Reddit reviews Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
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I would greatly recommend that you read the book Pax Technica.
Here are some excerpts:
> In a world in which most of our political, economic, and cultural lives are mediated by networked devices, power lies in setting technical standards. Simply put, you either set technical standards or you follow them. International tensions over competing technology standards are only going to increase as governments and firms identify the engineering protocols, licensing arrangements, and telecommunications standards that will allow them to use the [internet] to advance their goals.
> Information activism is already a global ideological movement, and competition among device networks will replace a clash of civilizations as the primary political fault line of global conflict. Samuel Huntington famously divided the world into nine competing political ideologies, and described these as largely irreconcilable worldviews that were destined to clash. What is more likely, in a world of pervasive sensors and networked devices, is a competition among device networks. The most important clash will be between the people and devices that push for open and interoperable networks and those who work for closed networks.
> The dominance of technology over ideology has two stabilizing consequences. The first is that information activism is now a global movement. Every country in the world has some kind of information-freedom campaign that allows for a consistent, global conversation about how different kinds of actors are using and abusing digital media. The second is that the diffusion of digital media is supporting popular movements for democratic accountability. Some Silicon Valley firms build hardware and software for dictators, and as I’ll show in the next chapter the serious threat to the pax technica comes from the rival network growing out of China.
> The [internet] will help bring structure to global politics, but we must work for a structure we want. This is a challenging project, but if we don’t take it on our political lives will become fully structured by algorithms we don’t understand, data flows we don’t manage, and political elites who manipulate us through technology. Since the internet of things is a massive network of people and devices, structural threats will come from competing networks. There are two rival networks that seriously threaten the pax technica: the Chinese internet and the closed, content-driven networks that undermine political equality from within the pax technica.
> The Chinese internet is already the most expensive and elaborate system ever built for suppressing political expression. The Chinese are trying to extend it by exporting their technologies to authoritarian regimes in Asia and Africa. Russia, Iran, and a few other governments are also developing competing network infrastructures. The Chinese government controls the entire network, the network is bounded in surprising ways, and the network can, and does, mobilize to attack other networks.
> The Communist Party has developed a dedicated army to resist the spread of the technologies and values of the West. By one estimate there are more than 2 million “public-opinion experts,” a new category for jobs that involve watching other people’s emails, search requests, and other digital output. In other words, the army of censors is as large as the military, and often military units are given censorship and surveillance tasks.
> Government agencies need censors, but the government also makes tech startups and large media conglomerates hire their own censors to help with the task of watching the traffic. Pundits have referred to these people as China’s fifty-cent army because some get paid small amounts of money to generate pro-regime messages online. But that moniker makes the army of censors seem like freelancers who are inexpensive to hire. In actuality, they are a well-financed force deeply embedded in the country’s technology industry.
> Lots of other authoritarian regimes employ censors, but let’s put the numbers in perspective. If there are 2 million people occupied with Chinese censorship tasks, and 500 million users, that’s one surveillance expert for every 250 people. Aside from the human resources put into censorship and surveillance, China’s device networks have three unique features: the government controls the entire network, the network is bounded in surprising ways, and the network attacks other networks.
> First, the Chinese government owns and controls all the physical access routes to the internet. People and businesses can rent bandwidth only from state-owned enterprises. Four major governmental entities operate the “backbone” of the Chinese internet, and several large mobile-phone joint ventures between the government and Chinese-owned media giants offer additional connectivity.
> The research on China’s censorship efforts finds that the government works hard to support Chinese content and communication networks that it can surveil, and discourages its citizens from using the information infrastructure of the West. In one study, researchers went through the process of launching a social media startup in China. They took notes each time they encountered a new regulatory hoop to jump through, and they kept track of the amount of information they were making available to the state-security apparatus.
> Second, the Chinese resist Western device networks by making sure that connections within China are extensive and reliable, and connections to the rest of the world less so. Chinese device networks are bounded by the Great Firewall of China, as we call it in the West, though the more poetic translation is the Golden Shield Project. Some consider it the largest national security project in the world, and its singular task is to protect Chinese internet users from access and exposure to outside content.
> Third, the Chinese government is aggressively assaulting international information infrastructure. Corporate cyberespionage, design emulation, patent acquisition, and technology export are the key weapons of this attack. Some of these are subtle defenses that smack of cultural protectionism, while others are aggressive strategies for attacking outside networks. Cyberattacks on Western news media regularly originate from within China.
> The Chinese are trying to win over other nations, co-opting the device networks of poor countries into nodes of their rival network. The Chinese are not just seeking to protect their citizens from the West, they are aggressively expanding their networks to rival the pax technica through cultural content, news production, hardware, software, telecommunications standards, and information policy. In terms of content and news, their rival strategy involves:
> • Direct Chinese government aid to friendly governments in the form of radio transmitters and financing for national satellites built by Chinese firms.
> • Provision of content and technologies to allies and potential allies that are often cash strapped.
> • Memoranda of understanding on the sharing of news, particularly across Southeast Asia.
> • Training programs and expenses-paid trips to China for journalists.
> • A significant, possibly multibillion-dollar, expansion of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) own media on the world stage, primarily through the Xinhua news agency, satellite and internet TV channels controlled by Xinhua, and state-run television services.
> China’s aggressive efforts to build a rival network are not the only form of resistance to the device networks of the pax technica. The Russians have been successfully pioneering another strategy, one emulated by Venezuela, Iran, and some of the Gulf States. The Russian gambit is not to build its own network from the ground up, it is to join the internet by sponsoring pro-regime internet users to generate supportive commentary online.
> The critical rivalry in the years ahead will not be between countries but between technical systems that countries choose to defend. Rival information infrastructure is the single most important long-term threat to international stability. The empire of the Western-inspired, but now truly global, internet isn’t the only major system in which political values and information infrastructures are deeply entwined. Indeed, there are many internets.