governance of technology and governance through technology
Class Nine: Surveillance Capitalism
For each quote, we plan on discussing it, placing it into its context, and understanding how it fits into the broader discussion about bias.
- Aeon
- It was that digital technologies had played a defining role in what happened, particularly the giant social media platforms that often style themselves as today’s global commons: supposed enablers of unmediated access to a shared social good that all can enjoy without fear or favour. The aim of Google, according to its parent company Alphabet, is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’; Facebook’s mission statement is to ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’.
- Is this true? Are they truly global, public, civic commons?
- Digital technologies are changing politics as we know it, but not because of some inherent or immutable characteristic that stands apart from the world in which they were created. Instead, these technologies have helped an underlying condition, namely growing discontent at marketisation – the privatising of ever more goods, services and social interactions, and the ideologies that justify that process – to find meaningful expression in the formal political arena.
- What shouldn’t be commodified?
- Large sections of the media have gone from mainstream to legacy, and the mushrooming of personalised, confirmation bias-driven newsfeeds have fragmented the public conversation, which in turn has limited our exposure to alternative perspectives, and altered our conception of ourselves. Around the world, an assumed infrastructure of broadly shared values has been exposed as precarious at best, and illusory at worst.
- Interesting. Is a personalized, profile-based internet experience, although more entertaining, worse for us?
- Pharaonic-era priests derived their legitimacy in part because of their seemingly divine ability to predict the rise and fall of the river’s floods, which determined the entire kingdom’s prosperity. In fact, they relied on Nilometers installed in the cellars of religious temples, which recorded the changing water levels; centuries of accumulated data made accurate forecasting relatively easy. As Nilometers eventually passed into the hands of state officials, the priesthood feared that their elevated class status would diminish, just as European scribes did upon the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Gunpowder was credited with democratising warfare in the Western world; in China, it served to reinforce feudal hierarchies. In each instance, new technologies served to accelerate or materialise existing social and political dynamics, not conjure them out of the ether.
- What parallels can be drawn between gunpowder and the internet?
- The billions of lines of code that increasingly colonise our private worlds and public spaces are wrapped in a veneer of neutrality, but they are neutral only in the sense that they lead us dumbly down whichever roads will generate income for their owners. That drive for income places digital technologies within an ideological framework which is itself deeply biased. As the former quantitative trader Cathy O’Neil puts it in Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2016): ‘There’s always a measure of success for any algorithm, and the general rule is that if you don’t know what that is, it’s probably profit.’
- Commodifying our public arenas. Interesting take. Is that a bad thing and has it happened before?
- We rightly view with alarm the old company-towns of the US rustbelt or northern England, designed and dictated entirely by coal barons or other industrial magnates for their own purposes. Yet to date we have acquiesced in the construction of a far larger digital metropolis in which the notion of public accountability is assumed, almost by default, to be inapplicable.
- The company town comparison fits extremely well. Do we need open-source, government-run social networks? YES WE DO! Can they be used as tools of oppression? YES THEY CAN! - Rohit Musti
- It is already happening. Wikis, open-source software and the Creative Commons copyright licence are all digital commons in their own right; initiatives such as Turkopticon, which ‘hacks’ Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace for crowdsourced labour to provide workers with better information and more power when navigating potential employers, illustrate how common endeavours can disrupt privatised digital infrastructure from within.
- Subversive technology as a form of rebellion and art. Do it! What are the limits of these approaches?
- Tech Crunch
- The problem is that Facebook doesn’t offer free speech; it offers free amplification.
- You cannot control how loud or how negative interpretted your words are online.
- But what people actually read on Facebook is what’s in their News Feed … and its contents, in turn, are determined not by giving everyone an equal voice, and not by a strict chronological timeline. What you read on Facebook is determined entirely by Facebook’s algorithm, which elides much — censors much, if you wrongly think the News Feed is free speech — and amplifies little.
- Should our newsfeed be chronological? Is that more fair?
- Two forms of content. For native content, the algorithm optimizes for engagement. This in turn means people spend more time on Facebook, and therefore more time in the company of that other form of content which is amplified: paid advertising.
- Should we allow both kinds of content? Should we have different rules?
- As Zuckerberg notes in his speech, Facebook works to stop things like hoaxes and medical misinformation from going viral, even if they’re otherwise anointed by the algorithm. But he has specifically decided that Facebook will not attempt to stop paid political misinformation from going viral.
- When you are the gatekeeper of information, what obligation do you have to that information? Web-based companies have foisted the responsibility of truth verification onto the user. This is what allows them to grow/scale so rapidly.
- The larger issue, though, is that Facebook seems to think that if an algorithm is content-agnostic, it is therefore fair. When Zuckerberg talks about giving people a voice, he really means giving those people selected by Facebook’s algorithm a voice. When he says “People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate,” what he actually means is that Facebook’s algorithm is itself that Fifth Estate.
- Is the most valuable realestate today the top of google’s search and facebook’s algorithm? Digital Real-Estate, worth looking into. Same rules as before, 1. Location 2. Location 3. Location. And one new one: 4. Profile users.
- Facebook’s original sin is not political ads; it is optimizing for engagement so that their users see more ads of all kinds. That’s what needs to change for Facebook to become a positive force in the world … and it’s also what never will, because that engagement is the fundamental engine of their business model.
- Should we ban their business model then?
- NYTimes
- This is the first presidential election happening after the business model for journalism collapsed. Advertising revenue for print newspapers has fallen by two-thirds since 2006. From 2008 to 2018, the number of newspaper reporters dropped 47 percent. Two-thirds of counties in America now have no daily newspaper, and 1,300 communities have lost all local coverage. Even outlets native to the web, like BuzzFeed and HuffPost, have laid off reporters.
- Wow. So there is no local news or accountability for local officials.
- It’s tempting to blame the rise of the internet for all of this, but it’s important to recognize that technology is shaped by law. Advertising, publishing and information distribution operate in publicly structured markets. In the past 40 years, the rules underlying these markets have undergone a radical reorganization.
- That line is so useful. We have no publicly structure internet markets.
- Data is now the key input into advertising: If you know who is looking at an ad, that ad space becomes much more valuable. Google and Facebook now know who is looking at every ad, and their competitors for ad dollars — newspapers — do not. Further, newspapers now must also rely on Google and Facebook to reach their customers, and hand them valuable subscriber and reader data; when The Wall Street Journal refused to abide by Google’s formatting terms, Google removed it from its search ranks and the newspaper’s traffic dropped by 44 percent.
- Wow. Google basicly gets to decide the future of internet infrastructure because if orgs don’t comply, they are finished.
- Advertising financing presents an inherent conflict of interest, because advertising is a third party paying to manipulate someone. In traditional media, advertising can influence editorial choices. There are a series of ethical structures designed to inhibit excessive control of advertisers in media industries, a result of debates for hundreds of years among public figures on the nature of advertising and publishing.
- Can we balance this conflict?
- Before Google became an enormous advertising company, the company’s co-founders — Sergey Brin and Larry Page — noted this problem. They looked at the problematic search engine market of the 1990s — with companies offering advertisers the chance to pay to be listed as an organic search result — and argued that financing a search engine business through advertising was fundamentally corrupting. Such information utilities would then have an incentive to keep users on their properties so that they could keep selling more ads. They would also have an incentive to self-deal, putting content in front of users that benefits the utility rather than the end user. And they would have an incentive to surveil their users, so that they could target them more effectively.
- The collapse of journalism and democracy in the face of the internet is not inevitable. To save democracy and the free press, we must eliminate Google and Facebook’s control over the information commons. That means decentralizing these markets and splitting information utilities from one another so that search, mapping, YouTube and other Google subsidiaries are separate companies, and Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook once again compete. It also means barring or severely curtailing advertising on any of these platforms. Advertising revenue should once again flow to journalism and art. And people should pay directly for communications services, instead of paying indirectly by forgoing democracy.
- Can these companies survive has for profit entities?