Abstract
Pax Technica operates at the convergence of Phil Howard’s longstanding interests in technology and governance, through the lenses of two constructs: the internet of things (IoT) and democracy. Competing with big data and cloud storage as the dominant tech buzzword of the last decade, the IoT is less descriptive of a particular technology than a set of relationships between technologies, a constant, largely invisible flow of communication between devices via embedded sensors. Although there is a tendency to think of the IoT as near futurism, these relationships are already here, from smartphone-based payment systems to weight scales that synch with personal fitness trackers. Howard’s main premise in this book is that as these processes of data gathering become increasingly embedded into our everyday lives, the consequences will not only be technological, they will also be profoundly political.
The book’s title, Pax Technica, refers to a socio-technical stability negotiated in important ways through liberal but pragmatic ways through a shared understanding of technology—how it should be used and whom it should serve. Pragmatism drives the Pax Technica, which Howard describes as an arrangement of institutions and technologies that are both political and industrial. Of course, for many media and information activists, the knitting together of industry and governments in terms of technological surveillance and monitoring is profoundly troubling. While not naive to activist concerns, Howard’s approach is deliberately upbeat in looking for possibilities and openings while also recognizing potential harms. In some ways, Howard echoes thinkers like Pariser (2011) and Wu (2011) in pointing out that the politics of technologies we use everyday, from Wi-Fi to search engines, have important consequences for our ability to communicate, engage in dialog and participate in our local communities, as well as negotiate our identities and beliefs as citizens.
Pax Technica’s examples draw from Howard’s extensive research on the relationships between political freedom and digital media, particularly in the Middle East and Asia. In addition to grounding his arguments in diverse accounts of political activism, Howard is refreshingly concrete in his account of how to shape IoT policy by offering specific design implementations to protect privacy and autonomy. (I found the suggestion of maintaining transparent accounts of who gathers IoT data particularly compelling.) Crucially, the book’s writing is immensely readable, and it’s clear that Howard intends this text as an intervention within tech communities already hyping the IoT, and as an alert beacon to policy circles yet to acknowledge this emerging technological paradigm.
In terms of how this book sits within larger conversations about technology and society, I would make two observations about how the IoT is conceptualized. First, in academic as well as industry texts on the subject, there is often a slippage between the IoT, big data and cloud storage. The IoT is a rhetorical mantle for a set of devices that gathers and circulates information that scales up to the datasets required for big data analysis, datasets increasingly stored and analyzed via cloud-based computing, which is a model for on-demand access to resources that are pooled and configurable. The occasional slippages in Pax Technica between cloud storage, big data and the IoT are representative of the ways that these technologies are part of a broader set of capitalist ambitions within the mainstream tech industry, but this conflation is important in that it buys into a vision of these technologies as predetermined and inextricably linked. Although these technological phenomena are connected, they are not interchangeable, nor will be the entities and policies governing them.
A second note about how the IoT is framed has to do with where and when these devices are deployed. Examples of the IoT are frequently centered on homes and devices of the privileged, where tech companies promise convenience and efficiency through invisible connectivity of devices that monitor and communicate on behalf of the consumer. But this kind of inter-connectedness is already familiar to people who tend not to be depicted in ads or tech review blog posts about near-future technological advancements. As Sadowski and Pasquale (2015) have noted, associations between the IoT and mundane devices like refrigerators obscure the social justice implications of these same infrastructures when deployed on a city (or nation) wide scale. And as Eubanks (2011, 2014) has documented, poor people experience the inter-connectedness of the state in monitoring rent, child-care, housing, work and food consumption. When we leave these relationships to technology, surveillance and democratic participation out of our conceptualization of the IoT, we do so in the service of some stakeholders (large tech companies) and at the expense of others (the poor and disenfranchised).
It isn’t then a matter of whether or when the IoT will come (because in fact, it is already here) but which assemblages will be gathered under that name and which will be excluded, and how to understand connections between them. Although I am arguing against the frustrating tendency to discuss the IoT as if it’s about to arrive and not already here, I agree with Howard that it is still possible to shape the politics of these socio-technical infrastructures. Indeed, from a social justice perspective, a collective insistence on conversations about the IoT is necessary for ensuring against the further erosion of individual privacy, as well as supporting democratic participation. Perhaps the most admirable thing about Pax Technica is that Howard offers the tools for a much broader group of people to participate in the conversation of what the IoT can and should be in our democratic public.