The Misery of Our Digital Addiction

How should we fight the tyranny of surveillance? The Snowden affair, named after the former American National Security Agency consultant behind the electronic surveillance program leaks, has revealed the extent of the monitoring of the entire world’s citizens. How can we cope with this phenomenon?

Triggered by Edward Snowden in the month of July, the stream of “revelations” on electronic surveillance programs continues. Following the European political classes and the press, there are now writers around the world who are angry and demand an edict from the United Nations on a digital human rights declaration (“We Do Not Want the Surveillance Society,” dated Dec. 11, Le Monde).

The public opinion that they have called upon to rise up in defense of these rights seems largely indifferent.

In this affair, those who are not disturbed, period, show more coherence and recall than those who show themselves to be shocked and surprised. For someone who is interested even a little in the path our global society has followed over these last decades, the amount of data automatically available to political surveillance and economic intelligence back rooms is not at all surprising.

Not Revelations but an Update

Given the extent of transformations in daily life and work, and given the power of the movement of interconnectivity between all communication networks, thousands of newspaper articles and dozens of publications have pronounced over the years the situation in which we find ourselves today. To list just a few very telling books: “All Recorded!” (Louisette Gouverne and Claude-Marie Vadrot, First, 1994), “Planetary Electronic Surveillance” (Duncan Campbell, Allia, 2001), “Under the Eye of Microchips” (Michel Alberganti, Actes Sud, 2007), “RFID: The Total Police” (collectif Pièces et main-d’oeuvre, L’Echappée, 2008), “Global Surveillance” (Eric Sadin, Climats, 2009).*

That is to say, at this point, the pieces of information that regularly made the front pages of newspapers this summer were not revelations. They are more or less an update: Got it! It is no longer a projection or a threat. We are in that world for good.

A world where any portion of the civil liberties won over the past centuries disappear de facto in fiber optic networks, the waves emitted by antenna-relays and servers of large data centers. Where the concern about private life becomes “a problem of an old fool,” according to the words of journalist Jean-Marc Manach.

Where, most of the time, the work of intelligence collection by the police and marketing by companies does not need to be conducted unbeknownst to people: Through social networks, without violating anyone’s intimate details, we can know who prefers what merchandise and why, who has what opinion, etc.

There Is Nothing There Besides Drift

For all those who defend the project of a “knowledge-based society,” there is nothing there besides drift. In their eyes, the new technologies remain a liberation vector without precedence, an economic, political and health panacea.

Democratic nations need to simply set up legal safeguards against the surveillance possibilities available to policing intelligence collections. (Pirate version: Communities of independent netizens need to organize themselves against the Web’s giants.)

Yet considering technology to be a negative but contingent facet is absurd. For example, it is not possible to place in opposition the benefits of radio-frequency identification chips to the remote monitoring possibilities they conceal because radio-identification technology relies on the automated transmission of data from one machine to another (from the chip to the reader, from the reader to the computer, etc.). The possibility of instantaneous monitoring stems from this directly.

More globally, from the moment all of our activities are computerized, there is much more information on us, which can never be erased in its totality, made anonymous or unusable — whether the software is free or not.

The same as it is impossible to build a house with asbestos where no one is ever in contact with the asbestos, it is illusory to think that all the information about social life could not generate information torrents on all things, for all useful ends.

Governments and big companies would really have to prove themselves to be of supernatural virtue in order to not be tempted to profit from our living in a society where everything is registered and memorized.

One of the Forms of Political Domination

It is time to admit that our addiction to screens and networks is a form of political domination exercised over us. The Snowden affair does not call for diplomatic clarification, technical or judicial regulation, and above all, no umpteenth renewal of the ill-named Data Protection Commission.

It is a challenge to our ultra-connected way of life. More than pushing us to shout out at the powerful to ask them to abuse their power, it should make us pause over what our era understands by culture, friendship, love and gratuity. Snowden’s audacity will remain in vain if it does not spread the idea that the political darkness into which we have fallen is doomed to deepen, as long as aspirations to detach ourselves from our intelligent machines do not blow through society.

*Editor’s Note: These titles are all originally French. The original titles are: “Tous fichés!” (Gouverne and Vadrot), “Surveillance électronique planétaire” (Campbell), “Sous l’oeil des puces” (Alberganti), “RFID: la police totale” (collectif Pièces et main-d’oeuvre) and “Surveillance globale” (Sadin).