Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [58]
Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig argues, in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, that the deep structural design of informatic systems—their architecture—has important implications for the degree of freedom people are allowed in using those systems, forever after. Whether consciously or not, values are encoded into a technology, in preference to others that might have been, and then enacted whenever the technology is employed.
For example, the Internet was originally designed so that the network itself knows nothing about the systems connected to it, other than the fact that each has a valid address and handles the appropriate protocols. It could have been designed differently, but it wasn't. Somebody made the decision that the cause of optimal network efficiency was best served by such an "end-to-end" architecture.*
* In this case, the identity of the "somebody" in question is widely known: The relevant design decisions were set forth by Robert E. Kahn and Vint Cerf, in a 1974 paper called A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication. The identity of responsible parties will not always be so transparent.
Lessig believes that this engineering decision has had the profoundest consequences for the way we present ourselves on the net and for the regulability of our behavior there. Among other things, "in real space... anonymity has to be created, but in cyberspace anonymity is the given." And so some rather high-level behaviors—from leaving unsigned comments on a Web site, to being able to download a movie to a local machine, traceable to nothing more substantial than an IP address—are underwritten by a decision made years before, concerning the interaction of host machines at the network layer.
We needn't go quite that deep to get to a level where the design of a particular technical system winds up inscribing some set of values in the world.
Imagine that a large American company—say, an automobile manufacturer—adopts a requirement that its employees carry RFID-tagged personal identification. After a lengthy acquisition process, the company selects a vendor to provide the ID cards and their associated paraphernalia—card encoders and readers, management software, and the like.
As it happens, this particular identification system has been designed to be as flexible and generic as possible, so as to appeal to the largest pool of potential adopters. Its designers have therefore provided it with the ability to encode a wide range of attributes about a card holder—ethnicity, sex, age, and dozens of others. Although the automotive company itself never uses these fields, every card carried nevertheless has the technical ability to record such facts about its bearer.
And then suppose that—largely as a consequence of the automobile manufacturer's successful and public large-scale roll-out of the system—this identification system is adopted by a wide variety of other institutions, private and public. In fact, with minor modifications, it's embraced as the standard driver's license schema by a number of states. And because the various state DMvs collect such data, and the ID-generation system affords them the technical ability to do so, the new licenses wind up inscribed with machine-readable data about the bearer's sex, height, weight and other physical characteristics, ethnicity....
If you're having a hard time swallowing this set-up, consider that history is chock-full of situations where some convention originally developed for one application was adopted as a de facto standard elsewhere. For our purposes, the prime example is the Social Security number, which was never supposed to be a national identity number—in fact, it was precisely this fear that nearly torpedoed its adoption, in 1936.
By 1961, however, when the Internal Revenue Service adopted the Social Security number as a unique identifier, such fears had apparently faded. At present, institutions both public (the armed forces) and private (banks, hospitals, universities) routinely use the SSN in place of their own numeric