I'd like to see a national, collective endeavour to protect individual privacy, because privacy confers a kind of freedom
Imagine that you were required, every day, to keep an old-fashioned diary recording all your interactions with the world; every bus you took, every song you listened to, every television programme you dipped into, every social arrangement you made. Imagine that, far from keeping a little tin lock on it, or scrawling "Private. Go away!" on the cover, you were instead required to hand it over at the end of each day to all sorts of complete strangers, who would then own your information, for ever. That would be a ridiculous situation for a free and autonomous person to put up with, an absurd and sinister exercise in identity mining. But it's how many of us live now, in the digital world.
The minutiae of our private lives, our personalities, is commercially valuable. Look at the vast numbers involved in the flotation of Facebook. It would be hyperbole to say our souls were being sold on the New York stock exchange. Nonetheless, disquiet about the currency in which people pay for their technological freedom is regularly expressed, in all sorts of ways, whether it is photographs finding their way from a blog into a newspaper, or social-networking indiscretions getting people fired.
Mostly, one buries one's qualms about living in a digital goldfish bowl – the advantages outweigh disadvantages that are so far from being inconvenient that they are closer to intangible. Anyway, there's not much choice in the matter, really. Be there, or be socially isolated, overtaken by technological events. Distrust about possibly heinous corporate habits? That's just paranoia, isn't it? A stroppy refusal to believe in the benign self-regulation of robust, innovative, dynamic, corporate capitalism?
The other night I was talking to a friend who has a web startup that he worked on first in the US, and now in Britain. He was extolling the virtues of American attitudes to business, and the frustrations he encountered back here. "While the US is floating Facebook," he said contemptuously, "Britain is conducting the Leveson inquiry." Happy as I am to be critical of Britain, I couldn't help thinking that wasn't entirely fair. "While the US was extolling the virtues of neoliberal corporatism," I replied, "Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the world wide web, and gifting it to the planet, for people like Mark Zuckerberg to exploit."
Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that these two positions really could be extrapolated to encapsulate national identity. The US hitches its wagon to entrepreneurship, and the idea that individual profit is the most sound barometer of worth. Britain, instead, believes in spreading its civilising influence around the world, for the common good of all concerned. The first description remains recognisably a distillation of dominant ideas about contemporary America. The second sounds like a rose-tinted justification for colonial empire, a discredited form of national identity that was noisily, unanswerably refuted during the course of the 20th century.
The point here is that maybe it's important simply to have some identity to feel pride in. Maybe part of Britain's problem is that it rejected its national myth, instead of recasting it and making a renewed effort to live up to its ambitious, ostensibly noble, yet previously compromised aspirations. Maybe, even more woefully, the postwar establishment of the welfare state was precisely a recasting of those aspirations, one that has been contested ever since, from left and right, instead of distilled into a national narrative that civilised everyone, and offered a reinvented national identity to be proud of.
Perhaps Britain even has a chance, still, to learn from the errors it made in the physical world, and build on its successes, to set a good example, and help make a better digital world.
Think back to the birth of the BBC, one great British institution that is admired and envied internationally (and politically controversial here). Early advances in mass communication technology conjure images of households around the nation all listening to a vital radio broadcast, or people in schools and offices all discussing the next morning the near-universal experience they'd had of the previous night's television. Sure, the content of those broadcasts was important.
But more important still was universal access to them. It was the guarantee of a standard, open system, one that could be easily accessed by every machine that every person purchased, by picking up a signal that the BBC undertook to ensure was available to all. That was the truly meaningful, truly radical aspect of the licence fee.
Current anomalies, whereby you have to pay a fee for your TV even if you never watch the BBC, yet pay none for your radio, which may well be tuned to the corporation's output for the whole of its working life, attest to ongoing confusion about what the licence fee is actually for.The BBC has focused on competing over content, targeting those on the "right" side of the digital divide, instead of concentrating first on addressing the divide itself. Provision of content has been pursued without first ensuring that the means of receiving it is open to all, without hidden commercial agendas being smuggled in. It is almost as if an important chunk of the institution has gone missing in action.
I don't mean here that a state institution should be charged with "policing" the internet. In many ways, Britain has come to distrust the state as much as Americans have. Even our most precious institutions – the NHS, the state education system – have to be fought for every day, because, somehow, political faith in market solutions has survived even market collapse. Yet beyond those battles, there is entropy as regards the role of the state, an obsession with retaining what we have, unchanged, instead of being innovative and ambitious about ways in which our institutions can regulate the markets of the future, and can forge a collective, national identity by providing a safe space in which we can express our own individual identities without fear of exploitation.
I, for one, would quite like to have the option of storing my "stuff" not in a corporate iCloud, but in a public-service BBC cloud, where it could be owned unambiguously by me, to keep or sell as and when I wished. I'd like Apple – and all other institutions – to understand that if they wanted to sell machines in this country, then there were certain specific standards, that they had to conform to.
I'd like providers such as Facebook, instead of being chivvied piecemeal by private individuals to uphold their own standards, to understand that a powerful national institution will seek redress from them, when, say, an app on their site releases info to other organisations without a British digital citizen's knowledge or consent.
I'd like to see a national, collective endeavour to protect individual privacy, not because people have things to hide, but because privacy confers a kind of freedom, to shed our "personalities" and answer to no one but ourselves, and our loved ones – often on the sofa, in front of the telly, in our own homes, where the things that we do should, on principle, be literally nobody else's business, unless we decide the terms under which it is.