Are we on the tail-end of a generation that is enamored with the novelty of these devices and will younger people coming of age be more blasé about them in a healthy way? You look back at the history of any medium and the people who were there when it was developing, whether it was the telegraph or cable television or radio, thought, This is amazing, it's going change everything, or, The human community will finally be able to recognize each other and speak and be one - I mean, some people thought the telegraph or television would usher in world peace.
What we need to do is take that inchoate sense that something isn't right and give it a structural component and the sense that things can be another way.
One connection I see between the work I did on philosophy and my work on technology is that both communities tend to mystify and create an atmosphere of complexity.
Whether it's a professional, academic keeping people out by using certain mystifying language, or technologists presenting their work as incredibly complicated, no one can understand it (especially not "moms," who are always invoked as the ultimate know-nothings, which is incredibly insulting to a whole lot of people).
The point is, this is what happens when advertising and data collection is the dominant business mode. We are encouraged to be compulsive. It's not that we're terrible addicts who need to go to an AA meeting and get off our gadgets.
It's always the balance between the individual's subjective experience and the social structural condition. As individuals we have access to more than we've ever had before. Giving up our data seems a small price to pay, especially if, as you say, we don't feel we have anything to hide.
The market won't let us treat all data equally because there's a potential to make huge gobs of money not doing that. In the United States of America, people will pay to be first unless we do something to stop them. We don't have defenses built in because we haven't been investing in criticism that would help us mount a defense. I
All this stuff - about the materiality of the network, what it's made of, and how it works - should be part of a basic media literacy, because we depend on this technology for more and more aspects of our day-to-day lives.
One of the big myths about people growing up is that they are "digital natives;" that just because they've been raised with the Internet - that you're very adept at using the app on your phone - it doesn't mean you have any idea about how the Internet actually works.
One sad consequence of this is that people don't feel permitted to try understand Internet infrastructure, so I'm really grateful to groups like Free Press and other nonprofits who are trying to make the issue urgent and comprehensible. And Andre Blum's book Tubes is great on this topic.
I was shocked when I tried to articulate this to someone who had posted the film and asked them to remove it for a few months, and I actually told them that after that they could put it back up and they were just completely unwilling to compromise - you'd think I was Rupert Murdoch or something.
ulturally, we are definitely seeing people being to ask hard questions. There's been a major shift over the last year. The NSA revelations played a big part but there are all sorts of other issues too, like inequality and gentrification in the Bay Area, and labor abuses everywhere from Amazon's warehouse, to Apple's factories, to start-ups like Uber and TaskRabbit.
Those who applaud social production and networked amateurism, the colorful cacophony that is the Internet, and the creative capacities of everyday people to produce entertaining and enlightening things online, are right to marvel. There is amazing inventiveness, boundless talent and ability, and overwhelming generosity on display. Where they go wrong is thinking that the Internet is an egalitarian, let alone revolutionary, platform for our self-expression and development, that being able to shout into the digital torrent is adequate for democracy.
