A new, global fascism, based on mass surveillance is on the rise

By Dirk Helbing
 

Last weekend, I spoke to business leaders at the Petersberger Dialogue in the Villa Hammerschmidt. I warned that a new, global fascism, based on mass surveillance, appears to be on the rise.

The German talk can be viewed here

 

Petersburger Dialogue

A similar, English video can be found here

Recently, an increasing number of experts and intellectuals have warned of an emerging technological totalitarianism, enabled by what some people call “surveillance capitalism.” 

A recent, much discussed contribution in Scientific American raised the question “Will democracy survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence”, pointed to the dangers of new kinds of behavioural manipulation. Even Cass Sunstein, one of the fathers of “Nudging”, has recently issued grave words of warning.

Today, secret services and Big Data companies possess much more data about us than were needed to run totalitarian states in the past. It is unlikely that such power will not be misused at some point in time. 

Moreover, it becomes increasingly evident that all the features of fascism have been implemented digitally or are currently being implemented. They could be used on a society-wide scale at any time. 

This includes:

• mass surveillance, 
• unethical experiments with humans,  
• social engineering,  
• forced conformity (“Gleichschaltung”),
•  propaganda and censorship,  
• “benevolent” dictatorship,
•  (predictive) policing,  
• different valuation of people,  
• relativity of human rights,  
• and, it seems, even euthanasia for the expected times of crisis in our unsustainable world.
  

The signs are clear. We are faced with the emergence of a new kind of totalitarianism of global dimensions that must be stopped immediately. “An emergency operation is inevitable, if we want to save democracy, freedom, and human dignity,” I warned. “Arguments such as terrorism, cyber threats and climate change have been used to undermine our privacy, our rights, and our democracy.”

The emergence of mass surveillance after 9/11, enabled by the Patriot Act and other laws, has led to the incremental erosion of liberties and human rights. Since the Snowden revelations, we know that there is mass surveillance of billions of people around the world. But most of us still have no idea how pervasive it is, and how it may influence their lives in future. 

Billions of dollars have been spent on mass surveillance tools of secret services to hack our computers, smartphones, smart TVs and smart cars. The estimated amount of data collected about us every day ranges from millions of numbers to Gigabytes of data. As a result, we have ended up with the digital tools for a data-driven, AI-based so-called “benevolent” dictatorship, where big businesses and the state determine “what is best for us.” Moreover, we have seen that democracies in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and elsewhere have already undergone transformations towards more autocratic regimes.

Citizens are being targeted, their data collected and consolidated. This is used to create a near complete profile of each person, their nature, habits and preferences. Each profile can contain thousands of specifiers. These digital doubles can be used to make thousands of computer experiments with our virtual self to find out how our thinking and behaviour can be manipulated.

More specifically, in today’s attention economy, our personal data is being applied to customize information such that it will influence our attention, emotions, opinions, decisions, and behaviours – often subconsciously – by a technique called big nudging or neuro-marketing. This ranges from steering our consumption behaviour to manipulating voting behaviour in elections.

In the wrong hands, the misuse of surveillance-based personal data will have catastrophic consequences for us and for society. In an explicitly or implicitly totalitarian state, this kind of information could be used to predict and identify those people who don’t agree with certain government policies and sanction them even before they can exercise their democratic rights.

The British secret service, for example, runs a program called Karma Police, which shows where our societies are heading. This Citizen Score, which is currently also tested in China, may be used to run an entirely new kind of autocratic society, or even police state. According to plans, the Citizen Score would determine the level of access to facilities, products and services. We would be scored or penalised according to our behaviours. Reading critical news or having the “wrong” kinds of social ties, for example, would get you minus points.

To counter this danger of a digital totalitarian state, I strongly suggest that we should:

• ensure a democratic framework of use for powerful cyberinfrastructures, 
• ensure scientific use by interdisciplinary teams, considering multiple perspectives,  
• ensure ethical use considering human rights and human dignity,  
• ensure transparency,  
• ensure cyber-security (by decentralization etc.),
•  prevent misuse (by effective laws/remedies and in-built self-destruction mechanisms in case of serious misuse, malfunction, or political power grabs),  
• ensure informational self-determination (e.g. with a Personal Data Store),  
• ensure informational self-determination by giving citizens the right to opt-out,  
• turn war rooms into peace rooms, as described in a recent proposal by myself and Peter Seele.
  

The purpose of these video message is to create and spread public awareness of the insidious extent that individual personal data is being used today.

The door is wide open for global fascism to take hold, unless we take action now.

I hope that you will pay attention to these well-founded concerns regarding the rise of a technological totalitarianism, potentially on a global scale. My presentation offers much evidence. 

If this is a topic of interest that you would like to investigate further, you are kindly invited to contact me at dhelbing@ethz.ch. 

An alternative vision of a better, participatory, digital future that everyone can benefit from, is offered here: A Digital World to Thrive in and here: and here: https://www.theglobalist.com/author/dirk-helbing/

Thank you for reading.

Dictatorship 4.0: How the digital revolution threatens our freedom - and what our alternatives are

by Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich/TU Delft)

Finally, it has become obvious that mass surveillance applies not only to terrorists, but to everyone! As Wikileaks recently revealed, more than $100 billion was spent by the CIA alone to hack our computers, smartphones, smart TVs, and even smart cars, and to tap our data on a regular basis. This equates to more than $1 billion per terrorist!

In today’s surveillance capitalism, we are the product. All of our clicks in the Internet are being recorded and evaluated. About each of us, more data have been collected than secret services of totalitarian states have ever had in the past. Meanwhile, some information systems know us better than our parents, friends and partners - or even ourselves!

What is this data collection all about? It is done in order to learn about our preferences and weaknesses and make us all manipulable. Personalized information can influence our attention, our emotions, opinions, decision-making and behavior. It is easier than ever to motivate us to purchase certain products or manipulate our voting behavior in democratic elections. If you want to find more detailed information about all this, the relevant keywords are "Neuromarketing", "Persuasive Computing", "Social Computing", and "Big Nudging".

These technologies are increasingly threatening our democracy and domestic peace. Social bots – robotic bloggers - bias public opinion in a much more powerful way than propaganda and censorship in the past. We have ended up in a post-fact society, in which fake news is increasingly difficult to distinguish from the truth. If you and I click the same link, we may see different content. While this is well known for booking platforms, personalized content is also spreading in news portals in the Internet. It is even possible to manipulate Youtube videos in real time: both facial expressions and what is being said can be changed without the observer noticing. So we can’t anymore rely on digital content. Remember, for example, Michael Jackson's "Slave to the Rhythm" video – it was produced after his death!

But that's not all. Each one of us has a digital double. This is a kind of blackbox, which is fed with our personal data. This data has usually been tapped without our knowledge and, thanks to machine learning, the resulting double behaves similar to us. What is the intended purpose of such digital doubles? World simulations such as "Sentient World" can simulate global war games on computers. But your digital double could also be used to identify the best ways to trick you into buying a particular product, downloading a Trojan onto your PC to make it hackable, or to hate particular colleagues, neighbors, or fellow human beings. In addition, one could find out who would protest if democracy or the freedom of press were abolished, and these people could be incarcerated proactively “for the sake of public security” - the keyword here is "predictive policing".

Since the "Arab Spring", such technologies have increasingly been used to destabilize states or to stabilize autocratic regimes. Since then, they have been continuously improved. Now, such cyber weapons are also applied to the own citizens. These technologies are suited to replace democracy – which many IT visionaries have called an "outdated technology" - with a data-driven "benevolent dictatorship". All what is needed for this is a big disaster or crisis fueling a public outcry for "more security". Then, the technological instruments of the "brave new world" might be fully used. Read the book "iGod" by Willemijn Dicke to understand how this could end. It’s an urgent warning, a final wake-up call!

In the event of a crisis, the Chinese "Citizen Score" would probably be applied, too. The Citizen Score boils all of your data down to a single number (which by the way encompasses your health data, which can continuously be monitored and evaluated by your smartphone). This number comprises all of your activities and your social network as well. You repaid your loan with a delay? Minus points! You read critical news about your government? Minus points! You have the “wrong” friends? Minus points! In any case, the resulting Citizen Score would determine your interest rates, the jobs offered to you, and travel visa for other countries - at least in China.

A similar system exists in the UK, where the Citizen Score is called "Karma Police". It also evaluates the videos you watch on the Internet and the radio programs you hear. Don’t believe such scoring systems do not exist everywhere by now! What is their purpose, you might ask? The Citizen Score would serve to decide who will get access to what kinds of resources, when they get scarce! Such scarcity may also be artificially produced, for example, to reach the goal of reducing global CO2 emissions and mitigate climate change. It is said that a related resolution of the UN General Assembly will be adopted on September 23, 2017. 

As a result, the Citizen Score would lead to a neo-feudal society. You can imagine who is most enthusiastic about the prospect of this system and who has brought it to life… If you have a high score, you will get everything you desire, no matter how bad the situation in the rest of the world are. The people who commissioned the system would certainly be among this tiny elite. For the rest of us, it would depend on our Citizen Score whether we could still have a car, obtain certain medicine, or eat meat regularly. In order to get plus rather than minus points, many would not question the instructions through their smart devices – they would just follow them. Thus, people may soon be turned from citizens into subordinates again. 

This sounds like a terribly dystopian science fiction - but unfortunately it is not! The technologies described above are available and ready for use. You might wonder why all this has been developed? The answer is that our economy is not sustainable! The world consumes 1.5 times the resources that are renewable. A typical European country consumes 3.5 times as much, and the USA 4.5 times as much. In order to avoid serious crises and disasters, humanity must quickly reduce this factor to one. The Citizen Score might help to get in this direction, but we would then live in a digital command economy with digital food stamps - a more totalitarian world than ever! For the most part, this would not be a life worth living anymore - we would simply struggle for survival. 

There are much better ways to create a sustainable world by 2030! So far, however, these alternatives have been blocked by people with vested interests who care more about power and wealth than about our future. Here are some options: First of all, we could regularly organize City Olympics, where cities around the world would regularly compete for the best environmental-friendly, energy-efficient, resource-saving and crisis-proof solutions. There would be different fields of competition, as well as various "weight classes" (small and large cities, for example). 

This competition would involve science, but also business, politics and the media. In particular, mobilizing the people to use resources more efficiently and to buy more environmentally-friendly products and technologies would be important. Information about the best technologies, organizational principles and mobilization strategies could then be exchanged between the cities every other year. This strategy implies a combination of competition and cooperation between cities. Moreover, if the resulting innovations were made available for free in the spirit of "Open Innovation", the solutions could be further developed by everyone. This would lead to a fast and widespread adoption of the best solutions. 

Second, the financial and monetary system, which has been in crisis for years, should be replaced with a socio-ecological “finance system 4.0+”. This would work as follows: Using the sensors of the Internet of Things, which are also in our smartphones, we could measure the impact of our actions on the environment and other people. This would enable us to quantify "negative externalities" such as noise, CO2, and all sorts of waste. Similarly, "positive externalities" such as cooperation, education, health, and the recycling of resources could also be measured. Using Blockchain technology – similar to the one behind the digital currency "Bitcoin" - different externalities could then be assigned a price or value. This would lead to a multi-dimensional incentive or financial system, which would be good for the real-time control of complex systems. 

With suitable incentives, the financial system could be aligned with social values ​​and environmental requirements. In this way, new market forces could be unleashed, which would bring about a circular and sharing economy. This could provide a high quality of life for more people with fewer resources. It would also benefit companies, citizens and the state alike.

Third, so-called “market-conform democracy”, which has obviously not solved the world’s problems and has weakened our democracy, could be replaced by "democratic capitalism". This would reinvent the way money is being created. Instead of feeding billions of fresh Euros into the system from the top, as it is the case with "quantitative easing", an "investment premium" would be transferred to a special bank account of each citizen. However, this money could not be used for yourself or saved. It would have to be invested in good ideas, projects and commitments of others, such that you could support whatever you consider important and right. This would be like "crowdfunding for all", or an economic “right to vote” for investments that affect yourself. If such an approach were combined with Open Data and Open Innovation, it would drive rapid and pluralistic innovation, which would lead to much faster and more flexible solutions of humanity's problems. 

These are just some of the untapped opportunities we have. An upgrade of democracy to boost “collective intelligence” and coordination by means of digital platforms would also be possible. All of these proposals are perfectly compatible with the fundamental values ​​of our society. Democracy and capitalism - so far the two most successful forms of organization in human history - could be “happily married” with each other and digitally upgraded. In this way, we could tackle the problems of the future more successfully - and reach the next level of our economic, social, political and cultural system. A new chapter of the history is about to begin. It's now up to us to write it! 

For further information, please visit the FuturICT youtube channel and blog. This video gives a good overview. Sources and documents can be found here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316989750_The_Dream_to_Control_the_World_-_and_Why_it_is_Failing

Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich and also affiliated to its Computer Science Department. He received an honorary PhD at TU Delft, where he coordinates the PhD school “Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future”. Helbing is also member of the German Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina” and serves in various committees related to the digital society.