High-Tech Surveillance and Control: Citizens or Sheep?

 

In recent testimony before the U. S. Senate's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, philosopher and author Matthew B. Crawford reminded his audience that the Revolutionary War was fought for principles that are now once again in jeopardy.  In a summary of his remarks posted on the website of the technology and society journal The New Atlantis, Crawford pointed out that the coming era of smart-home technology comes with a price that people may not fully understand.  He used the example of the Sleep Number bed product, which includes a phone app that must be installed to gain the full benefits of the bed.  To use the app, the user must agree to a sixteen-page "privacy policy" which is in reality anything but. 

 

The policy, which a vanishingly small number of users probably read in its entirety, talks about all the things that you allow the Sleep Number people to do with information about what is probably the most intimate and private sector of your life—the time you spend in bed, alone or with someone else.  Although this part of the policy has been deleted, one section used to state that the app was also allowed to transmit "audio in your room."  And the tracking can go on even after you cancel your Sleep Number account.

 

Crawford pointed out that this is only one prominent example of the multifarious ways that big tech is invading all aspects of our lives to mine data that is then used to "determine the world that is presented to us" and to "determine our standing in the reputational economy" with regard to credit ratings, for example.  One need only look to China to see how a malevolent government can employ high-tech means to rank its citizens by standards that it alone determines.  But the difference between what the Chinese Communist Party does and what Experian or Sleep Number does is only a matter of degree, not of kind.

 

The ability to take private information from us and to use it in ways that ultimately benefit corporations rather than individuals, without the individuals involved having any effective say over the process, is a good definition of tyranny.  Substitute "the state" for "corporations" and you have a good description of the way life was in the old Soviet Union.  And at least the USSR was honest enough to admit that the state took priority over the individual. 

 

But in the picture painted by our supposedly free-market big-tech firms, it's all positives and no negatives:  everything is "free" and all they're trying to do is give you a personalized world that will make you happier—or at least more profitable to them.

 

Politics is simply the conduct of public affairs, as a seventh-grade civics teacher once told me.  Facebook, Google, Apple, and their ilk are private only in the sense that they are not recognized as sovereign states (yet).  But if you measure the degree to which an organization is public by number of people affected, money that flows through it, or its power to influence lives, Google is a lot more of a public entity than the United States or even the United Nations. 

 

As Crawford reminded the senators, the Revolutionary War of 1776 was fought, among other things, over the way the government of Britain allowed corporations to control trade with the colonies.  Simply to go about one's ordinary life, one was forced to deal with certain British companies and had no choice in the matter, even if the prices or quality of service or goods was way out of line with reasonable expectations.

 

Surely there is a parallel between that situation and the fact that getting up in the morning, driving to work, and doing one's job, to say nothing of communicating with one's family and friends, is virtually impossible these days without submitting oneself to the powers of big-tech firms that are doing opaque things to one's data and one's online world.

 

Crawford drew an apt parallel between the way big-tech firms operate and the governmental trend of power flowing away from Congress—the only branch of government designed to represent the people in a direct way—and the administrative state of experts who are not beholden to anyone but their own kind.  Both are signs that whatever control the populace used to exert over either government or private business is waning, while power is concentrating in the hands of an elite group of overlords and their technological minions. 

 

He left the senators with a probing question:  "Who rules?"  Is it the people?  Congress?  The executive branch?  Or is it a group of mostly faceless high-tech employees and their billionaire controllers who, while sometimes intending to do the right thing, will not let anything get in the way of continuing to make money in the most successful way possible.  And one can't really blame them for that.  But one can take steps to safeguard what used to be the most cherished aspect of living in the United States:  freedom from tyranny. 

 

Crawford made no suggestions as to how this might be accomplished.  In the space I have remaining, I will throw something out that I'm sure is full of holes, but might get the ball rolling.

 

It used to be the case that banks could not operate outside of the state in which they were chartered.  In 1927, the federal McFadden Act restricted banks from opening branches across state lines.  That law did nothing to stop the Great Depression, but it did preserve the regional nature of the banking industry until the Riegle-Neal Act of 1994 rescinded most of those restrictions. 

 

One thing we could try would be to pass a kind of McFadden Act for online companies.  As legal corporations, they could not operate as a single entity, but only as state-chartered organizations.  You wouldn't have one Google:  you'd have fifty Googles, each with a physical presence in each state. Obviously, for Google to be Google, you'd have to allow them to exchange data somehow, but not money.  If something like this were proposed, I'm sure Google's corporate heads would scream bloody murder and say it would destroy the company, but that's just what we heard when the Bell System breakup came along.  And look what happened:  not only did phone service not vanish, it got a great deal better.  And something similar might happen with Google.  We'll never know until we try.

 

Sources:  Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft:  An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, is the author of "Defying the Data Priests" posted at https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/defying-the-data-priests.  I also referred to an article on interstate banking at https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/riegle-neal-act-of-1994.

The Transhumanist Bill of Goods

Depending on your point of view, the intellectual movement (and now political party) that goes under the name of "transhumanism" is either a set of fringe beliefs held by a small number of people who can be safely ignored, or the leading edge of something that will completely transform human life as we know it.  The truth probably lies somewhere in between.  One of transhumanism's intellectual fathers is Ray Kurzweil, who coined the term "the Singularity" to mean the moment when artificial intelligence, cyborgs, and uploading peoples' minds into software converge to create a kind of Big Bang of superintelligent activity that will make everything everyone ever wanted come true, and will also render ordinary biological human lives obsolete.  Significantly, Kurzweil now holds a high-level position at Google, and other tech leaders such as Elon Musk have promoted transhumanist ideas.

Not satisfied with the Silicon Valley reins of power they already hold, the transhumanists have formed a political party and issued a Transhumanist Bill of Rights.  The first version (called 1.0, naturally) was delivered to the U. S. Capitol on Dec. 14, 2015.  Its subsequent fate did not make the news.  In a recent piece reprinted in the Human Life Review, Wesley J. Smith noted that version 2.0 contains enough wacky ideas to wreck the economy, violate fundamental religious freedoms, and erase the difference between people and machines. 

For a group that tends to ignore the past and live mentally in the future, the writers of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights clearly acknowledged some historical precedents.  The very title, Bill of Rights, comes from that 230-year-old set of amendments to the U. S. constitution of the same name.  Their preamble says they "establish" the Bill to "help guide and enact sensible policies in the pursuit of life, liberty, security of person, and happiness."  That phrase goes one better than Thomas Jefferson's in the preamble to the U. S. Declaration of Independence—he left out "security of person."  And at the very end, almost as an afterthought, in Article XV (25, to those of you who can't read Roman numerals), they incorporate by reference all the rights in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was enacted by the then-new U. N. in 1948.

Like the U. N.'s declaration, the transhumanist Bill is aspirational, not legally binding.  And here is where the vast differences between the U. S. Bill of Rights and this document show most vividly.  The people who gathered in 1789 to debate how best to carry their young experiment in democracy forward were elected leaders of a real nation.  In a sense that the transhumanists don't seem to appreciate, they held their future in their hands.  The fate of a country that they and their compatriots fought for, and many had died for, depended on the wisdom with which they reconstituted their republic, which at the time was suffering from serious problems.  Looking back, we can say that while they didn't do a perfect job—the canker of slavery would have to be removed from the body politic in a horrendous Civil War two generations hence—the constitution they forged has withstood the test of time. 

Contrast what those founding fathers did with what the transhumanists are doing with their Bill of Rights 2.0.  For one thing, the transhumanist Bill's direct effect on the actual politics of the nation has been nil.  Despite the window-dressing of Roman numerals and references to historic documents, the actual content of the Bill reads like something out of a speech at a Comic Con convention.  One can come closest to being able to predict the things most desired by transhumanists by imagining a teenage boy of exceptional intelligence but limited experience, and asking him what his ideal world would be like, given unlimited technological resources and a free imagination.  The answers might go something like the following:

           

Gee, well, nobody would be poor (Article XVIII:  "Present and future societies should ensure that their members will not live in poverty solely for being born to the wrong parents.").  And there wouldn't be any discrimination or prejudice (Article XVI:  "All sentient entities should be protected from discrimination. . . "), and everybody would be healthy (Article VII:  "All sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of a system of universal health care.").  And (snigger) there'd be plenty of sex (Article XII:  "All sentient entities are entitled to reproductive freedom. . . . ").  And college should be free (Article XX:  "Present and future societies should provide education systems accessible and available to all . . . ").  And we wouldn't have nutcases like Trump running the government (Article XXIV:  "Transhumanists stand opposed to the post-truth culture of deception.  All governments should be required to make decisions and communicate information rationally and in accordance with facts. . . .").

Maybe Kurzweil, Musk, and their fellow transhumanists are experts in their deep, narrow pursuits that require specialization in technical fields and a certain amount of leadership and management expertise.  But in politics, they seem to think that if you take some half-baked left-wing notions, mix them with some technospeak, put Roman numerals on them, and quote a few well-known historical documents, the public will come flooding to your door and ask to join.

On the other hand, perhaps we should read this document not as a step in a democratic process that involves persuading the sovereign public to accept one's ideas, but more as a manifesto of what an elite, powerful group of people plan to do once they manage to dispose of all the stupidity and traditionalism of the vast majority of people in the world and run the place the way they know (from their superior expertise) that it ought to be run.  Wesley Smith worries that transhumanists in power would establish a communist-like society.  And I think he is right.  If transhumanists by some means gained real power to implement their ideas, the totalitarian government that would result might very well end human life as we know it—and leave nothing in its place but some buzzing machinery that would run down faster than anyone expects.

Sources:  Wired published the Transhumanist Bill of Rights 2.0 at https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2018/08/transhumanist-bill-rights-version-2-0/ on August 21, 2018.  Wesley J. Smith's article "The Transhumanist Bill of Wrongs" appeared in the Fall 2018 edition of the Human Life Review on pp. 91-93, and was reprinted from the American Spectator.

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End Of the Silk Road

Last Friday, Ross Ulbricht received a sentence of life in prison in a New York City federal courtroom.  His crime was drug dealing on a massive scale through a "dark-web" Internet site called Silk Road.  Prosecutors showed how Ulbricht, a libertarian with a master's degree in material science, brokered drug deals worth millions and got paid in the online currency called bitcoin.  In October of 2013, the FBI caught him as he was administering the site from a San Francisco library.  He was convicted in February of this year and sentenced last week.  His lawyers say they will appeal.

Ulbricht had some interesting things to say after hearing his sentence.  What he said shows that he is an extreme case of what can happen when an educational system gets so compartmentalized that it can produce people with massively developed technical abilities along with huge blind spots in their moral views.  Ulbricht apparently saw the drug laws of the various countries in which the Silk Road customers lived as intrusions upon the supreme value in his moral universe, which was freedom.  He rationalized that because these laws stood in the way of those who wished to use drugs, he was actually striking a blow for freedom every time someone used his site to buy illegal drugs.  And of course, he got a tidy profit from the transaction too. 

According to prosecutors, Ulbricht believed so strongly in his right to spread his kind of freedom, that he paid FBI undercover agents to assassinate someone who threatened to make public a list of his customers.  The glaring contradiction between Ulbricht's espousal of freedom and his attempt to take the life of a fellow human being apparently never occurred to him, at least not until he had lots of time to think about his actions in jail.  According to a New York Times report, Ulbricht reflected after he was sentenced that "the laws of nature are much like the laws of man. . . . Gravity doesn't care if you agree with it—if you jump off a cliff you are still going to get hurt.  And even though I didn't agree with the law, I still have been convicted of a crime and must be punished.  I understand that now and I respect the law and authority now."

We will never know for sure if a different educational experience could have stopped Ulbricht from doing what he did.  He grew up in Austin, Texas, graduating from high school there in 2002, and must have picked up some of the sky's-the-limit entrepreneurial atmosphere of the place, because before he went over to the dark side, he operated an online used-book site that donated some of its proceeds to charity.  But the inner compass, conscience, moral fiber, or whatever you want to call it, that keeps the vast majority of ordinary people on the good side of the law most of the time, was missing in his makeup and education.  For all I know, he may have taken an ethics or philosophy course in college, but in his case, it obviously didn't take.

Ulbricht used technologies that were designed at least in part to promote freedom.  Bitcoins are a form of digital currency that is designed to be untraceable, and Silk Road used Tor, a subset of the Web that the U. S. Navy developed to allow secret communication with, for example, freedom fighters in totalitarian countries.  But as Ulbricht himself has learned, freedom is not an absolute virtue, taking precedence over all others.  If you try to act as though it trumps all other values, you can end up in jail.

Ulbricht committed the same sort of error that many fringe sects do:  they take one virtue and put it on a pedestal above all others.   While some might argue with his comparison between the laws of man and the laws of nature, Ulbricht got that one absolutely right.  The moral law is just as objective and real as the law of gravity.  Ulbricht erred in seizing upon one part of that law—the goodness of freedom—to the neglect of the rest, including the Golden Rule:  do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  If he'd been the person threatening to reveal the names of customers, I don't think he would have liked it if someone put out a contract on him. 

This kind of moral reasoning is not rocket science.  But Ross Ulbricht's case shows that a highly intelligent person can get all the way through a complex educational system in the U. S. without being able to bring himself to reason morally in a way that most twelve-year-olds can.

All that human law can do is to try to model the moral law, whose ultimate source is God.  To the extent that it does so, it can serve as a teacher, though sometimes its lessons are painful to learn, as Ross Ulbricht has found.  A high priority in libertarian circles these days is liberalization of drug laws, and some states such as Colorado have already found that the effects of practical legalization of marijuana are not all good.  While drugs, like the Internet, can be used either for good or harm, I think Ulbricht now has a different view of human laws after his experiences than he did in his more innocent libertarian days.  Yes, some people will abuse drugs no matter what kind of laws are passed.  But if people are taught, both in school and by the laws, that some things are right and other things are wrong, maybe more of them can choose the right paths.  And we won't see as many Ross Ulbrichts running Silk Roads in the future.

Sources:  The news of Ross Ulbricht's conviction was carried by many news outlets such as the New York Times on May 30, 2015 at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/nyregion/ross-ulbricht-creator-of-silk-road-website-is-sentenced-to-life-in-prison.html.  I also referred to a New Yorker online article by Joshua Kopstein posted on Oct. 3, 2013 at http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-the-ebay-of-illegal-drugs-came-undone.  I blogged on Ulbricht's Silk Road on Jan. 20, 2014.  For more on the absolute nature of the moral law, see C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, available in numerous print editions and online at https://archive.org/details/TheAbolitionOfMan_229.