Reset: reclaiming the internet for civil society | LSE Online Event

hello everyone good morning good afternoon good evening depending on where you are on planet earth my name is andres velasco i'm a professor of public policy and the dean of school of public policy here at the lsa and i am very very pleased to be chairing this event today and very pleased also to welcome professor ron deibert to the lsa but before i introduce ron and tell you more about today's event let me make an announcement or two this is a double launch event it is a launch of a book at least in the uk but it is also a celebration and the launch of a double degree between the london school of economics and the hmong school of global affairs sorry affairs at the university of toronto this will be a double degree in which students can do one year at one institution a second year at the other institution and as the name indicates gain to degrees a master in public administration from the lse and a master of global affairs from toronto needless to say this is an opportunity for students to study public life public affairs public administration public policy at two of the world's leading research institutions so um if you like public policy that's why you're joining today's event or you have a friend or a colleague or a classmate who's interested in this kind of thing please spread the good word out we are very very excited about this new double degree and of course for twitter users in the audience the hashtag hashtag sorry for today's event is hashtag lsemonk so as usual this is an online event which is being recorded and presuming no technical difficulties there will be a podcast of the event available after ron's presentation we will have a q a and as part of the q a just feel free to submit the um the questions in writing into the uh q a box at the bottom of your screen and i will take those questions and ask the questions uh of ron and last thing that i should say as as the introduction that this is an event that is part of the broader lses shaping the post-covet world initiative which is a series of conversations on the direction that the world is taking after the covet crisis if we are after the covet crisis and not perhaps still in it but hoping to get out sooner rather than later okay enough enough announcements let me move on now and introduce professor ron dybard who's a professor of political science at the monk school of affairs and public policy and he's also affiliated with the department of political science at the university of toronto and at the same university he is the director of the monk schools citizens lab and the citizen lab is an interdisciplinary lab focusing on research development and high level strategic policy and legal engagement on information communications technologies human rights and global security ron has a new book out the book is called the reset reclaiming the internet for civil society and that is the subject of today's event so i'm going to hand it over to ron um who will take uh 10 maybe 15 minutes to tell us about the main ideas the main points in the book then i will take advantage of the cherished privilege ask him a couple of questions and then open it up to a dialogue with the audience so without further ado ron once again we are very very happy to have you at the lsc and the floor is yours over to you thank you so much professor velasco andre uh it's a pleasure to meet you and i'm really thrilled to be here uh for the launch of this joint degree uh i've spent many happy occasions at the london school of economics and to learn now that our students will be able to enjoy both excellent programs and and come out of it with a dual degree is really exciting and i hope this means that i'll be able to travel to london more myself maybe and come visit people and likewise hope to uh receive you in in toronto at some point in time uh so as andre said this uh presentation today uh is about my book reset reclaiming the internet for civil society and uh there is a uk version of the book so i i just want to mention briefly september publishers my publishers in the uk um thank you for putting that out um uh the book was written actually um at the very beginning of the pandemic in january 2020 when we all went into lockdown uh it was a bit fortunate for me because i immediately cancelled all my travels and locked myself in a room out of health necessity and buckled down and had a lot of fun writing this book so for those of you who don't know the the background this book was written for the cbc massey lecture series so for those of you who aren't canadian you may not be familiar with the massey lectures let me tell you a little bit about this for those of you in the uk you may know of course about the wreath lectures so the massey lectures are very similar to the wreath lectures they're usually delivered annually by a prominent public intellectual and broadcast over the radio nationally in canada and then always with the massey lectures there is an accompanying book uh as a student i devoured the books of the massey lectures so we've had some amazing massey lectures over the decades martin luther king jr noam chomsky john kenneth galbraith ursula franklin all these people cb mcpherson important member of my own department all of these people were um uh inspirational to me i i literally gobbled up these books and um when i was asked to deliver one myself i have to say uh it was a bit surreal i felt like i was uh stepping through the looking glass here and and had this opportunity um to do something that for me was uh truly phenomenal so it was a great honor uh just to be able to do this but also it was it was also kind of fun and a great opportunity because it allowed me to write in a different manner for a different audience so these lectures are not necessarily meant for an academic audience although i obviously wanted to write something that my colleagues uh wouldn't say is uh rubbish so i had to come up with something um that that would pass muster with with all of my peers but it had to be written differently because they're delivered as lectures so the writing style is more engaging um and and meant for a popular audience and for me that's that's really a big change from my normal day-to-day work as director of the citizen lab uh andre mentioned a bit about the citizen lab at the introduction i founded the citizen lab in 2001 and the reality is you know 95 of what i do orbits around the work of this phenomenal lab and the colleagues that i have the great fortune to work with um so just to give you a bit of background uh the citizen lab uh does uh investigations into um abuses of power uh in and around the internet and social media uh worldwide and uh i'd say the signature of the citizen lab is our mixture of methods so i had this one great idea many years ago to attract people who have technical expertise in the beginning people from computer science and engineering science and take their skills and orient them towards doing these very careful evidence-based uh investigations into topics like state censorship online into targeted espionage and reverse engineering maybe surveillance that is happening within popular applications and platforms so the work is uh very clinical and there's a lot at stake in the reports that we publish in terms of the evidence and so writing in that manner is is much different uh as i said is more clinical it's it's it's very precise we have to do a lot of due diligence to make sure that what we're writing is accurate if for no other reason than to prevent some of the objects of our research from suing us which has happened in the past so that writing the the massey lectures for me was kind of like being a musician who was unplugged i could just free flow a little bit and have a bit of fun but of course i had uh more serious objectives as well i would say there were two main aims in writing uh this book uh the first was to pull together what i saw as all of the various pathologies around social media um i i think it's fair to say that most everyone recognizes that there is something wrong with our social media environment it's causing a lot of problems on a number of levels it's associated with a lot of nasty things going on in the world from disinformation to the kind of toxic public sphere that we experience on platforms like facebook and twitter we see a lot of privacy and data breaches on an ongoing basis and so what i wanted to do was address what was coming to me from my non-academic peers from my friends in my neighborhood who would come up to me knowing what i do and say you know what do you think about facebook or social media and how should i understand the latest privacy scandal around twitter or some other platform and so i was my main aim was to pull together what i see as these i call them painful truths about social media truths because i think there is an emerging consensus among those who study social media about these problems but painful because even though we can recognize there are these problems they're very difficult to fix um in fact i think a lot of us don't want to address them squarely even though we know something's wrong we still depend on these platforms look at us right now in the midst of this pandemic we've had no alternative but to rely on a platform like zoom to do the type of work that we do so my first aim was to pull together all of the latest research in a friendly accessible way and tie together these painful truths about social media but that wasn't my only aim i also wanted to go uh beyond that and talk a little bit about solutions one of the frustrating things for me as a you know a person who studies this area is that in going through what has been written and researched by academics about the problems related to social media i would be nodding my head in agreement yes this sounds right to me okay you know i see there are all these problems i get it but when you would look for a solution you'd you'd be hard-pressed to find one usually an author will tack on a few uh paragraphs at the end of an essay or a book saying well we need to fix these problems we need to do something else and they don't really have anything in terms of a solution so i definitely wanted to take on that challenge and provide something like maybe not a series of recommendations so much as a set of principles about how we could think about what what some kind of framework might be how we can guide ourselves as we seek to as a subtitle of the book says reclaim the internet for civil society in terms of the actual pathologies i don't want to go into a lot of detail here um i'd rather leave it to the q a and hear from everybody in the audience but i really do think at the core to understanding the pathologies of social media you can't escape the business model uh what shoshanna zubov has has um has phrased surveillance capitalism i think a lot of the core issues that we see have their roots in this underlying business model which at its core is really about capturing and retaining users interests so no matter how the social media platforms describe themselves and their products wiring the world connecting friends and family and so on ultimately they all have one objective and that is to make their platforms as compelling as unquittable as essential to our lives as possible so that they can monitor everything that we're doing as we're using their platforms for targeted advertisement purposes in other words no matter how they describe themselves one way to think about it is we're the livestock for their data farms we're not actually their customers or their users we're they're raw material if you will and in order to accomplish that objective the companies have invested in a lot of basic behavioral psychology and they use their massive computing power capabilities to construct algorithms that push out uh sensational extreme content in our direction the reason is human nature being what it is we tend to be attracted to this type of content they also design their user interfaces in ways that someone like bf skinner would immediately recognize little icons bouncing up and down vibrations in your pockets this is basic uh schenerian behaviorism 101 being applied on a mass scale um unfortunately this also leads to a lot of the negative outcomes and externalities that we experience on a daily basis from the divisive toxic public sphere type of conversations that we see but also having this invasive by design but also insecure poorly regulated ecosystem creates enormous opportunities for malfeasance and this is where uh the work that i've done at the citizen lab comes into play it turns out that an environment that is designed in this manner is one that works perfectly in favor of those who want to sow confusion spread disinformation and conspiracy theories and undermine uh systems of of accountability and i believe this is one reason why we're seeing authoritarian practices spreading uh worldwide it's not that uh facebook twitter and so on have deliberately sought to cultivate those practices it's that they've created an environment that turns out to be propitious for those sorts of practices to spread very widely we see that indirectly in the growing number of dark pr social media disinformation campaigns which by the way are spreading globally becoming more professionalized but we see it more directly in the type of targeted espionage that we at the citizen lab have uncovered directly i have the story of our investigations into the spyware the hacking of the devices of the inner circle of jamal khashoggi the murdered washington post journalist we were able to discover that a number of his colleagues had their phones hacked using very sophisticated israeli-based spyware that's a really good example of one of the syndromes that i talk about in the book digital technologies and social media have inadvertently to be sure created an environment where autocrats can reach across borders using a form of transnational digital repression to stop silence dissent to neutralize political opposition in ways that simply wasn't possible uh two decades ago or at least would have been very challenging to do so we have to remember uh platforms like zoom are our windows to the world but they also allow people to look back at us and that's that's the ultimate i think um concern that i have when it comes to the potential for the abuse of power related to this enormous digital exhaust uh that we're constantly emitting we have essentially turned our digital lives inside out a lot of this has been done in a way that seems very convenient but we've now begun to realize that this has created all sorts of unintended consequences that we need to remedy i'll just say quickly in terms of the solutions as i mentioned i didn't want to write a book with you know 20 recommendations at the end there's not a policy book instead what i did was draw upon my own background and political philosophy to talk about the principle of restraint i really do believe that we need to think about applying principled democratic governance to states to corporations but also to ourselves if we are going to reclaim the internet for civil society we need to remind ourselves to put political principles before technology we've lived in an era for now two decades or so where innovation has been heralded for its own sake as if it meant something beyond an empty term for technological progress and we're now um uh reaping the consequences of it um so we need to apply restraints to social media platforms to governments and even to ourselves i would say in terms of how we think about uh communicating with each other and seeking and receive information uh one last comment um you know a lot of people after i give lectures especially on some of the nasty things that we unearth at the citizen lab people come up to me afterwards and say you know that's it i'm gonna throw my device in the ocean and never use the internet again and i say no that's not the right uh response i encourage them not to do that the fact of the matter is we live in a uh increasingly finite political space with many shared problems globally if we are going to solve them we're going to need something like the internet or social media to govern ourselves and govern the planet the problem is as presently constituted around the business model of surveillance capitalism and all of its dysfunctionalities social media um is counterproductive to those larger aims so with that i'll turn it back to you andre and look forward to a conversation with everybody who's checked in thank you thank you ron and um i'm happy to report we have 246 people listening in and um probably more on facebook and i would not be surprised if many other people are actually uh tuning in from different corners of the world as is typically the case on these asterisk events um you know ron i like you i have a background in political philosophy so i was particularly interested in one thing you said in the second half of your talk the principle of restraint i'm hoping you can elaborate a little bit restraint by whom are we supposed to exercise self-restraint that are as citizens are governments supposed to restrain themselves are we expecting facebook and twitter to get up one morning and and act in a more restrained way so tell us a bit more about what you have in mind and and if it is entirely self uh control how we do it how do we ensure that these big powerful entities will engage in self-restraint that's a that's a great question um i definitely don't mean by restraint some kind of corporate self-governance which is very much in the air right now of course the companies recognize that they're under the spotlight there's a lot of scrutiny naturally they're going to go out and lobby intensively to have various rules and regulations made that benefit them and and even prior to doing that they'll construct all sorts of self-governance regimes um that you know to be fair may have some positive aspects to it but they're really incomplete they're fragments of a larger um solution in my view by restraint i actually um mean a principle that is at the heart of something very simple actually so simple in fact that i think many of us tend to forget where it comes from which is at the heart of liberal theorizing is the idea that we need basically to restrain through laws and regulations those who are in positions of power to prevent abuse most people recognize this through basic systems of checks and balances or separation of powers as we know from the founding of the united states i think that's where most people recognize it but that principle actually has a long tradition going all the way back to ancient greece and typically it's thought of in terms of republicanism not to be confused with the uh party that goes by the name in the united states which is mostly antithetical to everything that i would advocate for in practice it boils down to basically putting in place mechanisms uh that prevent the centralization and potential for the abuse of power um now i think that um you know there are very basic forms of restraint um that i talked about already separation of powers even regular term limits and elections and so on however we've now entered into it a period of time an era if you will where given the volume of data that's in the hands of the private sector and in the hands of the state often using the private sector as proxies for the collection of data that we need to reinvigorate principles and practices of restraint what would that look like well when it comes to the private sector one of the most important principles of restraint um in republican theorizing is actually one that now is mostly seen as an economic measure and that's anti-trust if you look at the history of anti-trust i know andre i don't need to to speak to you about this you're very familiar um but i i talk a bit about justice louis brandeis in my book and how he saw antitrust actually as much a political lever as an economic one uh it was about preventing the centralization and concentration of power of wealth in a few large organizations or corporations because he understood that that type of concentration can very easily lead to abuses of various sorts so the government needs to step in uh we need to break those companies up um i think that's something that we definitely need to explore in an area in an era such as our own where we have these mammoth platforms that dominate our lives amazon facebook and so forth when it comes to governments i think here again one of the often overlooked parts of social media is the way that this has led to a great leap forward in remote surveillance capabilities in the hands of law enforcement intelligence agencies you have surveillance technologies essentially dual use so you know the platforms all engage in this highly invasive scrutiny of every aspect of our lives our social relationships our movements our purchasing patterns our habits increasingly our biorhythms even our most inner thoughts for advertising purposes well it's insatiable it's irresistible for government agencies to look to that marketplace in order to further information control for political purposes and meanwhile there is a huge unregulated private sector an industrial complex if you will that is willing to sell it to them everything from mass surveillance technologies to the spyware of the sort that we investigated the citizen lab we need to impose uh in my opinion uh strict oversight mechanisms um which frankly have eroded over time you know there are periods decades ago when when they were applied and invigorated in various ways usually after a scandal um but i do believe given how awesome our these these capabilities we need to uh compensate for them with new and stronger safeguards that check and constrain that power so that's what i'm talking about in terms of restraints it's not just something that we do as a norm it's something that really involves actual mechanisms backed up by the rule of law thank you for that clarification so this is not self-restraint it's externally imposed constraints of some kind or another uh talking about facebook uh i was just uh i was just told that on facebook we have people following this event uh from among other countries kenya greece cambodia india ireland and ecuador you know the awesome power of technology i suppose both for good and for for evil let me pursue the same line of argumentation uh uh and um maybe i'll put my head on as an economist here for a minute um i could not agree more that antitrust has bee has to be on the table when we're dealing with companies that are so large which inevitably have some kind of market power but antitrust is about prices and quantities antitrust comes into being when somebody decides that a large company is using market power to uh restrain output to increase prices so you know if you have an antitrust regulator step in and parenthetically they have in many cases you know microsoft apple and a number of others have been google have been have been on the receiving side of fairly large anti-trust actions both in the us and and in the eu in particular but um if if those go forward if they happen if the parties are found guilty you know they will be told to sell this bit of business you know lower your prices make sure that you don't package this particular service along with the other particular service so that will have an economic impact but it seems to me that the the case you're making extends far and beyond economics it has to do with privacy it has to do with personal freedom it has to do with the political impact of all these phenomena so i guess one way of summarizing my my question is this the other concept that i thought you you that you you introduced into the conversation which i had never heard is this notion of surveillance capitalism um you know i'm an economist so i've i've heard of of state capitalism i've i've heard of you know about all kinds of capitalism but i had not come across uh the concept of surveillance capitalism aside from monopoly considerations which are more or less well understood by by economists is surveillance that is to say is the use by companies of people's private information at the very core of this business and if it is is that something we can really address through um anti-trust legislation or do we need something more the short answer is no we can't just do it through antitrust we need something more you're absolutely right about that antitrust is one tool um i think there are some areas for example around amazon which started out as a reseller of used dvds and books now is uh globalization embodied in a single uh company really um it's it's gone beyond that to include transportation logistics etc etc uh even film and television um so i i do believe there is um an urgent need to to break up some of these companies to prevent the abuse of power not just for competitiveness reasons and pricing reasons um but really when you have such concentration of wealth in so few hands inevitably it's going to uh translate into political pressures of various sorts and just on the face of it i think you'd agree it's unjust and unethical to have you know uh whatever the percentage is uh now of these um you know these vast billionaires and most of it comes a lot of it comes from these uh tech platforms but if we simply bro uh broke up a few of these companies we might be left with um instead of one facebook 10 facebooks and multiply all of the syndromes that i that i talk about so we need more than that you really get at it when you were talking about surveillance capitalism and some of the privacy issues here if you look at how the industry operates and its principal objectives which are to treat us as their raw material and what that means it's about pushing sensors closer and closer to us drilling into our daily routines in order to extract value uh from us without thinking though of any of the unintended consequences and frankly without even worrying about some of the liabilities which are passed on to the consumers and experienced on a daily basis in terms of massive data breaches it has also spawned this uh enormous sub sector of uh startups and other companies uh most people have no clue about unless there's some kind of scandal companies in the location tracking space companies in the data analytics space um companies that provide uh dark pr services so these are companies that are uh basically um like amoebas feeding off of the the uh underbelly of of surveillance capitalism um highly invasive poorly regulated and leading to all sorts of abuses um a good example is what we see with um services being provided to some of the world's worst worst autocrats now um tapping into this marketplace to identify people's locations and their social networks to neutralize them in some cases even worse to murder them um so we need to get a handle on that um that hidden underbelly if you will and impose stricter regulations definitely that means real privacy safeguards and and by i emphasize real because in europe in canada we have uh privacy regimes we have privacy regulators but really they lock teeth they lack resources they lack capacity most of us experience in a day-to-day basis the type of safeguards that come from something like the gdpr in terms of these consent banners that we simply click okay i agree they're just giving us more uh information very few of us read you have to have a law degree to understand them what's going on in that because consent the terms of service if you will is a remarkable transfer of property so when i consent to the zoom call and i don't read all of the privacy policy what i'm effectively doing is granting permission to the platforms to extract as much data as they can from us um so i'm essentially becoming a surf if you will to these platforms that that property relationship which is completely imbalanced uh in favor of the platforms for a whole variety of structural reasons needs to be adjusted and that has to come through principal democratic governance in other words stronger privacy commissioners with real teeth i find it kind of ironic actually i'll just say this one final remark at a time in an era as never before in human history when we've turned our digital lives completely inside out and entrust ownership over the most minute aspects of our personal lives to the private sector we don't have compensating safeguards to prevent the abuse of that data that is collected from us we need to adjust that and that's essentially what i mean by uh principle of restraint in that regard i'm sure we will turn to policy issues i'm looking at the chat here and we have a number of questions on policy but before we do that let me just ask one question from my end i'm looking at the intro to your book and you talk about the real dark side to it all you talked about cyberware and the dangers of that you talk about uh both khashoggi's um devices and allegedly jeff bezos devices being hacked into and then you add we all think maybe i've been hacked too you wonder to yourself and suddenly we're all suspicious that that unsolicited text or email with an attachment you know was that dangerous uh suddenly you feel that it is all a major source of personal risk those are your words in the intro so i guess as we listen to you uh people out there and you know the country that i mentioned plus others are wondering did it happen to me could it happen to me uh have i been hatched could i be hacked one of these days um if you're not jeff bezos if you're not sitting on billions and billions of dollars are we all at risk absolutely we're all at risk because we've been conditioned into uh entrusting our information to these companies who frankly are using all sorts of tricks and dark patterns and so on in order to gather as much data from us play upon our natural tendency to share to socialize so we live in a world where clicking on links is very common and and accepting attachments and sharing information clicking i accept what's happened an unintended consequence of all of this is that there are always in human history uh malicious forces uh people out there who are looking for ways to take advantage of other humans to look for the cracks and crevices in institutions in order to exploit them what's different now is that you have multi-billion dollar companies that have arisen out of the intelligence world that spend enormous hours with very talented personnel who themselves come from uh the world's most elite signals intelligence agencies who do nothing but scour all of these platforms that we're using and looking for weaknesses to exploit them packaging those up and selling them to government security agencies sad reality of the world that we live in as it stands right now is that a large proportion of the world's governments are authoritarian or despots or autocrats this type of technology is typically marketed by those companies to assist governments in fighting serious issues of crime and terrorism what we have found at the citizen lab i think the khashoggi case exemplifies this very much is in the hands of those type of rulers who see journalists human rights defenders research scientists i would say even people like you and me as threats to their regime of course they're going to take these tools and deploy them in that manner um so one of the haunting parts of of my career actually and has been building it's it's actually reaching a crescendo is to see this epidemic of targeted espionage against global civil society now most people might say hey i'm just a regular person i've got nothing to hide i'm not a challenge to anyone but that doesn't matter to a criminal to an autocrat to a despot they're looking to take advantage of people they're looking to abuse people it's it's significant that all of the hundreds of cases that i've investigated along with my team friends and family members are often targeted as a way to get at the devices and the networks of the principal targets um and and that's a very frightening thing uh i think it it it speaks it illustrates um an acute problem around this larger issue of social media and digital technologies universe that we live in right now to me it's the most urgent of all the problems that needs to be addressed because you have really a wild west there is no international regulation over the surveillance industry that's meaningful uh that puts any type of restraint around this companies are able to sell repeatedly to the saudi arabias of the world and without any consequences okay guys so you heard it here first um we are all at risk or could be even if you're not either a billionaire or a world leading journalist um it could happen to all of us okay let's move on to questions from the audience and we have plenty um let me begin with karina velasquez who's a student at monk itself and karina says surveillance capitalism by both governments and corporations has given rise to phrases like data is the new oil or if the product is free you are the product from your experience and from your research uh i guess this is of course um this is uh directed at ron um have you come across an effective way not to stop but rather to limit or to cap data collection how can we limit this is it taxation is it quotas what um what do we do to keep people from looking into every nook and cranny of our lives well that's an excellent question and i think the the answer is challenging because um of structural reasons uh is is very inconvenient to uh step away from all of this to resist it on a personal level um and it's also frankly very difficult for individuals to address what we're talking about in the same way that if you say if you compare uh this problem around social media to the problems of climate change we can all do little things we can recycle we can consume differently but ultimately the problems of climate change are structural in nature and they require require structural changes to entire industries and how governments operate i would say the same is necessary here the reality is that our life our lives are are intersecting with a relentless uh industry that pushes continuously to put more and more sensors in front of us that on the surface appear very convenient very entertaining um very useful but underneath their ultimate purpose is simply to gather as much data from us as possible so let me give you an example uh a roomba vacuum cleaner some of you may have these they just roam around your house vacuuming and some of the more advanced ones well they will map your house and the companies will take those blueprints and they will look to sell them to advertisers who may want to know the square footage of your house for real estate purposes or perhaps to sell you carpet or or hardwood flooring or whatever just about every aspect of the digital mute world can be understood through that lens of higher and lower level functions um it's very hard for an individual to resist that so instead we need to think about principal democratic governance over this tech space to make sure that there is some kind of break uh that break has to come through institutions and agencies that are watching out for our rights for our privacy and put strong limits on what companies can do make sure that they're transparent and publicly accountable in various ways and that there are stiff penalties if they are caught transgressing those rules that's one of the problems right now is that in canada for example we have privacy commissioners at every province and one federally very smart people but you know small staffs limited budget uh the fines they can impose are typically very meager a rounding error for a company like amazon or facebook what would it take to correct all of that we're talking about a wholesale change in how we think about governing the technological landscape thank you ron um plenty of other questions let me uh take one now from sam tucci who's a harvard university phd student from toronto sam asks can public policy be separated from politics fairly first question but i imagine what he has in mind is you know we can discuss policy optimal policy improved policy until we turn purple in the face but policy requires politics and politics of course is subject to lobbying pressures influence and power so do you think we will be in a position not simply to discuss policy but actually to get policy approved and implemented yeah that's tough i would say it's tough because at least as i see it you know one of the byproducts of this enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of so few individuals and large tech platforms is that they're able to take that wealth and translate it into ways to pressure policy makers and legislators to get what they want of course there's nothing new in that but what's different now i would say is simply the scale of the effort that's available to them in fact through their own platforms in some cases which is a very dangerous prospect when you think about it um you know the whole cambridge analytical and analytical scandal was instructive it may have been a little bit of a tempest in a teapot insofar as we don't know whether cambridge analytica was able to actually influence people enough to change their minds in significant ways or have a an impact on the election results in either brexit or in the united states um but put that aside for a minute and just think about the prospect of that that illustrative example and what that might mean in the future when you have tech platforms able to monitor everything we do right down to the neurological level uh we're living in a time when internet connected brain implants are not science fiction this is something that elon musk has a company neurolink and of course this is a company that is guided by the principles of surveillance capitalism it's but a short step for those executives absent any restraints to start thinking about how they can manipulate people in ways that advantage them for their self-interest and then all you have to do is think about well what does it mean if that power is in the hands of governments very scary prospect so you know we have to make sure that uh our political processes are transparent and publicly accountable if we want to remain in a world governed by liberal democracy um which i'm sorry to say is under threat worldwide right now for a variety of reasons i would also just add one point about public policy versus politics i think there's a third dimension here which is political philosophy we often forget that what we see is the world of politics which is like a game people jostling uh jocking jostling with each other for advantage in parliament or whatever uh as like a spectator sport um and then you have uh public policy which is you know thinking about principles and you know advocating for certain types of legislation but we often overlook or forget about underlying political philosophy what are the principles what are the frameworks that we should draw from that guide us collectively towards a better society a more just society these are often absent from the type of conversations which we're having which is why the end of reset i devoted significant time to this concept of restraint as it comes from political philosophy actually on political philosophy while we're on the subject divan singh who is a graduate student at johns hopkins in the united states is hoping ron can elaborate more on the political philosophy behind restraint and he asks can you tell us how exactly would restraints on power changed the actual engineer structure of the internet so maybe a bit about the philosophy and a bit about the results that philosophy could have if applied yeah that's a that's a great question i'm happy to do that um you know the the principle of restraint for me at least comes from a number of different sources historically but i would say the most important is baron de montesquieu and i have a little excerpt quotation from montesquieu at the very beginning of my book about the potential for the abuse of power i particularly like the way in the spirit of laws montesquiou talks about how liberal democracies are very fragile first of all and rare historically and they usually only thrive under certain material conditions and he describes these material conditions with reference mostly to europe in terms of the topography uh the geography if you will he thought that was an important restraint it it prevented consolidation of power at least in that material context that he was writing in um so you know a dictator may want to take all over all of europe but at the time given the technology it's very difficult to do so why because you had these uh material constraints mountains rivers other topographical features that acted as a kind of retardant against the centralization of power fast forward to today it's really interesting to think about just to take one example law enforcement um so as recently as 20 years ago within my lifetime if a law enforcement officer had a suspect and they were trying to track down that suspect wanted to verify the location identity of that suspect they'd maybe have a photograph and the detective would go into a local pub and he would ask the bartender have you seen this person and you know it would take a lot of effort and time and so on most most often they would strike out uh now with a simple click of a button thanks to companies like clearviewai you can immediately not only get a facial recognition match in a lot of cases but you could find out extremely detailed information about every aspect of their lives of course this makes the job of law enforcement very easy um very efficient um but it's almost entirely absent any of the type of safeguards to prevent the abuse of power human beings are human beings not all law enforcement is bad but there always is in human institutions a number of people who are going to abuse their positions and we've seen that historically uh i don't need to tell anything like this to you andre coming from chile this is something that's uh endemic to the human condition so we've gone through this fast forward in surveillance technologies at the hands of government security services the prospects for the abuse of power are enormous so i imagine what someone like montesquieu who i believe is the political philosopher of restraint what would he say where he dropped into our world i think he would immediately zero in on the absence of material restraints around state power states you know in the past even 15 years ago the houses of our home uh you know the anonymity of a large crowd acted as a uh indirect form of restraint against the abuse of state power now those barriers have been obliterated potentially state security services can not only see inside our bedrooms they can see inside our minds uh ask yourselves what are the compensating safeguards in place to protect against the abuse of power in light of those changing material circumstances right now i think montesquieu would have a lot to say about that scary prospect indeed um but maybe we'll be saved by an enlightenment friend philosopher i have a lot of faith in philosophers so do you uh what a good thing that is we have about five minutes left and plenty of questions um let me pick a couple more easykill awaya who is a graduate student from the university of cape town now based in sheffield england uh ezekiel wants to ask a question which i'm sure you get asked all the time ron but uh because it is a common question that doesn't make it any less interesting what about fake news you know what can we do about what kind of regulation uh will really make a dent uh on authoritarian regimes using fake news to consolidate their power that's again i'll try to be as as quick as possible the challenge right now is that you have a communications environment oriented around surveillance capitalism uh whose primary motivation is to grab people emotionally that creates the perfect ecosystem for the promotion of disinformation so influence operations as they're traditionally known are in a golden age right now and we're just actually at the beginning um of course we have to be very careful though i think this is what the question hints at because right now you have a lot of world leaders who are using the excuse of fake news to clamp down on free expression to censor content to pressure social media platforms so for you and i fake news might be just what it is false information being circulated for someone like president duterte in the philippines fake news is anything critical uh that is directed at him coming from a journalist like maria ressa right um so i don't have a simple solution for this all i would say is we need to be very careful not to impose too many uh constraints on social media platforms when it comes to regulating content in the name of fake news thank you thank you um maybe a little time for one question um and um i've just been sent what appears to have been the most voted question people can express their support for any given question so here's the most voted question from daniel fanelli i don't know where danielle is and here's the question this information online is a real problem but the use of concepts like truth facts or scientific consensus in this context claims danielle i'm not sure i would agree but these are her words is disingenuous and politically manipulative no one can be sure to know all the facts on most issues there i agree so how could we ever trust a system that would fact-check conversations without effectively policing thought andre you want to take this one on well you know i would take issue with with a no with the notion that there's no objective truth i i had this conversation uh we had a couple of of of weeks ago uh an eminent uh harvard legal scholar launching a book and he was asked a very similar question and he said look there are some objective um facts in life for instance and he pointed to his head and said i used to have hair look at me i am bald now that is a fact so yes there are objective facts so there i would take issue with the question but um uh the fact that facts are objective doesn't mean that they cease to be complex they're very complex and i think that there's a very valid point in the question uh if complexity rules and if there may be uh you know more than one side to any complex issue then how could one possibly say that is true that is not true i will allow you to say this but not that you know we do go down a slippery slope and of course if the slippery slope is governed by um by an autocrat by the you know rodrigo duterte's of the world uh one autocrat or quasi-autocrat you mentioned then the slippery slope may be more dangerous so i've just restated the question but i haven't given an answer but you know i'll i'll i'll i'll hand it over to you you can provide a better answer than i did i don't know about that but i like your answer i i would say that um let me just say that i'm i i don't believe in big t objective truth i don't want to get into too much epistemology here i'm a pragmatist i i follow someone like john dewey i would say or william james uh i i'm a pragmatist in the sense that i do believe we can come to some consensus but the consensus has to be arrived at through a deliberate procedure that includes evidence that includes peer review i'm a scientist i i believe that uh science uh is essential uh to our society um and i will say that we live in a time though when it's more than ever difficult to have those norms uh working and functioning properly properly if only because of the volume of information that comes at anyone at any one time accelerated through social media um you know this we are rained upon with falsehoods and the task of uh fact checking verification is made extremely difficult because of this we need to adapt in some way otherwise we're going to be lost i mean the the alternative to saying there is no way for us to you know come at uh truth in some god-like posture which i agree with is not to say oh who who cares then anything goes uh that's that's anarchy so we need some pragmatic middle ground recognizing that social media right now throws up all sorts of hurdles in our way um that we'll need to adapt to it's not a very good not a uh it's a bit of a weak answer but oh it's not any answer that appeals to a little middle ground or a middleweight is a good answer i'm i'm i'm a buyer for that sort of product so we have one minute and let me just jose tapia has a very concrete question and this will be the last one now it just follows up very nicely from the previous questions he says please tell me which is a specific market that we should be regulating is it the market for ads is it marketing is it the tech industry please illustrate thinking uh from a particular regulation perspective i think it it's the if i were to just zero in on one it would be what i call the cesspool of the location data tracking industry so there is an enormous and an unregulated highly abused sector that is as i said before feeding like like uh an amoeba off of off of the big tech platforms selling also to law enforcement and terrible bad actors and criminals even we need to really get at that and make sure that people can't find out where i am at any one time by checking my cell phone's gps that data is like an exhaust that's completely unregulated very harmful all right well i wish we could carry on but we're out of time um i'm going to thank ron again for joining us at this event and for bringing his book and the ideas in his book to us you know the topic could not be harder it could not be more timely or more topical so thank you ron let me remind people also that um this is not just a book launch it is also a program launch we're celebrating the new lse monk school at the university of toronto double degree so again if you have family or friends who are looking for a great double degree on global affairs and public policy you've come to the right place folks toronto and london last but not least this is one event in what is a fairly long and we hope attractive and fun series of public events on issues of interest to you know students and practitioners of public policy so um for more information i'm not going to read the whole url but you can see it there on your screen um both the lse and the monk school have web pages in which you can find more info about future events and i very much hope you will be joining us at some of those events in the not too distant future to our friend ron to everybody who joined from many countries around the world good afternoon and have a good time bye bye

2021-07-17 11:54

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