By William Peterson
“Okay. Now everything you had on your other phone and on your hard drive is accessible here on the tablet and on your new phone, but it’s also backed up in the cloud and on our servers. Your music, your photos, your messages, your data. It can never be lost. You lose this tablet or phone, it takes exactly six minutes to retrieve all your stuff and dump it on the next one. It’ll be here next year and next century.” – Brandon, The Circle.
These words are spoken by one of the characters from Dave Eggers novel The Circle, of which you may have heard. In this story, a young woman joins a company (the Circle) which is currently changing the way humanity connects at every level; just imagine Apple, Microsoft and Google combined. Its owners have created a new operating system which uses one single identity for a user to access any kind of service, be it an internet forum, social network or bank account. Privacy is not only passé – it is an outright offense, according to the company’s philosopy. By keeping things private, you are hiding valuable information from others. Whereas the beginning still makes the company look like a Utopia, with consumer-and-employee friendly practices in every aspect, it soon becomes clear to the reader and the protagonist that behind the façade of a new, clean and social interface with the Internet and other people lie much darker intentions.
Although the novel takes place in the near future, one can see such patterns emerging. Most strikingly perhaps are the apathy and even joy with which people embrace these emerging patterns. Our online identity is quickly evolving to be on par with our ‘real identity’, and perhaps to some extent much more ‘curated’ on the web. Then again, you, the reader have probably heard such moralising editorials and news-coverages several times now, where people endlessly go on about how the consumer society is fuelled by social networks, maintaining such a society by targeted advertisement and the creation of inferiority complexes thanks to the myriad of updates, selfies and ‘better people’ floating by every day on your newsfeed.
So in the end, what is left to be said to an audience that may care at some level, but on the larger level sees no threat in the way that we relate to each other, and in the way that our entire identity both on-and-offline is geared for shaping us into consumers, not citizens or thinkers? Ultimately, let us admit it, hardly anybody cares because that is the point of such a consumer society – to make you so comfortable and desiring only of the superficial that you just. simply. do. not. care. Because hell, who wants to care when you have sports, fashion, Hollywood and make-up?
Now, I have frequently heard people argue: “well, if you think that we’re living in some kind of surveillance state, why don’t you go live in Russia or something and see what it’s like there”. Actually, this is quite interesting. It seems that because in other countries, surveillance of citizens by the state is much more blatant – and the result much more drastic – that the ever-finer dragnets of internet surveillance here in western Europe and the US are seen as harmless. Nevermind the fact that the police in the Netherlands will detain you in migrant detention centres in horrible conditions for refusing to show your passport at a public manifestation, or the fact that the police is taking pictures with iPhones to identify people for future reference. Also, take the fact that most people do not seem to mind, or at least be more than mildly upset by the fact that it has been revealed that intelligence agencies have access to your Dropboxes, Gmail accounts and social networks – all stored in the cloud, next week and next century, even if you have deleted all your data. Everything that is considered relevant will be stored and used to determine who you are.
We like to say “Sure, it’s not great, but this content and the access thereof would only be dangerous if we no longer lived in a democracy that safeguarded our human rights and wanted to use it for bad purposes, which will not happen”.
However, recalling the results of apathy and arrogance in Europe in the 19th and 20th century, consider the following: Which democratic government, or government without authoritarian intentions, engages in such secretive mass-surveillance of its population for no discernible reason? Of course, there is the official reason of ‘combatting terrorism’ – but Charlie Hebdo, the Copenhagen café shootings, the National Socialist Underground murders in Germany and the Boston bombings are making this reasoning seem naive at best, and a smokescreen at worst. The mass storing and analysis of our communications is so far removed from stopping actual terrorism, that the police in France only found out about a man who had allegedly been planning terrorist acts after he shot himself in the leg with his own gun and called an ambulance.[1]
However, these things are known, to the extent that discussion about these topics are not some kind of fringe event anymore, but have been in the bigger news channels for the past years now. Yet, the vast majority of people have difficulty caring, being presented with on the one hand, a struggle for nebulous ideals of privacy and freedom that would require some very deep discussions about the current activities of our governments – and on the other, the reigning principle that as long as you are not doing anything illegal, you do not have anything to hide.
Thus in the end, I come back to my main point: You may have nothing to fear (yet), but the current developments and the insincerity of our government about its practices should make even the most dis-interested of us at least question said developments. I just want to clarify at this point that I am most definitely not urging anybody at this point to engage in ‘illegal’ public manifestations here, take your backups offline, or install illicit software that would hide you from the rightful gaze of our democratic governments.
So if the current paradigm shift is towards the stance: “ALL MUST BE KNOWN” (as in Dave Egger’s book), then my question to you is: “WHY CARE?”
William Peterson is a student who wishes to remain anonymous for this issue of TR.
[1] http://www.mediaite.com/online/alleged-terrorists-plot-to-attack-paris-church-goes-awry-when-he-shoots-himself/
