The instructions "do not fold, spindle or mutilate" used to accompany
IBM punch cards, a ubiquitous technology for capturing and storing data
for computational purposes up until the late 1980s.
[Image]
As
colleges and universities began to computerize their student records
many people experienced feeling like they'd become just a number, just
some data in a big machine. Of course, many people - whole demographic
groups - had long been familiar with this phenomenon. Some of our worst
moments in history include government/business alliances that used "data
on people" for a variety of harmful reasons. A single century provides
examples from the passbook requirements for Blacks in apartheid South
Africa, to the stars on Jews in Nazi Germany, internment camps for
Japanese Americans in World War Two, and government files on American
citizens during the McCarthy era and the civil rights movement.
[Image]
Data
on people can be used for good (improving health care,
educational opportunities, tracking environmental refugees,
enfranchisement, targeted advertising) or evil (discrimination,
elimination, disenfranchisement, targeted advertising).
The
Free Speech movement of the 1960s co-opted the instructions to "not
fold, spindle or mutilate" to apply to the humans captured in the data,
not just the punch cards.
[Image]
(http://www.berkeleybyte.com/tag/free-speech-movement/)
Nowadays,
we are (or should be) aware that both businesses and governments are
collecting data on us in ways so pervasive and passive as to make punch
cards seem quaint. We also know that we have been complicit in making
our data available freely - often in exchange for search functionality,
social media connections, retail discounts, or two day free shipping.
[Image]
(http://www.grantcraft.org/guides/blueprint2017)
Given
this knowledge, people who are preparing to work with data - in any
capacity - need to think about the ethics of what they're doing. This
last week saw the rise of the NeverTech manifesto - in which tech company employees from across the spectrum vowed not to help build Donald Trump's muslim registry (#NeverAgain.Tech) Other tech executives are signing on to commitments to civil liberties. These statements are important, but, really, they are more of a floor than an aspirational ceiling.
Refusing to participate in building tools to facilitate discrimination
that defy the very principles of religious liberty on which the U.S.
was founded 200+ years ago hardly lives up to technologists' self-image
of disruptive, risk-taking, future creators.
The generation of digital tools on which we now depend - social media,
search, mobile - as long as they continue to destroy our
ability to speak freely, to assemble peacably, and to learn, think and
act privately are neither innovative nor groundbreaking. They are lazy
first generation solutions, avoiding the tough issues of personal
agency, liberty, privacy, and civil rights.
[Image]
(https://boingboing.net/2016/12/19/effs-full-page-wired-ad-dea.html)
We
the people who are the digital data, who are excited about its
possibilities, and who are dedicated to taking advantage of it must be
the ones to dismantle liberty-destroying pervasive surveilled networks
and unaccountable third-party landgrabs over our digital selves. We must be
the ones to fight for encryption as a fundamental bulwark of civil
society, to take on the difficult engineering tasks that encode and
protect personal privacy in pursuit of public benefit, and to invent
digital systems that align with and extend humanity's highest
aspirations for life and liberty.
We need bold action now to make the digital realm align with the
principles of justice, freedom, individual action and collective good
that centuries of humans have fought to codify in our most principled
democracies. To give up on the former is to destroy the latter.
To
defer to decades-old business models, special-interest influenced
governance protocols, or difficult engineering challenges is to default
on the opportunities we face, to walk away from enticing computing
challenges and disruptive possibility, and to choose business as usual.
Focusing our best minds and our creative capital on digital tools that
destroy civil liberties and threaten employment opportunities while
ignoring those that would conserve our natural resources and enhance
human dignity, will be to hasten our demise as free, peaceful people.
All of us - creators and users of digital tools - need to get out from behind our willful blindness and acknowledge that How We Use Digital Data
is as important as what we do with it. Our digital lives depend on the
ethical choices we bring to - and that we demand of - the digital spaces
that are substructural to our daily actions. We must now take to the
streets, to the classrooms, to our open plan workspaces, to our
lawmakers, and to the board rooms to protect our digital rights and
enhance our humanity.
People need to protect themselves and demand protections in the products they use and from the companies they purchase from
We
need to insist on government action that aligns with the founding
principles of democracy and doesn't toss them aside in favor of cowardly
falsehoods about national security or economic competition
Organizations and individuals need to use their market power to demand digital products that they can use without compromising their social missions
Tech
companies, hardware/software makers, telecommunication firms, and app
designers need to lead and be rewarded for person-protecting consent,
privacy, and security practices, transparency and auditability.
Business
people need to stop resting on incumbent explotaitive revenue models.
Now is the chance for true innovators to demonstrate an ability to
produce economic value in line with human and democratic values
We, and only we, can can
lead us into an era in which our human, civil and democratic rights are protected in digital spaces by
design and by default.
posted by Lucy Bernholz at 12:04 PM on Dec 20, 2016
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