Session 2: Freedom and Cyberspace
Chair: Jill Arnold

The Future is Now: 9/11, CCTV, and our Brave New World
Ursula Drees & Martin Bayer
Berlin, Germany and King’s College London, UK

Movies such as “1984”, “The Truman Show”, “Starship Troopers”, “Blade Runner”, or “Minority Report” are regarded as imaginations of the impossible and unthinkable. The future they depict seems too bleak (if not absurd) for many too accept. Mankind defines itself as an individualised, authentic civilisation, whose independence and freedom is steadily increasing. We will nevertheless argue that these movies describe possible future scenarios and models of life under constant and unrestricted surveillance. The result will be a uniform and standardised civilisation.
Marketing will surely embrace the “personalised advertisement” as shown in “Minority Report”, where the customers’ eyes are scanned, his identity is recognized, and his habits are loaded from a database. Several actual developments will be combined to make this future outlook too soon a reality. Many (especially web-based) companies save their customers’ data, some with, some without the consent or even the knowledge of the latter. Many people are just too willing to provide even highly intimate data to get some discounts. The number of the already ubiquitous CCTV cameras is increasing steadily – despite their questionable effect on reducing crime rates –, with the automated registration of cars entering central London only being the latest coup. Especially since 9/11 and the constant fear of terrorist attacks, “changes” to individual liberty have increased tremendously. “Echelon” is not a fiction, but reality, and internet and telecommunication providers happily offer their customers’ data to security agencies. Iris scanners and face recognition technologies are widely introduced to public environments such as airports and museums.
Still, surveillance in all its forms allegedly only provides for better security and personalised content; but we should hope that the governments and companies using these techniques will continue doing so for our good only – otherwise, “1984” will easily become a pale imitation of reality.

Weblogs: a Technological Practice of Freedom
Jennifer Cypher
York University, Canada

The idea that technology expands human freedom is common in literature about technology. Technologies are seen to make human interactions with nature less time consuming and labour intensive, and to free humans creatively and intellectually by offering us ways to express ourselves and think 'outside' of the limits of nature. Information technology, particularly the internet and World Wide Web, claim to offer users further freedoms, from geography and time for example. How do people experience freedom in relation to information technologies, and how does this transform notions of freedom on wider social, cultural and natural/environmental scales?

I am interested in how the idea of freedom is constituted in technological contexts, and how this is changing larger notions of freedom. "Significant changes are taking place in both the character of technology and our understanding of it" (Escobar 1994). One of these changes is how freedom is characterized within highly technologicalized cultures. This raises the question: what are these changes and what is their significance? More specifically I ask: How do people practice freedom through or with technology?

In order to investigate these questions I am doing primary research with people who write weblogs (blogs) in order to understand how they experience their blogging practice as enabling them to use technology to exercise kinds of freedom. Weblogs are online journals that allow bloggers to post their writing on the internet, and they incorporate links to other blogs and other web sites as an integral part of their structure. Bloggers make up 'technological communities' and by looking at their textual/technological practices I am taking, in part, a phenomenological approach, the purpose of which "is to illuminate the specific, to identify phenomena through how they are perceived by the actors in the situation." (Lester 1999)

Freedom and Power: cyber democracy in the future worlds of Robert A. Heinlein
Dena Hurst
Florida State University, Florida

“’Freedom!’” Their Charity Snorted [speaking to savage and slave, Hugh Farnham]. “A concept without a referent, like ‘ghosts.’ Meaningless. Hugh, you should study semantics. Modern semantics, I mean…We are all free—to walk our appointed paths. Just as a stone is free to fall when you toss it into the air. No one is free in the abstract meaning you give to the word.” This is the age-old philosophical dilemma, succinctly stated in this passage from Farnham’s Freehold, that permeates Heinlein’s future worlds: individual freedom versus societal obligations, the inevitable abuse of power within societies, and the restructuring of language to give new authority to outmoded ideologies.
The worlds that Heinlein created were caricatures of the world in which he lived, of a democracy that in varying degrees manifested almost every conceivable flaw pointed out by philosophers from Aristotle to Tocqueville to Chomsky. Heinlein’s future worlds are invariably democracies that, through catastrophe or evolution, have been carried to the limits of one form of degeneration or another. The reader finds worlds in which discrimination, slavery, exploitation, corruption and totalitarianism are the norm, and are justified by leaders and scholars using the same arguments that political philosophers have historically used to assert the virtues of democracy—arguments of equity, justice, and moral right, all played out in Wittgensteinian language games.
What happened in Heinlein’s future worlds is that the scientific theories and technologies advanced but the human race did not. Thus, while the quality of life was enhanced in terms of conveniences, dilemmas raised by social interaction remained unchanged. It was Heinlein’s premise that technological progress would exacerbate, not bridge, the divisions he saw present in the twentieth century, divisions between economic classes, races, religions, and politics. And these divisions would be further compounded by the introduction, through science and technology, of new classifications of life forms: androids and enhanced humans, from Friday, and survivors of brain/body transplants, from I Shall Fear No Evil.
While it is clear that Heinlein had little use for bureaucratic governments, preferring the strength and authority of individual rights to any collective obligations, it is equally clear that he had little faith in human beings to survive and thrive en masse. Despite the mechanisms available through science and technology to promote freedom and equality for all in Heinlein’s future worlds, the power dynamics of any human society, the inherent division between the haves and the have-nots, prevent the realization of such opportunities.