The eye in your pocket

Things have jobs: pillows are made for comfort, scissors are sharp, and digital devices are made to track your every move

by Carissa Véliz  BIO

Photo by Thielker/ullstein bild/Getty Images

is an associate professor in philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI and a fellow at Hertford College, both at the University of Oxford, UK. She works on privacy, technology, moral and political philosophy, and public policy. She is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics (2021), and the author of Privacy Is Power (2020) and Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI (2026).

Edited byNigel Warburton

Prometheus might have handed humanity fire, but he certainly did not give us a smartphone. Digital technology is not God-given. Nor is digital technology a natural kind, an object of nature, like strawberries or lakes. We don’t find smartphones growing from trees. The digital gadgets that populate our lives – smartphones, laptops, smartwatches and more – are artefacts.

An artefact exists because human beings have created it. Hammers, laws and symphonies are artefacts too. Their existence depends on human minds and purposes. No artefact, in all the richness of its details, is inevitable. That’s partly because artefacts are designed by human beings, and there are choices in design – choices that could’ve been different. Every one of the letters you are reading right now, for instance, could’ve had a different shape by design.

Shape is not the only choice we make in designing artefacts. In addition to making choices about the sensorial attributes of artefacts – their tactile qualities, what they look, sound, smell and sometimes taste like – we make choices about what the artefact is supposed to do. An artefact is created for a purpose; it’s intended to do some things and not others. Pillows are supposed to be comfortable, pens are meant to smoothly transfer ink onto paper, and toasters should brown your bread.

Some artefacts do many things. A perfect chair, say an Eames chair, is both an object of beauty, something that is pleasurable to behold, and a useful tool for the comfort of the body. I edited my last book on an Eames chair that was so comfortable, it allowed me to focus on the content of the book instead of worrying about my body.

Digital technology does many things too. A smartphone can enable you to make calls, send emails, and track how many minutes you meditate to destress from the calls and the emails, and then track how many hours you’ve been on your smartphone, and stress about that. Mixed in the flour that bakes digital technology sit two original sins pervading most gadgets, apps and platforms alike: surveillance and prediction; more specifically, surveillance at the service of prediction. Both lead to social control.

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For the most part, digital technology has been developed by computer scientists, engineers, data analysts and ambitious businessmen (yes, mostly men) with little to no consideration of the impact their technology could have on democracy.

That’s partly because, when the fundamental blocks of the digital and the online were designed, it was hard to envision that they would grow to be what they are today, something that everyone has access to, every second of the day, including gadgets that are small enough to fit into a pocket. The internet was originally designed to be a tool for researchers to communicate easily with one another; it wasn’t meant to be a major way of communication for ordinary citizens.

But another influencing element is undoubtedly that the people designing our gadgets tend to be people well versed in programming, business, mathematics and other fields distant from a deep understanding of ethics or politics. (That said, there are notable exceptions like Reid Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn, one of the least toxic social media platforms we have.) Considerations about how technology could impact democracy were largely not part of the design of our digital environment. And whenever political considerations did come in, they’ve come in the form of an anti-government bent.

There is some tension between Peter Thiel’s supposed defence of freedom, and the systems of mass surveillance, prediction and control he’s building

Some of the pioneers of the digital strike me as naive idealists, assuming that freedom and fairness will magically come from having no government interference. ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (1996) is one of the most iconic documents of the early internet era, written by John Perry Barlow, as quirky a character as they come. A Republican and an anarchist, Barlow was raised as a devoted member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; he was also a cattle rancher and a lyricist for the band Grateful Dead.

The beginning of his declaration reads:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We will create a civilisation of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Those strike me as extremely naive sentiments, at best, barely plausible when the internet was populated by a handful of nerdy........

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