He is looking for a green tent in a sea of tents baking under the hot sun. As we walk through the Chaos Communication Camp and talk, he overshoots it several times.
Tall, with white teeth and the charming, natural manners of so many Americans I’ve met abroad, Harry Halpin works for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on the standardization of cryptography and authentication.1 He is also a research scientist at MIT. His boss is Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.
At a panel discussion we had both attended on the second day of the camp, he had asked, “Why aren’t countries other than the United States funding hackers’ security projects?” He seemed to intend it as a provocation yet stopped short of offering his own views on the topic. At the end of the session, people had spilled out of the big-top tent into the inky summer night, avidly carrying on various debates. It was easy to approach Harry in the crowd and strike up a conversation but hard to finish it: people kept coming up to greet him. They were from Brazil, the United Kingdom, and other countries, male and female engineers and activists like Harry in their late twenties to thirties who had worked with him internationally in a multitude of ways.
We arranged to meet up midday and are now walking down one of the dusty roadways of the camp. Talking with Harry, it becomes apparent that the shortcomings of average users like me are not the only obstacle to building out democracy into cyberspace. There are daunting challenges to democratization in internet governance and design as well. I want to understand these, and that will require a level of knowledge beyond the primers that Andrew Clement and Christian Heck have given me.
Harry speaks fast, riffing out information and ideas, and I have to pay attention or I will miss something: “A lot of circumvention techniques are in fact funded by the US government, by the Open Technology Fund, but also by the navy, [which] was the primary founder of Tor.2 I have to say, they have, by and large, funded the right stuff.”3
Harry was a climate change activist in the US and the UK for the first decade of the millennium. He used to have long hair. Now he wears black button-down shirts, black pants, and a black satchel. He has been traveling and working internationally for a long time.
“But this is a short-term convergence of interests between the US and digital activists” he says. “A lot of these people at the CCC camp are anarchists, Marxists, or libertarians, while the US government is interested in overthrowing or countering the present regimes in Iran and China. Hillary Clinton has been one of the most enthusiastic proponents of open-source work, yet she is rabid when it comes to WikiLeaks. So you have this schizophrenic situation.
“For the activists, they should understand the convergence will end at some point, and they should be buffering themselves. The finances they are working with now will dry up, and then what will they use?
“But you have to ask yourself, why are there no other options for funding? Why aren’t other governments, for example, funding this work? They have an interest to stop spying and the mass surveillance of their populations by the US, yet they’re not cultivating a relationship with the activist technologists who can do this work.”
At last, we seem to be headed for the green tent.
He jokes that he, a former hacker, is now part of the “standards industrial complex.” At W3C, he puts companies like Google and Apple together with hackers to produce the standards that will allow interoperability on the internet. He recruited Apple to the W3C web cryptography working group at a Chaos Computer Club congress after noting in his talk that the company was not participating in the group.
Frankly, Harry says, the standards people and the companies he works with were “freaked out” by the Snowden revelations. He was freaked out by them: he had no idea how bad the surveillance had become. Right now, he is less interested in the technology and instead “obsessed with the social processes of getting this development into people’s heads.”
The law, he agrees, is inadequate to address the current challenges.
We duck into the green tent, and within seconds he is engaged in a deep-dive conversation with his copresenter for this evening’s talk. I look for an electrical outlet to recharge my dead laptop, but outlets are an overtaxed resource at the camp. The many power bars are all bristling with other people’s plugs. I balance my laptop on top of a dry gefilte fish that is some hacker’s lunch on a long table crammed with computers. Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist and academic who has written books on the free software movement and on the hacker/activist phenomenon Anonymous,4 is in the tent, along with a bunch of French activists from La Quadrature du Net. I’ve reached the hub of the activist circle.
Harry Halpin has told me to look at Jonathan Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It if I want to understand better how the internet is governed. Zittrain is a professor at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Later that afternoon, I get a cold beer at a bar nestled in a shady grove of trees and settle into a sofa under one of the many caravan tarps that cover groups of matching furniture, arranged like outdoor living rooms. Behind the sofa, someone is creating techno music at a console.
Techno penetrates the brain. The music, perpetually moving forward into an infinite space of shifting patterns, is strangely synergistic with the electrical pulses of thought. I noodle around on the web to find references to Jonathan Zittrain and stumble onto a video clip of his TED Talk called “The Web as Random Acts of Kindness.”5 Dandy.
In the video, Zittrain is down to earth and funny. He asks the audience to think about how the internet was first made—by geeks, he says, a bunch of guys who knew each other in high school, actually, who at the time of their invention had none of the capitalization you might think was needed to build a global infrastructure. “But they had an amazing freedom, which was they didn’t have to make any money from it,” Zittrain says. “The internet has no business plan, never did—no CEO, no firm responsible, singly, for building it. Instead, it was folks getting together to do something for fun, rather than because they were told to or because they expected to make a mint off of it. That ethos led to a network architecture, a structure, that was unlike other digital networks, then or since.”6 The internet, as Zittrain explains it, is basically a set of protocols. Anyone who wants to join the network can use those protocols to communicate, and anyone who wants to build an application on top of those protocols can do so. And it runs, more or less, by volunteerism, cooperation, and consensus. It has stewards, rather than bosses or overlords—Loraxes who “speak for the trees.”7 (The line from the Dr. Seuss children’s book is, “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.”)
I recall how Andrew Clement told me that the three main governance bodies of the internet—the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)—run, to a large degree, by consensus. It seems an incredible proposition.
I skip along to find more details from Zittrain’s book online. The IETF, a voluntary body, governs the architecture of the internet. It provides only the efficient packaging and routing of data between end nodes. First there was the ARPANET, the early wide-area network that linked university and research center computers. Then Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn figured out a code, or protocol, to allow any network, regardless of its features, to connect to this network. People say their protocol, known as TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol), could run over “two tin cans and a string.” (In his TED Talk, Zittrain shows a photo of them as gray-haired men, many years later, playing with strings and tin cans.) By conception, then, the internet is a decentralized network of networks and a triumph of interoperable design. It uses a common protocol that creates a “connectivity commons”8 everyone can share, as long as people do not enclose or sequester their part.
And with its neutral protocol that connects everyone to everyone, the internet has a marvelous generativity: anyone with an idea about what humans might do with this kind of connectivity can experiment and offer it to the world. Although the early internet might have looked like two tin cans connected by the string of Cerf and Kahn’s protocol, the current internet has burgeoned into what looks more like a voluptuous hourglass. This is the common way of diagramming it, in any case.
At the bottom of the hourglass is the physical layer of the network—the part that Andrew Clement has been trying to chart with IXmaps, the wires and cables that convey data electronically. Then there is the applications layer, where anyone can develop software that will run on top of the physical layer. The narrow waist is the protocol layer, the simple TCP/IP code for connection. Above that is a content layer of language and images, and above that is a social layer—the behaviors of users (what they adopt, how they use the internet, and how they relate with each other). People can work on code and ideas at different layers of the net and know little or nothing about the other layers.9 So there is both vertical decentralization (between layers) and horizontal decentralization (within layers) where anyone can plug in and experiment at any level.
The exception to the general decentralized pattern of the internet occurs when a company or government, say, builds a completely centralized system that does not allow interoperability at any layer of its sequestered network. Examples of completely centralized systems are China’s national cybernetwork or AOL’s early messaging service.
Today, it is more common to have closed, centralized services at only the applications layer of the internet, but these still threaten to balkanize the net and stifle its generative properties. This is a key insight of Zittrain and of others who study the internet: decentralization, free software, and open-source code that people can play with promote generativity (the proliferation of new ideas and experiments), while centralization and secret (or proprietary) code tend to kill it.
The IETF is concerned only with the connection layer, the waist of the hourglass. But this layer has implications for every other layer. The IETF maintains and improves the current internet protocol suite (the TCP/IP set of codes) that everyone uses voluntarily. It has no formal membership. Anyone can participate as a volunteer.
There is no voting process at the IETF. The work is often started by informal discussion groups known as “Birds of a Feather”10 and gets done by working groups. They each have a mandate to tackle a problem that defines the scope of their work. Anyone can participate through an open mailing list or at IETF meetings. When the work is done, the groups disband.
TCP/IP provides end-to-end, or node-to-node, connectivity, so it covers how data is packeted, identified, transmitted, routed, and received. This is a neutral function, yet each of these steps is rife with privacy and security vulnerabilities, as Edward Snowden’s leaks about NSA surveillance practices showed.
This is a lot of information to take in, and I need to absorb it to grasp the practical issues hackers are grappling with. But the heat and the scrolling are making me drowsy. I close my laptop and lean back into the sofa, surrendering for the moment to the protean patterns of the techno sound.
That night, Harry Halpin delivers a talk about a lawsuit he and some fellow activists are filing against the United Kingdom. I learn he was on a terrorist list for his climate and antiglobalization activism. When he returned to the UK to finish his PhD, he says, his supervisor and friends were harassed by the police. He was forced to supply his DNA. When he went to France, the French police started a file on him. When he went to Copenhagen as an official delegate to the Climate Summit in 2009, he says, he was beaten so badly by Danish security agents that he couldn’t see or walk.
At the time, he did not know that it was an undercover agent named Mark Kennedy, someone he knew in the UK and thought of as a friend, who was probably at the root of all this trouble. Kennedy was working for a domestic unit in the United Kingdom called the Association of Chief Police Officers, which was sharing its intelligence with businesses being targeted by activists. Kennedy also carried on a two-year romantic relationship with Harry’s copresenter on the panel, another climate activist, who was devastated when she found out her life had been hacked. Taking the microphone handed over to her by Harry, she tells the audience Kennedy had met her family. He was told by the command structure whether he would have dinner with her on any given evening. He was paid overtime for the nights he spent with her. Kennedy worked in over twenty countries. He worked for the private sector, as well, for the security company Stratfor, penetrating the animal rights movement, and for Densus, a private security firm in the United States.
East German Stasi agents had married dissidents during the Cold War and had children with them while spying on them, some for more than twenty years. But so, apparently, have the security agents of Western democracies. Ten women activists from the environmental movement sued Scotland Yard in 2011 for deception. Undercover police agents had lured them into long-term intimate relationships, and two of these men fathered children with the women they were spying on.11
I notice Harry is carrying his black satchel containing his laptop across his chest even when he is speaking on stage. Did Mark Kennedy have access to Harry’s private email when he was spying on Harry and his copresenter? Most probably. Kennedy was mapping the social network of activists in order to identify the main “influencers.” (His victims knew this because the security company Stratfor itself was hacked by a young American hacker named Jeremy Hammond. For that hack, Hammond is currently serving ten years in a US prison.)
Did Kennedy use the most intimate details of activists’ online lives against them? Almost certainly. Harry’s copresenter says her most debilitating thought is imagining Kennedy and his colleagues joking over her intimate correspondence with him.
Harry says he told his story about being put on a terrorist list to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, where a US representative there took him to lunch and said he was sorry but could do nothing. Then several of Harry’s friends were put on a terrorist list. When Harry’s lawyer made a freedom-of-information request in the United States, he received 7,624 pages of information the US government had accumulated on his client. Harry still gets stopped when he goes to the UK under the Schengen (EU) border control and information-sharing system.
A New York district court recently held that damages for victims of improper police surveillance could flow from the knowledge alone of the surveillance, the harm of knowing it had happened. The harm of surveillance, Harry tells the Chaos Communication Camp audience, is that it destroys people’s creativity and ability to organize. Do we destroy other public utilities, like the road system, in order to catch terrorists? If we destroy the internet, it will hurt our societies immensely. Data protection laws were put in place after World War II and the Cold War, he says, precisely because people understood how surveillance worked. “Today,” he concludes, “the legal guarantees need tech guarantees to back them up.”
I wander out of the big event tent into the night. Trying to reconcile the two Harrys I have come to know—the one who works for Tim Berners-Lee and the one who appears on terrorist lists—I walk down a dirt road that is flanked by a high embankment. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century machines stand like sentinels on its brow. A small railroad for transporting materials skirts its base. The machines have all been floodlit with colored lights. Diggers, movers, balers, tractors, sifters—lovingly floodlit—the technology the object of hacker affection. Technology old and obsolete, crude or elegant, rudimentary or sophisticated, all fascinating to the hacker mind.
Around the end of the embankment, the road opens up into a large central field where the Chaos Computer Club icon, that fifty-foot-high laminate-clad model of a rocket ship—looking very much like the rocket in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince—is pulsating with light and emiting vapors as if it is ready to take off. A few children are running around it or dancing with their parents close by.
A technically perfect sound system is playing impeccably cool music. The outdoor living rooms are full of reclining, amiable, conversing people. They float like illuminated islands in this large space of gathering darkness. In a stand of giant poplars at the edge of the camp, a thousand pinpoints of light shimmer like a thousand fireflies dancing in the trees on this fine summer night—magical, phosphorescent, digitally produced, fireflies.
The next morning, Harry and I run into each other at breakfast. The sun is already blazing, and we find some shade under a tarp in the center field near the rocket. Sacha, an unassuming and somewhat frowzled Dutch hacker, joins us. The three of us are sweaty and thirsty, so I go and get us bottles of water to drink while we talk.
Thinking of Harry’s talk the night before, I ask if his “standards” work dovetails at all with his activism. A lame question. He makes several attempts to respond with equivocal sounding sentence fragments before settling into the technical issues, which he has obviously decided are more to the point.
“The main problem with structural privacy,” he explains, “is that our browsers assume the server should have complete control over our individual device—and we have to trust the server. The user is always transparent to the server. Also the user has no control over what the server sends her—what Google sends you, for example.”
There is something almost impersonal about the way Harry speaks. He is friendly and kind, but like the internet, he transmits information as efficiently as possible from his node to mine. He speaks in paragraphs. He marshals and contextualizes what others are trying to say.
When the internet was invented, people didn’t need to build secure protocols, he explains, because the internet was used primarily by an academic community for the purpose of sharing ideas in a cooperative manner. Cryptography, in any case, was mostly classified as secret information by the US government. On the early internet, everything was sent unencrypted with many identifiers. It was not until people realized the internet was going to be used for commerce and personal data that they recognized they needed to fix it. When the internet was being built, no one understood protocols. It was a messy job, with many security flaws.
“We’re still trying to fix this infrastructural plumbing,” says Harry. “At W3C, we are like the UN, talking to companies and trying to get their buy-in. The future is unclear. The model could become increasingly centralized. This is how it is going with Apple, Facebook, and Google as they create monopoly platforms and siloed services. The countervailing effort is toward decentralization and openness.
“It’s in every big company’s and in every country’s interest to make passwords secure, for example,” Harry says. “It’s not in everyone’s interest to make end-to-end encryption secure. And it’s not in their interest to decentralize.
“And, in fact, it’s very hard to build decentralized systems. That is, it’s harder to build a privacy-secure decentralized system than it is to build a privacy-secure centralized system. Signal, for instance, from Open Whisper Systems in the hacker scene, is the best crypto package today, but it’s a centralized product. Centralized is just easier to do. People may want decentralized products, but they forget the politics of scaling.”
Many theorists of the internet do not understand protocols, Harry explains. They offer very naïve, flat solutions. “For example, they say, ‘Why don’t we create national internets for the public good?’” (I stop myself from confessing this has been my bright idea for the past month.) “Evgeny Morozov said this to me one time, and I responded, ‘Well, the NSA is a national institution established for the public good.’” Morozov is the Malcolm Gladwell of tech writing, Harry says. Eastern European, he has lived in the United States for a long time and is in grad school now. He worked at the State Department for a time on a New American Foundation Fellowship in the internet policy unit and wrote a widely read article on the ways that repressive governments use the internet to track dissidents. “So he counters the tech utopia talk of Silicon Valley. That’s good,” Harry says.
“But he’s a bit of a one-trick pony,” Sacha chips in.12
“I do not understand how anyone can call themselves progressive and advocate national versus international communications,” Harry says. “International communications, dialectically, opens up a space for change. It’s a hacker concept: we should be able to communicate with anyone on the planet. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia: these are the states that support national internets. Lately, I’m seeing a big misunderstanding more and more in the press. Yes, Google as a monopoly is dangerous, but a government monopoly by the EU or US could be worse.”
What about setting standards, I ask? People during the first Industrial Revolution managed to set standards for communications and other new technologies. So couldn’t the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) set standards that strike a balance between security and openness and between centralized services and a decentralized structure that allows experimentation and the generation of new ideas and products?
He grimaces slightly, head tilted. We are squinting at each other, even in the shade. The ISO has proposed the ITU as a potential governing body for the internet, says Harry, and every few years the ITU proposes itself at its annual general meeting. “The ISO stands out for its irrelevancy,” he concludes. “They made a book of recommendations, but no one has followed it.” In fact, in 1984, the ISO published a standard called “The Basic Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection” (number 7498). The ISO model conceived of a networking system divided into seven layers, each one using a prescribed set of protocols to interact only with the layer immediately beneath it.
I tell him that my understanding is that the current governance structure is consensus based, but that the mechanisms for achieving consensus are imperfect. “The current governance structure isn’t ideal,” Harry says. “The IETF does standards for the internet. W3C does standards for the web and browser structure. Both are largely dominated by corporations and by white males. Theoretically, anyone can show up, but in fact it’s the same old men who show up because when they were young, they invented the internet. They and the corporate representatives are the main attendees. It’s expensive to attend, too, and it takes time—four meetings a year for the IETF and once a year for W3C. The mailing lists are pretty good, but a lot of the real decisions happen in the meetings.”
“South America is now demanding a seat at the table and is a main player behind the NETmundial movement,” he notes.
Most of the big internet companies are based in the United States, and most of the physical infrastructure of the internet is located there. US credibility as a neutral steward of the internet took a blow with the Snowden revelations.13 Calls for a globally democratic net made headway when the IETF endorsed a call for all stakeholders, including all governments, to participate on an equal footing.14 Two years later, in early 2015, the NETmundial Initiative convened in Brazil and declared a set of robust democratic principles for global internet governance. The governance process, it said, should be “democratic, multi-stakeholder, open, participative, consensus-driven, transparent, accountable, inclusive and equitable, distributed, collaborative and enabling of meaningful participation”15—a tall order.16
“One NETmundial idea,” Harry continues, “is that if data is going to be really valuable, then companies that are collecting it are engaging in cybercolonialism. Hackers have been saying this for a while, and social movements are now taking this up, for example, at the Internet Social Forum, the Internet Governance Forum, and in the Pirate Party. NETmundial is part of a large-scale, digital rights, social movement, but I don’t think its advocates or supporters necessarily understand the revolutionary, anticapitalist implications of what they’re saying. Because while you can’t have the same companies and governments running the internet forever, this will have to be taken up politically at some point. The alternative is to just let Google run everything, but that’s unpleasant at best. This is one possible future, however.”
“Tim Berners-Lee, my boss, thinks of himself as a hacker. He writes code. He’s pushing for a Magna Carta of the internet (he’s British, so they say ‘Magna Carta’ not ‘constitution’).”
I think of John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” and many other declarations that have been written in recent years by NGOs, privacy commissioners, and international treaty bodies. The more frequently moral and legal rights are declaimed, it seems to me, the feebler they actually are in regulating the demons the tech is unleashing. “There are lots of declarations of rights,” I say.
“Yes, there’s a lot of declarations of rights,” Harry replies, “but can we build these rights into the protocols and software?”
“At the 2015 meeting of IETF in Prague, Edward Snowden was one of the beamed-in speakers, and he got a standing ovation. Even programmers who might have come from the hacker scene and ‘sold out’ to work for large companies still believe in the hacker ethos. In fact, Richard Stallman and Julian Assange have an intellectual influence which is vast, certainly larger than Steve Jobs and Larry Page. Google and Microsoft have people from the hacker movement running their centralized cryptology programs. These hackers need some money, so they go to work for these companies. But their loyalty is with some concept of the internet, not with the companies.”
“Decentralization, openness, human rights: most tech people generally believe in these things. Many companies donate money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and to the Free Software Foundation, for example. It’s a complex political space, but hackerdom is the conscience and consciousness of Silicon Valley.”
“That said,” he continues, “the biggest belief in the tech world is in the market. There’s talk of the commons, but the market is the prevailing belief. Also, there’s a lot of libertarianism. The Bitcoin community, especially, is almost postlibertarian, anarcholibertarian! Some projects, like Riseup, are anarchist. Some, like the Tor Project, are all over the map. Some, like HackingTeam, are just ‘black hat’ scumbags who will sell their services to anyone. But the common ground many tech people share is that they are rights-based: they believe in net rights, human rights. Decentralization is the overarching principle of the internet. The way the internet works is through decentralized protocol and free software. That’s what most of the internet is built from. So these values have been deeply embedded in the internet for forty years.”
Harry sums up his own work and the historical moment: “W3C? We are like the hacker intelligence agency. We want to avoid a Google and a state monopoly. Most people in the group are from the ’70s and ’80s era of the internet. A lot of the internet pioneers were part of the ’60s student and social movements.”
I stop to take stock of what Harry has just said. So the internet right now is governed by these hacker elders (Loraxes) speaking for ordinary users (for the trees)? What will happen when these pioneer elders are gone?
“Hacker politics will continue to develop organically over time in a way that is neither traditionally Marxist nor anarchist or any ‘ist’,” says Harry. “The hacker movement has been growing exponentially, especially since Snowden. The last CCC congress had ten thousand people attending! That’s a crazy number.”
“But movements take time. And right now, we have to address all the policy issues at once,” he says. “Public intellectuals massively simplify the issues and don’t understand the hacker scene.” He looks into my eyes and says it out straight: “We need a book that can take a nuanced, intelligent position.” I have been duly warned.
One of the most striking realizations for the layperson who wanders into this world is that, to begin to comprehend it, one must think multidimensionally. Apprehending the scope of the governance problems is similar to what it must have been like for people in the fifteenth century to apprehend the world is not flat. Everything potentially needs to be reconceived and recalculated, and new disciplines invented. Although forward thinkers are trying to map out the big picture, the multitude of discrete, knotty, technical, and policy questions that need to be fought over and settled in some way is daunting.
In this light, it is understandable that people allow themselves to indulge in simplifications of an exaggeratedly utopian or dystopian cast. As cybernetics scholar Thomas Rid has observed, “Myths work as conceptual aids, reducing complexity, condensing narratives, and making novel, yet unknown technologies approachable, either in a utopian or a dystopian way.”17
Gabriella Coleman (the anthropologist and author of books about free software and Anonymous) has observed that hackers often work easily across political ideologies on discrete, practical problems they deem worthy, and that some eschew ideology altogether.18 This may account for the fact that there are a lot of strange bedfellows and unlikely fellow travelers in the hacker space at the moment.
But what Harry Halpin seems to be getting at is that no one yet understands the political economy this new technological revolution is ushering in. Karl Marx’s monumental analysis of the Industrial Revolution focused on the factory as the locus of production and political organization. His work still offers many insights into how capitalism works and why it is inherently unstable. But the digital revolution unfolding in the twenty-first century has yet to be fully theorized.19
What can a simple twentieth-century democrat offer in this context? Maybe the goal should be to remind people what a democracy is and why it remains a desirable form of governance, whatever complexity the twenty-first century brings.
What is a democracy?
Western liberal democrats might say it involves at least three things. The first is the idea of popular sovereignty, discussed in chapter 3. Democracy means government is answerable to the people. Politically sovereign people are free people. Governments that consistently fail to carry out the wishes of the people, either because they are captured by class or corporate interests or because their technocrats take important issues “off the table,” are not democratic but tyrannical.
Liberal democrats might say the second thing a democracy involves is mitigating the domination of some over others. At the very least, this means that the majority rules but minorities are protected. Powerful interests are regulated and not allowed to run roughshod over the less powerful. In the same vein, a belief in the dignity and worth of each individual is central to the concept of liberal democracy. “Freedom” must be enjoyed by all, not just by the strongest, and this is achieved through institutional means such as a bill of rights, the separation of powers, regulation, tradition, and other social norms.
Finally, Western liberal democrats might say a democracy involves sharing a common wealth. John Perry Barlow called it the “commonweal” in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” “The commonwealth” is actually a very old democratic idea dating back to the Latin concept of res publica (“public thing”), or republic. As US historian Gordon S. Wood has observed, republics demand more from their citizens than monarchies do. They are not held together by “trains of dependencies and inequalities, supported by standing armies, strong religious establishments and a dazzling array of titles, rituals and ceremonies.”20 Rather, as early American republicans stressed, democracies are ordered on the virtue of their people; they demand citizens place a moral value on social cohesion and the common weal.21 A “commonwealth” is a political community founded for the common good.
These ideas correspond roughly to the great organizing principles of the Enlightenment—liberté, egalité, and fraternité. In these last two respects—egalité, or the concern for mitigating domination, and fraternité, or the concern for sharing a commonwealth—democracy is the opposite of libertarianism.22 It is certainly the opposite of authoritarianism. It shares some ideals with anarchism.
But democracy traditionally has been based on the nation state, and in maps of the digitally networked world, the nation state is looking increasingly irrelevant. As John Perry Barlow declaimed, networks do not heed borders. But what he did not foresee, perhaps, was that they intensify complexity. They intensify concentrations of power and value extraction. And there seems to be little that nation states can do about these negative network dynamics. Indeed, the network utopianism and neoliberalism that have politically dominated the last few decades would have us surrender ourselves to the power of the networks, the tech, the innovation, and the creative destruction of it all.23 After forty years of creative destruction, people have justifiably begun to question where surrender leads us.
For democrats, the current crisis in governance is profoundly dismaying. We know we need new theories of political economy and new social experiments to discover them. We know we need to invent new ways of democratic being.
Even in the hacker world, governance is challenging. Sacha has been listening patiently while Harry and I talk to each other, cross-legged in our bit of shade. Sacha van Geffen is the managing director of Greenhost, a hosting company that focuses on environmental issues and digital rights internationally. It works a lot with nongovernmental organizations. He says it tries to support tech that promotes “an internet of human rights.”
Harry has told me the Chaos Computer Club is very interesting but that the Dutch hackers are just as compelling and often overlooked. There is no long-standing, large-scale hacker organization in the Netherlands like the CCC, yet the Dutch have made some important contributions. Like Americans, they tend to put political emphasis on free speech, whereas the Germans have been consistently concerned with privacy.
Sacha tells me that Amsterdam was one of the first points in Europe that connected to ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet, which connected universities. A lot of Dutch universities were hooked up to this early version of the internet. The Dutch hacker group XS4ALL (Access for All) pushed a new idea that everyone, not just universities, should have access to the internet. The group set up a foundation and published a magazine called Hactic. Later, Amsterdam became the first municipality to attempt to create a digital city with free wireless access to the internet for everyone.
The World Wide Web was the first service that allowed ordinary people to use the internet. It took hypertext and put it on top of the internet around 1991 or 1992. The widespread use of the web took off around 1993 or 1994.
“When I first subscribed to XS4ALL,” Sacha recalls fondly, “they would send a booklet of known websites on the internet. These might have ‘web rings’ for associated sites (you know, url addresses at the bottom of a web page) and the heading, ‘Next Web Site.’”
“The point is,” Harry summarizes, “the Netherlands was instrumental in getting ordinary people onto the internet.”
“There is a space in the world for Dutch hackers,” Sacha says mildly, “it just needs to be refilled! In the ’90s, the Netherlands was very active in the hacker world. Since then, it’s tailed off.”
Dutch camps were first organized by the founder of XS4ALL. They happened every four years, in between the German Chaos Computer Club camps. At the last Dutch camp, in 2013, named “OHM” (for “Observe, hack, make” or the word ohm, the universal scientific measure for resistance, signified as Ω), there was a big fight over whether the company Fox IT should be a sponsor of the camp. The main organizer of the camp that year was an employee of the company.
“An anarchist from the hackerspace Puscii.nl, in Utrecht, wrote a piece titled ‘What’s Wrong with the Kids These Days?,’” Sacha continues. “Then the Chaos Computer Club said that if Fox IT was going to be a main sponsor, they were officially not going to be present at the event. This was a big political statement between hacker scenes. I said, ‘Okay, we’re not going to be there, but the kids are going to be there [meaning young hackers], and do we want them to be there with ‘cool’ techno companies teaching them how to spy and do bad things? Is that the only narrative we want to show them?’”
It was decided they could do one of two things—either organize a countercamp (but time was short, and that would take a lot of effort) or be at the camp.
Sacha told his fellow hackers, “Revolutions do not happen in silent circles. They happen in noisy squares, the embodiment of resistance.” They would attend the camp. (“Silent circles” was a play on the name of a new security software company called Silent Circle, created by Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of Pretty Good Privacy, in which he partnered controversially with two former US Navy SEALs.) They registered the domain name “Noisy Square” and used it with the slogan “Putting the resistance back into OHM.” They reached out to national and international organizations for donations and set up a large tent at the camp with its own politically based talks.
It was very tense at the OHM camp. Some incidents were blown out of proportion by the official organizers, Sacha says. For example, Sacha’s group made a mock police hazard tape that said, “Police, do not cross.” Someone then wrapped the Fox IT tent with the tape. The organizers took it badly.
Noisy Square became highly influential. It socialized the creation of policy streams and the discussion of policy at hacker conferences. Every single hacker conference since OHM has had a space called Noisy Square, including the last Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in the US. It is a safe place for politically aware hackers and technically aware activists to congregate. It reflects the growing pains of governance within the hacker scene itself as it struggles to maintain a politically informed purpose while its ranks are swelling with newcomers.
Still, there is the problem of finding funding for politically progressive hacking. “Private capital does not really fund freedom technologies or hackers, except Bitcoin,” Harry says, returning to the issue that first sparked our extended conversation. “There isn’t much of a business case for human rights. You have academic funding sometimes, but academic gatekeepers can affect how funding is used for progressive projects. To do a large software project is difficult, and you need big funding.”
“Technology usually follows the path of least resistance. It makes the powerful more powerful and the unpowerful even less powerful—unless you pay attention.”