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