Fix link.

[text-destroy-surveillance.git] / po / how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.fr.po

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# Copyright (C) YEAR Cory Doctorow
# This file is distributed under the same license as the How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism package.
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#. type: Attribute 'lang' of: <article>
msgid "en"
msgstr "fr"

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><title>
msgid "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism"
msgstr "Comment détruire le capitalisme de la surveillance"

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><authorgroup><author><firstname>
msgid "Cory"
msgstr "Cory"

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><authorgroup><author><surname>
msgid "Doctorow"
msgstr "Doctorow"

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><publisher><address>
#, no-wrap
msgid "<city>Oslo</city>"
msgstr "<city>Oslo</city>"

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo>
msgid ""
"<publisher> <publishername>Petter Reinholdtsen</publishername> <placeholder "
"type=\"address\" id=\"0\"/> </publisher> <copyright> <year>2020</year> "
"<holder>Cory Doctorow</holder> </copyright> <copyright> <year>2021</year> "
"<holder>Petter Reinholdtsen</holder> </copyright>"
msgstr ""
"<publisher> <publishername>Petter Reinholdtsen</publishername> <placeholder "
"type=\"address\" id=\"0\"/> </publisher> <copyright> <year>2020</year> "
"<holder>Cory Doctorow</holder> </copyright> <copyright> <year>2021</year> "
"<holder>Petter Reinholdtsen</holder> </copyright>"

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
msgid "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow."
msgstr "Comment détruire le capitalisme de la surveillance par Cory Doctorow."

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
msgid "Published by Petter Reinholdtsen."
msgstr "Publié par Petter Reinholdtsen."

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
msgid "<ulink url=\"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/\"/>."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (paperback)"
msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (livre de poche)"

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)"
msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)"

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
msgid ""
"This book is available for purchase from <ulink url=\"https://www.lulu.com/"
"\"/>."
msgstr ""
"Ce livre est disponible à la vente sur <ulink url=\"https://www.lulu.com/\"/"
">."

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para><inlinemediaobject>
msgid ""
"<imageobject> <imagedata fileref=\"images/cc-some-rights-reserved.png\" "
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"<imageobject> <imagedata fileref=\"images/cc-some-rights-reserved.svg\" "
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msgstr ""
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#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para><inlinemediaobject><textobject><phrase>
msgid "Creative Commons, Some rights reserved"
msgstr "Creative Commons, certains droits réservés"

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
msgid "<placeholder type=\"inlinemediaobject\" id=\"0\"/>"
msgstr "<placeholder type=\"inlinemediaobject\" id=\"0\"/>"

#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
msgid ""
"This book is licensed under a Creative Commons license. This license permits "
"any use of this work, so long as attribution is given and no derivatived "
"material is distributed.  For more information about the license visit "
"<ulink url=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/\"/>."
msgstr ""
"Ce livre est sous licence Creative Commons. Cette licence permet toute "
"utilisation de ce travail, tant que l'attribution est donnée et qu'aucun "
"matériel dérivé n'est distribué. Pour plus d'informations sur la licence, "
"visitez <ulink url=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/\"/>."

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "The net of a thousand lies"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the 21st "
"century is just how widespread the evidence against them is.  You can "
"understand how, centuries ago, people who’d never gained a high-enough "
"vantage point from which to see the Earth’s curvature might come to the "
"commonsense belief that the flat-seeming Earth was, indeed, flat."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But today, when elementary schools routinely dangle GoPro cameras from "
"balloons and loft them high enough to photograph the Earth’s curve — to say "
"nothing of the unexceptional sight of the curved Earth from an airplane "
"window — it takes a heroic effort to maintain the belief that the world is "
"flat."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Likewise for white nationalism and eugenics: In an age where you can become "
"a computational genomics datapoint by swabbing your cheek and mailing it to "
"a gene-sequencing company along with a modest sum of money, <quote>race "
"science</quote> has never been easier to refute."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"We are living through a golden age of both readily available facts and "
"denial of those facts. Terrible ideas that have lingered on the fringes for "
"decades or even centuries have gone mainstream seemingly overnight."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that can "
"explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea has gotten a "
"lot better at stating their case, or the proposition has become harder to "
"deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other words, if we want people to "
"take climate change seriously, we can get a bunch of Greta Thunbergs to make "
"eloquent, passionate arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds, "
"or we can wait for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case "
"for us. In practice, we’ll probably have to do some of both: The more we’re "
"boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier it will be for "
"the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The arguments for ridiculous beliefs in odious conspiracies like anti-"
"vaccination, climate denial, a flat Earth, and eugenics are no better than "
"they were a generation ago. Indeed, they’re worse because they are being "
"pitched to people who have at least a background awareness of the refuting "
"facts."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Anti-vax has been around since the first vaccines, but the early anti-"
"vaxxers were pitching people who were less equipped to understand even the "
"most basic ideas from microbiology, and moreover, those people had not "
"witnessed the extermination of mass-murdering diseases like polio, smallpox, "
"and measles. Today’s anti-vaxxers are no more eloquent than their forebears, "
"and they have a much harder job."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding on the "
"basis of superior arguments?"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Some people think so. Today, there is a widespread belief that machine "
"learning and commercial surveillance can turn even the most fumble-tongued "
"conspiracy theorist into a svengali who can warp your perceptions and win "
"your belief by locating vulnerable people and then pitching them with A.I.-"
"refined arguments that bypass their rational faculties and turn everyday "
"people into flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, or even Nazis. When the RAND "
"Corporation <ulink url=\"https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/"
"research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf\">blames Facebook for "
"<quote>radicalization</quote></ulink> and when Facebook’s role in spreading "
"coronavirus misinformation is <ulink url=\"https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/"
"en/facebook_threat_health/\">blamed on its algorithm</ulink>, the implicit "
"message is that machine learning and surveillance are causing the changes in "
"our consensus about what’s true."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories "
"like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread followings, "
"<emphasis>something</emphasis> must be afoot."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But what if there’s another explanation? What if it’s the material "
"circumstances, and not the arguments, that are making the difference for "
"these conspiracy pitchmen? What if the trauma of living through "
"<emphasis>real conspiracies</emphasis> all around us — conspiracies among "
"wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts "
"and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as "
"<quote>corruption</quote>) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy "
"theories?"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If it’s trauma and not contagion — material conditions and not ideology — "
"that is making the difference today and enabling a rise of repulsive "
"misinformation in the face of easily observed facts, that doesn’t mean our "
"computer networks are blameless. They’re still doing the heavy work of "
"locating vulnerable people and guiding them through a series of ever-more-"
"extreme ideas and communities."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses "
"real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics <ulink url=\"https://"
"www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html\">kicked off by vaccine denial</"
"ulink> to genocides <ulink url=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/"
"technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html\">kicked off by racist "
"conspiracies</ulink> to planetary meltdown caused by denial-inspired climate "
"inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to put the fires out — to "
"figure out how to help people see the truth of the world through the "
"conspiracies they’ve been confused by."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But firefighting is reactive. We need fire <emphasis>prevention</emphasis>. "
"We need to strike at the traumatic material conditions that make people "
"vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here, too, tech has a role to "
"play."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s <ulink url="
"\"https://edri.org/tag/terreg/\">Terrorist Content Regulation</ulink>, which "
"requires platforms to police and remove <quote>extremist</quote> content, to "
"the U.S. proposals to <ulink url=\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/"
"earn-it-act-violates-constitution\">force tech companies to spy on their "
"users</ulink> and hold them liable <ulink url=\"https://www.natlawreview.com/"
"article/repeal-cda-section-230\">for their users’ bad speech</ulink>, "
"there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies to solve the problems they "
"created."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these "
"solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance "
"over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a "
"more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The "
"<quote>solutions</quote> on the table today <emphasis>require</emphasis> Big "
"Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to "
"implement the systems these laws demand."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to "
"get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to "
"figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our "
"internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big "
"Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the "
"Internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic "
"Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free Software Foundation "
"launched in 1985. For most of the history of the movement, the most "
"prominent criticism leveled against it was that it was irrelevant: The real "
"activist causes were real-world causes (think of the skepticism when <ulink "
"url=\"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.\">Finland declared broadband a human right in "
"2010</ulink>), and real-world activism was shoe-leather activism (think of "
"Malcolm Gladwell’s <ulink url=\"https://www.newyorker.com/"
"magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell\">contempt for "
"<quote>clicktivism</quote></ulink>). But as tech has grown more central to "
"our daily lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way first to "
"accusations of insincerity (<quote>You only care about tech because you’re "
"<ulink url=\"https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-"
"google-patent-reform/id=98007/\">shilling for tech companies</ulink></"
"quote>) to accusations of negligence (<quote>Why didn’t you foresee that "
"tech could be such a destructive force?</quote>).  But digital rights "
"activism is right where it’s always been: looking out for the humans in a "
"world where tech is inexorably taking over."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The latest version of this critique comes in the form of <quote>surveillance "
"capitalism,</quote> a term coined by business professor Shoshana Zuboff in "
"her long and influential 2019 book, <emphasis>The Age of Surveillance "
"Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power</"
"emphasis>. Zuboff argues that <quote>surveillance capitalism</quote> is a "
"unique creature of the tech industry and that it is unlike any other abusive "
"commercial practice in history, one that is <quote>constituted by unexpected "
"and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control "
"that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new "
"markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism "
"challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long "
"evolution of market capitalism.</quote> It is a new and deadly form of "
"capitalism, a <quote>rogue capitalism,</quote> and our lack of understanding "
"of its unique capabilities and dangers represents an existential, species-"
"wide threat. She’s right that capitalism today threatens our species, and "
"she’s right that tech poses unique challenges to our species and "
"civilization, but she’s really wrong about how tech is different and why it "
"threatens our species."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"What’s more, I think that her incorrect diagnosis will lead us down a path "
"that ends up making Big Tech stronger, not weaker. We need to take down Big "
"Tech, and to do that, we need to start by correctly identifying the problem."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Tech exceptionalism, then and now"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Early critics of the digital rights movement — perhaps best represented by "
"campaigning organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free "
"Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, and others that focused on preserving "
"and enhancing basic human rights in the digital realm — damned activists for "
"practicing <quote>tech exceptionalism.</quote> Around the turn of the "
"millennium, serious people ridiculed any claim that tech policy mattered in "
"the <quote>real world.</quote> Claims that tech rules had implications for "
"speech, association, privacy, search and seizure, and fundamental rights and "
"equities were treated as ridiculous, an elevation of the concerns of sad "
"nerds arguing about <emphasis>Star Trek</emphasis> on bulletin board systems "
"above the struggles of the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela, or the Warsaw "
"ghetto uprising."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"In the decades since, accusations of <quote>tech exceptionalism</quote> have "
"only sharpened as tech’s role in everyday life has expanded: Now that tech "
"has infiltrated every corner of our life and our online lives have been "
"monopolized by a handful of giants, defenders of digital freedoms are "
"accused of carrying water for Big Tech, providing cover for its self-"
"interested negligence (or worse, nefarious plots)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"From my perspective, the digital rights movement has remained stationary "
"while the rest of the world has moved. From the earliest days, the "
"movement’s concern was users and the toolsmiths who provided the code they "
"needed to realize their fundamental rights.  Digital rights activists only "
"cared about companies to the extent that companies were acting to uphold "
"users’ rights (or, just as often, when companies were acting so foolishly "
"that they threatened to bring down new rules that would also make it harder "
"for good actors to help users)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The <quote>surveillance capitalism</quote> critique recasts the digital "
"rights movement in a new light again: not as alarmists who overestimate the "
"importance of their shiny toys nor as shills for big tech but as serene deck-"
"chair rearrangers whose long-standing activism is a liability because it "
"makes them incapable of perceiving novel threats as they continue to fight "
"the last century’s tech battles."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid "But tech exceptionalism is a sin no matter who practices it."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Don’t believe the hype"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"You’ve probably heard that <quote>if you’re not paying for the product, "
"you’re the product.</quote> As we’ll see below, that’s true, if incomplete.  "
"But what is <emphasis>absolutely</emphasis> true is that ad-driven Big "
"Tech’s customers are advertisers, and what companies like Google and "
"Facebook sell is their ability to convince <emphasis>you</emphasis> to buy "
"stuff. Big Tech’s product is persuasion. The services — social media, search "
"engines, maps, messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The fear of surveillance capitalism starts from the (correct)  presumption "
"that everything Big Tech says about itself is probably a lie. But the "
"surveillance capitalism critique makes an exception for the claims Big Tech "
"makes in its sales literature — the breathless hype in the pitches to "
"potential advertisers online and in ad-tech seminars about the efficacy of "
"its products: It assumes that Big Tech is as good at influencing us as they "
"claim they are when they’re selling influencing products to credulous "
"customers. That’s a mistake because sales literature is not a reliable "
"indicator of a product’s efficacy."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Surveillance capitalism assumes that because advertisers buy a lot of what "
"Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something real. But Big Tech’s "
"massive sales could just as easily be the result of a popular delusion or "
"something even more pernicious: monopolistic control over our communications "
"and commerce."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Being watched changes your behavior, and not for the better. It creates "
"risks for our social progress. Zuboff’s book features beautifully wrought "
"explanations of these phenomena. But Zuboff also claims that surveillance "
"literally robs us of our free will — that when our personal data is mixed "
"with machine learning, it creates a system of persuasion so devastating that "
"we are helpless before it.  That is, Facebook uses an algorithm to analyze "
"the data it nonconsensually extracts from your daily life and uses it to "
"customize your feed in ways that get you to buy stuff. It is a mind-control "
"ray out of a 1950s comic book, wielded by mad scientists whose "
"supercomputers guarantee them perpetual and total world domination."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "What is persuasion?"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"To understand why you shouldn’t worry about mind-control rays — but why you "
"<emphasis>should</emphasis> worry about surveillance <emphasis>and</"
"emphasis> Big Tech — we must start by unpacking what we mean by "
"<quote>persuasion.</quote>"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists promise their customers "
"(the advertisers) that if they use machine-learning tools trained on "
"unimaginably large data sets of nonconsensually harvested personal "
"information, they will be able to uncover ways to bypass the rational "
"faculties of the public and direct their behavior, creating a stream of "
"purchases, votes, and other desired outcomes."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
msgid ""
"The impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be "
"central to our analysis and any remedies we seek."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But there’s little evidence that this is happening. Instead, the predictions "
"that surveillance capitalism delivers to its customers are much less "
"impressive. Rather than finding ways to bypass our rational faculties, "
"surveillance capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg mostly do one or more of three "
"things:"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
msgid "1. Segmenting"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"If you’re selling diapers, you have better luck if you pitch them to people "
"in maternity wards. Not everyone who enters or leaves a maternity ward just "
"had a baby, and not everyone who just had a baby is in the market for "
"diapers. But having a baby is a really reliable correlate of being in the "
"market for diapers, and being in a maternity ward is highly correlated with "
"having a baby. Hence diaper ads around maternity wards (and even pitchmen "
"for baby products, who haunt maternity wards with baskets full of freebies)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Surveillance capitalism is segmenting times a billion. Diaper vendors can go "
"way beyond people in maternity wards (though they can do that, too, with "
"things like location-based mobile ads).  They can target you based on "
"whether you’re reading articles about child-rearing, diapers, or a host of "
"other subjects, and data mining can suggest unobvious keywords to advertise "
"against. They can target you based on the articles you’ve recently read. "
"They can target you based on what you’ve recently purchased. They can target "
"you based on whether you receive emails or private messages about these "
"subjects — or even if you speak aloud about them (though Facebook and the "
"like convincingly claim that’s not happening — yet)."
msgstr ""
"Le capitalisme de surveillance se segmente par milliard. Les vendeurs de "
"couches peuvent aller bien au-delà des personnes dans les maternités (bien "
"qu’ils puissent le faire aussi, avec des choses comme les annonces mobiles "
"basées sur la localisation). Ils peuvent vous cibler selon que vous lisez "
"des articles sur l’éducation des enfants, les couches ou une foule d’autres "
"sujets, et l’exploration de données peut suggérer des mots-clés non évidents "
"sur lesquels faire de la publicité. Ils peuvent vous cibler en fonction des "
"articles que vous avez récemment lus. Ils peuvent vous cibler en fonction de "
"ce que vous avez récemment acheté. Ils peuvent vous cibler selon que vous "
"recevez des courriels ou des messages privés sur ces sujets – ou même si "
"vous en parlez à haute voix (bien que Facebook et autres affirment de "
"manière convaincante que cela ne se produit pas encore)."

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid "This is seriously creepy."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid "But it’s not mind control."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid "It doesn’t deprive you of your free will. It doesn’t trick you."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Think of how surveillance capitalism works in politics.  Surveillance "
"capitalist companies sell political operatives the power to locate people "
"who might be receptive to their pitch.  Candidates campaigning on finance "
"industry corruption seek people struggling with debt; candidates campaigning "
"on xenophobia seek out racists. Political operatives have always targeted "
"their message whether their intentions were honorable or not: Union "
"organizers set up pitches at factory gates, and white supremacists hand out "
"fliers at John Birch Society meetings."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"But this is an inexact and thus wasteful practice. The union organizer can’t "
"know which worker to approach on the way out of the factory gates and may "
"waste their time on a covert John Birch Society member; the white "
"supremacist doesn’t know which of the Birchers are so delusional that making "
"it to a meeting is as much as they can manage and which ones might be "
"convinced to cross the country to carry a tiki torch through the streets of "
"Charlottesville, Virginia."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Because targeting improves the yields on political pitches, it can "
"accelerate the pace of political upheaval by making it possible for everyone "
"who has secretly wished for the toppling of an autocrat — or just an 11-term "
"incumbent politician — to find everyone else who feels the same way at very "
"low cost. This has been critical to the rapid crystallization of recent "
"political movements including Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street as "
"well as less savory players like the far-right white nationalist movements "
"that marched in Charlottesville."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"It’s important to differentiate this kind of political organizing from "
"influence campaigns; finding people who secretly agree with you isn’t the "
"same as convincing people to agree with you. The rise of phenomena like "
"nonbinary or otherwise nonconforming gender identities is often "
"characterized by reactionaries as the result of online brainwashing "
"campaigns that convince impressionable people that they have been secretly "
"queer all along."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"But the personal accounts of those who have come out tell a different story "
"where people who long harbored a secret about their gender were emboldened "
"by others coming forward and where people who knew that they were different "
"but lacked a vocabulary for discussing that difference learned the right "
"words from these low-cost means of finding people and learning about their "
"ideas."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
msgid "2. Deception"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Lies and fraud are pernicious, and surveillance capitalism supercharges them "
"through targeting. If you want to sell a fraudulent payday loan or subprime "
"mortgage, surveillance capitalism can help you find people who are both "
"desperate and unsophisticated and thus receptive to your pitch. This "
"accounts for the rise of many phenomena, like multilevel marketing schemes, "
"in which deceptive claims about potential earnings and the efficacy of sales "
"techniques are targeted at desperate people by advertising against search "
"queries that indicate, for example, someone struggling with ill-advised "
"loans."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Surveillance capitalism also abets fraud by making it easy to locate other "
"people who have been similarly deceived, forming a community of people who "
"reinforce one another’s false beliefs.  Think of <ulink url=\"https://www."
"vulture.com/2020/01/the-dream-podcast-review.html\">the forums</ulink> where "
"people who are being victimized by multilevel marketing frauds gather to "
"trade tips on how to improve their luck in peddling the product."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Sometimes, online deception involves replacing someone’s correct beliefs "
"with incorrect ones, as it does in the anti-vaccination movement, whose "
"victims are often people who start out believing in vaccines but are "
"convinced by seemingly plausible evidence that leads them into the false "
"belief that vaccines are harmful."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"But it’s much more common for fraud to succeed when it doesn’t have to "
"displace a true belief. When my daughter contracted head lice at daycare, "
"one of the daycare workers told me I could get rid of them by treating her "
"hair and scalp with olive oil. I didn’t know anything about head lice, and I "
"assumed that the daycare worker did, so I tried it (it didn’t work, and it "
"doesn’t work). It’s easy to end up with false beliefs when you simply don’t "
"know any better and when those beliefs are conveyed by someone who seems to "
"know what they’re doing."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"This is pernicious and difficult — and it’s also the kind of thing the "
"internet can help guard against by making true information available, "
"especially in a form that exposes the underlying deliberations among parties "
"with sharply divergent views, such as Wikipedia. But it’s not brainwashing; "
"it’s fraud. In the <ulink url=\"https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/"
"\">majority of cases</ulink>, the victims of these fraud campaigns have an "
"informational void filled in the customary way, by consulting a seemingly "
"reliable source. If I look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge and learn "
"that it is 5,800 feet long, but in reality, it is 5,989 feet long, the "
"underlying deception is a problem, but it’s a problem with a simple remedy. "
"It’s a very different problem from the anti-vax issue in which someone’s "
"true belief is displaced by a false one by means of sophisticated persuasion."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
msgid "3. Domination"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Surveillance capitalism is the result of monopoly. Monopoly is the cause, "
"and surveillance capitalism and its negative outcomes are the effects of "
"monopoly. I’ll get into this in depth later, but for now, suffice it to say "
"that the tech industry has grown up with a radical theory of antitrust that "
"has allowed companies to grow by merging with their rivals, buying up their "
"nascent competitors, and expanding to control whole market verticals."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"One example of how monopolism aids in persuasion is through dominance: "
"Google makes editorial decisions about its algorithms that determine the "
"sort order of the responses to our queries. If a cabal of fraudsters have "
"set out to trick the world into thinking that the Brooklyn Bridge is 5,800 "
"feet long, and if Google gives a high search rank to this group in response "
"to queries like <quote>How long is the Brooklyn Bridge?</quote> then the "
"first eight or 10 screens’ worth of Google results could be wrong. And since "
"most people don’t go beyond the first couple of results — let alone the "
"first <emphasis>page</emphasis> of results — Google’s choice means that many "
"people will be deceived."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Google’s dominance over search — more than 86% of web searches are performed "
"through Google — means that the way it orders its search results has an "
"outsized effect on public beliefs. Ironically, Google claims this is why it "
"can’t afford to have any transparency in its algorithm design: Google’s "
"search dominance makes the results of its sorting too important to risk "
"telling the world how it arrives at those results lest some bad actor "
"discover a flaw in the ranking system and exploit it to push its point of "
"view to the top of the search results. There’s an obvious remedy to a "
"company that is too big to audit: break it up into smaller pieces."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> whose "
"data-hoarding and machine-learning techniques rob us of our free will. But "
"influence campaigns that seek to displace existing, correct beliefs with "
"false ones have an effect that is small and temporary while monopolistic "
"dominance over informational systems has massive, enduring effects. "
"Controlling the results to the world’s search queries means controlling "
"access both to arguments and their rebuttals and, thus, control over much of "
"the world’s beliefs. If our concern is how corporations are foreclosing on "
"our ability to make up our own minds and determine our own futures, the "
"impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be "
"central to our analysis and any remedies we seek."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
msgid "4. Bypassing our rational faculties"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"<emphasis>This</emphasis> is the good stuff: using machine learning, "
"<quote>dark patterns,</quote> engagement hacking, and other techniques to "
"get us to do things that run counter to our better judgment. This is mind "
"control."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Some of these techniques have proven devastatingly effective (if only in the "
"short term). The use of countdown timers on a purchase completion page can "
"create a sense of urgency that causes you to ignore the nagging internal "
"voice suggesting that you should shop around or sleep on your decision. The "
"use of people from your social graph in ads can provide <quote>social proof</"
"quote> that a purchase is worth making. Even the auction system pioneered by "
"eBay is calculated to play on our cognitive blind spots, letting us feel "
"like we <quote>own</quote> something because we bid on it, thus encouraging "
"us to bid again when we are outbid to ensure that <quote>our</quote> things "
"stay ours."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Games are extraordinarily good at this. <quote>Free to play</quote> games "
"manipulate us through many techniques, such as presenting players with a "
"series of smoothly escalating challenges that create a sense of mastery and "
"accomplishment but which sharply transition into a set of challenges that "
"are impossible to overcome without paid upgrades. Add some social proof to "
"the mix — a stream of notifications about how well your friends are faring — "
"and before you know it, you’re buying virtual power-ups to get to the next "
"level."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Companies have risen and fallen on these techniques, and the <quote>fallen</"
"quote> part is worth paying attention to. In general, living things adapt to "
"stimulus: Something that is very compelling or noteworthy when you first "
"encounter it fades with repetition until you stop noticing it altogether. "
"Consider the refrigerator hum that irritates you when it starts up but "
"disappears into the background so thoroughly that you only notice it when it "
"stops again."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"That’s why behavioral conditioning uses <quote>intermittent reinforcement "
"schedules.</quote> Instead of giving you a steady drip of encouragement or "
"setbacks, games and gamified services scatter rewards on a randomized "
"schedule — often enough to keep you interested and random enough that you "
"can never quite find the pattern that would make it boring."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful behavioral tool, but it also "
"represents a collective action problem for surveillance capitalism. The "
"<quote>engagement techniques</quote> invented by the behaviorists of "
"surveillance capitalist companies are quickly copied across the whole sector "
"so that what starts as a mysteriously compelling fillip in the design of a "
"service—like <quote>pull to refresh</quote> or alerts when someone likes "
"your posts or side quests that your characters get invited to while in the "
"midst of main quests—quickly becomes dully ubiquitous. The impossible-to-"
"nail-down nonpattern of randomized drips from your phone becomes a grey-"
"noise wall of sound as every single app and site starts to make use of "
"whatever seems to be working at the time."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"From the surveillance capitalist’s point of view, our adaptive capacity is "
"like a harmful bacterium that deprives it of its food source — our attention "
"— and novel techniques for snagging that attention are like new antibiotics "
"that can be used to breach our defenses and destroy our self-determination. "
"And there <emphasis>are</emphasis> techniques like that. Who can forget the "
"Great Zynga Epidemic, when all of our friends were caught in "
"<emphasis>FarmVille</emphasis>’s endless, mindless dopamine loops? But every "
"new attention-commanding technique is jumped on by the whole industry and "
"used so indiscriminately that antibiotic resistance sets in. Given enough "
"repetition, almost all of us develop immunity to even the most powerful "
"techniques — by 2013, two years after Zynga’s peak, its user base had halved."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Not everyone, of course. Some people never adapt to stimulus, just as some "
"people never stop hearing the hum of the refrigerator.  This is why most "
"people who are exposed to slot machines play them for a while and then move "
"on while a small and tragic minority liquidate their kids’ college funds, "
"buy adult diapers, and position themselves in front of a machine until they "
"collapse."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"But surveillance capitalism’s margins on behavioral modification suck. "
"Tripling the rate at which someone buys a widget sounds great <ulink url="
"\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2018/03/09/the-advertising-"
"conversion-rates-for-every-major-tech-platform/#2f6a67485957\">unless the "
"base rate is way less than 1%</ulink> with an improved rate of… still less "
"than 1%. Even penny slot machines pull down pennies for every spin while "
"surveillance capitalism rakes in infinitesimal penny fractions."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"Slot machines’ high returns mean that they can be profitable just by "
"draining the fortunes of the small rump of people who are pathologically "
"vulnerable to them and unable to adapt to their tricks. But surveillance "
"capitalism can’t survive on the fractional pennies it brings down from that "
"vulnerable sliver — that’s why, after the Great Zynga Epidemic had finally "
"burned itself out, the small number of still-addicted players left behind "
"couldn’t sustain it as a global phenomenon. And new powerful attention "
"weapons aren’t easy to find, as is evidenced by the long years since the "
"last time Zynga had a hit. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that "
"Zynga has to spend on developing new tools to blast through our adaptation, "
"it has never managed to repeat the lucky accident that let it snag so much "
"of our attention for a brief moment in 2009. Powerhouses like Supercell have "
"fared a little better, but they are rare and throw away many failures for "
"every success."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
msgid ""
"The vulnerability of small segments of the population to dramatic, efficient "
"corporate manipulation is a real concern that’s worthy of our attention and "
"energy. But it’s not an existential threat to society."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid ""
"If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This adaptation problem offers an explanation for one of surveillance "
"capitalism’s most alarming traits: its relentless hunger for data and its "
"endless expansion of data-gathering capabilities through the spread of "
"sensors, online surveillance, and acquisition of data streams from third "
"parties."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Zuboff observes this phenomenon and concludes that data must be very "
"valuable if surveillance capitalism is so hungry for it. (In her words: "
"<quote>Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous "
"intensification of the means of production, so surveillance capitalists and "
"their market players are now locked into the continuous intensification of "
"the means of behavioral modification and the gathering might of "
"instrumentarian power.</quote>) But what if the voracious appetite is "
"because data has such a short half-life — because people become inured so "
"quickly to new, data-driven persuasion techniques — that the companies are "
"locked in an arms race with our limbic system? What if it’s all a Red "
"Queen’s race where they have to run ever faster — collect ever-more data — "
"just to stay in the same spot?"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Of course, all of Big Tech’s persuasion techniques work in concert with one "
"another, and collecting data is useful beyond mere behavioral trickery."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If someone wants to recruit you to buy a refrigerator or join a pogrom, they "
"might use profiling and targeting to send messages to people they judge to "
"be good sales prospects. The messages themselves may be deceptive, making "
"claims about things you’re not very knowledgeable about (food safety and "
"energy efficiency or eugenics and historical claims about racial "
"superiority). They might use search engine optimization and/or armies of "
"fake reviewers and commenters and/or paid placement to dominate the "
"discourse so that any search for further information takes you back to their "
"messages.  And finally, they may refine the different pitches using machine "
"learning and other techniques to figure out what kind of pitch works best on "
"someone like you."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Each phase of this process benefits from surveillance: The more data they "
"have, the more precisely they can profile you and target you with specific "
"messages. Think of how you’d sell a fridge if you knew that the warranty on "
"your prospect’s fridge just expired and that they were expecting a tax "
"rebate in April."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Also, the more data they have, the better they can craft deceptive messages "
"— if I know that you’re into genealogy, I might not try to feed you "
"pseudoscience about genetic differences between <quote>races,</quote> "
"sticking instead to conspiratorial secret histories of <quote>demographic "
"replacement</quote> and the like."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Facebook also helps you locate people who have the same odious or antisocial "
"views as you. It makes it possible to find other people who want to carry "
"tiki torches through the streets of Charlottesville in Confederate cosplay. "
"It can help you find other people who want to join your militia and go to "
"the border to look for undocumented migrants to terrorize. It can help you "
"find people who share your belief that vaccines are poison and that the "
"Earth is flat."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"There is one way in which targeted advertising uniquely benefits those "
"advocating for socially unacceptable causes: It is invisible.  Racism is "
"widely geographically dispersed, and there are few places where racists — "
"and only racists — gather. This is similar to the problem of selling "
"refrigerators in that potential refrigerator purchasers are geographically "
"dispersed and there are few places where you can buy an ad that will be "
"primarily seen by refrigerator customers. But buying a refrigerator is "
"socially acceptable while being a Nazi is not, so you can buy a billboard or "
"advertise in the newspaper sports section for your refrigerator business, "
"and the only potential downside is that your ad will be seen by a lot of "
"people who don’t want refrigerators, resulting in a lot of wasted expense."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But even if you wanted to advertise your Nazi movement on a billboard or "
"prime-time TV or the sports section, you would struggle to find anyone "
"willing to sell you the space for your ad partly because they disagree with "
"your views and partly because they fear censure (boycott, reputational "
"damage, etc.) from other people who disagree with your views."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Targeted ads solve this problem: On the internet, every ad unit can be "
"different for every person, meaning that you can buy ads that are only shown "
"to people who appear to be Nazis and not to people who hate Nazis. When "
"there’s spillover — when someone who hates racism is shown a racist "
"recruiting ad — there is some fallout; the platform or publication might get "
"an angry public or private denunciation. But the nature of the risk assumed "
"by an online ad buyer is different than the risks to a traditional publisher "
"or billboard owner who might want to run a Nazi ad."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Online ads are placed by algorithms that broker between a diverse ecosystem "
"of self-serve ad platforms that anyone can buy an ad through, so the Nazi ad "
"that slips onto your favorite online publication isn’t seen as their moral "
"failing but rather as a failure in some distant, upstream ad supplier. When "
"a publication gets a complaint about an offensive ad that’s appearing in one "
"of its units, it can take some steps to block that ad, but the Nazi might "
"buy a slightly different ad from a different broker serving the same unit. "
"And in any event, internet users increasingly understand that when they see "
"an ad, it’s likely that the advertiser did not choose that publication and "
"that the publication has no idea who its advertisers are."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"These layers of indirection between advertisers and publishers serve as "
"moral buffers: Today’s moral consensus is largely that publishers shouldn’t "
"be held responsible for the ads that appear on their pages because they’re "
"not actively choosing to put those ads there.  Because of this, Nazis are "
"able to overcome significant barriers to organizing their movement."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Data has a complex relationship with domination. Being able to spy on your "
"customers can alert you to their preferences for your rivals and allow you "
"to head off your rivals at the pass."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"More importantly, if you can dominate the information space while also "
"gathering data, then you make other deceptive tactics stronger because it’s "
"harder to break out of the web of deceit you’re spinning. Domination — that "
"is, ultimately becoming a monopoly — and not the data itself is the "
"supercharger that makes every tactic worth pursuing because monopolistic "
"domination deprives your target of an escape route."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If you’re a Nazi who wants to ensure that your prospects primarily see "
"deceptive, confirming information when they search for more, you can improve "
"your odds by seeding the search terms they use through your initial "
"communications. You don’t need to own the top 10 results for <quote>voter "
"suppression</quote> if you can convince your marks to confine their search "
"terms to <quote>voter fraud,</quote> which throws up a very different set of "
"search results."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Surveillance capitalists are like stage mentalists who claim that their "
"extraordinary insights into human behavior let them guess the word that you "
"wrote down and folded up in your pocket but who really use shills, hidden "
"cameras, sleight of hand, and brute-force memorization to amaze you."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Or perhaps they’re more like pick-up artists, the misogynistic cult that "
"promises to help awkward men have sex with women by teaching them "
"<quote>neurolinguistic programming</quote> phrases, body language "
"techniques, and psychological manipulation tactics like <quote>negging</"
"quote> — offering unsolicited negative feedback to women to lower their self-"
"esteem and prick their interest."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Some pick-up artists eventually manage to convince women to go home with "
"them, but it’s not because these men have figured out how to bypass women’s "
"critical faculties. Rather, pick-up artists’ <quote>success</quote> stories "
"are a mix of women who were incapable of giving consent, women who were "
"coerced, women who were intoxicated, self-destructive women, and a few women "
"who were sober and in command of their faculties but who didn’t realize "
"straightaway that they were with terrible men but rectified the error as "
"soon as they could."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Pick-up artists <emphasis>believe</emphasis> they have figured out a secret "
"back door that bypasses women’s critical faculties, but they haven’t. Many "
"of the tactics they deploy, like negging, became the butt of jokes (just "
"like people joke about bad ad targeting), and there’s a good chance that "
"anyone they try these tactics on will immediately recognize them and dismiss "
"the men who use them as irredeemable losers."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Pick-up artists are proof that people can believe they have developed a "
"system of mind control <emphasis>even when it doesn’t work</emphasis>. Pick-"
"up artists simply exploit the fact that one-in-a-million chances can come "
"through for you if you make a million attempts, and then they assume that "
"the other 999,999 times, they simply performed the technique incorrectly and "
"commit themselves to doing better next time. There’s only one group of "
"people who find pick-up artist lore reliably convincing: other would-be pick-"
"up artists whose anxiety and insecurity make them vulnerable to scammers and "
"delusional men who convince them that if they pay for tutelage and follow "
"instructions, then they will someday succeed. Pick-up artists assume they "
"fail to entice women because they are bad at being pick-up artists, not "
"because pick-up artistry is bullshit. Pick-up artists are bad at selling "
"themselves to women, but they’re much better at selling themselves to men "
"who pay to learn the secrets of pick-up artistry."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Department store pioneer John Wanamaker is said to have lamented, "
"<quote>Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I "
"don’t know which half.</quote> The fact that Wanamaker thought that only "
"half of his advertising spending was wasted is a tribute to the "
"persuasiveness of advertising executives, who are <emphasis>much</emphasis> "
"better at convincing potential clients to buy their services than they are "
"at convincing the general public to buy their clients’ wares."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "What is Facebook?"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Facebook is heralded as the origin of all of our modern plagues, and it’s "
"not hard to see why. Some tech companies want to lock their users in but "
"make their money by monopolizing access to the market for apps for their "
"devices and gouging them on prices rather than by spying on them (like "
"Apple). Some companies don’t care about locking in users because they’ve "
"figured out how to spy on them no matter where they are and what they’re "
"doing and can turn that surveillance into money (Google). Facebook alone "
"among the Western tech giants has built a business based on locking in its "
"users <emphasis>and</emphasis> spying on them all the time."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Facebook’s surveillance regime is really without parallel in the Western "
"world. Though Facebook tries to prevent itself from being visible on the "
"public web, hiding most of what goes on there from people unless they’re "
"logged into Facebook, the company has nevertheless booby-trapped the entire "
"web with surveillance tools in the form of Facebook <quote>Like</quote> "
"buttons that web publishers include on their sites to boost their Facebook "
"profiles. Facebook also makes various libraries and other useful code "
"snippets available to web publishers that act as surveillance tendrils on "
"the sites where they’re used, funneling information about visitors to the "
"site — newspapers, dating sites, message boards — to Facebook."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
msgid ""
"Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but "
"because it is <emphasis>big</emphasis>."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Facebook offers similar tools to app developers, so the apps — games, fart "
"machines, business review services, apps for keeping abreast of your kid’s "
"schooling — you use will send information about your activities to Facebook "
"even if you don’t have a Facebook account and even if you don’t download or "
"use Facebook apps. On top of all that, Facebook buys data from third-party "
"brokers on shopping habits, physical location, use of <quote>loyalty</quote> "
"programs, financial transactions, etc., and cross-references that with the "
"dossiers it develops on activity on Facebook and with apps and the public "
"web."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Though it’s easy to integrate the web with Facebook — linking to news "
"stories and such — Facebook products are generally not available to be "
"integrated back into the web itself. You can embed a tweet in a Facebook "
"post, but if you embed a Facebook post in a tweet, you just get a link back "
"to Facebook and must log in before you can see it. Facebook has used extreme "
"technological and legal countermeasures to prevent rivals from allowing "
"their users to embed Facebook snippets in competing services or to create "
"alternative interfaces to Facebook that merge your Facebook inbox with those "
"of other services that you use."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"And Facebook is incredibly popular, with 2.3 billion claimed users (though "
"many believe this figure to be inflated). Facebook has been used to organize "
"genocidal pogroms, racist riots, anti-vaccination movements, flat Earth "
"cults, and the political lives of some of the world’s ugliest, most brutal "
"autocrats. There are some really alarming things going on in the world, and "
"Facebook is implicated in many of them, so it’s easy to conclude that these "
"bad things are the result of Facebook’s mind-control system, which it rents "
"out to anyone with a few bucks to spend."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"To understand what role Facebook plays in the formulation and mobilization "
"of antisocial movements, we need to understand the dual nature of Facebook."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Because it has a lot of users and a lot of data about those users, Facebook "
"is a very efficient tool for locating people with hard-to-find traits, the "
"kinds of traits that are widely diffused in the population such that "
"advertisers have historically struggled to find a cost-effective way to "
"reach them. Think back to refrigerators: Most of us only replace our major "
"appliances a few times in our entire lives. If you’re a refrigerator "
"manufacturer or retailer, you have these brief windows in the life of a "
"consumer during which they are pondering a purchase, and you have to somehow "
"reach them. Anyone who’s ever registered a title change after buying a house "
"can attest that appliance manufacturers are incredibly desperate to reach "
"anyone who has even the slenderest chance of being in the market for a new "
"fridge."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Facebook makes finding people shopping for refrigerators a <emphasis>lot</"
"emphasis> easier. It can target ads to people who’ve registered a new home "
"purchase, to people who’ve searched for refrigerator buying advice, to "
"people who have complained about their fridge dying, or any combination "
"thereof. It can even target people who’ve recently bought <emphasis>other</"
"emphasis> kitchen appliances on the theory that someone who’s just replaced "
"their stove and dishwasher might be in a fridge-buying kind of mood. The "
"vast majority of people who are reached by these ads will not be in the "
"market for a new fridge, but — crucially — the percentage of people who "
"<emphasis>are</emphasis> looking for fridges that these ads reach is "
"<emphasis>much</emphasis> larger than it is than for any group that might be "
"subjected to traditional, offline targeted refrigerator marketing."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Facebook also makes it a lot easier to find people who have the same rare "
"disease as you, which might have been impossible in earlier eras — the "
"closest fellow sufferer might otherwise be hundreds of miles away. It makes "
"it easier to find people who went to the same high school as you even though "
"decades have passed and your former classmates have all been scattered to "
"the four corners of the Earth."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Facebook also makes it much easier to find people who hold the same rare "
"political beliefs as you. If you’ve always harbored a secret affinity for "
"socialism but never dared utter this aloud lest you be demonized by your "
"neighbors, Facebook can help you discover other people who feel the same way "
"(and it might just demonstrate to you that your affinity is more widespread "
"than you ever suspected). It can make it easier to find people who share "
"your sexual identity.  And again, it can help you to understand that what "
"you thought was a shameful secret that affected only you was really a widely "
"shared trait, giving you both comfort and the courage to come out to the "
"people in your life."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"All of this presents a dilemma for Facebook: Targeting makes the company’s "
"ads more effective than traditional ads, but it also lets advertisers see "
"just how effective their ads are. While advertisers are pleased to learn "
"that Facebook ads are more effective than ads on systems with less "
"sophisticated targeting, advertisers can also see that in nearly every case, "
"the people who see their ads ignore them. Or, at best, the ads work on a "
"subconscious level, creating nebulous unmeasurables like <quote>brand "
"recognition.</quote> This means that the price per ad is very low in nearly "
"every case."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"To make things worse, many Facebook groups spark precious little discussion. "
"Your little-league soccer team, the people with the same rare disease as "
"you, and the people you share a political affinity with may exchange the odd "
"flurry of messages at critical junctures, but on a daily basis, there’s not "
"much to say to your old high school chums or other hockey-card collectors."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"With nothing but <quote>organic</quote> discussion, Facebook would not "
"generate enough traffic to sell enough ads to make the money it needs to "
"continually expand by buying up its competitors while returning handsome "
"sums to its investors."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"So Facebook has to gin up traffic by sidetracking its own forums: Every time "
"Facebook’s algorithm injects controversial materials — inflammatory "
"political articles, conspiracy theories, outrage stories — into a group, it "
"can hijack that group’s nominal purpose with its desultory discussions and "
"supercharge those discussions by turning them into bitter, unproductive "
"arguments that drag on and on. Facebook is optimized for engagement, not "
"happiness, and it turns out that automated systems are pretty good at "
"figuring out things that people will get angry about."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Facebook <emphasis>can</emphasis> modify our behavior but only in a couple "
"of trivial ways. First, it can lock in all your friends and family members "
"so that you check and check and check with Facebook to find out what they "
"are up to; and second, it can make you angry and anxious. It can force you "
"to choose between being interrupted constantly by updates — a process that "
"breaks your concentration and makes it hard to be introspective — and "
"staying in touch with your friends. This is a very limited form of mind "
"control, and it can only really make us miserable, angry, and anxious."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This is why Facebook’s targeting systems — both the ones it shows to "
"advertisers and the ones that let users find people who share their "
"interests — are so next-gen and smooth and easy to use as well as why its "
"message boards have a toolset that seems like it hasn’t changed since the "
"mid-2000s. If Facebook delivered an equally flexible, sophisticated message-"
"reading system to its users, those users could defend themselves against "
"being nonconsensually eyeball-fucked with Donald Trump headlines."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The more time you spend on Facebook, the more ads it gets to show you. The "
"solution to Facebook’s ads only working one in a thousand times is for the "
"company to try to increase how much time you spend on Facebook by a factor "
"of a thousand. Rather than thinking of Facebook as a company that has "
"figured out how to show you exactly the right ad in exactly the right way to "
"get you to do what its advertisers want, think of it as a company that has "
"figured out how to make you slog through an endless torrent of arguments "
"even though they make you miserable, spending so much time on the site that "
"it eventually shows you at least one ad that you respond to."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Monopoly and the right to the future tense"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Zuboff and her cohort are particularly alarmed at the extent to which "
"surveillance allows corporations to influence our decisions, taking away "
"something she poetically calls <quote>the right to the future tense</quote> "
"— that is, the right to decide for yourself what you will do in the future."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"It’s true that advertising can tip the scales one way or another: When "
"you’re thinking of buying a fridge, a timely fridge ad might end the search "
"on the spot. But Zuboff puts enormous and undue weight on the persuasive "
"power of surveillance-based influence techniques. Most of these don’t work "
"very well, and the ones that do won’t work for very long. The makers of "
"these influence tools are confident they will someday refine them into "
"systems of total control, but they are hardly unbiased observers, and the "
"risks from their dreams coming true are very speculative."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"By contrast, Zuboff is rather sanguine about 40 years of lax antitrust "
"practice that has allowed a handful of companies to dominate the internet, "
"ushering in an information age with, <ulink url=\"https://twitter.com/"
"tveastman/status/1069674780826071040\">as one person on Twitter noted</"
"ulink>, five giant websites each filled with screenshots of the other four."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"However, if we are to be alarmed that we might lose the right to choose for "
"ourselves what our future will hold, then monopoly’s nonspeculative, "
"concrete, here-and-now harms should be front and center in our debate over "
"tech policy."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Start with <quote>digital rights management.</quote> In 1998, Bill Clinton "
"signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. It’s a complex "
"piece of legislation with many controversial clauses but none more so than "
"Section 1201, the <quote>anti-circumvention</quote> rule."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This is a blanket ban on tampering with systems that restrict access to "
"copyrighted works. The ban is so thoroughgoing that it prohibits removing a "
"copyright lock even when no copyright infringement takes place. This is by "
"design: The activities that the DMCA’s Section 1201 sets out to ban are not "
"copyright infringements; rather, they are legal activities that frustrate "
"manufacturers’ commercial plans."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"For example, Section 1201’s first major application was on DVD players as a "
"means of enforcing the region coding built into those devices. DVD-CCA, the "
"body that standardized DVDs and DVD players, divided the world into six "
"regions and specified that DVD players must check each disc to determine "
"which regions it was authorized to be played in. DVD players would have "
"their own corresponding region (a DVD player bought in the U.S. would be "
"region 1 while one bought in India would be region 5). If the player and the "
"disc’s region matched, the player would play the disc; otherwise, it would "
"reject it."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"However, watching a lawfully produced disc in a country other than the one "
"where you purchased it is not copyright infringement — it’s the opposite. "
"Copyright law imposes this duty on customers for a movie: You must go into a "
"store, find a licensed disc, and pay the asking price. Do that — and "
"<emphasis>nothing else</emphasis> — and you and copyright are square with "
"one another."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The fact that a movie studio wants to charge Indians less than Americans or "
"release in Australia later than it releases in the U.K.  has no bearing on "
"copyright law. Once you lawfully acquire a DVD, it is no copyright "
"infringement to watch it no matter where you happen to be."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"So DVD and DVD player manufacturers would not be able to use accusations of "
"abetting copyright infringement to punish manufacturers who made "
"noncompliant players that would play discs from any region or repair shops "
"that modified players to let you watch out-of-region discs or software "
"programmers who created programs to let you do this."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"That’s where Section 1201 of the DMCA comes in: By banning tampering with an "
"<quote>access control,</quote> the rule gave manufacturers and rights "
"holders standing to sue competitors who released superior products with "
"lawful features that the market demanded (in this case, region-free players)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This is an odious scam against consumers, but as time went by, Section 1201 "
"grew to encompass a rapidly expanding constellation of devices and services "
"as canny manufacturers have realized certain things:"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
msgid ""
"Any device with software in it contains a <quote>copyrighted work</quote> — "
"i.e., the software."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
msgid ""
"A device can be designed so that reconfiguring the software requires "
"bypassing an <quote>access control for copyrighted works,</quote> which is a "
"potential felony under Section 1201."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
msgid ""
"Thus, companies can control their customers’ behavior after they take home "
"their purchases by designing products so that all unpermitted uses require "
"modifications that fall afoul of Section 1201."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Section 1201 then becomes a means for manufacturers of all descriptions to "
"force their customers to arrange their affairs to benefit the manufacturers’ "
"shareholders instead of themselves."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This manifests in many ways: from a new generation of inkjet printers that "
"use countermeasures to prevent third-party ink that cannot be bypassed "
"without legal risks to similar systems in tractors that prevent third-party "
"technicians from swapping in the manufacturer’s own parts that are not "
"recognized by the tractor’s control system until it is supplied with a "
"manufacturer’s unlock code."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Closer to home, Apple’s iPhones use these measures to prevent both third-"
"party service and third-party software installation. This allows Apple to "
"decide when an iPhone is beyond repair and must be shredded and landfilled "
"as opposed to the iPhone’s purchaser. (Apple is notorious for its "
"environmentally catastrophic policy of destroying old electronics rather "
"than permitting them to be cannibalized for parts.) This is a very useful "
"power to wield, especially in light of CEO Tim Cook’s January 2019 warning "
"to investors that the company’s profits are endangered by customers choosing "
"to hold onto their phones for longer rather than replacing them."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Apple’s use of copyright locks also allows it to establish a monopoly over "
"how its customers acquire software for their mobile devices. The App Store’s "
"commercial terms guarantee Apple a share of all revenues generated by the "
"apps sold there, meaning that Apple gets paid when you buy an app from its "
"store and then continues to get paid every time you buy something using that "
"app. This comes out of the bottom line of software developers, who must "
"either charge more or accept lower profits for their products."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Crucially, Apple’s use of copyright locks gives it the power to make "
"editorial decisions about which apps you may and may not install on your own "
"device. Apple has used this power to <ulink url=\"https://www.telegraph.co."
"uk/technology/apple/5982243/Apple-bans-dictionary-from-App-Store-over-swear-"
"words.html\">reject dictionaries</ulink> for containing obscene words; to "
"<ulink url=\"https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just-banned-the-"
"app-that-tracks-us-drone-strikes-again\">limit political speech</ulink>, "
"especially from apps that make sensitive political commentary such as an app "
"that notifies you every time a U.S. drone kills someone somewhere in the "
"world; and to <ulink url=\"https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-05-19-"
"palestinian-indie-game-must-not-be-called-a-game-apple-says\">object to a "
"game</ulink> that commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Apple often justifies monopoly power over software installation in the name "
"of security, arguing that its vetting of apps for its store means that it "
"can guard its users against apps that contain surveillance code. But this "
"cuts both ways. In China, the government <ulink url=\"https://www.ft.com/"
"content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc\">ordered Apple to prohibit the "
"sale of privacy tools</ulink> like VPNs with the exception of VPNs that had "
"deliberately introduced flaws designed to let the Chinese state eavesdrop on "
"users. Because Apple uses technological countermeasures — with legal "
"backstops — to block customers from installing unauthorized apps, Chinese "
"iPhone owners cannot readily (or legally) acquire VPNs that would protect "
"them from Chinese state snooping."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <quote>rogue capitalism.</quote> "
"Theoreticians of capitalism claim that its virtue is that it <ulink url="
"\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal\">aggregates information in the "
"form of consumers’ decisions</ulink>, producing efficient markets. "
"Surveillance capitalism’s supposed power to rob its victims of their free "
"will through computationally supercharged influence campaigns means that our "
"markets no longer aggregate customers’ decisions because we customers no "
"longer decide — we are given orders by surveillance capitalism’s mind-"
"control rays."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no "
"longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at "
"<emphasis>least</emphasis> as much as influence campaigns. An influence "
"campaign might nudge you to buy a certain brand of phone; but the copyright "
"locks on that phone absolutely determine where you get it serviced, which "
"apps can run on it, and when you have to throw it away rather than fixing it."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Search order and the right to the future tense"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Markets are posed as a kind of magic: By discovering otherwise hidden "
"information conveyed by the free choices of consumers, those consumers’ "
"local knowledge is integrated into a self-correcting system that makes "
"efficient allocations—more efficient than any computer could calculate. But "
"monopolies are incompatible with that notion. When you only have one app "
"store, the owner of the store — not the consumer — decides on the range of "
"choices. As Boss Tweed once said, <quote>I don’t care who does the electing, "
"so long as I get to do the nominating.</quote> A monopolized market is an "
"election whose candidates are chosen by the monopolist."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This ballot rigging is made more pernicious by the existence of monopolies "
"over search order. Google’s search market share is about 90%. When Google’s "
"ranking algorithm puts a result for a popular search term in its top 10, "
"that helps determine the behavior of millions of people. If Google’s answer "
"to <quote>Are vaccines dangerous?</quote> is a page that rebuts anti-vax "
"conspiracy theories, then a sizable portion of the public will learn that "
"vaccines are safe. If, on the other hand, Google sends those people to a "
"site affirming the anti-vax conspiracies, a sizable portion of those "
"millions will come away convinced that vaccines are dangerous."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Google’s algorithm is often tricked into serving disinformation as a "
"prominent search result. But in these cases, Google isn’t persuading people "
"to change their minds; it’s just presenting something untrue as fact when "
"the user has no cause to doubt it."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This is true whether the search is for <quote>Are vaccines dangerous?</"
"quote> or <quote>best restaurants near me.</quote> Most users will never "
"look past the first page of search results, and when the overwhelming "
"majority of people all use the same search engine, the ranking algorithm "
"deployed by that search engine will determine myriad outcomes (whether to "
"adopt a child, whether to have cancer surgery, where to eat dinner, where to "
"move, where to apply for a job) to a degree that vastly outstrips any "
"behavioral outcomes dictated by algorithmic persuasion techniques."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Many of the questions we ask search engines have no empirically correct "
"answers: <quote>Where should I eat dinner?</quote> is not an objective "
"question. Even questions that do have correct answers (<quote>Are vaccines "
"dangerous?</quote>) don’t have one empirically superior source for that "
"answer. Many pages affirm the safety of vaccines, so which one goes first? "
"Under conditions of competition, consumers can choose from many search "
"engines and stick with the one whose algorithmic judgment suits them best, "
"but under conditions of monopoly, we all get our answers from the same place."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Google’s search dominance isn’t a matter of pure merit: The company has "
"leveraged many tactics that would have been prohibited under classical, pre-"
"Ronald-Reagan antitrust enforcement standards to attain its dominance. After "
"all, this is a company that has developed two major products: a really good "
"search engine and a pretty good Hotmail clone. Every other major success "
"it’s had — Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. — has come through an "
"acquisition of a nascent competitor. Many of the company’s key divisions, "
"such as the advertising technology of DoubleClick, violate the historical "
"antitrust principle of structural separation, which forbade firms from "
"owning subsidiaries that competed with their customers. Railroads, for "
"example, were barred from owning freight companies that competed with the "
"shippers whose freight they carried."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If we’re worried about giant companies subverting markets by stripping "
"consumers of their ability to make free choices, then vigorous antitrust "
"enforcement seems like an excellent remedy. If we’d denied Google the right "
"to effect its many mergers, we would also have probably denied it its total "
"search dominance. Without that dominance, the pet theories, biases, errors "
"(and good judgment, too) of Google search engineers and product managers "
"would not have such an outsized effect on consumer choice."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This goes for many other companies. Amazon, a classic surveillance "
"capitalist, is obviously the dominant tool for searching Amazon — though "
"many people find their way to Amazon through Google searches and Facebook "
"posts — and obviously, Amazon controls Amazon search.  That means that "
"Amazon’s own self-serving editorial choices—like promoting its own house "
"brands over rival goods from its sellers as well as its own pet theories, "
"biases, and errors— determine much of what we buy on Amazon. And since "
"Amazon is the dominant e-commerce retailer outside of China and since it "
"attained that dominance by buying up both large rivals and nascent "
"competitors in defiance of historical antitrust rules, we can blame the "
"monopoly for stripping consumers of their right to the future tense and the "
"ability to shape markets by making informed choices."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Not every monopolist is a surveillance capitalist, but that doesn’t mean "
"they’re not able to shape consumer choices in wide-ranging ways. Zuboff "
"lauds Apple for its App Store and iTunes Store, insisting that adding price "
"tags to the features on its platforms has been the secret to resisting "
"surveillance and thus creating markets. But Apple is the only retailer "
"allowed to sell on its platforms, and it’s the second-largest mobile device "
"vendor in the world. The independent software vendors that sell through "
"Apple’s marketplace accuse the company of the same surveillance sins as "
"Amazon and other big retailers: spying on its customers to find lucrative "
"new products to launch, effectively using independent software vendors as "
"free-market researchers, then forcing them out of any markets they discover."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Because of its use of copyright locks, Apple’s mobile customers are not "
"legally allowed to switch to a rival retailer for its apps if they want to "
"do so on an iPhone. Apple, obviously, is the only entity that gets to decide "
"how it ranks the results of search queries in its stores. These decisions "
"ensure that some apps are often installed (because they appear on page one) "
"and others are never installed (because they appear on page one million). "
"Apple’s search-ranking design decisions have a vastly more significant "
"effect on consumer behaviors than influence campaigns delivered by "
"surveillance capitalism’s ad-serving bots."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Only the most extreme market ideologues think that markets can self-regulate "
"without state oversight. Markets need watchdogs — regulators, lawmakers, and "
"other elements of democratic control — to keep them honest. When these "
"watchdogs sleep on the job, then markets cease to aggregate consumer choices "
"because those choices are constrained by illegitimate and deceptive "
"activities that companies are able to get away with because no one is "
"holding them to account."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But this kind of regulatory capture doesn’t come cheap. In competitive "
"sectors, where rivals are constantly eroding one another’s margins, "
"individual firms lack the surplus capital to effectively lobby for laws and "
"regulations that serve their ends."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Many of the harms of surveillance capitalism are the result of weak or "
"nonexistent regulation. Those regulatory vacuums spring from the power of "
"monopolists to resist stronger regulation and to tailor what regulation "
"exists to permit their existing businesses."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Here’s an example: When firms over-collect and over-retain our data, they "
"are at increased risk of suffering a breach — you can’t leak data you never "
"collected, and once you delete all copies of that data, you can no longer "
"leak it. For more than a decade, we’ve lived through an endless parade of "
"ever-worsening data breaches, each one uniquely horrible in the scale of "
"data breached and the sensitivity of that data."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for three "
"reasons:"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"<emphasis role=\"strong\">1. They are locked in the aforementioned limbic "
"arms race with our capacity to shore up our attentional defense systems to "
"resist their new persuasion techniques.</emphasis> They’re also locked in an "
"arms race with their competitors to find new ways to target people for sales "
"pitches. As soon as they discover a soft spot in our attentional defenses (a "
"counterintuitive, unobvious way to target potential refrigerator buyers), "
"the public begins to wise up to the tactic, and their competitors leap on "
"it, hastening the day in which all potential refrigerator buyers have been "
"inured to the pitch."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"<emphasis role=\"strong\">2. They believe the surveillance capitalism story."
"</emphasis> Data is cheap to aggregate and store, and both proponents and "
"opponents of surveillance capitalism have assured managers and product "
"designers that if you collect enough data, you will be able to perform "
"sorcerous acts of mind control, thus supercharging your sales. Even if you "
"never figure out how to profit from the data, someone else will eventually "
"offer to buy it from you to give it a try. This is the hallmark of all "
"economic bubbles: acquiring an asset on the assumption that someone else "
"will buy it from you for more than you paid for it, often to sell to someone "
"else at an even greater price."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"<emphasis role=\"strong\">3. The penalties for leaking data are negligible.</"
"emphasis> Most countries limit these penalties to actual damages, meaning "
"that consumers who’ve had their data breached have to show actual monetary "
"harms to get a reward. In 2014, Home Depot disclosed that it had lost credit-"
"card data for 53 million of its customers, but it settled the matter by "
"paying those customers about $0.34 each — and a third of that $0.34 wasn’t "
"even paid in cash. It took the form of a credit to procure a largely "
"ineffectual credit-monitoring service."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But the harms from breaches are much more extensive than these actual-"
"damages rules capture. Identity thieves and fraudsters are wily and "
"endlessly inventive. All the vast breaches of our century are being "
"continuously recombined, the data sets merged and mined for new ways to "
"victimize the people whose data was present in them.  Any reasonable, "
"evidence-based theory of deterrence and compensation for breaches would not "
"confine damages to actual damages but rather would allow users to claim "
"these future harms."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"However, even the most ambitious privacy rules, such as the EU General Data "
"Protection Regulation, fall far short of capturing the negative "
"externalities of the platforms’ negligent over-collection and over-"
"retention, and what penalties they do provide are not aggressively pursued "
"by regulators."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This tolerance of — or indifference to — data over-collection and over-"
"retention can be ascribed in part to the sheer lobbying muscle of the "
"platforms. They are so profitable that they can handily afford to divert "
"gigantic sums to fight any real change — that is, change that would force "
"them to internalize the costs of their surveillance activities."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"And then there’s state surveillance, which the surveillance capitalism story "
"dismisses as a relic of another era when the big worry was being jailed for "
"your dissident speech, not having your free will stripped away with machine "
"learning."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But state surveillance and private surveillance are intimately related. As "
"we saw when Apple was conscripted by the Chinese government as a vital "
"collaborator in state surveillance, the only really affordable and tractable "
"way to conduct mass surveillance on the scale practiced by modern states — "
"both <quote>free</quote> and autocratic states — is to suborn commercial "
"services."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Whether it’s Google being used as a location tracking tool by local law "
"enforcement across the U.S. or the use of social media tracking by the "
"Department of Homeland Security to build dossiers on participants in "
"protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s family separation "
"practices, any hard limits on surveillance capitalism would hamstring the "
"state’s own surveillance capability. Without Palantir, Amazon, Google, and "
"other major tech contractors, U.S. cops would not be able to spy on Black "
"people, ICE would not be able to manage the caging of children at the U.S.  "
"border, and state welfare systems would not be able to purge their rolls by "
"dressing up cruelty as empiricism and claiming that poor and vulnerable "
"people are ineligible for assistance. At least some of the states’ "
"unwillingness to take meaningful action to curb surveillance should be "
"attributed to this symbiotic relationship.  There is no mass state "
"surveillance without mass commercial surveillance."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Monopolism is key to the project of mass state surveillance. It’s true that "
"smaller tech firms are apt to be less well-defended than Big Tech, whose "
"security experts are drawn from the tops of their field and who are given "
"enormous resources to secure and monitor their systems against intruders. "
"But smaller firms also have less to protect: fewer users whose data is more "
"fragmented across more systems and have to be suborned one at a time by "
"state actors."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"A concentrated tech sector that works with authorities is a much more "
"powerful ally in the project of mass state surveillance than a fragmented "
"one composed of smaller actors. The U.S. tech sector is small enough that "
"all of its top executives fit around a single boardroom table in Trump Tower "
"in 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Most of its biggest players bid "
"to win JEDI, the Pentagon’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense "
"Infrastructure cloud contract. Like other highly concentrated industries, "
"Big Tech rotates its key employees in and out of government service, sending "
"them to serve in the Department of Defense and the White House, then hiring "
"ex-Pentagon and ex-DOD top staffers and officers to work in their own "
"government relations departments."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"They can even make a good case for doing this: After all, when there are "
"only four or five big companies in an industry, everyone qualified to "
"regulate those companies has served as an executive in at least a couple of "
"them — because, likewise, when there are only five companies in an industry, "
"everyone qualified for a senior role at any of them is by definition working "
"at one of the other ones."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
msgid ""
"While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly abet "
"surveillance."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Industries that are competitive are fragmented — composed of companies that "
"are at each other’s throats all the time and eroding one another’s margins "
"in bids to steal their best customers. This leaves them with much more "
"limited capital to use to lobby for favorable rules and a much harder job of "
"getting everyone to agree to pool their resources to benefit the industry as "
"a whole."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Surveillance combined with machine learning is supposed to be an existential "
"crisis, a species-defining moment at which our free will is just a few more "
"advances in the field from being stripped away. I am skeptical of this "
"claim, but I <emphasis>do</emphasis> think that tech poses an existential "
"threat to our society and possibly our species."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid "But that threat grows out of monopoly."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"One of the consequences of tech’s regulatory capture is that it can shift "
"liability for poor security decisions onto its customers and the wider "
"society. It is absolutely normal in tech for companies to obfuscate the "
"workings of their products, to make them deliberately hard to understand, "
"and to threaten security researchers who seek to independently audit those "
"products."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"IT is the only field in which this is practiced: No one builds a bridge or a "
"hospital and keeps the composition of the steel or the equations used to "
"calculate load stresses a secret. It is a frankly bizarre practice that "
"leads, time and again, to grotesque security defects on farcical scales, "
"with whole classes of devices being revealed as vulnerable long after they "
"are deployed in the field and put into sensitive places."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The monopoly power that keeps any meaningful consequences for breaches at "
"bay means that tech companies continue to build terrible products that are "
"insecure by design and that end up integrated into our lives, in possession "
"of our data, and connected to our physical world. For years, Boeing has "
"struggled with the aftermath of a series of bad technology decisions that "
"made its 737 fleet a global pariah, a rare instance in which bad tech "
"decisions have been seriously punished in the market."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"These bad security decisions are compounded yet again by the use of "
"copyright locks to enforce business-model decisions against consumers. "
"Recall that these locks have become the go-to means for shaping consumer "
"behavior, making it technically impossible to use third-party ink, insulin, "
"apps, or service depots in connection with your lawfully acquired property."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Recall also that these copyright locks are backstopped by legislation (such "
"as Section 1201 of the DMCA or Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive) "
"that ban tampering with (<quote>circumventing</quote>) them, and these "
"statutes have been used to threaten security researchers who make "
"disclosures about vulnerabilities without permission from manufacturers."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This amounts to a manufacturer’s veto over safety warnings and criticism. "
"While this is far from the legislative intent of the DMCA and its sister "
"statutes around the world, Congress has not intervened to clarify the "
"statute nor will it because to do so would run counter to the interests of "
"powerful, large firms whose lobbying muscle is unstoppable."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Copyright locks are a double whammy: They create bad security decisions that "
"can’t be freely investigated or discussed. If markets are supposed to be "
"machines for aggregating information (and if surveillance capitalism’s "
"notional mind-control rays are what make it a <quote>rogue capitalism</"
"quote> because it denies consumers the power to make decisions), then a "
"program of legally enforced ignorance of the risks of products makes "
"monopolism even more of a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> than surveillance "
"capitalism’s influence campaigns."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"And unlike mind-control rays, enforced silence over security is an "
"immediate, documented problem, and it <emphasis>does</emphasis> constitute "
"an existential threat to our civilization and possibly our species. The "
"proliferation of insecure devices — especially devices that spy on us and "
"especially when those devices also can manipulate the physical world by, "
"say, steering your car or flipping a breaker at a power station — is a kind "
"of technology debt."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"In software design, <quote>technology debt</quote> refers to old, baked-in "
"decisions that turn out to be bad ones in hindsight. Perhaps a long-ago "
"developer decided to incorporate a networking protocol made by a vendor that "
"has since stopped supporting it. But everything in the product still relies "
"on that superannuated protocol, and so, with each revision, the product team "
"has to work around this obsolete core, adding compatibility layers, "
"surrounding it with security checks that try to shore up its defenses, and "
"so on. These Band-Aid measures compound the debt because every subsequent "
"revision has to make allowances for <emphasis>them</emphasis>, too, like "
"interest mounting on a predatory subprime loan. And like a subprime loan, "
"the interest mounts faster than you can hope to pay it off: The product team "
"has to put so much energy into maintaining this complex, brittle system that "
"they don’t have any time left over to refactor the product from the ground "
"up and <quote>pay off the debt</quote> once and for all."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Typically, technology debt results in a technological bankruptcy: The "
"product gets so brittle and unsustainable that it fails catastrophically. "
"Think of the antiquated COBOL-based banking and accounting systems that fell "
"over at the start of the pandemic emergency when confronted with surges of "
"unemployment claims.  Sometimes that ends the product; sometimes it takes "
"the company down with it. Being caught in the default of a technology debt "
"is scary and traumatic, just like losing your house due to bankruptcy is "
"scary and traumatic."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But the technology debt created by copyright locks isn’t individual debt; "
"it’s systemic. Everyone in the world is exposed to this over-leverage, as "
"was the case with the 2008 financial crisis. When that debt comes due — when "
"we face a cascade of security breaches that threaten global shipping and "
"logistics, the food supply, pharmaceutical production pipelines, emergency "
"communications, and other critical systems that are accumulating technology "
"debt in part due to the presence of deliberately insecure and deliberately "
"unauditable copyright locks — it will indeed pose an existential risk."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Privacy and monopoly"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Many tech companies are gripped by an orthodoxy that holds that if they just "
"gather enough data on enough of our activities, everything else is possible "
"— the mind control and endless profits. This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis: "
"If data gives a tech company even a tiny improvement in behavior prediction "
"and modification, the company declares that it has taken the first step "
"toward global domination with no end in sight. If a company <emphasis>fails</"
"emphasis> to attain any improvements from gathering and analyzing data, it "
"declares success to be just around the corner, attainable once more data is "
"in hand."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Surveillance tech is far from the first industry to embrace a nonsensical, "
"self-serving belief that harms the rest of the world, and it is not the "
"first industry to profit handsomely from such a delusion. Long before hedge-"
"fund managers were claiming (falsely)  that they could beat the S&amp;P 500, "
"there were plenty of other <quote>respectable</quote> industries that have "
"been revealed as quacks in hindsight. From the makers of radium "
"suppositories (a real thing!)  to the cruel sociopaths who claimed they "
"could <quote>cure</quote> gay people, history is littered with the formerly "
"respectable titans of discredited industries."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This is not to say that there’s nothing wrong with Big Tech and its "
"ideological addiction to data. While surveillance’s benefits are mostly "
"overstated, its harms are, if anything, <emphasis>understated</emphasis>."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"There’s real irony here. The belief in surveillance capitalism as a "
"<quote>rogue capitalism</quote> is driven by the belief that markets "
"wouldn’t tolerate firms that are gripped by false beliefs. An oil company "
"that has false beliefs about where the oil is will eventually go broke "
"digging dry wells after all."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But monopolists get to do terrible things for a long time before they pay "
"the price. Think of how concentration in the finance sector allowed the "
"subprime crisis to fester as bond-rating agencies, regulators, investors, "
"and critics all fell under the sway of a false belief that complex "
"mathematics could construct <quote>fully hedged</quote> debt instruments "
"that could not possibly default. A small bank that engaged in this kind of "
"malfeasance would simply go broke rather than outrunning the inevitable "
"crisis, perhaps growing so big that it averted it altogether. But large "
"banks were able to continue to attract investors, and when they finally "
"<emphasis>did</emphasis> come a-cropper, the world’s governments bailed them "
"out. The worst offenders of the subprime crisis are bigger than they were in "
"2008, bringing home more profits and paying their execs even larger sums."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but "
"because it is <emphasis>big</emphasis>. The reason every web publisher "
"embeds a Facebook <quote>Like</quote> button is that Facebook dominates the "
"internet’s social media referrals — and every one of those <quote>Like</"
"quote> buttons spies on everyone who lands on a page that contains them (see "
"also: Google Analytics embeds, Twitter buttons, etc.)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The reason the world’s governments have been slow to create meaningful "
"penalties for privacy breaches is that Big Tech’s concentration produces "
"huge profits that can be used to lobby against those penalties — and Big "
"Tech’s concentration means that the companies involved are able to arrive at "
"a unified negotiating position that supercharges the lobbying."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The reason that the smartest engineers in the world want to work for Big "
"Tech is that Big Tech commands the lion’s share of tech industry jobs."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The reason people who are aghast at Facebook’s and Google’s and Amazon’s "
"data-handling practices continue to use these services is that all their "
"friends are on Facebook; Google dominates search; and Amazon has put all the "
"local merchants out of business."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Competitive markets would weaken the companies’ lobbying muscle by reducing "
"their profits and pitting them against each other in regulatory forums. It "
"would give customers other places to go to get their online services. It "
"would make the companies small enough to regulate and pave the way to "
"meaningful penalties for breaches. It would let engineers with ideas that "
"challenged the surveillance orthodoxy raise capital to compete with the "
"incumbents. It would give web publishers multiple ways to reach audiences "
"and make the case against Facebook and Google and Twitter embeds."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies "
"certainly abet surveillance."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Technology exceptionalism is a sin, whether it’s practiced by technology’s "
"blind proponents or by its critics. Both of these camps are prone to "
"explaining away monopolistic concentration by citing some special "
"characteristic of the tech industry, like network effects or first-mover "
"advantage. The only real difference between these two groups is that the "
"tech apologists say monopoly is inevitable so we should just let tech get "
"away with its abuses while competition regulators in the U.S. and the EU say "
"monopoly is inevitable so we should punish tech for its abuses but not try "
"to break up the monopolies."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"To understand how tech became so monopolistic, it’s useful to look at the "
"dawn of the consumer tech industry: 1979, the year the Apple II Plus "
"launched and became the first successful home computer. That also happens to "
"be the year that Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail for the 1980 "
"presidential race — a race he won, leading to a radical shift in the way "
"that antitrust concerns are handled in America. Reagan’s cohort of "
"politicians — including Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Brian Mulroney in "
"Canada, Helmut Kohl in Germany, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile — went on to "
"enact similar reforms that eventually spread around the world."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Antitrust’s story began nearly a century before all that with laws like the "
"Sherman Act, which took aim at monopolists on the grounds that monopolies "
"were bad in and of themselves — squeezing out competitors, creating "
"<quote>diseconomies of scale</quote> (when a company is so big that its "
"constituent parts go awry and it is seemingly helpless to address the "
"problems), and capturing their regulators to such a degree that they can get "
"away with a host of evils."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Then came a fabulist named Robert Bork, a former solicitor general who "
"Reagan appointed to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit "
"and who had created an alternate legislative history of the Sherman Act and "
"its successors out of whole cloth. Bork insisted that these statutes were "
"never targeted at monopolies (despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, "
"including the transcribed speeches of the acts’ authors) but, rather, that "
"they were intended to prevent <quote>consumer harm</quote> — in the form of "
"higher prices."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Bork was a crank, but he was a crank with a theory that rich people really "
"liked. Monopolies are a great way to make rich people richer by allowing "
"them to receive <quote>monopoly rents</quote> (that is, bigger profits) and "
"capture regulators, leading to a weaker, more favorable regulatory "
"environment with fewer protections for customers, suppliers, the "
"environment, and workers."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Bork’s theories were especially palatable to the same power brokers who "
"backed Reagan, and Reagan’s Department of Justice and other agencies began "
"to incorporate Bork’s antitrust doctrine into their enforcement decisions "
"(Reagan even put Bork up for a Supreme Court seat, but Bork flunked the "
"Senate confirmation hearing so badly that, 40 years later, D.C. insiders use "
"the term <quote>borked</quote> to refer to any catastrophically bad "
"political performance)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Little by little, Bork’s theories entered the mainstream, and their backers "
"began to infiltrate the legal education field, even putting on junkets where "
"members of the judiciary were treated to lavish meals, fun outdoor "
"activities, and seminars where they were indoctrinated into the consumer "
"harm theory of antitrust. The more Bork’s theories took hold, the more money "
"the monopolists were making — and the more surplus capital they had at their "
"disposal to lobby for even more Borkian antitrust influence campaigns."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The history of Bork’s antitrust theories is a really good example of the "
"kind of covertly engineered shifts in public opinion that Zuboff warns us "
"against, where fringe ideas become mainstream orthodoxy.  But Bork didn’t "
"change the world overnight. He played a very long game, for over a "
"generation, and he had a tailwind because the same forces that backed "
"oligarchic antitrust theories also backed many other oligarchic shifts in "
"public opinion. For example, the idea that taxation is theft, that wealth is "
"a sign of virtue, and so on — all of these theories meshed to form a "
"coherent ideology that elevated inequality to a virtue."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Today, many fear that machine learning allows surveillance capitalism to "
"sell <quote>Bork-as-a-Service,</quote> at internet speeds, so that you can "
"contract a machine-learning company to engineer <emphasis>rapid</emphasis> "
"shifts in public sentiment without needing the capital to sustain a "
"multipronged, multigenerational project working at the local, state, "
"national, and global levels in business, law, and philosophy. I do not "
"believe that such a project is plausible, though I agree that this is "
"basically what the platforms claim to be selling. They’re just lying about "
"it. Big Tech lies all the time, <emphasis>including</emphasis> in their "
"sales literature."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The idea that tech forms <quote>natural monopolies</quote> (monopolies that "
"are the inevitable result of the realities of an industry, such as the "
"monopolies that accrue the first company to run long-haul phone lines or "
"rail lines) is belied by tech’s own history: In the absence of anti-"
"competitive tactics, Google was able to unseat AltaVista and Yahoo; Facebook "
"was able to head off Myspace. There are some advantages to gathering "
"mountains of data, but those mountains of data also have disadvantages: "
"liability (from leaking), diminishing returns (from old data), and "
"institutional inertia (big companies, like science, progress one funeral at "
"a time)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Indeed, the birth of the web saw a mass-extinction event for the existing "
"giant, wildly profitable proprietary technologies that had capital, network "
"effects, and walls and moats surrounding their businesses. The web showed "
"that when a new industry is built around a protocol, rather than a product, "
"the combined might of everyone who uses the protocol to reach their "
"customers or users or communities outweighs even the most massive products. "
"CompuServe, AOL, MSN, and a host of other proprietary walled gardens learned "
"this lesson the hard way: Each believed it could stay separate from the web, "
"offering <quote>curation</quote> and a guarantee of consistency and quality "
"instead of the chaos of an open system. Each was wrong and ended up being "
"absorbed into the public web."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Yes, tech is heavily monopolized and is now closely associated with industry "
"concentration, but this has more to do with a matter of timing than its "
"intrinsically monopolistic tendencies. Tech was born at the moment that "
"antitrust enforcement was being dismantled, and tech fell into exactly the "
"same pathologies that antitrust was supposed to guard against. To a first "
"approximation, it is reasonable to assume that tech’s monopolies are the "
"result of a lack of anti-monopoly action and not the much-touted unique "
"characteristics of tech, such as network effects, first-mover advantage, and "
"so on."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"In support of this thesis, I offer the concentration that every "
"<emphasis>other</emphasis> industry has undergone over the same period. From "
"professional wrestling to consumer packaged goods to commercial property "
"leasing to banking to sea freight to oil to record labels to newspaper "
"ownership to theme parks, <emphasis>every</emphasis> industry has undergone "
"a massive shift toward concentration. There’s no obvious network effects or "
"first-mover advantage at play in these industries. However, in every case, "
"these industries attained their concentrated status through tactics that "
"were prohibited before Bork’s triumph: merging with major competitors, "
"buying out innovative new market entrants, horizontal and vertical "
"integration, and a suite of anti-competitive tactics that were once illegal "
"but are not any longer."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Again: When you change the laws intended to prevent monopolies and then "
"monopolies form in exactly the way the law was supposed to prevent, it is "
"reasonable to suppose that these facts are related.  Tech’s concentration "
"can be readily explained without recourse to radical theories of network "
"effects — but only if you’re willing to indict unregulated markets as "
"tending toward monopoly. Just as a lifelong smoker can give you a hundred "
"reasons why their smoking didn’t cause their cancer (<quote>It was the "
"environmental toxins</quote>), true believers in unregulated markets have a "
"whole suite of unconvincing explanations for monopoly in tech that leave "
"capitalism intact."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Steering with the windshield wipers"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"It’s been 40 years since Bork’s project to rehabilitate monopolies achieved "
"liftoff, and that is a generation and a half, which is plenty of time to "
"take a common idea and make it seem outlandish and vice versa. Before the "
"1940s, affluent Americans dressed their baby boys in pink while baby girls "
"wore blue (a <quote>delicate and dainty</quote> color). While gendered "
"colors are obviously totally arbitrary, many still greet this news with "
"amazement and find it hard to imagine a time when pink connoted masculinity."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"After 40 years of studiously ignoring antitrust analysis and enforcement, "
"it’s not surprising that we’ve all but forgotten that antitrust exists, that "
"in living memory, growth through mergers and acquisitions were largely "
"prohibited under law, that market-cornering strategies like vertical "
"integration could land a company in court."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Antitrust is a market society’s steering wheel, the control of first resort "
"to keep would-be masters of the universe in their lanes. But Bork and his "
"cohort ripped out our steering wheel 40 years ago. The car is still "
"barreling along, and so we’re yanking as hard as we can on all the "
"<emphasis>other</emphasis> controls in the car as well as desperately "
"flapping the doors and rolling the windows up and down in the hopes that one "
"of these other controls can be repurposed to let us choose where we’re "
"heading before we careen off a cliff."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in a "
"<quote>generation ship,</quote> plying its way across the stars, a ship once "
"piloted by their ancestors; and now, after a great cataclysm, the ship’s "
"crew have forgotten that they’re in a ship at all and no longer remember "
"where the control room is. Adrift, the ship is racing toward its extinction, "
"and unless we can seize the controls and execute emergency course "
"correction, we’re all headed for a fiery death in the heart of a sun."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Surveillance still matters"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"None of this is to minimize the problems with surveillance.  Surveillance "
"matters, and Big Tech’s use of surveillance <emphasis>is</emphasis> an "
"existential risk to our species, but that’s not because surveillance and "
"machine learning rob us of our free will."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Surveillance has become <emphasis>much</emphasis> more efficient thanks to "
"Big Tech. In 1989, the Stasi — the East German secret police — had the whole "
"country under surveillance, a massive undertaking that recruited one out of "
"every 60 people to serve as an informant or intelligence operative."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Today, we know that the NSA is spying on a significant fraction of the "
"entire world’s population, and its ratio of surveillance operatives to the "
"surveilled is more like 1:10,000 (that’s probably on the low side since it "
"assumes that every American with top-secret clearance is working for the NSA "
"on this project — we don’t know how many of those cleared people are "
"involved in NSA spying, but it’s definitely not all of them)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"How did the ratio of surveillable citizens expand from 1:60 to 1:10,000 in "
"less than 30 years? It’s thanks to Big Tech. Our devices and services gather "
"most of the data that the NSA mines for its surveillance project. We pay for "
"these devices and the services they connect to, and then we painstakingly "
"perform the data-entry tasks associated with logging facts about our lives, "
"opinions, and preferences. This mass surveillance project has been largely "
"useless for fighting terrorism: The NSA can <ulink url=\"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\">only point to a single minor success story</ulink> "
"in which it used its data collection program to foil an attempt by a U.S. "
"resident to wire a few thousand dollars to an overseas terror group. It’s "
"ineffective for much the same reason that commercial surveillance projects "
"are largely ineffective at targeting advertising: The people who want to "
"commit acts of terror, like people who want to buy a refrigerator, are "
"extremely rare. If you’re trying to detect a phenomenon whose base rate is "
"one in a million with an instrument whose accuracy is only 99%, then every "
"true positive will come at the cost of 9,999 false positives."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Let me explain that again: If one in a million people is a terrorist, then "
"there will only be about one terrorist in a random sample of one million "
"people. If your test for detecting terrorists is 99% accurate, it will "
"identify 10,000 terrorists in your million-person sample (1% of one million "
"is 10,000). For every true positive, you’ll get 9,999 false positives."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"In reality, the accuracy of algorithmic terrorism detection falls far short "
"of the 99% mark, as does refrigerator ad targeting. The difference is that "
"being falsely accused of wanting to buy a fridge is a minor nuisance while "
"being falsely accused of planning a terror attack can destroy your life and "
"the lives of everyone you love."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Mass state surveillance is only feasible because of surveillance capitalism "
"and its extremely low-yield ad-targeting systems, which require a constant "
"feed of personal data to remain barely viable.  Surveillance capitalism’s "
"primary failure mode is mistargeted ads while mass state surveillance’s "
"primary failure mode is grotesque human rights abuses, tending toward "
"totalitarianism."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"State surveillance is no mere parasite on Big Tech, sucking up its data and "
"giving nothing in return. In truth, the two are symbiotes: Big Tech sucks up "
"our data for spy agencies, and spy agencies ensure that governments don’t "
"limit Big Tech’s activities so severely that it would no longer serve the "
"spy agencies’ needs. There is no firm distinction between state surveillance "
"and surveillance capitalism; they are dependent on one another."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"To see this at work today, look no further than Amazon’s home surveillance "
"device, the Ring doorbell, and its associated app, Neighbors. Ring — a "
"product that Amazon acquired and did not develop in house — makes a camera-"
"enabled doorbell that streams footage from your front door to your mobile "
"device. The Neighbors app allows you to form a neighborhood-wide "
"surveillance grid with your fellow Ring owners through which you can share "
"clips of <quote>suspicious characters.</quote> If you’re thinking that this "
"sounds like a recipe for letting curtain-twitching racists supercharge their "
"suspicions of people with brown skin who walk down their blocks, <ulink url="
"\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/amazons-ring-enables-over-policing-"
"efforts-some-americas-deadliest-law-enforcement\">you’re right</ulink>. Ring "
"has become a <emphasis>de facto,</emphasis> off-the-books arm of the police "
"without any of the pesky oversight or rules."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"In mid-2019, a series of public records requests revealed that Amazon had "
"struck confidential deals with more than 400 local law enforcement agencies "
"through which the agencies would promote Ring and Neighbors and in exchange "
"get access to footage from Ring cameras. In theory, cops would need to "
"request this footage through Amazon (and internal documents reveal that "
"Amazon devotes substantial resources to coaching cops on how to spin a "
"convincing story when doing so), but in practice, when a Ring customer turns "
"down a police request, Amazon only requires the agency to formally request "
"the footage from the company, which it will then produce."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Ring and law enforcement have found many ways to intertwine their "
"activities. Ring strikes secret deals to acquire real-time access to 911 "
"dispatch and then streams alarming crime reports to Neighbors users, which "
"serve as convincers for anyone who’s contemplating a surveillance doorbell "
"but isn’t sure whether their neighborhood is dangerous enough to warrant it."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The more the cops buzz-market the surveillance capitalist Ring, the more "
"surveillance capability the state gets. Cops who rely on private entities "
"for law-enforcement roles then brief against any controls on the deployment "
"of that technology while the companies return the favor by lobbying against "
"rules requiring public oversight of police surveillance technology. The more "
"the cops rely on Ring and Neighbors, the harder it will be to pass laws to "
"curb them. The fewer laws there are against them, the more the cops will "
"rely on them."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Dignity and sanctuary"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But even if we could exercise democratic control over our states and force "
"them to stop raiding surveillance capitalism’s reservoirs of behavioral "
"data, surveillance capitalism would still harm us."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This is an area where Zuboff shines. Her chapter on <quote>sanctuary</quote> "
"— the feeling of being unobserved — is a beautiful hymn to introspection, "
"calmness, mindfulness, and tranquility."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"When you are watched, something changes. Anyone who has ever raised a child "
"knows this. You might look up from your book (or more realistically, from "
"your phone) and catch your child in a moment of profound realization and "
"growth, a moment where they are learning something that is right at the edge "
"of their abilities, requiring their entire ferocious concentration. For a "
"moment, you’re transfixed, watching that rare and beautiful moment of focus "
"playing out before your eyes, and then your child looks up and sees you "
"seeing them, and the moment collapses. To grow, you need to be and expose "
"your authentic self, and in that moment, you are vulnerable like a hermit "
"crab scuttling from one shell to the next. The tender, unprotected tissues "
"you expose in that moment are too delicate to reveal in the presence of "
"another, even someone you trust as implicitly as a child trusts their parent."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"In the digital age, our authentic selves are inextricably tied to our "
"digital lives. Your search history is a running ledger of the questions "
"you’ve pondered. Your location history is a record of the places you’ve "
"sought out and the experiences you’ve had there. Your social graph reveals "
"the different facets of your identity, the people you’ve connected with."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your "
"authentic self."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"There’s another way in which surveillance capitalism robs us of our capacity "
"to be our authentic selves: by making us anxious.  Surveillance capitalism "
"isn’t really a mind-control ray, but you don’t need a mind-control ray to "
"make someone anxious. After all, another word for anxiety is agitation, and "
"to make someone experience agitation, you need merely to agitate them. To "
"poke them and prod them and beep at them and buzz at them and bombard them "
"on an intermittent schedule that is just random enough that our limbic "
"systems never quite become inured to it."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Our devices and services are <quote>general purpose</quote> in that they can "
"connect anything or anyone to anything or anyone else and that they can run "
"any program that can be written. This means that the distraction rectangles "
"in our pockets hold our most precious moments with our most beloved people "
"and their most urgent or time-sensitive communications (from <quote>running "
"late can you get the kid?</quote> to <quote>doctor gave me bad news and I "
"need to talk to you RIGHT NOW</quote>) as well as ads for refrigerators and "
"recruiting messages from Nazis."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"All day and all night, our pockets buzz, shattering our concentration and "
"tearing apart the fragile webs of connection we spin as we think through "
"difficult ideas. If you locked someone in a cell and agitated them like "
"this, we’d call it <quote>sleep deprivation torture,</quote> and it would be "
"<ulink url=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKpRbvnx6g\">a war crime under "
"the Geneva Conventions</ulink>."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Afflicting the afflicted"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The effects of surveillance on our ability to be our authentic selves are "
"not equal for all people. Some of us are lucky enough to live in a time and "
"place in which all the most important facts of our lives are widely and "
"roundly socially acceptable and can be publicly displayed without the risk "
"of social consequence."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But for many of us, this is not true. Recall that in living memory, many of "
"the ways of being that we think of as socially acceptable today were once "
"cause for dire social sanction or even imprisonment.  If you are 65 years "
"old, you have lived through a time in which people living in <quote>free "
"societies</quote> could be imprisoned or sanctioned for engaging in "
"homosexual activity, for falling in love with a person whose skin was a "
"different color than their own, or for smoking weed."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Today, these activities aren’t just decriminalized in much of the world, "
"they’re considered normal, and the fallen prohibitions are viewed as "
"shameful, regrettable relics of the past."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"How did we get from prohibition to normalization? Through private, personal "
"activity: People who were secretly gay or secret pot-smokers or who secretly "
"loved someone with a different skin color were vulnerable to retaliation if "
"they made their true selves known and were limited in how much they could "
"advocate for their own right to exist in the world and be true to "
"themselves. But because there was a private sphere, these people could form "
"alliances with their friends and loved ones who did not share their "
"disfavored traits by having private conversations in which they came out, "
"disclosing their true selves to the people around them and bringing them to "
"their cause one conversation at a time."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The right to choose the time and manner of these conversations was key to "
"their success. It’s one thing to come out to your dad while you’re on a "
"fishing trip away from the world and another thing entirely to blurt it out "
"over the Christmas dinner table while your racist Facebook uncle is there to "
"make a scene."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Without a private sphere, there’s a chance that none of these changes would "
"have come to pass and that the people who benefited from these changes would "
"have either faced social sanction for coming out to a hostile world or would "
"have never been able to reveal their true selves to the people they love."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The corollary is that, unless you think that our society has attained social "
"perfection — that your grandchildren in 50 years will ask you to tell them "
"the story of how, in 2020, every injustice had been righted and no further "
"change had to be made — then you should expect that right now, at this "
"minute, there are people you love, whose happiness is key to your own, who "
"have a secret in their hearts that stops them from ever being their "
"authentic selves with you. These people are sorrowing and will go to their "
"graves with that secret sorrow in their hearts, and the source of that "
"sorrow will be the falsity of their relationship to you."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid "A private realm is necessary for human progress."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The lack of a private life can rob vulnerable people of the chance to be "
"their authentic selves and constrain our actions by depriving us of "
"sanctuary, but there is another risk that is borne by everyone, not just "
"people with a secret: crime."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Personally identifying information is of very limited use for the purpose of "
"controlling peoples’ minds, but identity theft — really a catchall term for "
"a whole constellation of terrible criminal activities that can destroy your "
"finances, compromise your personal integrity, ruin your reputation, or even "
"expose you to physical danger — thrives on it."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Attackers are not limited to using data from one breached source, either. "
"Multiple services have suffered breaches that exposed names, addresses, "
"phone numbers, passwords, sexual tastes, school grades, work performance, "
"brushes with the criminal justice system, family details, genetic "
"information, fingerprints and other biometrics, reading habits, search "
"histories, literary tastes, pseudonymous identities, and other sensitive "
"information. Attackers can merge data from these different breaches to build "
"up extremely detailed dossiers on random subjects and then use different "
"parts of the data for different criminal purposes."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"For example, attackers can use leaked username and password combinations to "
"hijack whole fleets of commercial vehicles that <ulink url=\"https://www."
"vice.com/en_us/article/zmpx4x/hacker-monitor-cars-kill-engine-gps-tracking-"
"apps\">have been fitted with anti-theft GPS trackers and immobilizers</"
"ulink> or to hijack baby monitors in order to <ulink url=\"https://www."
"washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/23/how-nest-designed-keep-intruders-"
"out-peoples-homes-effectively-allowed-hackers-get/?"
"utm_term=.15220e98c550\">terrorize toddlers with the audio tracks from "
"pornography</ulink>. Attackers use leaked data to trick phone companies into "
"giving them your phone number, then they intercept SMS-based two-factor "
"authentication codes in order to take over your email, bank account, and/or "
"cryptocurrency wallets."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Attackers are endlessly inventive in the pursuit of creative ways to "
"weaponize leaked data. One common use of leaked data is to penetrate "
"companies in order to access <emphasis>more</emphasis> data."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Like spies, online fraudsters are totally dependent on companies over-"
"collecting and over-retaining our data. Spy agencies sometimes pay companies "
"for access to their data or intimidate them into giving it up, but sometimes "
"they work just like criminals do — by <ulink url=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/"
"world-us-canada-24751821\">sneaking data out of companies’ databases</ulink>."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The over-collection of data has a host of terrible social consequences, from "
"the erosion of our authentic selves to the undermining of social progress, "
"from state surveillance to an epidemic of online crime. Commercial "
"surveillance is also a boon to people running influence campaigns, but "
"that’s the least of our troubles."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Big Tech has long practiced technology exceptionalism: the idea that it "
"should not be subject to the mundane laws and norms of <quote>meatspace.</"
"quote> Mottoes like Facebook’s <quote>move fast and break things</quote> "
"attracted justifiable scorn of the companies’ self-serving rhetoric."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Tech exceptionalism got us all into a lot of trouble, so it’s ironic and "
"distressing to see Big Tech’s critics committing the same sin."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Big Tech is not a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> that cannot be cured "
"through the traditional anti-monopoly remedies of trustbusting (forcing "
"companies to divest of competitors they have acquired) and bans on mergers "
"to monopoly and other anti-competitive tactics. Big Tech does not have the "
"power to use machine learning to influence our behavior so thoroughly that "
"markets lose the ability to punish bad actors and reward superior "
"competitors. Big Tech has no rule-writing mind-control ray that necessitates "
"ditching our old toolbox."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The thing is, people have been claiming to have perfected mind-control rays "
"for centuries, and every time, it turned out to be a con — though sometimes "
"the con artists were also conning themselves."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"For generations, the advertising industry has been steadily improving its "
"ability to sell advertising services to businesses while only making "
"marginal gains in selling those businesses’ products to prospective "
"customers. John Wanamaker’s lament that <quote>50% of my advertising budget "
"is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%</quote> is a testament to the triumph "
"of <emphasis>ad executives</emphasis>, who successfully convinced Wanamaker "
"that only half of the money he spent went to waste."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The tech industry has made enormous improvements in the science of "
"convincing businesses that they’re good at advertising while their actual "
"improvements to advertising — as opposed to targeting — have been pretty ho-"
"hum. The vogue for machine learning — and the mystical invocation of "
"<quote>artificial intelligence</quote> as a synonym for straightforward "
"statistical inference techniques — has greatly boosted the efficacy of Big "
"Tech’s sales pitch as marketers have exploited potential customers’ lack of "
"technical sophistication to get away with breathtaking acts of overpromising "
"and underdelivering."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"It’s tempting to think that if businesses are willing to pour billions into "
"a venture that the venture must be a good one. Yet there are plenty of times "
"when this rule of thumb has led us astray.  For example, it’s virtually "
"unheard of for managed investment funds to outperform simple index funds, "
"and investors who put their money into the hands of expert money managers "
"overwhelmingly fare worse than those who entrust their savings to index "
"funds. But managed funds still account for the majority of the money "
"invested in the markets, and they are patronized by some of the richest, "
"most sophisticated investors in the world. Their vote of confidence in an "
"underperforming sector is a parable about the role of luck in wealth "
"accumulation, not a sign that managed funds are a good buy."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The claims of Big Tech’s mind-control system are full of tells that the "
"enterprise is a con. For example, <ulink url=\"https://www.frontiersin.org/"
"articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01415/full\">the reliance on the <quote>Big "
"Five</quote> personality traits</ulink> as a primary means of influencing "
"people even though the <quote>Big Five</quote> theory is unsupported by any "
"large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is <ulink url=\"https://www.wired.com/"
"story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/\">mostly the realm of "
"marketing hucksters and pop psych</ulink>."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms can "
"accurately perform <quote>sentiment analysis</quote> or detect peoples’ "
"moods based on their <quote>microexpressions,</quote> but <ulink url="
"\"https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647040758/advertising-on-facebook-is-it-"
"worth-it\">these are marketing claims, not scientific ones</ulink>. These "
"methods are largely untested by independent scientific experts, and where "
"they have been tested, they’ve been found sorely wanting.  Microexpressions "
"are particularly suspect as the companies that specialize in training people "
"to detect them <ulink url=\"https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-"
"files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/\">have "
"been shown</ulink> to underperform relative to random chance."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Big Tech has been so good at marketing its own supposed superpowers that "
"it’s easy to believe that they can market everything else with similar "
"acumen, but it’s a mistake to believe the hype. Any statement a company "
"makes about the quality of its products is clearly not impartial. The fact "
"that we distrust all the things that Big Tech says about its data handling, "
"compliance with privacy laws, etc., is only reasonable — but why on Earth "
"would we treat Big Tech’s marketing literature as the gospel truth? Big Tech "
"lies about just about <emphasis>everything</emphasis>, including how well "
"its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"That skepticism should infuse all of our evaluations of Big Tech and its "
"supposed abilities, including our perusal of its patents. Zuboff vests these "
"patents with enormous significance, pointing out that Google claimed "
"extensive new persuasion capabilities in <ulink url=\"https://patents.google."
"com/patent/US20050131762A1/en\">its patent filings</ulink>. These claims are "
"doubly suspect: first, because they are so self-serving, and second, because "
"the patent itself is so notoriously an invitation to exaggeration."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Patent applications take the form of a series of claims and range from broad "
"to narrow. A typical patent starts out by claiming that its authors have "
"invented a method or system for doing every conceivable thing that anyone "
"might do, ever, with any tool or device. Then it narrows that claim in "
"successive stages until we get to the actual <quote>invention</quote> that "
"is the true subject of the patent.  The hope is that the patent examiner — "
"who is almost certainly overworked and underinformed — will miss the fact "
"that some or all of these claims are ridiculous, or at least suspect, and "
"grant the patent’s broader claims. Patents for unpatentable things are still "
"incredibly useful because they can be wielded against competitors who might "
"license that patent or steer clear of its claims rather than endure the "
"lengthy, expensive process of contesting it."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"What’s more, software patents are routinely granted even though the filer "
"doesn’t have any evidence that they can do the thing claimed by the patent. "
"That is, you can patent an <quote>invention</quote> that you haven’t "
"actually made and that you don’t know how to make."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"With these considerations in hand, it becomes obvious that the fact that a "
"Big Tech company has patented what it <emphasis>says</emphasis> is an "
"effective mind-control ray is largely irrelevant to whether Big Tech can in "
"fact control our minds."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Big Tech collects our data for many reasons, including the diminishing "
"returns on existing stores of data. But many tech companies also collect "
"data out of a mistaken tech exceptionalist belief in the network effects of "
"data. Network effects occur when each new user in a system increases its "
"value. The classic example is fax machines: A single fax machine is of no "
"use, two fax machines are of limited use, but every new fax machine that’s "
"put to use after the first doubles the number of possible fax-to-fax links."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Data mined for predictive systems doesn’t necessarily produce these "
"dividends. Think of Netflix: The predictive value of the data mined from a "
"million English-speaking Netflix viewers is hardly improved by the addition "
"of one more user’s viewing data. Most of the data Netflix acquires after "
"that first minimum viable sample duplicates existing data and produces only "
"minimal gains. Meanwhile, retraining models with new data gets progressively "
"more expensive as the number of data points increases, and manual tasks like "
"labeling and validating data do not get cheaper at scale."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Businesses pursue fads to the detriment of their profits all the time, "
"especially when the businesses and their investors are not motivated by the "
"prospect of becoming profitable but rather by the prospect of being acquired "
"by a Big Tech giant or by having an IPO.  For these firms, ticking faddish "
"boxes like <quote>collects as much data as possible</quote> might realize a "
"bigger return on investment than <quote>collects a business-appropriate "
"quantity of data.</quote>"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This is another harm of tech exceptionalism: The belief that more data "
"always produces more profits in the form of more insights that can be "
"translated into better mind-control rays drives firms to over-collect and "
"over-retain data beyond all rationality. And since the firms are behaving "
"irrationally, a good number of them will go out of business and become ghost "
"ships whose cargo holds are stuffed full of data that can harm people in "
"myriad ways — but which no one is responsible for antey longer. Even if the "
"companies don’t go under, the data they collect is maintained behind the "
"minimum viable security — just enough security to keep the company viable "
"while it waits to get bought out by a tech giant, an amount calculated to "
"spend not one penny more than is necessary on protecting data."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid ""
"How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The "
"Snapchat story"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"For the first decade of its existence, Facebook competed with the social "
"media giants of the day (Myspace, Orkut, etc.) by presenting itself as the "
"pro-privacy alternative. Indeed, Facebook justified its walled garden — "
"which let users bring in data from the web but blocked web services like "
"Google Search from indexing and caching Facebook pages — as a pro-privacy "
"measure that protected users from the surveillance-happy winners of the "
"social media wars like Myspace."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Despite frequent promises that it would never collect or analyze its users’ "
"data, Facebook periodically created initiatives that did just that, like the "
"creepy, ham-fisted Beacon tool, which spied on you as you moved around the "
"web and then added your online activities to your public timeline, allowing "
"your friends to monitor your browsing habits. Beacon sparked a user revolt. "
"Every time, Facebook backed off from its surveillance initiative, but not "
"all the way; inevitably, the new Facebook would be more surveilling than the "
"old Facebook, though not quite as surveilling as the intermediate Facebook "
"following the launch of the new product or service."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The pace at which Facebook ramped up its surveillance efforts seems to have "
"been set by Facebook’s competitive landscape. The more competitors Facebook "
"had, the better it behaved. Every time a major competitor foundered, "
"Facebook’s behavior <ulink url=\"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?"
"abstract_id=3247362\">got markedly worse</ulink>."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"All the while, Facebook was prodigiously acquiring companies, including a "
"company called Onavo. Nominally, Onavo made a battery-monitoring mobile app. "
"But the permissions that Onavo required were so expansive that the app was "
"able to gather fine-grained telemetry on everything users did with their "
"phones, including which apps they used and how they were using them."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Through Onavo, Facebook discovered that it was losing market share to "
"Snapchat, an app that — like Facebook a decade before — billed itself as the "
"pro-privacy alternative to the status quo. Through Onavo, Facebook was able "
"to mine data from the devices of Snapchat users, including both current and "
"former Snapchat users. This spurred Facebook to acquire Instagram — some "
"features of which competed with Snapchat — and then allowed Facebook to fine-"
"tune Instagram’s features and sales pitch to erode Snapchat’s gains and "
"ensure that Facebook would not have to face the kinds of competitive "
"pressures it had earlier inflicted on Myspace and Orkut."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The story of how Facebook crushed Snapchat reveals the relationship between "
"monopoly and surveillance capitalism. Facebook combined surveillance with "
"lax antitrust enforcement to spot the competitive threat of Snapchat on its "
"horizon and then take decisive action against it. Facebook’s surveillance "
"capitalism let it avert competitive pressure with anti-competitive tactics. "
"Facebook users still want privacy — Facebook hasn’t used surveillance to "
"brainwash them out of it — but they can’t get it because Facebook’s "
"surveillance lets it destroy any hope of a rival service emerging that "
"competes on privacy features."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "A monopoly over your friends"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of Facebook and "
"other Big Tech companies by fielding <quote>indieweb</quote> alternatives — "
"Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, Diaspora as a Facebook alternative, etc. "
"— but these efforts have failed to attain any kind of liftoff."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Fundamentally, each of these services is hamstrung by the same problem: "
"Every potential user for a Facebook or Twitter alternative has to convince "
"all their friends to follow them to a decentralized web alternative in order "
"to continue to realize the benefit of social media. For many of us, the only "
"reason to have a Facebook account is that our friends have Facebook "
"accounts, and the reason they have Facebook accounts is that <emphasis>we</"
"emphasis> have Facebook accounts."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant platforms — "
"into <quote>kill zones</quote> that investors will not fund new entrants for."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"And yet, all of today’s tech giants came into existence despite the "
"entrenched advantage of the companies that came before them. To understand "
"how that happened, you have to understand both interoperability and "
"adversarial interoperability."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
msgid "The hard problem of our species is coordination."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"<quote>Interoperability</quote> is the ability of two technologies to work "
"with one another: Anyone can make an LP that will play on any record player, "
"anyone can make a filter you can install in your stove’s extractor fan, "
"anyone can make gasoline for your car, anyone can make a USB phone charger "
"that fits in your car’s cigarette lighter receptacle, anyone can make a "
"light bulb that works in your light socket, anyone can make bread that will "
"toast in your toaster."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Interoperability is often a source of innovation and consumer benefit: Apple "
"made the first commercially successful PC, but millions of independent "
"software vendors made interoperable programs that ran on the Apple II Plus. "
"The simple analog antenna inputs on the back of TVs first allowed cable "
"operators to connect directly to TVs, then they allowed game console "
"companies and then personal computer companies to use standard televisions "
"as displays. Standard RJ-11 telephone jacks allowed for the production of "
"phones from a variety of vendors in a variety of forms, from the free "
"football-shaped phone that came with a <emphasis>Sports Illustrated</"
"emphasis> subscription to business phones with speakers, hold functions, and "
"so on and then answering machines and finally modems, paving the way for the "
"internet revolution."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"<quote>Interoperability</quote> is often used interchangeably with "
"<quote>standardization,</quote> which is the process when manufacturers and "
"other stakeholders hammer out a set of agreed-upon rules for implementing a "
"technology, such as the electrical plug on your wall, the CAN bus used by "
"your car’s computer systems, or the HTML instructions that your browser "
"interprets."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But interoperability doesn’t require standardization — indeed, "
"standardization often proceeds from the chaos of ad hoc interoperability "
"measures. The inventor of the cigarette-lighter USB charger didn’t need to "
"get permission from car manufacturers or even the manufacturers of the "
"dashboard lighter subcomponent. The automakers didn’t take any "
"countermeasures to prevent the use of these aftermarket accessories by their "
"customers, but they also didn’t do anything to make life easier for the "
"chargers’ manufacturers. This is a kind of <quote>neutral interoperability.</"
"quote>"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Beyond neutral interoperability, there is <quote>adversarial "
"interoperability.</quote> That’s when a manufacturer makes a product that "
"interoperates with another manufacturer’s product <emphasis>despite the "
"second manufacturer’s objections</emphasis> and <emphasis>even if that means "
"bypassing a security system designed to prevent interoperability</emphasis>."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Probably the most familiar form of adversarial interoperability is third-"
"party printer ink. Printer manufacturers claim that they sell printers below "
"cost and that the only way they can recoup the losses they incur is by "
"charging high markups on ink. To prevent the owners of printers from buying "
"ink elsewhere, the printer companies deploy a suite of anti-customer "
"security systems that detect and reject both refilled and third-party "
"cartridges."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Owners of printers take the position that HP and Epson and Brother are not "
"charities and that customers for their wares have no obligation to help them "
"survive, and so if the companies choose to sell their products at a loss, "
"that’s their foolish choice and their consequences to live with. Likewise, "
"competitors who make ink or refill kits observe that they don’t owe printer "
"companies anything, and their erosion of printer companies’ margins are the "
"printer companies’ problems, not their competitors’. After all, the printer "
"companies shed no tears when they drive a refiller out of business, so why "
"should the refillers concern themselves with the economic fortunes of the "
"printer companies?"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the history of "
"the tech industry: from the founding of the <quote>alt.*</quote> Usenet "
"hierarchy (which was started against the wishes of Usenet’s maintainers and "
"which grew to be bigger than all of Usenet combined)  to the browser wars "
"(when Netscape and Microsoft devoted massive engineering efforts to making "
"their browsers incompatible with the other’s special commands and "
"peccadilloes) to Facebook (whose success was built in part by helping its "
"new users stay in touch with friends they’d left behind on Myspace because "
"Facebook supplied them with a tool that scraped waiting messages from "
"Myspace and imported them into Facebook, effectively creating an Facebook-"
"based Myspace reader)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Today, incumbency is seen as an unassailable advantage. Facebook is where "
"all of your friends are, so no one can start a Facebook competitor. But "
"adversarial compatibility reverses the competitive advantage: If you were "
"allowed to compete with Facebook by providing a tool that imported all your "
"users’ waiting Facebook messages into an environment that competed on lines "
"that Facebook couldn’t cross, like eliminating surveillance and ads, then "
"Facebook would be at a huge disadvantage. It would have assembled all "
"possible ex-Facebook users into a single, easy-to-find service; it would "
"have educated them on how a Facebook-like service worked and what its "
"potential benefits were; and it would have provided an easy means for "
"disgruntled Facebook users to tell their friends where they might expect "
"better treatment."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Adversarial interoperability was once the norm and a key contributor to the "
"dynamic, vibrant tech scene, but now it is stuck behind a thicket of laws "
"and regulations that add legal risks to the tried-and-true tactics of "
"adversarial interoperability. New rules and new interpretations of existing "
"rules mean that a would-be adversarial interoperator needs to steer clear of "
"claims under copyright, terms of service, trade secrecy, tortious "
"interference, and patent."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"In the absence of a competitive market, lawmakers have resorted to assigning "
"expensive, state-like duties to Big Tech firms, such as automatically "
"filtering user contributions for copyright infringement or terrorist and "
"extremist content or detecting and preventing harassment in real time or "
"controlling access to sexual material."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"These measures put a floor under how small we can make Big Tech because only "
"the very largest companies can afford the humans and automated filters "
"needed to perform these duties."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But that’s not the only way in which making platforms responsible for "
"policing their users undermines competition. A platform that is expected to "
"police its users’ conduct must prevent many vital adversarial "
"interoperability techniques lest these subvert its policing measures. For "
"example, if someone using a Twitter replacement like Mastodon is able to "
"push messages into Twitter and read messages out of Twitter, they could "
"avoid being caught by automated systems that detect and prevent harassment "
"(such as systems that use the timing of messages or IP-based rules to make "
"guesses about whether someone is a harasser)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"To the extent that we are willing to let Big Tech police itself — rather "
"than making Big Tech small enough that users can leave bad platforms for "
"better ones and small enough that a regulation that simply puts a platform "
"out of business will not destroy billions of users’ access to their "
"communities and data — we build the case that Big Tech should be able to "
"block its competitors and make it easier for Big Tech to demand legal "
"enforcement tools to ban and punish attempts at adversarial interoperability."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Ultimately, we can try to fix Big Tech by making it responsible for bad acts "
"by its users, or we can try to fix the internet by cutting Big Tech down to "
"size. But we can’t do both. To replace today’s giant products with "
"pluralistic protocols, we need to clear the legal thicket that prevents "
"adversarial interoperability so that tomorrow’s nimble, personal, small-"
"scale products can federate themselves with giants like Facebook, allowing "
"the users who’ve left to continue to communicate with users who haven’t left "
"yet, reaching tendrils over Facebook’s garden wall that Facebook’s trapped "
"users can use to scale the walls and escape to the global, open web."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Fake news is an epistemological crisis"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Tech is not the only industry that has undergone massive concentration since "
"the Reagan era. Virtually every major industry — from oil to newspapers to "
"meatpacking to sea freight to eyewear to online pornography — has become a "
"clubby oligarchy that just a few players dominate."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"At the same time, every industry has become something of a tech industry as "
"general-purpose computers and general-purpose networks and the promise of "
"efficiencies through data-driven analysis infuse every device, process, and "
"firm with tech."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This phenomenon of industrial concentration is part of a wider story about "
"wealth concentration overall as a smaller and smaller number of people own "
"more and more of our world. This concentration of both wealth and industries "
"means that our political outcomes are increasingly beholden to the parochial "
"interests of the people and companies with all the money."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"That means that whenever a regulator asks a question with an obvious, "
"empirical answer (<quote>Are humans causing climate change?</quote> or "
"<quote>Should we let companies conduct commercial mass surveillance?</quote> "
"or <quote>Does society benefit from allowing network neutrality violations?</"
"quote>), the answer that comes out is only correct if that correctness meets "
"with the approval of rich people and the industries that made them so "
"wealthy."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Rich people have always played an outsized role in politics and more so "
"since the Supreme Court’s <emphasis>Citizens United</emphasis> decision "
"eliminated key controls over political spending. Widening inequality and "
"wealth concentration means that the very richest people are now a lot richer "
"and can afford to spend a lot more money on political projects than ever "
"before. Think of the Koch brothers or George Soros or Bill Gates."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But the policy distortions of rich individuals pale in comparison to the "
"policy distortions that concentrated industries are capable of.  The "
"companies in highly concentrated industries are much more profitable than "
"companies in competitive industries — no competition means not having to "
"reduce prices or improve quality to win customers — leaving them with bigger "
"capital surpluses to spend on lobbying."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Concentrated industries also find it easier to collaborate on policy "
"objectives than competitive ones. When all the top execs from your industry "
"can fit around a single boardroom table, they often do. And <emphasis>when</"
"emphasis> they do, they can forge a consensus position on regulation."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Rising through the ranks in a concentrated industry generally means working "
"at two or three of the big companies. When there are only relatively few "
"companies in a given industry, each company has a more ossified executive "
"rank, leaving ambitious execs with fewer paths to higher positions unless "
"they are recruited to a rival. This means that the top execs in concentrated "
"industries are likely to have been colleagues at some point and socialize in "
"the same circles — connected through social ties or, say, serving as "
"trustees for each others’ estates. These tight social bonds foster a "
"collegial, rather than competitive, attitude."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Highly concentrated industries also present a regulatory conundrum.  When an "
"industry is dominated by just four or five companies, the only people who "
"are likely to truly understand the industry’s practices are its veteran "
"executives. This means that top regulators are often former execs of the "
"companies they are supposed to be regulating. These turns in government are "
"often tacitly understood to be leaves of absence from industry, with former "
"employers welcoming their erstwhile watchdogs back into their executive "
"ranks once their terms have expired."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"All this is to say that the tight social bonds, small number of firms, and "
"regulatory capture of concentrated industries give the companies that "
"comprise them the power to dictate many, if not all, of the regulations that "
"bind them."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders <ulink url="
"\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/25/how-payday-lending-"
"industry-insider-tilted-academic-research-its-favor/\">winning the right to "
"practice predatory lending</ulink> or Apple <ulink url=\"https://www.vice."
"com/en_us/article/mgxayp/source-apple-will-fight-right-to-repair-legislation"
"\">winning the right to decide who can fix your phone</ulink> or Google and "
"Facebook winning the right to breach your private data without suffering "
"meaningful consequences or victories for pipeline companies or impunity for "
"opioid manufacturers or massive tax subsidies for incredibly profitable "
"dominant businesses, it’s increasingly apparent that many of our official, "
"evidence-based truth-seeking processes are, in fact, auctions for sale to "
"the highest bidder."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"It’s really impossible to overstate what a terrifying prospect this is. We "
"live in an incredibly high-tech society, and none of us could acquire the "
"expertise to evaluate every technological proposition that stands between us "
"and our untimely, horrible deaths. You might devote your life to acquiring "
"the media literacy to distinguish good scientific journals from corrupt pay-"
"for-play lookalikes and the statistical literacy to evaluate the quality of "
"the analysis in the journals as well as the microbiology and epidemiology "
"knowledge to determine whether you can trust claims about the safety of "
"vaccines — but that would still leave you unqualified to judge whether the "
"wiring in your home will give you a lethal shock <emphasis>and</emphasis> "
"whether your car’s brakes’ software will cause them to fail unpredictably "
"<emphasis>and</emphasis> whether the hygiene standards at your butcher are "
"sufficient to keep you from dying after you finish your dinner."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"In a world as complex as this one, we have to defer to authorities, and we "
"keep them honest by making those authorities accountable to us and binding "
"them with rules to prevent conflicts of interest. We can’t possibly acquire "
"the expertise to adjudicate conflicting claims about the best way to make "
"the world safe and prosperous, but we <emphasis>can</emphasis> determine "
"whether the adjudication process itself is trustworthy."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid "Right now, it’s obviously not."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The past 40 years of rising inequality and industry concentration, together "
"with increasingly weak accountability and transparency for expert agencies, "
"has created an increasingly urgent sense of impending doom, the sense that "
"there are vast conspiracies afoot that operate with tacit official approval "
"despite the likelihood they are working to better themselves by ruining the "
"rest of us."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"For example, it’s been decades since Exxon’s own scientists concluded that "
"its products would render the Earth uninhabitable by humans. And yet those "
"decades were lost to us, in large part because Exxon lobbied governments and "
"sowed doubt about the dangers of its products and did so with the "
"cooperation of many public officials.  When the survival of you and everyone "
"you love is threatened by conspiracies, it’s not unreasonable to start "
"questioning the things you think you know in an attempt to determine whether "
"they, too, are the outcome of another conspiracy."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The collapse of the credibility of our systems for divining and upholding "
"truths has left us in a state of epistemological chaos.  Once, most of us "
"might have assumed that the system was working and that our regulations "
"reflected our best understanding of the empirical truths of the world as "
"they were best understood — now we have to find our own experts to help us "
"sort the true from the false."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If you’re like me, you probably believe that vaccines are safe, but you "
"(like me) probably also can’t explain the microbiology or statistics. Few of "
"us have the math skills to review the literature on vaccine safety and "
"describe why their statistical reasoning is sound. Likewise, few of us can "
"review the stats in the (now discredited) literature on opioid safety and "
"explain how those stats were manipulated. Both vaccines and opioids were "
"embraced by medical authorities, after all, and one is safe while the other "
"could ruin your life. You’re left with a kind of inchoate constellation of "
"rules of thumb about which experts you trust to fact-check controversial "
"claims and then to explain how all those respectable doctors with their peer-"
"reviewed research on opioid safety <emphasis>were</emphasis> an aberration "
"and then how you know that the doctors writing about vaccine safety are "
"<emphasis>not</emphasis> an aberration."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"I’m 100% certain that vaccinating is safe and effective, but I’m also at "
"something of a loss to explain exactly, <emphasis>precisely,</emphasis> why "
"I believe this, given all the corruption I know about and the many times the "
"stamp of certainty has turned out to be a parochial lie told to further "
"enrich the super rich."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Fake news — conspiracy theories, racist ideologies, scientific denialism — "
"has always been with us. What’s changed today is not the mix of ideas in the "
"public discourse but the popularity of the worst ideas in that mix. "
"Conspiracy and denial have skyrocketed in lockstep with the growth of Big "
"Inequality, which has also tracked the rise of Big Tech and Big Pharma and "
"Big Wrestling and Big Car and Big Movie Theater and Big Everything Else."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"No one can say for certain why this has happened, but the two dominant camps "
"are idealism (the belief that the people who argue for these conspiracies "
"have gotten better at explaining them, maybe with the help of machine-"
"learning tools) or materialism (the ideas have become more attractive "
"because of material conditions in the world)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"I’m a materialist. I’ve been exposed to the arguments of conspiracy "
"theorists all my life, and I have not experienced any qualitative leap in "
"the quality of those arguments."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The major difference is in the world, not the arguments. In a time where "
"actual conspiracies are commonplace, conspiracy theories acquire a ring of "
"plausibility."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"We have always had disagreements about what’s true, but today, we have a "
"disagreement over how we know whether something is true. This is an "
"epistemological crisis, not a crisis over belief. It’s a crisis over the "
"credibility of our truth-seeking exercises, from scientific journals (in an "
"era where the biggest journal publishers have been caught producing pay-to-"
"play journals for junk science) to regulations (in an era where regulators "
"are routinely cycling in and out of business) to education (in an era where "
"universities are dependent on corporate donations to keep their lights on)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Targeting — surveillance capitalism — makes it easier to find people who are "
"undergoing this epistemological crisis, but it doesn’t create the crisis. "
"For that, you need to look to corruption."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"And, conveniently enough, it’s corruption that allows surveillance "
"capitalism to grow by dismantling monopoly protections, by permitting "
"reckless collection and retention of personal data, by allowing ads to be "
"targeted in secret, and by foreclosing on the possibility of going somewhere "
"else where you might continue to enjoy your friends without subjecting "
"yourself to commercial surveillance."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Tech is different"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"I reject both iterations of technological exceptionalism. I reject the idea "
"that tech is uniquely terrible and led by people who are greedier or worse "
"than the leaders of other industries, and I reject the idea that tech is so "
"good — or so intrinsically prone to concentration — that it can’t be blamed "
"for its present-day monopolistic status."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"I think tech is just another industry, albeit one that grew up in the "
"absence of real monopoly constraints. It may have been first, but it isn’t "
"the worst nor will it be the last."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But there’s one way in which I <emphasis>am</emphasis> a tech "
"exceptionalist. I believe that online tools are the key to overcoming "
"problems that are much more urgent than tech monopolization: climate change, "
"inequality, misogyny, and discrimination on the basis of race, gender "
"identity, and other factors. The internet is how we will recruit people to "
"fight those fights, and how we will coordinate their labor. Tech is not a "
"substitute for democratic accountability, the rule of law, fairness, or "
"stability — but it’s a means to achieve these things."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The hard problem of our species is coordination. Everything from climate "
"change to social change to running a business to making a family work can be "
"viewed as a collective action problem."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The internet makes it easier than at any time before to find people who want "
"to work on a project with you — hence the success of free and open-source "
"software, crowdfunding, and racist terror groups — and easier than ever to "
"coordinate the work you do."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The internet and the computers we connect to it also possess an exceptional "
"quality: general-purposeness. The internet is designed to allow any two "
"parties to communicate any data, using any protocol, without permission from "
"anyone else. The only production design we have for computers is the general-"
"purpose, <quote>Turing complete</quote> computer that can run every program "
"we can express in symbolic logic."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"This means that every time someone with a special communications need "
"invests in infrastructure and techniques to make the internet faster, "
"cheaper, and more robust, this benefit redounds to everyone else who is "
"using the internet to communicate. And this also means that every time "
"someone with a special computing need invests to make computers faster, "
"cheaper, and more robust, every other computing application is a potential "
"beneficiary of this work."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"For these reasons, every type of communication is gradually absorbed into "
"the internet, and every type of device — from airplanes to pacemakers — "
"eventually becomes a computer in a fancy case."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"While these considerations don’t preclude regulating networks and computers, "
"they do call for gravitas and caution when doing so because changes to "
"regulatory frameworks could ripple out to have unintended consequences in "
"many, many other domains."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The upshot of this is that our best hope of solving the big coordination "
"problems — climate change, inequality, etc. — is with free, fair, and open "
"tech. Our best hope of keeping tech free, fair, and open is to exercise "
"caution in how we regulate tech and to attend closely to the ways in which "
"interventions to solve one problem might create problems in other domains."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Ownership of facts"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Big Tech has a funny relationship with information. When you’re generating "
"information — anything from the location data streaming off your mobile "
"device to the private messages you send to friends on a social network — it "
"claims the rights to make unlimited use of that data."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But when you have the audacity to turn the tables — to use a tool that "
"blocks ads or slurps your waiting updates out of a social network and puts "
"them in another app that lets you set your own priorities and suggestions or "
"crawls their system to allow you to start a rival business — they claim that "
"you’re stealing from them."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The thing is, information is a very bad fit for any kind of private property "
"regime. Property rights are useful for establishing markets that can lead to "
"the effective development of fallow assets. These markets depend on clear "
"titles to ensure that the things being bought and sold in them can, in fact, "
"be bought and sold."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Information rarely has such a clear title. Take phone numbers: There’s "
"clearly something going wrong when Facebook slurps up millions of users’ "
"address books and uses the phone numbers it finds in them to plot out social "
"graphs and fill in missing information about other users."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But the phone numbers Facebook nonconsensually acquires in this transaction "
"are not the <quote>property</quote> of the users they’re taken from nor do "
"they belong to the people whose phones ring when you dial those numbers. The "
"numbers are mere integers, 10 digits in the U.S.  and Canada, and they "
"appear in millions of places, including somewhere deep in pi as well as "
"numerous other contexts. Giving people ownership titles to integers is an "
"obviously terrible idea."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Likewise for the facts that Facebook and other commercial surveillance "
"operators acquire about us, like that we are the children of our parents or "
"the parents to our children or that we had a conversation with someone else "
"or went to a public place.  These data points can’t be property in the sense "
"that your house or your shirt is your property because the title to them is "
"intrinsically muddy: Does your mom own the fact that she is your mother? Do "
"you? Do both of you? What about your dad — does he own this fact too, or "
"does he have to license the fact from you (or your mom or both of you) in "
"order to use this fact? What about the hundreds or thousands of other people "
"who know these facts?"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If you go to a Black Lives Matter demonstration, do the other demonstrators "
"need your permission to post their photos from the event? The online fights "
"over <ulink url=\"https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-take-photos-at-protests/"
"\">when and how to post photos from demonstrations</ulink> reveal a nuanced, "
"complex issue that cannot be easily hand-waved away by giving one party a "
"property right that everyone else in the mix has to respect."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The fact that information isn’t a good fit with property and markets doesn’t "
"mean that it’s not valuable. Babies aren’t property, but they’re inarguably "
"valuable. In fact, we have a whole set of rules just for babies as well as a "
"subset of those rules that apply to humans more generally. Someone who "
"argues that babies won’t be truly valuable until they can be bought and sold "
"like loaves of bread would be instantly and rightfully condemned as a "
"monster."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"It’s tempting to reach for the property hammer when Big Tech treats your "
"information like a nail — not least because Big Tech are such prolific "
"abusers of property hammers when it comes to <emphasis>their</emphasis> "
"information. But this is a mistake. If we allow markets to dictate the use "
"of our information, then we’ll find that we’re sellers in a buyers’ market "
"where the Big Tech monopolies set a price for our data that is so low as to "
"be insignificant or, more likely, set at a nonnegotiable price of zero in a "
"click-through agreement that you don’t have the opportunity to modify."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Meanwhile, establishing property rights over information will create "
"insurmountable barriers to independent data processing. Imagine that we "
"require a license to be negotiated when a translated document is compared "
"with its original, something Google has done and continues to do billions of "
"times to train its automated language translation tools. Google can afford "
"this, but independent third parties cannot.  Google can staff a clearances "
"department to negotiate one-time payments to the likes of the EU (one of the "
"major repositories of translated documents) while independent watchdogs "
"wanting to verify that the translations are well-prepared, or to root out "
"bias in translations, will find themselves needing a staffed-up legal "
"department and millions for licenses before they can even get started."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The same goes for things like search indexes of the web or photos of "
"peoples’ houses, which have become contentious thanks to Google’s Street "
"View project. Whatever problems may exist with Google’s photographing of "
"street scenes, resolving them by letting people decide who can take pictures "
"of the facades of their homes from a public street will surely create even "
"worse ones. Think of how street photography is important for newsgathering — "
"including informal newsgathering, like photographing abuses of authority — "
"and how being able to document housing and street life are important for "
"contesting eminent domain, advocating for social aid, reporting planning and "
"zoning violations, documenting discriminatory and unequal living conditions, "
"and more."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The ownership of facts is antithetical to many kinds of human progress. It’s "
"hard to imagine a rule that limits Big Tech’s exploitation of our collective "
"labors without inadvertently banning people from gathering data on online "
"harassment or compiling indexes of changes in language or simply "
"investigating how the platforms are shaping our discourse — all of which "
"require scraping data that other people have created and subjecting it to "
"scrutiny and analysis."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Persuasion works… slowly"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The platforms may oversell their ability to persuade people, but obviously, "
"persuasion works sometimes. Whether it’s the private realm that LGBTQ people "
"used to recruit allies and normalize sexual diversity or the decadeslong "
"project to convince people that markets are the only efficient way to solve "
"complicated resource allocation problems, it’s clear that our societal "
"attitudes <emphasis>can</emphasis> change."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The project of shifting societal attitudes is a game of inches and years. "
"For centuries, svengalis have purported to be able to accelerate this "
"process, but even the most brutal forms of propaganda have struggled to make "
"permanent changes. Joseph Goebbels was able to subject Germans to daily, "
"mandatory, hourslong radio broadcasts, to round up and torture and murder "
"dissidents, and to seize full control over their children’s education while "
"banning any literature, broadcasts, or films that did not comport with his "
"worldview."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Yet, after 12 years of terror, once the war ended, Nazi ideology was largely "
"discredited in both East and West Germany, and a program of national truth "
"and reconciliation was put in its place. Racism and authoritarianism were "
"never fully abolished in Germany, but neither were the majority of Germans "
"irrevocably convinced of Nazism — and the rise of racist authoritarianism in "
"Germany today tells us that the liberal attitudes that replaced Nazism were "
"no more permanent than Nazism itself."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Racism and authoritarianism have also always been with us. Anyone who’s "
"reviewed the kind of messages and arguments that racists put forward today "
"would be hard-pressed to say that they have gotten better at presenting "
"their ideas. The same pseudoscience, appeals to fear, and circular logic "
"that racists presented in the 1980s, when the cause of white supremacy was "
"on the wane, are to be found in the communications of leading white "
"nationalists today."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If racists haven’t gotten more convincing in the past decade, then how is it "
"that more people were convinced to be openly racist at that time? I believe "
"that the answer lies in the material world, not the world of ideas. The "
"ideas haven’t gotten more convincing, but people have become more afraid. "
"Afraid that the state can’t be trusted to act as an honest broker in life-or-"
"death decisions, from those regarding the management of the economy to the "
"regulation of painkillers to the rules for handling private information. "
"Afraid that the world has become a game of musical chairs in which the "
"chairs are being taken away at a never-before-seen rate. Afraid that justice "
"for others will come at their expense. Monopolism isn’t the cause of these "
"fears, but the inequality and material desperation and policy malpractice "
"that monopolism contributes to is a significant contributor to these "
"conditions. Inequality creates the conditions for both conspiracies and "
"violent racist ideologies, and then surveillance capitalism lets "
"opportunists target the fearful and the conspiracy-minded."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Paying won’t help"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"As the old saw goes, <quote>If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the "
"product.</quote>"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"It’s a commonplace belief today that the advent of free, ad-supported media "
"was the original sin of surveillance capitalism.  The reasoning is that the "
"companies that charged for access couldn’t <quote>compete with free</quote> "
"and so they were driven out of business. Their ad-supported competitors, "
"meanwhile, declared open season on their users’ data in a bid to improve "
"their ad targeting and make more money and then resorted to the most "
"sensationalist tactics to generate clicks on those ads. If only we’d pay for "
"media again, we’d have a better, more responsible, more sober discourse that "
"would be better for democracy."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But the degradation of news products long precedes the advent of ad-"
"supported online news. Long before newspapers were online, lax antitrust "
"enforcement had opened the door for unprecedented waves of consolidation and "
"roll-ups in newsrooms. Rival newspapers were merged, reporters and ad sales "
"staff were laid off, physical plants were sold and leased back, leaving the "
"companies loaded up with debt through leveraged buyouts and subsequent "
"profit-taking by the new owners. In other words, it wasn’t merely shifts in "
"the classified advertising market, which was long held to be the primary "
"driver in the decline of the traditional newsroom, that made news companies "
"unable to adapt to the internet — it was monopolism."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Then, as news companies <emphasis>did</emphasis> come online, the ad "
"revenues they commanded dropped even as the number of internet users (and "
"thus potential online readers) increased. That shift was a function of "
"consolidation in the ad sales market, with Google and Facebook emerging as "
"duopolists who made more money every year from advertising while paying less "
"and less of it to the publishers whose work the ads appeared alongside. "
"Monopolism created a buyer’s market for ad inventory with Facebook and "
"Google acting as gatekeepers."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Paid services continue to exist alongside free ones, and often it is these "
"paid services — anxious to prevent people from bypassing their paywalls or "
"sharing paid media with freeloaders — that exert the most control over their "
"customers. Apple’s iTunes and App Stores are paid services, but to maximize "
"their profitability, Apple has to lock its platforms so that third parties "
"can’t make compatible software without permission. These locks allow the "
"company to exercise both editorial control (enabling it to exclude <ulink "
"url=\"https://ncac.org/news/blog/does-apples-strict-app-store-content-policy-"
"limit-freedom-of-expression\">controversial political material</ulink>) and "
"technological control, including control over who can repair the devices it "
"makes. If we’re worried that ad-supported products deprive people of their "
"right to self-determination by using persuasion techniques to nudge their "
"purchase decisions a few degrees in one direction or the other, then the "
"near-total control a single company holds over the decision of who gets to "
"sell you software, parts, and service for your iPhone should have us very "
"worried indeed."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"We shouldn’t just be concerned about payment and control: The idea that "
"paying will improve discourse is also dangerously wrong. The poor success "
"rate of targeted advertising means that the platforms have to incentivize "
"you to <quote>engage</quote> with posts at extremely high levels to generate "
"enough pageviews to safeguard their profits. As discussed earlier, to "
"increase engagement, platforms like Facebook use machine learning to guess "
"which messages will be most inflammatory and make a point of shoving those "
"into your eyeballs at every turn so that you will hate-click and argue with "
"people."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Perhaps paying would fix this, the reasoning goes. If platforms could be "
"economically viable even if you stopped clicking on them once your "
"intellectual and social curiosity had been slaked, then they would have no "
"reason to algorithmically enrage you to get more clicks out of you, right?"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"There may be something to that argument, but it still ignores the wider "
"economic and political context of the platforms and the world that allowed "
"them to grow so dominant."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Platforms are world-spanning and all-encompassing because they are "
"monopolies, and they are monopolies because we have gutted our most "
"important and reliable anti-monopoly rules. Antitrust was neutered as a key "
"part of the project to make the wealthy wealthier, and that project has "
"worked. The vast majority of people on Earth have a negative net worth, and "
"even the dwindling middle class is in a precarious state, undersaved for "
"retirement, underinsured for medical disasters, and undersecured against "
"climate and technology shocks."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"In this wildly unequal world, paying doesn’t improve the discourse; it "
"simply prices discourse out of the range of the majority of people. Paying "
"for the product is dandy, if you can afford it."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If you think today’s filter bubbles are a problem for our discourse, imagine "
"what they’d be like if rich people inhabited free-flowing Athenian "
"marketplaces of ideas where you have to pay for admission while everyone "
"else lives in online spaces that are subsidized by wealthy benefactors who "
"relish the chance to establish conversational spaces where the <quote>house "
"rules</quote> forbid questioning the status quo. That is, imagine if the "
"rich seceded from Facebook, and then, instead of running ads that made money "
"for shareholders, Facebook became a billionaire’s vanity project that also "
"happened to ensure that nobody talked about whether it was fair that only "
"billionaires could afford to hang out in the rarified corners of the "
"internet."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Behind the idea of paying for access is a belief that free markets will "
"address Big Tech’s dysfunction. After all, to the extent that people have a "
"view of surveillance at all, it is generally an unfavorable one, and the "
"longer and more thoroughly one is surveilled, the less one tends to like it. "
"Same goes for lock-in: If HP’s ink or Apple’s App Store were really "
"obviously fantastic, they wouldn’t need technical measures to prevent users "
"from choosing a rival’s product. The only reason these technical "
"countermeasures exist is that the companies don’t believe their customers "
"would <emphasis>voluntarily</emphasis> submit to their terms, and they want "
"to deprive them of the choice to take their business elsewhere."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Advocates for markets laud their ability to aggregate the diffused knowledge "
"of buyers and sellers across a whole society through demand signals, price "
"signals, and so on. The argument for surveillance capitalism being a "
"<quote>rogue capitalism</quote> is that machine-learning-driven persuasion "
"techniques distort decision-making by consumers, leading to incorrect "
"signals — consumers don’t buy what they prefer, they buy what they’re "
"tricked into preferring. It follows that the monopolistic practices of lock-"
"in, which do far more to constrain consumers’ free choices, are even more of "
"a <quote>rogue capitalism.</quote>"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The profitability of any business is constrained by the possibility that its "
"customers will take their business elsewhere. Both surveillance and lock-in "
"are anti-features that no customer wants.  But monopolies can capture their "
"regulators, crush their competitors, insert themselves into their customers’ "
"lives, and corral people into <quote>choosing</quote> their services "
"regardless of whether they want them — it’s fine to be terrible when there "
"is no alternative."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Ultimately, surveillance and lock-in are both simply business strategies "
"that monopolists can choose. Surveillance companies like Google are "
"perfectly capable of deploying lock-in technologies — just look at the "
"onerous Android licensing terms that require device-makers to bundle in "
"Google’s suite of applications. And lock-in companies like Apple are "
"perfectly capable of subjecting their users to surveillance if it means "
"keeping the Chinese government happy and preserving ongoing access to "
"Chinese markets.  Monopolies may be made up of good, ethical people, but as "
"institutions, they are not your friend — they will do whatever they can get "
"away with to maximize their profits, and the more monopolistic they are, the "
"more they <emphasis>can</emphasis> get away with."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "An <quote>ecology</quote> moment for trustbusting"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If we’re going to break Big Tech’s death grip on our digital lives, we’re "
"going to have to fight monopolies. That may sound pretty mundane and old-"
"fashioned, something out of the New Deal era, while ending the use of "
"automated behavioral modification feels like the plotline of a really cool "
"cyberpunk novel."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Meanwhile, breaking up monopolies is something we seem to have forgotten how "
"to do. There is a bipartisan, trans-Atlantic consensus that breaking up "
"companies is a fool’s errand at best — liable to mire your federal "
"prosecutors in decades of litigation — and counterproductive at worst, "
"eroding the <quote>consumer benefits</quote> of large companies with massive "
"efficiencies of scale."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing "
"robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies’ all-powerful grip "
"on our society. The trustbusting era could not begin until we found the "
"political will — until the people convinced politicians they’d have their "
"backs when they went up against the richest, most powerful men in the world."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid "Could we find that political will again?"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Copyright scholar James Boyle has described how the term <quote>ecology</"
"quote> marked a turning point in environmental activism. Prior to the "
"adoption of this term, people who wanted to preserve whale populations "
"didn’t necessarily see themselves as fighting the same battle as people who "
"wanted to protect the ozone layer or fight freshwater pollution or beat back "
"smog or acid rain."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But the term <quote>ecology</quote> welded these disparate causes together "
"into a single movement, and the members of this movement found solidarity "
"with one another. The people who cared about smog signed petitions "
"circulated by the people who wanted to end whaling, and the anti-whalers "
"marched alongside the people demanding action on acid rain. This uniting "
"behind a common cause completely changed the dynamics of environmentalism, "
"setting the stage for today’s climate activism and the sense that preserving "
"the habitability of the planet Earth is a shared duty among all people."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"I believe we are on the verge of a new <quote>ecology</quote> moment "
"dedicated to combating monopolies. After all, tech isn’t the only "
"concentrated industry nor is it even the <emphasis>most</emphasis> "
"concentrated of industries."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"You can find partisans for trustbusting in every sector of the economy. "
"Everywhere you look, you can find people who’ve been wronged by monopolists "
"who’ve trashed their finances, their health, their privacy, their "
"educations, and the lives of people they love.  Those people have the same "
"cause as the people who want to break up Big Tech and the same enemies. When "
"most of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a very few, it follows that "
"nearly every large company will have overlapping shareholders."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"That’s the good news: With a little bit of work and a little bit of "
"coalition building, we have more than enough political will to break up Big "
"Tech and every other concentrated industry besides. First we take Facebook, "
"then we take AT&amp;T/WarnerMedia."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech "
"<emphasis>instead</emphasis> of breaking up the big companies also "
"forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Big Tech’s concentration currently means that their inaction on harassment, "
"for example, leaves users with an impossible choice: absent themselves from "
"public discourse by, say, quitting Twitter or endure vile, constant abuse. "
"Big Tech’s over-collection and over-retention of data results in horrific "
"identity theft. And their inaction on extremist recruitment means that white "
"supremacists who livestream their shooting rampages can reach an audience of "
"billions. The combination of tech concentration and media concentration "
"means that artists’ incomes are falling even as the revenue generated by "
"their creations are increasing."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Yet governments confronting all of these problems all inevitably converge on "
"the same solution: deputize the Big Tech giants to police their users and "
"render them liable for their users’ bad actions. The drive to force Big Tech "
"to use automated filters to block everything from copyright infringement to "
"sex-trafficking to violent extremism means that tech companies will have to "
"allocate hundreds of millions to run these compliance systems."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"These rules — the EU’s new Directive on Copyright, Australia’s new terror "
"regulation, America’s FOSTA/SESTA sex-trafficking law and more — are not "
"just death warrants for small, upstart competitors that might challenge Big "
"Tech’s dominance but who lack the deep pockets of established incumbents to "
"pay for all these automated systems. Worse still, these rules put a floor "
"under how small we can hope to make Big Tech."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"That’s because any move to break up Big Tech and cut it down to size will "
"have to cope with the hard limit of not making these companies so small that "
"they can no longer afford to perform these duties — and it’s "
"<emphasis>expensive</emphasis> to invest in those automated filters and "
"outsource content moderation. It’s already going to be hard to unwind these "
"deeply concentrated, chimeric behemoths that have been welded together in "
"the pursuit of monopoly profits. Doing so while simultaneously finding some "
"way to fill the regulatory void that will be left behind if these self-"
"policing rulers were forced to suddenly abdicate will be much, much harder."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Allowing the platforms to grow to their present size has given them a "
"dominance that is nearly insurmountable — deputizing them with public duties "
"to redress the pathologies created by their size makes it virtually "
"impossible to reduce that size. Lather, rinse, repeat: If the platforms "
"don’t get smaller, they will get larger, and as they get larger, they will "
"create more problems, which will give rise to more public duties for the "
"companies, which will make them bigger still."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"We can work to fix the internet by breaking up Big Tech and depriving them "
"of monopoly profits, or we can work to fix Big Tech by making them spend "
"their monopoly profits on governance. But we can’t do both. We have to "
"choose between a vibrant, open internet or a dominated, monopolized internet "
"commanded by Big Tech giants that we struggle with constantly to get them to "
"behave themselves."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Make Big Tech small again"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Trustbusting is hard. Breaking big companies into smaller ones is expensive "
"and time-consuming. So time-consuming that by the time you’re done, the "
"world has often moved on and rendered years of litigation irrelevant. From "
"1969 to 1982, the U.S. government pursued an antitrust case against IBM over "
"its dominance of mainframe computing — but the case collapsed in 1982 "
"because mainframes were being speedily replaced by PCs."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
msgid ""
"A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to "
"enforce the law as it was written."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"It’s far easier to prevent concentration than to fix it, and reinstating the "
"traditional contours of U.S. antitrust enforcement will, at the very least, "
"prevent further concentration. That means bans on mergers between large "
"companies, on big companies acquiring nascent competitors, and on platform "
"companies competing directly with the companies that rely on the platforms."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"These powers are all in the plain language of U.S. antitrust laws, so in "
"theory, a future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general "
"to enforce the law as it was written. But after decades of judicial "
"<quote>education</quote> in the benefits of monopolies, after multiple "
"administrations that have packed the federal courts with lifetime-appointed "
"monopoly cheerleaders, it’s not clear that mere administrative action would "
"do the trick."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If the courts frustrate the Justice Department and the president, the next "
"stop would be Congress, which could eliminate any doubt about how antitrust "
"law should be enforced in the U.S. by passing new laws that boil down to "
"saying, <quote>Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert "
"Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, <emphasis>fuck that "
"guy</emphasis>.</quote> In other words, the problem with monopolies is "
"<emphasis>monopolism</emphasis> — the concentration of power into too few "
"hands, which erodes our right to self-determination. If there is a monopoly, "
"the law wants it gone, period. Sure, get rid of monopolies that create "
"<quote>consumer harm</quote> in the form of higher prices, but also, "
"<emphasis>get rid of other monopolies, too</emphasis>."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But this only prevents things from getting worse. To help them get better, "
"we will have to build coalitions with other activists in the anti-monopoly "
"ecology movement — a pluralism movement or a self-determination movement — "
"and target existing monopolies in every industry for breakup and structural "
"separation rules that prevent, for example, the giant eyewear monopolist "
"Luxottica from dominating both the sale and the manufacture of spectacles."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"In an important sense, it doesn’t matter which industry the breakups begin "
"in. Once they start, shareholders in <emphasis>every</emphasis> industry "
"will start to eye their investments in monopolists skeptically. As "
"trustbusters ride into town and start making lives miserable for "
"monopolists, the debate around every corporate boardroom’s table will shift. "
"People within corporations who’ve always felt uneasy about monopolism will "
"gain a powerful new argument to fend off their evil rivals in the corporate "
"hierarchy: <quote>If we do it my way, we make less money; if we do it your "
"way, a judge will fine us billions and expose us to ridicule and public "
"disapprobation. So even though I get that it would be really cool to do that "
"merger, lock out that competitor, or buy that little company and kill it "
"before it can threaten it, we really shouldn’t — not if we don’t want to get "
"tied to the DOJ’s bumper and get dragged up and down Trustbuster Road for "
"the next 10 years.</quote>"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "20 GOTO 10"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Fixing Big Tech will require a lot of iteration. As cyber lawyer Lawrence "
"Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, <emphasis>Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace</"
"emphasis>, our lives are regulated by four forces: law (what’s legal), code "
"(what’s technologically possible), norms (what’s socially acceptable), and "
"markets (what’s profitable)."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"If you could wave a wand and get Congress to pass a law that re-fanged the "
"Sherman Act tomorrow, you could use the impending breakups to convince "
"venture capitalists to fund competitors to Facebook, Google, Twitter, and "
"Apple that would be waiting in the wings after they were cut down to size."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"But getting Congress to act will require a massive normative shift, a mass "
"movement of people who care about monopolies — and pulling them apart."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Getting people to care about monopolies will take technological "
"interventions that help them to see what a world free from Big Tech might "
"look like. Imagine if someone could make a beloved (but unauthorized) third-"
"party Facebook or Twitter client that dampens the anxiety-producing "
"algorithmic drumbeat and still lets you talk to your friends without being "
"spied upon — something that made social media more sociable and less toxic. "
"Now imagine that it gets shut down in a brutal legal battle. It’s always "
"easier to convince people that something must be done to save a thing they "
"love than it is to excite them about something that doesn’t even exist yet."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Neither tech nor law nor code nor markets are sufficient to reform Big Tech. "
"But a profitable competitor to Big Tech could bankroll a legislative push; "
"legal reform can embolden a toolsmith to make a better tool; the tool can "
"create customers for a potential business who value the benefits of the "
"internet but want them delivered without Big Tech; and that business can get "
"funded and divert some of its profits to legal reform. 20 GOTO 10 (or "
"lather, rinse, repeat). Do it again, but this time, get farther! After all, "
"this time you’re starting with weaker Big Tech adversaries, a constituency "
"that understands things can be better, Big Tech rivals who’ll help ensure "
"their own future by bankrolling reform, and code that other programmers can "
"build on to weaken Big Tech even further."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The surveillance capitalism hypothesis — that Big Tech’s products really "
"work as well as they say they do and that’s why everything is so screwed up "
"— is way too easy on surveillance and even easier on capitalism. Companies "
"spy because they believe their own BS, and companies spy because governments "
"let them, and companies spy because any advantage from spying is so short-"
"lived and minor that they have to do more and more of it just to stay in "
"place."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism "
"that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a "
"form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to "
"inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason "
"companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to "
"both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall "
"to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not "
"piss off the monopolists."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule "
"begets surveillance. Surveillance isn’t bad because it lets people "
"manipulate us. It’s bad because it crushes our ability to be our authentic "
"selves — and because it lets the rich and powerful figure out who might be "
"thinking of building guillotines and what dirt they can use to discredit "
"those embryonic guillotine-builders before they can even get to the "
"lumberyard."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
msgid "Up and through"
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"With all the problems of Big Tech, it’s tempting to imagine solving the "
"problem by returning to a world without tech at all. Resist that temptation."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is "
"not reliant upon high tech, it will be because civilization has fallen. Big "
"Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the "
"proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the "
"existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it’s up to us to seize "
"the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under "
"democratic, accountable control."
msgstr ""

#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
msgid ""
"I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not "
"in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize "
"because it has <quote>economies of scale</quote> or some other nebulous "
"feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right "
"matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe — and "
"doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our "
"civilization, our species, and our planet."
msgstr ""

#~ msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (hard cover)"
#~ msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (édition reliée)"

#~ msgid ""
#~ "If you find typos, error or have other corrections to the translated "
#~ "text, please update on <ulink url=\"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/"
#~ "rms-personal-data-safe/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/nb_NO/\"/>."
#~ msgstr ""
#~ "Si vous trouvez des fautes de frappe, des erreurs ou si vous avez "
#~ "d'autres corrections sur le texte traduit, veuillez mettre à jour <ulink "
#~ "url=\"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/rms-personal-data-safe/how-to-"
#~ "destroy-surveillance-capitalism/fr/\"/>."