4

FIVE PREMISES FOR THE PAX TECHNICA

Politics, and how people communicate about politics, have changed a lot since the internet became a public resource. Given all the research that has been done on media ownership, political communication, and technology diffusion, what safe generalizations would be reasonable premises about the role of the internet in political life so far?

1. Political leaders, governments, firms, and civic groups are aggressively using the internet to attack one another and defend their interests.

2. Citizens are using the internet to improve governance, and the success or failure of a government increasingly depends on a good digital strategy.

3. People are using the internet to marginalize extremist ideas, and authoritarian governments lose credibility when they try to repress new information technologies.

4. People are using digital media to solve collective action problems.

5. People are using big data to help provide connective security.

The Romans and British built stable infrastructures and prosperous societies by linking widespread territories through networks of roads, family ties, and trade routes. The technologies of the internet of things will have a similar role, and are already providing some palpable conduits for political power. Our internet has features that many privacy advocates dislike, but the problem-solving capacity and human security benefits of responsibly handled device networks trump the risks. The tough project—in the years ahead—is getting security agencies to behave responsibly.

In this chapter, some historical perspective about technology diffusion over the past twenty-five years helps turn the observations of the previous chapters into concrete premises. These five safe premises about how we have used the internet for political life can help us—in the subsequent chapter—envision the consequences of the internet of things.

Learning from the Internet Interregnum

Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first people to investigate political life in a systematic way. While most Americans know him for his observations on the early stages of their democracy, he also sought to understand the nature of revolution. Living through the tumultuous upheavals of 1848, he wrote in his Recollections that big political changes were the outcome of a myriad of causes.1 Louis Philippe, France’s last king, was chased out of the country in 1848 for what Tocqueville described as “senile imbecility.” The most important causes of political change, he concluded, were clumsy leaders and unfortunate mistakes.

Still, Tocqueville argued that chance events and idiotic leaders are only “accidents that render the disease fatal,” and that while political change is nearly impossible to predict, it clearly happens only at particular moments. Understanding the particularities of the revolutions of 1848 or the collapse of East Germany involves recognizing timely trends and comparative contexts.

The world is full of complex problems. Governments fall apart, terrorist cells persist, and, in any given year, a handful of countries suffer from genocide, internal warfare, and human-rights violations. We need to worry about nuclear proliferation, high population growth, and migration pressures. Entire regions are disrupted by debt crises, viral diseases, and breakdowns in our energy supply. Humanitarian crises brought on by environmental degradation, persistent poverty, and debilitating malnutrition affect millions of people each day. Given the complexities of all of these problems, why should we worry about the internet of things? How does understanding technology diffusion help to solve complex problems and explain political change?

No singular cause determines social outcomes: there is always an interplay of causal factors. This makes it tough to learn from the causes and consequences of technology diffusion throughout history. Important events and recognizable causal connections can’t be replicated or falsified. We can’t repeat the Arab Spring in some kind of experiment. We can’t test its negation—an Arab Spring that never happened, or an Arab Spring minus one key factor that resulted in a different outcome. We don’t have enough large datasets about Arab Spring–like events to run statistical models. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to learn from the real events that happened. In fact, for many in the social sciences, tracing how real events unfolded is the best way to understand political change. The richest explanations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example, as sociologist Steve Pfaff crafts them, come from such process tracing.2

We do, however, know enough to make some educated guesses about what will happen next. And, indeed, our experiences during the internet interregnum reveal five premises for how the internet of things will have an impact on global politics. I opened the chapter with basic statements of how device networks have had an impact on political life. Now let’s expand on each of those five premises.

First, it is safe to say that powerful political actors will use the internet of things as a weapon. They already use the internet to spy on one another, and they use it to manipulate public opinion. They defend their interests. Sometimes, they aggressively attack one another. Many of the key technologies that make up the hardware and software that we use today were developed by the U.S. military during the Cold War. Only recently have political actors figured out how to take full advantage of these technologies. Fortunately, there are good reasons to expect that cyberdeterrence will bring about the kind of peaceful stability we’ve seen in the past when political actors have maintained the balance of power, refrained from destructive attacks, and used their new weapons mostly for deterrence. The result of such stable positioning is a dynamic balance of power.

Second, when the modern state fails, the internet of things will provide governance. Or more accurately, people who live in places where governments collapse or fail to provide particular services use information technology to coordinate their own governance. These days, we also get immense amounts of data from failed states. So while failing or failed governments previously caused all sorts of problems for citizens and neighboring countries, now communities increasingly respond innovatively on their own, and more outsiders respond with more effective help. The result is often stability rather than anarchy.

Third, new information technologies undermine radical ideologies, and the internet of things will contribute to this trend too. Radical opinions simply don’t last very long on the internet. Or they persist only in the dark corners of the internet, before they get pushed off into the margins by people who do fact checking and present reasonable alternatives. When political elites manage to sequester their supporters via information choke points, ideological biases can last longer than they should. For the most part, people use information technologies to take the hot air out of ideologies. There are still a lot of bad people with bad ideas. On the whole, a world without radical ideological differences is a more stable world. Only one important ideological divide is worth talking about. Should the internet of things be open or closed?

Fourth, social media help people solve collective-action problems, and the internet of things will greatly deepen our ability to coordinate collective action. The number of stories in which information technology has helped community leaders address local problems grows every year. The kinds of problems that we can solve are diverse, from water scarcities and pollution to public-health needs and human rights. Some of these are tackled in niche hackathons, some of which are very issue specific.3 Others get addressed through social media, which puts transportable solutions into new community contexts. The result is that even some of the most intractable collective-action problems, sometimes called “wicked problems” due to their sheer maddening messiness, are being solved through new networks of information and creative-coding skills.4 By helping us overcome these challenges, the internet of things will help engender social stability.

Fifth, big data is providing us with collective security. The internet of things will make the data resources about our attitudes and behaviors so enormous as to be beyond the ability of the social sciences to interpret and make use of much of the material. Immense amounts of data about criminal activity, mafia strategy, drug lord schemes, and terrorist plans have already made it easier to protect people. Yes, some of the ways national security actors have obtained this big data are grotesque violations of the public trust. Reworking the ways in which we can oversee the collection of data is a key priority. Respectfully collected, big data helps us provide for our own security. Let’s examine each of these premises one by one.

First Premise: The Internet of Things Is Being Weaponized

The funders and founders of early internet architecture were U.S.-based military and research organizations looking for ways to distribute the command and control functions of military assets over wide areas. The internet has always been a powerful tool for surveillance and social control, even when private entrepreneurs started generating innovative new hardware and applications to attach to the internet. Device networks have been used by combatants in many different kinds of political competition and military conflict: border skirmishes, preemptive attacks, assassinations, old wars, new wars, propaganda wars, espionage, and coups. Whatever devices come embedded with sensors, power packs, and network connections, someone will try to weaponize them and attack opponents.

Authoritarian regimes have invested significant resources in attempts to prevent their populations from being exposed to information from more democratic countries. The raft of NSA surveillance scandals reveals that even democratic countries use the internet as part of their national security arsenal. The internet has been “commandeered,” in the words of one prominent privacy advocate, Bruce Schneier.5

The internet has become not just a weapon in the world’s great political battles. It has become the weapon for ideological influence, and careful use can mean the difference between winning and losing. Device networks have proven useful in the short, medium, and long game of politics. Digital media have become the most important offensive weapons, as they are where political battles play out, and their successful use goes a long way toward ensuring victory. In some ways, military strategy has been subsumed by media strategy.

Even before Edward Snowden exposed U.S. surveillance activities on the global internet, many people were concerned about the malware on device networks built by China’s largest telecommunications firms, Huawei and ZTE. Australian, Canadian, and U.S. officials have all objected to technologies from these firms on the grounds that the hardware would allow Chinese spies backdoor access into whatever networks they get plugged into.

We don’t know much about the malware Chinese firms are putting in the devices they sell. There appears to be enough classified evidence for multiple governments in the West to justify import bans, block development contracts, and talk openly about the national security risks of hooking Chinese equipment up to Western networks. This doesn’t mean Huawei and ZTE are short of customers. Many countries in the developing world, such as Zimbabwe, sign long-term infrastructure deals with China.

Networked devices and the data trails they generate can help police track criminals and allow militaries to target individuals. Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Chechen separatist leader, was traced by Russian security services when he used his satellite phone. Mobile phones with embedded bombs have carried out assassinations for the Israel Security Agency.6 It was the suspicious absence of networked devices and information infrastructure linking up an expensive mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that betrayed Osama bin Laden’s last hideout.⁷

Unfortunately, this also means that governments increasingly use networked devices to track the people protesting against them. During Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests in the winter of 2014, the government there exercised its technology clout and pulled off what is probably the first example of geotagged propagandizing.⁸ After several protesters were shot dead by police, the government identified all the mobile phones connected to cellphone towers in the conflict area and blasted out the message “Thank you special forces of Ukraine for saving the capital” and signed the message “Citizens of Kiev.”⁹

This enraged even more people, because it was easy to verify that the protests had been mostly peaceful up to that point. It was clear that the state was getting desperate, and reaching into a very personal technology and using it to manipulate public opinion. When protesters responded with more energy, the next geotagged message from the government was more ominous: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” This was probably the first example of a troubled government using networked devices to geolocate people in real time and go after them with a counterinsurgency campaign.

Most of the recent popular uprisings have exposed the ways that repressive regimes use networked devices as a weapon against dissent. Civic leaders from around the world condemned the company Nokia Siemens Networks for selling its Lawful Interception Gateway device to Iran.10 The equipment allowed the Iranian government to put down the 2009 Green Revolution by blocking internet and cell phone traffic. Ericsson’s equipment could have been used in similar ways against civic leaders in Belarus during protests there in 2010. A Boeing subsidiary sold powerful net inspection technology to Egypt’s state telecom in 2011, equipment used to examine the communications of the country’s bloggers and civic leaders.¹¹

But these days, devices on the internet of things can be targets as much as people can be targets. The Stuxnet virus is the earliest, most dramatic example of how a sophisticated military application can achieve a security objective by attacking devices. It was designed to make Iran’s nuclear enriching uranium centrifuges spin out of control.¹² The technical specifications are meaningful only to the handful of engineers who built that equipment, the specialists who wanted to use it, and the designers of the virus. It installed malware into memory block DB890 of the Profibus messaging bus of Siemens S7–300 centrifuges that used a variable frequency motor built by either Finland’s Vacon or Iran’s Fararo Paya, if those systems cycled between 807 and 1,210 per second. The malware periodically changed the rotational speed, from as low as 2 cycles to as high as 1,410 cycles per second. But it also installed a rootkit that misled monitoring systems. In other words, the virus made a specific kind of equipment built by a particular company—if it used one of two distinct motors operating at specific speeds—stress itself enough to break down. It hid the whole process from Iran’s nuclear engineers and dealt a serious blow to the country’s nuclear program.

Digital networks are also the staging ground for domestic political battles. In Turkey, the military attempted what the country’s journalists called a “coup-by-website.”13 Its government continues to wrangle with Twitter.¹⁴ In the first instance, elites in Turkey were unhappy about the likely election of a mildly Islamist president, Abdullah Gül, in 2007. Publishing an online memo reviewing the military’s obligations for protecting Turkish secularism and its options for Gül’s election created a national crisis. Gül eventually won the election and came out ahead—with many of his military challengers going to jail.

When Erdoğan banned Twitter and YouTube before local elections in 2014, there was a lot of online outrage. His party was easily returned to power. Shutting off vocal opposition at the right time still works, but it’s getting harder and harder to do.

These days, media targets in the West—and particularly the United States—are incredibly valuable. Taking down the New York Times’ website is one of the tactics of modern warfare.¹⁵ In August 2013, a hacker group loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad known as the Syrian Electronic Army took down the Times’ site and also attacked Twitter and the U.K. site of the Huffington Post. It was not the first time the group had attacked a Western media organization, but it was the first time that it was successful in denying online service for the Times. Indeed, the Times has become one of the most valuable targets for anti-U.S. hackers.

In emerging democracies, the police sometimes weigh in to help a government survive an election. In the 2006 elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the security services tried to shut down phone numbers used by opposition leaders. In 2009, Colombian security services used U.S. wiretapping technology from the war on drugs to surveil the government’s political opposition.16 Modern militaries have long been purposeful about developing a media strategy. Napoleon famously quipped that “four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” Militaries are now quick to launch social-media campaigns, and increasingly they begin their media offensive minutes ahead of action on the ground.¹⁷

Almost every variety of war, conflict, and competition now has its cyberequivalent. The substantive threat—that the internet of things will be used for attack—is only going to increase, in part because of the potential to make such attacks effective but tough to source. Espionage is always a threat, but cyberespionage seems to be the new, more productive strategy for Chinese businesses, the Russian mafia, and the Syrian government.

Digital networks are still relatively decentralized tools: so many different kinds of actors can use the new weaponry. Certainly hackers and technology ideologues such as Anonymous use the internet to attack political leaders and organizations they believe aren’t behaving well. And groups like the Tactical Technology Collective teach civil-society groups and democracy advocates how to fortify themselves with information technology.¹⁸ Governments and businesses use the internet to spy on one another, and the United States—and its allies—use the internet to spy on everyone.

Still, it’s getting ever harder to control the civilian application of technology. For several hundred years, the military either invented, cultivated and developed, or first applied technology. The military is still an important source of innovation, but the world is now rife with examples of technologies that are being used by civil-society groups in creative ways while governments think about regulations. Sometimes these governments give up on regulation and try for bans.

In 2013, Human Rights Watch used satellite images to show the abusive Nigerian Army wreaking havoc on the town of Baga.19 When the military raided the town, searching for Islamist supporters, it left behind a swath of destruction. Local community leaders claimed that more than 2,000 homes had been burned and 183 bodies identified after the military raid. Human Rights Watch corroborated the account with satellite images, identifying 2,275 destroyed buildings and another 125 buildings severely damaged. In 2014, the organization combined satellite imagery, public photos, and photos released by ISIS militants to reconstruct the execution of between 160 and 190 men in a field near a former palace of Saddam Hussein.²⁰

Protesters now use drones.²¹ Peaceniks mine Twitter for crisis data. The lesson isn’t so much that information technology can be used by political actors as that the innovators and developers of information technologies have less and less control over who uses these innovations, and for what ends. Only a few armies and navies could ever equip their forces with cannons. Now, both militaries and peaceniks can equip their members with digital media. Civilians have access to these tools, and they don’t always act in concert with their militaries.22 Many civic groups have creative digital media projects that inform their members and make policy makers think in new ways about old problems.

The aforementioned Tactical Technology Collective helps civic groups and social movements develop sophisticated and secure communications strategies.²³ FrontlineSMS, discussed in Chapter 3, is an open-source text messaging service used by nonprofits for distributing information about politics, health, and welfare.²⁴ The Mobilization Lab is used by environmental groups to experiment with new ways of reaching their supporters and coordinating their campaigns.²⁵

The internet of things—and the ability to manipulate devices—is the defining feature of modern political conflict. Countries spend ever more money on information infrastructures: on ways to surveil their people and disable enemy infrastructure. The internet of things could not have been built without the entrepreneurship and inventiveness of technology firms. Nonetheless, our surveillance state also could not have been built without that inventive industry.

Second Premise: People Use Devices to Govern

The state appeared as the dominant political form some five hundred years ago. As a way of organizing resources, states were good at building infrastructure. But for the first time the major infrastructure for social cohesion is not owned, managed, or even closely regulated by the state. Now, the information infrastructure that connects us is not monopolized by a particular political actor, or even by a particular kind of political actor. It exists and grows independent of any single political, economic, and cultural actor. When it comes to political power, people increasingly use technology to supplement or supplant government.

When governments do succeed at something these days, it is often because they have used information technologies to serve citizens in creative new ways. Governments have lost the exclusive power to frame current events. When governments fail, people repair their institutions with digital media. Monterrey’s public alert systems and Kibera’s mapping project, discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, are examples of how this can work.

James Scott is an anthropologist famous for demonstrating how much political power governments got from simply being able to define a public problem.²⁶ For example, a government derived its power from being able to draw maps because that made everyone think about national borders. Today, anyone with internet access can create, redraw, and share a map. And people have been using Ushahidi to draw entirely new maps that serve community needs over those of political elites. Internet users run their own public opinion polls when the government won’t call an election or the election is rigged. People use mobile phones to report a crisis, humanitarian or political.

Every modern political crisis comes with clumsy attempts to control the way events and facts are disseminated online. When governments are on the verge of collapse, their leaders quickly figure out that they need to manipulate digital media to save themselves. Some countries, like Algeria, find that in a crisis they just don’t have the technical skills to mount much of a digital counterinsurgency strategy. When the Arab Spring arrived on Algeria’s doorstep, it simply had no centralized management system to coerce the country’s internet and mobile-phone companies to support the regime. Other countries find that they have to rely on outside firms to do their bidding.

In Egypt, Mubarak required the assistance of London-based Vodafone to shut down national networks. Yet cutting off twenty million internet users and fifty-five million mobile-phone users only ratcheted up the political tension. The OECD estimates that this move cost the Egyptian economy $90 million a day for five days. Cutting off connections between friends and family—the majority of whom were not in the streets protesting—compounded public anger.

If a government is working at peak performance, it can accurately frame a problem and help all the stakeholders prioritize solutions. If it isn’t working well, digital media allow stakeholders to investigate and propose alternatives. The internet of things will make it harder for a regime to control “things” attached to networks and choke off information flows. Moreover, stakeholders will have ever more ability to do their own research and craft their own policy proposals.

People use the internet to compound attention on poorly performing governments. A group of researchers recently did a broad evaluation of this process. Merlyna Lim, for instance, found that authoritarian Egypt failed to respond to the communities of opposition that coalesced online well in advance of 2011, while Zeynep Tufekci and Chris Wilson illustrated that social media removed the disincentives for people to join Tahrir Square protests in early 2011.27 Catie Bailard showed that internet use predicted cynicism during a Tanzanian election.²⁸ Jonathan Hassid demonstrated that Chinese bloggers lead in the framing of issues when the ruling political and media elites do not appear to be acting responsibly; and Sebastián Valenzuela, Arturo Arriagada, and Andrés Scherman’s study of Facebook use in Chile illustrated that social media can effectively mobilize those who are not already involved in political activism.²⁹

Sometimes governments do figure out ways of using technology to improve themselves. Tech-savvy governments can often expose and stop corruption. In the Nigerian state of Bayelsa, a new biometric verification system of fingerprinting public employees and matching them with employment records confirmed twenty-five thousand legitimate employees but four thousand illegitimate ones. Most of the fraudulent employees were in the finance department. The local office of the national electoral commission had extra employees, including seventy people who claimed to work there but didn’t. An elected school board member employed ten members of his family—including underage children—in the board. In 2009, new systems like this allowed Nigeria to reduce its state salary budget by 20 percent. Similar smart databases cut the state procurement budget by 24 percent. Automated administrative systems did more to fight corruption than awareness campaigns and legal threats.³⁰

This doesn’t mean that governments can’t be innovative online. When states succeed at serving their publics these days, it’s increasingly because government bureaucrats have figured out creative ways of putting technology to work for the public good. Research shows that most civic projects that use information technology in creative ways need to be designed in concert with government. Markets can also serve as government mechanisms, and there is much evidence that device networks can help get rid of discrimination in markets. In India, clear price signals over mobile phones and dedicated apps have brought down prices and raised profits for fish markets in Kerala and soya beans in Madhya Pradesh.31 Civic projects that are totally independent of government legitimacy often fail; on the flip side, government projects that have little or no buy-in from civil-society actors often fail.

E-government services can bring transparency to procurement processes and make services more accessible to citizens.³² Governments do all sorts of information-intensive tasks, well beyond service delivery. A government that doesn’t use information technology well loses its legitimacy quickly. Keeping track of ballots on election day, noting which ships are in the port, who’s in jail, and who needs a driver’s license are all logistical challenges. Effective technology use has come to define good governance, whether creative initiatives come from people or their governments.

Third Premise: Digital Networks Weaken Ideologies

On July 9, 2008, Iran wanted to show the world its new mobile missile launchers. Leaders shared their triumph through high-resolution photos of the test site. The world’s major media outlets carried an image of four missiles blasting into the sky. The image was reproduced the next day, first on the Agence France-Presse webpage, then on the front pages of the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, the Chicago Tribune, and several other newspapers, as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo News, nytimes.com, and many other major news websites. Somehow, a different image was sent to the Associated Press—an image with only three missiles successfully launching—one missile had actually broken down and failed to launch.

Many of the world’s media outlets published retractions. Journalists wrote apologetic essays about how technology had made it too easy for manipulative regimes—such as Iran’s theocracy—to doctor images. The important lesson here is not that propaganda experts in the regime used Photoshop to make their country look more powerful. The lesson is that the manipulation was caught, by 3 P.M. on the East Coast of the United States, the very next day.33 Images are powerful because they can bolster or dissolve political authority.

Digital media have not only been useful in killing off ideological propaganda, they have allowed democracy advocates to keep political memes alive and to make their issue go viral. Where ideologues and their ideologies do find traction and audience, it is usually because the messengers have been especially effective at using technology to promote their message and to keep their followers corralled, not because the rhetoric or ideas are compelling or sensible. This means that rival messengers, with better technologies, can get the upper hand in a political battle.

In China, one of the most provocative political images around is still that of a man standing in the way of a tank in Tiananmen Square. The image, taken June 5, 1989, has become one of the most iconic images of political resistance. It has been cropped and retouched many times, but the Chinese have well-developed image analysis software that detects and removes the image whenever it pops up in the country’s digital traffic. Images of Chinese protest events are tough to find on the national search engine, Baidu. Yet careful editing has kept the image alive, most recently by a mash-up that replaces the tanks with large rubber duckies.34 Other versions involve a Lego figure standing up to Lego tanks.³⁵ Such visualizations keep the hope and spirit of civil disobedience alive and out of the automated surveillance net.

These are only examples of how digital images can undermine political ideology. The impact of new digital networks on ideology is bigger than just these stories. Indeed, the ideology of technology is trumping all others. There have been no truly new ideologies since the end of the last world order, and the closest thing to a new ideology is the ideology of technology itself.

As a concept, an ideology can be defined many ways. Among the best is the understanding that ideology is “meaning in the service of power.”³⁶ The dream of a truly wired society, with tech-savvy citizens and responsive e-governments, is part of such an ideological package. But this dream about what an information society should be, widely promoted by government and industry, also serves the interests of the businesses and politicians who deliver on this version of modernity. The internet of things is also becoming a kind of ideological package: internet use and networked devices have become deeply associated with our notions of modernization and economic growth. Popular imagery about the use, speed, and sophistication are pervasive, with some technologies becoming iconic in myth and symbol, and inspiring almost religious fervor.

Manuel Castells has called this “informationalism.”37 While I have argued that there have been no new ideologies since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ideology of internetled growth might be the exception. Our infatuation with the internet drove a dot-com boom in the economy, it inspired a rethinking of global development priorities, and it remains a pervasive Western export: the notion that information technologies can fix most problems. The economic buzz around technology startups has given entrepreneurs clout in culture and politics. In some countries in the Middle East, for example, this has meant that governments are trumpeting entrepreneurship and innovation over traditional Islamic values.³⁸ Today, information technology is the most important tool for servicing power.

The internet has a strong record of marginalizing partisanship, radicalism, fundamentalism, and extremism in social networks. Increasingly, the outcomes of both domestic and international political battles seem shaped if not determined by patterns of digital media use. Traditional ideologies have lost the power to frame events, and radicals in many countries have either had to soften their message, learn to manipulate the internet, or be socially marginalized. And increasingly, it is through decisions on technology policy that governments reveal the true extent of their commitment to democracy.

Ideologues spend a lot of time thinking about image. While powerful images can support an ideological perspective, the wrong images can deflate ideological claims. So technological resources determine domestic political battles. Political candidates in emerging democracies use digital media to raise funds, rally supporters, and outmaneuver opponents in policy debates. A growing number of upstart leaders and new political parties manage to achieve their political goals by manipulating the internet of things.

In authoritarian regimes, where elections are a farce, such rigged events have become especially sensitive moments. Many of the most violent confrontations between dictators and their opponents have come because civic leaders used digital media to document the depth and scale of electoral corruption. Even in China, where the Communist Party has no tolerance for open dissent at its executive levels, that same Party has been allowing—some would say encouraging—two kinds of political activism in local politics. Communities that use the micro blogging with Sina Weibo or instant messaging service Tencent QQ to rail against local corruption or environmental concerns seem to get the Party’s attention. People can use social media to vent, a little, and at certain authorized targets. Doing so reaffirms that the Communist Party of China is ultimately in charge.39

In democracies, smart use of technology increasingly gives a political party the upper hand at election time. At this point, good examples of this go back several years. Student rallies organized rapidly by SMS toppled Philippine president Joseph Estrada in 2001, when protesters gathered en masse. They were summoned together by a single line passed from phone to phone: “Go 2 EDSA [an acronym for a Manila street]. Wear Blck.”⁴⁰

President Roh Moo-hyun ushered in a new era of politics in South Korea, but he would not have been elected without the help of the internet and SMS. Back in December 2002, conservative mainstream media favored his rival Lee Hoi-chang to win the election, especially when a former rival who had endorsed Roh unexpectedly withdrew his support on the eve of election day. Roh’s young supporters launched a massive last-minute campaign, sending off emails and text messages to 800,000 Roh supporters to remind them to vote.41

In Spain, the Madrid bombings had direct political consequences as a result of communication newly enabled by technology. The ruling conservative Popular Party had been aggressively defending its close ties to George W. Bush’s war effort. When the terrorist bombs went off in March 2004, a wave of popular dissent cascaded by SMS through the electorate, faster than government spin doctors could handle. The overwhelming viral campaign cost the government its position of power. When public outrage goes viral, leaders in democracies are especially susceptible.

In more and more elections, political victory goes to the most tech-savvy campaigner. Ideological packaging seems secondary. To be a president or a prime minister you still need an impressive party machine, a good smile, and at least a few decent policy ideas. These days, an impressive party machine is one that uses social media to create a bounded news ecology for supporters. It mines data on shared affinity networks, and otherwise mobilizes voters on election day.

Research on elections in Brazil and Malaysia demonstrates that one of the most important statistically significant predictors of actually winning a parliamentary seat—especially in lower houses—is being a tech-savvy candidate.⁴² Having a Twitter feed and an interactive website helps connect with voters. And online search habits leading up to an election help predict which candidates will win.43 Around the world, being a modern politician means more than having a decent website. It means being able to work with the information infrastructure that young citizens are using to form their political identities.

Ideologies, like governments, have lost much of their ability to exclusively and comprehensively frame events. Indeed, the claim of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” argument is that there will be no more great ideologies because capitalism has triumphed over all of its rivals. While it may be true that there have been no great ideologies since the arrival of the civilian internet, it’s also true that when there are ideological battles, they happen online. What makes an ideology successful is its ability to prevent followers from being aware of the way public issues are being framed. With a worldwide network of watchers, trying to doctor photos or censor unflattering images is quickly met with a corrective from somebody in the network.

High-ranking Chinese officials certainly feel this way. Liu Yazhou, political commissar of the University of National Defense, published an article in the People’s Liberation Army Daily arguing that today’s internet has become the main battlefield for ideological struggle. “Entering the new century,” he wrote recently, “whoever controls the internet, especially micro-blog resources, will have the right to control opinions.”⁴⁴ The Party is aware that political conversations over social media have real-world consequences and can provide a metric of public opinion. Senior officials get exclusive access to social media sentiment analysis through the Party’s media research team. One Chinese pollster blames a 10 percent drop in confidence in the Party to the rapid spread of microblogs.45

When moderates and ideologues are given equal access to digital media, people tend to use social media to marginalize extremism, hate speech, and radical ideas. In part, this is because digital networks are ultimately social networks. On a personal level, we often don’t like experiencing “socialization” because it can mean embarrassing correctives to our bad behavior. The pressure to conform is rarely a pleasant thing to experience. Socialization also means that dangerously violent behavior, and the ideas that might foment such behavior, get stigmatized. The problem, of course: not everyone has the same degree of internet access.

The research is growing on how social media marginalizes bad ideas, and it is based on varied levels of analysis. Sociologists have found that digital media have several positive long-term consequences for users. Over time, people develop increasingly sophisticated search skills.⁴⁶ They tend to become more omnivorous with their news diets.⁴⁷ And there is evidence that they become more tolerant of ideas and opinions that diverge from their own.⁴⁸ Research suggests that digital networks moderate political opinion, and this is because the average person is moderate.

The internet has grown up along social networks. For better or worse, socialization works. Over time, people with extreme, radical, and disturbing ideas either moderate their opinions or find themselves marginalized in their networks of family and friends. Unfortunately, the corollary of socialization through digital networks is that extremists may have an easier time finding others like them. So pushing violent extremism out of mainstream political conversations may make some small networks of extremists seem to grow and become more resilient. But as we’ll see, this process also makes it easier to track and disable those networks when they become a threat.

The process of socialization over digital networks doesn’t have a positive impact just on individuals; it can be observed in political discourse as well. For example, experiments with online news rating systems show that social influence accumulates positively. We are social animals who tend to herd positively and create ratings bubbles of approval. The corollary is that negative influences get neutralized by the crowd. We tend to put a little effort into making sure a negative news story is deserved.49 This is why political parties usually compete for the middle. And not just during election time, either. Even autocrats have to maintain a balance between hegemony and public appeal.

The Arab Spring may be the best recent example of how moderate, digitally activated citizens coalesced into viable opposition movements. Only after several weeks of protest in Tunis and Cairo did Tunisia’s and Egypt’s Islamists decide to join protests against the authoritarian, secular governments. Islamists eventually formed governments in both countries during open and fair elections. But both groups of Islamists had to moderate their messages—they had to give up advocating for polygamy and the traditional punishments mandated by the Koran. When the government formed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt drifted too far, and excluded too many secular groups, civil disobedience erupted again and the government was tossed from power.

In Egypt, networks of democracy advocates proved their resilience by activating twice: they toppled a secular authoritarian regime that had lasted for thirty years, and then they toppled the government formed by the Muslim Brotherhood after a year. Digital media helped disaffected youth defeat radicalism and push Mubarak out. Then it helped them push the Islamists out.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia and Egypt are no longer the only viable parties in their reborn countries. Both must continually address concerns about their radical roots. Terrorist groups might find some safe harbor online by claiming tiny corners of the internet for recruiting impressionable members and coordinating activities. Islamists who hope to participate in political life, on the whole, are having a hard time. In Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey, Islamist political parties have had to moderate their message, and they often get punished by voters when they try to introduce radical legislation.

Indeed, there is a growing interest in using the network effects of digital media to consolidate radical groups more aggressively: dedicated social-network applications to support ex-neo-Nazis and ex-terrorists,50 mainstream civic groups and think tanks made up of former members of extreme groups.⁵¹

When someone in a migrant community comes from overseas and acts badly in the name of his faith or some perceived injustice in his homeland, news headlines tend to blame the internet for allowing radical ideas to spread among immigrants. But research suggests that while immigrant communities do use digital networks to construct new communities and stay in touch with their communities of origin, they tend to use it to defeat nostalgia about the conditions they left behind.52

Even more than declared ideology, a country’s technology policies reveal its true political values. While political scientists wrestle over the meaning of democracy and authoritarianism—and which countries are the best examples of each—technology policy has come to be the most revealing aspect of a regime’s priorities. When a government spends money on technology initiatives that make the business of governance more transparent, we celebrate. When a government decides that it needs to be doing more censorship and surveillance, we rightfully worry. In recent years, we find authoritarian regimes doing the former and democracies doing the latter.

Democracies don’t always get information policy right either. A powerful mobile-phone surveillance tool, the Stingray device allows a user to spoof a mobile-phone tower. Such technologies can be used to track terrorists in India, or drug dealers in Los Angeles.⁵³ Warrantless wiretapping is a more high-profile concern in the United States, so the country’s civil liberties groups quickly linked the use of the Stingray to privacy issues.

Singapore controls its journalists at election time so as to ensure the governing party returns to power, but puts its taxation and spending records online. Canada aggressively surveils its citizens—even travelers using airport wifi.⁵⁴ Which country is more open?

Videos from abusive dictatorships consistently expose the attitudes of ruling elites, and we might expect these countries to have active surveillance and censorship programs. Even liberal democracies have been running aggressive programs with relaxed public oversight. Google transparency reports show that requests for information are on the rise, and most of the requests come from within democracies.55

For modern dictatorships, all the new devices being connected to the internet present a real challenge. Some authoritarian regimes may run honest elections administratively but invest in social-media strategies that guarantee electoral victories. Russia makes significant investments in video equipment for its polling stations during referenda and elections. Their leaders decided that video evidence of fraud is not admissible in fraud complaints.

Today, democracy is a form of open society in which people in authority use the internet for public goods and human security in ways that have been widely reviewed and publicly approved. Democracy occurs when the rules and norms of mass surveillance have been developed openly, and state practices are acknowledged by the government.

Information policy has not only come to define what kind of government a country has; the political decision to disconnect information infrastructure now delineates a regime on the edge of collapse. Net watchers report instantly when packet switching through a nation’s digital switches stops and the country “goes dark.” Public protests in an authoritarian regime can be a sign of political instability. A defining feature of political, military, and security crisis is the moment when a ruler orders the mobile-phone company and internet-service providers to shut down. Going dark has become the modern mark of a regime in crisis, and the indicator that a state is close to collapse. Contemporary authoritarianism, democracy, and state failure are now defined by technology use.

Moreover, the way a political group treats digital infrastructure has also come to define serious insurgency. Nigeria’s Boko Haram figured out that digital media were being used to track its members, so it began taking down cell phone towers.56 Afghanistan’s Taliban takes down cell towers for fear that they help unmanned probes track their leaders. Lebanon’s Hamas has its own hard lines, which it defends in times of chaos. Even the Zapatistas knew that the first step in their insurgency was to disconnect the information infrastructure leading out of Chiapas. Now, Hezbollah owns its own cyberinfrastructure in Lebanon. Mobile phones made the Arab Spring possible. Before the Arab Spring, the most successful anti-Mubarak street protests in Cairo either had been organized by bloggers or were about the persecution of bloggers. In times of crisis, troops are sent to defend the one hotel in the port city where the digital switches that connect the country to the global economy are kept cool in the air-conditioning.

While digital media have made it harder for radical ideologies to captivate the imagination of large numbers of people, information technologies themselves have captured the public imagination. Perhaps most surprising is how technology standards themselves have become a civic issue: an important one—an issue that has an impact on how all other policy issues play out.

Most extremist groups never succeed because their ideologies fail to resonate with enough of the people they claim to be fighting for. Social media make it much easier for people to check facts and figures and sources, and to see how the meaning of words and images have been put into the service of political power. Not everyone checks all the facts all the time when radicals try to use digital media. But it takes only a few people to do this and provide the needed corrections and counterclaims.

Fourth Premise: Social Media Solve Collective Action Problems

Ahmed Maher was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1980. The next year Hosni Mubarak took the reins of political power, starting a thirty-year run as the country’s dictator. This means that Maher had little experience with political alternatives growing up. When two police officers dragged Khaled Said from a cybercafé and beat him to death, Maher and others decided to act.57 The images of Said’s body lying in the morgue—images shared by SMS—were proof of abuse. A few people fed up with violent security services are not enough to drive a revolution. That takes collective action.

Fighting for democracy and freedom presents the mother of all collective-action problems. Why risk tear gas and rubber bullets for an uncertain outcome? Everyone might benefit if you oppose the abuses of a ruling elite. Any one person alone must weigh the daunting costs, risks, and uncertain impact of standing up. What makes an authoritarian government authoritarian is that someone probably will watch you and punish you for your participation.

Too many die at the hands of brutal government-security officials. Increasingly, however, people document the suffering of their loved ones. In Iran, in 2009, Neda Agha-Soltan was shot dead at a street protest, and the video of her blood pooling in the streets of Tehran inspired immense public outrage.⁵⁸ This video inflamed the largest protests since the Iranian revolution of 1979. In Tunisia, in December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation depressed Tunisians, then enraged them to open insurrection.

In Syria, in April 2011, Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb, a thirteen-year-old boy, was brutally tortured and then killed, helping to fuel a civil war.59 In Bahrain, in August 2011, Ali Jawad al-Sheikh was killed when a police tear-gas canister struck him in the head. These victims focused popular anger. Or, more accurately, their stories were carried by digital media over wide networks of family and friends. The stories made people realize that the risks of individual inaction were greater than the risks of collective action.

Having information technologies that can carefully document a government’s failings means that people start to evaluate the costs and benefits of collective action in different ways. If a government terrorizes its people selectively and secretly, most citizens will decide that the risks of rising up in opposition are too great or just too uncertain. But information technologies help people understand what happens if they do nothing. In other words, they start to recognize the costs of staying home, of staying out of the fray: the possibility that random acts of violence might affect them. Taking to the streets no longer seems like risky behavior. Staying at home and doing nothing becomes the real risk.

It’s hard for people to figure out when to join a social movement. As Mancur Olson argues in the Logic of Collective Action, most groups are doomed to fail for structural reasons.⁶⁰ In the abstract, a big group is likely to fail because with so many people in the group, each individual gets only a fractional amount of benefit by contributing to the collective good. A small group is likely to fail because it lacks the resources to have an impact. The best structural scenario for collective action is a big group with lots of shared resources and a few entrepreneurial members willing to do most of the work and figure out the incentives and punishments needed to move everyone else along.

While this is a powerful way of looking at groups in the abstract, it is no longer the best way of explaining why some social movements succeed and others fail. Fundamentally, Olson’s way of looking at the world assumed that members would have only occasional contact with each other. Sharing grievances, discussing problems, and acting on solutions would involve only occasional synchronization over broadcast media and through social networks.

When it comes to understanding today’s popular uprisings and digital-activism campaigns, we can’t forget that communication among group members is usually continuous, if messy. Digital media are almost perfectly aligned with social networks. They are synchronous and two-way. The content is infinitely copy-able and mashable. As Ethan Zuckerman is correct to point out, we often use social media to flock together, strengthening our existing networks.61 Yet digital cosmopolitanism is driven by both a social problem and the information technologies that coordinate solutions. People will learn, adapt, ask for help, and build community, if the social problem is worth solving.

As Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg argue, fresh thinking is needed to understand how digital media solve collective-action problems.⁶² They describe a new logic of “connective action” that explains why digital networks allow collective action in ways that would surprise Olson. Their argument is that digital media help to personalize contentious issues, so that we can all do a better job interpreting the real risks and benefits to participating in collective action. This helps to explain why Maher—and so many others—decided to act in concert against Mubarak. And it helps to explain why spontaneous temporary teams have been able to use voluntary digital mapping projects to solve collective-action problems that have remained intractable for decades.

Looking around the world, research has found that a large proportion of digital activism projects have failed. The vast majority of crowd-sourced maps are started and never used.63 One of the key findings from global research on digital activism is that bad ideas and poorly executed civic projects fail quickly, while good ideas and effective online projects spread quickly.⁶⁴ The overall impact, over several years, has been an impressive list of problems tackled: a growing list of domains in which digital networks have solved collective action problems that, for many years, had not been resolved.

Fifth Premise: Big Data Backs Human Security

If the trends hold steady, by 2020, almost all of humankind will be online. Almost all the books will be there. All the communication between people who aren’t in the same room will be digitally mediated, and the physical goods we send to each other will depend on logistics managed by digital systems. Having so many people communicate about so many issues over so many devices creates immense amounts of data. Not all of it is analyzable, and even that which is analyzable is not necessarily useful. Moreover, if the internet of mobile phones and computers produced big data, what will the internet of things generate? For the most part, big data helps people tackle some of the most intractable human security problems.

The internet of things is only going to make big data gargantuan. Much of what we have is often called “dark data.” Such data is unstructured, unprocessed, and not easily turned into information, much less wisdom. The hype around using big data to predict flu vectors raised unreasonable expectations.65 What makes big data important for international affairs is that so much of it is now networked and geolocational. Some seventy-five billion apps have been downloaded for smartphones so far, and there are some two billion smartphones out there. If the average phone has thirty-eight apps on it, and the apps ping a server three times a day, the network generates 226 billion location points.

Think about what you might want to flag in a dataset of credit card purchases. Say you wanted to identify anyone in the United States who researches bomb making online, and then buys bomb-making supplies. By 2020, there will be around 174 billion noncash transactions each year in the United States, including ones for credit cards and paper checks that now are processed electronically.⁶⁶ That means 5,500 transactions per second. Each transaction generates several kinds of data about the buyer, the seller, the location, and the product.

To flag a bomb maker with bomb-making supplies, the data miner would have to pull something recognizable from all that data. And if the bomb components are also generating a data trail, then the information needs to be carefully merged. So the number of financial transactions will grow in parallel, presenting a significant analytical challenge. Some people would argue that the government should not be studying such data at all. There are some reasonable trade-offs for protecting democracy. In this example, flagging people who read about bomb making and then buy bomb-making ingredients is reasonable.

Computer scientists have a formal definition of “big data.” For them, big data often involves millions of cases, incidents, or files. It involves data generated by many people over many devices. It is measured in terabytes, petabytes, or more. Big data is important to the rest of us for several reasons. We used to have micro-level data about social life—the everyday portraits of interaction generated by journalists and sociologists. We used to have macro-level data, generated through telephone surveys, national censuses, and other large datasets that compared entire countries. Big data, in contrast, provides even richer evidence about particular people and broad social trends, and links it through mesolevel data about social ties and your changing behavior over time.

Moreover, we used to categorize data by using our intuition to come up with labels. Now we can let categories emerge from the data through a process we call machine learning. In art, this is the difference between making a sculpture by imposing a design, on one hand, and, on the other, bringing the design out of the rock. Big data is using ever more sophisticated computational models of political behavior. The internet of things is going to make it even easier for researchers and political consultants to use big data in ever more sophisticated computational models to predict political behavior.67

In recent years there has been an increasing number of cases demonstrating how big data, often combined with social-media campaigns, can serve to alert both the public and political leaders. Some kinds of monitoring problems are related to arms control, the drug trade, or human trafficking. Many more are related to human security, and connected to health or labor standards that have an impact on the quality of life for significant numbers of people. Big data, when collected purposefully and interpreted well, supports human security broadly. The startup Premise, for example, uses mobile apps to collate pricing information for the world’s food staples, from onions to milk.68

The internet of things is going to have a big impact on current events. The job of monitoring a problem, verifying that something can be done, and complying with expectations for solving it is tough, especially in global contexts. Fortunately, there is a growing number of vigilante watchers, citizen journalists, hacktivists, and whistle blowers.

In many countries, the government is also the largest employer. And payroll is a big target for corrupt officials. So any system that helps the government pay its employees properly makes the entire economy a little more transparent and efficient. In Afghanistan, when the government started paying its police officers using “mobile money” through mobile phones, many officers were surprised at the size of their paychecks. Some thought they had been given a raise, but it turns out that the new system simply cut out the middlemen who had long been taking their cut.⁶⁹ Local bureaucrats could no longer carve out their portion, and funds were suddenly flowing right from the public purse to the public employees. Using digital networks in this big way not only makes it easier to manage the economic role of the state, it improves the personal financial security of public employees.

Even the smallest of NGOs has the capacity to build its own communication campaign and watch either government or corporate behavior. Another reason data is important is that it is useful for catching the lies of government leaders who can’t quite admit the truth about bad trends in their country. Everyone knows that China’s economic forecasting data is bad. But its carbon emissions data is also bad—making it tougher to study trends in global warming.

Research teams went back over a decade of statistics on carbon emissions that each Chinese province had published. Then they compared the sum of provincial reports to the totals from the national report, and the numbers simply didn’t add up. The national-level statistics revealed a 7.5 percent annual increase in emissions. Altogether, the provincial-level statistics added up to an 8.5 percent annual increase—but the numbers should have been the same.

It may seem like a small discrepancy, but we are talking about China. By 2010 this amounted to a difference of some 1.4 billion tons of carbon pollution a year.70 Were the bureaucrats in Beijing understating the problem, or the bureaucrats in the provincial capitals overstating their figures? The first lesson is that China’s economic growth is coming with an environmental cost. The second is that when you let people plumb through data, they find inconsistencies. Sometimes the mistakes are malicious and politically motivated, and sometimes they are not. But spotting numbers that don’t add up is an important step in framing and fixing a problem.

Around the world, open-data movements are improving the quality of governance. As we learned in the previous chapter, this is not just about governments but about ways of organizing civic life. It won’t matter whether China’s government adopts an open-data policy any time soon—the internet of things will generate enough data to keep many China watchers busy.

People are creatively playing with data, some of it gleaned from reluctant governments. Some of that data feeds interesting predictive markets. Such markets don’t always work well, and because they trade in odds, you can count the number of times they don’t work at all. The models are getting better, and specialists use them to gauge popular and expert opinion on likely political outcomes. When will a dictator fall from power? Will Russia claim more territory from neighboring countries? Someone is taking bets, and someone else is data mining and running experimental conflict models.71

With global supplies of data about us being used globally, we are going to have to rethink our assumptions of national sovereignty. States may recognize one another as independent territories. Some states may even be sovereign in that they effectively control the people and resources within their borders. But they will have limited control over the internet of things within their borders.

In fact, people have used the internet aggressively to reassemble some almost forgotten identities, almost always at the expense of national identity. This manipulation has occurred mostly within authoritarian regimes, which seem to see ever more breakaway republics, autonomous zones, and rebel enclaves. Even some democracies have begun to suffer, with increasingly potent claims for cultural autonomy arising. Indeed, almost every democracy has a subculture that has become more aggressive in demanding political independence.

Spain’s Catalans, Belgian’s Flemish, and Great Britain’s Scots have all used the internet to organize bold claims for political self-governance. Australia’s aboriginal communities, Norway’s Sami and Canada’s Innu are groups with something in common: they are territorially disparate national minorities who have used digital media to build their collective identity, lobby for recognition, and improve self-governance. Many don’t even live in the lands of their ancestors.

But community members in Sydney, Toronto, and Oslo have reached out to their far-flung family and friends. They have reconnected, and have revived the idea of homelands in Australia, Nunavut in Canada, and Samiland in Norway. In an internet of things that connects so much more of our daily lives with the lives of others, people will probably use the technologies to promote the identities that mean the most to them. For people using the internet to develop a political life, national identities haven’t always been the highest priority.

Defining the Pax Technica

The pax technica is a political, economic, and cultural arrangement of social institutions and networked devices in which government and industry are tightly bound in mutual defense pacts, design collaborations, standards setting, and data mining. Over the past quarter-century we have learned a lot about the political impact of new information technologies. Given that our internet is evolving into an internet of connected things, it makes sense to apply what we know in some conservative premises. If these are the premises of the pax technica, what are the consequences—desirable or otherwise?

We have begun an extended period of stability brought about by the dominance of an internet built and maintained by Western democracies. This expansive network of devices has allowed viral social movements that are massive, networked, leaderless, temporary, and multi-issue. Power flows to people and organizations that control digital media or that do creative things with information infrastructure.

Political conflict and competition, in domestic and global contexts, occur over or through information technology. The internet is now standard issue as a weapon for elites seeking social control, and for activists seeking to solve collective-action problems. Conflict and competition are expressed through digital media, from start to finish.

Historically, significant new information infrastructure has ushered in periods of prolonged stability. Reorganizing and rebuilding streets, reconsidering the layout of towns, investing in public transportation and communications systems have all had their payoffs in predictable interactions.

This is part of what explains the rise of Rome and Britain. Rome’s roads provided the network that stitched together vast, conquered territories in a way that both defined the empire’s economy and demarked the core and periphery. Britain’s naval networks defined that empire’s economy, and connected people and resources in expansive ties of core and periphery. These empires were not free of violence, but they enjoyed sustained peace that allowed for incredible innovations alongside significant exploitation of conquered cultures.

In the pax technica, the core and the periphery are not territorially assigned but socially and technologically constructed. Or, rather, what connects us is not fixed infrastructure like roads and canals, but pervasive devices with connected sensors. Stability will take the form of cyberdeterrence, new forms of governance, marginalized radicalism, more clans and clubs, and better security for more people.

This doesn’t mean that the notions of the core and the periphery are irrelevant. Instead, core and periphery are relevant in terms of culture, status, language, media sophistication, information skills, and social capital. Such attributes may appear geographically distributed. Geography and infrastructure are certainly interdependent. What explains the distribution of social inequalities will increasingly be information access and skills, not physical access and territorial placement.

If there are positive things we can say about the political stability that the internet of things can provide, what are some of the big threats to this stability? What are the best strategies for deepening the encouraging impact of social media over the negative consequences?