Notes on Web 3.0 (Part Four)
Editor’s Note. In press coverage of the Snowden affair, there often seems to be little sense of what is really at stake. We asked Adam Sitze, from Amherst College’s Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, to shine a bit more light on the subject. What follows here is the fourth of a five-part series in which Sitze outlines a totalitarian dream, now become our common reality.
Web 3.0: A Prism of Absurd Design
Link to Part One
Link to Part Three
“The Internet is among the few things humans have built that they don’t truly understand.” Even this, the one true statement in Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt’s ghostwritten vanity book on the future of the Internet, radiates hubris, and hence falsity. So far is it from being the case that humans “truly understand” the world of our “built things”—most especially the things we use for building: our tools and devices, our protheses and machines—that our “built things” may even be considered to be the primary example of what humanity does not truly understand.
As so many different philosophers have argued, humanity’s relation to technē is a privileged site of human ignorance: it’s the place where humanity comes to encounter (or, as the case may be, refuses to encounter) its unthought and its unconscious, its enigmatic symptoms and its forgotten dreams, its unspoken anxieties and its unspeakable desires. So difficult is it for homo faber to “truly understand” the world of its fabrications, in fact, that precisely the opposite would seem to hold. As a general rule, we might even say, thought lags behind technology: technology produces its effects in the world well before thought has a chance to catch up, well before thought is able to estrange us from our habits and our actions, well before thought can ask us to stop and think about what we’re doing. The faster a technology is introduced into the world, the more this rule holds; and, as airport bookstore “think pieces” declared during the dot.com bubble, the Internet is a “disruptive technology” that rapidly transforms each and every world it touches.
Thus amended, Schmidt’s statement applies very well to Web 2.0, this ostensibly genial virtual world to which Google is so central. Snowden’s disclosures of comprehensive NSA spying reveal, precisely as Schmidt says, that we don’t understand the first thing about the Web we’ve helped to build.
One principle ultimately underlies comprehensive military surveillance of the Internet: your participation in Web 2.0 constitutes a permanent record that can be used to investigate you and all of your relations, to interrogate you in a holding cell, or to prosecute you in a court of law. The more that self-understanding of this principle comes to govern users of Web 2.0, the more outdated the lexicon of Web 2.0 will become, and the more Web 2.0 will transition into its successor—which also happens to be opposed, point by point, to the world that Web 2.0 understands itself to have built.
The result of this dynamic, this intensifying self-negation of Web 2.0, is what we may call Web 3.0. Through a gradual but relentless process, increasing wariness toward what is now an experientially liminal part of Web 2.0—toward the part of the Web that sees us but that we cannot see in return (PRISM, Boundless Informant, Tempora, XKeyscore, DNI Presenter, etc.)—cannot fail to erode each of the central propositions that ground the discourse of Web 2.0 as such. Web 3.0 is what happens to Web 2.0 as the military origins of the Web repressed by Web 2.0 gradually make their redoubled return in Web 2.0, exceeding its self-understanding from within.
This is a formulation that could be easily misunderstood, so let’s be clear. The point here is not that Snowden’s disclosures somehow announce a point of absolute discontinuity with Web 2.0. Just as certain sorts of participation were already evident in Web 1.0, preparing the conditions for it to be superseded from within by Web 2.0, so too surveillance was not unknown in Web 2.0. But distinctions of degree sometimes correlate to distinctions of kind—a 106° fever is, for example, qualitatively different than a 100°fever—and it’s this sort of correlation that Snowden’s disclosures require us to name in our contemporary experience.
The military surveillance Snowden has revealed to the public is so extensive that, over time, knowledge of its existence cannot but alter the quality of the public’s relation to the Internet as such, and hence too, given the centrality of the Internet in contemporary public life, the public’s own relation to itself. Just as it is now recognized that the primary purpose of Web 1.0 was information retrieval, and that the primary purpose of Web 2.0 was interactive participation, soon it will be recognized that the primary purpose of Web 3.0 is the command and control of populations, whether directly (through the use of archived electronic communications as a means to the end of investigations, detentions, and prosecutions) or indirectly (through the generalization and normalization of military surveillance in everyday life, resulting in militarized Panopticism).
Even at this early stage, there are clear signs that this self-consciousness is emerging. In the concluding paragraphs of her June 2013 New Yorker article on Snowden’s revelations, Jill Lepore pointed to an aporia in the public response to the fact of NSA spying. A portion of the public understandably reacted to the news of spying by rejecting the very idea that democratic governments should have any secret powers, arguing that such government should ground its authority not in “mystery” but in transparency. This same public, meanwhile, generally claims privacy as an inviolable right, insisting that its ways and means remain a “mystery” to the very government that is supposed to represent it with perfect transparency.
Privacy, Lepore suggests, thus entails a paradox. The public rejects in its elected representatives the very secrecy that it regards as central to its own life, and that indeed is the central technique through which the public elects its representatives (using ballots that are cast, precisely, in secret). Unexpectedly, therefore, the very concept of the public turns out to be in question in the Snowden affair. The public that mediates its relation to itself through the apparatus of Web 2.0, and that recoils in horror upon finding that this medium exposes it to surveillance, today no longer even seems to recognize itself as a public at all. “There is no longer a public self, even a rhetorical one. There are only lots of people protecting their privacy, while watching themselves, and one another, refracted, endlessly, through a prism of absurd design.”
A prism of absurd design: Lepore’s final phrase is worth dwelling on. She uses the word “prism” here not primarily as an acronym in the bureaucratic jargon of the U.S.’s secret military police, but instead in the sense it has in the science of optics, where a “prism” is a transparent object that distributes white light into a spectrum of color. In Lepore’s usage, “prism” is first of all a metaphor for the way Web 2.0 distorts the possibility of reflection itself, most especially the possibility that the Snowden affair should occasion self-reflection on the part of the public itself.
But at a still more fundamental level, Lepore’s concluding turn of phrase is not at all a metaphor, a figure that operates by transferring the attributes of an optical prism onto the public’s own modes of self-reflection. It is something very different: a synecdoche, a figure that operates by treating one piece of Web 2.0 (the NSA’s PRISM program) as a rhetorical device capable of conveying the essential character of Web 2.0 as such (“a prism of absurd design”). In Lepore’s rendering, in other words, PRISM isn’t just one among many parts of Web 2.0; it’s that part of Web 2.0 that best represents Web 2.0 as a whole.
It’s true that Lepore doesn’t then also take the next step: she doesn’t ask what it means that the synecdoche that seems to best represent Web 2.0 as a whole (PRISM, a spy program that is centralized, secretive, exclusive, etc.) is antithetical to Web 2.0‘s current self-understanding of its form (dispersed, open, transparent, participatory, etc.). Nevertheless, her synecdoche is exemplary: it marks the appearance of a new paradigm of self-consciousness, one that’s the logical conclusion of Snowden’s revelations, that in the coming years can’t but become more widespread, and that eventually will come to define a new and different moment in the history by which populations relation to the Internet as technology. The Internet, it turns out, is not for porn; it’s for spying.
For a long time, no doubt, reflections like Lepore’s will remain the exception to the norm. The lexicon of Web 2.0 is sure to remain operative for many years to come; like the light that still reaches us from a star that is already dead, it will remain in effect even though it is at root already extinguished. Just as Web 2.0 came into being when certain elements in Web 2.0 cumulatively intensified to a point where the kernel of Web 2.0 burst out from within the shell of Web 1.0, so too will it take some time before the dark light of Web 3.0 begins to illuminate from within the ruined architecture of Web 2.0. But make no mistake: the enduring effect of Snowden’s revelations is that Web 2.0 contains the germ of its own self-destruction, that it is defined by the permanent potential to actualize itself in an alliance with all of the forces its enthusiasts claim it opposes, with a result that promises to be even more uninhabitable than Web 2.0 is already on its own terms.
After Snowden, we will listen very differently to those who use the language of Web 2.0 as if they understood what they were talking about, as if this discourse signified anything else except a speaker who has been made the victim of someone else’s marketing scheme, a person in the grip of a pitiable fantasy.
One of the clearest signs of alienation from the natural world is sentimentality towards the natural world—a discourse on nature that supposes nature to entail neither predation nor extinction, as if nature were so thoroughly mastered by humanity that it no longer presented any danger or risk whatsoever, as if nature were nothing more than a giant couch or playground.
Today something similar can be said of the Internet: the surest mark of alienation from the Internet is excessive proximity to it—a relation to it that treats it not as an unprecedented security apparatus, but as an inhabitable world unto itself, an entire civilization replete with a Lebensraum of its own.
After Snowden, the distinction of greatest disconnect from the Web no longer belongs to the Luddites or to the Amish (or any of the other fantasmatic “others” whose exteriority to technology is the source of such fascination for contemporary technoculture). It belongs to those who are so enmeshed in Web 2.0 that they persist in using the language of Web 2.0, as if it meant something.
