In surveillance valley
‘Everything that we’ve
been sold about the democratic nature of the internet has always been a
marketing pitch.’ Yasha Levine on the military origins of the internet, on data
modelling and technocratic government, and why the Cambridge Analytica scandal
was good for Facebook.
You can’t start with
the internet, you have to start deeper: politics, culture. It’s a brutal
analysis, sorry. Our conception of politics today is so crude. We are
restricted to thinking that ‘we need to regulate something’, ‘we need to pass
some laws’. We shouldn’t start with that, we need to start with principles.
What does it mean to have communication technologies in a democratic society?
How could they help create a democratic world? How does this democratic world
take control of these technologies? How can we stop simply taking a defensive
position? What does it mean to have an active pose? To have a political culture
that says, ‘This is what we want technology to do for society’.
Everything that we’ve
been sold about the democratic nature of the internet has always been a
marketing pitch grafted on to the technology. To sell the internet as a
technology of democracy when it’s owned by giant corporations is ridiculous.
The only answer that I have is that we have to figure out what kind of society
we want to have, and what kind of role technology can play to that end.
Olivier Jutel: How
have you found the reception to your book Surveillance Valley and its central thesis that the internet is
essentially a surveillance weapon?
Yasha Levine: My book
has come at a really good time, right as people are becoming aware of the ‘dark
side’ of the internet. Before Trump it was all good things: Facebook
manipulation was a good thing when Obama used it. Surveillance Valley came
out two months before the Cambridge Analytica story hit and everything I talk
about is a preface to how personal data manipulation is central to our politics
and economy. It’s sort of the whole point of the internet, going back 50 years
to ARPANET. I hope the book fills some gaps in our knowledge because, as
strange as it seems, we have forgotten this history.
The way the
internet gets discussed, it’s often as if it were some immaterial phenomenon.
What your book does is to explain the material, political and ideological
origins of the network. Can you talk about the military imperatives it served?
One thing we have to
understand about the internet is that it came out of a research project that
started during the Vietnam war, when the US was concerned with
counterinsurgencies all around the world. It was a project that would help the
Pentagon manage a global military presence.
At the time there were
computer systems coming online like ARPANET that functioned as the first early
warning radar system in America to alert to a potential Soviet bombing raid. It
connected radar arrays and computer systems to allow analysts to watch the
entire US from a screen thousands of miles away. This was novel, as all
previous systems relied on manual calculation. Once you can do that
automatically it’s a totally new way of thinking about the world, because all
of sudden you can manage airspace and thousands of miles of border from a
computer terminal. This is in the late ’50s and early ’60s. The idea was to
expand this technology beyond airplanes to battlefields and societies.
One of things that
ARPA was involved with in Vietnam in the ’60s was ‘bugging the battlefield’, as
they called it. They’d drop sensors into the jungle in order to detect troop
movements hidden from aerial view. These sensors were wireless and would ping
back information to a control centre with an IBM computer taking that
information, mapping troop movements to help select bombing targets. This
became the basis of electronic fence technology that was exported to the US and
used on the border with Mexico. It’s still used today.
The internet came out
of this military context and the technology that could tie different types of
computer networks and databases together. At the time, every computer network
was built from scratch in terms of network protocols and the computers
themselves. The internet would be a universal networking language to share
information... read more
https://www.eurozine.com/in-surveillance-valley/