Legibility, Privacy and Creativity: Linked Data in a Surveillance Society

Christopher Brewster(Aston University)

andDougald Hine

(http://dougald.co.uk )

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Introduction:“Slipping through the raindrops”

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Legibility

• Concept comes from James Scott’s Seeing like a State -- desire of the state to “arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription and prevention of rebellion”

• Typically expressed in maps, catalogues, standards, and many types of infrastructure.

• Initiatives included building roads, single currencies, cadastral maps, imposition of a single language, census, ID cards and video surveillance.

• Privacy is a specific form of illegibility. Due to inability on part of the state to capture data.

• Much technological progress driven by or resulted in increased legibility

• Closely related to concept of “that which is measured is managed”

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Privacy and Anonymity

• Privacy is a modern phenomenon found in the city

• Privacy did not exist in the village or nomadic tribe

• Privacy arises due to atomisation and alienation and the technological gap between the creation of cities and the need for legibility

• Telecommunications and the Internet have “shrunk” the globe -- McLuhan’s “Global Village” is a reality

• As a village, we have also lost privacy:

• Consensual loss via social media, cookies, bank cards etc.

• Unintentional loss via telecom metadata, cross-site tracking, video surveillance

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Types of Freedom

• Privacy currently seen as a human right

• ... but really is just one type of freedom among many

• Much of technology provides some freedoms and removes others e.g. road networks

• We now can communicate around the globe at almost zero cost - great freedom but loss of privacy

• With each technology, different groups gain freedoms, others lose e.g. railways lines, digital file copying

• Freedom to be creative, to innovate, typically has occurred in cities

• Usually explained as due to cluster of ideas, skills, opportunities.

• Perhaps illegibility is important factor (e.g. Internet)

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The Semantic Web, Linked Data and IoT

• Core capability of Semantic Web and IoT is naming of things

• URIs and IP addresses provide unique “names”

• Linked Data and Open Data represent a vision of ever more data on all human activity

• Open Data is politically acceptable face of a transparent total surveillance society

• SW and IoT are standards like weights and measures, roads, etc. Potentially provide specific freedoms, and limit others

• SW and IoT are part of ongoing project to make everything more legible (to the State)

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Unintended Consequences

• A society with total surveillance:

• loses trust

• has a tendency to conform

• everything will be known rather than explored (cf. Google Glass)

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Unintended Consequences - 2

• Most worrying - potential loss of creativity

• Village societies are stable but no or limited complex civilisation, limited arts, limited innovation

• Loss of creativity and innovation will make society incapable of change.

• Parallel with USSR, they were good at chess, gymnastics, and poor at innovation.

• Total security = total classification

• Total classification = one may not be able to think the other

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Conclusions

• Semantic Web and IoT may provide some new freedoms

• but may reduce the illegible space

• loss of illegibility potentially very damaging

• culturally

• politically

• agility and innovation

• What next? Keep looking for the spaces between the raindrops.

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Acknowledgements

• Funding: This work was partially supported by the FI PPP FIspace project (http://www.fispace.eu )

• Images:

• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RAIN_DROP_TREES.jpg

• http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/morris/31-Dot-Map-Jewish-Pop-Amsterdam.jpg

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/taedc/9314162413/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/500hats/795842899/

• http://www.opinno.com/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screenshot-amphionforumintelkeynote-2012.jpeg

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/63787005/

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