The Use of Computers to Support Oppression
www-cs-students.stanford.edu
www-cs-students.stanford.edu
My family made extensive use of IBM computers and technology in their ANTI-apartheid activities.
They wrote speeches with Wordperfect and Wordstar on IBM XTs.
They saved them to Verbatim floppy disks, printed them out on Epson and HP printers, faxed them with imported fax machines (Canon?), scanned for viruses with McAfee antivirus, shredded evidence with imported shredders, and powered it all with no doubt dubiously imported UPSes and petrol generators.
Then they used US Robotics modems and PCAnywhere with encryption software (2) to transmit files to people both around South Africa and overseas.
They used personal-database software to keep track of press articles and potential supporters overseas, and then used Lotus 123 to calculate where the money was going.
They used the international telephone system (Gasp! Technology!) and Swiss Bank accounts (I think - I was never sure on where the banks were) to transfer money that supported anti-apartheid causes.
They also smuggled people over the border, no doubt using foreign-manufactured cars, airplanes, and perhaps foreign weapons in the process.
Did my family help more than having a computer system run the Pass system hurt? Absolutely not - but I like to think that by having access to some of this technology things changed for the better sooner.
Somehow in this history I've picked up a healthy anti-respect for authority, a view that some things can be used for both good and evil, and a fundamental respect for the power of computers. Balance in all things.
1. Many of your friends no doubt earned their pocket money by cleaning the yard and taking out the trash. I earned mine by shredding hundreds of pages of activist documentation for my grandmother.
2. The encryption software they used was dumbed down thanks to US ITAR export rules, probably putting the lives of countless good people in danger.
You could also write an article on "The Use of Clothing to Support Oppression", and again, the problem is not with the clothes.
Technologies are transformative: they create the opportunities for agents to commit entirely new kinds of actions, good and bad. You can't decouple their existence from the new things that result from them (from Nazi death camps to apartheid to the contemporary Panopticon State), any more than you can try to decouple, say, totalitarian political systems from the oppression they entail.
This doesn't mean that we should smash all our technology and all return to the farm. It just means we've got to think critically and pro-actively about how to make sure technology is used for good.
Technology itself clearly is not something that you can "make sure..is used for good". The problem is not with any one piece of technology (eg. the computer) or technology as the sum of all individual technologies. I see the root of the problem being technologizing. Oppression is more oppressive because we've technologized it. Totalitarian governments are more controlling because they've technologized control. The essence of technology is control. The plow let farmers control where and what things grew in an area of land. The hydroelectric dam controls the flow of an entire river to generate electricity. Your cellphone lets you control personal and professional interactions. Control and technology are deeply connected. That is why technology is both dangerous and beneficial. Technologies are not transformative they are indicative of trends in the larger field of control/power.
I'd phrase my core logic as this. Historically, most really big things, great or terrible, have been done by centralized states. Central to state-building, though, is the concept of legibility: making information about the world understandable to the State and making it so that the State can efficiently use and act on that information to enact its will on the world. And technology--particularly telecommunications, including spoken language, counting, writing, roads, the printing press, arithmetic, ship building, radio, all the way up to computer programming--is all about legibility. Every advance in technology extends the State's power, and that continues today.
That's why Lenin could hop on a train in 1917 and drop straight into absolutist Russia without anyone in charge noticing. Then in the 1980s the apartheid government had the ability to effectively track the movements and contacts of dissidents and activists. And today the US federal government can call up a couple contacts and know everything about you, from how many times a week you get a coffee from the store at the corner to what you were thinking and searching for online on January 4, 2010, after lunch.
I'd agree that it was unrealistic for me to say we can direct how technology will end up being used. It's obviously true that you can't really direct it, nor can you really avoid it by ignoring it and hoping it goes away. What's now important for being proactive is building technology that will make human actions less legible and less subject to control by external forces.
Why not? There is not one infallible way to ensure a technology is used for good and you never know in advance but it is not a reason to stop trying. I'd say for example that open formats and protocols are more likely to generate less evil than their counterparts.
Secure communities is a data sharing initiative between ICE, the FBI and several other agencies. Participating police districts now automatically pass on the citizenship status of detainees to ICE. Under President Obama, secure communities has deported more "dangerous illegals" than any other administration.
Talking with a friend who works at the county jail, this is the same protocol that was previously done by a human being, only made much more efficient by the data sharing initiative. Instead of having an officer look through a list of names for dangerous criminals, the system picks up people with really minor offenses.
To date my state of Washington has deported more people for having an expired fishing license than for murder. Secure communities has certainly upped the ante in terms of who is deported when pulled over by a police officer.
That's like punching other people instead of saying "sorry, I did bad things". Bonus thing, you ruin a country in process.
If an ex-thief becomes a sheriff, I say I'd be cynical and worried.
The US establishment was definitely not on board with that until years later. When the disinvestment campaigns were launched in the mid-1970s, and sanctions efforts had some initial success in the UN General Assembly, the US and UK opposed any Security Council involvement (i.e. anything with teeth).
It was only in 1986, following a significant escalation in violence and repression in South Africa, that the anti-apartheid activists in the US Congress (led by another Civil Rights Movement veteran, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Dellums) finally got a bill passed--- and Ronald Reagan vetoed that bill. It was eventually passed again over his veto.
Most of world's countries are in sad state, especially africa. South Africa was unique because it was both successful and messed up at the same time. It could go either up and down. I have the feeling they went down: more messed up than successful today. I don't exactly know what happens there, tho.
The question is: why "nuke" (economically and politically) this particular country and not any other?
You made it bad by supporting them and then made it even worse by cutting support really fast and isolating them.
It's amazing how you got the worst outcome possible. Glad they more or less survived it anyway. It could me much worse.