Technological Refusal and the Coming Quantum Internet

It’s an unseasonably rain-free evening in Sheffield, England, which means that I must be at the opening of the 25th Association of Internet Researchers conference. After warm welcomes from the President of AoIR and the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, we begin the conference with a keynote by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, whose focus is on technological refusal. What have we learnt from past pushbacks against socio-technical developments? How have such refusals evolved over time? Where might we be going, for instance with the coming rise of the quantum Internet?

What comes together here are strands of informed consent and refusal; of counter-publics; of other objections against technological and social developments. There is often also a sense of helplessness and coercion, especially for underprivileged groups and communities – yet also a strong sense of defiance and disobedience against top-down pressures. This can be seen as a new form of civil disobedience, directed no longer simply at the state but – since code is law – at the now power-holders in technology and other institutions and companies.

But in supporting such refusal, are we also aligning with populists and angry mobs – e.g. anti-vaxxer communities, and their disobedient and violent attacks against telecommunications technologies and installations? The key difference here is that populism seeks to create division and assert supremacy; this is not necessarily the case in other forms of technological disobedience. We might therefore consider technological refusal as a normative as well as an empirical concept: it can address individual and collective actions, but need not overfit and include problematic and violent groups that seek to resist the status quo.

A further question is about the timeliness of disobedience: what are the practical consequences of being disobedient? There are technological refusal campaigns that push back against algorithmic surveillance in public spaces – for instance in France in the context of the Paris Olympics, where such technologies do of course stick around indefinitely, well after the event itself; but such campaigns are often too little and too late, since these technologies are already well-established in the public space. Protests and refusal should have happened long ago in order to avoid the negative consequences of such technologies. Acts of refusal are therefore often seen as not timely, or not timely enough. They may still be important, but do not change the underlying situation.

How do we even begin to think about earlier acts of refusal, then? This is a very real question, and Seeta now moves to applying this question to the coming technology of quantum computing: what types of pushback and protests might quantum technologies invite? The quantum Internet does not exist yet, largely because quantum computing remains in the development stages; but quantum computers promise to be extremely powerful and to depart radically from classical computing approaches. The quantum Internet, then, is the network of quantum computers, and builds on quantum entanglement to transmit data instantly over long distances.

Such technologies promise to save time on calculations; to enable the secure transmission of quantum information; and thereby to radically change industrial and state cybersecurity. Quantum computing radically speeds up the cracking of conventional data encryption; this requires new forms of quantum encryption for whatever is determined to be highly sensitive data – and produces a two-class system of more (quantum encryption) and less (conventional encryption) sensitive data, and indeed of a more and less secure Internet overall, even though the quantum Internet will piggy-back onto the conventional Internet.

All of this is still some time in the future, but we are already on the brink of quantum-mania: global investment has already started flowing in its direction, and there are now various national- and state-level investment schemes – especially in the United States – that seek to develop quantum technologies. Such efforts are matched by corporate investment in quantum research and development; and of course military R&D also plays a substantial role here. Much of this sounds familiar from the early history of research and development in conventional Internet technologies.

If all this is coming, what might technological refusal of the same old development and deployment pathways look like, then? How might we sketch out a different approach? Meaningful refusal might require a challenge from within: exploring fallibility and developing reflexivity in quantum computing – reflexivity is refusal when it is endogenous to computation itself. This cannot fall to individual researchers standing against and pointing out the flaws current developments, who often ultimately end up leaving the field altogether: rather, we must discover what reflexivity entails from within the logic of computation – we must show, not tell of, the inherent flaws.

This involves enrolling the developers and computer scientists engaged in the development of quantum computing in a collaboration with the Internet researchers who can bring critical and translational ways of thinking; it might also require thinking of different institutional settings, and above all it requires timely action to enable acts of refusal that are not too little, too late, but come at a time when technological trajectories may still be adjusted. This is a generative rather than destructive or negatory process: it creates space for a field of action in creating technological possibilities, and can reenergise both practice and scholarship.