Pessimism is the new Optimism
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Basil, Priya
Keeping your perspective in the surveillance state.
 Hi, everyone. The organizers here were a bit surprised when I said I wouldn't be needing any computer equipment, and I had no slides and no audio or anything techy for my talk. So I think also the technicians are very happy to have a break. It's maybe going a bit against the grain of this sort of event, but I'm reverting to good old spoken word. So as was announced, it's not in the program, but the title of this talk is Pessimism is the New Optimism. It is very human and in some sense a prerequisite of survival to try and find the best in everything and sometimes to avoid all together seeing what is bad. A healthy relationship relies on being able to overlook the harmless flaws of the other. But when one person continually avoids confronting serious transgressions by the other, a relationship becomes unhealthy. The husband who pretends not to know about his wife's affairs. The parents who won't admit to their child's drug abuse. The employee who won't report a bullying boss. The abused woman who won't leave her tormentor. In all such situations, people are able to come up with compelling justifications for their behavior. You don't understand the argument, Migo. She can be so nice or he wouldn't cope without me or things are starting to get better now. In psychology, this pattern of deviant judgment in particular situations is called cognitive bias. We are all subject to it to a greater or lesser extent. And right now, many of us are guilty of such bias in one particular relationship. This relationship began at least for the older ones amongst us with the other party as a bulky stationary counterpart who is mostly confined to one room. Despite the restriction, encounters could be exciting and you generally had fun together. This companion knew its place and stayed there, its long tail winding down to the nearest available socket. The relationship was pretty much all on your terms. As time went on, the friend got cooler and more mobile, showing up in ever smaller and sexier attire. Eventually it could fit in your bag. Now it can snuggle in your pocket. It insinuated itself into more and more of your personal life. Soon, it's aiming to get right under your skin. It may already have become your most intimate companion. It probably goes everywhere with you during the day and then lies by your bed at night, monitoring your sleep cycle if you wish, and ready to sound a wake-up call when you desire. You love looking at it. All day you stroke its body, coaxing endless delight to its screen. This amazing friend, the Internet, gave an image of you and also a reflection of the world. You thought this companion was true, that you could tell it anything and never be betrayed. You thought that you were still in control of the relationship. Then Edward Snowden revealed that your cozy affair is more of a menage à trois. States and corporations are part of the intimate circle, collecting, analyzing, and storing data about everything you do through your friend. The news is shocking. You're upset, even outraged. This can't go on, you think. Something has to change. But at the same time, the friend keeps purring so enticingly to give you message alerts. It offers you upgrades and freebies and funky new apps. It's the friend all your other friends use to reach you. If you stop taking it everywhere, you'll probably lose your way a lot more and miss out on all kinds of very important stuff. You can't imagine not having its warmth against your thigh. You don't know what you do in those spare minutes without its ready distractions. So you ignore its infidelities and try not to think about its power to hurt you. It'll be fine, you tell yourself. Things are bound to improve. The signs are clear. You're suffering from digital cognitive bias. I suffer from it, too. That's another very human tendency. To spot the flaws in others and offer excellent advice while persisting, possibly obliviously, in similar behaviors yourself. People who do this on a daily basis are called psychologists and, you guessed it, fiction writers. Since Snowden's disclosures, I've talked to many people who've said, I don't want to change my behavior on principle. People feel they have a right to expose whatever they like to a selective circle. And it is the obligation of the state to protect them with laws that make it impossible for anyone outside the chosen circle to exploit their information. At first, this seemed to me like a contradiction in terms. How can we demand respect for privacy while at the same time going to ever-new levels of personal exposure? But then I thought, perhaps there isn't a contradiction. Perhaps each of these things leads to and necessitates the other. If you're putting post-coital selfies, ironically or not, on Instagram, as was the trend last month under hashtag after sex, then presumably you're going to be really concerned about privacy laws and who has accessed your information. On the other hand, I can't help thinking that the people who put such intimate material into the public realm have no true concept of what is or should be private and don't really care about the issue. Perhaps they've already entered some Orwellian realm of doublespeak where exposure means privacy, as if the more you reveal, the more you prove yourself to be personal and personable, and thus perversely, publicly qualify as a fully fledged private being. A couple of years ago, it seemed this paradigm might have become mainstream when following the discovery that two mass murderers, Norwegian Anders Brevik and American James Holmes, used almost no social media. The mainstream media hurried to suggest that people who weren't on Facebook could be considered suspicious by potential employers and lovers. As if the first question to establish rapport in any situation must naturally be, are you on Facebook? Because of course the internet is not a place where people exaggerate, lie, or have false identities. Anyone who uses digital devices regularly will have left layers of personal imprints on the quicksands of the net. There, no tides shift along the shore, washing away traces of yesterday. Everything you've done online stays online because the internet and its servers never forget. Most people are divulging seemingly superficial things through social media, or engaging in activities like shopping, banking, and researching, which don't seem especially implicating in and of themselves. However, all this information can cumulatively reveal a lot about our different selves, past, present, future, professional, social, sexual. With data storage capacities continually growing and getting ever cheaper, our digital shadows will persist, holding on to details of our every keystroke and mouse click. Yet forgetting, letting go, leaving things behind, these are necessary passages of individual development. We've evolved biologically to have a partial sense of the past because that is, for all its risks, the most effective way for us to exist. In the digital world, everything persists. And even if you or I can't access it, someone can. Increasingly, there will be discrepancies between the self in virtual and in real space. Distinctions the computer can't register and no algorithm can work out. Mass surveillance is so dangerous because our data trail leaves us at the mercy of people who do not know us and do not really care about us, except as a means to an abstract end like security or marketing. It's easy to disregard what's happening because we don't immediately feel its negative effect, or we believe ourselves to be immune to it. Yet with advertising by corporations, for example, if things are constantly tailored to sway us in a certain direction as they are now, we may incline that way almost in spite of ourselves. We don't become automata, but we inevitably react to such manipulation, perhaps even just subconsciously. As for the data collection by governments, all the evidence shows that such indiscriminate harvesting does not make us safer, and all common sense shows that it infringes our rights and undermines our democracies. To those who say, I have nothing to hide, the only answer is we all have something to hide, depending on who's looking and what they want to do with the information. Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something there to hang him, Cardinal Richelieu said in the 16th century. Every era has its Richelieu's. This is why it's so essential to have a more stringent international legal framework on how and by whom our data can be used. Of course, the law cannot make people value their own privacy, but it can force others to respect that privacy, which is the critical thing. Until that framework is in place, though, what can we do? In totalitarian states, citizens used to have three choices, in a migration resistance or exile. The inward migration was a retreat into the self, an attempt to live without challenging the status quo in the hope that one would remain unnoticed and be left alone. Resistance involved challenging the prevailing order, taking risks even with one's life. And exile, of course, was emigration, leaving for somewhere more free. Today, exile is no longer an option. The new international order means that we can be followed or observed everywhere we go. Even being offline can no longer protect us. That's not to say a bit of a retreat from technology would have no effect. On the contrary, it could empower us in surprising ways, not least by reminding us of the freedom in being digitally disconnected. But a complete retreat from technology, even if it were possible, would be irresponsible. Because freedom is not preserved just by evading a threat. Freedom needs guardians who remain ever vigilant of possible infractions. You can't properly resist a system by opting out of it, nor can you resist by finding your own personal normality within the existing environment. Resistance is an active state that involves staying at odds with what is there while seeking an alternative vision of the future. Resistance requires thinking. The basis of optimism, suggested Oscar Wilde with characteristic contrariness, is sheer terror. This assertion might hold a clue to why most of us want to continue pretty much as usual after Snowden's revelations. We understand the sheer scale of the assault on our privacy and therefore on our rights, but this is so overwhelming that it's easier to stop thinking about it, proceed as usual, and hope for the best. But to accept constant observation, even if you don't consciously feel it as a restriction or imposition, is to allow a gradual curtailment of freedom and to be complicit in the diminution of democracy. The polar sociologist Sigmund Baumann claims that we've lost the guts, the stamina, and above all the will to persist in defending these rights, these irrepressible building blocks of individual autonomy. I refuse to believe that. I sense people would act if they knew how, but most of us are unsure about what would really make a difference. We have to remember that even when we can't take practical steps to remedy a problem, we can reclaim some measure of control by how we choose to think about it. So instead of brushing aside the mass surveillance warnings, we must keep pondering them, forcing ourselves to consider that the status quo may not improve much and certainly not quickly. In short, we must allow ourselves to be pessimistic. That doesn't mean becoming doomsters and developing a tendency to stress the negative or take the gloomiest possible view as one of the kinder definitions of pessimism expresses it. Pessimism is also a philosophical position, and in this sense, it doesn't just stem from a negative mindset, but is rather informed by an outlook that seeks to face up to the distasteful realities of the world and to eliminate irrational hopes and expectations. Personally, I like the British writer Will Selv's laconic view of pessimism as a willingness to accept that things may be for the worst in a less than perfect world. Though my inclination is to adapt it slightly, replacing the word accept with acknowledge, so that pessimism is a willingness to acknowledge that things may be for the worst in a less than perfect world. Acceptance, a useful attitude in many situations, is obviously not desirable in the face of an evil-like mass surveillance, whereas acknowledgement involves admitting into our minds other possibilities, even dark and disturbing ones. To have reflected on the worst is, in some sense, even if just rudimentarily, to be more ready for it. The skillful warrior does not rely on the enemy's not coming, but on his own preparedness, Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War. It may seem grandiose to speak of mass surveillance in such militaristic terms, but the digital realm is a kind of battleground right now, with states and corporations on a ruthless advance to get hold of our data. The British Intelligence Agency, Government Communication Headquarters, GCHQ, certainly already sees it that way, declaring on their website that online is the new front line. We citizens are the targets, being indiscriminately bombarded with surveillance. State agencies are at it in the name of security, while corporations do it under the benign guise of customer service. The timeless question of history lessons the world over, what would you have done, is no longer just an abstract question. The tyranny is here, a digitatorship of states and corporations. The democratic privileges we cherish today were hard won, millions fought and died to overthrow totalitarianism. Now its threat looms again in a very different, though potentially equally serious form. Thankfully we do not yet need arms for this fight, but we do need courage, courage to think, to face the hard ugly facts of reality. Freedom, justice, fairness, these are not destinations at which we arrive through somebody else's efforts, only to lie back and take a holiday from thinking. Each generation has to engage with these concepts and you, redefining them as necessary. Human rights are almost always accompanied by the word responsibilities, because what we enjoy, we also have a duty to protect. During the Second World War the British writer Virginia Woolf often felt useless, wishing she could contribute more to the war effort and conscious that writing was somehow irrelevant in the circumstances. Yet she went on writing, using it to think about and understand what was happening and to analyze her role within that. Thinking is my fighting, she came to realize. And that's what we need to recognize too, thinking must become our fighting, for it is the only thing that can offer us immunity from the seductions and manipulations of tyranny. The internet with its manifold conveniences and attractions, its intersection with almost every facet of our lives, could become the most despotic tool in human history. I know I'm focusing on the negative and I have no wish to deny the internet's capacity to empower, enrich and liberate, but I'm daring to take the bleaker line because we are all already converts to the broad church of the web, believers in the promise of digital salvation. Indeed many of us, especially at such an event, are fanatics insistent still that the good outweighs the bad. Cognitive bias gone a little mad, you might say. But wherever we are on the spectrum of faith in the future of the net, optimist or pessimist, there is a single secular invocation for our digital congregation. Let us think. Ever since last autumn, I've been doing an online search now and then, checking changes in internet use since Snowden. It didn't turn out much in the way of broad usage statistics as I wanted, though it was interesting to see that within a few months of the revelations being published, usage of ducked out go and start page had increased significantly. Then a few weeks ago, I came across a couple of new surveys, one in the US conducted by Harris International on behalf of a security company called ESET, found that 47% of Americans think more carefully about where they go, what they say and what they do online. These people have even changed their behavior and are conducting fewer financial transactions online, including reducing their online shopping and banking. Meanwhile, 24% of the total respondents said they were less inclined to communicate via email. These sorts of choices, simple gestures of withholding can be incredibly effective because they harness our power as consumers by saying no. Companies feel and notice this. If more of us were saying no, more of the time, corporations would be forced to reconsider what they do with our data. A little bit more mindfulness as we go about our digital activities would be enough to send a strong message to those watching us across the web. Cultivating my own awareness has helped put me on guard against subtle things of which I was previously oblivious. I noticed the psychological pressure to buy being exerted everywhere online. Airlines with their alerts, only two seats left. Price comparison websites that inform you there are nine people viewing this hotel last booked three hours ago. One leading online bookshop has a new tool called Watch People Shop. You run your mouse over a map of the world and can see that someone just bought Genesis 3 in South Korea 28 seconds ago, or someone in Australia bought the marriage book seven seconds ago. What is this if not incontrovertible evidence that we are continually being monitored in real time by companies? The pressure doesn't even stop after you've bought something. Your item has been dispatched. You are kindly informed and often given a specific time slot in which it will be delivered. This might be convenient, but it is also restricting. I find myself wondering if I will be home. In the past, I would have tried to be home. Like my life should be organized around the delivery of my purchases rather than the other way around. Sure, you can change the delivery time. You can even track your item all the way along its route. But what happened to ordering something and forgetting about it until it arrived? At your doorstep, at the post office, at your neighbors? Of course, once it's there, the sender wants a review and inevitably has further recommendations. The barrage of helpful information from companies is actually an excuse for constant intrusion on our personal space. Somehow, though, it's a little easier to resist now that I see it for what it is. The rallying cry of the Enlightenment was, Saperre, our day, dare to think. Our digital Enlightenment is long overdue. Until recently, most of us carelessly embraced every technological advance. We fell for every online freebie, never considering that if the product is free, you are the product. As Nicolas Fargo, head of the Belgian Center for Data Protection, astutely pointed out. We have already consented to use of our irises as identifiers. Will we also allow our hearts to be colonized by corporations? Everyone's heartbeat rhythm or ECG is unique. A company called NIME already offers to put your heart into it, it being your digital universe, by making that singular rhythm the ultimate password to all your devices. Which brings us back to where we started with matters of the heart. Why do we stay in bad relationships? Because we don't want to be alone. Isn't this why we're reluctant to put some distance, however short, however temporary between us and our friends, the Internet? We're afraid of being left behind, of missing out, of being lonely, even for a second. But if we don't establish boundaries now, this digital liaison is going to turn into a tortuous affair that leaves us more exposed and vulnerable. Until eventually, too late, we face the truth, chillingly summed up by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, that to live entirely in public is a form of solitary confinement. That's the kind of loneliness we should dread. Never fight, except in a crisis, Sun Tzu advised in the Art of War. The crisis is here. The weapons are our minds. Our thoughts must lead the fight. Expecting the worst, but living in hope. Don't tell me that's too pessimistic. Not when the attitude can keep company with the position of Martin Luther King, who declared, we must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. He also believed that the time is always right to do the right thing. And I think you know what I'm going to say. The time is always right to do the right thinking. Or in our modern parlance, hashtag fight for freedom. Thank you, Priya. Are there any questions? Hi. Thank you very much for this very nice and enlightening and motivating talk that you had here with us. It's really great. Thank you for that, first of all. One question for you, though. Do you have a hint for us where to start? Because I really have to say, for me personally, I'm one of those people as well. I'm really living with my mobile phone kind of in a relationship, as you have described it. And I really love it, honestly. Not the phone itself, the services that come along with it. However, I see the points. And specifically, being here now for today's, listening to more of those speeches, I'm more willing now to change something. But I don't know where to start. Do you have an idea? I think starting with little things, that's what I did. I use start page now as a search engine rather than Google. And like I said, I think you just start to notice more things as you go about your daily life using these gadgets. And you say no to more things. Whenever I got an email to do maybe do a survey because I might get a 150-pound voucher, I would almost always do it if it was a company that I liked because I was sort of bribed into thinking, oh, I might get something free. And I never do them anymore because I think you're taking everything from me anyway. And then I'm stupid enough to fill in a survey as well. No, thank you. So I think it's just little things. And as you do those, your awareness expands. And then maybe you do more. But I think this is such a huge part of our lives and our world. It's really hard to imagine doing something drastic. And so I just believe in small steps. And you know what they say for smokers? Don't give up giving up. So don't give up trying. Just do the little things. And I really believe that that starts to expand our consciousness and to start things shifting. And talk about it to other people because I really believe that's another way as well to keep this salient and to keep people alert. Thank you. Just another question because it links up. Yesterday, Mr. Morozov, he met a very convincing point for me. He said that the kind of control you are talking about, civilians and the way we are losing data to others. This is not only driven by our relationship to the Internet and what it provides, but he said it's also driven by the basic political and social surroundings around the Internet. So I wonder, what do you see the front line in this fight? Is it only the relationship to the devices and the services? Or is it a larger social and political issue? Yeah, that's a very good point. And I think it's definitely part of a wider social and political environment. I mean, the Internet doesn't exist in a vacuum. And certainly, for me, what it represents most strongly is a sort of consumer aspect of our culture, which permeates every level online and offline. And so, however, I mean, I think so many things need to change. And the reason I call the Internet the front line is because the way it can be used against us, it seems to me right now the most threatening. The way we can be watched, the way we can be manipulated, it just seems to me to be a sort of point at which our agency is most threatened. And our understandings of what it is to be an autonomous individual, the self as a sovereign being that can't be watched, you know, are most private and intimate spaces now are being sort of subject to observation. And that's why I think it's the most dangerous. Because if we can't completely be ourselves, if we can't be free citizens, then our society is really threatened from the very core. I mean, I always think of what Roosevelt said, that we are the great arsenal of democracy. It's the people that make it. And I think the instrument is a tool that could really be used to somehow hone us in to restrict us if we're not careful. And that's why I think it's fair to say it's the front line. Any more questions? So I will say thank you, Priya Basil, for being here and enjoy your day. Thank you. It was a pleasure being with you.
 Hi, everyone. The organizers here were a bit surprised when I said I wouldn't be needing  any computer equipment, and I had no slides and no audio or anything techy for my talk.  So I think also the technicians are very happy to have a break. It's maybe going a bit against  the grain of this sort of event, but I'm reverting to good old spoken word. So as was announced,  it's not in the program, but the title of this talk is Pessimism is the New Optimism.  It is very human and in some sense a prerequisite of survival to try and find the best in everything  and sometimes to avoid all together seeing what is bad. A healthy relationship relies  on being able to overlook the harmless flaws of the other. But when one person continually  avoids confronting serious transgressions by the other, a relationship becomes unhealthy.  The husband who pretends not to know about his wife's affairs. The parents who won't  admit to their child's drug abuse. The employee who won't report a bullying boss. The abused  woman who won't leave her tormentor. In all such situations, people are able to come up  with compelling justifications for their behavior. You don't understand the argument, Migo.  She can be so nice or he wouldn't cope without me or things are starting to get better now.  In psychology, this pattern of deviant judgment in particular situations is called cognitive  bias. We are all subject to it to a greater or lesser extent. And right now, many of us  are guilty of such bias in one particular relationship. This relationship began at least  for the older ones amongst us with the other party as a bulky stationary counterpart who  is mostly confined to one room. Despite the restriction, encounters could be exciting  and you generally had fun together. This companion knew its place and stayed there, its long  tail winding down to the nearest available socket. The relationship was pretty much all  on your terms. As time went on, the friend got cooler and more mobile, showing up in  ever smaller and sexier attire. Eventually it could fit in your bag. Now it can snuggle  in your pocket. It insinuated itself into more and more of your personal life. Soon,  it's aiming to get right under your skin. It may already have become your most intimate  companion. It probably goes everywhere with you during the day and then lies by your bed  at night, monitoring your sleep cycle if you wish, and ready to sound a wake-up call when  you desire. You love looking at it. All day you stroke its body, coaxing endless delight  to its screen. This amazing friend, the Internet, gave an image of you and also a reflection  of the world. You thought this companion was true, that you could tell it anything and  never be betrayed. You thought that you were still in control of the relationship. Then  Edward Snowden revealed that your cozy affair is more of a menage à trois. States and corporations  are part of the intimate circle, collecting, analyzing, and storing data about everything  you do through your friend. The news is shocking. You're upset, even outraged. This can't go  on, you think. Something has to change. But at the same time, the friend keeps purring  so enticingly to give you message alerts. It offers you upgrades and freebies and funky  new apps. It's the friend all your other friends use to reach you. If you stop taking it everywhere,  you'll probably lose your way a lot more and miss out on all kinds of very important stuff.  You can't imagine not having its warmth against your thigh. You don't know what you do in  those spare minutes without its ready distractions. So you ignore its infidelities and try not  to think about its power to hurt you. It'll be fine, you tell yourself. Things are bound  to improve. The signs are clear. You're suffering from digital cognitive bias. I suffer from  it, too. That's another very human tendency. To spot the flaws in others and offer excellent  advice while persisting, possibly obliviously, in similar behaviors yourself. People who  do this on a daily basis are called psychologists and, you guessed it, fiction writers. Since  Snowden's disclosures, I've talked to many people who've said, I don't want to change  my behavior on principle. People feel they have a right to expose whatever they like  to a selective circle. And it is the obligation of the state to protect them with laws that  make it impossible for anyone outside the chosen circle to exploit their information.  At first, this seemed to me like a contradiction in terms. How can we demand respect for privacy  while at the same time going to ever-new levels of personal exposure? But then I thought,  perhaps there isn't a contradiction. Perhaps each of these things leads to and necessitates  the other. If you're putting post-coital selfies, ironically or not, on Instagram, as was the  trend last month under hashtag after sex, then presumably you're going to be really  concerned about privacy laws and who has accessed your information. On the other hand, I can't  help thinking that the people who put such intimate material into the public realm have  no true concept of what is or should be private and don't really care about the issue. Perhaps  they've already entered some Orwellian realm of doublespeak where exposure means privacy,  as if the more you reveal, the more you prove yourself to be personal and personable, and  thus perversely, publicly qualify as a fully fledged private being. A couple of years ago,  it seemed this paradigm might have become mainstream when following the discovery that two mass  murderers, Norwegian Anders Brevik and American James Holmes, used almost no social media.  The mainstream media hurried to suggest that people who weren't on Facebook could be considered  suspicious by potential employers and lovers. As if the first question to establish rapport  in any situation must naturally be, are you on Facebook? Because of course the internet  is not a place where people exaggerate, lie, or have false identities. Anyone who uses  digital devices regularly will have left layers of personal imprints on the quicksands of the  net. There, no tides shift along the shore, washing away traces of yesterday. Everything  you've done online stays online because the internet and its servers never forget. Most  people are divulging seemingly superficial things through social media, or engaging in  activities like shopping, banking, and researching, which don't seem especially implicating in  and of themselves. However, all this information can cumulatively reveal a lot about our different  selves, past, present, future, professional, social, sexual. With data storage capacities  continually growing and getting ever cheaper, our digital shadows will persist, holding  on to details of our every keystroke and mouse click. Yet forgetting, letting go, leaving  things behind, these are necessary passages of individual development. We've evolved biologically  to have a partial sense of the past because that is, for all its risks, the most effective  way for us to exist. In the digital world, everything persists. And even if you or I  can't access it, someone can. Increasingly, there will be discrepancies between the self  in virtual and in real space. Distinctions the computer can't register and no algorithm  can work out. Mass surveillance is so dangerous because our data trail leaves us at the mercy  of people who do not know us and do not really care about us, except as a means to an abstract  end like security or marketing. It's easy to disregard what's happening because we don't  immediately feel its negative effect, or we believe ourselves to be immune to it. Yet  with advertising by corporations, for example, if things are constantly tailored to sway  us in a certain direction as they are now, we may incline that way almost in spite of  ourselves. We don't become automata, but we inevitably react to such manipulation, perhaps  even just subconsciously. As for the data collection by governments, all the evidence  shows that such indiscriminate harvesting does not make us safer, and all common sense  shows that it infringes our rights and undermines our democracies. To those who say, I have  nothing to hide, the only answer is we all have something to hide, depending on who's  looking and what they want to do with the information. Give me six lines written by  the most honest man, and I will find something there to hang him, Cardinal Richelieu said  in the 16th century. Every era has its Richelieu's. This is why it's so essential to have a more  stringent international legal framework on how and by whom our data can be used. Of course,  the law cannot make people value their own privacy, but it can force others to respect  that privacy, which is the critical thing. Until that framework is in place, though,  what can we do? In totalitarian states, citizens used to have three choices, in a migration  resistance or exile. The inward migration was a retreat into the self, an attempt to  live without challenging the status quo in the hope that one would remain unnoticed and  be left alone. Resistance involved challenging the prevailing order, taking risks even with  one's life. And exile, of course, was emigration, leaving for somewhere more free. Today, exile  is no longer an option. The new international order means that we can be followed or observed  everywhere we go. Even being offline can no longer protect us. That's not to say a bit  of a retreat from technology would have no effect. On the contrary, it could empower  us in surprising ways, not least by reminding us of the freedom in being digitally disconnected.  But a complete retreat from technology, even if it were possible, would be irresponsible.  Because freedom is not preserved just by evading a threat. Freedom needs guardians who remain  ever vigilant of possible infractions. You can't properly resist a system by opting out  of it, nor can you resist by finding your own personal normality within the existing  environment. Resistance is an active state that involves staying at odds with what is  there while seeking an alternative vision of the future. Resistance requires thinking.  The basis of optimism, suggested Oscar Wilde with characteristic contrariness, is sheer  terror. This assertion might hold a clue to why most of us want to continue pretty much  as usual after Snowden's revelations. We understand the sheer scale of the assault on our privacy  and therefore on our rights, but this is so overwhelming that it's easier to stop thinking  about it, proceed as usual, and hope for the best. But to accept constant observation,  even if you don't consciously feel it as a restriction or imposition, is to allow a gradual  curtailment of freedom and to be complicit in the diminution of democracy. The polar sociologist  Sigmund Baumann claims that we've lost the guts, the stamina, and above all the will  to persist in defending these rights, these irrepressible building blocks of individual  autonomy. I refuse to believe that. I sense people would act if they knew how, but most  of us are unsure about what would really make a difference. We have to remember that even  when we can't take practical steps to remedy a problem, we can reclaim some measure of  control by how we choose to think about it. So instead of brushing aside the mass surveillance  warnings, we must keep pondering them, forcing ourselves to consider that the status quo  may not improve much and certainly not quickly. In short, we must allow ourselves to be pessimistic.  That doesn't mean becoming doomsters and developing a tendency to stress the negative or take the  gloomiest possible view as one of the kinder definitions of pessimism expresses it. Pessimism  is also a philosophical position, and in this sense, it doesn't just stem from a negative  mindset, but is rather informed by an outlook that seeks to face up to the distasteful realities  of the world and to eliminate irrational hopes and expectations. Personally, I like the British  writer Will Selv's laconic view of pessimism as a willingness to accept that things may  be for the worst in a less than perfect world. Though my inclination is to adapt it slightly,  replacing the word accept with acknowledge, so that pessimism is a willingness to acknowledge  that things may be for the worst in a less than perfect world. Acceptance, a useful  attitude in many situations, is obviously not desirable in the face of an evil-like  mass surveillance, whereas acknowledgement involves admitting into our minds other possibilities,  even dark and disturbing ones. To have reflected on the worst is, in some sense, even if just  rudimentarily, to be more ready for it. The skillful warrior does not rely on the enemy's  not coming, but on his own preparedness, Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War. It may seem grandiose  to speak of mass surveillance in such militaristic terms, but the digital realm is a kind of  battleground right now, with states and corporations on a ruthless advance to get hold of our data.  The British Intelligence Agency, Government Communication Headquarters, GCHQ, certainly  already sees it that way, declaring on their website that online is the new front line.  We citizens are the targets, being indiscriminately bombarded with surveillance. State agencies  are at it in the name of security, while corporations do it under the benign guise of customer service.  The timeless question of history lessons the world over, what would you have done, is no  longer just an abstract question. The tyranny is here, a digitatorship of states and corporations.  The democratic privileges we cherish today were hard won, millions fought and died to  overthrow totalitarianism. Now its threat looms again in a very different, though potentially  equally serious form. Thankfully we do not yet need arms for this fight, but we do need  courage, courage to think, to face the hard ugly facts of reality. Freedom, justice, fairness,  these are not destinations at which we arrive through somebody else's efforts, only to lie  back and take a holiday from thinking. Each generation has to engage with these concepts  and you, redefining them as necessary. Human rights are almost always accompanied by the  word responsibilities, because what we enjoy, we also have a duty to protect. During the  Second World War the British writer Virginia Woolf often felt useless, wishing she could  contribute more to the war effort and conscious that writing was somehow irrelevant in the  circumstances. Yet she went on writing, using it to think about and understand what was  happening and to analyze her role within that. Thinking is my fighting, she came to realize.  And that's what we need to recognize too, thinking must become our fighting, for it  is the only thing that can offer us immunity from the seductions and manipulations of tyranny.  The internet with its manifold conveniences and attractions, its intersection with almost  every facet of our lives, could become the most despotic tool in human history. I know  I'm focusing on the negative and I have no wish to deny the internet's capacity to empower,  enrich and liberate, but I'm daring to take the bleaker line because we are all already  converts to the broad church of the web, believers in the promise of digital salvation. Indeed  many of us, especially at such an event, are fanatics insistent still that the good outweighs  the bad. Cognitive bias gone a little mad, you might say. But wherever we are on the  spectrum of faith in the future of the net, optimist or pessimist, there is a single secular  invocation for our digital congregation. Let us think. Ever since last autumn, I've been  doing an online search now and then, checking changes in internet use since Snowden. It  didn't turn out much in the way of broad usage statistics as I wanted, though it was interesting  to see that within a few months of the revelations being published, usage of ducked out go and  start page had increased significantly. Then a few weeks ago, I came across a couple of  new surveys, one in the US conducted by Harris International on behalf of a security company  called ESET, found that 47% of Americans think more carefully about where they go, what they  say and what they do online. These people have even changed their behavior and are conducting  fewer financial transactions online, including reducing their online shopping and banking.  Meanwhile, 24% of the total respondents said they were less inclined to communicate via  email. These sorts of choices, simple gestures of withholding can be incredibly effective  because they harness our power as consumers by saying no. Companies feel and notice this.  If more of us were saying no, more of the time, corporations would be forced to reconsider  what they do with our data. A little bit more mindfulness as we go about our digital activities  would be enough to send a strong message to those watching us across the web. Cultivating  my own awareness has helped put me on guard against subtle things of which I was previously  oblivious. I noticed the psychological pressure to buy being exerted everywhere online. Airlines  with their alerts, only two seats left. Price comparison websites that inform you there are  nine people viewing this hotel last booked three hours ago. One leading online bookshop  has a new tool called Watch People Shop. You run your mouse over a map of the world and  can see that someone just bought Genesis 3 in South Korea 28 seconds ago, or someone  in Australia bought the marriage book seven seconds ago. What is this if not incontrovertible  evidence that we are continually being monitored in real time by companies? The pressure doesn't  even stop after you've bought something. Your item has been dispatched. You are kindly informed  and often given a specific time slot in which it will be delivered. This might be convenient,  but it is also restricting. I find myself wondering if I will be home. In the past,  I would have tried to be home. Like my life should be organized around the delivery of  my purchases rather than the other way around. Sure, you can change the delivery time. You  can even track your item all the way along its route. But what happened to ordering  something and forgetting about it until it arrived? At your doorstep, at the post office,  at your neighbors? Of course, once it's there, the sender wants a review and inevitably has  further recommendations. The barrage of helpful information from companies is actually an excuse  for constant intrusion on our personal space. Somehow, though, it's a little easier to resist  now that I see it for what it is. The rallying cry of the Enlightenment was,  Saperre, our day, dare to think. Our digital Enlightenment is long overdue. Until recently,  most of us carelessly embraced every technological advance. We fell for every online freebie,  never considering that if the product is free, you are the product. As Nicolas Fargo, head  of the Belgian Center for Data Protection, astutely pointed out. We have already consented  to use of our irises as identifiers. Will we also allow our hearts to be colonized by  corporations? Everyone's heartbeat rhythm or ECG is unique. A company called NIME already  offers to put your heart into it, it being your digital universe, by making that singular  rhythm the ultimate password to all your devices. Which brings us back to where we started with  matters of the heart. Why do we stay in bad relationships? Because we don't want to be  alone. Isn't this why we're reluctant to put some distance, however short, however  temporary between us and our friends, the Internet? We're afraid of being left behind,  of missing out, of being lonely, even for a second. But if we don't establish boundaries  now, this digital liaison is going to turn into a tortuous affair that leaves us more  exposed and vulnerable. Until eventually, too late, we face the truth, chillingly summed  up by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, that to live entirely in public is a form  of solitary confinement. That's the kind of loneliness we should dread. Never fight,  except in a crisis, Sun Tzu advised in the Art of War. The crisis is here. The weapons  are our minds. Our thoughts must lead the fight. Expecting the worst, but living in hope. Don't  tell me that's too pessimistic. Not when the attitude can keep company with the position  of Martin Luther King, who declared, we must accept finite disappointment, but we must  never lose infinite hope. He also believed that the time is always right to do the right  thing. And I think you know what I'm going to say. The time is always right to do the  right thinking. Or in our modern parlance, hashtag fight for freedom.  Thank you, Priya. Are there any questions?  Hi. Thank you very much for this very nice and enlightening and motivating talk that  you had here with us. It's really great. Thank you for that, first of all. One question for  you, though. Do you have a hint for us where to start? Because I really have to say, for  me personally, I'm one of those people as well. I'm really living with my mobile phone kind  of in a relationship, as you have described it. And I really love it, honestly. Not the  phone itself, the services that come along with it. However, I see the points. And specifically,  being here now for today's, listening to more of those speeches, I'm more willing now to  change something. But I don't know where to start. Do you have an idea?  I think starting with little things, that's what I did. I use start page now as a search  engine rather than Google. And like I said, I think you just start to notice more things  as you go about your daily life using these gadgets. And you say no to more things. Whenever  I got an email to do maybe do a survey because I might get a 150-pound voucher, I would almost  always do it if it was a company that I liked because I was sort of bribed into thinking,  oh, I might get something free. And I never do them anymore because I think you're taking  everything from me anyway. And then I'm stupid enough to fill in a survey as well. No, thank  you. So I think it's just little things. And as you do those, your awareness expands. And  then maybe you do more. But I think this is such a huge part of our lives and our world.  It's really hard to imagine doing something drastic. And so I just believe in small steps.  And you know what they say for smokers? Don't give up giving up. So don't give up trying.  Just do the little things. And I really believe that that starts to expand our consciousness  and to start things shifting. And talk about it to other people because I really believe  that's another way as well to keep this salient and to keep people alert.  Thank you. Just another question because it links up. Yesterday, Mr. Morozov, he met a  very convincing point for me. He said that the kind of control you are talking about,  civilians and the way we are losing data to others. This is not only driven by our relationship  to the Internet and what it provides, but he said it's also driven by the basic political  and social surroundings around the Internet. So I wonder, what do you see the front line  in this fight? Is it only the relationship to the devices and the services? Or is it  a larger social and political issue? Yeah, that's a very good point. And I think  it's definitely part of a wider social and political environment. I mean, the Internet  doesn't exist in a vacuum. And certainly, for me, what it represents most strongly is  a sort of consumer aspect of our culture, which permeates every level online and offline.  And so, however, I mean, I think so many things need to change. And the reason I call the  Internet the front line is because the way it can be used against us, it seems to me  right now the most threatening. The way we can be watched, the way we can be manipulated,  it just seems to me to be a sort of point at which our agency is most threatened. And  our understandings of what it is to be an autonomous individual, the self as a sovereign  being that can't be watched, you know, are most private and intimate spaces now are  being sort of subject to observation. And that's why I think it's the most dangerous.  Because if we can't completely be ourselves, if we can't be free citizens, then our society  is really threatened from the very core. I mean, I always think of what Roosevelt said,  that we are the great arsenal of democracy. It's the people that make it. And I think  the instrument is a tool that could really be used to somehow hone us in to restrict  us if we're not careful. And that's why I think it's fair to say it's the front line.  Any more questions? So I will say thank you, Priya Basil, for being here and enjoy your  day.  Thank you. It was a pleasure being with you.
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