Conference Agenda

Social networking systems like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram have become an essential part of everyday life. Unlike traditional media gatekeepers, these platforms allow users to search for information in an unmediated way, following a market-like logic rather than a truth-centered one. To snowball, content needs to gather several likes and visualizations that are independent from its epistemic reliability. Influencers carefully study their posts and adapt them to the audience they intend to intercept, staging up a show with measured choices of words, lights and framings. Following this trend, politicians have increasingly been using these platforms to obtain visibility, adapting their communication to this market-based, non-epistemic logic. Political scientists have described this shift in the balance of democracy with the category of “post-truth”, highlighting the rising role of appeals to emotion in the choice of who to vote. In spite of this, the CEOs of social media platforms do not acknowledge having any significant societal influence, thus upholding an image of neutrality of their businesses. On the other hand, philosophers of technology have argued that there should be more responsible regulation of social media platforms, since their current design might bring not only positive opportunities for their users but also undesirable, harmful consequences that corporate executives should anticipate. This paper aims to show that a helping hand in backing up this claim can be offered by aesthetic reflections on theater.

This paper will be structured as follows. First, I will give an overview of William Dutton’s suggestion that the Internet should be described as the fifth estate of democracy, focusing on the case of social media platforms. Second, I will argue that Ervin Goffman’s sociological framework allows for a description of social network systems as theatrical contexts. Third, I will argue that Bertolt Brecht’s theater theory allows us to understand that communication on social media platforms is centered on non-epistemic values, such as representativeness and appeals to emotion. This will also provide the justification for distinguishing social networking platforms from informational institutions. Fourth, I will back up this claim by borrowing the concept of post-truth from the field of political science and analyzing it in light of the idea of suspension of disbelief. Finally, I will conclude that social media platforms have a decisive influence on the functioning of the public sphere and that the emergence of the fifth estate as unprecedented social force can be framed as the start of a new chapter in the history of democracy. This will show that the supposed neutrality of social networking systems is a myth, and that philosophy of technology would benefit by adopting an interdisciplinary framework. Insights from sociology, theater theory and political science would provide useful analyses and labels to make the multifaceted influence of social media platforms on democracy more visible, thus making a stronger case for their regulation.

The question of how the Internet itself is maintained becomes increasingly important as humanity becomes more interconnected with the Internet. We survey the creation and cryptographic maintenance of Internet protocols by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and philosophical arguments over a new form of rights inherent to the Internet - called net rights, such as the right to access the internet or the right to the privacy of personal data - between the respective inventors of the Web and Internet (Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf) from the standpoint of the philosophy of technology, in particular the philosophy of maintenance. In the wake of the NSA revelations of mass surveillance by Snowden, a number of legalistic initiatives started to form a “Magna Carta” for the Web, but these efforts uniformly failed. Yet the technical repair and maintenance of standards has produced a new kind of constitution for the Internet to defend net rights based on cryptography, which holds wider lessons for the philosophy of technology but also political philosophy.

First, we will outline the notion of "net rights." In a well-known philosophical argument, Clark and Chalmers (1998) propose, in their Extended Mind Hypothesis, that under certain conditions “the mind extends into the world” (p. 12). Given that that our very memory is extended into the Internet, it makes sense to count the capabilities given by the Internet as part of our mental capabilities under certain conditions. However, if our cognitive capabilities are extended into the internet, should our notion of rights be extended into the internet? For example, we believe our memories should be private. Yet on the internet, our personal data is often believed to be private, but often is accessed by various platforms like Google and even intelligence agencies like the NSA. We then will overview the philosophical debates over rights and how their contradictions were seemingly resolved by the deployment of cryptographic protocols in the wake of the Snowden revelations concerning NSA surveillance. This notion of net rights was supported by Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the Web), but rejected by Vint Cerf (the inventor of the Internet) as Cerf believed human rights should be universal and unchanging, and not dependent on contingent technological developments such as the Internet. Berners-Lee called for the creation of a "magna carta" of the Web as a kind of international treaty, but it overall came to naught. Instead, the defense of net rights was taken up by committees of engineers creating protocols.

Second, we call for a philosophical theory of standards and protocols, and an inspection of the standardization process of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An informal international standards body with vast reach, the IETF has been dubbed the “immaterial aristocracy” of the Internet. . From the perspective of maintenance, the case of transforming the Internet from an insecure to a secure architecture provokes a host of questions. One particular question is: To what extent has the process of collective maintenance of the Internet itself by standards bodies gone beyond the initial design of these protocols by its inventors in reaction to a crisis such as the mass surveillance? We argue that despite its invisible nature, this attempt by the IETF to form an “immaterial constitution” for net rights enforceable by technology has important philosophical ramifications for the very notion of human rights in a thoroughly digital era. In particular, it leads to the notion of rights enforced by code outside of legal and juridical frameworks.

The maintenance of the Internet is – perhaps contradictorily – both a democratic and technical constituent process, yet one that is not absolutely democratic. The IETF is ultimately a self-selected assembly of engineers, representing primarily the United States and the large capitalist firms of Silicon Valley with very little participation from its users, including the vast majority of the world’s population in the Global South. The primary attempts post-Snowden to create a governance of the Internet that puts the Global South at the center, such as the NetMundial Initiative led by Brazil in the wake of the Snowden revelations, were eventually destroyed by the IAB and other U.S. interests. One possibility is that Berners-Lee’s original idea that a wider, bottom-up, social movement was needed to transform the Internet into a truly democratic space.

It should be noted that a coup against the IETF itself is underway: A new generation of engineers – with Snowden, Manning, and Assange all in support – are trying to redesign a democratic and decentralized Internet beyond Silicon Valley based on inscribing both net rights – and also property rights – into code via blockchain technology (De Filippi and Wright 2018). Standards are also not the only way to protect the right to privacy: Being built by startups, mixnets build an overlay network on top of the existing internet that not only encrypts but also mixes data to prevent adversaries like the NSA from determining the metadata inherent in TCP/IP packet transmission (Diaz et al., 2021). However, the question of how can the Internet be governed and maintained as an actual absolute democracy involving its users lies unsolved. The formation of a new constitution of code by the IETF to maintain the internet may only be the first step. Further philosophical exploration is needed to determine the valences of this audacious ongoing movement by engineers to sublimate the social into the technical.