The global conversation: info-anarchy, dissent, and human rights

Bill Thompson replies to Siva in “Bikinis in Saudi Arabia: info-anarchy as cultural imperialism”

In his response to my argument on the impact of peer-to-peer systems, Bill Thompson seems to have great faith in the accountability of nation-states and their willingness to mediate reasonable information policies that would maintain both healthy cultural democracy and market stability.

Alas, democratic governments in Europe and North America, and soon (thanks to coercive trade agreements) the rest of the world, have relinquished their duties to constrain communication monopolies and have abandoned traditional copyright at the behest of entertainment companies. Instead, they have instilled a technocratic regulatory regime that embodies no bargain at all. There is little hope that they will generate a new copyright bargain after the last one, having worked so well for more than 300 years, proved unacceptable to Hollywood.

I don’t mean to be so hopeless about the situation: there are strong citizens’ initiatives in both Europe and the United States attempting to “take back” copyright for the people. But don’t expect serious reform any time soon. When it comes to copyright – as with the selection of the president – the United States is not as democratic as it pretends to be.

My diagnosis that the debate over information policy and technology is lodged firmly between anarchists and oligarchs is just that – a wistful diagnosis. It is not a celebration or a prescription. I fear that there are too few forums in which the public interest may be considered. The oligarchs have been calling the shots for two decades now. And information anarchy seems to be the only reasonable response to them.

This is a sad state of affairs. My concern is that such widespread experimentation with information anarchy will extend the ideological habits and structures of anarchy, but the real story is in the ideology, not the technology. Anarchy is radical democracy, but it does not necessarily provide structures and habits of deliberation and serious study. In other words, shallow passions tend to rule in anarchistic systems at the expense of long-term considerations.

I wish Bill Thompson were correct about the politics of these problems. But he is not. It is the very failure of politics that drove me to consider these questions.

Degrees of anonymity

Bill Thompson also accuses me of misrepresenting (or perhaps even misunderstanding) the nature of peer-to-peer systems. I don’t think I have misrepresented the problems that p2p tries to confront. When he hacked together the software that became Napster, Shawn Fanning was, in fact, trying to allow his friends to access each others’ MP3s and those of distant hard drives in the wake of the mass disappearance of web-based and FTP-based MP3 libraries.

Contrary to Bill’s assertions, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) policy to introduce differential bandwidth (so downloading was faster than uploading), the rise of firewalls and network address translation (NAT) were ancillary not central in the development of p2p file-sharing. p2p does nothing to correct for differential bandwidth. This remains a problem for most users (but not those who use p2p systems via fast connections supplied by universities and businesses), as it prevents them from acting as real servers no matter what systems they use to distribute content via commercial ISPs.

However, I disagree with the proposition that differential bandwidth, firewalls, and NAT were “far more significant” changes than dynamic IP addresses. To most users and content donors, they were not. I can understand why Bill considers that the phrase “simulate the structure and function” claims too much success for p2p. That’s why I wrote that these systems “attempt to simulate the structure and function” of the original internet. They can’t do everything.

On another technical point, Bill points out that I overstated the role of copying in the process of access in the electronic domain. He points out that streaming technology evades this problem, that one may gain access to a file without making a usable copy of it. Yes, of course. Buffer data is trivial (although US law does not consider it trivial … but that’s trivial). But streaming technologies are not available or useful to most donors or sharers of digital content. So I consider streaming to be a trivial part of the digital communicative environment as of this date. Things could change. Right now, access implies copying for most content in most cases.

Bill Thompson points out that p2p systems are not truly anonymous because each node is identified to the network, and when logged on its IP address is known. I wrote that peer-to-peer systems are “effectively anonymous” early in the essay and “relatively anonymous” later. Is this diction insufficient? If not, perhaps I can make it clearer.

A dynamic IP number is not an identity. Nor is it a geographical address. And it is temporary and ephemeral unless someone (the ISP) is keeping a log. That’s why the RIAA needs Verizon to reveal the identity of the phantom peer-to-peer user, currently identifiable only via an IP number. The use is not something Verizon monitors. The identity of the person is not something that the RIAA can ascertain without Verizon’s coorperation. So the use of p2p systems like Gnutella and KaZaa via Verizon’s DSL system is “effectively anonymous.” There are plenty more anonymous systems that employ encryption and other methods of security and anonymity, such as Freenet and Mnemosyne. And they are likely to grow if the effective anonymity of Gnutella and KaZaa collapses.

But more importantly, people act as if they are anonymous. This is an issue of scale, and the fact that – at least in the United States – we assume that no one is likely to bust us for things we do in the privacy of our own homes. In addition, we know that among 100 million peer-to-peer users, the chance of being caught is slim. The industries will make examples out of a few people, but users do and will assume effective anonymity. As soon as that sense of anonymity evaporates, people will move to more secure, encrypted systems.

The issue is ideology, not technology

Bill Thompson seems to dismiss my concerns about authoritarian governments restricting communications. Here I am trying to explain that the same strategies that liberal governments use toward legitimate goals, like protecting industries, limiting child pornography, or limiting spam, can and will be used by illiberal ones to restrict political speech. By shifting the site of regulation to technology, we make a grave mistake. This is not a futile argument. If I did not make the argument fully in this piece, it is because it is an introduction to others and a trial run for fuller arguments I am making in my forthcoming book, The Anarchist in the Library.

Bill effectively points out that I seem to overstate the creative and democratic effects of peer-to-peer file-trading systems. I completely agree with him. I don’t hold such a romantic notion of the social effects of Napster. I hope none came across. In fact, my argument is more about the irresponsibility (as distinct from the immorality or illegality) of merely consumptive file-sharing.

File-trading can supply the raw material for conversation or the means to explore the subjects of cultural conversations and creativity. They can also be the library for such conversations and creativity. So far, they have not been used in that way. But there remains potential for more mature, responsible, dynamic uses of p2p file-sharing. Only if we let the systems ride along and grow, and we generate a global conversation about how we might want to live in a world blessed with such libraries can we learn to use them responsibly.

Bill takes issue with my association of peer review and peer-to-peer systems. This connection is a challenge that I hope to meet in the text of my book. I don’t think I can do it justice in this series of short articles. Suffice it to say that my concern is with the ideology of p2p, which is intimately connected with (if not an inchoate version of) the ideology of Open Source.

I should at least make this clear. The project is about the influence of ideology, and the technology is merely an expression and an amplifier of ideology, so it’s not the sort of file-sharing that’s discussed here. I am trying to move from the familiar to the more remote, and using file-sharing as a way of describing the battles and the ideologies. MP3s very much constitute portable elements of a collective culture, especially when they are brilliant mashes and mixes of more familiar works. But they are mere elements. They are supplemented by other elements – e-mails, chat sessions, collaborations in both cyber and real space.

The limits of trust

Bill seems to see trusted systems as a solution to these problems. Here we differ greatly. As he writes: “An architecture of control does not have to be guaranteed, it just has to be good enough.”

This is the source of my suspicion of trusted systems. As Elvis Costello sang (and Nick Lowe wrote): “Who are the trusted? And where is the harmony?” The phrase “trusted systems” is oxymoronic, in the sense that blind faith in such systems signifies a severe vacuum of trust in the people using the systems. This is not the sort of trust we should celebrate.

If Internet 3.0 is not open and customisable, it’s useless to political dissidents and less friendly to legitimate users of flexible, adaptable cultural information who live under less repressive regimes. Internet 3.0 would be good only for producers of unnaturally scarce content; it would be bad for educators, scientists, librarians, and anyone who loves to tinker with machines and code.

Extensibility is nice, but it’s far from the potential embodied by the Internet 1.0. And I don’t see how authentication through encryption could guarantee anonymity from oppressive or merely curious authorities. Only some limited uses of encryption work in trusted systems. When it comes to information, an architecture of control only controls the good guys. The bad guys find the wet walls and scurry about, doing all the damage they want. In fact, architectures of control can do more damage than they prevent by limiting legitimate uses through clumsy and blunt restrictions.

Dissent, intervention, and United States power

Most alarming of all, Bill Thompson writes: “And the idea that ‘anarchistic’ communication is a tool to undermine closed societies smacks of the worst sort of US interventionism. Is Saudi Arabia to be hacked because the social norms there make looking at photographs of women in bikinis impermissible? Should UK anti-war websites be undermined because they do not support the US imperial worldview?”

This is baffling. I’m not sure why Bill wants to have me carry the baggage of the government of the United States of America. I am sure the government of the US would not want to be associated with my opinions.

The United States government would do just about anything to keep the current Saudi regime secure and in power. I would not.

The worst sort of US interventionism is a barrage of Tomahawk missiles. The second-worst in the exploitation of natural resources for commercial gain guaranteed by deals with corrupt, oppressive governments like Saudi Arabia and Burma.

This issue is not about bikinis in Saudi Arabia. It’s about political dissent. And dissent is hardly an exclusively American value (especially now). More specifically and provocatively, it’s also about the right of women to avoid being raped. It’s about the right of Christians and Buddhists in China to worship as they wish, outside of state oversight and control. Again, the US government has no strong feelings on these matters. It cares nothing about the rights of women in oppressive regimes.

I don’t have any misgivings about defending the rights of humanitarian activists everywhere in the world. Free speech is free speech. It’s a human right, not an American right. If my government were on my side on this issue, I would be very proud. Alas, it is not.