Dialogue, Silence, Tech, & Trust

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Ryszard Kapuściński, the Polish anti-colonialist journalist and poet, wrote: “Silence is a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet.”

There’s a lesson here about technology and trust: Who gets to be part of the conversation, and who gets silenced? With the immense power of new tech concentrated in the hands of a small number of technology owners, this is not an abstract question. It will determine whether tech erodes trust or whether we can earn trust.

Transparency or Dialogue?

Tech can be used to earn trust by increasing transparency and fairness. Or it can be wielded to destroy trust, by enforcing silence. Unfortunately, I’ve seen far too much of the latter in recent weeks. The problem begins with how we talk about dialogue itself. Opening up honest dialogue is certainly a part of transparency. But that dialogue has to be honest and focussed around understanding the truth. What we’re seeing instead is a troubling shift: the prioritization of dialogue as performance over actual transparency. Transparency demands the truth of what is being shared. Dialogue, stripped to its bare mechanics, demands only words.

When the owners and builders of new technology aren’t honest about its benefits and drawbacks, that erodes trust. When those owners create spaces where only their voices are amplified and others are quieted, that erodes trust further. When people witness technology being deployed to benefit a privileged few at the cost of the many, when they watch as tech is weaponized to silence inconvenient voices—that isn’t just unfair. It’s dangerous. And it threatens both technology and society.

For the past year, and especially at January’s World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland we’ve watched tech CEOs and billionaires celebrate their rising influence, increasingly finding themselves in positions of political power and favor. Their confidence is palpable. Their platforms are vast. And their willingness to use those platforms selectively by amplifying some voices while marginalizing others has become impossible to ignore. The difference between private celebration and public suppression couldn’t be more stark. It couldn’t highlight the fundamental unfairness embedded in our current tech infrastructure more sharply.

Control and Silence

Kapuściński again: “Silence has its laws and its demands. Silence demands that concentration camps be built in uninhabited areas. Silence demands an enormous police apparatus with an army of informers.” Looking around, an Minneapolis and elsewhere in the US, I have to ask, what does it mean when the technology we develop becomes part of that silencing apparatus?

The difference between the “dialogue” on the promenade of Davos and the repression on the streets of Minneapolis couldn’t be more stark. It couldn’t highlight the unfairness of tech (and society) any more sharply. On the largest scale, social media, increasingly powered by AI, is shattering what’s left of our global digital commons. In the warring narratives of Minneapolis, the US federal government used whatever technical savvy at its disposal to elevate grudges and lies over truth and responsibility. As if seeking to embody this trend, TikTok, under new, ostensibly American and certainly less competent ownership, turned its addictive algorithm sharply to the right. On an individual level, the surveillance state we’ve been warning of for over a decade now allows for personal revenge against the administration’s enemies, with facial recognition used to both take away privileges and track down new victims for ICE.

You can’t earn trust without listening to others, enforced silence breeds resentment and distrust. Using technology, especially the very tools that promised to connect us and democratize information, to create that enforced silence is a betrayal of innovation and of our best hopes for the future. Responsibility – for truth, for honesty, and for innovating for trust – can only be postponed, and people will only be silenced for so long.   

This hiatus was much longer than expected

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In the meantime, I did, in fact, keep busy. Just not on this blog.

After spending some time at something like an international organization, with a strict outside activities policy (!), I’m free and feeling comfortable getting back to this blog. It’s been a long and difficult road, but I learned a lot and hopefully helped some people along the way.

You can catch up on my brand new personal (like, personal-professional, we are not that close) website here:
https://www.dobrygowski.com

I’ve also written a book! It’s called Technology Governance: Build Trust into Digital Innovation! It will be published in May 2026.

Preorder it today and be the first kid on your block who understands what Technology Governance needs to look like if we’re going to make it through our current adventures in technology, law, and policy.

Preorder here:
on the publisher’s site (KOGANPAGE25 for 25% off):
on Bookshop.org
on Barnes & Noble
and if none of those work for you, on Amazon.

Short Hiatus – June/July 2015 – Reading assignments below

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This blog is taking a short hiatus to concentrate on other publications and assorted duties and obligations. Should be back online in August.

Here’s some of the things that we found interesting recently.

The Agency – Russian military strength, diplomacy, and modern culture is apparently all just 4chan now.

Broadband for the Poor – FCC still fighting the “digital divide” battles of the 1990’s

Sharing Data, but not happily – People don’t like the tradeoffs that they feel the must make in order to live in the digital age

Tech Boom Aimed at the Few – It isn’t the consumers we should be worried about, it’s the builders

The Cardinals Hack the Astros – Hacking?! There’s no hacking in baseball!

“If I Speak in Tongues of Cash…”

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This isn’t directly related to technology, law and policy (well, not to technology anyway), but here’s my article, “The Catholic Case for Campaign Finance Reform,” recently published in America magazine.

In the article, I make a moral case for the reform of campaign finance and the related issue of how influence accrues in Congress. I think that reformers in the area make a lot of technical claims, but we need to address why the current system is wrong, morally and effectively, in order to get people interested.

My original title, reproduced above, was a play on 1 Corinthians 13, but I think the new one makes a broader statement, even if it lacks humor.

You, Consumer, are a RadioShack Bankruptcy Asset. Congratulations (?)

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RadioShack, as many well know, finally declared bankruptcy this year. This is likely to finally give economists peace of mind, since the continued existence of the Shack had many questioning their own devotion to the tenets of the dismal science.

One interesting fact has come out of the bankruptcy proceedings – RadioShack customer’s private data may very well be one of the companies most significant assets.

Brief primer on bankruptcy: when a company can no longer pay its debts, it can seek protection from creditors from the federal judiciary. There are a number of ways to declare bankruptcy, but RadioShack chose Chapter 11, which doesn’t automatically lead to liquidation (that’s Chapter 7), but the reorganization can lead to something that looks a lot like liquidation anyway. And that’s what’s happening here. Amazon is likely to buy some of RadioShack, as are the major cell phone carriers.

In order for this process to work, however, a company going through the bankruptcy must lay all its assets on the table, open its books. Here, RadioShack has listed all the information it has on its past customers as an asset. Your personal information has, for a long time, been the implicitly valuable thing underlying the business model of almost every Internet company. Only here, that open secret has been rewritten explicitly.

And that is why this asset has drawn an objection, but not an objection that this personal data belongs to the consumers. Rather, Apple is objecting that the consumer information that RadioShack collected when it sold Apple products belongs to Apple and should not be considered an asset in this bankruptcy. Apple sees the value of this information and wants it.

As usual, Apple and companies like it have armies of lawyers looking out for their own interests. And, again as usual, consumers simply don’t. This is far from the first time that personal data has left the control of the person and it won’t be the last. Get used to being seen as an asset in someone else’s business.

Walled gardens and micronetworks: Who’s acting ‘for your own good’

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Dale Lately has a though-provoking article in Slate today about how Facebook is trying to colonize social networking around the world within its own network while new start-ups abound that attempt to deliver anonymous or un-censorable communication among their users. What’s interesting is not so much the competition between communications tools that the article describes, but rather the vital, yet unasked, question of what we should expect from the creators and owners of these tool when they lock us into their digital platform.

These a theme running through this piece that we’re about to observe a ‘battle of the networks’ in which people start taking sides in choosing Facebook’s ubiquity versus Snapchat’s promise of ephemeral messaging versus Whisper’s anonymity. This action is the next wave of competition for your time and social ties, the article reasons.

That may very well be true, but the interesting thing that isn’t fully fleshed-out there is the fact that, while Facebook is the most overt of the builders, these are all just walled gardens (except for the mesh networks). If Lately’s version of competition is what’s in store, it is not communication over the public Internet, as we’ve had until now, but rather separate communications over separate networks, which do not communicate with each other, that we’re likely to experience in the near future.

This may erode the Westphalian geography of the world, at least with respect to these digital platforms, this new version of communication erects new, nigh insurmountable borders between types of communicators. If Lately is right, it will be as if, in the mid 20th century, the U.S. only used the telephone, Canada only the telegraph, and Mexico only fax machines – there’d be no way to communicate with anyone except your co-nationalists, with all the ensuing problems one could imagine.

The problem is best illustrated by an anecdote – while at Harvard, I took a class with Jonathan Zittrain and Larry Lessig on Digital Platforms. We were discussing IOS (a strongly walled garden) versus Android, where you could still side-load apps (install applications from somewhere other than the Google Play store). JZ mentioned, almost offhand, that if it led to more vulnerabilities for users, one day Google would likely shut down side-loading, “for our own good.”

And that gives rise to the question we need to ask about all these walled gardens: who decides what’s “for our own good” and how? Without very clear answers to those question, and virtually no one is clear about it now, we should be deeply suspicious of this turn in networking. At the very least, if we are to carve up the formerly borderless Internet, we should be clear about why we’re doing it and who this fragmentation serves.

We Don’t Want Companies like Verizon Owning Media Sites

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Verizon announced that it is buying AOL today. I hope, for the good of the world economy that it works out better than when Time Warner bought AOL for $165 billion, but there is a history to that albatross.

More importantly, there’s a history to Verizon’s interactions with the media.

We who rely on tech journalism should be worried about the sale of the parent company of sites like Engadget and TechCrunch to a firm that has shown no compunction about censoring media reports in the past. These are popular and widely-read sites even by non-tech-elites and that is why this is problem. There will always be information out there to the savvy, but AOL’s sites were seen by a wide variety of people who might not have cared about some of these issues had they not appeared in a place like Engadget or even HuffingtonPost (which may actually be spun off now). As journalism gets more and more fragmented, we need places that bridge the gaps between interests groups to be as neutral, or at least as transparent, as possible. This purchase puts some of that transparency and neutrality into question.

We should also be wary of Verizon’s past with regard to media in general, and its complicity with privacy-eradicating government agencies.

Likely stories to cease appearing on AOL’s sites:

Net Neutrality
Privacy and “Perma–Cookies”
The Mobile Web (except for ads touting 4G(!))
State-Corporation collusion and invasions of privacy
The Negative side of Big Data

And potentially more as Verizon finds other things that are best kept secret for the business model to thrive.

NSA’s 2nd Circuit loss – Privacy and Liberty versus Empty Promises

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ACLU v. Clapper took a long time to get to the right answer. And that’s OK.

It’s not really a surprise that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in NY would find that the NSA cannot legitimately use the shield of the Patriot Act to cover its continuous and pervasive data collection. Neither should it be a surprise that it took so long to get here. The courts, after all, are not the speedy actors of our system, in fact, the alacrity of the judiciary is really in third place, close behind the legislature and far behind the executive.

That being said, it seems that the pendulum, pushed wildly out of place by the events of September 11, 2001 and continually propelled by our fear of unknown technology, is starting its slow swing back toward something like a normal state where privacy and dissent are able to push against authoritative overreach. Part of this is because public opinion is slow, legislation is slow, and, as we said above, the courts. who are supposed to weigh our values against our actions, are slow.

In its own attempt to weigh those values, the Second Circuit reaches back to the Church Committee as its intellectual forebearer – because this is the last time that we had to bring secretive intelligence agencies back under control.  Now, same as then, we are not willing to trade off values. We are not willing to trade values like privacy or liberty for vague promises of security (put aside the fact that we haven’t seen evidence that the NSA’s activities enhance our security). To do otherwise would be to create a Ship of Theseus problem with our republic – keep replacing values and when does it become something wholly different from the country we though we knew and that we’ve struggled for generations to perfect?

After almost 15 years, we’ve come to the point where we can definitively say that the trade the NSA is offering is a bad trade and we reject it. And this is all to the good.

Brief thoughts on Internet and class

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[this is one of a series of posts that I did while a student in Nicco Mele‘s class at Harvard in 2013]

Techno-Utopians exist because new technology almost always brings the promise of a new, hopefully better world. This is especially true of the disruptive technologies of the Internet, which seem to hold the opportunity to disrupt rapidly calcifying class structures throughout the world.

But why haven’t Internet technologies had more of a leveling effect? Are they really so different from everything that’s come before when it has become clear that the elites have co-opted largest share of technological gains to support their own position. Sure, there has been a shuffling of the elites with nerds-from-privileged-backgrounds rising and the standard bankers, dictators, and CEOs forced to make room. If all the Internet has done is allow the children of millionaires to become billionaires, there’s a lot more it can do to change society.

Part of the problem, the thing that turns our utopia into a potential distopia, is that traditional elites have been, by far, better positioned to take advantage of the new technologies than the people at the bottom of the social ladder – and these vested interests have used those technologies, not to level the playing field, but to shore up their own positions. The Internet held the promise of allowing people, regardless of class, to take control of their own destinies by forming new and strong networks to help them advance their own interests. It is fundamentally important to ask why that hasn’t happened yet (if it hasn’t), whether it can, and if so, how.

Suboptimal Mechanisms and False Dichotomies

dobry mppdigital assignments , , ,
[this is one of a series of posts that I did while a student in Nicco Mele‘s class at Harvard in 2013]

What’d I read?

I’ve read quite a bit this week, but I think the following make the most sense together in the limited amount of time we have together:

Rebecca MacKinnon’s Consent of the Networked is a thorough and interesting examination of how the emerging technologies can empower oppressive governments too.

“The #freemona Perfect Storm: Dissent and the Networked Public Sphere” by Zeynep Tufekci draws from her experience helping her friend, journalist Mona El Tahawy, after she’d been arrested during the Egyptian protests at Tahir Square.

Evgeny Morozov’s afterward to his book, The Net Delusion, puts some of his arguments in more recent context and engages with the book’s detractors.

Was it any good?

I can say nothing ill about MacKinnon’s book.  She effectively marshals anecdotes, academic research, and a thorough grounding in political thought to show how the collusion between Internet business and all governments (not just the ones we think of as oppressive) is corrosive to liberty and democracy. Her emphasis on the problems of both business and governments is very useful and timely.

Tufekci’s fascinating article supplies us with invaluable food for thought: “When activists are arrested, in some cases, it is best to keep it quiet. In some cases it is best to kick up a big storm. Worst option, however, is to kick up a small storm which irritates the powerful, but without enough strength to nudge them to action.” Aside from that (which alone makes her article worth reading), the article describes and analyzes a great many themes (the problem of attention diffusion, the power of networks, the dangers of oppression and activism, even practical advice on how to mount a global campaign) cogently and effectively. The article isn’t naïve about the role technology played in helping Mona (after all, no one could spare her almost a day of what could only have been terror) while still asserting that it can play a valuable role.

Morozov’s lengthy-yet-highly-readable afterward hammers home the important and depressing point that we are not doing enough to notice and counter authoritarian suppression of dissent online. His statement that “while the temptation to do good with the help of the Internet has never been stronger, our understanding of how not to muck things up is still rudimentary” is immensely valuable.  His description of the disconnect between Silicon Valley’s lack of genuine awareness of social responsibility and the plaudits high tech companies receive is also well taken.

However, his attack on “Internet-centrism” seems like a straw man and almost fatally detracts from his valuable main point. Are there any serious writers out there who actually believe that the value of the Internet in politics can be discerned solely by looking at the Internet itself? Morozov himself knocks it down, saying “even the wildest cyber-utopians would agree that it was not the use of particular digital tools that ensured the timely departure of Egypt’s and Tunisia’s rulers” – so it isn’t entirely clear why he thinks he’s arguing against someone and his explanation is not particularly satisfying.

So?

Tufekci’s article was, as an anecdote, a great mirror to hold up to the odious (more so the more I think about it) story that Shirky’s otherwise good book opens with. Where Shirky’s hero managed to get a cell phone back from some lower-class girl, Tufekci uses similar means to actually (maybe) help someone who needs it. She even hammers home the important point that social media and technology may exacerbate existing disparities in prominence and social access (this is her point #5).

I agree with both MacKinnon and Morozov that the current situation with regard to Internet speech is less than optimal.  I might fall into Morozov’s camp with his pessimism, but his argumentation makes it hard to go along. I think its unfortunate that he falls into what Ivan Sigal today referred to in class as “the false dichotomy of cyber activism versus cyber skepticism.”

My only problem with MacKinnon’s vision is that her “Netizen-Centric” Internet requires that we leave notions of sovereignty behind in favor of empowered individuals operating in an ICANN-like multi-stakeholder body that will help make the web safe for free exchange of ideas. ICANN, however, is a mostly-technical body involved with relatively unobjectionable standards. I think that is why it is able to exist in the way it does (and even then, not without meddling by sovereign powers). If I’ve learned anything from my studies in global governance this year, its that sovereignty is a powerful notion and, by definition, most useful to the most powerful global actors that it is hard to see a world where subjective issues (like human rights) are given over to anything other than institutions created by and comprised of sovereign powers.

So I guess I am skeptical about the chances for things to get better without the backing of governmental authorities, but at the same time, I want to believe that we’ll find a way, just like MacKinnon says, to create a civilization in the Hobbessian “digital rainforest” we’ve found ourselves in.