Love, Privacy, and the Politics of Intellectual Shame - Meredith Whittaker, 38c3 | CCC

[Music] she worked at Google until she walked out she left her mark on the net neutrality debate in the US she founded the AI now Institute and she's is now the president of the signal Foundation she's a friend of the club please give her warm welcome here's Meredith [Applause] Whitaker okay it is perhaps my fault um thank you so much for having me thank you lonus it is truly my nervous system calmed down when I walked in this building because this is such a better and different Tech world than the world I often encounter working in tech for nearly 20 years so um I'm really really happy to be here and I'm really happy that this space exists and because I have a bit of a cold and because I'm apologize I don't speak German um I'm going to get right into my talk which represents a bit of a Divergence for me it's some research I've been doing um kind of in my spare time looking at how we can create better definitions of privacy that in pursuit of will lead to more liberatory ends um so my talk is called feelings are facts love privacy and the politics of intellectual shame I'm going to present it in five parts and then I'll be publishing it after this with citations for anyone who's interested in different facets of this talk so part one why we need to redefine privacy but before I get into that why am I talking about emotions about the subjective softedge stuff at a German hacker conference why this when there are builds to push and governments to push back on in large surveillance companies to scrutinize and strategies for survival that need attention now right is Lov an acronym for a new mode of digital rights that I'm aiming to introduce here is it a tongue and cheek name for a bug signal quietly patched and whose mediation revealed here teaches lessons useful to this crowd because those would make sense right those are facts well so are love shame desire and intimacy and my contention is that by taking these seriously and folding them into our analysis we can better formulate a useful and liberatory understanding of privacy that helps us reach more meaningful positions and paths forward in the context of an increasingly centralized and monopolis tech industry for close to two decades I've researched built and advocated for privacy and rights in the context of this metastatic tech industry and many of you have done this for much longer than that and you know who you are and you've taught me a great deal and many of you have been my inspiration in this work so thank you for that now during this time the tech landscape has changed drastically even as the positions that I and others you in this room have taken have been broadly correct born out proven in hindsight time and time again privacy is a human right the architectures of tech are eroding it not protecting it and there are many things that could be done to correct this bad trajectory things that those in this room have laid out in painstaking detail laboring it would appear under the assumption that what we're working to correct is a big misunderstanding and that good information refuting bad ideas will compel those steering the direction of our Collective Tech to set better more rights preserving paths but of course over this same period we've all felt the ground crumbling we are far less private than we've ever been and it's this reality the reality that we're losing that led me to dig into these key definitions or to paraphrase the great historian David rodiger by way of philosopher Amia Serena vason I'm not sure if speaking truth to power right now does much but I do know that it is imperative that we speak truthfully to each other that we clarify our terms and our Maps this is the only way we can chart a path to winning because failing to clarify our terms and our goals has consequences as I argued in January 2024 in a keynote at the ndss Symposium we lost the crypto Wars even though many still claim we have won now this observation is not new of course Rob gong and Frank rer reached a similar conclusion exactly 19 years ago on this very day in this very place in a talk titled we lost the war they delivered this talk a year before I graduated college and joined this strange industry and the argument I made at ndss in January built on Frank and Rob's work in it I looked at the political economic forces that shaped the tech industry we have today along side the analytical errors that led so many who fought on the side of encryption during the crypto Wars to see the outcome as a win for privacy even as surveillance metastasized now a historical summary for those still on their Learning Journey the crypto Wars refer to a series of legal battles campaigns and policy debates that played out in the US across the 1990s centered on questions about who should be allowed to develop and deploy strong encryption and whether that encryption should be undermined to enable government access now in decades prior the government had asserted an effective Monopoly on encryption so much so that the academic field of cryptographic research was starved as the NSA and others claimed the right to dominate and obscure work on crypto systems and while this loosened somewhat in the 1970s the government's desire to control the output of This research continued to put significant roadblocks in the way of wide dissemination now moving into the 1990s crypto systems were still classified as Munitions and subject to strict export controls and in order to integrate them into products or services and distribute them broadly you needed government permission now this regime of secrecy and restriction ended more or less with the liberalization of strong encryption at the end of the 90s the end of the crypto Wars and it was the drive to commercialize the internet during the the '90s That animated this fight the prospect of a commercial internet provided the guarantee for Monumental Pro Promises of economic Prosperity that the US government and Industry were counting on it was also the forcing function for a showdown that pitted government access to Communications awkwardly against the possibility of security and privacy on the commercial internet the question was whether there should be a backdoor and encryption so governments could access internet communications and other data no there should not be back doors privacy Advocates and the burgeoning tech industry said encryption as strong as you want it to be should be free to build and deploy for everyone many in government disagreed but after some fractious battles and clever lawfare in 1999 encryption was liberalized the restrictions on its development use and distribution were lifted in a move celebrated again as a win for privacy and this Narrative of winning continues to shape our strategies and tactics in the fight for digital rights somewhat to our Peril because what I argued in my talk was that this liberalization of encryption in the 9s was in fact a loss for privacy because while it meant that theoretically everyone could build and use encryption the same way everyone can walk away from an employment contract in truth due to how the growing internet industry was being shaped it was companies who would ultimately be able to make the choice as to whether how and where to use encryption not the people who needed privacy the so-called users of these companies platforms and services and not only this in the absence of any restrictions on surveillance and given the Clinton administration's explicit endorsement of advertising as the business model of tech tech companies were actively disincentivized to protect people's privacy of course this didn't mean these companies didn't need encryp encryption indeed encryption is the backbone of the commercial internet because companies needed to protect the privacy of the stuff that helped them do business payments Market trades transmission of confidential information authentication all of these required encryption without Which business and the process of Internet commercialization would fizzle but collecting data to create models that classify people into advertis Le friendly categories that can auction to agencies who create the content we see in targeted Adge which Remain the core economic engine of the internet that well applying encryption there in the name of people's privacy was not only not necessary from a financial perspective it was bad for business and this my friends is how liberalizing encryption and winning the crypto wars did not protect our privacy what it did in practice is enable the growth of the surveillance advertising driven internet with the economies of scale and network effects that have congealed into staggering concentrated power in the hands of a few dominant us and Chinese players but before you go toting on Mastadon I want to be clear this does not mean of course that we don't need encryption that is not what I'm saying this doesn't mean that encryption isn't essential to protecting privacy indeed encryption is the technology we have that can do this in the digital world we need it it is essential which is why signal is so unmovable staunch in our unwillingness to ever [ __ ] with our encryption and will absolutely leave any Market where the church were between [ __ ] with it and exiting but returning to the point we cannot mistake encryption in a vacuum for Meaningful privacy as we did in the 1990s confusing the technology and its capabilities its potential application its hypothetical use for a guarantee that it would be applied in good and just ways to create the world we wanted now what I hope this recap shows is that failing to clarify our terms and what we're actually fighting for does come with grave consequences and that part of the problem is that we pursued an incomplete and shallow definition of privacy a definition shaped by Frameworks of property rights and individual not Collective understanding of data and data ownership a definition that focused on bean counting data flows where is data stored and who can access it and then and one that as we've seen was anchored in a technologically deterministic perspective that assumed that the existence of a technology guaranteed its use that technology birthed the future as long as messy politics stepped out of the way now this definition of privacy is by and large still with us today and it's not only incomplete it's also boring administrative sterile no wonder it hasn't catalyzed a mass movement no wonder it's so hard to get regular people excited about protecting privacy no and I think this is also in part because this definition is oddly silent about the good stuff about the relationships political Horizons intimacies revolutions germination the beautiful and hopeful things in life that aren't themselves privacy but that require privacy as an exist as a condition of their existence the things that we fight for privacy to protect so this is why I'm talking about emotions because when we move to examine privacy beyond the sphere of digital rights and Tech Beyond this narrow definition we begin to see the concept of privacy haunted or maybe kindly accompanied by love intimacy and desire which right alongside privacy endures Prudence philosophy and literature so let's get into these part two love intimacy desire and privacy now anxiety about love and intimacy shapes our understanding of privacy privacy silently or no as philosopher Julie inis puts it privacy in practice means we have the ability to quote control intimate decisions and to possess autonomy with respect to expressions of Love liking and care and indeed when we examine how privacy is applied and revoked in the real world it's often based on determinations about who is allowed to love hook up Express desire mingle in private outside the Gaze of the state the school or the institutions privacy in this sense marks a boundary between sanctioned Love and Desire on the one hand and unruly desires that are seen as deviant or and understood to necessitate s surveillance scrutiny in service of control and prevention on the other who can be trusted in the shadows and whose shadowy Behavior poses a risk now I'm not making a grand theoretical Point here I'm merely saying that privacy who gets it and whom we strip it from is very often and shaped by these anxieties today too to scrape a few somber examples off the top of a massive pile in Uganda queer love is outlawed punishable by death thanks to oppressive laws pushed by us evangelicals this is why human rights groups in the UK working to secure Asylum for queer people in Uganda rely on Signal and other private Communications tools to share documents whose secrecy is a life or death matter in a context where queer people are not afforded the right to autonomy with respect to the expression of Love liking and care or privacy now in Egypt where queer Love and Desire is criminalized as debauchery grinder SK stings where authorities pose as a guy wanting to hook up on a dating app to lure queer people to be assaulted arrested and exposed were apparently common enough that it prompted grinder to issue a warning to Egyptian users letting them know that that the privacy of their desire was being systematically violated by the State and let's be honest via the surveillance capabilities of the grinder app and then there's the current Speaker of the US House Mike Johnson some months ago he told the public that he and his son install surveillance software that monitors and reports on whether either of them have access porn it's a us thing I'm proud to tell you my son has a clean slate Johnson boasted desire the desire to watch some porn in this case he implies is something both he and his son share and for Johnson preventing himself and his son from acting on this desire requires mutually assured shame via surveillance or cannot be left to privacy this present of course Builds on a long history in the US interracial love was historically outlawed same with gay love neither were granted the right to privacy both were criminalized and subject to surveillance and vigilante Terror and I could go on but I think I've sketched my point that our understanding and application of privacy has been shaped in part by a view that some types of people have the right to practice love intimacy and desire and other types do not and thus only the former can be trusted with the right to privacy now with this we've established that there's a firm connection between love intimacy desire and privacy that this isn't just an analytical exercise although it is that that our understanding of privacy is bound up with anxiety about Love and Desire with a project that works to stifle and Dam up some Love and Desire while permitting its flow along prescribed channels which The Selective application of privacy rights participates in enforcing we could of course write this off as puritanical overreach which it often is but what if we also asked whether there's a deeper reason for policing Love and Desire in part by EST lishing unevenly distributed rights to privacy what or what do Love and Desire left unchecked do in the world what do they threaten what if following Delo and guari we were to take Love and Desire seriously as productive forces and in so doing take seriously the state's need to channel and police them so let's follow this thread PR wrote that quote love is a striking example of how little reality means to us and if you've ever fallen hard in love which I hope that you have you know what he means it [ __ ] up your life it makes a joke out of the most solemnly made plans and commitments it threatens stability starting with your inner life your attachments your literal thoughts someone who in February seemed nice and friendly and unremarkable suddenly upends the ground under you in March and you cannot figure out why even if knowing why would help anything which it wouldn't you're sucking on ice cubes you're running laps at midnight you're in the group chat pouring over cues like a psychic reading cards now this isn't the only kind of love there are many kinds many kinds of intimacy and desire well beyond hot crushes and romantic and sexual relationships love also binds solidarities as Astra Taylor and Leah Hendrick examined in their recent work on the history and practice of solidarity now solidarity as they presented is an ethic of care that works not in service of uniformity we aren't in solidarity because we're the same but in service of appreciating each other across differences and particularities differences that are experienced and expressed in relationship not prescribed by an institution or no Norm not your job title but who you are as a person solidarity makes us Brave it makes us capable of creating new worlds because we have each other's back because it's rooted ultimately in love now any serious scholar looking at love also acknowledges that it's not all good for example Sarah Ahmed examines how love can be invoked to bind coalitions in ways that are used to justify cruelty and violence to those unloved those deemed outside the walls of the loving Coalition outside of for example the we that loves the nation we'll come back to this but for now what we see strewn across these examples is the reality that love is as Lauren Berlant put it quote a mess making Force love intimacy and desire descend on life they threaten to upend the order of the world whether established relationships or the Primacy of the workplace hierarchy whatever it is now for delus and guari desire is revolutionary quote desire does not want Revolution it is revolutionary in its own right as though involuntarily by wanting What It Wants end quote wanting What It Wants in spite of the reality that love cares so little about for theorist Michael Hart this makes love the motor of transformation it both propels transformation wanting What It Wants with no regard for order or what might stand in the way and it helps us weather what Lauren B Berlant refers to as the quote without guarantees part of Love's various temporalities love as she puts it is one of the few situations where we desire to have patience with what isn't working it lights our spirits up with courage to face the unknown and bear the journey in the name of the Beloved in the name of the adored ideal in the name of loving accountability even though there is no way to know whether it will work love is always a risk said Hart it's a risk in which we abandon some of our attachment to this world in the hope of creating a better one or as berant puts it it is a leap of faith to seek the end of a world on behalf of a fantasy and it's exactly this leap of faith that love demands of us that love requires to be love so now maybe we're getting somewhere right because it's when we understand love desire intimacy as a force for transformation that we see more clearly why love desire and intimacy are met with anxiety and regimes of control that aim to curtail and contain exactly this transformative potential because to indulge in tautology and service of making a point transformation is of course a threat to the status quo it's messy uncertain no guarantees and whatever else it is or it says it is it says no to what exists already it threatens the orders and hegemonies that rely on the perseverance of current forms for their legitimacy so we'll leave this here for now and return to it a in a minute when we Endeavor to weave this analysis into a more robust understanding of privacy one that can serve as a tool that I hope will help us better make sense of our current Tech landscape and identify met levers for Meaningful transformation part three computation knowledge and the politics of intellectual shame my engagement with the concept of intellectual shame did not start as a philosophical inquiry it began as an attempt to name a thing I experienced in uttering the phrase the politics of intellectual shame I was fumbling to put language around a pattern in the environments around around me something that I saw shaping Tech and our understanding of it and maybe you've seen it too a particular kind of fear and brittleness when technical topics are raised fam in the audience are likely familiar with how some dudes seem to blow a fuse when they realize that you know more than them about something to do with computers even if it's simply because you read a book and they did not EMP powerful people are often especially kg around these topics when they don't have a claim to technical expertise now sometimes you'll see Tech ignorance accompanied by a wincing apology the kind people make when they're hoping to be forgiven for something embarrassing but just as often it leads to Faking It nodding and grinning to hide uncertainty hoping to be mistaken for knowing the number of times I've seen well-healed and power a well-healed and Powerful guy not along to an AI pitch then repeat it as if it were gospel even though it's not correct even though I know he doesn't know this is the fifth Industrial Revolution no it's the sixth and on and on and on this pattern in my own experience as someone learning as I worked from within the tech industry led me to look more closely at what was going on here and to hone in on computation role in the world now when I pulled this weed so to speak I found a massive root system which linked to a long history that connects State census projects regime of quantification and Taxation Plantation accounting workplace surveillance and rationalization and a host of similar modes of abstraction that ultimately serve to order the world into a controllable shape for the benefit of centralized power whether States or corporations or a secret third thing now I won't recount these histories but again I will publish this talk with a biblography in the future and I encourage you to mine it and explore for yourself there's a lot there because threaded through these histories is an article of faith that assumes abstract fungible representations of the world are the proper way to know it and that the particular the specific the exceptional and the sensory are unreliable and cannot be counted on as knowledge that the proper Vantage for knowledge is from the top behind the curtain out of Harm's Way Through The Window of the corner office looking down and that certain people are capable of such knowledge and certain others can only be the subjects of it and it's here where we catch the authoritarian Edge in an introduction to CLA THS thit sorry I haven't said that out loud much in an introduction to CLA thit's examination of the Diaries and literature of Hitler's shock troops the free corpse scholar Barbara Arin Reich puts this Domination by knowledge in Stark terms the authoritarian attitude as demonstrated in the free corpse literature amounted to quote we know and are therefore human they fumbling in darkness after what they do not know can only be OB objects of our knowledge hence not fully human now to put this in modern Parliament you're either a main character or a non-playable character and only one matters today Tech holds this place at the epistemic Apex it is the way to know us and our world turning everything else into objects of Tech's knowledge so to know Tech to control Tech is to be a main character or at least to claim to be to be on the side of those who are winning those who know those not those who are known and so the desire to claim expertise even when we don't have it in the context of of tech does make sense now in using the term Tech I'm referring primarily to the products services and infrastructures that have deposited themselves across our world via the current tech industry and its broken incentives Tech here is a contingent formation shaped by the economic drivers that were enshrined during the struggle for internet commercialization in the 1990s and Beyond and that set the course for vast centralization and surveillance power now this isn't what tech or computation inevitably is it's not the essence but it's what we generally mean when we invoke it and it's important to keep the contingent nature of tech as it is in view it doesn't have to be this way but advocating for change in Tech is hard in part because leveraging Cold War era narratives of Science and progress the current tech industry its stenographers and most regular people whose ignorance of computation makes them particularly prone to taking industry's word for it have conflated commercial Tech products and services what tech is now with human and scientific prodct press to regulate to question to perturb the tech status quo is thus figured as interfering with the Arc of this progress and by narrating the decisions that tech companies make in the name of profit and growth as the products of innovation in progress advertising data becomes ground Truth for intelligence surveillance becomes Collective knowledge social control becomes an intelligent prediction Meed out by a sultry voiced AI assistant that never turns off so from this perspective encouraging a culture that shames question asking and promotes the idea that not knowing about computers makes you dumb and subservient makes a lot more sense especially given the way Capital flows in the current tech industry where you make money in Tech not when Tech Works although it may but when it's assumed to work when it's seen as capable and robust enough to result in an IPO or an acquisition investors need to believe your pitch if 90% of them are nodding along to the guy nodding along in time with a guy in the Patagonia vest who's also nodding Without Really knowing that is fine you all win whoever loses down the road and if you're all invested already well then you have a stake in silence as well because all those be because you all lose if the guy asking dumb questions ends up revealing a foundational flaw in your hype be before you're able to cash out a culture that shames ignorance also of course shames learning shames the practice of asking the questions that produce understanding and new and better questions and new worlds and it's here that I'm going to link it back with love ignorance not knowing is the starting position of learning it's a vulnerable position and one that propels transformation and all the uncertainty and danger that transformation entails to pick up that textbook I need to to recognize that there is something it has that I don't that I'd like to incorporate into my relationship to reality I need to acknowledge my ignorance to recognize that I'd like to be changed by what's in that book without yet knowing how that change will affect the Web of Knowledge and relationships that constitute my Consciousness before I read to admit ignorance and to ask the questions and pursue their answers requires a willingness to be changed by knowledge to have your map filled in rearranged your Palace reshuffled you are consenting to have your relationship with the world transformed and like all transformations it's no guarantees it's messy sound familiar learning like love is an engine of transformation Love and Desire break down boundaries transform relationships and open up possibilities for new freedoms beran's mess making Force learning and pedagogy too are mess making forces taking What's Understood the dominant par par Paradigm the classifications handed down from the window in the corner office the geocentric model of the universe for example and threatening to dismantle these and everything that rests on their being true and in this way learning the acknowledgement of not knowing and the willingness to face the uncertainty and transformation that learning requires is also dangerous in a similar way to love intimacy and desire and this helps us understand the particular culture of intellectual shame in Tech part four epistemic Authority or defining privacy Beyond data a rehydrated understanding of privacy needs to take these lessons seriously to take seriously the role of Love intimacy desire and learning in forming new worlds that rudely and wonderfully reject established orders and to figure privacy as the necessary condition that enables and protects these but to do this our understanding of privacy needs to go beyond data it must confront epistemic Authority headon confronting the forces that claim the right to Define our world on behalf of the rest of us who are figured the rest of us who are figured as objects of this knowledge not producers of it it's here where the dry data Centric privacy paradigms common in Tech fail us most drastically because once the data is created the question of who gets to Define me has already been answered no no I don't want to own my Facebook data I want to disavow Facebook as an Arbiter to reject Facebook's right to any claim to know me and my people and the type of person I am to begin with yes I want to retain the right to fall in love drastically to change my mind wildly based on new knowledge that scrambles paradigms and Common Sense and to forge and sever relationships and move toward messy no guarantees transformation toward truly new understandings and communities I want this for all of us but without a focus on epistemic Authority even privacy arguments against creating and collecting data can end up reaffirming the power of tech to Define us a especially when they argue that data limitation is necessary due to such data's accuracy or sensitivity because this argument ultimately implies that data is a proper and accurate way to know us to begin with but that such knowledge should not be in the hands of one or another party by taking data as a given and contesting only who has the right to it we naturalize and and affirm the companies and institutions that create it as that create it we naturally ize them as rightful Arbiters of us and our world but when exactly did we give a few companies the right to Define who we are with more Authority than we have right so a meaningful definition of privacy needs to start before data it needs to incorporate a much more fundamental understanding of the right to privacy as the right to Define ourselves in our own terms to practice and experiment with the mess making forces of Love intimacy desire and knowledg making and a right to the unobserved epistemic space in which to do this I agree this is a space where we can make our own knowing about ourselves and each other through practices of learning that reject the politics of intellectual shame the idea that ignorance is humiliating and best hidden and instead admit the messy vulnerability of ignorance and misunderstanding as exhilarated in starting places from which we can Pro proceed to shape our own knowledge knowledge of ourselves of each other and of our world that engages deep questioning and critique not to tear down but to temper and strengthen practices of knowledg making that reject the status of objects of tech know text knowing as a first order concern now before I move on I want to touch back on the negative edge of love the love of nation to take ahed's example that works to justif if cruelty and exclusion against those deemed outside the loving Community what we see here I believe is the dangerous tendency to reproduce epistemic domination even from within our cocooned private loving communities to dissolve the classifications and boundaries between us in transformative ways even as we reapply them to others seen as objects of our knowing now this is a tendency we need to reject as we reject epistemic do domination in total not simply when it's applied to us fighting for encryption during the crypto wars in the 1990s was necessary of course but because it didn't clarify the outcome we were fighting for practically speaking it ended up resulting in a setback for privacy and the tech industry we see today similarly fighting for more restricted data flows for data ownership and limitations a more robust click wrap without looking at who's behind the curtain creating the data that's structuring our world and our place in it to begin with serves to strengthen Tech's hold on us and to reaffirm Tech's place as the organizing principle of our world a definition of privacy focused on rejecting Tech epistemic Authority is a good place to begin correcting this part five conclusion practical applications love privacy and homomorph encryption so what do we do with this love Centric reformulation of privacy what does it mean to reject the epistemic authority of a massively powerful industry in the name of privacy that protects transformation and rejects being objects of their knowing like what does it mean at a practical level well the good news is that on a practical level it is both energizing and clarifying we can take for example homomorphic encryption which is being a applied hither and thither by large tech companies for things like so-called Sovereign Cloud offerings and on device AI models in these cases some pretty impressive zero knowledge work is providing the technical substance behind massive marketing campaigns touting the Privacy preserving properties of these products and services homomorphic encryption guarantees privacy the claims go because data processing happens on your device not on Apple's or Google service servers because data is never sent off your device and because of the presence of technically guaranteed plausible or provable deniability but butterfly meme is this privacy now under the old data Centric understanding yeah sort of probably it's not worth joining a movement over but I guess it's privacy it leverages encryption after all and isn't that private but with a version of privacy that is animated by a rejection of epistemic authority by the protection of spaces for love transformation and radical reimagining that cannot accept such implo imposed classifications the answer to the question of whether this is privacy changes and as I promised it gets a lot clearer no it's not private it may be better than the alternative in some way or another there may be reasons that it rep represents harm reduction over the status quo and that's a tactical call but again no it's not private under this rehydrated privacy definition it doesn't matter so much where the data is processed if the AI models the Logics and the probabilities by which it classifies me and my activity remain firmly outside of my control whether or not the model is on device it never it's nevertheless imposing classifications and categories solely determined by Apple or Google or whoever categories that work to slop me into one or another cell in a metaphorical and literal database and that go on to produce more classifications and judgments about me even as the company's producing these claims plausible deniability when it comes to What specifically these classifications mean and their potential errors now what we do from here is a question of strategy and our position and leverage it will be answered differently by different people as well it should be but I believe a love Centric definition of privacy that starts before data and that reject rejects again our status as objects of text knowing actually helps clarify this landscape and clarify a path forward and I think it's much more fun it's much cooler It Centers the lives and loves we want the things that make life worthwhile and why privacy matters for these this gives us something worth fighting for and in doing so it CS all the wonderful beautiful people who also want the world's privacy must exist to protect but don't want to have boring conversations about data protection so this then is why I'm talking about love at a hacker conference thank you [Applause] [Music]