[Reader-list] The age of surveillance: a new “dotcom boom”?

[mayur at sarai.net]

The age of surveillance: a new “dotcom boom”?
William Davies
2 - 8 - 2005
Will the era of digital networks and terrorism produce the worst of both
worlds: a society of mass surveillance that increases insecurity? William
Davies maps a new political-technological frontier.
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The most important lesson that marketers and futurologists can learn about
new technologies is not to extrapolate too far from the “early adopters”.
Be it cars, telephones, televisions or computers, the long-term
implications of new tools are never apparent at the outset, but only
emerge once they have become ubiquitous across society.

The car began life as a rich man’s toy, but its most profound long-term
consequence was the growth of suburbs. The television was initially an
object of fascination for the family to congregate around, rather than the
perennial and solitary experience that it has become for many individuals.
In recent years, we’ve witnessed what happens when mobile phones and
internet connections shift from the margins of society to the mainstream.




William Davies is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Public
Policy Research (ippr), and author of a new report, Modernising with
Purpose: A Manifesto for a Digital Britain.



Marketers use the term “tipping-point” to describe the moment when a
product makes the transition from being unusual and eye-catching, to being
pervasive and invisible. One minute an item is being paraded like a
trophy, of rarity and novelty value. The next it is a necessary
accoutrement, without which modern living would seem impossible.

The language of “early adopters” and “tipping-points” is generally used
when looking at the fast-moving though ultimately frivolous world of
consumer habits. But perhaps we can identify something analogous to a
tipping-point that took place on a more historically significant level,
around five years ago, in the eighteen months that followed the dotcom
crash.

Speculation about the shape and politics of the “digital age” had been
rife for decades. The tipping-point in question occurred between the
collapse of the Nasdaq and that of the World Trade Center, when one
narrative about the function of digital networks in our society stuttered
to a halt, and another one emerged. The underlying purpose of mass
digitisation changed.

Same technology, different story

The purpose of digital networks is not something that the IT industry
likes to dwell on too much. It is very often quite happy letting hype sell
its products for them. But one doesn’t need to scratch beneath the surface
too far to recognise that the Bill Clinton era of the “information
super-highway” and stock-option millionaires was driven by a very
different type of sales-pitch than the George W Bush era of iris-scanning
and data retention. An economic narrative of wealth creation has been
firmly replaced by a political narrative of control, yet each is rooted in
the same technologies.

In the wake of the London bombings of July 2005, the pessimistic question
has to be asked: did that period between April 2000 and September 2001
represent a tipping-point? As moronic and greedy as the dotcom boom and
its associated fripperies may have been, there was an innocence about all
of that investment and innovation, as if the benefits would flow later
somehow or other.

But having been drawn into the digital age by the allure of its newness –
just like any “early adopters” – we may now be settling down into a
surveillance society where privacy is at best conditional, and contingency
is monitored and dealt with. Historians may one day reflect on the bizarre
coincidence by which westerners exuberantly flooded their societies with
digital technology for very little reason whatsoever, just in time for it
to be put to use as part of the largest international policing programme
ever.

This is not to say that the economic narrative for digital modernisation
never stacked up at all. There are plenty of areas where businesses and
public services have been made more efficient or effective, but there are
also many that have fallen at the hardest hurdle of innovating the social
and managerial processes through which productivity gains are made.

Compared to the surveillance possibilities that this infrastructure has
opened up, the business case for pervasive computing looks comparatively
weak. After the first London attacks on 7 July, the British home secretary
Charles Clarke defended plans to track internet and email records, saying:
“the more we can survey the way in which people operate, the way in which
they make their phone calls, the better your chance of identifying
patterns of behaviour which are a threat.”

The IT industry will be relatively unconcerned by this transition. Like
the stock markets, technology companies are unlikely to do much more than
shrug, and shift additional capital into biometrics and out of e-commerce.
In academic departments, meanwhile, debates between Nietzscheans and
Marxists, which dominated 20th century European philosophy, seem to have
been won for the time being by the former. Marxists such as Giovanni
Arrighi struggle desperately to explain how contemporary politics is still
explicable in terms of the logic of capitalism, but common sense suggests
that, à la Nietzsche, it is far easier to explain in terms of the primeval
desire for control.

So were we duped by the story about the “information society” and the
“digital revolution”? Many companies certainly feel so, and as these
digital networks become a growing battleground between extremists and
internationally coordinated police forces, many citizens may be wishing we
could turn the clock back. As one blogger, Lee Maguire, jokes grimly on
his website:

    “Homepages, eh? I've always suspected there was a huge 'Big Brother'
database containing everyone's private details ... and now I'm
responsible for writing my own entry.”

The high-tech fetish

Both libertarians and capitalists – always fairly comfortable bedfellows –
have been pushed to the margins of the digital age for the time being. The
worry, but also in a way the hope, is that we will now charge headlong
into a high-tech surveillance society. Why is this both a worry and a
hope? Because it won’t work. In fact it could potentially make our
security situation worse.

As the American security guru, Bruce Schneier puts it:

    “technology will continue to alter the balance between attacker and
defender, at an ever-increasing pace. And technology will generally
favour the attacker, with the defender playing catch-up.”

Ever more complex technology can not only produce new security threats, as
the internet itself has demonstrated, but also create distractions for
security services, as they become more focused on spotting patterns in
complex systems, and less on human judgment.

It could be that we are about to enter the equivalent of a dotcom boom in
surveillance technologies. There will be no shortage of suppliers eager to
join in, even if they hesitate to become too openly enthusiastic about
this bubble compared to the previous one. But a boom would inevitably be
followed by a crash in confidence in technology. Just as companies
discovered that productivity gains depended on improving their social
processes, and not on infrastructure alone, security services will have to
learn the same lesson. The question is whether they will have to go
through the same painful process of boom and bust to get there.

The primary hope must of course be that terrorism is dealt with
effectively, which will be a political feat not a technological one. In
the same way that we hope we have not entered a sustained era of terror,
we must also hope that surveillance, tracking and pattern-spotting does
not turn out to be the long-term role of digital networks in society. If
police forces and governments put their faith in IT and under-invest in
social capabilities in the same way businesses did a decade ago, they will
get the same nasty shock as those businesses did. But then, hopefully,
another phase of the digital age might begin.