It came out recently that the website Ratemash has been linking the Facebook profiles and photos of unknowing Oxford students, for the anonymous throngs to pass judgment upon whether they are ‘hot or not’. Meanwhile, Twitter has attempted to amend its blocking rules, so that a blocked user could still see everything the blocker did. The firestorm that forced Twitter to back down aside, these two incidents, taken together (along with countless others), are a chilly reminder that, in the total freedom of the internet, individuals have surprisingly little independence from the passions and trespasses of the mass of humanity – and that enterprising behaviour can give the NSA a run for its money, when it comes to profiting from intrusions on private autonomy.
Whatever one’s views on the lately-revealed NSA surveillance apparatus, it is inescapable that its sort of activity is very much in keeping with the broader patterns of the online world. It is neither subversion of the internet’s original purpose, nor is it much of a departure from the behaviour of any of the corporate giants among whom almost the entire online infrastructure is partitioned. The billions and billions of pounds reaped by internet companies, and the accompanying explosion of human creativity and expression, rest upon the systematic harvesting of private information, no less inextricably than the early industrial revolution was built on the brutal exploitation of mill-workers and navvies. In both cases, the organising principle is the absence of any structures beyond those that emerge from the aggregation of purely private interactions.
If you want to remove your face from Ratemash along with your private information, all you can do is appeal to the conscience of the website owner, hoping there aren’t any strong financial incentives for them to ignore you. Facebook and Google have access to a vast amount of your personal details. If you want to ensure that this is never sold in bulk to advertisers or employers, all you can do is petition to this end and try to forget the ease with which these companies unilaterally change their privacy policies. Never mind, the magnetic appeal money has to them. These companies breathlessly tout their reluctance to cooperate with the NSA, as if that shows a real sense of obligation to their customers, but all it proves is that there’s no fortune to be made in state espionage. Spying for global capitalism, in contrast, has been proving infinitely more worthwhile – and they’re getting better at it.
The problem with a laissez-faire approach is that it places on the shoulders of the individual total responsibility for the consequences of their decision, as it percolates throughout eternity, including in ways one couldn’t possibly have expected it to. The unintended cumulative effect of a billion freely-made decisions has been the construction of an online world where privacy is breached on an industrial scale, under the banner of profit as well as national security. Moreover, it is a world in which constant access to hard-core pornography is now accepted as normal – a fact which could end up emotionally crippling an entire generation. This is to say nothing of the entire subcultures devoted to revenge porn, pro-ana propaganda and encouraging self-harm and suicide.
It would be less pressing if the internet was still a vast virtual playground, but it is not. Nowadays, it is yet another field of human social interaction – simply one more cylinder within our complex societies, whose dangers we accept because of the opportunities afforded by it. A commitment to a life online is a necessary precondition for full participation in society. Yet there is no proper discussion about extending the social contract to cover it. In the streets, in airports, in parks and at school, there is an expectation that the state will give some measure of protection, even at the cost of our total freedom of action. That is to say, there are public structures alongside the aggregation of private autonomy, which are accountable to society as a whole.
In a democratic society, public and private structures need to find a balance; this has been done (perhaps unsatisfactorily) in the physical world. But online, private always seems to trump public. We need a proper debate on where the actual limits should be – public structures of enforcement (not just ‘like’ counts and appeals to conscience) to protect Facebook pages from being unwittingly linked to lascivious websites, to curtail the permanent memorialisation of youthful mistakes and, in the longer term, maybe to protect women and men from the institutionalised degradation of easy-access pornography. The Wild West internet, like the Wild West itself, was always an illusion, evoked to justify the gradual hardening of an order predicated on exploitation; now we need an internet safe for democracy.
We cannot end NSA spying without also ending intrusion from Facebook and Google, because they are two sides of the same coin. To end both, however, requires extending public institutions until they are not only present but accepted online. The idea would be a world where the police treat Twitter death threats like real ones, where wholehearted measures would be taken to give parents control over their underage children’s access to pornography, where pro-ana websites would be treated like what they are – incitements to violence. There would be laws and effective enforcement mechanisms specifically dealing with the trade of personal information, by social-media companies. It is the internet’s blessing, and our poor fortune, that its emergence occurred at such a low point for our institutions of democratic governance. My hope, however, is that by opening a debate on replacing internet anarchy with internet democracy, we can revitalise and reclaim those institutions in every field of human life.
