeholder approach[3].
Civil society actors who had previously lived through the utopias of radio and television and, in the 1970s, the entire debate on “the new world information and communication order (NWICO)[4]” and the defeat that finally prevailed, tried to warn that the course could go the same way. However, many of us were optimistic and convinced that the Internet would take an alternative course. We bet on the extraordinary potential of the new medium in terms of its interactivity and marginal cost to be a producer or generator of quality content.
Why has society been so indifferent or naive with the aforementioned changes and especially why civil society specialized on these issues was left defenseless?
At the Baku Internet Governance Meeting (Azerbaijan), 2012, the situation was more than evident. The bulk of civil society continued to address very important issues, but without addressing essential issues that were already affecting the Internet ecosystem with significant consequences for subsequent events[5]. An image comes to mind and at that moment we share it with some colleagues. It was based on the Arab proverb “Dogs bark and the caravan passes” (Baku being a historical place as it was the passage of the old caravans that traveled between east and west[6]). We wanted to adapt the proverb to the situation at hand: the image is that of a caravan called Internet deviating from its utopian and foundational route towards a path traced by the TG and their allies while the dogs calmed their barking, very busy biting the bone of the multi-stakeholder’s governance. Those who still did so barked little and in the direction in which they have usually known how to do it: governments and international organizations. Thus, the way was clear for the private sector, especially those with the ability to define that new direction. The result was that the caravan, guided by the TGs, would continue its route without obstacles.
We had a very strong feeling that whatever appealing and promising was the concept of multi-stakeholder governance[7], it ended up being a clever trap for civil society to look the other way instead of focusing on the essential problems and in its place that open and dialogue vision was torn and dismembered.
The trap was complemented by a redistribution of funds for projects focused on the use of ICT for development to be even more effective. These resources were provided by the emerging private sector and were allocated through partner organizations, such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN[8]) and the Internet Society (ISOC[9]). While this was happening, financing from other sources for civil society was fading out. After WSIS, governments took responsibility for information society projects, complying with the guidelines of international organizations, and the space of NGOs was naturally shrinking. Thus, those who were not willing to enter the new dynamic established by the actor with the greatest financial muscle of multi-stakeholderism, that is large companies in the sector, were marginalized.
In the world of civil society that works in health, it is not considered an ethical attitude to receive funds from large pharmaceutical companies, or in the world of the environment, resources provided by Monsanto are not well regarded. However, in the field of the Internet and digital platforms that make up the global knowledge society, the discussion on whether it is ethical for civil society to receive funds from TG or their allies has not been honestly assumed.
Governments or TG: the cognitive bias
This situation has led to a cognitive bias with profound implications for the relationship between the multiple actors involved in the evolution of this 4th Industrial Revolution. The tendency is that the distrust of initiatives led by democratic governments[10] is growing as the trust of initiatives from the private sector, especially if they come from the TG.
An example of how this paradoxical trend materializes has been reflected in the midst of the de-escalation process of the confinement caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in France. The French government decides not to use the application developed jointly by Apple and Google to monitor the spread of the virus, but to design its own. A development of this nature requires that as many citizens as possible install it on their cell phones and allow intelligent management of infections by detecting potential sources of spread in nearby spaces. The dilemma arises because the government is criticized, firstly, because its ability to produce a better solution than the TG is questioned. Second, people deny trust to the official initiative because they perceive a high risk of their privacy being compromised[11]. The great paradox is that greater confidence is expressed in the TG, over whom there is no control whatsoever to audit their operations and who have so far amply demonstrated their interest in preserving user information, than in democratically elected governments which have perfectible mechanisms of accountability. The users-product trust, the citizen untrust!
When Edward Snowden[12], in 2013, reveals that the National Security Agency (NSA) is spying on communications on a planetary scale, using the global digital platform, this caused a tremendous and healthy worldwide commotion. However, for well-informed people, it was known for many years that OECD countries had developed advanced telecommunication espionage systems with powerful infrastructures in several countries (USA, England and other Anglophone countries with Echelon[13], Frenchelon[14] in France).
What is surprising is that the same people who declared themselves shocked by this revelation will not show comparable concern about the fact that the TG, for other reasons and with other resources, were doing the same, driven by the expansion of their businesses and without any control mechanism that regulates their actions.
Why is the retention of private information a sensitive point for citizens if the act is carried out by a government and not so much if it is perpetrated by private companies?
Journalist Carole Cadwalladr investigated and revealed in 2016 the endeavor of the Cambridge Analytica company[15], created in 2013. She inquires about the key role of that company in the manipulation, in SN, of the opinion of undecided voters in the Brexit referendum. This was achieved by illegally using data from the profiles of Facebook users who were subjected to a continuous and dense bombardment of messages openly laden with disinformation about European Union. Despite the monumental scandal that occurred in those days, everything remained relatively calm and controlled, even though it was revealed that other important political campaigns used the same type of resource. Not even the excellent documentary presented on Netflix[16] mobilized massive sectors of the population to express the outrage at the abusive proceeding.
The facts do not stop at Brexit; this company was found to have acted similarly in many countries[17], including the USA and Russia, without arousing a reaction of rejection. Neither the fines imposed on Facebook nor the negative impact on its listing on the stock market have meant a serious impact on the company’s finances. Public opinion observes these events that demonstrate the criminal connection between the private sector and political organizations where the information of tenth of million users has been used for electoral purposes and still the reaction is quite tepid. The impact on the TG business is marginal despite the fact that it is a real and active threat against the entire democratic system worldwide. It seems that what happens on digital platforms is an accepted fatality. Another caravan that advances without much barking.
These three examples show that at that time people are accepting what Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism (see Ref. [6]), promoted by the TG or non democratic governments, while they are rejecting any monitoring coming from democratic governments. Will it be a fully thought-out and assumed decision or will it rather reflect the lack of education in betting on what happens in the digital world? Our main hypothesis is that the explanation is at the low level of what digital culture means. Consequently, we consider that education for this culture, to act harmoniously within ethical, humanistic and ecologically sustainable values in the environments proper to the 4th. Industrial Revolution is an absolute priority for the planet, at the same level as the fight against global warming[18].
NOTES:
[1] https://www.lastampa.it/cultura/2015/06/11/news/umberto-eco-con-i-social-parola-a-legioni-di-imbecilli-1.35250428
[2] Often referred to as GAFAM.
[3]So much so that ISOC thought it could recently take up the business of shifting the management of the main civil society domain (.ORG) to a commercial company created ad-hoc through a juicy transaction without the community reacting. There the shot went wrong because the civil society group active on that front mobilized in the face of such a direct threat and came out of anesthesia. It reacted so strongly that ICANN had to reverse that decision, showing that there is knowledge and capacity to act wisely, at least when the rationale and goals are clear.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Information_and_Communication_Order
[5]In that same period, ICANN was, without encountering much opposition, opening the Internet domain system and creating a very juicy, albeit totally artificial, business, which was going to have the indirect consequence of a new tendency to monetize what was previously considered national sovereignty, the top-level national Internet domains. Thus, for example, Colombia proposed that .CO could be sold to companies outside Colombia as an alternative to .COM, and Haiti tried to sell .HT in the same way as something phonetically equivalent to ”acheter” (to buy in French).
[6] As remembered by a famous restaurant in the city center that retained its caravan receiver architecture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukhara_Caravanserai
[7] Participating in the construction and consolidation of a new utopia that would imply a consensual governance between governments, the private sector and civil society, the promise of participatory democracy.
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Society
[10]It is important to highlight that this dilemma only occurs in democratic regimes. In the multiple systems of non democratic governments that exist on the planet, it is not possible, by definition, to challenge the mandates issued by the authorities on risk of being accused of serious crimes for the mere fact of dissenting.
[11] The reality is that the application in question cannot prevent Google from knowing who is using it, since to download it on Android you have to identify yourself in PlayStore and, in addition, it uses the Recaptcha application from the same company. That represents another door for Google, although in principle neither of those two entries should give access to information about whether the person is infected or approached infected people.
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenchelon
[15] “Facebook’s role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSMr-3GGvQ
[16] “The Great Hack” https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542
[17] “The executives of Cambridge Analytica confessed in 2018 that their company intervened in more than 200 elections around the world. Analysis of the documents confirmed that 68 countries were targeted for what can be called “a global infrastructure with operations to manipulate voters on an industrial scale.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica. The company formally closed operations.
[18]Although they seem totally disjointed, the two themes are related. It was not possible to accurately count the portion of Internet traffic that corresponds to bad practices (for example: spams, chains, expendable file downloads) but it does not seem far-fetched to calculate it in around a third of the total. In other words, educating users for a better information ecology could have a positive and significant effect on global warming.
REFERENCES:
[1] — D. Pimienta, “At the Boundaries of Ethics and Cultures: Virtual Communities as an Open Ended Process Carrying the Will for Social Change (the” MISTICA “experience)” in the book “Localizing the Internet. Ethical Issues in Intercultural Perspective”, Capurro, R. & al. (Eds.). Schriftenreihe des ICIE Bd. 4, München: Fink Verlag, 2005
http://funredes.org/mistica/english/cyberlibrary/thematic/icie/
[2] — JG Koomey, “Estimating total power consumption by servers in the US and the world”, Stanford University, Feb. 2007
http://www-sop.inria.fr/mascotte/Contrats/DIMAGREEN/wiki/uploads/Main/svrpwrusecompletefinal.pdf
[3] — Y. Eshet-Alkalai, and E. Chajut, “Change over time in Digital Literacy”, Cyberpsychology & Behavior, Volume 12, Number X, 2009
[4] — D. Pimienta, “Digital divide, social divide, paradigmatic divide”, 1st edition of Journal of ICT and Human Development, 2009.
http://funredes.org/mistica/english/cyberlibrary/thematic/Paradigmatic_Divide.pdf
[5] — Bernard Stiegler, “Le Blues du Net”, 2013, Blog “Réseaux” of the French newspaper Le Monde.
[6] — S. Zuboff, “The secrets of surveillance capitalism”, Frankfurter Allgemeine, March, 2016 — http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillance-capitalism-14103616-p2.html
[7] — LG Rodríguez Leal. “The Disruption of the Technology Giants — Digital Emergency”, January 2020.
https://www.academia.edu/41701222/La_Disrupcio_n_de_las_Gigantes_Tecnolo_gicas_-_Emergencia_Digital
[8] — H. Chneiweiss, Interview in Recherche №557, Mars 2020, page 70. (in French)
