public/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.de.html

   1 <html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört</title><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.79.1"><meta name="description" content="Die von uns genutzten Geräte und Dienste sammeln den Großteil der Daten, welche die NSA für ihr Überwachungsprojekt nutzt. Wir bezahlen für diese Geräte und den damit verbundenen Diensten, und schließlich übernehmen wir auch noch die Lieferung der Daten, die über unsere Leben, Meinungen und Vorliegen erhoben werden. Dank Big Tech ist der Überwachungskapitalismus überall. Nicht weil er gut darin ist, unser Verhalten zu manipulieren, und nicht wegen schurkenhafter Ausnutzung der Macht der Großunternehmen. Er ist das Ergebnis ungehemmten Monopolismus und des missbräulichen Agierens, dem er Vorschub leistet. Es ist das System, das wir beabsichtigt und erwartet funktioniert. Cory Doctorow hat eine ausschweifende Kritik zu Shoshanas Zuboffs „Das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus“ verfasst, die eine unverblümte Analyse des Problems beinhaltet und zu einem alternativen Lösungsvorschlag führt."><style type="text/css">
   2 body { background-image: url('images/draft.png');
   3        background-repeat: no-repeat;
   4        background-position: top left;
   5        /* The following properties make the watermark "fixed" on the page. */
   6        /* I think that's just a bit too distracting for the reader... */
   7        /* background-attachment: fixed; */
   8        /* background-position: center center; */
   9      }</style></head><body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><div lang="de" class="article"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="index"></a>Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört</h2></div><div><div class="authorgroup"><div class="author"><h3 class="author"><span class="firstname">Cory</span> <span class="surname">Doctorow</span></h3></div></div></div><div><p class="copyright">Copyright © 2020 Cory Doctorow</p></div><div><p class="copyright">Copyright © 2020 Petter Reinholdtsen</p></div><div><div class="legalnotice"><a name="idm18"></a><p>
  10       Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört, von Cory Doctorow.
  11     </p><p>
  12       Published by Petter Reinholdtsen.
  13     </p><p>
  14       ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (hard cover)
  15     </p><p>
  16       ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (paperback)
  17     </p><p>
  18       ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)
  19     </p><p>
  20       Dieses Buch kann unter <a class="ulink" href="https://www.lulu.com/" target="_top">https://www.lulu.com/</a> erworben werden.
  21     </p><p>
  22       Falls du Rechtschreibfehler oder sonstige Fehler findest, oder falls du
  23 Verbesserungsvorschläge die Übersetzung betreffend hast, pflege diese auf
  24 <a class="ulink" href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/rms-personal-data-safe/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/de/" target="_top">https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/rms-personal-data-safe/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/de/</a>
  25 ein.
  26     </p><p>
  27       <span class="inlinemediaobject"><img src="images/cc-some-rights-reserved.png" align="middle" height="38" alt="Creative Commons, einige Rechte vorbehalten"></span>
  28     </p><p>
  29       Dieses Buch steht unter einer Creative-Commons-Lizenz. Diese Lizenz erlaubt
  30 beliebige Nutzung dieses Werks, so lange eine Namensnennung erfolgt und
  31 keine Bearbeitungen erfolgen. Weitere Informationen über diese Lizenz
  32 findest du unter <a class="ulink" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/" target="_top">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/</a>.
  33     </p></div></div><div><div class="abstract"><p class="title"><b>Zusammenfassung</b></p><p>
  34       Die von uns genutzten Geräte und Dienste sammeln den Großteil der Daten,
  35 welche die NSA für ihr Überwachungsprojekt nutzt. Wir bezahlen für diese
  36 Geräte und den damit verbundenen Diensten, und schließlich übernehmen wir
  37 auch noch die Lieferung der Daten, die über unsere Leben, Meinungen und
  38 Vorliegen erhoben werden.
  39     </p><p>
  40       Dank Big Tech ist der Überwachungskapitalismus überall. Nicht weil er gut
  41 darin ist, unser Verhalten zu manipulieren, und nicht wegen schurkenhafter
  42 Ausnutzung der Macht der Großunternehmen.  Er ist das Ergebnis ungehemmten
  43 Monopolismus und des missbräulichen Agierens, dem er Vorschub leistet. Es
  44 ist das System, das wir beabsichtigt und erwartet funktioniert. Cory
  45 Doctorow hat eine ausschweifende Kritik zu Shoshanas Zuboffs „Das Zeitalter
  46 des Überwachungskapitalismus“ verfasst, die eine unverblümte Analyse des
  47 Problems beinhaltet und zu einem alternativen Lösungsvorschlag führt.
  48     </p></div></div></div><hr></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Inhaltsverzeichnis</b></p><dl class="toc"><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#the-net-of-a-thousand-lies">Das Netz aus tausend Lügen</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#digital-rights-activism-a-quarter-century-on">Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus, ein Vierteljahrhundert später</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-exceptionalism-then-and-now">Tech-Exzeptionalismus, damals und heute</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dont-believe-the-hype">Glaube nicht an den Hype</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-persuasion">Was ist Überzeugung?</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#segmenting">1. Aufteilung</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#deception">2. Deception</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#domination">3. Domination</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#bypassing-our-rational-faculties">4. Bypassing our rational faculties</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#if-data-is-the-new-oil-then-surveillance-capitalisms-engine-has-a-leak">If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-facebook">What is Facebook?</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopoly-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Monopoly and the right to the future tense</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#search-order-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Search order and the right to the future tense</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopolists-can-afford-sleeping-pills-for-watchdogs">Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#privacy-and-monopoly">Privacy and monopoly</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ronald-reagan-pioneer-of-tech-monopolism">Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers">Steering with the windshield wipers</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#surveillance-still-matters">Surveillance still matters</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dignity-and-sanctuary">Dignity and sanctuary</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#afflicting-the-afflicted">Afflicting the afflicted</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#any-data-you-collect-and-retain-will-eventually-leak">Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#critical-tech-exceptionalism-is-still-tech-exceptionalism">Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#how-monopolies-not-mind-control-drive-surveillance-capitalism-the-snapchat-story">How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The
  49 Snapchat story</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#a-monopoly-over-your-friends">A monopoly over your friends</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#fake-news-is-an-epistemological-crisis">Fake news is an epistemological crisis</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-is-different">Tech is different</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ownership-of-facts">Ownership of facts</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#persuasion-works-slowly">Persuasion works… slowly</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#paying-wont-help">Paying won’t help</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#an-ecology-moment-for-trustbusting">An <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> moment for trustbusting</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#make-big-tech-small-again">Make Big Tech small again</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#goto-10">20 GOTO 10</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#up-and-through">Up and through</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="the-net-of-a-thousand-lies"></a>Das Netz aus tausend Lügen</h2></div></div></div><p>
  50     Am meisten überrascht am Wiederaufkommen der „Flat Earther“ im
  51 21. Jahrhundert, wie allgegenwärtig die Beweise gegen diese Theorie
  52 sind. Man mag noch einsehen, dass vor hunderten von Jahren Leute
  53 vernünftigerweise denken durften, dass die Erde flach sei, da sie keinen
  54 ausreichend hohen Beobachtungspunkt erreichen konnten, von dem aus sie die
  55 Erdkrümmung hätten sehen können.
  56   </p><p>
  57     Aber heutzutage braucht es schon einen außergewöhnlichen Glauben, um
  58 weiterhin an die Theorie der Flachen Erde zu glauben - wo man doch bereits
  59 in Grundschulen GoPro-Kameras an Ballons befestigt und sie hoch genug
  60 aufsteigen lässt, um die Erdkrümmung zu fotografieren, vom gewöhnlichen
  61 Ausblick aus einem Flugzeugfenster ganz zu schweigen.
  62   </p><p>
  63     Ähnlich verhält es sich mit Weißem Nationalismus und Eugenik: In einem
  64 Zeitalter, in dem jeder durch eine Postsendung eines Rachenabstrichs und
  65 etwas Geld an eine DNA-Sequenzierungs-Firma zu einem Genom-Datenpunkt werden
  66 kann, war das Wiederlegen von <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Rassentheorie</span>“</span> noch nie so
  67 einfach.
  68   </p><p>
  69     Wir durchleben ein goldenes Zeitalter von sowohl sofort verfügbaren Fakten
  70 als auch deren Leugnung. Furchtbare, randständige Vorstellungen, die
  71 Jahrzehnte oder gar Jahrhunderte geschlummert haben, haben es
  72 augenscheinlich über Nacht in den Mainstream geschafft.
  73   </p><p>
  74     Wenn eine obskure Idee an Auftrieb erlangt, gibt es nur zwei Erklärungen
  75 dafür: Entweder ist die Person, die die Idee verbeitet, besser darin
  76 geworden, ihre Ansicht zu vertreten, oder die Ansicht ist angesichts sich
  77 anhäufender Beweise schwerer zu leugnen geworden. Anders gesagt: Wenn wir
  78 möchten, dass die Leute den Klimawandel ernst nehmen, können wir einen
  79 Haufen Greta Thunbergs wortgewandte, emotionale Reden auf Podien halten
  80 lassen und damit unsere Herzen und unseren Verstand gewinnen, oder wir
  81 können Fluten, Feuersbrünste, eine mörderische Sonne und Pandemien für uns
  82 sprechen lassen. In der Praxis sollten wir wohl von beidem etwas tun: Je
  83 mehr wir schmoren, brennen, ertrinken und dahinschwinden, umso einfacher
  84 wird es für die Greta Thunbergs dieser Welt, uns zu überzeugen.
  85   </p><p>
  86     Die Argumente für den absurden Glauben an hasserfüllte Verschwörungen wie
  87 Impfgegnerschaft, Klimaleugnung, eine flache Erde und Eugenik sind nicht
  88 besser als vor einer Generation. Sie sind sogar schlechter, weil sie Leuten
  89 schmackhaft gemacht werden, die wenigstens ein Gespür für die widerlegenden
  90 Fakten haben.
  91   </p><p>
  92     Impfgegnerschaft gibt es bereits seit den ersten Impfstoffen, aber frühere
  93 Impfgegner hatten es auf Leute abgesehen, die nicht einmal ein grundlegendes
  94 Verständnis von Mikrobiologie hatten, und überdies waren jene Impfgegner
  95 nicht Zeugen massenmörderischer Krankheiten wie Polio, Pocken und Masern
  96 geworden. Impfgegner von heute sind nicht eloquenter als frührere Impfgegner
  97 und haben es heute schwieriger.
  98   </p><p>
  99     Können diese Verschwörungstheoretiker wirklich im Ansatz ihrer wichtigsten
 100 Argumente erfolgreich sein?
 101   </p><p>
 102     Manche denken ja. Heutzutage gibt es den weitverbreiteten Glauben, dass
 103 maschinelles Lernen und kommerzielle Überwachung sogar den schwurbelnsten
 104 Verschwörungstheoretiker in einen Marionettenspieler verwandeln können, der
 105 anfälligen Leuten mit K.I.-gestützten, das rationale Denken austricksenden
 106 Argumenten die Wahrnehmung verbiegt und sie, normale Leute, schließlich in
 107 Flacherdler, Impfgegner oder gar Nazis verwandelt. Wenn die
 108 RAND-Corporation<a class="ulink" href="https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf" target="_top">
 109 Facebook für <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Radikalisierung</span>“</span></a> verantwortlich macht und
 110 wenn Facebook das Verbreiten von Falschinformationen in Bezug auf SARS-CoV-2
 111 <a class="ulink" href="https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_threat_health/" target="_top">seinen
 112 Algorithmen in die Schuhe schiebt</a>, dann ist die verdeckte Botschaft,
 113 dass maschinelles Lernen und Überwachung die Änderungen in unserem Konsens
 114 darüber hervorrufen, was wahr ist.
 115   </p><p>
 116     Schließlich muss in einer Welt, in der wuchernde und inkohärente
 117 Verschwörungstheorien wie Pizzagate und sein Nachfolger QAnon zahlreiche
 118 Anhänger haben, <span class="emphasis"><em> einiges </em></span> im Gange sein.
 119   </p><p>
 120     Aber was, wenn es eine andere Erklärung gibt? Was, wenn es die wesentlichen
 121 Umstände und nicht die Argumente sind, die diesen Verschwörungstheoretikern
 122 Aufwind geben? Was, wenn die Traumata vom Durchleben <span class="emphasis"><em>echter
 123 Verschwörungen</em></span> um uns herum - Verschwörungen zwischen Reichen,
 124 deren Lobbyisten und Gesetzemachern, um unangenehme Fakten und Beweise von
 125 unlauterem Verhalten zu vertuschen (solche Verschwörungen nennt man
 126 üblicherweise <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Korruption</span>“</span>) - Leute anfällig für
 127 Verschwörungstheorien macht?
 128   </p><p>
 129     Wenn es Trauma und keine ansteckende Krankheit - materielle Umstände und
 130 nicht Ideologie - ist, die heutzutage den Unterschied macht und abstoßenden
 131 Falschinformationen angesichts leicht beobachtbarer Fakten Auftrieb gibt,
 132 heißt das nicht, dass unsere Computernetzwerke keine Schuld haben. Sie
 133 tragen immer noch den Großteil dazu bei, indem sie anfällige Leute
 134 identifizieren und sie nach und nach zu immer extremeren Ideen und
 135 Communities führen.
 136   </p><p>
 137     Der Glaube an Verschwörungen ist ein wütendes Feuer, das reellen Schaden
 138 angerichtet hat und eine echte Bedrohung für unseren Planeten und unsere
 139 Spezies ist, von Epidemien <a class="ulink" href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html" target="_top">, die von Impfgegnern
 140 ausgelöst wurden,</a> bis zu Massenmorden <a class="ulink" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html" target="_top">,
 141 ausgelöst von rassistischen Verschwörungstheorien,</a> bis zum Sterben
 142 unseres Planeten, ausgelöst von Klimawandel-leugnerischer Passivität. Unsere
 143 Welt brennt, und wir müssen diese Brände löschen - indem wir herausfinden,
 144 wir die Leute die Wahrheit der Welt durch die Verschwörungen erkennen lassen
 145 können, durch sie verwirrt wurden.
 146   </p><p>
 147     Aber das Löschen von Bränden ist reaktiv. Wir müssen die
 148 <span class="emphasis"><em>Prävention</em></span> befeuern. Wir müssen auf die traumatischen
 149 realen Umstände abzielen, die Leute anfällig für die Pandemie von
 150 Verschwörungstheorien machen. Auch darin spielt Technologie eine Rolle.
 151   </p><p>
 152     Vorschläge hierfür gibt es genug. Von der <a class="ulink" href="https://edri.org/tag/terreg/" target="_top">Terrorist Content Regulation</a> der
 153 Europäischen Union, welche Plattformen zwingt, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">extremistische</span>“</span>
 154 Inhalte zu überwachen und zu entfernen, über die Vorschläge der Vereinigten
 155 Staaten, wonach <a class="ulink" href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution" target="_top">Tech-Firmen
 156 ihre Nutzer ausspähen</a> und <a class="ulink" href="https://www.natlawreview.com/article/repeal-cda-section-230" target="_top">für deren
 157 „bad speech“</a> haftbar zu machen, gibt es zahlreiche Anstrengunen, um
 158 Tech-Firmen dazu zu zwingen, die Probleme zu lösen, die sie selbst
 159 geschaffen haben.
 160   </p><p>
 161     Dennoch fehlt ein wesentlicher Aspekt in dieser Debatte. All diese Lösungen
 162 setzen voraus, dass Techfirmen ein Fixum sind, dass ihre Dominanz über das
 163 Internet ein dauerhaftes Faktum ist. Vorschläge, „Big Tech”-Firmen mit einem
 164 dezentralerem, pluralistischerem Internet zu ersetzen, finden sich
 165 nirgendwo. Die <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Lösungen</span>“</span>, die heute zur Debatte stehen,
 166 <span class="emphasis"><em>setzen voraus</em></span>, dass Big Tech „big“ bleibt, weil nur die
 167 größten Unternehmen es sich leisten können, entsprechende gesetzeskonforme
 168 Systeme zu etablieren.
 169   </p><p>
 170     Wir müssen herausfinden, wie unsere Technologie aussehen soll, wenn wir aus
 171 diesem Schlamassel wieder herauskommen wollen. Wir stehen heute an einem
 172 Scheideweg, wo wir uns entscheiden müssen, ob wir die „Big Tech“-Firmen
 173 reparieren wollen, die das Internet kontrollieren, oder ob wir das Internet
 174 reparieren wollen, indem wir es aus dem Klammergriff von „Big Tech“
 175 befreien. Beides gleichzeitig geht nicht, so dass wir uns entscheiden
 176 müssen.
 177   </p><p>
 178     Ich möchte, dass wir uns weise entscheiden. Zur Reparatur ist es essentiell,
 179 dass „Big Tech“ gezähmt wird, und dafür brauchen wir
 180 Digitalen-Rechte-Aktivismus.
 181   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="digital-rights-activism-a-quarter-century-on"></a>Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus, ein Vierteljahrhundert später</h2></div></div></div><p>
 182     Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus ist mehr als 30 Jahre alt. Die Eletronic
 183 Frontier Foundation ist in diesem Jahr 30 Jahre alt geworden; die Free
 184 Software Foundation wurde 1985 gegründet. Das am meisten im Laufe der
 185 Geschichte der Bewegung gegen sie vorgebrachte Argument war, dass sie
 186 irrelevant sei: Die Themen „echter“ Aktivisten wären auch
 187 „echte-Welt“-Probleme (man denke an den Skeptizismus, als <a class="ulink" href="https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/finland-legal-right-to-broadband-for-all-citizens/#:~:text=Global%20Legal%20Monitor,-Home%20%7C%20Search%20%7C%20Browse&amp;text=(July%206%2C%202010)%20On,connection%20100%20MBPS%20by%202015." target="_top">Finnland
 188 im Jahr 2010 einen Breitbandinternetzugang zum Menschenrecht erklärte
 189 </a>), und „echter-Welt“-Aktivismus noch als Stiefel-Aktivismus („shoe
 190 leather activism”) galt (man denke an Malcolm Gladwells <a class="ulink" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell" target="_top">Geringschätzung
 191 für  <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Clicktivism</span>“</span></a>). Aber je zentraler Technologien für
 192 unseren Alltag wurde, desto mehr sind die Irrelevanz-Vorwürfe Vorwürfen von
 193 Unehrlichkeit gewichen (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Du sorgst dich nur um Tech, weil du  <a class="ulink" href="https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-google-patent-reform/id=98007/" target="_top">für
 194 Technologie-Unternehmen Werbung machen
 195 möchtest</a></span>“</span>). (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Wie konntest du nur nicht vorhersehen,
 196 dass Tech solch eine zerstörerische Kraft sein kann?</span>“</span>). Aber
 197 Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus steht nach wie vor dafür: auf die Menschen in
 198 einer Welt achtgeben, die unausweichlich von Technologie übernommen wird.
 199   </p><p>
 200     Die neueste Form dieser Kritik kommt in der Form des
 201 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überwachungskapitalismus</span>“</span>, einem Begriff, der von der
 202 Business-Professorin Shoshana Zuboff in ihrem langen und einflussreichen
 203 Buch <span class="emphasis"><em>Das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus</em></span> geprägt
 204 wurde, das 2019 erschienen ist. Zuboff argumentiert, dass
 205 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überwachungskapitalismus</span>“</span> ein einzigartigs Geschöpf der
 206 Tech-Industrie sei und dass es sich von allen anderen ausbeuterischen
 207 kommerziellen Praktiken Geschichte unterscheide; ein Geschöpf, das <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">
 208 sich aus unerwarteten und unverständlichen Mechanismen aus Extrahierung,
 209 Kommodifizierung und Kontrolle zusammensetze, das Menschen schließlich von
 210 ihrem eigenen Verhalten loslöse und dabei neue Märkte von
 211 Verhaltensvorhersage und -manipulation schaffe.</span>“</span> Es handelt sich
 212 dabei um eine neue tödliche Form von Kapitalismus, einen
 213 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">schurkenhaften Kapitalismus</span>“</span>, und unsere Unfähigkeit, dessen
 214 einzigartigen Fähigkeiten und Gefahren zu verstehen, stellt eine
 215 existenzielle und speziesweite Bedrohung dar. Sie hat insofern recht, als
 216 Kapitalismus unsere Spezies heute bedroht, und sie hat auch recht insofern,
 217 als Technologie unsere Spezies und Zivilisation vor einzigartige
 218 Herausforderungen stellt, aber sie irrt sich darin, inwiefern Technologie
 219 andersartig ist und warum es unsere Spezies bedroht.
 220   </p><p>
 221     Genauer gesagt, denke ich, dass ihre falsche Diagnose uns einen Weg
 222 hinabführt, der Big Tech stärker macht, nicht schwächer. Wir müssen Big Tech
 223 zu Fall bringen, und um das zu tun, müssen wir zunächst das Problem korrekt
 224 identifizieren.
 225   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="tech-exceptionalism-then-and-now"></a>Tech-Exzeptionalismus, damals und heute</h2></div></div></div><p>
 226     Frühe Kritiker des Digitalen-Rechte-Managements - die am wohl am besten
 227 durch Organisationen wie die Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free
 228 Software Foundation, Public Knowledge und andere vertreten werden, die ihren
 229 Fokus auf die Bewahrung und Stärkung elementarer Menschenrechte in der
 230 digitalen Welt legen - verurteilten Aktivisten für die Ausübung von
 231 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Tech-Exzeptionalismus</span>“</span>. Um die Jahrtausendwende machten
 232 bedeutende Leute jegliche Behauptung, dass Tech-Regularien in der
 233 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">echten Welt</span>“</span> eine Rolle spielten, lächerlich. Behauptungen,
 234 wonach Tech-Regularien Folgen für Speech, Zusammenschlüsse, Privatsphäre,
 235 Durchsuchungen und Konfiskationen, sowie für grundlegende Rechte und
 236 Gleichheit haben konnten, wurden verlacht - verlacht als Besorgnis, die von
 237 traurigen Nerds, die sonst in Webforen über <span class="emphasis"><em> Star Trek</em></span>
 238 diskutierten, geschürt und gar über die Freiheitskämpfe der Freedom Rider,
 239 Nelson Mandela oder des Warschauer Ghetto-Aufstandes erhoben würden.
 240   </p><p>
 241     In den seitdem vergangenen Jahrzehnten wurden die Vorwürfe von
 242 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Tech-Exzeptionalismus</span>“</span> schärfer, zumal sich die Bedeutung von
 243 Technologie im Alltag ausgeweitet hat: Jetzt, da Technologie jede Nische
 244 unseres Lebens infiltriert hat und unsere Online-Leben von einer Handvoll
 245 Giganten monopolisiert wurden, werden die Verteidiger der digitalen
 246 Freiheiten Beschuldigt, Wasserträger von „Big Tech“ zu sein und Deckung für
 247 dessen von eigenen Interessen geleiteter Fahrlässigkeit (oder schlimmer
 248 noch: ruchlose Pläne) zu bieten.
 249   </p><p>
 250     Nach meiner Aufassung ist die Digitale-Rechte-Bewegung stehen geblieben,
 251 während der Rest der Welt sich weiterbewegt hat. Von den frühesten Tagen an
 252 war das Anliegen der Bewegung, dass Nutzer und Programmierer ihre
 253 grundlegenden Rechte verwirklichen Rechte können. Digitale-Rechte-Aktivisten
 254 kümmerten sich nur soweit um Firmen, als sie die Rechte ihrer Nutzen
 255 achteten (oder, wie so oft, wenn sich Unternehmen so töricht verhielten und
 256 neue Regularien zu Fall zu bringen drohten, was es auch guten Akteuren
 257 schwerer gemacht hätte, Nutzen zu helfen).
 258   </p><p>
 259     Der Kritiker des <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überwachungskapitalismus</span>“</span> lässt die
 260 Digitale-Rechte-Bewegung erneut in einem neuen Licht erscheinen: nicht als
 261 Alarmisten, die die Wichtigkeit ihrer Spielzeuge überschätzen oder als
 262 Sprecher für Big Tech, sondern als gelassene Sessel-Aktivisten, deren
 263 langjähriger Aktivismus zur Last geworden ist, weil es sie unfähig macht,
 264 neuartige Bedrohungen zu erkennen, während sie weiterhin Tech-Schlachten des
 265 vorigen Jahrhunderts schlagen.
 266   </p><p>
 267     Aber Tech-Exzeptionalismus ist eine Sünde, unabhängig davon, wer ihn
 268 betreibt.
 269   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="dont-believe-the-hype"></a>Glaube nicht an den Hype</h2></div></div></div><p>
 270     Du hast wahrscheinlich schon einmal gehört, dass <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">du das Produkt bist,
 271 wenn du nicht für das Produkt bezahlst </span>“</span>. Wie wir noch sehen werden,
 272 ist diese Aussage im Grunde richtig, aber nicht vollständig. Aber es
 273 stimmt<span class="emphasis"><em>definitiv</em></span> ,  dass die Kunden von Big Tech
 274 Werbeunternehmen sind, und das Geschäftsmodell von Google und Facebook ist
 275 letztlich ihre Fähigkeit, <span class="emphasis"><em>dich</em></span> zu Käufen zu
 276 verleiten. Das Produkt von Big Tech ist die Überzeugungskunst. Die Dienste -
 277 soziale Medien, Suchmaschinen, Karten- und Kurznachrichtendienste und
 278 weitere - sind  schlicht Vehikel, um dessen Nutzer von etwas zu überzeugen
 279 und zu etwas zu verleiten.
 280   </p><p>
 281     Die Angst vor Überwachungskapitalismus basiert zunächst auf der (korrekten)
 282 Annahme, dass alles, was Big Tech über sich selbst sagt, wahrscheinlich eine
 283 Lüge ist. Aber der Kritiker des Überwachungskapitalismus macht hiervon eine
 284 Ausnahme, soweit es Big Techs eigene Behauptungen in seinen
 285 Verkaufsprospekten sind - der atemlose Hype, der potentiellen
 286 Werbeunternehmen online und in Werbetechnologie-Seminaren über die
 287 Wirksamkeit seiner Produkte angedient wird: Dem Hype zufolge kann uns Big
 288 Tech so gut wie von ihm behauptet beeinflussen. Das ist jedoch falsch, weil
 289 Verkaufsprospekte kein zuverlässiger Indikator für die Wirksamkeit eines
 290 Produkts ist.
 291   </p><p>
 292     Überwachungskapitalismus geht davon aus, dass Big Tech etwas Reales
 293 verkauft, weil Werbeunternehmen viel von dem kaufen, was Big Tech
 294 verkauft. Aber die massiven Umsatzzahlen von Big Tech könnten einfach auch
 295 nur das Produkt einer weit verbreiteten Täuschung sein, oder schlimmer noch:
 296 eines monopolistischen Kontrolle über unser aller Kommunikation und Handel.
 297   </p><p>
 298     Überwachung führt zu Verhaltensveränderungen, und zwar nicht zu
 299 positiven. Sie gefähdet unseren gesellschaftlichen Fortschritt. Zuboffs Buch
 300 arbeitet Erklärungen dieser Phänomene eindrucksvoll heraus. Aber Zuboff
 301 behauptet auch, dass Überwachung uns unseres freien Willens beraubt - dass,
 302 wenn unsere persönlichen Daten mit maschinellem Lernen kombiniert werden,
 303 ein System fataler Überzeugungskunst entsteht, in dessen Angesicht wir
 304 hilflos sind. Sprich, Facebook nutzt einen Algorithmus, um die Daten zu
 305 analysieren, welche ohne unsere Zustimmung aus deinem Alltag extrahiert
 306 werden, und nutzt diese, um deinen Feed so anzupassen, dass du Sachen
 307 kaufst. Es handelt sich um einen Strahl zur Gedankensteuerung wie aus einem
 308 Comic der 1950er Jahre, der von verrückten Wissenschaftlern bedient wird,
 309 deren Supercomputer ihnen ewige und umfassende Weltherrschaft garantiert.
 310   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="what-is-persuasion"></a>Was ist Überzeugung?</h2></div></div></div><p>
 311     Um zu verstehen, weshalb du dich nicht um Strahlen zur Gedankenkontrolle -
 312 aber weshalb du dich um Überwachung <span class="emphasis"><em>und</em></span> Big Tech sorgen
 313 <span class="emphasis"><em>solltest</em></span> -, müssen wir einordnen, was wir mit
 314 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überzeugung</span>“</span> meinen.
 315   </p><p>
 316     Google, Facebook und andere Überwachungkapitalisten versprechen ihren Kunden
 317 (den Werbeunternehmen), dass sich diesen - durch Werkzeuge maschinellen
 318 Lernes, die mit unvorstellbar großen Mengen an persönlichen Daten ohne
 319 Zustimmung trainier wurden - Wege eröffnen, um das rationale Denken der
 320 Öffentlichkeit umgehen und ihr Verhalten lenken zu können, so dass ein ein
 321 Strom an Käufen, Stimmen und anderer erwünschter Ergebnisse erzeugt wird
 322   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
 323       Die Auswirkungen von Vorherrschaft überwiegt die der Manipulation bei weitem
 324 und sie sollen im Mittelpunkt unserer Analyse und etwaiger Gegenmittel
 325 stehen, die wir zu finden suchen.
 326     </p></blockquote></div><p>
 327     Aber es gibt wenige Beweise dafür, dass dies geschieht. Stattdessen sind die
 328 Vorhersagen, die Überwachungskapitalisten ihren Kunden liefern, viel weniger
 329 beeindruckend. Anstelle Wege zu finden, die unser rationales Denken umgehen,
 330 tun Überwachungskapitlisten meistens eines oder mehrere der folgenden drei
 331 Dinge:
 332   </p><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="segmenting"></a>1. Aufteilung</h3></div></div></div><p>
 333       Falls du Windeln verkaufst, bist du besser beraten, diese Leuten auf
 334 Entbindungsstationen anzubieten. Nicht jeder, der eine Entbindungsstation
 335 betritt oder eine solche verlässt, hat gerade ein Kind entbunden, und nicht
 336 jeder, der gerade ein Kind entbunden hat, ist im Windelmarkt vertreten. Aber
 337 die Geburt eines Kindes ist ein sehr zuverlässiges Korrelat zur Teilnahme am
 338 „Windelmarkt“, und der Aufenthalt in einer Entbindungsstation steht in hoher
 339 Korrelation zur Geburt eines Kindes. Deshalb Windelwerbung im Bereich von
 340 Entbindungsstationen (und sogar Promoter, die auf Entbindungsstationen mit
 341 Körben voller Gratisproben herumspuken).
 342     </p><p>
 343       Surveillance capitalism is segmenting times a billion. Diaper vendors can go
 344 way beyond people in maternity wards (though they can do that, too, with
 345 things like location-based mobile ads).  They can target you based on
 346 whether you’re reading articles about child-rearing, diapers, or a host of
 347 other subjects, and data mining can suggest unobvious keywords to advertise
 348 against. They can target you based on the articles you’ve recently
 349 read. They can target you based on what you’ve recently purchased. They can
 350 target you based on whether you receive emails or private messages about
 351 these subjects — or even if you speak aloud about them (though Facebook and
 352 the like convincingly claim that’s not happening — yet).
 353     </p><p>
 354       This is seriously creepy.
 355     </p><p>
 356       But it’s not mind control.
 357     </p><p>
 358       It doesn’t deprive you of your free will. It doesn’t trick you.
 359     </p><p>
 360       Think of how surveillance capitalism works in politics.  Surveillance
 361 capitalist companies sell political operatives the power to locate people
 362 who might be receptive to their pitch.  Candidates campaigning on finance
 363 industry corruption seek people struggling with debt; candidates campaigning
 364 on xenophobia seek out racists. Political operatives have always targeted
 365 their message whether their intentions were honorable or not: Union
 366 organizers set up pitches at factory gates, and white supremacists hand out
 367 fliers at John Birch Society meetings.
 368     </p><p>
 369       But this is an inexact and thus wasteful practice. The union organizer can’t
 370 know which worker to approach on the way out of the factory gates and may
 371 waste their time on a covert John Birch Society member; the white
 372 supremacist doesn’t know which of the Birchers are so delusional that making
 373 it to a meeting is as much as they can manage and which ones might be
 374 convinced to cross the country to carry a tiki torch through the streets of
 375 Charlottesville, Virginia.
 376     </p><p>
 377       Because targeting improves the yields on political pitches, it can
 378 accelerate the pace of political upheaval by making it possible for everyone
 379 who has secretly wished for the toppling of an autocrat — or just an 11-term
 380 incumbent politician — to find everyone else who feels the same way at very
 381 low cost. This has been critical to the rapid crystallization of recent
 382 political movements including Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street as
 383 well as less savory players like the far-right white nationalist movements
 384 that marched in Charlottesville.
 385     </p><p>
 386       It’s important to differentiate this kind of political organizing from
 387 influence campaigns; finding people who secretly agree with you isn’t the
 388 same as convincing people to agree with you. The rise of phenomena like
 389 nonbinary or otherwise nonconforming gender identities is often
 390 characterized by reactionaries as the result of online brainwashing
 391 campaigns that convince impressionable people that they have been secretly
 392 queer all along.
 393     </p><p>
 394       But the personal accounts of those who have come out tell a different story
 395 where people who long harbored a secret about their gender were emboldened
 396 by others coming forward and where people who knew that they were different
 397 but lacked a vocabulary for discussing that difference learned the right
 398 words from these low-cost means of finding people and learning about their
 399 ideas.
 400     </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="deception"></a>2. Deception</h3></div></div></div><p>
 401       Lies and fraud are pernicious, and surveillance capitalism supercharges them
 402 through targeting. If you want to sell a fraudulent payday loan or subprime
 403 mortgage, surveillance capitalism can help you find people who are both
 404 desperate and unsophisticated and thus receptive to your pitch. This
 405 accounts for the rise of many phenomena, like multilevel marketing schemes,
 406 in which deceptive claims about potential earnings and the efficacy of sales
 407 techniques are targeted at desperate people by advertising against search
 408 queries that indicate, for example, someone struggling with ill-advised
 409 loans.
 410     </p><p>
 411       Surveillance capitalism also abets fraud by making it easy to locate other
 412 people who have been similarly deceived, forming a community of people who
 413 reinforce one another’s false beliefs.  Think of <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/the-dream-podcast-review.html" target="_top">the
 414 forums</a> where people who are being victimized by multilevel marketing
 415 frauds gather to trade tips on how to improve their luck in peddling the
 416 product.
 417     </p><p>
 418       Sometimes, online deception involves replacing someone’s correct beliefs
 419 with incorrect ones, as it does in the anti-vaccination movement, whose
 420 victims are often people who start out believing in vaccines but are
 421 convinced by seemingly plausible evidence that leads them into the false
 422 belief that vaccines are harmful.
 423     </p><p>
 424       But it’s much more common for fraud to succeed when it doesn’t have to
 425 displace a true belief. When my daughter contracted head lice at daycare,
 426 one of the daycare workers told me I could get rid of them by treating her
 427 hair and scalp with olive oil. I didn’t know anything about head lice, and I
 428 assumed that the daycare worker did, so I tried it (it didn’t work, and it
 429 doesn’t work). It’s easy to end up with false beliefs when you simply don’t
 430 know any better and when those beliefs are conveyed by someone who seems to
 431 know what they’re doing.
 432     </p><p>
 433       This is pernicious and difficult — and it’s also the kind of thing the
 434 internet can help guard against by making true information available,
 435 especially in a form that exposes the underlying deliberations among parties
 436 with sharply divergent views, such as Wikipedia. But it’s not brainwashing;
 437 it’s fraud. In the <a class="ulink" href="https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/" target="_top">majority of cases</a>,
 438 the victims of these fraud campaigns have an informational void filled in
 439 the customary way, by consulting a seemingly reliable source. If I look up
 440 the length of the Brooklyn Bridge and learn that it is 5,800 feet long, but
 441 in reality, it is 5,989 feet long, the underlying deception is a problem,
 442 but it’s a problem with a simple remedy. It’s a very different problem from
 443 the anti-vax issue in which someone’s true belief is displaced by a false
 444 one by means of sophisticated persuasion.
 445     </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="domination"></a>3. Domination</h3></div></div></div><p>
 446       Surveillance capitalism is the result of monopoly. Monopoly is the cause,
 447 and surveillance capitalism and its negative outcomes are the effects of
 448 monopoly. I’ll get into this in depth later, but for now, suffice it to say
 449 that the tech industry has grown up with a radical theory of antitrust that
 450 has allowed companies to grow by merging with their rivals, buying up their
 451 nascent competitors, and expanding to control whole market verticals.
 452     </p><p>
 453       One example of how monopolism aids in persuasion is through dominance:
 454 Google makes editorial decisions about its algorithms that determine the
 455 sort order of the responses to our queries. If a cabal of fraudsters have
 456 set out to trick the world into thinking that the Brooklyn Bridge is 5,800
 457 feet long, and if Google gives a high search rank to this group in response
 458 to queries like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">How long is the Brooklyn Bridge?</span>“</span> then the
 459 first eight or 10 screens’ worth of Google results could be wrong. And since
 460 most people don’t go beyond the first couple of results — let alone the
 461 first <span class="emphasis"><em>page</em></span> of results — Google’s choice means that many
 462 people will be deceived.
 463     </p><p>
 464       Google’s dominance over search — more than 86% of web searches are performed
 465 through Google — means that the way it orders its search results has an
 466 outsized effect on public beliefs. Ironically, Google claims this is why it
 467 can’t afford to have any transparency in its algorithm design: Google’s
 468 search dominance makes the results of its sorting too important to risk
 469 telling the world how it arrives at those results lest some bad actor
 470 discover a flaw in the ranking system and exploit it to push its point of
 471 view to the top of the search results. There’s an obvious remedy to a
 472 company that is too big to audit: break it up into smaller pieces.
 473     </p><p>
 474       Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> whose
 475 data-hoarding and machine-learning techniques rob us of our free will. But
 476 influence campaigns that seek to displace existing, correct beliefs with
 477 false ones have an effect that is small and temporary while monopolistic
 478 dominance over informational systems has massive, enduring
 479 effects. Controlling the results to the world’s search queries means
 480 controlling access both to arguments and their rebuttals and, thus, control
 481 over much of the world’s beliefs. If our concern is how corporations are
 482 foreclosing on our ability to make up our own minds and determine our own
 483 futures, the impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and
 484 should be central to our analysis and any remedies we seek.
 485     </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="bypassing-our-rational-faculties"></a>4. Bypassing our rational faculties</h3></div></div></div><p>
 486       <span class="emphasis"><em>This</em></span> is the good stuff: using machine learning,
 487 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">dark patterns,</span>“</span> engagement hacking, and other techniques to
 488 get us to do things that run counter to our better judgment. This is mind
 489 control.
 490     </p><p>
 491       Some of these techniques have proven devastatingly effective (if only in the
 492 short term). The use of countdown timers on a purchase completion page can
 493 create a sense of urgency that causes you to ignore the nagging internal
 494 voice suggesting that you should shop around or sleep on your decision. The
 495 use of people from your social graph in ads can provide <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">social
 496 proof</span>“</span> that a purchase is worth making. Even the auction system
 497 pioneered by eBay is calculated to play on our cognitive blind spots,
 498 letting us feel like we <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">own</span>“</span> something because we bid on it,
 499 thus encouraging us to bid again when we are outbid to ensure that
 500 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">our</span>“</span> things stay ours.
 501     </p><p>
 502       Games are extraordinarily good at this. <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Free to play</span>“</span> games
 503 manipulate us through many techniques, such as presenting players with a
 504 series of smoothly escalating challenges that create a sense of mastery and
 505 accomplishment but which sharply transition into a set of challenges that
 506 are impossible to overcome without paid upgrades. Add some social proof to
 507 the mix — a stream of notifications about how well your friends are faring —
 508 and before you know it, you’re buying virtual power-ups to get to the next
 509 level.
 510     </p><p>
 511       Companies have risen and fallen on these techniques, and the
 512 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">fallen</span>“</span> part is worth paying attention to. In general, living
 513 things adapt to stimulus: Something that is very compelling or noteworthy
 514 when you first encounter it fades with repetition until you stop noticing it
 515 altogether. Consider the refrigerator hum that irritates you when it starts
 516 up but disappears into the background so thoroughly that you only notice it
 517 when it stops again.
 518     </p><p>
 519       That’s why behavioral conditioning uses <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">intermittent reinforcement
 520 schedules.</span>“</span> Instead of giving you a steady drip of encouragement or
 521 setbacks, games and gamified services scatter rewards on a randomized
 522 schedule — often enough to keep you interested and random enough that you
 523 can never quite find the pattern that would make it boring.
 524     </p><p>
 525       Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful behavioral tool, but it also
 526 represents a collective action problem for surveillance capitalism. The
 527 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">engagement techniques</span>“</span> invented by the behaviorists of
 528 surveillance capitalist companies are quickly copied across the whole sector
 529 so that what starts as a mysteriously compelling fillip in the design of a
 530 service—like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">pull to refresh</span>“</span> or alerts when someone likes
 531 your posts or side quests that your characters get invited to while in the
 532 midst of main quests—quickly becomes dully ubiquitous. The
 533 impossible-to-nail-down nonpattern of randomized drips from your phone
 534 becomes a grey-noise wall of sound as every single app and site starts to
 535 make use of whatever seems to be working at the time.
 536     </p><p>
 537       From the surveillance capitalist’s point of view, our adaptive capacity is
 538 like a harmful bacterium that deprives it of its food source — our attention
 539 — and novel techniques for snagging that attention are like new antibiotics
 540 that can be used to breach our defenses and destroy our
 541 self-determination. And there <span class="emphasis"><em>are</em></span> techniques like
 542 that. Who can forget the Great Zynga Epidemic, when all of our friends were
 543 caught in <span class="emphasis"><em>FarmVille</em></span>’s endless, mindless dopamine loops?
 544 But every new attention-commanding technique is jumped on by the whole
 545 industry and used so indiscriminately that antibiotic resistance sets
 546 in. Given enough repetition, almost all of us develop immunity to even the
 547 most powerful techniques — by 2013, two years after Zynga’s peak, its user
 548 base had halved.
 549     </p><p>
 550       Not everyone, of course. Some people never adapt to stimulus, just as some
 551 people never stop hearing the hum of the refrigerator.  This is why most
 552 people who are exposed to slot machines play them for a while and then move
 553 on while a small and tragic minority liquidate their kids’ college funds,
 554 buy adult diapers, and position themselves in front of a machine until they
 555 collapse.
 556     </p><p>
 557       But surveillance capitalism’s margins on behavioral modification
 558 suck. Tripling the rate at which someone buys a widget sounds great <a class="ulink" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2018/03/09/the-advertising-conversion-rates-for-every-major-tech-platform/#2f6a67485957" target="_top">unless
 559 the base rate is way less than 1%</a> with an improved rate of… still
 560 less than 1%. Even penny slot machines pull down pennies for every spin
 561 while surveillance capitalism rakes in infinitesimal penny fractions.
 562     </p><p>
 563       Slot machines’ high returns mean that they can be profitable just by
 564 draining the fortunes of the small rump of people who are pathologically
 565 vulnerable to them and unable to adapt to their tricks. But surveillance
 566 capitalism can’t survive on the fractional pennies it brings down from that
 567 vulnerable sliver — that’s why, after the Great Zynga Epidemic had finally
 568 burned itself out, the small number of still-addicted players left behind
 569 couldn’t sustain it as a global phenomenon. And new powerful attention
 570 weapons aren’t easy to find, as is evidenced by the long years since the
 571 last time Zynga had a hit. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that
 572 Zynga has to spend on developing new tools to blast through our adaptation,
 573 it has never managed to repeat the lucky accident that let it snag so much
 574 of our attention for a brief moment in 2009. Powerhouses like Supercell have
 575 fared a little better, but they are rare and throw away many failures for
 576 every success.
 577     </p><p>
 578       The vulnerability of small segments of the population to dramatic, efficient
 579 corporate manipulation is a real concern that’s worthy of our attention and
 580 energy. But it’s not an existential threat to society.
 581     </p></div></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="if-data-is-the-new-oil-then-surveillance-capitalisms-engine-has-a-leak"></a>If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak</h2></div></div></div><p>
 582     This adaptation problem offers an explanation for one of surveillance
 583 capitalism’s most alarming traits: its relentless hunger for data and its
 584 endless expansion of data-gathering capabilities through the spread of
 585 sensors, online surveillance, and acquisition of data streams from third
 586 parties.
 587   </p><p>
 588     Zuboff observes this phenomenon and concludes that data must be very
 589 valuable if surveillance capitalism is so hungry for it. (In her words:
 590 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous
 591 intensification of the means of production, so surveillance capitalists and
 592 their market players are now locked into the continuous intensification of
 593 the means of behavioral modification and the gathering might of
 594 instrumentarian power.</span>“</span>) But what if the voracious appetite is
 595 because data has such a short half-life — because people become inured so
 596 quickly to new, data-driven persuasion techniques — that the companies are
 597 locked in an arms race with our limbic system? What if it’s all a Red
 598 Queen’s race where they have to run ever faster — collect ever-more data —
 599 just to stay in the same spot?
 600   </p><p>
 601     Of course, all of Big Tech’s persuasion techniques work in concert with one
 602 another, and collecting data is useful beyond mere behavioral trickery.
 603   </p><p>
 604     If someone wants to recruit you to buy a refrigerator or join a pogrom, they
 605 might use profiling and targeting to send messages to people they judge to
 606 be good sales prospects. The messages themselves may be deceptive, making
 607 claims about things you’re not very knowledgeable about (food safety and
 608 energy efficiency or eugenics and historical claims about racial
 609 superiority). They might use search engine optimization and/or armies of
 610 fake reviewers and commenters and/or paid placement to dominate the
 611 discourse so that any search for further information takes you back to their
 612 messages.  And finally, they may refine the different pitches using machine
 613 learning and other techniques to figure out what kind of pitch works best on
 614 someone like you.
 615   </p><p>
 616     Each phase of this process benefits from surveillance: The more data they
 617 have, the more precisely they can profile you and target you with specific
 618 messages. Think of how you’d sell a fridge if you knew that the warranty on
 619 your prospect’s fridge just expired and that they were expecting a tax
 620 rebate in April.
 621   </p><p>
 622     Also, the more data they have, the better they can craft deceptive messages
 623 — if I know that you’re into genealogy, I might not try to feed you
 624 pseudoscience about genetic differences between <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">races,</span>“</span>
 625 sticking instead to conspiratorial secret histories of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">demographic
 626 replacement</span>“</span> and the like.
 627   </p><p>
 628     Facebook also helps you locate people who have the same odious or antisocial
 629 views as you. It makes it possible to find other people who want to carry
 630 tiki torches through the streets of Charlottesville in Confederate
 631 cosplay. It can help you find other people who want to join your militia and
 632 go to the border to look for undocumented migrants to terrorize. It can help
 633 you find people who share your belief that vaccines are poison and that the
 634 Earth is flat.
 635   </p><p>
 636     There is one way in which targeted advertising uniquely benefits those
 637 advocating for socially unacceptable causes: It is invisible.  Racism is
 638 widely geographically dispersed, and there are few places where racists —
 639 and only racists — gather. This is similar to the problem of selling
 640 refrigerators in that potential refrigerator purchasers are geographically
 641 dispersed and there are few places where you can buy an ad that will be
 642 primarily seen by refrigerator customers. But buying a refrigerator is
 643 socially acceptable while being a Nazi is not, so you can buy a billboard or
 644 advertise in the newspaper sports section for your refrigerator business,
 645 and the only potential downside is that your ad will be seen by a lot of
 646 people who don’t want refrigerators, resulting in a lot of wasted expense.
 647   </p><p>
 648     But even if you wanted to advertise your Nazi movement on a billboard or
 649 prime-time TV or the sports section, you would struggle to find anyone
 650 willing to sell you the space for your ad partly because they disagree with
 651 your views and partly because they fear censure (boycott, reputational
 652 damage, etc.) from other people who disagree with your views.
 653   </p><p>
 654     Targeted ads solve this problem: On the internet, every ad unit can be
 655 different for every person, meaning that you can buy ads that are only shown
 656 to people who appear to be Nazis and not to people who hate Nazis. When
 657 there’s spillover — when someone who hates racism is shown a racist
 658 recruiting ad — there is some fallout; the platform or publication might get
 659 an angry public or private denunciation. But the nature of the risk assumed
 660 by an online ad buyer is different than the risks to a traditional publisher
 661 or billboard owner who might want to run a Nazi ad.
 662   </p><p>
 663     Online ads are placed by algorithms that broker between a diverse ecosystem
 664 of self-serve ad platforms that anyone can buy an ad through, so the Nazi ad
 665 that slips onto your favorite online publication isn’t seen as their moral
 666 failing but rather as a failure in some distant, upstream ad supplier. When
 667 a publication gets a complaint about an offensive ad that’s appearing in one
 668 of its units, it can take some steps to block that ad, but the Nazi might
 669 buy a slightly different ad from a different broker serving the same
 670 unit. And in any event, internet users increasingly understand that when
 671 they see an ad, it’s likely that the advertiser did not choose that
 672 publication and that the publication has no idea who its advertisers are.
 673   </p><p>
 674     These layers of indirection between advertisers and publishers serve as
 675 moral buffers: Today’s moral consensus is largely that publishers shouldn’t
 676 be held responsible for the ads that appear on their pages because they’re
 677 not actively choosing to put those ads there.  Because of this, Nazis are
 678 able to overcome significant barriers to organizing their movement.
 679   </p><p>
 680     Data has a complex relationship with domination. Being able to spy on your
 681 customers can alert you to their preferences for your rivals and allow you
 682 to head off your rivals at the pass.
 683   </p><p>
 684     More importantly, if you can dominate the information space while also
 685 gathering data, then you make other deceptive tactics stronger because it’s
 686 harder to break out of the web of deceit you’re spinning. Domination — that
 687 is, ultimately becoming a monopoly — and not the data itself is the
 688 supercharger that makes every tactic worth pursuing because monopolistic
 689 domination deprives your target of an escape route.
 690   </p><p>
 691     If you’re a Nazi who wants to ensure that your prospects primarily see
 692 deceptive, confirming information when they search for more, you can improve
 693 your odds by seeding the search terms they use through your initial
 694 communications. You don’t need to own the top 10 results for <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">voter
 695 suppression</span>“</span> if you can convince your marks to confine their search
 696 terms to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">voter fraud,</span>“</span> which throws up a very different set of
 697 search results.
 698   </p><p>
 699     Surveillance capitalists are like stage mentalists who claim that their
 700 extraordinary insights into human behavior let them guess the word that you
 701 wrote down and folded up in your pocket but who really use shills, hidden
 702 cameras, sleight of hand, and brute-force memorization to amaze you.
 703   </p><p>
 704     Or perhaps they’re more like pick-up artists, the misogynistic cult that
 705 promises to help awkward men have sex with women by teaching them
 706 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">neurolinguistic programming</span>“</span> phrases, body language
 707 techniques, and psychological manipulation tactics like
 708 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">negging</span>“</span> — offering unsolicited negative feedback to women to
 709 lower their self-esteem and prick their interest.
 710   </p><p>
 711     Some pick-up artists eventually manage to convince women to go home with
 712 them, but it’s not because these men have figured out how to bypass women’s
 713 critical faculties. Rather, pick-up artists’ <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">success</span>“</span> stories
 714 are a mix of women who were incapable of giving consent, women who were
 715 coerced, women who were intoxicated, self-destructive women, and a few women
 716 who were sober and in command of their faculties but who didn’t realize
 717 straightaway that they were with terrible men but rectified the error as
 718 soon as they could.
 719   </p><p>
 720     Pick-up artists <span class="emphasis"><em>believe</em></span> they have figured out a secret
 721 back door that bypasses women’s critical faculties, but they haven’t. Many
 722 of the tactics they deploy, like negging, became the butt of jokes (just
 723 like people joke about bad ad targeting), and there’s a good chance that
 724 anyone they try these tactics on will immediately recognize them and dismiss
 725 the men who use them as irredeemable losers.
 726   </p><p>
 727     Pick-up artists are proof that people can believe they have developed a
 728 system of mind control <span class="emphasis"><em>even when it doesn’t
 729 work</em></span>. Pick-up artists simply exploit the fact that
 730 one-in-a-million chances can come through for you if you make a million
 731 attempts, and then they assume that the other 999,999 times, they simply
 732 performed the technique incorrectly and commit themselves to doing better
 733 next time. There’s only one group of people who find pick-up artist lore
 734 reliably convincing: other would-be pick-up artists whose anxiety and
 735 insecurity make them vulnerable to scammers and delusional men who convince
 736 them that if they pay for tutelage and follow instructions, then they will
 737 someday succeed. Pick-up artists assume they fail to entice women because
 738 they are bad at being pick-up artists, not because pick-up artistry is
 739 bullshit. Pick-up artists are bad at selling themselves to women, but
 740 they’re much better at selling themselves to men who pay to learn the
 741 secrets of pick-up artistry.
 742   </p><p>
 743     Department store pioneer John Wanamaker is said to have lamented,
 744 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I
 745 don’t know which half.</span>“</span> The fact that Wanamaker thought that only
 746 half of his advertising spending was wasted is a tribute to the
 747 persuasiveness of advertising executives, who are <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span>
 748 better at convincing potential clients to buy their services than they are
 749 at convincing the general public to buy their clients’ wares.
 750   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="what-is-facebook"></a>What is Facebook?</h2></div></div></div><p>
 751     Facebook is heralded as the origin of all of our modern plagues, and it’s
 752 not hard to see why. Some tech companies want to lock their users in but
 753 make their money by monopolizing access to the market for apps for their
 754 devices and gouging them on prices rather than by spying on them (like
 755 Apple). Some companies don’t care about locking in users because they’ve
 756 figured out how to spy on them no matter where they are and what they’re
 757 doing and can turn that surveillance into money (Google). Facebook alone
 758 among the Western tech giants has built a business based on locking in its
 759 users <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> spying on them all the time.
 760   </p><p>
 761     Facebook’s surveillance regime is really without parallel in the Western
 762 world. Though Facebook tries to prevent itself from being visible on the
 763 public web, hiding most of what goes on there from people unless they’re
 764 logged into Facebook, the company has nevertheless booby-trapped the entire
 765 web with surveillance tools in the form of Facebook <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Like</span>“</span>
 766 buttons that web publishers include on their sites to boost their Facebook
 767 profiles. Facebook also makes various libraries and other useful code
 768 snippets available to web publishers that act as surveillance tendrils on
 769 the sites where they’re used, funneling information about visitors to the
 770 site — newspapers, dating sites, message boards — to Facebook.
 771   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
 772       Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but
 773 because it is <span class="emphasis"><em>big</em></span>.
 774     </p></blockquote></div><p>
 775     Facebook offers similar tools to app developers, so the apps — games, fart
 776 machines, business review services, apps for keeping abreast of your kid’s
 777 schooling — you use will send information about your activities to Facebook
 778 even if you don’t have a Facebook account and even if you don’t download or
 779 use Facebook apps. On top of all that, Facebook buys data from third-party
 780 brokers on shopping habits, physical location, use of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">loyalty</span>“</span>
 781 programs, financial transactions, etc., and cross-references that with the
 782 dossiers it develops on activity on Facebook and with apps and the public
 783 web.
 784   </p><p>
 785     Though it’s easy to integrate the web with Facebook — linking to news
 786 stories and such — Facebook products are generally not available to be
 787 integrated back into the web itself. You can embed a tweet in a Facebook
 788 post, but if you embed a Facebook post in a tweet, you just get a link back
 789 to Facebook and must log in before you can see it. Facebook has used extreme
 790 technological and legal countermeasures to prevent rivals from allowing
 791 their users to embed Facebook snippets in competing services or to create
 792 alternative interfaces to Facebook that merge your Facebook inbox with those
 793 of other services that you use.
 794   </p><p>
 795     And Facebook is incredibly popular, with 2.3 billion claimed users (though
 796 many believe this figure to be inflated). Facebook has been used to organize
 797 genocidal pogroms, racist riots, anti-vaccination movements, flat Earth
 798 cults, and the political lives of some of the world’s ugliest, most brutal
 799 autocrats. There are some really alarming things going on in the world, and
 800 Facebook is implicated in many of them, so it’s easy to conclude that these
 801 bad things are the result of Facebook’s mind-control system, which it rents
 802 out to anyone with a few bucks to spend.
 803   </p><p>
 804     To understand what role Facebook plays in the formulation and mobilization
 805 of antisocial movements, we need to understand the dual nature of Facebook.
 806   </p><p>
 807     Because it has a lot of users and a lot of data about those users, Facebook
 808 is a very efficient tool for locating people with hard-to-find traits, the
 809 kinds of traits that are widely diffused in the population such that
 810 advertisers have historically struggled to find a cost-effective way to
 811 reach them. Think back to refrigerators: Most of us only replace our major
 812 appliances a few times in our entire lives. If you’re a refrigerator
 813 manufacturer or retailer, you have these brief windows in the life of a
 814 consumer during which they are pondering a purchase, and you have to somehow
 815 reach them. Anyone who’s ever registered a title change after buying a house
 816 can attest that appliance manufacturers are incredibly desperate to reach
 817 anyone who has even the slenderest chance of being in the market for a new
 818 fridge.
 819   </p><p>
 820     Facebook makes finding people shopping for refrigerators a
 821 <span class="emphasis"><em>lot</em></span> easier. It can target ads to people who’ve
 822 registered a new home purchase, to people who’ve searched for refrigerator
 823 buying advice, to people who have complained about their fridge dying, or
 824 any combination thereof. It can even target people who’ve recently bought
 825 <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> kitchen appliances on the theory that someone
 826 who’s just replaced their stove and dishwasher might be in a fridge-buying
 827 kind of mood. The vast majority of people who are reached by these ads will
 828 not be in the market for a new fridge, but — crucially — the percentage of
 829 people who <span class="emphasis"><em>are</em></span> looking for fridges that these ads reach
 830 is <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span> larger than it is than for any group that might
 831 be subjected to traditional, offline targeted refrigerator marketing.
 832   </p><p>
 833     Facebook also makes it a lot easier to find people who have the same rare
 834 disease as you, which might have been impossible in earlier eras — the
 835 closest fellow sufferer might otherwise be hundreds of miles away. It makes
 836 it easier to find people who went to the same high school as you even though
 837 decades have passed and your former classmates have all been scattered to
 838 the four corners of the Earth.
 839   </p><p>
 840     Facebook also makes it much easier to find people who hold the same rare
 841 political beliefs as you. If you’ve always harbored a secret affinity for
 842 socialism but never dared utter this aloud lest you be demonized by your
 843 neighbors, Facebook can help you discover other people who feel the same way
 844 (and it might just demonstrate to you that your affinity is more widespread
 845 than you ever suspected). It can make it easier to find people who share
 846 your sexual identity.  And again, it can help you to understand that what
 847 you thought was a shameful secret that affected only you was really a widely
 848 shared trait, giving you both comfort and the courage to come out to the
 849 people in your life.
 850   </p><p>
 851     All of this presents a dilemma for Facebook: Targeting makes the company’s
 852 ads more effective than traditional ads, but it also lets advertisers see
 853 just how effective their ads are. While advertisers are pleased to learn
 854 that Facebook ads are more effective than ads on systems with less
 855 sophisticated targeting, advertisers can also see that in nearly every case,
 856 the people who see their ads ignore them. Or, at best, the ads work on a
 857 subconscious level, creating nebulous unmeasurables like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">brand
 858 recognition.</span>“</span> This means that the price per ad is very low in nearly
 859 every case.
 860   </p><p>
 861     To make things worse, many Facebook groups spark precious little
 862 discussion. Your little-league soccer team, the people with the same rare
 863 disease as you, and the people you share a political affinity with may
 864 exchange the odd flurry of messages at critical junctures, but on a daily
 865 basis, there’s not much to say to your old high school chums or other
 866 hockey-card collectors.
 867   </p><p>
 868     With nothing but <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">organic</span>“</span> discussion, Facebook would not
 869 generate enough traffic to sell enough ads to make the money it needs to
 870 continually expand by buying up its competitors while returning handsome
 871 sums to its investors.
 872   </p><p>
 873     So Facebook has to gin up traffic by sidetracking its own forums: Every time
 874 Facebook’s algorithm injects controversial materials — inflammatory
 875 political articles, conspiracy theories, outrage stories — into a group, it
 876 can hijack that group’s nominal purpose with its desultory discussions and
 877 supercharge those discussions by turning them into bitter, unproductive
 878 arguments that drag on and on. Facebook is optimized for engagement, not
 879 happiness, and it turns out that automated systems are pretty good at
 880 figuring out things that people will get angry about.
 881   </p><p>
 882     Facebook <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> modify our behavior but only in a couple
 883 of trivial ways. First, it can lock in all your friends and family members
 884 so that you check and check and check with Facebook to find out what they
 885 are up to; and second, it can make you angry and anxious. It can force you
 886 to choose between being interrupted constantly by updates — a process that
 887 breaks your concentration and makes it hard to be introspective — and
 888 staying in touch with your friends. This is a very limited form of mind
 889 control, and it can only really make us miserable, angry, and anxious.
 890   </p><p>
 891     This is why Facebook’s targeting systems — both the ones it shows to
 892 advertisers and the ones that let users find people who share their
 893 interests — are so next-gen and smooth and easy to use as well as why its
 894 message boards have a toolset that seems like it hasn’t changed since the
 895 mid-2000s. If Facebook delivered an equally flexible, sophisticated
 896 message-reading system to its users, those users could defend themselves
 897 against being nonconsensually eyeball-fucked with Donald Trump headlines.
 898   </p><p>
 899     The more time you spend on Facebook, the more ads it gets to show you. The
 900 solution to Facebook’s ads only working one in a thousand times is for the
 901 company to try to increase how much time you spend on Facebook by a factor
 902 of a thousand. Rather than thinking of Facebook as a company that has
 903 figured out how to show you exactly the right ad in exactly the right way to
 904 get you to do what its advertisers want, think of it as a company that has
 905 figured out how to make you slog through an endless torrent of arguments
 906 even though they make you miserable, spending so much time on the site that
 907 it eventually shows you at least one ad that you respond to.
 908   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="monopoly-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense"></a>Monopoly and the right to the future tense</h2></div></div></div><p>
 909     Zuboff and her cohort are particularly alarmed at the extent to which
 910 surveillance allows corporations to influence our decisions, taking away
 911 something she poetically calls <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">the right to the future tense</span>“</span>
 912 — that is, the right to decide for yourself what you will do in the future.
 913   </p><p>
 914     It’s true that advertising can tip the scales one way or another: When
 915 you’re thinking of buying a fridge, a timely fridge ad might end the search
 916 on the spot. But Zuboff puts enormous and undue weight on the persuasive
 917 power of surveillance-based influence techniques. Most of these don’t work
 918 very well, and the ones that do won’t work for very long. The makers of
 919 these influence tools are confident they will someday refine them into
 920 systems of total control, but they are hardly unbiased observers, and the
 921 risks from their dreams coming true are very speculative.
 922   </p><p>
 923     By contrast, Zuboff is rather sanguine about 40 years of lax antitrust
 924 practice that has allowed a handful of companies to dominate the internet,
 925 ushering in an information age with, <a class="ulink" href="https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040" target="_top">as one person
 926 on Twitter noted</a>, five giant websites each filled with screenshots
 927 of the other four.
 928   </p><p>
 929     However, if we are to be alarmed that we might lose the right to choose for
 930 ourselves what our future will hold, then monopoly’s nonspeculative,
 931 concrete, here-and-now harms should be front and center in our debate over
 932 tech policy.
 933   </p><p>
 934     Start with <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">digital rights management.</span>“</span> In 1998, Bill Clinton
 935 signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. It’s a complex
 936 piece of legislation with many controversial clauses but none more so than
 937 Section 1201, the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">anti-circumvention</span>“</span> rule.
 938   </p><p>
 939     This is a blanket ban on tampering with systems that restrict access to
 940 copyrighted works. The ban is so thoroughgoing that it prohibits removing a
 941 copyright lock even when no copyright infringement takes place. This is by
 942 design: The activities that the DMCA’s Section 1201 sets out to ban are not
 943 copyright infringements; rather, they are legal activities that frustrate
 944 manufacturers’ commercial plans.
 945   </p><p>
 946     For example, Section 1201’s first major application was on DVD players as a
 947 means of enforcing the region coding built into those devices. DVD-CCA, the
 948 body that standardized DVDs and DVD players, divided the world into six
 949 regions and specified that DVD players must check each disc to determine
 950 which regions it was authorized to be played in. DVD players would have
 951 their own corresponding region (a DVD player bought in the U.S. would be
 952 region 1 while one bought in India would be region 5). If the player and the
 953 disc’s region matched, the player would play the disc; otherwise, it would
 954 reject it.
 955   </p><p>
 956     However, watching a lawfully produced disc in a country other than the one
 957 where you purchased it is not copyright infringement — it’s the
 958 opposite. Copyright law imposes this duty on customers for a movie: You must
 959 go into a store, find a licensed disc, and pay the asking price. Do that —
 960 and <span class="emphasis"><em>nothing else</em></span> — and you and copyright are square
 961 with one another.
 962   </p><p>
 963     The fact that a movie studio wants to charge Indians less than Americans or
 964 release in Australia later than it releases in the U.K.  has no bearing on
 965 copyright law. Once you lawfully acquire a DVD, it is no copyright
 966 infringement to watch it no matter where you happen to be.
 967   </p><p>
 968     So DVD and DVD player manufacturers would not be able to use accusations of
 969 abetting copyright infringement to punish manufacturers who made
 970 noncompliant players that would play discs from any region or repair shops
 971 that modified players to let you watch out-of-region discs or software
 972 programmers who created programs to let you do this.
 973   </p><p>
 974     That’s where Section 1201 of the DMCA comes in: By banning tampering with an
 975 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">access control,</span>“</span> the rule gave manufacturers and rights
 976 holders standing to sue competitors who released superior products with
 977 lawful features that the market demanded (in this case, region-free
 978 players).
 979   </p><p>
 980     This is an odious scam against consumers, but as time went by, Section 1201
 981 grew to encompass a rapidly expanding constellation of devices and services
 982 as canny manufacturers have realized certain things:
 983   </p><div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist compact" style="list-style-type: disc; "><li class="listitem"><p>
 984         Any device with software in it contains a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">copyrighted work</span>“</span> —
 985 i.e., the software.
 986       </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
 987         A device can be designed so that reconfiguring the software requires
 988 bypassing an <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">access control for copyrighted works,</span>“</span> which is a
 989 potential felony under Section 1201.
 990       </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
 991         Thus, companies can control their customers’ behavior after they take home
 992 their purchases by designing products so that all unpermitted uses require
 993 modifications that fall afoul of Section 1201.
 994       </p></li></ul></div><p>
 995     Section 1201 then becomes a means for manufacturers of all descriptions to
 996 force their customers to arrange their affairs to benefit the manufacturers’
 997 shareholders instead of themselves.
 998   </p><p>
 999     This manifests in many ways: from a new generation of inkjet printers that
1000 use countermeasures to prevent third-party ink that cannot be bypassed
1001 without legal risks to similar systems in tractors that prevent third-party
1002 technicians from swapping in the manufacturer’s own parts that are not
1003 recognized by the tractor’s control system until it is supplied with a
1004 manufacturer’s unlock code.
1005   </p><p>
1006     Closer to home, Apple’s iPhones use these measures to prevent both
1007 third-party service and third-party software installation. This allows Apple
1008 to decide when an iPhone is beyond repair and must be shredded and
1009 landfilled as opposed to the iPhone’s purchaser. (Apple is notorious for its
1010 environmentally catastrophic policy of destroying old electronics rather
1011 than permitting them to be cannibalized for parts.) This is a very useful
1012 power to wield, especially in light of CEO Tim Cook’s January 2019 warning
1013 to investors that the company’s profits are endangered by customers choosing
1014 to hold onto their phones for longer rather than replacing them.
1015   </p><p>
1016     Apple’s use of copyright locks also allows it to establish a monopoly over
1017 how its customers acquire software for their mobile devices. The App Store’s
1018 commercial terms guarantee Apple a share of all revenues generated by the
1019 apps sold there, meaning that Apple gets paid when you buy an app from its
1020 store and then continues to get paid every time you buy something using that
1021 app. This comes out of the bottom line of software developers, who must
1022 either charge more or accept lower profits for their products.
1023   </p><p>
1024     Crucially, Apple’s use of copyright locks gives it the power to make
1025 editorial decisions about which apps you may and may not install on your own
1026 device. Apple has used this power to <a class="ulink" href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/5982243/Apple-bans-dictionary-from-App-Store-over-swear-words.html" target="_top">reject
1027 dictionaries</a> for containing obscene words; to <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just-banned-the-app-that-tracks-us-drone-strikes-again" target="_top">limit
1028 political speech</a>, especially from apps that make sensitive political
1029 commentary such as an app that notifies you every time a U.S. drone kills
1030 someone somewhere in the world; and to <a class="ulink" href="https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-05-19-palestinian-indie-game-must-not-be-called-a-game-apple-says" target="_top">object
1031 to a game</a> that commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
1032   </p><p>
1033     Apple often justifies monopoly power over software installation in the name
1034 of security, arguing that its vetting of apps for its store means that it
1035 can guard its users against apps that contain surveillance code. But this
1036 cuts both ways. In China, the government <a class="ulink" href="https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc" target="_top">ordered
1037 Apple to prohibit the sale of privacy tools</a> like VPNs with the
1038 exception of VPNs that had deliberately introduced flaws designed to let the
1039 Chinese state eavesdrop on users. Because Apple uses technological
1040 countermeasures — with legal backstops — to block customers from installing
1041 unauthorized apps, Chinese iPhone owners cannot readily (or legally) acquire
1042 VPNs that would protect them from Chinese state snooping.
1043   </p><p>
1044     Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism.</span>“</span>
1045 Theoreticians of capitalism claim that its virtue is that it <a class="ulink" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal" target="_top">aggregates information in
1046 the form of consumers’ decisions</a>, producing efficient
1047 markets. Surveillance capitalism’s supposed power to rob its victims of
1048 their free will through computationally supercharged influence campaigns
1049 means that our markets no longer aggregate customers’ decisions because we
1050 customers no longer decide — we are given orders by surveillance
1051 capitalism’s mind-control rays.
1052   </p><p>
1053     If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no
1054 longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at
1055 <span class="emphasis"><em>least</em></span> as much as influence campaigns. An influence
1056 campaign might nudge you to buy a certain brand of phone; but the copyright
1057 locks on that phone absolutely determine where you get it serviced, which
1058 apps can run on it, and when you have to throw it away rather than fixing
1059 it.
1060   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="search-order-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense"></a>Search order and the right to the future tense</h2></div></div></div><p>
1061     Markets are posed as a kind of magic: By discovering otherwise hidden
1062 information conveyed by the free choices of consumers, those consumers’
1063 local knowledge is integrated into a self-correcting system that makes
1064 efficient allocations—more efficient than any computer could calculate. But
1065 monopolies are incompatible with that notion. When you only have one app
1066 store, the owner of the store — not the consumer — decides on the range of
1067 choices. As Boss Tweed once said, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">I don’t care who does the electing,
1068 so long as I get to do the nominating.</span>“</span> A monopolized market is an
1069 election whose candidates are chosen by the monopolist.
1070   </p><p>
1071     This ballot rigging is made more pernicious by the existence of monopolies
1072 over search order. Google’s search market share is about 90%. When Google’s
1073 ranking algorithm puts a result for a popular search term in its top 10,
1074 that helps determine the behavior of millions of people. If Google’s answer
1075 to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are vaccines dangerous?</span>“</span> is a page that rebuts anti-vax
1076 conspiracy theories, then a sizable portion of the public will learn that
1077 vaccines are safe. If, on the other hand, Google sends those people to a
1078 site affirming the anti-vax conspiracies, a sizable portion of those
1079 millions will come away convinced that vaccines are dangerous.
1080   </p><p>
1081     Google’s algorithm is often tricked into serving disinformation as a
1082 prominent search result. But in these cases, Google isn’t persuading people
1083 to change their minds; it’s just presenting something untrue as fact when
1084 the user has no cause to doubt it.
1085   </p><p>
1086     This is true whether the search is for <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are vaccines
1087 dangerous?</span>“</span> or <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">best restaurants near me.</span>“</span> Most users
1088 will never look past the first page of search results, and when the
1089 overwhelming majority of people all use the same search engine, the ranking
1090 algorithm deployed by that search engine will determine myriad outcomes
1091 (whether to adopt a child, whether to have cancer surgery, where to eat
1092 dinner, where to move, where to apply for a job) to a degree that vastly
1093 outstrips any behavioral outcomes dictated by algorithmic persuasion
1094 techniques.
1095   </p><p>
1096     Many of the questions we ask search engines have no empirically correct
1097 answers: <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Where should I eat dinner?</span>“</span> is not an objective
1098 question. Even questions that do have correct answers (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are vaccines
1099 dangerous?</span>“</span>) don’t have one empirically superior source for that
1100 answer. Many pages affirm the safety of vaccines, so which one goes first?
1101 Under conditions of competition, consumers can choose from many search
1102 engines and stick with the one whose algorithmic judgment suits them best,
1103 but under conditions of monopoly, we all get our answers from the same
1104 place.
1105   </p><p>
1106     Google’s search dominance isn’t a matter of pure merit: The company has
1107 leveraged many tactics that would have been prohibited under classical,
1108 pre-Ronald-Reagan antitrust enforcement standards to attain its
1109 dominance. After all, this is a company that has developed two major
1110 products: a really good search engine and a pretty good Hotmail clone. Every
1111 other major success it’s had — Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. — has
1112 come through an acquisition of a nascent competitor. Many of the company’s
1113 key divisions, such as the advertising technology of DoubleClick, violate
1114 the historical antitrust principle of structural separation, which forbade
1115 firms from owning subsidiaries that competed with their
1116 customers. Railroads, for example, were barred from owning freight companies
1117 that competed with the shippers whose freight they carried.
1118   </p><p>
1119     If we’re worried about giant companies subverting markets by stripping
1120 consumers of their ability to make free choices, then vigorous antitrust
1121 enforcement seems like an excellent remedy. If we’d denied Google the right
1122 to effect its many mergers, we would also have probably denied it its total
1123 search dominance. Without that dominance, the pet theories, biases, errors
1124 (and good judgment, too) of Google search engineers and product managers
1125 would not have such an outsized effect on consumer choice.
1126   </p><p>
1127     This goes for many other companies. Amazon, a classic surveillance
1128 capitalist, is obviously the dominant tool for searching Amazon — though
1129 many people find their way to Amazon through Google searches and Facebook
1130 posts — and obviously, Amazon controls Amazon search.  That means that
1131 Amazon’s own self-serving editorial choices—like promoting its own house
1132 brands over rival goods from its sellers as well as its own pet theories,
1133 biases, and errors— determine much of what we buy on Amazon. And since
1134 Amazon is the dominant e-commerce retailer outside of China and since it
1135 attained that dominance by buying up both large rivals and nascent
1136 competitors in defiance of historical antitrust rules, we can blame the
1137 monopoly for stripping consumers of their right to the future tense and the
1138 ability to shape markets by making informed choices.
1139   </p><p>
1140     Not every monopolist is a surveillance capitalist, but that doesn’t mean
1141 they’re not able to shape consumer choices in wide-ranging ways. Zuboff
1142 lauds Apple for its App Store and iTunes Store, insisting that adding price
1143 tags to the features on its platforms has been the secret to resisting
1144 surveillance and thus creating markets. But Apple is the only retailer
1145 allowed to sell on its platforms, and it’s the second-largest mobile device
1146 vendor in the world. The independent software vendors that sell through
1147 Apple’s marketplace accuse the company of the same surveillance sins as
1148 Amazon and other big retailers: spying on its customers to find lucrative
1149 new products to launch, effectively using independent software vendors as
1150 free-market researchers, then forcing them out of any markets they discover.
1151   </p><p>
1152     Because of its use of copyright locks, Apple’s mobile customers are not
1153 legally allowed to switch to a rival retailer for its apps if they want to
1154 do so on an iPhone. Apple, obviously, is the only entity that gets to decide
1155 how it ranks the results of search queries in its stores. These decisions
1156 ensure that some apps are often installed (because they appear on page one)
1157 and others are never installed (because they appear on page one
1158 million). Apple’s search-ranking design decisions have a vastly more
1159 significant effect on consumer behaviors than influence campaigns delivered
1160 by surveillance capitalism’s ad-serving bots.
1161   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="monopolists-can-afford-sleeping-pills-for-watchdogs"></a>Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs</h2></div></div></div><p>
1162     Only the most extreme market ideologues think that markets can self-regulate
1163 without state oversight. Markets need watchdogs — regulators, lawmakers, and
1164 other elements of democratic control — to keep them honest. When these
1165 watchdogs sleep on the job, then markets cease to aggregate consumer choices
1166 because those choices are constrained by illegitimate and deceptive
1167 activities that companies are able to get away with because no one is
1168 holding them to account.
1169   </p><p>
1170     But this kind of regulatory capture doesn’t come cheap. In competitive
1171 sectors, where rivals are constantly eroding one another’s margins,
1172 individual firms lack the surplus capital to effectively lobby for laws and
1173 regulations that serve their ends.
1174   </p><p>
1175     Many of the harms of surveillance capitalism are the result of weak or
1176 nonexistent regulation. Those regulatory vacuums spring from the power of
1177 monopolists to resist stronger regulation and to tailor what regulation
1178 exists to permit their existing businesses.
1179   </p><p>
1180     Here’s an example: When firms over-collect and over-retain our data, they
1181 are at increased risk of suffering a breach — you can’t leak data you never
1182 collected, and once you delete all copies of that data, you can no longer
1183 leak it. For more than a decade, we’ve lived through an endless parade of
1184 ever-worsening data breaches, each one uniquely horrible in the scale of
1185 data breached and the sensitivity of that data.
1186   </p><p>
1187     But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for three
1188 reasons:
1189   </p><p>
1190     <span class="strong"><strong>1. They are locked in the aforementioned limbic arms
1191 race with our capacity to shore up our attentional defense systems to resist
1192 their new persuasion techniques.</strong></span> They’re also locked in an arms
1193 race with their competitors to find new ways to target people for sales
1194 pitches. As soon as they discover a soft spot in our attentional defenses (a
1195 counterintuitive, unobvious way to target potential refrigerator buyers),
1196 the public begins to wise up to the tactic, and their competitors leap on
1197 it, hastening the day in which all potential refrigerator buyers have been
1198 inured to the pitch.
1199   </p><p>
1200     <span class="strong"><strong>2. They believe the surveillance capitalism
1201 story.</strong></span> Data is cheap to aggregate and store, and both proponents
1202 and opponents of surveillance capitalism have assured managers and product
1203 designers that if you collect enough data, you will be able to perform
1204 sorcerous acts of mind control, thus supercharging your sales. Even if you
1205 never figure out how to profit from the data, someone else will eventually
1206 offer to buy it from you to give it a try. This is the hallmark of all
1207 economic bubbles: acquiring an asset on the assumption that someone else
1208 will buy it from you for more than you paid for it, often to sell to someone
1209 else at an even greater price.
1210   </p><p>
1211     <span class="strong"><strong>3. The penalties for leaking data are
1212 negligible.</strong></span> Most countries limit these penalties to actual
1213 damages, meaning that consumers who’ve had their data breached have to show
1214 actual monetary harms to get a reward. In 2014, Home Depot disclosed that it
1215 had lost credit-card data for 53 million of its customers, but it settled
1216 the matter by paying those customers about $0.34 each — and a third of that
1217 $0.34 wasn’t even paid in cash. It took the form of a credit to procure a
1218 largely ineffectual credit-monitoring service.
1219   </p><p>
1220     But the harms from breaches are much more extensive than these
1221 actual-damages rules capture. Identity thieves and fraudsters are wily and
1222 endlessly inventive. All the vast breaches of our century are being
1223 continuously recombined, the data sets merged and mined for new ways to
1224 victimize the people whose data was present in them.  Any reasonable,
1225 evidence-based theory of deterrence and compensation for breaches would not
1226 confine damages to actual damages but rather would allow users to claim
1227 these future harms.
1228   </p><p>
1229     However, even the most ambitious privacy rules, such as the EU General Data
1230 Protection Regulation, fall far short of capturing the negative
1231 externalities of the platforms’ negligent over-collection and
1232 over-retention, and what penalties they do provide are not aggressively
1233 pursued by regulators.
1234   </p><p>
1235     This tolerance of — or indifference to — data over-collection and
1236 over-retention can be ascribed in part to the sheer lobbying muscle of the
1237 platforms. They are so profitable that they can handily afford to divert
1238 gigantic sums to fight any real change — that is, change that would force
1239 them to internalize the costs of their surveillance activities.
1240   </p><p>
1241     And then there’s state surveillance, which the surveillance capitalism story
1242 dismisses as a relic of another era when the big worry was being jailed for
1243 your dissident speech, not having your free will stripped away with machine
1244 learning.
1245   </p><p>
1246     But state surveillance and private surveillance are intimately related. As
1247 we saw when Apple was conscripted by the Chinese government as a vital
1248 collaborator in state surveillance, the only really affordable and tractable
1249 way to conduct mass surveillance on the scale practiced by modern states —
1250 both <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">free</span>“</span> and autocratic states — is to suborn commercial
1251 services.
1252   </p><p>
1253     Whether it’s Google being used as a location tracking tool by local law
1254 enforcement across the U.S. or the use of social media tracking by the
1255 Department of Homeland Security to build dossiers on participants in
1256 protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s family separation
1257 practices, any hard limits on surveillance capitalism would hamstring the
1258 state’s own surveillance capability. Without Palantir, Amazon, Google, and
1259 other major tech contractors, U.S. cops would not be able to spy on Black
1260 people, ICE would not be able to manage the caging of children at the U.S.
1261 border, and state welfare systems would not be able to purge their rolls by
1262 dressing up cruelty as empiricism and claiming that poor and vulnerable
1263 people are ineligible for assistance. At least some of the states’
1264 unwillingness to take meaningful action to curb surveillance should be
1265 attributed to this symbiotic relationship.  There is no mass state
1266 surveillance without mass commercial surveillance.
1267   </p><p>
1268     Monopolism is key to the project of mass state surveillance. It’s true that
1269 smaller tech firms are apt to be less well-defended than Big Tech, whose
1270 security experts are drawn from the tops of their field and who are given
1271 enormous resources to secure and monitor their systems against
1272 intruders. But smaller firms also have less to protect: fewer users whose
1273 data is more fragmented across more systems and have to be suborned one at a
1274 time by state actors.
1275   </p><p>
1276     A concentrated tech sector that works with authorities is a much more
1277 powerful ally in the project of mass state surveillance than a fragmented
1278 one composed of smaller actors. The U.S. tech sector is small enough that
1279 all of its top executives fit around a single boardroom table in Trump Tower
1280 in 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Most of its biggest players bid
1281 to win JEDI, the Pentagon’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense
1282 Infrastructure cloud contract. Like other highly concentrated industries,
1283 Big Tech rotates its key employees in and out of government service, sending
1284 them to serve in the Department of Defense and the White House, then hiring
1285 ex-Pentagon and ex-DOD top staffers and officers to work in their own
1286 government relations departments.
1287   </p><p>
1288     They can even make a good case for doing this: After all, when there are
1289 only four or five big companies in an industry, everyone qualified to
1290 regulate those companies has served as an executive in at least a couple of
1291 them — because, likewise, when there are only five companies in an industry,
1292 everyone qualified for a senior role at any of them is by definition working
1293 at one of the other ones.
1294   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
1295       While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly abet
1296 surveillance.
1297     </p></blockquote></div><p>
1298     Industries that are competitive are fragmented — composed of companies that
1299 are at each other’s throats all the time and eroding one another’s margins
1300 in bids to steal their best customers. This leaves them with much more
1301 limited capital to use to lobby for favorable rules and a much harder job of
1302 getting everyone to agree to pool their resources to benefit the industry as
1303 a whole.
1304   </p><p>
1305     Surveillance combined with machine learning is supposed to be an existential
1306 crisis, a species-defining moment at which our free will is just a few more
1307 advances in the field from being stripped away. I am skeptical of this
1308 claim, but I <span class="emphasis"><em>do</em></span> think that tech poses an existential
1309 threat to our society and possibly our species.
1310   </p><p>
1311     But that threat grows out of monopoly.
1312   </p><p>
1313     One of the consequences of tech’s regulatory capture is that it can shift
1314 liability for poor security decisions onto its customers and the wider
1315 society. It is absolutely normal in tech for companies to obfuscate the
1316 workings of their products, to make them deliberately hard to understand,
1317 and to threaten security researchers who seek to independently audit those
1318 products.
1319   </p><p>
1320     IT is the only field in which this is practiced: No one builds a bridge or a
1321 hospital and keeps the composition of the steel or the equations used to
1322 calculate load stresses a secret. It is a frankly bizarre practice that
1323 leads, time and again, to grotesque security defects on farcical scales,
1324 with whole classes of devices being revealed as vulnerable long after they
1325 are deployed in the field and put into sensitive places.
1326   </p><p>
1327     The monopoly power that keeps any meaningful consequences for breaches at
1328 bay means that tech companies continue to build terrible products that are
1329 insecure by design and that end up integrated into our lives, in possession
1330 of our data, and connected to our physical world. For years, Boeing has
1331 struggled with the aftermath of a series of bad technology decisions that
1332 made its 737 fleet a global pariah, a rare instance in which bad tech
1333 decisions have been seriously punished in the market.
1334   </p><p>
1335     These bad security decisions are compounded yet again by the use of
1336 copyright locks to enforce business-model decisions against
1337 consumers. Recall that these locks have become the go-to means for shaping
1338 consumer behavior, making it technically impossible to use third-party ink,
1339 insulin, apps, or service depots in connection with your lawfully acquired
1340 property.
1341   </p><p>
1342     Recall also that these copyright locks are backstopped by legislation (such
1343 as Section 1201 of the DMCA or Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive)
1344 that ban tampering with (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">circumventing</span>“</span>) them, and these
1345 statutes have been used to threaten security researchers who make
1346 disclosures about vulnerabilities without permission from manufacturers.
1347   </p><p>
1348     This amounts to a manufacturer’s veto over safety warnings and
1349 criticism. While this is far from the legislative intent of the DMCA and its
1350 sister statutes around the world, Congress has not intervened to clarify the
1351 statute nor will it because to do so would run counter to the interests of
1352 powerful, large firms whose lobbying muscle is unstoppable.
1353   </p><p>
1354     Copyright locks are a double whammy: They create bad security decisions that
1355 can’t be freely investigated or discussed. If markets are supposed to be
1356 machines for aggregating information (and if surveillance capitalism’s
1357 notional mind-control rays are what make it a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue
1358 capitalism</span>“</span> because it denies consumers the power to make decisions),
1359 then a program of legally enforced ignorance of the risks of products makes
1360 monopolism even more of a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> than surveillance
1361 capitalism’s influence campaigns.
1362   </p><p>
1363     And unlike mind-control rays, enforced silence over security is an
1364 immediate, documented problem, and it <span class="emphasis"><em>does</em></span> constitute
1365 an existential threat to our civilization and possibly our species. The
1366 proliferation of insecure devices — especially devices that spy on us and
1367 especially when those devices also can manipulate the physical world by,
1368 say, steering your car or flipping a breaker at a power station — is a kind
1369 of technology debt.
1370   </p><p>
1371     In software design, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">technology debt</span>“</span> refers to old, baked-in
1372 decisions that turn out to be bad ones in hindsight. Perhaps a long-ago
1373 developer decided to incorporate a networking protocol made by a vendor that
1374 has since stopped supporting it. But everything in the product still relies
1375 on that superannuated protocol, and so, with each revision, the product team
1376 has to work around this obsolete core, adding compatibility layers,
1377 surrounding it with security checks that try to shore up its defenses, and
1378 so on. These Band-Aid measures compound the debt because every subsequent
1379 revision has to make allowances for <span class="emphasis"><em>them</em></span>, too, like
1380 interest mounting on a predatory subprime loan. And like a subprime loan,
1381 the interest mounts faster than you can hope to pay it off: The product team
1382 has to put so much energy into maintaining this complex, brittle system that
1383 they don’t have any time left over to refactor the product from the ground
1384 up and <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">pay off the debt</span>“</span> once and for all.
1385   </p><p>
1386     Typically, technology debt results in a technological bankruptcy: The
1387 product gets so brittle and unsustainable that it fails
1388 catastrophically. Think of the antiquated COBOL-based banking and accounting
1389 systems that fell over at the start of the pandemic emergency when
1390 confronted with surges of unemployment claims.  Sometimes that ends the
1391 product; sometimes it takes the company down with it. Being caught in the
1392 default of a technology debt is scary and traumatic, just like losing your
1393 house due to bankruptcy is scary and traumatic.
1394   </p><p>
1395     But the technology debt created by copyright locks isn’t individual debt;
1396 it’s systemic. Everyone in the world is exposed to this over-leverage, as
1397 was the case with the 2008 financial crisis. When that debt comes due — when
1398 we face a cascade of security breaches that threaten global shipping and
1399 logistics, the food supply, pharmaceutical production pipelines, emergency
1400 communications, and other critical systems that are accumulating technology
1401 debt in part due to the presence of deliberately insecure and deliberately
1402 unauditable copyright locks — it will indeed pose an existential risk.
1403   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="privacy-and-monopoly"></a>Privacy and monopoly</h2></div></div></div><p>
1404     Many tech companies are gripped by an orthodoxy that holds that if they just
1405 gather enough data on enough of our activities, everything else is possible
1406 — the mind control and endless profits. This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis:
1407 If data gives a tech company even a tiny improvement in behavior prediction
1408 and modification, the company declares that it has taken the first step
1409 toward global domination with no end in sight. If a company
1410 <span class="emphasis"><em>fails</em></span> to attain any improvements from gathering and
1411 analyzing data, it declares success to be just around the corner, attainable
1412 once more data is in hand.
1413   </p><p>
1414     Surveillance tech is far from the first industry to embrace a nonsensical,
1415 self-serving belief that harms the rest of the world, and it is not the
1416 first industry to profit handsomely from such a delusion. Long before
1417 hedge-fund managers were claiming (falsely)  that they could beat the
1418 S&amp;P 500, there were plenty of other <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">respectable</span>“</span>
1419 industries that have been revealed as quacks in hindsight. From the makers
1420 of radium suppositories (a real thing!)  to the cruel sociopaths who claimed
1421 they could <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">cure</span>“</span> gay people, history is littered with the
1422 formerly respectable titans of discredited industries.
1423   </p><p>
1424     This is not to say that there’s nothing wrong with Big Tech and its
1425 ideological addiction to data. While surveillance’s benefits are mostly
1426 overstated, its harms are, if anything, <span class="emphasis"><em>understated</em></span>.
1427   </p><p>
1428     There’s real irony here. The belief in surveillance capitalism as a
1429 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> is driven by the belief that markets
1430 wouldn’t tolerate firms that are gripped by false beliefs. An oil company
1431 that has false beliefs about where the oil is will eventually go broke
1432 digging dry wells after all.
1433   </p><p>
1434     But monopolists get to do terrible things for a long time before they pay
1435 the price. Think of how concentration in the finance sector allowed the
1436 subprime crisis to fester as bond-rating agencies, regulators, investors,
1437 and critics all fell under the sway of a false belief that complex
1438 mathematics could construct <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">fully hedged</span>“</span> debt instruments
1439 that could not possibly default. A small bank that engaged in this kind of
1440 malfeasance would simply go broke rather than outrunning the inevitable
1441 crisis, perhaps growing so big that it averted it altogether. But large
1442 banks were able to continue to attract investors, and when they finally
1443 <span class="emphasis"><em>did</em></span> come a-cropper, the world’s governments bailed them
1444 out. The worst offenders of the subprime crisis are bigger than they were in
1445 2008, bringing home more profits and paying their execs even larger sums.
1446   </p><p>
1447     Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but
1448 because it is <span class="emphasis"><em>big</em></span>. The reason every web publisher
1449 embeds a Facebook <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Like</span>“</span> button is that Facebook dominates the
1450 internet’s social media referrals — and every one of those
1451 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Like</span>“</span> buttons spies on everyone who lands on a page that
1452 contains them (see also: Google Analytics embeds, Twitter buttons, etc.).
1453   </p><p>
1454     The reason the world’s governments have been slow to create meaningful
1455 penalties for privacy breaches is that Big Tech’s concentration produces
1456 huge profits that can be used to lobby against those penalties — and Big
1457 Tech’s concentration means that the companies involved are able to arrive at
1458 a unified negotiating position that supercharges the lobbying.
1459   </p><p>
1460     The reason that the smartest engineers in the world want to work for Big
1461 Tech is that Big Tech commands the lion’s share of tech industry jobs.
1462   </p><p>
1463     The reason people who are aghast at Facebook’s and Google’s and Amazon’s
1464 data-handling practices continue to use these services is that all their
1465 friends are on Facebook; Google dominates search; and Amazon has put all the
1466 local merchants out of business.
1467   </p><p>
1468     Competitive markets would weaken the companies’ lobbying muscle by reducing
1469 their profits and pitting them against each other in regulatory forums. It
1470 would give customers other places to go to get their online services. It
1471 would make the companies small enough to regulate and pave the way to
1472 meaningful penalties for breaches. It would let engineers with ideas that
1473 challenged the surveillance orthodoxy raise capital to compete with the
1474 incumbents. It would give web publishers multiple ways to reach audiences
1475 and make the case against Facebook and Google and Twitter embeds.
1476   </p><p>
1477     In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies
1478 certainly abet surveillance.
1479   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="ronald-reagan-pioneer-of-tech-monopolism"></a>Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism</h2></div></div></div><p>
1480     Technology exceptionalism is a sin, whether it’s practiced by technology’s
1481 blind proponents or by its critics. Both of these camps are prone to
1482 explaining away monopolistic concentration by citing some special
1483 characteristic of the tech industry, like network effects or first-mover
1484 advantage. The only real difference between these two groups is that the
1485 tech apologists say monopoly is inevitable so we should just let tech get
1486 away with its abuses while competition regulators in the U.S. and the EU say
1487 monopoly is inevitable so we should punish tech for its abuses but not try
1488 to break up the monopolies.
1489   </p><p>
1490     To understand how tech became so monopolistic, it’s useful to look at the
1491 dawn of the consumer tech industry: 1979, the year the Apple II Plus
1492 launched and became the first successful home computer. That also happens to
1493 be the year that Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail for the 1980
1494 presidential race — a race he won, leading to a radical shift in the way
1495 that antitrust concerns are handled in America. Reagan’s cohort of
1496 politicians — including Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Brian Mulroney in
1497 Canada, Helmut Kohl in Germany, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile — went on to
1498 enact similar reforms that eventually spread around the world.
1499   </p><p>
1500     Antitrust’s story began nearly a century before all that with laws like the
1501 Sherman Act, which took aim at monopolists on the grounds that monopolies
1502 were bad in and of themselves — squeezing out competitors, creating
1503 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">diseconomies of scale</span>“</span> (when a company is so big that its
1504 constituent parts go awry and it is seemingly helpless to address the
1505 problems), and capturing their regulators to such a degree that they can get
1506 away with a host of evils.
1507   </p><p>
1508     Then came a fabulist named Robert Bork, a former solicitor general who
1509 Reagan appointed to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
1510 and who had created an alternate legislative history of the Sherman Act and
1511 its successors out of whole cloth. Bork insisted that these statutes were
1512 never targeted at monopolies (despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary,
1513 including the transcribed speeches of the acts’ authors) but, rather, that
1514 they were intended to prevent <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">consumer harm</span>“</span> — in the form of
1515 higher prices.
1516   </p><p>
1517     Bork was a crank, but he was a crank with a theory that rich people really
1518 liked. Monopolies are a great way to make rich people richer by allowing
1519 them to receive <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">monopoly rents</span>“</span> (that is, bigger profits) and
1520 capture regulators, leading to a weaker, more favorable regulatory
1521 environment with fewer protections for customers, suppliers, the
1522 environment, and workers.
1523   </p><p>
1524     Bork’s theories were especially palatable to the same power brokers who
1525 backed Reagan, and Reagan’s Department of Justice and other agencies began
1526 to incorporate Bork’s antitrust doctrine into their enforcement decisions
1527 (Reagan even put Bork up for a Supreme Court seat, but Bork flunked the
1528 Senate confirmation hearing so badly that, 40 years later, D.C. insiders use
1529 the term <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">borked</span>“</span> to refer to any catastrophically bad
1530 political performance).
1531   </p><p>
1532     Little by little, Bork’s theories entered the mainstream, and their backers
1533 began to infiltrate the legal education field, even putting on junkets where
1534 members of the judiciary were treated to lavish meals, fun outdoor
1535 activities, and seminars where they were indoctrinated into the consumer
1536 harm theory of antitrust. The more Bork’s theories took hold, the more money
1537 the monopolists were making — and the more surplus capital they had at their
1538 disposal to lobby for even more Borkian antitrust influence campaigns.
1539   </p><p>
1540     The history of Bork’s antitrust theories is a really good example of the
1541 kind of covertly engineered shifts in public opinion that Zuboff warns us
1542 against, where fringe ideas become mainstream orthodoxy.  But Bork didn’t
1543 change the world overnight. He played a very long game, for over a
1544 generation, and he had a tailwind because the same forces that backed
1545 oligarchic antitrust theories also backed many other oligarchic shifts in
1546 public opinion. For example, the idea that taxation is theft, that wealth is
1547 a sign of virtue, and so on — all of these theories meshed to form a
1548 coherent ideology that elevated inequality to a virtue.
1549   </p><p>
1550     Today, many fear that machine learning allows surveillance capitalism to
1551 sell <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Bork-as-a-Service,</span>“</span> at internet speeds, so that you can
1552 contract a machine-learning company to engineer <span class="emphasis"><em>rapid</em></span>
1553 shifts in public sentiment without needing the capital to sustain a
1554 multipronged, multigenerational project working at the local, state,
1555 national, and global levels in business, law, and philosophy. I do not
1556 believe that such a project is plausible, though I agree that this is
1557 basically what the platforms claim to be selling. They’re just lying about
1558 it. Big Tech lies all the time, <span class="emphasis"><em>including</em></span> in their
1559 sales literature.
1560   </p><p>
1561     The idea that tech forms <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">natural monopolies</span>“</span> (monopolies that
1562 are the inevitable result of the realities of an industry, such as the
1563 monopolies that accrue the first company to run long-haul phone lines or
1564 rail lines) is belied by tech’s own history: In the absence of
1565 anti-competitive tactics, Google was able to unseat AltaVista and Yahoo;
1566 Facebook was able to head off Myspace. There are some advantages to
1567 gathering mountains of data, but those mountains of data also have
1568 disadvantages: liability (from leaking), diminishing returns (from old
1569 data), and institutional inertia (big companies, like science, progress one
1570 funeral at a time).
1571   </p><p>
1572     Indeed, the birth of the web saw a mass-extinction event for the existing
1573 giant, wildly profitable proprietary technologies that had capital, network
1574 effects, and walls and moats surrounding their businesses. The web showed
1575 that when a new industry is built around a protocol, rather than a product,
1576 the combined might of everyone who uses the protocol to reach their
1577 customers or users or communities outweighs even the most massive
1578 products. CompuServe, AOL, MSN, and a host of other proprietary walled
1579 gardens learned this lesson the hard way: Each believed it could stay
1580 separate from the web, offering <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">curation</span>“</span> and a guarantee of
1581 consistency and quality instead of the chaos of an open system. Each was
1582 wrong and ended up being absorbed into the public web.
1583   </p><p>
1584     Yes, tech is heavily monopolized and is now closely associated with industry
1585 concentration, but this has more to do with a matter of timing than its
1586 intrinsically monopolistic tendencies. Tech was born at the moment that
1587 antitrust enforcement was being dismantled, and tech fell into exactly the
1588 same pathologies that antitrust was supposed to guard against. To a first
1589 approximation, it is reasonable to assume that tech’s monopolies are the
1590 result of a lack of anti-monopoly action and not the much-touted unique
1591 characteristics of tech, such as network effects, first-mover advantage, and
1592 so on.
1593   </p><p>
1594     In support of this thesis, I offer the concentration that every
1595 <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> industry has undergone over the same period. From
1596 professional wrestling to consumer packaged goods to commercial property
1597 leasing to banking to sea freight to oil to record labels to newspaper
1598 ownership to theme parks, <span class="emphasis"><em>every</em></span> industry has undergone
1599 a massive shift toward concentration. There’s no obvious network effects or
1600 first-mover advantage at play in these industries. However, in every case,
1601 these industries attained their concentrated status through tactics that
1602 were prohibited before Bork’s triumph: merging with major competitors,
1603 buying out innovative new market entrants, horizontal and vertical
1604 integration, and a suite of anti-competitive tactics that were once illegal
1605 but are not any longer.
1606   </p><p>
1607     Again: When you change the laws intended to prevent monopolies and then
1608 monopolies form in exactly the way the law was supposed to prevent, it is
1609 reasonable to suppose that these facts are related.  Tech’s concentration
1610 can be readily explained without recourse to radical theories of network
1611 effects — but only if you’re willing to indict unregulated markets as
1612 tending toward monopoly. Just as a lifelong smoker can give you a hundred
1613 reasons why their smoking didn’t cause their cancer (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">It was the
1614 environmental toxins</span>“</span>), true believers in unregulated markets have a
1615 whole suite of unconvincing explanations for monopoly in tech that leave
1616 capitalism intact.
1617   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="steering-with-the-windshield-wipers"></a>Steering with the windshield wipers</h2></div></div></div><p>
1618     It’s been 40 years since Bork’s project to rehabilitate monopolies achieved
1619 liftoff, and that is a generation and a half, which is plenty of time to
1620 take a common idea and make it seem outlandish and vice versa. Before the
1621 1940s, affluent Americans dressed their baby boys in pink while baby girls
1622 wore blue (a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">delicate and dainty</span>“</span> color). While gendered
1623 colors are obviously totally arbitrary, many still greet this news with
1624 amazement and find it hard to imagine a time when pink connoted masculinity.
1625   </p><p>
1626     After 40 years of studiously ignoring antitrust analysis and enforcement,
1627 it’s not surprising that we’ve all but forgotten that antitrust exists, that
1628 in living memory, growth through mergers and acquisitions were largely
1629 prohibited under law, that market-cornering strategies like vertical
1630 integration could land a company in court.
1631   </p><p>
1632     Antitrust is a market society’s steering wheel, the control of first resort
1633 to keep would-be masters of the universe in their lanes. But Bork and his
1634 cohort ripped out our steering wheel 40 years ago. The car is still
1635 barreling along, and so we’re yanking as hard as we can on all the
1636 <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> controls in the car as well as desperately
1637 flapping the doors and rolling the windows up and down in the hopes that one
1638 of these other controls can be repurposed to let us choose where we’re
1639 heading before we careen off a cliff.
1640   </p><p>
1641     It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in a
1642 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">generation ship,</span>“</span> plying its way across the stars, a ship once
1643 piloted by their ancestors; and now, after a great cataclysm, the ship’s
1644 crew have forgotten that they’re in a ship at all and no longer remember
1645 where the control room is. Adrift, the ship is racing toward its extinction,
1646 and unless we can seize the controls and execute emergency course
1647 correction, we’re all headed for a fiery death in the heart of a sun.
1648   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="surveillance-still-matters"></a>Surveillance still matters</h2></div></div></div><p>
1649     None of this is to minimize the problems with surveillance.  Surveillance
1650 matters, and Big Tech’s use of surveillance <span class="emphasis"><em>is</em></span> an
1651 existential risk to our species, but that’s not because surveillance and
1652 machine learning rob us of our free will.
1653   </p><p>
1654     Surveillance has become <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span> more efficient thanks to
1655 Big Tech. In 1989, the Stasi — the East German secret police — had the whole
1656 country under surveillance, a massive undertaking that recruited one out of
1657 every 60 people to serve as an informant or intelligence operative.
1658   </p><p>
1659     Today, we know that the NSA is spying on a significant fraction of the
1660 entire world’s population, and its ratio of surveillance operatives to the
1661 surveilled is more like 1:10,000 (that’s probably on the low side since it
1662 assumes that every American with top-secret clearance is working for the NSA
1663 on this project — we don’t know how many of those cleared people are
1664 involved in NSA spying, but it’s definitely not all of them).
1665   </p><p>
1666     How did the ratio of surveillable citizens expand from 1:60 to 1:10,000 in
1667 less than 30 years? It’s thanks to Big Tech. Our devices and services gather
1668 most of the data that the NSA mines for its surveillance project. We pay for
1669 these devices and the services they connect to, and then we painstakingly
1670 perform the data-entry tasks associated with logging facts about our lives,
1671 opinions, and preferences. This mass surveillance project has been largely
1672 useless for fighting terrorism: The NSA can <a class="ulink" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-cites-case-as-success-of-phone-data-collection-program/2013/08/08/fc915e5a-feda-11e2-96a8-d3b921c0924a_story.html" target="_top">only
1673 point to a single minor success story</a> in which it used its data
1674 collection program to foil an attempt by a U.S. resident to wire a few
1675 thousand dollars to an overseas terror group. It’s ineffective for much the
1676 same reason that commercial surveillance projects are largely ineffective at
1677 targeting advertising: The people who want to commit acts of terror, like
1678 people who want to buy a refrigerator, are extremely rare. If you’re trying
1679 to detect a phenomenon whose base rate is one in a million with an
1680 instrument whose accuracy is only 99%, then every true positive will come at
1681 the cost of 9,999 false positives.
1682   </p><p>
1683     Let me explain that again: If one in a million people is a terrorist, then
1684 there will only be about one terrorist in a random sample of one million
1685 people. If your test for detecting terrorists is 99% accurate, it will
1686 identify 10,000 terrorists in your million-person sample (1% of one million
1687 is 10,000). For every true positive, you’ll get 9,999 false positives.
1688   </p><p>
1689     In reality, the accuracy of algorithmic terrorism detection falls far short
1690 of the 99% mark, as does refrigerator ad targeting. The difference is that
1691 being falsely accused of wanting to buy a fridge is a minor nuisance while
1692 being falsely accused of planning a terror attack can destroy your life and
1693 the lives of everyone you love.
1694   </p><p>
1695     Mass state surveillance is only feasible because of surveillance capitalism
1696 and its extremely low-yield ad-targeting systems, which require a constant
1697 feed of personal data to remain barely viable.  Surveillance capitalism’s
1698 primary failure mode is mistargeted ads while mass state surveillance’s
1699 primary failure mode is grotesque human rights abuses, tending toward
1700 totalitarianism.
1701   </p><p>
1702     State surveillance is no mere parasite on Big Tech, sucking up its data and
1703 giving nothing in return. In truth, the two are symbiotes: Big Tech sucks up
1704 our data for spy agencies, and spy agencies ensure that governments don’t
1705 limit Big Tech’s activities so severely that it would no longer serve the
1706 spy agencies’ needs. There is no firm distinction between state surveillance
1707 and surveillance capitalism; they are dependent on one another.
1708   </p><p>
1709     To see this at work today, look no further than Amazon’s home surveillance
1710 device, the Ring doorbell, and its associated app, Neighbors. Ring — a
1711 product that Amazon acquired and did not develop in house — makes a
1712 camera-enabled doorbell that streams footage from your front door to your
1713 mobile device. The Neighbors app allows you to form a neighborhood-wide
1714 surveillance grid with your fellow Ring owners through which you can share
1715 clips of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">suspicious characters.</span>“</span> If you’re thinking that this
1716 sounds like a recipe for letting curtain-twitching racists supercharge their
1717 suspicions of people with brown skin who walk down their blocks, <a class="ulink" href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/amazons-ring-enables-over-policing-efforts-some-americas-deadliest-law-enforcement" target="_top">you’re
1718 right</a>. Ring has become a <span class="emphasis"><em>de facto,</em></span>
1719 off-the-books arm of the police without any of the pesky oversight or rules.
1720   </p><p>
1721     In mid-2019, a series of public records requests revealed that Amazon had
1722 struck confidential deals with more than 400 local law enforcement agencies
1723 through which the agencies would promote Ring and Neighbors and in exchange
1724 get access to footage from Ring cameras. In theory, cops would need to
1725 request this footage through Amazon (and internal documents reveal that
1726 Amazon devotes substantial resources to coaching cops on how to spin a
1727 convincing story when doing so), but in practice, when a Ring customer turns
1728 down a police request, Amazon only requires the agency to formally request
1729 the footage from the company, which it will then produce.
1730   </p><p>
1731     Ring and law enforcement have found many ways to intertwine their
1732 activities. Ring strikes secret deals to acquire real-time access to 911
1733 dispatch and then streams alarming crime reports to Neighbors users, which
1734 serve as convincers for anyone who’s contemplating a surveillance doorbell
1735 but isn’t sure whether their neighborhood is dangerous enough to warrant it.
1736   </p><p>
1737     The more the cops buzz-market the surveillance capitalist Ring, the more
1738 surveillance capability the state gets. Cops who rely on private entities
1739 for law-enforcement roles then brief against any controls on the deployment
1740 of that technology while the companies return the favor by lobbying against
1741 rules requiring public oversight of police surveillance technology. The more
1742 the cops rely on Ring and Neighbors, the harder it will be to pass laws to
1743 curb them. The fewer laws there are against them, the more the cops will
1744 rely on them.
1745   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="dignity-and-sanctuary"></a>Dignity and sanctuary</h2></div></div></div><p>
1746     But even if we could exercise democratic control over our states and force
1747 them to stop raiding surveillance capitalism’s reservoirs of behavioral
1748 data, surveillance capitalism would still harm us.
1749   </p><p>
1750     This is an area where Zuboff shines. Her chapter on <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">sanctuary</span>“</span>
1751 — the feeling of being unobserved — is a beautiful hymn to introspection,
1752 calmness, mindfulness, and tranquility.
1753   </p><p>
1754     When you are watched, something changes. Anyone who has ever raised a child
1755 knows this. You might look up from your book (or more realistically, from
1756 your phone) and catch your child in a moment of profound realization and
1757 growth, a moment where they are learning something that is right at the edge
1758 of their abilities, requiring their entire ferocious concentration. For a
1759 moment, you’re transfixed, watching that rare and beautiful moment of focus
1760 playing out before your eyes, and then your child looks up and sees you
1761 seeing them, and the moment collapses. To grow, you need to be and expose
1762 your authentic self, and in that moment, you are vulnerable like a hermit
1763 crab scuttling from one shell to the next. The tender, unprotected tissues
1764 you expose in that moment are too delicate to reveal in the presence of
1765 another, even someone you trust as implicitly as a child trusts their
1766 parent.
1767   </p><p>
1768     In the digital age, our authentic selves are inextricably tied to our
1769 digital lives. Your search history is a running ledger of the questions
1770 you’ve pondered. Your location history is a record of the places you’ve
1771 sought out and the experiences you’ve had there. Your social graph reveals
1772 the different facets of your identity, the people you’ve connected with.
1773   </p><p>
1774     To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your
1775 authentic self.
1776   </p><p>
1777     There’s another way in which surveillance capitalism robs us of our capacity
1778 to be our authentic selves: by making us anxious.  Surveillance capitalism
1779 isn’t really a mind-control ray, but you don’t need a mind-control ray to
1780 make someone anxious. After all, another word for anxiety is agitation, and
1781 to make someone experience agitation, you need merely to agitate them. To
1782 poke them and prod them and beep at them and buzz at them and bombard them
1783 on an intermittent schedule that is just random enough that our limbic
1784 systems never quite become inured to it.
1785   </p><p>
1786     Our devices and services are <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">general purpose</span>“</span> in that they can
1787 connect anything or anyone to anything or anyone else and that they can run
1788 any program that can be written. This means that the distraction rectangles
1789 in our pockets hold our most precious moments with our most beloved people
1790 and their most urgent or time-sensitive communications (from <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">running
1791 late can you get the kid?</span>“</span> to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">doctor gave me bad news and I
1792 need to talk to you RIGHT NOW</span>“</span>) as well as ads for refrigerators and
1793 recruiting messages from Nazis.
1794   </p><p>
1795     All day and all night, our pockets buzz, shattering our concentration and
1796 tearing apart the fragile webs of connection we spin as we think through
1797 difficult ideas. If you locked someone in a cell and agitated them like
1798 this, we’d call it <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">sleep deprivation torture,</span>“</span> and it would be
1799 <a class="ulink" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKpRbvnx6g" target="_top">a war crime under
1800 the Geneva Conventions</a>.
1801   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="afflicting-the-afflicted"></a>Afflicting the afflicted</h2></div></div></div><p>
1802     The effects of surveillance on our ability to be our authentic selves are
1803 not equal for all people. Some of us are lucky enough to live in a time and
1804 place in which all the most important facts of our lives are widely and
1805 roundly socially acceptable and can be publicly displayed without the risk
1806 of social consequence.
1807   </p><p>
1808     But for many of us, this is not true. Recall that in living memory, many of
1809 the ways of being that we think of as socially acceptable today were once
1810 cause for dire social sanction or even imprisonment.  If you are 65 years
1811 old, you have lived through a time in which people living in <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">free
1812 societies</span>“</span> could be imprisoned or sanctioned for engaging in
1813 homosexual activity, for falling in love with a person whose skin was a
1814 different color than their own, or for smoking weed.
1815   </p><p>
1816     Today, these activities aren’t just decriminalized in much of the world,
1817 they’re considered normal, and the fallen prohibitions are viewed as
1818 shameful, regrettable relics of the past.
1819   </p><p>
1820     How did we get from prohibition to normalization? Through private, personal
1821 activity: People who were secretly gay or secret pot-smokers or who secretly
1822 loved someone with a different skin color were vulnerable to retaliation if
1823 they made their true selves known and were limited in how much they could
1824 advocate for their own right to exist in the world and be true to
1825 themselves. But because there was a private sphere, these people could form
1826 alliances with their friends and loved ones who did not share their
1827 disfavored traits by having private conversations in which they came out,
1828 disclosing their true selves to the people around them and bringing them to
1829 their cause one conversation at a time.
1830   </p><p>
1831     The right to choose the time and manner of these conversations was key to
1832 their success. It’s one thing to come out to your dad while you’re on a
1833 fishing trip away from the world and another thing entirely to blurt it out
1834 over the Christmas dinner table while your racist Facebook uncle is there to
1835 make a scene.
1836   </p><p>
1837     Without a private sphere, there’s a chance that none of these changes would
1838 have come to pass and that the people who benefited from these changes would
1839 have either faced social sanction for coming out to a hostile world or would
1840 have never been able to reveal their true selves to the people they love.
1841   </p><p>
1842     The corollary is that, unless you think that our society has attained social
1843 perfection — that your grandchildren in 50 years will ask you to tell them
1844 the story of how, in 2020, every injustice had been righted and no further
1845 change had to be made — then you should expect that right now, at this
1846 minute, there are people you love, whose happiness is key to your own, who
1847 have a secret in their hearts that stops them from ever being their
1848 authentic selves with you. These people are sorrowing and will go to their
1849 graves with that secret sorrow in their hearts, and the source of that
1850 sorrow will be the falsity of their relationship to you.
1851   </p><p>
1852     A private realm is necessary for human progress.
1853   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="any-data-you-collect-and-retain-will-eventually-leak"></a>Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak</h2></div></div></div><p>
1854     The lack of a private life can rob vulnerable people of the chance to be
1855 their authentic selves and constrain our actions by depriving us of
1856 sanctuary, but there is another risk that is borne by everyone, not just
1857 people with a secret: crime.
1858   </p><p>
1859     Personally identifying information is of very limited use for the purpose of
1860 controlling peoples’ minds, but identity theft — really a catchall term for
1861 a whole constellation of terrible criminal activities that can destroy your
1862 finances, compromise your personal integrity, ruin your reputation, or even
1863 expose you to physical danger — thrives on it.
1864   </p><p>
1865     Attackers are not limited to using data from one breached source,
1866 either. Multiple services have suffered breaches that exposed names,
1867 addresses, phone numbers, passwords, sexual tastes, school grades, work
1868 performance, brushes with the criminal justice system, family details,
1869 genetic information, fingerprints and other biometrics, reading habits,
1870 search histories, literary tastes, pseudonymous identities, and other
1871 sensitive information. Attackers can merge data from these different
1872 breaches to build up extremely detailed dossiers on random subjects and then
1873 use different parts of the data for different criminal purposes.
1874   </p><p>
1875     For example, attackers can use leaked username and password combinations to
1876 hijack whole fleets of commercial vehicles that <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmpx4x/hacker-monitor-cars-kill-engine-gps-tracking-apps" target="_top">have
1877 been fitted with anti-theft GPS trackers and immobilizers</a> or to
1878 hijack baby monitors in order to <a class="ulink" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/23/how-nest-designed-keep-intruders-out-peoples-homes-effectively-allowed-hackers-get/?utm_term=.15220e98c550" target="_top">terrorize
1879 toddlers with the audio tracks from pornography</a>. Attackers use
1880 leaked data to trick phone companies into giving them your phone number,
1881 then they intercept SMS-based two-factor authentication codes in order to
1882 take over your email, bank account, and/or cryptocurrency wallets.
1883   </p><p>
1884     Attackers are endlessly inventive in the pursuit of creative ways to
1885 weaponize leaked data. One common use of leaked data is to penetrate
1886 companies in order to access <span class="emphasis"><em>more</em></span> data.
1887   </p><p>
1888     Like spies, online fraudsters are totally dependent on companies
1889 over-collecting and over-retaining our data. Spy agencies sometimes pay
1890 companies for access to their data or intimidate them into giving it up, but
1891 sometimes they work just like criminals do — by <a class="ulink" href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24751821" target="_top">sneaking data out of
1892 companies’ databases</a>.
1893   </p><p>
1894     The over-collection of data has a host of terrible social consequences, from
1895 the erosion of our authentic selves to the undermining of social progress,
1896 from state surveillance to an epidemic of online crime. Commercial
1897 surveillance is also a boon to people running influence campaigns, but
1898 that’s the least of our troubles.
1899   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="critical-tech-exceptionalism-is-still-tech-exceptionalism"></a>Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism</h2></div></div></div><p>
1900     Big Tech has long practiced technology exceptionalism: the idea that it
1901 should not be subject to the mundane laws and norms of
1902 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">meatspace.</span>“</span> Mottoes like Facebook’s <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">move fast and break
1903 things</span>“</span> attracted justifiable scorn of the companies’ self-serving
1904 rhetoric.
1905   </p><p>
1906     Tech exceptionalism got us all into a lot of trouble, so it’s ironic and
1907 distressing to see Big Tech’s critics committing the same sin.
1908   </p><p>
1909     Big Tech is not a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> that cannot be cured
1910 through the traditional anti-monopoly remedies of trustbusting (forcing
1911 companies to divest of competitors they have acquired) and bans on mergers
1912 to monopoly and other anti-competitive tactics. Big Tech does not have the
1913 power to use machine learning to influence our behavior so thoroughly that
1914 markets lose the ability to punish bad actors and reward superior
1915 competitors. Big Tech has no rule-writing mind-control ray that necessitates
1916 ditching our old toolbox.
1917   </p><p>
1918     The thing is, people have been claiming to have perfected mind-control rays
1919 for centuries, and every time, it turned out to be a con — though sometimes
1920 the con artists were also conning themselves.
1921   </p><p>
1922     For generations, the advertising industry has been steadily improving its
1923 ability to sell advertising services to businesses while only making
1924 marginal gains in selling those businesses’ products to prospective
1925 customers. John Wanamaker’s lament that <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">50% of my advertising budget
1926 is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%</span>“</span> is a testament to the triumph
1927 of <span class="emphasis"><em>ad executives</em></span>, who successfully convinced Wanamaker
1928 that only half of the money he spent went to waste.
1929   </p><p>
1930     The tech industry has made enormous improvements in the science of
1931 convincing businesses that they’re good at advertising while their actual
1932 improvements to advertising — as opposed to targeting — have been pretty
1933 ho-hum. The vogue for machine learning — and the mystical invocation of
1934 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">artificial intelligence</span>“</span> as a synonym for straightforward
1935 statistical inference techniques — has greatly boosted the efficacy of Big
1936 Tech’s sales pitch as marketers have exploited potential customers’ lack of
1937 technical sophistication to get away with breathtaking acts of overpromising
1938 and underdelivering.
1939   </p><p>
1940     It’s tempting to think that if businesses are willing to pour billions into
1941 a venture that the venture must be a good one. Yet there are plenty of times
1942 when this rule of thumb has led us astray.  For example, it’s virtually
1943 unheard of for managed investment funds to outperform simple index funds,
1944 and investors who put their money into the hands of expert money managers
1945 overwhelmingly fare worse than those who entrust their savings to index
1946 funds. But managed funds still account for the majority of the money
1947 invested in the markets, and they are patronized by some of the richest,
1948 most sophisticated investors in the world. Their vote of confidence in an
1949 underperforming sector is a parable about the role of luck in wealth
1950 accumulation, not a sign that managed funds are a good buy.
1951   </p><p>
1952     The claims of Big Tech’s mind-control system are full of tells that the
1953 enterprise is a con. For example, <a class="ulink" href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01415/full" target="_top">the
1954 reliance on the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Big Five</span>“</span> personality traits</a> as a
1955 primary means of influencing people even though the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Big Five</span>“</span>
1956 theory is unsupported by any large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is
1957 <a class="ulink" href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/" target="_top">mostly
1958 the realm of marketing hucksters and pop psych</a>.
1959   </p><p>
1960     Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms can
1961 accurately perform <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">sentiment analysis</span>“</span> or detect peoples’
1962 moods based on their <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">microexpressions,</span>“</span> but <a class="ulink" href="https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647040758/advertising-on-facebook-is-it-worth-it" target="_top">these
1963 are marketing claims, not scientific ones</a>. These methods are largely
1964 untested by independent scientific experts, and where they have been tested,
1965 they’ve been found sorely wanting.  Microexpressions are particularly
1966 suspect as the companies that specialize in training people to detect them
1967 <a class="ulink" href="https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/" target="_top">have
1968 been shown</a> to underperform relative to random chance.
1969   </p><p>
1970     Big Tech has been so good at marketing its own supposed superpowers that
1971 it’s easy to believe that they can market everything else with similar
1972 acumen, but it’s a mistake to believe the hype. Any statement a company
1973 makes about the quality of its products is clearly not impartial. The fact
1974 that we distrust all the things that Big Tech says about its data handling,
1975 compliance with privacy laws, etc., is only reasonable — but why on Earth
1976 would we treat Big Tech’s marketing literature as the gospel truth? Big Tech
1977 lies about just about <span class="emphasis"><em>everything</em></span>, including how well
1978 its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work.
1979   </p><p>
1980     That skepticism should infuse all of our evaluations of Big Tech and its
1981 supposed abilities, including our perusal of its patents. Zuboff vests these
1982 patents with enormous significance, pointing out that Google claimed
1983 extensive new persuasion capabilities in <a class="ulink" href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050131762A1/en" target="_top">its patent
1984 filings</a>. These claims are doubly suspect: first, because they are so
1985 self-serving, and second, because the patent itself is so notoriously an
1986 invitation to exaggeration.
1987   </p><p>
1988     Patent applications take the form of a series of claims and range from broad
1989 to narrow. A typical patent starts out by claiming that its authors have
1990 invented a method or system for doing every conceivable thing that anyone
1991 might do, ever, with any tool or device. Then it narrows that claim in
1992 successive stages until we get to the actual <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">invention</span>“</span> that
1993 is the true subject of the patent.  The hope is that the patent examiner —
1994 who is almost certainly overworked and underinformed — will miss the fact
1995 that some or all of these claims are ridiculous, or at least suspect, and
1996 grant the patent’s broader claims. Patents for unpatentable things are still
1997 incredibly useful because they can be wielded against competitors who might
1998 license that patent or steer clear of its claims rather than endure the
1999 lengthy, expensive process of contesting it.
2000   </p><p>
2001     What’s more, software patents are routinely granted even though the filer
2002 doesn’t have any evidence that they can do the thing claimed by the
2003 patent. That is, you can patent an <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">invention</span>“</span> that you haven’t
2004 actually made and that you don’t know how to make.
2005   </p><p>
2006     With these considerations in hand, it becomes obvious that the fact that a
2007 Big Tech company has patented what it <span class="emphasis"><em>says</em></span> is an
2008 effective mind-control ray is largely irrelevant to whether Big Tech can in
2009 fact control our minds.
2010   </p><p>
2011     Big Tech collects our data for many reasons, including the diminishing
2012 returns on existing stores of data. But many tech companies also collect
2013 data out of a mistaken tech exceptionalist belief in the network effects of
2014 data. Network effects occur when each new user in a system increases its
2015 value. The classic example is fax machines: A single fax machine is of no
2016 use, two fax machines are of limited use, but every new fax machine that’s
2017 put to use after the first doubles the number of possible fax-to-fax links.
2018   </p><p>
2019     Data mined for predictive systems doesn’t necessarily produce these
2020 dividends. Think of Netflix: The predictive value of the data mined from a
2021 million English-speaking Netflix viewers is hardly improved by the addition
2022 of one more user’s viewing data. Most of the data Netflix acquires after
2023 that first minimum viable sample duplicates existing data and produces only
2024 minimal gains. Meanwhile, retraining models with new data gets progressively
2025 more expensive as the number of data points increases, and manual tasks like
2026 labeling and validating data do not get cheaper at scale.
2027   </p><p>
2028     Businesses pursue fads to the detriment of their profits all the time,
2029 especially when the businesses and their investors are not motivated by the
2030 prospect of becoming profitable but rather by the prospect of being acquired
2031 by a Big Tech giant or by having an IPO.  For these firms, ticking faddish
2032 boxes like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">collects as much data as possible</span>“</span> might realize a
2033 bigger return on investment than <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">collects a business-appropriate
2034 quantity of data.</span>“</span>
2035   </p><p>
2036     This is another harm of tech exceptionalism: The belief that more data
2037 always produces more profits in the form of more insights that can be
2038 translated into better mind-control rays drives firms to over-collect and
2039 over-retain data beyond all rationality. And since the firms are behaving
2040 irrationally, a good number of them will go out of business and become ghost
2041 ships whose cargo holds are stuffed full of data that can harm people in
2042 myriad ways — but which no one is responsible for antey longer. Even if the
2043 companies don’t go under, the data they collect is maintained behind the
2044 minimum viable security — just enough security to keep the company viable
2045 while it waits to get bought out by a tech giant, an amount calculated to
2046 spend not one penny more than is necessary on protecting data.
2047   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="how-monopolies-not-mind-control-drive-surveillance-capitalism-the-snapchat-story"></a>How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The
2048 Snapchat story</h2></div></div></div><p>
2049     For the first decade of its existence, Facebook competed with the social
2050 media giants of the day (Myspace, Orkut, etc.) by presenting itself as the
2051 pro-privacy alternative. Indeed, Facebook justified its walled garden —
2052 which let users bring in data from the web but blocked web services like
2053 Google Search from indexing and caching Facebook pages — as a pro-privacy
2054 measure that protected users from the surveillance-happy winners of the
2055 social media wars like Myspace.
2056   </p><p>
2057     Despite frequent promises that it would never collect or analyze its users’
2058 data, Facebook periodically created initiatives that did just that, like the
2059 creepy, ham-fisted Beacon tool, which spied on you as you moved around the
2060 web and then added your online activities to your public timeline, allowing
2061 your friends to monitor your browsing habits. Beacon sparked a user
2062 revolt. Every time, Facebook backed off from its surveillance initiative,
2063 but not all the way; inevitably, the new Facebook would be more surveilling
2064 than the old Facebook, though not quite as surveilling as the intermediate
2065 Facebook following the launch of the new product or service.
2066   </p><p>
2067     The pace at which Facebook ramped up its surveillance efforts seems to have
2068 been set by Facebook’s competitive landscape. The more competitors Facebook
2069 had, the better it behaved. Every time a major competitor foundered,
2070 Facebook’s behavior <a class="ulink" href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362" target="_top">got
2071 markedly worse</a>.
2072   </p><p>
2073     All the while, Facebook was prodigiously acquiring companies, including a
2074 company called Onavo. Nominally, Onavo made a battery-monitoring mobile
2075 app. But the permissions that Onavo required were so expansive that the app
2076 was able to gather fine-grained telemetry on everything users did with their
2077 phones, including which apps they used and how they were using them.
2078   </p><p>
2079     Through Onavo, Facebook discovered that it was losing market share to
2080 Snapchat, an app that — like Facebook a decade before — billed itself as the
2081 pro-privacy alternative to the status quo. Through Onavo, Facebook was able
2082 to mine data from the devices of Snapchat users, including both current and
2083 former Snapchat users. This spurred Facebook to acquire Instagram — some
2084 features of which competed with Snapchat — and then allowed Facebook to
2085 fine-tune Instagram’s features and sales pitch to erode Snapchat’s gains and
2086 ensure that Facebook would not have to face the kinds of competitive
2087 pressures it had earlier inflicted on Myspace and Orkut.
2088   </p><p>
2089     The story of how Facebook crushed Snapchat reveals the relationship between
2090 monopoly and surveillance capitalism. Facebook combined surveillance with
2091 lax antitrust enforcement to spot the competitive threat of Snapchat on its
2092 horizon and then take decisive action against it. Facebook’s surveillance
2093 capitalism let it avert competitive pressure with anti-competitive
2094 tactics. Facebook users still want privacy — Facebook hasn’t used
2095 surveillance to brainwash them out of it — but they can’t get it because
2096 Facebook’s surveillance lets it destroy any hope of a rival service emerging
2097 that competes on privacy features.
2098   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="a-monopoly-over-your-friends"></a>A monopoly over your friends</h2></div></div></div><p>
2099     A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of Facebook and
2100 other Big Tech companies by fielding <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">indieweb</span>“</span> alternatives —
2101 Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, Diaspora as a Facebook alternative,
2102 etc. — but these efforts have failed to attain any kind of liftoff.
2103   </p><p>
2104     Fundamentally, each of these services is hamstrung by the same problem:
2105 Every potential user for a Facebook or Twitter alternative has to convince
2106 all their friends to follow them to a decentralized web alternative in order
2107 to continue to realize the benefit of social media. For many of us, the only
2108 reason to have a Facebook account is that our friends have Facebook
2109 accounts, and the reason they have Facebook accounts is that
2110 <span class="emphasis"><em>we</em></span> have Facebook accounts.
2111   </p><p>
2112     All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant platforms —
2113 into <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">kill zones</span>“</span> that investors will not fund new entrants
2114 for.
2115   </p><p>
2116     And yet, all of today’s tech giants came into existence despite the
2117 entrenched advantage of the companies that came before them. To understand
2118 how that happened, you have to understand both interoperability and
2119 adversarial interoperability.
2120   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
2121       The hard problem of our species is coordination.
2122     </p></blockquote></div><p>
2123     <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Interoperability</span>“</span> is the ability of two technologies to work
2124 with one another: Anyone can make an LP that will play on any record player,
2125 anyone can make a filter you can install in your stove’s extractor fan,
2126 anyone can make gasoline for your car, anyone can make a USB phone charger
2127 that fits in your car’s cigarette lighter receptacle, anyone can make a
2128 light bulb that works in your light socket, anyone can make bread that will
2129 toast in your toaster.
2130   </p><p>
2131     Interoperability is often a source of innovation and consumer benefit: Apple
2132 made the first commercially successful PC, but millions of independent
2133 software vendors made interoperable programs that ran on the Apple II
2134 Plus. The simple analog antenna inputs on the back of TVs first allowed
2135 cable operators to connect directly to TVs, then they allowed game console
2136 companies and then personal computer companies to use standard televisions
2137 as displays. Standard RJ-11 telephone jacks allowed for the production of
2138 phones from a variety of vendors in a variety of forms, from the free
2139 football-shaped phone that came with a <span class="emphasis"><em>Sports
2140 Illustrated</em></span> subscription to business phones with speakers, hold
2141 functions, and so on and then answering machines and finally modems, paving
2142 the way for the internet revolution.
2143   </p><p>
2144     <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Interoperability</span>“</span> is often used interchangeably with
2145 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">standardization,</span>“</span> which is the process when manufacturers and
2146 other stakeholders hammer out a set of agreed-upon rules for implementing a
2147 technology, such as the electrical plug on your wall, the CAN bus used by
2148 your car’s computer systems, or the HTML instructions that your browser
2149 interprets.
2150   </p><p>
2151     But interoperability doesn’t require standardization — indeed,
2152 standardization often proceeds from the chaos of ad hoc interoperability
2153 measures. The inventor of the cigarette-lighter USB charger didn’t need to
2154 get permission from car manufacturers or even the manufacturers of the
2155 dashboard lighter subcomponent. The automakers didn’t take any
2156 countermeasures to prevent the use of these aftermarket accessories by their
2157 customers, but they also didn’t do anything to make life easier for the
2158 chargers’ manufacturers. This is a kind of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">neutral
2159 interoperability.</span>“</span>
2160   </p><p>
2161     Beyond neutral interoperability, there is <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">adversarial
2162 interoperability.</span>“</span> That’s when a manufacturer makes a product that
2163 interoperates with another manufacturer’s product <span class="emphasis"><em>despite the
2164 second manufacturer’s objections</em></span> and <span class="emphasis"><em>even if that means
2165 bypassing a security system designed to prevent interoperability</em></span>.
2166   </p><p>
2167     Probably the most familiar form of adversarial interoperability is
2168 third-party printer ink. Printer manufacturers claim that they sell printers
2169 below cost and that the only way they can recoup the losses they incur is by
2170 charging high markups on ink. To prevent the owners of printers from buying
2171 ink elsewhere, the printer companies deploy a suite of anti-customer
2172 security systems that detect and reject both refilled and third-party
2173 cartridges.
2174   </p><p>
2175     Owners of printers take the position that HP and Epson and Brother are not
2176 charities and that customers for their wares have no obligation to help them
2177 survive, and so if the companies choose to sell their products at a loss,
2178 that’s their foolish choice and their consequences to live with. Likewise,
2179 competitors who make ink or refill kits observe that they don’t owe printer
2180 companies anything, and their erosion of printer companies’ margins are the
2181 printer companies’ problems, not their competitors’. After all, the printer
2182 companies shed no tears when they drive a refiller out of business, so why
2183 should the refillers concern themselves with the economic fortunes of the
2184 printer companies?
2185   </p><p>
2186     Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the history of
2187 the tech industry: from the founding of the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">alt.*</span>“</span> Usenet
2188 hierarchy (which was started against the wishes of Usenet’s maintainers and
2189 which grew to be bigger than all of Usenet combined)  to the browser wars
2190 (when Netscape and Microsoft devoted massive engineering efforts to making
2191 their browsers incompatible with the other’s special commands and
2192 peccadilloes) to Facebook (whose success was built in part by helping its
2193 new users stay in touch with friends they’d left behind on Myspace because
2194 Facebook supplied them with a tool that scraped waiting messages from
2195 Myspace and imported them into Facebook, effectively creating an
2196 Facebook-based Myspace reader).
2197   </p><p>
2198     Today, incumbency is seen as an unassailable advantage. Facebook is where
2199 all of your friends are, so no one can start a Facebook competitor. But
2200 adversarial compatibility reverses the competitive advantage: If you were
2201 allowed to compete with Facebook by providing a tool that imported all your
2202 users’ waiting Facebook messages into an environment that competed on lines
2203 that Facebook couldn’t cross, like eliminating surveillance and ads, then
2204 Facebook would be at a huge disadvantage. It would have assembled all
2205 possible ex-Facebook users into a single, easy-to-find service; it would
2206 have educated them on how a Facebook-like service worked and what its
2207 potential benefits were; and it would have provided an easy means for
2208 disgruntled Facebook users to tell their friends where they might expect
2209 better treatment.
2210   </p><p>
2211     Adversarial interoperability was once the norm and a key contributor to the
2212 dynamic, vibrant tech scene, but now it is stuck behind a thicket of laws
2213 and regulations that add legal risks to the tried-and-true tactics of
2214 adversarial interoperability. New rules and new interpretations of existing
2215 rules mean that a would-be adversarial interoperator needs to steer clear of
2216 claims under copyright, terms of service, trade secrecy, tortious
2217 interference, and patent.
2218   </p><p>
2219     In the absence of a competitive market, lawmakers have resorted to assigning
2220 expensive, state-like duties to Big Tech firms, such as automatically
2221 filtering user contributions for copyright infringement or terrorist and
2222 extremist content or detecting and preventing harassment in real time or
2223 controlling access to sexual material.
2224   </p><p>
2225     These measures put a floor under how small we can make Big Tech because only
2226 the very largest companies can afford the humans and automated filters
2227 needed to perform these duties.
2228   </p><p>
2229     But that’s not the only way in which making platforms responsible for
2230 policing their users undermines competition. A platform that is expected to
2231 police its users’ conduct must prevent many vital adversarial
2232 interoperability techniques lest these subvert its policing measures. For
2233 example, if someone using a Twitter replacement like Mastodon is able to
2234 push messages into Twitter and read messages out of Twitter, they could
2235 avoid being caught by automated systems that detect and prevent harassment
2236 (such as systems that use the timing of messages or IP-based rules to make
2237 guesses about whether someone is a harasser).
2238   </p><p>
2239     To the extent that we are willing to let Big Tech police itself — rather
2240 than making Big Tech small enough that users can leave bad platforms for
2241 better ones and small enough that a regulation that simply puts a platform
2242 out of business will not destroy billions of users’ access to their
2243 communities and data — we build the case that Big Tech should be able to
2244 block its competitors and make it easier for Big Tech to demand legal
2245 enforcement tools to ban and punish attempts at adversarial
2246 interoperability.
2247   </p><p>
2248     Ultimately, we can try to fix Big Tech by making it responsible for bad acts
2249 by its users, or we can try to fix the internet by cutting Big Tech down to
2250 size. But we can’t do both. To replace today’s giant products with
2251 pluralistic protocols, we need to clear the legal thicket that prevents
2252 adversarial interoperability so that tomorrow’s nimble, personal,
2253 small-scale products can federate themselves with giants like Facebook,
2254 allowing the users who’ve left to continue to communicate with users who
2255 haven’t left yet, reaching tendrils over Facebook’s garden wall that
2256 Facebook’s trapped users can use to scale the walls and escape to the
2257 global, open web.
2258   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="fake-news-is-an-epistemological-crisis"></a>Fake news is an epistemological crisis</h2></div></div></div><p>
2259     Tech is not the only industry that has undergone massive concentration since
2260 the Reagan era. Virtually every major industry — from oil to newspapers to
2261 meatpacking to sea freight to eyewear to online pornography — has become a
2262 clubby oligarchy that just a few players dominate.
2263   </p><p>
2264     At the same time, every industry has become something of a tech industry as
2265 general-purpose computers and general-purpose networks and the promise of
2266 efficiencies through data-driven analysis infuse every device, process, and
2267 firm with tech.
2268   </p><p>
2269     This phenomenon of industrial concentration is part of a wider story about
2270 wealth concentration overall as a smaller and smaller number of people own
2271 more and more of our world. This concentration of both wealth and industries
2272 means that our political outcomes are increasingly beholden to the parochial
2273 interests of the people and companies with all the money.
2274   </p><p>
2275     That means that whenever a regulator asks a question with an obvious,
2276 empirical answer (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are humans causing climate change?</span>“</span> or
2277 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Should we let companies conduct commercial mass surveillance?</span>“</span>
2278 or <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Does society benefit from allowing network neutrality
2279 violations?</span>“</span>), the answer that comes out is only correct if that
2280 correctness meets with the approval of rich people and the industries that
2281 made them so wealthy.
2282   </p><p>
2283     Rich people have always played an outsized role in politics and more so
2284 since the Supreme Court’s <span class="emphasis"><em>Citizens United</em></span> decision
2285 eliminated key controls over political spending. Widening inequality and
2286 wealth concentration means that the very richest people are now a lot richer
2287 and can afford to spend a lot more money on political projects than ever
2288 before. Think of the Koch brothers or George Soros or Bill Gates.
2289   </p><p>
2290     But the policy distortions of rich individuals pale in comparison to the
2291 policy distortions that concentrated industries are capable of.  The
2292 companies in highly concentrated industries are much more profitable than
2293 companies in competitive industries — no competition means not having to
2294 reduce prices or improve quality to win customers — leaving them with bigger
2295 capital surpluses to spend on lobbying.
2296   </p><p>
2297     Concentrated industries also find it easier to collaborate on policy
2298 objectives than competitive ones. When all the top execs from your industry
2299 can fit around a single boardroom table, they often do. And
2300 <span class="emphasis"><em>when</em></span> they do, they can forge a consensus position on
2301 regulation.
2302   </p><p>
2303     Rising through the ranks in a concentrated industry generally means working
2304 at two or three of the big companies. When there are only relatively few
2305 companies in a given industry, each company has a more ossified executive
2306 rank, leaving ambitious execs with fewer paths to higher positions unless
2307 they are recruited to a rival. This means that the top execs in concentrated
2308 industries are likely to have been colleagues at some point and socialize in
2309 the same circles — connected through social ties or, say, serving as
2310 trustees for each others’ estates. These tight social bonds foster a
2311 collegial, rather than competitive, attitude.
2312   </p><p>
2313     Highly concentrated industries also present a regulatory conundrum.  When an
2314 industry is dominated by just four or five companies, the only people who
2315 are likely to truly understand the industry’s practices are its veteran
2316 executives. This means that top regulators are often former execs of the
2317 companies they are supposed to be regulating. These turns in government are
2318 often tacitly understood to be leaves of absence from industry, with former
2319 employers welcoming their erstwhile watchdogs back into their executive
2320 ranks once their terms have expired.
2321   </p><p>
2322     All this is to say that the tight social bonds, small number of firms, and
2323 regulatory capture of concentrated industries give the companies that
2324 comprise them the power to dictate many, if not all, of the regulations that
2325 bind them.
2326   </p><p>
2327     This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders <a class="ulink" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/25/how-payday-lending-industry-insider-tilted-academic-research-its-favor/" target="_top">winning
2328 the right to practice predatory lending</a> or Apple <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxayp/source-apple-will-fight-right-to-repair-legislation" target="_top">winning
2329 the right to decide who can fix your phone</a> or Google and Facebook
2330 winning the right to breach your private data without suffering meaningful
2331 consequences or victories for pipeline companies or impunity for opioid
2332 manufacturers or massive tax subsidies for incredibly profitable dominant
2333 businesses, it’s increasingly apparent that many of our official,
2334 evidence-based truth-seeking processes are, in fact, auctions for sale to
2335 the highest bidder.
2336   </p><p>
2337     It’s really impossible to overstate what a terrifying prospect this is. We
2338 live in an incredibly high-tech society, and none of us could acquire the
2339 expertise to evaluate every technological proposition that stands between us
2340 and our untimely, horrible deaths. You might devote your life to acquiring
2341 the media literacy to distinguish good scientific journals from corrupt
2342 pay-for-play lookalikes and the statistical literacy to evaluate the quality
2343 of the analysis in the journals as well as the microbiology and epidemiology
2344 knowledge to determine whether you can trust claims about the safety of
2345 vaccines — but that would still leave you unqualified to judge whether the
2346 wiring in your home will give you a lethal shock <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span>
2347 whether your car’s brakes’ software will cause them to fail unpredictably
2348 <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> whether the hygiene standards at your butcher are
2349 sufficient to keep you from dying after you finish your dinner.
2350   </p><p>
2351     In a world as complex as this one, we have to defer to authorities, and we
2352 keep them honest by making those authorities accountable to us and binding
2353 them with rules to prevent conflicts of interest. We can’t possibly acquire
2354 the expertise to adjudicate conflicting claims about the best way to make
2355 the world safe and prosperous, but we <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> determine
2356 whether the adjudication process itself is trustworthy.
2357   </p><p>
2358     Right now, it’s obviously not.
2359   </p><p>
2360     The past 40 years of rising inequality and industry concentration, together
2361 with increasingly weak accountability and transparency for expert agencies,
2362 has created an increasingly urgent sense of impending doom, the sense that
2363 there are vast conspiracies afoot that operate with tacit official approval
2364 despite the likelihood they are working to better themselves by ruining the
2365 rest of us.
2366   </p><p>
2367     For example, it’s been decades since Exxon’s own scientists concluded that
2368 its products would render the Earth uninhabitable by humans. And yet those
2369 decades were lost to us, in large part because Exxon lobbied governments and
2370 sowed doubt about the dangers of its products and did so with the
2371 cooperation of many public officials.  When the survival of you and everyone
2372 you love is threatened by conspiracies, it’s not unreasonable to start
2373 questioning the things you think you know in an attempt to determine whether
2374 they, too, are the outcome of another conspiracy.
2375   </p><p>
2376     The collapse of the credibility of our systems for divining and upholding
2377 truths has left us in a state of epistemological chaos.  Once, most of us
2378 might have assumed that the system was working and that our regulations
2379 reflected our best understanding of the empirical truths of the world as
2380 they were best understood — now we have to find our own experts to help us
2381 sort the true from the false.
2382   </p><p>
2383     If you’re like me, you probably believe that vaccines are safe, but you
2384 (like me) probably also can’t explain the microbiology or statistics. Few of
2385 us have the math skills to review the literature on vaccine safety and
2386 describe why their statistical reasoning is sound. Likewise, few of us can
2387 review the stats in the (now discredited) literature on opioid safety and
2388 explain how those stats were manipulated. Both vaccines and opioids were
2389 embraced by medical authorities, after all, and one is safe while the other
2390 could ruin your life. You’re left with a kind of inchoate constellation of
2391 rules of thumb about which experts you trust to fact-check controversial
2392 claims and then to explain how all those respectable doctors with their
2393 peer-reviewed research on opioid safety <span class="emphasis"><em>were</em></span> an
2394 aberration and then how you know that the doctors writing about vaccine
2395 safety are <span class="emphasis"><em>not</em></span> an aberration.
2396   </p><p>
2397     I’m 100% certain that vaccinating is safe and effective, but I’m also at
2398 something of a loss to explain exactly, <span class="emphasis"><em>precisely,</em></span> why
2399 I believe this, given all the corruption I know about and the many times the
2400 stamp of certainty has turned out to be a parochial lie told to further
2401 enrich the super rich.
2402   </p><p>
2403     Fake news — conspiracy theories, racist ideologies, scientific denialism —
2404 has always been with us. What’s changed today is not the mix of ideas in the
2405 public discourse but the popularity of the worst ideas in that
2406 mix. Conspiracy and denial have skyrocketed in lockstep with the growth of
2407 Big Inequality, which has also tracked the rise of Big Tech and Big Pharma
2408 and Big Wrestling and Big Car and Big Movie Theater and Big Everything Else.
2409   </p><p>
2410     No one can say for certain why this has happened, but the two dominant camps
2411 are idealism (the belief that the people who argue for these conspiracies
2412 have gotten better at explaining them, maybe with the help of
2413 machine-learning tools) or materialism (the ideas have become more
2414 attractive because of material conditions in the world).
2415   </p><p>
2416     I’m a materialist. I’ve been exposed to the arguments of conspiracy
2417 theorists all my life, and I have not experienced any qualitative leap in
2418 the quality of those arguments.
2419   </p><p>
2420     The major difference is in the world, not the arguments. In a time where
2421 actual conspiracies are commonplace, conspiracy theories acquire a ring of
2422 plausibility.
2423   </p><p>
2424     We have always had disagreements about what’s true, but today, we have a
2425 disagreement over how we know whether something is true. This is an
2426 epistemological crisis, not a crisis over belief. It’s a crisis over the
2427 credibility of our truth-seeking exercises, from scientific journals (in an
2428 era where the biggest journal publishers have been caught producing
2429 pay-to-play journals for junk science) to regulations (in an era where
2430 regulators are routinely cycling in and out of business) to education (in an
2431 era where universities are dependent on corporate donations to keep their
2432 lights on).
2433   </p><p>
2434     Targeting — surveillance capitalism — makes it easier to find people who are
2435 undergoing this epistemological crisis, but it doesn’t create the
2436 crisis. For that, you need to look to corruption.
2437   </p><p>
2438     And, conveniently enough, it’s corruption that allows surveillance
2439 capitalism to grow by dismantling monopoly protections, by permitting
2440 reckless collection and retention of personal data, by allowing ads to be
2441 targeted in secret, and by foreclosing on the possibility of going somewhere
2442 else where you might continue to enjoy your friends without subjecting
2443 yourself to commercial surveillance.
2444   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="tech-is-different"></a>Tech is different</h2></div></div></div><p>
2445     I reject both iterations of technological exceptionalism. I reject the idea
2446 that tech is uniquely terrible and led by people who are greedier or worse
2447 than the leaders of other industries, and I reject the idea that tech is so
2448 good — or so intrinsically prone to concentration — that it can’t be blamed
2449 for its present-day monopolistic status.
2450   </p><p>
2451     I think tech is just another industry, albeit one that grew up in the
2452 absence of real monopoly constraints. It may have been first, but it isn’t
2453 the worst nor will it be the last.
2454   </p><p>
2455     But there’s one way in which I <span class="emphasis"><em>am</em></span> a tech
2456 exceptionalist. I believe that online tools are the key to overcoming
2457 problems that are much more urgent than tech monopolization: climate change,
2458 inequality, misogyny, and discrimination on the basis of race, gender
2459 identity, and other factors. The internet is how we will recruit people to
2460 fight those fights, and how we will coordinate their labor. Tech is not a
2461 substitute for democratic accountability, the rule of law, fairness, or
2462 stability — but it’s a means to achieve these things.
2463   </p><p>
2464     The hard problem of our species is coordination. Everything from climate
2465 change to social change to running a business to making a family work can be
2466 viewed as a collective action problem.
2467   </p><p>
2468     The internet makes it easier than at any time before to find people who want
2469 to work on a project with you — hence the success of free and open-source
2470 software, crowdfunding, and racist terror groups — and easier than ever to
2471 coordinate the work you do.
2472   </p><p>
2473     The internet and the computers we connect to it also possess an exceptional
2474 quality: general-purposeness. The internet is designed to allow any two
2475 parties to communicate any data, using any protocol, without permission from
2476 anyone else. The only production design we have for computers is the
2477 general-purpose, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Turing complete</span>“</span> computer that can run every
2478 program we can express in symbolic logic.
2479   </p><p>
2480     This means that every time someone with a special communications need
2481 invests in infrastructure and techniques to make the internet faster,
2482 cheaper, and more robust, this benefit redounds to everyone else who is
2483 using the internet to communicate. And this also means that every time
2484 someone with a special computing need invests to make computers faster,
2485 cheaper, and more robust, every other computing application is a potential
2486 beneficiary of this work.
2487   </p><p>
2488     For these reasons, every type of communication is gradually absorbed into
2489 the internet, and every type of device — from airplanes to pacemakers —
2490 eventually becomes a computer in a fancy case.
2491   </p><p>
2492     While these considerations don’t preclude regulating networks and computers,
2493 they do call for gravitas and caution when doing so because changes to
2494 regulatory frameworks could ripple out to have unintended consequences in
2495 many, many other domains.
2496   </p><p>
2497     The upshot of this is that our best hope of solving the big coordination
2498 problems — climate change, inequality, etc. — is with free, fair, and open
2499 tech. Our best hope of keeping tech free, fair, and open is to exercise
2500 caution in how we regulate tech and to attend closely to the ways in which
2501 interventions to solve one problem might create problems in other domains.
2502   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="ownership-of-facts"></a>Ownership of facts</h2></div></div></div><p>
2503     Big Tech has a funny relationship with information. When you’re generating
2504 information — anything from the location data streaming off your mobile
2505 device to the private messages you send to friends on a social network — it
2506 claims the rights to make unlimited use of that data.
2507   </p><p>
2508     But when you have the audacity to turn the tables — to use a tool that
2509 blocks ads or slurps your waiting updates out of a social network and puts
2510 them in another app that lets you set your own priorities and suggestions or
2511 crawls their system to allow you to start a rival business — they claim that
2512 you’re stealing from them.
2513   </p><p>
2514     The thing is, information is a very bad fit for any kind of private property
2515 regime. Property rights are useful for establishing markets that can lead to
2516 the effective development of fallow assets. These markets depend on clear
2517 titles to ensure that the things being bought and sold in them can, in fact,
2518 be bought and sold.
2519   </p><p>
2520     Information rarely has such a clear title. Take phone numbers: There’s
2521 clearly something going wrong when Facebook slurps up millions of users’
2522 address books and uses the phone numbers it finds in them to plot out social
2523 graphs and fill in missing information about other users.
2524   </p><p>
2525     But the phone numbers Facebook nonconsensually acquires in this transaction
2526 are not the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">property</span>“</span> of the users they’re taken from nor do
2527 they belong to the people whose phones ring when you dial those numbers. The
2528 numbers are mere integers, 10 digits in the U.S.  and Canada, and they
2529 appear in millions of places, including somewhere deep in pi as well as
2530 numerous other contexts. Giving people ownership titles to integers is an
2531 obviously terrible idea.
2532   </p><p>
2533     Likewise for the facts that Facebook and other commercial surveillance
2534 operators acquire about us, like that we are the children of our parents or
2535 the parents to our children or that we had a conversation with someone else
2536 or went to a public place.  These data points can’t be property in the sense
2537 that your house or your shirt is your property because the title to them is
2538 intrinsically muddy: Does your mom own the fact that she is your mother? Do
2539 you? Do both of you? What about your dad — does he own this fact too, or
2540 does he have to license the fact from you (or your mom or both of you) in
2541 order to use this fact? What about the hundreds or thousands of other people
2542 who know these facts?
2543   </p><p>
2544     If you go to a Black Lives Matter demonstration, do the other demonstrators
2545 need your permission to post their photos from the event? The online fights
2546 over <a class="ulink" href="https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-take-photos-at-protests/" target="_top">when and
2547 how to post photos from demonstrations</a> reveal a nuanced, complex
2548 issue that cannot be easily hand-waved away by giving one party a property
2549 right that everyone else in the mix has to respect.
2550   </p><p>
2551     The fact that information isn’t a good fit with property and markets doesn’t
2552 mean that it’s not valuable. Babies aren’t property, but they’re inarguably
2553 valuable. In fact, we have a whole set of rules just for babies as well as a
2554 subset of those rules that apply to humans more generally. Someone who
2555 argues that babies won’t be truly valuable until they can be bought and sold
2556 like loaves of bread would be instantly and rightfully condemned as a
2557 monster.
2558   </p><p>
2559     It’s tempting to reach for the property hammer when Big Tech treats your
2560 information like a nail — not least because Big Tech are such prolific
2561 abusers of property hammers when it comes to <span class="emphasis"><em>their</em></span>
2562 information. But this is a mistake. If we allow markets to dictate the use
2563 of our information, then we’ll find that we’re sellers in a buyers’ market
2564 where the Big Tech monopolies set a price for our data that is so low as to
2565 be insignificant or, more likely, set at a nonnegotiable price of zero in a
2566 click-through agreement that you don’t have the opportunity to modify.
2567   </p><p>
2568     Meanwhile, establishing property rights over information will create
2569 insurmountable barriers to independent data processing. Imagine that we
2570 require a license to be negotiated when a translated document is compared
2571 with its original, something Google has done and continues to do billions of
2572 times to train its automated language translation tools. Google can afford
2573 this, but independent third parties cannot.  Google can staff a clearances
2574 department to negotiate one-time payments to the likes of the EU (one of the
2575 major repositories of translated documents) while independent watchdogs
2576 wanting to verify that the translations are well-prepared, or to root out
2577 bias in translations, will find themselves needing a staffed-up legal
2578 department and millions for licenses before they can even get started.
2579   </p><p>
2580     The same goes for things like search indexes of the web or photos of
2581 peoples’ houses, which have become contentious thanks to Google’s Street
2582 View project. Whatever problems may exist with Google’s photographing of
2583 street scenes, resolving them by letting people decide who can take pictures
2584 of the facades of their homes from a public street will surely create even
2585 worse ones. Think of how street photography is important for newsgathering —
2586 including informal newsgathering, like photographing abuses of authority —
2587 and how being able to document housing and street life are important for
2588 contesting eminent domain, advocating for social aid, reporting planning and
2589 zoning violations, documenting discriminatory and unequal living conditions,
2590 and more.
2591   </p><p>
2592     The ownership of facts is antithetical to many kinds of human progress. It’s
2593 hard to imagine a rule that limits Big Tech’s exploitation of our collective
2594 labors without inadvertently banning people from gathering data on online
2595 harassment or compiling indexes of changes in language or simply
2596 investigating how the platforms are shaping our discourse — all of which
2597 require scraping data that other people have created and subjecting it to
2598 scrutiny and analysis.
2599   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="persuasion-works-slowly"></a>Persuasion works… slowly</h2></div></div></div><p>
2600     The platforms may oversell their ability to persuade people, but obviously,
2601 persuasion works sometimes. Whether it’s the private realm that LGBTQ people
2602 used to recruit allies and normalize sexual diversity or the decadeslong
2603 project to convince people that markets are the only efficient way to solve
2604 complicated resource allocation problems, it’s clear that our societal
2605 attitudes <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> change.
2606   </p><p>
2607     The project of shifting societal attitudes is a game of inches and
2608 years. For centuries, svengalis have purported to be able to accelerate this
2609 process, but even the most brutal forms of propaganda have struggled to make
2610 permanent changes. Joseph Goebbels was able to subject Germans to daily,
2611 mandatory, hourslong radio broadcasts, to round up and torture and murder
2612 dissidents, and to seize full control over their children’s education while
2613 banning any literature, broadcasts, or films that did not comport with his
2614 worldview.
2615   </p><p>
2616     Yet, after 12 years of terror, once the war ended, Nazi ideology was largely
2617 discredited in both East and West Germany, and a program of national truth
2618 and reconciliation was put in its place. Racism and authoritarianism were
2619 never fully abolished in Germany, but neither were the majority of Germans
2620 irrevocably convinced of Nazism — and the rise of racist authoritarianism in
2621 Germany today tells us that the liberal attitudes that replaced Nazism were
2622 no more permanent than Nazism itself.
2623   </p><p>
2624     Racism and authoritarianism have also always been with us. Anyone who’s
2625 reviewed the kind of messages and arguments that racists put forward today
2626 would be hard-pressed to say that they have gotten better at presenting
2627 their ideas. The same pseudoscience, appeals to fear, and circular logic
2628 that racists presented in the 1980s, when the cause of white supremacy was
2629 on the wane, are to be found in the communications of leading white
2630 nationalists today.
2631   </p><p>
2632     If racists haven’t gotten more convincing in the past decade, then how is it
2633 that more people were convinced to be openly racist at that time? I believe
2634 that the answer lies in the material world, not the world of ideas. The
2635 ideas haven’t gotten more convincing, but people have become more
2636 afraid. Afraid that the state can’t be trusted to act as an honest broker in
2637 life-or-death decisions, from those regarding the management of the economy
2638 to the regulation of painkillers to the rules for handling private
2639 information. Afraid that the world has become a game of musical chairs in
2640 which the chairs are being taken away at a never-before-seen rate. Afraid
2641 that justice for others will come at their expense. Monopolism isn’t the
2642 cause of these fears, but the inequality and material desperation and policy
2643 malpractice that monopolism contributes to is a significant contributor to
2644 these conditions. Inequality creates the conditions for both conspiracies
2645 and violent racist ideologies, and then surveillance capitalism lets
2646 opportunists target the fearful and the conspiracy-minded.
2647   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="paying-wont-help"></a>Paying won’t help</h2></div></div></div><p>
2648     As the old saw goes, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the
2649 product.</span>“</span>
2650   </p><p>
2651     It’s a commonplace belief today that the advent of free, ad-supported media
2652 was the original sin of surveillance capitalism.  The reasoning is that the
2653 companies that charged for access couldn’t <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">compete with free</span>“</span>
2654 and so they were driven out of business. Their ad-supported competitors,
2655 meanwhile, declared open season on their users’ data in a bid to improve
2656 their ad targeting and make more money and then resorted to the most
2657 sensationalist tactics to generate clicks on those ads. If only we’d pay for
2658 media again, we’d have a better, more responsible, more sober discourse that
2659 would be better for democracy.
2660   </p><p>
2661     But the degradation of news products long precedes the advent of
2662 ad-supported online news. Long before newspapers were online, lax antitrust
2663 enforcement had opened the door for unprecedented waves of consolidation and
2664 roll-ups in newsrooms. Rival newspapers were merged, reporters and ad sales
2665 staff were laid off, physical plants were sold and leased back, leaving the
2666 companies loaded up with debt through leveraged buyouts and subsequent
2667 profit-taking by the new owners. In other words, it wasn’t merely shifts in
2668 the classified advertising market, which was long held to be the primary
2669 driver in the decline of the traditional newsroom, that made news companies
2670 unable to adapt to the internet — it was monopolism.
2671   </p><p>
2672     Then, as news companies <span class="emphasis"><em>did</em></span> come online, the ad
2673 revenues they commanded dropped even as the number of internet users (and
2674 thus potential online readers) increased. That shift was a function of
2675 consolidation in the ad sales market, with Google and Facebook emerging as
2676 duopolists who made more money every year from advertising while paying less
2677 and less of it to the publishers whose work the ads appeared
2678 alongside. Monopolism created a buyer’s market for ad inventory with
2679 Facebook and Google acting as gatekeepers.
2680   </p><p>
2681     Paid services continue to exist alongside free ones, and often it is these
2682 paid services — anxious to prevent people from bypassing their paywalls or
2683 sharing paid media with freeloaders — that exert the most control over their
2684 customers. Apple’s iTunes and App Stores are paid services, but to maximize
2685 their profitability, Apple has to lock its platforms so that third parties
2686 can’t make compatible software without permission. These locks allow the
2687 company to exercise both editorial control (enabling it to exclude <a class="ulink" href="https://ncac.org/news/blog/does-apples-strict-app-store-content-policy-limit-freedom-of-expression" target="_top">controversial
2688 political material</a>) and technological control, including control
2689 over who can repair the devices it makes. If we’re worried that ad-supported
2690 products deprive people of their right to self-determination by using
2691 persuasion techniques to nudge their purchase decisions a few degrees in one
2692 direction or the other, then the near-total control a single company holds
2693 over the decision of who gets to sell you software, parts, and service for
2694 your iPhone should have us very worried indeed.
2695   </p><p>
2696     We shouldn’t just be concerned about payment and control: The idea that
2697 paying will improve discourse is also dangerously wrong. The poor success
2698 rate of targeted advertising means that the platforms have to incentivize
2699 you to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">engage</span>“</span> with posts at extremely high levels to generate
2700 enough pageviews to safeguard their profits. As discussed earlier, to
2701 increase engagement, platforms like Facebook use machine learning to guess
2702 which messages will be most inflammatory and make a point of shoving those
2703 into your eyeballs at every turn so that you will hate-click and argue with
2704 people.
2705   </p><p>
2706     Perhaps paying would fix this, the reasoning goes. If platforms could be
2707 economically viable even if you stopped clicking on them once your
2708 intellectual and social curiosity had been slaked, then they would have no
2709 reason to algorithmically enrage you to get more clicks out of you, right?
2710   </p><p>
2711     There may be something to that argument, but it still ignores the wider
2712 economic and political context of the platforms and the world that allowed
2713 them to grow so dominant.
2714   </p><p>
2715     Platforms are world-spanning and all-encompassing because they are
2716 monopolies, and they are monopolies because we have gutted our most
2717 important and reliable anti-monopoly rules. Antitrust was neutered as a key
2718 part of the project to make the wealthy wealthier, and that project has
2719 worked. The vast majority of people on Earth have a negative net worth, and
2720 even the dwindling middle class is in a precarious state, undersaved for
2721 retirement, underinsured for medical disasters, and undersecured against
2722 climate and technology shocks.
2723   </p><p>
2724     In this wildly unequal world, paying doesn’t improve the discourse; it
2725 simply prices discourse out of the range of the majority of people. Paying
2726 for the product is dandy, if you can afford it.
2727   </p><p>
2728     If you think today’s filter bubbles are a problem for our discourse, imagine
2729 what they’d be like if rich people inhabited free-flowing Athenian
2730 marketplaces of ideas where you have to pay for admission while everyone
2731 else lives in online spaces that are subsidized by wealthy benefactors who
2732 relish the chance to establish conversational spaces where the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">house
2733 rules</span>“</span> forbid questioning the status quo. That is, imagine if the
2734 rich seceded from Facebook, and then, instead of running ads that made money
2735 for shareholders, Facebook became a billionaire’s vanity project that also
2736 happened to ensure that nobody talked about whether it was fair that only
2737 billionaires could afford to hang out in the rarified corners of the
2738 internet.
2739   </p><p>
2740     Behind the idea of paying for access is a belief that free markets will
2741 address Big Tech’s dysfunction. After all, to the extent that people have a
2742 view of surveillance at all, it is generally an unfavorable one, and the
2743 longer and more thoroughly one is surveilled, the less one tends to like
2744 it. Same goes for lock-in: If HP’s ink or Apple’s App Store were really
2745 obviously fantastic, they wouldn’t need technical measures to prevent users
2746 from choosing a rival’s product. The only reason these technical
2747 countermeasures exist is that the companies don’t believe their customers
2748 would <span class="emphasis"><em>voluntarily</em></span> submit to their terms, and they want
2749 to deprive them of the choice to take their business elsewhere.
2750   </p><p>
2751     Advocates for markets laud their ability to aggregate the diffused knowledge
2752 of buyers and sellers across a whole society through demand signals, price
2753 signals, and so on. The argument for surveillance capitalism being a
2754 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> is that machine-learning-driven persuasion
2755 techniques distort decision-making by consumers, leading to incorrect
2756 signals — consumers don’t buy what they prefer, they buy what they’re
2757 tricked into preferring. It follows that the monopolistic practices of
2758 lock-in, which do far more to constrain consumers’ free choices, are even
2759 more of a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism.</span>“</span>
2760   </p><p>
2761     The profitability of any business is constrained by the possibility that its
2762 customers will take their business elsewhere. Both surveillance and lock-in
2763 are anti-features that no customer wants.  But monopolies can capture their
2764 regulators, crush their competitors, insert themselves into their customers’
2765 lives, and corral people into <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">choosing</span>“</span> their services
2766 regardless of whether they want them — it’s fine to be terrible when there
2767 is no alternative.
2768   </p><p>
2769     Ultimately, surveillance and lock-in are both simply business strategies
2770 that monopolists can choose. Surveillance companies like Google are
2771 perfectly capable of deploying lock-in technologies — just look at the
2772 onerous Android licensing terms that require device-makers to bundle in
2773 Google’s suite of applications. And lock-in companies like Apple are
2774 perfectly capable of subjecting their users to surveillance if it means
2775 keeping the Chinese government happy and preserving ongoing access to
2776 Chinese markets.  Monopolies may be made up of good, ethical people, but as
2777 institutions, they are not your friend — they will do whatever they can get
2778 away with to maximize their profits, and the more monopolistic they are, the
2779 more they <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> get away with.
2780   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="an-ecology-moment-for-trustbusting"></a>An <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> moment for trustbusting</h2></div></div></div><p>
2781     If we’re going to break Big Tech’s death grip on our digital lives, we’re
2782 going to have to fight monopolies. That may sound pretty mundane and
2783 old-fashioned, something out of the New Deal era, while ending the use of
2784 automated behavioral modification feels like the plotline of a really cool
2785 cyberpunk novel.
2786   </p><p>
2787     Meanwhile, breaking up monopolies is something we seem to have forgotten how
2788 to do. There is a bipartisan, trans-Atlantic consensus that breaking up
2789 companies is a fool’s errand at best — liable to mire your federal
2790 prosecutors in decades of litigation — and counterproductive at worst,
2791 eroding the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">consumer benefits</span>“</span> of large companies with massive
2792 efficiencies of scale.
2793   </p><p>
2794     But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing
2795 robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies’ all-powerful grip
2796 on our society. The trustbusting era could not begin until we found the
2797 political will — until the people convinced politicians they’d have their
2798 backs when they went up against the richest, most powerful men in the world.
2799   </p><p>
2800     Could we find that political will again?
2801   </p><p>
2802     Copyright scholar James Boyle has described how the term
2803 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> marked a turning point in environmental
2804 activism. Prior to the adoption of this term, people who wanted to preserve
2805 whale populations didn’t necessarily see themselves as fighting the same
2806 battle as people who wanted to protect the ozone layer or fight freshwater
2807 pollution or beat back smog or acid rain.
2808   </p><p>
2809     But the term <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> welded these disparate causes together
2810 into a single movement, and the members of this movement found solidarity
2811 with one another. The people who cared about smog signed petitions
2812 circulated by the people who wanted to end whaling, and the anti-whalers
2813 marched alongside the people demanding action on acid rain. This uniting
2814 behind a common cause completely changed the dynamics of environmentalism,
2815 setting the stage for today’s climate activism and the sense that preserving
2816 the habitability of the planet Earth is a shared duty among all people.
2817   </p><p>
2818     I believe we are on the verge of a new <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> moment
2819 dedicated to combating monopolies. After all, tech isn’t the only
2820 concentrated industry nor is it even the <span class="emphasis"><em>most</em></span>
2821 concentrated of industries.
2822   </p><p>
2823     You can find partisans for trustbusting in every sector of the
2824 economy. Everywhere you look, you can find people who’ve been wronged by
2825 monopolists who’ve trashed their finances, their health, their privacy,
2826 their educations, and the lives of people they love.  Those people have the
2827 same cause as the people who want to break up Big Tech and the same
2828 enemies. When most of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a very few, it
2829 follows that nearly every large company will have overlapping shareholders.
2830   </p><p>
2831     That’s the good news: With a little bit of work and a little bit of
2832 coalition building, we have more than enough political will to break up Big
2833 Tech and every other concentrated industry besides. First we take Facebook,
2834 then we take AT&amp;T/WarnerMedia.
2835   </p><p>
2836     But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech
2837 <span class="emphasis"><em>instead</em></span> of breaking up the big companies also
2838 forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later.
2839   </p><p>
2840     Big Tech’s concentration currently means that their inaction on harassment,
2841 for example, leaves users with an impossible choice: absent themselves from
2842 public discourse by, say, quitting Twitter or endure vile, constant
2843 abuse. Big Tech’s over-collection and over-retention of data results in
2844 horrific identity theft. And their inaction on extremist recruitment means
2845 that white supremacists who livestream their shooting rampages can reach an
2846 audience of billions. The combination of tech concentration and media
2847 concentration means that artists’ incomes are falling even as the revenue
2848 generated by their creations are increasing.
2849   </p><p>
2850     Yet governments confronting all of these problems all inevitably converge on
2851 the same solution: deputize the Big Tech giants to police their users and
2852 render them liable for their users’ bad actions. The drive to force Big Tech
2853 to use automated filters to block everything from copyright infringement to
2854 sex-trafficking to violent extremism means that tech companies will have to
2855 allocate hundreds of millions to run these compliance systems.
2856   </p><p>
2857     These rules — the EU’s new Directive on Copyright, Australia’s new terror
2858 regulation, America’s FOSTA/SESTA sex-trafficking law and more — are not
2859 just death warrants for small, upstart competitors that might challenge Big
2860 Tech’s dominance but who lack the deep pockets of established incumbents to
2861 pay for all these automated systems. Worse still, these rules put a floor
2862 under how small we can hope to make Big Tech.
2863   </p><p>
2864     That’s because any move to break up Big Tech and cut it down to size will
2865 have to cope with the hard limit of not making these companies so small that
2866 they can no longer afford to perform these duties — and it’s
2867 <span class="emphasis"><em>expensive</em></span> to invest in those automated filters and
2868 outsource content moderation. It’s already going to be hard to unwind these
2869 deeply concentrated, chimeric behemoths that have been welded together in
2870 the pursuit of monopoly profits. Doing so while simultaneously finding some
2871 way to fill the regulatory void that will be left behind if these
2872 self-policing rulers were forced to suddenly abdicate will be much, much
2873 harder.
2874   </p><p>
2875     Allowing the platforms to grow to their present size has given them a
2876 dominance that is nearly insurmountable — deputizing them with public duties
2877 to redress the pathologies created by their size makes it virtually
2878 impossible to reduce that size. Lather, rinse, repeat: If the platforms
2879 don’t get smaller, they will get larger, and as they get larger, they will
2880 create more problems, which will give rise to more public duties for the
2881 companies, which will make them bigger still.
2882   </p><p>
2883     We can work to fix the internet by breaking up Big Tech and depriving them
2884 of monopoly profits, or we can work to fix Big Tech by making them spend
2885 their monopoly profits on governance. But we can’t do both. We have to
2886 choose between a vibrant, open internet or a dominated, monopolized internet
2887 commanded by Big Tech giants that we struggle with constantly to get them to
2888 behave themselves.
2889   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="make-big-tech-small-again"></a>Make Big Tech small again</h2></div></div></div><p>
2890     Trustbusting is hard. Breaking big companies into smaller ones is expensive
2891 and time-consuming. So time-consuming that by the time you’re done, the
2892 world has often moved on and rendered years of litigation irrelevant. From
2893 1969 to 1982, the U.S. government pursued an antitrust case against IBM over
2894 its dominance of mainframe computing — but the case collapsed in 1982
2895 because mainframes were being speedily replaced by PCs.
2896   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
2897       A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to
2898 enforce the law as it was written.
2899     </p></blockquote></div><p>
2900     It’s far easier to prevent concentration than to fix it, and reinstating the
2901 traditional contours of U.S. antitrust enforcement will, at the very least,
2902 prevent further concentration. That means bans on mergers between large
2903 companies, on big companies acquiring nascent competitors, and on platform
2904 companies competing directly with the companies that rely on the platforms.
2905   </p><p>
2906     These powers are all in the plain language of U.S. antitrust laws, so in
2907 theory, a future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general
2908 to enforce the law as it was written. But after decades of judicial
2909 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">education</span>“</span> in the benefits of monopolies, after multiple
2910 administrations that have packed the federal courts with lifetime-appointed
2911 monopoly cheerleaders, it’s not clear that mere administrative action would
2912 do the trick.
2913   </p><p>
2914     If the courts frustrate the Justice Department and the president, the next
2915 stop would be Congress, which could eliminate any doubt about how antitrust
2916 law should be enforced in the U.S. by passing new laws that boil down to
2917 saying, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert
2918 Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, <span class="emphasis"><em>fuck that
2919 guy</em></span>.</span>“</span> In other words, the problem with monopolies is
2920 <span class="emphasis"><em>monopolism</em></span> — the concentration of power into too few
2921 hands, which erodes our right to self-determination. If there is a monopoly,
2922 the law wants it gone, period. Sure, get rid of monopolies that create
2923 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">consumer harm</span>“</span> in the form of higher prices, but also,
2924 <span class="emphasis"><em>get rid of other monopolies, too</em></span>.
2925   </p><p>
2926     But this only prevents things from getting worse. To help them get better,
2927 we will have to build coalitions with other activists in the anti-monopoly
2928 ecology movement — a pluralism movement or a self-determination movement —
2929 and target existing monopolies in every industry for breakup and structural
2930 separation rules that prevent, for example, the giant eyewear monopolist
2931 Luxottica from dominating both the sale and the manufacture of spectacles.
2932   </p><p>
2933     In an important sense, it doesn’t matter which industry the breakups begin
2934 in. Once they start, shareholders in <span class="emphasis"><em>every</em></span> industry
2935 will start to eye their investments in monopolists skeptically. As
2936 trustbusters ride into town and start making lives miserable for
2937 monopolists, the debate around every corporate boardroom’s table will
2938 shift. People within corporations who’ve always felt uneasy about monopolism
2939 will gain a powerful new argument to fend off their evil rivals in the
2940 corporate hierarchy: <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">If we do it my way, we make less money; if we do
2941 it your way, a judge will fine us billions and expose us to ridicule and
2942 public disapprobation. So even though I get that it would be really cool to
2943 do that merger, lock out that competitor, or buy that little company and
2944 kill it before it can threaten it, we really shouldn’t — not if we don’t
2945 want to get tied to the DOJ’s bumper and get dragged up and down Trustbuster
2946 Road for the next 10 years.</span>“</span>
2947   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="goto-10"></a>20 GOTO 10</h2></div></div></div><p>
2948     Fixing Big Tech will require a lot of iteration. As cyber lawyer Lawrence
2949 Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, <span class="emphasis"><em>Code and Other Laws of
2950 Cyberspace</em></span>, our lives are regulated by four forces: law (what’s
2951 legal), code (what’s technologically possible), norms (what’s socially
2952 acceptable), and markets (what’s profitable).
2953   </p><p>
2954     If you could wave a wand and get Congress to pass a law that re-fanged the
2955 Sherman Act tomorrow, you could use the impending breakups to convince
2956 venture capitalists to fund competitors to Facebook, Google, Twitter, and
2957 Apple that would be waiting in the wings after they were cut down to size.
2958   </p><p>
2959     But getting Congress to act will require a massive normative shift, a mass
2960 movement of people who care about monopolies — and pulling them apart.
2961   </p><p>
2962     Getting people to care about monopolies will take technological
2963 interventions that help them to see what a world free from Big Tech might
2964 look like. Imagine if someone could make a beloved (but unauthorized)
2965 third-party Facebook or Twitter client that dampens the anxiety-producing
2966 algorithmic drumbeat and still lets you talk to your friends without being
2967 spied upon — something that made social media more sociable and less
2968 toxic. Now imagine that it gets shut down in a brutal legal battle. It’s
2969 always easier to convince people that something must be done to save a thing
2970 they love than it is to excite them about something that doesn’t even exist
2971 yet.
2972   </p><p>
2973     Neither tech nor law nor code nor markets are sufficient to reform Big
2974 Tech. But a profitable competitor to Big Tech could bankroll a legislative
2975 push; legal reform can embolden a toolsmith to make a better tool; the tool
2976 can create customers for a potential business who value the benefits of the
2977 internet but want them delivered without Big Tech; and that business can get
2978 funded and divert some of its profits to legal reform. 20 GOTO 10 (or
2979 lather, rinse, repeat). Do it again, but this time, get farther! After all,
2980 this time you’re starting with weaker Big Tech adversaries, a constituency
2981 that understands things can be better, Big Tech rivals who’ll help ensure
2982 their own future by bankrolling reform, and code that other programmers can
2983 build on to weaken Big Tech even further.
2984   </p><p>
2985     The surveillance capitalism hypothesis — that Big Tech’s products really
2986 work as well as they say they do and that’s why everything is so screwed up
2987 — is way too easy on surveillance and even easier on capitalism. Companies
2988 spy because they believe their own BS, and companies spy because governments
2989 let them, and companies spy because any advantage from spying is so
2990 short-lived and minor that they have to do more and more of it just to stay
2991 in place.
2992   </p><p>
2993     As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism
2994 that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a
2995 form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to
2996 inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason
2997 companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to
2998 both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall
2999 to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not
3000 piss off the monopolists.
3001   </p><p>
3002     Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule
3003 begets surveillance. Surveillance isn’t bad because it lets people
3004 manipulate us. It’s bad because it crushes our ability to be our authentic
3005 selves — and because it lets the rich and powerful figure out who might be
3006 thinking of building guillotines and what dirt they can use to discredit
3007 those embryonic guillotine-builders before they can even get to the
3008 lumberyard.
3009   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="up-and-through"></a>Up and through</h2></div></div></div><p>
3010     With all the problems of Big Tech, it’s tempting to imagine solving the
3011 problem by returning to a world without tech at all. Resist that temptation.
3012   </p><p>
3013     The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is
3014 not reliant upon high tech, it will be because civilization has fallen. Big
3015 Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the
3016 proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the
3017 existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it’s up to us to seize
3018 the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under
3019 democratic, accountable control.
3020   </p><p>
3021     I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not
3022 in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize
3023 because it has <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">economies of scale</span>“</span> or some other nebulous
3024 feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right
3025 matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe — and
3026 doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our
3027 civilization, our species, and our planet.
3028   </p></div></div></body></html>