Freedom In the Cloud

I do believe the US State Department will go slanging away at the Chinese communist party for a year or two about internet freedom and I believe the Chinese communist party is going to go slanging back and what they’re going to say is “You think you’ve got real good privacy and autonomy in the internet voyear in your neighborhood?” And every time they do that now as they have been doing that in the last 2 weeks, I would say ouch if I was Hilary Clinton and I knew anything about it because we don’t. Because we don’t. It’s true. We have a capitalist kind and they have a centralist vanguard of the party sort of Marxist kind or maybe Marxist or maybe just totalitarian kind but we’re not going to win the freedom of the net discussion carrying Facebook on our backs. We’re not.

But you screw those wall wart servers around pretty thickly in American society and start taking back the logs and you want to know who I talked to on a Friday night? Get a search warrant and stop reading my email. By the way there’s my GPG key in there and now we really are encrypting for a change and so on and so on and so on and it begins to look like something we might really want to go on a national crusade about. We really are making freedom here for other people too. For people who live in places where the web don’t work.

So there’s not a challenge we don’t want to rise to. It’s one we want to rise to plenty. In fact, we’re in a happy state in which all the benefits we can get are way bigger than the technical intricacy of doing what needs to be done, which isn’t much.

That’s where we came from. We came from our technology was more free than we understood and we gave away a bunch of the freedom before we really knew it was gone. We came from unfree software had bad social consequences further down the road than even the freedom agitators knew. We came from unfreedom’s metaphors tend to produce bad technology.

In other words, we came from the stuff that our movement was designed to confront from the beginning but we came from there. And we’re still living with the consequences of we didn’t do it quite right the first time, though we caught up thanks to Richard Stallman and moving on.

Where we live now is no place we’re going to have to see our grandchildren live. Where we live now is no place we would like to conduct guided tours of. I used to say to my students how many video cameras are there between where you live and the Law school? Count them. I now say to my students how many video cameras are there between the front door to the law school and this classroom? Count them.

I now say to my students “can you find a place where there are no video cameras?” Now, what happened in that process was that we created immense cognitive auxiliaries for the state — enormous engines of listening. You know how it is if you live in an American university thanks to the movie and music companies which keep reminding you of living in the midst of an enormous surveillance network. We’re surrounded by stuff listening to and watching us. We’re surrounded by mine-able data.

Not all of that’s going to go away because we took Facebook and split it up and carried away our little shards of it. It’s not going to go away cause we won’t take free webhosting with spying inside anymore. We’ll have other work to do. And some of that work is lawyers work. I will admit that. Some of that work is law drafting and litigating and making trouble and doing lawyer stuff. That’s fine. I’m ready.

My friends an I will do the lawyers part. It would be way simpler to do the lawyer’s work if we were living in a society which had come to understand it’s privacy better. It would be way simpler to do the lawyer’s work if young people realize that when they grow up and start voting or start voting now that they’re grown up, this is an issue. That they need to get the rest of it done the way we fixed the big stuff when we were kids. We’ll have a much easier time with the enormous confusions of international interlocking of regimes when we have deteriorated the immense force of American capitalism forcing us to be less free and more surveilled for other people’s profit all the time. It isn’t that this gets all the problems solved but the easy work is very rich and rewarding right now.