How the California legislature is saving us from surveillance dystopia (twice, in 1967 and 2026)

Has everyone read the short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.?

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.

In the story, a future dystopian government prevents everyone from getting an advantage over anyone else by, for example, making some people wear a distracting device to break up their thoughts with loud noises.

Things might be trending that way, with notifications, deceptive UX, and “AI” services, but we’re not there yet. That kind of society—one that tries to make everyone equal by bringing some people down—is one of the dismal futures that the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) helps protect us from.

That’s because among the personal liberties most affected by surveillance are the economic ones. Fair markets, with competition (I know the Big Tech central planners hate that word. Competition, competition, competition.) depend on privacy. Information asymmetry makes negotiations one-sided. There is no free market under surveillance.

Big Tech’s goal is a kind of surveillance-driven centrally planned economy, where all businesses feed data into The Algorithm, which controls who sells what to who. In the world they want, no legit business can get ahead—because somewhere in a Big Tech data center, a drop-shipper or outright scammer is getting help from an AI trained on their data. Everyone gets driven into chickenization, where the pressure to serve the algorithm squeezes out all the profits from the system except Big Tech’s.

Fortunately, the California legislature chose to protect privacy—and the other freedoms that depend on it—this year. A new bill, SB 690, was modified to leave most of CIPA’s protections in place.

But, for some reason, this makes Governor Newsom mad. In a signing message, he writes that he wants the Legislature to do another bill next year, to take on “overzealous lawsuits” and calls CIPA “a statute written without today’s complex technological landscape in mind.”

Without today’s technological landscape in mind?

Really?

Honestly, people in 1967 couldn’t shut up about future communications technologies.

Photo credit: chirinstock on DeviantArt. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. (Click through for larger uncropped version and more photos. This is a replica costume and photo from 2008. The original series is still under copyright held by Paramount, but that’s another story.)

The Governor misrepresents the business and cultural environment that CIPA came from. Complex technology was on a lot of people’s minds in 1967. CIPA was drafted one year before The Mother of All Demos, at a time when mainstream articles and fiction were already concerned about “new devices and techniques for the purpose of eavesdropping upon private communications” and how those inventions would be “a serious threat to the free exercise of personal liberties.”

Legislators weren’t so much concerned with micromanaging the phone system as with anticipating new technologies. Star Trek communicators were on TV (the original series ran 1966-1969). 2001: A Space Odyssey has an iPad-like tablet computer in it—and was shooting at the same time that CIPA was being drafted.

The ahistorical characterization of CIPA as somehow tied to the 1967 phone system is a lazy lobbyist’s idea of how to misrepresent the past, in the hopes that people won’t check. 1967 was a hell of a time for thinking about The Future. Get some old magazines, mix yourself some Tang, and start reading if you don’t believe me. Legislators back in 1967 had some good ideas about how future communications systems could be misused for surveillance dystopia, so they did the best they could to keep us out of surveillance dystopia. We should thank them for making the law general enough to cover the devices and networks that they foresaw and that we have to deal with.

Anyway, the lawsuits aren’t the problem. The lawsuits are a symptom of a problem. Big Tech is a blight on the economy. The party line is that the surveillance economy is good for small businesses—but that’s obviously bogus. It that was the case, there should have been a small business boom in the peak surveillance years of the early 2010s—after widespread adoption of smartphones, but before Apple ATT, GDPR, and CCPA. Instead, we are losing more money to scams, and buying more and more of our stuff from fewer and fewer places.

And legitimate companies are still, by running tracking scripts, SDKs, and conversion tracking APIs, acting as proxies for Big Tech—giving up control of customer data and passing it into Big Tech’s machine learning systems where it can be used against the business and its customers. Read United to Stop Online Scams and it’s pretty obvious that we need more privacy cases, not fewer. At least until some of the worst surveillance practices get cleaned up.

As I wrote in Take A Break, Compliance Nerds. Privacy Is A Research Problem Now on AdExchanger, companies will have to understand what data practices are acceptable to their customers, and quietly shut down the stuff that isn’t.

More later.

Bonus links

Inside McDonald’s push to have AI price your Big Mac by Waylon Cunningham. (I doubt that surveillance, and surveillance pricing, are going to be any more popular next legislative session.)

In Drone Strategy Battle, Dispersed Ukraine Is Beating Centralized Rubikon by Jonathan Low. Ukraine’s is dispersed, adaptive, flexible and innovative while Russia’s is centralized, controlled and top-down.

Become worthless (to tech companies) If tech companies don’t value you, why provide value to them? If they back political positions hostile to your interests, why not return that hostility?