[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about how the cyber space entices our youth and how being exposed to repeated pseudo-facts affects human rights. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].

1. People’s beliefs are determined by our culture –and our culture is now determined by money. Money controls the press*; money controls advertisements; money controls social media. These media are a machine that skews our values (Paul Hawken) (as well as skewing factual information: figures presented to us are like people: if you stroke them enough they can end up telling you anything).

*: Press freedom only wears out when we do not use it. (Le Canard Enchaine)

2. No matter which mainstream media segment you are currently watching, I can promise you it is not getting to the heart of any issue. By definition they only participate in surface level analysis leaving a yawning gap.** (Yves Smith) [Already in the 1960s, T. S. Eliot told us: Where is the ‘really-knowing’ left when we have access to so much information?].

**: It is an old but very much current saying that de-contextualizing is a form of disinformation. (Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein)

3. And then there are video games: Video games imprint/inculcate an exciting subjectivity in our boys and girls that conditions their ‘really-knowing’ when exposed to local and global information in the social media.*** (Rafael Agacino) This is crucial, because the social media uselessly divide the world into bubbles, with seven seconds as the average attention span of a teenager using these media.**** (Roberto Savio)

***: Social media are now more local and no longer global.

****: Twitter, for instance, has disastrously failed to bring democracy and non-discrimination to the social media (remember Trump?). Yes, it is free and everybody has jumped into the bandwagon, but are totally oblivious of how their personal data are being mined and sold to advertisers –a signifier of the money control I mentioned above. (Oscar Schwartz)

4. Furthermore, the internet has made the entire world a library with no critical thinking and no supervisors. Have we forgotten how to read and listen critically? Since the internet has made the entire world a library with no exits or supervisors, many readers treat every published piece of writing as a conversation opener, demanding a bespoken response. Social media have tilted things so that books by contemporary authors —let alone essays– do not awaken the curiosity of readers. But the thinking about these postings is supposed to be left the readers –and today’s reader simply do not accept the baton being passed to them (not the readers of this Reader…), so it is the author(s) who must expand and explain. (Kate Harding)

5. Everybody knows what a self-fulfilling prophecy is. When a pseudo-fact or prediction is repeated sufficiently it ends up becoming reality, not because its relevance, but because of its on-and-on repetition. The technique is very much utilized in the political realm. (Jean Luc Melenchón) Take the Arab Spring. It revealed social media’s greatest potential, but it also exposed its greatest shortcomings. The social media storm ultimately affected the political efficacy and sustainability of the message. (Gal Beckerman)

A good sum-up

-Be careful with the mass communication media because, if not, you will end up defending the oppressors. (Malcolm X)

6. The internet is proving to be ambivalent. On the one hand, some kinds of online exchanges are excellent, on the other hand, the under-regulated cyber sphere gives too much scope for spreading lies and disinformation. Quality, trustworthy media deserve appreciation, because only they enable people to form and express informed opinions. (D+C) The challenge is to spot trustworthy media outlets.

7. The DNA of the digital world is multistakeholder: It is a world where big corporations and powerful Northern governments have normalized the role of the private sector in determining the normative directions of humanity’s technological (and other) progress.***** Multistakeholderism has accommodated Big Tech-led rules as de-facto governance practices in the digital space, not infrequently cynically in the name of ethics and human rights (HR).

*****: Large technology companies have emerged as geo-political actors and arbiters of difficult social questions without responsibilities commensurate with their out-sized profits.

8. The ideology of multistakeholderism in the digital realm presents a TINA (there is no alternative) predicament. It recasts questions about the future economy and society in which the digital is a central building block that can somehow be dealt with either through voluntary ethical standards and a platform among unequals. This perpetuates the status-quo in which the economic power derived from data and AI –primarily concentrated in the hands of a few corporations– are kept out of the global governance question.

9. A tremendous urgency confronts us in the task of restoring democratic values into global digital governance. Multistakeholderism is antithetical to public engagement and disclosure, eroding hard won rights of civil society in the international inter-governmental arena. The delivery of digital public goods through multistakeholder partnerships has unleashed great harm; it has hollowed-out the public sector, transferring control of public data systems to opportunistic private entities, foreclosing local accountability for data and algorithms and disregarding the HR of citizens.

10. The situation today is in a deadlock, unable to deliver on social equity, justice, dignity, and HR, precisely because of a fragmentation of multilateral institutions and their mandates, as well as a separation of any distributive justice from HR. International law that seeks to keep us knit together as a global community has long served the political-economic interests of rich countries and transnational corporations who operate with impunity.

11. This is not a case against the shared values for our common future, but a justification for a people-centric multilateralism –one in which normative directions are led through new, ambitious proposals for re-politicizing global governance from the point of view of equity, justice, peace, and planetary sustainability. At this historic conjuncture, our common future depends on taking the transnational corporation, and its digital avatar, firmly by the horns, and strengthening the multilateral system towards a peaceful and prosperous collective future for all. This is the common agenda we must work-for to counter the rapacious structures of data extractivism of the market. (Anita Gurumurthy)

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com

Postscript/Marginalia

-John von Neumann, sometimes considered the father of modern computing, is said to have confessed to his wife, “What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left.”

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