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Blowing Out Fires: The Rise of Big (Brother) Tech
A quarter century ago, information technology promised to spread liberty around the world. With the rise of AI, it’s fast becoming its worst enemy.
“They can blow out a candle
But they can’t blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch,
The wind will blow it higher.”
Biko
When Peter Gabriel wrote those lyrics in 1979, about the death of anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko in police custody two years earlier, it was true.
In the decade that followed, the world began watching in horror the final violent throes of South Africa’s crumbling apartheid regime, applying increasing international pressure through economic sanctions until its official demise in 1991.
It was comforting analogy, and at the time, apt. Yes, on any given day it was intimidating to watch how easily a state could crush individual resistance and societal freedoms with the application of brute force, ranging from police brutality against street protestors to the imprisonment and torture of dissidents. But over time such systems seemed helpless to deal with mass resistance.
