“Humanity is stuck with Big Data, intellectual property, centralized clouds, the internet of things, smart cities littered with surveillance, automation, algorithmic decision-making, Big Tech corporations, and surveillance capitalism. Or so we are told.”
It’s The Real News. I’m Lynn Fries.
That text was from Break the Hold of Digital Colonialism, a commentary on the present Western model of technology and the future, by Michael Kwet. In this program, with Michael Kwet, we explore findings that in the digital world the problems of privacy and monopoly power are rooted in the design of the digital architecture with its concentration of digital power in few hands, corporate and state. And to fix this problem, the design of the digital ecosystem has to be reengineered and re-decentralized. Michael Kwet joins us from New Haven, where he’s a visiting fellow at the Information Society Project at the Yale Law School, a leading research center in the intersection of the law and the digital society. Welcome, Michael.
MICHAEL KWET: Thank you for having me on, Lynn.
LYNN FRIES: Start by commenting on this situation of concentrated corporate control over critical functions of the present digital ecosystem.
MICHAEL KWET: If you look at what’s happened in the space of about 20-25 years, as there’s been a rise in economic and political concentration in the technology industry, which is today largely attributed to Big Data, but there’s an underlying structure beneath it. But if we’re to look at various industries, most things that have a function, so an operating system, you’re pretty much on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS. If you’re on a phone, it’s probably going to be Google Android or Apple iOS. If you’re using a taxi service, e-hailing service, it’s going to be Uber or Lyft. And so on and so forth. Web servers, for example, is another one, so you have Amazon, you have Microsoft Azure, Google and IBM is a distant third and fourth. And so on. So basically, we’re looking at a situation in which most of what we do today–social networking of course, with Facebook and Twitter–is concentrated in the hands of a few corporations.
LYNN FRIES: Turning now to the issue of governance, explain some of your thoughts on how the structural domination of the digital ecosystem is undermining national and local sovereignty, because it’s a privatized form of political, social, and economic governance.
MICHAEL KWET: So first of all, the Internet is open. So a lot of services that people are using on a day to day basis, Twitter, Facebook, Google search, you can’t really just block it. If you’re going to block it then you’re censoring everybody. And you’re surveilling them to make sure that, you know, they’re not accessing those kinds of services.
So what these companies are then doing is they’re determining a large part of what your day to day experience is using these services. So if they determine what the free speech policies are, then that’s what it is. If they say you can’t see Alex Jones on your Facebook then you can’t see it on that platform. And they have, in a certain sense, they have the right to do it. But the problem is that they’re so dominant that they’re effectively censoring what people in effect use all the time. Right? So it’s a coupling of the fact that they’re making these policies for people who then rely on these services for their day to day communications. Effectively winds up privatizing just not only their speech but their rights of freedom of association. So, if you have a certain activist group, that activist group can be shut down by Facebook. And if a lot of people are joining activism on something like Facebook then it’s going to hinder your ability to participate in being together and pursuing your activism. That might be for causes that are unseemly, but it can also be for causes that are social justice that are at the margins as well. It should. And so Facebook and these guys, they also determine what news gets seen, how frequently, on the basis of their algorithms. Those are secret algorithms. So now they’re having enormous impact on what people actually see and think about collectively and individually on a daily basis. So why should they have that kind of control? It’s the privatization of that. And so them coming in here, it winds up becoming a form of governance from without which is by definition a colonial process.
LYNN FRIES: As a contribution to the UN Secretary General’s high level panel on digital cooperation – and I’m going to attach that contribution as a context link to this conversation – you provided details of your findings that the historic process of colonialism is playing out once again in the digital era.
You wrote – a quote here – “Digital colonialism refers to the technological domination of political, economic, and social processes for sovereign state by a foreign power. In times past, European powers directly and indirectly governed the affairs of colonial subjects, exploited their labor, and attempted to indoctrinate their peoples into submission. As part of this process, they designed infrastructure such as railroads, transport networks, sea ports, and seaways in the interest of political, military, and economic domination.”
Taking the case of railroads of colonial empire, talk about the design of critical infrastructure built in the colonial era and the readthrough today into the digital era.
MICHAEL KWET: In that situation, Europeans would show up, they would start taking over the land. And then they would start forcing the local inhabitants to work and exploit their labor through slavery, and so on. And, so, what they would do is build railroads that would go into the interior. And where they’re forcing people into exploited labor, they’re extracting raw materials out. And the railroads were constructed in a way that would hook up their military outposts. Their labor centers. And then it would go back to the coast, the seaports, and then they would take and extract out that raw material, and they would send them back to the mother country. And then they would process the raw materials for manufactured goods, and in some instances, they would send back manufactured – surplus manufactured goods, and that would undermine the local markets and their capacity to produce their own resources. Their own goods that would potentially one day be able to compete with them. So if you look at the digital economy right now, you have a situation in which you have this data colonialism which is aprocess of taking all this data, extracting it out from all over the world, and processing the data, and then spitting back out services to people. And their local economies can’t compete because of the concentration of resources and the fact that these companies have already taken over these markets.
LYNN FRIES: You make the point that Big Tech is reinventing colonialism through centralised control of the Internet. This is partly achieved through data colonialism, collecting data from all over the world, and on top of that, this data extraction is fuelling the development of artificial intelligence and the rise of a surveillance society. And you explain digital architecture, like physical architecture, can be designed either for freedom or for the opposite of freedom. To illustrate this point, explain the concept of a panopticon.
MICHAEL KWET: The concept of a panopticon is you have a unit that may be in a physical space. And it started actually for worker surveillance, where you have somebody who is keeping track of what people in this physical space are doing. You might have them at the centre. And then you have a bunch of people who are doing what they’re doing kind of scattered around. So if you look from a map down, you might see, in a prison system, a control tower in the middle, and then everybody around in their prison cells are positioned so that the person in the tower can see what everybody else is up to. But those people can’t see when that prison guard is looking at them.
LYNN FRIES: At the open of this conversation, you said economic and political concentration in the technology industry is largely today attributed to Big Data. But there’s an underlying structure to it. Insofar as it’s possible in a brief conversation like this, talk about that to give us a glimpse of what this underlying structure is and the struggle to reengineer it so that instead of being built for digital colonialism, it’s built for digital freedom.
MICHAEL KWET: Data colonialism, it’s surveillance based, right? But it’s based on the way the system works, because the system is built for that. If you look at the technology ecosystem, it’s the stuff of technology is basically software, hardware, and Internet connectivity. And goes back to a speech by Columbia law professor Eban Moglin in 2004 called Die Gedanken Sind Frei. And in that speech, he framed the necessary prerequisites for digital freedom in the digital society. That is also, in large part, based on some of the concepts and activism and work by Richard Stallman, who created the free software movement. So those three pillars are free software, free hardware, and free spectrum, or if you want to consider it Internet connectivity. So, free as in freedom. So let’s go through each one of those real quick.
LYNN FRIES: Start with software and the concept that code is law.
MICHAEL KWET: So the notion that code is law is one that was popularized by Lawrence Lessig. Also Joel Reidenberg wrote an essay making the same kind of argument. And the notion is that the things that law does for society, so it can be regulating speech, it could be your freedom of association, can be taken on by a computer based on its code. And computer code, the software, is kind of like a kitchen recipe for what and your computer can do. If it’s free and open source then anybody can use it. Anybody can study the code and see what’s in it and understand how it works. And anybody can modify it, and then anybody can share that. Now when I say anybody there, I don’t mean every person has the real true resources or capability to do that. But theoretically, at least, an individual who has the resources, capabilities, and motivation to do it can as an individual do that. But also that the broader community can do that as well. So it provides individual and collective freedom to control your computer experience.
Now, it is also free as – turns out to be free as in price, often. So when we say free software it’s free and open source. But it’s also – and it’s about your freedom to control your device. But it’s also often free as in price, because there’s so much freedom given to you over the software that you can make a copy and just send it to somebody for free. So usually people don’t pay for it. And that’s important for the global south, because so many people don’t have disposable income and can’t afford things like like Microsoft and other proprietary software. So free and open source software provides that kind of freedom. And it’s important to note there that when Richard Stallman came up with free and open source software licenses it was at a time in which really kind of came before the rise of the cloud. So free and open source software can also be run off of servers. But even if it’s free and open source, now you’re – the core part of your being able to modify it is negated. So it doesn’t help you that you have – you don’t have your freedom anymore to control it.
LYNN FRIES: And also negated by this cloud computing, as you’ve pointed out, is the direct accountability created by free and open source software so that developers of software cannot take advantage of their users by doing things like spying on them or manipulating them to get them to spend more time on their products.
And what about the second form of digital power, hardware?
MICHAEL KWET: Free hardware can refer to really kind of two things. So, one, you have digital locks. So the notion would be that you can have free and open source software, but if your hardware is manufactured in a way that you can’t modify that software, then the free and open source software is once again subverted. The freedom that you get from it. Sometimes this is called TiVo-ization. The company TiVo manufactured devices where they have to check against a signature to see if the operating system that’s loading when you turn it on is the one that they allowed to be loaded, and if it’s not then you can’t load – then it won’t open. It won’t start. So basically, at that point, you can’t put your own software on there, and you’re stuck with what they give you. So we need to not have digital locks.
But also free hardware, and also the thought of it, at least for me, is something in which we have, we maintain control over the computing and the ownership of computing and storage so that it’s not once again centralized in the cloud. So right now our devices, our laptops, our smartphones, et cetera, have processors in them. They have powerful processors. They have storage. And we’re getting larger and larger hard drives. That situation could change, and it could be the case that we get “thin” clients, basically just very watered down devices. And most of the software is just executing off the cloud somewhere else, and also the data is stored on the cloud somewhere else.
So we’re already seeing that with the rise of streaming services. And so let’s take something like YouTube. YouTube didn’t used to show advertisements before you start playing the video. But, increasingly, as people stop downloading and owning digital files of their music, of their videos, they – and YouTube hosts, and Spotify and so on hosts them – then, if we don’t own that anymore, they can start dictating the terms of how we pay for and consume those services. So, for example, they can make it so that you have to watch an advertisement every five minutes. They can make it so you have to watch one every 10 minutes. They can also, if it’s going off the cloud, monitor which video you’re – and they do – which video you’re watching, when you’re watching it, how long you watch it for, and so on, and link it up to other data. So it’s important that we keep hardware decentralized and in possession of the people, and not into third parties, which is predominantly corporations, but could be government, too.
And then free internet connectivity would refer to net neutrality. So that would be that your internet traffic is treated as a common carrier. Your internet service providers treat the flow, the delivery of traffic and the routing of traffic, as if a common carrier. So there’s no paid prioritization. And there’s no throttling of your services. So if they know you’re using a privacy enhancing service, they can grind it to a halt. So the Tor web browser, for example, the ISPs can detect that they’re using Tor to mask from them – from the ISPs and from the government – which websites they’re accessing, and so on. And so if they throttle that traffic and they make it so that the traffic is so slow that it’s almost impossible to use the service.
LYNN FRIES: And as a closing thought, comment on digital freedom.
MICHAEL KWET: So, with free software, free hardware, and free internet connectivity, it. You have – the public will have the freedom to control the core elements of their digital experience for much of what we do in the digital society. And that, in effect, socializes the digital ecosystem. But it socializes in a way that doesn’t allow for exclusive ownership by any parties. So there’s no exclusive ownership by the government. There is no exclusive ownership by corporations. And it basically becomes a publicly owned and controlled global ecosystem.
So the idea is there is that part of the reason we’ve seen, if we update it for today, part of the reason we’ve seen the rise of Big Data and surveillance as a model for the digital society is because we don’t have enough control over the ecosystem. That we’ve seen as a centralization of the actual structure of the digital ecosystem. And with that power has come the ability to design it into a panoptic structure so that they can continue to suck data out of everybody’s day to day use of technology. And so the notion there is if you don’t want to live under surveillance capitalism, that just as you wouldn’t keep a panoptic housing structure design as a panopticon, just as you wouldn’t design your railroads if you don’t want an extractive process that benefits centralized powers, you wouldn’t design those railroads to bypass the local villages. You wouldn’t want to have – you shouldn’t – you can’t design the digital ecosystem this way and expect any different results.
— source https://therealnews.com/stories/the-internet-into-the-present-a-worldwide-web-of-digital-colonialism-pt-1-2 | Mar 27, 2019
Re-Decentralizing the Internet
“The principles which should underpin the digital realm are well established in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community. They include sharing, the freedom to control one’s own computing experiences, access to knowledge, local sovereignty and customization, and community participation. Global South countries embraced FOSS during the 1990s and early aughts, but the technology ecosystem has changed with the rise of Big Tech, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.”
“Initiatives such as FreedomBox and Solid are a recent manifestation of the FOSS community’s guiding ethos. They attempt to re-decentralize the Internet – including social media via projects like Mastodon and GNU Social – and provide true privacy from the prying eyes of Big Tech and the state. They are antagonistic to the entrenched political, economic, and geopolitics interests of concentrated wealth and power.”
“Cooperative approaches to ensure a safe and inclusive digital future require political, economic, technological, and ideological changes to the status quo. FOSS should be promoted by states for use in the public sector in combination with efforts to re-decentralize the Internet and provide user-friendly, state-of-the-art privacy tools. Privacy protections must be stronger than those included in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Data Care Act (DCA), and Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), which are not restrictive enough to protect the pervasive and personalized surveillance of individuals and populations. Antitrust initiatives should be pursued in an effort to break up corporations like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Copyright and patents buttress concentrated power, and should be challenged as anti-cooperative forces in the international community.”
“Schools should educate children using “People’s Technology for People’s Power” – FOSS, proprivacy tools, and Internet decentralization tools and services. FOSS is excellent for education, as it provides the freedom to study, understand, modify, use, and share software, while the decentralization software and encryption guard against surveillance and centralizing economic dynamics.”
It’s The Real News, I’m Lynn Fries. And that text was from a letter written by Michael Kwet as a contribution to the UN Secretary General High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation.
Joining us to continue our conversation on the digital ecosystem, Michael Kwet joins us from New Haven, where he’s a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at the Yale Law School. Welcome, Michael.
MICHAEL KWET: Thank you for having me on, Lynn.
LYNN FRIES: In part one, you said part of the reason we’ve seen a rise in Big Data and surveillance as a model for the digital society is because we’ve lost control over the digital ecosystem. Let’s pick it up there.
MICHAEL KWET: If you want to understand why you’re under surveillance, it’s not enough to say, ‘Oh look, we’re under surveillance.” These big corporations are collecting all of our data all the time. How did this happen? Part of it is because they have control over software, they have control over hosting of the data, they have control of it by centralized clouds. And they have an ideological hold over society, where everybody just assumes that this is the way it must be. So if you want to think about surveillance capitalism, you have to think about what about the technology allowed them to accumulate all of this data in the first place.
And if you look at the free software movement and you look at people like Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen–but many others, and this extends around to the Global South. If you look at what they have been saying about technology all along, including all the way up until the present with decentralization and Free and Open Source Software and being against centralization of the cloud, that needs to become part of the narrative because it has excellent explanatory power as to why this technology is working this way.
If we had ubiquitous encryption, plus Free and Open Source Software, plus decentralized technologies in place, and they were being used all the time, then it wouldn’t be so easy for anybody… If there’s no company in the middle, how are you going to get the data? So we can restructure the way the technology ecosystem works, but in order to understand why we wound up in a situation with all this surveillance in the first place, you have to think about, well, how does it work and how could it work alternatively? It’s not a given that it has to be this way if we’re going to use digital technology.
LYNN FRIES: Comment now on the state, as a follow-on to your earlier comments about how very few Big Tech corporations now control most critical functions that can be performed in the digital world. We should note that GAFAM, Google/Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, are the world’s top five digital corporations, with a combined market value topping three trillion dollars, to provide some context on the kind of reach of U.S. Big Tech into the world’s digital ecosystem.
MICHAEL KWET: Right. And it’s important to remember that the NSA is partnered with these corporations. As far as we know, they’re still partners with these corporations, and that when you’re under Big Data surveillance, you’re also under at least the surveillance of the United States, those who they’re partnered with, so the Five Eyes, to put people under surveillance through piggybacking off the corporate services. And so, states in general would like to have access to that information. And once the data becomes centralized into the hands of organizations, third parties, usually now it’s corporations, that the states have always the capabilities of demanding that they have access to that data. So it’s another reason why centralization just doesn’t work. And as far as far as that goes for places in the Global South, why should a foreign intelligence agency have access to your day to day life?
LYNN FRIES: In your contribution to the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, you wrote that “we have reached a point of crisis, and we need proposals that go beyond “tweaking” the power of Big Tech to do as it wishes through (weak) regulations naively contemplated or championed as real solutions to the problem at hand.”
MICHAEL KWET: Right. A regulated surveillance state it still a surveillance state. The point is, about getting rid of the surveillance, is that you’re not under surveillance. It’s not just how they use the data once they get it, it’s not being under surveillance in the first place.
LYNN FRIES: The U.S.-led, Western model of technology for the design of the digital ecosystem is being rolled out as a blueprint for the rest of the world; notably, the developing world, where Big Tech want to expand into new markets. Among the countries of the Global South, China has largely adopted this model. What’s your take on China?
China is a country that everybody should be keeping an eye on. A lot of their services, like for example WeChat, which everybody uses. WeChat is kind of like their WhatsApp. If you’re a U.S. listener, you probably don’t use WhatsApp, but most people do. It’s a chat app kind of like Facebook Messenger. And in China, they use WeChat, but it’s much more than that. They have all sorts of sharing of news going on and they have many games that they can share. Everything runs through WeChat. But it’s mostly driven towards the Chinese market. Baidu is a similar kind of thing for searching. It’s driven towards the Chinese market. I believe TikTok is the one that’s catching on in the West, and it’s not guaranteed that their software products remain primarily China-driven.
China is also exporting surveillance technology to places like Zimbabwe and elsewhere, which is not good. They do the video analytics, the facial recognition, and so on. And they’re predominantly capitalist, so their impulse is going to be towards exporting their technology and trying to gain a foothold into other markets. Coming from the West, it could be exaggerated. The U.S. is overwhelmingly dominant in the global technology ecosystem. Bar none, they are the top dog. However, it doesn’t mean that other countries aren’t also part of the colonization process.
LYNN FRIES: Given your point that the U.S. is overwhelmingly the dominant player globally in the digital ecosystem, but that that shouldn’t be taken to mean that other countries cannot also be part of a process of digital colonialization and data extraction under the Western model of technology, what’s your take on the rest of the Global South?
MICHAEL KWET: Well, no country in world history has ever gotten wealthy when a foreign entity, a corporation or government, has control and ownership over the core infrastructure. So to sit here and think that Microsoft, Google, Facebook, all these guys are just going to be the ones to provide these services, that it’s going to turn out well for these countries, it’s completely wrong. And in the Global South, it’s very typical for countries to aspire to compete and replicate what has come out of Silicon Valley. So in India, they might want to create their own kind of Facebook or their own kind of Tencent, and you’ll see some of their officials saying those things. In South Africa, the notion is, “We need to compete in the AI economy and we need to develop our own homegrown tech companies.” And that’s fine to do it as tech companies, but if you’re just replicating what is done in Silicon Valley, you’re going to concentrate resources locally.
And so, when you also look at things like data localism, where you’re requiring that data that comes out of services are stored on servers local in your country, the question winds up becoming, well, what is that actually getting for your people. If Facebook can still have servers in your country, it’s not getting rid of Facebook. Banning something like Facebook is usually something that will require… I mean, what are you going to do? Are you going to ban Facebook? It requires a draconian measure like a firewall, like the Great Firewall of China. So that doesn’t seem to be an option if you want to have freedom speech in your country. And trying to replicate these, they’re just not going to compete on the big services.
But not only that, some people make the case, and I think this is still right, that in more internally authoritarian-oriented countries, that storing data locally can help them get access to data about their citizens. If I’m a citizen in Zimbabwe and there is extreme hostility towards homosexuality and there’s state repression, do I want to be on a social network where all the data is stored locally and the Zimbabwean government can go in and get access to that data instantly? Why should the West have it? Yeah, the West shouldn’t have it either. So the notion is here that a different model of how to do the digital society is in order. I mean, this is what is in the interests of the Global South and smaller countries. But it’s in the interest of the broad people too, because you don’t want to have concentrated wealth in your local economy either.
LYNN FRIES: You argue that for the international community to arrive at a safe and inclusive digital future, political, economic, technological, and ideological changes to the status quo are going to be needed. Briefly talk about that and give us some examples, say for the case of social networking. What kind of technological change to the status quo would be needed there?
MICHAEL KWET: So for something like social networking, you need to reengineer the way it is. And for that we have things like FreedomBox, we have things like Mastodon social networking. These are alternatively structured. Mastodon is an alternately structured social network, FreedomBox is a device you can put in your household that will become a personal cloud and a personal server of yours of yours that can allow people to route traffic to each other and host their own data, either in a peer to peer way or then using decentralized servers in communities, that will, instead of going through intermediaries you’re just going horizontally. So the picture isn’t sent to Facebook first and then from Facebook to you, it’s sent either directly to each other or in a decentralized fashion. These are technological solutions that we need to put into place. And laws can be put in place to help us make sure that those technologies, the FreedomBoxes and so on, come into place.
But if we’re looking at regulations behind something like, let’s say an e-commerce company is sending out books to people and it’s to their home addresses, that can reveal a lot about you. So this is where something like information fiduciaries and what’s called the Data Care Act in the United States can come into place. If a privacy law is so weak that allows just for “informed consent” and it allows these companies to still stand and collect the minutia of everybody’s details on a day to day basis, then you know that the privacy law actually wasn’t very much of a privacy law. And that’s what we’re seeing right now, is we’re seeing these so-called privacy laws take place in Europe with the GDPR and elsewhere, and it’s doing some things that are potentially helpful. It’s almost like a “better than nothing” though, because the surveillance is still existing, and it’s still existing because it’s a structural problem.
LYNN FRIES: Very briefly, can you wrap things up as we are approaching the close of our conversation.
MICHAEL KWET: Without changing the way the technical infrastructure is of the digital ecosystem, who owns it, who controls it, the intellectual property relations, predominantly proprietary software, centralized cloud computing, and making sure that we have net neutrality, we’re not going to see much of a difference in the way this works. We also do need laws. We need better privacy laws than what we have being proposed right now and being implemented. And we need a social movement. We need people to get involved and raise their voices. We shouldn’t expect that the status quo is going to change when there’s such a grand concentration of wealth and power.
Without grassroots movement, they’re not going to give up their power and wealth voluntarily or through the stroke of a pen of some laws that were crafted by Congress. It’s going to take real hard work to look at the way the ecosystem works and to try to think more critically about that and to try to push creative solutions like putting Free and Open Source Software in the schools. People can grow up and think critically about how to use technology and to actually be using the people’s technologies in school systems from time they are young. And we need a combination of technological change, fundamentally the way our digital ecosystem works, as well as complimentary legal regulations, and culture and understanding and education in schools in order to change the digital status quo so that it favors the interests of the public.
— source therealnews.com | Mar 28, 2019