Crime Against Humanity: Hands Up and Give Us Your Wallet, 3
When you appoint a certification authority you entrust it with the related power. The parties appoint an arbitrator and in doing so they also accept to abide by its arbitration. The point is the gap from arbitration to arbitrariness, and that authority can turn into arbitrariness the power entrusted to it by altering, canceling, ransoming its entries in various ways: it can alter them to the advantage of someone and to the detriment of someone else, it can extort money based on them, it can interfere with their use for power, control and suppression purposes.
I’ll explain where this goes with an example: the digital “Cloud” now in fashion.
As digital tools advance, we move more and more of our heritage to them. “To move”, in addition to putting things in the destination, also tends to mean removing those things from the source. Hence an increasing reliance on those digital tools, while we’re enticed by “practicality” to get rid of the originals in our hands in favour of the copies.
Then comes the “Cloud”: based partly on efficiency and partly on our humanoid faults, we’re convinced to delegate to others the care for our heritage for a fee. Well, it could be said that delegating the care for one’s belongings, just like outsourcing in business, is an implicit admission of incapability: if you make me do this, maybe it’s because it’s cheaper to you, in which case chances are it ultimately is at the expence of someone, but it is far more likely that it’s because you were unable to do it yourself.
Then, little by little, our heritage in the digital cloud is no longer ours any more. After possession, property is questioned as well. “Terms and conditions” shift in the shade of their awkwardness and nuisance, and in the shade of those terms and conditions products become services. You think you’ve bought a book, a record, an ice cream, but you didn’t: they rented it to you. Your heritage is not yours anymore, now in terms of property as well as in terms of possession. Ok, so what?
