Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

People living under these conditions will be left to fend for themselves against the tag team of their government and its corrupt corporate allies. What governments can’t build in-house, they can outsource to willing suppliers. Guilt by association will take on a new meaning with this level of monitoring. Just being in the background of a person’s photo could matter if a government’s facial-recognition software were to identify a known dissident in the picture. Being documented in the wrong place at the wrong time, whether by photo, voice or IP address, could land unwitting citizens in an unwanted spotlight. Though this scenario is profoundly unfair, we worry that it will happen all too often, and could encourage self-censoring behaviors among the rest of society.

If connectivity enhances the state’s power, enabling it to mine its citizens’ data with a fly-on-the-wall vantage point, it also constricts the state’s ability to control the news cycle. Information blackouts, propaganda and “official” histories will fail to compete with the public’s access to outside information, and cover-ups will backfire in the face of an informed and connected population. Citizens will be able to capture, share and remark upon an event before the government can decide what to say or do about it, and thanks to the ubiquity of cheap mobile devices, this grassroots power will be fairly evenly distributed throughout even large countries. In China, where the government has one of the world’s most sophisticated and far-reaching censorship systems in place, attempts to cover up news stories deemed potentially damaging to the state have been missing the mark with increasing frequency.

In July 2011, the crash of a high-speed train in Wenzhou, in southeast China, resulted in the deaths of forty people and gave weight to a widely held fear that the country’s infrastructure projects were moving too quickly for proper safety reviews. Yet the accident was downplayed by official channels, its coverage in the media actively minimized. It took tens of millions of posts on weibo s, Chinese microblogs similar to Twitter, for the state to acknowledge that the crash had been the result of a design flaw and not bad weather or an electricity outage, as had previously been reported. Further, it was revealed that the government sent directives to the media shortly after the crash, specifically stating, “There must be no seeking after the causes [of the accident], rather, statements from authoritative departments must be followed. No calling into doubt, no development [of further issues], no speculation and no dissemination [of such things] on personal microblogs!” The directives also instructed journalists to maintain a feel-good tone about the story: “From now on, the Wenzhou train accident should be reported along the theme of ‘major love in the face of major disaster.’ ” But where the mainstream media fell in line, the microbloggers did not, leading to a deeply embarrassing incident for the Chinese government.

For a country like China, this mix of active citizens armed with technological devices and tight government control is exceptionally volatile. If state control relies on the perception of total command of events, every incident that undermines that perception—every misstep captured by camera phone, every lie debunked with outside information—plants seeds of doubt that encourage opposition and dissident elements in the population, and that could develop into widespread instability.

There may be only a handful of failed states in the world today, but they offer an intriguing model for how connectivity can operate in a power vacuum. Indeed, telecommunications seems to be just about the only industry that can thrive in a failed state. In Somalia, telecommunications companies have come to fill many of the gaps that decades of war and failed government have created, providing information, financial services and even electricity.

In the future, as the flood of inexpensive smart phones reaches users in failed states, citizens will find ways to do even more. Phones will help to enable the education, health care, security and commercial opportunities that the citizens’ governments cannot provide. Mobile technology will also give much-needed intellectual, social and entertainment outlets for populations who have been psychologically traumatized by their environment. Connectivity alone cannot revert a failed state, but it can drastically improve the situation for its citizens. As we’ll discuss later, new methods to help communities handle conflict and post-conflict challenges—developments like virtual institution building and skilled labor databases in the diaspora—will emerge to accelerate local recovery.

In power vacuums, though, opportunists take control, and in these cases connectivity will be an equally powerful weapon in their hands. Newly connected citizens in failed states will have all the vulnerabilities of undeletable data, but none of the security that could insulate them from those risks. Warlords, extortionists, pirates and criminals will—if they’re smart enough—find ways to consolidate their own power at the expense of other people’s data. This could mean targeting specific populations, such as wealthier subclans or influential religious leaders, with more precision and virtually no accountability. If the online data (say, transfer records for a mobile money platform) showed that a particular extended family received a comparatively large sum of money from relatives in the diaspora, local thugs could stop by and demand tribute—paid, probably, over a mobile money system as well. Today’s warlords grow rich by acting as the requisite pass-through for all sorts of valuable resources, and in the future, while drugs, minerals and money will all still matter, so too will valuable personal data. Warlords of the future may not even use the data they have, instead selling it to outside parties willing to pay a premium. And, most important, these opportunists will be able to appear even more anonymous and elusive than they do today, because they’ll unfortunately have the resources and incentive to get anonymity in ways ordinary people do not.

Power vacuums, warlords and collapsed states may sound like a foreign and unrelated world to many in Silicon Valley, but this will soon change. Today, technology companies constantly underscore their focus on, and responsibility to, the virtual world’s version of citizenry. But as five billion new people come online, companies will find that the attributes of these users and their problems are much more complex than those of the first two billion. Many of the next five billion people live in impoverished, censored and unsafe conditions. As the providers of access, tools and platforms, technology companies will have to shoulder some of the physical world’s burdens as they play out online if they want to stay true to the doctrine of responsibility to all users.

Technology companies will need to exceed the expectations of their customers in both privacy and security protections. It is unsurprising that the companies responsible for the architecture of the virtual world will shoulder much of the blame for the less welcome developments in our future. Some of the anger directed toward technology firms will be justified—after all, these businesses will be profiting from expanding their networks quickly—but much will be misplaced. It is, after all, much easier to blame a single product or company for a particularly evil application of technology than to acknowledge the limitations of personal responsibility. And of course there will always be some companies that allow their desire for profit to supersede their responsibility to users, though such companies will have a harder time achieving success in the future.

In truth, some technology companies are more acutely aware than others of the responsibility they bear toward their own users and the online community around the world; this is in part why nearly all online products and services today require users to accept terms and conditions and abide by those contractual guidelines. People have a responsibility as consumers and individuals to read a company’s policies and positions on privacy and security before they willingly share information. As the proliferation of companies continues, citizens will have more options and thus due diligence will be more important than ever. A smart consumer will look not just at the quality of a product, but also at how easy that product makes it for you to control your privacy and security. Still, in the court of public opinion and environments where the rule of law is shaky, these preexisting stipulations count for little, and we can expect more attention to be focused on the makers and purveyors of such tools in the coming decades.