I’ve rarely been at an event full of so many contradictions as this year’s SXSW. The who’s who of the Geekerati and Intelligentsia have assembled in Austin for a full 10 days to discuss the advances of technology and culture, but this year’s event was special – it heralded the end of Internet innocence that the Summer of Snowden so swiftly provided.
The “Whistle-Blowers” (or “Light-Shedders” and “Illuminators” as they should more accurately be known) weren’t there physically; they’re resigned to hiding in the shadows and can’t come to the US – or any other place for that matter. Instead we heard them via Skype and Google Hangout links, while we the audience relished in taking pictures of them with our iPhones and Android devices, tweeting and posting messages on Facebook with our Macs and Windows laptops, just to let the world know we were in the pseudo-presence of Snowden and others. Ironically it is these exact tools and services that are now under scrutiny thanks to their defining revelations.
As a result, we realise that there are really no practical options; so have we already given up on privacy and the dreams of the new society that the internet would help us build?
Some are asking for the policy makers to fix the mess. Others say that it is really about educating people about what is going on so that they at least can make educated decisions on how they conduct their lives online. Some propose encryption tools like PGP and TOR, but others say it’s currently too complex.
Many of the extremely tech-literate people at SXSW say that we’re now in a stalemate. There are no viable alternatives for the tools and services that we use close to the level of functionality and usability that we are currently used to and expect.
At SXSW we didn’t hear an easy answer to these questions, because there probably are none. But there are a couple of things that we can improve in the areas that the crowd members, like myself, are heavily involved in. Here are some of my suggestions:
Crypto – it actually works, but only very few are using it, so we need easy to use encryption for messaging, email, files, our hard drives and cloud storage services – it doesn’t need to be perfect but it needs to be perfectly easy to useMore open source – we need fully transparent services provided by more suppliers, and not just one service from a Silicon Valley advertising companyA shift to open source based hardware and less reliance on proprietary, closed, backdoored devices from very few secretive companiesA focus on services that do not rely on advertising for their monetisation. This would allow for end-to-end encryption
People are absolutely willing these days to pay for privacy; and this is a huge opportunity for the people at SXSW. Like Cory Doctorow said in the pre-Snowden panel: “I hope that ten years from now we will be talking about the technology that was created by us all in the meantime to fix privacy and the Internet.”
