conflict

Privacy is not dying, it is being killed. And those who are killing it have names and addresses

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Quite often, while discussing the role of web giants in enforcing mass digital surveillance (and while insisting that there is a cultural and political war going on around privacy and technology), I am asked this question: “If people are not willing to be spied upon, how come they aren’t out in the streets protesting tech companies’ privacy invasions?”. To which I reply: “Sure they are!”

Case in point: as part of a larger San Francisco Bay Area anti-Google campaign, protesters have started organizing rallies outside houses of Google Street View developers.

http://www.berkeleyside.com/2014/01/22/activists-target-google-employee-berkeley-resident/

Activists target Google employee at his Berkeley home | Berkeleyside

I’m not endorsing these protest tactics (they display deontological ambiguity, plus the flyer they distributed is pure rambling). I’m just pointing them out as examples of ongoing struggles. To paraphrase Utah Phillips: “Privacy is not dying, it is being killed. And those who are killing it have names and addresses.” Activists know these addresses, and protest outside them.

Further reading: my latest book Against the hypothesis of the « end of privacy » in social media: An agent-based modeling approach, co-authored with Paola Tubaro and Yasaman Sarabi, just published by Springer.

Trollarchy in the UK: the British Defamation Bill and the delusion of the public sphere

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[UPDATE 26.06.2102: A French version of this post is now available on the news website OWNI. As usual, thanks to Guillaume Ledit for translating it.]

These days, the House of Commons has been debating an amendment to the British Defamation Bill specificially designed to tackle Internet trolls. Now website owners and internet access providers will be forced to reveal the IP and personal information of users identified as authors of ‘vile messages’. It is business as usual: whenever some ICT-related news story catches the public eye, British policy makers come up with an ad hoc law. Preferably, one mindlessly disregarding privacy and free speech.

Why mainstream media are scared of trolls

In a remarkable effort to lull the general public in a false sense of understanding digital cultures, The Guardian has devoted a special session of its June 12, 2012 edition to this peculiar online phenomenon. The pièce de résistance is Zoe Williams’s What is an internet troll?. An article concocted using the usual troll news story recipe: one part pyschology professor delivering highbrow quotes about the ‘disinhibition effect’ of electronic media, one part journalist whining about today’s diminishing education standards and pervasive hate speech, two parts sad anecdotes about some celebrities we’re supposed to sympathize with. The conclusion of this tone-setting essay (“We shouldn’t call them ‘trolls’. We should call them rude people.”) is probably best rendered when pronounced with a high-pitched monty pythonesque voice, like in The Life of Brian‘s “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy!”.

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R.I.P. Sandro Roventi (1947-2010) (Sunday Sociological Song)

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Italian sociologist Sandro Roventi left us. Yesterday he was put to rest in the cemetery of  Lambrate (Milan). Sandro was the person who introduced me to sociology (after being trained as an economist). Passionate, funny, politically unpredictable, lucid, generous: he was all these things and much more. He started his career during the Italian Years of Lead. After the European Consortium for Political Research published his Italy and Terrorism in the 1970s (1980) he became the target of unwanted attention from both the political police and the Red Brigades. The epitome of a generation of social scientists / activists steering through a time of political unrest and de facto civil war.

The first lesson of his Sociology class went something like: “Ok kids. To make a champagne molotov all you need is a bottle, alcohol and a cloth…” – and after looking at our dumbfounded faces he would go on introducing us to the notions of conflict, labour, social justice, etc. We became friends eventually. He supervised my tesi di laurea. He wrote the preface to my first book. Until I left Italy I was a regular guest at his dinner parties. Sometimes, we would listen to music. I remember he loved this song. I love it, too.

—a

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