=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1121/paper6
|storemode=property
|title=Legibility, Privacy and Creativity: Linked Data in a Surveillance Society
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1121/privon2013_paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-1121
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/BrewsterH13
}}
==Legibility, Privacy and Creativity: Linked Data in a Surveillance Society
==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1121/privon2013_paper6.pdf
Legibility, Privacy and Creativity: Linked Data
in a Surveillance Society
Christopher Brewster1 and Dougald Hine2
1
Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK
2
http://dougald.co.uk
Abstract. This paper looks at the issue of privacy and anonymity thro-
ugh the prism of Scott’s concept of legibility i.e. the desire of the state
to obtain an ever more accurate mapping of its domain and the actors
in its domain. We argue that privacy was absent in village life in the
past, and it has arisen as a temporary phenomenon arising from the
lack of appropriate technology to make all life in the city legible. Cities
have been the loci of creativity for the major part of human civilisation.
There is something specific about the illegibility of cities which facilitates
creativity and innovation. By providing the technology to catalogue and
classify all objects and ideas around us, this leads to a consideration
of semantic web technologies, Linked Data and the Internet of Things
as unwittingly furthering this ever greater legibility. There is a danger
that the over description of a domain will lead to a loss in creativity
and innovation. We conclude by arguing that our prime concern must
be to preserve illegibility because the survival of some form, any form,
of civilisation depends upon it.
Keywords: legibility, privacy, innovation, creativity, semantic web, linked data
1 Introduction
“Slipping through the raindrops” - this is an expression the mother of one of the
authors uses to explain her desire to be invisible to the state. She wants as little
to do with officialdom as possible whether it comes in the form of pensions, taxes,
building regulations or anything else. She operates largely in a gift economy and
avoids showing herself, making herself visible, to the state wherever possible. At
the age of 74, her attitude comes from experiences stretching back to the Second
World War and beyond. And yet this is largely an illusion, or wishful thinking,
as she has a passport, a bank account, a telephone number, and more recently a
mobile phone. She shops from Amazon, has a Yahoo email account, and because
she uses Firefox almost all her Internet searches are performed through Google.
She is entirely visible to the state, and to corporate extensions of the state,
should they wish to know more about her or actually focus the technology at
their disposal upon her.
In this paper, we will build upon James C. Scott’s concept of legibility, specif-
ically the continuous desire of the state to increase the legibility of the actors
with which it interacts. We will argue that Linked Data, and similarly the In-
ternet of Things, are in fact further steps along the continuum of increasing the
legibility of human and non-human entities in the world to the state and state-
like actors. We will argue that the process is neither surprising nor objectively
negative. Looking back at the history of state sponsored interventions which in-
crease legibility, we can identify concomitant reductions of freedom and increases
in freedom.
Privacy and anonymity, while distinct, have historically been an anomaly, the
result of the coincidence of the creation of large cities and the lack of appropriate
technological means for the state to track all people and activities in its area of
concern. In the village there is no privacy. In McLuhan’s “Global Village” yet
again there will be none. Privacy is merely a specific type of freedom, the freedom
to act or think in a manner that may or may not be approved of in wider society
without its knowledge. Facebook and similar technologies have shown how easily
people ignore their privacy, often due to lack of awareness, making public some
of their most private and intimate thoughts and actions on the medium. Of far
greater concern than the loss of privacy is the loss of the illegible. The illegible
is the space where things have not been named, where ambiguity and vagueness
can be found, where ideas and artefacts can be mixed, re-mixed, re-created, ab
initio. Copyrights and patents are part of the ever increasing attempts by the
state to make legible the creative impulse, the intellectual innovations which
could affect or change society. Digital Rights Management, as many authors
have argued [6] , is an extension of that control into the digital world exactly
there where illegibillity (in this case in file sharing) has made itself manifest.
The core technological innovation of the Semantic Web/Linked Data stack
lies in the idea of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). These are fundamentally
names for entities in the digital universe, and in the real world. Their immense
power lies, first, in the granularity – there is no technical impediment to hav-
ing URIs for every person, every tree, every sheep, every tomato we eat. The
second power lies in the act of stating that x is the same as y (owl:SameAs, or
owl:EquivalentClass). Conceptually this is no different from an ID card or pass-
port allowing the state to connect your employment with your taxes or military
service. This simple act of identifying “same as” lies at the heart of Google’s
unification of different services and the single sign on. In the rest of this paper
we will attempt to make the case a) that privacy, however desirable, is a histor-
ical anomaly; b) that each increase in legibility has reduced freedoms in some
spheres but increased them in others, some of which we have come to consider
desirable or even as rights; and c) that the real challenge is not lack of privacy
but rather the loss of illegibility because creativity and innovation depend on
this.
2 Legibility
The concept of legibility was proposed by the anthropologist and political sci-
entist James C. Scot in his book Seeing like a State [18]. Legibility, for Scott,
reflects the attempt by the state to “arrange the population in ways that sim-
plified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription and prevention of
rebellion”, usually by means of a map (e.g. cadastral maps), model or other
abstraction that allows a “synoptic” view of the land and the people in it. To
this need for making society more legible, he ascribes a wide range of initiatives
across time and space including the methods of Prussian scientific forestry, the
creation of standard measuring systems and the assignment of surnames. The
need for legibility lies in the need for the state to be able to make effective in-
terventions whether positive or negative, in the provision of social welfare or the
taking of plunder. In order to make such effective interventions, a synoptic view
is needed, a view which simplifies the landscape being surveyed (whether real
or metaphorical) sufficiently to make these interventions possible. Simplification
goes hand in hand with this “ongoing project of legibility” of the state, a project
which Scott considers is never seen as complete. Simplification for the purposes
of greater legibility consists of seeking out facts with the following characteris-
tics: First, the state seeks only facts in which it is interested i.e. utilitarian facts.
Second, it is interested in documentary facts whether numerical or verbal. Third,
the state seeks facts which are typically static i.e. valid at some point in time and
place, rather than processes or narratives. Fourth, the state seeks aggregate facts
such as traffic statistics or population wide facts. Finally, the state is interested
in standardised facts, not facts which are true of only one individual [18].
Legibility has greatly increased over time. This is one of the central themes
of Scott’s work. When the state had limited power and resources, its ability to
track, measure, count or map what its subjects were doing was limited. Many
actions by the state were steps towards greater legibility for the fundamental
purposes of taxation, conscription and control. These included the appointment
of provincial governors in Ancient Rome, the building of roads, the use of a
single currency, the obligation to have a surname, the establishment of cadastral
maps, the imposition of one language across a whole realm, the establishment of a
census, social security numbers, passports, identity cards and video surveillance.
A great many technological advances contributed to the legibility project of the
state. This did not mean that these advances did not also have a positive impact,
as we will discuss below.
The relevance of the notion of legibility to privacy lies in that privacy is
essentially a specific form of illegibility. Privacy exists either because the state
is unable (for legal, cultural, or technological reasons) to capture the relevant
information, or because it is uninterested. The state has long sought to know
our names or dates of birth, but as yet the state is largely uninterested in what
we ate last night. Private information entails first the existence of some sort of
information to keep private (i.e. it must be documentary in some sense), and
secondly entails some sort of state or other entity against which the individual
seeks to keep their privacy i.e. not provide the information. In a similar manner,
we can see surveillance as an attempt by the state to increase legibility without
the overt awareness or agreement of the individuals concerned.
The history of the growth of the state, and correspondingly the legibility of
society, has largely gone hand in hand with the growth of technology. A great
deal of technological progress, if it has not been driven by the intent to increase
legibility, has had such an effect. Thus the Roman road network was a means
for the state to control, collect information and intervene where necessary across
the empire. Equally the process of mapping such continents as Africa and South
America were part and parcel of making them legible for conquest, colonisation
and taxation.
There is an interesting contradiction in the growth of cities. On the one
hand, many states and empires sought to settle nomadic communities (a topic
discussed at length by Scott) in order to make them more legible, and yet as ever
more people congregated to the cities so “illegible” activities occurred, whether
Socrates speaking with the Athenian youth, the crowds of Roman, Byzantine and
Medieval cities, or later on the “revolutions” of ‘68. It is important, for example,
to understand Baron Haussmann’s restructuring of Paris as a desire to ensure
rapid and easy access for the army to all parts of Paris, to eliminate the illegible
and politically dangerous slums and working class districts [18]. He succeeded in
achieving this to a large extent, except for the region of Montmartre (Bellevue)
which led to the Paris Commune and a subsequent very violent suppression. A
very similar dynamic is currently being played out in the pacification of Brazilian
favelas [25]. Throughout history, cities have both enabled and frustrated the
ambitions for greater legibility.
3 Privacy and Anonymity
Privacy is a modern phenomenon, above all a phenomenon to be found in the
city. Privacy in any meaningful sense is absent from the village or nomadic
community. Anyone who has lived in a village for any length of time can vouch for
this experience. Every action, every conversation, every purchase, every dalliance
is logged, commented upon and evaluated by the ever present gossip mill. We
should not forget also that rumour was not just “idle curiosity” but provides a
nexus for social control, social welfare and social cohesion [5,11].
The experience of privacy and anonymity arises due to the atomisation (and
social alienation) of the modern industrial city. Even older pre-industrial cities
do not have very much privacy because the village is often re-created in a specific
quarter of the town (such being the case in many parts of Athens to this day).
However, large modern industrial cities with a mix of incomers from various
regions have provided opportunities for real privacy in that other people are too
busy with industrial life to care too much about the strange man who incessantly
paints in the attic, the couple who have strange sexual proclivities, or the old
person who dies alone undiscovered. Even if they are observed, they are usually
not interfered with without due cause. The 20th and early 21st centuries have
seen a gradual erosion of this anonymity provided by the city.
In certain regards, the experience of privacy arises in the gap between the
state creating or enabling the growth of the city on the one hand, and the absence
of any appropriate technology to ensure the legibility of all citizens in the city.
The growth of telecommunications, the Internet, and especially the explosion
of social media together with such technologies as free video conferencing have
radically shrunk the globe, or at least the manner in which it is experienced by
its inhabitants. Today we communicate via Skype for free, videoconference with
relatives and colleagues across the world, and share photographs and videos
via a variety of social media and video sharing websites. McLuhan’s “global
village” is truly global. And somehow it has become a village in unexpected ways
including our loss of privacy. People make public their own lives on social media
in a way unprecedented, and often intentionally or inadvertently make other
people’s private lives public People have shared an immense range of personal
information on social media sites such as Facebook ranging from their current
relationship status, through images and videos of themselves and their friends
drunk, to whether they had sex the night before.
Some people are surprised at the way people expose parts of their lives using
such technologies. However, there has been a constant adaptation to the changes
wrought by technology. There are two aspects of importance here. One is that as
technology has progressed so more facts become documented and thus legible.
The “fact” you made a telephone call used to have to be obtained by interview-
ing the telephone operator, and now is just logged amongst millions of other
electronic data an individual leaves as detritus in their wake. Second what was
seen as normal at one stage in technological development becomes strange or
abnormal at another.
It would appear that there is an inverse relationship between the the legibility
desired by the state and personal privacy. More legibility equals less privacy. If no
records were kept of the telephone conversations you had beyond last week, any
state actor such as the police would be entirely dependent on personal memory
to recall any conversations, and who spoke to whom when. Now every email
we send, every website we visit, every search we perform on a search engine,
every conversation over video conferencing, every electronic purchase, and even
every act of window shopping is recorded first by the respective organisation,
and then, as we have long suspected and recently had confirmed, these records
are frequently passed on for further perusal by state spying agencies [8] 3 .
Much has been made of the need to preserve anonymity, especially in the
context of the large scale collection of data. The fundamental idea is that ag-
gregated or “anonymised” data is being made available by mobile phone, web
analytics and financial services companies, as well as many others, to third par-
ties for various types of analysis and data mining. Unfortunately politicians still
think this is feasible - Vivienne Redding recently stated “Anonymous data is
easy to deal with. .... There is no risk.”4 . The reality as many writers have noted
is that anonymisation of data is unrealistic since it is easy to take such data
and identify individuals. Whether it is mobile data logs, or even just the sensor
3
This text was begun before the revelations of Snowden concerning the NSA and the
Prism project, and was completed subsequently.
4
Speech given on 26 March 2013 http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_
SPEECH-13-269_en.htm
traces of a mobile, whether the search queries or video rentals, all such data can
be used to re-identify people [15,16] As far back 1999, Scott McNealy said “You
have zero privacy anyway, ... get over it”[22].
4 Types of Freedom
Privacy is currently seen as a human right. The notion of human rights has grad-
ually become an important legal concept in the last 200 years, largely due to the
influence of the the Enlightenment, and the American and French Revolutions. It
is important to remember the relative newness of the concept of “human rights”
historically. There is no history of a “right to privacy” until very recently. The
important point is that privacy is a specific form of freedom. As noted above,
it is a freedom from legibility. Privacy and “illegibility” are not equivalent in
that there are various forms of the absence of legibility which are not about
privacy. The freedom to be a nomadic tribe or a travelling gypsy is not focussed
on privacy. The freedom to save seeds and grow your own varieties of fruit and
vegetables has little to do with privacy. Both are forms of illegibility.
If we are able to see privacy as just one type of freedom that human being
have had or have acquired, then we are able to see technology providing certain
types of freedom at certain times at the cost of other types of freedom. A great
many technological developments in human history have changed the range and
opportunities of human beings, change what they are free to do, or not to do.
Road networks, for example, allow increased freedom of movement, and equally
rapid responses to political challenges. Freedoms were lost and gained.
We now have the freedom to communicate with almost anyone around the
world, often if not always, at zero cost. This is an immense freedom, but has
been associated with a concurrent loss of privacy in that every telephone call we
make is logged and the contents recorded. A freedom gained vs. a freedom lost.
It is now impossible to make a mechanical switched call that leaves no electronic
trace.
Freedom is not an objective state of affairs since freedom is always relative to
the tools and power an individual or community have. Each technological devel-
opment has afforded certain freedoms and opportunities, while unsuspectingly it
has taken away others. A good counter-intuitive example is that of the growth of
the railway system in India in the 19th century under colonial rule, and how it
increased the incidence of famines in the countryside rather than reduced them
[4]. Although there was a freedom provided - to sell into the world market, and
if needed to buy from the world market - in reality presence of a railway line
made it easier for landowners to sell wheat on the international markets at a
higher price and thus the local peasantry starved. Areas with no railway lines
suffered less (ibid.). In an entirely different context, the ability to copy digital
files has transformed (and continues to transform) the music and film industries.
On the one hand huge freedom has arisen to create and access digital content, on
the other hand this has decreased the power and control of the music industry
(though not its profits). This area includes a relatively rare case where technol-
ogy decreases legibility, specifically in the creation of bit torrent, the sharing of
music and other files has become less legible to the state and its proxies.
Perhaps the one of the most important “freedoms” is the freedom to be cre-
ative, to innovate or imagine the “other”. We have noted above the importance
of cities in this regard. There is an extensive literature, especially in the business
and management research domain, on the role of cities and clusters in encour-
aging, facilitating or being dependent on innovation. The obvious and common
explanation for the phenomena is the need for people to congregate face to face,
for ideas, skills and opportunities to come together, for there to be an appropriate
mixture [7,23].
However, there is another way of looking at the phenomenon of cities as loci
of innovation and creativity. We have argued above that cities are concentrated
centres of the illegible. We could thus argue that is is the illegible which enables
the creativity and innovation. Cities provide opportunities for illegible activi-
ties, for un-codified spaces where spontaneity and creativity can emerge. The
combination of people meeting face to face and the absence of the constraints
associated with the village (or any other village-like structure) make it possible
to envisage the “other”, the alternative to that which is at present in existence
or known [17]. In effect, it could be argued that it is by providing illegibility that
the city enables the outpouring of arts, literature, engineering and technology
as a whole. This “hidden variable” would also provide a step towards under-
standing why there is such variability between different cities in their capacity
for innovation and creation.
One argument in favour of such an interpretation, that is of emphasising the
illegible as the driving force or enabler, is the phenomenon we have observed
on the Internet in the last 20-30 years. As the Internet has grown, so there has
been an outpouring of creative ideas in how to use it and innovative services and
products. One needs only to mention email, the World Wide Web, Linux, wikis,
search engines and social media to make this point. Many of the innovations as-
sociated with the internet have be “invented” in cities (hence the fame of Silicon
Valley) which would support the former hypothesis, but equally many ideas and
projects have developed away from cities and are largely the result of the facility
to communicate/create a community and we would argue to experiment. The
famous wild west atmosphere of the Internet both celebrated and maligned is a
quintessentially illegible space allowing the opportunity for creativity, innovation
and the envisioning of the other.
5 The Semantic Web, Linked Data and the Internet of
Things
The Semantic Web vision consists of imagining a machine readable “web of
data” where software agents could negotiate on our behalf to book tickets[19]
or perhaps even recommend girlfriends. In parallel, but in many ways closely
related, there has been the vision of an Internet of Things (IoT), largely involv-
ing the ability to address and communicate at a machine level with everyday
objects such as fridges and cars [2], and to easily scan and identify objects with
such technologies such as RFID [13]. Although there are many aspects to the
Semantic Web and IoT technology stacks, the aspect that interests us here is
that in both cases one core aspect lies in the “naming of things”. The concept of
Unique Resource Identifiers (URIs) and unique IP addresses are both examples
of a vastly more sophisticated technology for the cataloguing, classifying and
naming of both individual real world objects and abstract ideas. In the Seman-
tic Web vision, both objects in the real world (buildings, cars, and people) and
in the abstract world (concepts, categories, classes, individual ideas) have unique
“pointers”, individual names. The Internet of Things vision is a poor cousin, in
one sense, because all it provides are unique identifiers for real world objects
addressable with an IP address. Its ambition in this regard is not quite as all
encompassing as the Semantic Web.
Much work has been undertaken in the Semantic Web research and develop-
ment world to create rigorous, usable ontologies, and while the notion of an over-
arching universal ontology has been long recognised as an unachievable ambition
[21], the use of “namespaces” has enabled a whole industry to develop in creating
formal definitions of a variety of sub-domains. The variety of sub-domains and
corresponding namespaces has led to a great deal of effort being undertaken in
ontology mapping and matching [14,20] because in many ways this becomes the
fundamental challenge for the greater uptake and utility of the technology. The
need for this and the awareness of this challenge has greatly increased with the
appearance of Linked Data, which has made a large amount of data available,
formatted so as to be compatible with the Semantic Web technology stack [3].
Linked Data, and its close relative Open Data, represents a vision where
more and more information is available about all human activity and processes.
Politically, it is the positive, acceptable face of a completely transparent surveil-
lance society. The act of linking the data, whether manually or automatically,
crucially increases the utility and power of the technology stack. Let us imagine
a world of total transparency where all information about an individual is avail-
able through the Linked Data Cloud. We would be able to navigate across from
the person’s name to all their activities, friends, social and political activities,
holidays and reading habits. As we write this, it becomes clear that there is a
very short distance, just a handful of sameAs or equivalentClass statements for
this to be true. In the light of the Snowden revelations, it probably is already
true within the NSA data base.
The Semantic Web and IoT are particularly powerful, in contrast with previ-
ous technologies because of the level of granularity they provide in their descrip-
tive power. It is possible to provide a URI for every item that we can think of.
This means that every item in our physical and abstract worlds can be classified
and characterised. Every item and idea will have some sort of is a type of
classification. If we look at such technologies as standards, in the same way
that weights and measures, roads, and common languages are all standards, we
can see that they will provide immensely powerful infrastructure. The funda-
mental business case for technologies like these is that they facilitate exchange
- both of information and of goods - and thus make it easier to lead our lives
and run businesses. Standards, whether informal or formal, are fundamental to
human social activity and by extension to business activity.
Standards like Schema.org, GoodRelations, FOAF, and Dublin Core, as well
as a myriad of candidate vocabularies and ontologies waiting in the wings, pro-
vide “formal conceptualisations of a domain”. By agreeing on a particular vo-
cabulary, the technologies make certain things possible which could not happen
before. Like all significant technological innovations, the Semantic Web and the
Internet of Things provides very specific but substantial types of freedoms. They
may make it possible to track and trace every item of food we consume, reduce
the incidence of food safety emergencies, enable hyper-local food networks, and
re-fashion the food supply chain in a similar manner to the way the music in-
dustry has been transformed. It is in this light, that we would propose to see the
Semantic Web and Linked Data stack, as well as the Internet of Things, as part
of the “ongoing project” by the state to make all items and actors more legible.
This is not to ascribe agency to the state, but rather to see this as part of an
ongoing trajectory reflecting a certain momentum on the part of the state and
the expansionary dynamics of human technological progress.
Fundamentally, these technologies will provide another layer of infrastruc-
ture, much like the Internet or the mobile phone network, which we will come to
rely on, come to enjoy the freedoms they provide. We will in all likelihood come
to accommodate ourselves to the reductions in other freedoms they result in.
6 Ethical Dilemmas and Unintended Consequences
Each individual is leaving an ever increasing digital footprint, no matter what
they do in their lives. An individual’s telephone calls are logged and the actual
conversations recorded. We are yet to absorb the implications of this for doctor/-
patient and lawyer/client confidentiality [10]. Whenever one calls a call centre,
people are warned the conversation is recorded. Every action online is tracked,
whether by your ISP, the target website or the NSA. This includes not just web
addresses but also every click you make, every item of data you enter, piece of
text you read or video you watch. Within the digital domain, fundamentally
the only kind of privacy that exists is privacy due to obscurity - what you do
or who you are is of so little interest that you never trigger one of the relevant
algorithms to provoke interest. This loss of privacy is not limited to the digital
domain, as extensive video and satellite surveillance shows.
Historically, the push against greater state legibility appears to be associated
with the establishment of “principles” or “rights”, but moral and legal principles
do not obviously and easily translate into reality. Slavery was abolished through-
out the world in the 19th century and yet it still continues on a large scale in
many parts of the world, including in Europe. Thus, if any principles concerning
privacy or the much vaunted European Commision’s desire to allow the “right
to be forgotten” are to have any long term effect, then a concerted effort needs
to be made across civil society. What needs to concern us is the unintended
consequence of a society based on total surveillance on the one hand, but also
total classification or knowledge representation, on the other hand.
The unintended consequences of a society with total surveillance are many.
Some are obvious such as the loss of trust which pervades such a society [12]
and the tendency to conformity [1]. The unintended consequences of a society
with total classification (i.e. where every object or idea with a digital footprint
will inevitably be classified and characterised) is not so obvious to us. It will on
the one hand give people the illusion of knowing about “things”, rather than
perhaps be exposed to the initial amazement of an idea, experience or object in
itself. If we wear Google Glass, or some similar technology, there will be very
little in our environment which is unknown, unlabelled, unclassified. Everything
will be legible to the eye, everything will be legible both to the individual and
the state. In many ways, this will be taken for granted and/or seen as desirable
by a great proportion of the population.
Perhaps less obvious will be the loss of creativity and innovation. If we are
correct to argue that creativity and innovation needs certain types of freedom,
freedoms that we have historically found most often in cities, then the loss of
these freedoms will have a substantial impact on our ability as a society to be
creative. Village and tribal societies are incredibly stable, with very little of
the accoutrements we associate with high civilisation. Cities are the centres of
innovation in all the arts and technology. Total surveillance will inevitably, as
algorithms improve and as classification schemas and ontologies achieve greater
comprehensiveness, provide a total classification and categorisation of human
activity. Based on the parallel with the village, such a “global digital village”
will lack the empty spaces, the chaotic spaces for complex interactions, for con-
versations and inquiry, for agitation and discovery, that have inspired writers,
artists and inventors.
The loss of the illegible encompassed the loss of privacy, but has much deeper
costs, less obvious ones, but costs which will undermine civilisation and society
more deeply. The loss of creativity and innovation lays open a society to make it
unable to adapt, change and keep alive its political, social and economic infras-
tructure. Taken from this perspective, the addition of Semantic Web technologies
and the Internet of Things are in Tainter’s terms an additional layer of complex-
ity with insufficient benefit [24]. The best recent example has been the collapse
of Soviet Russia, a society which invested huge resources in tracking, tracing
and cataloguing all its citizens activities. The Soviet surveillance state, with its
concomitant absence of trust, resulted in a society which could excel at a hand-
ful of things (mathematics, chess, gymnastics) and not much else, even though
its intellectual and cultural foundations were equal to any Western country. By
extension, Gupta has argued that if the cyber-security is taken to mean total
lockdown of the Internet, we will lose that very creativity and innovative poten-
tial which is one of its most important characteristics [9]. Total security with
the concomitant classification and analysis of every action on the internet may
provide a secure environment but will be entirely stifling to the entrepreneurial
activity which has brought about so many interesting and important innovations
on the Internet and by extension to society as a whole.
7 Conclusion
In this paper we have drawn a broad narrative arc. We have argued that ever
increasing legibility is a normal trajectory for the state in all its forms. Legi-
bility is often expressed in standards and infrastructure which provides certain
freedoms as well as enabling the power of the state (examples include roads and
passports). We have suggested that privacy is a phenomenon absent from village
society and rather occurs in cities where the technology needed by the state
has not caught up so as to provide the full legibility it desires. Thus privacy is
a temporary phenomenon, a particular type of freedom. If we look further at
cities, we see them as fundamental locations for creativity and innovation, and
much of what we recognise as civilisations arises therefrom. Finally we moved
to a consideration of Semantic Web technologies and the Internet of Things,
which we have characterised as yet another set of technologies which increase
the legibility of human endeavour. At the same time, we recognise its potential
to provide other “freedoms” or at least other types of opportunities for action.
We have drawn this together to argue that the ever increasing cataloguing and
classification of the world and human activity may have a negative consequence
in the reduction of the illegible. We need the illegible because it is the nexus of
of creativity and innovation in all areas - the arts, the sciences and technology.
The loss of the illegible includes the loss of privacy and anonymity but has far
more dangerous consequences for society and our civilisation as whole.
7.1 Acknowledgements
The work described in this paper has been partially supported by the EU FP7
FI PPP projects, SmartAgriFood (http://smartagrifood.eu) and FISpace
(http://www.fispace.eu/).
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