Edward Snowden is a very smart and courageous person. He has a brilliant mind for identifying important information and deciding who should know it and when–– what is typically called “operational security” or OpSec. It is the kind of rarified skill that quickly earned him a top spot in a private intelligence corporation before achieving the dubious honor of best known whistle blower. That being said, I have one simple request for media outlets: stop interviewing Snowden.

I’m not alone on this. None other than Snowden himself would like it if people stopped interviewing him. In his most recent interview with The Nation he said,

The only reason I do these interviews—I hate talking about myself, I hate doing this stuff—is because incredibly well-meaning people, whom I respect and trust, tell me that this will help bring about positive changes. It’s not going to cause a sea change, but it will benefit the public.

The following then, is for those “incredibly well-meaning people” who want Snowden to keep doing interviews. There are two big reasons why Snowden, as a political figure, should probably back away from the limelight and perhaps take on a more supporting role as a people’s OpSec analyst. First, Snowden might be a brilliant engineer, he might even be a brilliant engineer with a family history of government service (he is), but that doesn’t make him the best person to ask about foreign policy or even government surveillance. Second, what he is expert on ––the keeping of secrets and the technologies that make it possible–– shouldn’t take center stage in imagining a new and better digitally augmented society.

I teach at an engineering school. My students, generally speaking, are brilliant abstract problem solvers and are quick learners of discrete concepts but have little taste for complex and multifaceted social problems. And that’s okay! At least in the present form and boundaries of what it means to be an engineer institutions of education or production don’t select for or encourage that sort of thinking. That might not make for the best products or the most just allocation of scarce resources but that’s our present condition.

Obviously, given Snowden’s personal experiences and motivations he knows more about the present “deep state” than the average bear. But when it comes to asking what brings about effective social change or what that kind of change should look like, Snowden comes off as a novice. Sometimes, even echoes some of the cynical (not to mention empirically wrong) social Darwinism that comes across my desk every year. I don’t hold it against my students or Snowden because we live in a deeply competitive society and the best way to keep it that way is to make it appear as a natural phenomenon. That’s just how hegemony works. So when Snowden describes harassment on the Internet and partisan politics as being instantiations of “tribalism” I and other potential supports should balk.

I don’t really want to get into the missing analyses of power that not only make Snowden’s “tribalism” wrong, but also potentially deeply destructive so let me just leave it at this: When the powerless and the marginalized work together and form social and discursive barriers to outsiders on the basis of mutual solidarity, they are fighting power. When politicians or men’s rights activists form toxic nests of hate-mongering built from executive orders and subreddits, they are maintaining structures of power. Both might look the same structurally, but both cannot be described with the same hilariously outmoded term. I don’t think I’m putting words in Snowden’s mouth when I say that characterizing the present historical moment as fraught with “tribalism” is to make a lot of false equivalencies. Okay maybe I did get into the missing analysis of power. But trust me, I could go on.

False equivalencies brings me back to the second reason why we should stop interviewing Snowden. His prescriptive recommendations, most notably that reform that moves us away from massive state surveillance, should come in the form of new kinds of encryption for digital networks, paired with a parallel fight for “digital rights.” From the same The Nation interview (excuse the big block quote):

I spoke with Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web. We agree on the necessity for this generation to create what he calls the Magna Carta for the Internet. We want to say what “digital rights” should be. What values should we be protecting, and how do we assert them? What I can do—because I am a technologist, and because I actually understand how this stuff works under the hood—is to help create the new systems that reflect our values. Of course I want to see political reform in the United States.we could pass the best surveillance reforms, the best privacy protections in the history of the world, in the United States, and it would have zero impact internationally. Zero impact in China and in every other country, because of their national laws—they won’t recognize our reforms; they’ll continue doing their own thing. But if someone creates a reformed technical system today—technical standards must be identical around the world for them to function together.

The distinction between national laws and technical standards is dubious at best, and a red herring at its worst. The reality, and I’m not saying that allied figures like Tim Berners-Lee don’t get this, is that legal and technical standards mutually shape one another, often in unpredictable ways. This is why a focus on rights and encryption are, to my anarchist mind, the wrong way to go about fending off state and corporate surveillance.

Rights language has long been critiqued by anarchists and leftists as a reaffirmation of state authority, rather than a check. Rights, the argument goes, just enumerate and codify reforms of social power retroactively, they do not produce any kind of power. To focus on a “bill of rights” might be a good way to lay out your social movement’s platform, but too many times those kinds of documents get officially accepted by law-making bodies only to neglect the necessary guarantees to accessing (or freely avoiding) the goods and services necessary to enact those rights. Which brings us to what Snowden himself says he wants to do–– provide the underlying technical infrastructure for “digital rights.”

I’ve always been perplexed by the argument for encryption as the beginning and end of digital privacy. Sure encryption is really about making sure that only intended recipients receive certain communications, and just because you employ encryption doesn’t mean you necessarily have anything to hide sort-of-speak, but that sounds a lot like (at least in the American context) the second amendment “remedies” for ineffective government. That is, instead of trying to dismantle power, activists are focused on constructing better offenses and defenses. That seems like an abdication to power, not a long-term strategy for a better world.

We don’t need better encryption, we need better governance. Even new and better methods of data encryption and transmission were invented, do we think that governments and corporations won’t stop trying to crack it? Are we advocating a doomed arms race? Even if you think private citizens will win, what kind of power dynamics does that promote? Who holds the power when the only thing standing between you and unchecked state authority is an engineer who doesn’t think racism exists?

A movement that seeks to secure rights by way of encryption is not an anti-authoritarian movement, so much as it is a call for competing authorities. On the one side will be the well-funded old guard trying to tap our phones and read our emails, and on the other side will be self-appointed guardians with a kind of technical expertise that shows no sign of being democratized to the extent necessary for truly democratic governance. Snowden is a smart man, but he’s also a product of his time. And what a time it is.

David is on Twitter, Tumblr, and Ello.