Paul - Planetary Messengers
Planetary Messengers
PV Schmidt
We write a love note to a person far away, organise a political meeting in a particular place, or arrange a lunch, with the usual carrier of communication today: The messenger. Social contact today is preceded, facilitated or followed by chat over software such as Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Viber, or the Messaging-function of Facebook and Instagram. Every day arrangements on the planet happen through text chats, voice notes or digitalised calls.
We think of the internet as a global phenomenon, as it's everywhere, as a technology without borders. In theory, we can seamlessly reach everyone with an internet connection through a messenger. A pledge of a sheer infinite reach is already constrained through obvious inequality in accessibility of technological infrastructure, and capped at many points beyond. The origin of the barriers range from state and supranational legislation, over to app store rulings, or to the service's own moderation. The messengers unveil the delicate state of the open internet, as they’re central to contemporary digital life.
In the People's Republic of China, the Great Firewall, a juridical and technological arrangement encloses the internet inside the country through the blockage of manifold traffic, and oversees messaging. Within the European Union, internet censorship is utilized similarly for websites, used inter alia to “influence political discourse and favour businesses”. (Ververis et al. 2024, 142) A discussed chat control proposal attempts to for services to make all messages disclosable within Europe.
All mentioned messengers rely on being available in the software stores of Apple and Google, to reach the customers confronted with the quasi-duopoly of iOS and Android. Developers are subordinated to the companies audition for every update on their apps. To be able to stay inside the valuable markets of the respective states, they have to comply to state rulings.
In August 2024, Telegram’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested at an Airport in France and held for four days in custody, with the accusation of facilitation and participation in criminal activities through the lack of moderation. Out on a €5 Mio. bail, Durov shortly afterwards harmonized Telegram’s data sharing with authorities worldwide, and cleared with human moderators and ‘AI’ a lot of ‘problematic content’ and banned affiliated users. (Agence France-Presse 2024) Outspoken intention of governing messaging are, among others, copyright violation, hate-speech, sexual exploitation, and prevention of drug trafficking and terrorism. Policies such as chat control look like a trade-off, but as with all mass-scale surveillance—before and after the Snowden revelations—crime is not necessary out of the way while privacy is cornered. (see Lyon 2015)
But how can the messenger (1-to-1) be governed, when secrecy of correspondence should not be in question? Some messengers are end-to-end encrypted by default (Whatsapp, Signal and Viber), without access to the terminal devices there is no way to inspect the content of communication. All the others are not encrypted at all (WeChat), not encrypted by default (Telegram, KakaoTalk, Viber, and Facebook and Instagram messaging)—offering it through additional configuration, entaling usually fewer features. The privacy paradox is a myth. Just because users don’t explicitly choose to have privacy, it doesn't mean they shouldn't have. (Solove 2021) Abandoning the possibility of it is nothing more than abandoning the rule of law and thus the basis for democracy. (Anderson 2022, 13–14)
The planetary as an entity to grasp a bigger picture joins the ranks with contemporary 21st century theory terms alike the Anthropocene. (Falb and Avanessian 2024) Both conceptualise the world as a whole, which lead with the Anthropocene more often than not to a negligence of power relations.
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