Andrew Keen
It’s not often that a European head of state uses the
“radical postmodernist philosophy” of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard to
bash a hostile superpower. But then Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s defiantly
erudite president of nearly 10 years, is no ordinary head of state.
Ilves is trying to reinvent Estonia as the brightly lit
antithesis of Russia, and in today’s confessional age of Edward Snowden,
WikiLeaks and the Panama Papers, claims he is baking transparency and
accountability into a new kind of digital civic operating system.
Ilves is known for his controversial opinions on
everything from Snowden and internet privacy to cyberwarfare and Vladimir
Putin’s postmodernist state, which have apparently, transformed the 63-year-old
into a “regional sex symbol”.
Aivar, my Uber driver, chatters enthusiastically about
Ilves as his grey Volvo sedan drops me outside Kadriorg Palace in Tallinn. “Enjoy
our president. He’s quite a character.”
An imposing 18th-century baroque jewel, Kadriorg was
built in the Estonian capital by Peter the Great for his wife,
Catherine. The tsar, however, would not have been amused by Ilves and his
outspoken criticism of Russia. Ilves greets me in his trademark checkered bow
tie.
The problem with Putin’s Russia, Ilves insists, is
that the truth has been entirely devalued. Quoting from Peter Pomerantsov’s
2015 Nothing Is True and
Everything Is Possible, the
Estonian president says that “all truths have become equivalent” in
contemporary Russia.
According to Ilves, the country is being run by
postmodernists such as Putin’s chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, a “big fan”
apparently of Baudrillard, who stage-manages Russia as if it was a murky
reality television show. The result, Ilves says, is the death not only of truth
but also of trust and accountability – the core currencies of a modern
democratic state. Thus the proliferation of Russian troll
factories that churn out anonymous comments that are poisoning the internet.
There is nothing small, charmingly or otherwise, about
Ilves. If, as Marshall McLuhan suggested, we now live in an electronic global
village, then the Swedish-born and American-educated Estonian president, with
his nearly 70,000 Twitter
followers is a kind of global village elder, dispensing his own
cosmopolitan brand of personalized wisdom to anyone that will listen.
But it’s not all bluster. Much of his presidential
tenure, as well as previous roles as foreign minister, ambassador to the US and
a member of the European parliament in the post-Soviet era, has been focused on
making Estonia less village-like, on coming up with a grand idea that would enable
this little Baltic republic to punch above its analog weight on the world
stage.
Ilves came up with this grand idea a
quarter of a century ago. When Gorbachev pulled the Soviets out of Estonia in
1991, Ilves asked himself a simple question about the future of a country that
had been brutally occupied by its eastern neighbor for a half-century.
“What do we have?” Ilves asked himself about a country
not much larger than Israel with a population less than half that of Silicon
Valley.
His answer was equally simple. What the 1.3 million
Estonians had, Ilves concluded in 1991, was technology. He recognized that the
Soviets, despite their appropriation of most of Estonia’s wealth, had
bequeathed a decent educational legacy, especially in mathematics. Estonia’s
future, Ilves thus imagined a quarter of a century ago, was hi-tech, especially
personal computers and the internet.
Ilves – a trained psychologist with degrees from
Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania – is also self-schooled in computer
science. He proudly recalls learning to program as a 13-year-old schoolboy in
New Jersey and being among the first geeks to own Apple’s iconic 2E personal
computer. By 1993, he was already arguing that Estonia “should computerize all
schools” and by 1997 had championed putting all Estonian schools online and
establishing publicly funded internet centers around the country.
Size matters, Ilves figured about
Estonia’s new role in a post-cold war, multipolar world. In the mid-90s he
claims to have “reverse-engineered” Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work, the 1995
bestseller arguing that information technology would undermine large-scale
industrial production. What he calls his “backward reading” of Rifkin led him
to recognize the importance of Estonia’s miniature physical size in creating a
substantial post-industrial economy, where a small, tightly knit hi-tech
workforce of perpetually pivoting entrepreneurs could reinvent Estonia as the
original startup nation.
Yet despite its multibillion-dollar success stories –
including Skype, Playtech and more startups per person than anywhere else in
the world – Estonia isn’t just “E-Stonia”, some Baltic version of Silicon Valley or Israel. The
little Baltic republic – with the counterintuitive Ilves at its helm – is
actually building something more ambitious than just another tightly knit
ecosystem of entrepreneurs, investors and technologists.
Estonia is pioneering a model for a democratically
transparent 21st-century networked society – the opposite of Putin’s opaque
virtual reality show – by giving everyone a digital license plate. “Our goal is
to make it impossible to do bad things,” he explains. “Six billion lanes, and
nobody has a license plate except the Estonians.”
Is Estonia becoming a 21st-century panopticon?
That is Ilves’ grand – one might even say baroque –
idea. Under his presidency over the past 10 years, Estonia has pioneered a
series of technological reforms to not only bring everyone online but also to
create a national database. The system is built around the online ID card,
introduced in 2002, in which its citizens’ information – from healthcare
records to tax filings to educational qualifications to real estate documents –
is stored in a seamlessly integrated national database.
But what about privacy in this database of its
citizens’ intentions, I asked. Surely he’s creating a kind of 21st-century
panopticon, a digital remix of Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century “simple idea of architecture”
where people could be watched in everything they did?
“Our obsession with privacy is misguided,” Ilves – who
is, of course, anything but indifferent to 20th-century Big Brother
surveillance regimes – insists. The Estonian system, he explains, is based on
“trust”. While the national database can be accessed by the authorities, he
stresses, the citizen has to be notified when their records are observed. So if
the system hasn’t been built on Blockchain technology, it nonetheless operates
on Blockchain-like principles – creating a data system that can’t be altered
with notifying both the authorities and citizens.
This is what Ilves calls a “Lockean contract” between
digital citizen and the government. The 21st-century networked sovereign, he
says, is the guarantor of what he calls “data integrity”. While the government
can’t access our data without our knowledge, the citizen no longer has any
anonymity in this system.
So everyone – from government to police to tax
authorities to the citizens themselves – are transparent. Ilves sees this
accountable system, the antithesis of Vladislav Surkov’s opaque Russian reality
television show, as being the essential foundations of a social contract for
our networked age. It will, he believes, encourage responsible use of the
internet. It may even flush out the trolls.
Rather than privacy from the state, the real concern,
Ilves insists, is the integrity of data. Instead of worrying about somebody
else knowing our blood type, we should be worried when they start “fiddling”
with that data to change our blood type.
Snowden ‘harmed the EU privacy debate’
This focus on data integrity is why Ilves is much less
concerned with Snowden’s NSA revelations than either last year’s Office of Personnel
Management (OPM) hack in which the data of 21 million people was
stolen, or with the ongoing fight between Apple and the FBI over a back door to
the iPhone’s data.
Ilves believes that paranoia over the Snowden
revelations “harmed the debate” about privacy in the EU. The NSA, he quipped,
wasn’t “mining the deep packets of Bohemian poets sending emails to their
girlfriends”. In contrast, the OPM and Apple cases are both about trust. Giving
the authorities a blanket and unverifiable back door on the iPhone, for
example, means that citizens can no longer trust either their government or
Apple.
Trust, then, particularly trust of both government and
an accountable legal system, is the heart of the matter. That’s why Ilves
co-chaired Digital Dividends, a World Bank report published earlier this year
which focuses on the need for developing nations to build the foundations of an
accountable legal system first if they are to develop a thriving digital
sector.
The Estonian model of digital development is
“scalable”, Ilves says, although he acknowledges that its political side is
much easier to build in a small country like Estonia. But, in light of the
revelations from Snowden and other whistleblowers, can we ever really trust the
system – even in a tiny country like Estonia?
So what exactly does the Estonian secret service do, I
ask Ilves as our interview comes to a close. “Track down Russian spies,” the
Estonian president answers nonchalantly before detailing the “brutal” postwar
occupation of his country and Soviet destruction of 10m books between 1945 and
1946.
While he acknowledges that the threat of cyberwarfare
has receded since the big cyberattacks in
2007 and that some of the contemporary paranoia about the
Russian cyberthreat is “hyperventilated”, he doesn’t dismiss the threat of
another occupation. After all, while Ilves might be able to make it “impossible
for people to do bad things” in Estonia, this guarantee doesn’t extend to what
people do in Moscow.
That’s why, Ilves explains, the Estonians are
digitalizing all their indigenous books and shipping the data out of the
country. “And that’s why,” he adds, smiling grimly, “we are in Nato.”
No comments:
Post a Comment