Then, in the early-morning hours of July 4, masked gunmen allegedly shot Bautista, just off that same park, as he was beginning his shift as an employee of the city’s Department of Public Works. He remained lying on the pavement for more than an hour before a passerby discovered him. By the time emergency services arrived, Bautista was dead.

As if his killing weren’t tragic enough for his family, in the days that followed another dimension of the story unfolded. Just weeks before the shooting, the Cambridge city council had voted to shut off ShotSpotter, the gunshot-detection system that had been used by the city for more than a decade to help the police locate shootings and to more quickly respond to victims in high-crime areas. One of those unutilized sensors was located only feet from where Xavier lay wounded.

Viewed in isolation, Cambridge’s removal of an anti-crime technology could be dismissed as the predictable politics of a college town with an oversupply of highly educated liberal voters. But Cambridge isn’t an isolated case. Across the country, Left-wing activists and progressive elected officials are increasingly targeting law-enforcement technologies they cast as tools of state surveillance, corporate power, and racial inequality. 

ShotSpotter is one such technology. Others include Flock Safety — a license-plate-recognition system that police departments use daily to apprehend suspects fleeing crime scenes, locate abducted children, and recover stolen vehicles. Together, these local campaigns show how opposition to new anti-crime technologies has become fertile ground for Left-wing activists seeking political wins. 

Yet affluent progressives are rarely the ones who pay the price for this kind of anti-policing push. 

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For Bautista’s family and many residents of The Port, the city’s decision was impossible to fathom. Days after his death, more than 200 angry residents packed a meeting with city officials, demanding answers. The central question that emerged in the discussion was: why had the city removed a technology that existed to help first responders reach gunshot victims more quickly?

The answer begins in January, when a 24-year-old Harvard graduate and self-identified democratic socialist named Ayah Al-Zubi — the youngest person ever elected to the city council — was sworn into office and immediately appointed chairwoman of the council’s public-safety committee. Al-Zubi had no background in law enforcement or public safety, nor had she ever lived in a low-income neighborhood, having spent most of her adolescence in a comfortable suburb of Cincinnati, where both of her parents worked as dentists.

Even so, Al-Zubi made ending Cambridge’s ShotSpotter program her first priority in office. It was a cause she’d championed for months alongside other local Left activists, who’d concluded —  rather suddenly, it seemed — that the tried-and-tested technology is an instrument of racialized surveillance.

In the public hearings that followed, activists repeatedly hammered this point: that ShotSpotter was inherently racist because its sensors were disproportionately concentrated in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. As one elderly white Cambridge resident told the committee, “ShotSpotter does not make Cambridge a safer community… It makes Cambridge a more oppressive place to live… particularly for its black and brown residents who are already targeted by racism.”

Others repeatedly cited an 82% false-positive rate, a figure drawn from a nearly decade-old Harvard Crimson analysis that the Cambridge Police Department disputes. And still others criticized the technology for failing to deter gun violence, despite the fact that its manufacturer, SoundThinking, has consistently described ShotSpotter as primarily a gunfire-detection-and-response tool, rather than a prevention system.

Yet these present-focused arguments ultimately took up only a small share of the advocacy. Far more common was reasoning focused not on what ShotSpotter actually does, but on what it might someday achieve. Activists warned that the sensors could eventually record private conversations and that ICE agents or a future Republican administration might gain access to the data.

Future speculation thus dominated the discussions. The arguments reflected what has become a defining characteristic of contemporary Left-wing politics: a paranoid style and a paranoid political imagination detached from reality, in which hypothetical future abuses of technology and state authority carry far greater significance than present challenges. Soon, the council voted to remove ShotSpotter, with five votes in favor of the proposal, two opposed, and two abstaining.

The successful effort of a small group of Left-wing activists to remove ShotSpotter in Cambridge reflects a broader transformation in the nature of progressive activism during President Trump’s second administration. Compared to the first Trump presidency, when opposition was organized centrally around resisting a single political figure, today’s activism is more fragmented and directed toward technological objects that have come to symbolize the larger political and economic systems the movement opposes. 

Whether the target is a gunshot-detection system, a license-plate reader, a Tesla car, or a hyperscale data center, the hardware increasingly becomes the site through which broader Left-wing anxieties about surveillance, policing, capitalism, and inequality are expressed. This new focus revises the mission of the historic Left, which welcomed technological advancement, even as it sought to reform or revolutionize the relations of production. Under the new dispensation, the product itself is the target — and advancement is presumed suspect unless proved otherwise.  

The pattern has become unmistakable. Since Trump’s return to office, dozens of predominantly progressive cities, the largest being Los Angeles, have ended or reconsidered their relationships with Flock Safety. In each of these cases, the campaigns shifted the debate away from the technology’s demonstrated uses and toward what it might someday become. Similar campaigns have targeted data centers, turning reasonable land-use disputes into a broader ideological struggle over Big Tech.

This shift coincides with two larger developments. The first is the growing disarray of the liberal institutions that once organized and directed Left-wing political energy. After nearly a decade of defining themselves in opposition to Trump, Democrats and the broader network of DC-based progressive organizations have struggled to produce a comparable national movement capable of channeling the Left’s diverse grievances into a unified political project. The Women’s March, the impeachment campaigns, and the George Floyd protests represented the high-water mark of that form of resistance, yet none produced a durable political movement beyond opposition to Trump himself.

As Trump approaches the end of his presidency, even that organizing center is beginning to dissolve, and the political energy it once contained is dispersing into smaller, localized battles fought in mayor’s offices and city-council meetings over the technologies increasingly shaping everyday life.

The second development is the speed at which computing has embedded itself into the economy. As semiconductors have shrunk and computing power has become cheaper, more industries have adopted technology capable of processing vast amounts of information and automating tasks that once required human judgment or that were simply impossible to perform at scale.

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Public safety and law enforcement have enjoyed the benefits of this computing revolution. Tools like ShotSpotter and Flock Safety are examples of the same more-powerful computing now commonplace across medicine, manufacturing, and finance, filling long-standing operational needs through automation and pattern recognition. The primary difference is that the Left sees these technologies, when used by law enforcement, as proxies for fears about the future of state authority and technological control.

To be sure, new technologies can produce unexpected consequences. Social media promised greater openness and connection but also gave rise to pervasive targeted advertising and worsening mental-health outcomes for adolescents. That history helps explain the public’s current unease with new technologies.

But broad skepticism alone doesn’t explain why anti-crime technology has emerged as a lightning rod for Left-wing ire. The reason lies in the unique character of the technological revolution. Unlike previous waves of technological change, today’s computing revolution has unfolded without a broadly shared national narrative explaining its purpose, benefits, or tradeoffs. That vacuum has given activists an opportunity to frame the debate, and to define these technologies primarily as instruments of surveillance and social control. 

As political commentators search for signs of how the Democratic Party will regain national power in 2028, much of their attention remains fixed on Democrats in Congress. But a quieter political movement is taking shape in local governments across the country. Led by informal networks of Left-leaning activists and citizens, it has become one of the most effective forces of our time, helping to block billions of dollars in government contracts with major technology companies and successfully turning symbolic political campaigns into real policy victories.

Perhaps more important, these campaigns reveal something deeper about the modern Left. Its belief system is now defined by a generalized suspicion of technology, institutions, and the exercise of power itself, mirroring the descent of parts of the Right into conspiracism and what used to be called the paranoid style. As these ideas become more influential within the Democratic Party, it is worth asking whether they provide the foundation for a national campaign capable of persuading ordinary Americans that Democrats are prepared to govern. At stake, after all, are the lives of people like Xavier Bautista, whose death might have been prevented had Cambridge retained the technology it chose to abandon in response to the Left’s anti-tech paranoia.

The pandemic dumped jet fuel into the growing counter-disinformation machine while extending its controls into the physical world. That brought the information state into people’s everyday lives. This was something different from the drama of false allegations about Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia that plagued the Trump presidency. Though Russiagate dominated the news cycle, it was essentially a political crime against abstractions like the “rule of law” and the “democratic process.” Normal people who did not devote their time to scrolling newsfeeds could mostly choose to ignore the sordid Trump-Russia drama. Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates removed the “normie” exemption.

The senseless cruelty of preventing people from attending outdoor weddings and visiting sick relatives in their final moments. The images of authorities in New York City placing locks on children’s playgrounds. Authorities in Venice, California, using bulldozers to shovel thirty-seven tons of sand into the city’s iconic skatepark to prevent kids from playing outdoors. Prolonged school closures that isolated children and caused generational learning losses, hurting poor and disadvantaged kids worst of all. The brazen flouting of these restrictions by the upper classes and political elites. At Barack Obama’s 60th birthday party, for instance, where the former president and his hundreds of celebrity guests on Martha’s Vineyard danced with their faces exposed while the army of workers hired for the event were forced to wear masks. The fact that the technique of lockdowns was imported into the United States from the authoritarian surveillance state of China, where the virus originated. The even more galling fact that mere discussion of the virus’ origins was labeled a racist conspiracy by the most venerated institutions of science and journalism.

By imposing excessive and arbitrary policies while attempting to conceal vital information about the pandemic, the state provoked a public backlash. In turn, government officials treated the backlash not as legitimate democratic dissent, but as proof that unregulated misinformation was fueling domestic extremism. They responded by doubling down on the same policies, tightening their information controls, and imposing new methods of digital cancellation like “debanking” that cut off people’s access to their own financial accounts. Official repression and popular revolt fed off each other in a cycle that radicalized both sides and laid bare the realities of mass manipulation and digital dependency in the information state.

***

On February 15, 2020, as people were just learning about Covid, the World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous.” His statement came almost a month before the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared a pandemic. The “infodemic” not only preceded the physical pandemic, it was, in the words of the world’s foremost health authority, “just as dangerous.”

The following month, all the major tech platforms — Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube — released a joint statement pledging that they would be “jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus” while also “elevating authoritative content”.

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“The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise,” wrote Klaus Schwab, head of the Davos-based World Economic Forum (WEF), in a book published at the start of the pandemic that announced its aims in the title, COVID-19: The Great Reset. The global surveillance network Schwab described had a second purpose. Beyond detecting the spread of new viruses, it could monitor the information environment and shape the public’s response to new policies. Yet the category of “authoritative information”, which would supposedly prevent future “infodemics”, was less reliable than its name suggested.  

Members of the public who had eyes to see could not help but notice that whatever the experts vehemently declared about Covid could be reversed a day later. Health authorities like the WHO and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were often acting on incomplete information to rush out policies heavily influenced by political considerations in the name of “science”. Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of Google subsidiary YouTube, said her platform’s publishing policy called for “removing information that is problematic”. Examples of problematic information she named included people advocating vitamin C and turmeric as cures for the coronavirus and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations”. Meanwhile, the WHO frequently changed its recommendations, which meant the meaning of misinformation changed from day to day.

By following its own rule, Google would have been forced, at various times during the pandemic, to ban posts that advocated wearing masks, that characterized the virus as highly contagious, or that suggested that it might have come from a laboratory, since all those went against official stances taken by the WHO. The CDC was similarly inconsistent, changing its policy on masking at least three times in the span of two years. The agency originally discouraged their use before endorsing it, then finally acknowledging that the cloth masks most Americans used could not stop the fine aerosols that spread Covid — a fact that Anthony Fauci had privately acknowledged at the outset of the pandemic in a February 2020 email.

Despite the inconsistencies of the public health authorities, experts from the disinformation field proved flexible enough to enforce every new pronouncement as if they were both moral imperatives and matters of settled science. When Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton suggested that Covid-19 could have escaped from the Chinese virology laboratory in Wuhan at the epicenter of the outbreak, he was swiftly attacked by journalists who all seemed to use strikingly similar language. The Washington Post labeled the idea of a possible lab leak a “conspiracy theory that was already debunked”. A reporter who was then at Politico accused Cotton of “spreading rumors… that were easily debunked within minutes”, while The New York Times chided Cotton for spreading what it called a “conspiracy theory.” Given the apparent consensus, Facebook banned users from discussing the lab leak theory under its misinformation policy. That May, The Washington Post’s top fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, wrote that it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a lab. A year later, Kessler published a new article explaining “How the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory Suddenly Became Credible.” And a short time after that, Facebook quietly reversed its policy, posting a notice that read, “In consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”

In June 2020, the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, sponsored the creation of a nominally independent organization called the Election Integrity Partnership whose mission was to monitor and remove election-related misinformation online in the lead-up to the November election. A consortium of four groups (two universities, a private defense contractor, and a Washington think tank), the EIP’s mandate, according to one of its founders, a former chief security officer for Facebook, Alex Stamos, was to “try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves”. With more than 100 employees scouring social media sites for speech that they deemed misinformation and flagged for suppression or removal by the tech companies, the EIP did the kind of work, according to Stamos, that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations” to do on its own.

Immediately after the election, one of the four groups that made up the EIP, the Stanford Internet Observatory, spun off into a new information-monitoring initiative called the Virality Project. In a seamless transition from elections to public health, the project collaborated with the surgeon general’s office and the CDC while policing social media for what it labeled vaccine and pandemic-related misinformation. One email sent by a Virality Project staffer to multiple social media companies recommended that the platforms take action even against posts that described “stories of true vaccine side effects”, specifically “true posts which could fuel hesitancy”. 

Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.

Without any public deliberation or legislative debate, without any formal amendments to the Constitution, the authority to censor that which was true but deemed harmful had become the law… not quite of the land, but of the society online that was ruled by code. The more arbitrary the health policies became, the better they propped up the authority of the information regulators.

***

At 77, Joe Biden was the oldest major-party candidate to ever run for president, and it showed. Heading into the November 2020 election against Trump, he looked unsteady, even feeble, in his limited and carefully stage-managed public engagements. Biden’s voice would trail off mid-sentence. He would forget what he was talking about or refer to someone who had died as if they were still alive.

Given his frequent verbal gaffes, blank stares, and ghost-white pallor, there were concerns about his health and mental fitness for office. But the powerful fact-checking bureaus in the press dismissed these concerns as Right-wing conspiracy mongering, misinformation, and ageist discrimination. One Homeland Security bulletin leaked to the media detailed an alleged Kremlin plot to manipulate American voters by spreading “unsubstantiated allegations” about Biden’s declining mental health.

With the election only a few months away, Biden’s campaign announced that he would not hold any public campaign rallies due to Covid-19. Biden added, in an offhand comment to reporters, “This is the most unusual campaign I think in modern history.” Not long after that, Biden won a most unusual election.

After losing the election, Trump spent two months challenging the results and stoking the fury of his supporters with a manic “Stop the Steal” campaign that mixed reasonable questions of electoral interference with absurd and wildly irresponsible claims that prodded at the fragile basis of civic peace. The effort culminated on January 6, 2021, when a large pro-Trump demonstration that had assembled in Washington, DC, to challenge the election results splintered off into a riot at the US Capitol building. Ugly scenes of Trump supporters rampaging around the Capitol and fighting with police officers blanketed the news.

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In a symbolic register, the images of protesters dressed like Vikings marauding inside the Capitol building were uniquely threatening to American democracy. But, despite the symbolism, the riots were disorganized and ineffectual. Moreover, January 6 fit into a larger pattern of political violence that had played out over the previous year. The nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which had taken place six months earlier, were orders of magnitude larger and more destructive than the pro-Trump riot. Nineteen people were killed in violence connected to the BLM protests, which spread to more than a hundred cities across the US and caused over $1 billion in damages.

And yet the elite establishment overwhelmingly supported the BLM movement and sympathetically pandered to its demands such as defunding the police. Nancy Pelosi, the powerful Speaker of the House, posed for a photo op kneeling in a brightly colored African kente cloth to show solidarity with the protesters. Public figures who for months had vilified public gatherings as deadly superspreader events suddenly celebrated the sight of tens of thousands of demonstrators crowding in the streets for BLM marches. One petition signed by more than 1,200 health officials declared it incumbent on members of the medical profession to offer “unwavering support” to the protesters. The ruling tech platforms, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, all vocally endorsed and amplified the BLM movement.

In contrast, the response to January 6 was as swift and decisive as any political fallout in recent history. One day after the Capitol melee, Facebook banned the sitting president from posting on its platform. Then Twitter banned Trump permanently, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence”. PayPal and its subsidiary Venmo blocked the accounts of individuals and groups involved in organizing the pro-Trump demonstrations, as well as a Christian crowdfunding site raising money for the protesters. GoFundMe announced that it would remove fundraisers promoting conspiracy theories and “misinformation” about the election. 

To be sure, one could reasonably argue that the threat posed by rioters storming the Capitol and threatening to overturn the election justified the response. That was a political judgment. But the coordinated campaign of digital disconnection reflected a profound transformation in the American system of government. It exposed the outline of a new power structure that operated outside of the formal government by controlling the strategic heights of the information space. A cartel of Silicon Valley tech companies had accomplished in days what Congress failed to do over four years: it shut Trump up and silenced his movement. For a while, at least.

Biden’s inauguration a week later came as a mere formality. The first Trump presidency ended the moment he lost his means of speaking directly to the public, which social media had initially provided, propelling him into the White House, and then unilaterally revoked. The invisible hand of the information regime, once it decided to reveal itself, simply hit mute on the most powerful man in the world. In doing so it revealed an essential rule of power in the digital age: sovereign are they who control the information.

This is an edited extract from The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, by Jacob Siegel (Henry Holt & Company).

For 10 years, Coleman loved his job teaching math and technology in Fall River, Mass. He lived for the “teachable moments” when young minds lit up and grasped concepts during lively, spontaneous tangents from lesson plans. Then his district mandated that he use i-Ready, an online platform that delivers canned tests and “personalized learning” on internet-connected devices. Coleman wasn’t wild about it. His students began complaining bitterly. Many disengaged entirely or learned to game the system. 

Then a directive came down that usage of the system would increase. “The day that the principal told us that we needed to do i-Ready three times a week, that’s when I was done,” he tells me. “It was three hours a week for each class, when we only had five hours a week. So 60% of the teaching was going to be done by this computer that the kids absolutely hate. That’s not what I went to college for.”

Coleman’s story isn’t unusual. Across the United States, veteran teachers in public and private schools alike describe a quiet exodus from a profession radically transformed by i-Ready and other educational-technology, or “ed-tech,” platforms.  

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Of course, American education has had a rough few decades; student achievement continues to fall ever further behind other developed nations. Partisan tribalists may blame their favorite villains — lazy union teachers and woke-ness for the Right, structural racism and poverty for the Left. But both political parties have been equally guilty of legislating more and more standardized testing over the past 25 years, creating an ideal environment for Big Tech to hawk “data-based” panaceas like i-Ready. 

Marketed as a high-tech solution to lagging scores on government-mandated tests, i-Ready is used across 30-plus US states and a staggering 70% of the top-100 school districts, covering nearly half of elementary- and middle-school children. This, even though i-Ready has never been proved to successfully teach, immerses already-screen-addled kids in yet more screens, and in all likelihood is making America’s children quantifiably dumber.

But storm clouds are gathering. Teachers are whispering their outrage. Parents are organizing to demand that their children be allowed to opt out. And last year, i-Ready publisher Curriculum Associates was hit with a federal class-action lawsuit that insists the platform is less about e-learning than it is a data-extraction racket exploiting minors without parental consent.

Curriculum Associates did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this essay 

In the $94 billion North American ed-tech market of 2026, Curriculum Associates stands as a dominant pillar. Founded in 1969, the firm operated for decades as a sleepy, also-ran textbook publisher before pivoting to the nascent e-learning market in the late aughts. Today, the company is a private-equity-backed juggernaut with more than 2,700 employees and $750 million in annual revenue — derived overwhelmingly from America’s taxpayer-funded public schools.

Curriculum Associates’ flagship product is i-Ready. First launched in 2011, it has evolved into two tightly intertwined screen-based products. i-Ready Inform is the diagnostic half: standardized “adaptive” tests given three times per subject annually. The other half is i-Ready Learning, which translates each student’s i-Ready Inform scores into algorithmically generated lessons called “My Path.” This takes the form of gamified multiple-choice math and English questions delivered by infantile cartoon characters with names like “Yoop Yooply” and “Snargg.” 

The sales pitch is that kids benefit from a kind of one-on-one “personalized instruction” that today’s teachers are simply stretched too thin to deliver. In practice, it usually means that in any one classroom, 25 headphones-wearing students are silently absorbing 25 unrelated e-lessons on a grid of glowing screens, rather than interacting in shared learning moments. 

In traditional, analog education, human teachers can apply infinite adaptations to assist struggling students, answering questions and reading facial expressions and classroom energy. But when kids answer i-Ready questions incorrectly, the system merely swaps in new numbers or texts and instantly regurgitates them through the same characters and scripts. For millions of children, this quickly becomes excruciatingly repetitive.

A private math coach in Alaska describes kids’ frustration to me in stark terms. “I’ve been tutoring for 25-plus years. In my experience, universally, without a doubt, every single kid hates i-Ready. Even my most diligent, self-taught kids loathe it.” 

When children are mandated to spend hours each week using a tool they actively detest, it trains them to equate schoolwork with coercion and monotony. The danger is not merely that kids dislike i-Ready; it’s that the software risks poisoning their attitudes toward learning as such.

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Across the internet, students howl visceral invective against i-Ready: thousands of one-star ratings dominate on Apple’s App Store, excoriating i-Ready as “mentally exhausting,” “THE WORST,” and “a nightmare.” On websites like Sitejabber, which aggregates consumer reviews, thousands more one-star ratings accompany statements like: “It makes students want to kill themselves.” A recent YouTube video titled “i-Ready GARBAGE” racked up 350,000 views in one week; its creator calls i-Ready a “medieval torture method.” 

Given this extraordinary geyser of acid bile from i-Ready’s own captive user base, it’s unsurprising that on both its official YouTube channels, Curriculum Associates disables all commenting. 

As for educators, many view i-Ready as a vocational and philosophical threat: a substitution of analytics and algorithms for human insight, one that erodes teachers’ role as decision-makers and is a Trojan Horse for the total machine takeover of education. Teachers resoundingly give i-Ready a failing grade at Common Sense Media and take to private Facebook groups and Reddit in droves to vent that it is “useless” and “toxic.” 

The most common educator complaint is that i-Ready replaces finite, invaluable teaching time with gratuitous additional testing. “Ms. A,” a director of math curricula at a California public charter school, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, explains that “we lose between three and six weeks of actual instruction time every year taking the i-Ready assessments, and our teachers don’t find it useful at all.”

That problem is compounded in districts that also mandate i-Ready Learning. Although Curriculum Associates nominally recommends limiting usage to 45 minutes per subject per week, institutional pressure to demonstrate Stretch Growth® — CA’s convoluted internal metric that conveniently interprets failure and success as grounds for more i-Ready use — often bloats into hours of student screen time every day.

Teachers resent that i-Ready strips them of the authority to design lessons based on years of experience, effectively demoting them to a demeaning hybrid role: part test proctor, part IT support, part teaching assistant to their digital stand-in. Worse, educators are expected to treat i-Ready’s algorithmic assessments as definitive, even when the results contradict their firsthand knowledge of students’ abilities. 

Coleman, the Massachusetts teacher, recalls the program reporting that his class couldn’t solve basic geometry problems he knew they had already mastered. The software “was telling me my kids were completely ignorant,” he said. “But I knew for a fact they could take apart a right-angle triangle and figure out the other angles.” In his experience, many students gamed or rushed through the diagnostics, generating incorrect scores that then locked them into weeks of needlessly remedial lessons.

However heartfelt or valid their objections to i-Ready, many teachers dare not protest once a school or district implements the system. As Coleman explains, educators “will not stick their necks out, they don’t want to get fired … teachers are terrified.” This anxiety is exacerbated because the program itself also becomes a vector of almost Orwellian surveillance. Last year, “Mr. J,” a West Virginia teacher, received a reprimand after local officials noticed his students weren’t clocking the minimum i-Ready minutes per week. “A district administrator came to my class and sat me down and told me that I had to do what I’m told,” he explained. “Teachers at my school are worried…. There’s absolute fear.” 

You might assume that i-Ready must meet rigorous standards to lead district leaders to insist on its use, over and against the complaints of teachers and students. But you’d assume wrong.  The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the 2015 federal K-12 education law that replaced No Child Left Behind, requires schools to use evidence-based programs. Yet those standards are far looser than the public imagines. Genuine proof of the effectiveness of a program requires multiyear, independently run, randomized trials — which are slow and expensive. 

To date, no such gold-standard studies support i-Ready’s effectiveness. A 2016 Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy Brief warned “there is no evidence that [i-Ready] provides information that teachers can use to help students learn,” and chided Curriculum Associates for claiming “their assessments have the ability to increase learning,” when “none of the studies we found were peer-reviewed or independent.” 

Instead, Curriculum Associates routinely turns to its own employees and paid contractors to produce non-randomized quasi-experimental studies that meet only the very lowest threshold of ESSA evidence — enabling the firm to legally market i-Ready as “evidence-based” without substantiating the claim in a manner rigorous enough to pass muster with independent scientists. 

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Public LinkedIn profiles reveal that Curriculum Associates staffs a research-and-analytics  department with more than 50 full-time data and psychometrics scientists, whose names appear as authors on a steady stream of positive white-paper self-evaluations — all housed in the company’s own painstakingly search-optimized Research Library. 

Critics point to this as fitting the textbook definition of science-washing: credentialed employees using scientific language and internal data to overwhelm would-be doubters with well-packaged supportive documentation — a convincing facsimile of true scientific rigor. 

Lisa LeVasseur of Internet Safety Labs, which evaluates ed-tech software, says the strategy carries ominous echoes of Big Tobacco’s heyday: “Curriculum Associates funding their own research sounds like part of what I call the ‘Product Safety Resistance Playbook,’ which the tobacco industry pioneered back in 1953. It’s a whole set of social-engineering strategies to attack unfavorable research and fund bullshit research that showed positive things about cigarettes. And now we’re seeing that playbook again.”

Curriculum Associates, to be sure, also commissions evaluations from prestigious academic brands like the Johns Hopkins Center for Research & Reform in Education, or CRRE, which has produced at least seven CA-sponsored studies supporting i-Ready’s efficacy. Each study stresses that the underlying data is provided by school districts by way of touting its independence. Yet this sidesteps the reality that even district-supplied data are born of the firm’s closed i-Ready algorithm, which researchers can’t audit. That i-Ready generates the in-house black-box data upon which its supporting studies depend means that CA effectively operates a closed-loop evidence system, highlighting these affirmations in its Research Library as proof that i-Ready works.

Asked to clarify Johns Hopkins’ policy on whether its clients are permitted to review or edit their fee-for-service studies, CRRE Executive Director Steven Ross replied via email that “we don’t have a written policy,” adding that “they may offer caveats or suggestions for editing.”

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University research departments, moreover, routinely post their output to online government databases, including the Education Resources Information Center. ERIC is a mere digital archive which does not evaluate the legitimacy of any studies stored therein. But when i-Ready’s self-funded studies appear atop Google search results on the US Department of Education’s ED.GOV web domain, replete with federal ID numbers, it signals a government-vetted imprimatur that the research doesn’t actually have. The end result is credibility laundering: Curriculum Associates’ marketing studies wear federal government badges they didn’t earn — a distinction few district administrators or school board members are capable of making before deciding whether to implement i-Ready.

Perhaps more troubling is that on rare occasions when truly independent research into i-Ready has been conducted, Curriculum Associates has materially distorted mixed or negative findings.  For example, CA’s research library summarizes a 2018 WestEd/Gates Foundation evaluation as evidence that i-Ready students “demonstrated a significant improvement in their scores” on the Smarter Balanced Assessment and “tended to score 24 points higher.” 

But to the vanishingly few who slog through the 52-page report, the opposite picture emerges. WestEd cautioned that “causal conclusions about the impact of i-Ready cannot be made.” Students described lessons as “repetitive” and said they were “not learning new material,” while teachers reported that the diagnostic results “did not match their own perceptions of students’ readiness.” In other words: Curriculum Associates took a study festooned with red flags and repackaged it as a blue ribbon.  

So how is a product so unloved and so untested now compulsory for a generation of American K-8 students? Like other companies whose target market is government bureaucracy, Curriculum Associates employs lobbyists across the county. A filed lobbying disclosure by the firm declares an intention to “promote education technology within federal compliance standards,” and job postings for senior government-relations positions seek candidates “to drive policy wins with state leaders that grow student learning and expand CA’s business.” 

One tactic to drive policy wins is Curriculum Associates’ “Diamond Level” sponsorship of conferences for the Council of the Great City Schools, or CGCS, an organization that engages in federal- and state-level lobbying on behalf of America’s 81 largest school districts. CGCS brochures indicate its Diamond Level sponsors enjoy VIP access to top district leaders and are “entitled to share gifts and/or materials with attendees.”  

In 2019, an unprecedented joint initiative by CGCS and Los Angeles Unified School District selected Curriculum Associates as one of just three (out of 100) ed-tech publishers to develop “high-quality instruction materials.” A news release encouraged districts nationwide to piggyback on a no-haggle contract, assuring them “15 major city school systems have already expressed interest,” and CGCS’ Urban Educator newsletter praised the effort to “harness the joint purchasing power of the nation’s major city school systems.” The criteria for selecting Curriculum Associates over 97 other publishers were never released, despite the choice creating a de-facto whitelist of national vendors. 

While there is no public accounting of exactly how many urban districts ultimately contracted with Curriculum Associates because of the CGCS consortium, news releases indicate that its classroom penetration surged 75% in the four years following, jumping to 14 million by 2023.

i-Ready didn’t achieve its stranglehold on US classrooms because school boards are foolish or malicious, however. It’s because i-Ready is exquisitely designed to prey on education leaders’ accountability anxiety. Today, poor scores on federally mandated assessments can trigger state intervention plans, tank school ratings, animate angry parents, and place proverbial heads on chopping blocks.

So when i-Ready promises “actionable data” and a “path to proficiency” packaged in color-coded dashboards exuding scientific precision, it’s catnip for superintendents desperate to inoculate themselves from sanctions, lousy headlines, and charges of ineptitude. i-Ready enables district brass to say “we’re on this” by subjecting students as young as kindergarten to the stress and tedium of six additional standardized tests per year. 

Once implemented, the black-box system is perniciously self-perpetuating. Low i-Ready scores serve as proof that students will benefit from more i-Ready lessons. Over time, districts embrace the circular logic and begin optimizing not for actual learning, but for improved metrics within the i-Ready ecosystem.

There’s also alarming evidence that i-Ready plans to colonize more of the school experience. In late 2023, Curriculum Associates acquired Ireland’s Soapbox Labs, which specializes in AI recognition of children’s voices. A spring 2025 news release indicates that i-Ready is actively integrating SoapBox’s voice engine, which “will allow children to read aloud while the technology listens, analyzes, and provides timely feedback.” 

Curriculum Associates CEO Kelly Sia praised the plan, declaring that it would soon be “giving teachers back precious instructional time” — when, in fact, it is designed to supplant teacher interaction with students. By automating the act of listening to a child read and responding in real time, the software supplants one of the most intimate instructional roles a teacher performs and turns the teacher into a mere supervisor.

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In July 2025, Curriculum Associates also acquired Stile Education, an Australian ed-tech company that produces middle-school online science curricula. “Expanding into science is the next obvious strategic priority for us,” Sia explained in a news release. This means i-Ready’s core portfolio could soon balloon beyond its math and English to absorb science classes, boosting kids’ screen time even more. 

Another concern is privacy. i-Ready, just like social-media apps, is built for internet-connected mass data extraction — tracking and recording users’ every click, scroll, keystroke, and pause. According to its own Data Handling & Privacy Statement, i-Ready combines such “usage metrics” with personally identifiable information, including the names, birthdays, and racial backgrounds of its 14 million student users. And because it is a cloud-based system, i-Ready’s data extraction continues unabated whether children are in a classroom or in the privacy of their own bedrooms doing i-Ready homework on school-issued devices. 

The rub here is that minors can’t legally consent to surrendering their privacy for industrial-scale harvesting. In fact, American children are supposed to be protected by strict privacy laws. Federal laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and the Family Education Rights and Privacy Acts are meant to shield children from predatory digital exploitation. But both contain loopholes big enough for Curriculum Associates to exploit. 

In December 2025, a group of parent activists filed suit in a federal court in Massachusetts, accusing i-Ready of amounting to a compulsory child-surveillance system. The complaint alleges that CA sells “highly intimate academic and psychographic profiles of children” to advertising, marketing, and consumer-data-profiling companies. It further asserts that the company evades child-privacy laws by forcing families to surrender basic privacy rights in exchange for a public education. The suit seeks more than $5 million in damages under wiretap, privacy, and consumer-protection laws. 

In 2026, a mere 15 years after launching, i-Ready isn’t some upstart tech disruptor — it’s the status quo. With roughly 14 million students jacked into the platform, and usage guidelines requiring roughly 54 hours per child annually, that’s a conservatively estimated 750 million hours (or 86,000 years) of childhood consumed by i-Ready screen time annually — a breathtaking displacement of young American lives into one company’s experimental ecosystem. 

Which raises the fundamental question: has i-Ready delivered results? The big picture suggests not. Because i-Ready’s core selling point has always been improved performance on government-mandated assessments, those same standardized tests offer a common-sense measure of the product’s effectiveness. Unfortunately, results indicate that i-Ready’s screen-based learning paradigm has been a bust. 

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, was established by Congress in 1969 as the benchmark of American academic performance. While NAEP showed broad student-achievement gains in the early 2000s, during the 2010s, when smartphones and ed-tech took over, achievement flattened. On NAEP’s 2025 Nation’s Report Card, America’s reading scores continue to fall, math gains are minimal, and achievement gaps between low-income students and their affluent peers are widening. NAEP may not explicitly point to i-Ready as causing the decline, but it undercuts any claim that the platform’s massive market share is reversing it. 

As for hope that i-Ready districts buck that trend, even Curriculum Associates’ own State of Student Learning 2025 report — based on diagnostic data from all 14 million current i-Ready students — acknowledges that “academic recovery has stalled nationwide,” with “little change or small declines” across nearly all grades, subjects, and income levels in the previous year. The report reveals that i-Ready users’ proficiency has regressed so deeply that in Grade 8 Math, 60% of students fail to reach grade level — a failure rate that has increased since 2019. Worse, nearly 30% of fifth graders are two or more years behind, proving that the i-Ready algorithm is not a recovery engine, but a stagnation trap. 

And so the rise of i-Ready has mirrored a collapse of US academic achievement. This demands we finally ask: if i-Ready simply doesn’t work, at what point does America’s education establishment cut its losses and declare it digital snake oil — a boondoggle of historic proportions?

If and when we do, Benjamin Coleman won’t miss it. He still yearns for a return to the personal, empathetic classroom dynamics he watched Curriculum Associates steadily erode. “There is no teachable moment with i-Ready, man,” he says. “It’s all kids sitting in silence staring at the freaking screen. It takes the humanity out of education. It’s very sad.”

Chat Control, formally known as the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, was first proposed by the European Commission in 2022. The original plan would have made it mandatory for email and messenger providers to scan private, even encrypted, communications — with the purported aim of detecting child sexual abuse material. 

The tool was sold as a noble crusade against some of the world’s most horrific crimes. But critics argued that the tool risked becoming a blueprint for generalized surveillance, by essentially giving states and EU institutions the ability to scan every private message. Indeed, a public consultation preceding the proposal revealed that a majority of respondents opposed such obligations, with over 80% of explicitly rejecting its application to end-to-end encrypted communications.

Yet despite repeated blockages, and widespread criticism for violating privacy and fundamental rights, the text was never abandoned. Instead, it was repackaged, and continually pushed forward from one Council presidency to the next. Each time democratic resistance stopped the original plan, it kept returning in new forms, under new labels, each time dressed up as a “necessary” and “urgent” tool to protect children online, yet always preserving its core logic: normalizing government-mandated monitoring of private communications on an unprecedented scale. 

In May, the European Commission once again presented its proposal. Yet several states objected. That included Germany, but also Poland, Austria and the Netherlands. As a result, Denmark, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, immediately began drafting a new version, known as “Chat Control 2.0” and unveiled earlier this month, which removed the requirement for general monitoring of private chats; the searches would now remain formally voluntary for providers. All this happened under the auspices of Coreper, the Committee of Permanent Representatives — one of the most powerful, but least visible, institutions in the EU decision-making process. It is where most EU legislation is actually negotiated; if Coreper agrees on a legislative file, member states almost always rubber-stamp it. 

The gamble worked. Yesterday, this revised version was quietly greenlit by Coreper, essentially paving the way for the text’s adoption by the Council, possibly as early as December. As digital rights campaigner and former MEP Patrick Breyer put it, this maneuver amounts to “a deceptive sleight of hand” aimed at bypassing meaningful democratic debate and oversight. 

While the removal of mandatory on-device detection is an improvement on the first draft, the new text still contains two extremely problematic features. First, it encourages “voluntary” mass scanning by online platforms — a practice already allowed in “temporary” form, which would now become a lasting feature of EU law. Second, it effectively outlaws anonymous communication by introducing mandatory age-verification systems. 

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An open letter signed by 18 of Europe’s leading cybersecurity and privacy academics warned that the latest proposal poses “high risks to society without clear benefits for children”. The first, in their view, is the expansion of “voluntary” scanning, including automated text analysis using AI to identify ambiguous “grooming” behaviors. This approach, they argue, is deeply flawed. Current AI systems are incapable of properly distinguishing between innocent conversation and abusive behavior. As the experts explain, AI-driven grooming detection risks sweeping vast numbers of normal, private conversations into a dragnet, overwhelming investigators with false positives and exposing intimate communications to third parties. 

Breyer further emphasized this danger by noting that no AI can reliably distinguish between innocent flirtation, humorous sarcasm — and criminal grooming. He warned that this amounts to a form of digital witch-hunt, whereby the mere appearance of words like “love” or “meet” in a conversation between family members, partners or friends could trigger intrusive scrutiny. This is not child protection, Breyer has argued, but mass suspicion directed at the entire population. Even under the existing voluntary regime, German federal police warn that roughly half of all reports received are criminally irrelevant, representing tens of thousands of leaked legal chats annually. According the Swiss Federal Police, meanwhile, 80% of machine-reported content is not illegal. It might, for example, encompass harmless holiday photos showing nude children playing at a beach. The new text would expand these risks dramatically. 

Further concerns arise from Article 4 of the new compromise proposal, which requires providers to implement “all appropriate risk mitigation measures”. This clause could allow authorities to pressure encrypted messaging services to enable scanning, even if this undermines their core security model. In practice, this could mean requiring providers such as WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram to scan messages on users’ devices before encryption is applied. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has noted that this approach risks creating a permanent security infrastructure, one which could gradually become universal. Meta, Google and Microsoft already scan unencrypted content voluntarily; extending this practice to encrypted content would merely require technical changes. Moreover, what begins as a voluntary option can easily become compulsory in practice, as platforms face reputational, legal and market pressure to “cooperate” with the authorities. Furthermore, this doesn’t affect just people in the EU, but everyone around the world, including the United States. If platforms decide to stay in the EU, they would be forced to scan the conversations of everyone in the bloc. If you’re not in the EU, but you chat with someone who is, then your privacy is compromised too. 

Another major danger is the introduction of mandatory age-verification systems for app stores and private messaging services. Though the Council claims these systems can be designed to “preserve privacy”, critics insist that the very concept is technologically unworkable. Age assessments inevitably rely on biometric and behavioral data, both of which require invasive data collection. Far from protecting children, these systems would increase the volume of sensitive personal information being stored and potentially exploited. 

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Requiring official identity documents for online verification would exclude millions of people who lack easy access to digital IDs or who won’t provide such sensitive documentation merely to use a messaging service. In practice, this would spell the end of anonymous communication online, forcing users to present ID or face scans simply to open an email or messaging account. Breyer has warned that such measures would be particularly disastrous for whistleblowers, journalists, political activists and others reliant on online anonymity. It would also push under-16s towards less safe, poorly regulated alternatives that lack encryption or basic safety protections. 

Ultimately, critics argue that mass surveillance is simply the wrong approach to combating child sexual exploitation. Scanning private messages does not stop the circulation of child abuse material. Platforms such as Facebook have used scanning technologies for years, yet the number of automated reports continues to rise. Moreover, mandatory scanning would still fail to detect perpetrators who distribute material through decentralized secret forums or via encrypted archives shared using only links and passwords — methods that scanning algorithms cannot successfully penetrate. The most effective strategy would be to delete known abuse material from online hosts, something Europol has repeatedly failed to do. 

Chat Control, in short, would do little to actually help victims of child sexual exploitation while harming everyone else. Every message would become subject to surveillance, without any judicial oversight, contrary to long-standing guarantees of private correspondence. There’s a legal question here too. The EU Court of Justice has previously ruled that general and automatic analysis of private communications violates fundamental rights, yet the EU is now poised to adopt legislation that contravenes this precedent. Once adopted, it could take years for a new judicial challenge to overturn it. 

The confidentiality of electronic communication — essential for personal privacy, business secrecy and democratic participation — would be sacrificed. Sensitive conversations could be read, analyzed, wrongly flagged or even misused, as past scandals involving intelligence officials and tech employees have shown. One of the most notorious cases of intelligence abuse came from the US National Security Agency, in which multiple NSA employees were caught using the agency’s powerful surveillance tools to spy on romantic partners and ex-lovers. Leaked documents have also shown that the UK intelligence agency GCHQ captured and stored images from Yahoo webcam chats, including millions of sexually explicit images of completely innocent users. There have also been several cases of Big Tech employees — from Google to Facebook — using internal tools to spy on unsuspecting users. 

Furthermore, secure encryption, a foundation of cybersecurity, would be compromised by introducing backdoors or client-side scanning tools that foreign intelligence services or criminal actors could exploit. At the same time, the responsibility for criminal investigations would shift from democratically accountable authorities to opaque corporate algorithms, with minimal transparency or oversight. 

Opponents therefore argue that the EU should instead adopt a fundamentally different approach: one that protects children without undermining fundamental rights. They propose ending the current voluntary scanning of private messages by US internet companies — restoring the principle that targeted surveillance requires a judicial warrant and must be limited to individuals reasonably suspected of wrongdoing — and maintain that secure end-to-end encryption, and the right to anonymous communication, must be preserved. 

Particularly worrying is the issue of function creep, the process by which a technology introduced for a narrowly defined purpose gradually expands to serve broader, and sometimes entirely different, purposes over time. The UK’s Online Safety Act, passed in October 2023, obliges firms to develop child sexual abuse detection systems, even though the British government itself admits that such infrastructure is not yet technically available, creating legal authority awaiting technical capability. In the United States, “temporary” surveillance measures introduced under the post-9/11 Patriot Act became permanent, and indeed expanded in scope. Once a technological infrastructure for comprehensive online surveillance exists, it can easily be repurposed and is hard to dismantle. Technologies designed to detect harmful content can quickly be extended to political repression; examples from authoritarian states demonstrate how similar systems are used to identify and target dissidents. 

Breyer summarized this pattern starkly: “They are selling us security but delivering a total surveillance machine. They promise child protection but punish our children and criminalize privacy.” The implications are ominous. Europe effectively stands on the threshold of building a machine that can see everything. Once constructed, it will serve not only the current political authorities — the idea of Ursula von der Leyen spying on everyone’s messages is disturbing enough — but whoever wields power next. With yet another vote approaching, the window to stop Chat Control is narrowing. 

When I first found out about it, I don’t think I was meant to notice. The head teacher mentioned it offhand in a staff meeting, folded between rotas and bullet points. A safeguarding tool, she said — like it was a smoke alarm or a wet floor sign. Neutral, necessary, beyond question. 

I sat there fuming for the rest of the meeting, checking my phone under the table to see whether I’d misunderstood our rights. I hadn’t. No consent had been sought. No Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) had been shared. There was no discussion of who would see what, or under what terms. I wasn’t even sure what was being recorded. I’d had private conversations with friends through email — some stupid, some serious, some that could easily have triggered alerts. I left the meeting already second-guessing what had been noticed — and what might be next. 

At first, I thought my reaction was about privacy. Partly, it was. But what lingered — what I kept turning over — was something else. A kind of moral labor was being handed over to a machine: the quiet discipline of noticing, of staying with another person’s experience, of holding their reality in mind. And no one seemed to notice, or care. 

What I was seeing — or rather, what was vanishing — was a form of attention. Not just focus or vigilance, but something older and more human. The effort to see someone in their full, contradictory reality — not as a data point, a red flag, or a procedural category. 

Increasingly, we’re asked to trade that kind of attention for something simpler, more measurable. Tools like Senso make that trade easy — and invisible. They train us to scan for risk, not to remain with the person. Moral attention is the ground of judgment, the beginning of care. It is also a stance of active presence: an effort to refuse reducing the person in front of us to the signals a system is designed to detect. 

As Simone Weil wrote: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” It is not just noticing — it is the effort to see someone else as they are, without turning away. 

That kind of attention brings people together. Sociologists have long recognized that moral life depends not only on individual decisions, but on shared structures of attention — what Émile Durkheim called the “collective conscience”, shaped by ritual, proximity, and mutual recognition. In schools, hospitals, and social care settings, these structures once meant knowing names, noticing changes, and responding to need before it was formally flagged. In the best institutions, good judgment was relational, not procedural. When those structures weaken — when proximity is replaced by process — something shifts. The moral weight of a situation is no longer felt; it is processed. As judgment is replaced by assessment, the capacity for care erodes.

Without that effort, institutions can log risk but cannot enact responsibility. They become unable to see people. This is partly because systems like Senso reshape how people pay attention. Instead of helping staff stay present with what’s in front of them, they train users to follow protocol. The presence of the system creates the illusion that the job is already being done — and so, for many, the impulse to notice or intervene quietly weakens. Senso may be useful, but the risk of complacency is built in. It rewards what can be flagged, not what must be recognized. And it teaches students to act as if they are being watched, even when no one is — a habit that replaces trust with performance. 

I noticed the change in myself almost immediately. I hesitated before typing certain words — even in professional contexts. I second-guessed what I included in safeguarding reports. I was more aware of being observed than of who I was trying to support. 

And I’ve felt this displacement in deeper ways. My wife and I struggled to have a child — we had to go through IVF. Pregnancy was one of the flagged terms. During that time, I searched for information at work, during breaks. That should have been private to us. It wasn’t. I will never know who may have seen those alerts. 

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I know colleagues who struggle with mental health — some with histories of depression, trauma, or self-harm — all of which could easily trigger the system. I spoke to people about this. At first, they brushed it off. But then something dawned on them. You could see it in their faces: that slow shift from indifference to unease, as they realized their ordinary life — the rough edges, the unguarded moments — had been pulled into a framework no one had asked for, and no one had consented to. 

Sometimes we’re told the software works. The head, with a touch of pride, said most alerts were meaningless — and shared what she seemed to think was a funny story: a teacher preparing for a school production of Oliver! had repeatedly been flagged, for typing “Fag” as shorthand for Fagin. But then she added, more seriously, that once a student researching suicide had been flagged and supported. In that moment, the tool had helped. It was good that it existed. 

Of course it was. But this is the logic of instrumental ethics: justify the structure by pointing to a rare success. Focus on the outcome, ignore the culture it creates. One good intervention becomes the alibi for the entire framework. 

But the tension is real. When a tool helps prevent a tragedy — even once — it becomes almost impossible to oppose. Who wants to be the person who blocked something that might have saved a life? That’s how these systems spread: not by malice, but by the steady pressure of caution. 

If we let rare successes outweigh the quiet damage they produce, we risk building institutions that can no longer sustain trust, judgment, or genuine care. A tool that prevents harm in one moment cannot excuse a culture that forgets how to see. The broader harm — the unraveling of trust, of moral attention, of the space for private experience — goes uncounted. 

This isn’t unique to Senso. And it isn’t unique to schools. Techno-rationalist tools prioritize consistency, efficiency, and measurable outcomes over human judgment. They’re designed to streamline decision-making, not to deepen moral awareness. And once you begin to see how they displace moral attention, you see it everywhere.

I’ve always felt uneasy when friends tell me they use apps that track their children’s location, read their messages, even let them listen in on their surroundings. One enthusiastically claimed, “It’s amazing!” But it isn’t. It simulates attentiveness while displacing the human presence that moral attention requires. 

I found out that one boy in my class had this kind of app installed on his phone. His parents approached me after school — not to ask about his day, but because they already knew, in granular detail, everything he’d done and said. Including a conversation I’d had with him that afternoon, which they quoted back to me. 

I was horrified. Not because they meant harm, but because they couldn’t see what had been lost. The ordinary fabric of relationship — curiosity, trust, even the joy of being surprised by who your child is — had been replaced by data. They weren’t parenting him. They were managing him. 

And in doing so, they left something behind — not deliberately, but carelessly. A quiet trail of moral damage: the fraying of trust, the flattening of relationships, the unspoken message that being known is the same as being watched. Not just for their son, but for others too. They had entered their son’s private life — and his friends’, and his teachers’ — without even realizing it, because they’d already outsourced the need to look. 

The same logic is spreading into workplaces. A friend told me his company monitors Slack activity to detect signs of burnout. There’s no conversation, no check-in — just an algorithm scanning for dips in productivity or changes in tone. On paper, it looks like concern. In practice, it reduces well-being to a pattern of keystrokes. The message is clear: we’ll watch over you, but we won’t talk to you. We’ll detect the signal, but we won’t sit with the person. 

And there’s an irony here. Many of these technologies — from school safeguarding software to corporate wellness trackers — are sold with the promise of freeing us to focus on what matters: relationships, creativity, care. The software will handle the rest. 

But moral attention doesn’t remain neatly available once displaced. It gets rerouted, co-opted, commodified. The same culture that hands over moral responsibility to automated processes is the one that floods our remaining attention with platforms built to capture and exploit it.

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We tell ourselves we’re buying time. What we’re buying is distraction. A school automates its safeguarding to “focus on pupils”, but the system itself redirects attention, away from human judgment and toward process. A company automates wellbeing checks so that managers don’t have to ask. Parents install surveillance apps so they can worry less, and then find themselves scrolling through timelines designed to keep them worried. What’s lost isn’t just focus, but the ability to attend in any meaningful way.

I did raise concerns about Senso. When I spoke to the head and deputy, the response was polite at first — a warm wash of flattery, the kind that’s meant to settle you down. But there was something else in it too: a subtle attempt to steer the conversation before it began. A little soft power. A little quiet manipulation. A little whiff of gaslighting — as if I’d misunderstood, or was being overly sensitive.

When I pushed further — isn’t this surveillance? — the tone hardened. “No, it’s not! It’s a safeguarding tool,” the deputy snapped.

I remember saying, Sure — and this is a chair. But if I smash someone over the head with it, it becomes a weapon. A thing isn’t just what it’s called. It’s what it does — and what it makes possible.

In hindsight, I probably lost my temper a bit too. Not dramatically, but enough to feel the room shift. The sense that I’d stopped playing the game — and that this conversation was now something to be ended.

I left the meeting furious. For a while, I seriously considered typing the most obscene, provocative, and wildly flaggable phrases I could think of — purely to flood the software with alerts. I didn’t do it. But the fact that the thought was so tempting seemed to prove the point: the system wasn’t fostering trust or responsibility. It was inviting petty rebellion.

If this is the future of care, it comes at the cost of attention. What emerges is a culture of vigilance that undermines the moral core of the work. Techno-rationalism and institutional drift teach us to monitor and manage, not to attend.

Moral attention is fragile and easily displaced. It requires a person willing to stay present with another — to hold their experience, their complexity, their risk, their humanity in mind. A tool can log behavior, but it cannot attend. It can flag risk, but it cannot discern intention. It can generate vigilance, but not care.

When institutions lose moral attention — when their people are trained out of it — they perform responsibility but no longer embody it. They can process signals all day long, but they can no longer really see.

And when you work in such a place, the dissonance is constant. You see thoughtful, decent people outsourcing their judgment — not because they don’t care, but because the structure encourages them not to. It’s not cruelty; it’s drift. The gradual substitution of moral attention with protocol, of discernment with detection.

Sometimes it’s framed as efficiency. Sometimes it’s necessity: a way to save money, stretch thin staff, or avoid paying people properly in the first place. Sometimes it’s just about keeping up — institutions adopting whatever looks modern, whether or not it helps. Technology and automation might be able to support care, but they cannot replace it. And over time, people stop trying. Not because they don’t care, but because they’ve been trained out of noticing. The pattern shifts, but the effect is familiar.

Senso did not respond to a request for comment. But before we install the next solution, we should ask: does it train us to see more clearly — or to look away?

Skepticism in China about Christianity predates Communism by quite some way. When Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci (1552-1510) began to visit in the late 16th century, they found that even those elites who were sympathetic to their faith required a great deal of persuasion before entering the fold — God appeared to ask too much while offering too little and so many of the aspects of Christianity they would have to adopt seemed to clash with traditional Chinese life. Doing away with concubines seemed self-defeating, since they might furnish a man with an heir. Removing ancestor tablets from the home meant losing the means of paying filial respect. The crucifixion of Jesus struck many as shocking rather than heroic: corporal punishment was reserved for the very lowest in society.

Still, Christianity in China grew under the Jesuits and then again in the 19th and 20th centuries when missionaries from Europe, the United States and elsewhere began to travel there to spread the gospel. Fortunes changed, however, with the Chinese Revolution in 1949. For China’s early Communist leaders, Christianity was associated with the ravages of European imperialism and was seen as a clear ideological competitor. Its transnational connections, from the Vatican — where a number of modern popes have condemned Communism — across to America’s West Coast meant that it might readily become a tool of foreign subversion.

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Rather than seek to ban Christianity outright, the strategy from the Fifties onwards has been to build ideologically safe, state-sponsored Christian organizations. Protestant Christians were shepherded into a state-sponsored “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (TSPM) — the three selves being self-governance, self-support and self-propagation. Catholics were asked to join a Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). In both cases, links with foreign organizations were banned in favor of a state-directed fusion of Christian with Communist and patriotic ideals. Most foreign missionaries operating in China at the time of the Revolution were thrown out.

Even then, given the CCP’s interest in managing people who possess the ability to influence whole communities in China, the ideological soundness of church leaders has never been taken for granted. Education at seminaries is tightly managed, with a strong focus on patriotism. Qualified clergy face constant pressure to demonstrate their loyalty, to which some respond by emphasizing Christianity’s proletarian credentials: Jesus was a carpenter, who chose fishermen as his early disciples and had harsh words for merchants and the wealthy.

Given these unpromising beginnings for Christianity under Communism, China-watchers were astounded by its rapid growth across the final three decades of the 20th century. In 1949, Protestant Christians accounted for less than 0.2% of the Chinese population — a million people at most. By the mid-Nineties, that figure had risen to 14 million. And that was only registered Protestants. Underground “house churches” were doing spectacular business, raising the overall number of Protestants to somewhere between 60 million and 90 million people. Breathless commentators began to predict big things for Christianity in China. Some claimed that by 2050, Christians might even be in the majority.

That now seems unlikely — and for two reasons.

First, Xi Jinping is a keen student of why the Soviet Union collapsed and some scholars in China regard religion as a factor. It served, they say, as a “sacred banner” under which anti-government elements could unite. It’s no surprise, then, that during Xi’s term in office the regulation of religion in China has tightened. Patriotic religious associations are now overseen by the United Front Work Department, which in turn reports directly to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. New measures, in 2018, on “Internet Religious Information Services” linked religion to national security and required churches to apply for licenses before sharing religious content online, from live-streaming to micro-blogging. Most registered churches in China are thought to be under some form of electronic surveillance.

Christian organizations have meanwhile been required to re-evaluate their teachings in light of Xi’s push for “Sinicization”: a fusion of traditional Chinese values and ideas with the CCP’s vision for China’s future. Christmas hasn’t been cancelled, but local governments increasingly seek to steer local businesses away from erecting Christmas displays or selling Christmas-themed commodities.

A second reason why this might not, after all, be a “Christian century” in China is that statistics suggest a slowing-down of the growth rate of Chinese Christianity since the 2000s. Some urban churches are growing, but at the expense of rural Christianity: a consequence of large-scale urban migration in China. Once a rich, inter-generational weave of miracle healings, exorcisms and Spirit-infused worship, many village churches are now said to resemble old people’s homes, that are more sober, full of people in search of meaning through a combination of community and a rational, textual faith.

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The case for decolonising philosophy

By Christopher Harding

The reality for Chinese Christianity is that over the next few decades, almost anything might happen. Even if Christian numbers begin to decline, match or run ahead of an overall fall in the country’s population, the lesson from countries like South Korea is that the cultural influence of Christianity can end up mattering more than raw numbers. “Sinicization” may backfire on the CCP if potent combinations emerge of Christianity and Chinese philosophy: Jesus, Confucius and Mencius forming an ethical dream-team, focused on love, self-sacrifice and prophetic critique of spiritually empty, narrowly growth-focused governance — of the sort with which the CCP’s critics within China charge it. At the same time, those same two traditions, Christian and Confucian, provide the basis for regarding government as God-given and thus profoundly legitimate.

Western culture may play its own modest role in what comes next, serving as it does as a vehicle for Christian values. Christian creations, from The Chronicles of Narnia to The Passion of the Christ, are the focus of discussion, where internet restrictions allow or where the use of a VPN permits. China is even home to a number of high-profile “cultural Christian” intellectuals like Liu Xiaofeng, who are capable of taking varying degrees of critical distance from the CCP.

Meanwhile, academics and journalists who study underground Christianity in China — with heavy use of pseudonyms for the people they interview and even the cities where they conduct their research — reveal grassroots churches in rude health. Branches of McDonalds have been used for sessions of the Timothy Training Course, a grassroots discipleship and leadership program. A different lesson from the course is taught at each plastic table-top, and when the police arrive to round everyone up, they cheerfully sign pledges not to do it again — or, at least, in that particular branch of McDonalds.

The bigger picture is of a country that has upended many of the predictions confidently made about it by Western commentators. It was once expected that market forces would drive political liberalization in China. Perhaps Xi Jinping enjoys a quiet chuckle about that one, now and again. In a similar way, secularization theorists once claimed that modernity brings a two-fold decline: first, in the social significance of religion, and then later in its salience for the individual. This hasn’t been borne out in South Korea or in China, where Christianity has grown in tandem with the economy and with urbanization. Xi no doubt finds this departure from expectations rather less amusing. The battle for China’s soul goes on.

As I say, I wish I didn’t know who they are. And that’s because any of us might, for any particular reason, become Andy Byron or Kristin Cabot: flawed people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anybody can make a bad-but-irrelevant-to-the-rest-of-us mistake on camera and face personal destruction. What such episodes reveal is a pathology in the social body, and the desperate need for a new ethic of privacy.

The “Coldplay-concert-couple” story is fundamentally irrelevant and effectively contentless, telling us nothing about the world, about ourselves; it isn’t particularly funny or tragic or profound. There is no pathos, no insight. True, the current culture on X and other social-media apps is perhaps less immediately destructive than it was during peak woke (circa 2017 to 2021). Still, the viral potential of these kinds of stories is a warning sign that our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance, and control. An obsession with other people’s private lives is a sickness.

Leaking, doxing, spying on private citizens on Reddit, on private Facebook groups, on X, on Instagram, on TikTok — regardless of the moral quality of the subjects under consideration — hurts everyone. Because it makes everyone subject to this omnipresent, collectivized panopticon, and the more these images circulate, the more normal it becomes.

Group chats, dating apps, emails — or in Byron’s and Cabot’s case, simply being in public with no intention to be filmed — should not be subject to public judgment. This species of story is a distraction from serious issues, and runs cover for the genuinely powerful individuals and entities who materially impact our lives.

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Test article

By Matthew Gasda

Clearly, there is something in human nature that is primed to gossip, shame, and ridicule (thoughtlessly, automatically). But new technology allows us to give vent to these sordid tendencies in historically unprecedented ways. We should take seriously the moral warping effect that such stories, and our obsession with them, have on our souls.

The global village is like any village — scolding, punitive, consumed by hearsay, with nothing better to do. While turning someone into a meme might seem fun, it’s severely undignified, and discards the customs and safeguards of a liberal society in order to participate in a sadistic pile-on. So while the particular example at hand might not seem worth this much deliberation, that is my point.

There might be a story here about the hypocrisy of a CEO and an HR officer having an in-house affair that might get lesser-ranking employees fired. But what I see surfacing in the discursive arena is not intelligent critique of HR departments and their culture, but a glee at the immiseration of a random person.

If these trends continue — if algorithms continue to work the way they do, and I can’t imagine they won’t — then more and more victims will be dragged out of anonymity for mimetic sacrifice. And as a consequence, meaningful taboos about privacy, shame, and respect have disappeared, and everyone’s lives and behaviors have become fodder for comment and ridicule.

We sorely need new taboos — not against adultery or sexual immorality or interpersonal deception, because clearly we have plenty of those already. Rather, we need taboos against aggregating ourselves into idiotic, loathsome mobs, incapable of thinking about what the subjects of our ridicule and these digital stonings might suffer. A wiser perspective would admit that we all, at the wrong moment, are liars, fools, cheaters, charlatans, hypocrites. Let who has not sinned click the “like” or “repost” button.

We all sin, and we might have received grace or mercy under the theocracies of older liberal and Enlightenment arrangements. Algorithmic justice and judgment, however, contains neither the virtues of theocratic society — you could at least avail yourself of religious law, with its exceptions and casuistry — nor of classically liberal society: there is no due process, no appeal mechanism. There’s no mediating structure in the global village. It is instinctive, animalistic, rash, cruel.

The force and direction of this collective online judgment should be turned against itself: We should punish not those caught in the panopticon, but the anonymous posters, Redditors, and the like; all who take joy in random acts of scorn. If we want to live in a tolerant, sane society, we should turn off our cameras, step away from mimetic digital village stonings, and reflect on our own haphazard and imperfect lives and selves.

This “should” will not come from above: there is no sign that tech companies will change their products to disincentivize this kind of behavior. Self-regulation, at scale, is, as of now, the only answer. The way we talk, write, act, and respond matters. Culture matters insofar as culture is a layer of software that at least partially governs how we use our phones. We sorely lack codes of conduct surrounding technology and our ability to record, dox, and harass each other.

If our natural response to constant mutual surveillance is not disgust, then it should be; phones come with cameras, but cameras linked to the global cortex are weapons. Using them to film strangers should not be normalized — telling people to put their phones away should. Piling on viral posts about random people who had no intention of going viral should not be normal, either. If Big Tech won’t take them down, then self-restraint is called for. Institutions can help uphold and reinforce these new norms by prohibiting phone usage in as many public spaces as possible.

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By Kathleen Stock

There are secondary benefits, too: public spaces are also just better without everyone being on their phones; 50,000 people all filming the same concert, for instance, aside from having unintended consequences, is stupid and unaesthetic. Each of us doesn’t need to take our own badly framed photos of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” when we visit Vienna. There are professional photos and postcards widely available. We could employ the faculty of memory, too.

Codes of conduct are what we might call counter-mimetics; they do have to be injected into social interaction and discourse, artificially at first, before they catch on. That’s what I’m proposing here. We might think something is amusing and worth commenting on or bad and worth scolding, and maybe, in isolation it is. But on the whole, we’re making life intolerable, anxious, and graceless.

It took several centuries for mounted knights to develop the code of conduct known as chivalry to regulate their unparalleled ability to kill or threaten anyone who didn’t have a horse, mail, and sword; let’s hope we can develop codes of conduct around our phones or whatever next-generation AI devices replace phones.

Privacy is a hard-won social good; give it back to others to protect your own.

The below forms part of the testimony Lee Fang delivered to the House Select Committee on Weaponization on 6 February, 2024. 

***

Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, esteemed members of the Select Committee,

As an independent investigative journalist, it is my duty to serve the broad public interest, to watch over governmental and corporate conduct, to safeguard the principles underpinning a free society, and to spotlight wrongdoing — whether it comes from the Left, the Right, or the centre. It is a privilege to present my work to this committee. Over the past 15 years, I have uncovered a variety of different forms of surveillance and censorship, documenting how special interest groups, politicians, and law enforcement agencies use these tactics to silence or weaken their enemies.

I am committed to reporting on surveillance and censorship, because I regard free speech as the bedrock of our republic and the linchpin of our democratic process. These principles are the defining characteristics that set America apart on the global stage. But freedom of speech has not endured without a fight. In every generation, political and corporate actors from across the ideological spectrum have seized on crisis and moral panics to demand restrictions on speech.

Now as ever, we must remain vigilant against efforts to undermine free speech and free expression. Recent technological advancements have created new opportunities to restrict speech without public input or accountability. The rapid development of artificial intelligence tools, in particular, offers powerful entities the unprecedented ability to monitor, flag, and censor billions of individuals at a scale and scope never before conceivable. While this technology holds significant benefits, it also carries substantial risks. Private security firms are increasingly marketing AI solutions to both government agencies and corporations. Mounting evidence suggests that state and business interests are already deploying this technology with the goal of stifling lawful discourse and silencing dissent.

Some of you may be familiar with my October 2022 investigation delving into the history of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and the FBI’s concurrent expansion into the policing of social media. Using court documents and evidence provided by a DHS whistleblower, I reported that government programs initially designed to curb foreign influence and incitement to terrorism had transformed into a broader campaign to suppress ordinary domestic speech. CISA’s expansive focus eventually touched on a wide range of political topics, from the 2020 presidential election to the origins of Covid-19 to criticism of the Ukraine-Russia war.

Two months later, in December 2022, I reported on a cache of Twitter’s internal corporate documents that became known as the Twitter Files. I gained access to internal emails, tools, and chats that confirmed my earlier reporting about CISA. I revealed that law enforcement agencies like CISA and non-governmental partner organisations consistently pressured Twitter executives to censor political speech under the guise of combating misinformation. I have since published many articles on my Substack based on these documents, including a piece released on Monday.

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The Right has embraced cancel culture

By Lee Fang

In my latest report, I reveal that a non-profit anti-misinformation election consortium provided an inaccurate tip to CISA in November 2020 about a New York Times journalist’s observations about delays in the presidential vote count in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Instead of verifying the validity of the tip, CISA hastily produced a “Misinformation Report” about the incident, arguing that the tweet had promoted falsehoods about the election. The agency then lobbied Twitter to restrict access to the reporter’s tweet. In response, Twitter shadowbanned the Times reporter’s tweet, effectively rendering it invisible to most users — despite substantial evidence supporting the journalist’s accuracy.

I understand the stated intent behind these efforts — the desire to uphold the highest standards for our elections and deter any illicit manipulation. However, as this and many other cases illustrate, the government often errs and acts in a politically motivated manner. For this reason alone, it is inappropriate for law enforcement or intelligence agencies to act as the arbiter of permissible journalism. Moreover, government censorship of truthful and accurate speech — rather than dispelling conspiracy theories — serves only to exacerbate the erosion of public trust in our elections.

My work on the Twitter Files and other reporting on this topic differs slightly from recent testimony heard by this committee. I have also shed light on private entities’ attempts to control and curtail public discourse on major areas of public policy. I revealed that a group called Public Good Projects regularly collaborated with Twitter during the pandemic to censor specific social media accounts because of their criticism of establishment views around Covid-19 vaccines, while amplifying accounts supportive of vaccines and government viewpoints. This particular censorship campaign was entirely funded by biopharma lobbyists that represent Moderna and Pfizer.

In some instances, the censorship demands targeted users who simply expressed opposition to “vaccine passports” – the proposal to make a person’s right to travel and engage in certain forms of commerce dependent on their vaccination status. The validity of the idea of “vaccine passports” is a reasonable topic of debate in a free society, and should not be repressed by a drug company with financial interests at stake.

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More recently, in collaboration with UnHerd and RealClearInvestigations, and with co-author Jack Poulson, I reported that Moderna relaunched efforts to influence vaccine discourse, again working with Public Good Projects. Moderna also employed the services of the artificial intelligence firm Talkwalker to monitor vaccine-related conversations across 150 million websites, including social media and gaming platforms like Steam. Moderna labelled almost any critic of the company or vaccine policies as “high risk” for spreading misinformation, including reputable academics like Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya and local elected officials who simply voiced objections to vaccine mandates.

The company even targeted tennis champion Novak Djokovic in its misinformation reports, not for any statement he made but for his accomplishments. In one report, Moderna warned that: “The optics of Djokovic, whose vaccine opposition barred him from competing in the 2022 US Open, returning to and winning the Moderna-sponsored [2023 US Open] competition bolsters anti-vaccine claims that vaccines — and mandates — are unnecessary.” In other words, Djokovic’s alleged act of “misinformation” was his unvaccinated athletic ability. There are many other examples in my reporting, beyond the Twitter Files and Moderna documents, that show government and corporate interests trying to stifle free speech on public safety and national security grounds.

Last month, I reported on confidential documents chronicling the activities of Logically, a British artificial intelligence firm that has expanded into the US market with the guidance of former DHS intelligence director Brian Murphy. This individual was previously responsible for the illicit surveillance of Left-wing protesters and the creation of dossiers on journalists critical of the government. Logically has quietly secured US military contracts and piloted a program for the Chicago Police Department to employ its AI platform to analyse local hip-hop music to predict crime. The state of Oregon also retained Logically to combat so-called election misinformation during the 2022 midterm elections. The company is now competing for contracts to monitor and remove alleged social media misinformation in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

It is important to underscore why the American public should be aware of the British AI firm Logically. The United Kingdom government awarded Logically multi-million dollar contracts to combat misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. The company instead surveilled activists and academics who expressed legitimate forms of speech, including thoughtful concerns about pandemic lockdowns and vaccine passports, according to a recent watchdog report on the firm’s activities. Logically previously boasted of a special partnership with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to automatically suppress and label content they deemed as misinformation, giving the company immense influence over content moderation decisions. It is another case of the government outsourcing censorship to a private entity with a record of targeting lawful speech around hotly contested political issues.

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California's elite crowns its own AOC

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I want to emphasise that this focus on corporate influence and government surveillance is not a recent development in my work. In 2015, I uncovered evidence of agricultural industry lobbyists ghostwriting state legislation designed to criminalise the recording of slaughterhouses and dairy facilities. The legislation was designed to imprison journalists and animal rights activists who document conditions in slaughterhouses. Many of these “Ag-Gag” laws have since been overturned by the courts for violating the First Amendment. I have also previously reported on government and private sector surveillance and censorship targeting environmental groups, Black Lives Matter activists, and labour unions.

In December, I exposed the efforts of pro-Israel activists to stifle pro-Palestinian voices. One notable example, relevant to today’s hearing, involves the deployment of artificial intelligence bots to mass-report social media posts expressing solidarity or sympathy for Palestinians as violations of platform terms of service. Many of the targets appear to be individuals using innocuous hashtags like #FreePalestine, unrelated to hate or violence. There are over 1,000 documented cases of Meta removing peaceful content advocating for Palestinian human rights. The use of artificial intelligence bots to suppress nonviolent and benign forms of political expression during a conflict illustrates another case of organised censorship.

Last summer, I profiled the activities of Flashpoint, among the cottage industry of so-called threat intelligence firms that use artificial intelligence to monitor activist behaviour. The company began by infiltrating al-Qaeda chat rooms and selling that data to the FBI. Critics argue that the firm played a central role in the wrongful convictions of several Muslim Americans. Flashpoint, which still maintains ties with the FBI, has more recently infiltrated the private communications of ordinary airline workers who organised against coercive and ultimately unconstitutional vaccine mandates. Many of these anti-mandate activists were conservative Trump supporters.

I present these examples to underscore how censorship affects dissenting voices of all ideological stripes. I understand that in our intensely polarised environment, free speech has become a divisive issue — often misused by politicians seeking a scapegoat for societal ills. But free speech is critical for activists spanning the ideological spectrum, and to every journalist committed to uncovering the truth. And history teaches us that when governments and private entities demand new censorship authority to attack dissidents of a particular stripe in one era, those tools are just as likely to be used against an entirely different set of actors a few years later. Today’s cheerleaders for an unaccountable “content moderation” regime may very well be tomorrow’s victims of that same system.

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By Jonathan Sumption

Before I close, I wish to draw your attention to a hearing held nearly 12 years ago by another House committee, addressing a remarkably similar topic. The committee convened a hearing to demand answers from the Department of Homeland Security about revelations that the agency had retained General Dynamics, a defence contractor, to conduct round-the-clock monitoring of social media.

Republicans controlled the House at the time, but members of the committee from both sides of the aisle raised concerns about DHS practices. Then-Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California, called for assurances that DHS was not infringing upon “civil rights and civil liberties of those who choose to use social media” or “spying on lawful activities”. Then-Rep. Patrick Meehan, a Republican from Pennsylvania, cautioned against DHS and its contractors monitoring private citizens’ speech, which he said “could have a chilling effect on individuals’ privacy rights and people’s freedom of speech and dissent against their government”.

That hearing looks quaint today. In terms of bureaucratic and technological capabilities, the General Dynamics scandal was a relic of another era. It occurred prior to the emergence of CISA, the DHS agency with a multi-billion-dollar budget, actively monitoring Americans for wrong speak on contentious issues. It transpired before significant advancements in AI allowed for far more invasive monitoring of constitutionally protected speech through sentiment analysis. And it pre-dated the creation of numerous anti-misinformation NGOs and private-sector firms competing for contracts to control and censor the internet.

Nonetheless, the 2012 hearing serves as a reminder that concerns about censorship and surveillance need not break down along partisan lines. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle can still unite to voice concerns about the erosion of free expression and government efforts to regulate political discourse. I implore this committee to rise above partisanship and treat the threat posed by online surveillance and censorship as an American issue, affecting all of us equally. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to testify today, and I eagerly await your questions. Thank you.

Yet the app has achieved neither of these things. All it’s done is create more anxiety for many of the 140 million workers registered under India’s rural employment scheme known as the “Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act” (MGNREGA), who are all required by law to use it.

Kumar, 32, has been toiling under India’s rural employment scheme for four years now: working on public infrastructure projects such as road and building construction. He typically gets paid around 2,700 rupees ($33) per month for his labour — but last month, he earned only 1,600 rupees ($19), despite working the same number of days he always does. This is because, without good internet connectivity, the app is prone to glitching or not uploading photos, which means that Kumar doesn’t get paid for the actual number of days he works.

As the sole breadwinner of his family of five, Kumar is worried about providing for his children if this problem persists. “I don’t even understand what’s going on — sometimes I get less money and sometimes I get nothing,” Kumar told me. He’s not alone: as a direct result of this app, the number of workdays registered via MGNREGA have fallen 35% from 530 million in January and February 2022 to 340 million during the same months this year.

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“There are weird technical error codes that nobody understands; numbers and alphabets that nobody really knows what they mean,” says Laavanya Tamang, a senior researcher with LibTech India, an organisation that works to improve public service delivery in the country. Tamang tells me about a group of seven MGNREGA workers in the state of Jharkhand who worked at their site every day: due to app-related issues, their attendance was calculated as zero. (The Ministry of Rural Development that runs MGNREGA did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)

As a result of this dysfunction, workers are agitated and trying to take action. Earlier this year, hundreds, from across multiple states, went to Delhi to protest the mandatory imposition of the technology, demanding that the app be rolled back. The protest lasted 40 days, followed by talks with the Government, but to no avail. “It’s like a human rights violation,” said Nikhil Dey, an activist who works with MGNREGA workers.

All this points to a bigger challenge for India. Over the past eight years, there has been a sweeping digitisation of many aspects of everyday life, from identity cards and Covid vaccinations to digital payments — all in the name of efficiency and inclusion. Narendra Modi’s administration has embraced digital governance, claiming it will make welfare services more transparent and weed out corruption. It was a key theme of India’s presidency at G20. “We in G20 have a unique opportunity to lay a foundation of an inclusive, prosperous and secure global digital future,” Modi told a group at the conference.

Yet by failing to consider the reality of rural life in India, Modi’s tech imposition has alienated ordinary people. In 2021, female rural childcare workers, known as Anganwadi workers, were mandated to use an app that led to them being overburdened with work for very little pay. It was met with protests across the country. Around the same time, female rural healthcare workers, known as Asha workers — who were on the frontline during Covid — were forced to install an app that would track their whereabouts. In many Indian states, sanitation workers have also been asked to wear a GPS wristband that would track their work hours, but many argue that such devices invade their privacy.

When it came to inoculating 1.4 billion Indians, the Government leaned on a vaccine slot-booking app called Cowin. By making it mandatory for people who wanted to get vaccinated to download Cowin, Modi left behind Indians from low-income backgrounds who didn’t have a smartphone or enough digital literacy to use the app. Concerns about data privacy also turned out to be credible. Earlier this year, the personal data of millions of Indians was exposed by a leak supposedly from Cowin — an especially problematic event in a country that did not have a data protection law until this August.

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Of course, all these projects claim honourable motives. The NMMS app is intended to curb corruption in India’s rural employment scheme, which guarantees at least 100 days of employment in a year for rural households. Considered to be the world’s largest welfare programme in absolute numbers, the scheme has more than 250 million workers registered. But over the years, it has become notorious — for corruption. One investigation found that roughly $130 million of this programme’s funds were misappropriated in four years, used for bribes or as payments to non-existent people. “MGNREGA was infested with ghost accounts,” India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said last year, adding that Modi’s government was working towards using the programme with “transparency”.

Activists and policy analysts argue that the app has been ineffective in stopping corruption. “MGNREGA is riddled with corruption — when you go to villages you will see that many work sites only exist on paper, or the job cards are fake,” said Tamang. “But the Government’s approach to solving this is that they will slap on a tech band-aid and it will be resolved, which is not an informed approach that prioritises workers.”

The Government, however, isn’t paying attention. Despite strong resistance to the app, it brought in another tech innovation earlier this year. Now, all payments have to be done through Aadhaar, India’s vast biometric ID system — a process that further excludes thousands of workers. While most Indians have an Aadhaar number, many of them have had their information entered incorrectly: with spelling errors, or the wrong date of birth. This makes them invisible to the system.

The Government first announced this mandate in February, though it has since been extending the deadline to comply with it. But the damage is already done, says Mukesh Nirvasit, joint secretary of the Rajasthan Asangathit Mazdoor Union. “On the ground, many work sites have started rejecting workers unless they have an Aadhaar card, which is depriving people of work even though the deadline for this new rule has been pushed till the end of the year,” said Nirvasit. “In my opinion, this issue will not be resolved even if they give us 10 years.”

Yet either way, India’s internet connectivity will increase regardless, with one billion smartphone users expected by 2026. And while experts believe that some of the technical issues arising from the rise of digital governance will be resolved, the larger issue of surveillance and data collection will become commonplace. “Smartphone use is growing by millions per year and eventually, in five to 10 years, everyone is going to have a smartphone — but this will not only increase surveillance but also normalise it,” said Shweta Mohandas, a researcher with the Center for Internet and Society. “There’s also asymmetry in terms of consent because what happens if a worker doesn’t give consent to their data being captured? Would this mean that they would not be able to get the job?”

Meanwhile, the members of an al Qaeda cell were plotting.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were believed by many at the time to have awakened America from the post-historical fantasies of the 1990s. “We have been called out of our trivial concerns,” declared an editorial from September 19, 2001 in The Weekly Standard, the influential neoconservative publication known as “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One”. This was a prominent attitude and not confined to the Right. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, in an interview published the day before, declared “the end of the age of irony” and predicted that “things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear”.

Twenty years later, the Taliban’s predictable takeover of Afghanistan is the final crushing defeat of America’s post-9/11 calling as the armed evangelist of global democracy. Instead of spreading the gifts of liberty to the Middle East, the crusading policy of the past two decades collapsed the guardrails of liberal democracy at home, undermined its appeal abroad and wasted America’s strategic power while enriching its ruling class.

Over those same years, the infrastructure of the War on Terror achieved a revolutionary transformation of the global order; albeit one altogether different from the liberalising mission it heralded. From the start, US intelligence agencies argued that the Internet comprised the key terrain of 21^st-century warfare and only by controlling it could they prevent another “intelligence failure” like the one blamed for the al Qaeda attacks in 2001. The unprecedented rise of Google, Facebook and Amazon, as hegemons of the new digital order in which “real life” is what takes place online, is in part the story of the American security establishment outsourcing its surveillance project to private information monopolies. In the process, the emerging digital economy amassed the greatest concentration of wealth in human history, while helping to systematically dismantle the American middle class and with it those institutions like the free press that made liberal democracy possible.

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

The Weekly Standard editorial from September 19th continues in the next line: “We have resigned our parts in the casual comedy of everyday existence. We live for the first time since World War II, with a horizon once again.” You couldn’t look at the carnage in downtown New York and the Potomac without seeing that the US had enemies who were both determined and savage. Salafist-jihadism is a millenarian cult, an authentic expression of Islamic fundamentalism and an ultra-modern totalitarian ideology. Formulating an effective response to networked and state-aligned terrorism that matched the severity of the threat without overstating its significance was not an easy task — which is why so many people got it wrong.

But the answer given by people with the President’s ear, to elevate the terrorist attack to mythological significance as the event that restored a lost horizon, set the mould for a naive triumphalism that led directly to Iraq and twenty years of delusion and defeat in Afghanistan.

Not everyone held such views, of course. There was some dissent even within the D.C. Beltway. But the Standard’s Republican version of Wilsonian Neoconservatism, which shared with the Democrats’ liberal interventionism almost everything but its cultural and stylistic tics, was the purest expression of a prevailing attitude in the American political and media classes. In a nation that had grown too comfortable and complacent, global jihadism offered a civilisational challenge. Our Islamist enemy would call forth a new “national greatness” in the American character, wrote the New York Times’ David Brooks.

The authors of this vision were nearly all baby boomers. Their call to forge a new generation’s greatness in battle against “Islamofascism” was a self-conscious attempt to recreate the heroic national destiny they had grown up venerating in the shadow of the Second World War. It was an understandable response to the strength and nobility of their fathers’ generation, but a fatal blueprint for American foreign policy.

This new call to arms was not purely a response to 9/11. One important source text was written in the summer of 1996 while Bill Clinton was in office. Together, the Weekly Standard’s editor William Kristol and fellow influential neoconservative Robert Kagan co-authored an essay in which they developed ideas that would inform George W. Bush’s vision for the world, especially the “freedom agenda” put forth in his second inaugural address. The article lamented the “tepid consensus” that had taken hold after Ronald Reagan left office among conservatives who accepted a diminished role for America in global affairs.

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The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

Against what they called “the pinched nationalism” of Patrick Buchanan’s “America First” foreign policy, the authors presented a true “conservatism of the heart”. Under this maudlin title, they enumerated their aims: “To emphasize both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking in American foreign policy.”

Perhaps I was too young to appreciate it at the time — certainly I was too caught up in my own anger and patriotic furore, which involved enlisting in the military in 2002 — but some 20 years later, the overwrought boyishness of these programmes for the making of “great men” makes for painful reading. In the pages of The New Republic, the emotionally precocious Peter Beinart championed a politics of “muscular liberalism”. Beinart’s twee recreation of historical mission was captured in his 2006 book arguing for why “Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.”

So what did we get for all this talk of revived greatness and reborn heroism? We got Bush, the boyish president whose reputation for mangling the English language could never account for his genuine knack for grandiloquent oratory. We got Rumsfeld and Cheney, who were not quite the Strangelovian villains of lore, mostly because they were less cinematic in their foibles and more grubby and desperate. We got a new techno-Calvinist social dispensation and a permanent state of exception that blurs the line between terrorism and disease. We got generations of military generals who have been, with few exceptions, glorified hangers for uniforms overweighted with cheapened medals.

American soldiers who fought with honour know all too well that the heroism of our peers was a private affair, shared between comrades. There was nothing larger in it. No national greatness or unifying purpose. Any contact we had with real heroism only widened the gulf between us and our fellow citizens.

All in all, this quest has been a tragic disappointment. Rather than enlarging the stature of Americans, the effort to manufacture greatness had a miniaturising effect. Everything it touched became not only less heroic but less human. We wanted greatness, but we got simulations.

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How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

Meanwhile, in the same years that the measure of man was being stunted, another type of anti-heroism — this time in a technological form — was coming to rule over the planet. Even before the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, the budding War on Terror had already begun to metastasise into a permanent bureaucracy. Word of the “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) programme was leaked to the New York Times, which reported on the initiative in 2002 while it was still in development.

Headed up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), TIA intended to create a universal data mining system in which every kind of information ever collected on a person would be collated in one database. US authorities could then query and analyse the data — which, properly interpreted, would contain a composite portrait of every individual alive — with algorithms designed to detect patterns identified with criminals and terrorists. For its logo the group chose the eye of providence, that always reassuring image from the one-dollar bill of an eyeball floating at the apex of a pyramid.

Once word got out about TIA, a backlash ensued led by both legislators and civil liberties groups and the programme was shut down. But what we now know — thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013 — is that TIA didn’t end when the Government shut it down; it just took on new names as it spread far outside its origins at DARPA. Within the US government, TIA was a direct forerunner to the National Security Agency’s secret efforts known as PRISM to collect bulk data and spy on Americans’ communications. Just this past April, it was revealed that the US postal office was running a secret programme to monitor Americans’ social media activity for signs of “extremism” that would then be passed on to other federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. As a specific office TIA is gone, but the principle that unconstitutional spying on Americans’ private behaviour is only limited by the possibility of getting caught lives on.

The true heirs to the Government’s efforts at total information control are companies like Google and Facebook whose businesses are based on luring people in with free services in order to extract their user data. In her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes how the “state of exception” created by the Government use of special extra-legal prerogatives in the aftermath of 9/11 “favored Google’s growth and the successful elaboration of its surveillance-based logic of accumulation”. In other words, why would US intelligence agencies run their own collection programmes and have to worry about political scandals and Congressional oversight when they can just allow private companies to cast a legal surveillance net over the entire globe and then tap into the servers on the backend, like they did with PRISM.

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Washington was gripped by fear

By Justin Webb

In 2000, the year the tech bubble burst, there was a burgeoning effort in the US government, led by the Federal Trade Commission, to regulate the Internet and protect users’ privacy. Zuboff details how that came to an abrupt end after 9/11 as, “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism”.

Exactly 20 years after the survey that found “Optimism Reigns, Technology Plays Key Role,” Pew conducted another survey in 2019. Too much has happened to reduce its findings to any one cause, but its headline gives one indication of the direction that change took in the post 9/11 era: “Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts: Majorities predict a weaker economy, a growing income divide, a degraded environment and a broken political system.”

The soaring rhetoric employed by the architects of post-9/11 US policy promised to restore a classical grandeur to American democracy that had supposedly been lost in the “end of history” Nineties. Instead, they undermined its foundations and launched the United States into the anti-heroic era of human-bots, social automation and authoritarian technocracy.

The reason these annoying little pop-ups exist at all is thanks to a recent-ish law which helps you understand what’s being collected about you online. It’s something that probably deserves a moment of your attention. But we’re spending more and more time online; who wants to waste it checking 20 tedious Ts&Cs a day?

The future of the internet will come down to tiny things like this: subtle decisions made at the engineering or regulatory level — stuff which most of us ignore because we can’t be bothered to find out what it’s all about. Are you curious about “digital object architecture”? Do you want to know who’s behind the “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers”? A colleague of mine once spent weeks tracking this stuff — only to conclude that internet protocols are “simply too impenetrable and boring to feel angry about”. Nobody cares. Nobody, except the autocrats of the world, who are quietly trying to wrestle control over various working groups and technical decisions — to make sure they can tame the digital beast.

Given our abject dependency on it, it’s scary to think of the internet as a flimsy experiment. But it’s already changed shape several times over its short life: from a government-funded research project for military scientists, to an academic network, to a vehicle for e-commerce and now a platform for social content. Through it all one thing remained constant, in theory if not always in practice: the idea that the internet was a single open network which anyone could join, and where everything was connected via a standard set of protocols and rules.

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According to a new book, that’s about to change. Four Internets argues that the era of a single internet might be drawing to a close, replaced by a balkanised network of different versions living alongside each other. Scholars Wendy Hall and Kieron O’Hara reckon four internets in particular are already taking shape.

The “Silicon Valley” model is open and libertarian — anyone can join the network, no single authority is in charge and there are few rules about what sort of information can be transported across the network. Its modus operandi is to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. This is the original vision and remains just about still on top.

The “Washington DC” version, by contrast, prioritises data collection and corporate interests. It doesn’t mind big tech firms collecting massive amounts of information on citizens, providing it generates profits and excellent products for consumers to enjoy.

Then there’s the “Brussels bourgeois” model which is “ordered, respectful, polite, decent, well-behaved, well- mannered, and considerate” (and also a little dull). Preferred by most EU countries, it is quick to launch anti-trust cases and punish companies that “move quickly and break things”. It is the Brussels vision that created “GDPR” privacy rules, the “right to be forgotten” and those damn cookie laws.

Finally, there is the fast-developing “Beijing” internet, which is paternalistic and tightly controlled by the government. Back in 2000, Bill Clinton told a Chinese trade delegation that cracking down on the internet would be like “trying to nail jello to the wall … good luck”. But over the last 20 years the Chinese government has gradually brought the internet to heel through its doctrine of “cyber-sovereignty”. They’ve done it slowly and cleverly: China’s “deep packet inspection” technology checks what’s coming in from the rest of the world; IP addresses they don’t approve of are turned away. All internet content providers are held liable for what appears on their websites, under an insidious “you yourself decide” code, which encourages everyone to turn into draconian self-censors to avoid trouble.

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This is how democracy dies

By Jamie Bartlett

Where does the UK stand in all of this? It’s hard to imagine our government would have either the competence or the inclination to go as far as China’s, but what if the Beijing model is the future? In his recent book The Great Firewall of China, James Griffiths argues the Chinese model is starting to spread. Most visibly in Africa, where various governments are happy to buy up cheap, decent Chinese technology — and in some cases the surveillance or AI technology that can help them stay in charge. Although as some analysts have argued, it’s not always Beijing pushing the Beijing model — Western companies are also happy to assist snooping autocrats with cheque books. At home, Westminster is liable to fall for the allure of control. While we might not import Chinese technology itself — especially after the furore with Huawei and the 5G network — the promise of being in charge of the internet is irresistible.

And so, our internet is getting increasingly authoritarian. You may recall the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (aka the “Snoopers Charter”), which, among other things, required internet companies to keep a record of the websites you visit for a year. Earlier this year it was revealed that the government was testing a creepy new tool as part of the Act — surveillance technology that could track and record everything that every single person in the country does on the internet. Funnily enough, the Chinese government cited the Snoopers Charters when defending their own draconian surveillance techniques.

There also seems to be a running game of cat and mouse between the police and campaign groups over the use of facial recognition technology. Last year the Court of Appeals deemed that South Wales Police’s use of live facial recognition technology was unlawful — a win for campaigners. But this year some forces started trialling retrospective facial recognition technology instead.

Then there’s the proposed Online Harm Bill, currently inching through Parliament, which aims to make companies more responsible for user safety on their platforms. It will force tech firms to take on a “duty of care” and remove “harmful content” while keeping up “democratically important” stuff. There’s certainly plenty of bad stuff online, but phrases like “duty of care” and “harmful content” are terrifyingly broad — and reminiscent of China’s “you yourself decide” code. If the British bill passes, it will invariably mean proactive and excessive censorship — with government setting the tone.

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And it probably will pass, because the truth is the public seem to quite like the Beijing model, even if they wouldn’t call it that. According to a recent YouGov survey, 78% of us want users to disclose their real identity when signing up on social media — a petition about this hit almost 700,000 signatures recently. It’s easy to understand the instinct — this followed the controversy over racist attacks on England footballers after the team lost the European Championship final, much of which came from anonymous social media accounts. Labour MPs Margaret Hodge, Angela Rayner and Jess Philips have all argued that de-anonymising users will force them to be accountable for their actions.

If the goal is noble, the method is not. For one thing, it’s not clear that such a move would deal with the problem, given a decent chunk of online abuse comes from anonymous users overseas (should we ban them too? How?) Besides, cyber-disinhibition is also caused by the lack of face-to-face, immediate contact, which wouldn’t change — unless of course the government forced us to hand-deliver our tweets and posts in person to the recipient. And besides, after everything we know about Facebook, are we sure we really want to hand our passports or driving licenses over to Zuck? What of those who have good reason to stay anonymous online — the whistleblower, the undercover journalist, the teen in a self-help group?

Anonymity used to be seen as a benefit of online life: a chance to say what you really think, to safely explore new ideas and new identities. “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog,” went the famous New Yorker cartoon, and it wasn’t meant as an insult. Now Fido and Patch are a menace to society.

When you add this all up, it’s possible to see the UK drifting accidentally into its very own authoritarian internet. Not up to Beijing’s Olympian standards, perhaps, but where censorship in the name of harmony trumps all and where surveillance is built in to the rules and the tech.

As the internet becomes more embedded in our everyday life, that will take on an even more sinister meaning. Any minor infraction in our self-driving cars will result in a system override and an automatic locked-door ride to the nearest police station (“in the interests of pedestrian safety!”). Smart fridges will hector you about meat consumption levels and simply refuse to open if you’ve been recorded saying anything rude or offensive (“in the interests of the nation’s health!”). The internet will become a far more sanitised, controlled and monitored place than it already is — and by extension so will all of us.

The Sleep Number Bed is typical of smart home devices, as Harvard business school Professor Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It comes with an app, of course, which you’ll need to install to get the full benefits. Benefits for whom? Well, to know that you would need to spend some time with the 16-page privacy policy that comes with the bed. There you’ll read about third-party sharing, analytics partners, targeted advertising, and much else. Meanwhile, the User Agreement specifies that the company can share or exploit your personal information even “after you deactivate or cancel … your Sleep Number account.” You are unilaterally informed that the firm does not honor “Do Not Track” notifications. By the way, the bed also transmits the audio signals in your bedroom. (I am not making this up.)

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How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

The business rationale for the smart home is to bring the intimate patterns of life into the fold of the surveillance economy, which has a one-way mirror quality. Increasingly, every aspect of our lives — our voices, our facial expressions, our political affiliations and intellectual predilections — are laid bare as a data to be collected by companies who, for their own part, guard with military-grade secrecy the algorithms by which to use this information to determine the world that is presented to us, for example when we enter a search term, or in our news feeds. They are also in a position to determine our standing in the reputational economy. The credit rating agencies and insurance companies would like to know us more intimately; I suppose Alexa can help with that.

Allow me to offer a point of reference that comes from outside the tech debates, but can be brought to bear on them. Conservative legal scholars have long criticized a shift of power from Congress to the administrative state, which seeks to bypass legislation and rule by executive fiat, through administrative rulings. The appeal of this move is that it saves one the effort of persuading others, that is, the inconvenience of democratic politics. 

All of the arguments that conservatives make about the administrative state apply as well to this new thing, call it algorithmic governance, that operates through artificial intelligence developed in the private sector. It too is a form of power that is not required to give an account of itself, and is therefore insulated from democratic pressures. 

In machine learning, an array of variables are fed into deeply layered “neural nets” that simulate the binary, fire/don’t-fire synaptic connections of an animal brain. Vast amounts of data are used in a massively iterated (and, in some versions, unsupervised) training regimen. Because the strength of connections between logical nodes is highly plastic, just like neural pathways, the machine gets trained by trial and error and is able to arrive at something resembling knowledge of the world. The logic by which an AI reaches its conclusions is impossible to reconstruct even for those who built the underlying algorithms. We need to consider the significance of this in the light of our political traditions.

When a court issues a decision, the judge writes an opinion in which he explains his reasoning. He grounds the decision in law, precedent, common sense, and principles that he feels obliged to articulate and defend. This is what transforms the decision from mere fiat into something that is politically legitimate, capable of securing the assent of a free people. It makes the difference between simple power and authority. One distinguishing feature of a modern, liberal society is that authority is supposed to have this rational quality to it — rather than appealing to, say, a special talent for priestly divination. This is our Enlightenment inheritance. It appears to be in a fragile state. With the inscrutable arcana of data science, a new priesthood peers into a hidden layer of reality that is revealed only by a self-taught AI program — the logic of which is beyond human knowing.

The feeling that one is ruled by a class of experts who cannot be addressed, who cannot be held to account, has surely contributed to populist anger. From the perspective of ordinary citizens, the usual distinction between government and “the private sector” starts to sound like a joke, given how the tech firms order our lives in far-reaching ways.

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The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon have established portals that people feel they have to pass through to conduct the business of life, and to participate in the common life of the nation. Such bottlenecks are a natural consequence of “the network effect.” It was early innovations that allowed these firms to take up their positions. But it is not innovation, it is these established positions, and the ongoing control of the data it allows them to gather, that accounts for the unprecedented rents they are able to collect, as in a classic infrastructure monopoly. If those profits measure anything at all, it is the reach of a grid of surveillance that continues to spread and deepen. It is this grid’s basic lack of intelligibility that renders it politically unaccountable. Yet accountability is the very essence of representative government. 

Mark Zuckerberg has said frankly that “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company.” If we take the man at his word, it would seem to raise the question: can the United States government tolerate the existence of a rival government within its territory? 

In 1776, Americans answered that question with a resounding ”No!” and then fought a revolutionary war to make it so. The slogan of that war was “don’t tread on me.” This spirited insistence on self-rule expresses the psychic core of republicanism. As Senator Amy Klobuchar points out in her book Antitrust, the slogan was directed in particular at the British Crown’s grant of monopoly charters to corporations that controlled trade with the colonies. 

Today, the platform firms appear to many as an imperial power. The fundamental question “who rules?” is pressed upon America once again.

This is an edited version of Matthew B. Crawford’s testimony before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on June 15th 2021.

The trouble is ‘Sandra’ wasn’t a student. She was a police spy who had been sent to gather information about the Women’s Liberation Movement. Sandra wasn’t even her name. One of her key targets, Diane Langford, now 79-years-old, has only now spoken publicly about how she was watched by at least six undercover cops who were part of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) formed after protests against the Vietnam war at Grosvenor Square in 1968.

SDS were set up to gather intelligence about groups that were organising public protest — ostensibly to assist with the more effective policing of such protest. But as evidence emerges it seems they served a wider purpose, gathering intelligence and potentially disrupting the activities of anyone who might be regarded as a subversive.

The way male police officers inveigled their way into protest groups was exploitative and callous: the gravest possible interference with their targets’ private lives. The officers posed as fellow activists with a lifelong commitment to whichever cause the groups were pursuing, with many forming intimate sexual relationships with the women, meeting family members and, in two known cases, even having children with the women they were spying on. In some cases the undercover officers had wives and families to return to on their days off.

It seems extraordinary that the authorities were so worried about the risk women posed to national security that they sent spies to gather information from children’s Christmas parties and jumble sales. But it would seem that this indeed was the case.

The scandal of police spy abuse broke ten years ago, when the Met tried to explain away the Mark Stone affair as the action of a lone rogue officer – he had been spying on a woman in the climate change movement who became his lover. His conduct was described by the Met as unacceptable. However, the uncovering and naming of Mark Kennedy encouraged more women who had been targeted to come forward. The overriding feeling was that the surveillance had come close to abuse. The collective battle by these women put the lie to the rogue officer theory and laid the foundations for an allegation of institutionalised sexism.

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Why women fear the police

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The Sarah Everard case and the ensuing public outcry about the misogyny within the police force is but one example of the failure of police to get rid of locker room culture. Last year, the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) filed a super-complaint to the Police Inspectorate highlighting systemic failures women are experiencing when reporting domestic abuse perpetrated by police officers and others employed by the police.

According to the evidence amassed by CWJ, the culture of “institutionalised sexism” within the police condones and trivialises violence against women. Cited are the levels of sexual harassment reported by police employees, concerning levels of power abuse by police officers for sexual gain, and high numbers of reports of sexual assault by police officers who then face no sanction. Women who report such cases have very little trust or confidence in the police when they seek help because their abuser is part of the system intended to protect them.

In 2015, following the startling revelation that the Stephen Lawrence family had also been targeted by the SDS using unorthodox methods, the then Home Secretary Theresa May announced a public inquiry with an aim to get to the truth about undercover policing across England and Wales since 1968, and provide recommendations for the future. It took the inquiry five years to gather evidence and eventually, amid worries about protecting former undercover operatives from exposure, the first public hearings took place last November. They are ongoing today.

It has gradually emerged through the hearings that a range of women’s groups were reported on during the course of the SDS’s deployment, including Greenham Common Women’s Support Group, the Spare Rib collective, Women in Ireland, Women Workers League, and Brixton Black Women’s Group. Langford was aware that she and comrades in a Marxist-Leninist study group had been spied on in the early 1970s by an undercover cop using the name Dave Robertson, who was rumbled when he was recognised by a friend of hers as a police officer. Then, sometime in the 1980s, she tried to get a visa to go to the United States: “I went to the US Embassy, was taken to a cubicle and this guy took out an enormous file and dumped it on the desk and said, ‘ma’am, you are not a fit person to go to the USA’.” It’s true Langford was a high-profile activist — she had set up the Women’s Liberation Front with her partner Manu Manchanda. But was she really a danger to national security?

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Definitely not, claims Langford. She thinks they were targeted following a bomb explosion at the Miss World competition in November 1970. Langford was one of 150 women who attended the first NWL conference at Ruskin College, where plans for a protest at the beauty competition were drawn up.

Sandra, who was deployed as an undercover officer between September 1971 May 1973, told the Inquiry that she remembers very little detail about her time spying on the Women’s Liberation Front. “As far as I recall, I was just instructed to attend a meeting: to look, listen and feedback any plans, including demonstrations or potential disorder.”

“I was there to observe people come who we regarded as being on the fringes of society,” she continued. “They all conducted themselves within the bounds of the law.”

As Langford insists: “there wasn’t any decent intelligence to get. Everything that we did was in the public anyway, so they could have just bought a women’s liberation newsletter or gone and picked up a leaflet from the local leftist cafe.”

Reports submitted to SDS by Sandra and other undercover officers confirm this. But they don’t show the police in an exemplary light. They expose some deeply offensive attitudes, without determining whether or not the infiltrated groups posed any danger to national security.

One report on a women’s group meeting in 1976 describes a member as having, “a typically Jewish lilt to her … and rather prominent nose, always scruffily dressed in blue jeans and T-shirt (without a bra).” Another from the same year: “A negress was in the audience”, and a gay man was described as having an “effeminate manner”.

Sandra’s report on the National Women’s Liberation Conference in 1972 states: “Lesbian friends in particular made exaggerated and noisy displays of affection openly kissing and hugging each other. These displays were common-place throughout the conference, and it was not unusual to see two girls entwined in a corner.”

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Although aware that a number of male undercover cops had previously targeted groups she had been involved in, Langford never knew she was being spied up on by Sandra until a researcher with the Undercover Research Group read Langford’s blog about Dave Robertson.

The researcher told Langford that a female officer had also been involved and that Langford’s name was on a number of her reports to SDS. “That was the first time I heard of Sandra,” says Langford. “I felt completely soiled and disgusted, and felt as if I had to handle the evidence files with tongs when I had to read through it,” she says. “This woman had been in my house where I lived with my child and my partner, and around all my personal belongings. I felt totally violated.”

For Langford, there is no doubt that her life has been affected by the past actions of the SDS. “I’ll never know what career opportunities were denied to me, or what other barriers have been placed in front of me during my life. I’ll never be certain whether unpleasant incidents, for example, being denied credit or visas, or break-ins at my home, were connected to the surveillance I was being subjected to.”

As more evidence emerges it is now clear that the operations of the SDS were the well-kept secret lurking behind a pretence of an open liberal democracy — where anyone expressing dissent and opposing the establishment, from environmental and animal rights activists to trade unionists and Left-wing MPs, from anti-apartheid campaigners and peace activists to black justice campaigns and women’s liberationists, could he subject to a form of spying that at its most extreme included officers forming long-term intimate sexual relationships with targets. The discovery of this deceit has caused targets long-term psychological harm; it is a grave violation by agents of the state.

The SDS has long been disbanded, and the Inquiry will hopefully lead to greater police accountability, but root and branch reform is needed before trust in the police is restored. “It’s harrowing to learn of the pernicious attitudes of officers masquerading as comrades and sisters who inveigled their way into our homes, families, meetings and lives,” says Langford. “The betrayal of trust is unforgiveable.”

In 1997, just after the youngest millennials were born, Damien Hirst accidentally prophesied how that tension would affect their generation, in the title of his art book: “I WANT TO SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE, EVERYWHERE, WITH EVERYONE, ONE TO ONE, ALWAYS, FOREVER, NOW.” The online world is destructively dual: it creates a delirious dream of boundlessness, while being an open prison; its subjects can see anything, while under total surveillance. These days, the kids who were toddlers when Hirst was pickling his first shark know this so implicitly that they seldom really think about it.  For them, what they screen off — and what they broadcast — has always been a function of being the first generation to undergo the process of identity formation within the feedback loop of a networked world.

And what that gets up-voted above all else, in that world, is emotional disclosure. It is the “stunning and brave” tale of trauma, spliced with a measure of pithy, pungent political agitprop — the essay that can generalise out from “me me me” to any kind of oppressed “we”. The inherent narcissism of the confessional genre is offset by those “we” aspects of the generalising think-piece, while the most shareable articles on social media have that same combination of relatability and a call to arms. In that context, writers like Jia Tolentino are in poll position to be the Voice.

Back in 2014, Tolentino was an editor at Jezebel, the blog site that pioneered a certain kind of personal-is-political feminism, now everywhere, which involves paying women $50 to share painful experiences in their past. Tolentino’s own work never misses the chance to score some minor culture wars point, always peeling back yet more of the soft viscera of her hurts in exchange for kudos.

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Like many women who grew up in the 90s, Tolentino feels defined by her very online-ness. At the start of her 2019 essay collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, she tracks the technological timeline of her life, from hymning the alien fritz of the 48k dial-up modem to raking over her pre-teen diary on her AngelFire website. For her, it was that early experience of online identity construction that represents that generational break-point. “The self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance,” she says. But: “the internet adds a host of other, nightmarish metaphorical structures: the mirror, the echo, the panopticon.”

Life in the internet’s panopticon means you can never screen-off your personality — never engage in the perfectly normal behaviour of being different people in different social settings. It’s a process Tolentino sees as inherently crazymaking, because it means you’re never “off”, you never get to be in a rumpus room of consequence-free engagement. This over-construction, she concludes with the weary inevitability of an ex-Jezebel writer, is worse for women, who have always been socialised that way. She offers a millennial cliché as a solution: be more you. Lean into your saleable self. Tolentino is very good at doing this; she seems to have a native gift for swimming with the digital tides.

The same cannot be said of Roisin Kiberd, who, with a pedigree at VICE and a thing for techno-dystopian Mark Fischer, is another contender for the Voice. True, her new collection of essays, The Disconnect, opens with a remarkably similar catalogue of digital personhood. And the two are almost the same age; Kiberd references many of the same formative moments in the life of the net as Tolentino. But while Tolentino was expertly curating her brand, Kiberd began to come apart. In early 2016, she tells us, she had a breakdown, swallowed a month’s worth of pills and washed them down with cheap rum — taking care to set her Twitter to private, and write down all her online passwords.

A Dubliner, Kiberd had a PR job as the voice of an online cheese brand, then drifted into ill-paid, gig economy work writing about tech and for tech. Meantime, Dublin’s property market trebled in value, meaning that hers is a life of shunting between share-houses, with regular crestfallen returns to the parental nest. Kiberd was supposedly living the dream, a quintessential anywhere, free to jet off at a moment’s notice to live an Emily In Paris-style in a dreamy mittel European city. Yet in truth, all she does is work obsessively, storing up shifts on the treadmill today to make room for some undefined “real life” tomorrow. Anything that could be regarded as progress, the true stuff of life — a decent home, colleagues, regularity, hobbies — hovers just out of reach. Her world has become an infinite scroll, she’s a hare on a wire.

Somewhere, she knows this. But can she stop it? Can she look away? Well, ask yourself: can you?

If Tolentino is The Millennial Voice in 1D — a flatland of on-message self-disclosure — then Kiberd is its 2D upgrade: human, often lyrical, if still prone to cling to the orthodoxies of the consensus culture. But it takes the memoir-as-fiction to really nail the Voice in 3D; for true millennial thought, you need someone who thinks beyond the impact of tech in culture. Who thinks about culture as though it were just another kind of tech.

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Lauren Oyler was once a writer in VICE’s Brooklyn offices. I think I saw her there, in late 2015. Her tribe, Broadly — VICE’s women’s pages — were hived off in a single glass-panelled office, about eight of them around a single board room table. Peering in, the vibe did not seem good in their own personal panopticon. To say Oyler’s fantastic new novel Fake Accounts is thinly-veiled is an insult to the diaphanous. It’s literary cling-film, right down to the Peanut Butter M&M dispenser in that Brooklyn HQ. Oyler’s lead — like her, like Tolentino — also writes articles which are “designed to say X is bad for women”, dredged up by fishing the net for similar articles. Just like her heroine, prior to VICE, Oyler “moved to Berlin” in the golden age of the moving-to-Berlin era, around 2012. According to nothing more reliable than internet forum gossip, “she refused to learn any German and made a huge unnecessary fuss about Berghain”, the celebrated club that’s basically impossible to get into. (Oyler apparently claims her German is fine.)

Oyler’s leading woman is a moth drawn to this Mecca of hip globalised youth culture. Actual Germans with actual lives and cultures move around behind her on wires, Non-Player Characters in her personal video game. She speaks none of the language. She invests nothing. Instead, she spends a lot of time of Twitter, babysits for an American woman and goes on shapeless, meaningless internet dates, dishing up a string of fake personas for a string of nice enough men.

To say that Oyler has captured the Millennial Voice would almost be an understatement. She’s nailed that sense in which the surveillance is as much internal as external. Her narrator is perfectly self-aware, yet gets in tussles with herself about politics. Somewhere, there’s a catechism of things she merely thinks she believes, that she should believe — the same decision paralysis you see everywhere. When another character admits to an obsessive desire to get into baking, you get the sense she’s riven between the notion that baking is fantastically Instagrammable, and an ongoing ascetic quest to purge, to forego the net entirely and get back to real, manual work.

The Millennial’s is a binge-purge universe; a neurotically self-optimising one, always looking for the next tweak, the next FODMAP-free diet, or net-abstaining dopamine fast — which will be the one that will finally snap life itself into focus. Meanwhile, panning back, the truth of the matter that people with two Master’s degrees share shabby houses in cities where they don’t belong, well into their thirties, always on dates, always on Twitter, and thus perfectly, sublimely, free. It’s a culture of never truly gaining anything because you never truly commit to anything.

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So you want to quit the rat race

By Mary Harrington

Oyler “divides her time” between New York and Berlin now. Kiberd’s Instagram bio says she’s “Irish, mostly in Berlin”. The climax of the latter’s book comes, where else, at the Berghain (though she never actually names the club). There she is reunited with an apparent true love, in a town with “rents a third of Dublin”. At around the same moment in history, back in fiction, Oyler’s narrator was also trotting past the place, making mindless quips.

Berghain is famous for confiscating your phone on arrival. If Berlin is Mecca, then Berghain is the Black Stone of Kaaba, a big silent rock nothing can penetrate. Somewhere in there is a place where, for just one night, you cannot post anything to your socials. It is the Lost World Of Spontaneity. And while the word spontaneity has a reputation for, y’know, carefree stuff, in truth it requires deliberate choice. It requires putting something down, in order to become undivided. A lesson which none of our real or fake memoirists ever fully absorb.

Turns out the voice of the millennial isn’t so much that of the Anywhere as the exhausted Everywhere: a generation who simultaneously wish to have the kudos of the rat race, the hyper-socialisation of the big city, and yet also the simple parsimony, the mental clarity and basic stability, that comes from families and small towns; and the sacrifice inherent in choosing. You cannot live the rest of a life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always and forever — now can you?

The modern world is defined by “progress”, be it social, economic or technological. We demand change, strive for growth and promote development. To a great extent we’ve succeeded. Most of us live lives which are wealthier and healthier than our ancestors could have imagined.

Further reading

What do post-liberals really want?

By Peter Franklin

And yet progress means abandonment. While we can do without the dirt and drudgery of pre-modern life, that’s not all we’ve left behind. Our ancestors were poor, but increasingly we feel the absence of the things that enriched their lives: A connection to nature; the satisfaction of craftsmanship; the support of a strong community; time and space for family; a world still enchanted with spiritual significance. These are things we associate with the past much more than the present, which is why some of us want to get back there.

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The question, though, is how. Time travel is obviously not an option. And even it were, few people would take it. Only the most dedicated traditionalists would take the past as a package deal. Baking your own bread is fun; extracting your own teeth, not so much. 

Most “trads” are selective. They don’t want to recreate the past, but learn from it to build a better future. However, there’s no getting away from their technological scepticism. Consider the case of Katharine Birbalsingh — “Britain’s strictest headteacher”. She argues that parents should take away their children’s smartphones and replace them with cheap “brick phones” that have basic voice and messaging functions, but allow very little else — and certainly not immersion in social media.

I think she’s absolutely right, but what she proposes is no small thing. It’s not just counter-cultural, but counter-historical — a deliberate decision to turn back the clock on one of the most important technological developments of the 21st century. 

For an even more significant example, read this essay for UnHerd by Aris Roussinos — who wants us to go “back to the land”. To be clear, this is not a Year Zero manifesto. It’s not even “knit your own lentils”. His modest proposal is that Britain needs a million more farmers. This would take an agriculture policy that supported smallholders not barley barons, but if the opportunity were available, I wouldn’t be surprised if something like a million Britons took it up. I’d expect rather less than that number to succeed, but overall I think we’d be better for it.

Further reading

Why Britain needs a million new farmers

By Aris Roussinos

But while what Aris proposes is doable, it’s also deeply subversive. The move from the countryside and farming to the cities and non-agricultural occupations isn’t just an economic trend, it is the economic trend. More than anything it describes our transition as a species from the long millennia of pre-industrial stasis, to the breakneck developments of the last two hundred years. In this sense, going back to the land is to go back in time. 

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Previously, I’ve argued against accepting technological progress as a fait accompli. We should never incorporate new technology into our lives just because it’s new. Rather, like the Amish, we should only accept what genuinely serves our personal and collective goals. In fact, in some cases — like eugenics for instance — we should actively and unapologetically suppress the application of scientific discoveries. 

And yet a discriminating approach to technological progress doesn’t have to be a subtractive one. It’s true that removing technologies from your life will probably bring you closer to a traditional way of living, but there’s a limit to the number of people who are likely to follow you. 

I’m a traditionalist too, but an optimistic and ambitious one. For me it’s not good enough to be part of a mere sub-culture, living off-grid, somewhere up the Dark Mountain. I want a wholesale healing of the damage that modernity has done to my country and to the world. New technology got us into the mess we’re in, but it is also has the potential to get us out again. 

In imaging the future we compare the present to the past and extrapolate. Therefore we assume the future will be like the present only more so. It will be faster, stronger, bigger, smarter. And, if the good things get better, then, by the same logic, the bad things will get worse: climate change, inequality, anomie and the loss of privacy. 

But history, while always moving forward, doesn’t do so in straight lines. What we think of as modernity is not an ever-increasing intensity of the same thing, it is subject to phase changes in which it can transform into something else altogether. 

Just look at where our energy comes from. Our ancestors relied on their immediate environment — gathering firewood, cutting peat, building windmills. But with industrialisation, motorisation and electrification, energy became evermore centralised and remorselessly polluting — the price we’ve paid for abundance. That was supposed to be our future too: a Bladerunner world of resource wars and environmental catastrophe.

Further reading

The things we do for growth

By Peter Franklin

So what’s this then? It’s the latest UK government cost estimates for different energy sources. The cheapest (and hence fastest growing) technologies are now wind and solar power. They’re cheaper than gas, cheaper than coal and much, much cheaper than nukes. Suddenly, our energy future looks decentralised and unpolluted. 

Of course, this future isn’t quite like the past either. Today’s windmills are nothing like their medieval predecessors. For a start they’re the size of the London Eye and you’re more likely to find them out to sea, not by the village pond. Still, it’s better than Bladerunner, isn’t it? 

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This isn’t the only example of the future changing for the better. 

For all the bad news we’ve had this year, lockdown has opened our eyes to a different way of working and living. It turns out that millions of us can work from home without the economy collapsing. Obviously, we’ve discovered this the hard way, and the cost will be enormous, but in rebuilding we don’t have to go back to the way things were. A lot of us will decide that subjecting ourselves to stupidly-long commutes and stupidly-high rents is, well, stupid. 

A piece of modern folk wisdom is that the internet makes physical proximity all the more important, but this isn’t as true as it used to be. We’ve spend the last decade having endless debates about social media, not noticing that the underlying architecture of the internet is becoming more capable as a platform for useful communication. Zoom-style online meetings are still far from seamless, as I’m sure you’ve noticed; but in 2010 they’d have been impractical and, in 2000, unthinkable. So just imagine what might be possible by 2030. 

The cliché that there’s no substitute for face-to-face contact just isn’t the case anymore. There literally is a substitute. It’s glitchy, but improving all the time and great swathes of the workforce are getting used to it.

And in case you think that doesn’t sound very traditional, just think what’s getting disrupted here. There’s nothing trad about the concentration of opportunity in a few global megacities. As a trend it was ripping apart our economic geography, dividing entire nations between the overheated metropolis and the left-behind hinterland. If technology unbundles the megacity, allowing people to prosper within their own towns and villages, then we can begin the process of rebuilding economic and social capital within all our communities. 

Then there’s the potential for an even more important development: the re-bundling of the household. Our homes used to be places where everything happened: not just sleep and a bit of quality time with the kids, but also work, education, entertainment, worship and the self-provision of all sorts of goods and services we now outsource to others elsewhere. It was occupied throughout the day, not just at overnight and at the weekends. And it was multigenerational: children didn’t spend all day in school, young adults weren’t sent away to distant cities and the elderly weren’t isolated.

Further reading

How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

As I argue here, the old way of living wasn’t all good, but it wasn’t all bad either. A new study has found that teenagers have become less anxious during the lockdown period — contradicting expectations of a mental health crisis. Perhaps the reason why is that they’ve had the opportunity to spend more time with family members who actually love them instead of the bully bear-pit that we call “school”. 

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Perhaps the most anti-traditional thing about modern life is its anonymity. It’s astonishing just how much of our time we spend with people we barely know or don’t know at all. We pass them on the street, commute sat next to them, have arguments with them online. We might live next door to strangers, work with strangers, even have sex with strangers. It’s an odd thought — and certainly would be to our ancestors — that we don’t know the names of most of the people we share our lives with. 

All of which suits the sociopath. Why treat others with respect if you don’t know them and they don’t know you? In the absence of a moral code or a calculated fear of being caught, why not treat other people and their property as if they’re entirely yours to do with as you will? 

We’re told that the fear of crime is exaggerated. In fact, we greatly under-appreciate just how hemmed-in our lives are by the constant need to guard against the predators among us. Those tales about an earlier time when people left their front doors unlocked or money for the milkman out on the porch aren’t fantasy — that’s how things really were (and still are, in a few places). 

When who you are — and what you do — is common knowledge, you behave differently. That’s not an unalloyed blessing, but on the whole I think it’s a better way to live. Which is why I’m in partial disagreement with Elizabeth Oldfield’s condemnation of facial recognition technology. Yes, there is something sinister about machines looking at us. But what about our anonymous cities, the crowds through which one can pass unrecognised — isn’t that creepy too?

Further reading

Test article

By Elizabeth Oldfield

A future in which people won’t be able to thieve or harass or vandalise without being seen and held accountable isn’t some unprecedented dystopia, it’s just going back to the way things used to be.

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Okay, enough with the law and order — how about some tech that might enhance our ancient liberties? Self-driving cars, for instance. If we ever get them, they’d be great news for country pubs. No need for a designated driver — just let a computer take the wheel instead, while you sleep off the evening’s enjoyment. 

Meanwhile automated delivery drones could be a boon to all those extra smallholders that Aris Roussinos wants to see. A distribution network that’s open to all would allow farmers and artisan producers to sell direct to consumers, bypassing the greedy supermarkets. Whereas modern logistical know-how has allowed a small number of large companies to exert growing control over the food chain, all that could change once the ability to coordinate distribution becomes a dispersed commodity. 

And that’s not the only new technology that could transform rural economics. For all the advantages of traditional farming methods, the fact is that it relied upon the back-breaking labour of of a now non-existent peasantry. Even our supposedly modern agriculture is dependent on poorly-paid, and sometimes exploited, migrants. 

Advances in agricultural robotics and AI could open up a new set of possibilities — for instance controlling weeds without chemicals or tending to livestock without factory farming. It’s another paradox, but we need automation to de-industrialise the countryside.

Further reading

Environmentally-friendly farming doesn’t have to be technologically backward

By Peter Franklin

The same applies to the built environment. As much as much we might appreciate traditional architecture, many of its features — such as richly carved masonry — relied upon the availability and affordability of an army of craftsmen. With the modern age came new materials and methods of construction that favoured the crude and repetitive forms of 20th century architecture. But, again, we now have the possibility of a phase change — through automation that doesn’t replace the true craftsman, but greatly enhances his or her productivity. If we can transform the economics of construction, then what gets built might just follow suit. 

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I’ll admit I’ve presented a series of best-case scenarios. It is just as possible that we could be dragged further away from truth and beauty than ever before — and all in the name of progress. Far from a traditionalist restoration, we could be headed for a future of tech-enabled abominations.

But that makes it all the more important that we stay engaged, that we don’t give up on science and technology, but fight to push it in the right direction. 

We must harness the power of innovation to restore the natural world and to defend human dignity. Traditional values will not prevail if we carry them off onto some low-tech reservation.

The only way back is forward.

The Lib Dems have since disappeared into irrelevance. The lib Cons are still around — and include in their number our current Prime Minister. But could the man who buried David Cameron’s premiership be the one to resurrect ID cards?

There’s no point rehashing the arguments made in the early 2000s. This is an issue in which the case for and against is prone to exaggeration. The fact is that a liberal democracy can have compulsory ID cards without sliding into dictatorship — or not have them and avoid anarchy. There are plenty of examples of both scenarios.

So, instead of having the old argument, let’s have a new one. I’ve always been instinctively opposed to ID cards, but looking at the underlying dynamics of the issue, 2020 looks very different from 2010. The most obvious — and recent — of game-changing developments is the Covid crisis. The future is pathogenic now. Even if there’s no second wave, we cannot assume a new normal in which pandemic disease risk isn’t a major policy consideration.

Suggested reading

Not so rosy: the legacy of the Coalition government

By Peter Franklin

Lockdown has restricted our freedoms in ways that make the concerns of the ID card debate look trivial. We’re now presented with plausible — indeed, likely — scenarios in which our freedom of movement and association depends on us being able to produce documented facts about ourselves: quarantine certificates; vaccination records; immunity status; test, trace and tracking data.

In terms of international travel some of this is already in force — with passports serving as the primary means of proving ID. How long before ID cards serve a parallel function as ‘internal passports’? It’s a disturbing concept, but as an alternative to general lockdown, it may be the least worst option.

Suggested reading

Should we let the aviation industry die?

By Peter Franklin

Another game-changing development is new technology. Back in 2010 we hadn’t yet woken up to the full implications of social media. We didn’t realise just how much the tech companies knew about us. A lot of people weren’t even using smartphones yet. In 2020, we still don’t know the whole story, but we’ve come to accept a significant degree of electronic surveillance in our everyday lives. Thus the idea of being easily identified doesn’t seem so foreign anymore, not when we’re identified every time we go online to shop, socialise and express our opinions.

Of course, the information flows that would be enabled through ID cards would be controlled by the state — and the state, unlike Facebook or Google, has the power to arrest and imprison you. So, the stakes are higher. But, then again, if the authorities want to track your movements and behaviour, they already can.

The last ten years have seen rapid advances across a variety of surveillance technologies, including facial recognition, gait recognition, and even heartbeat recognition. The CCTV network is ever expanding in scope and sophistication and is supplemented by drones and other mobile forms of image capture. And that’s just one form of big data collected by the various arms of the state.

In short, if you’re leading any sort of normal life, the authorities don’t need you to carry around an ID card in order to identify you.

Suggested reading

Big Bezos is watching you

By Peter Franklin

Indeed, the bigger risk may lie in not being identified. This was demonstrated by the Windrush Scandal — in which people who had immigrated to this country from the Caribbean were required to prove to the authorities that they’d been legally resident in the UK. For the Windrush generation who arrived before legal immigration was documented in the way it is now, this was difficult to do. Shamefully, longstanding UK residents were deported because they were unable to assemble the documentary evidence that wasn’t there — or, at least, wasn’t accessible. The scandal was in fact two scandals: first and foremost the inhumanity of plunging innocent people into a Kafkaesque nightmare; but also that it should be so hard to prove the basic facts of your own life.

A future full of big data will be a hyper-bureaucratic future. In our dealings with both the state and private corporations it is, therefore, vital that we have some consistent hold over the way our identities are recorded and recognised. ID cards could provide that control — a key that grants us access to what we need to know and what we want others to know about us. There’s no guarantee that the introduction of such a system would guarantee our rights, but it would be an opportunity to fight for them.

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We also need to think about the people who slip through the cracks of the system — living undocumented, unofficial lives unsupported and unprotected by the authorities. Only a small minority of these will be citizens who freely choose an ‘off-grid’ existence — a choice that should be respected. The great majority, though, will be vulnerable adults and children, many of them illegal immigrants, some of them trafficked against their will — and all of them at risk of exploitation. A recent report from the Centre for Social Justice estimates that there may be 100,000 or more victims of modern slavery in Britain alone.

We make things easy for this vile trade by tolerating, even celebrating, a bargain basement labour market — the legal and illegal components of which shade into one another. This is further enabled by a context in which it’s still possible for people to live and work without needing to prove who they are — and without their employers and landlords having to confirm those identities. A robust ID card system that made this simple and straightforward — but also inescapable — would be a severe blow to the modern slavers, people smugglers, slum landlords and other exploiters who depend on the anonymity of those they exploit.

Of course, no such system can be foolproof, nor would it be completely free of inconvenience for law abiding citizens. However, the same can be said of our passports system. Ultimately, it is a question of comparing these potential harms against the consequences of the status quo — in which we’re neither able to fully control our borders nor to prevent the everyday violation of basic human rights.

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What about the practical arrangements? One of the reasons why there was such resistance to New Labour’s ID cards policy was the lack of confidence in the government’s ability to manage IT projects. Indeed, the decade was marked by a series of fiascos — including one occasion when two CDs containing confidential child benefit data on 25 million people got lost in the post. Yes, really. The ensuing outrage was probably what doomed the ID policy before it was even implemented.

Is there any reason why we should have any more confidence in government today? The faltering progress on the promised test-and-trace app isn’t exactly encouraging. However, there’s no reason why governments can’t deliver ambitious IT projects. Singapore and Taiwan have impressed the world with their use of tech to control the spread of Covid. As it happens, both countries also have compulsory ID card systems. Another interesting model is Estonia, a world leader in providing online government services. Estonians can even vote in national elections online. And that’s despite the country being under constant cyber-attack. 

Suggested reading

Covid is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

By Peter Franklin

So if they can do it, why can’t we? Well, the fact is that we can. Any ID card system could be based on systems that have been successfully and reliably computerised. The passports system is the obvious example and an appropriate one if ID cards are re-introduced as means of exempting individuals from future lockdown restrictions. 

If HMG ever persuades the British people to accept ID cards it must be in the service of our overall convenience, not theirs. Every ID card should come as part of a package that also includes a free passport and, for those suitably qualified, a free driving license too. As in Estonia, it should provide strong authentication for access to online government services and participating private sector websites. And even if we don’t immediately follow the Estonian example of internet-based voting, ID cards could be used to provide a robust system of confirming identity for voting by post and at polling stations. 

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Then there’s the question of electronic cash. Thanks to innovations like contactless payments and online retail we’re using less physical cash than ever. Covid has only accelerated the decline of notes and coins, whose circulation through so many hands makes them a potential vector of disease. But to do without them altogether would require some form of e-cash — that is, not a credit or debit card, but a card that carries a digital currency for making instant, frictionless payments. In other words, something like an Oyster Card, but which could be used anywhere.

Suggested reading

Why is Zuckerberg inventing a currency?

By Peter Franklin

The big tech companies smell an opportunity. Some of them, like Facebook with its Libra project, are already on the case. But do we really want private companies running the digital currencies of the future? Or do we want one of the very oldest functions of government to stay in public hands? Writing in The Guardian, the economist Kenneth Rogoff suggests one possible way forward:

“The most radical approach would be a dominant retail central-bank currency which allows consumers to hold accounts directly at the central bank. This could have some great advantages, such as guaranteeing financial inclusion and snuffing out bank runs.”

It doesn’t have to go quite that far, but if currencies do go fully digital then making sure that everyone has access to the means of exchange becomes absolutely essential. At the very least, government needs to provide some form of guaranteed basic account. But that, of course, raises the question of identification. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to have our electronic cash on the same piece of plastic as our ID, but the two would have to be linked in some way.

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William Gibson once said that “the future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed”. Well, a future in which everyone is subject to constant, electronic, centralised identification is certainly on its way.

The things that were decentralised — the little bits of information we give away through our relationships with friends, family, strangers, suppliers, customers and the agencies of the state — are inexorably coming together. But that process of centralisation is not evenly distributed. It privileges the most powerful organisations and is taking place away from public scrutiny.

ID cards might just be our best chance to drag the centralisation of our data — our very identities — into the light. It’s not a question of whether we’ll be ID’d in every moment of our lives, but how.

Within a few years of even the most successful show in the world opening, only traces of that show will be left behind, and the best record of what made it extraordinary will only exist in people’s memories. A playtext might be published, leaving a record of what was said, and the production might transfer and run in the West End for a while, but it will always close eventually. Revivals will happen, new versions for new times, and the creatives who were part of the first productions will go on and do other things, but they’re rarely, if ever, seen together again.

Imagine a world where bands only ever played their latest albums, and all previous albums could only be heard on bootleg live recordings, no one could ever hear the real thing again. That’s the theatre.

Bearing this in mind, you can understand the elation of many when it was announced on St George’s Day that Ian Rickson was going to direct Mark Rylance in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem again next year, over a decade after they first told that story together. For a great number of theatregoers, Jerusalem ranks as the most extraordinary night they’ve spent in a theatre, Rylance’s towering, Eric Cantona-like portrayal of the lead character, Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, the most compelling thing they’ve witnessed.

More from this author

'This Country' is a modern TV miracle

By Barney Norris

These kinds of shows rarely come round again. The key creatives are too busy, with too many projects and calls on their time, and they’ve done the thing, anyway — they’re happy to move on. But Rylance and Rickson are going to revisit their greatest work, while still at the peak of their powers, after a decade when everything and nothing seems to have changed in England. It’s a truly amazing opportunity for audiences to experience something many of us thought was gone.

Jerusalem tells the story of a man about to be evicted from his caravan in a Wiltshire wood by the Kennet and Avon council. It’s about people living on the wild edges of society, and people who’ve fallen into the meat grinder of precarious rural life. It’s about the lure of the lawless, the country’s rebel spirit. It’s about England, in an ambitious way that few writers attempt and even fewer avoid embarrassing themselves in the course of attempting. But Butterworth did it triumphantly. Very few theatremakers living now will ever produce anything as good as this show was in its first production.

There’s a bit of the Tyson Furys about the play. Fury, widely thought to be the world’s best heavyweight boxer, is principally interesting to me because, like the folk singer John Martyn, he shows us that talent, like love, doesn’t always behave well, but lands wherever it falls instead, indiscriminate as lightning or Covid-19. It’s the idea Peter Shaffer explored in Amadeus — that genius is not necessarily accompanied by refinement, modesty, self-awareness, common sense. Genius just happens — sometimes to a boxer in a Bolton gym, sometimes to a folk singer with heroin and alcohol dependency issues, sometimes to a sex-crazed Austrian man-child. And sometimes it emerges in a play that seems to celebrate troubling things (one major plotline in Jerusalem centres on the whereabouts of the local May queen, who has gone missing on the day the new May queen should be crowned).

I had my own reservations about Jerusalem after I first saw it a decade ago. Growing up in Wiltshire, where the play is set, I and many others felt that Butterworth’s high octane, technicolour version of our world seemed in part like an effacement of our reality, which really had more in common with the work of Shane Meadows than the world of this play.

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Is there a future for English nationalism?

By Paul Mason

Jerusalem didn’t set out to represent our reality, of course — with its comedy vicar and Morris dancing, the play is more reminiscent of Alan Bennett or Martin McDonagh’s subversion of theatrical tropes in plays such as Habeas Corpus or The Beauty Queen of Leenane, its real references are in the theatre more than they’re in the real world. However, in a culture that paid no attention whatsoever to the world we came from, to feel that the one story set among us didn’t quite tell us right was a strange thing.

People who contributed to workshops during the play’s development have told me that the man they think Rooster is based on used to hang around the gates of a Wiltshire school, causing parents to drive in at the end of the day and collect their kids rather than letting them walk home, and ended up going to prison for several years for offences which were not entirely unrelated to this behaviour. To some, the play also effaces the impact of what he did. But this brings me back to Tyson Fury — Butterworth wasn’t trying to respectfully chronicle a Wiltshire community. He was writing about England’s rebel heart, asserting that the centre of our identity is actually to be found at the margins, in the woods, like Robin Hood.

Michael Billington has written of Jerusalem as a year zero for a golden period in contemporary British playwriting — so how will the play look to us, as it returns to an English theatre scene it so electrified once before? I think its darker themes will seem more prominent than they originally did. The MeToo movement and Jimmy Savile will make the unsettling story of the May Queen at the heart of the play ring out very clear indeed, and I wonder if that will turn the play into more of a challenge, a provocation to those who see it and enjoy it — a way of asking what exactly it is that they enjoy.

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Test article

By Jenny McCartney

Perhaps the play will even seem like an exploration of the darkness and deformity at the heart of England, in the tradition of the late, great Irish writer William Trevor’s novels, like the Whitbread Prize-winning Felicia’s Journey, which laid bare the rottenness that ran through so much of English life long before we’d heard the whole truth about Savile. I also think the play could seem sadder as well.

The hope glimpsed at the end of the play, that one day on this benighted island someone might find Drake’s drum, begin to beat it, and rescue us from the state we’re in, seems to me to have been more or less extinguished by a decade of austerity, a realisation of the climate crisis and the arrival of the coronavirus. Jerusalem might seem now like a story about people who, if they were in our capital, would all live in places like Grenfell Tower, and a man who hasn’t woken up yet to the hopelessness of that predicament, who is still left beating the same old drum.

What Jerusalem will show us above all is the England that is under threat. Here we all are, being obedient and doing what the state says, remaining indoors and preparing to accept unprecedented surveillance into our lives, as the price, poignantly enough, for our liberty.

Jerusalem seems to me like a howl in the face of that: an insistence that there are parts of us all, the part we recognise in Rooster Byron, that still can’t be policed. We’re going to need to work out how to protect and cultivate that aspect of ourselves, as we adapt to this new normal. Returning to Butterworth’s great play will afford us an opportunity to think about that.

It is beyond doubt that a reckoning is merited. Since the SARS outbreak in 2002, virologists have warned that the “large reservoir” of viruses in horseshoe bats, along with the Chinese custom of eating exotic mammals and using them for traditional medicines, has been “a time bomb” for the world’s health. Yet not only did China do nothing to clamp down on this danger before Covid-19, it has done nothing since.

The only state action in China’s notorious wet markets since they reopened has been the recruitment of security guards to stop visitors taking photographs of the insanitary conditions.

While many of the West’s useful idiots have praised the scale and speed of the Chinese response to the outbreak, we know that Beijing’s first response was to deny there was a problem and silence the medics who tried to blow the whistle. In those vital days, millions of people left Wuhan, the centre of the outbreak, making it inevitable coronavirus would become an international danger. China refused to engage with the World Health Organisation and left other countries guessing the characteristics of the virus. Now, its diplomats and state-backed media outlets are spreading fake news, claiming coronavirus began in Italy or America.

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China is not the hero in this darkest hour

By Ian Birrell

This behaviour should not come as a surprise to anybody who has watched Beijing since China was allowed into the world’s system of international trade. China has abused liberal trading rules by over-producing goods and dumping them on other markets. It has engaged in mass industrial espionage. It has set debt traps for other countries to win leverage over them. The prosperity earned through trade has not made its state more liberal or democratic, but even more oppressive. It has developed technologies made possible by international trade and used them to control its people. And it has abused the openness of other economies to undercut rival businesses and blackmail governments.

So a reckoning is not only deserved, but long overdue. The question is, what can we actually do?

There are limits, of course. China is a world power, with a population of about 1.4 billion people. It has nuclear weapons and a military with more than two million active personnel. Its Belt and Road Initiative spans 65 countries, covers more than 60% of the world’s population, and involves investment plans reportedly worth $900 billion. It owns more than $1 trillion of US public debt, and has made itself a vital investor not only in the British economy but in our critical national infrastructure.

But this does not mean we can do nothing. By our own actions, and by working in concert with our friends and allies, there is plenty Britain can do to protect our citizens and interests from China’s actions.

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Have we been played by China?

By James Kirkup

The most immediate step should be to reverse the decision to allow Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company, to run parts of Britain’s new 5G network. Whatever ministers and officials have convinced themselves, Huawei is not some benign company from a conventional market economy. It is subsidised by Beijing’s autocratic, communist regime so it can find its way into the most sensitive parts of other countries’ critical national infrastructure. Britain should change policy so – like the United States, Australia and other security allies — we ban Huawei from our system.

Critics will argue that the alternatives to Huawei — Nokia and Ericsson — are unable to provide the same equipment and services, and relying on these Western companies will take longer and cost more. But if officials believe we have been forced to make this awful choice because of a broken market, this is an argument not for strengthening Huawei but for making sure we do not destroy the market share of Nokia, Ericsson and other Western firms. It means we need to overcome our adherence to free market ideology and, working with allied governments, reform the telecommunications market, invest in new entrants, and make sure the West has tech capabilities to rival and surpass China’s.

Telecommunications is only one part of our critical national infrastructure we should be thinking about. Chinese companies are now huge investors in Britain’s energy sector. They part-own Britain’s gas piping network, and are funding the construction of the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point. As part of the deal agreed by David Cameron and George Osborne, Hinkley is the first stage of China’s “progressive entry” into the British nuclear system, allowing them to take on operational functions in future plants at Sizewell and Bradwell. And of course, Beijing’s investment strategy comes with a bill attached. Not only are the returns on the Hinkley deal absurdly generous, China uses Britain’s dependence on its investment as leverage in diplomatic and geopolitical controversies. We need to limit this leverage and curtail China’s role in our infrastructure.

Suggested reading

2019: the year the West wised up to China

By John Gray

This requires a different approach to economic policy and, in particular, a new form of industrial strategy. The coronavirus crisis is showing us not only that over-dependence on countries like China is dangerous, but that we need to keep certain industrial capabilities closer to home. British researchers are playing their part in the global effort to find a coronavirus vaccine, for example, but Britain has precious little capacity to manufacture vaccines at scale.

If and when a vaccine is discovered, experts have warned that we will need to wait in the queue to get it. Similarly, one of the reasons Germany is so far ahead of Britain in its testing strategy is, ministers explain, that the Germans have Roche, one of the world’s biggest diagnostic companies. Britain’s smaller diagnostics firms are dependent on Germany and the United States for their supplies.

Overall we need to build greater national resilience and far more state capacity to protect us from danger. The NHS will need more investment and capacity, but so will other state services, such as border control, and key parts of our social infrastructure, such as local authorities. The Government’s defence review, which is now effectively on hold while the state puts all its efforts into fighting the pandemic, will need to reflect the beyond-obvious fact that China — more than Islamist terrorism or Russian or Iranian aggression — is the West’s greatest threat and strategic rival.

Together with our allies, we need to wean ourselves off our over-dependence on China, with more manufacturing production and assembly work shifting to other Asian countries, such as Vietnam, lower-cost European countries, such as Poland and Portugal, and back home in Britain. Both governments and businesses will need to shorten the stretched global supply chains that serve the modern economy.

Suggested reading

China’s great global game

By Peter Franklin

Of course there are limits to what Britain can achieve alone and, like the rest of the West, we desperately need the United States to return to its role as the leader of the liberal democracies. Without stable and sensible American leadership, we are all weaker. We need to build new alliances with countries that share similar interests to our own. Japan and South Korea — prosperous democracies with neighbourly concerns about China — are obvious examples. As Tom Tugendhat, the Chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, points out, there is an opportunity for us to cooperate with what he calls the “new Indies”, independent states with an interest in the international rules-based order, including Japan and South Korea, but Chile, Kenya, Nigeria and others too.

And Britain can play an important role in forging a new multilateralism, in which the rise of new powers — not just China, but the likes of Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico — have the global voice they deserve. We can lead the creation of new institutions to ensure peaceful economic competition between East and West. And we can help to establish a new forum in which democratic governments can work together to regulate cyberspace and protect the internet from autocratic regimes. Predictably, China continues to seek a New Internet Protocol, which, in the name of “digital sovereignty”, would put the internet under the control of states. They must be stopped.

Compared with undemocratic states like China, it is often assumed that the democracies cannot act strategically and lack the state strength to get things done. But while there are many ways we can improve the way we are led, this is unnecessarily defeatist. Autocratic states lack legitimacy, democracies do not. They rely on fear, while we rely on our own choices to work with one another. They have alliances based on intimidation, while we have friendships based on shared values and interests. We will have to learn to live with an important and powerful China, but we must also learn to assert ourselves and protect ourselves from the very serious danger Beijing represents.

Nick Timothy is the author of ‘Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism’ (Polity)

It’s not that video door entry systems are anything new. They’ve been available for decades. The Ring system, however, is easy to use and pretty affordable. It’s also fully digital – on your smartphone or tablet, you can look at what your doorbell sees and have the footage stored online for a modest monthly fee.

Further reading

The irresistible rise of the machines

By Libby Emmons

In America, a Ring doorbell can be yours for as little as $99 – or nothing at all if your local police force is giving them away to residents. The New York Post reports on the cops’ enthusiasm for these gadgets:

“…as more police agencies join with the company known as Ring, the partnerships are raising privacy concerns. Critics complain that the systems turn neighborhoods into places of constant surveillance and create suspicion that falls heavier on minorities. Police say the cameras can serve as a digital neighborhood watch.”

We’ve come to think of CCTV as a top-down intervention – the province of law enforcement agencies and security services. Indeed, the spread of CCTV networks conjures up the world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a totalitarian state has its citizens under continuous surveillance, not least through the ubiquitous Telescreens.

However, unlike Orwell’s dystopia, the reach of CCTV in the real world is limited. Indeed, the state sometimes struggles to fund installation, maintenance and monitoring – leading to cuts in coverage. But rather than celebrate their liberation from the all-seeing-eye of the state, local people tend to react with dismay: never underestimate the popularity of security.

The technology is advancing – becoming cheaper, smaller and smarter. With Amazon and other providers developing video surveillance as a mass consumer product, the old top-down model of deployment and control is giving way to something more decentralised and, some might say, insidious.

Back in 2017, I speculated that it might not be long before ordinary members of the public start creating their own surveillance networks – and joining them up through social media:

“Access to existing CCTV networks is generally controlled by private businesses or public bodies… however the ultra-cheap (and therefore widely owned) internet-connected sensors of the future may operate on a different model – feeding information into a shared system in much the same way that we currently feed our photographs into Facebook and Instagram.  

“Whichever website does the best job of integrating data from the ubiquitous sensors of the near future will become the dominant digital platform of the 21st century.”

Further reading

Kiss your privacy goodbye – CCTV is just the beginning

By Peter Franklin

In 2019, the age of bottom-up, citizen-led surveillance is well-and-truly underway. It’s not a surveillance state we’re building, but a surveillance society, catered to by a surveillance market.

A particularly interesting feature of the Ring system is the Neighbors App. It is mentioned in a report by Wesley Dockery for the International Business Times:

“One of Ring’s services, Neighbors, allows members of a community to share safety information and suspicious footage captured on their Ring doorbells in a shared network, akin to Facebook’s news feed.”

It’s easy to see the direction this technology is going in.

As it becomes ever cheaper, more homes will use it, and each home will have more cameras creating a bubble of surveillance around each property. Surveillance social media will become more sophisticated, with neighbours granting each other access to their camera feeds. The individual surveillance bubbles will thus merge – to cover the whole street and, in time, the entire neighbourhood. The police, community groups, landlords and insurance companies will encourage the process.

More from this author

The battle for the Tory Party's soul

By Peter Franklin

Inevitably, artificial intelligence will be used to integrate and analyse camera feeds, thus eliminating the need for constant monitoring by human eyes. If surveillance bubbles are merged across wide enough an area then AI-powered image recognition of faces, objects, number plates etc. will allow users to locate, identify and track an individual or a vehicle through a neighbourhood, town or city.

So, good luck being a burglar in 10 years’ time. In fact, good luck doing anything you might get in trouble for, because within a surveillance bubble, it’s not going to go undetected. Burglars, muggers, car thieves, vandals, truants, under-the-radar adulterers and secret smokers should all beware: the streets will have eyes.

As well as looking around you for doorbell cameras, don’t forget to look up. Because, as Bobby Allyn of NPR explains, Jeff Bezos is leaving no angle unexplored:

“Going on vacation and want some extra security around your home? Someday you may be able to call Amazon’s drones.

“The Seattle tech giant is moving closer to making that scenario a real possibility after winning approval from federal officials this month for a patent for ‘home surveillance’ drones.

“Company officials stress that the plan is still in its infancy, but the patent papers describe a future in which Amazon customers order drones to hover around a home and scan for things such as a garage door left open, a broken window, graffiti or a fire.”

Ever wanted to call in a drone? One day, Amazon might be able to arrange it for you – though I imagine missile strikes won’t be an option.

Further reading

Elon Musk's extra-terrestrial threat

By Peter Franklin

The company is well placed to succeed in the surveillance society to come. It’s not just the Ring system or the Neighbors app or the vast door-to-door distribution network – or even the plans for an aerial drone delivery service. More important than any of those will be the ability to store and process the overwhelming quantities of visual data thus collected. As luck would have it, Amazon also owns AWS – one of the biggest cloud computing companies in the world. So, if anyone ends up hosting a live video feed of the entire planet, it’ll be Amazon.

In thinking about what is already possible – or soon will be – one can’t help but be impressed. That said, when one contemplates the implications for privacy, one might also feel an uncontrollable urge to sit down and cry.

But make sure you do your crying behind closed doors. You wouldn’t want the neighbours to see.

Or Jeff.

So, manned spaceflight: been there, done that, let’s not go again. Rather, let’s pay more attention to the hugely more consequential business of unmanned spaceflight and satellite technology.

There’s important stuff happening over your head right now – and you need to know about it.

Suggested reading

Why we need a moratorium on manned spaceflight

By Peter Franklin

For instance, that irrepressible scamp Elon Musk has been up to his tricks again. This time he’s only gone and launched a ‘train’ of 60 satellites into space – and obtained the authorisation to launch thousands more. Indeed, the plan is that the SpaceX Starlink fleet will consist of nearly 12,000 satellites with the objective of providing space-based internet services anywhere on Earth.

This would be of great benefit to unconnected parts of the world. However, it’s widely reported that astronomers are not happy – believing that Starlink and other satellite ‘constellations’ will interfere with their observations of the night sky.

A report for Forbes by Jonathan O’Callaghan conveys their mounting alarm:

“SpaceX is one of nine companies known to be working on global space internet, and already concerns have been raised about space junk. Now astronomers too are worried about what the future may hold.

“‘The potential tragedy of a mega-constellation like Starlink is that for the rest of humanity it changes how the night sky looks,’ says Ronald Drimmel from the Turin Astrophysical Observatory in Italy. ‘Starlink, and other mega constellations, would ruin the sky for everyone on the planet.’”

But while the proliferation of satellites may make it harder for us to look up, they’ll make it easier for us to look down.

There’s nothing new about satellite imagery, of course. It’s been around for decades. However, according to Christopher Beam in MIT Technology Review, the intensity of space-based surveillance is about to hit a whole new level:

“Every year, commercially available satellite images are becoming sharper and taken more frequently. In 2008, there were 150 Earth observation satellites in orbit; by now there are 768…

“Maxar, formerly DigitalGlobe, which launched the first commercial Earth observation satellite in 1997, is building a constellation that will be able to revisit spots 15 times a day. BlackSky Global promises to revisit most major cities up to 70 times a day.”

Suggested reading

Why we need a moratorium on manned spaceflight

By Gerard DeGroot

It’s not only the frequency of coverage that’s going to increase, but also the detail of the images:

“Commercial satellite imagery is currently in a sweet spot: powerful enough to see a car, but not enough to tell the make and model; collected frequently enough for a farmer to keep tabs on crops’ health, but not so often that people could track the comings and goings of a neighbor. This anonymity is deliberate. US federal regulations limit images taken by commercial satellites to a resolution of 25 centimeters, or about the length of a man’s shoe.”

With so many more satellites in space owned by interests all over the world, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for the American and other western governments to restrict the availability of espionage-grade satellite images.

Conceivably, every location on Earth will be photographed at high resolution, many times a day – and not just in the visible part of the spectrum, but also other wavelengths capable of gathering other kinds of data – heat signatures, for instance. AI-powered advances in image analysis will mean that ever-greater levels of intelligence can be derived from what the eyes in the sky see of our daily lives.

Worried yet? You should be.

Suggested reading

Who’s that watching your every move? Don’t worry, it’s only everyone...

By Peter Franklin

Of course, there are privacy concerns surrounding other surveillance technologies – CCTV and, more lately, drones. However, as Beam reminds us, these are subject to regulation by sovereign states. Space, however – the high frontier – is pretty much a free for all:

“The Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967 by the US, the Soviet Union, and dozens of UN member states, gives all states free access to space, and subsequent agreements on remote sensing have enshrined the principle of ‘open skies.’”

My guess is that we’ll respond to the threat of space-based surveillance with ground-based counter- surveillance. Beam paints a scenario in which satellite imagery is used to analyse patterns of light spilling out from windows, from which one could work out which buildings are most likely to be unoccupied at any particular time. Vehicle movement analysis could yield the same information – which would, of course, be of great interest to burglars. In all likelihood, criminals and terrorists will soon know a great more about our daily routines than they do now.

So what do we do about it? The obvious answer is to build-out CCTV and drone networks so that the authorities charged with our protection know more about what the bad guys are up to than the bad guys know about us. Burglary, for instance, would be rendered unviable if, from the moment of a break-in, the burglars were inescapably captured on camera – all the way from our houses to their houses.

It’ll be some time before satellites are sufficiently numerous and powerful to provide continuous real-time video coverage of the Earth. However, in particular locations, this is already possible using ground and air-based technologies. Expect the threat from space to accelerate the spread of defensive surveillance across entire cities, regions and nations.

Let’s hope those in charge have our best interests at heart.

Further reading

The consequences of cosy AI collusion

By Peter Franklin

There’s a parallel between the world of The Matrix and what I’m assuming is the actual real world. Of course, our own AI systems aren’t about to achieve sentience, let alone the ability to enslave us. But here’s the parallel: though AI can ‘learn’, the learning process is in most cases deeply dependent on human beings. I don’t just mean the clever researchers who create the hardware and develop the software – I also mean the people who supply the data that’s the basic fuel of the learning process.

Those people include you and me. When you fill in one of those ‘I am not a robot’ forms on a website – perhaps by decyphering a piece of distorted text or clicking on images that contain a specified object – you are creating labelled data that an AI system can learn from. By spotting commonalities in labelled data items, the system learns to identify unlabelled data items that contain the same patterns. And, of course, if they’ve done it once, they can do it again and again with super-human speed and attention to detail.

However, every time we want an AI system to learn a new pattern it needs another source of human labelled data – this is the ‘energy source’ that powers AI’s continued progress.

In an important piece for Bloomberg, Matt Day, Giles Turner and Natalia Drozdiak write about the workers who help Alexa – the digital assistant who ‘lives’ in Amazon’s smart speaker products – to get better at her job :

“Amazon.com Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa’s understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands.”

This is the sort of thing the Alexa’s human assistants do for her:

“One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as ‘Taylor Swift’ and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist.”

Further reading

Are you truly unfakeable?

By Tom Chivers

It’s not that Amazon and other companies in the field are denying this. Indeed, the whole point of a smart speaker is that it’s listening to us, ready to act upon our desires.

Is it a problem that Amazon’s human workforce may be listening in too? The article includes a statement from Amazon assuring us that they “only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience” and that “employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow”. (But – see this follow-up report from Matt Day and his Bloomberg colleagues).

A quick flick through UnHerd’s tech coverage should make it clear that we’re not exactly uncritical of the big tech companies. However, on this issue, I don’t think we should panic – yet. Day tells us that 78 million smart speakers were sold last year alone. To the extent that the tech companies can afford to pay people to listen in, it will be to gain a competitive edge in improving the technology itself. I doubt they’re interested in our private gossip. We give away enough of that to Facebook anyway.

If the AI companies are downplaying the human side of their operations, it’s to make the AI side seem more impressive than it actually is so far. It’s an uncomfortable irony that this most futuristic of technologies is dependent on so much mundane human labour.

As with so much else in the tech industry, costs are kept down by outsourcing much of the work to low-wage countries. However, this leaves companies with a problem when they want to train up AI systems in languages that are only spoken in high-wage countries.

Writing for The Verge, Angela Chen looks at the situation in Finland – a country whose beautiful but difficult language is spoken pretty much exclusively by Finns. Where can you find enough people both willing and able to do the laborious work of teaching an AI how to process spoken or written Finnish? Chen reports that one start-up has hit upon a solution: a joint venture with the authorities to get the country’s prisoners to do the work. Apparently, it’s preferred to traditional prison work – which includes metal-smithing – because it doesn’t involve equipment that can be used as a weapon. 

It’s also a great example of the domain dependency of AI – however well it learns one task it is extremely limited in applying that skill to another task and thus must turn once more to human tutors. Far from finding ourselves trapped in a computer-generated simulation, the fact is that AI lives within the ‘human matrix’ – the various bubbles of language and thought through which we perceive and conceptualise the real world.

Of course, we shouldn’t forget that the army of human workers currently being used to fuel the development of AI is ultimately working towards its own obsolescence – a state in which computers will be able to recognise anything we can recognise and understand anything we can understand.

Further reading

The true cost of digital convenience

By Mark Piesing

This will mean a world of surveillance unlimited by the availability of human eyes and ears. Potentially anything we say or do within sight or hearing of a machine will be looked at, listened to and, in some way, interpreted. Just how much power that will give them (and their controllers) and what they do with it remains to be seen.

Suggested reading

Is it all over for the big tech companies?

By Peter Franklin

Where might this new direction come from? Batteries that charge instantly and last ten times longer would be nice, but then so would teleportation – and that’s not happening anytime soon either. When trying to spot the next big thing, we should focus on tech that already exists, but isn’t quite ready for mass market take up. Last year, I took a look at the potential of augmented reality (AR) – which might just fit the bill.

However, what the example of the smartphone teaches us is that game-changing IT products emerge from the coming together of several technologies not just one. The smartphone is the perfect combination of a high definition touchscreen interface; 3G/4G networks; social media and other mobile apps; plus the operating system and chip architecture to make it all work. The team matters as much as its members, indeed a smartphone is greater than the sum of its parts.

In a must read post on her blog, Sakunthula looks at what might be next constellation of star technologies:

“A few different technologies are finally starting to reach maturity for commercial use — HD sensors, predictive artificial intelligence, and 3D displays — and combined they can be used to reshape the way people interact with computers.

“This new way of putting together software and hardware can be called a ‘3D human-machine interface’.”

These 3D displays will include “haptic feedback” – the sense-of-touch equivalent to the visual feedback of a screen or the audio feedback of a speaker system. The vibration mode on your smartphone is a very simple haptic interface.)

What would be so revolutionary about this new human-machine interface? The author starts by explaining what’s so limited about our existing interfaces:

“Most computing, especially web and mobile, is mostly for consumption. The user provides very minimal input into the computer, but gets a lot of information out. With a few thumb swipes, the user can endlessly scroll through pages and pages of images, video and text.”

It’s true. When you think about the flow of information from machine to human, it is usually much richer, and certainly much faster, than anything the moves in the opposite direction. What we input via a keyboard, a mouse or a touchscreen is a mere dribble of data compared to the multimedia torrent we get in return.

Suggested reading

The biggest threat to your online freedom

By Carl Miller

Sakunthula argues that the hi-def sensors, 3D displays and predictive AI software making up the human-machine interfaces of the near future could greatly speed up our interactions with computers. She gives the example of a system capable of displaying a 3D object and tracking the eye movements of someone designing or modifying it:

“It can tell which part of the 3D model you’re focusing on, and maybe automatically zoom in. It might use an trained AI to guess from your eye fixation behavior to guess what menu you want to open, and automatically click through the menus to get to the action you want.”

For an architect, an engineer or an artist this could supercharge the creative process. However, I think that most people would use the next generation of human-machine interfaces to work on themselves. A system capable of Watching what we do and providing appropriate feedback (both audio-visual and haptic) sounds a lot like a personal trainer to me – but much cheaper and infinitely patient. Imagine a world full of people learning how to paint, play musical instruments or deadlift without putting their backs out.

But perhaps we’d be more interested in convenience than creativity. A human-machine interface capable of anticipating our needs and organising our lives for us would be very convenient indeed.

In fact, the first such systems already exist. Take the example of Amazon Go – Amazon’s fully automated, real world retail outlet. Using a panoply of sensors, it allows shoppers to take what they want from the shelves and, er, go. The store’s technology identifies you, records what you take, works out your bill and deducts the payment from your account. Shop-and-go systems could be commonplace within a decade (assuming they can deal with the problem of shoplift-and-go).

Suggested reading

What does the 'charging elephant' - also known as Amazon - want? Only everything (and beware of getting in its way)

By Peter Franklin

Would we want to have similar technology in our homes? A system that observes our movements and organises our lives might strike many of us as creepy. But if it’s useful, I suspect that we’ll get used to the idea. However, I wonder if we can be persuaded to deal with the fiddliness of filling our homes and augmenting our bodies with the various sensors, displays and feedback systems that these human-machine interfaces are physically made out of.

Amazon Go works because the company sorts out the tech and customers just have to shop. But if we’re talking about the next revolution in personal IT, then the hardware needs to be as simple (from the user point of view) as a smartphone.

It also has to be intuitive. We took to smartphones so quickly because they looked like the mobile phones we had before, which were themselves modelled on fixed-line telephones. Similarly, desktop and laptop computers weren’t so different from the typewriters and television screens we were already familiar with.

But perhaps, in preparing us for the next tech revolution, the tech companies are using stealth tactics. After all, one by one, they’re persuading us to put their sensors into our homes (e.g. smart speakers) and onto our bodies (e.g. fitness monitors) – and, linking these up via increasingly intelligent networks.

If the process continues there must come a stage at which the emerging interface between machine and human encompasses the latter – at which point the most important thing inside the machines we use will be us.

Suggested reading

The true cost of digital convenience

By Mark Piesing

The purpose of the project is combine data from all sorts of different sources to create a trustworthiness score for every citizen – on which various state-sanctioned rewards and restrictions will depend.

It’s like a financial credit rating, but covering all sorts of other social (or anti-social) behaviours – hence the name.

Coverage of this development in the western media is heavy on adjectives such as ‘sinister’, ‘dystopian’ and, of course, ‘Orwellian’ – but, for reasons I explored in a previous UnPacked, the social credit concept appears to be popular with the Chinese public.

Suggested reading

The dark side of China's Social Credit System

By Peter Franklin

In a Bloomberg piece entitled ‘Why Big Brother Doesn’t Bother Most Chinese’, Adam Minter provides an astonishing example of social credit technology in action:

“In one Chinese city, the local court system recently launched a smartphone-based map that displays the location and identity of anyone within 500 meters who’s landed on a government creditworthiness blacklist. Worried the person seated next to you at Starbucks might not have paid a court-approved fine? The Deadbeat Map, as it’s known, provides pinpoint confirmation, the ability to share that information via social media and — if so inclined — a reporting function to notify the authorities.”

The Deadbeat Map and other pilot projects are being tested by various agencies, cities and companies, the most successful of which will be incorporated into the as yet unlaunched national system:

“Today there are more than 40 social-credit systems operating across China. Some are private: Sesame Credit, a subsidiary of Alibaba, collects and aggregates data generated on Alibaba services, such as a customer’s payment history and record of time and money spent online, then devises a score used to extend credit and other benefits. Others are run by the government, such as a national list of individuals who have defaulted on court judgments. “

Minter argues that “it’s difficult to imagine that there’s any good use for the Deadbeat Map, beyond public shaming and cruel entertainment”. But when did those things ever hold back the growth of social media – whether in China or the West?

As mentioned, there are reasons why Chinese society is receptive to social credit systems:

“…a whopping 76 percent of survey participants said that ‘mutual mistrust between citizens’ is a problem in Chinese society. Social-credit systems are viewed as a means of bridging that trust gap.”

Then again, does anybody anywhere need a legitimate excuse to poke their noses into other people’s business? If the opportunity presents itself then most people will make use of it.

Suggested reading

Click here for details on a free trip across America!

By Peter Franklin

The digital age presents us with many such opportunities. For instance, Google Earth is a hugely impressive source of aerial and satellite photography, allowing you to explore the remotest corners of the planet from the comfort of your sofa. But it also allows you to peer into your neighbours’ back gardens. Google Earth may provide breathtaking views of the Himalayas and sophisticated 3D mapping of cities from New York to Venice, but I suspect that a lot of people use the site to, er, keep an eye on goings-on rather closer to home.

Now imagine if there were a website in your country that allowed users to peer into the financial affairs of friends, family and workmates. Would privacy-minded Westerners refuse to use it on principle? Or would they comb through every available detail? I think we all know the answer to that one.

To be clear, the purpose of the Chinese state in developing its Social Credit System is not to cater to the country’s nosey neighbours; it is primarily intended as a powerful instrument of social control.

Nevertheless, in sharing at least some of the information it gathers on its people with its people, the government is giving them a stake in their own surveillance. Not doing so was Big Brother’s big mistake in Nineteen Eighty-Four. If he hadn’t kept all the gossip to himself, he could have saved himself – and the Ministry of Love – a lot of bother.

Western countries may have stronger privacy laws, but expect ‘open source Orwellianism’ to be the means by which public and private sector organisations push social credit and other intrusive technologies deeper into our lives.

If we believe we have more to gain from us knowing about other people’s lives than we have to lose from them knowing about ours, then we will consent to it.

Suggested reading

Who’s that watching your every move? Don’t worry, it’s only everyone...

By Peter Franklin

In the end, what was unveiled was not Marty McFly on a levitating skateboard, but the not-so-soaraway Segway – a two-wheeled electric scooter.

Further reading

How the robots of the underworld could turn your life upside down

By Peter Franklin

To be fair, the technology was quite impressive – especially the self-balancing mechanism. However, as a commercial product, it was deemed too expensive, too cumbersome and too nerdy to revolutionise personal transport. Look around you in any town or city and you can see that the critics were right – the Segway did not change our way of life.

However, unlike the infamous Sinclair C5 (another ill-fated personal transport ‘solution’), the product didn’t die. It found niches here and there, and the company found new owners.

An article in The Economist brings the story into the present day:

“It took Segway a decade to hit its initial 13-month target to sell 100,000 units of its original two-wheeler. In 2018, just three years into production, Segway-Ninebot will sell 1m scooters, up from sales of 600,000 last year. Ninebot’s factory in Changzhou builds over 5,000 scooters a day. The firm’s backers, which include Xiaomi, valued it at $1.5bn in its latest funding round.”

The technology has evolved and product lines now include unicycles, ‘e-skates’ and ‘hoverboards’ (which don’t actually hover, but are much less bulky versions of the original Segway concept – i.e. a wheeled, self-balancing platform that you stand and ride around on).

Further reading

Two wheels good; four wheels bad

By Peter Franklin

While it remains to be seen whether the streets will ever fill with people using these devices, there is one of the company’s product lines that I think could prove highly consequential:

“[Gao Lufeng, chief executive of the company] has especially high hopes for delivery businesses. In five years’ time he wants unmanned delivery vehicles called Loomo, currently being trialled by its robotics arm with Meituan-Dianping, an online-services giant, to account for over half of Ninebot’s total revenue. Using artificial intelligence Loomo can wheel goods from the gate of a compound into lifts then up to office doors, and, as costs come down, could take them straight to workers’ desks…”

At the moment, Loomo is a hoverboard with robotic and AI functions. You can ride it, but among other abilities it can follow you around like a little robot dog. Judging by what Gao Lufeng told The Economist, the plan is to develop Loomo into an autonomous transportation unit.

This is a potentially enormous market – and not just within factories, warehouses and offices. Instead of delivery vans lumbering around our streets, imagine unmanned delivery pods bringing us our shopping. Such systems could also function as robotic porters, carrying our luggage for us and generally doing the heavy lifting.

Clearly, there’s investment going into the technology and, in theory, it should be easier to get right than the self-driving car. Automated delivery pods would be smaller and slower, therefore safer. They’d probably use pavements rather than roads – though, like a human pedestrian, they’d have to be able to cross the road safely. Even on the pavement, they’d need to avoid fixed and moving objects – including lampposts, joggers and urinating dogs.

Further reading

Who'll have the guts to ban cars from our cities?

By Peter Franklin

The biggest challenge is likely to be crime. How would the delivery pods defend themselves and their cargo against theft and vandalism? Electric shocks would be out of the question, but not video surveillance. Equipped with cameras and network connections, the pods could transmit live footage of the crime (and the criminals) to the police.

In merely navigating the streets, they’d be constantly monitoring their surroundings. Therefore they wouldn’t just be delivery pods, they’d be mobile CCTV systems. If they also functioned as help points – and being networked devices with Al capabilities, why not – they’d could effectively serve as mini police officers.

Sooner or later we will find ourselves sharing our streets with robots. Whether we’ll find their presence annoying, creepy or reassuring remains to be seen.

There is, of course, a lot said about the rise of export-led Asian economies, especially China, but notice the framing of the issue. Despite the huge impact of Chinese industrial prowess on the global economy, western media narratives relegate the country to a supporting role in a drama that is still all about us: cheap Chinese exports servicing western consumer culture; Chinese capital flows feeding the West’s appetite for debt; the offshoring of manufacturing capacity as a business strategy for western companies.

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Chinese capital flows – the ‘dragon energy’ of globalisation

By Peter Franklin

Meanwhile, we arrogantly assume that the process of globalisation-as-westernisation (i.e. the rest of the world becoming more like us) will carry on regardless. The idea that China might be able to exert ‘soft power’ influence in the other direction doesn’t much enter into our minds.

Here are three unrelated stories that should give us pause for thought:

The first starts with Ariana Grande, an American pop star so famous that even I’ve heard of her. When, earlier this month, she released her new single, it was expected it would go straight to the top of the charts – including the iTunes chart for digital downloads. But as Adam Minter explains for Bloomberg, that’s not how things worked out:

“Kris Wu, a superstar in China, not only had the No. 1 spot on the iTunes’ singles chart but also seven of the top 10 songs. It was an extraordinary achievement for an artist with almost no North American profile”

How, then, did he did he pull off this chart upset? There were allegations of hi-tech malarkey, but the explanation appears to be that Wu’s new album was released in America before China – and that his devoted Chinese fans found a way of downloading it from US websites. The episode is an illustration of the way that digital is creating a global media market place in which western tastes, and taste-makers, are no longer the be-all-and-end-all.

Now, onto a different kind of chart: The Economist reports on the growing achievements of Chinese universities in STEM subjects. The article includes a list of world universities ranked by the number of highly cited papers they’ve produced in maths and computing. China’s Tsinghua University comes in at number one – and of the top 15 universities, seven are in China (including one in Hong Kong), six are in America and two in Singapore. Europe doesn’t feature at all.

Suggested reading

The dark side of China's Social Credit System

By Peter Franklin

Finally, a particular application of China’s STEM expertise: surveillance. Previously on UnHerd, I’ve written about the Chinese state’s advanced deployment of facial recognition technology and its all-encompassing Social Credit System. I also argued that such systems would be exported to, or emulated by, other countries.

Well, here’s a Reuters special report by Angus Berwick on Chinese involvement in Venezuela’s ‘ Fatherland Card’ – a smartcard ID system that “transmits data about cardholders to computer servers. The card is increasingly linked by the government to subsidized food, health and other social programs most Venezuelans rely on to survive.”

One could also mention Singapore’s “Lamppost-as-a-Platform” project which is looking to install CCTV on the city-state’s 110,000 lampposts. Here, by Aradhana Aravindan and John Geddie, is another Reuters report on the story:

“Video surveillance networks are common in cities like London or New York. But Ian Wilson, a security lecturer at Australia’s Murdoch University said he believed that Singapore’s would be different in that it might involve extensive facial recognition technology.

“Such technology has become commonplace in Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai.”

Cities around the world could soon be looking like Beijing and Shanghai – looking right at you, in fact.

It’s not that the age of westernisation is over, but that it’s no longer the only force in globalisation – and nor does it have any right to be. For both better and worse, China, and other rising powers, will be shaping the way we live and not just in the economic sphere. 

So, one more reason to lift our heads from our immediate news fixations and take in the world around us.

A recent report by Peter Dockrill for ScienceAlert, explains the comprehensive nature of the system:

“For positive personal and social acts – such as paying bills on time, engaging in charity, and properly sorting your recycling – citizens get their score bumped up, which gives them access to perks, like better credit facilities, cheaper public transport, and even shorter wait times for hospital services.

“But if you break the rules, beware. People who are late with payments, or caught jaywalking or smoking in non-smoking areas, will be punished.”

Further reading

China's sinister Social Credit System

By Peter Franklin

Dockrill says that the Social Credit System is “expected to be fully operational by 2020″ and that in some areas pilot schemes are already up and running.

Quite clearly intended as an instrument of social control, the regime is making no attempt to hide that fact:

“According to China’s Communist Party, the system will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step’.”

From a western perspective, the most shocking thing about the System is that it seems to have widespread popular support:

“Back home, surveys show the early system is already popular with socially advantaged citizens who are already enjoying the perks of pilot programs.”

According to Ipsos, 87% of Chinese citizens believe their country is heading in the “right direction”, but 47% see “moral decline” as a major threat. Both of these numbers are unusually high (compared to other countries), which could be interpreted as evidence that the Chinese trust their leaders more than they trust one another.

Further reading

Will the Chinese economy go the way of the USSR's?

By Peter Franklin

It is in the nature of a totalitarian regime to undermine the ‘horizontal’ ties between citizens so that their vertical ties to the central authority can become all important. China is not the totalitarian state that it was, but the era of (economic) liberalisation has been marked by rapid urbanisation and large-scale internal migrations – upheavals that have disrupted the re-accumulation of social capital. This has left a gap, which the artificial substitute of the Social Credit System is intended to fill.

While commentary in the West has focused on how the SCS might be used to punish dissidents and reward the favoured few, that is not the most significant thing about it. A regime that has prison camps on the one hand and the privileges of Communist Party membership on the other, already has the extremes covered.

The most important thing about the system is that it is designed to manage the great bulk of the Chinese population, not just the elites or the ‘enemies of the state’. As such, it needs to keep the majority happy – or at least the bulk of China’s growing middle class. Which is why the carrots offered by the system are as important as the stick.

According to Dockrill, these carrots include better credit facilities, cheaper public transport and shorter waiting times for services. However, it strikes me that these things are secured at the expense of those who don’t qualify for them because their social credit scores are too low. In other words, there is a qualifying in-group that effectively exploits the non-qualifying out-group: the insiders get to queue-jump ahead of the outsiders; and the outsiders pay more for certain items so that the insiders can pay less.

Of course, if you’re redistributing carrots from a small out-group to a much larger in-group, you have to chop them into tiny slices. Thus, for a substantial part of the population to gain noticeable advantages from a zero-sum arrangement, the disadvantaged group also has to be fairly substantial – a deeply divisive dynamic.

Who would be most likely to fall into the out-group? Given the ostensible purpose of the Social Credit System, it would be those most prone to impulsive, anti-social, self-sabatoging behaviour. In all likelihood, therefore, we can expect those with low social credit scores to be disproportionally young, male, poorly educated and under-employed.

Further reading

Will China's demography be its downfall?

By Isabel Hilton

The Social Credit System will render such individuals officially untrustworthy – and systematically limit their opportunities in mainstream society and the legitimate economy.

It’s hard to think of a more effective way of expanding the criminal population.

Further reading

Facial recognition systems will imprison us all

By Peter Franklin

But at least we have our homes – private spaces which we can shield from prying eyes (including those of the electronic kind). Of course, if you want to take endless selfies with your smartphone or set up your own security camera you can – but it’s under your control.

Or is it? Last week, Facebook launched a new gadget, which caused some consternation on that front. Mike Isaac and Brian X Chen reported on the launch for the New York Times:

“On Monday, Facebook introduced a pair of video-calling devices — Portal and Portal Plus — to help expand its reach into people’s living rooms.

“Portal and Portal Plus, which have a 12-megapixel camera with high-definition video and artificial intelligence software, can be used to do video chats. The A.I.-powered camera follows users as they move, letting them converse without sitting stiffly. The devices also include Amazon’s Alexa, which people can command to play music or check the weather.”

I suppose it’s reassuring that the company isn’t insensible to the obvious worries over privacy and hacking:

“To address privacy concerns with Portal and Portal Plus, Facebook said the products include an electronic kill switch for the front-facing camera, as well as a cover for the lens. In addition, video calls are encrypted, and the camera’s A.I. technology runs on the device itself, not on Facebook’s servers, the company said.”

And yet one has to ask whether such products – “digital assistants” that watch and/or listen to their owners – are habituating us to a culture of surveillance in our own homes.

Further reading

'Alexa, are you turning my kid into a brat?'

By Peter Franklin

Yes, it’s all about improving the user experience – our gadgets attending more closely to our needs and minimising the effort required to instruct them. However, there is a progression to these things: novelty becomes convenience, which becomes indispensability, and that, in turn, provides the provider with a means of control.

Not that long ago, an internet connection was a convenience. For the first time one could download software content directly, instead of laboriously loading it up from a physical storage medium (‘insert floppy disk 6 of 10’). But what started off as an option quickly became essential to using a computer. Unless one wishes to live a highly restricted digital life, one now has no option but to be online. This has given the tech companies a great deal of power over how we use their products – and over the data we generate in the process.

How long, I wonder, before we have to choose between digital isolation and granting the tech lords to the right to watch and to listen to what goes on at home?

To understand where this might be going next, keep an eye on China. Here’s a fascinating report from Zheping Huang of the South China Morning Post:

“Tencent Holdings, the world’s top-grossing games publisher, will use facial recognition technology to detect minors amid tighter scrutiny by the Chinese government over concerns excessive video gaming is hurting public health.

“Tencent’s blockbuster mobile title, Honour of Kings, will be the first to test the technology, with some 1,000 new users in Beijing and Shenzhen selected to verify their identities through camera checks…”

The company even has a video app that will blur the screen if the viewer gets too close to it.

My guess is that many parents, whether China or the West, would welcome these protections. It certainly takes the effort out of monitoring what their children are doing online. In theory, video confirmation of identity would also stop internet paedophiles from posing as children – another parental worry.

Further reading

Who’s that watching your every move? Don’t worry, it’s only everyone...

By Peter Franklin

But think what else this technology could be used for. Paywalled content providers could use it to stop people from sharing log-ins. People who violate the rules on social media sites could be prevented from switching to another account. Marketing experts could analyse facial expressions to find out how viewers react to advertisements. Legitimate applications, one could argue – but a further extension of big tech into private life.

And then, of course, there’s what oppressive regimes would do once they have eyes and ears in every home. People won’t just have to be careful about what they say in private, but also what is unsaid: the fleeting scowl crossing a face when the great leader appears on TV.

It’ll all be more benign in the West; but someone, somewhere will still be watching.

The counter-argument – that ‘prison works’ – is based on at least one incontestable truth: when criminals are locked-up, they can’t do anything to harm the general public.

But what if offenders could be kept apart from the public – at least in the situations where they’re most likely to cause harm – without the need for, and disadvantages of, imprisonment?

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Who’s that watching your every move? Don’t worry, it’s only everyone...

By Peter Franklin

That, of course is what the electronic tagging of convicted offenders (or people awaiting trial) is supposed to achieve. But does it? Reporting from the US for the Guardian, Olivia Solon finds plenty of cause for doubt:

“The use of GPS ankle monitors in the American criminal justice system is on the rise – up 140% between 2005 and 2015, says the latest data available. The government uses these devices to track the location of individuals to make sure they are complying with the terms of their release, whether that’s being at home every night after a certain time or avoiding specific places…

“But wearers described them as digital shackles that deprive them of their liberties in cruel and unexpected ways.”

One very basic difficulty is keeping the batteries charged:

“Every day at about 5pm, 60-year-old Willard Birts has to find a power outlet. Then he has to wait two hours next to it while the battery on his ankle monitor recharges. If he lets the battery drain… he risks being sent back to jail while he awaits trial.”

And then there’s the cost:

“Birts pays $30 per day – that’s $840 per month – for the privilege of wearing the bulky device. It sucks up all his income, leaving him homeless and sleeping in his Ford Escape in Oakland…

“… in some cases the county covers the total cost of the technology – after all, it’s saving money on extra beds in prison – while in others fees for the wearer range anywhere from $10 to $35 per day.”

Of course, any anxiety that something may go wrong with the ankle monitor, and thereby lead to re-imprisonment is preferable to actually being in prison. Nevertheless, there has to be a better way.

For a start, if those required to wear such devices have to pay for the privilege, it should only be in the form of a percentage levy on their earnings. This would give the system operators a direct stake in offender rehabilitation and employment.

However, we need better technology too. Solon says that devices currently in use aren’t just cumbersome and dependent on batteries, they can also send out false information. Then there are cases in which offenders have illegally removed their ankle monitors and committed serious crimes in the time it took the authorities to catch up with them.

No doubt there’s scope to improve the reliability and robustness of these undesirable ‘wearables’, but it maybe that the most effective way of electronically monitoring offenders is a system that monitors everyone.

Suggested reading

Who wants to buy the products of 'Beijing Analytica'? Many of us (probably).

By Peter Franklin

I’ve written before about developments in CCTV and facial recognition technology. Imagine a future – probably not too distant – in which networked camera coverage is ubiquitous, providing a constantly updated flow of visual data from which individuals can be automatically identified and their movements tracked at all times. Note that these systems wouldn’t even need a continual view of the target’s face. People can be identified by other means, for instance, by they way they walk – so called ‘gait recognition’.

Such systems are already operating in some places – and the algorithms that do the identification are getting smarter all the time and the sensors that gather the data are getting smaller and cheaper. At some point we will cross a threshold of coverage, reliability and affordability that renders ankle monitors obsolete.

A CCTV-based system would have several advantages. There’d be no device to wear, no device that could be removed, no single device on which the monitoring of each individual would depend.

As with a GPS ankle monitor, the system could be used to facilitate curfews and/or geographical restrictions on movements during non-curfew hours. But, in theory, a camera network plus AI-based analysis of data could do so much more than monitor location. For instance, it might be able to identify not just the target, but also individuals or types of individual that the target was in proximity to. This could be used, for instance, to prohibit interactions between the target and other convicted criminals – the precise opposite of what a custodial sentence achieves.

Never mind making ankle monitors obsolete, advanced CCTV could make prison obsolete for all but the most dangerous offenders.

If you’ve read this far, then the word ‘Orwellian’ may well have occurred to you. And not without reason. The purpose of a prison is to create an environment in which every aspect of a person’s life can be controlled. Advanced, ubiquitous CCTV will turn everywhere into such an environment. And, whether directly targeted or not, we’d all be on the inside.

Suggested reading

How racist is your computer?

By Peter Franklin

In theory, digital image technology should have made it easier for hoaxers to gull the public – instead it’s made us more sceptical. When jaw-dropping images are circulated on social media there’s always a debate as to whether it’s been ‘Photoshopped’.

Furthermore, if need be, expert analysis can reveal if an image has been digitally manipulated. Or at least, it could. In a piece for Brookings, Alina Polyakova and Chris Meserole warn that the application of artificial intelligence to image manipulation is taking us into new era of undetectable ‘deep fakes’:

“Although computers have long allowed for the manipulation of digital content, in the past that manipulation has almost always been detectable: A fake image would fail to account for subtle shifts in lighting, or a doctored speech would fail to adequately capture cadence and tone. However, deep learning and generative adversarial networks have made it possible to doctor images and video so well that it’s difficult to distinguish manipulated files from authentic ones…

“Deep fakes and the democratization of disinformation will prove challenging for governments and civil society to counter effectively.”

‘Deep learning’, by the way, is a type of machine learning (itself a type of artificial intelligence). A ‘generative adversarial network’ in this context is when you have two AI systems – one that generates fake images, the other that tries to spot them. The first system uses feedback from the second to refine its fakery until the second system can’t spot it anymore.

Further reading

What you need to learn about machine learning

By Peter Franklin

Polykova and Meserole argue that if we can no longer rely on computer analysis to spot the fakes, then we will have to “invest in new models of social verification.”

Let’s say a photograph appeared of ‘Donald Trump’ accepting a suitcase full of money from ‘Vladimir Putin’. Assuming that no jiggery-pokery could be detected by technological means, one would have to ask whether the scenario was at all plausible – and, if so, whether the circumstantial details corresponded to known facts about the individuals depicted in the images (for instance their movements over the relevant time period).

I think that public figures would have little to fear from ‘deep fake’ technology – indeed they may have less to fear because even real images of misbehaviour would be assumed to be false in the absence of strong corroborating evidence.

The real problem would be images involving unidentifiable individuals and locations that, therefore, don’t allow for corroboration. Images could be faked to show, say, police brutality that didn’t happen or violence on the part of (in reality) peaceful protesters, or any other scenario that suits some political narrative or other.

What would happen to politically-potent viral images that couldn’t be detected as fake or confirmed as genuine? Could we rely on the big social media companies to make the right call and take them down?

Even if we could, for how much longer will they have the power to do so?

“Blockchain technologies and other distributed ledgers are best known for powering cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum. Yet their biggest impact may lie in transforming how the internet works. As more and more decentralized applications come online, the web will increasingly be powered by services and protocols that are designed from the ground up to resist the kind of centralized control that Facebook and others enjoy.”

Looking further into the future, a possible solution presents itself: if the distribution of images can become radically decentralised, then why not the capture of those images?

Imagine a world in which web-connected cameras are tiny, cheap and ubiquitous – enabling a constant visual record to be made of all public space by multiple networks, with no one in overall control. (Think of how many many independent CCTV networks already operate in our cities and then apply a visual surveillance equivalent of Moore’s Law to their proliferation).

Further reading

Who’s that watching your every move? Don’t worry, it’s only everyone...

By Peter Franklin

You couldn’t get away with concocting or doctoring images from one source, you’d have to do it for all the sources – which would impossible unless they were all hacked simultaneously.

Such a world would, of course, mean an end to anonymity (and therefore privacy) in public spaces, but at least you could always get a witness.

I’m glad to say that someone else has noticed – John Harris of the Guardian is also less than impressed:

“Back in 1999, Google hit 1bn searches a year. Wifi began to make an impact about two years later. Thanks to the pioneers of Facebook and Twitter, the age of mass social media dawned between 2004 and 2006 – and non-stop posting, messaging and following was soon enabled by the iPhone, launched in 2007. These things have changed the world… But the revolution they represented is old now, and nothing comparable has come along for more than a decade.”

Further reading

Alexa, how do we disrupt the tech lords?

By Peter Franklin

Harris goes on to excoriate the hype surrounding the tech giants’ increasingly insignificant product launches :

“Every now and again, at some huge auditorium, a senior staff member… will take the stage dressed in box-fresh casualwear, and inform the gathered multitudes of some hitherto unimagined leap forward, supposedly destined to transform millions of lives. (There will be whoops and gasps in response, and a splurge of media coverage – before, in the wider world, a palpable feeling of anticlimax sets in.)”

Tech optimists will be able to quote all sorts of figures about advances in processing power, bandwidth and other metrics for the size, speed and reach of the digital world. They’ll also be able to point to online products and services that just weren’t available ten years ago.

However, it’s not the growing capacity of the technology that Harris is calling into question, but whether it’s been used to do anything that’s both new and useful. There’s a key distinction to be made here between new products that change society because of what they enable us to achieve and those that change society merely because they’ve got better at grabbing our attention.

Further reading

Many in the tech industry are avoiding their products. Should we do the same?

By Peter Franklin

Imagine you could wave a wand and magic-away the last ten years of technological progress – specifically, progress in digital.

Waving that wand in, say, 2008 would have wiped out the iPhone and mass market smartphones generally – though mobiles of a more basic nature would still be common (game of ‘Snake’ anyone?). The internet would survive in a just-about-recognisable form, but it would be painfully slow. There would be no YouTube, no Twitter, no Facebook, no MySpace even. Social media as we know it would be gone.

However, the effect of waving the wand in 2018 would be… underwhelming. Smart phones wouldn’t as advanced or as ubiquitous, but they’d still be there, as would social media. Streaming of music and video would be back to its infancy (as a mass consumer product), but it would still be a thing. In fact, in terms of all the fundamental things you can do with digital tech, it’s hard to think what we’d lose.

There are a few bits and pieces we’d miss. Language translation these days is actually useful, though far from flawless. Voice recognition is breaking through as a technology that people use in their living rooms – definitely one to watch. Facial recognition systems are also making an impact; though more so in some places than others. Virtual reality has finally become a consumer product, but, thus far, a niche one – not much more significant than the 3D TVs we’re not rushing to buy.

Further reading

Who’s that watching your every move? Don’t worry, it’s only everyone...

By Peter Franklin

Personally, I’m very grateful for the combination of the iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil and MyScript software, which converts my onscreen handwriting to text with near miraculous accuracy. However, I’ve yet to meet a single other person using the same to liberate themselves from the keyboard – maybe they’re all too young to have ever used anything else to write with.

Harris does admit that we may be on the brink of some genuinely significant breakthroughs:

“Amazing and sometimes life-enhancing innovations, I dare say, are being worked on by tech geniuses across the world. In fields such as driverless transport, virtual reality and blockchain technology, new inventions may eventually transform our lives, and fulfil the cliched big-tech promise about making the world a better place.”

As always, there’s a path to be trod between boundless optimism and hopeless pessimism. Knee-jerk cynicism is also to be avoided. However, before asking whether new technologies are good or bad for society, we should ask whether they matter that much one way or the other.