Notes on Web 3.0 (Part Five)
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 conclusion of a five-part series in which Sitze outlines a totalitarian dream, now become our common reality.
Time to Think
Link to Part One
Link to Part Four
Bidding farewell to the forced optimism of Web 2.0 doesn’t require us to welcome a world defined by comprehensive NSA spying. There’s another way to negotiate this juncture, even if the path is steep and fraught with uncertainty, and the gains modest. This is the path that treats Snowden’s revelations not primarily as the object of legislative and political action, but also—prior to that action, as the sole condition for it to be able to measure up to this event—as a chance for thought to catch up to technology. The emergence of Web 3.0 from within Web 2.0 is, from this view, a chance to step back, not only from our teletechnical devices but also from their grammar, from the categories of thought that are hardwired into them, and that imprint their shape upon our self-relations as individuals and as a possible public.
Web 2.0 was a technological response to a series of non-technological questions, ranging from the changing nature of politics in a “globalizing” world, to the legacy of the experiments of 1960s counterculture, from the place and function of religious meaning under conditions of secularization, to the essence and basis of community, from the limits of value in capitalist economy, to the limits of the human itself. The more that Web 2.0 enters into crisis—the less “obviously” its clichés operate as credible answers to these questions—the more these questions will force themselves upon us anew.
What we want from the Snowden affair is to give voice to these questions, in order to provide responses to them that differ not only from the brittle utopianism of Web 2.0, but also from the dystopian archives of the NSA.
“Privacy,” as Lepore so rightly argues, isn’t up to this task. The desire of privacy activists, understood phenomenologically, is to defend the interior self from an exterior world that is experienced primarily as a source of potential danger. The problem with this project, especially when marshaled as an argument against military spying, is that it reproduces in miniature the very project it opposes: the explicitly stated desire of the NSA, after all, is also to protect the interior of the nation from an exterior world that is experienced primarily as a source of potential danger.
By depending upon the same premises that call for surveillance in the first place, the discourse of privacy rights militates against its own desire, preparing the conditions for its own refutation. When privacy imagines its task as nothing more than micro-security, it becomes non-identical with itself, signing a secret treaty surrendering to its adversary in advance of any real contestation. When the question of spying is framed as a “trade-off”between the protection of the public, and the protection of private individuals, it’s not hard to see who has the upper hand. Since Aristotle the reasoning has varied very little: because the body can live without a hand, while the hand cannot live without the body, the safety of the whole must be the prior condition for the safety of the part.
There’s no reason to suppose that this reasoning will disappear in the coming years. The more the Internet’s globalization increases in scope and intensifies in complexity, the more it will present various secret police forces with the specter of a form of communication whose risks must but can’t be brought under control, and the more difficult it will be to resist the distorted revival of the worst classical reasoning—the reasoning that treats “public safety” as a warrant to suspend any and all rights. Under such conditions, fears of threats from the outside (which, given the unique shape of distributed networks, will double as threats from the inside) will produce even more fearsome strategies for immunization—strategies that aim at protecting and securing life, but that strike out blindly at threats that appear to be both both inside and outside, both nowhere and everywhere. The more this dynamic gains momentum, the more the intolerable paradox at work in the Snowden affair—that today the forces of protection have become so excessive that we now need to seek protection from the forces of protection themselves—will become the norm.
Under such conditions, privacy rights no doubt will continue to serve as a rallying cry capable of producing certain legal and political victories. Some of these victories even may be somewhat lasting, seeming to suspend the dynamic by which Web 2.0 is structurally vulnerable to collapse into Web 3.0. But as a response to the immunitary crisis that seems destined to emerge out of the NSA’s drive to protect us from our teletechnics, our desire to protect our privacy from an outside force called “the state”is more than just insufficient. It’s the germ of the crisis itself, one that replicates itself, like a contagious virus, when the discourse of privacy rights automatically dictates the form of our response each and every time a state security apparatus threatens to metastasize.
To the side of privacy rights—or rather underneath it, as its uninterrogated presupposition—it’s possible to discern another set of questions at work in the Snowden affair. These questions may be less obvious and immediate than those associated with privacy, but they are no less critical.
In genealogical terms, there was a very clear answer to the question of how the Internet could be “civilianized”: by “personalizing” it. Building on the precedent of Apple’s “personal computer,” the emergence of personalized search engines and Facebook “personas” allowed Web 2.0 to make its distinctive wager: that integrating “personal data” into each of its component parts would not only “customize” its interfaces, according to the unpredictable tastes of each of its various users, but also simultaneously “humanize” the Web in general.
This gambit failed, but not because the effort behind it was insufficiently strong. To the contrary: it failed because it took personalization to the extreme—because it radicalized the personalization of digital technology without also ever stopping to ask what was meant by the category of “the person” in the first place.
To be sure, debates over Web 2.0 did sometimes raise questions pertaining to personhood, but only after first shrouding “the person” in self-evidence, framing it in terms of false dichotomies, and sterilizing it with stalled dialectics. Is real personhood being corroded by the virtual personhood of social media? Or is there still a chance for real personhood to survive under such artificial conditions?
Web 3.0 reveals the real dialectic to be significantly more uncomfortable: personhood does indeed remain intact in Web 2.0, but not in a good way. In juridical terms, the operative kernel of personhood is culpability: in Roman Law, the person is a legal fiction that allowed for the attribution of guilt to life. From this perspective, the person always has been an apparatus for control and regulation, for discipline and punishment. Web 2.0, in trying to engineer distributed networks that made everything revolve around the person, has not escaped this history. Quite the opposite: in its ignorance of it, Web 2.0 has intensified the means by which the person is able to “apprehend” life.
The pivot point that renders Web 2.0 permanently vulnerable to Web 3.0 is, after all, not just some glitch or flaw at the margin of Web 2.0. It’s the experience at the very center of Web 2.0, its strongest strength and most definitive self-definition. The more personalized one’s relation to Web 2.0, the more fully and precisely one exposes oneself to surveillance, the greater one’s chances for discipline and punishment. Personalization of the web in unbounded freedom (the inner principle of Web 2.0) is at one and the same also what allows for the capture of persons in a web of culpability (the inner principle of Web 3.0). Web 2.0’s extreme personalization of distributed networking is not then antithetical to Web 3.0—this newly disciplinary and punitive declension of the Web that threatens to supersede Web 2.0 from within. It is, to the contrary, Web 3.0’s indispensable precondition.
This aporia may be inescapable, but it shouldn’t be cause for melancholy. Under conditions where technology moves too fast to allow us to stop and think about what we’re doing, there’s a decidedly salutary dimension to the paralyzing immobility that this aporia, like every aporia, seems to cause: it’s exactly what we need if we should want our thought to “catch up” to our technology.
The desire at stake here is not, in the end, complicated. At root, it’s a desire for technology to catch up to itself. It’s a desire for technology to begin tarrying with the thinking that called it into being in the first place, and that continues to program its daily operations just as surely as any inconspicuous malware.This is a desire, in other words, to use technology not on the terms of today’s corporate masters or spymasters, but with reference to the thinking that allowed for its genesis, and that silently governs its performance, but that technology itself, once set into motion, no longer is able to think.
To “re-introduce” thinking back into technology, to bring this or that technology “up to speed” with the non-technological questions to which it itself is just the excessively functional answer, certainly would introduce non-identity into our everyday relations to technology; it certainly would estrange us from the very technologies that many today seem unable to live without. But precisely this inefficiency, precisely this slowness, carries with it its own supreme efficiency, since it alone stands a chance of delivering these same technologies from their own self-destructive potentialities.
This includes, above all, our “technologies of the self.” These are the techniques that govern us prior to any privacy–dictating to us, from within, the permissible forms for “interiority” itself. It may seem counterintuitive to consider “personhood” as a technology (rather than, say, as something inviolable or sacred). But precisely this conclusion is enjoined upon us by our current predicament, where the “experience of personhood” designates not only what we most want to secure from the NSA, but also the most effective means for exposing ourselves—with increasing degrees of self-awareness—to the security apparatus that the NSA itself is.
The most difficult question posed to us by the Snowden affair is not then how to secure ourselves from threats coming from the exterior (whether from terrorists or their opposite, the NSA). It’s how to deprogram a drive for security that has become so automatic for us that increasingly it has become the danger itself. Power, Michel Foucault once wrote, is not only totalizing; it’s also individualizing. Today this is true for Snowden himself, and acutely so. But to suppose this true of Snowden alone is to personalize his revelations, in exactly the wrong way.
