Digital Freedom

Roberta Fischli & Thomas Beschorner argue that our digital future is not preprogrammed: it's about time we start thinking about what it should look like.

- Roberta Fischli & Thomas Beschorner

Did you watch the dystopian TV series Black Mirror? The episode Nosedive paints a picture of a future society where people rate each other's behaviour according to a credit system. 'Good' behavior is rewarded with points; 'bad' behavior reduces your score. This form of social control is flanked by all kinds of state surveillance: facial recognition technologies are used to track peoples' every move, for example. When the episode first aired in 2016 it was already an allusion to and criticism of the emerging Social Credit System in China. But we don't have to look that far. In recent years the Western world has also become familiar with similar trends.

'Lacie Pound', the main protagonist of the episode, plummets in this society. Her behavior results in a dropping score, and she finds herself in a downward spiral. Ultimately, she ends up in prison. Ironically, this is the only place of freedom in that society. The 'prison' metaphor also serves another important function in the ongoing discussion about digital transformation. It provides an allegory for the new surveillance capitalism that takes away our freedom and 'imprisons' us, albeit in a peculiar way. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham once designed an 'ideal prison' called the Panopticon. In it, a few guards in a central observation towers would be able to monitor many prisoners. In our digital times, though, the Norwegian criminologist Thomas Mathiesen speaks of a synopticon, in which everyone potentially observes - and thereby controls everyone else. Whether the observation actually takes place or not is irrelevant for the effect. As behavioral economists have shown, the mere possibility of 'social moderation' is itself likely to have a chilling effect on expression and action.