Questions of Knowledge, Technology, Privacy and Efficiency

Sundae Labs’ mission is inspired, in part, by an old Socratic principle – that our well-being and our self-knowledge must depend on one another. “The examined life” is one of man’s greatest gifts. It helps a person improve himself by being conscious of himself, becoming aware of his patterns of thinking and acting, his identity, his way of conducting himself in the world. If he does this diligently, he can become aware of behaviours that thwart the advancement of his life, and the lives of others. Self-examination is one of the most significant philosophical projects in the history of humanity.

Smart technology has not contributed positively to this project.

It made us numerous promises: to make life better, provide autonomy, give us access to more knowledge and information, make better use of our time and energy, and allow us to fulfill our potential. But these promises are broken. Technology has complicated man’s world without adding to
his wisdom, and so it has made him more dangerous to himself. Technology has magnified man’s impulses while reducing the regulating forces of time, distance and difficulty. It has made his thinking more dissociative and distractible. It has made his sociability more narcissistic and less intimate. It multiplied his possibilities so much that he cannot make choices soberly. It created so many competing stories that he cannot tell which are real. It created so many authorities that he does not know which to trust. To him, the world looks like a funhouse of refracted light and mirrors. It moves through him so rapidly that he works harder just to stay in one place. He feels burnout instead of progress, and a great sense of futility. He senses the absurdity of the situation: all of this technological abundance could be helping him, if only he knew how to harness it.

In this process, something else hashappened.

The idea of the human being has somehow grown smaller. He has been capable of great feats throughout his history. He can build mind palaces of memory, and open vast spaces inside himself to explore, imagine and create. But as the mobile smartphone roots itself, it is harder and harder to separate the human
being from his technological appendage. It becomes his default way of idling, socializing, and solving problems. When he is caught without his device, man feels severed from himself. This dependence is reflexive, and gives him a constant feeling of anxiety, of being powerless and naked on his own. Even when he is aware of its dangers he usually cannot bring himself to act on them; he does not feel that he has any alternative to choose. He lives in this double bind, and it makes him feel less like a human being and more like a restless beast. As the philosophy Heidegger famously warned, technology is not fitting
into the frame of the human being; he is being remade to fit into its frame, and is finding himself shrinking in the process.

Human Data

Meanwhile, the person gives himself away.Through apps, subscriptions, and various commercial activities, his data is extracted from him. All the details of his life – health, habits,hobbies, moods, taste in food, art and sex – are given to parties that do not care for him, that use the data to nudge his behaviour and improve their products and strategies. He receives a service in return, but not the knowledge that could be gleaned from his data. If aggregated, this knowledge could be powerful, and frightening. His browser history can reveal the objects of his interest and desire; keystrokes and speech patterns can reveal the process of thinking; his movements can reveal his habits and vices; and biometrics can indicate his heath and temperament. It is now possible to create models and profiles of a person with these trackable metrics, as though we were naturalists observing a foreign species. We can image his physical state, his mental state, and the patterns that make up his life and relationships.

Human Data and Privacy

These patterns are sensitive, and veryrevealing. If made available to other parties, they leave a person exposed to shame, invasion, reductive profiling, and a myriad of other harms. This is the environment we currently find ourselves in: a landscape rife with data brokerage and breaches of privacy. Laws around the world have failed to keep up with this problem and provide adequate safeguards, because the intuitive significance of privacy has not been adequately translated into our ethical consciousness, much less into public policy. Meanwhile, the aforementioned double bind: people are both anxious about technology and utterly incapable of choosing against it. This is why privacy is central, and anything else that Sundae Labs hopes to achieve must founded first on it – not merely to protect a
person from concrete harm, but from the psychological danger of being watched. Our digital worlds are now extensions of our home. They are our bedrooms, our bathrooms, our living rooms. The presence of interloping eyes affects our sense of solitude. It affects how honestly we are able to look at ourselves, how directly we are able to talk to ourselves. How do we ensure that our data cannot be breached by the outside observer, and give the person the space to breath, the space to see himself clearly?