Floridi, L. (2014). The 4th revolution: How the infosphere is reshaping human reality

^{Header image: KF in Dall-E}

Floridi, L. (2014). The 4th revolution: How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (First ed.). Oxford University Press.

how our digital ICTs are affecting our sense of self, how we relate to each other, and how we shape and interact with our world.
we are still used to looking at ICTs as tools for interacting with the world and with each other. In fact, they have become environmental, anthropological, social, and interpretative forces. They are creating and shaping our intellectual and physical realities, changing our self-understanding, modifying how we relate to each other and ourselves, and upgrading how we interpret the world, and all this pervasively, profoundly, and relentlessly.
‘Cyberculture’, ‘posthumanism’, ‘singularity’, and other similar fashionable ideas can all be understood as attempts to make sense of our new hyperhistorical predicament.
We know that the information society has its distant roots in the invention of writing, printing, and the mass media. However, it became a reality only recently, once the recording and transmitting facilities of ICTs evolved into processing capabilities.
semanticize (give meaning to and make sense of)

we need a philosophy of information as a philosophy of our time for our time.

To rephrase a colourful analogy by Friedrich Waismann, a philosopher member of the Vienna Circle, just as a good swimmer is able to swim upstream, so a good philosopher may be supposed to be able to master the difficult art of thinking ‘up-speech’, against the current of linguistic habits.

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2. T I M E Hyperhistory

it was the invention and development of ICTs that made all the difference between who we were, who we are, and, as I shall argue in this book, who we could be and become.
only very recently has human progress and welfare begun to be not just related to, but mostly dependent on, the successful and efficient management of the life cycle of information
in prehistory, there are no ICTs; in history, there are ICTs, they record and transmit information, but human societies depend mainly on other kinds of technologies concerning primary resources and energy; and in hyperhistory, there are ICTs, they record, transmit, and, above all, process information, increasingly autonomously, and human societies become vitally dependent on them and on information as a fundamental resource in order to flourish.

an obvious question is where all this computational power goes… The answer is: interactions, both machine-to-machine and human–computer ones, also known as HCI.
The real epistemological problem with big data is small patterns…to spot where the new patterns with real added-value lie in their immense databases, and how they can best be exploited for the creation of wealth, the improvement of human lives, and the advancement of knowledge.
- Small patterns matter because, in hyperhistory, they represent the new frontier of innovation and competition,
- Small patterns may also be risky, because they push the limit of what events or behaviours are predictable, and therefore may be anticipated.

Memory

two myths about the dependability of digital memory
- the quality of digital memory. ICTs have a kind of forgetful memory.
- Our digital memory seems as volatile as our oral culture was but perhaps even more unstable, because it gives us the opposite impression. KF: Eircom emails
This paradox of a digital ‘prehistory’—ICTs are not preserving the past for future consumption because they make us live in a perennial present—will become increasingly pressing in the near future. Memory is not just a question of storage and efficient management; it is also a matter of careful curation of significant differences, and hence of the stable sedimentation of the past as an ordered series of changes, two historical processes that are now seriously at risk.
The risk is that differences are erased, alternatives amalgamated, the past constantly rewritten, and history reduced to the perennial here and now. When most of our knowledge is in the hands of this forgetful memory, we may find ourselves imprisoned in a perpetual present.
the potentially catastrophic risk of immense quantities of data being created simultaneously – Contrary to what we experienced in the past, the life expectancies of our data supports are today dangerously synchronized. This is why you may think of this as a sort of ‘baby boom’: big data will age and become dead data together.
- consider the transition of silent movies to new kinds of support, or of recorded music from vinyl to the CD. Huge quantities of data were left behind, becoming lost, unavailable, or inaccessible.
In history, the problem was what to save. In hyperhistory, saving is the default option. The problem becomes what to erase.

half of our data is junk, we just do not know which half

we should soon be able to ask big data what data are worth saving
More information may help us to decide which information to save and curate.

Connectivity: we need to look first at some features of networks.

Metcalfe’s Law: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected nodes of the system (n2) 4²=16
Communication requires a link but it comes with a speed. Think of a road, and the difference it makes whether it is a small street or a motorway, with or without traffic. This is the bottleneck our future historian identified. It is known as Nielsen’s Law.’
- the speed of network connections for home users like you and me increases approximately 50 per cent per year… impressive, but not as impressive as the speed identified by Moore’s Law…, for the foreseeable future our online experience will be constrained by our bandwidth.

3. S P A C E Infosphere

One of the most obvious features that characterizes any technology is its in-betweenness.
Second-order technologies are those relating users no longer to nature but to other technologies; that is, they are technologies whose prompters are other technologies
As the history of the floppy disk shows, at some stage it is easier to replace the whole system – change paradigm, to put it more dramatically – than to keep improving one part of it.
Anyone who could invent an affordable, universal appliance that may be attached to our billions of artefacts in order to make them interact with each other would soon be a billionaire. It is a problem of integration and defragmentation, which we currently solve by routinely forcing humans to work like interfaces.
- Essentially, third-order technologies (including the Internet of things) are about removing us, the cumbersome human in-betweeners, off the loop.
- ICTs finally close the loop, and let technology interact with technology through itself
barcodes are not for our eyes, and in high-frequency trading7 (three-quarters of all equity trading volume in the US is HFT) the buying and selling of stocks happens at such an extremely high speed that

second-order technology is related to the engine as third-order technology is related to the computer.

At the same time, one may still reply that ICTs, as third-order technologies that close the loop, internalize the technological in-betweenness but generate a new ‘outside’, for they create a new space (think for example of cyberspace), which is made possible by the loop, that relies on the loop to continue to exist and to flourish, but that is not to be confused with the space inside the loop

pilots still fly drones actively, with a stick and a throttle, but operators merely control them with a mouse and a keyboard.3

Interfaces

the wood-splitting axe is a typical first-order technology. It fits the scheme humanity–technology–nature. The grip is the user-friendly interface, and the handle+blade is the protocol
the quintessential second-order technology, the engine. We now have a case of the humanity–technology–technology scheme. Technological protocols may now ensure that the technology in-between takes care of the technological prompter.
consider a generic modem as a case of third-order technology. As the word indicates, this is a device that modulates an analogue signal to encode digital information at the sender’s side, and demodulates such a signal to decode the transmitted information at the receiver’s side, often over a telephone line. We now have a case of technology–technology–technology scheme
[technology’s in-betweenness] disembodiment or at least a devaluation of embodiment, hence to delocalization (no body, no place), globalization (no place, no localization), and ultimately with consumerism, as a devaluation of the uniqueness of physical things and their special relations with humans

ICTs make us think about the world informationally and make the world we experience informational.

ICTs are modifying the very nature of, and hence what we mean by, reality, by transforming it into an infosphere
- Minimally: infosphere denotes the whole informational environment constituted by all informational entities, their properties, interactions, processes, and mutual relations.
- Maximally, infosphere is a concept that can also be used as synonymous with reality, once we interpret the latter informationally
In the infosphere, populated by entities and agents all equally informational, where there is no physical difference between processors and processed, interactions become equally informational.
informational friction.: consider ‘informational friction’ as a label for how difficult it may be to let some information flow from sender to receiver. For example, in a noisy environment, like a pub or a cocktail party, you need to shout and maybe even use some gestures (that is, add redundancy) to ensure that your message gets across.
frictionless infosphere, such as spamming (because every email flows virtually free) and micrometering (because every fraction of a penny may now count). Such ‘data superconductivity’ has at least four important consequences.

a substantial erosion of the right to ignore
an exponential increase in common knowledge
so: a steady increase in agents responsibilities: The more any bit of information is just an easy click away, the less we shall be forgiven for not checking it. ICTs are making humanity increasingly responsible, morally speaking, for the way the world is, will be, and should be. [KF: Singer’s drowning child]
Privacy

Onlife: ever more blurred and then disappear. For example, it already makes little sense to ask whether one is online
To people belonging to Generation Z, the world has always been wireless

We are changing our everyday perspective on the ultimate nature of reality from a historical and materialist one, in which physical objects and mechanical processes play a key role, to a hyperhistorical and informational one.

This shift means that objects and processes are dephysicalized / typified / clonable

Information, when treated as a commodity, has three main properties that differentiate it from other ordinary goods, including CDs and printed books.
- First, it is non-rivalrous
- Second, information tends to be non-excludable. Some information—such as intellectual properties, non-public and sensitive data, or military secrets—is often protected, but this requires a positive effort precisely because, normally, exclusion is not a natural property of information, which tends to be easily disclosed and shareable.
- Cost of reproduction tends to be negligible (zero marginal cost).
For all these reasons information may be sometimes seen as a public good, a view that in turn justifies the creation of public libraries
Because of all these properties, the previous comparison with stealing a CD from a shop is not helpful. It conflates the physical with the informational.

Cars: we buy the model – We buy the type not the token.

Such a shift in favour of types of objects has led, by way of compensation, to a prioritization of informational branding…and of reappropriation. [stickers on laptop]
SPACE: the processes of dephysicalization and typification of individuals as unique and irreplaceable entities may start eroding our sense of personal identity as well.
since in the infosphere we, as users, are increasingly invited, if not forced, to rely on indicators rather than actual references—we cannot try all the restaurants in town, the references, so we trust online recommendations, the indicators of quality—we share and promote a culture of proxies.
- In a proxy culture, we may easily be de-individualized and treated as a type… Such proxies may be further used to reidentify us as specific consumers for customizing purposes. I do not know whether there is anything necessarily unethical with all this, but…

3 I D E N T I T Y Onlife ICTs as technologies of the self

a well-honed distinction between who we are—let us call this our personal identities—and who we think we are—call this our self-conceptions. [KF: I²?]
The two selves—our personal identities and our selfconceptions— flourish only if they support each other in a mutually healthy relationship.
This is a third sense in which we speak of ‘the self ’. It is the social self, so elegantly described by Marcel Proust3 : “our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.”
the hyper-self-conscious generation,

Never before in the history of humanity have so many people monitored, recorded, and reported so many details about themselves to such a large audience.

the micro-narratives we are producing and consuming are also changing our social selves and hence how we see ourselves.
Today, we increasingly acknowledge the importance of a common yet unprecedented phenomenon, which may be described as the online construction of personal identities.
School & hospital example [location v use]: you are and you are not your Facebook profile.
- It depends on why you are asking, and therefore on the right interface needed to answer the question.
- John Locke (x 1704): your identity is grounded in the unity of your consciousness and the continuity of your memories
- Narrative theory of the self: your identity is a ‘story’, understood as a socio- and/or auto-biographical artefact.
[In any case] The self is seen as a complex informational system, made of consciousness activities, memories, or narratives. From such a perspective, you are your own information. And since ICTs can deeply affect such informational patterns, they are indeed powerful technologies of the self
the ‘it from bit’ hypothesis: John Archibald Wheeler (x 2008)
The point that material vs. immaterial may be two states of some underlying informational stuff is reinforced by the discussion about location vs. presence.

Being in space: location vs. presence

The self, and mental life in general, is located in the brain but not present in the brain. This is why ICTs can so easily make us spend so much of our conscious time present elsewhere from where we are bodily located.
Being in time: outdating vs. ageing If you think of it, nothing that outdates can outdate more or less well. By contrast, the self ages, and can do so more or less graciously. The effect, which we have only started to experience and with which we are still learning to cope, is a chronological misalignment between the self and its online habitat, between parts of the self that age (e.g. my face) and parts that simply outdate (e.g. the picture of my face on my driving licence). Asynchronicity is acquiring a new meaning in onlife contexts.

In France, a madeleine de Proust is a common expression referring to a smell, taste or sound which dredges up a long-lost memory. [Proust; In Search of Lost Time; involuntary memory]

The more memories we accumulate and externalize, the more narrative constraints we provide for the construction and development of our personal identities.
The hyperconscious self never really stops trying to understand how it is seen by the other [KF: profiliciy]
e-ducation our Western culture is based on a deeply ingrained Greek divide between episteme (science and ‘knowledge that’), which is highly valued and respected, and techne (technology and ‘knowledge how’), which is seen as secondary.

4 S E L F – U N D E R S T A N D I N G The Four Revolutions

1543, Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies
1859, Charles Darwin:On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection… ‘evolution’ that acquired a new meaning [‘unrolling a papyrus scroll’]
1. Despite Copernicus and Darwin, we could still regroup behind a Cartesian trench.
It was Sigmund Freud (x1939) who shattered this illusion through his psychoanalytic work.

BUT – Pascal: We could still hold on to the view that our special place in the universe was not a matter of astronomy, biology, or mental transparency, but of superior thinking abilities.

Pascal’s mechanical calculator: It had an enormous influence on the history of calculators and on Gottfried Leibniz (x 1716), the great German mathematician and philosopher who devised the modern binary number system and is rightly considered the first computer scientist and information theorist.
We are slowly accepting the post-Turing idea that we are not Newtonian, stand-alone, and unique agents, some Robinson Crusoe on an island. Rather, we are informational organisms (inforgs), mutually connected and embedded in an informational environment (the infosphere), which we share with other informational agents, both natural and artificial, that also process information logically and autonomously.
We are witnessing an epochal, unprecedented migration of humanity from its Newtonian, physical space to the infosphere itself as its new environment, not least because the latter is absorbing the former.
- KF: but our bodies still need food/water/shelter [~ virtual {climate} refugees]
When the migration is complete, my guess is that Generation Z will increasingly feel deprived, excluded, handicapped, or poor to the point of paralysis and psychological trauma whenever it is disconnected from the infosphere, like fish out of water.

One day, being an inforg will be so natural that any disruption in our normal flow of information will make us sick.

NOMOPHOBIA: NO MObile PHone PhoBIA

“We have to stay in the real world more than virtual world. We have to re-establish the human-human interactions, face to face connections. So, we need to limit our use of mobile phones rather than banning it because we cannot escape the force of technological advancement.”

in the long run, de-individualized (you become ‘a kind of ’) and reidentified (you are seen as a specific crossing point of many ‘kinds of ’) inforgs may be treated like commodities that can be sold and bought on the advertisement market.
a personalizing reaction to such massive customization is natural, but also tricky. We saw that we could construct, self-brand, and reappropriate ourselves in the infosphere by using blogs and Facebook entries…
digital souls (avatars) intensely feel the pressure to obtain visible signs of self-identity. After all, your free avatar looks like anybody else.
Never before has informational privacy played such a crucial role in the lives of millions of people. It is one of the defining issues of our age.

5 P R I V A C Y Informational Friction

Privacies as freedoms from

Alice’s physical privacy: freedom from sensory interference or intrusion
Alice’s mental privacy’:
Alice’s decisional privacy – “autonomy”;
Alice’s informational privacy.

Why have ICTs made privacy one of the most obvious and pressing issues in our society?
- because they unquestionably and influentially affect informational friction.
Informational friction Informational friction refers to the forces that oppose the flow of information within a region of the infosphere.

the amount of effort required for some agent to obtain, filter, or block information about other agents in a given environment, by decreasing, shaping, or increasing informational friction

privacy is a function of the informational friction in the infosphere.

although ICTs may erode informational friction, anonymity may counterbalance their impact.
old ICTs, such as the radio and the TV, affect informational friction only one way, that is, by decreasing it, whereas new ICTs work both ways
Anonymity Urban environments fostered a type of privacy based on anonymity.
In their classic article ‘The Right to Privacy’, published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, Samuel D. Warren and Louis Brandeis warned that privacy was being undermined by recent inventions and business methods [ . . . ], instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise [ . . . ] and numerous mechanical devices.7
In a way, a different kind of privacy is the price we pay to enter into hyperhistory.
Two theories about the value of our privacy are particularly popular
- The reductionist interpretation is more oriented towards a consequentialist assessment of privacy in terms of cost-benefit analyses of its protection or violation. The ownership-based interpretation is more oriented towards a ‘natural rights’ understanding of the value of privacy itself, in terms of private or intellectual property

The self-constitutive value of privacy

in the same way that the information revolution is best understood as a fourth revolution in our self-understanding, privacy requires an equally radical reinterpretation, one that takes into account the informational nature of our selves and of our interactions as inforgs.
by understanding a breach of one’s informational privacy as a form of aggression towards one’s personal identity.
The value of privacy is both to be defended and enhanced.
The information flow needs some friction in order to keep firm the distinction between the macro multi-agent system (the society) and the identity of the micro multi-agent systems (the individuals) constituting it. Any society (even a utopian one) in which no informational privacy is possible is one in which no self-constituting process can take place, no personal identity can be developed and maintained, and hence no welfare can be achieved, social welfare being only the sum of the individuals’ involved.
The total ‘transparency’ of the infosphere that may be advocated by some reductionists…achieves the protection of society only by erasing all personal identity and individuality,…
the condition of no-privacy threatens not only to chill the expression of eccentric individuality, but also, gradually, to dampen the force of our aspirations to it.
to understand the right to privacy as a right to personal immunity from unknown, undesired, or unintentional changes in one’s own identity as an informational entity, both actively and passively.

Brainwashing is as much a privacy breach as mindreading.
There is no difference because ‘you are your information’, so anything done to your information is done to you, not to your belongings.
violations of informational privacy are now more fruitfully compared to kidnapping rather than trespassing.
It expresses a sense of constitutive belonging, not of external ownership, a sense in which your body, your feelings, and your information are part of you but are not your (legal) possessions.

This self-constituting conception of privacy and its value has started being appreciated by more advanced hyperhistorical societies, in which identity theft is one of the fastest growing offences.
How many things are there that you wish you had never seen, or been told, or heard? We must protect children’s privacy exactly because ICTs are technologies that shape the self.
At the same time, we might relax our attitude towards some kinds of ‘dead personal information’ that, like ‘dead pieces of oneself ’, are not really, or no longer, constitutive of ourselves. Legally, Alice may not sell her kidney, but she may sell her hair or be rewarded for giving blood.
If we were all treated fairly as ‘prisoners of the information society’, our privacy would be well protected and yet there would still be some personal data that would be perfectly fine to share with any other agent, even hostile ones. It is not a binary question of all or nothing, but an analogue one of fine balance and degree.

Holden C: Don’t tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.22

KF: RTBF – ….privacy is also a matter of construction of one’s own identity. Your right to be left alone is also your right to be allowed to experiment with your own life, to start again, without having records that mummify your personal identity for ever, taking away from you the power to form and mould who you are and can be. Every day, a person may wish to build a different, possibly better, ‘I’. We never stop becoming ourselves, so protecting a person’s privacy also means allowing that person the freedom to construct and change herself profoundly. The right to privacy is also the right to a renewable identity
A quick and dirty way to fix the problem would be to clog the infosphere by slowing down the information flow; building some traffic-calming devices, as it were…[but] ‘resistance is futile’. Trying to withstand the evolution of the infosphere only harms current users and, in the long run, fails to deliver an effective solution.
A much better approach is to ensure that the informational friction continues to decrease, thus benefiting all the inhabitants of the infosphere, while safeguarding personal identity by data that are not arbitrary labels about, but rather constitutive traits of, the person in question. = BIOMETRICS [KF: Web 3 – SSI; resistance is futile; what of revolt? [Camus – Sisyphus]]
By giving away a little bit of your self-constituting information, you can safeguard your identity and hence your informational privacy more effectively, while taking advantage of interactions that are customized through preferences derived from your habits, behaviours, or expressed choices.
if one applies the ‘Geneva Convention’ test introduced earlier, it seems that even the worst enemy could be allowed to authenticate someone’s identity by measuring her fingerprints or his eye retinas. These seem to be personal data that are worth sacrificing in favour of the extra protection they can offer for one’s personal identity and private life.

6 I N T E L L I G E N C E Inscribing the World Shifting

Turing Test and the Loebner Prize

Wason selection task https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task
The fact that in 2011 Watson—IBM’s system capable of answering questions asked in natural language—won against its human opponents when playing Jeopardy! only shows that artefacts can be smart without being intelligent. Data miners do not need to be intelligent to be successful.
ICTs are not becoming more intelligent while making us more stupid. Instead, the world is becoming an infosphere increasingly well adapted to ICTs’ limited capacities. Recall how we set up a border wire so that the robot could safely and successfully mow the lawn. In a comparable way, we are adapting the environment to our smart technologies to make sure the latter can interact with it successfully.

7 A G E N C Y Enveloping the World

In industrial robotics, the three-dimensional space that defines the boundaries within which a robot can work successfully is defined as the robots’ envelope.
It is the difficulty of finding the right envelope that makes ironing (as opposed to pressing) so time-consuming.
We have been enveloping the world around ICTs for decades without fully realizing it.
As usual, entertainment and military applications are driving innovation.
‘Core components’ of ICTs is how we are being perceived. Our rating and ranking activities are exploited in order to improve the performance of some ICTs.
Web ranking has transformed word of mouth to word of mouse.
The risk we are running is that, by enveloping the world, our technologies might shape our physical and conceptual environments and constrain us to adjust to them because that is the best, or easiest, or indeed sometimes the only, way to make things work.
- It is the mechanical circular saw that, paradoxically, generates a right-angled world. In both cases, squarish and roundish places have been built following the predominant technologies, rather than through the choices of their potential inhabitants.
it is easy to see how the opportunity represented by technologies’ power comes in three forms: rejection, critical acceptance, and proactive design

Artificial companions (henceforth ACs)

A distant ancestor of this sort of HCI was Microsoft’s infamous Office Assistant, known as Clippy. It was meant to assist users but turned out to be a nuisance and was discontinued in 2003.
Finally, ACs will act as ‘memory stewards’, creating and managing a repository of information about their owners. This is good news. [KF: WHY?]
A personalized AC could make one ‘e-mortal’.
Our new memory stewards will exacerbate old problems and pose new and difficult ones. What to erase, rather than what to record (as is already the case with one’s emails), the safety and editing of what is recorded, the availability, accessibility, and transmission of the information recorded, its longevity, future consumption and ‘replaying’, the management of ACs that have outlived their human partners, the redressing of the fine balance between the art of forgetting and the process of forgiving (consider post-dictatorial, post-apartheid, or postcivil- war cultures), delicate issues in informational privacy, and the impact that all this will have on the construction of personal and social identities, and on the narratives that make up people’s own past and roots
Web 2.0 and its semantic engines Providing a watertight definition of what qualifies as Web 2.0 might be an impossible rather than just a tricky task.
The deepest philosophical issue brought about by ICTs concerns not so much how they extend or empower us, or what they enable us to do, but more profoundly how they lead us to reinterpret who we are and how we should interact with each other.

8 P O L I T I C S The Rise of the Multi-Agent Systems Political apoptosis

history has lasted 6000 years, since it began with the invention of writing in the 4th millennium BC.
ICTs provided the recording and transmitting infrastructure that made the escalation of other technologies possible. Today, their autonomous processing capacities have ushered in a new, hyperhistorical age.
2011: Perhaps for the first time, we also spent more on ways to entertain ourselves than on ways to kill each other.
We are witnessing a slow and gradual process of political apoptosis.
- I am using the expression ‘political apoptosis’ in order to describe the gradual and natural process of renovation of sovereign states7 as they develop into information societies
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) meant the end of World War Zero, namely the Thirty Years War, the Eighty Years War,…
The Westphalian order: the principles of sovereignty (each state has the fundamental right of political self-determination), legal equality (all states are equal), and non-intervention (no state should interfere with the internal affairs of another state) became the foundations of such a system of international relations.
The passport became like an elastic band that ties the holder to a geographical point, no matter how far in space and prolonged in time the journey in other lands has been.
Montesquieu (1689-1755) suggested the classic division of the state’s political powers that we take for granted today: a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary. The state as a multi-agent system organizes itself as a network of these three ‘small worlds’, among which only some specific channels of information are allowed. Today, we may call that arrangement Westphalian 2.0
However, by fostering the development of ICTs, the state ends by undermining its own future as the only, or even the main, information agent. This is the political apoptosis I mentioned earlier.
And so ICTs help shift the balance against centralized government, in favour of distributed governance and international, global coordination.
The Bretton Woods conference may be interpreted as the event that seals the beginning of the political apoptosis of the state. The gathering in 1944: brought about a variety of multi-agent systems as supranational or intergovernmental forces involved with the world’s political, social, and economic problems.
John Williamson9 coined the expression ‘Washington Consensus’ in 1989: “dealing with” countries coping with economic crises [KF: Neoliberal wedge]
Identity. Throughout modernity, the state has dealt with the problem of establishing and maintaining its own identity by working on the equation between state and nation. This has often been achieved through the legal means of citizenship and the narrative rhetoric of space (the mother/fatherland) and time (story in the sense of traditions, recurrent celebrations of past nation-building events, etc.).
Failing to grasp the previous transformation from historical opt-out to hyperhistorical opt-in means being less likely to understand the apparent inconsistency between the disenchantment of individuals with politics and the popularity of global movements, international mobilizations, activism, voluntarism, and other social forces with huge political implications.12
Clausewitz (x 1831), according to whom ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means [KF: education is the continuation of politics by other means]
This kind of transparency is also known as Open Government.
Famously, Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance’ exploits precisely this aspect of information, in order to develop an impartial approach to justice.15
For example, strategies based on ethics by design may let you opt out of the default preference according to which, by obtaining a driving licence, you are also willing to be an organ donor. Strategies based on pro-ethical design may not allow you to obtain a driving licence unless you have indicated whether you wish to be an organ donor: the unbiased choice is still all yours
environments that can facilitate ethical choices, actions, or process, the ethical infrastructure, or infraethics

9 E N V I R O N M E N T The Digital Gambit The

10 E T H I C S E-nvironmentalism

ICTs are creating the new informational environment in which future generations will live most of their time.
The information revolution—whether understood as a third one, in terms of wealth creation, or as a fourth one, in terms of a reconceptualization of ourselves
Such an ethical framework must address and solve the unprecedented challenges arising in the new environment. It must be an e-nvironmental ethics for the whole infosphere. This sort of synthetic (both in the sense of holistic or inclusive, and in the sense of artificial) environmentalism will require a change in how we perceive ourselves and our roles with respect to reality, what we consider worth our respect and care, and how we might negotiate a new alliance between the natural and the artificial.

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