Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [59]
We see that a structural decision made for business purposes—i.e., the ability given each card to record a lengthy list of attributes about the person carrying it—eventually winds up providing the state with an identity card schema that reflects those attributes, which it can then compel citizens to carry. What's more, private parties equipped with a standard, off-the-shelf reader now have the ability to detect such attributes, and program other, interlinked systems to respond to them.
Closing the loop, what happens when a building's owners decide that they'd rather not have people of a given age group or ethnicity on the premises? What happens if such a lock-out setting is enabled, even temporarily and accidentally?*
* It's worth noting, in this context, that the fundamentalist-Christian putsch in Margaret Atwood's 1986 The Handmaid's Tale is at least in part accomplished by first installing a ubiquitous, nationwide banking network and then locking out all users whose profiles identify them as female.
No single choice in this chain, until the very last, was made with anything but the proverbial good intentions. The logic of each seemed reasonable, even unassailable, at the time it was made. But the clear result is that now the world has been provisioned with a system capable of the worst sort of discriminatory exclusion, and doing it all cold-bloodedly, at the level of its architecture.
Such decisions are essentially uncontestable. In this situation, the person denied access has no effective recourse in real time—such options that do exist take time and effort to enact. Even if we are eventually able to challenge the terms of the situation—whether by appealing to a human attendant who happens to be standing by, hacking into the system ourselves, complaining to the ACLU, or mounting a class-action lawsuit—the burden of time and energy invested in such activism falls squarely on our own shoulders.
This stands in for the many situations in which the deep design of ubiquitous systems will shape the choices available to us in day-to-day life, in ways both subtle and less so. It's easy to imagine being denied access to some accommodation, for example, because of some machine-rendered judgment as to our suitability—and given a robustly interconnected everyware, that judgment may well hinge on something we did far away in both space and time from the scene of the exclusion.
Of course, we may never know just what triggered such events. In the case of our inherent attributes, maybe it's nothing we "did" at all. All we'll be able to guess is that we conformed to some profile, or violated the nominal contours of some other.
One immediate objection is that no sane society would knowingly deploy something like this—and we'll accept this point of view for the sake of argument, although again history gives us plenty of room for doubt. But what if segregation and similar unpleasant outcomes are "merely" an unintended consequence of unrelated, technical decisions? Once a technical system is in place, it has its own logic and momentum; as we've seen, the things that can be done with such systems, especially when interconnected, often have little to do with anything the makers imagined.*
* As security expert Bruce Schneier says, "I think [a vendor of RFID security systems] understands this, and is encouraging use of its card everywhere: at sports arenas, power plants, even office buildings. This is just the sort of mission creep that moves us ever closer to a 'show me your papers' society."
We can only hope that those engineering ubiquitous systems weigh their decisions with the same consciousness of repercussion reflected in the design of the original Internet protocols. The downstream consequences of even the least significant-seeming architectural decision could turn out to be considerable—and unpleasant.
Thesis 43
Everyware produces a wide belt of circumstances where human agency,