FIVE CONSEQUENCES OF THE PAX TECHNICA
In a world in which most of our political, economic, and cultural lives are mediated by networked devices, power lies in setting technical standards. Simply put, you either set technical standards or you follow them. International tensions over competing technology standards are only going to increase as governments and firms identify the engineering protocols, licensing arrangements, and telecommunications standards that will allow them to use the internet of things to advance their goals.
Being purposeful about the design of the internet of things is the safest way to export democracy. However, the internet of things is being built over the internet we have now. For each of the premises about the political internet in the previous chapter, there’s a consequence for the emerging internet of things.
1. Major governments and firms will hold back on inflicting real damage to rival device networks for fear of suffering consequences themselves—a kind of cyberdeterrence against debilitating attacks.
2. Even more communities will be able to replace their failing governments with institutional arrangements that provide distinct governance goods over the internet of things.
3. The primary fissures of global politics will be among rival device networks and the competing technology standards and media ecosystems that entrench the internet of things.
4. People will use the internet of things for connective action, especially for those crypto-clans organized over networks of trust and reciprocity established by people and mediated by their devices.
5. The great new flows of data from the internet of things will make it much easier for security services to stop crime and terrorism, but unless civil society groups also have access to such data, it will be difficult to know how pervasive censorship and surveillance really is.
Even some of the most banal engineering protocols for how the internet works can have immense implications for political life. If the Russians, Chinese, or Iranians can put those protocols to work for their political projects, they will. Technology standards used to be left to technocrats—the experts who actually understood the internet. But political leaders of all stripes have seen how information technology shapes political outcomes, so they’ve taken over and exacerbated technology disputes in predictable ways.
Imagine that the internet is an empire.1 It’s the year 2020, and the empire is made up of some eight billion people and thirty billion devices. Both constitute the empire, because while people have political values, devices report on both behaviors and attitudes. People have power inasmuch as they are citizens who can use their devices and are aware of how information from those devices is used by others.
The key infrastructure for this empire comprises advanced networks of cables and wireless connections. Being an active citizen of this empire can mean participating in political life through a laptop, mobile phone, or another chipped device. Even those without laptops or mobile phones have an impact because data about their economic, cultural, and social lives feeds political conversations. Their behavior, since they interact with the internet of things, generates data too.
This economic empire has upward of $4 trillion worth of economic exchanges, making it the fifth-largest economy after the United States, China, Japan, and India.2 The speed of its transactions is mind-boggling, and the pace of its economic growth is rapid. Facebook is one of the empire’s biggest provinces, with more than a billion citizens and the device networks that have been given permission to share in Facebook’s data streams.
Most people on the planet have varying degrees of membership in this empire—their clout demonstrated by the clarity of data about their attitudes and behavior and the savvy with which they can control the data about themselves. In comparison with other empires, this one is constantly expanding in coverage through the addition of more devices. In the early years much of its population lived in North America and Europe, but now its citizens are spread around the world. In 1989, most internet users were found in the United States, and there were around 900,000 of them. By 2015, around 900,000 new citizens from around the world were joining each day and almost all of the 4.3 billion existing internet addresses had been given to devices. Fortunately, in this scenario, by 2020 a new addressing system will allow every human-made object to have an address.3
Like empires throughout history, there are also persistent inequalities. In wealthy parts of the empire the internet is fast, mobile-phone connections are dependable, and the internet of things is transmitting useful information that improves product design and user experience without compromising privacy. This means that even more of the benefits of being connected to the global-information economy accrue in those wealthy neighborhoods. In other places the infrastructure is a little older, and not surprisingly, the possible health and welfare benefits arrive unevenly.
When motivated, this empire rivals the United States and China for political dominance. More important, some countries are determined to stop the internet from having too much political power. They fight back by meddling with its infrastructure, discouraging open standards, and censoring and surveilling its inhabitants. Sometimes they even try to build new internets and subnetworks.
As an empire, the internet of things certainly has its enemies and rivals. The group Reporters Without Borders regularly classifies the “State Enemies of the Internet.”4 Bahrain, China, Iran, Syria, and Vietnam are the governments that most consistently use connected devices to censor and surveil their people and poison other device networks. One of the founding provinces of this empire, the United States, occasionally appears on the list for its government’s aggressive surveillance programs.5
The Russians, Iranians, Saudis, and Venezuelans try to work alongside the internet empire to various degrees. They still face a digital dilemma when they try to get the economic benefits of participating in the empire without the political risks to their own authoritarian rule. Even the U.S. government gives mixed signals, having built this empire’s foundations but with elements of its government doing so much to meddle. Smaller regimes fear the empire. Some try to coexist peacefully with it, some try to undermine it. The Chinese aggressively undermine it by designing rival technologies on parallel networks. They are still trying to build their own internet of connected things.
The latest sensors and mobile-phone technologies connect the inhabitants of the pax technica. This empire is key to the economic life of all the smaller countries, and the innovations of its high-tech industries have an impact on wars around the world, determine the fate of political leaders in many different kinds of governments, and bring communities of interest and identity together.
Its inhabitants have to put up with surveillance—from marketing firms, political lobbyists, academics, and national-security services. And keeping the legal checks and balances over these actors requires constant vigilance.
Moreover, not everything this empire produces is wanted. Every day it generates more and more spam, porn, hate speech, and bad ideas. Sometimes it seems like an empire of anarchy, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t occasional leaders, moments of consensus, or deliberate actions. The opinions of its inhabitants matter, and they can make or break an entertainer, a corporation, or a political movement. Temporary teams form, and when they are motivated to act, they can have an impact, whether we are talking about huge parts of our culture, business, or politics.
Of course, the internet isn’t quite a country, a superpower, or an empire. Thinking about scenarios for the future is less about predicting specific outcomes than about being prescient about the trends that are likely to continue. We will be layering the internet of things over the internet infrastructure we’ve built so far, with consequences for each of the five safe premises discussed in Chapter 4. Thinking about the likely political consequences of expanding device networks may help us identify ways to prevent the worst of the possibilities from materializing. What are the likely consequences of expanding device networks for the way we organize, communicate, and do politics?
First Consequence: Networked Devices and the Stability of Cyberdeterrence
Each major period of political history is defined by its military. Or to put it another way, the major weapons of the time have historically helped to define political realities. The stability of the Cold War rested on nuclear deterrence. In the years ahead, global peace will be maintained by cyberdeterrence, and any balance of power among state actors will be achieved through either cyberwar or the perception of other actors’ abilities to wage it.
So many governments and economies will be so dependent on the internet of things that massive attacks using it will be less likely. The proliferation of internet devices will result in a balance of power akin to when a handful of nuclear states held an uncomfortable balance of power. There will be an analogous possibility of accidents, and there will be regional conflicts where minor cyberskirmishes erupt. Based on our recent history, the prospects for all-out cyberwar diminish as the internet of things spreads.
Cyberwar has developed in interesting ways. At first, there were occasional and targeted attacks for specific military secrets. The earliest examples of cyberwarfare date back to the 1980s and 1990s, when Soviet and later Russian hackers went after U.S. military technologies.6 It wasn’t until the turn of the current century that the first cyberwar incidents and campaigns occurred: multiple attacks with retaliations and strategies, involving multiple people who had clearly taken sides or had been sponsored by sides. In this second phase, the attacks were mostly about embarrassing opponents by defacing their websites and demonstrating superior skills.
We’ve entered a more serious phase in recent years, with extended exchanges of cyberattacks by trained professionals and contracted freelancers. They go after both military and corporate secrets. The public performance of these attacks is important, and getting news coverage for a hack can be a strategic bonus. Many of the more recent attacks are about stealing intellectual property, or about crippling an opponent’s ability to develop intellectual property. Cyberwar involves the professional staff of established militaries that no longer just act in response to offline events but are trained to respond to the last cyberattack.
For example, when the United States bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, Chinese hackers went after several U.S. government websites and brought down the White House website for days. But in 2001, Israeli and Arab hackers went after each other, and each other’s internet service providers, for four months. Today, the assault from firms and state agencies in China is constant.
While “cyberpeace” would certainly be preferable to cyberwar, the internet of things will probably support two dependable dynamics of conflict. First, deterrence sets up a kind of stable understanding among all the parties with the skills to damage one another’s information infrastructure. Second, one of the most dependable rhythms in current events arises from the cycles of learning and creativity that come with digital media—and how it’s used for political ends. Democracy advocates and civil-society leaders try something creative and new. This can throw ruling elites off guard.
When surprised, ruling elites sometimes respond violently and ruthlessly. Sometimes they are so unprepared that they falter, stall, surrender, or make major concessions. Elites in neighboring countries learn from their fallen peers and adapt. Other elites, in neighboring countries, learn. They observe and develop the counterinsurgency strategy that uses device networks for entrapment, propaganda, and the other strategies of social control.
The cascading events of the Arab Spring provide an example of how these cycles work. Digital images of people who suffered at the hands of government security forces circulated among young Tunisians and Egyptians. These images inspired massive turnouts at street protests. Equipped with mobile phones and Facebook, protesters were able to coordinate themselves with an information infrastructure that government officials were not used to manipulating. In frustration, the government eventually tried to disable the country’s entire information infrastructure—to pull the plug on its internet access. Elites in Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia watched closely. When protests emerged in those countries—a few weeks after momentum had built in Tunisia and Egypt—governments were ready with new strategies. Morocco and Jordan offered immediate concessions, and the civil unrest dissipated. Saudi Arabia offered financial concessions—incentives including money for food, rent, and other basics totaling $130 billion to its citizens—while also making a military response.7 Bahrain, with help from the Saudi government, went straight to a military response, with a heavy-handed crackdown on anyone taking part in a protest.
Moreover, the regimes embroiled in homegrown uprisings found that they could use Facebook and Twitter for their own ends. Because activists were using these digital media to coordinate protests, state security services could use the same tools to coordinate arrests. New users, with false profiles, popped up and called protesters to particular intersections, where those who came were arrested. Police could follow the social networks of protest leaders to map out the ties between organizers and followers. Regime spin doctors could monitor the communications of protest organizers and be ready for questions from journalists. At the beginning of the Arab Spring, Facebook and text-messaging services were tools for the protesters. By the end, Facebook and text messaging were counterinsurgency tools for ruling elites.
Around the world, protesters try tactics with new devices, and regimes learn. Then protesters try new tactics. The civic use of digital media almost always outpaces that of governments. Even governments with some technical capacity often limit their strategies to surveillance and censorship. Every new device that gets connected to the internet gets repurposed in some way. The user, a bot, or a hacker does things with device networks that technology designers never anticipated.
Authoritarian regimes learn slowly, and tend to be reactive. They often have to hire hackers to attack civil-society groups. Other than hiring censorship firms from Silicon Valley, they tend not to be creative with new tools. Activists learn quickly, and they are desperate and creative. Increasingly, they get tech support from civil-society groups, governments, and citizens in the West. The internet of things will be a powerful weapon for the political actors that know how to use it. Perhaps most important, the value and strength of the internet of things will not rely directly on any particular government’s stability.
Second Consequence: Governance Through the Internet of Things
Digital governance solutions thrive when established institutions fail and networked devices are available. The important consequence of social-media mapping is that working around scheduled events like elections or humanitarian challenges help community leaders prepare for unscheduled events. Early mapping projects often flopped, but having a group meet and practice coding was useful practice. When projects flopped or had a negligible impact, organizers learned from their failure, such that when some other collective action problem arose—election violence or a sudden forest fire—the social capital and networked devices were available. What we learn from all those social media–mapping projects is that a few altruistic people with even modest technology skills can have a significant humanitarian impact. What do those projects teach us about the prospects for governance over an internet of things?
These days, many experts speak of “governance goods” instead of governance. Governments are supposed to provide goods like working sewage lines and dependable electricity. They are supposed to provide more abstract benefits like trustworthy policies, reasonable banking rules, a postal service, and security from internal and external threats. In times of crises, governments are supposed to provide access to food and shelter. Device networks, when people are encouraged to be creative, can make a wide variety of governance systems more efficient. As discussed in Chapter 4, widespread networks of mobile phones have made food markets more efficient by eliminating waste and reducing wild variations in price. Even more widespread networks, of devices equipped with sensors, can provide more of such stability under the right conditions.
In places where these goods and services aren’t provided, people make their own arrangements and fare as best they can. So if there are no trustworthy banks, for example—or no banks that will serve a particular community—mobile phones with banking apps provide an adequate substitute. For us in the West, mobile banking may not seem like an important governance good, because we have a host of stable banking options. In parts of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, mobile banking systems provide much-needed governance goods.
When states fail, people use digital media to build new organizations and craft their own institutional arrangements. Policy wonks in Washington, D.C., rarely use the term “failed states” anymore, but regardless of the term used, an unfortunate number of governments have ceased to function. Indeed, state failure doesn’t always take the form of a catastrophic and complete collapse in government. States can fail at particular moments, like election time, or in particular domains, such as in tax collection. But the mobile phone doesn’t take the place of your member of parliament or your government; it substitutes for governance.
For example, in much of sub-Saharan Africa, banking institutions have failed to provide the poor with financial security or the benefits of organized banking. This is due to both a lack of incentive to serve the poor as a customer base and to a regulatory failure on the part of governments that try to establish stable and secure banking regulations for countries. These days, in response, whenever or wherever financial institutions have failed whole communities, mobile phones support complex networks of private lending and community-banking initiatives. Plenty of other large projects involve institutional innovation through technology, so let’s evaluate a few.
M-Pesa is a money-transfer system that relies on mobile phones, not banks or the government.8 Airtime itself has become a kind of transferable asset alternative to government-backed paper currency.9 M-Pesa is popular in Kenya, but almost every country in Africa has an equivalent service because the banking sectors are either corrupt, too small, or just not interested in serving the poor. Since the “governance good” that can come from having a banking sector that gets some regulatory oversight is missing, people have taken to using their phones to collect and transfer value.
Moreover, they make personal sacrifices to be able to have the technology to participate in this new institutional arrangement. Kenya-based iHUB Research found that people would forgo meat at mealtime if doing so would save enough funds to allow them to make a call or send a text message that might result in some return.10 In the first half of 2012, M-Pesa moved some $8.6 billion, so this isn’t a boutique service.11 Phone credits are currency that isn’t taxed by the government. To put this in some context: a typical day laborer in Kenya might earn a dollar a day, but the value of personal sacrifices for mobile-phone access amounts to 84 cents a week.12 Two-thirds of Kenyans now send money over the phone.
Politics is about who gets infrastructure, and maps are the highly politicized index of how people and resources are organized. Maps are a key artifact of political power. As discussed in Chapter 3, people in one of Nairobi’s uncharted slums made their own digital map specifically for the purpose of identifying public-infrastructure needs and levying their own taxes to help pay for urgent repairs.13 Ushahidi, the online-mapping platform, can claim many important victories in the battle to provide open records about the demand and supply of social services.
The political power that can come from digital media is the power to let people write and rewrite institutional arrangements. In some parts of the Philippines, the justice system has largely collapsed. So vigilante groups equipped with mobile phones and social-networking applications have organized themselves with their own internal governance system to dispense justice. They deliberate about targets and negotiate about tasks, and they are responsible for upward of ten thousand murders in Manila.
And these days, when individuals feel that their government is not providing the governance goods needed in specific domains, digital media provides the workaround. Average Americans who felt that the U.S. government was not doing enough to support the Green Movement in Iran in 2009 could dedicate their own computational resources to democracy activists. Citizens unhappy with government efforts at overseas development assistance turn to Kickstarter.com to advance their own aid priorities. The next cyberwar might be started by Bulgarian hackers, the Syrian Electronic Army, or Iranian Basiji militias, but it might also be started by Westerners using basic online tools to launch their own Twitter bots.14
Even when state failure is partial, or perhaps especially when state failure is partial, people increasingly organize to provide their own governance goods through the internet. For example, when the local government in Monterrey, Mexico, failed to provide public-warning systems about street battles between drug gangs and the military, desperate citizens developed their own public-communication systems. And once in a while there is an example of how governments in wealthy democracies can fail to provide governance at a key moment or in a key domain. During Hurricane Sandy, open-data maps both provided the public with emergency news and information and significantly expanded New York City’s capacity to serve citizens in crisis.15
Government is not the only source of governance. Technologyled governance is not always a good thing. The internet of things will probably strengthen social cohesion to such a degree that when regular government structures break down, or weaken, they can be repaired or substituted. In other words, people will continue using the internet of things to provide governance when government is absent.
Third Consequence: From a Clash of Civilizations to a Competition Between Device Networks
Information activism is already a global ideological movement, and competition among device networks will replace a clash of civilizations as the primary political fault line of global conflict. Samuel Huntington famously divided the world into nine competing political ideologies, and described these as largely irreconcilable worldviews that were destined to clash.16 What is more likely, in a world of pervasive sensors and networked devices, is a competition among device networks. The most important clash will be between the people and devices that push for open and interoperable networks and those who work for closed networks.
The dominance of technology over ideology has two stabilizing consequences. The first is that information activism is now a global movement. Every country in the world has some kind of information-freedom campaign that allows for a consistent, global conversation about how different kinds of actors are using and abusing digital media. The second is that the diffusion of digital media is supporting popular movements for democratic accountability. Some Silicon Valley firms build hardware and software for dictators, and as I’ll show in the next chapter the serious threat to the pax technica comes from the rival network growing out of China.
Many civil-society groups, even those not concerned with technology policy issues, now think of internet freedoms as human rights. People mobilize themselves on information policy, and civil-society groups have taken up technology standards as civic issues. The reasons are evident: civic leaders realize that their ability to activate the public shapes their political opportunities, and political elites realize that their capacity to rule depends on their control of device networks. The result is that every country in the world has an active tech community that is connected to a global alliance of privacy and information-freedom groups. Some of these activists started their work through the Global Voices network.17 Others came to technology issues when their websites were attacked, or when their broadband connections got throttled by national ISPs.
In terms of political opinion, they run the spectrum, and many are more interested in fast-streaming access to content about the Eurovision contest or distant soccer games than in political news. Some are libertarian, others progressive, some conservative, and some a mix of all three. But they are all often dedicated to pushing back on onerous government regulations over their internet access, and some participate in, or eagerly read about, technology issues from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, tweet about the latest reports on their country from the Open Society Foundation or Reporters Without Borders, run Tor Project software quietly on their home equipment, and even participate in training sessions from the Tactical Technology Collective.
Even the most banal technology standards in the poorest of countries get scrutinized by civic groups emboldened by John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” or Hillary Clinton’s arguments that internet freedoms are a foreign policy priority.18 When I visited Tajikistan a few years ago, the government simply didn’t have an employee who was in charge of public-spectrum allocation. The Aga Khan Foundation was providing a staff of three Western-educated computer science interns to help set policy.19 Who would have thought that young civil-society actors would want to weigh in on how the public spectrum gets allocated, or want to attend specialized International Telecommunication Union meetings on internet protocols?
Digital media have allowed civil society to bloom, even in the toughest of regimes. Telecommix, Anonymous, and CANVAS are committed to teaching civic leaders to be more tech savvy.20 These groups include Nawaat in Tunisia and Piggipedia in Egypt.21 Piggipedia may not bring many prosecutions of police torturers. But it breaks the fear barrier for citizens, helps victims find a way to respond, and reminds police that they should be accountable public actors. It used to be that the nuances of internet protocols were left to engineers concerned with system efficiency and business opportunities. A growing number of people, especially in the West, have a basic literacy about cookies, privacy, and censorship. This is a good thing.
Information activism has developed a powerful ideology of its own, one that can shape the spending priorities of governments. A cadre of civic groups has real clout in technology policy. At the end of 2012, activists’ lobbying helped to prevent the ITU in Dubai from giving governments the power to interfere with the internet. In the United States, they defeated the antipiracy legislation known as the Stop Online Piracy Act because it went too far in protecting the interests of record labels and media companies. They took on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in Europe and worked aggressively on Brazil’s bill of internet rights, the Marco Civil. They have successfully campaigned against national firewalls in countries like Pakistan and aggressive cybercrime laws in the Philippines. Sympathizers and concerned citizens contribute the computing power of their home machines to Tor networks, particularly in times of crises for democracy movements in other countries.
As Muzammil Hussain demonstrates, the pace of collaboration between the state department and Silicon Valley quickened after the Arab Spring.22 In its aftermath, information activism has grown more sophisticated, and moved into a transnational environment, as demonstrated by Western democracy–initiated stakeholder gatherings. AccessNow, the main organization that lobbied corporations to keep communications networks running and pressured technology companies to stop selling software tools to dictators, organized the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference in November 2011.23 The event was sponsored by Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, AT&T, Skype, and other technology firms, and it brought together the corporate leaders and foreign policy officials of major Western democratic nations to design policies for corporate social responsibility in the interest of international human rights. Similarly, the governments of the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the European Union all created formal funding programs totaling more than $100 million to support digital activists working from within repressive regimes.
At least seven conventions and conferences have been brokered by the foreign policy offices of key Western democratic countries since the Arab Spring. These meetings have brought together information activists and technology corporations. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has referred to this interesting mix of brokered meetings as “twenty-first-century statecraft.” Information activists increasingly find themselves working diplomatically with Western foreign policy makers on one hand and also targeting and lobbying businesses to stop building technologies for repressive regimes.
In several European countries, the civic groups that formed under the banner of defending “internet freedoms” have successfully become political parties. The Pirate Bay, a file-sharing website, inspired widespread interest in intellectual-property issues. Enough interest, in fact, that small new political parties have popped up around the world, taken the name of the Pirate Party, and fielded candidates for elected office. By 2015, Pirate Parties had started in more than forty countries, and dozens of party members had been elected to city and regional governments in countries around the world.24 In short, technology access, digital-cultural production, and information access have become civic issues. Civil-society groups from across the political spectrum are now concerned with privacy and information policy because these things have such an impact on their work.
Even outside Europe, networks of like-minded technology advocates turned their online activism into Pirate Parties.25 Significant numbers of voters have put Pirates into office, raising the visibility of technology-related issues and improving the public’s literacy on intellectual property law reform, public-spectrum allocation, and telecommunications standards setting. In some authoritarian regimes, where governments worked for decades to close down policy domains from open debate, discussion of technology policy was tolerated. In part, this was because many authoritarian states either had no capacity to set internet policies or did not think them worth controlling. This made technology access a civic issue that was safe to mobilize on—at first. With newfound skills in organizing, educating, and lobbying governments, these public-interest groups have been able to expand to other issue domains.
People sometimes say that the internet doesn’t “cause” democracy. Or “it’s the people, not the mobile phones.” But people and their technology are often impossible to separate. Try to imagine your life without your mobile phone or your internet connection. Or try to tell the story of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, or any recent international social movement without mentioning digital media. You’ll find yourself with an incomplete story. Many of the people involved with these movements are eager to talk about the devices and media that are their tools of resistance. Their technology and their story go together.
Political scientists have found similar causal narratives when they compare many different kinds of political changes over time: media use, as a causal factor conjoined with others, often provides the best explanation for political outcomes. In other words, economic wealth, social inequality, and education are robust predictors of democracy on their own. But their explanatory power grows when these variables are paired with media use. Social development is important, but understanding diffusion patterns is even more important. Predictors of spatial proximity, networks, and digital media have become among the most important parts of any democratization analysis. In some ways, the relationship between media exposure and democratization is pretty straightforward. Exposure to news and information from democracies raises the hopes of those living in authoritarian regimes. The introduction of device networks means more knowledge about the standard of living in Western democracies and the rise of incentives to create sustainable democracy at home.
Of course, device networks get embedded in cultures, introducing different patterns of adoption and local variations in political values. The causal relationship is there. In fact, research suggests that it was media control that prevented democratic norms from spreading around the Middle East, and the introduction of digital media and social media that undermined these same controls. In the years leading up to the Arab Spring, whole cohorts of young people across North Africa were developing political identities under the very noses of aging elites who had ruled for decades. This was possible because these young people used their devices to build their own trust networks. Young people, and democracy advocates, will continue to do this with new device networks. A good many of these will be distributed networks in which people may not have met but have validated one another through personal ties and trusted cryptography.
Fourth Consequence: Connective Action and Crypto Clans
The fourth consequence of the internet of things is that connective action will solve more and more collective problems. Whereas Ahmed Maher had a powerful reason for joining a popular uprising for democracy, Eliot Higgins’s interest in the Syrian civil war is tough to figure out. As the blogger “Brown Moses,” Higgins develops his hobby for a cause. He tracks the weapons that appear in images and video coming out of conflict zones. He records who is holding which assault rifle, where armaments appear to be stored, and what impact those weapons have.
His research has been used by media outlets and politicians. He culls his observations from hundreds of YouTube videos filed by journalists and citizens caught up in the conflict. When the Syrian government denied using cluster bombs on its people, he had the video evidence to catch its lie. He found barrel bombs when the Russians said none were being used. He has counted and catalogued shoulder-launched, heat-seeking missiles and found Croatian weapons that must have come to the Syrian opposition with Western assistance. The systematic evidence about the regime’s use of ballistic missiles, which he collected at his home computer, triggered an Amnesty International investigation.
Getting good information from countries in crisis is always difficult, and it is even more difficult when ruling elites have a lot to hide. Higgins isn’t Syrian, hasn’t been to Syria, and has no long-term ties to Syria. He has no weapons training and has taught himself to recognize weaponry using online sources.26 Why would he get involved?
Brown Moses is only one of many people and projects that have put the interests of a few or one to work for the many. Indeed, as more people get mobile phones and smartphones, more digital-activism projects have appeared. The main antidote to dirty networks of gun runners is the attention of social media. Modern political life is rife with examples of how people have used social media to catch dictators off guard and engage their neighbors with political questions.
Ushahidi, the mapping platform for crowd-sourced knowledge, has a good record of problem solving. It may be one of the largest and most high profile of such providers of connective action, but it’s not the only one. Uchaguzi is a platform built specifically for monitoring the Kenyan election in 2013.27 In neighboring Nigeria, researchers find that the number and location of electoral fraud reports is highly correlated with voter turnout.28 This means that social media are starting to generate statistically valid snapshots of what’s happening on the ground—even in countries as chaotic as Nigeria. Still, connective action doesn’t just happen through crowd-sourced maps.
Indian Kanoon, an online, searchable database on Indian law, has opened up a whole swath of data to the average person.29 Many Indians are proud of living in the largest democracy in the world, but it is difficult for average citizens to understand Indian law. The text of an act can be extensive, and finding the small section of law that has a bearing on any specific issue can be difficult. Extracting the applicable sections from hundreds of pages of law documents is too daunting for nonlawyers. Moreover, laws are often vague, and one needs to see how they have been interpreted by judges. In Indian law libraries, the laws and judgments are often maintained separately, making it difficult for average citizens to link relevant laws with judgments and precedents. Indian Kanoon is helping to make the law more accessible.
In Russia, Liza Alert helps coordinate the search for missing children.30 Other sites track complaints about poor public services and coordinate volunteers.31 People use the internet to track corruption at universities in Kenya and Uganda.32 India’s I Paid a Bribe project inspired similar projects in Pakistan and Kenya.33 Altogether, these projects don’t simply make up a scattered network of do-gooders. Over the past decade we’ve seen civil-society actors develop digital tools for engaging with the public and with public policy makers. India’s Kiirti platform relies on the public to identify problems, crowd-sources the process of verification, involves a civic group in identifying relevant policy makers, and summarizes the trends for policy makers.34 Today, digital activists are often found at the center of new social movements.
Vladimir Putin’s hold on national broadcast media has been so tight that civil-society actors turned to the internet, and there they bloomed—and found solidarity. In an important way, the Russian internet became the home of the effective opposition, because it was there that the best investigative journalism, anticorruption campaigns, and groups like Pussy Riot found audiences. In Tunisia and Egypt, before the Arab Spring, the largest civic protests were either organized by bloggers or were about the arrest of bloggers.
People have used device networks to produce very different kinds of social movements. During the revolutions of 1848, the civil unrest of 1968, and the popular uprisings of 1989, formal hierarchical organizations drove political events. They were well organized, had clear leadership structures, and were armed with ideological or nationalist zeal. They often had the savvy to put then-new media to work for them and their propaganda: leaflets, radio, and cassette tapes carried messages to supporters. Social networks were important for binding together people within the same working class, and the result was large cohorts of like-minded socialists, nationalists, and freedom fighters who acted in concert and were quick to form political parties.
Today’s social movements are distinct. They are much less about class and race, and no longer so driven by prepackaged ideologies and high-profile, charismatic leaders. Now social movements are temporary networks of networks, sharing grievances and a negotiated action plan. The first wave of protesters on the streets of Tunis and Cairo were young and middle class—they weren’t just Islamists, Marxists, or the poor from urban slums. Street protests involved networked groups, many of which had formed around specific digital initiatives. They governed themselves in peculiar ways.
The modern social movement is a temporary team of linked, smaller networks with a shared memory of past interactions with state police and the expectation of future contact with one another. This peculiar aspect of network politics is also what can make such social movements brittle. They may act swiftly and impressively and massively, but they may not last. As we’ve seen from the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring, and many major national protests since, networked social movements have a difficult time becoming political parties. They have a tough time staying in the long game.
It would be impossible for all of us to form opinions on all issues, much less volunteer to help solve every political problem. The key reason social media are helping people solve collective-action problems is that they link up the people who do have the ideas and energy to work together. In a sense, digital networks help organize knowledge and address ignorance. And this happens even in authoritarian regimes, where ruling elites see the young as uncontrolled and the young see themselves as powerless. Social media give power to the rationally ignorant.
Social media certainly helped Ahmed Maher to find his network in Cairo, and they allowed Eliot Higgins to make his contribution to international affairs. Both formed digital clubs of peers with shared interests, willing to act together. Both have generated useful knowledge and information for the larger clans of activists, journalists, and interested publics.
Yet the impact of social media extends beyond information supplies and personally compelling calls to action. Social media encourage collective action precisely because information is embedded in a social context. It’s what we do with the information, how we act in our daily lives, that ultimately helps us address the challenges of our era. These days, there are two qualities that are unique about the connective action enabled by digital media: we maintain clans, and we join clubs. These two terms from anthropology and economics have usefully specific meanings for the internet of things.
Facebook facilitates the formation of clans and supports clan identity. Essentially, it is a service that allows clans to stay connected on a daily—even hourly—basis, and across international borders. And perhaps not surprisingly, these clan ties, digitally maintained, are behind resurgent subnationalisms around the world. Political identities that had been effectively subsumed for decades have surged back because their communities preserved cultural knowledge, and various diasporas reconnected, sent money, and carried political issues around the world.
A crypto-clan is a group based on actual or perceived kinship and descent that we actively maintain through new information technologies. Your extended family, your close friends on your block, your high school pals: these can all be the basis of your clan affiliations. Race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are among the many sources of identity we have. But groups we actively maintain with Facebook and Twitter and crypto-clans, and they are important because they are elective. We don’t always choose our family ties, but we do choose how to maintain those ties digitally. We don’t know everyone in our crypto-clans, but within a few steps it is easy to get to know the other people in the clan. Broad norms of trust and reciprocity permeate crypto-clans, and our clan networks are great sources of information. A crypto-clan is a collection of weak ties, mediated by device networks, that we get to curate for ourselves.
In contrast, digital clubs are the smaller groups of people whom we know more directly. Trust and reciprocity aren’t the only criteria for membership. Active engagement is the norm, and providing collective good is the goal. Like crypto-clans, digital clubs are elective. So they are important because as groups they have even more of our loyalties and goodwill—they are collections of strong ties, digitally mediated. We use digital clans to gather information, and we join digital clubs to change the world.
In an authoritarian regime, it’s risky to attend a small protest. You’ll get beaten up and arrested, and the regime will learn who you are. The internet of things will transform the way people participate in politics by making their devices agents of information about opinion and behavior. Researchers found that during the Arab Spring in Cairo, one-third of protesters were protesting for the first time.35 The vast majority of people who attended the first day learned about the event online, and they all used their devices to do some kind of documentary work to discover what was going on. These weren’t individuals attending a small protest, they were a clan of like-minded citizens linked by shared grievances and values.
Exactly who controls the process by which networked devices generate politically valuable information remains to be seen. Will it be the users who buy them, the companies that make them, or the governments that surveil networks? Currently industry and government have the most systematic means of rendering politically meaningful information from networks of devices. Unless civil-society groups fight for a radical change in the understanding of how the internet of things is to be used, the “balance of power” favors those who have the cryptographic skills to use and manipulate the networked devices around them.
In many authoritarian regimes, there is a disjunction between ruling elites, who see the young as dangerous and shiftless, and the young, who see themselves as unable to act. If there is something to be learned from the peculiar social movements of recent years, it is that young people who feel disenfranchised will teach themselves technology tricks. This does not mean that the world will be full of cryptography experts. Those who are skilled in cryptography will be able to form clans and clubs, using basic security tools with their devices to create distributed networks of trust.
Fifth Consequence: Connective Security and Quality of Life
The fifth consequence of the internet of things is that people will look for more and more ways to use device networks to improve human security. Along with connective action, there is some security that comes from having infrastructure that can be studied for big-picture trends and small deviations. We might start to think of this as “connective security,” namely, the improvements in our ability to track good trends, monitor bad behavior, and make reasoned security decisions with high-quality data. First, the data generated by the internet of things is likely to improve our ability to watch our governments and construct new governance mechanisms when established ones fail. Second, all this data will improve our ability to follow and extinguish dirty networks of criminals, drug lords, and political strongmen.
Big data refers to the kind of information you can get from lots of people using lots of different technologies. Mobile phones, video-game consoles, email accounts, website log files, and a host of other appurtenances of consumer electronics generate immense amounts of information about people’s interests. Even more valuable is information about people’s behavior that comes from analyzing big data. Through big data a country can address its own health-and-welfare problems, and direct smart military operations such as the one that killed Osama bin Laden. Just as social media can be used to coordinate democracy advocates or as a tool for social control, big data can be used for solving social problems, surveillance, or manipulation.
Big governments often “frame” problems as being manageable. In countries where new media are dominated by the government, journalists sometimes just pass the official perspective on to citizens. The U.S. government framed the Hurricane Katrina disaster as a crisis it was addressing efficiently.36 The Russian government claimed that it had a handle on the forest fires of 2010, a claim refuted by community maps. The Japanese government claimed that the radiation leaking out of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was under control. Mapping by several people, including web designer Haiyan Zhang, proved otherwise.37 Social media allow alternative frames, and sometimes they allow communities to frame problems, victims, and culprits before a government can spin the facts.
Along with tracking the bad behavior of governments, big data makes it possible to track international networks of criminal activity. Digital media have made it much easier to coordinate different networks of crime fighters and get them working in concert across international borders. To combat dirty networks requires input from different kinds of organizations: local police, intelligence agencies, militaries, media outlets, academics, NGOs, and, perhaps most important, average citizens.
One of the most pernicious networks includes the ties that form between dictators, drug lords, gun runners, holy thugs, and rogue generals. But police also form networks, and they have better resources for putting together big data for themselves. The rising drug violence in South America, for example, has motivated police across several borders to work out joint security plans. Experienced officers from Colombia and Chile now help those in Nicaragua and Honduras.
Indeed, the fact that mafias use information technology often makes it easier to map out their networks. Most anticrime initiatives are national. Almost every country in the world has seen a boom in local anticorruption initiatives over social media. Some are organized by average citizens putting together the pieces to solve mysteries, and some come from major technology firms targeting drug cartels.38
Dirty networks are effective because the connections between powerful criminals are tenuous and closely guarded. The nodes in such networks often have chosen to hide in Latin American or African jungles because the roads that link their compounds to the rest of the world are not easily watched. The Lord’s Resistance Army has been able to move through the Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic for decades. A single road, passable only during the dry season, weaves through the western part of South Sudan. But tracking technologies improve faster than these thugs’ ability to discover new hiding spots.
In some cases, people are able to muster significant information resources toward undermining the credibility of poor leaders, then organize opponents for a coordinated push. These information cascades start as small examples of citizen journalism, efforts to document police abuse, or political jokes. They can grow to topple a dictator. Dirty networks are not always governments, but bad governments are often networked with drug lords, corrupt generals, or holy thugs. Social media can be used against those kinds of political actors too, as a way of undermining their control or as a way of coping during moments of extreme violence.
A powerful country is going to be one that has the capacity to use big data to solve its own domestic social inequalities. Such a country can use the internet of things to outmaneuver enemies, and use social media to deepen cultural relationships even when government leaders are hostile with one another. The powerful country is going to be the one that can intelligently analyze a continuous flow of information from neighbors, friends, and enemies.
During the Cold War, security analysts, pundits, and scholars studied patterns of alliances and camps. Any country that didn’t fall neatly into a camp raised doubts about its strategic intentions. Now the perception of camps is less relevant, and indeed it is possible for a savvy international player to use digital media to create the impression that it is an active member of several camps.
Big data is useful not just for understanding the global connections between political actors. It can be useful as well for understanding small and local sociotechnical systems. For example, Sandy Pentland argues, in Social Physics, that an immense amount of organizational complexity can be captured with what he calls reality-based research involving sensors and log files.39 Yet big data analysis certainly has critics, and the big data debate is relevant for thinking through the impact of the internet of things.40 The internet of things is going to make big data truly gargantuan. Successfully analyzing the data that can be collected by a world of networked devices will itself be an engineering challenge. Unfortunately, the hyperbole and enthusiasm for the “social physics” of big data analysis has kindled new excitement about data mining. Most people, most of the time, value their privacy online.41 Big data analysis can be good for modeling behavior, but is unable to reveal peoples’ attitudes and aspirations.
The Downside of Connective Security
Immense privacy violations will arise if we aren’t careful about the ways we use big data. The potential for abuse—by politicians or businesses—is significant. Ron Deibert documents this well in Black Code.42 And large amounts of data, smartly analyzed, have been solving a great range of problems. Incompetence and bad policy cannot trump good information forever.
The prospects for big data analysis are exciting because of the possibility of exposing previously unsuspected causal relationships, and confirming the ones we’ve found too tough to demonstrate in other ways. For example, demand for white vinegar soared in Guangzhou, China, in 2002.43 SARS was spreading, but the central government was denying any public-health emergency. There was a public perception that vinegar would help clean kitchens of whatever bacteria was spreading. It took outside analysts to connect the trends and identify the public-health crisis. Knowing something about how the public deals with problems can help alert a government of the need for action.
During the SARS epidemic, Chinese authorities tried to censor messages that mentioned the disease. But people figured out how to talk in ways that couldn’t be quickly detected by authorities. So the Chinese spent significantly more money to beef up their surveillance. Even now, they don’t seem to be able to control everything. They seemed less able to control topics than mobilization efforts. They’ve had to reduce censorship efforts, limiting themselves to framing and discouraging physical logistics among protesters. And the Party seems unsuccessful even in this effort.
Information is always prone to political interpretation, and there is a proven capacity for bad analysis in this process. Experts, at least, know that correlations are spurious. The best example of this is the entertaining analysis produced by some economists revealing that the rate of production of butter in Bangladesh was a good correlate of the rise and fall of the S&P 500 stock index between 1981 and 1993.44 Big data can still be put to work for the social good, but all data needs to be interpreted and contextualized.
And, of course, bad governments can be good at big data analysis. For example, the Miami Herald has a good record of breaking important news stories about Latin American politics. In March 2012 it reported that sensitive data about Venezuelans was being kept in Cuba.45 Government databases, voting records, citizenship and intelligence records, and more were being stored in server farms outside Havana. To an outsider, it might be silly to think of Havana as a more secure city than Caracas. What makes this interesting is not that data about a country’s citizens was being transported out of country. The Russian mafia has bought the credit card records of many U.S. citizens. Data-mining firms in Texas maintain detailed profiles of Argentina’s citizens, and there is a global trade in data about people from all corners of the world.46
What is important in the Cuba-Venezuela connection is that the government did not choose to house important information with a firm or in a place that has good security or stable infrastructure. Data warehouses across the United States and Europe have such features. The network ties between Venezuela and Cuba are so strong that they overcame any technical logic to file storage. The data did not simply need to be stored, it needed to be stored with political compatriots that would share the same expectations of surveillance and social control. So while bad analysis of big data is a real danger, there is also a proven capacity for big data analysis by bad governments.
It will be challenging to extend and adjust our expectations for privacy and definitions for bad behavior. Criminals will want to manipulate the internet of things as much as anyone. If drug smugglers can figure out how to hack the cranes working in the Belgian shipping port of Antwerp to move their illicit cargo around, they will try to make use of the equipment in our homes too.47
If there is anything we can learn from the evolution of the political internet, it is that there are persistent threats to its openness. For some communities, the internet of things will bring collective insecurity: bad analysis can come from big data; privacy violations appear to be the norm for big data collection; and bad governments are capable of doing big data analysis too. In the end, however, social problems are easier to solve with good data. At the very least, the internet of things will greatly expand the network of devices capable of carrying political information. So what are the greatest threats to the greatest of these networks? What rival interests and actors have the ability to weaken the pax technica or limit it in some way?