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This is a writeup about human rights and ethics applied to the Internet, intended to work as a standalone literature work aimed at complete beginners on the topic.
At the moment this project is very small and incomplete, for now you can use it as a jumping of point to learn about new concerns and ideas about the digital world.
Since this project just begun, you might need to take some things in mind and the use of some special software, In the future this work will be available as a PDF, for now instructions on how to understand this project can be found inside a file called ‘Manual - how to read this book.md’ on github.
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Many online privacy advocates have been extremely focused in methodology. The community has arrived at an understanding of the means and methods, what software you should use, what kind of license should your software be labeled under, who’s software is considered trustworthy and what methods of internal processes are permitted to fun on your software programs. For example, a software package may be socially prohibited amongst tech enthusiasts because it requires an online account and an internet connection at all time to function, or a media player uses DRM to restrict what is allowed to be played. This methods and so called “red flags”, amongst others, restrict what type of program we may use for basic tasks.
These rules and regulations are by themselves similar to code in many ways. The privacy status quo are a set of non-written rules we use rules of thumb to restrict our software choices. And like all written rules, written on physical or metaphorical stone, the rules privacy conscious users live by are written lines of code. Rules that were written by someone, for some purpose - but written nonetheless. Said lines of social constructed code are part of a read-write program, we as a community of techy people can use, distribute and modify these rules. Despite the flexibility of social constructed norms, we pretend we’re dealing with a read only file - thus becoming cannon.
The existence of these two conditions leads to a logical end. If some software methods and means are to be avoided and the list of what’s allowed can’t be modified then users whom value privacy have no choice but to “execute the commands”, we execute these rules as if we were cold machine-like computers without autonomy; as if computers are our flesh and the software we run is proprietary software. Ironically, our current rules are supposed to cancel non-free software from our lives, but instead if taken literally it transforms our lives into proprietary ones. We have become closed source in our journey towards software liberty.
To follow this proprietary code to the beat means to constantly take inputs from the outside system to modify our outputs, because with our proprietary mindset we act with extreme loyalty to our owners. Good boys! This phenomenon is extremely pavlovian. If the community takes in new inputs, that for example that a previously trusted software uses proprietary JavaScript or has partnered with a venture capital backed company, then that software is to be un-installed from memory, both hard drive memory and RAM in the literal an metaphorical scene: We should allocate our short term memory and mental energy to erase said program from our short sided view and commit our collective long term memory to forget our mistake and make sure we never use that program ever again. We also run in RAM-like and non-volatile-like manners, we accepted these process when we begun to execute the privacy status quo as a read only program.
This constant reactionary process we execute plays out like an ancient set of thought experiments put forth by old-school Greek philosophers. Said paradoxes are a type of gotcha journalism game, meaning one thinker would come up with an universal law of nature only for some other fellow to come up with a strange situation that makes the universality of the law break down. Thus we arrive at Zeno’s paradoxes. Zeno of Elea was a classical Greek philosopher looking to poke holes in the concept of motion. If we define motion as an object that travels from one place to another within a time interval then we would assume that motion is a fluid, ever changing, constant process. But Zeno had a different perspective, he re-framed motion to be a kind of to-do list: For an object to move from place A to B, it has to go though the places in between A and B first, but how many in between stages are there? An infinite amount of distances, and because he assumed that to complete an infinite amount of actions is impossible, then it logically follows that no distance can ever arrive at it’s final destination since all infinite processes are never ending by definition - in other words motion is technically impossible and actually possible at the same time. This paradox has been adapted in various ways, but the main takeaway remains: That reality in shape of time, motion and existence are all illusions, since they are not technically feasible under Zeno’s premise. The most popular example of Zeno’s paradox is a story of a running character: This character wants to run a kilometer, but in order to cover a Kilometer’s worth of distance he must first complete half a kilometer, 500 meters, but before completing said distance he must complete half that amount, 250 meters, and so on; thus our character has to fulfill an infinite list of individual steps to compete the task of running a kilometer, because we can always divide by half. A literal interpretation of this paradox indicates that our runner can not even finish the first step of his journey, because as soon as he lifts his foot from the ground his foot must travel a step’s worth of distance - another process that can be endlessly divided and therefore infinite in process length; in this story we conclude that traveling, both a kilometer and a single step, is impossible because we cant ever finish a never ending task.
Note that a superficial understanding of this paradox is a kind of logical trap, a kind of armor for criticism or action. While a profound look at this experiment highlights the strange state of experience in an almost dream like illusion while serving as food for philosophical thought, a moot interpretation stops critical thinking altogether. A deep exploration of any given topic crashes against a sudden wall of concrete if after putting forth the question at hand we answer with well everything is an illusion!
This phenomenon of never asking the next question because of an unsatisfactory, but simple, answer is immediately summoned is not foreign to the world of technology. Focusing on the privacy community rather than the whole tech ecosystem we can see this paradox in practice. If we presuppose that privacy is an absolute and that we require an amount of inputs to run the process and get perfect Utopian privacy as an output, but the amount of inputs needed is unknown or infinite then we logically conclude that privacy is paradoxically impossible, or as Zeno would put it: An illusion. Because we are always in reaction mode waiting for inputs we can erroneously think that the inputs are random or never enough - thus making privacy reactionaries a pablovian breed. We have in one way or another accepted this as a fact of nature, privacy breaches, hacks, exploits and vulnerabilities are expected and therefore the best we can do is to patch said inconveniences. But we can never fully achieve full privacy because it’s an absolute value that can never be fully conquered. We must first gain 50% privacy, to put a number on it, but to get to 50% we must first patch this small problem or abandon this specific software, but we can always to more since privacy is infinitely absolute. We can always sub-divide the racetrack towards perfect privacy in half steps.
This is what I call Zeno’s privacy, an unachievable but increasingly desirable process of applying systems and methods. Zeno’s privacy is not a value, but a process. Only processes can be endlessly divided into steps and categories, while values can only be reproduced limitlessly without loosing the most essential substance, while with Zeno’s privacy we kill privacy with close inspection when we chop it up into little pieces. Put privacy is not to be squashed into insignificant dots of dust, but a value to be experienced, true Privacy is not a task to be completed but a value by itself. Just like Zeno’s paradox uses a story to illustrate the point we can come up with a narrative to explain Zenonian privacy.
This book is work in process, to view a rough draft go to the gitgub repo, click here to get updates on a new release of this book.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.