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Ethics and Information Technology
Published in: Ethics and Information Technology 1/2019

02-11-2018 | Original Paper

P2P surveillance in the global village

Author: Jeremy Weissman

Published in: Ethics and Information Technology | Issue 1/2019

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Abstract

New ubiquitous information and communication technologies, in particular recording-enabled smart devices and social media programs, are giving rise to a profound new power for ordinary people to monitor and track each other on a global scale. Along with this growing capacity to monitor one another is a new capacity to explicitly and publicly judge one another—to rate, rank, comment on, shame and humiliate each other through the net. Drawing upon warnings from Kierkegaard and Mill on the power of public opinion to produce conformity, I argue a new apparatus of surveillance and control is being generated that threatens individual freedom through a coercion of the will by an anonymous and interconnected crowd. I conclude that we must urgently assess how to protect individuals from a social tyranny of the public enabled by these new technologies while effective measures can still be taken to mitigate their dangers.
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Footnotes
1
By “ordinary” people, I mean people who do not have the advanced surveillance training of government agents, for example, or the expectations of public exposure on the scale of political leaders or other celebrities.
 
2
Kierkegaard sardonically notes, “the drunken sailor has absolutely the same right to a public as the most distinguished of men”, (2000) which to me sounds like an apt description of Twitter. In that sense, is it all that surprising that the “drunken sailor” and “the most distinguished of men” could become one and the same person?
 
3
P2P surveillance can also magnify state surveillance powers. For example, in the 2011 Vancouver riots police used the massive amount of photos and videos uploaded on Facebook and Twitter to identify and charge rioters with social media users playing an active role in aiding the investigation. In repressive government regimes, P2P surveillance could clearly aid in the repression and greatly amplify already vast state surveillance powers.
 
4
There is a question over whether we should read this notion of electronic media “re-tribalizing” us as pointing to the creation of multiple transnational tribes or a single global tribe. Current conditions may appear to reflect more of the former, but in the context of the “global village”, I interpret McLuhan as pushing towards the latter as well. For example, in at least once interview he speaks of people, “not only in the U.S. but throughout the world [uniting] into a single tribe” (“The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan” 1969). This is not incompatible with the existence of multiple publics within this “single tribe”. But because there are no closed groups in a global network, and the public as a whole may therefore possibly watch over anyone, an individual is not only subject to the watch of a specific public they may subscribe to, but that public is itself under watch by the “social totality” of the global public as well, and subject to its pressures.
 
5
This incident is notable in itself as Adam Smith was shamed for a failed attempt at shaming a Chic-Fil-A drive-thru employee, berating her on film for working at a company that at the time was a target of intense protest for its opposition to same-sex marriage. This may show how one public can be at war with another public with one side coming out the victor and setting the prevailing opinion for the public at large. In this particular episode, the prevailing opinion of the public as a whole led to Smith being cast out entirely with severe and lasting effects even though there might have been a public within the social totality that was sympathetic towards him.
 
6
Kierkegaard himself was famously the victim of a mass media public humiliation campaign in the Corsair Affair, that led to a deeply painful social ostracization in Denmark, which some say led to his depression and early death. Now that the mass media is directly in the hands of the public, anyone can become a victim of this sort of attack, and one no longer need be a notable public figure in order to be targeted.
 
7
When a mob of trolls descends upon an offending individual, it is often a minority doing the really dirty work, and the majority remains relatively silent. Sometimes trolls are even tweetbots controlled by a financial elite. But, just like in a medieval village, it may be only a few who really hurl the abuse - who throw trash in the face of offenders—but the power of the shame and humiliation is so deep because of it occurring out in the open in front of the majority of people. In these cases, the tyranny of the majority is enabled in the fact that the majority remains silent and watches the “offender” be humiliated, which is what makes the punishment so deeply shameful, and thereby relatively effective as a system of control.
 
8
I do not include this example to condone Sacco’s joke, but rather because it clearly demonstrates the massive P2P surveillance and control mechanism already in action in which the public can strike down upon essentially any ordinary individual at any time, track them across the planet, and instantaneously shut them out of society, internationally, for an indefinite period of time, with severe lasting repercussions, without any real chance of defending oneself, for what was very possibly a misunderstanding.
 
9
Currently, Google’s Project Loon and Facebook’s Aquila are being rolled out to beam down wi-fi from the skies to the world’s most remote locations, so the global village infrastructure will soon be nearly complete.
 
10
Here I am referring specifically to in-real-life communities. The anonymity of online forums, for example, allows for more unconventionality. But while the anonymous nature of online groups may have distinct benefits, for example a loosening of inhibitions on speech (which can have both positive and negative effects), online groups are not a replacement for in-real-life communities and face-to-face interactions. Nor are these online groups totally immune from P2P surveillance either as things said in small groups can be screenshot and possibly spread throughout the global network with the author identified. Online groups can sometimes have corollaries in real life, but as soon as these groups meet in real life they are faced with the possibility of recording devices and thereby become subject to the chilling effects of P2P surveillance.
 
11
This is not to say that individuals cannot gain forms of support from their identification and interaction with a public. But under a public’s gaze, individuals become subject to feedback loops that can allow a public to monitor and judge one’s performance of a collective identity for conformity with its prevailing opinion.
 
12
Another way in which P2P surveillance may lead to group harm is through discriminatory algorithmic decision-making based in part upon aggregated surveillance data generated by the public. These violations of ‘data justice’ tend to occur at the level of types rather than tokens, due to the use of massive anonymized datasets. While these sorts of harms are more directly perpetrated by government and corporate agencies, rather than the public, they represent another way in which group harm may be inflicted, in this case as a by-product of P2P surveillance.
 
13
Of course, in a society where commercial recording devices are ubiquitous, especially a possible future of ubiquitous wearable recording devices, these “privacy/anonymity zones” in publicly accessible establishments risk becoming magnets for those who expressly wish to do harm out of sight. One way to combat this would be for the owners of such a “privacy/anonymity protected” establishment to still employ standard surveillance devices. This might deter crime while still greatly reducing the likelihood that recordings of patrons would be disseminated to the public online. Trust in the establishment and its proprietor/s would then, however, become paramount.
 
14
While these clever fashions will allow individuals to protect some degree of anonymity from the global village, the extremely eccentric and futuristic designs are sure to attract a lot of attention in real life and may lead to one’s image being broadcast online.
 
15
Though these need to be very carefully designed and monitored, and have built-in mechanisms for appeals on removed content, since AI’s, while having monitoring capacities beyond human capability, may also lack a fully-nuanced understanding of language, at least for now, and could sweep too broadly in its automated censorship. In any case, blocking trolling, while perhaps helpful, doesn’t solve the problem of online shaming. People can be massively shamed and humiliated online just from exposing unwanted content to the public without any comments at all, and shaming comments can arguably occur without any explicitly abusive language.
 
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Metadata
Title
P2P surveillance in the global village
Author
Jeremy Weissman
Publication date
02-11-2018
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Ethics and Information Technology / Issue 1/2019
Print ISSN: 1388-1957
Electronic ISSN: 1572-8439
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9488-y

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