After Cyberwar
The women are coerced to switch them on just as some victims of abusive employers are coerced to be subject to "bossware" and other kinds of inhumane workplace surveillance. Technology is leverage. At the cybershow it concerns us how many applications labelled as "cybersecurity" and given a veneer of legitimacy are really "weaponised" and abusive code.
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These digital harms are foundational to a definition of new forms of cyber-conflict as "ambient", as something different from an overt military spat between nation states. It is a war both for humane and dignified technology that serves humanity, and against pathological ideas and implementations of that technology by those who have the power but not the good sense to deploy it well. This is the state of ambient cyberwar. We cannot trust our devices. It feels wrong to take a smartphone into a business meeting or a doctors appointment where confidential matters may be discussed. We no longer worry that a plane might crash because of mechanical failure. Aeronautic engineering in 2025 is extraordinarily safe. We rightly worry that a software bug or hack will route us into the side of a mountain while the pilots blissfully play games on the their phones because the "AI" instruments tell them everything is fine!
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But a report by Cambridge University researchers led by Prof. Ross Anderson and meta-studies of many works by global researchers collated by Jonathan Haidt reveals a devastating "gotcha". As violence and misery has disappeared from everyday "meat-space" life, there's been an equal, commensurate rise in all kinds of online harms and violence. No matter how many soothing sound effects, pastel candy colours, rounded corners and drop-shadows vendors add to make technology seem less threatening the reality is that "tech means trouble". Most of us carry around some little box of anxiety in our pockets.
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Microsoft, Google (indeed all of BigTech) have had abusive tendencies for all their existence. Companies coming out of the neoliberal creed of the United States since the late 1970s are fundamentally predicated on unchecked growth and domination. There is no question of them living "in equilibrium" with the world and we should accept this as their nature. They seek to take over and control everything. Given the chance they would usurp democratic governance and impose their way of "being" (of organising and conducting technological life) on every person on the planet. All that keeps them in check is other predatory companies cut from the same cloth. The state of war we are in, which we might call "late stage market capitalism" is presently the "best possible" dynamic alternative to tyrannical stasis.