Skip to main content

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.

Paperback:

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more