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Reset - Ronald Deibert ***

The subtitle underscores a topic of 'reclaiming the internet for civil society'. There is no doubt that the internet has given us huge benefits - never more obvious than during the COVID pandemic - but Ronald Deibert argues that it also presents huge dangers, both from the state being able to gather data on citizens and from corporations indulging in 'surveillance capitalism' - making money out of keeping track of us and our data. Both of these are certainly significant issues that need to be explored.

The majority of the book gives a depressingly dark picture of an internet where we are constantly observed, while the last pages come up with a form of response - the reset of the title. Unlike the stark specifics of the description of the problem, the suggested solution is far more tenuous, coming down primarily to being more 'republican' (with a small r, not the policies of the US political party of the same name).

I'll be honest, I found Reset hard going, not because of the dire state of the internet but more because Deibert's writing style is dense and loaded with soft science/political jargon. The book also can sound like an advertising brochure for his Citizen Lab organisation, which sometimes gets several mentions on a single page. The description of the over-reaching state side of the problem is very one-sided, focussed entirely on civil liberties without any significant consideration of the real need for state intelligence-gathering, or, for that matter, the huge everyday benefits we get from using the internet. At one point only, Deibert admits that states do need to perform intelligence gathering - but at no point does he actual weave that need into the narrative, which is all about the dark side. Similarly, when he gets on to solutions, there's a mention, for example, of the value of end-to-end encryption to keep our conversations private - but nothing about how to deal with terrorists and criminal gangs using this same technology.

Deibert rightly points out that the 'You've nothing to fear if you've nothing to hide' argument is wrong, although he doesn't mention that one of the biggest reasons for this at the moment is that if you work for an organisation like a university, you need to hide any deviation from left wing true-believer status if you are to succeed. But outside the action of repressive states (something that happens with or without the internet) he then fails to give good examples of individuals suffering, despite having nothing to hide - the examples tend to be about organisations. Deibert is also effective on the need to restrain the behaviour of corporates, making their sharing and use of our information more transparent (and in pointing out the GDPR just imposes on us far more irritating clicks with very limited real protection). Once again, however, the solutions aren't really there. I don't blame him - it's very difficult to frame solutions that don't become state censorship, but we are where we are.

A particular irritation for a non-US reader is the framing of the solution as republicanism, with examples mostly drawn from the US and its constitution - to those of us outside of North America this can sound like so much US imperialism and exceptionalism. I don't live in a republic, and I certainly wouldn't like to live in one run the way that the US is.

Overall, then, an important topic, but an unbalanced book that doesn't address potential solutions in any useful way.

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