Hi everyone. The organizers here were a bit surprised when I said I wouldn't be needing any computer equipment. I had no slides and no audio or anything techy for my talk. So I think also the technicians are very happy to have a break. It's maybe going a bit against the grain of this sort of event, but I'm reverting to good old spoken

word. So as was announced, it's not in the program but the title of this talk is pessimism is the new optimism. It is very human and in some sense a prerequisite of

survival to try and find the best in everything and sometimes to avoid altogether seeing what is bad. A healthy relationship relies on being able to overlook the harmless flaws of the other. But when one person continually avoids confronting serious transgressions by the other, a relationship becomes unhealthy.

The husband who pretends not to know about his wife's affairs, the parents who won't admit to their child's drug abuse, the employee who won't report a bullying boss, the abused woman who won't leave her tormentor. In all such situations, people are able

to come up with compelling justifications for their behavior. You don't understand, the argument may go, she can be so nice or he wouldn't cope without me or things are starting to get better now. In psychology, this pattern of deviant judgment in particular

situations is called cognitive bias. We are all subject to it to a greater or lesser extent and right now, many of us are guilty of such bias in one particular relationship. This relationship began, at least for the older ones amongst us, with the other party

as a bulky stationary counterpart who is mostly confined to one room. Despite the restriction, encounters could be exciting and you generally had fun together. This companion knew its place and stayed there, its long tail winding down to the nearest available socket. The

relationship was pretty much all on your terms. As time went on, the friend got cooler and more mobile, showing up in ever smaller and sexier attire. Eventually it could fit in your bag, now it can snuggle in your pocket. It insinuated itself into more and

more of your personal life. Soon it's aiming to get right under your skin. It may already have become your most intimate companion. It probably goes everywhere with you during the day and then lies by your bed at night, monitoring your sleep cycle if you wish and ready to sound a wake up call when you desire. You love looking at it. All day

you stroke its body, coaxing endless delights to its screen. This amazing friend, the internet, gave an image of you and also a reflection of the world. You thought this companion was true, that you could tell it anything and never be betrayed. You thought

that you were still in control of the relationship. Then Edward Snowden revealed that your cozy affair is more of a menage a trois. States and corporations are part of the intimate circle, collecting, analysing and storing data about everything you do through your friend. The news is shocking. You're upset, even outraged. This can't go on,

you think. Something has to change. But at the same time, the friend keeps purring so enticingly to give you message alerts. It offers you upgrades and freebies and funky new apps. It's the friend all your other friends use to reach you. If you stop taking it

everywhere, you'll probably lose your way a lot more and miss out on all kinds of very important stuff. You can't imagine not having its warmth against your thigh. You don't know what you do in those spare minutes without its ready distractions. So you ignore its infidelities and try not to think about its power to hurt you. It'll be fine, you tell yourself.

Things are bound to improve. The signs are clear. You're suffering from digital cognitive bias. I suffer from it too. And that's another very human tendency to spot the flaws in others and offer excellent advice while persisting, possibly obliviously, in similar behaviours

yourself. People who do this on a daily basis are called psychologists and, you guessed it, fiction writers. Since Snowden's disclosures, I've talked to many people who've said, I don't want to change my behaviour on principle. People feel they have a right

to expose whatever they like to a selective circle, and it is the obligation of the state to protect them with laws that make it impossible for anyone outside the chosen circle to exploit their information. At first, this seemed to me like a contradiction in terms. How can we demand respect for privacy while at the same time going to ever-new levels

of personal exposure? But then, I thought, perhaps there isn't a contradiction. Perhaps each of these things leads to and necessitates the other. If you're putting post-coital selfies, ironically or not, on Instagram, as was a trend last month under hashtag after

sex, then presumably you're going to be really concerned about privacy laws and who has access to your information. On the other hand, I can't help thinking that the people who put such intimate material into the public realm have no true concept of what

is or should be private and don't really care about the issue. Perhaps they've already entered some Orwellian realm of doublespeak where exposure means privacy, as if the more you reveal, the more you prove yourself to be personal and personable, and thus perversely, publicly qualify as a fully-fledged private being. A couple of years ago, it seemed this

paradigm might have become mainstream when following the discovery that two mass murderers, Norwegian Anders Breivik and American James Holmes, used almost no social media. The mainstream media hurried to suggest that people who weren't on Facebook could be considered

suspicious by potential employers and lovers, as if the first question to establish rapport in any situation must naturally be, are you on Facebook? Because of course, the internet is not a place where people exaggerate, lie, or have false identities. Anyone who

uses digital devices regularly will have left layers of personal imprints on the quicksands of the net. There, no tides shift along the shore, washing away traces of yesterday. Everything you've done online stays online, because the internet and its servers never

forget. Most people are divulging seemingly superficial things through social media, or engaging in activities like shopping, banking, and researching, which don't seem especially implicating in and of themselves. However, all this information can cumulatively reveal a lot about our different selves. Past, present, future, professional, social,

sexual. With data storage capacities continually growing and getting ever cheaper, our digital shadows will persist, holding onto details of our every keystroke and mouse click, yet forgetting, letting go, leaving things behind, these are necessary passages of individual

development. We've evolved biologically to have a partial sense of the past, because that is, for all its risks, the most effective way for us to exist. In the digital world, everything persists, and even if you or I can't access it, someone can. Increasingly,

there will be discrepancies between the self in virtual and in real space, distinctions the computer can't register, and no algorithm can work out. Mass surveillance is so dangerous, because our data trail leaves us at the mercy of people who do not know us, and do not really

care about us, except as a means to an abstract end, like security or marketing. It's easy to regard what's happening, because we don't immediately feel its negative effect, or we believe ourselves to be immune to it. Yet with advertising by corporations, for example, if things are

constantly tailored to sway us in a certain direction, as they are now, we may incline that way almost in spite of ourselves. We don't become automata, but we inevitably react to such manipulation, perhaps even just subconsciously. As for the data collection by governments, all the evidence shows that such indiscriminate harvesting does not

make us safer, and all common sense shows that it infringes our rights and undermines our democracies. To those who say, I have nothing to hide, the only answer is, we all have something to hide, depending on who's looking and what they want to do with

the information. Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something there to hang him, Cardinal Richelieu said in the 16th century. Every era has its Richelieu's. This is why it's so essential to have a more stringent international legal framework on how and by whom our data can be used. Of course, the law cannot make

people value their own privacy, but it can force others to respect that privacy, which is the critical thing. Until that framework is in place, though, what can we do? In totalitarian states, citizens used to have three choices, inner migration, resistance, or

exile. The inward migration was a retreat into the self, an attempt to live without challenging the status quo in the hope that one would remain unnoticed and be left alone. Resistance involved challenging the prevailing order, taking risks, even with one's life. And

exile, of course, was emigration, leaving for somewhere more free. Today, exile is no longer an option. The new international order means that we can be followed or observed everywhere we

go. Even being offline can no longer protect us. That's not to say a bit of a retreat from technology would have no effect. On the contrary, it could empower us in surprising ways, not least by reminding us of the freedom in being digitally disconnected. But a complete retreat from technology, even if it were possible, would be irresponsible. Because freedom is not preserved

just by evading a threat. Freedom needs guardians who remain ever vigilant of possible infractions. You can't properly resist a system by opting out of it, nor can you resist by finding your own personal normality within the existing environment. Resistance is an active state that

involves staying at odds with what is there while seeking an alternative vision of the future. Resistance requires thinking. The basis of optimism, suggested Oscar Wilde with characteristic contrariness, is sheer terror. This assertion might hold a clue to why most of us

want to continue pretty much as usual after Snowden's revelations. We understand the sheer scale of the assault on our privacy and therefore on our rights. But this is so overwhelming that it's easier to stop thinking about it, proceed as usual, and hope for the best. But to accept

constant observation, even if you don't consciously feel it as a restriction or imposition, is to allow a gradual curtailment of freedom and to be complicit in the diminution of democracy.

The Polish sociologist, Sigmund Bauman, claims that we've lost the guts, the stamina, and above all, the will to persist in defending these rights, these irreplaceable building blocks of individual autonomy. I refuse to believe that. I sense people would act if they knew how, but most of us are unsure about what would really make a difference.

We have to remember that even when we can't take practical steps to remedy a problem, we can reclaim some measure of control by how we choose to think about it. So instead of brushing aside the mass surveillance warnings, we must keep pondering them,

forcing ourselves to consider that the status quo may not improve much and certainly not quickly. In short, we must allow ourselves to be pessimistic. That doesn't mean becoming doomsters and developing a tendency to stress the negative or take the gloomiest possible view as one of the kinder definitions of pessimism expresses it. Pessimism is also a

philosophical position, and in this sense it doesn't just stem from a negative mindset, but is rather informed by an outlook that seeks to face up to the distasteful realities of the world and to eliminate irrational hopes and expectations. Personally,

I like the British writer Will Selb's laconic view of pessimism as a willingness to accept that things may be for the worst in a less than perfect world, though my inclination is to adapt it slightly, replacing the word accept with acknowledge, so that pessimism

is a willingness to acknowledge that things may be for the worst in a less than perfect world. Acceptance, a useful attitude in many situations, is obviously not desirable in the face of an evil like mass surveillance, whereas acknowledgement involves admitting into our minds other possibilities, even dark and disturbing ones. To have reflected on

the worst is, in some sense, even if just rudimentarily, to be more ready for it. The skillful warrior does not rely on the enemies not coming, but on his own preparedness, Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War. It may seem grandiose to speak of mass surveillance in

such militaristic terms, but the digital realm is a kind of battleground right now, with states and corporations on a ruthless advance to get hold of our data. The British intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, certainly

already sees it that way, declaring on their website that online is the new frontline. We citizens are the targets, being indiscriminately bombarded with surveillance. State agencies are at it in the name of security, while corporations do it under the benign guise of customer service. The timeless question of history lessons the world over, what would

you have done, is no longer just an abstract question. The tyranny is here, a digitatorship of states and corporations. The democratic privileges we cherish today were hard won. Millions fought and died to

overthrow totalitarianism. Now its threat looms again in a very different, though potentially equally serious form. Thankfully, we do not yet need arms for this fight, but we do need courage, courage to think, to face the hard, ugly facts of reality. Freedom, justice,

fairness, these are not destinations at which we arrive through somebody else's efforts, only to lie back and take a holiday from thinking. Each generation has to engage with these concepts anew, redefining them as necessary. Human rights are almost always accompanied by the word responsibilities, because what we enjoy, we also have a duty to protect.

During the Second World War, the British writer Virginia Woolf often felt useless, wishing she could contribute more to the war effort, and conscious that writing was somehow irrelevant in the circumstances. Yet she went on writing, using it to think

about and understand what was happening, and to analyse her role within that. Thinking is my fighting, she came to realise. And that's what we need to recognise too. Thinking must become our fighting, for it is the only thing that can offer us immunity from the seductions and manipulations of tyranny. The internet, with its manifold conveniences

and attractions, its intersection with almost every facet of our lives, could become the most despotic tool in human history. I know I'm focusing on the negative, and I have no wish to deny the internet's capacity to empower, enrich and liberate. But I am daring

to take the bleaker line, because we are all already converts to the broad church of the web, believers in the promise of digital salvation. Indeed, many of us, especially at such an event, are fanatics, insistent still that the good outweighs the bad.

Cognitive bias, gone a little mad, you might say. But wherever we are on the spectrum of faith in the future of the net, optimist or pessimist, there is a single secular invocation for our digital congregation. Let us think. Ever since last autumn, I've

been doing an online search now and then, checking changes in internet use since Snowden. It didn't turn out much in the way of broad usage statistics as I wanted, though it was interesting to see that within a few months of the revelations being published, usage of DuckDuckGo and StartPage had increased significantly. Then a few weeks ago, I came

across a couple of new surveys. One in the US, conducted by Harris International on behalf of a security company called ESET, found that 47% of Americans think more carefully about where they go, what they say and what they do online. These people have even changed

their behavior and are conducting fewer financial transactions online, including reducing their online shopping and banking. Meanwhile, 24% of the total respondents said they were less inclined to communicate via email. These sorts of choices, simple gestures of withholding,

can be incredibly effective because they harness our power as consumers by saying no. Companies feel and notice this. If more of us were saying no, more of the time, corporations would be forced to reconsider what they do with our data. A little bit more mindfulness as we go about our digital activities would be enough to send a strong message to those

watching us across the web. Cultivating my own awareness has helped put me on guard against subtle things of which I was previously oblivious. I noticed the psychological pressure to buy being exerted everywhere online. Airlines with their alerts.

Only two seats left. Price comparison websites that inform you there are nine people viewing this hotel last booked three hours ago. One leading online bookshop has a new tool called Watch People Shop. You run your mouse over a map of the world and can see that someone just bought Genesis 3 in South Korea 28 seconds ago or someone in Australia

bought the marriage book seven seconds ago. What is this if not incontrovertible evidence that we are continually being monitored in real time by companies? The pressure doesn't even stop after you've bought something. Your item has been dispatched you are kindly

informed and often given a specific time slot in which it will be delivered. This might be convenient but it is also restricting. I find myself wondering if I will be home. In the past I would have tried to be home like my life should be organized around the

delivery of my purchases rather than the other way around. Sure you can change the delivery time. You can even track your item all the way along its route. But what happened to ordering something and forgetting about it until it arrived? At your doorstep? At the post office? At your neighbors? Of course once it's there the sender wants a review and inevitably has

further recommendations. The barrage of helpful information from companies is actually an excuse for constant intrusion on our personal space. Somehow though it's a little easier to resist now that I see it for what it is. The rallying cry of the enlightenment was sapere

aude, dare to think. Our digital enlightenment is long overdue. Until recently most of us carelessly embraced every technological advance. We fell for every online freebie never

considering that if the product is free you are the product. As Nicholas Fargo, head of the Belgian Center for Data Protection, astutely pointed out. We have already consented to use of our irises as identifiers. Will we also allow our hearts to be colonized by corporations? Everyone's heartbeat rhythm or ECG is unique. A company called NYMI already

offers to put your heart into it, it being your digital universe, by making that singular rhythm the ultimate password to all your devices. Which brings us back to where we started with matters of the heart. Why do we stay in bad relationships? Because we

don't want to be alone. Isn't this why we're reluctant to put some distance, however short, however temporary, between us and our friend, the internet? We're afraid of being left behind, of missing out, of being lonely, even for a second. But if we don't establish

boundaries now, this digital liaison is going to turn into a torturous affair that leaves us more exposed and vulnerable. Until eventually, too late, we face the truth, chillingly summed up by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, that to live entirely in public is a form

of solitary confinement. That's the kind of loneliness we should dread. Never fight, except in a crisis, Sun Tzu advised in The Art of War. The crisis is

here. The weapons are our minds. Our thoughts must lead the fight. Expecting the worst, but living in hope. Don't tell me that's too pessimistic. Not when the attitude can keep company with the position of Martin Luther King, who declared, we must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. He also believed that

the time is always right to do the right thing. And I think you know what I'm going to say. The time is always right to do the right thinking, or in our modern parlance, hashtag fight for freedom. Thank you Priya. Are there any questions? Hi, thank you very

much for this very nice and enlightening and motivating talk that you had here with

us. It's really great. Thank you for that, first of all. One question for you though, do you have a hint for us where to start? Because I really have to say, for me personally, I'm one of those people as well. I'm really living with my mobile phone, kind of in a relationship as you have described it. And I really love it, honestly. Not the

phone itself, the services that come along with it. However, I see the points and specifically being here now for two days, listening to more of those speeches, I'm more willing now to change something. But I don't know where to start. Do you have an idea? I think

starting with little things, I mean, that's what I did. I use start page now as a search engine rather than Google. And like I said, I think you just start to notice more things as you go about your daily life using these gadgets. And you say no to more

things. I mean, whenever I got an email to do, maybe do a survey, because I might get a 150 pound voucher. I would almost always do it if it was a company that I liked, because I was sort of bribed into thinking, oh, I might get something free. And I never do them anymore, because I think you're taking everything from me anyway. And then I'm stupid enough to fill in a survey as well. No, thank you. So I think it's just little

things. And as you do those, your awareness expands. And then maybe you do more. But I think this is such a huge part of our lives and our world. It's really hard to imagine doing something drastic. And so I just believe in small steps. And you know

what they say for smokers, don't give up giving up. So don't give up trying, just do the little things. And I really believe that that starts to expand our consciousness and to start things shifting. And talk about it to other people, because I really believe that's another way as well to keep this salient and to keep people alert.

Thank you. Just another question, because it links up. Yesterday, Mr Morozov, Elgeny Morozov, he made a very convincing point for me. He said that the kind of control you are talking about, surveillance and the way we are losing data to others, this is not only

driven by our relationship to the internet and what it provides. But he said it's also driven by the basic political and social surroundings around the internet. So I wonder, where do you see the front line in this fight? Is it only the relationship to the

devices and the services? Or is it a larger social and political issue? Yeah, that's a very good point. And I think it's definitely part of a wider social and political environment. I mean, the internet doesn't exist in a vacuum. And certainly,

for me, what it represents most strongly is a sort of consumer aspect of our culture, which permeates every level, online and offline. And so, however, I mean, I think so many things need to change. And the reason I call the internet the front line

is because the way it can be used against us seems to me right now the most threatening. The way we can be watched, the way we can be manipulated, it just seems to me to be a sort of point at which our agency is most threatened. And our understandings of what it is to be an autonomous individual, the self as a sovereign being that can't

be watched. You know, our most private and intimate spaces now are being sort of subject to observation. And that's why I think it's the most dangerous. Because if we can't completely be ourselves, if we can't be free citizens, then our society is really

threatened from the very core. I mean, I always think of what Roosevelt said, that we are the great arsenal of democracy. It's the people that make it. And I think the instrument is a tool that could really be used to somehow hone us in to restrict us if we're not careful. And that's why I think it's fair to say it's the front line.

Any more questions? So I will say thank you Priya Basel for being here and enjoy your day. Thank you. It was a pleasure being with you.