The Blind Giant

by Nick Harkaway

  Every time I run across a new one of these, it reminds me of Patrice Leconte’s delightful 1996 film, Ridicule. In the movie, which is essentially about barbed wit and its capacity to ruin lives in the eighteenth-century court of Versailles, there’s a moment that stops the breath: Charles-Michel de l’Épée, the originator of sign language, makes a brief appearance at court. In France at the time deafness was seen at best as a form of mental retardation, and when de l’Épée presents his students, the nobles are vile to them. The game changes completely, however, when one of the students makes a snappy comeback in sign language. When asked to translate, de l’Épée responds that this is impossible. The joke cannot be rendered in words.

  The Internet, too, has its own humour, sometimes coarse, sometimes almost embarrassingly lyrical. But you have to see it for yourself. I can tell you that the sunset over the Barrens is gorgeous, too, but you won’t understand unless you climb one of the hills Blizzard’s designers created for World of Warcraft, and sit down and watch it yourself.

  All of which comes down to this: the part of us that plays – the deep, strong playfulness of creative adulthood and of the hearth – has come to understand the Internet as being a venue for play. Yes, it is also used to do work, but the way our interaction with the Net and its technology has evolved has made it primarily something that is used creatively, humorously, playfully – even where it is pressed into service by the professional world. The divisions between worlds are blurred online, and intrusions occur in both directions (look how many companies complain at the amount of time employees spend on Facebook). The prevailing ethos of those who created the protocols that underpin the Internet even now – people like Richard Stallman and John Gilmore – was a libertarian one, in so far as it was consciously articulated at the time. The share-and-share-alike culture of researchers and scientists is at its heart. The Free Software and Open Source movements that created GNU and Linux were about making things that were needed and contributing them to the community without charge. David Farber described it as Marxist, but it might be more accurate to call it genuinely anarchic – and it has anarchism’s uncertain relationship with the notion of ownership.

  Still, when proprietary software systems such as Windows came along, Stallman and others resisted them and tried to create alternatives so that users need not be locked in to the systems of one company. Microsoft and Apple spawned a resistance movement that persists to this day, but by the time they arrived on the scene, the basic character of the electronic world was to some degree already set: it was an environment that did not need or acknowledge rules, a place separate from normal society, where there were no consequences and almost anything was possible and allowable. It was a refuge.

  People had set the Internet aside as a play space that belonged to them, and not to the exterior rule-driven world – and there are very few of those left. So when someone suggests that the Internet may be bad for you, or that what is happening online is a problem for the economy, or any number of other things, they’re not threatening to take away a pleasurable vice or a useful tool. They’re trying to take away one of the most important venues for being what we are – playful, creative, communal creatures – that has ever existed. That space is regarded as home territory by a very primal part of the self. So it’s hardly surprising that the reaction is negative in the extreme.

  We draw lines as a matter of course. We make a separation in our thoughts between private and public, professional and personal, family and friends and strangers, Like Us and Not Like Us. We draw lines in time – birthdays, anniversaries, festivals – and lines in space such as borders and property boundaries. We separate the world into chunks so that we can understand it and control it, or at least predict it. People crossing from one chunk to another without permission alarm us: a work colleague reading our personal journal, or someone jumping over the hedge into our garden. We delineate different spaces that we reserve for certain purposes – churches, sports fields, bars, bathrooms – and we don’t like it when someone uses those spaces for other purposes, such as playing football in a church or music in a library. Spaces have purposes, and so do times.

  The introduction of a governmental, corporate or legal perspective into a play space feels like a gross intrusion, or, worse, a simple mismatching of concepts, like demanding perfect adherence to the rules of international professional soccer at an under-nines Saturday afternoon kickabout. On the everyday level, it’s the guest at dinner who won’t shut up about immigration policy while everyone else is talking about television, sex or sport. It’s the arrival of parking regulations in our favourite side street. And, inevitably, the same feeling of mismatch applies for many to the belated attempt to force Scandinavian file-sharing anarchists to obey copyright law, bolt a conventional paid-for business model to the age of digital reproduction, or curtail the assumed (but never legislated) freedom of expression in the online world.

  Social media services such as the newly arrived Google+, and to some extent also Facebook and Twitter, replicate this sort of partitioning. You can determine who you share information with – at least notionally, and at least up to a point. The desire to keep your parents from knowing what you did last night, or your friends from seeing your baby pictures, is respected by the software. On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s creator, told David Kirkpatrick (author of The Facebook Effect) that having two identities for yourself was an example of a lack of integrity. In Zuckerberg’s worldview, it seems, the days of this kind of separation are numbered – if they aren’t over already. The various partitions, Zuckerberg appeared to feel, would collapse in on one another, leaving a stew of subcultures and fractions all jumbled together, all able to see one another, and no one would be any the worse for it.

  That perception is not entirely disinterested. Zuckerberg’s company has an immense paper value – investment firm General Atlantic put it at $65 billion in March 2011 – and a large part of that is the notional value of all the customer information in the network. That information, properly analysed and deployed, could allow the kind of targeted selling companies are only able to dream about (and, ultimately, the kind I proposed in both my opening digital scenarios, as well). If Facebook users started to defect en masse, though, either by ramping up their privacy settings or moving to other social media services that allow more perfect control of data, the company could deflate rapidly – a fate familiar to watchers of (and investors in) Internet companies. Facebook needs its users to feel easy in their minds about sharing, and to decide that integrity of the sort Zuckerberg talks about is something they believe in and relate to; or, at the very least, don’t hate.

  Meanwhile, everything you do online – and increasingly in the outside world, because between your GPS-enabled mobile phone, your credit card and the many CCTV cameras that cover a great portion of the urban environment of many countries, there’s not much difference any more – leaves a trail of breadcrumbs. That trail not only leads back to you, it actually draws a picture of who you are. It might not be one you’d wish to recognize or to which you’d want to own up in public, but it will be in some ways strikingly accurate. It may even be more accurate on some levels than your self-perception. Over time, and with broad access, that accuracy approaches what Google CEO Eric Schmidt might call the Creepy Line. Schmidt told the Washington Ideas Forum in October 2010: ‘With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.’

  I said at the time, and I still feel now, that ‘creepy’ is not a line. It’s a no-man’s-land, and any time you approach it, you’re already in it. Google’s StreetView program strikes many as well into creepy territory, for all that it’s useful and unthreatening when it’s a view of someone else’s street. In Germany, where the notion of privacy is more powerful than it is in the UK, the government
has constrained Google to allow citizens to assert a ‘Verpixelungsrecht’ – a right to blur images of their homes on the StreetView service. It’s a made-up word created to express a right that Germans feel they have – and which, in truth, many of us assume we have or wish we had too – to control the degree to which their personal spaces are casually snoopable. The extended hearths of Germany have the protection of their government.

  Schmidt at least understands that not everyone wants every aspect of their lives to waterfall together online, although his solution to the problem is novel and perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek: in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in August 2010, he suggested that in time it may become customary for a person to take a new name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful errors on social media sites and make a new beginning. As a cultural what-if, it’s fascinating. As a genuine strategy, it’s hopeless. It only requires one person to connect the two identities for the whole thing to go up in smoke, and the idea that, for example, future employers would abide by the restriction on peeking is wishful at best. The information on a standard CV is more than enough to find out who you were, as well as who you want to be now. (I also can’t help but feel I’d want to change my name about once every ten years or so just to disavow some truly bad fashion choices.)

  The sense of violated privacy is partly the sense of one sphere of life having entered another without permission; the inappropriate application of type B rules to behaviour that took place within a space governed by type A rules. Or you could see it as the application of the working world to play. There’s a blurring of the lines – a common phenomenon in situations where the digital world is heavily involved in our lives. In reaching out to the world through social media, we have extended our grasp and made ourselves available to a great webwork of personalities and information. We have extended ourselves into informational space, and we are richer for it in many ways. But in reaching out, spreading our memories into digital formats and storing them outside our physical hearths, in servers accessible from around the world, we have also weakened the borders of our personal space, and as we extend into the world, so, inevitably, the world reaches out towards us – or even into us: at least, into the new spaces of the mind where we have located our external selves, and through them into the private spaces that we guard more jealously, but which, until recently, we did not need to fear might be exposed from without.

  I say ‘we’ although there is a school of thought that says that the generations after my own feel less and less that this is the case. I’m not sure that’s true: I don’t think privacy is ever a primary issue in a political campaign, any more than a triumphal speech about voting reform and electoral methodology is likely to win you an election (alas). But the desire for privacy arrives when it is breached, not before; until the first time you feel intruded upon, or are denied a job because your Facebook page is too rowdy, how can you know you need it? Privacy is an issue when you want to be respectable, when you don’t wish to advertise your sex life, when you want to be alone and contemplative – things that happen somewhat later in life. I don’t imagine I cared much for privacy when I was nineteen. I do care about it now. So, yes, I believe that ‘we’, people in general, retain certain expectations about how our data will be handled, and who will be able to handle it, even if those expectations are unawakened until they are trespassed against.

  More specifically: on some level, we feel that the information we create in response to the world, or which is created as a result of our passage through the world – digital or not – falls by natural right under our control. It is our choice who sees it, or whether it should be retained, sold or destroyed. The law feels much the same way, and much of the endless boilerplate text on social media sites is a contractual agreement in which we use the service in exchange for access to that information. Facebook and the like are not free. They are paid for in data about us, but our relationship with personal data is still in flux. We don’t yet understand the consequences of it, or even really have a feel for what it is. It’s become popular among some technologists recently to refer to laptops and data storage devices as ‘exobrains’ – an external place to keep information that is nonetheless part of the person in question.

  In preparing this book, I’ve made copious use of a service called Evernote. Evernote is a scrapbook that allows me to see something and make a note of it either by dictating a voice note, typing, photographing or clipping it from a web browser. It is, I suppose, a digital prosthetic that allows me to go far beyond the normal limits of the cognitive load of my working memory without dropping a stitch. When I need to go back to a topic, I type in a keyword and the service produces the items I wanted to consider, allowing me to weave them together with what I’m working on. I am literally using Evernote as an extension of my memory; my brain has no doubt included it in its metamap of my capabilities, considering Evernote a part of me. Here, however, US law at least begs to differ. An electronic device is not presently acknowledged to be a private thing, and is subject to search without cause or a warrant at ports of entry.

  Increasingly, though, our information is part of our lives and our identities, even when detached from our persons. Amazon and assorted libraries have historically resisted requests from law enforcement to know what people are reading. Google has fought demands for access to search histories. Twitter has gone to court to avoid handing over user data. Information about us and created by us, we feel on an instinctual level, still belongs to us and in some way is still part of us after we have moved on. Our digital footprints are not (should not be) public unless we say so. And on the face of it, at least, digital corporations agree and understand. In part, no doubt, for the historical reasons we’ve already talked about, many of the founders of these companies are averse to government scrutiny. The general tenor of hacker culture is anti-government. But not always anti-corporate, or, at least, not against the use of information gleaned from customers to make very large amounts of money. (It also has to be acknowledged, as Misha Glenny points out in Dark Market, that a certain amount of leeway exists in the relationship between large digital corporations and the US government; the US considers Google a strategic asset. Google’s Trust and Safety Manager is a former agent of the US Secret Service. This is not to suggest that Google would ever compromise its legal responsibilities to its customers, or that employees of the company would supply data to the government for which they should have to obtain court orders. Rather, it is to observe that while Google’s public posture is of rakish defiance of authority – a posture that perhaps looks a bit odd now that the company is a global titan – it seems not implausible that where necessary and permissible, Google tries to be a helpful corporate citizen of the nation where it was born.)

  The practical reasons for our desire to sequester information are obvious, if not always entirely honourable. Eric Schmidt again, back in 2009, told CNBC: ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.’ Well, true; it’s probably a lot easier to get caught out having an affair now than it ever has been. On the other hand, Schmidt’s posture is massively entitled, the response of a wealthy white male in one of the most protected nations on earth. A moment’s reflection shows why he’s wrong: it’s not impossible, for example, to find shelters for battered women by reverse engineering data. There are many things people do that are legal, even admirable, that require a fog of, if not deception, at least uncertainty to take place without negative repercussions. Face recognition software now being built in to social networking sites has the potential to expose all manner of secrets, from Romeo and Juliet-style relationships to undercover police operations, unless individuals are allowed control over their data. And the appetite for Internet spaces that are not premised on the exploitation of vast amounts of personal data exists: the start-up network Diaspora, constructed in response to a statement by Free Software guru Eben Moglen in which he described conventional social netw
orks as ‘spying for free’,1 received $200,000 in funding through Kickstarter (an initiative that allows companies to seek funding directly from the public) and is gathering momentum even as this book is being written.

  A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of so doing; only comparable power or anonymity can do that. More practical and more disturbing, there is a much used quotation regarding the value of privacy in troubled times – and when are times anything else? – that is attributed to Cardinal Richelieu in the seventeenth century, though it may actually have come from one of his agents: ‘If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.’

  Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important – it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not – but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.