Response - Joe Bruner

It's an interesting proposition. I have thought of it from a perspective that is sort of similar, but also sort of different. The benefits of this big data stuff are pretty well-advertised. When I taught high school speech and debate and we had privacy topics, the kids would always complain, "They have concrete benefits. Reduction in terrorism. Better agricultural productivity and less food waste through the Internet of Things. All we have is this nebulous privacy thing, but what's the impact privacy has on us?" I think the primary difficulty with Moglen's ideas (I think it took me about 14 months of knowing him and really trying to listen to fully appreciate the heart of what he was getting at) is that a bunch of forces make it really difficult for people to imagine two things:

1. One, what it's like when the other foot drops. Moglen said in the 1970s reading a lot of Sci-fi made it easier to see the problem coming, and that's probably still true today - you mentioned Code Geass so I'll say Psycho-Pass is really excellent for this issue. But for most people in the 21st century, privacy is your mom not walking in on you masturbating. Seeing it as a threat to your existence requires either a lot of imagination (and imagination is really dying slowly since we no longer have to spend time just imagining random things when there's Horriblesubs batch torrents of 20 shows you haven't seen) or having an existence that is already precarious, which leads on to the next point:

2. Two, even if the other foot could, in theory, drop, most people really struggle to consider that a serious and practical problem. Trump and Brexit make it somewhat easier, but it's still hard, and I know a fair amount of Dreamer kids still on insta and Facebook. Even if the state or corporations could, in theory, do all sorts of things, we don't see it as much more likely than the state using its nuclear arsenal on us. In my view, this is the hardest problem of all - the negative impact of the Trump election and political partisanship and ineffectiveness has been that trust in politicians falls while trust in the military and the deep state rises, counteracting some of the benefits Snowden gave us.

In my view, these are the really hard problems. If they can be addressed, I think arguments in favor of robust privacy will generally prevail over advantages in catching terrorists or outing neo-nazis. Terrorists get at most a few thousand a year. Myanmar plus Facebook get more Rohingya, and nobody knows how many people China is disappearing. And Neo-Nazis, we should turn that back on them by asking "If the Neo-Nazis do come to power one day, what tools will we have lying around for them to use?" If you have a robust general social graph of the United States and the names of 5 random Jews, you can probably find them all.

On Confronting the Opposition

-- By TrippOdom? - 01 May 2018

Army of the Few

Like many visionaries, Eben Moglen appears to be of two minds as to his goals regarding the ideas that he propagates. At times, he demonstrates a belief that is not only possible but imperative that a wide range of people take up his idea of liberty or one like it. In 2014, he wrote

Four years and a presidential election later, he views his ideas as the purview of a select few, a minority elite fighting a near hopeless intellectual insurgency on the basis of contraband knowledge. “[T]he indifference of the people. You,” he says to his students, “are what stands between us and that. Because you know.”

This presents a fundamental conflict. If victory in the war for liberty requires mass participation, then any ideology which is accessible only to the few is inadequate to the task.

Give Us This Last Man

Moglen’s article “Privacy Under Attack” gives one example. It is an extremely lengthy article for the editorial format. Its length is justified by the number and depth of insights it contains, but it is astounding that in such a lengthy missive on internet surveillance, he never addresses the issue of terrorism, which defines the larger discourse on internet surveillance. Where Moglen briefly mentions efforts against “’non-state actors’” he dismisses them as a “scheme” which has been “bought” by the gullible. Scarcely acknowledging the siren song of “security,” Moglen fails to silence it.

Moglen knows but does not overcome the fact that his audience is actively demanding exactly the dystopia he hopes to warn them of. He describes in ominous tones a world where terrorism is defeated, where hate speech is adequately punished, where “big data” enables both sociological and medical breakthroughs, and where the populace continues to perceive themselves to live in a self-governed democracy. In this sense, Moglen is Zarathustra, preaching to the villagers of the last man and the overman.

"I Don't Mean Lost, I Mean Forgotten"

In this century the Gestapo and KGB are perceived as comical boogiemen of a bygone era, while the deaths of September 11, few though they are in comparison to the horrors of the past, are an ever-present national trauma. The consequences Moglen’s “liberty” seeks to prevent are distant, imaginary, while the fears that his dystopia assuages are salient, subjectively real.

Dank Ideologies, Free of Apologies

Selling Superman

Facing Their Fears

Such a compelling and positive depiction of terrorism has already taken place in the politically conservative nation of Japan. The widely popular Japanese television show Code Geass explicitly frames its main character as a terrorist who kills American soldiers and innocent Japanese civilians for the purpose of defeating American imperialism. Yet stores nationwide are stocked with notebooks and school folders decorated with his image. If an aesthetically pleasing version of terrorism can be used to sell merch and nationalism in Japan, it can be part of a successful ideology in the name of digital liberty.

Conclusion: A Cause Worth Dying For