The Internet Is Not the Answer (27 page)

The establishment of a Bentham-style electronic panopticon, fused with his utilitarian faith in the quantification of society, is what is so terrifying about twenty-first-century networked society. We are drifting into a Benthamite world in which everything—from our fitness to what we eat to our driving habits to how long and how hard we work—can be profitably quantified by companies like Google’s smart home device manufacturer Nest, which is already building a lucrative business managing the electricity consumption of consumers on behalf of energy utilities.
⁴¹
And with its Gross National Happiness Index and its secret experiments to control our moods, Facebook is even resurrecting Bentham’s attempt to quantify our pleasure and pain.

In an electronic panopticon of 50 billion intelligent devices, a networked world where privacy has become a privilege of the wealthy, it won’t just be our televisions, our smartphones, or our cars that will be watching us. This is John Lanchester’s “new kind of human society,” a place where everything we do and every place we go can be watched and turned into personal data—a commodity that EU consumer commissioner Meglena Kuneva describe as the “new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world.”
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“Is the Internet now just one big human experiment?”
⁴³
asked the
Guardian
’s Dan Gillmor in response to July 2014 revelations about emotion-manipulation experiments conducted by Facebook and by the dating site OkCupid. In the future, I’m afraid, the answer to Gillmor’s question will be yes. As the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci warns about this infinitely creepy networked world, big data companies like Facebook and OkCupid “now have new tools and stealth methods to quietly model our personality, our vulnerabilities, identify our networks, and effectively nudge and shape our ideas, desires and dreams.”
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Such nudging and shaping—particularly for dating—isn’t necessarily new, argues the
Financial Times’
Christopher Caldwell. But in the pre-Internet past, he notes, this has been done by outside authorities—particularly parents, communities, and religious bodies. “The difference,” Caldwell notes, between OkCupid’s experiment and parent and religious groups, “is that these groups actually loved the young people they were counselling, had a stake in ensuring things did not go wrong, would help as best they could if things did, and were not using the young lovers strictly as a means of making money.”
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We will be observed by every unloving institution of the new digital surveillance state—from Silicon Valley’s big data companies and the government to insurance companies, health-care providers, the police, and ruthlessly Benthamite employers like Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, with its scientifically managed fulfillment centers where the company watches over its nonunionized workforce. Big data companies will know what we did yesterday, today, and, with the help of increasingly accurate predictive technology, what we will do tomorrow. And—as in what Christopher Caldwell calls OkCupid’s “venal” experiment—the goal of these big data companies will be strictly to make money from our personal data rather than use it as a public service.

Our Crystal Future

Imaginary dystopias about a future dominated by monstrously powerful technology companies tend to be presented as updated versions of the Orwellian totalitarian state. One example is Ridley Scott’s
Prometheus
, a 2012 movie about a future in which a tech company called the Weyland Corporation has become so powerful that its CEO is able to boast, “We are the gods now.” The assumption is these companies will replace the government. That they will become Big Brother.

Such a dramatic scenario works well in movies, but is an overly Manichaean take on the future. In our libertarian age of hostility to the state, Google doesn’t really need to actually become the government to give it more power over us. So Eric Schmidt, when asked if Google wanted to operate like a government, said that his company didn’t want to have the responsibilities of being a country. “We’re not becoming a state,” he explained. “We don’t want to be because states have a lot of complicated problems.”
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But, of course, Google doesn’t need to become an old-fashioned state—with all those “complicated problems” of tax collection and welfare and educational policy—to increase its power and wealth. Google can, instead, partner with the government to create a more efficient and profitable surveillance society.

“Who should we fear more with our data: the government or companies?” asks
Guardian
columnist Ana Marie Cox.
⁴⁷
Unfortunately, however, it’s not an either/or question. In today’s networked world, we should fear both the government and private big data companies like Facebook and Google.

We got a preview of this terrifying new world in the summer of 2013 with the National Security Agency data-mining Prism scandal revealed by the former NSA analyst Edward Snowden. “If Big Brother came back, he’d be a public-private partnership,” explained the British historian Timothy Garton Ash. And it’s exactly this kind of partnership between big data companies like Google and the NSA—both the government
and
private companies—that we should most fear.

According to a June 2013 report in the
New York Times
, the Prism program “grew out of the National Security Agency’s desire several years ago to begin addressing the agency’s need to keep up with the explosive growth of social media.”
⁴⁸
Prism showed the backdoor access to the data of their customers that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple all gave—or were legally required to give, according to these companies—to the government. As the Internet historian John Naughton notes, Prism uncovered the “hidden wiring of our networked world”
⁴⁹
and revealed the fact “that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system.”
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The Prism scandal reveals what the
New York Times
’
James Risen and Nick Wingfield call the “complex reality” of data mining as “an industry and a crucial intelligence tool” that “binds N.S.A and Silicon Valley leaders.”
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The
Atlantic
’s Michael Hirsh argues that “the government’s massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats but by Silicon Valley and private defense contractors.”
⁵²
As the
New York Times
’ Claire Cain Miller adds, some Internet companies, notably Twitter, “declined to make it easy for the government” to collect personal data. But most were compliant and “many cooperated at least a bit”
⁵³
with the government. Google, for example, complied with government requests during the second half of 2012 for information 88% of the time.
⁵⁴

Unfortunately, the NSA Prism scandal is not the only example of data collusion between Internet companies and the US government. One of the creepiest online data companies is Acxiom, an information broker that, according to the technology writer Sue Halpern, has “profiles of 75% of all Americans, each around five thousand data points that can be constructed and deconstructed” to find supposedly suspicious people. “It should come as no surprise,” Halpern says, “that the NSA and the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security buy this material from Acxiom.”
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Competing with Acxiom as the Internet’s creepiest public-private partnership is Peter Thiel’s 2004 data intelligence startup Palantir, “the go-to company mining massive data sets for intelligence and law enforcement applications.”
⁵⁶
Funded in part by a $2 million investment from the CIA’s venture arm Q-Tel, with the CIA being its only client between 2005 and 2008, Palantir now boasts a client list that includes the FBI, CIA, Army, Marines, Air Force, and Defense Department and was valued at $9 billion when the private company raised $107.5 million in 2013. According to Mark Bowden, the author of a popular book about the killing of Osama bin Laden, Palantir “actually deserves the popular designation Killer App.”
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One Special Forces member based in Afghanistan who has extensively used Palantir compares its intelligence to a God-like force. “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” he told
Bloomberg
’s Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’”
⁵⁸

Since the Snowden leak, Internet companies have scrambled to distance themselves from the NSA and the US government or any association with creepy data collectors like Acxiom. There have also been calls from both Google and Twitter for more encryption of Web traffic
⁵⁹
and the publication of an open letter to Congress and Barack Obama for the American government to “take the lead” and put an end to digital surveillance.
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But as a December 2013 editorial in
Bloomberg
argued, the effort of Silicon Valley’s retrospective critique of the NSA is “richly hypocritical” because “collecting, packaging and selling personal information, often without users’ full knowledge and sometimes without their informed consent, is generally what these companies do for a living.”
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The
Bloomberg
editorial is right. “The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance,” notes Bruce Schneier, a leading computer security expert, “and our government’s intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to this data.”
⁶²

So rather than an aberration, Silicon Valley’s involvement with the NSA’s Prism surveillance program conforms with the Internet’s core identity. Data, as the EU’s Meglena Kuneva reminds us, is the new oil of the digital economy. So whether it’s Google’s attempt to embed tiny cameras in networked contact lenses
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or the networked home with its detailed knowledge of our comings and goings,
⁶⁴
or smart cities that track everything from our driving to our shopping habits,
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surveillance remains the Internet’s main business model.

“Cities are our paradises of anonymity, a place for self-erasure and self-invention,” the veteran technology reporter Quentin Hardy reminds us.
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So what becomes of self-erasure and self-invention in today’s digital panopticon, with products like the aptly named Panono ball camera that films everything it sees? What is the fate of privacy in an Internet of Everything and Everyone?

Today’s “simple idea of Architecture,” as Jeremy Bentham put it, is an electronic network in which everything we do is recorded and remembered. Bentham’s eighteenth-century Panopticon has been upgraded to a twenty-first-century instrument of mass surveillance. Like Vannevar Bush’s Memex, its trails never fade; like Ted Nelson’s hypertext, there is no “concept of deletion”; like Erich Mielke’s Stasi, its appetite for our personal data is insatiable. The Internet has, indeed, become a crystal republic for crystal man.

We shape our architecture; and thereafter it shapes us.

CHAPTER EIGHT
EPIC FAIL

FailCon

Big Brother might be dead, but one department of the old totalitarian state remains in robust health. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth—in fact, of course, the Ministry of Propaganda—was supposed to have gone out of business in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But, like other failed twentieth-century institutions, the ministry has relocated its operations to the west coast of America. It has moved to the epicenter of twenty-first-century innovation—to Silicon Valley, a place so radically disruptive that it is even reinventing failure as the new model of success.

On the list of all-time greatest lies, the idea that FAILURE IS SUCCESS doesn’t quite match the Orwellian trinity of WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, or IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, but it’s still an astonishing perfidy, worthy of the best Ministry of Truth propagandist. And yet, in Silicon Valley the “failure is success” lie has become such an accepted truth that there is now even a San Francisco event called FailCon, dedicated to its dissemination.

Along with several hundred other aspiring disruptors, I’d gone to FailCon to learn why, in the Valley at least, failure is considered to be desirable. Held at San Francisco’s luxury Kabuki hotel a couple of miles west of the Battery, FailCon was part countercultural remix of the old Protestant work ethic, part classic Californian self-help therapy, and—like most technology events in Silicon Valley—wholly divorced from reality. It’s as if Orwell’s Ministry of Truth had, to borrow another fashionable Valley word, “pivoted” into the conference business. “Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it,”
¹
the event instructed its audience. And to help us overcome the fear, to make it feel good to fail, FailCon invited some of Big Tech’s greatest innovators to outfail each other with tales of their losses.