The Version of the Law
In philosophy of law there are two traditional ways to consider the legal rules: the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. This is a very deep and complicated subject. It is a central point for religion: many religions are separated by how they interpret texts - hint the term "fundamentalist" - and discussions around these ideas were central to the writing of the constitution of the USA. New information technologies have introduced a third way. I don't know that there is already a word or an expression to define it. It is the subject of this post to analyze this new way to interpret laws. But first things first, let’s set up an expression to denote this new approach to legality. I am going to use the term: the version of the law. This expression has a bit of irony in it that is neither in the spirit nor the letter of the law. I am obviously talking about the fact that rules are no longer well established. The Terms of Service change every few weeks within a platform and are not comparable between platform. Yet "code is law" as they say. Really?
(In)Stabilities
When Moses came back from the mountains with the tenth commandments in his arms, two things could be noticed. The first thing is: there were not many laws, 10, moreover they were simple to understand. The second thing - laws were written on Stone tablets, meaning they were not going to change the next day.
I have not to spend screens to convince you that both of those points have vanished today. You have the daily experience to have to click on abstruse terms of service to install apps, or on esoteric security policies regarding cookies, that anyway are going to change by the end of the month.
This is particularly clear on the virtual space. The practice of any social media is going to prove it to you beyond any doubt. The problem is that the virtual world is eating the world. If you are, God forbids, politician your ability to conduct your election campaign is directly linked to your presence on social media. If you are (shadow) banned, for whatever reason, your political future is great danger. I take this example because it touches at how we understand democracy. If the choice for who you can vote is subjected to obscure changing rules maybe it is time to take a pause. Because if you think that the game is not going to be rigged you are naive beyond belief. The number of examples like this one can be multiplied as far as your imagination can bring you. The digital revolution is acting at every level of the society. You don’t need a PhD in sociology nor sophisticated statistics to get it. Just having open eyes is enough.
These instabilities happen both for the letter of the law (the ever changing TOS) and for the spirit of the law at the same time (E. Musk reinstating banned accounts overnight). This is one major reason why it is very difficult to have an idea of where we stand. For instance do you know what were the TOS of Twitter in 2019 ? How they were enforced - which is a separate thing ? Etc. Let’s examine few recent examples to see how this concept manifests itself in our lives.
Daemonetization
The recent Russel Brand affair is just the last one in town. I am not going to talk about the affair on itself, I genuinely have no idea of what it is except that there are accusations of sexual assaults and rape. I am going to talk about the unfolding of guilt by transitive closure that followed. We already had the example of Trump being banned from his social media accounts while he was a sitting president of the USA. It morphed very quickly into the ban of Parler app from the Google and Apple stores, and eventually reached AWS refusing Parler to use its infrastructure… The whole story is well known but remains striking: no notion of due process was touching the mind of cancelers. With Russel Brand the same scheme develops, it is better now. One new thing that happened is the list of companies deciding to cave in and to remove their advertisement from Rumble because this platform did not choose to daemonetized/banned R. Brand right away.
Those examples show how much the Rule of Law and the idea of due process are things of the past. In the virtual world no one will hear you make an appeal. You can be suspended overnight without knowing why and what are your rights and recourse. Rules, and how they are applied, are completely opaque. It is not a bug. It almost becomes like a process unfolding following, irony is not lost on everyone, a precise script.
Automation of penalties
I have already touched on the subject of how new information technologies have changed how public opinion react to world events.
It turns out that public opinons can be managed quite effectively. This was also the subject of a previous post few years ago in “The politics of the lightning rod” I proposed the idea that because there are so much ways to gather news (or not only from MSM) that it was ludicrous to try to control the narrative (e.g. by implanting agents on press rooms). The new way is to deflect the attention of the crowds. Trump was a master in it: building sentences with double reads polarizing the opposition on details while still delivering a message to his camps. But that was craftsmanship. Technique has evolved during COVID. It now looks like the administration, and big tech, have an equivalent of the death star. They can focus the attention of crowds on a very specific point for few instants. The mechanics of network will do the rest without thinking (not minimizing the impact of reach management and trends tuning by social media platforms). It is almost like there is a script something like “smearing_script.sh” to destroy particular individuals.
Sex offense accusations, like in the Russell Brand affair, is the usual suspect. But there is also this story of Ken Paxton impeachment. Here the script is akin a denial of service attack. You are first silenced, gag orders (I never heard about the term until few years ago) are now common. This is typical for a digital society: as speech can reach all of the world in an instant it replaces restriction of movement that were used before. Today we will know.where you physically are much more easily than who and through which medium you are talking too. And as seen above being plugged on the network may allow you to form a counter swarm. Since communication can happen before you leave the court house, for instance through a tweet, this is become a major priority, so much that due process has become irrelevant. In order to favor speed you don’t know what the accusations are precisely (just like daemonetization on YouTube). First ban, discuss later is the motto. The interview of K. Paxton by T. Carlson is partly what inspired me to write this post. It is really worth your time.
File Corruption
On computer science a file is said to be corrupted if a bit has flipped. It means that its content no longer match the stored checksum. You know it is not the right file -typically the data you received through the network has experienced interferences- but you don’t know which bits are faulty. Sometimes you don’t care because the data is a picture and just two or three faulty pixels won’t make visible difference. Other times the file is an executable file, and just one flipped bit may cause the process to crash or do unexpected things out of proportion. Our society's checksum doesn't add up. Yet Karens of the world are following the instruction by the letter, and the elites are following the spirit of an unwritten law (something like 2030 agenda). What could go wrong ?