Digital Rights Are Human Rights
My first substack post was more of a brainstorm than anything else. It isn’t polished, it isn’t an immutable manifesto, and it will probably never be complete. Instead, it has been an outlet for me to articulate, explore and clarify my own perspectives, and how they came to be rooted in my experiences as a millennial growing into an adult in the 2000s. With that said, I wanted to produce a document that could explain to friends and family why I’m so passionate about something that many of them consider to be conspiracy-theory-level musings.
As I proof read the document before sharing with a handful of friends, the final paragraph stuck in my mind:
Digital Rights are Human Rights. As millennials who grew up in a reality where the digital realm is intertwined with every part of daily life, there is an imperative for us to fight on this new frontier. I urge you to fight for human rights. Fight for freedom to transact. Fight for Bitcoin.
The statements here are simple, but the ideas are profound, and without more explanation, I think that a lot of important nuance could be easily missed.
As a millennial, I remember being in 8th grade with a Nokia brick cell phone. My parents didn’t pay for a text message plan, and I thought the whole idea of texting was pretty stupid: why would you pay extra to send short messages to someone when you could just call them?
When the first iPhone launched, again, I was incredulous. Why would anyone want a device that was more fragile than my Nokia cell phone, held less songs than my mp3 player, and took worse photos than my digital camera? It was the jack-of-all-trades, master of none, and there was no way it would ever catch on…
I remember traveling to Europe when it was a luxury to have 20 megabytes of cell phone data. We would switch the data on for just long enough to get directions on Google Maps, and then switch it off immediately to conserve data. If we got lost along the way, we would turn it back on for just long enough to get back on track, and then switch it off. It sure beat printing out MapQuest directions!
In 2018 and 2019, I was in Japan frequently for work, and while I couldn’t read any of the signs on the bus routes, I knew that I could rely on Google Maps to tell me exactly which bus to take. If the bus showed up at the stop 1 minute early or 1 minute late, it was not my bus! The precision was amazing - I just had to follow the directions given to me by the super-computer overlord in my pocket.
Circa 2012, I became aware of the term “Metaverse”. It conjured images of the virtual reality headset that my friend’s brother had recently developed in his back yard workshop... He would later name the headset Oculus and sell it to Facebook for $2bn.
Ready Player One brought the debate surrounding open source and proprietary tech - an analogue to the decentralization/centralization issue highlighted by Bitcoin - to pop culture. Google patented “pay-per-gaze” pupil dilation tracking biometric technology. Shortly after that, Zuk announced that facebook would be changing their name from Facebook to Meta, and hiring an army of 10,000 metaverse engineers to jumpstart the revolution... The race was clearly underway.
But I still didn’t really comprehend what the metaverse was, why it was important to me, or what “digital rights” had to do with human rights.
That was when I discovered Punk6529. As an early bitcoin adopter Punk6529 has become the closest thing to a modern day digital philosopher that I have found. His thoughts on the future of technology and how it fits into a broader historical context - shared and archived mostly through epic twitter threads - created the “aha” moment for me in the context of the metaverse.
As 6529 tells the story, the metaverse is not so much a destination, but a journey that we are already on. It’s not a future dystopian Wall-e World, where we float around in chairs plugged into virtual reality headsets. There won’t be a date on the calendar that we can point to, to say, “This was the day the metaverse came to be.”
Instead the best way to think about the “metaverse” is that it encompasses the idea of technology becoming intertwined with our daily lives and inextricably linked to our decision making and our realities both in the digital and physical worlds. Increasingly we live in a world where peoples’ identities online and their identities IRL are equally valid parts of who they are, impacting their communities, their thoughts, and who they see themselves as.
The metaverse is social media. It is the digital tools that we carry around with us in our pockets at every moment of the day. It is our personal assistants who wake us up in the morning and remind us of our schedules throughout the day, or help us make the most mundane decisions of every day life. It is the communities of people that we connect with over shared interests (Reddit), restaurant recommendations (Yelp), or to vent (X)… In a short period of time, almost every aspect of real life has been digitized in some form, and the cumulative result is the present day version of the metaverse.
Digital Rights Are Human Rights
If we accept that technology is becoming more and more inextricably linked to our identities, our decision making, and our thoughts, then we need to think about the entities that control these services that we interact with on a daily basis.
In The Social Dilemma documentary a USC professor poses the question to his class, “Do you ever get the feeling that your phone is listening to your conversations?” You talk to your friend about green pants, and an ad for green pants pops up on your Instagram feed! The professor goes on to pose, “What if I told you that your phone was not listening to you, but that it had predicted what you were going to talk about, before you ever had the conversation?” He explains how big data algorithms and machine learning models are used to analyze contextual clues about who you are with, where you were when you ran into that person, what you were doing on your phone before the conversation, and much more, to make a guess about what you might talk about - or more specifically, what you might be thinking about.
From our cell phones, to our email providers, to the search engines we interact with, the digital assistants in our homes, and the smart devices that we wear on our bodies, your average millennial has the digital footprint of bigfoot, that feeds the supercomputers at Apple, Google, Facebook, and so many more with information about their interests, needs and personalities. It is not a far jump to think that this process might be reverse engineered to make small but persistent nudges to shape our behaviors, and over time, shift our conversations, thoughts, and through this, even who we are as people. In fact, this is the exact business model that so many of the biggest tech companies is built on.
The silicone valley adage is, “If you’re not paying for the product, then YOU are the product.” In essence, Facebook sells mind control…
In my university studies, we discussed how in-situ measurements can cause bad data because the presence of an observer can change the results of the measurements. As Glen Greenwald explains in his Ted Talk on why privacy matters, the pan-opticon - the “all seeing prison” that inspired George Orwell’s surveillance state 1984 - influences behavior not by enforcing discipline, but by the ever present possibility of observers. Some examples of this include:
Chinese surveillance state
Location tracking using cell phones
Face tracking while flying through airports
Smart listening devices in homes such as Alexa
America was founded on rights that the founding fathers felt were inalienable rights. As the metaverse becomes more and more intertwined in our lives, we must ask the question: do we believe that the same inalienable rights still matter in the digital realm? If someone decides to interact with digital devices, should it be assumed that they are waiving these rights? Does this preclude someone who believes in the rights of the constitution from interacting in every day society as a normal person who uses a cell phone? If your business expects you to be in contact 16 hours a day via phone or email, to document receipts for expense reports by taking photos, and to track expenses, is there a way to do this without giving third party data conglomerates access to information about details of your life?