It seems we’re barely over the euphoria about social networking systems, which were said to bring on revolutions. Now we’re scared half to death about mass surveillance on the internet and its ability to suppress dissent.
Not that such concerns are new. In Discipline and Punish, the philosopher Foucault writes of “disciplinary societies” modelled on Jeremy Bentham’s prison design, the panopticon. Bentham’s concept enabled screws to see what every prisoner was up to, while keeping the screws invisible. Foucault suggests that all hierarchical institutions like the army, schools, hospitals and factories have evolved historically towards this form. Other social critics say it particularly fits the internet.
And it does seem this potential nightmare was tailor-made for internet denizens. In the wake of the 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks, Tom Brignall of Tennessee Tech warned of the potential for a “new panopticon”. The FBI was using a program named Carnivore to monitor e-mail randomly, he said. Brignall added: “The panopticon as a conceptual structure can be applied to any physical structure that provides the ability of those in a position of authority to monitor the ‘inmates’ without the ‘inmates’ knowing when they are being monitored. What is unique within the structure of the Internet is that it allows multiple layers of observation to occur such that the ‘inmates’ can become the observers of other ‘inmates’. In such a situation, no one knows who is the observer and who is the observed.”
Great: a computer system that enables us to scab on each other. Fears of this kind of detailed control are familiar enough. George Orwell’s 1984 was based on real societies, mainly the eastern bloc states.
While learning German in high school, I was given a pen pal from East Berlin. This meant I could later visit and assess East Germany’s fake socialism at first hand. It didn’t seem too bad at first, as long as you avoided looking at the notorious Berlin Wall. Then one day a Stasi agent confronted my pen pal on campus about our correspondence. Smirking, face to face: “You are writing to an American”.
He wanted to flaunt his power and the power of others like him. And so he might – East Germany was spy heaven. Not only did the state recruit perhaps half the population to spy on the other half; the Stasi even planted someone inside the West German cabinet, which is pretty good spying.
When the right time came for a democratic revolution, however, none of this mattered. The spooks went out of business. An East German broadcaster went to air, with a coded radio message in the form of a nursery rhyme: All my little ducklings, swimming on the lake. It was the signal for Stasi spies to make themselves scarce. The people of East Germany were in the streets; the Berlin Wall was coming down, so the Stasi files would soon be opened. Mass action had succeeded.
Since the exhilarating Arab spring, Egyptian activists have often spurned the claim that social media powered their revolution. It came from grassroots organising, mass action and good old fashioned class struggle, they insist. Similarly, they shrug off arguments that secret police can stop a revolution. They point to the fact that as the masses took to the streets, the Mubarak regime shut off the internet and mobile phone networks. Clearly Mubarak didn’t think internet surveillance could save him, and in the big scheme of things the cyber shutdown made little difference.
Researchers from George Washington University found that new media “did not appear to play a significant role” during the 2011 uprisings.
Social media’s main contribution in Egypt – and likewise in Iran – has probably been to get the story out to the world via YouTube and blogs. TV networks then turned the bloggers they liked (well groomed, middle class, politically moderate) into celebrities. And false claims and disinformation spread via the internet just as fast as valid information.
Meanwhile the main struggle was being fought out in streets and workplaces.
The Black Panther Party used to say, “The power of the people is greater than the Man’s technology”. It isn’t always; you have to mobilise. But if we build movements on a sound political basis, we can prevail.
Last week’s conclusion of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt scheme has once again brought national attention to the program that, from 2015 to 2019, saw nearly half a million welfare recipients hounded over unlawful fake debts concocted using faulty calculations.
Hundreds of students protested across the country on Friday 17 March to demand an end to fossil fuels and taxes on the rich and big corporations to fund a shift to renewables and decarbonisation of the economy. The protests, organised by the National Union of Students, criticised the Labor government for approving major new coal and gas projects when the world needs to rapidly reduce emissions.
The global economy has been in turmoil since the start of the pandemic—collapse, rebound, inflationary spiral. Now, “It’s the ‘Godot’ recession”, Ray Farris, chief economist at Credit Suisse, told the Wall Street Journal in early March. Everyone waits but it doesn’t seem to come. Every few months, economic forecasts flip from contraction to slowdown to cautious optimism about sustained growth.
The Australian Greens achieved unprecedented success at the last federal election, gaining their highest ever number of parliamentary seats after putting forward a left-wing platform calling for including dental and mental health in Medicare, the wiping of student debt, 1 million affordable homes, free child care and income-support increases.
There is a dangerous escalation of transphobia happening right now. The political right in the United States and the United Kingdom are rolling back civil rights for trans people specifically and LGBT people more broadly. This is being driven by an amalgamation of mainstream conservative parties, the far right, Christian fundamentalists and right-wing shock jocks and tabloids.
“Australia has always pursued a world without nuclear weapons”, tweeted Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong on 5 March, the first International Day for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Awareness. “We are redoubling our efforts towards this goal and to strengthening the non-proliferation regime.”