Juxtapose. A fancy word from the art world, putting incompatible things together to create a contrast effect. Think Baz Luhrmann‘s apocalypse punk Romeo and Juliet. Or Duchamp’s “Fountain” (a urinal) displayed in prestigious galleries. Except, I think art types don’t even use it anymore because it smacks of intellectual wannabe-ism. With the risk of committing that particular sin, I can think of no better word than Juxtapose to describe this week’s Digital Venice-conference.

The obvious point, which few speakers failed to make, is the futuristic topic in the historic setting. Selling the merits of the “Internet of Everything” against the backdrop of 16^th century frescos. If the speakers are to be believed, the IoE promises to fix generate 8,9 trillion Euro economic contribution by 2020 and fix not only jobs and growth but also provide smart homes and stop climate change. One can’t help but think whether the Internet of Everything would have helped Romeo’s and Juliet’s love troubles.

But the Venice Juxtaposition goes deeper, a few blocks from the digital event is another celebration of science and endeavour: the Architecture Biennale. The similarity is striking, technology and architecture both rely on engineering and emphasize the rational, but with mystic qualities – the great machine vs the great inspiration. For all its post-modernist claims, architecture is profoundly structuralist – something is built after all, creating order from chaos. This is also true of the internet: while it is hailed as the post-modern triumph that puts all hierarchy to an end, the further ambition is to create a new order. It is no coincidence Google defines its mission as to organise and make available the world’s information – a structuralist proposition, if there ever was one!

If my head was spinning from –isms and juxtaposition already, I stepped into the French pavilion only to find the answer I was looking for to the smart home question. Villa Arpel is the main character of Jacques Tati’s 1958 farce Mon Oncle. There, as in a time capsule, is the “smart home” and Tati’s slapstick captures all the frustration of mastering technology when he tries to put a pitcher back in to an automatic kitchen closet. Anyone who has used automatic taps in public restrooms can relate. If you thought migrating photos and contacts to your new smart phone is a nosebleed, wait till you move into the programmable house. The lady of Villa Arpel even says the line “It’s all connected” as she brags to her friends about the features.

Don’t get me wrong, I love gadgets. I love programming my Lego robot to make new tricks. I love my smart phone (Windows Mobile, if you must know). I can even say I love cloud services, only perhaps not each and every one. But the Venice Juxtaposition of technology and architecture tells me the latter has richer sources of inspiration. While technology draws mainly on engineering, science fiction and libertarian economics, architecture considers geography, topography, urban planning, ground conditions, art history, construction technology, climate, sociology, human behaviour and relationships, design patterns dating back millennia and much more. Sure, it’s an unfair and somewhat pointless exercise to compare the two, but nevertheless it’s striking that the architectural thinking is so much more inspired and nuanced than how we discuss technology. This would explain why the smart home hype is driven by the tech sector, rather than architects. Your penny might have dropped on this ages ago, but it took me a long walk along the Grand Canal to figure it out.

As I leave Venice, I pick up a copy of Time Magazine to read on the plane. It should come no surprise: The cover story is the smart home. There is no escape. The internet of everything is everywhere. Resistance is futile. Can I have my blue pill now?

Welcome to Netopia, where technology meets society.

In Philip K. Dick’s 1968 sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the protagonist Deckard fails at his job to identify “replicants,” human-like robots, instead falling in love with one. You may recall Harrison Ford and Sean Young in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film version of Bladerunner. The story is inspired by British mathematician Alan Turing’s idea that if artificial intelligence can convince a real person that it is human, it will be as smart as a human. Real, human-like artificial intelligence.

The other week, the presumably required 33% of a panel of judges in London deemed the chat-AI Eugene Goostman to be human, thus passing the Turing test. Of course there has been no shortage of criticism of the method, and no one really believes that computers are smarter than people. Yet. But they may well be, one day, provided the exponential growth in computing power known as Moore’s Law continues.

Manual labour has to a large extent been replaced by machines, exchanging salary expenses for capital investment on many corporate books. With human-level AI—actually, long before—intellectual labour will also be possible to replace with machines—not necessarily robots as we know them, but algorithms. Software. Believers say new (and better) jobs will come, not to worry. Economists say that there may be transition problems that increase with the speed of change. But the government ought to worry about taxes. The industrialised world’s tax system relies on taxes on labour. If AI and algorithmization happen, that would need to shift to tax on capital and consumption. Not an easy sell in a Europe still recovering from the crisis.

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When faced with the EUCJ ruling on the “right to be forgotten,” Google’s Larry Page said it could help repressive governments and damage innovation. For sure, those dictators use digital technology for oppression just as much as democracy activists can use it for change. And it is difficult to understand why start-ups should play by different rules than others. However, there is a deeper question here: is everything online “speech”? Are banking services speech? Maps? Search, self-driving cars, auctions, mail orders, spam filters… if everything online is speech, real speech is diluted. Freedom of speech should be reserved for the right to express one’s own views without censorship or prosecution. All the rest needs a finer set of rights and responsibilities. Freedom online will be a focus for Netopia in the near future. Watch this space!

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

Footnote: this is Netopia’s newsletter for the week of June 30th.

With great power comes great responsibility, so said Spider-Man (or was that Voltaire?). What greater power is there than knowing our most intimate relationships and emotions? It seems Facebook has that power; it just announced the result of a secret test that turned 689,000 users into involuntary guinea pigs. According to the experiment, negative posts in our feed make us more likely to write negative statuses ourselves. Who could have guessed? By tinkering with the algorithm (oh, it’s always the algorithm), Facebook can decide whether we get more or fewer negative posts. So not only does Facebook know how we feel, but it can actually change the way we feel. At least to the extent those feelings are expressed in status updates. Not sure the eight-page user agreement says anything about that, but it does apparently give Facebook the right to conduct experiments like this on its users without prior consent. Of course, if you want to use Facebook, it’s take it or leave it, so who reads the fine print anyway? Is there a problem here? Sure, you could vote with your feet, but the more social networks influence our lives, the harder it gets. The point of no return is probably in the past, so Facebook (and the others, you know who they are) should stop talking about voluntary users and start taking some responsibility. With great power…

There is talk around Place Lux and Schuman that the new Commission should appoint a DG Digital to ensure that the digital perspective is represented in EU policy. But what is the digital perspective?

There are two competing views on how to describe and understand digital networks. (A little simplified, sure, but bear with me.) One is the idea that digital technology is an outside force that cannot and should not be stopped or interfered with. We can call this techno-centrism – it has many evangelists, one prime example is Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants and much more).The other view, let’s call it techno-scepticism, rather sees the technology as a consequence of human decisions, conflicting business interests, regulation and such. Thinkers like Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov are perhaps the most prominent representatives of this idea. Which of the two perspectives you prefer has fundamental implications for policy. It should also come as no surprise that Netopia subscribes to the techno-sceptic view.

In techno-centrism, the future is predictable and inevitable. Moore’s law is a force of nature, every 18-months or so capacities of processing, storing and transferring data doubles and everything else that happens is a consequence of this constant evolution. Resistance is futile, we can only adjust our systems, habits and institutions to the change, not influence them. This is what net activists mean when they talk about “understanding” new technology, that is embracing the idea that technological evolution is a force unto itself and stronger than other forces. Thus the phrase “new technology cannot be stopped” makes sense and can be used as an argument on plenty of different topics. You may think that this could all be true, while at the same time being sceptical and trying to control or influence the development, but according to techno-centrism, there is always a reason such attempts will be fruitless – perhaps if we don’t do it, the Chinese will. Or innovation will make legislation irrelevant. Or hackers will break the firewall. Or something else, the point is that human effort is inferior to technology. The title of Kelly’s book is telling: Technology has a will of its own. We are its mere tools. This is where such concepts as “market disruption” are born: regardless of current regulation, hierarchies, functions or agreements, technology will come and tear it apart. The ultimate sin is to stick to an outdated business model, whether you’re in advertising, logistics, travel, hotels, transportation, finance, content, health care, security, agriculture or pretty much any field, you better adjust to the new ways or perish.

In techno-centrism, good policy is anything that speeds up development and adaptation of digital technology, and bad policy is anything that interferes with it (data protection, tax enforcement, criminal investigation, copyright, local legislation). The concept of network neutrality that is so popular in the EU these days, is a prime example of techno-centric policy: the only feasible legislation is such that secures non-interference with the technology. Techno-centrism promises many great things: freedom of speech for all, access to a global audience and all the culture in the world, spreading democracy, economic growth, fixing hunger, energy and possibly climate change, empowering the consumer, overthrowing outdated institutions and hierarchies. Even eternal life. We can have all this, if only we stop fighting against the inevitable progress.

Techno-centrism has difficulties with surveillance (NSA/GCHQ but also big data businesses), privacy, tax evasion, cybercrime, child pornography (and other Darknet phenomena like drug trade, contract killers, black market organs, threatened animals, trafficking etc), money laundering, fair competition (power concentration and abuse of dominant position) and such, but those problems are always the consequence of (a) government intervention, (b) uneducated user/consumers or (c) will be fixed with better technology (which will inevitably come, just be patient), thus confirming the doctrine that technology itself is always the answer.

With the techno-centric understanding of digital technology, a DG Digital would be tasked with repeating the maxim: “don’t mess with digital tech, everything will be fine except if you mess it up by trying to intervene”. (In fact, why not put that on a framed embroidery in every meeting room in all EU institutions and save the tax payers some money on the Director General’s wages?)

Techno-scepticism on the other hand, acknowledges technology as an influential force, but one among others. Economy, law, individual decisions, human preference, ideology and many other factors are also in play. Jaron Lanier sees Moore’s law as an inspiration for R&D-departments rather than an outside force. He mocks the religious aspects of techno-centrism. The techno-centric buzzwords are rather slogans to protect the business interests of a few Silicon Valley outfits, who compete just as much with each other using patents, marketing, lobbying, geo-political influence and other old-world forces of power as weapons. What technologies are adopted by the users may be just as much a consequence of marketing budgets, flashy design, PR-stunts, celebrity endorsements and chance, as the quality of the service. To techno-sceptics, there is not a single, right and inevitable way that technology can develop, but many different possibilities. Which ones end up winning (or rather being temporary top dogs, because techno-sceptics believe most things change with time) depends on things like competing standards (remember VHS vs Beta?), government investment and intervention, litigation in patent and competition cases, black swans, trends in public taste, competition from emerging markets, the battle for power between the Silicon Valley-giants, butter-fly effects, the economy’s boom- and bust-cycles (or perhaps they think that concept is too simplistic?), whims by CEOs, policy-makers, and you and me. And many other factors… actually techno-sceptics probably believe the list is endless. To techno-sceptics, “the internet” is a misnomer because there are many different digital networks with different functions, priorities and set-ups, it can not be regarded as a unified technology and it certainly does not want anything in particular.

Techno-sceptics (including this writer!) also enjoy reminding techno-centrics that the internet was invented by the US military (and TOR more specific by the US Navy) and that dictators love to work in tandem with telecoms and internet services to weed out dissidents. The techno-sceptics’ main issue is that they look like bores and have no snappy one-liners on things like growth, hunger and climate change, rather pointing to complexity than simplicity. They also run the risk of being tempted to embrace everything techno-critical message as a truth (thus becoming techno-critics, who are much more dogmatic than –sceptics).

But if the DG Digital were to be a techno-sceptic, what would he or she do? Say “It’s complicated”? You can get that on Facebook!

Today, Netopia took part in a seminar on digital policy and intellectual property in the House of Commons in  London. My speech:

Members of Parliament,

Fellow Speakers,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

My name is Per Strömbäck, I am the editor of Netopia – a Brussels-based think-tank and web magazine on the digital society.

I am humbled and honoured to speak to you today at this joint meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Intellectual Property and the Digital Policy Alliance. Coming from Sweden, it is safe to say that my home country has a lot to answer for: the Pirate Party in European parliament and of course the infamous Pirate Bay. Sweden is sort of the fossil fuel of intellectual property infringement, spreading the CO2 of piracy to other countries through the atmosphere of the internet, destroying the climate for everyone. So, apologies for that, but believe me; I have worked hard against it on the home front.

For that reason, it is inspiring to be here in the United Kingdom where the intellectual level of the debate regarding the digital topics is so much higher and where policy-makers have not resigned to the myth that any attempt to influence technology or regulate the internet would be both misguided and dangerous. As our lives, businesses and societies become increasingly digital, it is clear that it is more democracy and not less that is the answer to protecting our rights and interests online. Public institutions guarantee the freedom of the individual, not threaten it. This is true of our offline lives, as well as online. In a global view, the United Kingdom is a leader in internet governance. Blocking infringing websites, ideas for new forms of licensing for online content brought forward, carriers sending notes to illegal downloaders – such concepts are anathema in many other countries. So I congratulate you, but of course there is much ground left to cover before legal certainty online is anywhere close to that of the offline markets.

I have often noticed that policy-makers find themselves behind the curve of technology and struggle to make good digital policies. Often, regulation comes after the fact, added on as an after-thought, which makes it a blunt instrument, may not achieve the intended results and may have collateral effects that can be difficult to predict. While this is true, it is also true that technology does not exist in a vacuum. Let me remind you that the internet of today is not the product of digital evolution without interference. Rather it is the result of government funding and political decisions. The internet was first developed by the US Military in the 1960’s, the so-called ARPANet. Your own Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the world-wide web at CERN, a physics laboratory which is funded by the EU and member states. Today’s clashes of content and technology can be traced to the Clinton Administration’s  Digital Millennium Copyright Act from 1998, which gave intermediaries immunity and rights-owners a way to bring legal cases against infringers. Without this so-called “safe harbour” for the telecom carriers, peer2peer file-sharing piracy could not have thrived the way it did.

The next frontier for intellectual property in the digital space may well be 3d-printing technology, which, if it follows a similar trajectory as for example photo printers, threaten to bring the challenges that the culture industries have been struggling with to physical goods manufacturers. In June last year, the UK government announced 14,7 million pounds investment for 3d-printing projects. Again, policy is ahead of the curve of technology, making it happen by putting tax money into it. Do these funds come with demands that society’s priorities like taxes, tariffs and fair competition can be included in the technology? They should.

Of course tech companies will tell you that any government intervention will “break the internet”. Everyone would prefer to be left to their own devices. But government decisions and tax money made, and continue to make the internet.

New technologies, such as big data, internet of things, artificial intelligence and fog computing follow this similar pattern: publicly funded research and development, commercial launch, impact on society. The cycle is predictable by now. In Netopia’s report Can We Make the Digital World Ethical? the authors suggest particular actions, such as a new technology body that oversees software much like the Health Department or Food and Drug Administration keeps an eye on the food industry. (Two of the authors are here today, Jane Whyatt and Peter Warren.)

This brings me to my second point. “Free” is a keyword in all topics digital, but the different meanings can be confusing. There is an old joke by Richard Stallman, one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley: “Free as in Speech or as in Beer?”. Of course, free speech is a human right, free beer not so. Freedom of speech is not the freedom to distribute somebody else’s work to a global audience without permission. Freedom of speech is not the freedom to take anything one finds online without consequence. Quite the opposite, it is an abuse of free speech. Free beer, dressed up as free speech.

Another gem from the early days of Silicon Valley, which has been misinterpreted over the years is “information wants to be free”. Stewart Brand is the man who said it, but the complete quote reads:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

This was in 1985, but it sums up today’s debates nicely. The invitation to this seminar wants to discuss the convergence of content and technology. It is fair to say that the two are mutually dependent: content needs a delivery mechanism and technology needs something to fill the pipes with, to fuel the demand of the consumers for more bandwidth and hardware. Some may argue that amateur creativity, remix culture and social media is the new black, but one look at the Pirate Bay top-charts shows the opposite: of the 100 most popular video downloads, 99 are current feature films or television series. The odd one out is a Bollywood movie. Professional quality material remains the most desired content. Consumers want it to be free. Distributors want it to be as cheap as possible. Creators and publishers want it to be expensive. It is the same drama that have always played out between distributors and creators, artists complaining about record labels, writers about publishers. Except this time the gate-keepers are not music executives, but internet platforms and telecom carriers. In this view, buzzwords like “innovation” and “market disruption” are just other ways to commercialize content without having to pay for it.

Let me finish with a quote from John Locke:

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.

Freedom online requires democratic governance. The alternative is not anarchy, but regulation by technology.

Our online lives run on cloud services and the cloud services run on data centers with hundreds of thousands of computers. Whether it’s an NSA bunker in Idaho or Facebook’s facility in Luleå, Sweden, the concept is centralisation. But computing power is Peerialism becoming ubiquitous. Your mobile phone, surfpad, laptop, television and new car all have processors that are connected to the internet. Soon, with the “Internet of things”, more and more devices will have online processors: kitchen machines, electric cabinet, lamp posts… Time to learn a new buzz word, the new frontier is “fog computing” where distributed processing challenges the current trend of centralisation. By tapping into the power of the processors that surround us, many calculation clock cycles can be made available on the network. Fog computing is a cousin of “grid computing” where PC-users share unused computing power with others, such as the SETI-project, except the fog is not limited to PC.

In the summer of 2009, internet piracy was the focus of the world’s attention: The Pirate Party had been elected to European Parliament by Swedish voters and the founders of The Pirate Bay had been sentenced to prison – two spectacular events in digital policy. In July, The Pirate Bay called a press conference and announced it had been sold to a business man, Hans Pandeya, whom most had never heard of before. This sparked an outrage among the pirate sympathisers, the online forums screamed sell-out, the group that operates the website had painted themselves as anti-establishment activists but now looked like greedy entrepreneurs. And Pandeya had little success in convincing rights-owners to license content now that TPB was going to go legit. The media focused on spectacular parts of the business plan, like TPB-branded baby pacifiers and vodka (not in combination!). Hans Pandeya soon got in trouble with the finance supervisor authority for misleading information to the stock market and the whole operation crashed. Pandeya himself lost most of his property in repossessions and was convicted for fraud (suspended sentence).

That is how the story is often told, but there is one missing piece. Pandeya’s game plan was much smarter. Besides The Pirate Bay, he also bought Stockholm-based tech developer Peerialism, specialising in digital media distribution. Hans Pandeya said that the conflict of rights-holders and pirates was because of out-dated technology. By connecting the dots of The Pirate Bay and Peerialism, the idea was to build a system where downloaders paid for content, not with money or by looking at ads, but by making unused computer power (memory, hard drive space, processing power) available to cloud services via Peerialism’s software. Cloud services would pay for the data capacity, which in turn would pay content owners. Problem solved! Hans Pandeya deserves credit for his radical thinking in this, too bad we will probably never see it live. And content distribution has also moved on, now streaming is the new black, not download. Peerialism’s most popular product is called “Hive Streaming”, another term that suggests distributed intelligence. And there is the connection to fog computing – decentralisation may be the answer to tomorrow’s computing, rather than the current trend of centralisation. And Hans Pandeya was one of the first to see the business opportunities and user applications. Too bad he picked such an awful case to prove it.

The shock and drama of the anti-EU and pro-fascist parties’ progress was of course the most important development in the EU parliament election. There is a lot to be discussed about that and who knows: perhaps some of it can touch the digital policy issues? But before that, Netopia looks closer at the only party that has a single focus on digital policy – the Pirate Party. Yes, single focus, despite what the Pirates claimed in the campaign, they traded their votes on all issues except digital policy to the Greens in order to get their support on file-sharing and anti-copyright. In this EU parliament election, the Pirate Party lost two seats from Sweden and won one from Germany. Europe’s voters sent MEPs Christian Engström and Amelia Andersdotter back home, and Germany’s Julia Reda to Brussels. Half the votes and five years of experience lost for the Pirates. Looking closer at the national results, 2,2% of Sweden’s voters chose the Pirates, but only 1,4% of Germany’s. Popular support is thus bigger in Sweden, but Germany has four times as many seats in European Parliament. And Sweden’s support for the Pirates is down from 7,1% in the 2009 elections, more than two thirds of voters moved on.

For all their efforts to brand themselves as internet freedom activists and privacy watch dogs, the Pirates’ real policy has always been free entertainment. Free as in free of charge. By embracing file-sharing and attempting to make unauthorised mass distribution of copyright content legal, the Pirate Party managed to ride the wave that Napster and The Pirate Bay set in motion. It is populism dressed up as civil rights defence. The Pirates most important policy victory was the EU Parliament’s veto on the ACTA trade agreement, which they have taken opportunity to point out in the campaign. (Not that ACTA would really have stopped illegal file-sharing, but who cares about details?) More recently, the Pirates have tried to connect their image to the fight against mass surveillance online and Edward Snowden’s self-sacrificing revelations. (And Julian Assange before him, except his gloria was stained by the sex crime allegations that he still refuses to answer.) However, the real dilemma for the Pirate Party is that it has never found an answer to the conflict between freedom of speech and privacy. They talk about both as absolutes in an almost binary way (you either have it or you don’t), but the two often clash. Radical freedom of speech means no restriction, but defamation and hate speech can violate privacy and is limited in most countries. If “speech” is not only words, but also data, images, videos, voice recordings and perhaps bank statements, the list of conflicts grows very long, very fast. By embracing radical freedom of expression and information, the Pirates end up defending the NSA, Google, Facebook and all the “little brother” prying eyes that strip away our privacy online. It’s an impossible equation and the core of the Pirates ideological confusion. Perhaps the newly elected MEP Reda can figure it out? Or maybe not. My bet is pirate policy is going to go out of fashion faster than eyebrow piercings.

Europe is busy debating network neutrality, the idea that all data packets should be treated equal. Except for spam, that should be filtered out. And viruses, which should be deleted. And other harmful code, that should be blocked. And perhaps also criminal or infringing content. But apart from those exceptions (and potentially some others), the network should be traffic neutral. No discrimination of traffic, no prioritisation. Neutrality as equality or justice, that is the concept that regulation or other intervention hurts the delicate balance, the fairness that the invisible hand made. Freedom as when the state stays out. Funny how Europe fell in love with such an American flavour.

The idea of network neutrality builds on the assumption that the network is its own entity, separate from the content and services that run on it. In the old era of state-owned telecom monopolies, the network may have been distinguishable from the content (but not really because the monopolies ran all sorts of services, remember Minitel in France?). The American networks were operated by private companies, but with legislation competition could be secured – ergo network neutrality.

However these days, the lines are blurring. Two main trends challenge the idea of the independent network, one of centralisation and the other of fragmentation. Centralisation because internet services are building their own networks, such as the 1000 megabit Google Fibre that is currently built in some US cities. Facebook invests in sci-fi technologies like lasers and drones to deliver internet access to far-off places. With the Internet.org-initiative, competitors Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Qualcomm (chip manufacturer), Opera (browser software), Mediatek (chip manufacturer) and Facebook, aim to bring the gift of internet to least-developed countries. Please note that neither one of them is a telecom operator. How can the network be neutral if Google owns it?

The trend of fragmentation is multihoming traffic which is set to become the next decade’s mobile digital communication, where data is agnostic to whether it is carried over wi-fi, mobile networks or cable – even turning the phone in your pocket into a relay for third party traffic (or your vacuum cleaner if the smart home/internet of things-hype is to be believed). Some talk about the “sneakernet” which is off-line file-sharing between users that meet in the meatspace using pocket devices with enough storage space to carry big parts of the internet as we know it (or, you know, all films and music ever made). If the network is in your pocket, is it a tangible thing that can be distinguished from what’s next to it? Can it be neutral?

Europe is barking up the wrong tree, folks. We should throw out neutrality and think in terms of protection of rights, where we will need institutions and regulation that recognise the connection between the cables and what is inside. And in spite of all her talk about the merits of network neutrality, Commissioner Kroes is no stranger to the concept. Last year she committed €50 million to 5G mobile network research.