“Who are we?” is an even bigger question than “Who am I?” We are social animals; we live our lives among one another, depend on each other, must contend with those around us. To facilitate this, when we left what philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau described as the state of nature, our ancient ancestors entered into a social contract. With this social contract, we agreed that we were better off together, but the trade-off was that we had to play by a certain set of rules: not stealing whenever we wanted something, not killing each other whenever we felt angry. In short, the terms of the social contract demand that we subordinate our individual needs to the needs of the community. While most of us do not spend much time thinking about those terms, they establish the essential framework for our lives. To be effective, they must evolve as civilization does, adapting to new realities, acknowledging new challenges.
As we adapt our social contract, we must return to the core questions—the questions we seldom ask but ought to. While politicians might, often rhetorically, ask “What kind of society do we wish to live in?” the bigger question, the one that dates back to the very origins of the social contract, is: “Why do we live within a society at all?” It is one we have lost sight of in many ways. Indeed, acknowledging the importance of the question “Who are we?” raises related concerns: “What are our rights?” or “How should we govern ourselves given new technologies at our disposal and the way technologies have always altered the nature of governance?”
National constitutions are supposed to enshrine fundamental rights for everyone—and for generations. Such documents are also, of course, products of moments in time. That’s why the best of them, like the US Constitution, draw from the debates of the era, like freedom of the press, and contain the seeds of their own reinvention. Indeed, the secret to a sustainable constitution is that it both captures what is enduring and anticipates the need to change. Among the questions most important to ask, therefore, is: “Are we and our institutions and philosophies flexible enough to adapt to change, to the impending ethical and moral and social challenges for which there are no good precedents?” I believe the answer is yes. (Though, as I consider it, I can’t help but think of Winston Churchill’s famous remark regarding the United States, in which he expresses confidence that we always do the right thing, although, typically, “after [we] have exhausted every other possibility.”)
Over the years, the US Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times—the first ten being the Bill of Rights—to stay current with prevailing views of what is fundamental or best for the United States. Among the finest examples of the Constitution’s adaptability to shifting and maturing norms are the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery, and the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, which guaranteed voting rights for everyone regardless of race or gender, respectively.
Because it is meant to be malleable, the original Constitution included references to very few technologies. In fact, America’s founders were so sure that technologies would evolve over time that they even included protection for the rights of innovators in Article 1, Section 8 (the Copyright Clause). The technologies that were mentioned were ones that, by the late 1700s, had become so ingrained in daily life that they seemed natural, or at least critical, to the functioning of the government: money, for instance, and a military. In at least two cases in the Bill of Rights, the unfettered use of technologies was necessary for citizens’ freedom—those technologies being the press and arms. The press was more than three centuries old when the Constitution translated into the law of the land in the United States the freedom of expression. Meanwhile, the arms referenced were not specified, but no doubt included the firearms of the day that were essential to the upkeep of a militia, which was the express rationale for the right to bear arms in the first place.
Technological progress challenges the assumptions that underlie even the best-conceived documents. This has been evident recently in the debate over whether Fourth Amendment guarantees against illegal search and seizure, which explicitly pertained to the main information storage system of the late 1700s (papers), now cover technologies like email and metadata. And, tragically, while there has been vigorous public debate noting that the arms of the twenty-first century could not possibly have been foreseen by the authors of the Constitution and have little to do with a well-regulated militia, special interests in the United States have resisted changes that might have better maintained the spirit of the narrow, purpose-driven right conferred by the Constitution in terms of the technological realities of the present day, a world effectively without militias or the need for them.
Arguing that people cannot assert rights beyond the imagination of the Constitution’s framers is an absurdity as great as suggesting that every law conceived in the context of the eighteenth century should apply hundreds of years later. Further, it is dangerous. It is hazardous not to bring the American conception of rights in line with the ways and means of modern life, because to do otherwise creates vulnerabilities and risks inconsistent with the principles underlying the Constitution. (Surely the framers of the Constitution did not intend that the right to protect one’s records or home from unreasonable searches only protected individuals from the kinds of searches that existed at the time the document was drawn up.)
The technological changes afoot today demand a reconsideration of what constitutes a fundamental right. What’s more, we dare not let risks or threats that are so complicated or new that only a few truly understand them grow simply because they are arcane—nor is it consistent with our idea of democracy to allow only those technological elites who understand an emerging issue to define how it is resolved while leaving the ignorant masses to live with the consequences of their conclusions (as is currently happening with much of the debate around what is acceptable government surveillance behavior in the connected big-data world).
Unfettered Web access is the modern equivalent of the right America’s forefathers demanded to read or distribute a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine or to gather in a town square to discuss it. The UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression has argued that disconnecting people from the Internet constitutes a human rights violation. Estonia passed the first law enshrining this right in 2000, but the trailblazing country’s engagement with the Internet dates back a decade earlier, to the midst of a crisis. In 1992, facing a failing economy in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Prime Minister Mart Laar invested in digital systems for business registration and new government infrastructure. Internet use was widespread before 2000, with every school in the country connected by 1998. Since that time, access to the Internet has spread to remote parts of the country, promoted efficient government reforms, and attracted globally minded investors. Connectivity is viewed as an essential part of the modern identity of that country, which has resulted in it being a trailblazer in considering the new issues associated with this new era. Other countries, including Costa Rica, Finland, France, Greece, and Spain, have since asserted some right of access in their constitutions or legal codes or via judicial rulings.
As connectivity expands from people to devices—the Internet of Things—all those interactions must be covered by our laws and founded in some sense of our values. Who will write these new laws? Who will debate them? Who among our electorate will be able to understand them when they are implemented?
Related questions rise into view. In the Information Age, does the right to privacy exist? In an age when the fundamental units of economic value are bits and bytes, who owns the data an individual or a sensor may produce? If there is a right to the Internet, for instance, does that mean people must also have a right to the electricity needed to plug into the Web? The answer, resoundingly, is yes. Electricity once seemed a luxury, but today, the nearly 1.3 billion people without it are effectively cut off from modern life. This raises another question: In a world where roughly 80 percent of the electricity is—and for a long time will be—produced by burning fossil fuels, how is the right to a clean, healthy environment balanced with the right to the social and economic participation afforded by the Internet?
Right now, profound decisions about who can tap into the Internet, how much of the Web one can access, and who lawfully owns the data being contributed, shared, and used across it are being made, often without benefit of forethought. Those decisions are being made by powerful interests who would be perfectly happy if you did not think too hard about questions like “What should the nature of privacy be in the connected world?” or “What are the rights of individuals and governments regarding their data in the connected world?” or even a fundamental question like “Who owns my data?”
Data flows are becoming as important to the competitive success of nations, companies, and individuals as capital flows. Understanding this, a foundational question must then be “Who owns the data?” Imagine that each person emits a small cloud of data that told of their interests, financial resources, health, shopping needs, and so on. That data has significant economic and political value. It’s a value that big companies have been trying to induce average citizens to give away since the dawn of the Internet Age. Google, for example, has persuaded hundreds of millions of people that offering up their data in exchange for free email makes economic sense—and then sells the data they have gathered for billions. It will go down in history as one of the great scams of all time, akin to buying the island of Manhattan from Native Americans for $24 worth of beads.
The question “Who owns the data?” is more complex, however. Some of the data we provide—about our location or political affiliations—might be of special interest to an intrusive or oppressive government. Thus, you can imagine a situation in which corporations, governments, and individuals all want to claim a right to access this data. That is a battle being waged right now: the efforts that the US government has made to try to gain access to encrypted data on an Apple iPhone as a way to fight terrorism; the efforts that companies have made to have privacy laws written so that data collected in their apps or software or hardware might be something that they could access and monetize.
If bits and bytes, therefore, are the most basic value-carrying instruments of the new economy—the coin of the realm of the Information Age—then how you answer the question “Who owns the data?” determines who has the wealth in this new era, and who has much of the power.
These changes seem certain to shift how society works—redefining haves and have-nots, power and its absence and its use, what opportunity is and how it is gained, and the nature of risk. Knowing that such changes are afoot, we then must ask ourselves how we go about adapting our social contract to the needs of the future. All the metrics we use to measure the success or failure of our countries or leaders tend to imply reasons that are tied to assumptions that have emerged from history or have been crafted by special-interest groups to serve their needs. For example, we sometimes measure our progress by the economic growth of the countries in which we live—the speed with which gross domestic product or income levels rise. Or we focus intently on national measures of progress and dismiss as foreign global trends or issues that once might have been remote but today could have direct impact on our way of life.
But is the purpose of society purely economic growth, especially growth that benefits the few, as often happens in the case of the metrics we most commonly use? Do events somehow matter less if they occur outside our borders? At one point in history, a community was defined as those physically close to us; those were the people with whom we had the most in common. However, in the wired world, as we’ve seen, communities are no longer principally defined by geography or proximity. The nature of interaction in those communities changes. Common interests are different. They may be greater than those within cities or nation-states. What if they are? To whom or to whose flag do we pledge allegiance then?
The evolution of our social contract does not just happen. In the past, most of the changes that altered the social contract unfolded slowly. It took three and a half centuries for the printing press to change social discourse to the degree that democratic governments were forced to enshrine freedom of the press as a basic human right. During that period, those in power sought to control the dissemination of dissenting views. Revolutions were fought. Lives were lost. Pioneer champions of free speech, whether political or religious, economic or artistic, were condemned to prison or even burned alive. Debate over their fates coursed through parliaments and universities and the salons of the day. Ultimately, philosophers grappled with the questions that were underlying this ferment—about core principles that had gone unchallenged: the divine right of kings, whether sovereignty resided in monarchs or in the people, what rights and powers those people had or should have. Some of these issues remain unresolved. Some countries still, for example, deny people basic rights that were long ago accepted as inalienable in Western societies. Nonetheless, great strides were made around the world.
In fact, gradually, as a consequence of many concurrent forces (chiefly mass literacy), the many gained the power to demand recognition of the free exchange of views and ideas. Freedom of the press was enshrined as a basic right of all men (and later of all women).
The path to conclusions about free expression—a value many citizens of democracies consider basic today—was not a straight nor an easy one. That should not be surprising, given how many nations in the world today still deny freedom of expression and are trying to use new technologies to stifle or distort it, perceiving this right as a threat to their power. Yet, those who can spread ideas and win support for them via new technologies find new power at their disposal. This relationship—between ideas and power—begs vital questions. Who writes the social contract? Who modifies it? When is it up for review? How do we implement changes? Are there new challenges the connected world presents us with regarding a society in which people live much of their lives in virtual space, beyond borders, beyond many of our existing rules, in a realm increasingly populated not just by people but also by machines and apps that act like people, where social behaviors are modified dramatically and even an absolute concept like truth has come to be viewed as relative or malleable?
It is at this fault line that so many of the battles of history have been fought. It is a place where the rights that are asserted and granted determine the fate of civilizations, where the accumulation of power determines the destiny of millions or billions of people, where the speed of change shakes the foundations of our institutions. And these are questions that once again—as they did during the last communications, transportation, and intellectual revolutions that remade our ideas of communities—must be asked. Indeed, they will be answered whether they are asked or not.
This reality creates a special responsibility for every one of us. If we were to look out the window in the morning and see storm clouds on the horizon, it would fall to us to prepare for a rainy day. The same is true now, only more so, because what we see on the horizon is not a change in the weather that will pass but a change in our way of life on the planet. We must ask ourselves what the changes will mean for us, how to adapt, how to prepare our families, and how to prepare personally and professionally.
Of course, grappling with such upheaval is not a job for everyone. There are disciplines that can help society adapt to these changes and that can help us understand what these changes are likely to mean, what their impact and implications are likely to be, and what we should do to use them to drive positive change across society.
We must ask: Where are the philosophers?
Where are the people who can help make sense of these changes at the level of what is good and what is evil, what we should aspire to, and how we should protect our core values in a new environment? Throughout history it has, after all, been the philosophers—the great thinkers who dare to question conventional wisdom—who have brought crucial debates about our social contract into the public conversation. They have framed questions about the reasons we entered society and our basic rights in ways that have brought down governments and produced ideas that have become the foundations for what we think of as modern society. The right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is a shining example. We need those voices now, but before we can begin to debate the issues of the day, before we can begin to adapt our social contract, we must first understand what the fundamental rights of this new era will look like.
Debating the important questions has always been thorny. Take debates about freedom of expression. John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, and a powerful political voice during England’s Puritan era, helped shape Western views on this issue. He argued that truth was best achieved through a free and open encounter of views—conversations writ large and small. However, while he defended freedoms for Protestants, he worked to deny them to those whose views he thought dangerous, from Catholics to atheists. John Locke argued that we “commiserate our mutual ignorance and endeavor to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information,” but also that opinions “contrary to human society or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society” should be legally accepted. Revolutionary collaborators—and rivals—Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson also offered opposing views. Hamilton asserted that freedom of the press was “impracticable,” while Jefferson wrote, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
This is as it always has been. It is, in fact, the nature of most critical debates, and we should remember that as we discuss how the new era of the connected world will cause us to rethink and revise the social contract. The push and pull is the way we kick the tires on big changes and roll ideas around in our collective imaginations before embracing them.
Today, changes happen quickly and then rapidly spread. The pace and direction of change is fueled by a set of forces I suggested in Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs in 1998, forces that affect all aspects of life in the Information Age.
These included:
• Acceleration: Events would unfold faster.
• Amplification: The impact of those events would be magnified, would touch more lives.
• Volatility: Acceleration plus amplification produces bigger swings in outcomes.
• Decentralization: Networks redistribute power (although see discussion later in this book about the network paradox, and how networks both disseminate and concentrate power simultaneously).
• Disintermediation: Middlemen are undercut and often disappear.
• Interconnection: The most obvious characteristic of networks is that they link all their members, but the implications of such ubiquitous linkage are hard to understand and take many forms.
The trouble is that, on this rapidly shifting ground, we are literally acting before we have the time to think. We are enshrining into law or promulgating as regulation views that have profound impacts on the nature of our societies without benefit of public debate or, perhaps more troublingly, of the intervention of philosophical reflection. Of course, there are certainly philosophers in the world today who weigh new theories of social contract and political science (we have already encountered one of them—Nick Bostrom—on issues associated with artificial intelligence). However, the reality is that during the past several decades the study of how technology impacts our existing social philosophies, and how philosophy should impact our approach to new technologies, has grown. (We should have the humility to recognize that this study is not new. Democritus and Aristotle developed theories about how artifacts created by humans imitate nature, and how they differ from it.)
Philosophy, of course, is more than abstract thought—it becomes the foundation for our system of laws and governance. Thus, on the legal front, pioneering thinkers around the world have found that they must ask what a modern constitution needs to contain to protect its citizens. Exploring whether our right to the Internet should be enshrined in law is one such area for consideration. Considering what system of law governs the supranational space of the infosphere when the power of governments stops at their own borders is another.
One of the thorniest and most prominent of such questions has arisen in the area of privacy. A generation is rising that is so used to posting all aspects of their lives on social media, of having everything about everyone be searchable, that many studies show millennials and younger generations largely have no expectation of privacy, or that their expectations are quite different from those of prior generations. Indeed, this a generation for whom transparency is the norm to an unprecedented degree—a fact that may well impact everything from the future of surveillance by the state or by corporations to the nature of what is fair game for journalists to publish to the question of the value of classified government information systems.
(I have had some amusing experiences on this front. Once, my open-source intelligence company presented a briefing to some admirals at the headquarters of PACOM, the world’s largest military command. We displayed a picture of a North Korean missile launcher. An admiral immediately stood up and shouted, “Take that image down! This is an unclassified briefing.” We calmly, and somewhat bemusedly, noted that the picture was available on the Internet. He nonetheless insisted we take it down. Later, I asked General Tony Zinni, former commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM) about this, and he noted that he once did a study that discovered that of all the classified materials he received, 80 percent were available via open sources, and of the remaining 20 percent, 80 percent were discoverable via open sources. Think what you may of the stubbornness of bureaucrats, but the handwriting is on the wall. The way governments treat classified material is going to change, and the cost savings and benefits to better policy making and mission execution will be enormous.)
A crucial dimension of the privacy discussion relates to the collection of metadata.
Edward Snowden’s famous revelation about the US National Security Agency program led to two cases brought on behalf of the public against the NSA. Both cases were ruled upon in December 2013, with divergent rulings. Judge Richard Leon of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in Klayman v. Obama that such searches are probably illegal. While challenging what he called an “almost Orwellian” practice, he allowed a stay for the government to mount an appeal. Less than two weeks later, Judge William H. Pauley III of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York came to the opposite conclusion in ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) v. Clapper. Citing his belief in the necessity of collecting metadata for national security, Judge Pauley dismissed the case and pronounced the program lawful under both the Fourth Amendment and the controversial section 215 of the Patriot Act. These types of contradictions underscore the complexity around the privacy issues of our day.
These contradictory rulings also, fittingly, reveal a paradox. Progress often requires us to reassess the rules of society when those rules were written for different times and realities (consider the Second Amendment, written at a time when militias were common and assault rifles were not). However, at the same time, we can often find within old texts enduring principles; thus, if the Fourth Amendment prohibited the search of papers and records, and metadata contains much of what was once contained within such papers and records, then metadata should be protected.
Moving forward into an era of ubiquitous sensing—of everything from your clothes to the bridge you drive over to your office chair teeming with sensors producing data about your life and passing it along to countless intermediaries, all with claims of ownership or rights to it—suggests the complexity of such debates will grow greater with each passing year.
To take this another step further, some philosophers are taking on the risks and conundrums raised by machine intelligence within the laws and bounds of our social contract. Bostrom, for example, has joined with other notables, like physicist Stephen Hawking and entrepreneur Elon Musk, to enumerate the dangers associated with artificial intelligence. All were signatories to a letter prepared by the Future of Life Institute that laid out their concerns but also stated that they believed that “research on how to make AI systems robust and beneficial is both important and timely,” and that there are concrete research directions that can be pursued today.
What of other questions, such as who owns the intellectual property created by machine intelligence? When are machines entitled to certain rights? What if a machine spies on someone and retains that information—is that the same as when a person does it? Even if the machine never shares it with a person? What if a machine conducts an attack? What if machines could influence the outcome of an election—acting independently?
The list of thinkers doing important work around the globe on these issues is extensive, but, except for the Snowden-NSA scandal, these ideas rarely meet the public discourse. Those debates, in fact, tend to focus on the issues of the past, wrapped in formulations of the past, because that is what politicians believe works for them. It is also because that is what politicians understand. Few are trained to understand the implications of the coming technology-driven changes. Few have the vocabulary to even discuss those issues. Therefore, despite the work of innovators who recognize that massive issues are looming, those in power who are supposed to help prepare society for dealing with them are not doing so. They aren’t asking the right questions. Typically, they don’t even know what the questions are.
The resultant gap between the pace of change altering the nature of society and the creation and oversight of rules for society should be of great concern. When such gaps have existed in the past, as when the Industrial Revolution changed the social order more rapidly than the elites in charge cared to acknowledge, the result was spasm after spasm of revolution stretching from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. We can ill afford such upheavals. But the question is—looking at the Arab Spring or Net activism movements from Occupy Wall Street in the US to upheavals in China—whether they have already begun.