BUILDING A DEMOCRACY OF OUR OWN DEVICES
The internet of things will be the most powerful political tool ever created. By 2020 there will be some thirty billion devices connected to the internet, and political power over the eight billion people on the planet will rest with the people who can control those devices. Ideally, we will all share control in responsible ways. Political clout already comes from owning or regulating mobile-phone networks, controlling the broadcast spectrum, and having the ability to shut these things down.
We have to fundamentally change the way we think of political units and order. Digital media have changed the way we use our social networks and allowed us to be political actors when we choose to be. We use technology to connect to one another, and to share stories. The state, the political party, the civic group, the citizen: these are all old categories from a pre-digital world. Action and reaction among governments, with occasional involvement of substate political actors, once propelled political conflict and competition. But now the interaction is continuous, and between many kinds of actors. The agency of individuals is being enhanced by the device networks of the internet of things. Increasingly, international relations will be about interpersonal relations and how devices talk to one another.
All the creative civic projects making use of device networks demonstrate that their impact depends on the power of their ideas and their effectiveness at social networking. This is in sharp contrast to nations, where power comes from the size of the population, economic wealth, or military arsenal. Civic networks are more creative, and better at deflating ideological arguments by political parties and dogmatic leaders. They can focus on problems in a sustained way, while governments and political parties have to juggle competing priorities. Competing networks exist in several forms, and to make this sociotechnical system function fairly, we need to work to strengthen the information infrastructures that have the most open standards, the widest reach, and the greatest potential for innovation.
We all need to take a more active interest in our own information security and in international affairs. We need to make sure the internet of things works for us. Program or be programmed, as hackers say. If we aren’t purposeful in designing the internet of things, we’ll find that those with power will make decisions using data gleaned about us, and without our informed consent. Our behavior will have more meaningful political consequences than our attitudes or aspirations.
The internet of things will be useful in many ways. Yet over the past twenty-five years we’ve seen many examples of how politically closed subnetworks of communities and devices degrade, while open networks thrive and evolve. Open networks share content and communicate quickly, making it easier to solve problems and take full advantage of available resources.
The internet of things will turn everyday device networks into politically valuable data. For example, pod coffeemakers have become popular sources for users’ daily dose of caffeine. They have sprung up in offices, restaurants, and homes around the world. One of the most prominent distributors of these pod coffee machines is working on ways to prevent the machines from using pods made by other companies.1 This seems like an obvious business strategy—more long-term profits can come from locking in a customer to a supply chain of coffee. Key to the process of locking in its customers to this supply chain are the chips in machines and pods that talk to each other and confirm their compatibility. If you purchase the right coffee pods, the machine will make your coffee.
It’s unlikely that your coffeemaker will be put to work on some of the world’s grand collective action problems, though we could imagine scenarios in which that might happen. Still, the worst way of developing the internet of things is to let it become finicky, proprietary, and materially locked down by DRM. Programming our appliances to take only the consumables approved by the manufacturers would have both economic and political consequences. Obviously it would make our economic consumption more path-dependent. The choices we have in the years ahead would be limited by the decisions we make now about our device networks. Similarly, if we construct the internet of things without asking for control over the data streams in our early device networks, we will have limited control over those streams as we add more devices. Building device networks to be closed systems, and not interoperable or hackable, encourages other manufacturers to do the same. Public leadership on an open, flexible internet of things would guide technology designers to be creative and responsible.
Digital-rights management has become one of the most legally complex and politically intractable problems of our time. Many legal experts have argued that it is a largely a problem of political culture—clear political leadership could resolve many issues.2 So what if we allow the digital-rights management regime that was shaped by industry lobbyists to envelop the internet of things? In a world of interconnected devices, it is not impossible to imagine that your coffeemaker would shut down when you try to use coffee from your local roaster—after, of course, transmitting data about your usage patterns and your attempted hack to the other devices in your kitchen, the device’s manufacturer, and the coffee industry association. Imagine a disapproving “smart” home: would consuming unapproved or incompatible products have an impact on the terms of service or generate data for government regulators?
Upending the grounds that remain in a cup of coffee is an ancient fortune-telling method. This is a magical process of divining your future and interpreting your thoughts. Increasingly, the devices attached to the internet do more than reveal our behavior. They betray our behavior and share data about us with other devices and other people we don’t know. As ever more products get internet addresses, the depth of connectedness among our devices will be difficult for any one of us to keep track of.
For many years, there has been concern about network neutrality—the challenge of making sure that the owners of infrastructure on a digital network don’t favor some content over others with special privileges in speed or storage. Before digital media, experts demonstrated the negative impact of media monopolies on the public sphere. Media concentration, whether in private or state hands, has always had bad effects.
In the years ahead, the ownership patterns we need to track involve more than just the producers of content and the back-end superstructure of the internet. We need to be aware of how the internet of things is developing, with everything from mobile phones to digital switches. If content, search, or data-mining businesses own whole subnetworks of devices, will that create privileged content networks? Machines for the rich, machines for the poor?
The pax technica is an empire of people and devices. With sensors and activators embedded in more of the objects we produce, we must be conscious of how the constant flow of data can enrich our cultural, economic, and political lives. We must also learn from our recent experiences with politics and digital media, and be deliberate in the design of the internet of things.
This is a technical peace in the sense that the major battles may no longer be fought by militaries but by corporations with competing technical standards and a vested interest in making systems interoperable or closed. The competition over infrastructure can be fierce, and the race to fill our lives with an internet of things may involve proprietary claims, independent subnetworks of people and devices, and technologies that do not play nice with each other. The fiercest political competition in the years ahead will be over the standards-setting process for device networks. Openness does not refer just to the firmware or to increased consumer choice in electronics.
Internet Succession: Computers, Mobiles, Things
From one of the most politically peripheral corners of Mexico’s Lacandon Jungle, the Zapatistas taught the world how information technology could be used to advance a social cause. More recently, democracy advocates set popular uprisings in motion across an entire region of North Africa and the Middle East. The internet involved in each of these social movements was different—the Zapatistas successfully linked their content across webpages and computers. During the Arab Spring, activists relied on mobile phones that spread their content through text messages and social-networking applications.
Social media allow protesters to maintain nonviolent strategies. Violence by protesters gives regimes the green light to respond in kind—and authoritarian governments are usually better at violence. Social media let people build the norms of trust and reciprocity needed for successful community engagement.3 If the internet of things consists of billions of networked devices, how will this internet be used for political protest?
During the first twenty-five years of the internet interregnum, we saw ever-increasing numbers of people using technology to solve collective action problems. The pace of problem solving increased dramatically with the evolution of social media that made mobile phones the most important devices for social connectivity. Social media have been especially good at exposing the lies of rigged elections and at bringing corruption to light. It used to be that governments produced and implemented the binding rules of social coordination and provided collective goods, ideally, in exchange. As governments—and other kinds of formal organizations—fail to provide collective goods, people use their own social networks to repair and rebuild.
Digital media use has had two important impacts on international affairs. The first is a process called connective action: social media are bridging and bonding civic networks faster than they are strengthening criminal networks. The second is a process called connective security: big data is making it easier to crowd-source information about the threats and solutions to our well-being.
If these assertions are valid, then we find ourselves with a surprising kind of stability, almost predictability, to the way political power will flow in the years ahead. This pax technica is a dynamic, systemwide stability ensured by patterns of interaction and the domains in which political power will be exercised. Internet-connected devices now mediate our political culture. If the internet of things grows as projected, it will eventually contain our political culture.
Coalitions of Western governments and technology firms control most of the world’s information infrastructure and enjoy almost unchallenged influence over that infrastructure. Understanding the path of the political development of the internet gives us these premises for what the internet of things will mean for global power politics. These premises will have consequences, and we all need to appreciate that using the internet of things is a political activity. If government and industry aggressively set technology standards on their own, they make technology use political through the streams of behavioral data they will collect and act upon.
In a sense, the idea of the pax technica is straightforward. Whoever controls the largest device networks gets the most sensor data and manages the largest number of relationships between and among people and devices. The Roman Empire lasted because the Romans built roads. The British ruled the world because they built ships and robust trade alliances. The United States dominated because it had atomic bombs and engineered the post–World War II Bretton Woods system.4 While the internet may have started off as an American technology, its current users—and developers—come from all over the world. Digital media like mobile phones and the internet are tough to monopolize and control. They are the sources and conduits of modern political power, as the infrastructure of roads, ships, and weapons have served political power in years past. But information infrastructure offers different kinds of political power to different actors, and the rules that govern modern politics have radically changed.
The standards-setting process for information technologies has become the one policy domain that, over the long term, will affect all other policy domains. Technology policy decisions affect what scientists can learn about the environment, what the World Health Organization can learn about disease vectors, what the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations can learn about caloric intake, and what security officials can learn about suspicious financial transfers. Decisions about how to set up and govern information infrastructure have a path-setting impact on how scientists, public policy makers, and interested stakeholders communicate to their publics and arrive at decisions. Today’s decisions about implementing the internet of things will have political resonance for generations to come.
Global technology policy is central precisely because it sets the rules by which progress in all other policy domains can be made. This means that international tensions over competing technology standards are only going to increase. Some of the most banal engineering protocols for how the internet works can have immense implications for everyday 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 how the internet worked. Leaders of all stripes have seen how information technology shapes political outcomes, so they have an incentive to set the standards that serve their interests.
The eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, argued that “the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of wisdom and virtue.”5 At this point, the networks of devices connected to the internet are allowing us to provide many kinds of governance goods for our own communities. We can’t be certain that this will always be so for the internet of things. The next internet will certainly be used to express and challenge political power. Now is the time to encode the next internet with democratic virtues. More than ever, technology, including technical expertise, means political power. Political clout now comes from owning or regulating mobile-phone networks, controlling the broadcast spectrum, and having the expertise to turn off access to both.
By 2020, the majority of the global population will live under limited and fragile governments, rather than stable democratic or authoritarian ones.6 The internet of things, more than formal governments, will be providing political structure. In 2000 only about 10 percent of the world’s population was online. By 2020, most of the world’s population will either be online or be economically, culturally, and politically affected by the internet of things. Three of every five of these new internet users will live in a fragile state. The things that constitute and define the internet will not be just computers and mobile phones but the objects of everyday life: lamps and refrigerators, sneakers and biosensors. Some thirty-two million smart thermostats will be installed in U.S. homes by 2020.7 Myriad devices will consume much of the internet’s bandwidth: talking among themselves, reporting on their status, and revealing the behaviors of the people in sensor range. Political bots will use much of the rest, and original, human-made content will be a fractional amount of the information that is exchanged. Data sharing among devices will be as ubiquitous, and as nearly unnoticed, as electricity.
Technology companies will become the arbiters of human rights, because it will be through their devices that we will learn of abuse, and through their devices that abuse is carried out. National security agencies around the world will be engaged in conversations about cyberdeterrence that continue to use the language of nuclear deterrence developed for an earlier era. This may not seem productive, but having political leaders fear the consequences of launching a major cyberassault is likely to result in a stable balance of power maintained and monitored through the internet of things. Instead of being caught up in an arms race, political actors will race to develop better bots. With device networks expanding rapidly, botnets will have many more nodes and passages in which to grow, and many more sensors that can be activated to surveil and manipulate public opinion.
One of the most eloquent campaigners for internet freedoms is Rebecca MacKinnon. She wrote the book on the struggles many internet users face when trying to build political futures for themselves in authoritarian countries.8 Some people argue that information access isn’t a human right, or is at most a secondary priority to more basic needs. When MacKinnon was in Tunisia for the World Summit on the Information Society in 2002—ironically, Tunisia was a dictatorship then—an audience member challenged her pleas for internet freedoms. The real priority for the world should be feeding people, clothing people, and providing housing, argued the challenger. After addressing these issues, the argument went, we could worry about information freedoms. One of MacKinnon’s collaborators immediately responded: “Without freedom of speech, I can’t talk about who is stealing my food.”9
This is the reason that the internet of things must have a civic and public function. By 2020, many of us will inhabit a world of interconnected sensors that will have been embedded in everyday objects, and increasingly in our bodies. Filling our lives with such devices should not be just about making better consumer products but about giving us the ability to improve our quality of life.
The Hope and Instability of Hackers and Whistle Blowers
We’ve come to depend on hacktivists and whistle blowers to teach us about how this internet of things is evolving. It’s easy to despise Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning for the perceived breach of trust with their national security colleagues and the armed forces. And industry lobbyists work hard to paint activists like Aaron Swartz as miscreants.10 But it is difficult to ignore the debates these hackers and whistle blowers set in motion. Refusing to address their questions is foolish. They risk breaching the trust of their colleagues, but earn public trust and trigger a much-needed, evidence-based public conversation about what our device networks are being used for.
Any government agency, if left unchecked and unsupervised, can violate human rights, abuse citizens, or overreach its authority in defense of its organizational interests. Throughout history, we have relied on whistle blowers to expose the bad behavior of such agencies. Valuing whistle blowers is not about encouraging rampant and unconsidered security leaks. Whistle blowers are valuable because they demonstrate how deviant government agencies have become, and the threat of public attention from a whistle blower may even deter other agencies from working beyond their public charge.
These days, whistle blowers seem to drive many of the big issues that capture headlines on technology, security, and governance. Leaks about what firms and governments can already do with devices rightly scare most of us. These days, the computer and mobile phone are the primary devices of the internet. Those are the network devices through which we work and connect to family and friends. The latest scandals typically involve the government and corporate actors gleaning information about us, usually without our informed consent, without allowing us to opt out and without providing a way to retrieve and destroy the data about us. As more of the things we manufacture are powered and networked, “inanimate” objects will be replaced by devices that talk with our other devices. They will communicate with their original manufacturer, the information services we subscribe to, national security agencies, contractors, cloud computing services, and anyone else who has broken into, or been allowed into, the data stream.
One safe inference about our future is that criminals and bots will have more devices to manipulate. The Russian Business Network has become a service that essentially provides IT support for criminal networks.11 For a while it was openly selling a key-logging software for $150. The organization is probably behind the Storm botnet described earlier, and it actually specializes in identity theft services. The Russian government taps it for work projects. It contributes to the international market for zero-day exploits, trading in software flaws that a buyer can only use once against a device.12
For such dubious businesses and criminal actors, the internet of things will serve as a vast array for gathering data and a means of providing illegal information services. Coupled with the largely unregulated but not illegal markets in data about people from around the world, much of what is collected over the inter net of things will be valuable—and valued—by lobbyists every where.13 Denial-of-service attacks can be ordered online for between five and one hundred dollars, depending on the size of the target.14
Hacktivists and whistle blowers will continue to teach us the most about political actors’ use of inconspicuous devices to manipulate public opinion and manage political life. The number of people in the United States who have access to sensitive information is considerable. In 2013, more than 5.1 million civilian government employees, military personnel, and contractors were eligible for some kind of security clearance.15 Of these, around 2 million were eligible but hadn’t been given access to sensitive material. The rest had been given access, and some 1.4 million citizens had very high levels of access to top-secret material.16
One reasonable expectation we should have of our modern democracy is that the government would not allow national security agencies to deliberately undermine internet infrastructure. Among Snowden’s revelations is evidence about how the NSA has weakened the internet by deliberately introducing flaws into cryptographic systems so that its agents could read encrypted traffic.17 The Heartbleed bug, which was publicly identified in 2014 as a software flaw exposing up to two-thirds of the world’s websites, was actually identified by the NSA two years earlier. The discovery was not publicized but in fact was kept secret and actively used to gather intelligence.18 Some officials might justify the national security advantages of allowing infrastructure flaws to persist. Healthy and stable infrastructure should not be deliberately degraded.
A broad, global, democratic agenda must now include strengthening, not sabotaging, open device networks. When officials choose specific strategic gains over long-term democratic values, they tempt potential whistle blowers to act. The security establishment is burgeoning with a new generation of data-savvy citizens who simply have different values about information openness. Such a citizen might value the chance to serve her country, have a stable job with a good salary, and work in the interesting world of intelligence. She probably has no history of civil disobedience, which would make it less likely that she would have gotten the requisite high level of security clearance. She values information openness, and is willing to risk life as she knows it by publicizing government activities online.
Most hacktivists are young, and have shown that they have a different set of values from those held by the organizations they work in—and expose. Moreover, hacktivists rarely stop their work. Srđa Popović, the Serb who in 2000 mobilized the resistance to end Slobodan Milošević’s rule, went on in 2003 to train protesters for Georgia’s “Rose Revolution,” Ukraine’s 2005 “Orange Revolution,” and the Maldives’ revolution in 2007, before training activists in Egypt’s April 6 Movement in 2008. Popović’s book Nonviolent Struggle: 50 Crucial Points has been downloaded thousands of times.19
For the presidents of countries and companies, people like Aaron Swartz, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange are threats to national security and the corporate bottom line. But in many networks they are heroes. Every few years, hacktivists and whistle blowers turn national security and diplomacy upside down by putting large amounts of previously secret content online. Conservative security analysts and industry pundits often react hostilely to people who play with information technologies and exploit consumer electronics beyond designers’ intent.
Still, working for a better world increasingly means forming digital clubs or putting your crypto clan to work by being creative with digital media in a political domain. Patrick Meier and his extended network of friends started a wave of crisis-mapping projects that take advantage of the energy and altruism of volunteers. Eman Abdelrahman’s “We Are All Laila” project inspired a cohort of young Egyptians to think collectively about their problems and what they could do about them. Brown Moses diligently does his documentary work on Syrian munitions. Other crypto clubs—such as the Tactical Technology Collective and Citizen Lab—develop the software workarounds that let people in closed regimes get access to the internet.20 Because these hacktivists are so well connected, governments that go after them risk upsetting extended networks of tech-savvy people. Arbitrary arrest, secret trials, and long periods of detention without charge remain a common way of going after bloggers and other online activists, even in the West.21 Because of social media, news of arrests spreads quickly, and trials are harder to keep secret. Indeed, when a country’s leaders target information infrastructure itself, leaders usually lose.
Young people in failing states take to digital media with such energy because they suffer more than their seniors. Jobs go to older adults with social connections, so youth unemployment rates are often high. Young people get restless, and they see what their friends and family overseas have. They start off by sending jokes and irreverent text messages. When pushed, they join political conversations and sign online petitions. They may not hit the streets and attack the government right away, or on their own. But when crises do emerge, political leaders increasingly find that there are surprising new information networks in place. Old, established political leaders aren’t always able to remain the mandatory point of passage for information, and security services can’t always keep track of how the latest device networks are being used. Social media often get used for good, especially when times are tough, because they enable people’s altruism.
Firing the Social Scientists—and Training New Ones
Most social scientists have a tough time talking about what’s ahead. Only a small—but growing—number are using digital media as a research tool. There’s already lots of technology used in places social scientists don’t look, or can’t look very easily. This means that most social scientists won’t be ready for the internet of things. Computer scientists have an important tool kit, but have little experience interpreting socially significant phenomena or making workable public-policy arguments. A new breed of social scientist needs to understand sociotechnical systems and analyze big data, but provide comparative context and causal narratives and demonstrate the political affordances of new device networks.
The reason we need a rapid turnover in the social sciences is that so many people have been trained to see categories that will have much less significance to the networks of devices in which we will be embedded. Moreover, the political and economic sciences have a well-evolved language for studying markets, classes, and nation-states that is quickly becoming obsolete. As I argued early in this book, most social scientists are trained to think of nation-states as representative systems—models of government defined by the relationships between people. Instead, researchers need to be trained to see the world as a system of relationships between and among people and devices.
Social scientists often begin their academic lives reading Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Smith was among the first to search for the laws of interaction in markets that communicate signals of demand and supply. Marx was the first social scientist to do systematic research—collecting large amounts of evidence in purposeful ways—into the premises and consequences of political power. Their different ways of framing social life have endured because they used a largely analogue tool kit and worked on highly aggregated categories like market, class, and nation. These categories had to be operationalized through averages and ranges. In the United States, for example, the working class might include households with an annual income between $35,000 and $75,000.22 Or the working class might be defined by average levels of income: an average working-class man earns $57,000 and a working-class woman earns $40,000. Either approach is meant to find the most sensible general tendency among the largest number of people.
Device networks, in contrast, render detailed individual data on network tendencies. What was latent is now discoverable, and what counts as data about social life is changing. As Sandy Pentland points out, social life is made up of millions of small transactions between individuals.23 The patterns in those individual transactions can be reduced to averages but no longer have to be. Important details about all these people and all these devices actually determine social outcomes. Traditional statisticians are shy about making causal claims with the customary tool kit. If standard maps no longer reflect real relationships on land, and existing analytical categories don’t capture enough nuances, why should we stick with conventional ways of doing social science? If real-time social science data is available, and orthodox social scientists are unwilling to make strong causal claims, why would we trust their findings?
In important ways, governments no longer define citizens and manage the way they express that citizenship. Devices play that role. Modern citizenship has become a data-driven obligation. Or, more accurately, citizens increasingly make their impact through what I’ve called a “data shadow”—the silhouette of preferences that is cast by things like credit card records and internet use.24 Ensuring that you get control over the data you leave behind as you move through device networks is going to become one of the most important civil liberty goals. If you defer on this responsibility to track the trackers, government and industry will set the permission levels on who gets what data about you. You don’t want that, as only you really care about your privacy. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that you will have access to the data about your behavior.
Putting the Civic into the Internet of Things, Domestically
In this day and age, you either set the technology standards or you follow them. Many brilliant civic projects provide governance through the open, considered, and deliberate use of the internet. So we need an internet of things that allows expression and experimentation. Brett Frischmann makes this same argument in Infrastructure: all public works like the internet of things should be open and nondiscriminatory.25 We need to make sure the internet of things is designed for civic engagement. These days, it’s normal for civil-society groups to have an internet strategy or a social-media strategy. Are such groups ready with a strategy for the internet of things?
Authoritarian regimes and unscrupulous politicians who stay in character will throw bots into the internet to obscure issues and muddy public opinion. Should we wait for that to happen? We need a comprehensive civic strategy for the internet of things, and we need it soon, not eventually. Why should there be a coordinated civic strategy for the development of the internet of things? What should that response be?
If the modern state is a sociotechnical system made up of people and networked devices, then we need to adapt our working definition of democracy and our expectations for what democracy can be. Democracy is a form of open society in which people in authority use the internet of things for public good and human security in ways that have been widely reviewed and publicly approved. Open societies depend on coherent collective identities, shared motivations, and opportunities to act together. Here’s how I think we can build that open society.
First, the devices on the internet of things should tithe for the public good. Media historians have argued that the early newspaper industry benefited greatly from public subsidies.26 And the countries with the best-functioning communities of investigative journalists are those that allow some public funding of civic-minded news organizations. What if the internet of things rolled out a kind of “technology tithe,” in which some portion of the device’s abilities were reserved for open and public use?
Ten percent of the processing time, 10 percent of the devices’ information-storage capacity, and 10 percent of the bandwidth used by devices could be reserved for third-party, civic, and open applications. Public-health organizations, libraries, nonprofit organizations, academics, and get-out-the vote campaigns would be allowed to make use of a certain percentage of our devices. Tech-savvy democracy advocates are already working on ways to build shadow networks that can piggyback on existing infrastructure but be immune to surveillance and censorship by profit-hungry firms and abusive governments.27 Regardless of whether they succeed, reserving some capacity for civic life over the internet of things means creating networks that can never be blocked, filtered, or shut down. As crisis mappers have shown, disaster relief is essentially a giant logistical operation. The internet of things could be ready for duty during complex humanitarian disasters or any moment when altruism should be especially encouraged.
Second, the data produced over the internet of things should be more openly shared than that which is being produced by the current internet of mobile phones and computers. A recent study of government data sources found that most countries get lousy scores for providing data on corporate actors and nonprofit groups.28 Most governments say they promote open data. But there are actually only a few countries where you can easily find the legal name of a firm and get an official address, incorporation date, status, and other basic details.
The data collected by device networks will have to feed manufacturer and industry analysis—there’s no way around that. The value chain for building the internet of things includes access to rich flows of data. If users can’t opt out of being surveilled by device networks—especially by the devices they buy for themselves—users should have the ability to add to the list of organizations that can have access to data flows.
Third, people should be allowed to decide what kinds of data about their lives should qualify for the “aftermarket” in data. The United States has few rules about what firms can do with data mining. One of the rules is that a data mining firm can’t profit by selling access to voter registration files. The state collects these and provides them as a public service. Political parties, civic groups, and candidates for election access the data because it helps them develop good strategy for engaging with the public. In practice, data-mining companies merge voter registration files with credit card records, public-opinion data, and other bits of information to create a rich database that can be sold. But in principle they are not supposed to make money off the voter registration files alone. Big data from devices, whether from satellites overhead or from everyday objects, tends to flow to governments and companies, and occasionally to scientists. It needs to flow to civic groups, and not simply be “open.”
The dangerous approach is to allow government and industry to monopolize the use of device networks, data, and metadata. The best approach is to let many stakeholders have access to the data that people are willing to share. So the third recommendation is that people be allowed to decide what kinds of data about their political lives could also qualify for this nonprofit rule. If my voter registration data is public and useful, and others can’t profit from it, I should be able to label other kinds of data about my political life that way. If I feel passionate about fair-trade coffee, and my coffee consumption data might help producers improve their products or profit margins, I should be able to prevent the maker of my coffee machine from hoarding that data.
This is a form of user control that many people might want, though many people might choose to not have any data shared with anyone. Particular citizens will probably never be able to completely opt out of the internet of things. If I’m fiscally conservative, or socially liberal, or want to do my part to slow down climate change, I should be able to share relevant data with the groups that could learn from my behavior and help me behave more responsibly. If valuable data is going to be extracted from device networks by industry and government, users should be able to share it with civic groups, hospitals, and scientists as well.
This should be expanded significantly, to cover a wide range of data that should be publicly valuable. In other words, if the government requires that firms, civic groups, and people provide data about themselves, the government should do the work of assembling that data in a basic way and providing easy access to analysts. Agencies need to think about which data should be private. Some commercial providers may figure out additional ways of packaging or analyzing data, and may charge for adding that value. But it should be illegal for political consultants, data-mining companies, and other private actors to profit from data that is shared with the state for the public good.
Fourth, each device produced for the internet of things needs to be able to report the ultimate beneficiary of the data it collects. Tax evaders, terrorists, drug cartels, and corrupt politicians don’t want to keep their dirty money under their own names. So one of the most important anticorruption campaigns is against anonymous companies that are able to hide their owner ship structure in layers of easily created shell companies.29 The cruel industry behind blood diamonds, in particular, has been able to bury the identity of company owners and beneficiaries.
Unfortunately, only the most experienced data sleuths can track down their personal data and see who is using it. Given the large volumes of compromised personal records—on average each U.S. adult has had nine such records compromised—it would be impossible to fully understand who has access to data about us.30 National-security organizations may have better digital archives of our communications than we have on our own devices. Terms-of-service agreements are increasingly complex, and there are numerous efforts to simplify them.31 In many countries, federal agencies require food to come with simplified labels. Energy-intensive appliances have to display efficiency grades. Every device that is added to the internet of things should be tagged with up-to-date and simplified records on the beneficiaries of data flows from each device.
Occasionally, we see how much data about us exists. Spreadsheets of information surprise us with their detail, or lists of variables are published that have been compromised by a hacker, clumsy firm, or careless government office. If we cannot opt out of data collection over the internet of things, we should require that devices identify the ultimate beneficiaries of data flows. Personal identity is organized around government-issued birth certificates, passport documents, and social security numbers. Even though there’s a significant industry of analysis and data miners who append our behavioral data to those records, we don’t know who benefits from our data. Software protocols make it difficult to know what is collected and where it is sent. For products, the maze of engineering firms, assembly services, and intermediaries shield those beneficiaries from all but the most patient hacker. By default, device networks should have high privacy settings. The next best alternative is clearly identifiable beneficiaries of data flows.
Fifth, a number of industry groups are developing a collective conversation about how technology firms should work with governments—we need more of this. In the United States, the Global Network Initiative (GNI) has emerged as among the most important industry associations.32 For several years, Western tech firms eager to enter China had to cooperate with that government’s requests for information about democracy advocates. Between 2002 and 2004, Yahoo! supplied the Chinese government with information that helped it arrest several activists. Microsoft deleted the blog of an activist in 2005, and Google built a Chinese-based version of its search engine in 2006. Cisco began supplying the Chinese government with its internet monitoring and filtering equipment. Within a few years, pressure from Western governments and democracy activists started to have some impact. Bad press forced the industry to consider its role in the political life of tough regimes.
Some firms started behaving well, signing up for the GNI to help them coordinate their response to the world’s dictators. Google stopped offering its censored search results, and both Microsoft and Google kept their email services out of easy access by China’s security services. Other firms worked out complex foreign ownership arrangements that make services and technologies available in China under other names, still allowing collaboration with the Chinese government, but making the collaboration seem innocuous. So several developments could improve the likelihood of a “good” internet of things. More Western technology firms could get behind the GNI and participate in the conversations about corporate responsibility that it leads. While there are ways to ensure that healthy, public conversations about the internet of things occur within countries and trading zones like North America and Europe, there are also foreign policies that project civic values into the technology policies of other countries.
Device Networks and Foreign Affairs
Some creative thinking in foreign affairs would allow us to promote open systems through the device networks of the internet of things. Since many giant technology firms from the developing world want to be publicly traded on stock exchanges in the West, they should be held to the same ethical standards as Western firms traded on those exchanges.
Developing countries often turn to wealthy countries for loans and advice on how to implement good technology policy. All governments need to be diligent about having open public auctions for access to the public spectrum, and to continue providing extra support to women- and minority-owned businesses competing for broadcast licenses. When governments sell off access to the public spectrum through backroom deals, they usually create media titans. This happened in Mexico and India.33 Countries that administer complex application processes, make special deals with particular firms, and allow industry lobbyists too much access to government technocrats end up with billion-dollar corruption scandals and media oligarchs. India lost between $8 billion and $20 billion from a badly managed licensing process that benefited corrupt officials and shell companies but left mobile-phone users with worse service, not better.
Governments should have open and transparent ways of allocating the public spectrum that encourage ownership diversity. Auctions are straightforward, and special credits for women-owned, minority-owned, and locally owned businesses can increase the diversity of ownership within many sectors that make use of public resources like the broadcast spectrum.
When access to the spectrum is publicly auctioned in coordination with programs to improve ownership diversity, the outcome is a transparent process with diverse stakeholders.34 If we buy the argument that a “device tithe” could also go a long way to promoting public access to the internet of things, then perhaps 10 percent of the profits of such auctions should be set aside as a technology fund for public-interest groups. Or 10 percent of the public spectrum could be set aside for creative civic projects and device networks for disenfranchised communities.
This is not a new idea. Universal service funds have a history of constructive success. Phone company customers in urban areas of the United States had to subsidize rural service throughout much of the twentieth century.35 Making telephone networks available to all was deemed a public good when rolling out land-line telephone infrastructure seemed like a viable engineering project. Putting the internet of things to work for the public good is also worthwhile.
Finally, wiring Africa should be a development priority. The great dangers ahead will come from competing device networks, and Chinese state enterprises are aggressively selling their wares and technology expertise at great discount to African countries in need of infrastructure. Internet access is desperately slow there, with consequences for economic, political, and cultural life.36 In part, this is because of greedy pricing strategies from Western telecommunications firms and narrow-sighted loan conditions from international lending organizations.
Much of West Africa has limited fiber-optic links to the rest of the world. Small clusters of satellite dishes point to the sky and provide the wealthiest of customers with internet access. Satellite bandwidth supplies the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Guinea, Liberia, São Tomé, and the Seychelles with connections to the global internet. Many of these countries get less bandwidth than would be needed to keep a small town in the United States or Europe satisfied with connection quality. The World Bank has provided $30 million in funding for a new underwater fiber-optic cable to Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown. But going from there to the countryside, or to Africa’s landlocked states, is a big step. It’s not a “last mile” problem, it’s a last–thousand miles problem.37
The solutions are out there, and the customer base is large. History has shown that it is tough for collectively managed infrastructure projects to land international backing. Africa has the most to gain with good connectivity. Communities in failed states seem to beget the most creative digital alternatives in governance. It’s a battle worth fighting, and if we lose there, we all lose in many ways.
Finally, some rationality has to come to the use of export controls and information sanctions. Export controls on information technologies tend to have mixed effects. Tunisians used Google Earth to map torture centers. Yet Syrians couldn’t use Google Earth until late into their civil war, because it wasn’t licensed for export.38 Once people in authoritarian regimes have widespread access to new media, it becomes tough to take the technologies away. Mubarak, having faced the digital dilemma, drove more people into the streets of Cairo when he disconnected the country’s internet access. When Erdoğan, the prime minister of Turkey, launched a campaign against Twitter use and access to Google, he drove millions of people to try Twitter for the first time, set up their own Tor servers, and learn about internet censorship.
Democracies and open governments should discourage the export of some technologies and services to dictatorships, especially technologies that help a regime build its own rival internet infrastructure, conduct censorship, and surveil its citizens. Some companies, such as Canada’s Netsweeper, seem to actively pursue opportunities in Somalia, Pakistan, and other failing states with bad human-rights records.39 And other technologies and services that are blocked by export controls—such as open education platforms and MOOCs—should be allowed.
Moreover, foreign sanctions can go beyond devices to people, through travel bans. Politicians who cavort with drug lords, gambling rings, and organized crime often face travel bans. Paulo Maluf, after four decades in various political offices in Brazil, can no longer leave his country because of the money-laundering charges he would face. Venezuela’s defense minister, General Rangel Silva, is on the U.S. Treasury Department’s blacklist for allegedly aiding drug traffickers. We keep track of the technicians who help to train the engineers of aspiring nuclear states. Also placed under travel sanctions are people like Shigeo Nishiguchi, the top Sumiyoshi-kai leader, and his deputy, Hareaki Fukuda, two men responsible for setting policy and resolving disputes within yakuza (Japanese mafia) networks.
Perhaps it’s time to track the engineers who seek to hobble the internet. At the very least, stating the obvious can have important political consequences. Naming the firms and engineers who build information infrastructures for the world’s nastiest dictators might have that desirable shaming effect that has worked in the past.
What can the past twenty-five years of internet politics teach us about the internet of things we might want in the next twenty-five years? First, it makes sense to discourage the export of censorship software. Censoring pornographic websites to protect cultural values rarely works and often turns into suppression of political content. Second, we should proactively and publicly help finance the construction of information infrastructures in developing countries. Such connectivity can improve the capacity of governments to serve citizens, provide more stability and certainty to the private sector, and allow civil-society groups to work more effectively. Third, we should prepare civil-society groups for their work on and over the internet of things. Civil-society organizations often create good content over computers and mobile phones that competes with regime-vetted broadcasts, partisan propaganda, and extremist cries for attention. Public use of the internet of things will guarantee the ability of all government, corporate, party, and civic actors to check one another’s behavior and benefit from connectivity in balanced ways.
How Can You Thrive in the Pax Technica?
The internet of things could become a robust civic infrastructure. A network of devices that produces open-source data that is easy for users and contributors to understand, can be locally managed, can be ethically shared, and allows people to opt out would be an information network that people would actively want to contribute to.40 But whether or not we have a public conversation about what the internet of things could be, there are ways for us to thrive in this new empire of devices.
First, you can be a more sophisticated user. Do one thing a month to improve your tech savvy. Try out a virtual private network to see how it operates. Get a PGP key, which enables “pretty good privacy,” and use it to trade one political joke with a friend.41 Use social-networking software to map out your own Facebook networks. Check your credit history using the free services of an online credit agency. Make sure the records on you are accurate and fix anything that is not correct. Scrub your social-media profiles to make them just a little more private. One individual technology user taking these steps won’t change the world. Still, you can change the way you live, protect yourself, and be more aware of how your data is being used.
Second, appreciate that devices you acquire in the years ahead have an immediate function that is useful to you and an indirect function that is useful to others. Be purposeful in choosing devices that give you control over settings. Reward the firms that treat your data responsibly and punish the ones that don’t with the one thing they’ll pay attention to: loss of your business. Moreover, be ready to use your internet of things for political purposes. Social media and big data have become important to modern power politics. People armed with grievances, passion, and mobile phones take down nasty dictators; the most consequential international political battles are now over the minutiae of information policy, engineering protocols, and telecommunications standards. It’s tough for everyone to be engaged in technology issues all the time. We can hope that some people will be engaged on most things most of the time.
Over the past twenty-five years we’ve learned that almost any group that can amass informational and network resources can rise to functional prominence. The internet of things will be a powerful tool kit for governments and corporations. To ensure balance in political life, civil society groups need full access to the same tool kit. You can be a functionally prominent political actor by thoughtfully managing your internet of things.
The past twenty-five years of internet politics can teach us about what to expect over the next twenty-five years. The next world order will be significantly shaped by—indeed contained in—an infrastructure of devices that will be constantly talking to one another.
What will power mean in this new world order? The roles of winner and loser will go to the actors who can demonstrate truths through big data gathered over the internet of things and disseminate those truths over social media. The role of loser will go to those who cannot survive scrutiny over social media, whose lies are exposed by big data, and who do not have the skill to manipulate the internet of things.
We already have twenty-five years of experience researching the political impact of networked devices, and significant research has demonstrated both the capacities and the constraints that come with political communication mediated by digital tools. Thinking about the political impact of social media and big data so far will yield some insight into the political impact of the internet of things to come: social networks will reach even more widely and be mediated by even more devices. The data won’t be big, it will be enormous.
Imagine a set of magical devices that could help inspire new entrepreneurs and link democracy advocates. These devices could help people work around a lousy postal service and bad roads that slow everyone down. In the near future, devices will come with the ability to manipulate and learn from each other. They will allow people to negotiate new business ideas and help us move money quickly and securely. You actually don’t have to imagine these devices because you probably already have access to several.
It’s for these reasons that some people have come to call new technologies, such as the smart mobile phone, “liberation technologies.” You are about to get many more such devices, and we need to think about the world we’re being liberated into. If our devices are talking to one another more, won’t the data generated by them, and their role in our lives, only grow in importance?
The internet of things is a medium of increasing returns, meaning that the number of people and devices connected to it determine its value. A user has limited opportunities to do creative things with their small network of devices if no one else in the community is connected to it. As billions of new devices are connected, what will you do with the ones immediately around you?
Civic engagement has become a networked, data-intensive experience. In this book I’ve tried to demonstrate the great diversity of ways in which people are using digital media to change their relationships with governments and corporations. Politics used to be what happened whenever one person or organization tried to represent another person or organization. Devices will be doing much of that representative work in the years ahead, and social scientists need to stay relevant by expanding their tool kits and amending their analytical frames. From now on, politics is what happens when your devices represent you in the pax technica.