Boris’s dark arts threat starts at home
Apolite hush fell at the UN on Tuesday as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson walked to the podium to deliver his inaugural address to the General Assembly.
It is difficult to convey the audacity of the speech that followed. Johnson ranged widely, reflecting on the transformative power of “great scientific revolutions of the past”: print, the steam engine, aviation, and nuclear energy.
Such technological revolutions, Johnson argued, led to the creation of powerful new instruments, but ones over which human beings ultimately had control. The digital age, however, is different.
Johnson breathlessly issued a series of warnings: “Your front door will sweep wide the moment you approach, like some silent butler Your mattress will monitor your nightmares; your fridge will beep for more cheese
“Smart cities,” he blusterated, “will pullulate with sensors, all joined by the Internet of Things. Bollards communing invisibly with lamp posts so there is always a parking space for your electric car”. But technology, he warned, could also be used “to place citizens [under] relentless state surveillance”.
Will artificial intelligence take the form of robots caring for an ageing population? Or do we face “pink-eyed terminators sent back from the future to cull the human race”? Will synthetic biology “restore our livers and our eyes with miracle regeneration of tissue”? Or will it “bring terrifying limbless chickens to our tables”?
Habitually poker-faced diplomats struggled to suppress their laughter. Even the UK delegation chuckled. Foreign office mandarins did not write the speech. Such master rhetoricians can glide smoothly over the institutionalised hypocrisies of Britain’s “democracy-promoting” foreign policy. After all, the world’s second-largest arms trader does 80% of its business with authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
This speech was penned by Johnson’s abrasive Downing Street advisers, preoccupied with a more immediate matter: an impending general election. We cannot take seriously Johnson’s claim to be befuddled by the rise of mass surveillance technologies. As recently as 2016, the UK parliament passed an Investigatory Powers Act that legalised the illegal mass surveillance conducted by the British state over the previous two decades. It also enabled its expansion, unchecked.
The prime minister’s superficially infantile, but carefully scripted, ramblings about the potential abuses of social media in democratic politics must also be understood in the context of the coming election. It was not by chance that Johnson observed: “You may keep secrets from your friends, from your parents, your children, your doctor even your personal trainer but it takes real effort to conceal your thoughts from Google.”
Johnson’s advisers include pioneers of the new dark arts of campaigning. In February, the House of Commons’ digital, culture, media and sport select committee produced an insightful report on “Disinformation and Fake News” that detailed the vulnerabilities of the UK’s electoral system to new campaign techniques.
Johnson’s senior-most political adviser is a guru of “microtargeting”. By mining “big data” sets assembled from our routine social media activities, it is now possible to build individual personality profiles, together with groups of “hot button” issues for each voter. Campaigners can now create targeted, customised messages, crafted about our individual preoccupations and prejudices.
The select committee noted that the UK’s electoral law is outdated, leaving it vulnerable to the abuse of such techniques. Moreover, the regulation of social media companies is woefully inadequate given their new capabilities.
The issue of how a campaign can legitimately be conducted is certain to become a campaign issue in itself. Johnson will bluster, blather and lie, and remind UK citizens he has been trying to figure out the convoluted significance of new technologies and the digital age, but it’s all been far too complicated for him to understand.