Techno-utopianism is any ideology based on the premise that
advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or
another utopian ideal.
A techno-utopia is
therefore an ideal society, in which laws,
government, and social conditions are solely operating for the benefit and
well-being of all its citizens, set in the near- or far-future, as advanced science and technology
will allow these ideal living standards to exist; for example, post-scarcity, transformations in human nature, the avoidance
or prevention of suffering and even the end of death.
Even today, the
negative social effects of a technological utopia can be seen. Mediated
communication such as phone calls, instant messaging and text messaging are
steps towards a utopian world in which one can easily contact another
regardless of time or location. However, mediated communication removes many
aspects that are helpful in transferring messages. As it stands today, most
text, email, and instant messages offer fewer nonverbal cues about the
speaker’s feelings than do face-to-face encounters. This makes it
so that mediated communication can easily be misconstrued and the intended
message is not properly conveyed. With the absence of tone, body language, and
environmental context, the chance of a misunderstanding is much higher,
rendering the communication ineffective. In fact, mediated technology can be
seen from a dystopian view because it can be detrimental to effective
interpersonal communication. These criticisms would only apply to messages that
are prone to misinterpretation as not every text based communication requires
contextual cues.
Large technology companies have come to
dominate the online experience, constantly gathering users’ personal data,
often without their knowledge, and feeding it through proprietary algorithms to
curate search results, recommendations, and news. Propagandists and extremists
wishing to conceal their identities fund targeted ads and create armies of
social media bots to push misleading or outright false content, robbing
citizens of a basic understanding of reality. And authoritarians take advantage
of technology to censor information and suppress dissent. The most sophisticated effort comes from
China, which, in addition to its Great Firewall, is developing a system of
“social credits,” which takes the idea of a credit score to its creepiest
extension. The idea is to aggregate information from public and private records
to assess citizens’ behavior, generating scores that can be used to determine
their opportunities for employment, education, housing, and travel. China is
using facial recognition and vast data to exert control over the ethnic Uyghurs
in western China in a high-tech update of the mass surveillance and societal
control of East Germany’s Stasi and, before that, Hitler’s Germany. Not
only has the Internet been used to strengthen authoritarian states; it has also
been used to weaken democracies.As detailed in the indictments issued in
February by Robert Mueller, the U.S. special prosecutor investigating Russian
interference in the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives created fake
online personas aimed at spreading false information. It was run by the
Internet Research Agency, an organization linked to the Russian government that
is responsible for online influence operations. A particular goal was to
depress African American turnout in order to hurt Clinton’s campaign. As an
investigation by CNN found, one social media campaign called “Blacktivist” was
actually a Russian troll operation; it had more “likes” on Facebook than the
official Black Lives Matter page.
Those who organize disinformation campaigns
on social media exploit commercial data-gathering and targeting systems. They
sweep up personal data from a host of sources across different devices and
categorize people by their behavior, interests, and demographics. Then, they
target a given segment of users with ads and bots, which encourage users to
like pages, follow accounts, and share information. In this way, disinformation
campaigns weaponize digital platforms, whose algorithms seem to reward outrage
because that is what keeps users engaged. As the scholar Zeynep Tufekci has
found, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm steers viewers toward increasingly
radical and extremist videos. Sites like InfoWars – a conspiracy theory
site are frightening.
We must act now to prevent the further
weaponization of the Internet against democracies and individuals attempting to
exercise their human rights – and to do so without sacrificing
democratic values such as freedom of expression. Dark money and dark
data to undermine democracy are real
threats. Digital platforms should find a way to offer users more context for
the news their algorithms present. They might do so through some method of
differentiating those news outlets that follow accepted journalistic practices
(customs such as having a masthead, separating news from opinion, and issuing
corrections) from those that do not. The platforms should be required to take
down fake accounts and remove bots unless they are clearly labeled as such. The
largest social media companies – Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – need to be
transparent about their content-moderation rules. Regulation might even require
certain platforms to provide due-process protections for users whose content is
taken down.
The spectre of 1984 is more real than ever before.
Ack:GMF
USA.Wiki.
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