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   9      }</style></head><body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><div lang="en" class="article"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="index"></a>How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism</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       How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow.
  11     </p><p>
  12       Published by Petter Reinholdtsen.
  13     </p><p>
  14       ISBN 978-82-93828-05-1 (hard cover)
  15     </p><p>
  16       ISBN 978-82-93828-06-8 (paperback)
  17     </p><p>
  18       ISBN 978-82-93828-07-5 (ePub)
  19     </p><p>
  20       <span class="inlinemediaobject"><img src="images/cc.png" align="middle" height="38" alt="Creative Commons, Some rights reserved"></span>
  21     </p><p>
  22       This book is licensed under a Creative Commons license. This
  23       license permits any use of this work, so long as attribution is
  24       given and no derivatived material is distributed.  For more
  25       information about the license visit <a class="ulink" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/" target="_top">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/</a>.
  26     </p></div></div></div><hr></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl class="toc"><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#the-net-of-a-thousand-lies">The net of a thousand lies</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#digital-rights-activism-a-quarter-century-on">Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-exceptionalism-then-and-now">Tech exceptionalism, then and now</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dont-believe-the-hype">Don’t believe the hype</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-persuasion">What is persuasion?</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#segmenting">1. Segmenting</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
  27   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
  28   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
  29   capitalism: The 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>The net of a thousand lies</h2></div></div></div><p>
  30     The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the
  31     21st century is just how widespread the evidence against them is.
  32     You can understand how, centuries ago, people who’d never gained a
  33     high-enough vantage point from which to see the Earth’s curvature
  34     might come to the commonsense belief that the flat-seeming Earth
  35     was, indeed, flat.
  36   </p><p>
  37     But today, when elementary schools routinely dangle GoPro cameras
  38     from balloons and loft them high enough to photograph the Earth’s
  39     curve — to say nothing of the unexceptional sight of the curved
  40     Earth from an airplane window — it takes a heroic effort to maintain
  41     the belief that the world is flat.
  42   </p><p>
  43     Likewise for white nationalism and eugenics: In an age where you can
  44     become a computational genomics datapoint by swabbing your cheek and
  45     mailing it to a gene-sequencing company along with a modest sum of
  46     money, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">race science</span>”</span> has never been easier to refute.
  47   </p><p>
  48     We are living through a golden age of both readily available facts
  49     and denial of those facts. Terrible ideas that have lingered on the
  50     fringes for decades or even centuries have gone mainstream seemingly
  51     overnight.
  52   </p><p>
  53     When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that
  54     can explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea
  55     has gotten a lot better at stating their case, or the proposition
  56     has become harder to deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other
  57     words, if we want people to take climate change seriously, we can
  58     get a bunch of Greta Thunbergs to make eloquent, passionate
  59     arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds, or we can wait
  60     for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case for
  61     us. In practice, we’ll probably have to do some of both: The more
  62     we’re boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier
  63     it will be for the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us.
  64   </p><p>
  65     The arguments for ridiculous beliefs in odious conspiracies like
  66     anti-vaccination, climate denial, a flat Earth, and eugenics are no
  67     better than they were a generation ago. Indeed, they’re worse
  68     because they are being pitched to people who have at least a
  69     background awareness of the refuting facts.
  70   </p><p>
  71     Anti-vax has been around since the first vaccines, but the early
  72     anti-vaxxers were pitching people who were less equipped to
  73     understand even the most basic ideas from microbiology, and
  74     moreover, those people had not witnessed the extermination of
  75     mass-murdering diseases like polio, smallpox, and measles. Today’s
  76     anti-vaxxers are no more eloquent than their forebears, and they
  77     have a much harder job.
  78   </p><p>
  79     So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding
  80     on the basis of superior arguments?
  81   </p><p>
  82     Some people think so. Today, there is a widespread belief that
  83     machine learning and commercial surveillance can turn even the most
  84     fumble-tongued conspiracy theorist into a svengali who can warp your
  85     perceptions and win your belief by locating vulnerable people and
  86     then pitching them with A.I.-refined arguments that bypass their
  87     rational faculties and turn everyday people into flat Earthers,
  88     anti-vaxxers, or even Nazis. When the RAND Corporation
  89     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf" target="_top">blames
  90     Facebook for <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">radicalization</span>”</span></a> and when Facebook’s role in
  91     spreading coronavirus misinformation is
  92     <a class="ulink" href="https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_threat_health/" target="_top">blamed
  93     on its algorithm</a>, the implicit message is that machine
  94     learning and surveillance are causing the changes in our consensus
  95     about what’s true.
  96   </p><p>
  97     After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy
  98     theories like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread
  99     followings, <span class="emphasis"><em>something</em></span> must be afoot.
 100   </p><p>
 101     But what if there’s another explanation? What if it’s the material
 102     circumstances, and not the arguments, that are making the difference
 103     for these conspiracy pitchmen? What if the trauma of living through
 104     <span class="emphasis"><em>real conspiracies</em></span> all around us — conspiracies
 105     among wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury
 106     inconvenient facts and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies
 107     are commonly known as <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">corruption</span>”</span>) — is making people vulnerable to
 108     conspiracy theories?
 109   </p><p>
 110     If it’s trauma and not contagion — material conditions and not
 111     ideology — that is making the difference today and enabling a rise
 112     of repulsive misinformation in the face of easily observed facts,
 113     that doesn’t mean our computer networks are blameless. They’re still
 114     doing the heavy work of locating vulnerable people and guiding them
 115     through a series of ever-more-extreme ideas and communities.
 116   </p><p>
 117     Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and
 118     poses real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics
 119     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html" target="_top">kicked
 120     off by vaccine denial</a> to genocides
 121     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html" target="_top">kicked
 122     off by racist conspiracies</a> to planetary meltdown caused by
 123     denial-inspired climate inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we
 124     have to put the fires out — to figure out how to help people see the
 125     truth of the world through the conspiracies they’ve been confused
 126     by.
 127   </p><p>
 128     But firefighting is reactive. We need fire
 129     <span class="emphasis"><em>prevention</em></span>. We need to strike at the traumatic
 130     material conditions that make people vulnerable to the contagion of
 131     conspiracy. Here, too, tech has a role to play.
 132   </p><p>
 133     There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s
 134     <a class="ulink" href="https://edri.org/tag/terreg/" target="_top">Terrorist Content
 135     Regulation</a>, which requires platforms to police and remove
 136     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">extremist</span>”</span> content, to the U.S. proposals to
 137     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution" target="_top">force
 138     tech companies to spy on their users</a> and hold them liable
 139     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.natlawreview.com/article/repeal-cda-section-230" target="_top">for
 140     their users’ bad speech</a>, there’s a lot of energy to force
 141     tech companies to solve the problems they created.
 142   </p><p>
 143     There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these
 144     solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their
 145     dominance over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to
 146     replace Big Tech with a more diffused, pluralistic internet are
 147     nowhere to be found. Worse: The <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">solutions</span>”</span> on the table today
 148     <span class="emphasis"><em>require</em></span> Big Tech to stay big because only the
 149     very largest companies can afford to implement the systems these
 150     laws demand.
 151   </p><p>
 152     Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re
 153     going to get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where
 154     we’re trying to figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies
 155     that dominate our internet or if we want to fix the internet itself
 156     by unshackling it from Big Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so
 157     we have to choose.
 158   </p><p>
 159     I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing
 160     the internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism.
 161   </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>Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on</h2></div></div></div><p>
 162     Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The
 163     Electronic Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free
 164     Software Foundation launched in 1985. For most of the history of the
 165     movement, the most prominent criticism leveled against it was that
 166     it was irrelevant: The real activist causes were real-world causes
 167     (think of the skepticism when
 168     <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">Finland
 169     declared broadband a human right in 2010</a>), and real-world
 170     activism was shoe-leather activism (think of Malcolm Gladwell’s
 171     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell" target="_top">contempt
 172     for <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">clicktivism</span>”</span></a>). But as tech has grown more central to
 173     our daily lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way
 174     first to accusations of insincerity (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">You only care about tech
 175     because you’re
 176     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-google-patent-reform/id=98007/" target="_top">shilling
 177     for tech companies</a></span>”</span>) to accusations of negligence (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Why
 178     didn’t you foresee that tech could be such a destructive force?</span>”</span>).
 179     But digital rights activism is right where it’s always been: looking
 180     out for the humans in a world where tech is inexorably taking over.
 181   </p><p>
 182     The latest version of this critique comes in the form of
 183     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">surveillance capitalism,</span>”</span> a term coined by business professor
 184     Shoshana Zuboff in her long and influential 2019 book, <span class="emphasis"><em>The
 185     Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the
 186     New Frontier of Power</em></span>. Zuboff argues that <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">surveillance
 187     capitalism</span>”</span> is a unique creature of the tech industry and that it is
 188     unlike any other abusive commercial practice in history, one that is
 189     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of
 190     extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile
 191     persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of
 192     behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism
 193     challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the
 194     centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.</span>”</span> It is a new and
 195     deadly form of capitalism, a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism,</span>”</span> and our lack of
 196     understanding of its unique capabilities and dangers represents an
 197     existential, species-wide threat. She’s right that capitalism today
 198     threatens our species, and she’s right that tech poses unique
 199     challenges to our species and civilization, but she’s really wrong
 200     about how tech is different and why it threatens our species.
 201   </p><p>
 202     What’s more, I think that her incorrect diagnosis will lead us down
 203     a path that ends up making Big Tech stronger, not weaker. We need to
 204     take down Big Tech, and to do that, we need to start by correctly
 205     identifying the problem.
 206   </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 exceptionalism, then and now</h2></div></div></div><p>
 207     Early critics of the digital rights movement — perhaps best
 208     represented by campaigning organizations like the Electronic
 209     Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Public Knowledge,
 210     and others that focused on preserving and enhancing basic human
 211     rights in the digital realm — damned activists for practicing <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">tech
 212     exceptionalism.</span>”</span> Around the turn of the millennium, serious people
 213     ridiculed any claim that tech policy mattered in the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">real world.</span>”</span>
 214     Claims that tech rules had implications for speech, association,
 215     privacy, search and seizure, and fundamental rights and equities
 216     were treated as ridiculous, an elevation of the concerns of sad
 217     nerds arguing about <span class="emphasis"><em>Star Trek</em></span> on bulletin board
 218     systems above the struggles of the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela,
 219     or the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
 220   </p><p>
 221     In the decades since, accusations of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">tech exceptionalism</span>”</span> have only
 222     sharpened as tech’s role in everyday life has expanded: Now that
 223     tech has infiltrated every corner of our life and our online lives
 224     have been monopolized by a handful of giants, defenders of digital
 225     freedoms are accused of carrying water for Big Tech, providing cover
 226     for its self-interested negligence (or worse, nefarious plots).
 227   </p><p>
 228     From my perspective, the digital rights movement has remained
 229     stationary while the rest of the world has moved. From the earliest
 230     days, the movement’s concern was users and the toolsmiths who
 231     provided the code they needed to realize their fundamental rights.
 232     Digital rights activists only cared about companies to the extent
 233     that companies were acting to uphold users’ rights (or, just as
 234     often, when companies were acting so foolishly that they threatened
 235     to bring down new rules that would also make it harder for good
 236     actors to help users).
 237   </p><p>
 238     The <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">surveillance capitalism</span>”</span> critique recasts the digital rights
 239     movement in a new light again: not as alarmists who overestimate the
 240     importance of their shiny toys nor as shills for big tech but as
 241     serene deck-chair rearrangers whose long-standing activism is a
 242     liability because it makes them incapable of perceiving novel
 243     threats as they continue to fight the last century’s tech battles.
 244   </p><p>
 245     But tech exceptionalism is a sin no matter who practices it.
 246   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="dont-believe-the-hype"></a>Don’t believe the hype</h2></div></div></div><p>
 247     You’ve probably heard that <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">if you’re not paying for the product,
 248     you’re the product.</span>”</span> As we’ll see below, that’s true, if incomplete.
 249     But what is <span class="emphasis"><em>absolutely</em></span> true is that ad-driven
 250     Big Tech’s customers are advertisers, and what companies like Google
 251     and Facebook sell is their ability to convince
 252     <span class="emphasis"><em>you</em></span> to buy stuff. Big Tech’s product is
 253     persuasion. The services — social media, search engines, maps,
 254     messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion.
 255   </p><p>
 256     The fear of surveillance capitalism starts from the (correct)
 257     presumption that everything Big Tech says about itself is probably a
 258     lie. But the surveillance capitalism critique makes an exception for
 259     the claims Big Tech makes in its sales literature — the breathless
 260     hype in the pitches to potential advertisers online and in ad-tech
 261     seminars about the efficacy of its products: It assumes that Big
 262     Tech is as good at influencing us as they claim they are when
 263     they’re selling influencing products to credulous customers. That’s
 264     a mistake because sales literature is not a reliable indicator of a
 265     product’s efficacy.
 266   </p><p>
 267     Surveillance capitalism assumes that because advertisers buy a lot
 268     of what Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something
 269     real. But Big Tech’s massive sales could just as easily be the
 270     result of a popular delusion or something even more pernicious:
 271     monopolistic control over our communications and commerce.
 272   </p><p>
 273     Being watched changes your behavior, and not for the better. It
 274     creates risks for our social progress. Zuboff’s book features
 275     beautifully wrought explanations of these phenomena. But Zuboff also
 276     claims that surveillance literally robs us of our free will — that
 277     when our personal data is mixed with machine learning, it creates a
 278     system of persuasion so devastating that we are helpless before it.
 279     That is, Facebook uses an algorithm to analyze the data it
 280     nonconsensually extracts from your daily life and uses it to
 281     customize your feed in ways that get you to buy stuff. It is a
 282     mind-control ray out of a 1950s comic book, wielded by mad
 283     scientists whose supercomputers guarantee them perpetual and total
 284     world domination.
 285   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="what-is-persuasion"></a>What is persuasion?</h2></div></div></div><p>
 286     To understand why you shouldn’t worry about mind-control rays — but
 287     why you <span class="emphasis"><em>should</em></span> worry about surveillance
 288     <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> Big Tech — we must start by unpacking what
 289     we mean by <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">persuasion.</span>”</span>
 290   </p><p>
 291     Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists promise their
 292     customers (the advertisers) that if they use machine-learning tools
 293     trained on unimaginably large data sets of nonconsensually harvested
 294     personal information, they will be able to uncover ways to bypass
 295     the rational faculties of the public and direct their behavior,
 296     creating a stream of purchases, votes, and other desired outcomes.
 297   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
 298       The impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and
 299       should be central to our analysis and any remedies we seek.
 300     </p></blockquote></div><p>
 301     But there’s little evidence that this is happening. Instead, the
 302     predictions that surveillance capitalism delivers to its customers
 303     are much less impressive. Rather than finding ways to bypass our
 304     rational faculties, surveillance capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg
 305     mostly do one or more of three things:
 306   </p><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="segmenting"></a>1. Segmenting</h3></div></div></div><p>
 307       If you’re selling diapers, you have better luck if you pitch them
 308       to people in maternity wards. Not everyone who enters or leaves a
 309       maternity ward just had a baby, and not everyone who just had a
 310       baby is in the market for diapers. But having a baby is a really
 311       reliable correlate of being in the market for diapers, and being
 312       in a maternity ward is highly correlated with having a baby. Hence
 313       diaper ads around maternity wards (and even pitchmen for baby
 314       products, who haunt maternity wards with baskets full of
 315       freebies).
 316     </p><p>
 317       Surveillance capitalism is segmenting times a billion. Diaper
 318       vendors can go way beyond people in maternity wards (though they
 319       can do that, too, with things like location-based mobile ads).
 320       They can target you based on whether you’re reading articles about
 321       child-rearing, diapers, or a host of other subjects, and data
 322       mining can suggest unobvious keywords to advertise against. They
 323       can target you based on the articles you’ve recently read. They
 324       can target you based on what you’ve recently purchased. They can
 325       target you based on whether you receive emails or private messages
 326       about these subjects — or even if you speak aloud about them
 327       (though Facebook and the like convincingly claim that’s not
 328       happening — yet).
 329     </p><p>
 330       This is seriously creepy.
 331     </p><p>
 332       But it’s not mind control.
 333     </p><p>
 334       It doesn’t deprive you of your free will. It doesn’t trick you.
 335     </p><p>
 336       Think of how surveillance capitalism works in politics.
 337       Surveillance capitalist companies sell political operatives the
 338       power to locate people who might be receptive to their pitch.
 339       Candidates campaigning on finance industry corruption seek people
 340       struggling with debt; candidates campaigning on xenophobia seek
 341       out racists. Political operatives have always targeted their
 342       message whether their intentions were honorable or not: Union
 343       organizers set up pitches at factory gates, and white supremacists
 344       hand out fliers at John Birch Society meetings.
 345     </p><p>
 346       But this is an inexact and thus wasteful practice. The union
 347       organizer can’t know which worker to approach on the way out of
 348       the factory gates and may waste their time on a covert John Birch
 349       Society member; the white supremacist doesn’t know which of the
 350       Birchers are so delusional that making it to a meeting is as much
 351       as they can manage and which ones might be convinced to cross the
 352       country to carry a tiki torch through the streets of
 353       Charlottesville, Virginia.
 354     </p><p>
 355       Because targeting improves the yields on political pitches, it can
 356       accelerate the pace of political upheaval by making it possible
 357       for everyone who has secretly wished for the toppling of an
 358       autocrat — or just an 11-term incumbent politician — to find
 359       everyone else who feels the same way at very low cost. This has
 360       been critical to the rapid crystallization of recent political
 361       movements including Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street as
 362       well as less savory players like the far-right white nationalist
 363       movements that marched in Charlottesville.
 364     </p><p>
 365       It’s important to differentiate this kind of political organizing
 366       from influence campaigns; finding people who secretly agree with
 367       you isn’t the same as convincing people to agree with you. The
 368       rise of phenomena like nonbinary or otherwise nonconforming gender
 369       identities is often characterized by reactionaries as the result
 370       of online brainwashing campaigns that convince impressionable
 371       people that they have been secretly queer all along.
 372     </p><p>
 373       But the personal accounts of those who have come out tell a
 374       different story where people who long harbored a secret about
 375       their gender were emboldened by others coming forward and where
 376       people who knew that they were different but lacked a vocabulary
 377       for discussing that difference learned the right words from these
 378       low-cost means of finding people and learning about their ideas.
 379     </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="deception"></a>2. Deception</h3></div></div></div><p>
 380       Lies and fraud are pernicious, and surveillance capitalism
 381       supercharges them through targeting. If you want to sell a
 382       fraudulent payday loan or subprime mortgage, surveillance
 383       capitalism can help you find people who are both desperate and
 384       unsophisticated and thus receptive to your pitch. This accounts
 385       for the rise of many phenomena, like multilevel marketing schemes,
 386       in which deceptive claims about potential earnings and the
 387       efficacy of sales techniques are targeted at desperate people by
 388       advertising against search queries that indicate, for example,
 389       someone struggling with ill-advised loans.
 390     </p><p>
 391       Surveillance capitalism also abets fraud by making it easy to
 392       locate other people who have been similarly deceived, forming a
 393       community of people who reinforce one another’s false beliefs.
 394       Think of
 395       <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/the-dream-podcast-review.html" target="_top">the
 396       forums</a> where people who are being victimized by multilevel
 397       marketing frauds gather to trade tips on how to improve their luck
 398       in peddling the product.
 399     </p><p>
 400       Sometimes, online deception involves replacing someone’s correct
 401       beliefs with incorrect ones, as it does in the anti-vaccination
 402       movement, whose victims are often people who start out believing
 403       in vaccines but are convinced by seemingly plausible evidence that
 404       leads them into the false belief that vaccines are harmful.
 405     </p><p>
 406       But it’s much more common for fraud to succeed when it doesn’t
 407       have to displace a true belief. When my daughter contracted head
 408       lice at daycare, one of the daycare workers told me I could get
 409       rid of them by treating her hair and scalp with olive oil. I
 410       didn’t know anything about head lice, and I assumed that the
 411       daycare worker did, so I tried it (it didn’t work, and it doesn’t
 412       work). It’s easy to end up with false beliefs when you simply
 413       don’t know any better and when those beliefs are conveyed by
 414       someone who seems to know what they’re doing.
 415     </p><p>
 416       This is pernicious and difficult — and it’s also the kind of thing
 417       the internet can help guard against by making true information
 418       available, especially in a form that exposes the underlying
 419       deliberations among parties with sharply divergent views, such as
 420       Wikipedia. But it’s not brainwashing; it’s fraud. In the
 421       <a class="ulink" href="https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/" target="_top">majority
 422       of cases</a>, the victims of these fraud campaigns have an
 423       informational void filled in the customary way, by consulting a
 424       seemingly reliable source. If I look up the length of the Brooklyn
 425       Bridge and learn that it is 5,800 feet long, but in reality, it is
 426       5,989 feet long, the underlying deception is a problem, but it’s a
 427       problem with a simple remedy. It’s a very different problem from
 428       the anti-vax issue in which someone’s true belief is displaced by
 429       a false one by means of sophisticated persuasion.
 430     </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="domination"></a>3. Domination</h3></div></div></div><p>
 431       Surveillance capitalism is the result of monopoly. Monopoly is the
 432       cause, and surveillance capitalism and its negative outcomes are
 433       the effects of monopoly. I’ll get into this in depth later, but
 434       for now, suffice it to say that the tech industry has grown up
 435       with a radical theory of antitrust that has allowed companies to
 436       grow by merging with their rivals, buying up their nascent
 437       competitors, and expanding to control whole market verticals.
 438     </p><p>
 439       One example of how monopolism aids in persuasion is through
 440       dominance: Google makes editorial decisions about its algorithms
 441       that determine the sort order of the responses to our queries. If
 442       a cabal of fraudsters have set out to trick the world into
 443       thinking that the Brooklyn Bridge is 5,800 feet long, and if
 444       Google gives a high search rank to this group in response to
 445       queries like <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">How long is the Brooklyn Bridge?</span>”</span> then the first
 446       eight or 10 screens’ worth of Google results could be wrong. And
 447       since most people don’t go beyond the first couple of results —
 448       let alone the first <span class="emphasis"><em>page</em></span> of results —
 449       Google’s choice means that many people will be deceived.
 450     </p><p>
 451       Google’s dominance over search — more than 86% of web searches are
 452       performed through Google — means that the way it orders its search
 453       results has an outsized effect on public beliefs. Ironically,
 454       Google claims this is why it can’t afford to have any transparency
 455       in its algorithm design: Google’s search dominance makes the
 456       results of its sorting too important to risk telling the world how
 457       it arrives at those results lest some bad actor discover a flaw in
 458       the ranking system and exploit it to push its point of view to the
 459       top of the search results. There’s an obvious remedy to a company
 460       that is too big to audit: break it up into smaller pieces.
 461     </p><p>
 462       Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>”</span> whose
 463       data-hoarding and machine-learning techniques rob us of our free
 464       will. But influence campaigns that seek to displace existing,
 465       correct beliefs with false ones have an effect that is small and
 466       temporary while monopolistic dominance over informational systems
 467       has massive, enduring effects. Controlling the results to the
 468       world’s search queries means controlling access both to arguments
 469       and their rebuttals and, thus, control over much of the world’s
 470       beliefs. If our concern is how corporations are foreclosing on our
 471       ability to make up our own minds and determine our own futures,
 472       the impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and
 473       should be central to our analysis and any remedies we seek.
 474     </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>
 475       <span class="emphasis"><em>This</em></span> is the good stuff: using machine
 476       learning, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">dark patterns,</span>”</span> engagement hacking, and other
 477       techniques to get us to do things that run counter to our better
 478       judgment. This is mind control.
 479     </p><p>
 480       Some of these techniques have proven devastatingly effective (if
 481       only in the short term). The use of countdown timers on a purchase
 482       completion page can create a sense of urgency that causes you to
 483       ignore the nagging internal voice suggesting that you should shop
 484       around or sleep on your decision. The use of people from your
 485       social graph in ads can provide <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">social proof</span>”</span> that a purchase is
 486       worth making. Even the auction system pioneered by eBay is
 487       calculated to play on our cognitive blind spots, letting us feel
 488       like we <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">own</span>”</span> something because we bid on it, thus encouraging us
 489       to bid again when we are outbid to ensure that <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">our</span>”</span> things stay
 490       ours.
 491     </p><p>
 492       Games are extraordinarily good at this. <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Free to play</span>”</span> games
 493       manipulate us through many techniques, such as presenting players
 494       with a series of smoothly escalating challenges that create a
 495       sense of mastery and accomplishment but which sharply transition
 496       into a set of challenges that are impossible to overcome without
 497       paid upgrades. Add some social proof to the mix — a stream of
 498       notifications about how well your friends are faring — and before
 499       you know it, you’re buying virtual power-ups to get to the next
 500       level.
 501     </p><p>
 502       Companies have risen and fallen on these techniques, and the
 503       <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">fallen</span>”</span> part is worth paying attention to. In general, living
 504       things adapt to stimulus: Something that is very compelling or
 505       noteworthy when you first encounter it fades with repetition until
 506       you stop noticing it altogether. Consider the refrigerator hum
 507       that irritates you when it starts up but disappears into the
 508       background so thoroughly that you only notice it when it stops
 509       again.
 510     </p><p>
 511       That’s why behavioral conditioning uses <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">intermittent
 512       reinforcement schedules.</span>”</span> Instead of giving you a steady drip of
 513       encouragement or setbacks, games and gamified services scatter
 514       rewards on a randomized schedule — often enough to keep you
 515       interested and random enough that you can never quite find the
 516       pattern that would make it boring.
 517     </p><p>
 518       Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful behavioral tool, but it
 519       also represents a collective action problem for surveillance
 520       capitalism. The <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">engagement techniques</span>”</span> invented by the
 521       behaviorists of surveillance capitalist companies are quickly
 522       copied across the whole sector so that what starts as a
 523       mysteriously compelling fillip in the design of a service—like
 524       <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">pull to refresh</span>”</span> or alerts when someone likes your posts or side
 525       quests that your characters get invited to while in the midst of
 526       main quests—quickly becomes dully ubiquitous. The
 527       impossible-to-nail-down nonpattern of randomized drips from your
 528       phone becomes a grey-noise wall of sound as every single app and
 529       site starts to make use of whatever seems to be working at the
 530       time.
 531     </p><p>
 532       From the surveillance capitalist’s point of view, our adaptive
 533       capacity is like a harmful bacterium that deprives it of its food
 534       source — our attention — and novel techniques for snagging that
 535       attention are like new antibiotics that can be used to breach our
 536       defenses and destroy our self-determination. And there
 537       <span class="emphasis"><em>are</em></span> techniques like that. Who can forget the
 538       Great Zynga Epidemic, when all of our friends were caught in
 539       <span class="emphasis"><em>FarmVille</em></span>’s endless, mindless dopamine loops?
 540       But every new attention-commanding technique is jumped on by the
 541       whole industry and used so indiscriminately that antibiotic
 542       resistance sets in. Given enough repetition, almost all of us
 543       develop immunity to even the most powerful techniques — by 2013,
 544       two years after Zynga’s peak, its user base had halved.
 545     </p><p>
 546       Not everyone, of course. Some people never adapt to stimulus, just
 547       as some people never stop hearing the hum of the refrigerator.
 548       This is why most people who are exposed to slot machines play them
 549       for a while and then move on while a small and tragic minority
 550       liquidate their kids’ college funds, buy adult diapers, and
 551       position themselves in front of a machine until they collapse.
 552     </p><p>
 553       But surveillance capitalism’s margins on behavioral modification
 554       suck. Tripling the rate at which someone buys a widget sounds
 555       great
 556       <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
 557       the base rate is way less than 1%</a> with an improved rate
 558       of… still less than 1%. Even penny slot machines pull down pennies
 559       for every spin while surveillance capitalism rakes in
 560       infinitesimal penny fractions.
 561     </p><p>
 562       Slot machines’ high returns mean that they can be profitable just
 563       by draining the fortunes of the small rump of people who are
 564       pathologically vulnerable to them and unable to adapt to their
 565       tricks. But surveillance capitalism can’t survive on the
 566       fractional pennies it brings down from that vulnerable sliver —
 567       that’s why, after the Great Zynga Epidemic had finally burned
 568       itself out, the small number of still-addicted players left behind
 569       couldn’t sustain it as a global phenomenon. And new powerful
 570       attention weapons aren’t easy to find, as is evidenced by the long
 571       years since the last time Zynga had a hit. Despite the hundreds of
 572       millions of dollars that Zynga has to spend on developing new
 573       tools to blast through our adaptation, it has never managed to
 574       repeat the lucky accident that let it snag so much of our
 575       attention for a brief moment in 2009. Powerhouses like Supercell
 576       have fared a little better, but they are rare and throw away many
 577       failures for every success.
 578     </p><p>
 579       The vulnerability of small segments of the population to dramatic,
 580       efficient corporate manipulation is a real concern that’s worthy
 581       of our attention and energy. But it’s not an existential threat to
 582       society.
 583     </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
 584   has a leak</h2></div></div></div><p>
 585     This adaptation problem offers an explanation for one of
 586     surveillance capitalism’s most alarming traits: its relentless
 587     hunger for data and its endless expansion of data-gathering
 588     capabilities through the spread of sensors, online surveillance, and
 589     acquisition of data streams from third parties.
 590   </p><p>
 591     Zuboff observes this phenomenon and concludes that data must be very
 592     valuable if surveillance capitalism is so hungry for it. (In her
 593     words: <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous
 594     intensification of the means of production, so surveillance
 595     capitalists and their market players are now locked into the
 596     continuous intensification of the means of behavioral modification
 597     and the gathering might of instrumentarian power.</span>”</span>) But what if the
 598     voracious appetite is because data has such a short half-life —
 599     because people become inured so quickly to new, data-driven
 600     persuasion techniques — that the companies are locked in an arms
 601     race with our limbic system? What if it’s all a Red Queen’s race
 602     where they have to run ever faster — collect ever-more data — just
 603     to stay in the same spot?
 604   </p><p>
 605     Of course, all of Big Tech’s persuasion techniques work in concert
 606     with one another, and collecting data is useful beyond mere
 607     behavioral trickery.
 608   </p><p>
 609     If someone wants to recruit you to buy a refrigerator or join a
 610     pogrom, they might use profiling and targeting to send messages to
 611     people they judge to be good sales prospects. The messages
 612     themselves may be deceptive, making claims about things you’re not
 613     very knowledgeable about (food safety and energy efficiency or
 614     eugenics and historical claims about racial superiority). They might
 615     use search engine optimization and/or armies of fake reviewers and
 616     commenters and/or paid placement to dominate the discourse so that
 617     any search for further information takes you back to their messages.
 618     And finally, they may refine the different pitches using machine
 619     learning and other techniques to figure out what kind of pitch works
 620     best on someone like you.
 621   </p><p>
 622     Each phase of this process benefits from surveillance: The more data
 623     they have, the more precisely they can profile you and target you
 624     with specific messages. Think of how you’d sell a fridge if you knew
 625     that the warranty on your prospect’s fridge just expired and that
 626     they were expecting a tax rebate in April.
 627   </p><p>
 628     Also, the more data they have, the better they can craft deceptive
 629     messages — if I know that you’re into genealogy, I might not try to
 630     feed you pseudoscience about genetic differences between <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">races,</span>”</span>
 631     sticking instead to conspiratorial secret histories of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">demographic
 632     replacement</span>”</span> and the like.
 633   </p><p>
 634     Facebook also helps you locate people who have the same odious or
 635     antisocial views as you. It makes it possible to find other people
 636     who want to carry tiki torches through the streets of
 637     Charlottesville in Confederate cosplay. It can help you find other
 638     people who want to join your militia and go to the border to look
 639     for undocumented migrants to terrorize. It can help you find people
 640     who share your belief that vaccines are poison and that the Earth is
 641     flat.
 642   </p><p>
 643     There is one way in which targeted advertising uniquely benefits
 644     those advocating for socially unacceptable causes: It is invisible.
 645     Racism is widely geographically dispersed, and there are few places
 646     where racists — and only racists — gather. This is similar to the
 647     problem of selling refrigerators in that potential refrigerator
 648     purchasers are geographically dispersed and there are few places
 649     where you can buy an ad that will be primarily seen by refrigerator
 650     customers. But buying a refrigerator is socially acceptable while
 651     being a Nazi is not, so you can buy a billboard or advertise in the
 652     newspaper sports section for your refrigerator business, and the
 653     only potential downside is that your ad will be seen by a lot of
 654     people who don’t want refrigerators, resulting in a lot of wasted
 655     expense.
 656   </p><p>
 657     But even if you wanted to advertise your Nazi movement on a
 658     billboard or prime-time TV or the sports section, you would struggle
 659     to find anyone willing to sell you the space for your ad partly
 660     because they disagree with your views and partly because they fear
 661     censure (boycott, reputational damage, etc.) from other people who
 662     disagree with your views.
 663   </p><p>
 664     Targeted ads solve this problem: On the internet, every ad unit can
 665     be different for every person, meaning that you can buy ads that are
 666     only shown to people who appear to be Nazis and not to people who
 667     hate Nazis. When there’s spillover — when someone who hates racism
 668     is shown a racist recruiting ad — there is some fallout; the
 669     platform or publication might get an angry public or private
 670     denunciation. But the nature of the risk assumed by an online ad
 671     buyer is different than the risks to a traditional publisher or
 672     billboard owner who might want to run a Nazi ad.
 673   </p><p>
 674     Online ads are placed by algorithms that broker between a diverse
 675     ecosystem of self-serve ad platforms that anyone can buy an ad
 676     through, so the Nazi ad that slips onto your favorite online
 677     publication isn’t seen as their moral failing but rather as a
 678     failure in some distant, upstream ad supplier. When a publication
 679     gets a complaint about an offensive ad that’s appearing in one of
 680     its units, it can take some steps to block that ad, but the Nazi
 681     might buy a slightly different ad from a different broker serving
 682     the same unit. And in any event, internet users increasingly
 683     understand that when they see an ad, it’s likely that the advertiser
 684     did not choose that publication and that the publication has no idea
 685     who its advertisers are.
 686   </p><p>
 687     These layers of indirection between advertisers and publishers serve
 688     as moral buffers: Today’s moral consensus is largely that publishers
 689     shouldn’t be held responsible for the ads that appear on their pages
 690     because they’re not actively choosing to put those ads there.
 691     Because of this, Nazis are able to overcome significant barriers to
 692     organizing their movement.
 693   </p><p>
 694     Data has a complex relationship with domination. Being able to spy
 695     on your customers can alert you to their preferences for your rivals
 696     and allow you to head off your rivals at the pass.
 697   </p><p>
 698     More importantly, if you can dominate the information space while
 699     also gathering data, then you make other deceptive tactics stronger
 700     because it’s harder to break out of the web of deceit you’re
 701     spinning. Domination — that is, ultimately becoming a monopoly — and
 702     not the data itself is the supercharger that makes every tactic
 703     worth pursuing because monopolistic domination deprives your target
 704     of an escape route.
 705   </p><p>
 706     If you’re a Nazi who wants to ensure that your prospects primarily
 707     see deceptive, confirming information when they search for more, you
 708     can improve your odds by seeding the search terms they use through
 709     your initial communications. You don’t need to own the top 10
 710     results for <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">voter suppression</span>”</span> if you can convince your marks to
 711     confine their search terms to <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">voter fraud,</span>”</span> which throws up a very
 712     different set of search results.
 713   </p><p>
 714     Surveillance capitalists are like stage mentalists who claim that
 715     their extraordinary insights into human behavior let them guess the
 716     word that you wrote down and folded up in your pocket but who really
 717     use shills, hidden cameras, sleight of hand, and brute-force
 718     memorization to amaze you.
 719   </p><p>
 720     Or perhaps they’re more like pick-up artists, the misogynistic cult
 721     that promises to help awkward men have sex with women by teaching
 722     them <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">neurolinguistic programming</span>”</span> phrases, body language
 723     techniques, and psychological manipulation tactics like <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">negging</span>”</span> —
 724     offering unsolicited negative feedback to women to lower their
 725     self-esteem and prick their interest.
 726   </p><p>
 727     Some pick-up artists eventually manage to convince women to go home
 728     with them, but it’s not because these men have figured out how to
 729     bypass women’s critical faculties. Rather, pick-up artists’
 730     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">success</span>”</span> stories are a mix of women who were incapable of giving
 731     consent, women who were coerced, women who were intoxicated,
 732     self-destructive women, and a few women who were sober and in
 733     command of their faculties but who didn’t realize straightaway that
 734     they were with terrible men but rectified the error as soon as they
 735     could.
 736   </p><p>
 737     Pick-up artists <span class="emphasis"><em>believe</em></span> they have figured out a
 738     secret back door that bypasses women’s critical faculties, but they
 739     haven’t. Many of the tactics they deploy, like negging, became the
 740     butt of jokes (just like people joke about bad ad targeting), and
 741     there’s a good chance that anyone they try these tactics on will
 742     immediately recognize them and dismiss the men who use them as
 743     irredeemable losers.
 744   </p><p>
 745     Pick-up artists are proof that people can believe they have
 746     developed a system of mind control <span class="emphasis"><em>even when it doesn’t
 747     work</em></span>. Pick-up artists simply exploit the fact that
 748     one-in-a-million chances can come through for you if you make a
 749     million attempts, and then they assume that the other 999,999 times,
 750     they simply performed the technique incorrectly and commit
 751     themselves to doing better next time. There’s only one group of
 752     people who find pick-up artist lore reliably convincing: other
 753     would-be pick-up artists whose anxiety and insecurity make them
 754     vulnerable to scammers and delusional men who convince them that if
 755     they pay for tutelage and follow instructions, then they will
 756     someday succeed. Pick-up artists assume they fail to entice women
 757     because they are bad at being pick-up artists, not because pick-up
 758     artistry is bullshit. Pick-up artists are bad at selling themselves
 759     to women, but they’re much better at selling themselves to men who
 760     pay to learn the secrets of pick-up artistry.
 761   </p><p>
 762     Department store pioneer John Wanamaker is said to have lamented,
 763     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I
 764     don’t know which half.</span>”</span> The fact that Wanamaker thought that only
 765     half of his advertising spending was wasted is a tribute to the
 766     persuasiveness of advertising executives, who are
 767     <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span> better at convincing potential clients to
 768     buy their services than they are at convincing the general public to
 769     buy their clients’ wares.
 770   </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>
 771     Facebook is heralded as the origin of all of our modern plagues, and
 772     it’s not hard to see why. Some tech companies want to lock their
 773     users in but make their money by monopolizing access to the market
 774     for apps for their devices and gouging them on prices rather than by
 775     spying on them (like Apple). Some companies don’t care about locking
 776     in users because they’ve figured out how to spy on them no matter
 777     where they are and what they’re doing and can turn that surveillance
 778     into money (Google). Facebook alone among the Western tech giants
 779     has built a business based on locking in its users
 780     <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> spying on them all the time.
 781   </p><p>
 782     Facebook’s surveillance regime is really without parallel in the
 783     Western world. Though Facebook tries to prevent itself from being
 784     visible on the public web, hiding most of what goes on there from
 785     people unless they’re logged into Facebook, the company has
 786     nevertheless booby-trapped the entire web with surveillance tools in
 787     the form of Facebook <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Like</span>”</span> buttons that web publishers include on
 788     their sites to boost their Facebook profiles. Facebook also makes
 789     various libraries and other useful code snippets available to web
 790     publishers that act as surveillance tendrils on the sites where
 791     they’re used, funneling information about visitors to the site —
 792     newspapers, dating sites, message boards — to Facebook.
 793   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
 794       Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is
 795       tech but because it is <span class="emphasis"><em>big</em></span>.
 796     </p></blockquote></div><p>
 797     Facebook offers similar tools to app developers, so the apps —
 798     games, fart machines, business review services, apps for keeping
 799     abreast of your kid’s schooling — you use will send information
 800     about your activities to Facebook even if you don’t have a Facebook
 801     account and even if you don’t download or use Facebook apps. On top
 802     of all that, Facebook buys data from third-party brokers on shopping
 803     habits, physical location, use of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">loyalty</span>”</span> programs, financial
 804     transactions, etc., and cross-references that with the dossiers it
 805     develops on activity on Facebook and with apps and the public web.
 806   </p><p>
 807     Though it’s easy to integrate the web with Facebook — linking to
 808     news stories and such — Facebook products are generally not
 809     available to be integrated back into the web itself. You can embed a
 810     tweet in a Facebook post, but if you embed a Facebook post in a
 811     tweet, you just get a link back to Facebook and must log in before
 812     you can see it. Facebook has used extreme technological and legal
 813     countermeasures to prevent rivals from allowing their users to embed
 814     Facebook snippets in competing services or to create alternative
 815     interfaces to Facebook that merge your Facebook inbox with those of
 816     other services that you use.
 817   </p><p>
 818     And Facebook is incredibly popular, with 2.3 billion claimed users
 819     (though many believe this figure to be inflated). Facebook has been
 820     used to organize genocidal pogroms, racist riots, anti-vaccination
 821     movements, flat Earth cults, and the political lives of some of the
 822     world’s ugliest, most brutal autocrats. There are some really
 823     alarming things going on in the world, and Facebook is implicated in
 824     many of them, so it’s easy to conclude that these bad things are the
 825     result of Facebook’s mind-control system, which it rents out to
 826     anyone with a few bucks to spend.
 827   </p><p>
 828     To understand what role Facebook plays in the formulation and
 829     mobilization of antisocial movements, we need to understand the dual
 830     nature of Facebook.
 831   </p><p>
 832     Because it has a lot of users and a lot of data about those users,
 833     Facebook is a very efficient tool for locating people with
 834     hard-to-find traits, the kinds of traits that are widely diffused in
 835     the population such that advertisers have historically struggled to
 836     find a cost-effective way to reach them. Think back to
 837     refrigerators: Most of us only replace our major appliances a few
 838     times in our entire lives. If you’re a refrigerator manufacturer or
 839     retailer, you have these brief windows in the life of a consumer
 840     during which they are pondering a purchase, and you have to somehow
 841     reach them. Anyone who’s ever registered a title change after buying
 842     a house can attest that appliance manufacturers are incredibly
 843     desperate to reach anyone who has even the slenderest chance of
 844     being in the market for a new fridge.
 845   </p><p>
 846     Facebook makes finding people shopping for refrigerators a
 847     <span class="emphasis"><em>lot</em></span> easier. It can target ads to people who’ve
 848     registered a new home purchase, to people who’ve searched for
 849     refrigerator buying advice, to people who have complained about
 850     their fridge dying, or any combination thereof. It can even target
 851     people who’ve recently bought <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> kitchen
 852     appliances on the theory that someone who’s just replaced their
 853     stove and dishwasher might be in a fridge-buying kind of mood. The
 854     vast majority of people who are reached by these ads will not be in
 855     the market for a new fridge, but — crucially — the percentage of
 856     people who <span class="emphasis"><em>are</em></span> looking for fridges that these
 857     ads reach is <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span> larger than it is than for
 858     any group that might be subjected to traditional, offline targeted
 859     refrigerator marketing.
 860   </p><p>
 861     Facebook also makes it a lot easier to find people who have the same
 862     rare disease as you, which might have been impossible in earlier
 863     eras — the closest fellow sufferer might otherwise be hundreds of
 864     miles away. It makes it easier to find people who went to the same
 865     high school as you even though decades have passed and your former
 866     classmates have all been scattered to the four corners of the Earth.
 867   </p><p>
 868     Facebook also makes it much easier to find people who hold the same
 869     rare political beliefs as you. If you’ve always harbored a secret
 870     affinity for socialism but never dared utter this aloud lest you be
 871     demonized by your neighbors, Facebook can help you discover other
 872     people who feel the same way (and it might just demonstrate to you
 873     that your affinity is more widespread than you ever suspected). It
 874     can make it easier to find people who share your sexual identity.
 875     And again, it can help you to understand that what you thought was a
 876     shameful secret that affected only you was really a widely shared
 877     trait, giving you both comfort and the courage to come out to the
 878     people in your life.
 879   </p><p>
 880     All of this presents a dilemma for Facebook: Targeting makes the
 881     company’s ads more effective than traditional ads, but it also lets
 882     advertisers see just how effective their ads are. While advertisers
 883     are pleased to learn that Facebook ads are more effective than ads
 884     on systems with less sophisticated targeting, advertisers can also
 885     see that in nearly every case, the people who see their ads ignore
 886     them. Or, at best, the ads work on a subconscious level, creating
 887     nebulous unmeasurables like <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">brand recognition.</span>”</span> This means that the
 888     price per ad is very low in nearly every case.
 889   </p><p>
 890     To make things worse, many Facebook groups spark precious little
 891     discussion. Your little-league soccer team, the people with the same
 892     rare disease as you, and the people you share a political affinity
 893     with may exchange the odd flurry of messages at critical junctures,
 894     but on a daily basis, there’s not much to say to your old high
 895     school chums or other hockey-card collectors.
 896   </p><p>
 897     With nothing but <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">organic</span>”</span> discussion, Facebook would not generate
 898     enough traffic to sell enough ads to make the money it needs to
 899     continually expand by buying up its competitors while returning
 900     handsome sums to its investors.
 901   </p><p>
 902     So Facebook has to gin up traffic by sidetracking its own forums:
 903     Every time Facebook’s algorithm injects controversial materials —
 904     inflammatory political articles, conspiracy theories, outrage
 905     stories — into a group, it can hijack that group’s nominal purpose
 906     with its desultory discussions and supercharge those discussions by
 907     turning them into bitter, unproductive arguments that drag on and
 908     on. Facebook is optimized for engagement, not happiness, and it
 909     turns out that automated systems are pretty good at figuring out
 910     things that people will get angry about.
 911   </p><p>
 912     Facebook <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> modify our behavior but only in a
 913     couple of trivial ways. First, it can lock in all your friends and
 914     family members so that you check and check and check with Facebook
 915     to find out what they are up to; and second, it can make you angry
 916     and anxious. It can force you to choose between being interrupted
 917     constantly by updates — a process that breaks your concentration and
 918     makes it hard to be introspective — and staying in touch with your
 919     friends. This is a very limited form of mind control, and it can
 920     only really make us miserable, angry, and anxious.
 921   </p><p>
 922     This is why Facebook’s targeting systems — both the ones it shows to
 923     advertisers and the ones that let users find people who share their
 924     interests — are so next-gen and smooth and easy to use as well as
 925     why its message boards have a toolset that seems like it hasn’t
 926     changed since the mid-2000s. If Facebook delivered an equally
 927     flexible, sophisticated message-reading system to its users, those
 928     users could defend themselves against being nonconsensually
 929     eyeball-fucked with Donald Trump headlines.
 930   </p><p>
 931     The more time you spend on Facebook, the more ads it gets to show
 932     you. The solution to Facebook’s ads only working one in a thousand
 933     times is for the company to try to increase how much time you spend
 934     on Facebook by a factor of a thousand. Rather than thinking of
 935     Facebook as a company that has figured out how to show you exactly
 936     the right ad in exactly the right way to get you to do what its
 937     advertisers want, think of it as a company that has figured out how
 938     to make you slog through an endless torrent of arguments even though
 939     they make you miserable, spending so much time on the site that it
 940     eventually shows you at least one ad that you respond to.
 941   </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>
 942     Zuboff and her cohort are particularly alarmed at the extent to
 943     which surveillance allows corporations to influence our decisions,
 944     taking away something she poetically calls <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">the right to the future
 945     tense</span>”</span> — that is, the right to decide for yourself what you will do
 946     in the future.
 947   </p><p>
 948     It’s true that advertising can tip the scales one way or another:
 949     When you’re thinking of buying a fridge, a timely fridge ad might
 950     end the search on the spot. But Zuboff puts enormous and undue
 951     weight on the persuasive power of surveillance-based influence
 952     techniques. Most of these don’t work very well, and the ones that do
 953     won’t work for very long. The makers of these influence tools are
 954     confident they will someday refine them into systems of total
 955     control, but they are hardly unbiased observers, and the risks from
 956     their dreams coming true are very speculative.
 957   </p><p>
 958     By contrast, Zuboff is rather sanguine about 40 years of lax
 959     antitrust practice that has allowed a handful of companies to
 960     dominate the internet, ushering in an information age with,
 961     <a class="ulink" href="https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040" target="_top">as
 962     one person on Twitter noted</a>, five giant websites each filled
 963     with screenshots of the other four.
 964   </p><p>
 965     However, if we are to be alarmed that we might lose the right to
 966     choose for ourselves what our future will hold, then monopoly’s
 967     nonspeculative, concrete, here-and-now harms should be front and
 968     center in our debate over tech policy.
 969   </p><p>
 970     Start with <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">digital rights management.</span>”</span> In 1998, Bill Clinton signed
 971     the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. It’s a complex
 972     piece of legislation with many controversial clauses but none more
 973     so than Section 1201, the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">anti-circumvention</span>”</span> rule.
 974   </p><p>
 975     This is a blanket ban on tampering with systems that restrict access
 976     to copyrighted works. The ban is so thoroughgoing that it prohibits
 977     removing a copyright lock even when no copyright infringement takes
 978     place. This is by design: The activities that the DMCA’s Section
 979     1201 sets out to ban are not copyright infringements; rather, they
 980     are legal activities that frustrate manufacturers’ commercial plans.
 981   </p><p>
 982     For example, Section 1201’s first major application was on DVD
 983     players as a means of enforcing the region coding built into those
 984     devices. DVD-CCA, the body that standardized DVDs and DVD players,
 985     divided the world into six regions and specified that DVD players
 986     must check each disc to determine which regions it was authorized to
 987     be played in. DVD players would have their own corresponding region
 988     (a DVD player bought in the U.S. would be region 1 while one bought
 989     in India would be region 5). If the player and the disc’s region
 990     matched, the player would play the disc; otherwise, it would reject
 991     it.
 992   </p><p>
 993     However, watching a lawfully produced disc in a country other than
 994     the one where you purchased it is not copyright infringement — it’s
 995     the opposite. Copyright law imposes this duty on customers for a
 996     movie: You must go into a store, find a licensed disc, and pay the
 997     asking price. Do that — and <span class="emphasis"><em>nothing else</em></span> — and
 998     you and copyright are square with one another.
 999   </p><p>
1000     The fact that a movie studio wants to charge Indians less than
1001     Americans or release in Australia later than it releases in the U.K.
1002     has no bearing on copyright law. Once you lawfully acquire a DVD, it
1003     is no copyright infringement to watch it no matter where you happen
1004     to be.
1005   </p><p>
1006     So DVD and DVD player manufacturers would not be able to use
1007     accusations of abetting copyright infringement to punish
1008     manufacturers who made noncompliant players that would play discs
1009     from any region or repair shops that modified players to let you
1010     watch out-of-region discs or software programmers who created
1011     programs to let you do this.
1012   </p><p>
1013     That’s where Section 1201 of the DMCA comes in: By banning tampering
1014     with an <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">access control,</span>”</span> the rule gave manufacturers and rights
1015     holders standing to sue competitors who released superior products
1016     with lawful features that the market demanded (in this case,
1017     region-free players).
1018   </p><p>
1019     This is an odious scam against consumers, but as time went by,
1020     Section 1201 grew to encompass a rapidly expanding constellation of
1021     devices and services as canny manufacturers have realized certain
1022     things:
1023   </p><div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist compact" style="list-style-type: disc; "><li class="listitem"><p>
1024         Any device with software in it contains a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">copyrighted work</span>”</span> —
1025         i.e., the software.
1026       </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
1027         A device can be designed so that reconfiguring the software
1028         requires bypassing an <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">access control for copyrighted works,</span>”</span>
1029         which is a potential felony under Section 1201.
1030       </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
1031         Thus, companies can control their customers’ behavior after they
1032         take home their purchases by designing products so that all
1033         unpermitted uses require modifications that fall afoul of
1034         Section 1201.
1035       </p></li></ul></div><p>
1036     Section 1201 then becomes a means for manufacturers of all
1037     descriptions to force their customers to arrange their affairs to
1038     benefit the manufacturers’ shareholders instead of themselves.
1039   </p><p>
1040     This manifests in many ways: from a new generation of inkjet
1041     printers that use countermeasures to prevent third-party ink that
1042     cannot be bypassed without legal risks to similar systems in
1043     tractors that prevent third-party technicians from swapping in the
1044     manufacturer’s own parts that are not recognized by the tractor’s
1045     control system until it is supplied with a manufacturer’s unlock
1046     code.
1047   </p><p>
1048     Closer to home, Apple’s iPhones use these measures to prevent both
1049     third-party service and third-party software installation. This
1050     allows Apple to decide when an iPhone is beyond repair and must be
1051     shredded and landfilled as opposed to the iPhone’s purchaser. (Apple
1052     is notorious for its environmentally catastrophic policy of
1053     destroying old electronics rather than permitting them to be
1054     cannibalized for parts.) This is a very useful power to wield,
1055     especially in light of CEO Tim Cook’s January 2019 warning to
1056     investors that the company’s profits are endangered by customers
1057     choosing to hold onto their phones for longer rather than replacing
1058     them.
1059   </p><p>
1060     Apple’s use of copyright locks also allows it to establish a
1061     monopoly over how its customers acquire software for their mobile
1062     devices. The App Store’s commercial terms guarantee Apple a share of
1063     all revenues generated by the apps sold there, meaning that Apple
1064     gets paid when you buy an app from its store and then continues to
1065     get paid every time you buy something using that app. This comes out
1066     of the bottom line of software developers, who must either charge
1067     more or accept lower profits for their products.
1068   </p><p>
1069     Crucially, Apple’s use of copyright locks gives it the power to make
1070     editorial decisions about which apps you may and may not install on
1071     your own device. Apple has used this power to
1072     <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
1073     dictionaries</a> for containing obscene words; to
1074     <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
1075     political speech</a>, especially from apps that make sensitive
1076     political commentary such as an app that notifies you every time a
1077     U.S. drone kills someone somewhere in the world; and to
1078     <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
1079     to a game</a> that commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
1080   </p><p>
1081     Apple often justifies monopoly power over software installation in
1082     the name of security, arguing that its vetting of apps for its store
1083     means that it can guard its users against apps that contain
1084     surveillance code. But this cuts both ways. In China, the government
1085     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc" target="_top">ordered
1086     Apple to prohibit the sale of privacy tools</a> like VPNs with
1087     the exception of VPNs that had deliberately introduced flaws
1088     designed to let the Chinese state eavesdrop on users. Because Apple
1089     uses technological countermeasures — with legal backstops — to block
1090     customers from installing unauthorized apps, Chinese iPhone owners
1091     cannot readily (or legally) acquire VPNs that would protect them
1092     from Chinese state snooping.
1093   </p><p>
1094     Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism.</span>”</span>
1095     Theoreticians of capitalism claim that its virtue is that it
1096     <a class="ulink" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal" target="_top">aggregates
1097     information in the form of consumers’ decisions</a>, producing
1098     efficient markets. Surveillance capitalism’s supposed power to rob
1099     its victims of their free will through computationally supercharged
1100     influence campaigns means that our markets no longer aggregate
1101     customers’ decisions because we customers no longer decide — we are
1102     given orders by surveillance capitalism’s mind-control rays.
1103   </p><p>
1104     If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can
1105     no longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at
1106     <span class="emphasis"><em>least</em></span> as much as influence campaigns. An
1107     influence campaign might nudge you to buy a certain brand of phone;
1108     but the copyright locks on that phone absolutely determine where you
1109     get it serviced, which apps can run on it, and when you have to
1110     throw it away rather than fixing it.
1111   </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>
1112     Markets are posed as a kind of magic: By discovering otherwise
1113     hidden information conveyed by the free choices of consumers, those
1114     consumers’ local knowledge is integrated into a self-correcting
1115     system that makes efficient allocations—more efficient than any
1116     computer could calculate. But monopolies are incompatible with that
1117     notion. When you only have one app store, the owner of the store —
1118     not the consumer — decides on the range of choices. As Boss Tweed
1119     once said, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to
1120     do the nominating.</span>”</span> A monopolized market is an election whose
1121     candidates are chosen by the monopolist.
1122   </p><p>
1123     This ballot rigging is made more pernicious by the existence of
1124     monopolies over search order. Google’s search market share is about
1125     90%. When Google’s ranking algorithm puts a result for a popular
1126     search term in its top 10, that helps determine the behavior of
1127     millions of people. If Google’s answer to <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Are vaccines dangerous?</span>”</span>
1128     is a page that rebuts anti-vax conspiracy theories, then a sizable
1129     portion of the public will learn that vaccines are safe. If, on the
1130     other hand, Google sends those people to a site affirming the
1131     anti-vax conspiracies, a sizable portion of those millions will come
1132     away convinced that vaccines are dangerous.
1133   </p><p>
1134     Google’s algorithm is often tricked into serving disinformation as a
1135     prominent search result. But in these cases, Google isn’t persuading
1136     people to change their minds; it’s just presenting something untrue
1137     as fact when the user has no cause to doubt it.
1138   </p><p>
1139     This is true whether the search is for <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Are vaccines dangerous?</span>”</span> or
1140     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">best restaurants near me.</span>”</span> Most users will never look past the
1141     first page of search results, and when the overwhelming majority of
1142     people all use the same search engine, the ranking algorithm
1143     deployed by that search engine will determine myriad outcomes
1144     (whether to adopt a child, whether to have cancer surgery, where to
1145     eat dinner, where to move, where to apply for a job) to a degree
1146     that vastly outstrips any behavioral outcomes dictated by
1147     algorithmic persuasion techniques.
1148   </p><p>
1149     Many of the questions we ask search engines have no empirically
1150     correct answers: <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Where should I eat dinner?</span>”</span> is not an objective
1151     question. Even questions that do have correct answers (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Are vaccines
1152     dangerous?</span>”</span>) don’t have one empirically superior source for that
1153     answer. Many pages affirm the safety of vaccines, so which one goes
1154     first? Under conditions of competition, consumers can choose from
1155     many search engines and stick with the one whose algorithmic
1156     judgment suits them best, but under conditions of monopoly, we all
1157     get our answers from the same place.
1158   </p><p>
1159     Google’s search dominance isn’t a matter of pure merit: The company
1160     has leveraged many tactics that would have been prohibited under
1161     classical, pre-Ronald-Reagan antitrust enforcement standards to
1162     attain its dominance. After all, this is a company that has
1163     developed two major products: a really good search engine and a
1164     pretty good Hotmail clone. Every other major success it’s had —
1165     Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. — has come through an
1166     acquisition of a nascent competitor. Many of the company’s key
1167     divisions, such as the advertising technology of DoubleClick,
1168     violate the historical antitrust principle of structural separation,
1169     which forbade firms from owning subsidiaries that competed with
1170     their customers. Railroads, for example, were barred from owning
1171     freight companies that competed with the shippers whose freight they
1172     carried.
1173   </p><p>
1174     If we’re worried about giant companies subverting markets by
1175     stripping consumers of their ability to make free choices, then
1176     vigorous antitrust enforcement seems like an excellent remedy. If
1177     we’d denied Google the right to effect its many mergers, we would
1178     also have probably denied it its total search dominance. Without
1179     that dominance, the pet theories, biases, errors (and good judgment,
1180     too) of Google search engineers and product managers would not have
1181     such an outsized effect on consumer choice.
1182   </p><p>
1183     This goes for many other companies. Amazon, a classic surveillance
1184     capitalist, is obviously the dominant tool for searching Amazon —
1185     though many people find their way to Amazon through Google searches
1186     and Facebook posts — and obviously, Amazon controls Amazon search.
1187     That means that Amazon’s own self-serving editorial choices—like
1188     promoting its own house brands over rival goods from its sellers as
1189     well as its own pet theories, biases, and errors— determine much of
1190     what we buy on Amazon. And since Amazon is the dominant e-commerce
1191     retailer outside of China and since it attained that dominance by
1192     buying up both large rivals and nascent competitors in defiance of
1193     historical antitrust rules, we can blame the monopoly for stripping
1194     consumers of their right to the future tense and the ability to
1195     shape markets by making informed choices.
1196   </p><p>
1197     Not every monopolist is a surveillance capitalist, but that doesn’t
1198     mean they’re not able to shape consumer choices in wide-ranging
1199     ways. Zuboff lauds Apple for its App Store and iTunes Store,
1200     insisting that adding price tags to the features on its platforms
1201     has been the secret to resisting surveillance and thus creating
1202     markets. But Apple is the only retailer allowed to sell on its
1203     platforms, and it’s the second-largest mobile device vendor in the
1204     world. The independent software vendors that sell through Apple’s
1205     marketplace accuse the company of the same surveillance sins as
1206     Amazon and other big retailers: spying on its customers to find
1207     lucrative new products to launch, effectively using independent
1208     software vendors as free-market researchers, then forcing them out
1209     of any markets they discover.
1210   </p><p>
1211     Because of its use of copyright locks, Apple’s mobile customers are
1212     not legally allowed to switch to a rival retailer for its apps if
1213     they want to do so on an iPhone. Apple, obviously, is the only
1214     entity that gets to decide how it ranks the results of search
1215     queries in its stores. These decisions ensure that some apps are
1216     often installed (because they appear on page one) and others are
1217     never installed (because they appear on page one million). Apple’s
1218     search-ranking design decisions have a vastly more significant
1219     effect on consumer behaviors than influence campaigns delivered by
1220     surveillance capitalism’s ad-serving bots.
1221   </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>
1222     Only the most extreme market ideologues think that markets can
1223     self-regulate without state oversight. Markets need watchdogs —
1224     regulators, lawmakers, and other elements of democratic control — to
1225     keep them honest. When these watchdogs sleep on the job, then
1226     markets cease to aggregate consumer choices because those choices
1227     are constrained by illegitimate and deceptive activities that
1228     companies are able to get away with because no one is holding them
1229     to account.
1230   </p><p>
1231     But this kind of regulatory capture doesn’t come cheap. In
1232     competitive sectors, where rivals are constantly eroding one
1233     another’s margins, individual firms lack the surplus capital to
1234     effectively lobby for laws and regulations that serve their ends.
1235   </p><p>
1236     Many of the harms of surveillance capitalism are the result of weak
1237     or nonexistent regulation. Those regulatory vacuums spring from the
1238     power of monopolists to resist stronger regulation and to tailor
1239     what regulation exists to permit their existing businesses.
1240   </p><p>
1241     Here’s an example: When firms over-collect and over-retain our data,
1242     they are at increased risk of suffering a breach — you can’t leak
1243     data you never collected, and once you delete all copies of that
1244     data, you can no longer leak it. For more than a decade, we’ve lived
1245     through an endless parade of ever-worsening data breaches, each one
1246     uniquely horrible in the scale of data breached and the sensitivity
1247     of that data.
1248   </p><p>
1249     But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data
1250     for three reasons:
1251   </p><p>
1252     <span class="strong"><strong>1. They are locked in the aforementioned
1253     limbic arms race with our capacity to shore up our attentional
1254     defense systems to resist their new persuasion
1255     techniques.</strong></span> They’re also locked in an arms race with
1256     their competitors to find new ways to target people for sales
1257     pitches. As soon as they discover a soft spot in our attentional
1258     defenses (a counterintuitive, unobvious way to target potential
1259     refrigerator buyers), the public begins to wise up to the tactic,
1260     and their competitors leap on it, hastening the day in which all
1261     potential refrigerator buyers have been inured to the pitch.
1262   </p><p>
1263     <span class="strong"><strong>2. They believe the surveillance capitalism
1264     story.</strong></span> Data is cheap to aggregate and store, and both
1265     proponents and opponents of surveillance capitalism have assured
1266     managers and product designers that if you collect enough data, you
1267     will be able to perform sorcerous acts of mind control, thus
1268     supercharging your sales. Even if you never figure out how to profit
1269     from the data, someone else will eventually offer to buy it from you
1270     to give it a try. This is the hallmark of all economic bubbles:
1271     acquiring an asset on the assumption that someone else will buy it
1272     from you for more than you paid for it, often to sell to someone
1273     else at an even greater price.
1274   </p><p>
1275     <span class="strong"><strong>3. The penalties for leaking data are
1276     negligible.</strong></span> Most countries limit these penalties to
1277     actual damages, meaning that consumers who’ve had their data
1278     breached have to show actual monetary harms to get a reward. In
1279     2014, Home Depot disclosed that it had lost credit-card data for 53
1280     million of its customers, but it settled the matter by paying those
1281     customers about $0.34 each — and a third of that $0.34 wasn’t even
1282     paid in cash. It took the form of a credit to procure a largely
1283     ineffectual credit-monitoring service.
1284   </p><p>
1285     But the harms from breaches are much more extensive than these
1286     actual-damages rules capture. Identity thieves and fraudsters are
1287     wily and endlessly inventive. All the vast breaches of our century
1288     are being continuously recombined, the data sets merged and mined
1289     for new ways to victimize the people whose data was present in them.
1290     Any reasonable, evidence-based theory of deterrence and compensation
1291     for breaches would not confine damages to actual damages but rather
1292     would allow users to claim these future harms.
1293   </p><p>
1294     However, even the most ambitious privacy rules, such as the EU
1295     General Data Protection Regulation, fall far short of capturing the
1296     negative externalities of the platforms’ negligent over-collection
1297     and over-retention, and what penalties they do provide are not
1298     aggressively pursued by regulators.
1299   </p><p>
1300     This tolerance of — or indifference to — data over-collection and
1301     over-retention can be ascribed in part to the sheer lobbying muscle
1302     of the platforms. They are so profitable that they can handily
1303     afford to divert gigantic sums to fight any real change — that is,
1304     change that would force them to internalize the costs of their
1305     surveillance activities.
1306   </p><p>
1307     And then there’s state surveillance, which the surveillance
1308     capitalism story dismisses as a relic of another era when the big
1309     worry was being jailed for your dissident speech, not having your
1310     free will stripped away with machine learning.
1311   </p><p>
1312     But state surveillance and private surveillance are intimately
1313     related. As we saw when Apple was conscripted by the Chinese
1314     government as a vital collaborator in state surveillance, the only
1315     really affordable and tractable way to conduct mass surveillance on
1316     the scale practiced by modern states — both <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">free</span>”</span> and autocratic
1317     states — is to suborn commercial services.
1318   </p><p>
1319     Whether it’s Google being used as a location tracking tool by local
1320     law enforcement across the U.S. or the use of social media tracking
1321     by the Department of Homeland Security to build dossiers on
1322     participants in protests against Immigration and Customs
1323     Enforcement’s family separation practices, any hard limits on
1324     surveillance capitalism would hamstring the state’s own surveillance
1325     capability. Without Palantir, Amazon, Google, and other major tech
1326     contractors, U.S. cops would not be able to spy on Black people, ICE
1327     would not be able to manage the caging of children at the U.S.
1328     border, and state welfare systems would not be able to purge their
1329     rolls by dressing up cruelty as empiricism and claiming that poor
1330     and vulnerable people are ineligible for assistance. At least some
1331     of the states’ unwillingness to take meaningful action to curb
1332     surveillance should be attributed to this symbiotic relationship.
1333     There is no mass state surveillance without mass commercial
1334     surveillance.
1335   </p><p>
1336     Monopolism is key to the project of mass state surveillance. It’s
1337     true that smaller tech firms are apt to be less well-defended than
1338     Big Tech, whose security experts are drawn from the tops of their
1339     field and who are given enormous resources to secure and monitor
1340     their systems against intruders. But smaller firms also have less to
1341     protect: fewer users whose data is more fragmented across more
1342     systems and have to be suborned one at a time by state actors.
1343   </p><p>
1344     A concentrated tech sector that works with authorities is a much
1345     more powerful ally in the project of mass state surveillance than a
1346     fragmented one composed of smaller actors. The U.S. tech sector is
1347     small enough that all of its top executives fit around a single
1348     boardroom table in Trump Tower in 2017, shortly after Trump’s
1349     inauguration. Most of its biggest players bid to win JEDI, the
1350     Pentagon’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud
1351     contract. Like other highly concentrated industries, Big Tech
1352     rotates its key employees in and out of government service, sending
1353     them to serve in the Department of Defense and the White House, then
1354     hiring ex-Pentagon and ex-DOD top staffers and officers to work in
1355     their own government relations departments.
1356   </p><p>
1357     They can even make a good case for doing this: After all, when there
1358     are only four or five big companies in an industry, everyone
1359     qualified to regulate those companies has served as an executive in
1360     at least a couple of them — because, likewise, when there are only
1361     five companies in an industry, everyone qualified for a senior role
1362     at any of them is by definition working at one of the other ones.
1363   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
1364       While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly
1365       abet surveillance.
1366     </p></blockquote></div><p>
1367     Industries that are competitive are fragmented — composed of
1368     companies that are at each other’s throats all the time and eroding
1369     one another’s margins in bids to steal their best customers. This
1370     leaves them with much more limited capital to use to lobby for
1371     favorable rules and a much harder job of getting everyone to agree
1372     to pool their resources to benefit the industry as a whole.
1373   </p><p>
1374     Surveillance combined with machine learning is supposed to be an
1375     existential crisis, a species-defining moment at which our free will
1376     is just a few more advances in the field from being stripped away. I
1377     am skeptical of this claim, but I <span class="emphasis"><em>do</em></span> think that
1378     tech poses an existential threat to our society and possibly our
1379     species.
1380   </p><p>
1381     But that threat grows out of monopoly.
1382   </p><p>
1383     One of the consequences of tech’s regulatory capture is that it can
1384     shift liability for poor security decisions onto its customers and
1385     the wider society. It is absolutely normal in tech for companies to
1386     obfuscate the workings of their products, to make them deliberately
1387     hard to understand, and to threaten security researchers who seek to
1388     independently audit those products.
1389   </p><p>
1390     IT is the only field in which this is practiced: No one builds a
1391     bridge or a hospital and keeps the composition of the steel or the
1392     equations used to calculate load stresses a secret. It is a frankly
1393     bizarre practice that leads, time and again, to grotesque security
1394     defects on farcical scales, with whole classes of devices being
1395     revealed as vulnerable long after they are deployed in the field and
1396     put into sensitive places.
1397   </p><p>
1398     The monopoly power that keeps any meaningful consequences for
1399     breaches at bay means that tech companies continue to build terrible
1400     products that are insecure by design and that end up integrated into
1401     our lives, in possession of our data, and connected to our physical
1402     world. For years, Boeing has struggled with the aftermath of a
1403     series of bad technology decisions that made its 737 fleet a global
1404     pariah, a rare instance in which bad tech decisions have been
1405     seriously punished in the market.
1406   </p><p>
1407     These bad security decisions are compounded yet again by the use of
1408     copyright locks to enforce business-model decisions against
1409     consumers. Recall that these locks have become the go-to means for
1410     shaping consumer behavior, making it technically impossible to use
1411     third-party ink, insulin, apps, or service depots in connection with
1412     your lawfully acquired property.
1413   </p><p>
1414     Recall also that these copyright locks are backstopped by
1415     legislation (such as Section 1201 of the DMCA or Article 6 of the
1416     2001 EU Copyright Directive) that ban tampering with
1417     (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">circumventing</span>”</span>) them, and these statutes have been used to
1418     threaten security researchers who make disclosures about
1419     vulnerabilities without permission from manufacturers.
1420   </p><p>
1421     This amounts to a manufacturer’s veto over safety warnings and
1422     criticism. While this is far from the legislative intent of the DMCA
1423     and its sister statutes around the world, Congress has not
1424     intervened to clarify the statute nor will it because to do so would
1425     run counter to the interests of powerful, large firms whose lobbying
1426     muscle is unstoppable.
1427   </p><p>
1428     Copyright locks are a double whammy: They create bad security
1429     decisions that can’t be freely investigated or discussed. If markets
1430     are supposed to be machines for aggregating information (and if
1431     surveillance capitalism’s notional mind-control rays are what make
1432     it a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>”</span> because it denies consumers the power to
1433     make decisions), then a program of legally enforced ignorance of the
1434     risks of products makes monopolism even more of a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>”</span>
1435     than surveillance capitalism’s influence campaigns.
1436   </p><p>
1437     And unlike mind-control rays, enforced silence over security is an
1438     immediate, documented problem, and it <span class="emphasis"><em>does</em></span>
1439     constitute an existential threat to our civilization and possibly
1440     our species. The proliferation of insecure devices — especially
1441     devices that spy on us and especially when those devices also can
1442     manipulate the physical world by, say, steering your car or flipping
1443     a breaker at a power station — is a kind of technology debt.
1444   </p><p>
1445     In software design, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">technology debt</span>”</span> refers to old, baked-in
1446     decisions that turn out to be bad ones in hindsight. Perhaps a
1447     long-ago developer decided to incorporate a networking protocol made
1448     by a vendor that has since stopped supporting it. But everything in
1449     the product still relies on that superannuated protocol, and so,
1450     with each revision, the product team has to work around this
1451     obsolete core, adding compatibility layers, surrounding it with
1452     security checks that try to shore up its defenses, and so on. These
1453     Band-Aid measures compound the debt because every subsequent
1454     revision has to make allowances for <span class="emphasis"><em>them</em></span>, too,
1455     like interest mounting on a predatory subprime loan. And like a
1456     subprime loan, the interest mounts faster than you can hope to pay
1457     it off: The product team has to put so much energy into maintaining
1458     this complex, brittle system that they don’t have any time left over
1459     to refactor the product from the ground up and <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">pay off the debt</span>”</span>
1460     once and for all.
1461   </p><p>
1462     Typically, technology debt results in a technological bankruptcy:
1463     The product gets so brittle and unsustainable that it fails
1464     catastrophically. Think of the antiquated COBOL-based banking and
1465     accounting systems that fell over at the start of the pandemic
1466     emergency when confronted with surges of unemployment claims.
1467     Sometimes that ends the product; sometimes it takes the company down
1468     with it. Being caught in the default of a technology debt is scary
1469     and traumatic, just like losing your house due to bankruptcy is
1470     scary and traumatic.
1471   </p><p>
1472     But the technology debt created by copyright locks isn’t individual
1473     debt; it’s systemic. Everyone in the world is exposed to this
1474     over-leverage, as was the case with the 2008 financial crisis. When
1475     that debt comes due — when we face a cascade of security breaches
1476     that threaten global shipping and logistics, the food supply,
1477     pharmaceutical production pipelines, emergency communications, and
1478     other critical systems that are accumulating technology debt in part
1479     due to the presence of deliberately insecure and deliberately
1480     unauditable copyright locks — it will indeed pose an existential
1481     risk.
1482   </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>
1483     Many tech companies are gripped by an orthodoxy that holds that if
1484     they just gather enough data on enough of our activities, everything
1485     else is possible — the mind control and endless profits. This is an
1486     unfalsifiable hypothesis: If data gives a tech company even a tiny
1487     improvement in behavior prediction and modification, the company
1488     declares that it has taken the first step toward global domination
1489     with no end in sight. If a company <span class="emphasis"><em>fails</em></span> to
1490     attain any improvements from gathering and analyzing data, it
1491     declares success to be just around the corner, attainable once more
1492     data is in hand.
1493   </p><p>
1494     Surveillance tech is far from the first industry to embrace a
1495     nonsensical, self-serving belief that harms the rest of the world,
1496     and it is not the first industry to profit handsomely from such a
1497     delusion. Long before hedge-fund managers were claiming (falsely)
1498     that they could beat the S&amp;P 500, there were plenty of other
1499     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">respectable</span>”</span> industries that have been revealed as quacks in
1500     hindsight. From the makers of radium suppositories (a real thing!)
1501     to the cruel sociopaths who claimed they could <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">cure</span>”</span> gay people,
1502     history is littered with the formerly respectable titans of
1503     discredited industries.
1504   </p><p>
1505     This is not to say that there’s nothing wrong with Big Tech and its
1506     ideological addiction to data. While surveillance’s benefits are
1507     mostly overstated, its harms are, if anything,
1508     <span class="emphasis"><em>understated</em></span>.
1509   </p><p>
1510     There’s real irony here. The belief in surveillance capitalism as a
1511     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>”</span> is driven by the belief that markets wouldn’t
1512     tolerate firms that are gripped by false beliefs. An oil company
1513     that has false beliefs about where the oil is will eventually go
1514     broke digging dry wells after all.
1515   </p><p>
1516     But monopolists get to do terrible things for a long time before
1517     they pay the price. Think of how concentration in the finance sector
1518     allowed the subprime crisis to fester as bond-rating agencies,
1519     regulators, investors, and critics all fell under the sway of a
1520     false belief that complex mathematics could construct <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">fully hedged</span>”</span>
1521     debt instruments that could not possibly default. A small bank that
1522     engaged in this kind of malfeasance would simply go broke rather
1523     than outrunning the inevitable crisis, perhaps growing so big that
1524     it averted it altogether. But large banks were able to continue to
1525     attract investors, and when they finally <span class="emphasis"><em>did</em></span>
1526     come a-cropper, the world’s governments bailed them out. The worst
1527     offenders of the subprime crisis are bigger than they were in 2008,
1528     bringing home more profits and paying their execs even larger sums.
1529   </p><p>
1530     Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is
1531     tech but because it is <span class="emphasis"><em>big</em></span>. The reason every
1532     web publisher embeds a Facebook <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Like</span>”</span> button is that Facebook
1533     dominates the internet’s social media referrals — and every one of
1534     those <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Like</span>”</span> buttons spies on everyone who lands on a page that
1535     contains them (see also: Google Analytics embeds, Twitter buttons,
1536     etc.).
1537   </p><p>
1538     The reason the world’s governments have been slow to create
1539     meaningful penalties for privacy breaches is that Big Tech’s
1540     concentration produces huge profits that can be used to lobby
1541     against those penalties — and Big Tech’s concentration means that
1542     the companies involved are able to arrive at a unified negotiating
1543     position that supercharges the lobbying.
1544   </p><p>
1545     The reason that the smartest engineers in the world want to work for
1546     Big Tech is that Big Tech commands the lion’s share of tech industry
1547     jobs.
1548   </p><p>
1549     The reason people who are aghast at Facebook’s and Google’s and
1550     Amazon’s data-handling practices continue to use these services is
1551     that all their friends are on Facebook; Google dominates search; and
1552     Amazon has put all the local merchants out of business.
1553   </p><p>
1554     Competitive markets would weaken the companies’ lobbying muscle by
1555     reducing their profits and pitting them against each other in
1556     regulatory forums. It would give customers other places to go to get
1557     their online services. It would make the companies small enough to
1558     regulate and pave the way to meaningful penalties for breaches. It
1559     would let engineers with ideas that challenged the surveillance
1560     orthodoxy raise capital to compete with the incumbents. It would
1561     give web publishers multiple ways to reach audiences and make the
1562     case against Facebook and Google and Twitter embeds.
1563   </p><p>
1564     In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies,
1565     monopolies certainly abet surveillance.
1566   </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>
1567     Technology exceptionalism is a sin, whether it’s practiced by
1568     technology’s blind proponents or by its critics. Both of these camps
1569     are prone to explaining away monopolistic concentration by citing
1570     some special characteristic of the tech industry, like network
1571     effects or first-mover advantage. The only real difference between
1572     these two groups is that the tech apologists say monopoly is
1573     inevitable so we should just let tech get away with its abuses while
1574     competition regulators in the U.S. and the EU say monopoly is
1575     inevitable so we should punish tech for its abuses but not try to
1576     break up the monopolies.
1577   </p><p>
1578     To understand how tech became so monopolistic, it’s useful to look
1579     at the dawn of the consumer tech industry: 1979, the year the Apple
1580     II Plus launched and became the first successful home computer. That
1581     also happens to be the year that Ronald Reagan hit the campaign
1582     trail for the 1980 presidential race — a race he won, leading to a
1583     radical shift in the way that antitrust concerns are handled in
1584     America. Reagan’s cohort of politicians — including Margaret
1585     Thatcher in the U.K., Brian Mulroney in Canada, Helmut Kohl in
1586     Germany, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile — went on to enact similar
1587     reforms that eventually spread around the world.
1588   </p><p>
1589     Antitrust’s story began nearly a century before all that with laws
1590     like the Sherman Act, which took aim at monopolists on the grounds
1591     that monopolies were bad in and of themselves — squeezing out
1592     competitors, creating <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">diseconomies of scale</span>”</span> (when a company is so
1593     big that its constituent parts go awry and it is seemingly helpless
1594     to address the problems), and capturing their regulators to such a
1595     degree that they can get away with a host of evils.
1596   </p><p>
1597     Then came a fabulist named Robert Bork, a former solicitor general
1598     who Reagan appointed to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the
1599     D.C. Circuit and who had created an alternate legislative history of
1600     the Sherman Act and its successors out of whole cloth. Bork insisted
1601     that these statutes were never targeted at monopolies (despite a
1602     wealth of evidence to the contrary, including the transcribed
1603     speeches of the acts’ authors) but, rather, that they were intended
1604     to prevent <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">consumer harm</span>”</span> — in the form of higher prices.
1605   </p><p>
1606     Bork was a crank, but he was a crank with a theory that rich people
1607     really liked. Monopolies are a great way to make rich people richer
1608     by allowing them to receive <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">monopoly rents</span>”</span> (that is, bigger
1609     profits) and capture regulators, leading to a weaker, more favorable
1610     regulatory environment with fewer protections for customers,
1611     suppliers, the environment, and workers.
1612   </p><p>
1613     Bork’s theories were especially palatable to the same power brokers
1614     who backed Reagan, and Reagan’s Department of Justice and other
1615     agencies began to incorporate Bork’s antitrust doctrine into their
1616     enforcement decisions (Reagan even put Bork up for a Supreme Court
1617     seat, but Bork flunked the Senate confirmation hearing so badly
1618     that, 40 years later, D.C. insiders use the term <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">borked</span>”</span> to refer
1619     to any catastrophically bad political performance).
1620   </p><p>
1621     Little by little, Bork’s theories entered the mainstream, and their
1622     backers began to infiltrate the legal education field, even putting
1623     on junkets where members of the judiciary were treated to lavish
1624     meals, fun outdoor activities, and seminars where they were
1625     indoctrinated into the consumer harm theory of antitrust. The more
1626     Bork’s theories took hold, the more money the monopolists were
1627     making — and the more surplus capital they had at their disposal to
1628     lobby for even more Borkian antitrust influence campaigns.
1629   </p><p>
1630     The history of Bork’s antitrust theories is a really good example of
1631     the kind of covertly engineered shifts in public opinion that Zuboff
1632     warns us against, where fringe ideas become mainstream orthodoxy.
1633     But Bork didn’t change the world overnight. He played a very long
1634     game, for over a generation, and he had a tailwind because the same
1635     forces that backed oligarchic antitrust theories also backed many
1636     other oligarchic shifts in public opinion. For example, the idea
1637     that taxation is theft, that wealth is a sign of virtue, and so on —
1638     all of these theories meshed to form a coherent ideology that
1639     elevated inequality to a virtue.
1640   </p><p>
1641     Today, many fear that machine learning allows surveillance
1642     capitalism to sell <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Bork-as-a-Service,</span>”</span> at internet speeds, so that
1643     you can contract a machine-learning company to engineer
1644     <span class="emphasis"><em>rapid</em></span> shifts in public sentiment without
1645     needing the capital to sustain a multipronged, multigenerational
1646     project working at the local, state, national, and global levels in
1647     business, law, and philosophy. I do not believe that such a project
1648     is plausible, though I agree that this is basically what the
1649     platforms claim to be selling. They’re just lying about it. Big Tech
1650     lies all the time, <span class="emphasis"><em>including</em></span> in their sales
1651     literature.
1652   </p><p>
1653     The idea that tech forms <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">natural monopolies</span>”</span> (monopolies that are
1654     the inevitable result of the realities of an industry, such as the
1655     monopolies that accrue the first company to run long-haul phone
1656     lines or rail lines) is belied by tech’s own history: In the absence
1657     of anti-competitive tactics, Google was able to unseat AltaVista and
1658     Yahoo; Facebook was able to head off Myspace. There are some
1659     advantages to gathering mountains of data, but those mountains of
1660     data also have disadvantages: liability (from leaking), diminishing
1661     returns (from old data), and institutional inertia (big companies,
1662     like science, progress one funeral at a time).
1663   </p><p>
1664     Indeed, the birth of the web saw a mass-extinction event for the
1665     existing giant, wildly profitable proprietary technologies that had
1666     capital, network effects, and walls and moats surrounding their
1667     businesses. The web showed that when a new industry is built around
1668     a protocol, rather than a product, the combined might of everyone
1669     who uses the protocol to reach their customers or users or
1670     communities outweighs even the most massive products. CompuServe,
1671     AOL, MSN, and a host of other proprietary walled gardens learned
1672     this lesson the hard way: Each believed it could stay separate from
1673     the web, offering <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">curation</span>”</span> and a guarantee of consistency and
1674     quality instead of the chaos of an open system. Each was wrong and
1675     ended up being absorbed into the public web.
1676   </p><p>
1677     Yes, tech is heavily monopolized and is now closely associated with
1678     industry concentration, but this has more to do with a matter of
1679     timing than its intrinsically monopolistic tendencies. Tech was born
1680     at the moment that antitrust enforcement was being dismantled, and
1681     tech fell into exactly the same pathologies that antitrust was
1682     supposed to guard against. To a first approximation, it is
1683     reasonable to assume that tech’s monopolies are the result of a lack
1684     of anti-monopoly action and not the much-touted unique
1685     characteristics of tech, such as network effects, first-mover
1686     advantage, and so on.
1687   </p><p>
1688     In support of this thesis, I offer the concentration that every
1689     <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> industry has undergone over the same
1690     period. From professional wrestling to consumer packaged goods to
1691     commercial property leasing to banking to sea freight to oil to
1692     record labels to newspaper ownership to theme parks,
1693     <span class="emphasis"><em>every</em></span> industry has undergone a massive shift
1694     toward concentration. There’s no obvious network effects or
1695     first-mover advantage at play in these industries. However, in every
1696     case, these industries attained their concentrated status through
1697     tactics that were prohibited before Bork’s triumph: merging with
1698     major competitors, buying out innovative new market entrants,
1699     horizontal and vertical integration, and a suite of anti-competitive
1700     tactics that were once illegal but are not any longer.
1701   </p><p>
1702     Again: When you change the laws intended to prevent monopolies and
1703     then monopolies form in exactly the way the law was supposed to
1704     prevent, it is reasonable to suppose that these facts are related.
1705     Tech’s concentration can be readily explained without recourse to
1706     radical theories of network effects — but only if you’re willing to
1707     indict unregulated markets as tending toward monopoly. Just as a
1708     lifelong smoker can give you a hundred reasons why their smoking
1709     didn’t cause their cancer (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">It was the environmental toxins</span>”</span>), true
1710     believers in unregulated markets have a whole suite of unconvincing
1711     explanations for monopoly in tech that leave capitalism intact.
1712   </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>
1713     It’s been 40 years since Bork’s project to rehabilitate monopolies
1714     achieved liftoff, and that is a generation and a half, which is
1715     plenty of time to take a common idea and make it seem outlandish and
1716     vice versa. Before the 1940s, affluent Americans dressed their baby
1717     boys in pink while baby girls wore blue (a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">delicate and dainty</span>”</span>
1718     color). While gendered colors are obviously totally arbitrary, many
1719     still greet this news with amazement and find it hard to imagine a
1720     time when pink connoted masculinity.
1721   </p><p>
1722     After 40 years of studiously ignoring antitrust analysis and
1723     enforcement, it’s not surprising that we’ve all but forgotten that
1724     antitrust exists, that in living memory, growth through mergers and
1725     acquisitions were largely prohibited under law, that
1726     market-cornering strategies like vertical integration could land a
1727     company in court.
1728   </p><p>
1729     Antitrust is a market society’s steering wheel, the control of first
1730     resort to keep would-be masters of the universe in their lanes. But
1731     Bork and his cohort ripped out our steering wheel 40 years ago. The
1732     car is still barreling along, and so we’re yanking as hard as we can
1733     on all the <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> controls in the car as well as
1734     desperately flapping the doors and rolling the windows up and down
1735     in the hopes that one of these other controls can be repurposed to
1736     let us choose where we’re heading before we careen off a cliff.
1737   </p><p>
1738     It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in
1739     a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">generation ship,</span>”</span> plying its way across the stars, a ship once
1740     piloted by their ancestors; and now, after a great cataclysm, the
1741     ship’s crew have forgotten that they’re in a ship at all and no
1742     longer remember where the control room is. Adrift, the ship is
1743     racing toward its extinction, and unless we can seize the controls
1744     and execute emergency course correction, we’re all headed for a
1745     fiery death in the heart of a sun.
1746   </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>
1747     None of this is to minimize the problems with surveillance.
1748     Surveillance matters, and Big Tech’s use of surveillance
1749     <span class="emphasis"><em>is</em></span> an existential risk to our species, but
1750     that’s not because surveillance and machine learning rob us of our
1751     free will.
1752   </p><p>
1753     Surveillance has become <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span> more efficient
1754     thanks to Big Tech. In 1989, the Stasi — the East German secret
1755     police — had the whole country under surveillance, a massive
1756     undertaking that recruited one out of every 60 people to serve as an
1757     informant or intelligence operative.
1758   </p><p>
1759     Today, we know that the NSA is spying on a significant fraction of
1760     the entire world’s population, and its ratio of surveillance
1761     operatives to the surveilled is more like 1:10,000 (that’s probably
1762     on the low side since it assumes that every American with top-secret
1763     clearance is working for the NSA on this project — we don’t know how
1764     many of those cleared people are involved in NSA spying, but it’s
1765     definitely not all of them).
1766   </p><p>
1767     How did the ratio of surveillable citizens expand from 1:60 to
1768     1:10,000 in less than 30 years? It’s thanks to Big Tech. Our devices
1769     and services gather most of the data that the NSA mines for its
1770     surveillance project. We pay for these devices and the services they
1771     connect to, and then we painstakingly perform the data-entry tasks
1772     associated with logging facts about our lives, opinions, and
1773     preferences. This mass surveillance project has been largely useless
1774     for fighting terrorism: The NSA can
1775     <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
1776     point to a single minor success story</a> in which it used its
1777     data collection program to foil an attempt by a U.S. resident to
1778     wire a few thousand dollars to an overseas terror group. It’s
1779     ineffective for much the same reason that commercial surveillance
1780     projects are largely ineffective at targeting advertising: The
1781     people who want to commit acts of terror, like people who want to
1782     buy a refrigerator, are extremely rare. If you’re trying to detect a
1783     phenomenon whose base rate is one in a million with an instrument
1784     whose accuracy is only 99%, then every true positive will come at
1785     the cost of 9,999 false positives.
1786   </p><p>
1787     Let me explain that again: If one in a million people is a
1788     terrorist, then there will only be about one terrorist in a random
1789     sample of one million people. If your test for detecting terrorists
1790     is 99% accurate, it will identify 10,000 terrorists in your
1791     million-person sample (1% of one million is 10,000). For every true
1792     positive, you’ll get 9,999 false positives.
1793   </p><p>
1794     In reality, the accuracy of algorithmic terrorism detection falls
1795     far short of the 99% mark, as does refrigerator ad targeting. The
1796     difference is that being falsely accused of wanting to buy a fridge
1797     is a minor nuisance while being falsely accused of planning a terror
1798     attack can destroy your life and the lives of everyone you love.
1799   </p><p>
1800     Mass state surveillance is only feasible because of surveillance
1801     capitalism and its extremely low-yield ad-targeting systems, which
1802     require a constant feed of personal data to remain barely viable.
1803     Surveillance capitalism’s primary failure mode is mistargeted ads
1804     while mass state surveillance’s primary failure mode is grotesque
1805     human rights abuses, tending toward totalitarianism.
1806   </p><p>
1807     State surveillance is no mere parasite on Big Tech, sucking up its
1808     data and giving nothing in return. In truth, the two are symbiotes:
1809     Big Tech sucks up our data for spy agencies, and spy agencies ensure
1810     that governments don’t limit Big Tech’s activities so severely that
1811     it would no longer serve the spy agencies’ needs. There is no firm
1812     distinction between state surveillance and surveillance capitalism;
1813     they are dependent on one another.
1814   </p><p>
1815     To see this at work today, look no further than Amazon’s home
1816     surveillance device, the Ring doorbell, and its associated app,
1817     Neighbors. Ring — a product that Amazon acquired and did not develop
1818     in house — makes a camera-enabled doorbell that streams footage from
1819     your front door to your mobile device. The Neighbors app allows you
1820     to form a neighborhood-wide surveillance grid with your fellow Ring
1821     owners through which you can share clips of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">suspicious characters.</span>”</span>
1822     If you’re thinking that this sounds like a recipe for letting
1823     curtain-twitching racists supercharge their suspicions of people
1824     with brown skin who walk down their blocks,
1825     <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
1826     right</a>. Ring has become a <span class="emphasis"><em>de facto,</em></span>
1827     off-the-books arm of the police without any of the pesky oversight
1828     or rules.
1829   </p><p>
1830     In mid-2019, a series of public records requests revealed that
1831     Amazon had struck confidential deals with more than 400 local law
1832     enforcement agencies through which the agencies would promote Ring
1833     and Neighbors and in exchange get access to footage from Ring
1834     cameras. In theory, cops would need to request this footage through
1835     Amazon (and internal documents reveal that Amazon devotes
1836     substantial resources to coaching cops on how to spin a convincing
1837     story when doing so), but in practice, when a Ring customer turns
1838     down a police request, Amazon only requires the agency to formally
1839     request the footage from the company, which it will then produce.
1840   </p><p>
1841     Ring and law enforcement have found many ways to intertwine their
1842     activities. Ring strikes secret deals to acquire real-time access to
1843     911 dispatch and then streams alarming crime reports to Neighbors
1844     users, which serve as convincers for anyone who’s contemplating a
1845     surveillance doorbell but isn’t sure whether their neighborhood is
1846     dangerous enough to warrant it.
1847   </p><p>
1848     The more the cops buzz-market the surveillance capitalist Ring, the
1849     more surveillance capability the state gets. Cops who rely on
1850     private entities for law-enforcement roles then brief against any
1851     controls on the deployment of that technology while the companies
1852     return the favor by lobbying against rules requiring public
1853     oversight of police surveillance technology. The more the cops rely
1854     on Ring and Neighbors, the harder it will be to pass laws to curb
1855     them. The fewer laws there are against them, the more the cops will
1856     rely on them.
1857   </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>
1858     But even if we could exercise democratic control over our states and
1859     force them to stop raiding surveillance capitalism’s reservoirs of
1860     behavioral data, surveillance capitalism would still harm us.
1861   </p><p>
1862     This is an area where Zuboff shines. Her chapter on <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">sanctuary</span>”</span> —
1863     the feeling of being unobserved — is a beautiful hymn to
1864     introspection, calmness, mindfulness, and tranquility.
1865   </p><p>
1866     When you are watched, something changes. Anyone who has ever raised
1867     a child knows this. You might look up from your book (or more
1868     realistically, from your phone) and catch your child in a moment of
1869     profound realization and growth, a moment where they are learning
1870     something that is right at the edge of their abilities, requiring
1871     their entire ferocious concentration. For a moment, you’re
1872     transfixed, watching that rare and beautiful moment of focus playing
1873     out before your eyes, and then your child looks up and sees you
1874     seeing them, and the moment collapses. To grow, you need to be and
1875     expose your authentic self, and in that moment, you are vulnerable
1876     like a hermit crab scuttling from one shell to the next. The tender,
1877     unprotected tissues you expose in that moment are too delicate to
1878     reveal in the presence of another, even someone you trust as
1879     implicitly as a child trusts their parent.
1880   </p><p>
1881     In the digital age, our authentic selves are inextricably tied to
1882     our digital lives. Your search history is a running ledger of the
1883     questions you’ve pondered. Your location history is a record of the
1884     places you’ve sought out and the experiences you’ve had there. Your
1885     social graph reveals the different facets of your identity, the
1886     people you’ve connected with.
1887   </p><p>
1888     To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your
1889     authentic self.
1890   </p><p>
1891     There’s another way in which surveillance capitalism robs us of our
1892     capacity to be our authentic selves: by making us anxious.
1893     Surveillance capitalism isn’t really a mind-control ray, but you
1894     don’t need a mind-control ray to make someone anxious. After all,
1895     another word for anxiety is agitation, and to make someone
1896     experience agitation, you need merely to agitate them. To poke them
1897     and prod them and beep at them and buzz at them and bombard them on
1898     an intermittent schedule that is just random enough that our limbic
1899     systems never quite become inured to it.
1900   </p><p>
1901     Our devices and services are <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">general purpose</span>”</span> in that they can
1902     connect anything or anyone to anything or anyone else and that they
1903     can run any program that can be written. This means that the
1904     distraction rectangles in our pockets hold our most precious moments
1905     with our most beloved people and their most urgent or time-sensitive
1906     communications (from <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">running late can you get the kid?</span>”</span> to <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">doctor
1907     gave me bad news and I need to talk to you RIGHT NOW</span>”</span>) as well as
1908     ads for refrigerators and recruiting messages from Nazis.
1909   </p><p>
1910     All day and all night, our pockets buzz, shattering our
1911     concentration and tearing apart the fragile webs of connection we
1912     spin as we think through difficult ideas. If you locked someone in a
1913     cell and agitated them like this, we’d call it <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">sleep deprivation
1914     torture,</span>”</span> and it would be
1915     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKpRbvnx6g" target="_top">a war crime
1916     under the Geneva Conventions</a>.
1917   </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>
1918     The effects of surveillance on our ability to be our authentic
1919     selves are not equal for all people. Some of us are lucky enough to
1920     live in a time and place in which all the most important facts of
1921     our lives are widely and roundly socially acceptable and can be
1922     publicly displayed without the risk of social consequence.
1923   </p><p>
1924     But for many of us, this is not true. Recall that in living memory,
1925     many of the ways of being that we think of as socially acceptable
1926     today were once cause for dire social sanction or even imprisonment.
1927     If you are 65 years old, you have lived through a time in which
1928     people living in <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">free societies</span>”</span> could be imprisoned or sanctioned
1929     for engaging in homosexual activity, for falling in love with a
1930     person whose skin was a different color than their own, or for
1931     smoking weed.
1932   </p><p>
1933     Today, these activities aren’t just decriminalized in much of the
1934     world, they’re considered normal, and the fallen prohibitions are
1935     viewed as shameful, regrettable relics of the past.
1936   </p><p>
1937     How did we get from prohibition to normalization? Through private,
1938     personal activity: People who were secretly gay or secret
1939     pot-smokers or who secretly loved someone with a different skin
1940     color were vulnerable to retaliation if they made their true selves
1941     known and were limited in how much they could advocate for their own
1942     right to exist in the world and be true to themselves. But because
1943     there was a private sphere, these people could form alliances with
1944     their friends and loved ones who did not share their disfavored
1945     traits by having private conversations in which they came out,
1946     disclosing their true selves to the people around them and bringing
1947     them to their cause one conversation at a time.
1948   </p><p>
1949     The right to choose the time and manner of these conversations was
1950     key to their success. It’s one thing to come out to your dad while
1951     you’re on a fishing trip away from the world and another thing
1952     entirely to blurt it out over the Christmas dinner table while your
1953     racist Facebook uncle is there to make a scene.
1954   </p><p>
1955     Without a private sphere, there’s a chance that none of these
1956     changes would have come to pass and that the people who benefited
1957     from these changes would have either faced social sanction for
1958     coming out to a hostile world or would have never been able to
1959     reveal their true selves to the people they love.
1960   </p><p>
1961     The corollary is that, unless you think that our society has
1962     attained social perfection — that your grandchildren in 50 years
1963     will ask you to tell them the story of how, in 2020, every injustice
1964     had been righted and no further change had to be made — then you
1965     should expect that right now, at this minute, there are people you
1966     love, whose happiness is key to your own, who have a secret in their
1967     hearts that stops them from ever being their authentic selves with
1968     you. These people are sorrowing and will go to their graves with
1969     that secret sorrow in their hearts, and the source of that sorrow
1970     will be the falsity of their relationship to you.
1971   </p><p>
1972     A private realm is necessary for human progress.
1973   </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>
1974     The lack of a private life can rob vulnerable people of the chance
1975     to be their authentic selves and constrain our actions by depriving
1976     us of sanctuary, but there is another risk that is borne by
1977     everyone, not just people with a secret: crime.
1978   </p><p>
1979     Personally identifying information is of very limited use for the
1980     purpose of controlling peoples’ minds, but identity theft — really a
1981     catchall term for a whole constellation of terrible criminal
1982     activities that can destroy your finances, compromise your personal
1983     integrity, ruin your reputation, or even expose you to physical
1984     danger — thrives on it.
1985   </p><p>
1986     Attackers are not limited to using data from one breached source,
1987     either. Multiple services have suffered breaches that exposed names,
1988     addresses, phone numbers, passwords, sexual tastes, school grades,
1989     work performance, brushes with the criminal justice system, family
1990     details, genetic information, fingerprints and other biometrics,
1991     reading habits, search histories, literary tastes, pseudonymous
1992     identities, and other sensitive information. Attackers can merge
1993     data from these different breaches to build up extremely detailed
1994     dossiers on random subjects and then use different parts of the data
1995     for different criminal purposes.
1996   </p><p>
1997     For example, attackers can use leaked username and password
1998     combinations to hijack whole fleets of commercial vehicles that
1999     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmpx4x/hacker-monitor-cars-kill-engine-gps-tracking-apps" target="_top">have
2000     been fitted with anti-theft GPS trackers and immobilizers</a> or
2001     to hijack baby monitors in order to
2002     <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
2003     toddlers with the audio tracks from pornography</a>. Attackers
2004     use leaked data to trick phone companies into giving them your phone
2005     number, then they intercept SMS-based two-factor authentication
2006     codes in order to take over your email, bank account, and/or
2007     cryptocurrency wallets.
2008   </p><p>
2009     Attackers are endlessly inventive in the pursuit of creative ways to
2010     weaponize leaked data. One common use of leaked data is to penetrate
2011     companies in order to access <span class="emphasis"><em>more</em></span> data.
2012   </p><p>
2013     Like spies, online fraudsters are totally dependent on companies
2014     over-collecting and over-retaining our data. Spy agencies sometimes
2015     pay companies for access to their data or intimidate them into
2016     giving it up, but sometimes they work just like criminals do — by
2017     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24751821" target="_top">sneaking
2018     data out of companies’ databases</a>.
2019   </p><p>
2020     The over-collection of data has a host of terrible social
2021     consequences, from the erosion of our authentic selves to the
2022     undermining of social progress, from state surveillance to an
2023     epidemic of online crime. Commercial surveillance is also a boon to
2024     people running influence campaigns, but that’s the least of our
2025     troubles.
2026   </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
2027   exceptionalism</h2></div></div></div><p>
2028     Big Tech has long practiced technology exceptionalism: the idea that
2029     it should not be subject to the mundane laws and norms of
2030     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">meatspace.</span>”</span> Mottoes like Facebook’s <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">move fast and break things</span>”</span>
2031     attracted justifiable scorn of the companies’ self-serving rhetoric.
2032   </p><p>
2033     Tech exceptionalism got us all into a lot of trouble, so it’s ironic
2034     and distressing to see Big Tech’s critics committing the same sin.
2035   </p><p>
2036     Big Tech is not a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>”</span> that cannot be cured through
2037     the traditional anti-monopoly remedies of trustbusting (forcing
2038     companies to divest of competitors they have acquired) and bans on
2039     mergers to monopoly and other anti-competitive tactics. Big Tech
2040     does not have the power to use machine learning to influence our
2041     behavior so thoroughly that markets lose the ability to punish bad
2042     actors and reward superior competitors. Big Tech has no rule-writing
2043     mind-control ray that necessitates ditching our old toolbox.
2044   </p><p>
2045     The thing is, people have been claiming to have perfected
2046     mind-control rays for centuries, and every time, it turned out to be
2047     a con — though sometimes the con artists were also conning
2048     themselves.
2049   </p><p>
2050     For generations, the advertising industry has been steadily
2051     improving its ability to sell advertising services to businesses
2052     while only making marginal gains in selling those businesses’
2053     products to prospective customers. John Wanamaker’s lament that <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">50%
2054     of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%</span>”</span> is
2055     a testament to the triumph of <span class="emphasis"><em>ad executives</em></span>,
2056     who successfully convinced Wanamaker that only half of the money he
2057     spent went to waste.
2058   </p><p>
2059     The tech industry has made enormous improvements in the science of
2060     convincing businesses that they’re good at advertising while their
2061     actual improvements to advertising — as opposed to targeting — have
2062     been pretty ho-hum. The vogue for machine learning — and the
2063     mystical invocation of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">artificial intelligence</span>”</span> as a synonym for
2064     straightforward statistical inference techniques — has greatly
2065     boosted the efficacy of Big Tech’s sales pitch as marketers have
2066     exploited potential customers’ lack of technical sophistication to
2067     get away with breathtaking acts of overpromising and
2068     underdelivering.
2069   </p><p>
2070     It’s tempting to think that if businesses are willing to pour
2071     billions into a venture that the venture must be a good one. Yet
2072     there are plenty of times when this rule of thumb has led us astray.
2073     For example, it’s virtually unheard of for managed investment funds
2074     to outperform simple index funds, and investors who put their money
2075     into the hands of expert money managers overwhelmingly fare worse
2076     than those who entrust their savings to index funds. But managed
2077     funds still account for the majority of the money invested in the
2078     markets, and they are patronized by some of the richest, most
2079     sophisticated investors in the world. Their vote of confidence in an
2080     underperforming sector is a parable about the role of luck in wealth
2081     accumulation, not a sign that managed funds are a good buy.
2082   </p><p>
2083     The claims of Big Tech’s mind-control system are full of tells that
2084     the enterprise is a con. For example,
2085     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01415/full" target="_top">the
2086     reliance on the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Big Five</span>”</span> personality traits</a> as a primary
2087     means of influencing people even though the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Big Five</span>”</span> theory is
2088     unsupported by any large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is
2089     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/" target="_top">mostly
2090     the realm of marketing hucksters and pop psych</a>.
2091   </p><p>
2092     Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms
2093     can accurately perform <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">sentiment analysis</span>”</span> or detect peoples’ moods
2094     based on their <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">microexpressions,</span>”</span> but
2095     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647040758/advertising-on-facebook-is-it-worth-it" target="_top">these
2096     are marketing claims, not scientific ones</a>. These methods are
2097     largely untested by independent scientific experts, and where they
2098     have been tested, they’ve been found sorely wanting.
2099     Microexpressions are particularly suspect as the companies that
2100     specialize in training people to detect them
2101     <a class="ulink" href="https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/" target="_top">have
2102     been shown</a> to underperform relative to random chance.
2103   </p><p>
2104     Big Tech has been so good at marketing its own supposed superpowers
2105     that it’s easy to believe that they can market everything else with
2106     similar acumen, but it’s a mistake to believe the hype. Any
2107     statement a company makes about the quality of its products is
2108     clearly not impartial. The fact that we distrust all the things that
2109     Big Tech says about its data handling, compliance with privacy laws,
2110     etc., is only reasonable — but why on Earth would we treat Big
2111     Tech’s marketing literature as the gospel truth? Big Tech lies about
2112     just about <span class="emphasis"><em>everything</em></span>, including how well its
2113     machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work.
2114   </p><p>
2115     That skepticism should infuse all of our evaluations of Big Tech and
2116     its supposed abilities, including our perusal of its patents. Zuboff
2117     vests these patents with enormous significance, pointing out that
2118     Google claimed extensive new persuasion capabilities in
2119     <a class="ulink" href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050131762A1/en" target="_top">its
2120     patent filings</a>. These claims are doubly suspect: first,
2121     because they are so self-serving, and second, because the patent
2122     itself is so notoriously an invitation to exaggeration.
2123   </p><p>
2124     Patent applications take the form of a series of claims and range
2125     from broad to narrow. A typical patent starts out by claiming that
2126     its authors have invented a method or system for doing every
2127     conceivable thing that anyone might do, ever, with any tool or
2128     device. Then it narrows that claim in successive stages until we get
2129     to the actual <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">invention</span>”</span> that is the true subject of the patent.
2130     The hope is that the patent examiner — who is almost certainly
2131     overworked and underinformed — will miss the fact that some or all
2132     of these claims are ridiculous, or at least suspect, and grant the
2133     patent’s broader claims. Patents for unpatentable things are still
2134     incredibly useful because they can be wielded against competitors
2135     who might license that patent or steer clear of its claims rather
2136     than endure the lengthy, expensive process of contesting it.
2137   </p><p>
2138     What’s more, software patents are routinely granted even though the
2139     filer doesn’t have any evidence that they can do the thing claimed
2140     by the patent. That is, you can patent an <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">invention</span>”</span> that you
2141     haven’t actually made and that you don’t know how to make.
2142   </p><p>
2143     With these considerations in hand, it becomes obvious that the fact
2144     that a Big Tech company has patented what it
2145     <span class="emphasis"><em>says</em></span> is an effective mind-control ray is
2146     largely irrelevant to whether Big Tech can in fact control our
2147     minds.
2148   </p><p>
2149     Big Tech collects our data for many reasons, including the
2150     diminishing returns on existing stores of data. But many tech
2151     companies also collect data out of a mistaken tech exceptionalist
2152     belief in the network effects of data. Network effects occur when
2153     each new user in a system increases its value. The classic example
2154     is fax machines: A single fax machine is of no use, two fax machines
2155     are of limited use, but every new fax machine that’s put to use
2156     after the first doubles the number of possible fax-to-fax links.
2157   </p><p>
2158     Data mined for predictive systems doesn’t necessarily produce these
2159     dividends. Think of Netflix: The predictive value of the data mined
2160     from a million English-speaking Netflix viewers is hardly improved
2161     by the addition of one more user’s viewing data. Most of the data
2162     Netflix acquires after that first minimum viable sample duplicates
2163     existing data and produces only minimal gains. Meanwhile, retraining
2164     models with new data gets progressively more expensive as the number
2165     of data points increases, and manual tasks like labeling and
2166     validating data do not get cheaper at scale.
2167   </p><p>
2168     Businesses pursue fads to the detriment of their profits all the
2169     time, especially when the businesses and their investors are not
2170     motivated by the prospect of becoming profitable but rather by the
2171     prospect of being acquired by a Big Tech giant or by having an IPO.
2172     For these firms, ticking faddish boxes like <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">collects as much data
2173     as possible</span>”</span> might realize a bigger return on investment than
2174     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">collects a business-appropriate quantity of data.</span>”</span>
2175   </p><p>
2176     This is another harm of tech exceptionalism: The belief that more
2177     data always produces more profits in the form of more insights that
2178     can be translated into better mind-control rays drives firms to
2179     over-collect and over-retain data beyond all rationality. And since
2180     the firms are behaving irrationally, a good number of them will go
2181     out of business and become ghost ships whose cargo holds are stuffed
2182     full of data that can harm people in myriad ways — but which no one
2183     is responsible for antey longer. Even if the companies don’t go
2184     under, the data they collect is maintained behind the minimum viable
2185     security — just enough security to keep the company viable while it
2186     waits to get bought out by a tech giant, an amount calculated to
2187     spend not one penny more than is necessary on protecting data.
2188   </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
2189   capitalism: The Snapchat story</h2></div></div></div><p>
2190     For the first decade of its existence, Facebook competed with the
2191     social media giants of the day (Myspace, Orkut, etc.) by presenting
2192     itself as the pro-privacy alternative. Indeed, Facebook justified
2193     its walled garden — which let users bring in data from the web but
2194     blocked web services like Google Search from indexing and caching
2195     Facebook pages — as a pro-privacy measure that protected users from
2196     the surveillance-happy winners of the social media wars like
2197     Myspace.
2198   </p><p>
2199     Despite frequent promises that it would never collect or analyze its
2200     users’ data, Facebook periodically created initiatives that did just
2201     that, like the creepy, ham-fisted Beacon tool, which spied on you as
2202     you moved around the web and then added your online activities to
2203     your public timeline, allowing your friends to monitor your browsing
2204     habits. Beacon sparked a user revolt. Every time, Facebook backed
2205     off from its surveillance initiative, but not all the way;
2206     inevitably, the new Facebook would be more surveilling than the old
2207     Facebook, though not quite as surveilling as the intermediate
2208     Facebook following the launch of the new product or service.
2209   </p><p>
2210     The pace at which Facebook ramped up its surveillance efforts seems
2211     to have been set by Facebook’s competitive landscape. The more
2212     competitors Facebook had, the better it behaved. Every time a major
2213     competitor foundered, Facebook’s behavior
2214     <a class="ulink" href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362" target="_top">got
2215     markedly worse</a>.
2216   </p><p>
2217     All the while, Facebook was prodigiously acquiring companies,
2218     including a company called Onavo. Nominally, Onavo made a
2219     battery-monitoring mobile app. But the permissions that Onavo
2220     required were so expansive that the app was able to gather
2221     fine-grained telemetry on everything users did with their phones,
2222     including which apps they used and how they were using them.
2223   </p><p>
2224     Through Onavo, Facebook discovered that it was losing market share
2225     to Snapchat, an app that — like Facebook a decade before — billed
2226     itself as the pro-privacy alternative to the status quo. Through
2227     Onavo, Facebook was able to mine data from the devices of Snapchat
2228     users, including both current and former Snapchat users. This
2229     spurred Facebook to acquire Instagram — some features of which
2230     competed with Snapchat — and then allowed Facebook to fine-tune
2231     Instagram’s features and sales pitch to erode Snapchat’s gains and
2232     ensure that Facebook would not have to face the kinds of competitive
2233     pressures it had earlier inflicted on Myspace and Orkut.
2234   </p><p>
2235     The story of how Facebook crushed Snapchat reveals the relationship
2236     between monopoly and surveillance capitalism. Facebook combined
2237     surveillance with lax antitrust enforcement to spot the competitive
2238     threat of Snapchat on its horizon and then take decisive action
2239     against it. Facebook’s surveillance capitalism let it avert
2240     competitive pressure with anti-competitive tactics. Facebook users
2241     still want privacy — Facebook hasn’t used surveillance to brainwash
2242     them out of it — but they can’t get it because Facebook’s
2243     surveillance lets it destroy any hope of a rival service emerging
2244     that competes on privacy features.
2245   </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>
2246     A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of
2247     Facebook and other Big Tech companies by fielding <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">indieweb</span>”</span>
2248     alternatives — Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, Diaspora as a
2249     Facebook alternative, etc. — but these efforts have failed to attain
2250     any kind of liftoff.
2251   </p><p>
2252     Fundamentally, each of these services is hamstrung by the same
2253     problem: Every potential user for a Facebook or Twitter alternative
2254     has to convince all their friends to follow them to a decentralized
2255     web alternative in order to continue to realize the benefit of
2256     social media. For many of us, the only reason to have a Facebook
2257     account is that our friends have Facebook accounts, and the reason
2258     they have Facebook accounts is that <span class="emphasis"><em>we</em></span> have
2259     Facebook accounts.
2260   </p><p>
2261     All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant
2262     platforms — into <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">kill zones</span>”</span> that investors will not fund new
2263     entrants for.
2264   </p><p>
2265     And yet, all of today’s tech giants came into existence despite the
2266     entrenched advantage of the companies that came before them. To
2267     understand how that happened, you have to understand both
2268     interoperability and adversarial interoperability.
2269   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
2270       The hard problem of our species is coordination.
2271     </p></blockquote></div><p>
2272     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Interoperability</span>”</span> is the ability of two technologies to work with
2273     one another: Anyone can make an LP that will play on any record
2274     player, anyone can make a filter you can install in your stove’s
2275     extractor fan, anyone can make gasoline for your car, anyone can
2276     make a USB phone charger that fits in your car’s cigarette lighter
2277     receptacle, anyone can make a light bulb that works in your light
2278     socket, anyone can make bread that will toast in your toaster.
2279   </p><p>
2280     Interoperability is often a source of innovation and consumer
2281     benefit: Apple made the first commercially successful PC, but
2282     millions of independent software vendors made interoperable programs
2283     that ran on the Apple II Plus. The simple analog antenna inputs on
2284     the back of TVs first allowed cable operators to connect directly to
2285     TVs, then they allowed game console companies and then personal
2286     computer companies to use standard televisions as displays. Standard
2287     RJ-11 telephone jacks allowed for the production of phones from a
2288     variety of vendors in a variety of forms, from the free
2289     football-shaped phone that came with a <span class="emphasis"><em>Sports
2290     Illustrated</em></span> subscription to business phones with
2291     speakers, hold functions, and so on and then answering machines and
2292     finally modems, paving the way for the internet revolution.
2293   </p><p>
2294     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Interoperability</span>”</span> is often used interchangeably with
2295     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">standardization,</span>”</span> which is the process when manufacturers and other
2296     stakeholders hammer out a set of agreed-upon rules for implementing
2297     a technology, such as the electrical plug on your wall, the CAN bus
2298     used by your car’s computer systems, or the HTML instructions that
2299     your browser interprets.
2300   </p><p>
2301     But interoperability doesn’t require standardization — indeed,
2302     standardization often proceeds from the chaos of ad hoc
2303     interoperability measures. The inventor of the cigarette-lighter USB
2304     charger didn’t need to get permission from car manufacturers or even
2305     the manufacturers of the dashboard lighter subcomponent. The
2306     automakers didn’t take any countermeasures to prevent the use of
2307     these aftermarket accessories by their customers, but they also
2308     didn’t do anything to make life easier for the chargers’
2309     manufacturers. This is a kind of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">neutral interoperability.</span>”</span>
2310   </p><p>
2311     Beyond neutral interoperability, there is <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">adversarial
2312     interoperability.</span>”</span> That’s when a manufacturer makes a product that
2313     interoperates with another manufacturer’s product <span class="emphasis"><em>despite
2314     the second manufacturer’s objections</em></span> and <span class="emphasis"><em>even
2315     if that means bypassing a security system designed to prevent
2316     interoperability</em></span>.
2317   </p><p>
2318     Probably the most familiar form of adversarial interoperability is
2319     third-party printer ink. Printer manufacturers claim that they sell
2320     printers below cost and that the only way they can recoup the losses
2321     they incur is by charging high markups on ink. To prevent the owners
2322     of printers from buying ink elsewhere, the printer companies deploy
2323     a suite of anti-customer security systems that detect and reject
2324     both refilled and third-party cartridges.
2325   </p><p>
2326     Owners of printers take the position that HP and Epson and Brother
2327     are not charities and that customers for their wares have no
2328     obligation to help them survive, and so if the companies choose to
2329     sell their products at a loss, that’s their foolish choice and their
2330     consequences to live with. Likewise, competitors who make ink or
2331     refill kits observe that they don’t owe printer companies anything,
2332     and their erosion of printer companies’ margins are the printer
2333     companies’ problems, not their competitors’. After all, the printer
2334     companies shed no tears when they drive a refiller out of business,
2335     so why should the refillers concern themselves with the economic
2336     fortunes of the printer companies?
2337   </p><p>
2338     Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the
2339     history of the tech industry: from the founding of the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">alt.*</span>”</span>
2340     Usenet hierarchy (which was started against the wishes of Usenet’s
2341     maintainers and which grew to be bigger than all of Usenet combined)
2342     to the browser wars (when Netscape and Microsoft devoted massive
2343     engineering efforts to making their browsers incompatible with the
2344     other’s special commands and peccadilloes) to Facebook (whose
2345     success was built in part by helping its new users stay in touch
2346     with friends they’d left behind on Myspace because Facebook supplied
2347     them with a tool that scraped waiting messages from Myspace and
2348     imported them into Facebook, effectively creating an Facebook-based
2349     Myspace reader).
2350   </p><p>
2351     Today, incumbency is seen as an unassailable advantage. Facebook is
2352     where all of your friends are, so no one can start a Facebook
2353     competitor. But adversarial compatibility reverses the competitive
2354     advantage: If you were allowed to compete with Facebook by providing
2355     a tool that imported all your users’ waiting Facebook messages into
2356     an environment that competed on lines that Facebook couldn’t cross,
2357     like eliminating surveillance and ads, then Facebook would be at a
2358     huge disadvantage. It would have assembled all possible ex-Facebook
2359     users into a single, easy-to-find service; it would have educated
2360     them on how a Facebook-like service worked and what its potential
2361     benefits were; and it would have provided an easy means for
2362     disgruntled Facebook users to tell their friends where they might
2363     expect better treatment.
2364   </p><p>
2365     Adversarial interoperability was once the norm and a key contributor
2366     to the dynamic, vibrant tech scene, but now it is stuck behind a
2367     thicket of laws and regulations that add legal risks to the
2368     tried-and-true tactics of adversarial interoperability. New rules
2369     and new interpretations of existing rules mean that a would-be
2370     adversarial interoperator needs to steer clear of claims under
2371     copyright, terms of service, trade secrecy, tortious interference,
2372     and patent.
2373   </p><p>
2374     In the absence of a competitive market, lawmakers have resorted to
2375     assigning expensive, state-like duties to Big Tech firms, such as
2376     automatically filtering user contributions for copyright
2377     infringement or terrorist and extremist content or detecting and
2378     preventing harassment in real time or controlling access to sexual
2379     material.
2380   </p><p>
2381     These measures put a floor under how small we can make Big Tech
2382     because only the very largest companies can afford the humans and
2383     automated filters needed to perform these duties.
2384   </p><p>
2385     But that’s not the only way in which making platforms responsible
2386     for policing their users undermines competition. A platform that is
2387     expected to police its users’ conduct must prevent many vital
2388     adversarial interoperability techniques lest these subvert its
2389     policing measures. For example, if someone using a Twitter
2390     replacement like Mastodon is able to push messages into Twitter and
2391     read messages out of Twitter, they could avoid being caught by
2392     automated systems that detect and prevent harassment (such as
2393     systems that use the timing of messages or IP-based rules to make
2394     guesses about whether someone is a harasser).
2395   </p><p>
2396     To the extent that we are willing to let Big Tech police itself —
2397     rather than making Big Tech small enough that users can leave bad
2398     platforms for better ones and small enough that a regulation that
2399     simply puts a platform out of business will not destroy billions of
2400     users’ access to their communities and data — we build the case that
2401     Big Tech should be able to block its competitors and make it easier
2402     for Big Tech to demand legal enforcement tools to ban and punish
2403     attempts at adversarial interoperability.
2404   </p><p>
2405     Ultimately, we can try to fix Big Tech by making it responsible for
2406     bad acts by its users, or we can try to fix the internet by cutting
2407     Big Tech down to size. But we can’t do both. To replace today’s
2408     giant products with pluralistic protocols, we need to clear the
2409     legal thicket that prevents adversarial interoperability so that
2410     tomorrow’s nimble, personal, small-scale products can federate
2411     themselves with giants like Facebook, allowing the users who’ve left
2412     to continue to communicate with users who haven’t left yet, reaching
2413     tendrils over Facebook’s garden wall that Facebook’s trapped users
2414     can use to scale the walls and escape to the global, open web.
2415   </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>
2416     Tech is not the only industry that has undergone massive
2417     concentration since the Reagan era. Virtually every major industry —
2418     from oil to newspapers to meatpacking to sea freight to eyewear to
2419     online pornography — has become a clubby oligarchy that just a few
2420     players dominate.
2421   </p><p>
2422     At the same time, every industry has become something of a tech
2423     industry as general-purpose computers and general-purpose networks
2424     and the promise of efficiencies through data-driven analysis infuse
2425     every device, process, and firm with tech.
2426   </p><p>
2427     This phenomenon of industrial concentration is part of a wider story
2428     about wealth concentration overall as a smaller and smaller number
2429     of people own more and more of our world. This concentration of both
2430     wealth and industries means that our political outcomes are
2431     increasingly beholden to the parochial interests of the people and
2432     companies with all the money.
2433   </p><p>
2434     That means that whenever a regulator asks a question with an
2435     obvious, empirical answer (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Are humans causing climate change?</span>”</span> or
2436     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Should we let companies conduct commercial mass surveillance?</span>”</span> or
2437     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Does society benefit from allowing network neutrality
2438     violations?</span>”</span>), the answer that comes out is only correct if that
2439     correctness meets with the approval of rich people and the
2440     industries that made them so wealthy.
2441   </p><p>
2442     Rich people have always played an outsized role in politics and more
2443     so since the Supreme Court’s <span class="emphasis"><em>Citizens United</em></span>
2444     decision eliminated key controls over political spending. Widening
2445     inequality and wealth concentration means that the very richest
2446     people are now a lot richer and can afford to spend a lot more money
2447     on political projects than ever before. Think of the Koch brothers
2448     or George Soros or Bill Gates.
2449   </p><p>
2450     But the policy distortions of rich individuals pale in comparison to
2451     the policy distortions that concentrated industries are capable of.
2452     The companies in highly concentrated industries are much more
2453     profitable than companies in competitive industries — no competition
2454     means not having to reduce prices or improve quality to win
2455     customers — leaving them with bigger capital surpluses to spend on
2456     lobbying.
2457   </p><p>
2458     Concentrated industries also find it easier to collaborate on policy
2459     objectives than competitive ones. When all the top execs from your
2460     industry can fit around a single boardroom table, they often do. And
2461     <span class="emphasis"><em>when</em></span> they do, they can forge a consensus
2462     position on regulation.
2463   </p><p>
2464     Rising through the ranks in a concentrated industry generally means
2465     working at two or three of the big companies. When there are only
2466     relatively few companies in a given industry, each company has a
2467     more ossified executive rank, leaving ambitious execs with fewer
2468     paths to higher positions unless they are recruited to a rival. This
2469     means that the top execs in concentrated industries are likely to
2470     have been colleagues at some point and socialize in the same circles
2471     — connected through social ties or, say, serving as trustees for
2472     each others’ estates. These tight social bonds foster a collegial,
2473     rather than competitive, attitude.
2474   </p><p>
2475     Highly concentrated industries also present a regulatory conundrum.
2476     When an industry is dominated by just four or five companies, the
2477     only people who are likely to truly understand the industry’s
2478     practices are its veteran executives. This means that top regulators
2479     are often former execs of the companies they are supposed to be
2480     regulating. These turns in government are often tacitly understood
2481     to be leaves of absence from industry, with former employers
2482     welcoming their erstwhile watchdogs back into their executive ranks
2483     once their terms have expired.
2484   </p><p>
2485     All this is to say that the tight social bonds, small number of
2486     firms, and regulatory capture of concentrated industries give the
2487     companies that comprise them the power to dictate many, if not all,
2488     of the regulations that bind them.
2489   </p><p>
2490     This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders
2491     <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
2492     the right to practice predatory lending</a> or Apple
2493     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxayp/source-apple-will-fight-right-to-repair-legislation" target="_top">winning
2494     the right to decide who can fix your phone</a> or Google and
2495     Facebook winning the right to breach your private data without
2496     suffering meaningful consequences or victories for pipeline
2497     companies or impunity for opioid manufacturers or massive tax
2498     subsidies for incredibly profitable dominant businesses, it’s
2499     increasingly apparent that many of our official, evidence-based
2500     truth-seeking processes are, in fact, auctions for sale to the
2501     highest bidder.
2502   </p><p>
2503     It’s really impossible to overstate what a terrifying prospect this
2504     is. We live in an incredibly high-tech society, and none of us could
2505     acquire the expertise to evaluate every technological proposition
2506     that stands between us and our untimely, horrible deaths. You might
2507     devote your life to acquiring the media literacy to distinguish good
2508     scientific journals from corrupt pay-for-play lookalikes and the
2509     statistical literacy to evaluate the quality of the analysis in the
2510     journals as well as the microbiology and epidemiology knowledge to
2511     determine whether you can trust claims about the safety of vaccines
2512     — but that would still leave you unqualified to judge whether the
2513     wiring in your home will give you a lethal shock
2514     <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> whether your car’s brakes’ software will
2515     cause them to fail unpredictably <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> whether
2516     the hygiene standards at your butcher are sufficient to keep you
2517     from dying after you finish your dinner.
2518   </p><p>
2519     In a world as complex as this one, we have to defer to authorities,
2520     and we keep them honest by making those authorities accountable to
2521     us and binding them with rules to prevent conflicts of interest. We
2522     can’t possibly acquire the expertise to adjudicate conflicting
2523     claims about the best way to make the world safe and prosperous, but
2524     we <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> determine whether the adjudication
2525     process itself is trustworthy.
2526   </p><p>
2527     Right now, it’s obviously not.
2528   </p><p>
2529     The past 40 years of rising inequality and industry concentration,
2530     together with increasingly weak accountability and transparency for
2531     expert agencies, has created an increasingly urgent sense of
2532     impending doom, the sense that there are vast conspiracies afoot
2533     that operate with tacit official approval despite the likelihood
2534     they are working to better themselves by ruining the rest of us.
2535   </p><p>
2536     For example, it’s been decades since Exxon’s own scientists
2537     concluded that its products would render the Earth uninhabitable by
2538     humans. And yet those decades were lost to us, in large part because
2539     Exxon lobbied governments and sowed doubt about the dangers of its
2540     products and did so with the cooperation of many public officials.
2541     When the survival of you and everyone you love is threatened by
2542     conspiracies, it’s not unreasonable to start questioning the things
2543     you think you know in an attempt to determine whether they, too, are
2544     the outcome of another conspiracy.
2545   </p><p>
2546     The collapse of the credibility of our systems for divining and
2547     upholding truths has left us in a state of epistemological chaos.
2548     Once, most of us might have assumed that the system was working and
2549     that our regulations reflected our best understanding of the
2550     empirical truths of the world as they were best understood — now we
2551     have to find our own experts to help us sort the true from the
2552     false.
2553   </p><p>
2554     If you’re like me, you probably believe that vaccines are safe, but
2555     you (like me) probably also can’t explain the microbiology or
2556     statistics. Few of us have the math skills to review the literature
2557     on vaccine safety and describe why their statistical reasoning is
2558     sound. Likewise, few of us can review the stats in the (now
2559     discredited) literature on opioid safety and explain how those stats
2560     were manipulated. Both vaccines and opioids were embraced by medical
2561     authorities, after all, and one is safe while the other could ruin
2562     your life. You’re left with a kind of inchoate constellation of
2563     rules of thumb about which experts you trust to fact-check
2564     controversial claims and then to explain how all those respectable
2565     doctors with their peer-reviewed research on opioid safety
2566     <span class="emphasis"><em>were</em></span> an aberration and then how you know that
2567     the doctors writing about vaccine safety are
2568     <span class="emphasis"><em>not</em></span> an aberration.
2569   </p><p>
2570     I’m 100% certain that vaccinating is safe and effective, but I’m
2571     also at something of a loss to explain exactly,
2572     <span class="emphasis"><em>precisely,</em></span> why I believe this, given all the
2573     corruption I know about and the many times the stamp of certainty
2574     has turned out to be a parochial lie told to further enrich the
2575     super rich.
2576   </p><p>
2577     Fake news — conspiracy theories, racist ideologies, scientific
2578     denialism — has always been with us. What’s changed today is not the
2579     mix of ideas in the public discourse but the popularity of the worst
2580     ideas in that mix. Conspiracy and denial have skyrocketed in
2581     lockstep with the growth of Big Inequality, which has also tracked
2582     the rise of Big Tech and Big Pharma and Big Wrestling and Big Car
2583     and Big Movie Theater and Big Everything Else.
2584   </p><p>
2585     No one can say for certain why this has happened, but the two
2586     dominant camps are idealism (the belief that the people who argue
2587     for these conspiracies have gotten better at explaining them, maybe
2588     with the help of machine-learning tools) or materialism (the ideas
2589     have become more attractive because of material conditions in the
2590     world).
2591   </p><p>
2592     I’m a materialist. I’ve been exposed to the arguments of conspiracy
2593     theorists all my life, and I have not experienced any qualitative
2594     leap in the quality of those arguments.
2595   </p><p>
2596     The major difference is in the world, not the arguments. In a time
2597     where actual conspiracies are commonplace, conspiracy theories
2598     acquire a ring of plausibility.
2599   </p><p>
2600     We have always had disagreements about what’s true, but today, we
2601     have a disagreement over how we know whether something is true. This
2602     is an epistemological crisis, not a crisis over belief. It’s a
2603     crisis over the credibility of our truth-seeking exercises, from
2604     scientific journals (in an era where the biggest journal publishers
2605     have been caught producing pay-to-play journals for junk science) to
2606     regulations (in an era where regulators are routinely cycling in and
2607     out of business) to education (in an era where universities are
2608     dependent on corporate donations to keep their lights on).
2609   </p><p>
2610     Targeting — surveillance capitalism — makes it easier to find people
2611     who are undergoing this epistemological crisis, but it doesn’t
2612     create the crisis. For that, you need to look to corruption.
2613   </p><p>
2614     And, conveniently enough, it’s corruption that allows surveillance
2615     capitalism to grow by dismantling monopoly protections, by
2616     permitting reckless collection and retention of personal data, by
2617     allowing ads to be targeted in secret, and by foreclosing on the
2618     possibility of going somewhere else where you might continue to
2619     enjoy your friends without subjecting yourself to commercial
2620     surveillance.
2621   </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>
2622     I reject both iterations of technological exceptionalism. I reject
2623     the idea that tech is uniquely terrible and led by people who are
2624     greedier or worse than the leaders of other industries, and I reject
2625     the idea that tech is so good — or so intrinsically prone to
2626     concentration — that it can’t be blamed for its present-day
2627     monopolistic status.
2628   </p><p>
2629     I think tech is just another industry, albeit one that grew up in
2630     the absence of real monopoly constraints. It may have been first,
2631     but it isn’t the worst nor will it be the last.
2632   </p><p>
2633     But there’s one way in which I <span class="emphasis"><em>am</em></span> a tech
2634     exceptionalist. I believe that online tools are the key to
2635     overcoming problems that are much more urgent than tech
2636     monopolization: climate change, inequality, misogyny, and
2637     discrimination on the basis of race, gender identity, and other
2638     factors. The internet is how we will recruit people to fight those
2639     fights, and how we will coordinate their labor. Tech is not a
2640     substitute for democratic accountability, the rule of law, fairness,
2641     or stability — but it’s a means to achieve these things.
2642   </p><p>
2643     The hard problem of our species is coordination. Everything from
2644     climate change to social change to running a business to making a
2645     family work can be viewed as a collective action problem.
2646   </p><p>
2647     The internet makes it easier than at any time before to find people
2648     who want to work on a project with you — hence the success of free
2649     and open-source software, crowdfunding, and racist terror groups —
2650     and easier than ever to coordinate the work you do.
2651   </p><p>
2652     The internet and the computers we connect to it also possess an
2653     exceptional quality: general-purposeness. The internet is designed
2654     to allow any two parties to communicate any data, using any
2655     protocol, without permission from anyone else. The only production
2656     design we have for computers is the general-purpose, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Turing
2657     complete</span>”</span> computer that can run every program we can express in
2658     symbolic logic.
2659   </p><p>
2660     This means that every time someone with a special communications
2661     need invests in infrastructure and techniques to make the internet
2662     faster, cheaper, and more robust, this benefit redounds to everyone
2663     else who is using the internet to communicate. And this also means
2664     that every time someone with a special computing need invests to
2665     make computers faster, cheaper, and more robust, every other
2666     computing application is a potential beneficiary of this work.
2667   </p><p>
2668     For these reasons, every type of communication is gradually absorbed
2669     into the internet, and every type of device — from airplanes to
2670     pacemakers — eventually becomes a computer in a fancy case.
2671   </p><p>
2672     While these considerations don’t preclude regulating networks and
2673     computers, they do call for gravitas and caution when doing so
2674     because changes to regulatory frameworks could ripple out to have
2675     unintended consequences in many, many other domains.
2676   </p><p>
2677     The upshot of this is that our best hope of solving the big
2678     coordination problems — climate change, inequality, etc. — is with
2679     free, fair, and open tech. Our best hope of keeping tech free, fair,
2680     and open is to exercise caution in how we regulate tech and to
2681     attend closely to the ways in which interventions to solve one
2682     problem might create problems in other domains.
2683   </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>
2684     Big Tech has a funny relationship with information. When you’re
2685     generating information — anything from the location data streaming
2686     off your mobile device to the private messages you send to friends
2687     on a social network — it claims the rights to make unlimited use of
2688     that data.
2689   </p><p>
2690     But when you have the audacity to turn the tables — to use a tool
2691     that blocks ads or slurps your waiting updates out of a social
2692     network and puts them in another app that lets you set your own
2693     priorities and suggestions or crawls their system to allow you to
2694     start a rival business — they claim that you’re stealing from them.
2695   </p><p>
2696     The thing is, information is a very bad fit for any kind of private
2697     property regime. Property rights are useful for establishing markets
2698     that can lead to the effective development of fallow assets. These
2699     markets depend on clear titles to ensure that the things being
2700     bought and sold in them can, in fact, be bought and sold.
2701   </p><p>
2702     Information rarely has such a clear title. Take phone numbers:
2703     There’s clearly something going wrong when Facebook slurps up
2704     millions of users’ address books and uses the phone numbers it finds
2705     in them to plot out social graphs and fill in missing information
2706     about other users.
2707   </p><p>
2708     But the phone numbers Facebook nonconsensually acquires in this
2709     transaction are not the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">property</span>”</span> of the users they’re taken from
2710     nor do they belong to the people whose phones ring when you dial
2711     those numbers. The numbers are mere integers, 10 digits in the U.S.
2712     and Canada, and they appear in millions of places, including
2713     somewhere deep in pi as well as numerous other contexts. Giving
2714     people ownership titles to integers is an obviously terrible idea.
2715   </p><p>
2716     Likewise for the facts that Facebook and other commercial
2717     surveillance operators acquire about us, like that we are the
2718     children of our parents or the parents to our children or that we
2719     had a conversation with someone else or went to a public place.
2720     These data points can’t be property in the sense that your house or
2721     your shirt is your property because the title to them is
2722     intrinsically muddy: Does your mom own the fact that she is your
2723     mother? Do you? Do both of you? What about your dad — does he own
2724     this fact too, or does he have to license the fact from you (or your
2725     mom or both of you) in order to use this fact? What about the
2726     hundreds or thousands of other people who know these facts?
2727   </p><p>
2728     If you go to a Black Lives Matter demonstration, do the other
2729     demonstrators need your permission to post their photos from the
2730     event? The online fights over
2731     <a class="ulink" href="https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-take-photos-at-protests/" target="_top">when
2732     and how to post photos from demonstrations</a> reveal a nuanced,
2733     complex issue that cannot be easily hand-waved away by giving one
2734     party a property right that everyone else in the mix has to respect.
2735   </p><p>
2736     The fact that information isn’t a good fit with property and markets
2737     doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable. Babies aren’t property, but
2738     they’re inarguably valuable. In fact, we have a whole set of rules
2739     just for babies as well as a subset of those rules that apply to
2740     humans more generally. Someone who argues that babies won’t be truly
2741     valuable until they can be bought and sold like loaves of bread
2742     would be instantly and rightfully condemned as a monster.
2743   </p><p>
2744     It’s tempting to reach for the property hammer when Big Tech treats
2745     your information like a nail — not least because Big Tech are such
2746     prolific abusers of property hammers when it comes to
2747     <span class="emphasis"><em>their</em></span> information. But this is a mistake. If we
2748     allow markets to dictate the use of our information, then we’ll find
2749     that we’re sellers in a buyers’ market where the Big Tech monopolies
2750     set a price for our data that is so low as to be insignificant or,
2751     more likely, set at a nonnegotiable price of zero in a click-through
2752     agreement that you don’t have the opportunity to modify.
2753   </p><p>
2754     Meanwhile, establishing property rights over information will create
2755     insurmountable barriers to independent data processing. Imagine that
2756     we require a license to be negotiated when a translated document is
2757     compared with its original, something Google has done and continues
2758     to do billions of times to train its automated language translation
2759     tools. Google can afford this, but independent third parties cannot.
2760     Google can staff a clearances department to negotiate one-time
2761     payments to the likes of the EU (one of the major repositories of
2762     translated documents) while independent watchdogs wanting to verify
2763     that the translations are well-prepared, or to root out bias in
2764     translations, will find themselves needing a staffed-up legal
2765     department and millions for licenses before they can even get
2766     started.
2767   </p><p>
2768     The same goes for things like search indexes of the web or photos of
2769     peoples’ houses, which have become contentious thanks to Google’s
2770     Street View project. Whatever problems may exist with Google’s
2771     photographing of street scenes, resolving them by letting people
2772     decide who can take pictures of the facades of their homes from a
2773     public street will surely create even worse ones. Think of how
2774     street photography is important for newsgathering — including
2775     informal newsgathering, like photographing abuses of authority — and
2776     how being able to document housing and street life are important for
2777     contesting eminent domain, advocating for social aid, reporting
2778     planning and zoning violations, documenting discriminatory and
2779     unequal living conditions, and more.
2780   </p><p>
2781     The ownership of facts is antithetical to many kinds of human
2782     progress. It’s hard to imagine a rule that limits Big Tech’s
2783     exploitation of our collective labors without inadvertently banning
2784     people from gathering data on online harassment or compiling indexes
2785     of changes in language or simply investigating how the platforms are
2786     shaping our discourse — all of which require scraping data that
2787     other people have created and subjecting it to scrutiny and
2788     analysis.
2789   </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>
2790     The platforms may oversell their ability to persuade people, but
2791     obviously, persuasion works sometimes. Whether it’s the private
2792     realm that LGBTQ people used to recruit allies and normalize sexual
2793     diversity or the decadeslong project to convince people that markets
2794     are the only efficient way to solve complicated resource allocation
2795     problems, it’s clear that our societal attitudes
2796     <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> change.
2797   </p><p>
2798     The project of shifting societal attitudes is a game of inches and
2799     years. For centuries, svengalis have purported to be able to
2800     accelerate this process, but even the most brutal forms of
2801     propaganda have struggled to make permanent changes. Joseph Goebbels
2802     was able to subject Germans to daily, mandatory, hourslong radio
2803     broadcasts, to round up and torture and murder dissidents, and to
2804     seize full control over their children’s education while banning any
2805     literature, broadcasts, or films that did not comport with his
2806     worldview.
2807   </p><p>
2808     Yet, after 12 years of terror, once the war ended, Nazi ideology was
2809     largely discredited in both East and West Germany, and a program of
2810     national truth and reconciliation was put in its place. Racism and
2811     authoritarianism were never fully abolished in Germany, but neither
2812     were the majority of Germans irrevocably convinced of Nazism — and
2813     the rise of racist authoritarianism in Germany today tells us that
2814     the liberal attitudes that replaced Nazism were no more permanent
2815     than Nazism itself.
2816   </p><p>
2817     Racism and authoritarianism have also always been with us. Anyone
2818     who’s reviewed the kind of messages and arguments that racists put
2819     forward today would be hard-pressed to say that they have gotten
2820     better at presenting their ideas. The same pseudoscience, appeals to
2821     fear, and circular logic that racists presented in the 1980s, when
2822     the cause of white supremacy was on the wane, are to be found in the
2823     communications of leading white nationalists today.
2824   </p><p>
2825     If racists haven’t gotten more convincing in the past decade, then
2826     how is it that more people were convinced to be openly racist at
2827     that time? I believe that the answer lies in the material world, not
2828     the world of ideas. The ideas haven’t gotten more convincing, but
2829     people have become more afraid. Afraid that the state can’t be
2830     trusted to act as an honest broker in life-or-death decisions, from
2831     those regarding the management of the economy to the regulation of
2832     painkillers to the rules for handling private information. Afraid
2833     that the world has become a game of musical chairs in which the
2834     chairs are being taken away at a never-before-seen rate. Afraid that
2835     justice for others will come at their expense. Monopolism isn’t the
2836     cause of these fears, but the inequality and material desperation
2837     and policy malpractice that monopolism contributes to is a
2838     significant contributor to these conditions. Inequality creates the
2839     conditions for both conspiracies and violent racist ideologies, and
2840     then surveillance capitalism lets opportunists target the fearful
2841     and the conspiracy-minded.
2842   </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>
2843     As the old saw goes, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">If you’re not paying for the product, you’re
2844     the product.</span>”</span>
2845   </p><p>
2846     It’s a commonplace belief today that the advent of free,
2847     ad-supported media was the original sin of surveillance capitalism.
2848     The reasoning is that the companies that charged for access couldn’t
2849     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">compete with free</span>”</span> and so they were driven out of business. Their
2850     ad-supported competitors, meanwhile, declared open season on their
2851     users’ data in a bid to improve their ad targeting and make more
2852     money and then resorted to the most sensationalist tactics to
2853     generate clicks on those ads. If only we’d pay for media again, we’d
2854     have a better, more responsible, more sober discourse that would be
2855     better for democracy.
2856   </p><p>
2857     But the degradation of news products long precedes the advent of
2858     ad-supported online news. Long before newspapers were online, lax
2859     antitrust enforcement had opened the door for unprecedented waves of
2860     consolidation and roll-ups in newsrooms. Rival newspapers were
2861     merged, reporters and ad sales staff were laid off, physical plants
2862     were sold and leased back, leaving the companies loaded up with debt
2863     through leveraged buyouts and subsequent profit-taking by the new
2864     owners. In other words, it wasn’t merely shifts in the classified
2865     advertising market, which was long held to be the primary driver in
2866     the decline of the traditional newsroom, that made news companies
2867     unable to adapt to the internet — it was monopolism.
2868   </p><p>
2869     Then, as news companies <span class="emphasis"><em>did</em></span> come online, the ad
2870     revenues they commanded dropped even as the number of internet users
2871     (and thus potential online readers) increased. That shift was a
2872     function of consolidation in the ad sales market, with Google and
2873     Facebook emerging as duopolists who made more money every year from
2874     advertising while paying less and less of it to the publishers whose
2875     work the ads appeared alongside. Monopolism created a buyer’s market
2876     for ad inventory with Facebook and Google acting as gatekeepers.
2877   </p><p>
2878     Paid services continue to exist alongside free ones, and often it is
2879     these paid services — anxious to prevent people from bypassing their
2880     paywalls or sharing paid media with freeloaders — that exert the
2881     most control over their customers. Apple’s iTunes and App Stores are
2882     paid services, but to maximize their profitability, Apple has to
2883     lock its platforms so that third parties can’t make compatible
2884     software without permission. These locks allow the company to
2885     exercise both editorial control (enabling it to exclude
2886     <a class="ulink" href="https://ncac.org/news/blog/does-apples-strict-app-store-content-policy-limit-freedom-of-expression" target="_top">controversial
2887     political material</a>) and technological control, including
2888     control over who can repair the devices it makes. If we’re worried
2889     that ad-supported products deprive people of their right to
2890     self-determination by using persuasion techniques to nudge their
2891     purchase decisions a few degrees in one direction or the other, then
2892     the near-total control a single company holds over the decision of
2893     who gets to sell you software, parts, and service for your iPhone
2894     should have us very worried indeed.
2895   </p><p>
2896     We shouldn’t just be concerned about payment and control: The idea
2897     that paying will improve discourse is also dangerously wrong. The
2898     poor success rate of targeted advertising means that the platforms
2899     have to incentivize you to <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">engage</span>”</span> with posts at extremely high
2900     levels to generate enough pageviews to safeguard their profits. As
2901     discussed earlier, to increase engagement, platforms like Facebook
2902     use machine learning to guess which messages will be most
2903     inflammatory and make a point of shoving those into your eyeballs at
2904     every turn so that you will hate-click and argue with people.
2905   </p><p>
2906     Perhaps paying would fix this, the reasoning goes. If platforms
2907     could be economically viable even if you stopped clicking on them
2908     once your intellectual and social curiosity had been slaked, then
2909     they would have no reason to algorithmically enrage you to get more
2910     clicks out of you, right?
2911   </p><p>
2912     There may be something to that argument, but it still ignores the
2913     wider economic and political context of the platforms and the world
2914     that allowed them to grow so dominant.
2915   </p><p>
2916     Platforms are world-spanning and all-encompassing because they are
2917     monopolies, and they are monopolies because we have gutted our most
2918     important and reliable anti-monopoly rules. Antitrust was neutered
2919     as a key part of the project to make the wealthy wealthier, and that
2920     project has worked. The vast majority of people on Earth have a
2921     negative net worth, and even the dwindling middle class is in a
2922     precarious state, undersaved for retirement, underinsured for
2923     medical disasters, and undersecured against climate and technology
2924     shocks.
2925   </p><p>
2926     In this wildly unequal world, paying doesn’t improve the discourse;
2927     it simply prices discourse out of the range of the majority of
2928     people. Paying for the product is dandy, if you can afford it.
2929   </p><p>
2930     If you think today’s filter bubbles are a problem for our discourse,
2931     imagine what they’d be like if rich people inhabited free-flowing
2932     Athenian marketplaces of ideas where you have to pay for admission
2933     while everyone else lives in online spaces that are subsidized by
2934     wealthy benefactors who relish the chance to establish
2935     conversational spaces where the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">house rules</span>”</span> forbid questioning the
2936     status quo. That is, imagine if the rich seceded from Facebook, and
2937     then, instead of running ads that made money for shareholders,
2938     Facebook became a billionaire’s vanity project that also happened to
2939     ensure that nobody talked about whether it was fair that only
2940     billionaires could afford to hang out in the rarified corners of the
2941     internet.
2942   </p><p>
2943     Behind the idea of paying for access is a belief that free markets
2944     will address Big Tech’s dysfunction. After all, to the extent that
2945     people have a view of surveillance at all, it is generally an
2946     unfavorable one, and the longer and more thoroughly one is
2947     surveilled, the less one tends to like it. Same goes for lock-in: If
2948     HP’s ink or Apple’s App Store were really obviously fantastic, they
2949     wouldn’t need technical measures to prevent users from choosing a
2950     rival’s product. The only reason these technical countermeasures
2951     exist is that the companies don’t believe their customers would
2952     <span class="emphasis"><em>voluntarily</em></span> submit to their terms, and they
2953     want to deprive them of the choice to take their business elsewhere.
2954   </p><p>
2955     Advocates for markets laud their ability to aggregate the diffused
2956     knowledge of buyers and sellers across a whole society through
2957     demand signals, price signals, and so on. The argument for
2958     surveillance capitalism being a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>”</span> is that
2959     machine-learning-driven persuasion techniques distort
2960     decision-making by consumers, leading to incorrect signals —
2961     consumers don’t buy what they prefer, they buy what they’re tricked
2962     into preferring. It follows that the monopolistic practices of
2963     lock-in, which do far more to constrain consumers’ free choices, are
2964     even more of a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism.</span>”</span>
2965   </p><p>
2966     The profitability of any business is constrained by the possibility
2967     that its customers will take their business elsewhere. Both
2968     surveillance and lock-in are anti-features that no customer wants.
2969     But monopolies can capture their regulators, crush their
2970     competitors, insert themselves into their customers’ lives, and
2971     corral people into <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">choosing</span>”</span> their services regardless of whether
2972     they want them — it’s fine to be terrible when there is no
2973     alternative.
2974   </p><p>
2975     Ultimately, surveillance and lock-in are both simply business
2976     strategies that monopolists can choose. Surveillance companies like
2977     Google are perfectly capable of deploying lock-in technologies —
2978     just look at the onerous Android licensing terms that require
2979     device-makers to bundle in Google’s suite of applications. And
2980     lock-in companies like Apple are perfectly capable of subjecting
2981     their users to surveillance if it means keeping the Chinese
2982     government happy and preserving ongoing access to Chinese markets.
2983     Monopolies may be made up of good, ethical people, but as
2984     institutions, they are not your friend — they will do whatever they
2985     can get away with to maximize their profits, and the more
2986     monopolistic they are, the more they <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> get
2987     away with.
2988   </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>
2989     If we’re going to break Big Tech’s death grip on our digital lives,
2990     we’re going to have to fight monopolies. That may sound pretty
2991     mundane and old-fashioned, something out of the New Deal era, while
2992     ending the use of automated behavioral modification feels like the
2993     plotline of a really cool cyberpunk novel.
2994   </p><p>
2995     Meanwhile, breaking up monopolies is something we seem to have
2996     forgotten how to do. There is a bipartisan, trans-Atlantic consensus
2997     that breaking up companies is a fool’s errand at best — liable to
2998     mire your federal prosecutors in decades of litigation — and
2999     counterproductive at worst, eroding the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">consumer benefits</span>”</span> of large
3000     companies with massive efficiencies of scale.
3001   </p><p>
3002     But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books,
3003     terrorizing robber barons, and shattering the illusion of
3004     monopolies’ all-powerful grip on our society. The trustbusting era
3005     could not begin until we found the political will — until the people
3006     convinced politicians they’d have their backs when they went up
3007     against the richest, most powerful men in the world.
3008   </p><p>
3009     Could we find that political will again?
3010   </p><p>
3011     Copyright scholar James Boyle has described how the term <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">ecology</span>”</span>
3012     marked a turning point in environmental activism. Prior to the
3013     adoption of this term, people who wanted to preserve whale
3014     populations didn’t necessarily see themselves as fighting the same
3015     battle as people who wanted to protect the ozone layer or fight
3016     freshwater pollution or beat back smog or acid rain.
3017   </p><p>
3018     But the term <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">ecology</span>”</span> welded these disparate causes together into a
3019     single movement, and the members of this movement found solidarity
3020     with one another. The people who cared about smog signed petitions
3021     circulated by the people who wanted to end whaling, and the
3022     anti-whalers marched alongside the people demanding action on acid
3023     rain. This uniting behind a common cause completely changed the
3024     dynamics of environmentalism, setting the stage for today’s climate
3025     activism and the sense that preserving the habitability of the
3026     planet Earth is a shared duty among all people.
3027   </p><p>
3028     I believe we are on the verge of a new <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">ecology</span>”</span> moment dedicated to
3029     combating monopolies. After all, tech isn’t the only concentrated
3030     industry nor is it even the <span class="emphasis"><em>most</em></span> concentrated
3031     of industries.
3032   </p><p>
3033     You can find partisans for trustbusting in every sector of the
3034     economy. Everywhere you look, you can find people who’ve been
3035     wronged by monopolists who’ve trashed their finances, their health,
3036     their privacy, their educations, and the lives of people they love.
3037     Those people have the same cause as the people who want to break up
3038     Big Tech and the same enemies. When most of the world’s wealth is in
3039     the hands of a very few, it follows that nearly every large company
3040     will have overlapping shareholders.
3041   </p><p>
3042     That’s the good news: With a little bit of work and a little bit of
3043     coalition building, we have more than enough political will to break
3044     up Big Tech and every other concentrated industry besides. First we
3045     take Facebook, then we take AT&amp;T/WarnerMedia.
3046   </p><p>
3047     But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech
3048     <span class="emphasis"><em>instead</em></span> of breaking up the big companies also
3049     forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later.
3050   </p><p>
3051     Big Tech’s concentration currently means that their inaction on
3052     harassment, for example, leaves users with an impossible choice:
3053     absent themselves from public discourse by, say, quitting Twitter or
3054     endure vile, constant abuse. Big Tech’s over-collection and
3055     over-retention of data results in horrific identity theft. And their
3056     inaction on extremist recruitment means that white supremacists who
3057     livestream their shooting rampages can reach an audience of
3058     billions. The combination of tech concentration and media
3059     concentration means that artists’ incomes are falling even as the
3060     revenue generated by their creations are increasing.
3061   </p><p>
3062     Yet governments confronting all of these problems all inevitably
3063     converge on the same solution: deputize the Big Tech giants to
3064     police their users and render them liable for their users’ bad
3065     actions. The drive to force Big Tech to use automated filters to
3066     block everything from copyright infringement to sex-trafficking to
3067     violent extremism means that tech companies will have to allocate
3068     hundreds of millions to run these compliance systems.
3069   </p><p>
3070     These rules — the EU’s new Directive on Copyright, Australia’s new
3071     terror regulation, America’s FOSTA/SESTA sex-trafficking law and
3072     more — are not just death warrants for small, upstart competitors
3073     that might challenge Big Tech’s dominance but who lack the deep
3074     pockets of established incumbents to pay for all these automated
3075     systems. Worse still, these rules put a floor under how small we can
3076     hope to make Big Tech.
3077   </p><p>
3078     That’s because any move to break up Big Tech and cut it down to size
3079     will have to cope with the hard limit of not making these companies
3080     so small that they can no longer afford to perform these duties —
3081     and it’s <span class="emphasis"><em>expensive</em></span> to invest in those automated
3082     filters and outsource content moderation. It’s already going to be
3083     hard to unwind these deeply concentrated, chimeric behemoths that
3084     have been welded together in the pursuit of monopoly profits. Doing
3085     so while simultaneously finding some way to fill the regulatory void
3086     that will be left behind if these self-policing rulers were forced
3087     to suddenly abdicate will be much, much harder.
3088   </p><p>
3089     Allowing the platforms to grow to their present size has given them
3090     a dominance that is nearly insurmountable — deputizing them with
3091     public duties to redress the pathologies created by their size makes
3092     it virtually impossible to reduce that size. Lather, rinse, repeat:
3093     If the platforms don’t get smaller, they will get larger, and as
3094     they get larger, they will create more problems, which will give
3095     rise to more public duties for the companies, which will make them
3096     bigger still.
3097   </p><p>
3098     We can work to fix the internet by breaking up Big Tech and
3099     depriving them of monopoly profits, or we can work to fix Big Tech
3100     by making them spend their monopoly profits on governance. But we
3101     can’t do both. We have to choose between a vibrant, open internet or
3102     a dominated, monopolized internet commanded by Big Tech giants that
3103     we struggle with constantly to get them to behave themselves.
3104   </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>
3105     Trustbusting is hard. Breaking big companies into smaller ones is
3106     expensive and time-consuming. So time-consuming that by the time
3107     you’re done, the world has often moved on and rendered years of
3108     litigation irrelevant. From 1969 to 1982, the U.S. government
3109     pursued an antitrust case against IBM over its dominance of
3110     mainframe computing — but the case collapsed in 1982 because
3111     mainframes were being speedily replaced by PCs.
3112   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
3113       A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general
3114       to enforce the law as it was written.
3115     </p></blockquote></div><p>
3116     It’s far easier to prevent concentration than to fix it, and
3117     reinstating the traditional contours of U.S. antitrust enforcement
3118     will, at the very least, prevent further concentration. That means
3119     bans on mergers between large companies, on big companies acquiring
3120     nascent competitors, and on platform companies competing directly
3121     with the companies that rely on the platforms.
3122   </p><p>
3123     These powers are all in the plain language of U.S. antitrust laws,
3124     so in theory, a future U.S. president could simply direct their
3125     attorney general to enforce the law as it was written. But after
3126     decades of judicial <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">education</span>”</span> in the benefits of monopolies, after
3127     multiple administrations that have packed the federal courts with
3128     lifetime-appointed monopoly cheerleaders, it’s not clear that mere
3129     administrative action would do the trick.
3130   </p><p>
3131     If the courts frustrate the Justice Department and the president,
3132     the next stop would be Congress, which could eliminate any doubt
3133     about how antitrust law should be enforced in the U.S. by passing
3134     new laws that boil down to saying, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Knock it off. We all know what
3135     the Sherman Act says. Robert Bork was a deranged fantasist. For
3136     avoidance of doubt, <span class="emphasis"><em>fuck that guy</em></span>.</span>”</span> In other
3137     words, the problem with monopolies is
3138     <span class="emphasis"><em>monopolism</em></span> — the concentration of power into
3139     too few hands, which erodes our right to self-determination. If
3140     there is a monopoly, the law wants it gone, period. Sure, get rid of
3141     monopolies that create <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">consumer harm</span>”</span> in the form of higher prices,
3142     but also, <span class="emphasis"><em>get rid of other monopolies, too.</em></span>
3143   </p><p>
3144     But this only prevents things from getting worse. To help them get
3145     better, we will have to build coalitions with other activists in the
3146     anti-monopoly ecology movement — a pluralism movement or a
3147     self-determination movement — and target existing monopolies in
3148     every industry for breakup and structural separation rules that
3149     prevent, for example, the giant eyewear monopolist Luxottica from
3150     dominating both the sale and the manufacture of spectacles.
3151   </p><p>
3152     In an important sense, it doesn’t matter which industry the breakups
3153     begin in. Once they start, shareholders in
3154     <span class="emphasis"><em>every</em></span> industry will start to eye their
3155     investments in monopolists skeptically. As trustbusters ride into
3156     town and start making lives miserable for monopolists, the debate
3157     around every corporate boardroom’s table will shift. People within
3158     corporations who’ve always felt uneasy about monopolism will gain a
3159     powerful new argument to fend off their evil rivals in the corporate
3160     hierarchy: <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">If we do it my way, we make less money; if we do it your
3161     way, a judge will fine us billions and expose us to ridicule and
3162     public disapprobation. So even though I get that it would be really
3163     cool to do that merger, lock out that competitor, or buy that little
3164     company and kill it before it can threaten it, we really shouldn’t —
3165     not if we don’t want to get tied to the DOJ’s bumper and get dragged
3166     up and down Trustbuster Road for the next 10 years.</span>”</span>
3167   </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>
3168     Fixing Big Tech will require a lot of iteration. As cyber lawyer
3169     Lawrence Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, <span class="emphasis"><em>Code and Other
3170     Laws of Cyberspace</em></span>, our lives are regulated by four
3171     forces: law (what’s legal), code (what’s technologically possible),
3172     norms (what’s socially acceptable), and markets (what’s profitable).
3173   </p><p>
3174     If you could wave a wand and get Congress to pass a law that
3175     re-fanged the Sherman Act tomorrow, you could use the impending
3176     breakups to convince venture capitalists to fund competitors to
3177     Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Apple that would be waiting in the
3178     wings after they were cut down to size.
3179   </p><p>
3180     But getting Congress to act will require a massive normative shift,
3181     a mass movement of people who care about monopolies — and pulling
3182     them apart.
3183   </p><p>
3184     Getting people to care about monopolies will take technological
3185     interventions that help them to see what a world free from Big Tech
3186     might look like. Imagine if someone could make a beloved (but
3187     unauthorized) third-party Facebook or Twitter client that dampens
3188     the anxiety-producing algorithmic drumbeat and still lets you talk
3189     to your friends without being spied upon — something that made
3190     social media more sociable and less toxic. Now imagine that it gets
3191     shut down in a brutal legal battle. It’s always easier to convince
3192     people that something must be done to save a thing they love than it
3193     is to excite them about something that doesn’t even exist yet.
3194   </p><p>
3195     Neither tech nor law nor code nor markets are sufficient to reform
3196     Big Tech. But a profitable competitor to Big Tech could bankroll a
3197     legislative push; legal reform can embolden a toolsmith to make a
3198     better tool; the tool can create customers for a potential business
3199     who value the benefits of the internet but want them delivered
3200     without Big Tech; and that business can get funded and divert some
3201     of its profits to legal reform. 20 GOTO 10 (or lather, rinse,
3202     repeat). Do it again, but this time, get farther! After all, this
3203     time you’re starting with weaker Big Tech adversaries, a
3204     constituency that understands things can be better, Big Tech rivals
3205     who’ll help ensure their own future by bankrolling reform, and code
3206     that other programmers can build on to weaken Big Tech even further.
3207   </p><p>
3208     The surveillance capitalism hypothesis — that Big Tech’s products
3209     really work as well as they say they do and that’s why everything is
3210     so screwed up — is way too easy on surveillance and even easier on
3211     capitalism. Companies spy because they believe their own BS, and
3212     companies spy because governments let them, and companies spy
3213     because any advantage from spying is so short-lived and minor that
3214     they have to do more and more of it just to stay in place.
3215   </p><p>
3216     As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the
3217     monopolism that creates inequality and the inequality that creates
3218     monopolism. It’s a form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who
3219     destroy the real economy to inflate the bottom line, and they get
3220     away with it for the same reason companies get away with spying:
3221     because our governments are in thrall to both the ideology that says
3222     monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall to the ideology that
3223     says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not piss off the
3224     monopolists.
3225   </p><p>
3226     Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked
3227     rule begets surveillance. Surveillance isn’t bad because it lets
3228     people manipulate us. It’s bad because it crushes our ability to be
3229     our authentic selves — and because it lets the rich and powerful
3230     figure out who might be thinking of building guillotines and what
3231     dirt they can use to discredit those embryonic guillotine-builders
3232     before they can even get to the lumberyard.
3233   </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>
3234     With all the problems of Big Tech, it’s tempting to imagine solving
3235     the problem by returning to a world without tech at all. Resist that
3236     temptation.
3237   </p><p>
3238     The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our
3239     future is not reliant upon high tech, it will be because
3240     civilization has fallen. Big Tech wired together a planetary,
3241     species-wide nervous system that, with the proper reforms and course
3242     corrections, is capable of seeing us through the existential
3243     challenge of our species and planet. Now it’s up to us to seize the
3244     means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under
3245     democratic, accountable control.
3246   </p><p>
3247     I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech
3248     exceptionalist. Not in the sense of thinking that tech should be
3249     given a free pass to monopolize because it has <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">economies of scale</span>”</span>
3250     or some other nebulous feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I
3251     believe that getting tech right matters and that getting it wrong
3252     will be an unmitigated catastrophe — and doing it right can give us
3253     the power to work together to save our civilization, our species,
3254     and our planet.
3255   </p></div></div></body></html>