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