Trust issues

-- By LianchenLiu - 26 Oct 2015

The level of trust we are willing to place on things that we do not understand is surprisingly high. To use myself as an example, I do not know how iPhone work, but I store my credit cards information on it; I do not know how cloud works, but I store all my photos on Baidu Cloud; I talk freely on Wechat on topics that I probably should not talk freely about, without knowing who else might have access to it. The reasons I did not educate myself on privacy issus are, firstly, I am ignorant about technology; second, I have (almost) nothing to hide; third, I am not important enough for anyone to watch; and fourth, even assume my browsing history was sold on the market, what is the harm?

Depite my ignorance how iPhones, clouds and Wechat work, I have expectation of privacy. Is that delusional? After all, storing my photos on the cloud is like storing it in a box and leaving it on the street. When it comes to cyberspace, we have a false sense of security.

I think most people share my ignorance and the attitude of indifference: they do not know how computers or phones work, and they are not going to bother figuring it out.

Because we do not know, we trust the people who know, whether they have a good intention or not. When software becomes a necessity in human life, when softwares provide us with content to read, transportation to ride, games to play and porns to watch, softwares affect and control our consciousness. The ability to create and control softwares is power. With that power, they exert dominion over us in a way that the Genghis Khan had never dreamed of controlling his people.

In the age that most men are illiterate, the men who are not hold the power. The ruling class derives the power by impoverishing other people. As long the people struggled in feeding themselves and their families, they had no time to learn to read and write. Software is a new form of power, and the power is derived from our laziness to learn about it. One thousand year ago, when time was scarce in a common man's life, the class that can afford the time to learn is warranted access to power. Nowadays, time is no longer scarcity, as technology has freed human from most of the repetitive work that our ancestors spend most of their time on. With money becoming the new scarcity, the capitalists are given the access to power. The ancient ruling class, while trusted with the lives of their people, had done more ill than good. Similarly, why capitalists/coders who run the biggest technology companies that possess most people's consciousness should be given trust freely by the public, relying on nothing but their good will?

It is not that capitalists and coders are bad people. It is just that human can hardly resist the temptation to achieve personal gains by screwing their fellow men, when no consequence will attach. Our ancestors were limited by time constraint to learn to read and write. However, our limitation is only our laziness. While a peasant, living in the Ming Dynasty, could not possibly be blamed for being illiterate, the public in our age has a civil duty to educate themselves on things that are running their phones and computers. The cost of knowledge is free, and therefore, there is no reason why we are ignorant.

It is always in the best interst of the rulers to keep his people ignorant. Laozi wanted to create a world in which "the people renounce [their] sageness and discard [their] wisdom," and "they should think their (coarse) food sweet; their (plain) clothes beautiful; their (poor) dwellings places of rest; and their common (simple) ways sources of enjoyment." For centuries, the rulers did not know how to accomplish it. They resorted violence to subdue their people, and trembled in fear of being overthrown by greater violence. Now, technology provides the perfect solution. Softwares that possessed our thinking and consciousness

1. In a society held together by digital networks, people who know how software works, who can understand and change the physiology of the species-wide nervous system, are a privileged class.
2. Individuals are likely to be unable to understand how the digital technology running human society works. Only those who have specialized education and who know how to ask the right questions will be "conscious" participants in a growing fraction of the whole life of every human being.
3. Educated people can eliminate their ignorance about how society actually works, but to do so requires effort that even most educated people will not make.

You might have been more terse in the expression of these you did include, so as to consider adding two more points:

1. Power benefits from ignorance about how society really works. The more people do not consciously understand how their technology is used to control them, the more thoroughly and peacefully they are controlled. You could have said that this is one of the most important political ideas associated with Laozi (老子).
2. The ability to learn how society really works depends on the transparency of the software that is the physiological layer of this nervous system. You cannot know how WeChat or Baidu services are affecting you unless you know what is being done with the data they aggregate about who accesses your messages or photos and who else's messages or photos you access. That's probably impossible. But you can know, if you are doing your personal messaging and photo-sharing through a FreedomBox that costs $50 and does everything the "cloud" companies do for you, but only for sharing with the people you actually mean to share with, that no one is using that data or information about who accesses it to control you.
3. Which would lead to a third point, namely that the technology doesn't control the social outcome, the people who control the technology control the social outcome. If that is us, democracy is possible. Otherwise it dies.

The greatest improvement possible in the essay is to remove its greatest limitation. You observe that knowledge is power, and you urge people to learn. But if people need to learn, someone needs to teach. Your essay, then, should be directed at helping people teach, so that many other people may learn.