Internet infrastructure has become a major political issue of our time. It has long been known that it has a significant impact on climate change and should therefore not be left to the IT sector, lobbyists and bureaucrats. In the MORE WORLD interview, journalist, activist and bestselling author Marta Peirano talks about the link between the climate crisis and internet infrastructure and why she thinks that community-developed technologies can be a way out of the climate crisis.
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Peirano’s book “El enemigo conoce el sistema” (The enemy knows the system) makes an important contribution by thinking of today’s major challenges in context rather than as isolated instances. It suggests that the politics of the net are no longer to be discussed among a sworn-in community of net aficionados but rather in the broadest possible social conversation and, moreover, in relation to all the different political, social, economic issues that the all-pervasive net is nowadays connected to. The fact that her book has become a bestseller in Spain – it is now in its sixth edition, only three months after publication – makes one wonder whether there is particularly fruitful ground in Spain for thinking and discussing contemporary challenges in a broader, inter-connected context. It seems there are some unexpected lessons to be learned for advancing such an approach in the future.
The second chapter of your book “El enemigo conoce el sistema” is dedicated to internet infrastructure. You begin the chapter with a quote by mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer Claude Shannon – known also as “the father of information theory.” The quote in fact inspired your book’s title. Could you explain how you chose the title and how it reflects the issue of infrastructure?
In the original quote, Shannon states that “one ought to design systems under the assumption that the enemy will immediately gain full familiarity with them”, meaning you cannot rely on the secrecy of your infrastructure to protect it from attack. I take a different approach. I say you cannot rely on the security/availability/goals of infrastructure if you do not know them. Today, only a few companies know the workings of the complex systems we rely on – and not only for communications. Those companies make great efforts to conceal them from us, not only physically but also cognitively, producing an interface of metaphors that has replaced our knowledge. This deliberate substitution is designed to conceal those systems’ true goals: data extraction, mass manipulation and, increasingly, population control.
How from your point of view is the issue of Internet infrastructure a critical political issue that transcends net politics in a narrow sense, encompassing all sectors of political life today?
Critical infrastructure is by definition a social concern. Big dependency requires big sovereignty. Today, European governments are openly investing in 5G infrastructure built by companies funded by authoritarian regimes that are also known to fund hacker groups that engage in infrastructure boycott and disinformation campaigns. This was unthinkable only a few decades ago. It should also be illegal, especially in the context of climate emergency. We need infrastructure we can rely on. We know what happens when we rely on infrastructure we don’t own, know or legislate. Puerto Rico happens. Thousands of people die.
The expansion of cloud infrastructure (the installation of fiber optic cables, the erection of data centers and server farms, etc.) has a geopolitical dimension that is rarely discussed. It materializes itself at border controls, in immigration decisions, in drone attacks – and is also linked to global warming. The political geography of cloud infrastructure transcends the sovereignty of nation-states and apparently also suspends their responsibility. What is your analysis of this predicament?
The Cloud is an embassy; it has successfully turned intellectual property laws into a “rule of inviolability” of the 1961 Vienna Convention. It also operates as a tax haven, infrastructure built to protect the workings of a dubious business, opaque to local authorities and controlled overseas. Our authorities cannot enter those servers, even when they have proof of a growing amount of illegal activities, from child abuse porn to disinformation campaigns. Child abuse is an Internet problem; Cambridge Analytica is a business problem. This is capitalism without democracy, power without responsibility. As Edward Snowden said, if the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was working, they would be paying 3% of their yearly revenue in fines. You cannot police what you cannot see.
Turning to the influence of cloud infrastructure on global warming: while the incessant increase in ‘cloud activities’ leads to higher temperatures through the rising heat of server farms, higher temperatures cause stress for cloud infrastructure (necessitating ever more energy-devouring cooling systems). It seems this is a vicious cycle that no-one is prepared to deal with seriously. Aren’t there any critical and practical responses are worth pursuing?
As usual, this is presented as a technical problem. It is not. It is a design and a humanitarian problem. This cloud infrastructure has been developed for and by the data extraction industry, and is being further developed, not with the purpose of managing the climate crisis but with the purpose of managing humans during that crisis. Different goal, different design.
What new responses to this particular vicious cycle do we need to invent? What role do communal technologies play in this context?
We need to develop technologies for the opposite goal: helping humans manage the climate crisis where it is happening. Right now, that means helping people disconnect from those who love the same songs, movies, books or values they love and reconnect with those in physical proximity who face the same challenge: their neighbors. Those tools will be local and communal because they will be designed to respond to local, shared emergencies.
I wonder how reinventing the net would bring us closer to the initial promise of the net. That promise now survives only as a neoliberal myth, namely, that the net provides spaces for new forms of cooperation.
The problem is not the Internet per se, it is something that has happened to it. It could be described as a fungus infection, contracted during the dotcom crisis when its immune system was weak. It has quickly propagated in the same way heroin and casinos do, in a context of prolonged austerity and severe inequality. I believe we have a unique chance to save the internet, though, with the right medicine: decentralized, locally-run infrastructure designed to protect the ecosystem and help communities look after themselves and share their own precious resources in ways that are just and humane.
The question of cooperation also looms large in the context of climate change. The goal of the MORE WORLD project is to better understand and grasp the causes of climate change through entanglements of ecosystems with communal, state and global structures, and ultimately to explore possibilities to tackle climate change from within such interconnections – as enablers of cross-border cooperation among all of us who are affected by climate change. Re-imagining the net as a distributed, decentralized bottom-up infrastructure, what potentialities for cross-border cooperation do you see arising vis-à-vis climate change?
GPL is my religion. It is the only system designed to ensure everybody benefits from progress, and nobody is taken for a ride. Every local improvement should become an improvement for everyone else. Technically, we already know how to do it: everything one Uber car learns becomes something every other Uber car then knows. We must apply this knowledge to repair and improve our relationship with the environment. It is the only way to survive.
And regarding other major social, economic and political challenges of the day?
I think what’s required here is a holistic approach. Any protocol genuinely focused on helping communities repair their relationship with the environment and manage their resources fairly and sensibly will become tools for social and political justice. Only the tools of the village can dismantle the master’s house. It is time to demand a radical responsibility over the tools of our own survival. We are ready.
Editor’s note: Marta Peirano was a keynote-speaker at the Berliner Gazette Conference MORE WORLD, which took place from October 10th to October 12th in the ZK/U Berlin
It explored the following question with workshops, performances and discussions: How can we work together across borders to tackle climate change? A comprehensive documentation of the conference with projects, audios and videos will soon be available here. The interview questions were asked by the Berliner Gazette editorial team as part of the MORE WORLD initiative.