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Technology in The Dystopian World

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Are we already living in a tech dystopia.

People should no more believe in dystopia than utopia. The fact is that technology has changed the world for so many for so long for the better—from reduction of disease to extending life to increased food and health—that to dismiss those gains is just know-nothingism. As with all technological advances, not everyone shares equally in the gains or benefits in the same way, and some may even experience disproportionately negative impacts, but that does not diminish the overall societal value of the advancements. Instead, it should motivate society to extend those benefits to all, to find equity and reduce the negative impacts.

Technology itself is neither good nor evil—it is how society chooses to implement it that creates the problems. Rather than banning this or that technology out of fear of future harm or abuse, it is better to prevent or prosecute the misuse. Maximize the benefits, manage the risks, make the outcomes more fair. All of that is achievable with any technology even though it may not be achievable in every society.

For all those who think we live in a dystopian world, when did we arrive there and at which technological advance would they have shouted “enough!”? Presumably sometime north of the Iron Age, or perhaps at the dawn of the semiconductor or transistor, or social media’s rise, or is it the development of artificial intelligence? I don’t think we’ve achieved utopia, but technology actually keeps us from dystopia, and keeps us striving for the next great cure or the next advancement or innovation.

Part of a Gizmodo series . 

Are We Already Living in a Tech Dystopia?

Jonathan Zittrain

Gizmodo asked experts, including Jonathan Zittrain, for their answers to the question:  Are We Already Living in a Tech Dystopia?

“Yes, in the sense that so many of us feel rightly that instead of empowering us, technology is used against us – most especially when it presents itself as merely here to help,” Zittrain said. “I’ve started thinking of some of our most promising tech, including machine learning, as like asbestos: it’s baked wholesale into other products and services so we don’t even know we’re using it; it becomes pervasive because it seems to work so well, and without any overlay of public interest on its installation; it’s really hard to account for, much less remove, once it’s in place; and it carries with it the possibility of deep injury both now and down the line.”

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What Technological Dystopias Can Tell Us About Human Values

On June 5 th , Season Five of the popular television show Black Mirror became available for streaming on Netflix. The series isn’t for the faint of heart—most of the storylines are about as existential as television can get. The name “Black Mirror” is a reference to the idea that when one stares into a dark cell phone or computer screen one sees one’s own reflection. Aptly, the series explores the human relationship with technology.

In many episodes, Black Mirror hints that the development of certain kinds of technology could lead to dystopic living conditions. Most dictionaries define a “dystopia” as a world in which life is particularly difficult. For example, dictionary.com defines dystopia as, “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.” Though these definitions capture some of the essential features of a dystopia, there is an important common element that they miss—dystopias are almost always generated as part of a desperate search to achieve utopia.    

Utopia, a book written by Sir Thomas More in 1516, introduced the term into common parlance. In this work, a world traveler describes his visit to the island of Utopia—a perfect society. One of the most noteworthy characteristics of the Utopians is that they don’t value things that don’t contribute significantly to a meaningful human life. They view obsession with money and the extravagances of material wealth as childish and humiliating:

They find pearls on their coast, and diamonds and carbuncles on their rocks. They seek them not, but if they find them by chance, they polish them and give them to their children for ornaments, who delight in them during their childhood. But when they come to years of discretion, and see that none but children use such baubles, they lay them aside of their own accord; and would be as much ashamed to use them afterward, as grown children among us would be of their toys.

More uses the fictional Utopians to pursue questions such as: What if we didn’t value wealth?​ What if we shared resources so that no one had to worry about their livelihood or the well-being of those they love?​ What if we avoided war at all costs?​  What if we allowed people to believe according to the dictates of their consciences?​

Dystopias are often presented initially as answers to questions of this type. What if society could easily resolve our most substantial struggles as human beings? Traditional dystopias explore the nature of the relationship between individuals and governments. For example, Brave New World describes a society in which, at least on the face of things, all humans are maximally happy. The primary way that the government achieves this result is by ensuring that citizens always get what they want. They do this by engineering them in such a way that they have little to no control over what they want. In 1984, citizens no longer need to worry themselves about what beliefs they ought to have. Language is refined, reduced, and policed by the dominant party, and knowledge is what the government says that it is. In The Handmaid’s Tale , the government sorts out messy decisions concerning love and sex.The conclusion that the reader is left to draw at the end of each of these stories is that a world in which the government solves the most difficult problems wouldn’t be a better world. Part of what makes life meaningful is the struggle to answer these questions for oneself, even when it’s challenging.  

In a technological dystopia, technology plays the role that government once did in similar stories. What if we could use technology to eliminate or reduce life’s most painful struggles? Black Mirror takes up these questions in chilling ways. For example, in the season four episode, Arkangel , a young single mother struggles with the question of exactly how much control she should exert over her daughter’s life. She is offered the opportunity to know exactly how her child is doing at all times, to check her vital statistics, blur out disturbing sensory images, and even to see what her daughter is seeing, all on a tablet. This technology presents an opportunity to achieve what many might think is a utopic ideal. What if we could keep our children perfectly protected from the harshness and danger of the world? The episode suggests something about human nature and human values; character development for both parent and child requires some level of uncertainty and plenty of independence.  

Black Mirror also explores questions about memory. We all have experiences that cause us to wish that our memories were perfect. If only we could remember everything, we would never misplace our car keys, leave something crucial behind, or miss an important appointment. The episodes Crocodile and The Entire History of You explore what the consequences might be if our memories were perfect. The viewer is left with the impression that our fallible memories may be a blessing in disguise. The ability to forget is associated with reduction of anxiety and pain, the potential to forgive, and the power to move on. A world in which human memory is perfect may not be a utopia after all.

There are many episodes of Black Mirror in which a character’s consciousness is uploaded into a digital space. These episodes encourage introspection about questions such as: Are human beings essentially mortal? What kinds of things are persons? Is immortality desirable?

There are only three episodes in the most recent season.  In an interesting twist, one of the episodes is set in 2018—the past. It suggests that our addiction to social media may have already landed us in a dystopia of our own making.

The philosophical questions raised by Black Mirror are, in many ways, more fundamental and existential than those posed by earlier dystopic works. All dystopias get those who engage with them thinking about their values. Technological dystopias reflect back to us who we are at an existential level. With any luck, they also get us thinking about the moral parameters we should set on the development of new technology.

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Technological Dystopia in the Science Fiction Genre

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• First Online: 28 May 2020
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• Peter Pericles Trifonas 2  

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Science fiction films as a mass medium for public consumption have disseminated cautionary parables of technological dystopia rooted in existing social and economic conditions. Metropolis (1927), Blade Runner (1982), Terminator (1984), and The Matrix (1999) illustrate transformations of the genre. The theme that ties them together is the representation of technology and its effect on human society in the future. Each film deals with the subject in different ways that ultimately relate to its cinematographic style, technical advancements, and the story line. And yet, the theme of the failed quest for utopia remains morally unresolved in the depiction of the rise of a technological dystopia and its effect on human society in a world to come, playing on the incommensurability of philosophical, religious, political, economic, and literary narratives of scientific progress.

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Trifonas, P.P. (2020). Technological Dystopia in the Science Fiction Genre. In: Trifonas, P. (eds) Handbook of Theory and Research in Cultural Studies and Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56988-8_41

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Our Technology Dystopia and How to Survive It

100 Dystopia Essay Topics & Ideas

🏆 best dystopian titles, 📌 simple & easy dystopian title ideas, 👍 good dystopia essay titles, ❓ dystopian discussion questions.

• Saunders’s “The Red Bow”: The Dystopian Reality of Totalitarianism This essay will consider the relevance of the topic introduced by Saunders and provide actual historical examples that support his hypothesis.”The Red Bow” starts with a group of men going out for a dog hunt […]
• 20th Century Dystopian Fiction and Today’s Society The author considers the fiction works of that era as an attempt to convey the destructive nature of violence and everything related to injustice.”The tone of dystopia is of despair and the feel it gives […] We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Gender Issues in Dystopian Film “Children of Men” The significance of this source is validated by its contribution to the argument of the relevance of the dystopian genre in cinematography for unfolding social issues.
• The Brave New World Dystopia by Aldous Huxley The primary assertion in the novel is that the cost of this stability is the loss of individuality, creativity, and genuine human connection.
• The Planet of the Apes – A Dystopian Film Via the cinematic experience the entire infrastructure of people’s culture and the state of the world at large can be seen and experienced.
• ‘Se7en’ by David Fincher: A Film Steeped in Dystopia A professional model is found dead in her bed with her nose cut off, a container of sleeping pills in one hand, and a phone in the other; her death was the result of a […]
• Dystopias “Brave New World” by Huxley and “1984” by Orwell The modern world is full of complications and the moments when it seems like a dystopia the darkest version of the future. In the novel, promiscuity is encouraged, and sex is a form of entertainment.
• The Concept and History of Dystopian Fiction Thus, the goal of this paper is to study the phenomenon of DF based on the examples of Orwell’s and Huxley’s fiction and determine the presence of the themes that overlap with the contemporary social, […]
• Genre: Science Fiction Dystopia The western genre is the most common movie genre used to highlight the dominance and development of both American and European cultures and economies to the rest of the world.
• “WALL-E”: Dystopian Narrative In addition, genre conventions, along with the rules of science fiction, promote the engagement of the movie with the issues of programming and consumption.
• Dystopia in “Gattaca” and “Never Let Me Go” Movies When people think about the future, in the majority of cases, they believe that science and technology should help to change the world. One of the goals of a utopia is to remove the overwhelming […]
• Genre Assessment: Dystopian Genre Review Based on the Film “Children of Men” The current proposal implies the creation of a review that explores the key features of dystopia as a cinema genre and based on a prominent example of such a film.
• Unhappiness of Society in Orwell’s 1984 Dystopia His character is a strong individual who will not transgress the ideals of his party and is fully committed to him.
• Welcome to Your Nightmares: The Dystopian Vision of the World It is quite peculiar that both Orwell and Huxley chose the same tool to express the tension and the absurdity of the situation that the people of the future were trapped in, creating the abridged […]
• Dystopias in “Animal Farm” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” In this regard, the aim of literary dystopias is to caution and warn society against the blind following of ideologies that lead to the breakdown of social order.
• Dystopias by Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Silverberg The feature of the story The Pain Peddlers is in the fact that the situation in it reminds bureaucratic procedures in reality.
• Utopia Versus Dystopia: Discussion However, the practical realization of Communist concepts in Russia, had resulted in millions of citizens loosing their lives and in those people, who managed to survive, during the course of Communist “social purges”, becoming the […]
• The Dystopian Societies of “1984” and Brave New World The three features which are discussed in this respect are the division of the two societies into social strata, the use of state power and control over citizens, and the loss of people’s individualities.
• Dystopian Fiction for Young Readers First of all, it must be noted that the article of the current analysis is devoted to the impact of dystopian fiction on young people.
• Dystopian Future in the “Blade Runner” Film The foremost aspect of how the urban landscape is being represented in Blade Runner is that the director made a deliberate point in accentuating the perceptual unfriendliness of the environment, in the foreground of which […]
• Dystopia Idea in the Movies and Novels If considering the rebels in the novel and the movies the “vermin” instead of the “prey,” the idea of the stories will change slightly.
• A Dystopian State: Astutopia The education system reinforces the essence of the dungeons, and the aim is to instill fear within the children so they can adhere to laid down teachings and doctrines.
• Popularity of Utopian/Dystopian Young Adult Literature The box is entrusted in the Mayor’s care and a tradition of passing it from one Mayor to the next is established.
• Dystopian Social Contract The Hunger Games series 1 is a science-fiction drama that delineates the situation of enslavement among the citizens of Panem to the governing class that reside in a city called Capitol.
• Subversive Literature/ Dystopia in science fiction novels In the endeavor to place a case in support of this line of argument, the paper considers the key traits of dystopian literature then showing how Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep possesses them in […]
• Utopia and Dystopia in The Future City
• An Analysis of Feminist Dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Our Society is Becoming More Like a Dystopia Than a Democracy
• Integrating Research for Water Management: Synergy or Dystopia
• American Dystopia; American Spaces and Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’
• The Brave New World’s Dystopia And Assimilation
• Gattaca and Fahrenheit 451 – Technology and Dystopia
• Dystopia: Science Fiction, Exaggeration, Or Imminent Reality
• Thoughts on Feminism and Dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale
• Censorship in Dystopia in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
• The Dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
• Dystopia Caused by the Massive Boom of Technology in The Hunger Games
• The Theme of Feminist Dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale, a Novel by Margaret Atwood
• Somewhere Between Utopia and Dystopia: Choosing From Incomparable Prospects
• The Causes of the Island’s Changes from Utopia to Dystopia in the Novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Cowardly Current Dystopia In Aldous Huxley’s Novel “Brave New World”
• Searching for the Meaning of Life: Beckett’s Dystopia in “Endgame”
• Comments on: Totalitarian Government: Discovering Dystopia in Matched
• How Does Orwell Create a Dystopia in 1984
• Utopia, Dystopia or Anti-Utopia? by Choloe Houston
• Humanity And Dystopia In Anthem, By Ayn Rand
• The Contrast Between Utopia and Dystopia in the Novels 1984 and The Dispossessed
• The Role Of A Good City Thinking: Utopia, Dystopia And Heterotopia
• Concept of Dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale, a Novel by Canadian Poet Margaret Atwood
• Similarities Between Dystopia and Harrison Bergeron
• The Portrayal of Dystopia in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
• The Beauty Of Dystopia By Aldous Huxley
• Utopia and Dystopia in Harrison Bergeron and The Lottery
• Utopia and Dystopia in the Futuristic Novel, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Aldous Huxley’s Dystopia As Relating To Society Today
• Utopia and Dystopia in The Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
• The Handmaid’s Tale: Dissecting the Feminist Dystopia
• Self-Repression and Dystopia: The Bumpy Road to Freedom in “Never Let Me Go”
• Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 Modern Dystopia Warnings
• Utopia and Dystopia in Animal Farm by George Orwell
• The Art of War: The Ancient Chinese Classic Adapted for Dystopia Circa 2032
• The Evolution of Dystopia Fiction in Some Works of Literature
• The Horror Of Dystopia Revealed By Neuromancer
• Similarities Between Utopia and Dystopia
• Contrastive Utopias: The Role of Nature and Technology in the Concepts of Utopia and Dystopia
• The Dystopia of William Gibson’s Neuromancer
• Analyzing Technology and Politics in The Blade Runner Dystopia by Judith Kerman
• The Concept of Dystopia in Harrison Bergeron, The Giver, and Uglies
• Utopia or Dystopia: The Future of Technology
• Religious Dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale
• Dystopia As A Literary Genre In A Handmaid’s Tale
• Identity: Fighting Dystopia’s Cookie-Cutter Molds
• Dystopia in the Novels of Ray Bradbury and George Orwell
• Free Handmaid’s Tale Essays: The Handmaid’s Dystopia
• What Are Dystopian Novels?
• Which Writer Creates the Most Disturbing Dystopia Future Vision?
• Why Are Dystopian Novels So Popular?
• What Is an Example of a Dystopia?
• What’s a Dystopia Society?
• What Are the Five Characteristics of Dystopia?
• What Are the Four Types of Dystopia?
• What Are the Nine Traits of Dystopia?
• What Is Another Word for Dystopia?
• What Is Utopia vs. Dystopia?
• What’s the Opposite of Dystopia?
• What Is a Dystopia Person?
• How Do You Recognize a Dystopia?
• Why Is It Called Dystopia?
• How Do You Survive a Dystopia?
• What Happens to an Individual in a Dystopia Society?
• What Type of Government Does a Dystopia Society Have?
• What Is a Feminist Dystopia?
• Who Invented Dystopia?
• Is a Dystopia Society Possible?
• Why Dystopia Fiction Often Paints a Frightening Picture of the Future?
• Why Dystopia Literature Often Presents the Individual’s Quest for Meaning in Hostile and Oppressive Worlds?
• What Are the Issues With Human Progress in Utopia and Dystopia Fiction?
• How Does Individualism Manifest Within Utopia and Dystopia Novels?
• What Are Dystopia Societies and Progression Towards Equality?
• How Do Dystopia Novels Convey Humanity and Individualism?
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• Chicago (N-B)

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IvyPanda . "100 Dystopia Essay Topics & Ideas." February 26, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/dystopia-essay-topics/.

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Slouching towards dystopia: the rise of surveillance capitalism and the death of privacy

Our lives and behaviour have been turned into profit for the Big Tech giants – and we meekly click “Accept”. How did we sleepwalk into a world without privacy?

By John Naughton

Suppose you walk into a shop and the guard at the entrance records your name. Cameras on the ceiling track your every step in the store, log which items you looked at and which ones you ignored. After a while you notice that an employee is following you around, recording on a clipboard how much time you spend in each aisle. And after you’ve chosen an item and bring it to the cashier, she won’t complete the transaction until you reveal your identity, even if you’re paying cash. 

Another scenario: a stranger is standing at the garden gate outside your house. You don’t know him or why he’s there. He could be a plain-clothes police officer, but there’s no way of knowing. He’s there 24/7 and behaves like a real busybody. He stops everybody who visits you and checks their identity. This includes taking their mobile phone and copying all its data on to a device he carries. He does the same for family members as they come and go. When the postman arrives, this stranger insists on opening your mail, or at any rate on noting down the names and addresses of your correspondents. He logs when you get up, how long it takes you to get dressed, when you have meals, when you leave for work and arrive at the office, when you get home and when you go to bed, as well as what you read. He is able to record all of your phone calls, texts, emails and the phone numbers of those with whom you exchange WhatsApp messages. And when you ask him what he thinks he’s doing, he just stares at you. If pressed, he says that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear. If really pressed, he may say that everything he does is for the protection of everyone.

A third scenario: you’re walking down the street when you’re accosted by a cheery, friendly guy. He runs a free photo-framing service – you just let him copy the images on your smartphone and he will tidy them up, frame them beautifully and put them into a gallery so that your friends and family can always see and admire them. And all for nothing! All you have to do is to agree to a simple contract. It’s 40 pages but it’s just typical legal boilerplate – the stuff that turns lawyers on. You can have a copy if you want. You make a quick scan of the contract. It says that of course you own your photographs but that, in exchange for the wonderful free framing service, you grant the chap “a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free and worldwide licence to host, use, distribute, modify, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works” of your photos. Oh, and also he can change, suspend, or discontinue the framing service at any time without notice, and may amend any of the agreement’s terms at his sole discretion by posting the revised terms on his website. Your continued use of the framing service after the effective date of the revised agreement constitutes your acceptance of its terms. And because you’re in a hurry and you need some pictures framed by this afternoon for your daughter’s birthday party, you sign on the dotted line.

All of these scenarios are conceivable in what we call real life. It doesn’t take a nanosecond’s reflection to conclude that if you found yourself in one of them you would deem it preposterous and intolerable. And yet they are all simple, if laboured, articulations of everyday occurrences in cyberspace. They describe accommodations that in real life would be totally unacceptable, but which in our digital lives we tolerate meekly and often without reflection. The question is: how did we get here? 

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It’s a long story, but with hindsight the outlines are becoming clear. Technology comes into it, of course – but plays a smaller part than you might think. It’s more a story about human nature, about how capitalism has mutated to exploit digital technology, about the liberal democratic state and the social contract, and about governments that have been asleep at the wheel for several decades.

To start with the tech: digital is different from earlier general-purpose technologies in a number of significant ways. It has zero marginal costs, which means that once you have made the investment to create something it costs almost nothing to replicate it a billion times. It is subject to very powerful network effects – which mean that if your product becomes sufficiently popular then it becomes, effectively, impregnable. The original design axioms of the internet – no central ownership or control, and indifference to what it was used for so long as users conformed to its technical protocols – created an environment for what became known as “permissionless innovation”. And because every networked device had to be identified and logged, it was also a giant surveillance machine.

Since we humans are social animals, and the internet is a communications network, it is not surprising we adopted it so quickly once services such as email and web browsers had made it accessible to non-techies. But because providing those services involved expense – on servers, bandwidth, tech support, etc – people had to pay for them. (It may seem incredible now, but once upon a time having an email account cost money.) Then newspaper and magazine publishers began putting content on to web servers that could be freely accessed, and in 1996 Hotmail was launched (symbolically, on 4 July, Independence Day) – meaning that anyone could have email for free.  Hotmail quickly became ubiquitous. It became clear that if a business wanted to gain those powerful network effects, it had to Get Big Fast; and the best way to do that was to offer services that were free to use. The only thing that remained was finding a business model that could finance services growing at exponential rates and provide a decent return for investors.

That problem was still unsolved when Google launched its search engine in 1998. Usage of it grew exponentially because it was manifestly better than its competitors. One reason for its superiority was that it monitored very closely what users searched for and used this information to improve the algorithm. So the more that people used the engine, the better it got. But when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Google was still burning rather than making money and its two biggest venture capital investors, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, started to lean on its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to find a business model.

Under that pressure they came up with one in 2001. They realised that the data created by their users’ searches could be used as raw material for algorithms that made informed guesses about what users might be interested in – predictions that could be useful to advertisers. In this way what was thought of as mere “data exhaust” became valuable “behavioural surplus” – information given by users that could be sold. Between that epiphany and Google’s initial public offering in 2004, the company’s revenues increased by over 3,000 per cent.

Thus was born a new business model that the American scholar Shoshana Zuboff later christened “surveillance capitalism”, which she defined as: “a new economic order that claims human experience as the raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales”. Having originated at Google, it was then conveyed to Facebook in 2008 when a senior Google executive, Sheryl Sandberg, joined the social media giant. So Sandberg became, as Zuboff puts it, the “Typhoid Mary” who helped disseminate surveillance capitalism.

The dynamic interactions between human nature and this toxic business model lie at the heart of what has happened with social media. The key commodity is data derived from close surveillance of everything that users do when they use these companies’ services. Therefore, the overwhelming priority for the algorithms that curate users’ social media feeds is to maximise “user engagement” – the time spent on them – and it turns out that misinformation, trolling, lies, hate-speech, extremism and other triggers of outrage seem to achieve that goal better than more innocuous stuff. Another engagement maximiser is clickbait – headlines that intrigue but leave out a key piece of information. (“She lied all her life. Guess what happened the one time she told the truth!”) In that sense, social media and many smartphone apps are essentially fuelled by dopamine – the chemical that ferries information between neurons in our brains, and is released when we do things that give us pleasure and satisfaction. 

The bottom line is this: while social media users are essential for surveillance capitalism, they are not its paying customers: that role is reserved for advertisers. So the relationship of platform to user is essentially manipulative: he or she has to be encouraged to produce as much behavioural surplus as possible. 

A key indicator of this asymmetry is the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) that users are required to accept before they can access the service. Most of these “contracts” consist of three coats of prime legal verbiage that no normal human being can understand, and so nobody reads them. To illustrate the point, in June 2014 the security firm F-Secure set up a free WiFi hotspot in the centre of London’s financial district. Buried in the EULA for this “free” service was a “Herod clause”: in exchange for the WiFi, “the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity”. Six people accepted the terms.  In another experiment, a software firm put an offer of an award of $1,000 at the very end of its terms of service, just to see how many would read that far. Four months and 3,000 downloads later, just one person had claimed the offered sum. 

Despite this, our legal systems accept the fact that most internet users click  “Accept” as confirmation of informed consent, which it clearly is not. It’s really passive acceptance of impotence. Such asymmetric contracts would be laughed out of court in real life but are still apparently sacrosanct in cyberspace. 

According to the security guru Bruce Schneier of Harvard, “Surveillance is the business model of the internet.” But it’s also a central concern of modern states. When Edward Snowden broke cover in the summer of 2013 with his revelations of the extensiveness and scale of the surveillance capabilities and activities of the US and some other Western countries, the first question that came to mind was: is this a scandal or a crisis? Scandals happen all the time in democracies; they generate a great deal of heat and controversy, but after a while the media caravan moves on and nothing happens. Crises, on the other hand, do lead to substantive reform.

Snowden revealed that the US and its allies had been engaged in mass surveillance under inadequate democratic oversight. His disclosures provoked apparent soul-searching and anger in many Western democracies, but the degree of public concern varied from country to country. It was high in Germany, perhaps because so many Germans have recent memories of Stasi surveillance. In contrast, public opinion in Britain seemed relatively relaxed: opinion surveys at the time suggested that about two-thirds of the British public had confidence in the security services and were thus unruffled by Snowden. Nevertheless, there were three major inquiries into the revelations in the UK, and, ultimately, a new act of parliament – the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. This overhauled and in some ways strengthened judicial oversight of surveillance activities by the security services; but it also gave those services significant new powers  – for example in “equipment interference”  (legal cover to hack into targeted devices such as smartphones, domestic networks and “smart” devices such as thermostats). So, in the end, the impact of the Snowden revelations was that manifestly inadequate oversight provisions were replaced by slightly less inadequate ones. It was a scandal, not a crisis. Western states are still in the surveillance business; and their populations still seem comfortable with this.

There’s currently some concern about facial recognition, a genuinely intrusive surveillance technology. Machine-learning technology has become reasonably good at recognising faces in public places, and many state agencies and private companies are already deploying it. It means that people are being identified and tracked without their knowledge or consent. Protests against facial recognition are well-intentioned, but, as Harvard’s Bruce Schneier points out, banning it is the wrong way to oppose modern surveillance.  

This is because facial recognition is just one identification tool among many enabled by digital technology. “People can be identified at a distance by their heartbeat or by their gait, using a laser-based system,” says Schneier. “Cameras are so good that they can read fingerprints and iris patterns from metres away. And even without any of these technologies, we can always be identified because our smartphones broadcast unique numbers called MAC addresses. Other things identify us as well: our phone numbers, our credit card numbers, the licence plates on our cars. China, for example, uses multiple identification technologies to support its surveillance state.”

The important point is that surveillance and our passive acceptance of it lies at the heart of the dystopia we are busily constructing. It doesn’t matter which technology is used to identify people: what matters is that we can be identified, and then correlated and tracked across everything we do. Mass surveillance is increasingly the norm. In countries such as China, a surveillance infrastructure is being built by the government for social control. In Western countries, led by the US, it’s being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behaviour, and is then used incidentally by governments.

What’s happened in the West, largely unnoticed by the citizenry, is a sea-change in the social contract between individuals and the state. Whereas once the deal was that we accepted some limitations on our freedom in exchange for security, now the state requires us to surrender most of our privacy in order to protect us. The (implicit and explicit) argument is that if we have nothing to hide there is nothing to fear. And people seem to accept that ludicrous trope. We have been slouching towards dystopia.

The most eerie thing about the last two decades is the quiescence with which people have accepted – and adapted to – revolutionary changes in their information environment and lives. We have seen half-educated tech titans proclaim mottos such as “Move fast and break things” – as Mark Zuckerberg did in the early years of Facebook – and then refuse to acknowledge responsibility when one of the things they may have helped to break is democracy.  (This is the same democracy, incidentally, that enforces the laws that protect their intellectual property, helped fund the technology that has enabled their fortunes and gives them immunity for the destructive nonsense that is disseminated by their platforms.) And we allow them to get away with it.

What can explain such indolent passivity? One obvious reason is that we really (and understandably) value some of the services that the tech industry has provided. There have been various attempts to attach a monetary value to them, but any conversation with a family that’s spread over different countries or continents is enough to convince one that being able to Skype or FaceTime a faraway loved one is a real boon. Or just think of the way that Google has become a memory prosthesis for humanity – or how educational non-profit organisations such as the Khan Academy can disseminate learning for free online. 

We would really miss these services if they were one day to disappear, and this may be one reason why many politicians tip-toe round tech companies’ monopoly power. That the services are free at the point of use has undermined anti-trust thinking for decades: how do you prosecute a  monopoly that is not price-gouging its users? (The answer, in the case of social media, is that users are not customers;  the monopoly may well be extorting its actual customers – advertisers – but nobody seems to have inquired too deeply into that until recently.)

Another possible explanation is what one might call imaginative failure – most people simply cannot imagine the nature of the surveillance society that we are constructing, or the implications it might have for them and their grandchildren. There are only two cures for this failure: one is an existential crisis that brings home to people the catastrophic damage that technology could wreak. Imagine, for example, a more deadly strain of the coronavirus that rapidly causes a pandemic – but governments struggle to control it because official edicts are drowned out by malicious disinformation on social media. Would that make people think again about the legal immunity that social media companies enjoy from prosecution for content that they host on their servers? 

The other antidote to imaginative failure is artistic creativity. It’s no accident that two of the most influential books of the last century were novels – Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The first imagined a world in which humans were controlled by fear engendered by comprehensive surveillance; the second portrayed one in which citizens were undone by addiction to pleasure – the dopamine strategy, if you like. The irony of digital technology is that it has given us both of these nightmares at once.

Whatever the explanation, everywhere at the moment one notices a feeling of impotence – a kind of learned helplessness. This is seen most vividly in the way people shrug their shoulders and click “Accept” on grotesquely skewed and manipulative  EULAs. They face a binary choice: accept the terms or go away. Hence what has become known as the “privacy paradox” – whenever researchers and opinion pollsters ask internet users if they value their privacy, they invariably respond with a  resounding “yes”. And yet they continue to use the services that undermine that beloved privacy.

It hasn’t helped that internet users have watched their governments do nothing about tech power for two decades. Surveillance capitalism was enabled because its practitioners operated in a lawless environment. It appropriated people’s data as a free resource and asserted its right to do so, much as previous variations of capitalism appropriated natural resources without legal restrictions. And now the industry claims as one of its prime proprietary assets the huge troves of that appropriated data that it possesses. 

It is also relevant that tech companies have been free to acquire start-ups that threatened to become competitors without much, if any, scrutiny from competition authorities. In any rational universe, Google would not be permitted to own YouTube, and Facebook would have to divest itself of WhatsApp and Instagram. It’s even possible – as the French journalist  Frédéric Filloux has recently argued – that  Facebook believes its corporate interests are best served by the re-election of Donald Trump, which is why it’s not going to fact-check any political ads. As far as I can see, this state of affairs has not aroused even a squawk in the US.

When Benjamin Franklin emerged on the final day of deliberation from the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a woman asked him, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin replied, “A republic… if you can keep it.” The equivalent reply for our tech-dominated society would be: we have a democracy, if we can keep it. 

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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2020 issue of the New Statesman, The death of privacy

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Are We Already Living in a Tech Dystopia?

For the most part, fictional characters rarely recognize when they’re trapped in a dystopia. Watching their neighbors get carted off for harboring subversive thoughts, they almost never say, “I wish we weren’t living in this dystopia.” To them, that dystopia is just life. Which suggests that—were we, at this moment, living in a dystopia ourselves—we might not even notice it. We might call this or that policy/data-harvesting technique “dystopian,” but, at least on some level, we believe we aren’t totally there yet—that there is still room, in our world, for a modicum of personal freedom/happiness. Is this a laughable delusion? Is our free will merely a fragile illusion enjoyed at the provisional discretion of five or six unaccountable technology companies? Is this, right here, the tech-dystopia we were worried about? For this week’s Giz Asks , we reached out to a number of experts with differing opinions .

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Jonathan zittrain.

Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Director of the Harvard Law School Library, and Co-Founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

Yes, in the sense that so many of us feel rightly that instead of empowering us, technology is used against us—most especially when it presents itself as merely here to help. I’ve started thinking of some of our most promising tech, including machine learning, as like asbestos: it’s baked wholesale into other products and services so we don’t even know we’re using it; it becomes pervasive because it seems to work so well, and without any overlay of public interest on its installation; it’s really hard to account for, much less remove, once it’s in place; and it carries with it the possibility of deep injury both now and down the line. I’m not anti-tech. But I worry greatly about the deployment of such power with so little thought given to, and so few boundaries against, its misuse, whether now or later. More care and public-minded oversight goes into someone’s plans for an addition to a house than to what can be or become a multi-billion dollar, multi-billion-user online platform. And while thanks to their power, and the trust placed in them by their clients, we recognize structural engineers, architects, lawyers, and doctors as members of learned professions—with duties to their clients and to the public that transcend a mere business agreement—we have yet to see that applied to people in data science, software engineering, and related fields who might be in a position to recognize and prevent harm as it coalesces. There are ways out of this. But it first requires abandoning the resignation that so many have come to about business as usual.

McKenzie Wark

Professor, Culture and Media, The New School, whose research focuses on media and cultural history and theory

The term ‘dystopia’ might be too limiting, in that it scripts ways of thinking about oppression with which we are already familiar from popular books and movies. It also gives us a limited palette of ways of resisting or changing that oppression. It can also play into this way of thinking about technology in terms of extremes: we are promised unlimited freedom, and when it seems that’s not what technology is creating, we imagine total domination. It might be more useful to think of technologi es as having a range of possibilities, but where the way those play out in their effects on our everyday lives is a product of conflict over how they are shaped and deployed, and in whose interests. Here it is useful to keep in mind the difference between the potential of a technology and its actual uses. Of all the things we could do with tech, how did we end up choosing these particular uses? Why did these technologies get accelerated development while others were left on the shelf? More often than not this comes down to who funded their development. A good deal of what we think of as ‘tech’ today goes back to the Second World War and the Cold War. Tech emerged out of government supported labs, but not so much for the common good as for the military. The experimental, high risk work that was government funded is what seeded a commercial tech industry which has profited off the fruits of that fundamental work for half a century or more now. If we were to think about a tech utopia, it would have to be one based on developing the uses of the tech that we know for the common good, rather than expanding the power and reach of a handful of corporations. Tech is now mostly how corporations seek to achieve dominance over markets and to fend off each other’s claims to dominance. Hence what we have is tech that subordinates human needs to corporate power. You could call that dystopian if you like, but maybe it’s something wor se. What we need is a people’s technology movement. For that we need the leadership of those who work in tech and who realize their creativity and effort is being squandered on destroying the planet to make a few rich people richer.

Albert Gidari

Director of Privacy at the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School

People should no more believe in dystopia than utopia. The fact is that technology has changed the world for so many for so long for the better—from reduction of disease to extending life to increased food and health—that to dismiss those gains is just know-nothingism. As with all technological advances, not everyone shares equally in the gains or benefits in the same way, and some may even experience disproportionately negative impacts, but that does not diminish the overall societal value of the advancements. Instead, it should motivate society to extend those benefits to all, to find equity and reduce the negative impacts. Technology itself is neither good nor evil—it is how society chooses to implement it that creates the problems. Rather than banning this or that technology out of fear of future harm or abuse, it is better to prevent or prosecute the misuse. Maximize the benefits, manage the risks, make the outcomes more fair. All of that is achievable with any technology even though it may not be achievable in every society. For all those who think we live in a dystopian world, when did we arrive there and at which technological advance would they have shouted “enough!”? Presumably sometime north of the Iron Age, or perhaps at the dawn of the semiconductor or transistor, or social media’s rise, or is it the development of artificial intelligence? I don’t think we’ve achieved utopia, but technology actually keeps us from dystopia, and keeps us striving for the next great cure or the next advancement or innovation.

David Golumbia

Professor, English, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism

We live in a world saturated with technological surveillance, democracy-negating media, and technology companies that put themselves above the law while helping to spread ha te and abuse all over the world. Yet the most dystopian aspect of the current technology world may be that so many people actively promote these technologies as utopian. As more than a few commentators have noted, our world has uncanny resemblances to the one Aldous Huxley portrayed in his 1932 novel Brave New World . While preparing a stage adaptation of the book years ago, British theater director James Dacre noted that in the novel, technology “can control our decision-making with social media, pornography, the commercialization of sex, advertising and reality TV.” In contrast to the more nightmarish totalitarian vision of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , in Huxley’s world, “people think they are always happy, always get what they want, and never want what they can’t have.” Free will and political deliberation have been eliminated almost entirely, but the pursuit of pleasure obscures that. Social media, in-home surveillance tools, home genetics tests, and many other technologies exceed even what Huxley imagined. While some people do understand what is happening, many more actively demand even more technology of this sort while dismissing its downsides. It does not help that nearly all attempts by creative thinkers like Huxley to warn us about those downsides get reinterpreted by tech promoters as terrific product ideas. Perhaps the most frightening thing is that the tech promoters frequently cite the dystopias as their inspiration—“ Black Mirror in real life ,” “ Minority Report in real time .” I don’t think even Huxley’s or Orwell’s imaginations were quite that dark, but here we are.

Guy Standing

Professorial Research Associate, Development Studies, and a founding member and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), a non-governmental organization that promotes a basic income for all

I think the best answer to your question is that we are drifting into a techno-dystopia because the income distribution system is not being adjusted to a world in which automation and AI are generating more rental income and profits to the detriment of people dependent on labour for their income. The answer is not to halt technological change but to recycle part of the income to everybody through a basic income system. Among the ways of doing that is to have digital data levies and a capital fund from which social dividends could be paid out as basic incomes. Protecting privacy is a separate matter and must be greatly strengthened if we are to avoid the panopticon state.

Aral Balkan

Developer at the Small Technology Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for and building small technology to protect personhood and democracy in the digital network age

Technology that’s owned and controlled by people (individuals) is an empow ering tool that protects human rights and democracy. Technology that’s owned and controlled by a handful of trillion-dollar interests is a weapon of surveillance and oppression that destroys human rights and democracy. Ask yourself who owns and controls technology today, and you’ll have your answer. If we want to change this, we must stop worshipping at the church of the myopic and toxic Silicon Valley model of venture capital, startups, exponential growth, and start investing in individually owned and controlled Small Tech as an alternative to Big Tech.

Do you have a burning question for Giz Asks? Email us at [email protected].

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Essay Samples on Dystopia

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Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

Politics and privacy, private-sector influence and big tech, state competition and conflict, author biography, how is technology changing the world, and how should the world change technology.

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Josephine Wolff; How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change Technology?. Global Perspectives 1 February 2021; 2 (1): 27353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.27353

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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected. Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems all rely on more computer software than they ever have before, making them seem both harder to understand and, in some cases, harder to control. Government and corporate surveillance of individuals and information processing relies largely on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, and therefore involves less human-to-human contact than ever before and more opportunities for biases to be embedded and codified in our technological systems in ways we may not even be able to identify or recognize. Bioengineering advances are opening up new terrain for challenging philosophical, political, and economic questions regarding human-natural relations. Additionally, the management of these large and small devices and systems is increasingly done through the cloud, so that control over them is both very remote and removed from direct human or social control. The study of how to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things “explainable” has become its own area of research because it is so difficult to understand how they work or what is at fault when something goes wrong (Gunning and Aha 2019) .

This growing complexity makes it more difficult than ever—and more imperative than ever—for scholars to probe how technological advancements are altering life around the world in both positive and negative ways and what social, political, and legal tools are needed to help shape the development and design of technology in beneficial directions. This can seem like an impossible task in light of the rapid pace of technological change and the sense that its continued advancement is inevitable, but many countries around the world are only just beginning to take significant steps toward regulating computer technologies and are still in the process of radically rethinking the rules governing global data flows and exchange of technology across borders.

These are exciting times not just for technological development but also for technology policy—our technologies may be more advanced and complicated than ever but so, too, are our understandings of how they can best be leveraged, protected, and even constrained. The structures of technological systems as determined largely by government and institutional policies and those structures have tremendous implications for social organization and agency, ranging from open source, open systems that are highly distributed and decentralized, to those that are tightly controlled and closed, structured according to stricter and more hierarchical models. And just as our understanding of the governance of technology is developing in new and interesting ways, so, too, is our understanding of the social, cultural, environmental, and political dimensions of emerging technologies. We are realizing both the challenges and the importance of mapping out the full range of ways that technology is changing our society, what we want those changes to look like, and what tools we have to try to influence and guide those shifts.

Technology can be a source of tremendous optimism. It can help overcome some of the greatest challenges our society faces, including climate change, famine, and disease. For those who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to advance economic development and lead to better quality of life, technology is a vital economic driver (Schumpeter 1942) . But it can also be a tool of tremendous fear and oppression, embedding biases in automated decision-making processes and information-processing algorithms, exacerbating economic and social inequalities within and between countries to a staggering degree, or creating new weapons and avenues for attack unlike any we have had to face in the past. Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010) . More recently, technologists have sharply criticized what they view as a wave of new Luddites, people intent on slowing the development of technology and turning back the clock on innovation as a means of mitigating the societal impacts of technological change (Marlowe 1970) .

At the heart of fights over new technologies and their resulting global changes are often two conflicting visions of technology: a fundamentally optimistic one that believes humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and a fundamentally pessimistic one that holds that technological systems have reached a point beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that neither of these views is wholly accurate and that a purely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology is insufficient to capture the nuances and complexity of our relationship to technology (Oberdiek and Tiles 1995) . Understanding technology and how we can make better decisions about designing, deploying, and refining it requires capturing that nuance and complexity through in-depth analysis of the impacts of different technological advancements and the ways they have played out in all their complicated and controversial messiness across the world.

These impacts are often unpredictable as technologies are adopted in new contexts and come to be used in ways that sometimes diverge significantly from the use cases envisioned by their designers. The internet, designed to help transmit information between computer networks, became a crucial vehicle for commerce, introducing unexpected avenues for crime and financial fraud. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, designed to connect friends and families through sharing photographs and life updates, became focal points of election controversies and political influence. Cryptocurrencies, originally intended as a means of decentralized digital cash, have become a significant environmental hazard as more and more computing resources are devoted to mining these forms of virtual money. One of the crucial challenges in this area is therefore recognizing, documenting, and even anticipating some of these unexpected consequences and providing mechanisms to technologists for how to think through the impacts of their work, as well as possible other paths to different outcomes (Verbeek 2006) . And just as technological innovations can cause unexpected harm, they can also bring about extraordinary benefits—new vaccines and medicines to address global pandemics and save thousands of lives, new sources of energy that can drastically reduce emissions and help combat climate change, new modes of education that can reach people who would otherwise have no access to schooling. Regulating technology therefore requires a careful balance of mitigating risks without overly restricting potentially beneficial innovations.

Nations around the world have taken very different approaches to governing emerging technologies and have adopted a range of different technologies themselves in pursuit of more modern governance structures and processes (Braman 2009) . In Europe, the precautionary principle has guided much more anticipatory regulation aimed at addressing the risks presented by technologies even before they are fully realized. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation focuses on the responsibilities of data controllers and processors to provide individuals with access to their data and information about how that data is being used not just as a means of addressing existing security and privacy threats, such as data breaches, but also to protect against future developments and uses of that data for artificial intelligence and automated decision-making purposes. In Germany, Technische Überwachungsvereine, or TÜVs, perform regular tests and inspections of technological systems to assess and minimize risks over time, as the tech landscape evolves. In the United States, by contrast, there is much greater reliance on litigation and liability regimes to address safety and security failings after-the-fact. These different approaches reflect not just the different legal and regulatory mechanisms and philosophies of different nations but also the different ways those nations prioritize rapid development of the technology industry versus safety, security, and individual control. Typically, governance innovations move much more slowly than technological innovations, and regulations can lag years, or even decades, behind the technologies they aim to govern.

In addition to this varied set of national regulatory approaches, a variety of international and nongovernmental organizations also contribute to the process of developing standards, rules, and norms for new technologies, including the International Organization for Standardization­ and the International Telecommunication Union. These multilateral and NGO actors play an especially important role in trying to define appropriate boundaries for the use of new technologies by governments as instruments of control for the state.

At the same time that policymakers are under scrutiny both for their decisions about how to regulate technology as well as their decisions about how and when to adopt technologies like facial recognition themselves, technology firms and designers have also come under increasing criticism. Growing recognition that the design of technologies can have far-reaching social and political implications means that there is more pressure on technologists to take into consideration the consequences of their decisions early on in the design process (Vincenti 1993; Winner 1980) . The question of how technologists should incorporate these social dimensions into their design and development processes is an old one, and debate on these issues dates back to the 1970s, but it remains an urgent and often overlooked part of the puzzle because so many of the supposedly systematic mechanisms for assessing the impacts of new technologies in both the private and public sectors are primarily bureaucratic, symbolic processes rather than carrying any real weight or influence.

Technologists are often ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to the sorts of social problems that their creations have—often unwittingly—exacerbated, and instead point to governments and lawmakers to address those problems (Zuckerberg 2019) . But governments often have few incentives to engage in this area. This is because setting clear standards and rules for an ever-evolving technological landscape can be extremely challenging, because enforcement of those rules can be a significant undertaking requiring considerable expertise, and because the tech sector is a major source of jobs and revenue for many countries that may fear losing those benefits if they constrain companies too much. This indicates not just a need for clearer incentives and better policies for both private- and public-sector entities but also a need for new mechanisms whereby the technology development and design process can be influenced and assessed by people with a wider range of experiences and expertise. If we want technologies to be designed with an eye to their impacts, who is responsible for predicting, measuring, and mitigating those impacts throughout the design process? Involving policymakers in that process in a more meaningful way will also require training them to have the analytic and technical capacity to more fully engage with technologists and understand more fully the implications of their decisions.

At the same time that tech companies seem unwilling or unable to rein in their creations, many also fear they wield too much power, in some cases all but replacing governments and international organizations in their ability to make decisions that affect millions of people worldwide and control access to information, platforms, and audiences (Kilovaty 2020) . Regulators around the world have begun considering whether some of these companies have become so powerful that they violate the tenets of antitrust laws, but it can be difficult for governments to identify exactly what those violations are, especially in the context of an industry where the largest players often provide their customers with free services. And the platforms and services developed by tech companies are often wielded most powerfully and dangerously not directly by their private-sector creators and operators but instead by states themselves for widespread misinformation campaigns that serve political purposes (Nye 2018) .

Since the largest private entities in the tech sector operate in many countries, they are often better poised to implement global changes to the technological ecosystem than individual states or regulatory bodies, creating new challenges to existing governance structures and hierarchies. Just as it can be challenging to provide oversight for government use of technologies, so, too, oversight of the biggest tech companies, which have more resources, reach, and power than many nations, can prove to be a daunting task. The rise of network forms of organization and the growing gig economy have added to these challenges, making it even harder for regulators to fully address the breadth of these companies’ operations (Powell 1990) . The private-public partnerships that have emerged around energy, transportation, medical, and cyber technologies further complicate this picture, blurring the line between the public and private sectors and raising critical questions about the role of each in providing critical infrastructure, health care, and security. How can and should private tech companies operating in these different sectors be governed, and what types of influence do they exert over regulators? How feasible are different policy proposals aimed at technological innovation, and what potential unintended consequences might they have?

Conflict between countries has also spilled over significantly into the private sector in recent years, most notably in the case of tensions between the United States and China over which technologies developed in each country will be permitted by the other and which will be purchased by other customers, outside those two countries. Countries competing to develop the best technology is not a new phenomenon, but the current conflicts have major international ramifications and will influence the infrastructure that is installed and used around the world for years to come. Untangling the different factors that feed into these tussles as well as whom they benefit and whom they leave at a disadvantage is crucial for understanding how governments can most effectively foster technological innovation and invention domestically as well as the global consequences of those efforts. As much of the world is forced to choose between buying technology from the United States or from China, how should we understand the long-term impacts of those choices and the options available to people in countries without robust domestic tech industries? Does the global spread of technologies help fuel further innovation in countries with smaller tech markets, or does it reinforce the dominance of the states that are already most prominent in this sector? How can research universities maintain global collaborations and research communities in light of these national competitions, and what role does government research and development spending play in fostering innovation within its own borders and worldwide? How should intellectual property protections evolve to meet the demands of the technology industry, and how can those protections be enforced globally?

These conflicts between countries sometimes appear to challenge the feasibility of truly global technologies and networks that operate across all countries through standardized protocols and design features. Organizations like the International Organization for Standardization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and many others have tried to harmonize these policies and protocols across different countries for years, but have met with limited success when it comes to resolving the issues of greatest tension and disagreement among nations. For technology to operate in a global environment, there is a need for a much greater degree of coordination among countries and the development of common standards and norms, but governments continue to struggle to agree not just on those norms themselves but even the appropriate venue and processes for developing them. Without greater global cooperation, is it possible to maintain a global network like the internet or to promote the spread of new technologies around the world to address challenges of sustainability? What might help incentivize that cooperation moving forward, and what could new structures and process for governance of global technologies look like? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Do the same traditional drivers for public policy, such as politics of harmonization and path dependency in policy-making, still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space? As new technologies and their applications spread across the globe in uneven ways, how and when do they create forces of change from unexpected places?

These are some of the questions that we hope to address in the Technology and Global Change section through articles that tackle new dimensions of the global landscape of designing, developing, deploying, and assessing new technologies to address major challenges the world faces. Understanding these processes requires synthesizing knowledge from a range of different fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and history, as well as technical fields such as engineering, climate science, and computer science. A crucial part of understanding how technology has created global change and, in turn, how global changes have influenced the development of new technologies is understanding the technologies themselves in all their richness and complexity—how they work, the limits of what they can do, what they were designed to do, how they are actually used. Just as technologies themselves are becoming more complicated, so are their embeddings and relationships to the larger social, political, and legal contexts in which they exist. Scholars across all disciplines are encouraged to join us in untangling those complexities.

Josephine Wolff is an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her book You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches was published by MIT Press in 2018.

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