Tag Archives: Politics

VPN in the Subcontinent

A timely piece in Rest of World on the tightening of regulations on the use of VPNs by the Modi administration in India. In this instance, the enforcement of visibility is carried out at the business level, with a regulatory requirement of customer data retention placed on VPN providers. This new policy may precipitate the exit from the Indian market of certain foreign companies, such as Proton VPN (which is headquartered in Switzerland).

A blanket requirement of data collection on VPN use at the source, such as in the Indian case, strongly suggests that the underlying goals of the policy are the unfettered operation of mass surveillance and a chilling effect on stigmatized activity online, since more targeted and discriminating solutions exist technically to deal with specific forms of malfeasance and lawbreaking behind VPNs. In this case (as in the resort to prolonged internet shutdowns), Indian digital policies can be seen to inhabit a troubling hybrid zone, in which a democratic government acts in ways more readily associated with authoritarian regimes. In general, the hardening of India’s policymaking on IT, including a muscular assertion of its data sovereignty, cannot easily be disentangled from geopolitical considerations (specifically, concern over Chinese influence), but has also undeniably benefited the government’s domestic agenda and its electoral and interest coalition.

Rightwing algorithms?

A long blog post on Olivier Ertzscheid’s personal website [in French] tackles the ideological orientation of the major social media platforms from a variety of points of view (the political leanings of software developers, of bosses, of companies, the politics of content moderation, political correctness, the revolving door with government and political parties, the intrinsic suitability of different ideologies to algorithmic amplification, and so forth).

The conclusions are quite provocative: although algorithms and social media platforms are both demonstrably biased and possessed of independent causal agency, amplifying, steering, and coarsening our public debate, in the end it is simply those with greater resources, material, social, cultural, etc., whose voices are amplified. Algorithms skew to the right because so does our society.

Digital Welfare Systems

An extremely interesting series of talks hosted by the Digital Freedom Fund: the automation of welfare system decisons is where the neoliberal agenda and digitalization intersect in the most socially explosive fashion. All six events look good, but I am particularly looking forward to the discussion of the Dutch System Risk Indication (SyRI) scandal on Oct. 27th. More info and free registration on the DFF’s website.

A global take on the mistrust moment

My forthcoming piece on Ethan Zuckerman’s Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them for the Italian Political Science Review.

Bridle’s vision

Belatedly finished reading James Bridle’s book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (Verso, 2018). As the title suggests, the text is systemically pessimist about the effect of new technologies on the sustainability of human wellbeing. Although the overall structure of the argument is at times clouded over by sudden twists in narrative and the sheer variety of anecdotes, there are many hidden gems. I very much enjoyed the idea, borrowed from Timothy Morton, of a hyperobject:

a thing that surrounds us, envelops and entangles us, but that is literally too big to see in its entirety. Mostly, we perceive hyperobjects through their influence on other things […] Because they are so close and yet so hard to see, they defy our ability to describe them rationally, and to master or overcome them in any traditional sense. Climate change is a hyperobject, but so is nuclear radiation, evolution, and the internet.

One of the main characteristics of hyperobjects is that we only ever perceive their imprints on other things, and thus to model the hyperobject requires vast amounts of computation. It can only be appreciated at the network level, made sensible through vast distributed systems of sensors, exabytes of data and computation, performed in time as well as space. Scientific record keeping thus becomes a form of extrasensory perception: a networked, communal, time-travelling knowledge making. (73)

Bridle has some thought-provoking ideas about possible responses to the dehumanizing forces of automation and algorithmic sorting, as well. Particularly captivating was his description of Gary Kasparov’s reaction to defeat at the hands of AI Deep Blue in 1997: the grandmaster proposed ‘Advanced Chess’ tournaments, pitting pairs of human and computer players, since such a pairing is superior to both human and machine players on their own. This type of ‘centaur strategy’ is not simply a winning one: it may, Bridle suggests, hold ethical insights on patways of human adaptation to an era of ubiquitous computation.