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http://www.genderit.org/articles/legacy-how-gender-built-way-we-discuss-and-use-technology
In Memory of Dr. Heike Jensen - http://www.genderit.org/node/4485/
A Legacy on How Gender Is Built into the Way We Discuss
and Use Technology
This article is
part of a special GenderIT.org edition to commemorate the life and work of
academic, activist, feminist and, for many of us, friend Heike Jensen.
One of the main
threads running through Heike’s work was a challenge to the dominant narrative
of a benign gender-neutral technology, that is both a-political and without
structural bias. Resisting dichotomies that posed problems in zero-sum terms, a
pay-off between rights and security, for instance, led to looking at the ways
in which the debates around issues such as censorship and privacy are
constructed, and challenging the bases of the debates themselves. By probing
the manner in which gender is built into the way we discuss and use technology,
her articles are helping us evolve new ways of imagining a feminist internet.
In this article,
GenderIT.org talks with Anita Gurumurthy from IT For Change about gender and privacy.
Anita worked with Heike in the Gender and Citizenship in the Information
Society research programme.
GenderIT.org: Thanks in particular to WikiLeaks and the Snowden
revelations, there is increased awareness that governments are surveilling
their citizens, even if there is a dearth of action to rein in this
surveillance. Do you think there has been an equivalent moment, or series of
actions, for corporate surveillance?
Anita Gurumurthy
(AG): The state has always held information
about citizens. The power of the state to track its citizens, and its
disciplining and discourses of obedience, are well understood historically.
What Snowden did was reveal the panspectronism that marks state power today – a
shift from the panopticon gaze under which some were surveyed to an
always-everywhere-everybody surveillance. But Snowden also pointed loud and
clear to network power – the complicity of tech companies in the grand alliance
of rich countries and their corporations – for the NSA’s ruthlessly clear plan
to dramatically
increase mastery of the global network The fact is that
centralisation of power in the network society is unprecedented. We are witness
to relationships of convenience in the global arena that reveal the shifting
contours of power – some that we have the tools to recognise with our
historical-social memory and some that we can’t recognise nor name. The
informational state we are able to see as the product of new anxieties. But the
power of the corporation in the network age is less evident to our epistemic
sensibilities. Research by a Swiss-based think tank has shown how about 150 companies
control the world, and they own interlocking stakes of one another!
Corporate surveillance
may seem benign. It may even be reduced to an irritant – too many calls from
those who believe I can buy, to those silly ads that I must see. The
extraordinary intrusion into our lives by companies that seek to watch and
second guess our lives is, as William Davies who wrote the Happiness
Industry says, a device of control. It is about power that is diffuse,
invisible even if ever- present, and frighteningly friendly. Davies talks about
how the intent of such surveillance is to release “contagions” – ideas, to
infect and thus expand control over the network. It is an elephant in the room.
The crisis is here but it seems that another Snowden moment is unlikely. Even
though the limits of advanced capitalism were more than clear with the
financial crisis in the US, and the insolence of the 1% has been called out, we
seem to be somewhat condemned to live life as self-obsessed narcissistic
objects of commodified desire that network power conjures up. Data control
through corporate surveillance is the disciplining of society by powerful
nations and their corporations or should I say, powerful corporations and their
benefactor-governments.
Data is the most
valuable resource, and the network-data complex – the powerful alliances
controlling the world today – has access to the most microcosmic of social
realities, enlisting as it does the willing subsumption of all of us into the
web of totalitarian capitalism. Monsanto is sitting on top of micro-level data
on landholding in the US. It would be most reasonable to assume that the future
of land-use in the US will be tied closely to the whims of Monsanto and its
social engineering of agriculture.
Many of us come
from a tradition of media and communication activism where even ten years ago,
media freedom meant saying no to regulation. Our fights vis-a-vis the
panspectron follow from our instinct to push back against state excess and
impunity. But the writing on the wall – about corporate surveillance – is about
our sociality under siege. Everything we do, adds to economic power. We are – as
data in the network – part of the new economic structure, anxious participants.
We are no doubt resisting and subverting power, but still unable to seek and
articulate the political-institutional forms of democratic global arrangements
that can counter network hegemony. We are unable to admit that governance of
the internet requires us to understand the economics of the network-data
complex.
That eureka
moment on corporate surveillance is not going to come. We need to get out of
the current impasse and strategise what we need to do through our resistance
politics. Last year, when developing countries asked for and moved a resolution
on a binding treaty on business and human rights in the HR Council, developed
nations voted against it. Sadly, even key civil society groups in the Internet
Governance arena wrote against this move to seek a treaty or remained silent
and neutral. This is classical political economy and feminist activism and
theory need to seek recourse in democratic governance frameworks. The fight is
not simple, but its parameters are.
GenderIT.org: What has changed in best practice, from either governments or
companies, in relation to privacy, in the last five years?
AG: The Human Rights Council has recently created the mandate of a Special
Rapporteur on the right to privacy. The Council has recognised “the global and
open nature of the Internet and the rapid advancement in information and
communications technology as a driving force in accelerating progress towards
development in its various forms” affirming that “the same rights that people
have offline must also be protected online”. The “right to privacy” would also
mean the right to the protection of the law against arbitrary or unlawful
interference, as set out in article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights. One estimate ranks Spain, Czech Republic, Iceland, Norway and Slovenia
as the top 5 countries that best protect their citizens’ right to privacy.
While the state
easily slips into its favourite rhetoric of ‘national security’ to legitimise
its privacy violations, corporations have most often than not sought to
side-step the issue. As I said earlier, economic structures across all industries
and social domains are predicated upon the structures of data value and the
expropriation of data for private gain. Looking for corporate best practices in
this scenario, would be naive. As Tarleton Gillespie observes so eloquently,
online companies carefully position themselves to users, clients, advertisers,
and policymakers, making strategic claims about how their place in the
information landscape should be understood. Deploying the term ‘platform’ in
both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches – sometimes as
technical platforms, sometimes as platforms from which to speak, sometimes as
platforms of opportunity, they slip between identities, thus pursuing immunity
from liability under law and to be seen as champions of free speech. What we
have empirically seen so far, is that attempts to assuage privacy anxieties of
users have at best been carefully crafted tactics in brand management that
window dress grievous violations. The latest privacy and security update from
google allows you to erase all your previous data, but at your own peril,
issuing an ominously kind warning that “the speed and accuracy of your searches
or voice commands may suffer” if you opt for privacy. The rhetoric of ‘user
experience’ is paramount in public relations management and while there may be
a confounding number of options to personalise your settings, you will not be
allowed to turn-off advertising. Of course you can ‘choose’ from more options
for advertising to make it all ‘relevant’ to you! Such choice, as Nadine Moawad
powerfully reminded us in the Inclusion in the Network Society roundtable
we held, extends to fixing your gender identity from “the 52 different options
that Facebook gives you, when you sign up.”
GenderIT.org: What about the gender dimension to the manner in which
information is gathered and how it is used?
AG: The possibility to segment data in ways that allow highly sophisticated
micro-control is what sets apart the surveillance machinery of the network
society. The know-how to mine, curate and manage data and deploy data patterns
to serve capitalism generates and propagates a Foucauldian ‘regime of truth’.
In the hyper-personalised consumption environments today, a multiplicity of
patriarchies arising from informational control coexist. Race, caste, location
and more are harnessed in mind-boggling permutations to package and reaffirm
gendered hierarchies in the online environment. While women and people of
non-normative gender orders continue to claim online spaces for self assertion
and resistance, pervasive patriarchy in the network flourishes through its ever
expanding mutations. As has been observed in recent scholarly
work, one way by which capitalism reproduces is by maintaining its
own internal varieties of anti-capitalism, ensuring thus that the justification
for capitalism is not reducible to its purely economic and monetary rationales.
It is not as if dominant narratives of the Net are not challenged. But the
counter-narratives are not able to create a singular world view that can
produce a new regime of truth – a shared interpretation of reality that has
moral authority.
The violation of
privacy is primarily a meta-narrative of body and sexuality. As Heike’s work
for the CITIGEN research program shows, surveillance has been gendered through
history. The nation-state has managed reproduction of its citizens in
ideological and material ways through a control over women’s bodies, something
that it now does with renewed vigour. The hyper-sexualised online environment
normalises extreme forms of exploitation in the name of freedom to consume. One
research in the Philippines found that parents of children used in cyber-sex
rackets believed that virtual sex did not really implicate the actual body! The
surveillance machinery in the network society tracks not only to abstract
commodified sociality for global economic value processes, but to silence and
erase that which is inadmissible in the network-data complex. Facebook pages of
the Pink Chaddi
campaign by feminists in India attracted heavy trolling and were
subsequently simply shut down. Data flows in the internet may be intertwined in
overlapping and competing gender discourses – but the normative critiques of
patriarchal capitalism have not really produced a wider social agreement
against the dominant regimes of gender truth.
GenderIT.org: There seems to be a perception among many feminist activists
in the Global South that these issues are primarily issues for women in the
North – aided, no doubt, by the fact that there is disproportionate coverage of
scandals involving Hollywood stars and the like. How does surveillance affect
women that you work with or other women in the Global South? Are there
different ways that different levels of surveillance (in the family, corporate
or government surveillance) affect them?
AG: Yes. The notion of privacy seems to suggest violations may not target all
women or all people. In the new political environment, online activists and
women bloggers are being increasingly silenced. The recent ruling by the
Supreme Court in India, striking down the draconian provisions of the IT Act
that empowered the state to arrest anyone for ‘offensive’ postings online, has
been seen by many as a victory for free speech. But state- and community-based
surveillance of girls and women in the name of nationalist and communitarian
sentiment shows amazing tenacity. Newer forms of surveillance are really
worrisome. The profiling of the poor, especially rural poor women, for
introducing new ‘bottom of the pyramid’ strategies, is critical to emerging
markets. The micro-finance industry’s diverse range of products slice the poor
into various market segments in pursuit of unimaginably unethical profiteering.
Women, who are first generation users of digital technology (and a large
majority of women in the global south are first generation users), lack
awareness about the surveillance industry. There is little or no public debate
on data governance and traditional feminist movements have not owned agenda
that challenge structural injustice in the network society.
GenderIT.org: What directions do you think research and practice need to
take? Given the multiple burdens many women carry, are there promising avenues
to offer simple solutions to the problem of surveillance? What role do we need
activists playing to address some of these issues?
AG: There is no simple solution perhaps, and this is not to sound glib. The
struggle that women are waging against the takeover of their lands, their
forests, their commons and to resist the unjust terms of liberalisation
policies that have decimated public systems, reveals the material-semiotic
tactics of powers that be. I do understand that every user must know how to
address her security online and this in some limited sense is about personally
feeling empowered to deal with your gadget and its privacy settings. But the
right to privacy cannot be divorced from normative discussions on internet
commons, nor can it be realised without international law and global governance
of data flows and data architectures. The idea of ‘communication rights’ must
embrace the notion of justice in the network society. Continuities with the
global justice movement are vital.
The feminist
movements have not been able to claim leadership in the resistance politics
with respect to digital technologies. This is despite the extraordinary
contribution of feminist scholars to theories on media and communications;
activists working on women’s access to information, community media, and right
to freedom of expression. The intellectual and mobilisation work to be done in
this regard is considerable. It calls for independent research, not influenced
by statist nor corporatist agenda. Exposing the dominant narrative is part of
the painful but vital task of deconstructing currently authoritative discourse
through feminist critique.
The constructed nature of social reality must be examined and interpreted from
where we stand – as alienated commodities in the network, but also as agents
who are, and are capable of, using that very subject position for a politics of
resistance. The economics of data, and the configurations of networks of
hegemony are vital arenas for deeper study. Celebrating subversion is
important, but it is one part of the bigger project of resistance. Activist
scholars and scholar activists must work to build authority for a new regime of
truth. How and where the comforts of selective and disconnected political
engagements end, and what may be the theories, configurations and practices of
a renewed ‘networked resistance’, comprise some of the immediate questions for
activism.