Cory Doctorow on privacy, technology, and control
I very much liked Cory Doctorow’s keynote address at this year’s OSCON on the normative aspects of our technological choices. Open societies need open and autonomy-promoting infrastructres: economic, political, legal, and technological. Design choices are rarely value neutral, indeed, there is a ghost in every machine. As we noted earlier on this blog (in broadly Rawlsian terms) in the context of net neutrality:
Net neutrality is first and foremost a question about the background institutions of a just society. The end-to-end Internet architecture is about to put an end to one-way sender-recipient communication that has all but destroyed the discursive nature of the political process. Net neutrality is about a basic infrastructure of equality built into the protocols of our communication, providing equal freedoms for all. The Bill of Rights was not about maximizing total welfare. It was — and is — about guaranteeing a fully adequate set of equal political and civil liberties to everyone. Architecture mirrors legal code. We insist on equal access to public spaces, and — despite congestion — we insist on equal access to public roads. (And where we do think about congestion pricing, we engage in a full-blown policy debate, in which economics is one but not the only concern.)
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