Blowing Out Fires: The Rise of Big (Brother) Tech

A quarter century ago, information technology promised to spread liberty around the world. With the rise of AI, it’s fast becoming its worst enemy.

“They can blow out a candle But they can’t blow out a fire Once the flames begin to catch, The wind will blow it higher.” Biko

When Peter Gabriel wrote those lyrics in 1979, about the death of anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko in police custody two years earlier, it was true.

In the decade that followed, the world began watching in horror the final violent throes of South Africa’s crumbling apartheid regime, applying increasing international pressure through economic sanctions until its official demise in 1991.

It was comforting analogy, and at the time, apt. Yes, on any given day it was intimidating to watch how easily a state could crush individual resistance and societal freedoms with the application of brute force, ranging from police brutality against street protestors to the imprisonment and torture of dissidents. But over time such systems seemed helpless to deal with mass resistance.

In short, it seemed relatively easy to feel optimistic about the inexorable rise of human freedom and liberal (in the classical British sense) democracy. The historian Francis Fukuyama raised eyebrows with the title of his 1989 essay, “The End of History”, which suggested just that. But once they got past the provocative title, most readers had to admit he was making a good point.

For how could oppressive political systems survive, let alone thrive, when their impositions on human liberty seemed incompatible with the economic freedoms and economic prosperity that ultimately supported the wealth and status of political elites in any given country?

Post-war generations had shuddered at the vision so horrifically elaborated by George Orwell in 1984 nearly half a century earlier, of a world that might slip into the grip of a handful of competing, warring, totalitarian states that would crush liberty so completely as to erase even its memory.

Yet the arguments of the period’s Gabriels and Fukuyamas gave them hope. As Internet usage became widespread in the 1990s, apparently seeping even into the deeper reaches of authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian states, the rallying cries went up. Freedom thrives on information. Information wants to be free. No one can control the Internet. Oppression is now impossible.

Techno-libertarian optimism flourished, so widely that no one needed to call it that. In the 21st century it would no longer be possible for a country like China to control history the way Orwell’s Oceana had, by attempting to stamp out the memory and inspiration potential of events such as the 1989 Tiannenmen Square massacre.

It seemed that even China had got the message. Under the late 20th century leadership of Deng Xiaoping, who began to openly embrace policies the rest of the world would recognize as capitalist, China’s totalitarians appeared to be ready to capitulate.

In 1997 Hong Kong returned from British to Chinese rule with promises that it would be able to keep the freedoms that apparently underpinned its status as Asia’s financial powerhouse. This was not just wishful thinking — it was what China’s rising economic elites needed in order to preserve, grow and enjoy their wealth. History had ended. Liberalism had won.

Only a few realized, yet alone remained bold enough to say aloud, that this burst of optimism was entirely, horribly, foolishly wrong.

Fast forward to July 1, 2020. Hong Kong’s new security laws have all but ended freedom in the former colony. For over a generation citizens have been quietly moving their wealth overseas, and not so quietly snapping up (and rarely visiting) real estate in cities from London to Vancouver as so-called “insurance” against a crackdown from the mainland.

Which has now come. After a year of embarrassing pro-democracy demonstrations, anyone who may never have taken to the streets but might be mistaken for a subversive, from journalists to bookstore owners, is now at risk of prosecution, imprisonment, or worse.

Why the U-turn? What happened to the Internet? What about the freedom required to drive Chinese capitalism? Hasn’t there been enough wind to blow all those flames higher?

The answer is as banal and obvious as it is inescapable: technology has caught up to the needs of state control. All the advantages that early stage Internet technology gave to dissidents — its resistance to monitoring and blocking above all — have been erased. In its place has come a series of survey and control technologies, from online tracking to facial recognition, which promise to give would-be oppressors an insurmountable advantage for the foreseeable future. If not, at the risk of sounding like a pessimistic, latter-day Fukuyama, forever.

In recent years stories of the application of such technologies have multiplied, become more alarming with each telling. The Uighur people of Northwest China now live in the closest thing to an Orwellian state the world has ever seen, with re-education camps, facial recognition and other AI-powered surveillance technologies making people afraid to speak freely in the streets, the privacy of their own homes — even on the other side of the world. A title previously held by North Korea — now made infinitely more terrifying by infinitely more penetrating tech.

It’s also becoming nigh impossible to move between countries without one’s entire online profile, duly analyzed and highlighted by the appropriate AI, being visible to the border guard. Even travelers between such friendly nations as Canada and the United States have been stopped and even detained to explain their political views — something that would have been unimaginable half a generation ago.

In short, we may all still light up in the name of freedom like so many candles. The wind of public opinion may well fan them into the occasional fire, as we hear in the outcry over the oppression of the Uighurs. But let there be no mistake. States now have the capacity to blow out a fire. As they get more and more comfortable with their new tools — as China is becoming — they will.

Even this article may one day get me stopped and detained at a border, if not worse. Raising the obvious question, why bother? Why even light a candle?

This one’s a cliffhanger.

Stay tuned.

Stephen Butler is a management consultant. He has a PhD in intellectual history from the University of Cambridge. The views expressed here are his own.