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

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