Yes, we all love being online. It’s how we stay in touch, read and hear the news, watch movies, bank, buy, sell, find directions, track our health, influence culture and politics, read books, and generally stay in contact with the world. I’ve been an online maven since about 1995, if not earlier, and I’m the last one to cast aspersions on the entire apparatus.
And yet sometimes my heart aches with sadness over the difference between what it promised and what it is. Before an entire generation forgets, the point of the internet, the web, the app economy, and everything we associate with it was to bolster freedom. It was going to break through the cartels on information flows and grant everyone a voice. Some of us went further, believing that the digital world in general was emancipatory from state and corporate control.
In my own thinking, which I now recognize was mostly wrong, the physical world was always restricted by the problem of scarcity and thus vulnerable to control by government. The digital world, however, is powered by information, which is infinitely malleable and reproducible and therefore not subject to limits. It was also less subject to control and hence offered a new chance for freedom.
The whole point was to empower individuals and embolden democracy. There’s a reason for the name YouTube, for example. The idea was to grant to every person the ability to contribute to and be part of an uncensored television experience. Today, however, takedowns are routine on the platform for a huge range of topics that are considered to be controversial. Do a dance routine and you’re fine; warn about the adverse effects of vaccines and you'll be hit with censorship.
The platform was purchased by Google, a company that once swore that it wouldn’t be evil. We should have suspected something had gone very wrong when the company eliminated that slogan. It was an admission: We’re now going to do evil. Between Google and all its properties, along with the other large corporations that dominate the online world, the internet has become a tool and mouthpiece for governments, as incredible as that seems.
I can recall having debates with others in the early 2010s who warned that the digital world offers the state an unprecedented power to surveil, censor, and control the population. I said otherwise. One debate in particular I recall with great sadness. It was with Ladar Levison, who created Lavabit and Silent Circle together with Phil Zimmerman of PGP fame. He told the story of how he chose to shut down his very popular email service rather than cooperate with the National Security Agency in effectively granting the government a backdoor.
I said at the time that this was surely a temporary setback. Eventually, we would find the way toward perfect freedom through technology. At that time, I even held the same view toward Edward Snowden’s astonishing revelations that government had deployed surveillance tools affecting (10 years ago) at least a quarter of a million people. What he did in risking his freedom and life to inform Americans was completely heroic. I felt so at the time and said so. And yet nothing could shake my faith that such practices were so utterly un-American that they surely couldn’t last.
Sadly, my wild optimism utterly blinded me to the gathering storms. Think back on this period. It was 10 years ago when Mr. Snowden’s allegations and proof rocked the world press. He had to make his way to Hong Kong and finally to Russia, where he continues to live. What precisely was done in light of his revelations to fix the system so that the First and Fourth amendments were no longer routinely violated by our own government? I can’t think of a single thing that was done about this.
One does wonder about Mr. Snowden’s attitude toward the entire experience. He threw away his professional stability and risked his life to inform the world what was happening. He surely believed that something would come of it, perhaps major legislative efforts to restore the original dream of the internet. I wonder what he must be thinking now that we’ve accumulated vast evidence that what he discovered was just the beginning.
Ten years later, we’re confronted with a mighty censorship industrial complex that involves government, corporations, universities, nongovernment organizations, private foundations, global bureaucracies, and a huge tangle of corporatist thickets of surveillance and control. The weaponized bureaucratic machinery operates with very little if any real oversight and without any real reticence about the legality and morality of what they’re doing. Not even active court cases seem to make a dent in the operations.
The case of Missouri v. Biden is particularly interesting in this context. It began with some scientists who took note of the way their social media censorship coincided directly with emails from the head of the National Institutes of Health for a quick and devastating refutation of the Great Barrington Declaration. This triggered a curiosity concerning a possible link here between government and censorship that would clearly violate the First Amendment.
But as this case proceeded, so did the change of hands at Twitter and the unearthing of much more in the way of government pressure. Once researchers and attorneys knew where to look, they discovered an awesome and frightening machinery in place that had been operating for many years dating back to the election of President Donald Trump. It’s as if the whole regime made the decision that the internet was a fundamental threat to ruling-class control of the entire political system. They were determined never to see a repeat of that.
The pretext of COVID-19 provided another great leap forward in digital surveillance on every front. The excuse of testing, tracking, and tracing a virus provided the pretext for massive invasions of privacy and even an attempt to impose vaccine passports in states. That didn’t go well and eventually blew up. But keep in mind that this was just the first attempt. It isn’t as if the motivation behind complete totalitarian control via the internet is gone; it’s just experiencing a temporary setback in one area.
The single most alarming prospect for digital surveillance comes from the intention to create a central bank digital currency that would permit government direct control over people’s livelihoods, allowing for the construction of a China-style social credit system that would effectively end democracy and freedom as we know it.
I think back on those two decades following the turn of the millennium, and I’m astonished at my own naivete over this entire subject. Many people shared it. Our freedoms and rights were slipping away, and the tool they were using to achieve this was the very system that I and others had long celebrated as the instrument of our liberation. This conviction caused a kind of blindness toward the troubles that were growing right under our noses.
For my own part, it took the lockdowns of March 2020 to wake me up about the reality of what had been years in the making. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It took an incredible period of adjustment to go from happy techno-utopian to being a more realistic chronicler of how the original vision of the digital age came to be wholly betrayed. Here we are three years later, and I’m far more inclined to look with greater sympathy at communities such as the Amish, which have eschewed this entire system.
Can the original vision be restored? Not without a dramatic turn of the existing trajectory. We need all hands on deck if we’re going to save our freedoms and rights from being eaten up by a digital leviathan. Sad to say that the system we believed would be freedom’s greatest friend has become one of the biggest threats we face.
