FUTURE history “books” will report that the paradigm change from a culture of personal privacy to one enforcing the absolute transparency of individual life was put into effect not only under the banner of measurement but also under that of networking. One will read that in the twenty-first century, the Internet of things inaugurated the triumph of artificial intelligence, given human complacency, over the remaining attempts at data protection. It consolidated objects and activities and simplified people’s lives by way of control. Its immense accumulation of data was a paradise for all those interested in human behavior on a grand scale: sociologists, advertising experts, insurance companies, physicians, traffic and urban planners, law enforcement, and other agencies of security. Although the process was occasionally troubled by data protectors, for a long time the vast majority of the population had already been cooperating with the state and commercial data collectors. The majority had permitted a glimpse into its buying behavior via the supermarket discount card, and it was now “selling” its digital communication—or, rather, just giving it away, considering the value generated by the data for others. It was doing so, in fact, not only to get free Internet service; one didn’t want to do without GPS either, not even when it began to cost more. Even Google Glass was, eventually, a great success, maybe because it gave everyone a place at the heart of a personal surveillance center in which one forgot that this technology had been set up chiefly in order to survey surveillance. At some point most people had acquired an “intelligent trash container” that although it no longer worked under the banner of self-optimization or information management was nonetheless serving governmental control by registering whatever was being tossed into it and notifying the town hall as to whether recycling was being done correctly.1
Future historians will identify the precursors of this development and use them to justify the status quo. They will refer to the Dutchman Alex van Es, an early-adopting pioneer of self-tracking who, in 1998, had already published the contents of his trash bin on the website icepick.com using a barcode scanner, proving that no obsession with data mining can be so absurd as not to be converted instantly into a business plan. One will immediately be reminded that the idea of surveillance had already been contemplated by the avant-garde artist Fernand Léger for a film that was to record twenty-four hours in the everyday life of a man and a woman without their knowledge (1931), as well as in Dan Graham’s project Alteration of a Suburban House (1978), which was to replace the wall of a home with glass and thus bring the life of this family onto the neighborhood stage—both ideas quite some time before Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998). These predecessors demonstrate the extent to which art, commerce, and control are interconnected. Future historians will also report that users of the intelligent trash container—which became generally accepted in the 2020s—received a discount on the cost of their garbage disposal and that “the transparent 90 percent” movement filed an application to revoke the security passes for anyone in a household that refused to participate in the “Smart Bin, Safer City” program.
On the background of these cultural-historical findings one might agree with Morozov that the commercialization of data cannot be prohibited by law as long as it is driven by the wishes of the people. Thus the debate in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures revolved, instead, around questions of how to prevent Internet companies and intelligence agencies from collaborating. Morozov called this the reaching for the “low-hanging fruit,”2 a political maneuver predicated on the delusion that one could keep state institutions from accessing commercially collected data. It is difficult to believe that politicians would allow this self-disempowerment vis-à-vis the commercial realm. After all, the state’s intimate knowledge of the life of its citizens guarantees a more efficient fulfillment of its duties: lowering the cost of healthcare by detecting disease patterns early and introducing preventive care in cases of clearly detrimental behaviors, fighting against tax evasion and fraudulent social-security benefits through detailed knowledge of its citizens’ buying habits, improving control of traffic flow by analyzing patterns of mobility, allowing for better city planning through a more accurate knowledge of spatial use, more efficiently managing energy by analyzing consumption profiles, and optimizing educational policy by gathering insight into individual patterns of interest and behavior.
No state will have any objection to knowing more about its citizens. On the contrary, every state will want to put at its disposal the data generated both through commercial and ideological tracking and data mining. Just how little can be expected from governments regarding data protection became clear on June 28, 2012, when the German Bundestag passed new legislation allowing the state to sell its citizens’ data to advertising and credit agencies as long as citizens did not opt out by filing an objection. This resolution was made in an almost empty parliament as the twenty-first item of its agenda, shortly before 9 p.m., just after the beginning of the European Cup semifinals, Germany vs. Italy. The vote passed by a narrow margin but was later annulled following the protest of data protectionists. However, the fact that a majority of two or three politicians can pass such a law does not leave much room for consolation.
Is privacy better protected in the world of business? We might suppose so, given that its primary goal is not control or moral judgment but selling, satisfying whatever demand it perceives. However, for this very reason business is even more inquisitive than intelligence agencies, which are only concerned with potential threats. The transparent customer is the larger and weightier twin of the transparent citizen. Marketing consultants dream of the “full take” just as profoundly as intelligence agencies—if not more so—and of the real-time mining of social media, online communication, and offline actions. Among other things, they dream of the supermarket equipped with intelligent path tracking, that is, how a customer navigates the store based on data captured from their mobile. Via RFID chips feeding and coordinating biometric data the “smart” supermarket also registers, for example, whether a customer puts cream cheese back onto the shelf and opts for low-fat cottage cheese instead. Knowing his or her preference, the supermarket will now highlight diet products as the customer walks by and will also adjust in real time, assuming his willingness to pay more for less fat, the prices on the electronic displays.3 Marketing loves data retrieval that allows for the refinement of the classical concept of segmentation as customization for the individual consumer.
The transparent customer is always also a transparent citizen. This justifies Morozov’s concern that companies could be forced by governments to share their data. Morozov demands more than legislation in order to control IT companies. He maintains that it is necessary to take action to prevent a “data catastrophe” comparable to that envisaged by the ecological movement. At a certain point one’s energy bill was no longer simply a private matter since the ecological consequences of individual energy consumption affects everyone. Analogously, our dealings in personal data have a public ethical dimension. Morozov is not only targeting the extrospective variant of self-tracking, that is, the saving and sharing of data that directly affects others (via camera, audio recording, or tagging in social media). Already the introspective variety—the gathering of personal data by insurance companies concerning driving or consumption habits, physical exercise, movement and mobility, and so on—presents a problem. It contributes to the determination of statistical criteria and norms against which all customers, regardless of their willingness to disclose private data, will be measured. Every purchase of an intelligent trash container increases the pressure on all those who do not yet cooperate with the data-collecting servants of the municipal garbage collector. Morozov’s cautionary conclusion is that individual generosity—or perhaps promiscuity—with data sets the standards from which others will be unable to extricate themselves.
Morozov’s perspective approaches the “ethics of responsibility for distant contingencies” demanded by Hans Jonas in his 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. We have to consider the consequences of our actions even though they do not affect us or our immediate environment directly.4 At the same time, Morozov’s perspective points to the problem of surveillance, underlining just how complex the subject is as soon as one delves into it more deeply.5 This approach turns the victims themselves into perpetrators while signaling the inefficacy of legal action vis-à-vis more complex and ambivalent ethical discussion. No wonder that others have pointedly recast Morozov’s intimation of a structural problem within information society as a matter of politics. Among the reactions to Morozov’s contribution in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung one could read that total surveillance is an insult to democracy, that mature citizens were being treated like immature children, and that the protest should not be seen in terms of the ecological movement but rather as comparable to the 1960s resistance against “emergency legislation.” The political inflection of discussion was echoed in the appeal of Gerhart Baum, the former interior secretary from the Free Democratic Party: “We lack a citizen’s movement for the protection of privacy as it existed and exists for the protection of natural resources.”6 Only the late chief editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Frank Schirrmacher noted—and more than once—that the general sense of alarm in the wake of Snowden’s revelations did not result from the disclosure of sophisticated surveillance technologies but from the realization that those technologies apply the same logic, systems, formulas, and mechanisms that determine our everyday life and working environment. Elsewhere, Schirrmacher, speaking about GPS, points out that the intercommunication of the giants of Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies has not come about in a dystopian, Orwellian mode but “by way of things that even please us.”7 This fusion between what we fear and what we desire is the problem that paralyzes politics and people.
Morozov’s correlation of environmental and data catastrophe, which meanwhile has gained some notoriety, is, in the end, unsound. When speaking of data catastrophe, the principle of a shifting baseline—as used in the discourse of the environmental catastrophe—is not equivalent to the destruction of the natural resources for future generations. The data catastrophe “only” threatens current cultural norms, and by contrast with global warming and pollution, a disaster resulting from altered values applied to social coexistence is hardly guaranteed. While the ecological movement’s call to halt in response to the looming end of mankind can hardly be contradicted (the focus of contention being only a matter of the urgency of its appeal), saying “Halt” to cultural change would seem to oblige future generations to observe established norms of social interaction.8 When motivated by cultural concerns, an ethics of preservation is less convincing than when it is a response to the known threat of environmental catastrophe. Not only must a culturally inclined ethics of preservation substantiate the reality of a threat; it must also speak to its menacing character, all the while resisting the counterargument that radical upheavals of culture are inherent within modernity.
The data catastrophe demands a more profound discussion than that surrounding questions of how to retain the integrity and privacy of mail in the age of digitization. It points to a change of social mentalities chiefly embodied in digital natives. The fact that this constituency appears unbothered by the loss of their private sphere is for many—and especially for members of the older generation—evidence of ignorance and indifference. From a psychosociological perspective, the lack of protest might also be understood as an emancipatory effort—as a longing for a realm that no longer differentiates between the private and the public, or as a rebellion against parents and grandparents whose earlier cultural revolution, which involved—in the 1960s and 1970s—making the private sphere public, has now become further radicalized with the help of the new media. On the one hand, this rebellion may be seen as very successful, given all the complaints of the older generation concerning the youthful lack of concern. On the other hand, this longing may simply be a resurgence that can be referred back to historical models since, in the early twentieth century, transparent man was not only invoked by communists against bourgeois culture but also by the Western avant-garde.9 The guiding principles of other earlier cultural tendencies—best expressed in Georg Simmel’s declaration “The secret is one of man’s greatest achievements” as well as in Peter Handke’s admission “I live off of what the others don’t know about me”10—lose their validity under the contemporary imperative of transparency and disclosure, to say nothing of the fact that they prove to be impracticable against the prospects of intelligent things and smart environments. From this perspective, surveillance and control are merely the social implementation of the radical transparency widely propagated and practiced in social networks.
Compared to the ecological catastrophe, as an existential problem the data catastrophe is less menacing and as an ethical one less unequivocal. It is possible that this is the reason that Morozov’s discomforting but entirely necessary call for a larger debate to counteract our data-specific ignorance has proved ineffective. Perhaps it explains the appeal of the emancipated-citizen-versus-suppressive-state rhetoric, which was made all the more persuasive when the British government blundered in sending its Secret Intelligence Service to the Guardian’s offices in order to destroy the hard disks holding Snowden’s information. With this purely symbolic act of power—no intelligence agency worthy of its name believes that in the age of digital reproduction unwanted data can be erased through material violence—the media circle was strategically closed at the point where it had begun, namely with Edward Snowden’s “betrayal.” Although many have rightly regarded this betrayal as more of an awakening and as a call to necessary debate, in most cases the discussion does not go beyond the consequences that Snowden himself attributed to his disclosures. It is easy to understand why.