The sinister news this week that British courts have greenlighted the police’s use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology in public spaces is yet another demolition charge detonated under the foundation of individual freedom as we have understood it in the modern world. Yet it will likely pass with little notice in the daily avalanche of crises and distractions, from wars and political scandals to the latest TikTok fad. We have come to barely notice the tightening of control on our private lives and the destruction of the most important underpinnings of liberty and human dignity. This process is now nearly irreversible and almost complete – and the lack of any serious political resistance to it is absolutely astounding.
LFR tech takes mass surveillance to the next level. It identifies and tracks you personally, and your every behaviour, in public. Of course, the justification is “fighting crime” and improving public safety, just like the restrictions and surveillance of your online activity have been continuously expanded in the name of “online safety”. The idea with all this is that you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
Except that we see how it’s playing out in China – the only other more enthusiastic and legally-established environment for LFR than Britain – where LFR is used to deter protest, to penalise even small rule-breaking like harmless jaywalking, and more broadly to advance social control in conjunction with the CPC’s Social Credit System. In the UK all of this it is now starting just with a few initial deployments of LFR on police vans in a few city centres; but whoever thinks that there is any way to prevent the expansion of this practice now that the technology and the principle of State use of it has been established, is deluded.
Whether we are heading towards the age of tech-enabled “super-abundance” promised by techno-optimist elites and their circles of heavily-online advocates, is debatable. AI and robots may come, in the style of Wall-E, to do all the work, and make all the goods we can possibly wish for, and consume, for free – or they may not.
What is certain, however, is that we are hurtling towards a fast-approaching future of automated individual surveillance in which every aspect of our life and patterns of behaviour is sampled, registered and evaluated at citizen-level by “authorities” – using private technology – against approved parameters set down in law. This is the realisation in actual fact of what seemed to be an exaggerated sci-fi dystopia in the film Minority Report where “crimes” don’t even need to happen before people are arrested based purely on “predicted” behaviour.
The scale of this ultra-tech threat for individual freedom, in an age of gargantuan and fiendishly complex regulatory regimes, bad and incompetent politicians, increasingly authoritarian governments, as well as judicial activism generally biased in favour of more censorship and control, is hard to comprehend.
The worst thing about this is that there will be no escape from it. Already, the ability of the individual to live a completely non-digital life in a modern Western society and, at the same time, to still enjoy the same access to public services, protection and fulfilment of his rights, and basic opportunities as the “connected citizen” is severely curtailed. Just try to get by without using the Internet, i.e. without email or without a smartphone and any apps, and see how you get on.
“But why would one want to do that?”, one may ask. The answer is that it doesn’t matter why; that option should be there for any free-born citizen who chooses to live in an analogue way. Technology was supposed to be an add-on that improved our lives, not something that would define our existence. But, soon, things like Digital ID – which will gradually become essential in any interactions not just with the State but surely with many privately-provided services – and the “cashless society”, will circumscribe the limits of what we can do without being connected, somehow, to data systems that track our every action. It goes to the fundamental aspects of society, to the most basic philosophical principles of the relationship between the citizen and the state.
None of this is an argument against technology, but an argument for protecting genuine choice and freedom. Luddite turns against tech in general are absurd in the 21st century, given the many improvements and benefits that modern technology has brought us and that it has yet to offer.
There are downsides, too. For example, technology is potentially bringing us closer to crippling risks – such as the prospect of Claude Mythos-powered AI cyber-hacking that has recently spooked governments around the world, or quantum decryption which promises even more catastrophic results if not thoroughly addressed. And, generally speaking, we are certainly becoming dependent as a society on increasingly complex yet essential systems that no single person fully understands, which raises any number of practical, democratic and indeed philosophical questions. Even so, technology is here to stay but the balance of control and free choice – including opting out of it – must remain firmly and unquestionably with the individual citizen.
The remarkable thing about all of this is the fact that this fundamental argument does not really have a political home in our times, and that it is not even a major issue in public debate. The word “civilisational” has long been entered the Rightwing lexicon in the context of the culture wars waged against Leftwing attempts to control the cultural landscape through censorship and other means. But there’s nothing more “civ”, as a cause, than human control of our very destiny and meaning as human beings, which is unambiguously now challenged by the expanding Big Tech control over our lives.
This subject cuts across the classical “ideological” divide, which is why it is so hard to grapple with, and why it does not have a clear political constituency. On the Right, the great Tech Tycoons are of course great capitalists and free-marketeers – and being denounced for it by hardcore Leftists as Evil incarnate. Yet these same Big Tech CEOs and exponents of libertarianism are the ones hoovering up and monetising our data and building the tech-chains that tighten around our digital existence and build the digital “cage” we find ourselves in.
This confuses even wider classical liberal opinion, as well as libertarian think-tanks and “neoliberal” political figures. They wax lyrical about Adam Smith and the wonders of capitalism, about low taxes and the small State, and they deify figures like Thatcher, but they feel bound to back Big Tech – partly because it is so savagely attacked by the Left – and say nothing about the clear digitally-enabled slide into progressive authoritarianism. Quick to summon quotes from Burke, Hayek or J S Mill when the Left argues for more censorship or socialistic measures, they are rather quiet when freedom-curtailing technologies are actually rolled out in practice.
In a different corner of the political spectrum, techno-optimist and neo-Futurist movements fancy themselves as Rightwing and have an unalloyed enthusiasm for tech progress on all fronts, apparently without serious regard to any side effects. But they fail to see that while the original Futurism of the 1920s was a novel vision of technology as a dynamic liberating force, opening new frontiers and fuelling a spirit of defiance, today’s uncritical attitude to tech is a path that leads, ultimately, only to more constraints and conformity on the most fundamental level. It offers merely the illusion of enhanced possibilities: “freedom”, but within the parameters set by Big Tech and with control handed over, ultimately, to State bureaucrats. Indeed, in the future, the likely penalty of disconnection from the digital community for assessed “wrongdoings” – already road-tested with debanking, in some cases – will feel just as terminal as that of religious excommunication from the Catholic Church in the days of old.
It is indeed tricky to form a coherent political coalition around this issue. The anti-capitalist Left generally wants to destroy Big Tech companies. The Right generally backs the latter to the hilt and refrains from seriously questioning them. Hardly anyone is taking a balanced view on the matter, one premised on ensuring real controls over how the liberty-infringing technologies are being implemented, and on designing a set of rules for these new systems grounded in freedom-imperatives, rather than accepting the rules designed or imposed by their makers as a function of how the tech itself has been developed. Such and such a digital service has to be given such and such liberties with our data, you see, otherwise it wouldn’t work properly – this is always the justification.
The lack of a serious, mainstream Rightwing engagement with these issues is a tremendous mistake, but perhaps the time for a pivot in this direction is now approaching. Over the past decade and more, anti-establishment National Populism has been focussing relentlessly on issues like immigration, the pernicious power of supranational institutions, the culture wars, and the like.
Now, populism is arguably losing steam: the political blowback against MAGA in the United States in response to Trump’s Iran war, together with Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary, are just the most prominent recent pieces of evidence in this regard. More profoundly, populism has actually succeeded to a significant extent in shifting public opinion and the political wind in the direction of its views, having some of its policies and rhetoric – including on immigration, or reindustrialisation etc – adopted by some of the traditional parties even in places like Britain or Germany.
In these conditions, the next banner under which anti-establishment energies can rally – and the issue on which cross-party coalitions are possible – may well be that of digital Rights and the question of citizen-level choice and control vs the encroachment of State-backed technologies such as the dystopian LFR now being deployed on British. The Right needs to get its priorities straight and to rediscover the great cause it has championed in the past – including during the Cold War – to such tremendous benefit for the world: Individual freedom. Nothing is more important.
Ten years on, is European populism on a road to nowhere?