Entering the Age of Digital Imperialism

Belief systems are more powerful than information systems - even in technology.

"The net changes everything," Google's "Don't be evil," "Facebook was built to accomplish a social mission" (from its IPO filing documents) and even "Revenge of the Nerds:" built into the core of the industry's self-image is the notion that whatever they produce or do is better for humanity than what came before.

Hence Uber's and Airbnb's indignation that mere elected government entities would attempt to thwart their expansion or that there is something malign in Google's and Facebook's and Amazon's omnivorous acquisitions of personal data.

But what this attitude fails - or refuses - to accept is that this 'march of progress' is freighted with values and principles that may or may not be consistent with the cultural, philosophical and psychological mores or norms of the societies they are attempting to transform.

This would be an abstruse intellectual debate were it nor for the fact that technology has achieved market saturation in most of the developed world. And in some areas, there are more cell phones than people.

So the future lies in providing internet access to those who do not yet have it. But as that process begins, with talk of lasers and giant balloons and satellites and drones, those who face this opportunity may well question what they are getting. And at the same time, those who have already received this bounty may begin to push back against the overwhelming digitization of their existence. A balance can and will be struck, but determining where and how and when will be the challenge. JL

Bill Wasik reports in the New York Times:

Smartphones and other gadgets are bearing cultural freight as they cross borders. Executives of these companies believe that information technology is crucial to bettering society. The “power to share” looks like a social good. But what (does) that sharing adds up to. Silicon Valley spread(s) values as they create value — a virtuous circle for all who share their virtues.

In March, the Culture Ministry of Thailand sent out an unusual communiqué. Women, it seems, both locals and tourists, were snapping pictures of their breasts from beneath, in an act known colloquially as the “underboob selfie.” The ministry reminded women that sharing such images was banned under the Computer Crime Act of 2007 and that offenders could face five years in prison. Since the shots were cropped below the face, a ministry spokesman acknowledged to Reuters, prosecuting the scofflaws would be difficult. But this flaunting of flesh, the spokesman feared, might tempt others toward the same indelicacy. “We can only warn people to not take it up,” he said. “They are inappropriate actions.”

Some foreign observers saw this as another reactionary move by Thailand’s military junta, which took power a year ago in a bloodless coup. But in fact the ministry has long policed images of nudity in the country, in keeping with a longstanding uneasiness in Thai culture around public displays of sexuality. For at least a century, despite Thailand’s famously (or infamously) laissez-faire attitude toward prostitution, the mainstream Thai stance on pornography has been markedly more conservative than the West’s. Production, distribution and possession of porn, widely defined, are all outlawed. In 2011, when three teenage girls danced bare-breasted at a spring festival, a video of the event sparked a national scandal, and the police — under what was then a democratically elected government — began a search for the culprits. (The girls, 13 to 16, eventually turned themselves in and paid fines of $16 each.)

During the 20th century, for governments that hoped, as Thailand’s did and does, to beat back undesirable values from outside, the main culprit was what sometimes is called “cultural imperialism.” Pop-culture products like rock ’n’ roll and Hollywood films were seen, no doubt correctly, as smuggling within them not just a licentiousness but a dangerous individualism, a hatred of authority, a love of consumerism and wealth. In Thailand, the banning of foreign films stretches back at least as far as 1925, when an Indian-German production called “The Lion of India” was barred for its depiction of the Buddha’s life. Today the country continues to repel big-screen indecency (e.g., “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” from 2008) as well as sins against the Thai royal family like “The King and I,” whose most recent Hollywood rendition, “Anna and the King” (from 1999, starring Jodie Foster), got no further with the Culture Ministry than any previous version.

The underboob selfie, though, represents a rather different form of cultural incursion. Call it digital imperialism, perhaps, in that the values are arriving not inside artworks made by others but through a tool that locals can use themselves. As Thailand is discovering, the smartphone — for all its indispensability as a tool of business and practicality — is also a bearer of values; it is not a culturally neutral device. On the matter of privacy, for example, the pull toward sharing more and concealing less begins with the mere existence of the camera, tucked in every pocket, available whenever the impulse arises. It continues through the design of the apps we use, which have been calibrated to make our uploading seamless, to make our posts default to public, to make the less private choice always and everywhere more attractive to us in a cycle of escalating self-revelation. Thanks to the Internet’s ability to find for us, in an instant, hordes of other people with the same impulse as ours — to photograph, say, the underside of a taboo body part — we can feel secure in that impulse, even if it’s not shared by anyone else within a hundred or a thousand miles. We Americans might praise this shift as liberatory, or laugh it off as harmless, but we cannot pretend that it is somehow value-free. And if digital imperialism is happening — if smartphones and other gadgets are bearing cultural freight as they cross borders — there is little doubt as to which nation’s values are hiding in the hold. As of 2013, eight of the world’s top 10 Internet companies by audience were based in the United States, though 81 percent of their online visitors were not. (This fact was made painfully obvious to those users and their governments that same year, when Edward Snowden’s trove of N.S.A. documents showed just how low these American Internet giants had stooped to cooperate with surveillance demands.) Smartphones themselves, from their precision-milled exteriors to their tiled grids of apps on-screen, are patterned largely on Apple’s blueprint, even when designed and made by companies based in South Korea or China. The question is not whether the spread of technology is promulgating, as Hollywood once did, an American vision of what the world should be. Rather, the question is how the rest of the world will respond.

We try to see American technology as it looks from elsewhere. In some locales, we focus on industries that are mourning or battling (or both) the arrival of high-tech competition from afar. In others, we linger on homegrown technological creations that face the prospect of displacement as the American juggernaut rolls on. We chart the unexamined footprint of technology on landscapes and languages, on fashion and friendships, far from the California office parks in which so many of these tools are devised and honed.

In Silicon Valley, the notion that technology spreads values is part of the corporate culture — as evidenced in the manifesto that Facebook published, rather incongruously, in the filing papers for its $16 billion I.P.O. three years ago. Declaring at the outset that Facebook was “built to accomplish a social mission,” the document goes on to promise a sort of Facebook revolution: “By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible.” It continues: “Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-Internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.” This evangelical stance, pervasive in the Valley, explains why a major part of Facebook’s and Google’s philanthropic efforts in the past two years has been concentrated on taking Internet access to the developing world. Executives of these companies genuinely believe that over the long run, information technology — including, naturally, the services they themselves provide — is crucial to bettering society.

From the Valley’s perspective, that is, the “power to share” looks less like an imposition of American values and more like a universal social good. But even if we agree with this proposition — as Thailand’s Culture Ministry, for one, might not — there is the more fraught question of what all that sharing adds up to. For individual users, everything about the smartphone nudges them by design to reveal more, to express and connect more. But all the resulting revelations then get rolled up as data that can be offered to governments and corporations — which feel practically compelled, once they know they can obtain it, to parse it all for usable intelligence. For institutions, as with consumers, all resistance recedes once they understand what is possible, once it’s all made to seem not merely acceptable but inevitable and desirable.

This double-edged quality is a hallmark of so many technological innovations today. The same facial recognition software that autotags your photos can autoflag dissidents at the border. The machine-translation engine that lets you flirt in passable French can help spy on multiple continents from a single cubicle. The fitness data you use to adjust your workout might soon forcibly adjust your health-insurance premium. And the stakes have risen considerably as the Valley’s ambitions, during the past few years, have clambered into physical space; in a phenomenon that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has famously called “software eating the world,” a new generation of tech companies has encroached on industries like hospitality (Airbnb), transportation

(Uber and Lyft), office space (WeWork) and more, bringing a set of tech-inflected values with them.

In old-fashioned 19th-century imperialism, the Christian evangelists made a pretense of traveling separately from the conquering colonial forces. But in digital imperialism, everything travels as one, in the form of the splendid technology itself: salvation and empire, missionary and magistrate, Bible and gun. For all that the world-changing talk of Silicon Valley gets parodied, it is not just empty rhetoric. Over the past decade, it has helped draw so many of the nation’s most driven college graduates to Silicon Valley, the one place in 21st-century America that promises to satisfy both their overweening ambition and their restless craving for social uplift. These unquiet Americans have gone on to design tools that spread values as they create value — a virtuous circle for all who share their virtues.