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