We said this at the very beginning from bitcoin: it represents the first socially sovereign currency at scale, and moreover it is strongly based on open source / commons dynamics through its open code. But that social sovereignty is immediately and very strongly embedded in another principle: that of the sovereignity and independence of the corporate class from any form of social and political regulation. It’s a declaration of independence from the market sector, which sees itself as society, since for the propertarians, the market IS civil society, and society is simply the sum of atomistic relations of individuals. If we want to make crypto innovation work for society as a whole, which is the whole that actually co-produces individuals and needs its own care, then the powerful but suppressed principles of social sovereignty must be literated from market totalitarian thinking and practice. This critique also applies to the blockchain. Yes, we can tweak design of the blockchain to serve the needs of the commons, just as we used the experience of corporate platforms to build platform cooperatives as an alternative.

Sarah Manski complexifies this basic dualism into five potential scenarios of the future, which are all already present in seed form in the design itself of the blockchain; the scenario of libertarian individualism, the scenario of corporate sovereignity the scenario of governmental control, but also crucially, the blockchain can also be adapted to cooperative sovereignty, through its potential as a major tool for building a global technological commonwealth.

No Gods, No Masters, No Coders? The Future of Sovereignty in a Blockchain World.  Law Critique (2018)

Authors: Sarah Manski and Ben Manski (Published on Academia.edu)

Individual Sovereignty

The technical politics of the Bitcoin blockchain are often described as libertarian in part because the design choices of this first blockchain emphasize the technology’s tendencies toward liquidity and decentralization. The builders of blockchain technology emerged from the self-identified cypherpunk movement of cryptologists and coders; Satoshi Nakamoto was a member.

As Nakamoto wrote in an email to early collaborator Hal Finney, ‘It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly’ (Nakamoto 2008b).

Back when Satoshi had first launched the software, his writings were drily focused on the technical specifications of the programming. But after the first few weeks, Satoshi began emphasizing the broader ideological motivations for the software to help win over a broader audience. (Popper 2015 p. 30) Those economic libertarians who identify as ‘Ancap’ (or ‘anarcho-capitalist’) claim society best facilitates individual will in a free-market economy free from regulation by states or large corporations. The discourse of Bitcoin enthusiasts is revealing: the use of the term ‘mining’ to describe blockchain maintenance and ‘coin’ to describe a chain of digital signatures speaks to their fondness for gold. At the same time, libertarians generally share a faith in progressive technological determinism, believing that society can be improved and that social relationships and institutions can function more effectively through the use of new technological tools. Blockchain forms, such as Bitcoin, institutionalize this ideal by enabling a form of trustless direct exchange among individual property owners. Applications such as uPort ID seek to wrest control of personal data from major corporations and governments, as well as to provide privacy protections to individuals (ConsenSys 2015). Evidence is widespread and multiplying of efforts by technologists to use blockchain technology to challenge existing hierarchical institutional forms with peer-to-peer networks. It seems questionable, however, whether large numbers of people — as citizens, consumers, producers, etc. — will embrace a total shift from regulatory oversight toward a disaggregated society of autonomous individuals picking and choosing between peer-to-peer legal codes of arbitration and enforcement of agreements.

Popular Sovereignty

After more than two centuries of building a world beyond capitalist logics, the cooperative movement is well positioned to make the most of blockchain’s tendencies toward globality, liquidity, permanence, decentralization and future focus. Through these, blockchain is beginning to convert the long standing vision of a popular ‘cooperative commonwealth’ into the actual construction of a ‘global technological commonwealth’ enacted through the use of advanced exchange, communication, and governance technologies (Manski 2017). There are many current examples of applications that make the global decentralized exercise of a popular sovereignty possible. Blockchain for Change has developed Fummi, an application that uses blockchain’s immutability and globality to store digital identities for those lacking permanent homes (Schiller 2017). Applications that make use of blockchain’s tendency toward future focus (Aitken 2017)—via the utility of stored autonomous self-reinforcing agency (SASRA) to handle contract administration and management — can be found in the development of AgriLedger for agricultural cooperatives (Hammerich 2018) and of the Pylon Network for energy cooperatives (Klenergy 2017).

Decentralized commons-based currencies such as Duniter and Faircoin (Bauwens 2018) are now in use; these have been coded to reduce inequality via pro-vision of a Universal Dividend (also known as Basic Income) and other features. And emerging on the horizon are a series of next generation technology platforms designed to bypass bottlenecks and inequalities contained within current block-chain architectures; the most notable of these is Holochain (Brock and Harris-Braun 2017).We think blockchain is a powerful tool for the cooperative movement in its quest for economic democracy because many of blockchain’s tendencies toward globality, permanence, decentralization and future focus move parallel to ongoing cooperative projects. Additionally, we see in the distributed and secure structure of block-chain a limited safeguard against suppression should capitalist states move against blockchain-based pro-democracy initiatives.

Activist use of simple virtual private network (VPN) or Proxy systems to access blockchain applications is much less vulnerable to state attack than has proven the case for many centralized and ‘above ground’ social movement organizations. To the extent that the construction of a global technological commonwealth faces obstacles, these lie not in the tendencies of blockchain technology but instead in the somewhat insular path dependencies of the cooperative movement itself. We are uncertain as to whether democratizers will prove capable of creating a culture sufficiently open, user-friendly, expansionist, and politically ambitious to maximize the possibilities offered by blockchain.

Technological Sovereignty

Technocracies are characterized by powerful actors and institutions able to maintain unequal positions of power through their use and control of technical knowledge. In tending toward ethereality, blockchains favour those with superior technological knowledge and positionality. Blockchain coders enjoy a comparative advantage over lay users because in calibrating blockchain over multiple prototype iterations, coders establish a lasting frame of reference through which they imagine alternatives and make design choices. This agency can be used toward different ends—as a means of resistance to capitalism, or as a means to personal profit, or as path to power consolidation. Notably, the early days of blockchain coding have seen an organizational commitment to open source. Open source code is co-created in a cooperative manner and appears to be dominating the core development of blockchain. This may be true because blockchain coding is more demanding than other types of programming and because group participation in creating blockchain-based applications is inherently more purposive than individual participation in development. As blockchain applications become more lucrative, however, we are witnessing a growing cast of corporate in-house blockchain developers and blockchain developer billionaires. At least one tendency of blockchain technology — future focus — may be leading toward a sovereignty not of technologists but of the technology itself. The development of SASRA could enable the creation of blockchain businesses that run themselves with distributed and decentralized profits, management, and services. These independent DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), would automatically leverage manifold smart contracts, thereby eliminating the lawyers, accountants and bureaucrats whose job it is to confirm the trustworthiness and legal standing of contracts between parties (Dew 2015). One example is Colony (Rea et al. 2018), which is testing a decentralized platform for work collaboration. Overall — whether in the technology or the technologists, or in service of democracy, capital, or self — we see little question but that blockchain technology tends in every way toward some form of technological sovereignty.

Corporate Sovereignty

With their abilities to mobilize unmatched financial resources, major corporations are exploiting blockchain’s tendencies toward verifiability, globality, liquidity, permanence, and future focus to forcibly adapt the technology to their own purposes. For example, Kodak, Amazon, Facebook and other corporations have identified the potential benefits of creating their own platform cryptocurrencies. Blockchain cryptocurrencies can include smart contracts that automatically dole out the company’s currency as a reward for developers who build apps on its platform or users who engage in desired behaviour. This kind of corporate ‘token economy’ has the flavour of a traditional company town; in this case the owner of the online space is the sovereign. And corporations are extraordinarily bad sovereigns (Lessig 2006). Indeed, already functioning corporate sovereignties such as Google claim and expand their exclusive sovereign territory by absorbing existing spaces (Bratton 2016 p. 144). The introduction of blockchain’s powers of verifiability and permanence could further the degree of data granularity captured and monetized by these corporate platforms. All of this has the immediate effect of strengthening hierarchies, centralizing power, exacerbating inequality, and generally weakening democ-racy. Furthermore, as some of the most advantaged players in the world system, corporations enjoy a significant head start in the race to program their logics into mainstream blockchain applications, as well as the capacity to enact state policies that block new applications threatening future disintermediation. Where the environmental economics literature describes ‘technology forcing’ as technological development driven by regulatory pressure, we see a similar process underway in the corporatization of blockchain toward the ends of corporate sovereignty.”

Techno-totalitarian State Sovereignty

Many have claimed that blockchain technology will inevitably weaken the nation state, and in the final analysis, it may. Yet at the moment, national and transnational state institutions are actively working to support and regulate favoured types of block-chain activity and otherwise, where blockchain applications are disfavoured, ‘to regu-late it out of existence’ (Nicolaci da Costa 2018). They are going about this by criminally investigating initial coin offering (or ‘ICOs’) (De 2018), demanding currency exchanges turn over user information (Paul 2018), enacting capital gains taxes on cryptocurrency trades (Bernard 2018), criminalizing non-state cryptocurrencies (Iyer and Anand 2018), and more. At the same time, major powers such as China, Russia, Japan, and the United States, as well as regional technology leaders like Uruguay, Estonia, Slovenia, and Kenya—as well as subsidiary states—are all jockeying for comparative strategic advantage in the development and deployment of new blockchain technologies (Tapscott and Tapscott 2016).Such interventions signal the possibilities for states to expand their reach. In block-chain’s tendencies toward verifiability, globality, permanence, and future focus, state actors are finding greater capacities to intervene globally in the daily lives of individuals. These expanded capacities are making possible the emergence of new technologi-cal totalitarian forms of state sovereignty. To begin with, states cannot easily control what they cannot measure, and a blockchain-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) amplified by artificial intelligence furthers the degree with which states can monitor the material and social world. The rapidly expanding IoT is expected to more than triple in size by 2020 to nearly 21 billion devices (Stravridis and Weinstein 2016). When there is a tiny blockchain-connected chip embedded in each material object with which we interact, state institutions will assuredly seek to monitor and discipline the personal, political, and economic activities of the many. This prediction should not be controversial. Political parties in power regularly use targeted voter suppression technologies to gain partisan political advantage (Palast 2000; Norris 2014; Simon 2016). Police forces use technology to engage in ‘predictive policing’ that disproportionately targets communities of colour (Jouvenal 2016; Winston 2018). State welfare agencies use technology to track and restrict how food assistance money is spent or pension fraud or error (Templeton 2016; UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser 2016). The Chinese state is moving to a whole new level of state control with the creation of a national reputation system ranking individuals based on their economic and social status (Chinese State Council 2014). Altogether, recent history gives us reason to expect that state interventions into the development of blockchain technology are more likely to lead in a totalitarian rather than democratizing direction.

No Gods No Masters No Coders the Future shared by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Photo by Okinawa Soba (Rob)

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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

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