[bestbits] The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’

[parminder]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html?_r=0 


Reading this article by Julian Assange, most people will be left with a 
gnawing feeling of deep concern and worry, but they may only be able to 
frown and fret helplessly about where the world seems headed. However, 
those among the Internet governance civil society will perhaps have to 
read it with a certain sense of introspection and political 
responsibility....

I think it is worth having a discussion in the IGC on this article, 
examining what needs the support of civil society and maybe what doesn't 
so much, assuming there is at least some significance to what Assange 
writes.

Article also cut pastes below....


  The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’

By JULIAN ASSANGE

“THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint 
for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, 
Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United 
States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever 
closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as 
personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/google_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton 
who is now director of Google Ideas. The authors met in occupied Baghdad 
in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two 
became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society 
flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech 
industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.

The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s 
people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, 
whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the 
argument confident and the wisdom — banal. But this isn’t a book 
designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster 
alliances.

“The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to 
position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company 
that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not 
surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers 
has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to 
Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry 
Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director 
Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.

In the book the authors happily take up the white geek’s burden. A 
liberal sprinkling of convenient, hypothetical dark-skinned worthies 
appear: Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, 
anticorruption activists in San Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle 
herders in the Serengeti are all obediently summoned to demonstrate the 
progressive properties of Google phones jacked into the informational 
supply chain of the Western empire.

The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrow’s world: the 
gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have 
right now — only cooler. “Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread 
of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth. Already, 
every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are 
activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States 
government, between the communications of every human being not in China 
(naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban 
professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; 
democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and 
control is enthusiastically rebranded as “participation”; and our 
present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and 
oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.

The authors are sour about the Egyptian triumph of 2011. They dismiss 
the Egyptian youth witheringly, claiming that “the mix of activism and 
arrogance in young people is universal.” Digitally inspired mobs mean 
revolutions will be “easier to start” but “harder to finish.” Because of 
the absence of strong leaders, the result, or so Mr. Kissinger tells the 
authors, will be coalition governments that descend into autocracies. 
They say there will be “no more springs” (but China is on the ropes).

The authors fantasize about the future of “well resourced” revolutionary 
groups. A new “crop of consultants” will “use data to build and 
fine-tune a political figure.”

“His” speeches (the future isn’t all that different) and writing will be 
fed “through complex feature-extraction and trend-analysis software 
suites” while “mapping his brain function,” and other “sophisticated 
diagnostics” will be used to “assess the weak parts of his political 
repertoire.”

The book mirrors State Department institutional taboos and obsessions. 
It avoids meaningful criticism of Israel and Saudi Arabia. It pretends, 
quite extraordinarily, that the Latin American sovereignty movement, 
which has liberated so many from United States-backed plutocracies and 
dictatorships over the last 30 years, never happened. Referring instead 
to the region’s “aging leaders,” the book can’t see Latin America for 
Cuba. And, of course, the book frets theatrically over Washington’s 
favorite boogeymen: North Korea and Iran.

Google, which started out as an expression of independent Californian 
graduate student culture — a decent, humane and playful culture — has, 
as it encountered the big, bad world, thrown its lot in with traditional 
Washington power elements, from the State Department to the National 
Security Agency.

Despite accounting for an infinitesimal fraction of violent deaths 
globally, terrorism is a favorite brand in United States policy circles. 
This is a fetish that must also be catered to, and so “The Future of 
Terrorism” gets a whole chapter. The future of terrorism, we learn, is 
cyberterrorism. A session of indulgent scaremongering follows, including 
a breathless disaster-movie scenario, wherein cyberterrorists take 
control of American air-traffic control systems and send planes crashing 
into buildings, shutting down power grids and launching nuclear weapons. 
The authors then tar activists who engage in digital sit-ins with the 
same brush.

I have a very different perspective. The advance of information 
technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most 
people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is the 
principal thesis in my book, “Cypherpunks.” But while Mr. Schmidt and 
Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in 
“repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say 
governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them 
to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In reality, the 
erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant 
centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving the “good” 
societies closer to the “bad” ones.

The section on “repressive autocracies” describes, disapprovingly, 
various repressive surveillance measures: legislation to insert back 
doors into software to enable spying on citizens, monitoring of social 
networks and the collection of intelligence on entire populations. All 
of these are already in widespread use in the United States. In fact, 
some of those measures — like the push to require every social-network 
profile to be linked to a real name — were spearheaded by Google itself.

THE writing is on the wall, but the authors cannot see it. They borrow 
from William Dobson the idea that the media, in an autocracy, “allows 
for an opposition press as long as regime opponents understand where the 
unspoken limits are.” But these trends are beginning to emerge in the 
United States. No one doubts the chilling effects of the investigations 
into The Associated Press and Fox’s James Rosen. But there has been 
little analysis of Google’s role in complying with the Rosen subpoena. I 
have personal experience of these trends.

The Department of Justice admitted in March that it was in its third 
year of a continuing criminal investigation 
<http://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/doj-wikileaks.pdf> of WikiLeaks. 
Court testimony states that its targets include “the founders, owners, 
or managers of WikiLeaks.” One alleged source, Bradley Manning, faces a 
12-week trial beginning tomorrow, with 24 prosecution witnesses expected 
to testify in secret.

This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the 
language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil 
they are constructing. “What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,” 
they tell us, “technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 
21st.” Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly 
implemented George Orwell’s prophecy. If you want a vision of the 
future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant 
human faces — forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer technology will 
find little to inspire them here, not that they ever seem to need it. 
But this is essential reading for anyone caught up in the struggle for 
the future, in view of one simple imperative: Know your enemy.


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