In December 2017 Nathan Heller published an article, Estonia, The Digital Republic in The New Yorker. Heller frequently writes on digital topics, events and personalities in the Silicon Valley, books, and higher education --recently The Hidden Radicalism of Chris Hughes's Call the Break Up Facebook (May 14, 2019). Heller's "Letter from Tallinn" received some notice, notably from Rainer Kattel and Ines Mergel at University College of London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. The subject had also gained the interest of Ben Hammersley, a contributing editor for Wired.
Estonia has found a path forward for secure, social computing on a small scale, a humane, digital way of life that does not depend upon surveillance from giant corporations and semi-governmental entities. What has happened since 2017? What are the questions yet to be addressed in Estonia? What might a humane, digital way of life look like in the USA, at a vastly larger scale? How might academics (and academic librarians in particular) advocate for a manner of social computing that is fundamentally different from our troubled, troll-filled present?
Estonia's story as a nation is deep-rooted and troubled. Emerging from pre-history in a the Scandinavian, Viking cultural orbit, Estonian origins are obscure and combine several groups connected by language. (Estonian, like Finnish, Hungarian, and Maltese, is not of Indo-European origins; but those four languages are only distantly related to each other.) The name Aesti was used by Tacitus in Germania 45 but it is unknown whether than name has anything to do with the ancient marahvas, the Estonian self-descriptor "country people."
The forcible Christianization of the "country people" 1206-1227 was one of the last such campaigns in Europe; Estonians were then dominated by Baltic Germans and Swedes. Estonia became Lutheran in the 1530s, about the time when monarchies of Muscovy, Sweden, and Poland/Lithuania sought to expand; the following centuries Estonians were dominated by Swedes and Russians in bloody conflicts that sometimes halved the population. The Estonian nationalist awakening began with the reclamation of the language mid-19th century, using the term eestlane, and Estonian epics, songs, theatre began to be recovered. (Recently the historic religions are regaining adherents and visibility.)
Estonian independence was declared in the violent confusion of German defeat and Bolshevik revolution 1918-1919 but lasted only twenty years; the Soviet Union annexed Estonia and reconstituted is as a Soviet republic in 1940. The war years 1940-1945 reduced the population by 25% as Estonians were killed, exiled, or fled as refugees; Soviet Russians began a program of forcible Russification to cement their hegemony and annihilate remnants of the Estonian resistance in the 1950s. The Estonian Republic was proclaimed in August, 1991 and the Russian army decamped by 1994. Estonians now comprise 88% of the population; the largest minority groups are Russian, Swedish, and Finnish; the latter two are official recognized cultural minorities.
For Estonian digital life, the defining event was a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack in April and May 2007 that paralyzed the country. The attack was traced to undoubted Russian coordination and origins, especially since it started soon after Estonia relocated a Soviet war memorial from the center of Tallinn, and culminated on May 9 (Russian commemoration of victory in World War 2) and then suddenly disappeared. The 2007 attack was a template for later attacks against the Georgia, Denmark, NATO, the NASDAQ, and Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. In response, Estonians vowed "never again," and have hosted the NATO Cooperative Defense Centre of Excellence. Estonia now also hosts Locked Shields, a "unique international cyber defence exercise offering the most complex technical live-fire challenge in the world." (https://ccdcoe.org/exercises/locked-shields/)
External threats, largely Russian, influenced the fundamental design of Estonia's digital society. The Estonian government's Information Systems Authority developed X-Road, a "centrally governed distributed integration layer between information systems," first released in 2016 under an MIT license (free, but permitting reuse within proprietary applications). As a distributed integration layer between systems, X-Road permits (and even requires) fundamental Estonian policies: information is entered only once; an individual owns all information about herself or himself; information can only be used with the permission of the owner.
Such distributed information means that there is no central databank of information and no assembling of individual profiles without that person's knowledge (excepting law enforcement). It's all done on-the-fly and the owner of the data has to give permission. With no central databank, there is no single target for cyberattack. X-Road itself is protected by K.S.I. technology (Keyless Signature Infrastructure) that uses blockchain-like public ledger that appends a record of events to each successive event, and uses a "one-way cryptographic hash function" that encode data but is irreversible --no one could reconstruct the data from the hash values. The integrity of data is assured, and cannot be breached through any mere appearance of normality: every footprint can be traced. A massive network of meshed devices --the "internet of things"-- essentially asks every other device it contacts, "Are you OK?" The distributed effect of such device security is that a hacker has to penetrate the defenses of not only one object, but of a host of objects, all protected by a series of one-way encrypted queries.
Estonians know that the Russians will likely attack again: it is just a matter of time, as has been the case since the 13th century. One solution has been to backup the entire Estonian infrastructure on servers in Luxembourg with the same legal standing as any Estonian physical embassy. When the invasion comes, Estonia's elected leaders, scattered as necessary, can reconstitute their government and assure a secure integrated system remotely, on the cloud. The same backup will provide service continuity in the case of a massive cyberattack that is even partially successful.
The fundamental Estonian commitments to data ownership, integrity, and authorized use on-the-fly, foster a meaningful conversation about the basic values of Estonian society: What kind of society do people want? Where are the borders and the limits, whether tangible or digital? Who makes important decisions, and how are those decisions made? How can transparency and trust be assured?
In Estonia (and elsewhere) this will, in the long run, have to extend to questions only now emerging: what is a person's "digital estate" after death, and its status? How do healthcare and legal proxies work in a fully digital society? Does financial bankruptcy mean digital bankruptcy, and are they connected? Can anything ever really be forgotten? Many thorny issues remain to be addressed, from the difficult to the wicked, and they all hinge on cultural values: what is important and necessary.
These are fundamentally humanistic questions: they belong to the humanities, or at least to those humanists who believe they have something to contribute. Estonians do not have an luxury of distance, or any comfort from history, and their technical relationships with Finland and elsewhere cannot make up for their well-founded sense of unease. So the questions that Estonians are asking in a digital society are forerunners of those only now emerging publicly in the USA, EEC, and elsewhere. Events since 2017--the revelation of the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 US election, in the Brexit vote, attempted interference in France, continuing mischief in Italy --all have confirmed the message of 2007: no nation is safe, and Putin's Russia is more than willing to host and facilitate any bad actor that might come along. Cyber chaos is not just a tactic: it is a strategic goal itself, and interrogates ideas such as truth and justice. Teachers of the humanities who are unwilling to address the profound question, what makes a society human and humane?--simply abdicate their real responsibility to their students and readers. Martin Kaevats, Estonia's national digital advisor, said to Nathan Heller, the "gadgetry . . . is not important. It's about the mind-set. It's about the culture. It's about the human relations--what it enables us to do."
So what do we do? Where do we go from here?
What does a liberally educated person do? William Cronon's list (discussed in this blog previously) answers as well as any. Liberally educated people have mastered a inter-connected set of skills:
- They listen and they hear;
- They read and they understand;
- They can talk with anyone;
- They can write clearly, persuasively, and movingly;
- They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems;
- They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth;
- They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism;
- They understand how to get things done in the world;
- They nurture and empower the people around them;
- They follow E.M. Forster’s injunction from Howards End, "Only connect . . ."
That's a lovely list, but where do we go from here? What's the point?
In 2017, when Heller asked Kaevats "what he saw when he looked at the U.S.," he responded: "A technical mess. Data architecture was [is!] too centralized. Citizen's didn't own their own data; it was sold, instead, by brokers. Basic security was [is!] lax." Convoluted and backwards ideas of legal and digital protection have resulted in what some might call a "wicked" problem: "a systemic loss of community and trust."
To regain this trust takes quite a lot of time. . . . There also needs to be a vision from the political side. It needs to be there always--a policy, not politics. But the politicians need to live it, because in today's world, everything will be public at some point. . . . You need to constantly be who you are."
Estonia: the Digital Republic: Letter from Tallinn, by Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, December 11, 2018
Being constantly who you are (emphasis mine) connects Cronon's list and Kaevat's visionary diagnosis. Such humane "being who you" are starts with listening, continues with literacy, humility, and practicality, and ends with connection. That connection is perhaps the only source of renewed trust still available to us in fractured, divisive, fear-filled America today. It's about the culture: how do we change it, how to get that change done. It's about living the policy of humility, real security, personal dignity, and genuine respect (not hostility) for others who are bound to disagree.
In Rainer Kattel's and Ines Mergel's words, "Economic efficiency gains are not enough as value frameworks for digital transformations." They go on to note that while digital infrastructure and systems are sine qua non, so are the institutional arrangements that would create "countervailing powers to existing powers and routines within the bureaucracy. . . Public sector organizations need new forms of capabilities that centre on socially conscious design and software skills. . ."
The liberally educated person in that context will understand many frameworks of value, the importance of "countervailing powers" (Kattel & Mergel credit the phrase to J.K. Galbraith), and be able to get on with the "new forms of [public] capabilities that centre on socially conscious design and software skills." That is: they will be able to solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems, respect rigor as a way of seeking truth, and connect people through reason, argumentation, and literate communication: the core of Cronon's list.
The U.S.A. is exponentially larger and more complex than Estonia, and both available and potential transformations will not have the same results in every location, sector, or class. American society so lacks any kind of civility and trust that is sometimes seems that the only way to save this village is to burn it down. Estonia cannot afford such a way of nihilism --because those who would burn it all down, and be happy to do so, sit just across a historically fragile border. Neither can the U.S.A. afford such nihilism in the face of the catastrophic challenges of climate change, financial mismanagement, generational inequity, and political polarization that will shortly become unavoidable. We have to change our cultural, legal, and commercial understanding of data security, ownership, and privacy. We have to follow something like Chris Hughes' advice to break up Facebook, and not just Facebook, but (in Nathan Heller's words) break up "the way the tech industry runs, changing the flow of investment capital, the strategies for growth, the people to whom the spoils of efficiency go." It won't be easy: Only connect. The Estonians can do it; we can do it, too. If only we will constantly be who we are (really).