Listen to Aral Balkan, cyborg rights activist, designer and developer, outline the problem with surveillance capitalism and explain how we can avoid it to build a People’s Internet starting right here in the EU.

The post Aral Balkan on Building the People’s Internet appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Republished from The Guardian

The office planner on the wall features two reminders: “Technosocialism” and “Indienet institute”. A huge husky named Oskar lies near the door, while the two people who live and work here – a plain apartment block on the west side of Malmö, Sweden – go about their daily business.

Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag moved here from Brighton in 2015. Balkan has Turkish and French citizenship, and says their decision was sparked by two things: increasing concerns about the possibility of Britain leaving the EU, and the Conservative government’s Investigatory Powers Act, otherwise known as the snoopers’ charter, some of which was declared unlawful this week by the court of appeal. The legislation cut straight to the heart of what now defines the couple’s public lives: the mesh of corporate and government surveillance surrounding the internet, and how to do something about it.

Kalbag, 31, is from Surrey, has a web design background and says she’s “always been a very socially minded, troublemaking kind of person”. Balkan, 41, traces what he does now to his experiences as a small child, designing his own games for a personal computer. It was “the last time when we actually owned and controlled our computers – there wasn’t some corporation somewhere watching everything we were doing, storing it and monetising it.”

Now, they style themselves as “a two-person-and-one-husky social enterprise striving for social justice in the digital age”.

Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag with their husky, Oskar. Photograph: Lars Dareberg/Getty for the Guardian

Balkan and Kalbag form one small part of a fragmented rebellion whose prime movers tend to be located a long way from Silicon Valley. These people often talk in withering terms about Big Tech titans such as Mark Zuckerberg, and pay glowing tribute to Edward Snowden. Their politics vary, but they all have a deep dislike of large concentrations of power and a belief in the kind of egalitarian, pluralistic ideas they say the internet initially embodied.

What they are doing could be seen as the online world’s equivalent of punk rock: a scattered revolt against an industry that many now think has grown greedy, intrusive and arrogant – as well as governments whose surveillance programmes have fuelled the same anxieties. As concerns grow about an online realm dominated by a few huge corporations, everyone involved shares one common goal: a comprehensively decentralised internet.

Balkan energetically travels the world, delivering TED-esque talks with such titles as “Free is a Lie” and “Avoiding Digital Feudalism”. His appearances have proliferated on YouTube, although he himself uses an online video player that doesn’t harvest personal data. (“If there’s a free and open, decentralised and usable alternative, we try to use it,” he says – he favours, for example, the privacy-respecting search engine DuckDuckGo over Google.) At the same time, he and Kalbag are on a painstaking journey that involves ideas and prototypes aimed at creating a new kind of digital life.

Back in 2014, they came up with a plan for the Indiephone, “a beautiful new mobile platform and a phone that empowers regular people to own their own data”. “One of my mistakes was, I told people about it,” says Balkan. “And then we realised there was no way we could finance it.” Assisted by around £100,000 in crowdfunding, they started work on a new kind of social network, called Heartbeat, whose users would hold on to their data, and communicate privately. Since then, they have launched an app for iPhone and Macs called Better Blocker, purchased by about 14,000 people, and with a simple function: in a much more thorough way than most adblocking software, it disables the endless tracking devices that now follow people as they move around the web.

In the last few months, they have started working with people in the Belgian city of Ghent – or, in Flemish, Gent – where the authorities own their own internet domain, complete with .gent web addresses. Using the blueprint of Heartbeat, they want to create a new kind of internet they call the indienet – in which people control their data, are not tracked and each own an equal space online. This would be a radical alternative to what we have now: giant “supernodes” that have made a few men in northern California unimaginable amounts of money thanks to the ocean of lucrative personal information billions of people hand over in exchange for their services.

“I got into the web because I liked the democracy of it,” says Kalbag, who has just published a book titled Accessibility for Everyone, about innovating in a way that includes those who technology too often ignores – not least people with disabilities. “I want to be able to be in a society where I have control over my information, and other people do as well. Being a woman in technology, you can see how hideously unequal things are and how people building these systems don’t care about anyone other than themselves. I think we have to have technology that serves everybody – not just rich, straight, white guys.”

In the Scottish coastal town of Ayr, where a company called MaidSafe works out of a silver-grey office on an industrial estate tucked behind a branch of Topps Tiles, another version of this dream seems more advanced. MaidSafe’s first HQ, in nearby Troon, was an ocean-going boat. The company moved to an office above a bridal shop, and then to an unheated boatshed, where the staff sometimes spent the working day wearing woolly hats. It has been in its new home for three months: 10 people work here, with three in a newly opened office in Chennai, India, and others working remotely in Australia, Slovakia, Spain and China.

Muneeb Ali (left) and Ryan Shea of Blockstack. Photograph: David Chuchuca

MaidSafe was founded 12 years ago by the 52-year-old computing engineer and former lifeboat captain David Irvine. He has the air of someone with so many ideas he can barely get them all out. Despite spurning money from venture capitalists, his company has come from humble beginnings to the verge of its proper launch.

In a pristine meeting room, Irvine explains a mistake carried over from old-fashioned corporate computer networks to the modern internet. “There’s a big server, and people connect to it. That used to be the way companies work; now, they’ve done the same thing to the internet. Which is remarkably stupid, because they are central points of failure. They’re points of attack. There are passwords on them: stuff gets stolen.” He goes on: “And as the internet was starting, it was clear to me straight away that it would centralise around several large companies and they would basically control the world.”

His alternative is what he calls the Safe network: the acronym stands for “Safe Access for Everyone”. In this model, rather than being stored on distant servers, people’s data – files, documents, social-media interactions – will be broken into fragments, encrypted and scattered around other people’s computers and smartphones, meaning that hacking and data theft will become impossible. Thanks to a system of self-authentication in which a Safe user’s encrypted information would only be put back together and unlocked on their own devices, there will be no centrally held passwords.

No one will leave data trails, so there will be nothing for big online companies to harvest. The financial lubricant, Irvine says, will be a cryptocurrency called Safecoin: users will pay to store data on the network, and also be rewarded for storing other people’s (encrypted) information on their devices. Software developers, meanwhile, will be rewarded with Safecoin according to the popularity of their apps. There is a community of around 7,000 interested people already working on services that will work on the Safe network, including alternatives to platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

One big question hangs over Irvine’s concept of a decentralised internet: given what we know about what some people use technology for, the encrypted information stored on people’s devices will include fragments of nasty, illegal stuff, won’t it?

“It will. It will. It definitely will. It’s all society’s data. All information,” says Irvine

I read him a quote from the company’s blog: “Even MaidSafe staff don’t know who is on the network, where they are based, what has been stored and where the data is located.”

“No. We don’t know. That’s fine, though.”

Is it? Even if it includes child abuse images, or so-called revenge porn or beheading videos?

“Yeah. I think it’s fine. Because to me, the whole thing here is like … You’re building a road, and you think: ‘How can I be absolutely certain that a paedophile doesn’t drive on that bit of tarmac?’ You can’t. That’s the thing with the internet. When you’ve got these controlled things like Facebook, of course they could clamp down on some of that stuff. But also, it means they can manipulate the whole of society. And we can’t be in that position.”

Irvine adds that MaidSafe’s encryption is no more developed than the kind already used by the net’s criminal elements. “We’re not enabling them. We’re enabling everybody else,” he says. He says he would encourage the police to go on to the network and use the same detection and entrapment methods they already use on the so-called dark web, where users can stay anonymous.

Once MaidSafe is up and running, there will be very little any government or authority can do about it: “We can’t stop the network if we start it. If anyone turned round and said: ‘You need to stop that,’ we couldn’t. We’d have to go round to people’s houses and switch off their computers. That’s part of the whole thing. The network is like a cyber-brain; almost a lifeform in itself. And once you start it, that’s it.”

Before my trip to Scotland, I tell him, I spent whole futile days signing up to some of the decentralised social networks that already exist – Steemit, Diaspora, Mastadon – and trying to approximate the kind of experience I can easily get on, say, Twitter or Facebook. They were largely so underpopulated that there’s been no incentive to go back. Won’t the same thing happen to MaidSafe?

“It might,” he says.

But is he optimistic or pessimistic? “Oh, this won’t fail. It won’t. If you ask me: ‘Will this be the future?’ … absolutely. Not necessarily my version, but a version of a completely decentralised network based on privacy, security, freedom – that will exist.”

One big focus of the conversation about a different internet are cryptocurrencies and so-called blockchain technology, whose most spectacular story so far has been the rise of Bitcoin. All users of a cryptocurrency have their own “private key”, which unlocks the opportunity to buy and sell it. Instead of financial transactions having to be hosted by a bank – or, for that matter, an online service such as PayPal – a payment in a cryptocurrency is validated by a network of computers using a shared algorithim. A record of the transaction is added to an online ledger – the blockchain – in a way that is unalterable. And herein lie two potential breakthroughs.

One, according to some cryptocurrency enthusiasts, is a means of securing and protecting people’s identities that doesn’t rely on remotely stored passwords. The other is a hope that we can leave behind intermediaries such as Uber and eBay, and allow buyers and sellers to deal directly with each other.

Blockstack, a startup based in New York, aims to bring blockchain technology to the masses. Like MaidSafe, its creators aim to build a new internet, and a 13,000-strong crowd of developers are already working on apps that either run on the platform Blockstack has created, or use its features. OpenBazaar is an eBay-esque service, up and running since November last year, which promises “the world’s most private, secure, and liberating online marketplace”. Casa aims to be an decentralised alternative to Airbnb; Guild is a would-be blogging service that bigs up its libertarian ethos and boasts that its founders will have “no power to remove blogs they don’t approve of or agree with”.

Muneeb Ali, 36, is originally from Islamabad in Pakistan and is one of Blockstack’s two founders. He is an admirer of Snowden, who, in March, will be the star attraction at a Blockstack event in Berlin.

An initial version of Blockstack is already up and running. Even if data is stored on conventional drives, servers and clouds, thanks to its blockchain-based “private key” system each Blockstack user controls the kind of personal information we currently blithely hand over to Big Tech, and has the unique power to unlock it. “That’s something that’s extremely powerful – and not just because you know your data is more secure because you’re not giving it to a company,” he says. “A hacker would have to hack a million people if they wanted access to their data.”

David Irvine of Maidsafe. Photograph: Maidsafe

It’s significant that Blockstack isn’t based in northern California: Ali says: “The culture in Silicon Valley isn’t the right fit for us.” Even though the startup has attracted millions of dollars from its backers – who include venture capitalists – Ali insists they are in for the long haul.

Back in Malmö, Balkan recalls that Zuckerberg put out a new year statement in which he tried to sound a note of sympathy with people who have grown sick of an online world controlled by a few big players. “In the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralising force,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies – and governments using technology to watch their citizens – many people now believe technology only centralises power rather than decentralises it.” He mentioned encryption and cryptocurrencies, and said he was “interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies and how best to use them in our services”.

Balkan marvels. “How does that work with a huge entity like Facebook, that just sucks power up?” he asks. “It’s absolute spin.”

He and Kalbag have much more modest ambitions, and that, he says, is the whole point: if we want a more diverse, open, decentralised internet, developers are going to have to wave goodbye to the idea of huge platforms that will supposedly make them rich.

“We’ve kind of been brainwashed into this Silicon Valley idea of success,” he says. “You know: ‘Unless you’ve made a billion dollars and you’re on the cover of Forbes magazine as the next king, you’re not successful.’ With our projects, no one’s going to make a billion dollars if we’re successful – not me, not Laura, not anyone.”

He drains the last of his coffee and checks his phone. “And if we do, you’ll know something’s gone wrong. We’ll have screwed up.”

Lead image: Punk rock internet illustration. Illustration: Andy Martin/Heart

The post The punk rock internet – how DIY ​​rebels ​are working to ​replace the tech giants appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Mariana Mazzucato¹ has an article in MIT Technology Review titled Let’s make private data into a public good.

Let’s not.

While Mariana’s criticisms of surveillance capitalism are spot on, her proposed remedy is as far from the mark as it possibly could be.

Yes, surveillance capitalism is bad

Mariana starts off by making the case, and rightly so, that surveillance capitalists² like Google or Facebook “are making huge profits from technologies originally created with taxpayer money.”

Google’s algorithm was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, and the internet came from DARPA funding. The same is true for touch-screen displays, GPS, and Siri. From this the tech giants have created de facto monopolies while evading the type of regulation that would rein in monopolies in any other industry. And their business model is built on taking advantage of the habits and private information of the taxpayers who funded the technologies in the first place.

There’s nothing to argue with here. It’s a succinct summary of the tragedy of the commons that lies at the heart of surveillance capitalism and, indeed, that of neoliberalism itself.

Mariana also accurately describes the business model of these companies, albeit without focusing on the actual mechanism by which the data is gathered to begin with³:

Facebook’s and Google’s business models are built on the commodification of personal data, transforming our friendships, interests, beliefs, and preferences into sellable propositions. … The so-called sharing economy is based on the same idea.

So far, so good.

But then, things quickly take a very wrong turn:

There is indeed no reason why the public’s data should not be owned by a public repository that sells the data to the tech giants, rather than vice versa.

There is every reason why we shouldn’t do this.

Mariana’s analysis is fundamentally flawed in two respects: First, it ignores a core injustice in surveillance capitalism – violation of privacy – that her proposed recommendation would have the effect of normalising. Second, it perpetuates a fundamental false dichotomy ­– that there is no other way to design technology than the way Silicon Valley and surveillance capitalists design technology – which then means that there is no mention of the true alternatives: free and open, decentralised, interoperable ethical technologies.

No, we must not normalise violation of privacy

The core injustice that Mariana’s piece ignores is that the business model of surveillance capitalists like Google and Facebook is based on the violation of a fundamental human right. When she says “let’s not forget that a large part of the technology and necessary data was created by all of us” it sounds like we voluntarily got together to create a dataset for the common good by revealing the most intimate details of our lives through having our behaviour tracked and aggregated. In truth, we did no such thing.

We were farmed.

We might have resigned ourselves to being farmed by the likes of Google and Facebook because we have no other choice but that’s not a healthy definition of consent by any standard. If 99.99999% of all investment goes into funding surveillance-based technology (and it does), then people have neither a true choice nor can they be expected to give any meaningful consent to being tracked and profiled. Surveillance capitalism is the norm today. It is mainstream technology. It’s what we funded and what we built.

It is also fundamentally unjust.

There is a very important reason why the public’s data should not be owned by a public repository that sells the data to the tech giants because it’s not the public’s data, it is personal data and it should never have been collected by a third party to begin with. You might hear the same argument from people who say that we must nationalise Google or Facebook.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no! The answer to the violation of personhood by corporations isn’t violation of personhood by government, it’s not violating personhood to begin with.

That’s not to say that we cannot have a data commons. In fact, we must. But we must learn to make a core distinction between data about people and data about the world around us.

Data about people ≠ data about rocks

Our fundamental error when talking about data is that we use a single term when referring to both information about people as well as information about things. And yet, there is a world of difference between data about a rock and data about a human being. I cannot deprive a rock of its freedom or its life, I cannot emotionally or physically hurt a rock, and yet I can do all those things to people. When we posit what is permissible to do with data, if we are not specific in whether we are talking about rocks or people, one of those two groups is going to get the short end of the stick and it’s not going to be the rocks.

Here is a simple rule of thumb:

Data about individuals must belong to the individuals themselves. Data about the commons must belong to the commons.

I implore anyone working in this area – especially professors writing books and looking to shape public policy – to understand and learn this core distinction.

There is an alternative

I mentioned above that the second fundamental flaw in Mariana’s article is that it perpetuates a false dichotomy. That false dichotomy is that the Silicon Valley/surveillance capitalist model of building modern/digital/networked technology is the only possible way to build modern/digital/networked technology and that we must accept it as a given.

This is patently false.

It’s true that all modern technology works by gathering data. That’s not the problem. The core question is “who owns and controls that data and the technology by which it is gathered?” The answer to that question today is “corporations do.” Corporations like Google and Facebook own and control our data not because of some inevitable characteristic of modern technology but because of how they designed their technology in line with the needs of their business model.

Specifically, surveillance capitalists like Google and Facebook design proprietary and centralised technologies to addict people and lock them in. In such systems, your data originates in a place you do not own. On “other people’s computers,” as the Free Software Foundation calls it. Or on “the cloud” as we colloquially reference it.

The crucial point here, however, is that this toxic way of building modern technology is not the only way to design and build modern technology.

We know how to build free and open, decentralised, and interoperable systems where your data originates in a place that you – as an individual – own and control.

In other words, we know how to build technology where the algorithms remain on your own devices and where you are not farmed for personal information to begin with.

To say that we must take as given that some third party will gather our personal data is to capitulate to surveillance capitalism. It is to accept the false dichotomy that either we have surveillance-based technology or we forego modern technology.

This is neither true, nor necessary, nor acceptable.

We can and we must build ethical technology instead.

Regulate and replace

As I’m increasingly hearing these defeatist arguments that inherently accept surveillance as a foregone conclusion of modern technology, I want to reiterate what a true solution looks like.

There are two things we must do to create an ethical alternative to surveillance capitalism:

1. 1. Regulate the shit out of surveillance capitalists.The goal here is to limit their abuses and harm. This includes limiting their ability to gather, process, and retain data, as well as fining them meaningful amounts and even breaking them up.⁴
   2. Fund and build ethical alternatives.In other words, replace them with ethical alternatives.Ethical alternatives do exist today but they do so mainly thanks to the extraordinary personal efforts of disjointed bands of so-called DIY rebels.

Whether they are the punk rockers of the tech world or its ragamuffins – and perhaps a little bit of both – what is certain is that they lead a precarious existence on the fringes of mainstream technology. They rely on anything from personal finances to selling the things they make, to crowdfunding and donations – and usually combinations thereof – to etch out an existence that both challenges and hopes to alter the shape of mainstream technology (and thus society) to make it fairer, kinder, and more just.

While they build everything from computers and phones (Puri.sm) to federated social networks (Mastodon) and decentralised alternatives to the centralised Web (DAT), they do so usually with little or no funding whatsoever. And many are a single personal tragedy away from not existing at all.

Meanwhile, we use taxpayer money in the EU to fund surveillance-based startups. Startups, which, if they succeed will most likely be bought by larger US-based surveillance capitalists like Google and Facebook. If they fail, on the other hand, the European taxpayer foots the bill. Europe, bamboozled by and living under the digital imperialism of Silicon Valley, has become its unpaid research and development department.

This must change.

Ethical technology does not grow on trees. Venture capitalists will not fund it. Silicon Valley will not build it.

A meaningful counterpoint to surveillance capitalism that protects human rights and democracy will not come from China. If we fail to create one in Europe then I’m afraid that humankind is destined for centuries of feudal strife. If it survives the unsustainable trajectory that this social system has set it upon, that is.

If we want ethical technological infrastructure – and we should, because the future of our human rights, democracy, and quite possibly that of the species depends on it – then we must fund and build it.

The answer to surveillance capitalism isn’t to better distribute the rewards of its injustices or to normalise its practices at the state level.

The answer to surveillance capitalism is a socio-techno-economic system that is just at its core. To create the technological infrastructure for such a system, we must fund independent organisations from the common purse to work for the common good to build ethical technology to protect individual sovereignty and nurture a healthy commons.

Photo by JForth

The post Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve been elected to the DiEM25 Advisory Panel to help lead a new initiative with Renata Avila to craft DiEM25’s 7th pillar: a progressive tech policy for a democratic Europe. 

>Diem 25: The 7th pillar – a progressive tech policy that guarantees individual sovereignty and a healthy commons from ind.ie on Vimeo.

I’m joining the DiEM25 Advisory Panel to help lead a new initiative with Coordinating Collective member (and good friend and long-time ally) Renata Avila to craft the 7th pillar of DiEM25’s Progressive Agenda for Europe: An Internet of People.

Beyond surveillance capitalism

Today, we see a Europe in the throes of wholesale capitulation to the digital imperialism of Silicon Valley. We are worried to observe Europe’s growing dependence on the centralised, surveillance-based technologies of a handful of American platform monopolies that share an intimate relationship with the US government. This state of affairs doesn’t bode well for the individual sovereignty of Europe’s citizens or for the national sovereignty of Europe’s member states.

We also see, however, a unique potential in Europe – with its unique history, culture, and approach to human rights – to diverge from this current system of surveillance capitalism and mark its own progressive path ahead.

Progressive tech policy for a democratic Europe

The mission of our initiative is to start a Pan-European process, working together with members of the DiEM25 Network from across Europe, to draft a progressive tech policy for a democratic Europe.

DiEM 25: Next stop 2019? May 25-26, 2017 at the Volksbühne, Berlin

Our policy must achieve two important goals. First, in the short term, we must effectively regulate Silicon Valley’s abusive business model in Europe. Second, in the medium-to-long term, we must fund and create an ethical alternative to surveillance capitalism.

Imagine an Internet where everyone owns and controls their own space.

Our guiding principles in drafting the 7th pillar of the Progressive Agenda For Europe are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Four Freedoms of the Free Software, the Ethical Design Manifesto, the “Share Alike” philosophy of Creative Commons, and a profound respect for – and a desire to protect and encourage – individual sovereignty and a healthy commons as prerequisites for democracy and progressive internationalism.

An Internet of People

In the words of Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. A democratic Europe and a progressive internationalism cannot be achieved without democratic, progressive technological infrastructure.

We will take the first steps of drafting the 7th pillar in Berlin this Thursday.

The Internet of People imagines a decentralised, free and open, interoperable, sustainable, and democratic technology infrastructure for a democratic Europe and beyond. It is our progressive counter-narrative to the exploitative, centralised, and feudalistic mainstream narrative exported by Silicon Valley.

Imagine an Internet where everyone owns and controls their own space. Imagine a world where the ability to do this is acknowledged as a basic human right.

In such a world, all of your smart devices – the various technological extensions of your self – connect to your own sovereign node (and to each other) instead of to faceless corporations. That is the Internet of People. The Internet of People is an Internet that respects and protects your human rights and the integrity of your self. It is a basic prerequisite for personhood in the digital age.

It starts in Berlin on May 25th…

We will take the first steps of drafting the 7th pillar in Berlin this Thursday as DiEM25 meets to answer the important question: How can we take our European New Deal to the ballot box in every corner of Europe, and make it a reality?

Renata and I will be holding a 90-minute panel on the 25th to introduce the core philosophy and goals of the 7th pillar. During the first-half of our panel, we will be joined for short presentations by representatives from Free Software Foundation Europe and The Commons Network, Polina Malaja and Sophie Bloemen. The remainder of the panel will be an open round-table discussion with DiEM25 members. In the evening, Renata and I will take to the main stage to introduce the initiative alongside DiEM25 founders Yanis Varoufakis and Srećko Horvat.

Renata and I look forward to working together with the DiEM25 Network across Europe and beyond to craft a progressive, democratic, inspiring European vision to counter Silicon Valley’s neoliberal narrative of surveillance capitalism.

Here’s to an Internet of People, a democratic Europe, and to progressive internationalism.

About the author: Aral Balkan is an activist, designer, and developer. He’s ⅓ of Ind.ie, a tiny social enterprise working for social justice in the digital age.

The post Introducing the 7th pillar of DiEM25: An Internet of People – a progressive tech policy for a democratic Europe. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

originally posted on the blog of Aral Balkan

18 Feb, 2017 Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto outlines his vision for a centralised global colony ruled by the Silicon Valley oligarchy. I say we must do the exact opposite and create a world with individual sovereignty and a healthy commons.

Mark Zuckerberg has released a manifesto titled Building Global Community in which he details how he – one of the top 8 billionaires in the world – and his byzantine American/multinational corporation, Facebook Incorporated, are going to solve all of the world’s problems.

In his grand vision for humanity, Mark keeps returning to how Facebook fundamentally “brings us closer together” by “connecting friends and families.” What Mark fails to mention is that Facebook does not connect people together; Facebook connects people to Facebook, Inc.

Facebook: the myth
Mark wants you to think Facebook connects you to each other.

Facebook: the reality
Facebook connects you to Facebook, Inc.

Facebook’s business model is to be the man in the middle; to track every move you, your family, and your friends make, to store all that information indefinitely, and continuously analyse it to understand you better in order to exploit you by manipulating you for financial and political gain.

Facebook isn’t a social network, it is a scanner that digitises human beings. It is, for all intents and purposes, the camera that captures your soul. Facebook’s business is to simulate you and to own and control your simulation, thereby owning and controlling you.

Where Mark asks you to trust him to be a benevolent king, I say let us build a world without kings.

I call the business model of Facebook, Google, and the venture-capital-funded long tail of Silicon Valley startups “people farming”. Facebook is a factory farm for human beings. And Mark’s manifesto is nothing more than a panicked billionaire’s latest sophomoric attempt to decorate an unpalatable business model grounded in the abuse of human rights with faux moral purpose to stave off regulation and justify what is unabashedly a colonial desire: to create a global fiefdom by connecting all of us to Facebook, Inc.

Avoiding a Global Colony

Mark’s manifesto isn’t about building a global community, it is about building a global colony – with himself as king and with his corporation and the Silicon Valley oligarchy as the court.

Facebook wants us to think that it is a park when it’s actually a shopping mall.

It is not the job of a corporation to “develop the social infrastructure for community” as Mark wants to do. Social infrastructure must belong to the commons, not to giant monopolistic corporations like Facebook. The reason we find ourselves in this mess with ubiquitous surveillance, filter bubbles, and fake news (propaganda) is precisely due to the utter and complete destruction of the public sphere by an oligopoly of private infrastructure that poses as public space.

Facebook wants us to think that it is a park when it’s actually a shopping mall. The last thing we need is more privately owned centralised digital infrastructure to solve the problems created by an unprecedented concentration of power, wealth, and control in a tiny number of hands. It’s way past time we started funding and building the digital equivalents of parks in the digital age instead of building ever-larger shopping malls.

Others have written detailed critiques of Mark’s manifesto. I will not repeat their efforts here. Instead, I want to focus on how we can build a world that stands in stark contrast to the one in Mark’s vision. A world in which we – individuals – instead of corporations, have ownership and control of our selves. In other words, where we have individual sovereignty.

Where Mark asks you to trust him to be a benevolent king, I say let us build a world without kings. Where Mark’s vision is rooted in colonialism and the perpetuation of centralised power and control, mine is based on individual sovereignty and a healthy, distributed commons.

Individual Sovereignty and the Cyborg Self

We can no longer afford the luxury of not understanding the nature of the self in the digital age. The very existence of our freedoms and democracy depend on it.

We are (and we have been for a while now) cyborgs.

We must resist any attempt to reduce people to property with the greatest of fervour.

In that, I don’t mean to conjure up the stereotypical representation of cyborgs as prevalent in science fiction wherein technology is implanted within biological tissue. Instead, I offer a more general definition in which the term applies to any extension of our minds and our biological selves using technology. While technological implants are certainly feasible, possible, and demonstrable, the main way in which we extend ourselves with technology today is not through implants but explants.

We are sharded beings; the sum total of our various aspects as contained within our biological beings as well as the myriad of technologies that we use to extend our biological abilities.

We must constitutionally protect the dignity and sanctity of the extended self.

Once we understand this, it follows that we must extend the protections of the self beyond our biological borders to encompass those technologies by which we extend our selves. Wherefore, any attempt to own, control, and trade in these technologies by third parties is an attempt to own, control, and trade in the constitutional elements of people. It is, in short, an attempt to own, control, and trade in people.

Needless to say, we must resist any attempt to reduce people to property with the greatest of fervour. For to not do so is to give our tacit consent to a new slavery: one in which we do not trade in the biological aspects of human beings but their digital aspects. The two, of course, do not exist apart and are not truly separable when manipulation of one necessarily affects the other.

Beyond Surveillance Capitalism

Once we understand that our relationship to technology is not one of master/butler but cyborg/organ; once we understand that we extend our selves with technology and that our technology and data lie within the boundaries of the self, then we must insist that the constitutional protections of the self that we have enshrined within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and implemented within our myriad of national laws are extended to protect the cyborg self.

It also follows, then, that any attempt to violate the boundaries of the self must be considered an assault on the cyborg self. It is exactly this abuse that constitutes the everyday business model of Facebook, Google, and mainstream Silicon Valley-inspired technology today. In this model, which Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, what we have lost is individual sovereignty. People have once again become property – albeit in digital, not biological, form.

To counter this, we must build new infrastructure to enable people to regain individual sovereignty. Those aspects of the infrastructure that concern the world around us must belong to the commons and those parts that concern people – that make up the organs of our cyborg selves – must be owned and controlled by individuals.

So, for example, smart city architecture must be in the commons and data about the world around us (“data about rocks”) must belong to the commons, while your smart car, smart phone, smart watch, smart teddy bear, etc., and the data they collect (“data about people”) must belong to you.

An Internet of people

Imagine a world where everyone has their own space on the Internet, funded from the commons. This is a private space (an organ of the cyborg self) that all our so-called smart devices (also organs) link into.

Instead of thinking of this space as a personal cloud, we must consider it a special, permanent node within a peer-to-peer structure wherein all our various devices (organs) connect to one another. Pragmatically, this permanent node is used to guarantee findability (initially using domain names) and availability (as it is hosted/always on) as we transition from the client/server architecture of the current Web to the peer-to-peer architecture of the next generation Internet.

An Internet of people.

The infrastructure we build must be funded from the commons, belong to the commons, and be interoperable. The services themselves must be constructed and hosted by a plethora of individual organisations – not governments or corporate behemoths – working with interoperable protocols and competing to provide the best service possible to the people they serve. Not coincidentally, this severely limited scope of corporate function marks the entirety of a corporation’s role within a democracy as I see it.

The sole purpose of a corporation should be to compete with other organisations to provide the best service to the people it serves. This is in stark contrast to the wide remit corporations have today to attract people (whom they call “users”) under false pretences (free services wherein they are the product being sold) only to addict them, entrap them with lock-in using proprietary technology, farm them, manipulate their behaviour, and exploit them for financial and political gain.

In the corporatocracy of today, we – individuals – serve corporations. In the democracy of tomorrow, corporations must serve us.

The service providers must, of course, be free to extend the capabilities of the system as long as they share their improvements back into the commons (“share alike”), thus avoiding lock-in. For providing services above and beyond the core services funded from the commons, individual organisations may set prices for and charge for value-added services. In this way, we can build a healthy economy of competition on top of an ethically sound core instead of the system of monopolies we have today on top of an ethically rotten core. And we can do so without embroiling the whole system in convoluted government bureaucracy that would stifle experimentation, competition, and the organic, decentralised evolution of the system.

A healthy economy built upon an ethical core.

Interoperability, free (as in freedom) technology with “share alike” licenses, a peer-to-peer architecture (as opposed to client/server), and a commons-funded core are the fundamental safeguards for preventing this new system from decaying into a new version of the monopolistic surveillance web we have today. They are how we avoid economies of scale and break the feedback loop between the accumulation of information and wealth that is the core driver of surveillance capitalism.

To be perfectly clear, we are not talking about a system that can flourish under the dictates of late-stage surveillance capitalism. It is a system, however, that can be constructed under present conditions to act as the bridge from that status quo to a sustainable, post-capitalist world.

Building the world you want to live in

In a talk I gave at a European Commission event in Rome recently, I told the audience that we must “build the world we want to live in.” For me, that is not a world owned and controlled by a handful of Silicon Valley oligarchs. It is a world with a healthy commons wherein we – as a community – collectively own and control those aspects of our existence that belong to us all and where we – as individuals – individually own and control those aspects of our existence that belong to our selves.

Imagine a world where you (and those you love) have democratic agency; where we all enjoy basic welfare, rights, and freedoms befitting cyborg dignity. Imagine a sustainable world freed of the destructive short-term greed of capitalism where we no longer reward sociopaths for finding ever more ruthless and destructive ways to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. Imagine a free world removed from the feedback loop of manufactured fear and ubiquitous surveillance that has us spiralling deeper into a fresh vortex of fascism. Imagine a world where we grant ourselves the mercy of an intellectually rewarding existence where we are free to explore the potential of our species among the stars.

That is the world that I wake up every day to work towards. Not because it is charitable. Not because I’m a philanthropist. In fact, for no reason at all other than because that is the world that I want to live in.

Aral Balkan is an activist, designer, and developer. He’s 1/3 of Ind.ie, a tiny social enterprise working for social justice in the digital age.

The post Encouraging individual sovereignty and a healthy commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

#OSFest15  –  May 21, 22:  Just a few steps into the main entry hall of Cabaret Sauvage, the site of the OuiShare 2015 event, was a large, black chalkboard. On the board there was a drawing of an elephant, and the phrase, “Share Your Elephant in the Room”. In case the expression “elephant in the room” isn’t familiar, it refers to a very obvious fact which nobody wants to talk about, one which is more convenient to politely ignore. I regret not taking a picture of that sign, because as the second and third days of OuiShareFest 2015 proceeded, it became clear that the elephant was loose in the room and, more importantly, lots of voices were calling him out.

Over the last two years, the buzz I’d heard about OuiShare Fest was that it was the place where the identity battle over the meaning and effect of the “sharing” and “collaborative” economies was being played out, at times centering on the use, or if you like, appropriation, of the term “sharing”. This year’s Fest seemed to bring out the deeper dichotomies underlying not only the nomenclature but the core characteristics and strategies of the widely varying forms of businesses and platforms represented and discussed onstage, on the grounds and online.

This year’s “zero-waste” policy requested that all participants refrain from casually distributing paper pamphlets and other materials, but at times I would have liked to have had access to some more take-away documentation, or at least links to the presentation slides online. One speaker, Yann Moulier-Boutang, a French economist, essayist and author of “Cognitive Capitalism”, delivered a highly detailed talk on “Basic Principles of Sharing Economics” that featured a lot of his views on the benefits of open licensing, the commons and public domain, but I’d need to see it again to get the most out of it. Michel de Kemmeter also gave a presentation on the value of intangible assets, and the need to build bridges with traditional corporations as funding collaborators, which would be great to review again. I’m looking forward to seeing the videos recorded by OuiShare and reviewing the many other talks I saw, and missed.

Aral Balkan of ind.ie, one of Friday morning’s opening speakers, is the author of a widely shared criticism of the venture capital elephant hiding behind the social media platform Ello. He had more than one incisive comment to share during OSFest15, including criticisms of the dark side of the sharing economy. “Remove the feel-good yoga/spiritualism BS & you’re left with venture capital & the ugly face of Silicon Valley digital feudalism” he tweeted during the Fest. Izabella Kaminska, who moderated the debate on day one, blogged about the effect of this digital feudalism in her recent post where she claims, “…the uncomfortable truth is that the sharing economy is a rent-extraction business of the highest middle-man order.”  Not all presentations or online reactions were this critical, of course, but there were more than enough to stir up interesting conversation.

Talking with people outside the tents made me feel a bit like an ambassador for the commons. I chatted with dozens of people about the Goteo.org mission of crowdfunding oriented towards open and social returns, and also spoke about the other commons-oriented projects I’m involved with, Guerrilla Translation and Commons Transition / P2P Foundation. Together these make up a commons-oriented family of resources working in cooperation and solidarity, well aligned with topics from the program’s workshops like P2P practices, open source, participative government, and citizen engagement.  Several people said that these were among their favorite commons oriented projects and initiatives. Others were happy to hear more about Goteo’s scope and vision, including our concept of cloudfunding and our recent reduction in campaign commission to 4%. If you didn’t get a printed brochure from me (shh!), have a look at our online edition, and in any case please don’t hesitate to get in touch about how to join our efforts.

Finally, one of the best “one-liners” I heard at the fest was delivered by Joe Ross during a workshop held by Joe along with Charles Eisenstein, Etienne Hayem, and Brett Scott. The workshop was called, “After Capitalism: Let’s Reinvent Everything”, and called upon the participants to do some introspection and share stories about a moment that changed their views about money and value. Joe, in the opening of the workshop, said the following: “Transition is capitalism in a t-shirt; what I want to see is transformation.” That seems to sum up a lot of views expressed, rather than repressed, at the 2015 OuiShare Fest.

The post OuiShare 2015, From Transition to Transformation: The Elephant in the Room appeared first on P2P Foundation.