York Festival of Ideas 2015

Posted on 2015-06-15 by Nick Thomas

Users vs. Techs

This year, I learned about York's Festival of Ideas. Started in 2011, this year's

theme was "Secrets and Discoveries", which included a whole day (today) on

Surveillance, Snowden and Security. Right up my alley, so off I went. This

article is really about things that were brought up in a panel discussion,

entitled The Future of Cyber-Security. I don't know if these things are being

recorded and uploaded, but I'll link if it becomes available.

Festival of Ideas

Surveillance, Snowden and Security

The Future of Cyber-Security

The panel was composed of five speakers, with what could be called a range of

experience; it was chaired by a BBC technology correspondent. Early in the main

discussion came a generally-agreed maxim - that "we" shouldn't let "the techies"

determine our online future. Being as charitable as I can be to this idea, I think

it's expressible as "not everything that is possible should be permitted". Or maybe,

"techies should build the online environment we mutually agree we should have,

rather than the one techies think is best". At the time, it came across as being

quite antagonistic - in any division of the populace between "techie" and "everyone else",

I'm surely in the former group, after all.

Later in the discussion, an illuminating window was shone on this attitude - at

least for me - by a digression into the power that a small, elite group of

technologists sitting in Silicon Valley and working on huge online edifices that

we find ourselves willing, or forced, to use. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft,

etc. These services and software companies mediate a large portion of online

interactions, and to a very real approximation, they *do* decide what is possible

online for people. This became evident in the last (and best) audience question

of the session, where someone asked what alternatives there were to these

behemoths - the questioner wanted to know what she could do, right now, to avoid

them, if possible.

None of the panel could answer this. They all sheepishly proclaimed their allegiance

to Google, or to Apple, and commuted the question to "can we do without this service?"

or "what's the minimum amount of information I can give to this company while still

using their service?". One of the panellists (I forget who) managed to note that

alternatives do exist for some of these services, but didn't know what any of them

were, and opined that the cost of finding and using such an alternative outweighed

the benefits of escaping the Silicon Valley set of solutions.

These people are users. More than that, they are consumers. Consumer activism,

it turns out, is how they expect their online services to evolve in a direction

that fulfils their wishes. (The pig-dog blog, incidentally, turns out to be

consumer activism and it's not a new thing. Who knew?) The techs are expected to

present a choice of online services that represents the range of the possible

(well, minus a few that have been determined ahead-of-time to be too dangerous),

and consumer choice is meant to filter out the bad ones. Wouldn't that be nice?

In reality, of course, the options open to me as a tech for any online service

are much broader than the options open to a user, simply because many ways of

providing a given service haven't been productised in any sensible fashion. I

host my own email and instant messaging, and create my own encryption keys to

secure these things over the wider Internet. This is the online equivalent of

brewing your own beer, or making your own biltong. Those who can't are unlikely

to ever have the *dubious* pleasure of tasting Henderson's Relish biltong.

Anyway, these users have their view of what is possible shaped by the products

that are currently successful. The "right to be forgotten" ruling came up partway

through this panel. Removing search results from Google indexing is fairly

pointless, a techie will cry - the content still exists, after all, and other

search indexes also exist. You just can't stop YaCy from indexing them. But it

doesn't matter to the user - the desired effect has been achieved according to

their (limited) view of what is possible.

The idea of having your own email securely located in your own living room, or

being responsible for asserting your own identity online, is a revolutionary

concept to users in general. They're just not aware that it's an option until a

helpful techie informs them that it is - brainstorming "alternatives to GMail"

with such a group is going to throw up replies like "hotmail". Their view of

hat is possible is shaped by the techies providing the services they already

use.

Attempts to productise self-hosting of email, say, are ongoing - but it's a niche

thing. The other side of the coin is attempting to convince users to be more

gung-ho with non-productised (or less-productised, I guess) solutions. If we're

sat in a wood, freezing to death, a decent proportion of us could make fire from

first principles, even if we don't have a Zippo lighter with us. As things are

with online services, we wouldn't even start collecting the analogous driftwood.

Groups of techies like those behind MailPile have got the right idea, I think,

but it's an uphill slog - and trying to make users aware of these possibilities,

and get them into policy and legislative debates, is the hardest bit. The tech

comes naturally to us, after all. Did I stand up and say any of this at the panel

discussion? Of course not :p.

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Contact the author by email: gemini@ur.gs

mailto:gemini@ur.gs