[P2P-F] Democratic technology and unintended consequences

Wed Feb 2 07:51:56 CET 2011

great comment, thanks Chris!

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Chris Pinchen <chrispinchen at mac.com> wrote:

> [image: star]O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about
> emerging technologies.
> 1 de febrero de 2011 18:00
> by Joshua-Michéle Ross
>  Democratic technology and unintended consequences<http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/oreilly/radar/atom/%7E3/bpfD6RBpfrE/egypt-technology.html>
>
> I was struck by this photo<http://www.opposableplanets.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Egypt_NY_Times.jpg>that appeared Sunday in the New York Times. It shows a crowd of Egyptian
> protesters listening to a military announcement. Try to count the number of
> people in the crowd who *do not* have a mobile device recording the
> action.
>
> Expanding people's ability to communicate — from printing press to
> telegraph to telephone to text messaging — is always a revolutionary act.
> Communications technologies do not create the conditions for civic action
> (the unrest in Egypt is due to longstanding political repression), but they
> can accelerate the entire process by:
>
>    1. Dramatically expanding the number of people directly involved in
>    gathering, distributing and consuming information.
>
>    2. Allowing a positive feedback loop to develop where people see the
>    effect of their actions in real-time, which simultaneously reinforces
>    commitment and recruits more members into the cause.
>
>
> We tend to think of these technologies as inherently democratic. But the
> rub in all of this is that *while these technologies democratize
> communications, they tend to monopolize surveillance and control*.
>
> So while more of us are capable of holding an open, peer-to-peer
> discussion, we are doing so with the consent and under the watchful (or
> subpoena-able) eye of just a handful of corporations or governments. And
> when citizen calls-to-action conflict with government calls for quiet, the
> government holds more of the cards. Vodafone has shut down<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/28/egypt_vodafone_shuts/>cell phone communications in Egypt, the Egyptian government has effectively shut
> down<http://www.fastcompany.com/1721856/how-egypt-turned-off-the-internet>Internet communications, and there are now calls
> for Ham radio operators <http://pastebin.com/fHHBqZ7Q> to lend assistance
> as Egypt is being pushed back down the communications ladder.
>
> In the "rich world" our experience of technology is often Utopian and our
> forecasts of negative consequences are framed only through our experience of
> current circumstance; we simply can't imagine what it is like to live in a
> repressive government or believe that we will ever live under one. But the
> seemingly benign governments in which we reside are an historical
> contingency. If the past provides any lesson it is that governments will wax
> and wane in their concern for civil liberties and human rights. Yet our
> digital profile (purchase history, political and personal associations etc.)
> will remain. Through our participation in these technologies we are donating
> our data to a vast, indelible reservoir whose future utility is unknown to
> us.
>
> I am actually optimistic about the future of the Internet as a medium to
> promote civil liberty, free expression, better government and corporate
> citizenship (if one can credibly use such a phrase). However, I don't think
> it happens on its own. The Internet needs an architecture (legal and
> physical) to achieve such ends. Paradoxically I believe it requires some
> form of regulation to maintain its dynamic, emergent and decentralized
> properties so that any government or corporation has a limited ability to
> act in a crisis to shut things down.
>
> Is access to communications a fundamental human right? If so, should a
> corporation have the ability to abrogate that right at the request of a host
> government? As we watch the battle between the Egyptian government's
> attempts to throttle information flow (including how corporations defy or
> collaborate with these attempts) and the people's struggle to maintain
> access to communications, we are seeing the contours of a struggle that will
> exemplify the next decades of political and policy changes as we try to
> define the increasingly critical relationship between technology and civil
> liberties.
> <http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/oreilly/radar/atom?a=bpfD6RBpfrE:6aab4PVYChg:V_sGLiPBpWU>
> <http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/oreilly/radar/atom?a=bpfD6RBpfrE:6aab4PVYChg:yIl2AUoC8zA>
> <http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/oreilly/radar/atom?a=bpfD6RBpfrE:6aab4PVYChg:JEwB19i1-c4>
> <http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/oreilly/radar/atom?a=bpfD6RBpfrE:6aab4PVYChg:7Q72WNTAKBA>
>
>  Gov 2.0 control democracy egypt technology
>
>
> sent from my mobile device
>
>
>

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