VILLAGE OF THE SPAMMED

I lost a reader today. No, not that way; he simply decided that social networking is no longer worth the risk to his privacy. You can understand his concern. If this was any other country – the USA or Britain, Russia or China, with an enormous, well-funded state security apparatus – you might share it.

            It wasn’t meant to be this way, was it? We were going to live in a global village. The free exchange of information, we were told, would pave the road to the New Jerusalem.

Right now a monomaniacal antipodean misfit seeks South American asylum, spouting all the while his messianic belief: that absolute freedom of information will absolutely free us all. His acolytes include human-rights lawyers, celebrities, and all manner of academics and idealists. The similarity of his rhetoric to that of John Calvin seems to have escaped them.

Not too long ago social media was going to free the Middle East. Facebook would roar, Twitter would tweet, and tyrannies would topple from Tehran to Tripoli. It's a nice story. Did wonders for share prices and advertising campaigns in New York and Silicon Valley. The reality was different.

Social media didn’t stop Egypt’s President Morsi appointing himself effective Dictator last week. Nor has it prevented his enactment of a new constitution – one heavy with Shari’ah Law. Whether Egypt’s new constitution passes or fails at a referendum, social media will have little hope of averting the likely consequences: either a brutal government crack-down, or a vicious civil war.

We won’t mention Syria. No amount of tweeting can help where China and Russia have money and the US has no interest (or any combination of the above).

 No, Facebook will not free the world any time soon; but what about privacy? At the moment our profiles are used to fashion ads for ourselves and our friends. Social media is a store, and we are the products. In Australia you’re more likely to be spammed than spied on ... for now.

Governments – authoritarian and “democratic” – have been quicker than activists to learn the real lessons of the internet. A century ago, Irish Nationalists feared infiltration of their groups by government agents. Nowadays it’s easier to train a few bloggers. These can then go online, monitor opposition activity, and disseminate propaganda.

 I don’t buy, sell or bank online, so I’m reasonably safe in that sense; but what about personal information? I make no secret of my past: drunk, junkie, and wastrel. In fact, I rather trade upon it – a kind of demented Dylan Moran of the blogosphere. I’m no longer doing anything illegal. My life, as my art, is an open book.

However, my network contains a fair cross section of political activists, artists and drug users. The right kind of government – or corporation – could use my profile to find them, and either arrest them, or follow them to bigger fish.

Conversely, imagine a government using the same techniques as Google and Facebook to create a flexible, intelligent, insidious and effective censorship system.

Freedom of information is a double-edged sword. As anyone knows who watches reality TV, some of the highest-security prisons have cells with transparent walls.