Trust Based
Photo: Alexander Hayes
As we descend into an era of technology-mediated insecurity, our blockchain constantly handshaking with provider, service, and national security identity checkpoint there is one thing apparent.
“…Engineers and information system developers have ensured our fundamental connection with each other as now compulsorily mediated, dependent on digital profiles we once dismissed playfully as inconvenient at worst. After all, who needs a password when we use the same one for all service providers except the bank. For those who seek ultimate expediency even trust has become a commodity, an embodied implant perhaps closer to a Uberveillance we once dismissed as science fiction.”
We are led to believe as citizens that we have a right to question why each and every one of our transactions is being monitored, retained, compared. If nothing more our right to know about ourselves and the power for deletion must be maintained at all cost we claim yet where and when do we exercise such a right?
Nothing is more apparent, more important now in this Information Age than the trust itself and so trust must be firmly foremost in any technological creation.
From an observation point of those less enamored, we are lurching around now as Foucault posits, subject to disciplinary surveillance exercised by the very institutions, corporations, and services we once considered trustworthy, of moral accord or even remotely ethical by design.
“… If society by virtue of cultural association is largely disciplinary then what became of trust? In that regard, has digital, replicable technology eroded that trust by cannibalising control and become the very tool of oppression we sought to avoid?”
My PhD at one time teetered dangerously to the hard right as I sought and fought to validate claims that head-worn surveillance, human as a network node, camera carrier would be of benefit to humanity. My attestations brought forward a null hypothesis that pitched technological determinism as default, a good.
If technology has been good for humanity such as life expectancy for those needing a heart pacemaker, then isn't a body-worn camera simply an extension of that human convenience?
However, like a drug mule substantiating a gut full of powder-filled condoms, a cognitive dissonance seems to be at play here, a trust mechanism that I once believed was "user" led and bred.
It became evident to me as the Internet crept steadily towards a 4G omniscience that creatives are at great risk of contributing to an Orwellian surveillant state. Likewise educational technologists drunk on their own outcomes efficiency stupor run the same risk by virtue of their own egoic need to share such data.
The Internet is after all a United States of America-based innovation according to a technology skeptic. For others a more pragmatic claim that if we have nothing to hide then we have nothing to worry about yet as we well know, through history such claims have proven that governments only serve themselves and those elite minorities that prey on the demise of others.
For all their claims of counter-cultures, decommissioning, and de-schooling under an Illich [ref] inspired utopia educational technologists and their kin fall mute in the face of their actions and inaction. Of course, despite all assertions to the contrary, these head-worn camera data end up disaggregated at the very least automatically rendered visible to the very corporations seeking insight into their 100 million or so minute-by-minute user base.
If humans "become" a camera have we then as humanity simply lost our ability to see? Or, as some would have us believe, has humanity evolved into an übermensch, a superhuman made up of nodes in an electrophorus where trust is merely one number joined to the next?
It is apparent to me that a trajectory is articulated that seeks a way forward for humanity, not simply a predictive analysis touting papal control, a singular dystopia, and environmental degradation unchecked. Nor claim that trust is a blockchain, artificial intelligence an inevitable, automated food farm an answer for a flailing Anthropocene.
Trust is a handshake, an eye-to-eye human connection that brings all senses to bear. Without trust, in a state-led technologically mediated hope all we do is thrash around in a virtual reality unaware we have pissed in our own pants and wiped out a community in a single keystroke.
