Living in Asia in the late 90s, I spent time in countries that were then considered “developing” economies. Textbooks were filled with prognostications about the potential growth and downfall of these places but no bar chart captured the terrifying hilarity of driving an hour outside of Seoul at high speed in a brand new sedan on unpaved roads and only potholes and feral animals to navigate by. Technology was tangibly out of sync with infrastructure. When something blocked the road drivers veered onto the front steps of houses to get around it. Parking was wherever you feel like it, and parked cars were often rendered inaccessible due to other people’s feelings about parking. Disagreements were resolved the old-fashioned way, with pointing, yelling, and threat of fists. Over time, enough pedestrians were casualties and enough expensive tires were blown in potholes that laws became necessary, as did the paving of roads. The automobile is no less amazing because society set a speed limit. We mitigate and retard technology where it threatens and outpaces us. This is how we civilize our innovations.

The most poignant irony of the Information Age is the internet’s role in restructuring our relationship to politics. In CITIZENFOUR, Edward Snowden avowed his intent to end the tyranny of the snooping government, but technocratic paternalism is equally invasive and it’s built into the digital realm. Complicated legal documents pop up at the outset of a business relationship and people with no legal background are conditioned to move ahead with a trust us one-click “Agree.” Our relationship to intelligent technology is best portrayed by the routine updates we tacitly agree to without reading or understanding what they entail. I Agree to whatever you’re about to load onto my phone or into my computer, agree to what you think is best for this device and my use of it, agree without stipulation, agree without working knowledge, agree because not agreeing seems time-wasting and foolish and questioning is beyond my technical ability. I always agree with you because everyone else is agreeing with you so it must be okay. I always agree with you because I don’t know why I should disagree.

This habitual agreement has proved deadly to the exchange of real information. The technocracy devised the fastest, most appealing method for securing a user, and internet users subsequently became desensitized to the act of giving away their rights. The repetitive process has numbed healthy suspicion of any organization that demands legal agreement to a loss of personal agency. Those internet service agreements are not there to protect individuals, they are documents created by expensive legal teams to ensure a company has no responsibility to the consumer. If these statements aren’t disturbing enough, stretch them to apply to the government in the shocking months and years after 9/11. The PATRIOT Act was the federal government’s service agreement, and the majority of the American people agreed to it without understanding what they were signing away.

Fourteen years on, perhaps the greatest misstep in rectifying our mistake is to begin with privacy. Loss of privacy is an end result. Privacy can be protected, it can be violated, but it cannot be given. That notion is a falsehood born of Victorian manners — I’ll give you some privacy — which preempt uncomfortable directives: Leave the room. Get off the line. Turn your head. Don’t read my emails. I need my privacy. The sci-fi notion of “mindreading” is terrifying precisely because it violates the only space on earth that belongs entirely to us. When we communicate with people, through talking, writing, or touch, we consciously extend that private space to include others. A violation of private space is a form of mindreading. In building society around the digital world, we’ve ceded a massive amount of private space to move in safely. The only recourse to learning your boyfriend has read your journal is to hide it in a new place, but the only recourse to discovering people can hack your emails is to stop writing anything sensitive or private at all. By necessity, we’ve retreated inward. Our truly private worlds are almost entirely interior now. That loss of intimacy has already alienated us from one another. Unable to safely extend a hand or share a thought, our knowledge of people stops with avatars and public text. We can’t know people’s deeper feelings and they can’t know ours. There’s nowhere safe to talk. We are alienated.

In Citizenfour, Glenn Greenwald asked Edward Snowden why he would risk imprisonment — the obliteration of privacy. In doing so, Greenwald identified the one circumstance where personal agency is taken away. That the cyber debate revolves around the give and take of privacy tells us that we’re already in a prison of sorts. To get out, we need to reestablish laws and agreement. Not the tacit agreement of accepting free stuff in exchange for unknown costs but overt agreement and expectation of legal recourse if our rights are violated. As political theorist Stephen Krasner observed in the early 1980s: “The Constitution is a document more concerned with limiting than enhancing the power of the state.” Modern lawmakers violated this precept into extinction with the USA PATRIOT Act. There’s no current expectation that the present government will give up the Patriot Act of their own volition, and no reason to believe the public has the will to make them. This is where most people drop out of the resistance movement and succumb to prison life.

The other misstep in solving the puzzle is a myopic focus on the future. Pew Research Center’s Net Threats survey asked over 1400 technology experts to predict “the most serious threats to the most effective accessing and sharing of content on the Internet.” With so much focus on forecasting, we’re overlooking a wealth of facts in the present. Ask a South Korean mother living 20 miles from the DMZ in 1997 what the most serious threat to her children’s lives was and most Americans would have predicted a doomsday fear of war with the north. However, it’s just as likely she would have said: “See that black sedan driving 50mph over my front doormat…?” Attention-grabbing headlines often obliterate imminent dangers. Public discussion leapfrogs over what we could solve today because no one wants to dig in and do the unglamorous work of painting a dotted line down the center of the road. (Put another way: Why isn’t Pew asking these 1400 experts to identify today’s most solvable problem and offer a specific solution? That’s 1400 solutions right there.)

If technology is responsible for creating a state of alienation then the government is guilty of capitalizing on that alienation. When politicians appeal to people’s confusion over new technology, they perpetuate a dangerous myth that people can separate themselves from the digital age. Lindsey Graham’s opinion on cyber surveillance is useless if he doesn’t understand how Americans use email or why they might be upset that those emails are intercepted and read by government officials. Perhaps he’d like to turn his diary over to the CIA and see how that feels. His vote on privacy legislation would certainly be made with the necessary wisdom.

America is a world leader in computer technology and innovation. Every member of Congress, and certainly the next president, should be knowledgeable about computer technology. America’s elite governing body must be prepared to debate cyber. My 90-year-old grandmother has been sending emails for years and she has a Facebook account. If United States senators can’t keep up with her computing skills then they don’t belong anywhere near the Capitol. The most important action Americans can take is to vote for cybersmart House and Senate representatives in upcoming elections.

As backwards as Washington seems, cybersmart politicians do exist. It’s clear from Hillary Clinton’s decision to house computer servers in her home during her tenure at State that she’s knowledgeable about cyber. Despite her public statement, Clinton’s use of personal servers has nothing to do with convenience and everything to do with security. Clinton owns her data. She also possesses depth of knowledge about what goes on in the intelligence community. I expect that is what drove her to take control of her privacy. If she wants to do the country a great service, in or out of the White House, she should make cyber legislation her top priority and level the playing field for citizens everywhere. It would unite the country to speak plainly about the state of our internet. Honest talk about cyber surveillance from a public figure who can speak to both sides of the debate would be a huge step forward for the country.

What will hopefully become apparent, to decision makers and citizens alike, is that both sides of the ideological struggle derive their power from the online participation of citizens. The present situation has left people with nowhere to turn for trustworthy leadership. The conditions that permitted fascism’s spread after World War I — post-war malaise, financial struggles, political distrust — tamp down people’s natural resistance to incremental loss of agency. The circumstances that facilitated the rapid creation of totalitarian governments in previously liberal, rational societies are cropping up exactly one century later. The situation is again ripe for machtergreifung, or power-grab.

Democratic European societies once made a desperate attempt to escape their status quo by funding unstable third parties with disastrous consequences. We are now seeing many radical ideas thrown into the mix, some backed by logical process, others attempting to shake people out of rhetoric fatigue. Reboot the Government! Reboot the Bible! Reboot the Brain! Drop one letter from those slogans and we’re deep in A.I. territory. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and their ilk proclaim their fear of the dark side of artificial intelligence with increasing regularity. We should be afraid too. There’s no precedent for the power vacuum created by a flaccid Congress and a disproportionately wealthy technology sector. This situation could pave the way for the first artificially intelligent leader. The engineering is getting there, and the rest would be…history.

Excerpted from a longform analysis of historical, theoretical and political factors in the ongoing “cyber” debate. Full piece here— https://medium.com/@paintedbird/the-information-game-aee16ecdfd0d