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You might think that a massive hack of one of Australia's largest Telcos is a problem, but that's peanuts compared to the hacking of our personal lives.
Where are we going as a society? And will you be happy when we get there? Steve McAlpine is here to help you answer those questions.
If a Delorean time machine pulled up in front of your house - Back To The Future style - and someone offered to show you what the future would be like, would you be content with what you found? And if not, what could you do to change it? Thinking this through is what Steve McAlpine calls Delorean Philosophy.
Steve McAlpine is a well-known social commentator, respected theologian and popular author. Each week, he takes a crucial trend or event that's playing out in society now and asks, "Where is this taking us?"
Rather than just pontificating, Steve then provides practical steps listeners can take if they want to change the future. That's Delorean Philosophy.
HOW ABOUT THIS?
So I get a text message the other day from my Telco provider
Optus – an Australian company bought out by Singapore’s Singtel
Cyberattack update: Confirming only the licence number on your Driver’s Licence was exposed, not the card number. Your State or Territory government will provide advice on any action that you may need to take via their website.
My first thought: Wait? My Driver’s Licence has a card number as well as a licence number? Who knew?
It took a hack to discover that? You learn something new every day.
Something new like this: one of our major Telcos had hopelessly inadequate security measures when it comes to protecting our data.
Yes that’s right:
Here in Australia OPTUS has just been hacked. An amateurish hack – as these things go – but 10 and a half million customers and ex-customers were hacked.
Ten and a half million – forty percent of the population of Australia – had licence numbers, bank account details, passport details etc, taken. Now, given the secondary and tertiary levels of security for things these days it’s not all doom and gloom.
But the next time a public entity – or a govt department for that matter – says “for extra levels of security please provide us with …”
We’re all going to think twice.
I mean how much data do they need? And is this hack just the tip of the iceberg?
And should we care any more that an amateur hacker has our details, or should we care more that a large corporation – or a government – has a level of information about us that they didn’t really need to take, but which we willingly gave?
Even my password reminder questions seem sullied.
What’s it to you what my mother’s maiden name was?
And why can’t Fido rest in peace without me having to dredge up the horrors of the death of the first pet I owned?
Jokes aside – we give out information flippantly, then recoil in horror, wondering how we can gather it all in again, sheepishly checking our bank accounts to make sure some villain in a Guy Fawkes mask isn’t stealing our life’s savings.
We value our privacy
Except of course when we don’t.
At the same time we worry about data being hacked, we public extol the virtues of everything we read, everything we think, every trip we go on, our spending habits, our worship habits the state of our mental health, the state of our physical health, and where we will be in two day’s time.
We're private about our financial and legal data
but profligate with our personalities.
What was that word OPTUS used in its “hacked” text message ?
Exposed
No one has to “hack” that much about us
We willingly expose so much about ourselves to everyone
A sign – apparently – of being authentic
Is self-exposure
Maybe our self-hacks – as we might call them
Are exposing ourselves in a more sinister and potentially worrying
Manner than our financial data hacks
Maybe we haven’t figure out to whom
And for whom our self-exposure
is most valuable.
SO WHERE’S IT ALL GOING?
Well if you believe the reports – not in a very good direction
And we’re not talking about the conspiracy theory websites
.
Bloomberg – the financial news journal
In an article headlined
“China's Surveillance State Will Be the West's Future, Too”
Says it baldly:
“The arc of the digital revolution bends towards tyranny”
Forget the golden glow of tech company ads
And the promise to keep us connected.
Bloomberg staff writer, Adrian Wooldridge,
Says our future is the Chinese present
China’s zealous harvesting of data,
The fact that China possesses fifty percent of the surveillance cameras on the planet,
The fact that its cable TV network now provides households with a remote control that includes a button that allows you to report a crime without having to leave the comfort of your chair…
Or the fact that China has pushed a financial credit system to its logical conclusion: a social credit system determining which citizens should be rewarded for good behaviour, and which should be locked out – or indeed locked up – all on the basis of huge amounts of data.
All scary stories and all safely locked away in an authoritarian state. But according to Wooldridge it’s coming to a democracy near you
In fact it’s already here.
Writing in The Australian newspaper in the wake of the OPTUS data breach, Peter van Onselen, made the point that the major Australian political parties have far-reaching data bases that they – by parliamentary act - have excluded from Privacy Act rules.
Big deal – you might say – but when appointments are made to government boards, the data bases are searched to see if the information about individuals suggests which party they may vote for.
Government boards then become stacked with groupthink. It’s just a more sophisticated version of Amazon suggesting books you ought to read because you read one particular tome.
Now in case it all sounds scary – let’s be clear – in our risk averse world it’s all about safety.
As Wooldridge states the Chinese Communist Party now believes that data mining:
Will discern what people want without having to give them either a vote or a voice, ceaselessly adjusting the party’s “offer” to satisfy its “customers.”
Heading problems off at the pass, so to speak.
And lest we think, once again, that’s just China, then what do we do with New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinta Ardern’s statements to the UN recently about how to limit misinformation on the internet,
Ardern stated:
“We are rightly concerned that even those most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech we value so highly,”
I’m with you there Jacinta
But then she follows up with this concern that allowing the internet to rip:
“poses an equal threat to the norms we all value”.
Here’s the problem
We don’t all value the same norms.
Some things you see as a threat I see as a promise
And vice versa.
The West is experiencing a huge splintering
In terms of what we call the “Common Good”
So for example
My norms around how gender is determined
And the parameters of sexuality
Are neither everyone’s norms
Nor are they – increasingly – viewed as the common good.
But rather – they are viewed by many large corporations
And increasingly governments – as problematic
And contrary not simply to the norms we all value
But to the norms we SHOULD value.
Data collection is not merely
About Storing information from us
But shaping opinions for us.
Collectively.
That’s the point of algorithms.
Who determines which information is for the common good
Around hotly contested matters
Such as public health
Political opinion
Sexual identity and the like?
Does this sound too dystopian?
Too futuristic?
Too science fiction?
The best science fiction of course
Tells us where – unchecked – our ideas might lead.
They are almost invariably dystopian
And perhaps that’s because the best sci-fi writers
Are not political or poetic
But prophetic
They take ideas and drive them to their logical extension
This podcast is called Delorean Philosophy
Not because the future is all hoverboards and electric guitars
But because we want to take ideas to their logical extension
And in doing so – work out where ideas are taking us
Which future?
Whose future?
And in terms of prophetic sci-fi
Exhibit A: The movie Minority Report:
Produced 20 years ago
Starring Tom Cruise
Based on a short story by Phillip K Dick
Written nearly 70 years ago
The premise?
A specialist crimes unit
Actually called a “pre-crimes unit”
– underpinned by three psychics – called Pre-Cogs
Pre-cogniscent – knowing before the event -
Visualise impending homicides
They’ve made the US a safer place
Violent crime is headed off at the pass.
The only problem – a minority report by
Another Pre-Cog – constantly goes against the data
Resulting in their adverse findings being scrapped.
Injustices occur.
People are wrongfully imprisoned.
Or are they?
Best not take any chances
A few unsafe eggs need to be broken to
Make a safety omelette, right?
Enter Tom Cruise…
Watch it if you haven’t.
Because this is not about stalags
And gulags
Not in the West at least
It’s not about a
Political Zombie apocalypse
More
“A Beautiful Apocalypse”
Perhaps the arc of the digital revolution
DOES bend towards tyranny
But in our case it’s a soft-focus
Pastel-coloured tyranny with a background
Of elevator music.
The tyranny of
A highly ordered
Highly crafted society
Of comfort and ease
And above all else – safety -
One in which those
troublesome micro decisions
Which we find so tiresome
Are made for us
In this increasingly curated life
Of “surveillance capitalism”
- Companies using data harvesting technologies
To compile behaviours and predict markets -
No one needs to hack our data.
All the information required
We gladly give them.
Every click we make
Every pic we take
They’ve been watching you …
And our need to be authentic
- Conspicuously so -
In a social media world
Hands out data on a plate.
Your Resume might tell your prospective employer
That you would be a model employee
Hardworking and honest
But if you’re constantly posting pics on social media
Of your weekend shenanigans
Then hitting the ground running on Monday mornings
Might not be your thing.
Thanks you for your application, but…
And just as a speak
The newly appointed CEO of a national football
Club in Australia is all over the headlines
Because as a Christian
He believes in some values around sexual ethics
That the national league
Diametrically opposes
Did he blog about it?
Tweet his views on sex?
No
But his church’s website is full of
Sermons that reveal what this community
He belongs to – thinks of such matters
Can the national football code
Which is constantly seeking to promote diversity
And indeed has a Pride Round each year?
Afford CEOs in its clubs
who don’t value the norms we all value?
Maybe better to head it off at the pass
In a Minority Report kinda way
Pressure the club to self-censor.
We’ve become accustomed to frantic digital cleansing
In order to align ourselves with some
Supposed pole star “norms”
We apparently all value.
While this soft tyranny is a “danger in the West”
There’s an outlier country in Europe
When it comes to data
One nation has swung so far the other way
That getting any data seems impossible.
Extreme “Data hygiene” threatens
The normal functions of modern life.
No surprises for guessing the country: Germany.
The Germans take seriously that quote in Bloomsberg
“The arc of the digital revolution bends towards tyranny”
having seen first hand in their own country
How data was harvested
For hard tyranny
They’ve swung the other way
In a recent article in The Times
It was reported that in post-pandemic Germany
Employers were having a hard time getting
Employees back to work
They were not even permitted
To check that they were back at their desks.
Government departments are struggling to align
After being ordered to stop using Microsoft Office programmes such as Word, Excel and Teams because some of the data might be unwittingly transferred to the US.
96 per cent of all departments use Office, so unless someone comes up with a new – and universal – programme, things could grind to a halt.
And during the pandemic health officials, devoid of data about which citizens might be above 80 years of age and therefore in a higher risk category, resorted to sourcing local postal service lists and guessing who might be old just from peoples’ names!
Which names?
Perhaps the German equivalent of Ethyl, Mavis or Bertie
Neither extreme
Too much data
Or too little data
Seems either helpful or healthy
SO WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THIS?
First up
Don’t panic
Well not too much
If the OPTUS breach
Or a similar one has compromised your data
Then you need to sort out some new documents
And watch as the government tightens up regulations.
This is no call to
Go off grid
In some sort of post-technological existence.
We live here
We live now
Sacrificing our current communities
Friendships and spheres of influence
For the sake of zealous data hygiene
In the off-grid wilderness
Is a trade-off I don’t think is worth considering.
But second
Don’t go down the – ironically -
Digital Conspiracy theory rabbit hole
Algorithms cut both ways
Don’t be unthinking
But don’t be overthinking either.
Be discerning
Perhaps be most discerning about
Your soft data
How much we share of ourselves online
When corporations and governments have a
Keen interest in shaping the so called “norms we value”
It may help to reject the “let it all hang out authenticity program”
And play your cards closer to your chest.
This is not a call for total self-censoring
But for wisdom
Be aware that
The serpentine arms of data harvesting
Will reach further into our lives
As technology increases.
And what about some digital Detoxing?
As Australian author
Daniel Sih calls for in his book
Spacemaker: How to Unplug, Unwind and Think Clearly in a Digital Age.
Digital self-care
Unless we’re somehow bombed back into the Stone Age
Or an actual Zombie Apocalypse occurs
Then the Digital Age isn’t going away any time soon.
How can we help each other think clearly about it?
How can we help our friends and family members
Our children – who are digital natives –
Be discerning about data and its use?
How can we resist the push by
Surveillance capitalism to make life smooth
By nudging and nurdling us towards decisions
That are all about our comfort and ease?
Interestingly – it’s as I’ve been part of a local church community
And the discipleship program it offers
That I find an alternative to
Discipleship programs big Tech lures me with.
One that rewards me with digital dopamine hit
After digital dopamine hit
When I hit “search”
We need a Minority Report community
A dissenting voice
That rises above the fog of digital war.
One that refutes and refuses
the so-called
“norms we all value”
Norms that lure us into
Lives committed to
comfort and ease.
Personal autonomy
Perhaps the arc of the digital revolution
Does bend towards tyranny
But for us in the West it will probably
Be a soft tyranny
The question is
What are YOU putting in place
To stare down such a tyrant?