Long-term Netopia readers will recall Mariam Kirollos’s thought-provoking piece “The Revolution Beyond 140 Characters” from last summer. While the rest of us were following the so-called Arab Spring from the comfort of our Tweetdecks, Mariam Kirollos risked her physical safety on Tahrir Square for “bread, freedom, and social justice.”. The threat was not only from regime troops and hired thugs but also from other protesters. Women were particularly exposed to danger. We were told that social media made the Arab Spring happen, but Mariam Kirollos reminds us that a lot of the people who put their lives at stake in the revolution are illiterate. Only a minority had internet access, and a tiny fraction of that minority had social media accounts. So while we in the West pride ourselves on providing the tools for liberation, those who did the heavy lifting had completely different circumstances. Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in protest against a government official who confiscated the fruit he was selling as a street vendor. It was his sacrifice as a martyr that set the Arab spring in motion.

For all the talk of freedom of speech and democracy, the internet companies first loyalty will always be to the profit of their shareholders, not such liberal ideas. So argued Belarusian-American writer Evgeny Morozov in his 2011 book The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (Penguin). There are many cases to this point: Cisco built China’s “Great Firewall,” Ericsson provided Syria’s al-Assad with surveillance equipment, Nokia Siemens helped the Iranian regime crackdown on dissidents, TeliaSonera helped Belarus secret police hunt down protesters, and many more examples. Technology can be used for good and for bad, but dictators are brought down by people, not technology.

Today almost four years have passed since the Arab Spring first started, and the democracy movement has lost much of its momentum. New horrors have emerged. What is the role of social media today in Egypt? This and many other questions, Mariam Kirollos will explain in her visit to Netopia’s breakfast meeting in Brussels on Human Rights Day, December 10. Please join us!

In the past weeks, the video game world has been shocked by the hatred, threats, and misogynist harassment associated with the so-called Gamergate scandal, where trolls hiding behind aliases have attacked female journalists and scholars who publicly criticise stereotypical depictions of women in video games. The assaults go beyond online practices of tweeted rape and murder threats, to the point where one had to cancel a public appearance and more than one cannot safely stay in their homes. Some will say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” and while few people on the receiving end of online abuse will agree, the Gamergate scandal has reached the point where the physical safety of certain women cannot be guaranteed. Their crime? Speaking their mind on sexism in games. Yes, the irony is clear; the rape threats and the fact that the targets are women confirm the sexism. The activities are orchestrated in online forums such as 8chan, Reddit threads, and Twitter hashtags.

Gamergate supporters claim that the real message is about press ethics and anti-corruption, but to the neutral observer, it is clear that this has become an excuse for harassment. (What the #GG-campaign was meant to be, what it could have been, and what it should be about are all pointless questions at this juncture.) The Week says Gamergate has backfired on its “nincompoop perpetrators.” Newsweek analyses tweets and concludes there is little to support the claim that the Gamergate-campaign is about ethics rather than harassment. Numerous media run stories about the victims of online misogynist hate. Wired Magazine says the old-school nerd gamer is going out of style fast as games become mainstream entertainment.

This is by no means the first and surely not the last time online anonymity is abused for various reasons with disastrous results for particular individuals. Is that the price we have to pay for anonymity? That would then beg the question: what is anonymity good for? It is often held up as the answer to privacy online, but as such, it leaves a lot to be desired. First, there is rarely any real anonymity; the companies running the services know who you are, and some of them know much more than you’d like to think. Anonymity may exist toward other users, but hardly to the cloud service (who will share your data with both advertisers and government agencies, as has been made very clear). Second, the purpose of anonymity is often said to be such things as whistle-blowing, filing police reports, giving sensitive information to members of the press corps, and other similar, let’s say, civil duties. But those are not really dependent on anonymity but rather trust and the legal protection of sources. The reporter knows who the source is in most cases; in fact, that can be key to evaluating the quality of the information and making decisions about making it public. You can write a letter to the editor and have it published under a pseudonym, but the editor knows your identity. Online anonymity does not help to this end; protecting sources does.

Another aspect of this phenomenon is anonymous mass broadcasts, such as tweets, which can potentially reach thousands or millions of readers, making it a de facto mass medium. But other mass media have editors fronting the publications, editorial policies, press ethics regulations, and many other checks and balances because reaching a mass audience is a great power, and with great power comes great responsibility (as Spider-Man’s uncle wisely put it). This is a fact that is recognised in various ways in all democracies, but for some reason it is thought not to apply online.

A third takeaway is a variation on the filter bubble theory, the idea that personalisation of digital services provides us with information confirming what we already know, reinforcing our beliefs rather than putting them to the test with new information. In the case of Gamergate and other similar online harassment patterns, perhaps we can talk about “pressure cookers,” where like-minded people confirm each other’s beliefs, inspire or challenge taking action, and then brag about it to the group. One of the victims of Gamergate, Anita Sarkeesian, has spoken about this in conferences, about how, for example, trolls would hack her Wikipedia page, putting up nude pictures with Sarkeesian’s head on them, then posting the screen grabs on forums (or even their Facebook pages) to get the credit from their peers. As Sarkeesian has pointed out, this pattern is not so much about anonymity but rather a lack of consequence for those wrongdoers. Also, any journalist or politician can testify that trolls like these have always been around, sending letters with death threats (or, you know, faeces), but these days they are not isolated but congregate online, pushing one another to action.

Now, the cool, techno-optimistic point to make would be that exactly the democratisation that makes trolls possible can also be the antidote.For example, there are a number of online petitions against abuse and harassment. But they are a response to the trolls and would not be necessary if freedom of speech online also contained the element of responsibility that it is always associated with offline.

The Gamergate scandal demonstrates that the combination of anonymity and irresponsible mass media is a dead end. The question is, how do we get democratised access to a global audience without the harassment?

UPDATE: It is also fair to say that the games industry has some clues for solutions, for example, how it moderates its player forums. Here is one example: http://diversi.nu/initiatives/paradox-interactive/

Full disclosure: This writer’s background is in video games, and he continues to work part-time in that industry

Few people have inspired Netopia as Jaron Lanier. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Lanier received the Peace Prize of German Book Trade. A peace prize to a Silicon Valley pioneer? While that may sound odd, Netopia applauds the jury’s choice. Jaron Lanier is no typical digital evangelist, quite the opposite. His criticism against the walled gardens of cloud services, the lack of inspired thinking in software development, and the religious impulses of Silicon Valley billionaires make him one of today’s most urgent thinkers and a truth-sayer with no match.

Lanier’s opposition to techno-centrism is fierce; “cybernetic totalism” is his phrase; there is nothing inevitable about technology, he says. It is designed and developed by humans, with conscious decisions and responsibility along the way. However, as one software is added to another, the design decisions add up, limiting the scope and potential and building on the restrictions of earlier programming. Therefore, writes Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Knopf 2010), he and his early-day Silicon Valley peers would have laughed had someone told them that the greatest achievements of the digital revolution would be an encyclopaedia and a new version of Unix. Jaron Lanier holds the digital promise to a higher standard. In his Peace Prize acceptance speech, Lanier stresses that new technologies that rely on “dignity destruction” for efficiency are cheating; “really efficient technology designs should improve both service and dignity.”. So speaks a humanist.

Another recurring topic of Lanier’s is the obsession with mortality among Silicon Valley billionaires. The parallels to salvation (embrace digital faith), wishes for eternal life (trans-humanism), and the reliance on a greater power (techno-determinism) that are so prominent in the digital ethos, to Lanier, are mere reiterations of familiar religious themes. However, in his speech, Jaron Lanier grants these pseudo-Christian concepts the benefit of the doubt and concludes that, like so many other digital progressions, eternal life will end up eating its tail. Unless limited to an elite, it would demand restrictions on how many new people can be put into the world, ending up in an “infinitely stale gerontocracy.”. What looks like creative destruction in many cases turns out to be truly conservative.

Another disappointment of Lanier’s is how the digital revolution did not end up making us better people. This is the part where he may be criticised for naivety. Again in the acceptance speech, Jaron Lanier expresses that he had hoped that through digital networks, we could have belonged to many different groups rather than organising in packs or hives. (I would argue we do belong to many different groups, but each can still find a mirror or an opponent group). I see it as his take on the filter bubble problem; the networks tend to connect like-minded people, creating echo chambers where oddball ideas can start to look realistic. Lanier doesn’t say it out loud, but I can’t help but read it as a reference to the current so-called #GamerGate debate, where packs of men hiding under aliases on Twitter or forums like 8chan threaten and harass women who publicly criticise sexism in video games, to the extent that their physical safety cannot be upheld, even in their own homes. This is one of the worst examples of that horrible mix of perceived online untouchability, radical information freedom, misogyny, and lack of consequence or accountability on the part of the intermediaries. If that is the prize we have to pay for so-called internet freedom, it’s not worth it.

Perhaps it’s not too late to change the tide, but the digital revolution did not deliver on its promises. Or, as Jaron Lanier put it in an interview for his most recent book Who Owns the Future (Allen Lane/Penguin 2013), “I miss the future.”

As Netopia reports in Jane Whyatt’s story “The Herod Clause”, open wifis have surfaced as a new threat to privacy and security online. By using open wifis, users reveal e-mail addresses, passwords, and, perhaps worst, their wifi history, making it possible to retrace their steps and thus monitor past movements. The irony of online privacy is that the internet is both a place of anonymity and perceived invisibility, while at the same time the perfect surveillance machine as recent debates on big data and Edward Snowden’s leaks have shown. But with smartphone and soon maybe wearable computers, the surveillance enters the physical space. Apps for sharing wifi-info, such as InstaWifi or Wifipass, may look like another generous piece of the “sharing economy”, but could in practice be a real Trojan horse.

Europol’s spokesperson in Whyatt’s story recommends the use of VPN-technology as privacy precaution. It is an ambiguous piece of advice. Is it reasonable that the individual user should bear the responsibility to solve this problem? Can users ever keep up with the advances of surveillance technology? And can it be done without turning into actual “tin foil hats” (to block out satellites and radio-waves)? Does a majority of users have required skills to master anti-surveillance technology? Or enough appetite to learn? So far, it seems most users prefer the comfort of ignorance or denial – “perhaps the haystack is so big my particular needle will not be found”. But with algorithms and big data technology, any needle can be identified, so it’s in deed a false sense of security. Perhaps users think they don’t have anything to hide, but that would be giving up privacy in exchange for free search and e-mail – we will live to regret it.

Rather, the question should be: what is the responsibility for those who commercially deploy these technologies to respect privacy? And if they don’t see privacy protection as part of the commercial offer, the solution may not be more technology, but more democracy. In that perspective, the EU:s legal action against some tech players is more than welcome.

Welcome to Netopia, where technology meets society.

The Juncker commission has a strong focus on digital, not one but two nominated commissioners to cover this field: the German Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, Günther Oettinger,  and Estonian Commission’s Vice President for Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip. The former will be in charge of setting clear long-term strategic goals to offer legal certainty to the sector while the latter will be responsible for overseeing the drafting of policies linked to the digital economy by seven Commissioners in their respective policy areas. The single digital market aside, Netopia asks how this duo will address the growing challenge of internet governance: who makes the rules online and how can we make sure the same rules apply as in the offline world?

There are two schools of thought on this matter: multi-stakeholderism and government action. Multi-stakeholderism is the notion that the internet is best served untouched by government regulation, the less regulation the more freedom is the theory. Instead, the government is one of multiple stakeholders, the others being civil society, industry and the technology community, each with equal voice at summits like the Internet Governance Forum. It is a self-regulation of sorts, but with no teeth. The multi-stakeholder model can at best inform and suggest courses of action to those with the real power: those who design technology, define and enforce terms of use, operate dominating online market and social platforms, and manage traffic in the networks. At worst, the multi-stakeholder model is an exercise in futility serving as a smoke-screen for these actors to go about their business as they wish without outside involvement.

The other idea is based on democracy and the thought that human rights are best supported by law, courts and public institutions. This is the model that has served the West so well, underpinning both Europe and America’s celebrated Montesqueieu-influenced constitutions. This view has best been articulated by the French Senate in its recent report Europe to the Rescue of the Internet, which suggests Europe takes the lead in creating a more democratic and productive internet governance, pointing to the disadvantages of the current US-dominated rather than truly global internet, such as the surveillance scandals following the Edward Snowden-revelations.

The main case against the democratic path is that it would open the floodgates for dictators to intervene and that Western democracies must stand in the way of such a development. Of course those dictators already monitor, censor and control the internet locally in various ways, often with the active aid and support of Western tech and telecom companies (Ericsson in Syria, Nokia/Siemens in Iran, TeliaSonera in Belarus to name but a few). It’s not the Internet’s fault that there are oppressive regimes in many countries, at the same time the Internet as such won’t bring democracy.

Will Commissioners Oettinger and Ansip resort to Silicon Valley messianism, like their predecessor? Or will the new Commission take this opportunity for Europe to take the lead in internet governance based on human rights. That would make internet governance a project for real liberation and world peace.

The digital topics are hotter than ever. Join the conversation at netopia.mslgcp.com!

This is Netopia’s newsletter on September 19 2014

A leaked draft of the new European Commission suggests that there will not be one, but two new commissioners concerned with digital issues. One is the “Digital Champion” that the tech industry has demanded, so no big surprise—this looks very much like an extension of Neelie Kroes’s work as the current Digital Commissioner (sometimes called “Silicon Valley’s Third Senator”), except there is pressure from the tech businesses to expand the remit by applying an “innovation principle” to all decision-making (as opposed to a precautionary principle). Which, of course, is the complete opposite of the thought of a “building standard” for software that was suggested in Netopia’s report Can We Make the Digital World Ethical?

The second speculation is more intriguing: a commissioner tasked with “internet and culture.”. Netopia’s question is not so much who will take the job, but the contents of that portfolio: is this just another way to make more content available for Silicon Valley to monetise without sharing revenue with its creators (a “copyright reform”). Or is it a real attempt to strike a balance between the interests of the culture and entertainment sector on the one hand and the digital middlemen on the other? Netopia has split personalities over this: the pessimist is betting on the former, while the optimist hopes for the latter.

Netopia readers will recall that this editor and two of the main contributors – main writer Peter Warren and interviewee professor Murray Shanahan – addressed the French Senate this spring, following the release of the report Can We Make the Digital World Ethical?. Now the Senate’s information mission is concluded and its findings published, as abstract and report (both in French).

Once again, the French resistance is the last hope for freedom and democracy in Europe. The Senate’s report does not pull its punches in describing the current internet governance as US-centric, biased and lacking in respect for basic human rights. It calls for a radical make-over of the regulating bodies, such as ICANN and IETF.

The Senate report argues that internet governance today is “de facto American”. For example, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) governs top level domains such as .gov, .eu, .tv etc as well as the “phone book” that connects these with the IP-addresses that identify internet servers. It is a core function of internet infrastructure and you probably would guess it’s an NGO or part of the United Nations or under the supervision of some governments, but it is a (not for profit) company in California, supervised by the US Department of Commerce. It abides by the so-called “multi-stakeholder model”, according to which businesses, academics, governments, the public and other stakeholders supposedly get equal influence: that’s right, elected representatives in this model are considered one of many stakeholders. That goes against the principles of democracy, where we elect representatives and task them with making law for all of society. The multi-stakeholder model reduces democracy to a vested interest, which makes it in practice technocratic – only masquerading as independent (my conclusion, not the Senate’s).

The Senate makes a strong call for making internet governance a truly global undertaking where all involved parties have influence in a transparent and democratic way. Netopia congratulates the French Senate to its insight and recommends European legislators and the Commission to take notice.

UPDATE: Link to the English summary of the French Senate report: http://www.senat.fr/fileadmin/Fichiers/Images/commission/MCI_nouvelle_gouvernance_de_l_internet/EUROPE_TO_THE_RESCUE_OF_THE_INTERNET_english_summary.pdf

“If you can’t trust the governments of the world, who can you trust?” Thus said Young Einstein, played by Yahoo Serious in the 1988 Australian comedy movie with the same title. In this version, Einstein is a Tasmanian genius who splits the beer atom and wants to share the gift of atomic power with the world. The – obviously ironic – line leaps to mind as I read Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide (Henry Holt, 2014), which of course is the story of how Edward Snowden leaked top secret NSA files to him and the events that followed. The story is familiar by now, but the first part of Greenwald’s book is still a page-turner, on par with any crime fiction you will read at the beach this summer. In the second part, Greenwald goes deeper into the material that Snowden provided, demonstrating the depth and span of NSA and GCHQ monitoring. Most of it is also already familiar to anyone who follows the news, but put together, it’s still overwhelming. I find myself fascinated that those government agencies can not only collect this data but also, to some extent, make sense of it. I find it difficult to find old messages in my Outlook inbox; imagine searching through billions of e-mails. As fascinating as this may be, the second third is also the least appealing to the reader; the story is interrupted with facsimiles of PowerPoint slides and other outtakes from the documents on almost every page.

In the third and final part, Greenwald discusses the impact of the surveillance state on the freedom of the individual and, by extension, democracy. When Big Brother is watching, we change our behaviour, says Greenwald and it’s hard to disagree. But there is something off with his logic; the NSA tried to keep their surveillance secret. Snowden, Greenwald and their partners revealed it. The idea was not for NSA to let people know they were being watched, but the opposite. So however compelling a case Greenwald makes against government surveillance, it seems to go beside the point of revealing the “US surveillance state”. Greenwald also expresses great frustration that so many of his journalist colleagues took sides with the government, even collaborated with it—and not only on the NSA case; apparently many US news organisations confer with government authorities before releasing secret documents! And while it is easy to share his frustration, Greenwald’s surprise is a little… well, surprising. The point that mainstream media supports the government has been made many times before, perhaps best by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 1988). We knew this already: in a perfect world, the “fourth estate” should be a vigilant watchdog over the government, but in practice this is the exception rather than the rule.

The Snowden leaks and Greenwald’s publications are no small accomplishment; as the writer puts it himself, they have changed the course of history. But I find it hard to agree with the conclusion that the government is the primary threat online and that anonymity through cryptography is the answer for the average user. Rather, the takeaway should be that government involvement online should be closely regulated, but it is the idea that the internet is a place void of rules that is the real problem. That gives license to security agencies to do what they want, as well as private companies to sell our personal information to third parties or criminals to operate without consequence. The internet needs to move out of the shadows, not deeper into them. And to Young Einstein’s point, no, we can’t trust the governments of the world. But we also can’t do without them.