OVERVIEW

The truism that freedom exists at the point of tension between chaos and control has never been tested more than in the past two decades. The rise of pervasive digital technologies has allowed for a wide array of social and economic goods. But it has also enabled both an unprecedented level of official surveillance and a proliferation of attacks upon vital institutions and infrastructure. Few of us would give up the many benefits of the Internet and mobile digital tools, but we have increasingly come to recognize the state of dependence that these technologies create.

The Outlaw Planet superthreat covers the rise of both ubiquitous surveillance and the persistent digital attacks characterized here as "griefing." We will discuss shortly what this means, but the important takeaway is that the kinds of attacks examined here have less to do with discovering and exploiting flaws in the technology than with using the technology to discover and exploit social flaws. The Internet and related systems are the medium for these attacks, not the cause.

That said, it's clear that the acceleration of technology innovation and adoption has made us vulnerable to a new diversity of threats. The proximate targets of these threats may include financial, political, or infrastructural systems, but the real victim of these threats is the trust and reliance on social connections. Moreover, these threats don't just come from hackers and digital terrorists--some of the worst examples of attacks upon our social connections have come from traditional large institutions that feel themselves under attack.

The WorldRun simulations included Outlaw Planet as a key superthreat because it most clearly attacks our ability to cooperate to confront the other extinction risks. The last few years have seen an abundance of examples.

  • Thriving underground markets for jewelry and hats "spoof" monitor cameras, typically by putting out a strong infrared signal (obscuring the wearer's face in a bright spot of light visible to the camera, but not to human eyes).
  • The rise of "walled garden" networks offers regional Internet services, but largely cuts those services off from a global Internet. China and Iran have the most active walled networks, but smaller (and more controllable) regional networks are popping up all over.
  • Political candidates have been brought down using faked videos showing the candidates making controversial or insulting statements. Hoaxes are usually discovered within days, but enough damage is done to undermine candidates.
  • Tasmania has become the first UN-recognized "pervasive awareness" zone, requiring real-time monitoring of citizen location, health, and environmental
  • impact. Legal restrictions are in place to prevent unauthorized use of data, but protests abound.
    • Digital currency initiatives in Singapore, Japan, Ireland and Dubai stalled as security flaws proliferate. The percentage of personal finance transactions carried out in cash has increased for the third year in a row.

UBIQUITOUS NETWORKS

The global explosion of smart mobile devices, and the high-speed wireless networks they use, has proven to be a true revolution over the past decade. Mobile phones offering real Internet access have become almost ubiquitous around the world. This has, in myriad ways, transformed the relationship people have with their environment, their social networks, and the information needed to carry out their daily lives.

A profound transformation to be sure, but it has not been without costs. We are highly dependent upon these systems, but (despite the Kaminsky exploits of nearly a decade ago, and ongoing White Papers and UN panels) they remain fragile and vulnerable to outside attacks. Information overload, a concept nearly 50 years old, is now almost pandemic. Among its more insidious effects, information overload tends to make people more responsive to propaganda, conspiracy theories, and hoaxes. Even more problematic has been the ongoing assault on personal privacy. The same technologies enabling handheld supercomputers also enable the proliferation of networked sensors; compounding this, our mobile devices increasingly form part of the larger sensor network.

This is not a simple warning about police states. Most of the surveillance technologies in this superthreat are bottom-up, and many are directed not at other people, but at the environment. The result, however, is a kind of asymmetric transparency that applies more to everyday citizenry than to either economic/political elites or the technically proficient. The superthreat aspect of ubiquitous networks isn't their existence--in fact, these networks will very likely be critical to our successfully overcoming the extinction risk--but the ease with which they can be abused, ways in which they can be used to extend power over others, and our dependency upon them combined with their lack of real resilience.

"GRIEFING"

Griefing, a term from the multiplayer game community, originally meant intentionally disrupting the game-play of others, with the intent to cause harm. As immersive social technologies have become more pervasive, however, the notion of willful harassment intended solely to disrupt online interactions has taken on a broader meaning. Griefing attacks our capacities to achieve desirable outcomes from digitally mediated communication. Whereas hacking and malware can destroy data and one's sense of security, griefing targets trust and social cohesion.

Today, the term griefing encompasses behavior ranging from the creation of hoax data to degrade the accuracy of information and reputation networks to "transparency bombs" that put stolen--and not necessarily accurate--confidential and personal information online. (This information is usually about elected officials but is increasingly targeting more and more "ordinary" people.) As noted above, the pandemic of information overload makes many people especially susceptible to this. The more troubling forms of griefing include attacks on emotional or physical weaknesses of victims, from impersonating friends to unleash abuse (sometimes leading to suicide attempts) to adding strobing images to epilepsy support message boards in order to trigger seizures and fugue states in visitors (as happened in 2008 and, more notoriously, in 2014).

Some observers note a parallel between griefing and more conventional hacking or malware attacks. There is an important difference, however. The prevalence of malware on the Internet seems environmental, like some kind of biohazard -- the origin of a virus or scam may be useful for the digital epidemiologists, but unnecessary trivia for people wishing to keep anti-virus software up to date. Griefing is less environmental, and more social. There are no automated "anti-griefing" protections, because griefing depends on the social relationships we value in the participatory web. You can eliminate griefing by eliminating social interaction. But to call on an old metaphor, it would be necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.

POINTS OF IMPACT

Given that the Internet and related networks already extend to satellites in orbit around Mars, it's easy to say that the entire planet is vulnerable to this superthreat. It's more accurate, however, to say that the targets of this superthreat are the connections that underlie economic, political, and civic relationships. These points of impact are, in effect, our civilization's central nervous system.

Examples of communities and practices most likely to suffer from this superthreat include:

  • Internet-linked institutions
  • Electoral processes
  • Civil society
  • Social networks
  • Social trust
  • Privacy

CONNECTIONS

The Outlaw Planet superthreat interacts with the four other superthreats in the following ways:

Quarantine: Piracy and griefing reduces access to and reliability of medicines. The spread of monitoring and sensor technologies improve capacity to watch crisis zones. In turn, the spread of disease increases demand for public monitoring.

Ravenous: Starvation increases demands for monitoring of agricultural systems, distribution, and (in some cases) consumption. Increasing conflict over food leads to terror and griefing attacks on food systems.

Power Struggle: Ongoing proliferation of attacks on power infrastructure, from production to distribution. Energy-related conflicts increase money and motivation for griefing and disruption.

Generation Exile: Migration is driven by need to escape social conflict. Demands for monitoring of migrants grow. Griefers hide easily within diasporic populations.