1 # SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE
2 # Copyright (C) YEAR Cory Doctorow
3 # This file is distributed under the same license as the How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism package.
4 # FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
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27 msgid "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism"
28 msgstr "Jak zniszczyć kapitalizm oparty na inwigilacyjnych systemach nadzoru"
30 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><authorgroup><author><firstname>
34 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><authorgroup><author><surname>
38 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><publisher><address>
40 msgid "<city>Oslo</city>"
41 msgstr "<city>Oslo</city>"
43 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo>
45 "<publisher> <publishername>Petter Reinholdtsen</publishername> <placeholder "
46 "type=\"address\" id=\"0\"/> </publisher> <copyright> <year>2020</year> "
47 "<holder>Cory Doctorow</holder> </copyright> <copyright> <year>2020</year> "
48 "<holder>Petter Reinholdtsen</holder> </copyright>"
50 "<publisher> <publishername>Petter Reinholdtsen</publishername> <placeholder "
51 "type=\"address\" id=\"0\"/> </publisher> <copyright> <year>2020</year> "
52 "<holder>Cory Doctorow</holder> </copyright> <copyright> <year>2020</year> "
53 "<holder>Petter Reinholdtsen</holder> </copyright>"
55 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
56 msgid "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow."
58 "Jak zniszczyć kapitalizm oparty na inwigilacyjnych systemach nadzoru Autor: "
61 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
62 msgid "Published by Petter Reinholdtsen."
63 msgstr "Wydawca: Petter Reinholdtsen."
65 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
66 msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (hard cover)"
67 msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (oprawa twarda)"
69 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
70 msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (paperback)"
71 msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (oprawa miękka)"
73 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
74 msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)"
75 msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)"
77 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
79 "This book is available for purchase from <ulink url=\"https://www.lulu.com/"
82 "Ta książka jest dostępna w sprzedaży na <ulink url=\"https://www.lulu.com/\"/"
85 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
87 "If you find typos, error or have other corrections to the translated text, "
88 "please update on <ulink url=\"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/rms-"
89 "personal-data-safe/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/nb_NO/\"/>."
91 "Jeśli znajdziesz literówkę, błąd lub masz inne uwagi na temat poprawienia "
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93 "projects/rms-personal-data-safe/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/nb_NO/"
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109 msgid "Creative Commons, Some rights reserved"
110 msgstr "Creative Commons, Pewne prawa zastrzeżone"
112 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
113 msgid "<placeholder type=\"inlinemediaobject\" id=\"0\"/>"
114 msgstr "<placeholder type=\"inlinemediaobject\" id=\"0\"/>"
116 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
118 "This book is licensed under a Creative Commons license. This license permits "
119 "any use of this work, so long as attribution is given and no derivatived "
120 "material is distributed. For more information about the license visit "
121 "<ulink url=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/\"/>."
123 "Ta książka jest wydana na licencji Creative Commons. Licencja ta pozwala na "
124 "dowolny użytek tej pracy tak długo, jak długo podane jest jej autorstwo i "
125 "nie jest rozpowszechniany żaden materiał pochodny. Więcej informacji na "
126 "temat tej licencji znajdziesz na <ulink url=\"https://creativecommons.org/"
127 "licenses/by-nd/4.0/\"/>."
129 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><abstract><para>
131 "Our devices and services gather most of the data that the NSA mines for its "
132 "surveillance project. We pay for these devices and the services they connect "
133 "to, and then we painstakingly perform the data-entry tasks associated with "
134 "logging facts about our lives, opinions, and preferences."
136 "Nasze urządzenia i usługi zbierają większość danych, które NSA następnie "
137 "wydobywa w ramach swojego inwigilacyjnego projektu nadzoru. Płacimy za te "
138 "urządzenia i usługi, z którymi się łączą, a następnie skrupulatnie "
139 "wykonujemy zadania związane z wprowadzaniem danych, które rejestrują fakty "
140 "dotyczące naszego życia, opinii i preferencji."
142 #. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><abstract><para>
144 "Thanks to Big Tech, Surveillance capitalism is everywhere. This is not "
145 "because it is really good at manipulating our behaviour, or the rogue abuse "
146 "of corporate power. It is the result of unchecked monopolism and the "
147 "abusive behavior it abets. It is the system working as intended and "
148 "expected. Cory Doctorow has written an extended critique of Shoshana "
149 "Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at "
150 "the New Frontier of Power, with a non-magical analysis of the problem "
151 "leading to a different proposal for a solution."
153 "Dzięki `Big Tech` kapitalizm oparty na inwigilacyjnym systemie nadzoru jest "
154 "wszędzie. Nie dzieje się tak dlatego, że jest naprawdę dobry w manipulowaniu "
155 "naszym zachowaniem lub nieuczciwym nadużywaniu władzy korporacji. Jest to "
156 "wynik niekontrolowanego monopolizmu i obelżywego zachowania, jakie on "
157 "wywołuje. Jest to system działający zgodnie z zamierzeniami i oczekiwaniami. "
158 "Cory Doctorow napisał obszerną krytykę książki Shoshana Zuboff pt. The Age "
159 "of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier "
160 "of Power, z obiektywną, nie-magiczną analizą problemu, prowadzącą do innej "
161 "propozycji jego rozwiązania."
163 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
164 msgid "The net of a thousand lies"
165 msgstr "Sieć tysięcy kłamstw"
167 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
169 "The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the 21st "
170 "century is just how widespread the evidence against them is. You can "
171 "understand how, centuries ago, people who’d never gained a high-enough "
172 "vantage point from which to see the Earth’s curvature might come to the "
173 "commonsense belief that the flat-seeming Earth was, indeed, flat."
175 "Najbardziej zaskakującą kwestią w dziedzinie powtórnych narodzin `płaskich` "
176 "Ziemian w XXI wieku jest to, jak szeroko rozpowszechnione są przeciwko nim "
177 "dowody. Można teraz zrozumieć, jak przed wiekami ludzie, którzy nigdy nie "
178 "mieli okazji zobaczyć Ziemi z orbity ziemskiej, mogli dojść do przekonania, "
179 "opartego na zdrowym rozsądku, że Ziemia - wyglądająca na płaską - jest "
180 "faktycznie, płaska."
182 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
184 "But today, when elementary schools routinely dangle GoPro cameras from "
185 "balloons and loft them high enough to photograph the Earth’s curve — to say "
186 "nothing of the unexceptional sight of the curved Earth from an airplane "
187 "window — it takes a heroic effort to maintain the belief that the world is "
190 "Lecz dzisiaj, gdy szkoły podstawowe rutynowo podczepiają do balonów kamery "
191 "GoPro i umieszczają je na tyle wysoko, aby sfotografować krzywą Ziemi — nie "
192 "mówiąc już o niezrównanie wyjątkowym widoku zakrzywionej Ziemi z okna "
193 "samolotu — trzeba naprawdę heroicznego wysiłku, aby uwierzyć, że Ziemia jest "
196 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
198 "Likewise for white nationalism and eugenics: In an age where you can become "
199 "a computational genomics datapoint by swabbing your cheek and mailing it to "
200 "a gene-sequencing company along with a modest sum of money, <quote>race "
201 "science</quote> has never been easier to refute."
203 "Podobnie jest z eugeniką i białym nacjonalizmem: w epoce, w której można "
204 "stać się obliczeniowym punktem danych genomicznych, poprzez pobranie wymazu "
205 "z policzka, i przesłanie go — za pomocą poczty elektronicznej — do firmy "
206 "sekwencjonujoącej geny, wraz ze skromną sumą pieniędzy, nigdy nie było "
207 "łatwiej zaprzeczyć twierdzeniom wysuwanym podczas <quote>naukowego wyścigu "
210 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
212 "We are living through a golden age of both readily available facts and "
213 "denial of those facts. Terrible ideas that have lingered on the fringes for "
214 "decades or even centuries have gone mainstream seemingly overnight."
216 "Żyjemy w złotej epoce, zarówno łatwo dostępnych faktów, jak i zaprzeczenia "
217 "tym faktom. Okropne idee, które pozostawały na marginesie przez "
218 "dziesięciolecia, a nawet stulecia, z dnia na dzień weszły do głównego nurtu."
220 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
222 "When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that can "
223 "explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea has gotten a "
224 "lot better at stating their case, or the proposition has become harder to "
225 "deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other words, if we want people to "
226 "take climate change seriously, we can get a bunch of Greta Thunbergs to make "
227 "eloquent, passionate arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds, "
228 "or we can wait for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case "
229 "for us. In practice, we’ll probably have to do some of both: The more we’re "
230 "boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier it will be for "
231 "the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us."
233 "Kiedy niejasny pomysł zyskuje na popularności, istnieją tylko dwie rzeczy, "
234 "które mogą wyjaśnić jego przewagę: albo osoba wyrażająca ten pomysł znacznie "
235 "lepiej radzi sobie z przedstawieniem swojej racji, albo twierdzenie staje "
236 "się trudniejsze do zaprzeczenia w obliczu rosnących dowodów. Innymi słowy, "
237 "jeśli chcemy, aby ludzie poważnie podchodzili do zmian klimatycznych, możemy "
238 "skłonić grupę Grety Thunberg do wyrażenia wymownych, namiętnych argumentów w "
239 "sposób publiczny, przez co zdobędzie ona nasze serca i umysły, lub możemy "
240 "poczekać na powódź, ogień, palące słońce i pandemie, aby przemówiła za nami. "
241 "W praktyce prawdopodobnie będziemy musieli zrobić jedno i drugie: im więcej "
242 "będziemy gotować, palić, topić i marnować, tym łatwiej będzie Grecie "
243 "Thunberg nas przekonać."
245 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
247 "The arguments for ridiculous beliefs in odious conspiracies like anti-"
248 "vaccination, climate denial, a flat Earth, and eugenics are no better than "
249 "they were a generation ago. Indeed, they’re worse because they are being "
250 "pitched to people who have at least a background awareness of the refuting "
253 "Argumenty za absurdalnymi wierzeniami w oparciu o teorie spiskowe, takie jak "
254 "teoria antyszczepionkowa, teoria negująca zmiany klimatu, teoria o istnieniu "
255 "płaskiej Ziemi i teoria eugeniczna, wcale nie są lepsze niż w pokoleniu "
256 "wcześniejszym. W rzeczywistości, są gorsze, ponieważ są przedstawiane "
257 "ludziom, którzy mają przynajmniej podstawową świadomość faktów obalających "
260 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
262 "Anti-vax has been around since the first vaccines, but the early anti-"
263 "vaxxers were pitching people who were less equipped to understand even the "
264 "most basic ideas from microbiology, and moreover, those people had not "
265 "witnessed the extermination of mass-murdering diseases like polio, smallpox, "
266 "and measles. Today’s anti-vaxxers are no more eloquent than their forebears, "
267 "and they have a much harder job."
269 "Antyszczepionkowcy pojawiali się już od czasu wynalezienia pierwszych "
270 "szczepionek, lecz pierwsi z nich byli ludźmi słabo przygotowanymi do "
271 "zrozumienia nawet najbardziej podstawowych kwestii mikrobiologii, a – "
272 "ponadto - ludzie ci nie byli świadkami masowej eksterminacji, spowodowanej "
273 "takimi morderczymi chorobami, jak polio, ospa czy odra. Dzisiejsi "
274 "przeciwnicy szczepień nie są bardziej elokwentni niż ich przodkowie, a mają "
275 "znacznie cięższą pracę."
277 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
279 "So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding on the "
280 "basis of superior arguments?"
282 "A więc, czy ci wyrafinowani zwolennicy teorii spiskowych mogą, tak naprawdę, "
283 "odnieść sukces w oparciu o lepsze argumenty?"
285 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
287 "Some people think so. Today, there is a widespread belief that machine "
288 "learning and commercial surveillance can turn even the most fumble-tongued "
289 "conspiracy theorist into a svengali who can warp your perceptions and win "
290 "your belief by locating vulnerable people and then pitching them with A.I.-"
291 "refined arguments that bypass their rational faculties and turn everyday "
292 "people into flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, or even Nazis. When the RAND "
293 "Corporation <ulink url=\"https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/"
294 "research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf\">blames Facebook for "
295 "<quote>radicalization</quote></ulink> and when Facebook’s role in spreading "
296 "coronavirus misinformation is <ulink url=\"https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/"
297 "en/facebook_threat_health/\">blamed on its algorithm</ulink>, the implicit "
298 "message is that machine learning and surveillance are causing the changes in "
299 "our consensus about what’s true."
301 "Niektórzy ludzie myślą, że tak. Obecnie panuje powszechne przekonanie, że "
302 "uczenie maszynowe i komercyjne systemy inwigilacji mogą zmienić nawet "
303 "najbardziej nieudolnego teoretyka spiskowego w `swengali`, osobę, która może "
304 "wypaczyć czyjeś spostrzeżenia i zdobyć jego /jej zaufanie, lokalizując osoby "
305 "wrażliwe, a następnie przedstawiając im wyrafinowane argumenty Sztucznej "
306 "Inteligencji, omijające racjonalne umiejętności ludzi i zmieniające ich w "
307 "`płaskich` Ziemian, przeciwników szczepień, a nawet nazistów. Gdy the RAND "
308 "Corporation <ulink url=\"https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/"
309 "research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf\">oskarża Facebook'a za "
310 "<quote>radykalizację</quote></ulink>, kiedy Facebook'a oskarża się o "
311 "rozpowszechnianie dezinformacji na temat koronawirusa, <ulink url = \"https"
312 "://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_threat_health/\">a jest to "
313 "spowodowane jego algorytmem</ulink>, to domyślnym przesłaniem jest fakt, że "
314 "uczenie maszynowe i systemy inwigilacyjnego nadzoru powodują zmiany w naszym "
315 "konsensusie wobec tego, co jest prawdą."
317 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
319 "After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories "
320 "like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread followings, "
321 "<emphasis>something</emphasis> must be afoot."
323 "W końcu, w świecie, w którym rozległe i niespójne teorie spiskowe, takie jak "
324 "Pizzagate i jej nastepczyni, QAnon, mają szeroko rozpowszechnionych "
325 "następców, <emphasis>coś</emphasis>, musi trwać nadal."
327 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
329 "But what if there’s another explanation? What if it’s the material "
330 "circumstances, and not the arguments, that are making the difference for "
331 "these conspiracy pitchmen? What if the trauma of living through "
332 "<emphasis>real conspiracies</emphasis> all around us — conspiracies among "
333 "wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts "
334 "and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as "
335 "<quote>corruption</quote>) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy "
339 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
341 "If it’s trauma and not contagion — material conditions and not ideology — "
342 "that is making the difference today and enabling a rise of repulsive "
343 "misinformation in the face of easily observed facts, that doesn’t mean our "
344 "computer networks are blameless. They’re still doing the heavy work of "
345 "locating vulnerable people and guiding them through a series of ever-more-"
346 "extreme ideas and communities."
349 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
351 "Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses "
352 "real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics <ulink url=\"https://"
353 "www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html\">kicked off by vaccine denial</"
354 "ulink> to genocides <ulink url=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/"
355 "technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html\">kicked off by racist "
356 "conspiracies</ulink> to planetary meltdown caused by denial-inspired climate "
357 "inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to put the fires out — to "
358 "figure out how to help people see the truth of the world through the "
359 "conspiracies they’ve been confused by."
362 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
364 "But firefighting is reactive. We need fire <emphasis>prevention</emphasis>. "
365 "We need to strike at the traumatic material conditions that make people "
366 "vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here, too, tech has a role to "
370 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
372 "There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s <ulink url="
373 "\"https://edri.org/tag/terreg/\">Terrorist Content Regulation</ulink>, which "
374 "requires platforms to police and remove <quote>extremist</quote> content, to "
375 "the U.S. proposals to <ulink url=\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/"
376 "earn-it-act-violates-constitution\">force tech companies to spy on their "
377 "users</ulink> and hold them liable <ulink url=\"https://www.natlawreview.com/"
378 "article/repeal-cda-section-230\">for their users’ bad speech</ulink>, "
379 "there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies to solve the problems they "
383 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
385 "There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these "
386 "solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance "
387 "over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a "
388 "more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The "
389 "<quote>solutions</quote> on the table today <emphasis>require</emphasis> Big "
390 "Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to "
391 "implement the systems these laws demand."
394 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
396 "Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to "
397 "get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to "
398 "figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our "
399 "internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big "
400 "Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose."
403 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
405 "I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the "
406 "Internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism."
409 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
410 msgid "Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on"
411 msgstr "Aktywizm praw cyfrowych, krótka historia 25 lat działalności"
413 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
415 "Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic "
416 "Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free Software Foundation "
417 "launched in 1985. For most of the history of the movement, the most "
418 "prominent criticism leveled against it was that it was irrelevant: The real "
419 "activist causes were real-world causes (think of the skepticism when <ulink "
420 "url=\"https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/finland-legal-right-to-"
421 "broadband-for-all-citizens/#:~:text=Global%20Legal%20Monitor,-Home%20%7C"
422 "%20Search%20%7C%20Browse&text=(July%206%2C%202010)%20On,connection"
423 "%20100%20MBPS%20by%202015.\">Finland declared broadband a human right in "
424 "2010</ulink>), and real-world activism was shoe-leather activism (think of "
425 "Malcolm Gladwell’s <ulink url=\"https://www.newyorker.com/"
426 "magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell\">contempt for "
427 "<quote>clicktivism</quote></ulink>). But as tech has grown more central to "
428 "our daily lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way first to "
429 "accusations of insincerity (<quote>You only care about tech because you’re "
430 "<ulink url=\"https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-"
431 "google-patent-reform/id=98007/\">shilling for tech companies</ulink></"
432 "quote>) to accusations of negligence (<quote>Why didn’t you foresee that "
433 "tech could be such a destructive force?</quote>). But digital rights "
434 "activism is right where it’s always been: looking out for the humans in a "
435 "world where tech is inexorably taking over."
438 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
440 "The latest version of this critique comes in the form of <quote>surveillance "
441 "capitalism,</quote> a term coined by business professor Shoshana Zuboff in "
442 "her long and influential 2019 book, <emphasis>The Age of Surveillance "
443 "Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power</"
444 "emphasis>. Zuboff argues that <quote>surveillance capitalism</quote> is a "
445 "unique creature of the tech industry and that it is unlike any other abusive "
446 "commercial practice in history, one that is <quote>constituted by unexpected "
447 "and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control "
448 "that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new "
449 "markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism "
450 "challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long "
451 "evolution of market capitalism.</quote> It is a new and deadly form of "
452 "capitalism, a <quote>rogue capitalism,</quote> and our lack of understanding "
453 "of its unique capabilities and dangers represents an existential, species-"
454 "wide threat. She’s right that capitalism today threatens our species, and "
455 "she’s right that tech poses unique challenges to our species and "
456 "civilization, but she’s really wrong about how tech is different and why it "
457 "threatens our species."
460 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
462 "What’s more, I think that her incorrect diagnosis will lead us down a path "
463 "that ends up making Big Tech stronger, not weaker. We need to take down Big "
464 "Tech, and to do that, we need to start by correctly identifying the problem."
467 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
468 msgid "Tech exceptionalism, then and now"
469 msgstr "Wyjątkowość Technologii, dawniej i obecnie"
471 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
473 "Early critics of the digital rights movement — perhaps best represented by "
474 "campaigning organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free "
475 "Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, and others that focused on preserving "
476 "and enhancing basic human rights in the digital realm — damned activists for "
477 "practicing <quote>tech exceptionalism.</quote> Around the turn of the "
478 "millennium, serious people ridiculed any claim that tech policy mattered in "
479 "the <quote>real world.</quote> Claims that tech rules had implications for "
480 "speech, association, privacy, search and seizure, and fundamental rights and "
481 "equities were treated as ridiculous, an elevation of the concerns of sad "
482 "nerds arguing about <emphasis>Star Trek</emphasis> on bulletin board systems "
483 "above the struggles of the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela, or the Warsaw "
487 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
489 "In the decades since, accusations of <quote>tech exceptionalism</quote> have "
490 "only sharpened as tech’s role in everyday life has expanded: Now that tech "
491 "has infiltrated every corner of our life and our online lives have been "
492 "monopolized by a handful of giants, defenders of digital freedoms are "
493 "accused of carrying water for Big Tech, providing cover for its self-"
494 "interested negligence (or worse, nefarious plots)."
497 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
499 "From my perspective, the digital rights movement has remained stationary "
500 "while the rest of the world has moved. From the earliest days, the "
501 "movement’s concern was users and the toolsmiths who provided the code they "
502 "needed to realize their fundamental rights. Digital rights activists only "
503 "cared about companies to the extent that companies were acting to uphold "
504 "users’ rights (or, just as often, when companies were acting so foolishly "
505 "that they threatened to bring down new rules that would also make it harder "
506 "for good actors to help users)."
509 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
511 "The <quote>surveillance capitalism</quote> critique recasts the digital "
512 "rights movement in a new light again: not as alarmists who overestimate the "
513 "importance of their shiny toys nor as shills for big tech but as serene deck-"
514 "chair rearrangers whose long-standing activism is a liability because it "
515 "makes them incapable of perceiving novel threats as they continue to fight "
516 "the last century’s tech battles."
519 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
520 msgid "But tech exceptionalism is a sin no matter who practices it."
523 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
524 msgid "Don’t believe the hype"
525 msgstr "Nie wierz 'szumom' medialnym"
527 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
529 "You’ve probably heard that <quote>if you’re not paying for the product, "
530 "you’re the product.</quote> As we’ll see below, that’s true, if incomplete. "
531 "But what is <emphasis>absolutely</emphasis> true is that ad-driven Big "
532 "Tech’s customers are advertisers, and what companies like Google and "
533 "Facebook sell is their ability to convince <emphasis>you</emphasis> to buy "
534 "stuff. Big Tech’s product is persuasion. The services — social media, search "
535 "engines, maps, messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion."
538 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
540 "The fear of surveillance capitalism starts from the (correct) presumption "
541 "that everything Big Tech says about itself is probably a lie. But the "
542 "surveillance capitalism critique makes an exception for the claims Big Tech "
543 "makes in its sales literature — the breathless hype in the pitches to "
544 "potential advertisers online and in ad-tech seminars about the efficacy of "
545 "its products: It assumes that Big Tech is as good at influencing us as they "
546 "claim they are when they’re selling influencing products to credulous "
547 "customers. That’s a mistake because sales literature is not a reliable "
548 "indicator of a product’s efficacy."
551 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
553 "Surveillance capitalism assumes that because advertisers buy a lot of what "
554 "Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something real. But Big Tech’s "
555 "massive sales could just as easily be the result of a popular delusion or "
556 "something even more pernicious: monopolistic control over our communications "
560 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
562 "Being watched changes your behavior, and not for the better. It creates "
563 "risks for our social progress. Zuboff’s book features beautifully wrought "
564 "explanations of these phenomena. But Zuboff also claims that surveillance "
565 "literally robs us of our free will — that when our personal data is mixed "
566 "with machine learning, it creates a system of persuasion so devastating that "
567 "we are helpless before it. That is, Facebook uses an algorithm to analyze "
568 "the data it nonconsensually extracts from your daily life and uses it to "
569 "customize your feed in ways that get you to buy stuff. It is a mind-control "
570 "ray out of a 1950s comic book, wielded by mad scientists whose "
571 "supercomputers guarantee them perpetual and total world domination."
574 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
575 msgid "What is persuasion?"
576 msgstr "Co to jest przekonywanie?"
578 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
580 "To understand why you shouldn’t worry about mind-control rays — but why you "
581 "<emphasis>should</emphasis> worry about surveillance <emphasis>and</"
582 "emphasis> Big Tech — we must start by unpacking what we mean by "
583 "<quote>persuasion.</quote>"
586 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
588 "Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists promise their customers "
589 "(the advertisers) that if they use machine-learning tools trained on "
590 "unimaginably large data sets of nonconsensually harvested personal "
591 "information, they will be able to uncover ways to bypass the rational "
592 "faculties of the public and direct their behavior, creating a stream of "
593 "purchases, votes, and other desired outcomes."
596 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
598 "The impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be "
599 "central to our analysis and any remedies we seek."
602 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
604 "But there’s little evidence that this is happening. Instead, the predictions "
605 "that surveillance capitalism delivers to its customers are much less "
606 "impressive. Rather than finding ways to bypass our rational faculties, "
607 "surveillance capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg mostly do one or more of three "
611 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
612 msgid "1. Segmenting"
613 msgstr "1. Segmentacja"
615 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
617 "If you’re selling diapers, you have better luck if you pitch them to people "
618 "in maternity wards. Not everyone who enters or leaves a maternity ward just "
619 "had a baby, and not everyone who just had a baby is in the market for "
620 "diapers. But having a baby is a really reliable correlate of being in the "
621 "market for diapers, and being in a maternity ward is highly correlated with "
622 "having a baby. Hence diaper ads around maternity wards (and even pitchmen "
623 "for baby products, who haunt maternity wards with baskets full of freebies)."
626 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
628 "Surveillance capitalism is segmenting times a billion. Diaper vendors can go "
629 "way beyond people in maternity wards (though they can do that, too, with "
630 "things like location-based mobile ads). They can target you based on "
631 "whether you’re reading articles about child-rearing, diapers, or a host of "
632 "other subjects, and data mining can suggest unobvious keywords to advertise "
633 "against. They can target you based on the articles you’ve recently read. "
634 "They can target you based on what you’ve recently purchased. They can target "
635 "you based on whether you receive emails or private messages about these "
636 "subjects — or even if you speak aloud about them (though Facebook and the "
637 "like convincingly claim that’s not happening — yet)."
640 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
641 msgid "This is seriously creepy."
644 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
645 msgid "But it’s not mind control."
648 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
649 msgid "It doesn’t deprive you of your free will. It doesn’t trick you."
652 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
654 "Think of how surveillance capitalism works in politics. Surveillance "
655 "capitalist companies sell political operatives the power to locate people "
656 "who might be receptive to their pitch. Candidates campaigning on finance "
657 "industry corruption seek people struggling with debt; candidates campaigning "
658 "on xenophobia seek out racists. Political operatives have always targeted "
659 "their message whether their intentions were honorable or not: Union "
660 "organizers set up pitches at factory gates, and white supremacists hand out "
661 "fliers at John Birch Society meetings."
664 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
666 "But this is an inexact and thus wasteful practice. The union organizer can’t "
667 "know which worker to approach on the way out of the factory gates and may "
668 "waste their time on a covert John Birch Society member; the white "
669 "supremacist doesn’t know which of the Birchers are so delusional that making "
670 "it to a meeting is as much as they can manage and which ones might be "
671 "convinced to cross the country to carry a tiki torch through the streets of "
672 "Charlottesville, Virginia."
675 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
677 "Because targeting improves the yields on political pitches, it can "
678 "accelerate the pace of political upheaval by making it possible for everyone "
679 "who has secretly wished for the toppling of an autocrat — or just an 11-term "
680 "incumbent politician — to find everyone else who feels the same way at very "
681 "low cost. This has been critical to the rapid crystallization of recent "
682 "political movements including Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street as "
683 "well as less savory players like the far-right white nationalist movements "
684 "that marched in Charlottesville."
687 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
689 "It’s important to differentiate this kind of political organizing from "
690 "influence campaigns; finding people who secretly agree with you isn’t the "
691 "same as convincing people to agree with you. The rise of phenomena like "
692 "nonbinary or otherwise nonconforming gender identities is often "
693 "characterized by reactionaries as the result of online brainwashing "
694 "campaigns that convince impressionable people that they have been secretly "
698 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
700 "But the personal accounts of those who have come out tell a different story "
701 "where people who long harbored a secret about their gender were emboldened "
702 "by others coming forward and where people who knew that they were different "
703 "but lacked a vocabulary for discussing that difference learned the right "
704 "words from these low-cost means of finding people and learning about their "
708 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
712 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
714 "Lies and fraud are pernicious, and surveillance capitalism supercharges them "
715 "through targeting. If you want to sell a fraudulent payday loan or subprime "
716 "mortgage, surveillance capitalism can help you find people who are both "
717 "desperate and unsophisticated and thus receptive to your pitch. This "
718 "accounts for the rise of many phenomena, like multilevel marketing schemes, "
719 "in which deceptive claims about potential earnings and the efficacy of sales "
720 "techniques are targeted at desperate people by advertising against search "
721 "queries that indicate, for example, someone struggling with ill-advised "
725 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
727 "Surveillance capitalism also abets fraud by making it easy to locate other "
728 "people who have been similarly deceived, forming a community of people who "
729 "reinforce one another’s false beliefs. Think of <ulink url=\"https://www."
730 "vulture.com/2020/01/the-dream-podcast-review.html\">the forums</ulink> where "
731 "people who are being victimized by multilevel marketing frauds gather to "
732 "trade tips on how to improve their luck in peddling the product."
735 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
737 "Sometimes, online deception involves replacing someone’s correct beliefs "
738 "with incorrect ones, as it does in the anti-vaccination movement, whose "
739 "victims are often people who start out believing in vaccines but are "
740 "convinced by seemingly plausible evidence that leads them into the false "
741 "belief that vaccines are harmful."
744 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
746 "But it’s much more common for fraud to succeed when it doesn’t have to "
747 "displace a true belief. When my daughter contracted head lice at daycare, "
748 "one of the daycare workers told me I could get rid of them by treating her "
749 "hair and scalp with olive oil. I didn’t know anything about head lice, and I "
750 "assumed that the daycare worker did, so I tried it (it didn’t work, and it "
751 "doesn’t work). It’s easy to end up with false beliefs when you simply don’t "
752 "know any better and when those beliefs are conveyed by someone who seems to "
753 "know what they’re doing."
756 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
758 "This is pernicious and difficult — and it’s also the kind of thing the "
759 "internet can help guard against by making true information available, "
760 "especially in a form that exposes the underlying deliberations among parties "
761 "with sharply divergent views, such as Wikipedia. But it’s not brainwashing; "
762 "it’s fraud. In the <ulink url=\"https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/"
763 "\">majority of cases</ulink>, the victims of these fraud campaigns have an "
764 "informational void filled in the customary way, by consulting a seemingly "
765 "reliable source. If I look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge and learn "
766 "that it is 5,800 feet long, but in reality, it is 5,989 feet long, the "
767 "underlying deception is a problem, but it’s a problem with a simple remedy. "
768 "It’s a very different problem from the anti-vax issue in which someone’s "
769 "true belief is displaced by a false one by means of sophisticated persuasion."
772 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
773 msgid "3. Domination"
774 msgstr "3. Dominacja"
776 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
778 "Surveillance capitalism is the result of monopoly. Monopoly is the cause, "
779 "and surveillance capitalism and its negative outcomes are the effects of "
780 "monopoly. I’ll get into this in depth later, but for now, suffice it to say "
781 "that the tech industry has grown up with a radical theory of antitrust that "
782 "has allowed companies to grow by merging with their rivals, buying up their "
783 "nascent competitors, and expanding to control whole market verticals."
786 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
788 "One example of how monopolism aids in persuasion is through dominance: "
789 "Google makes editorial decisions about its algorithms that determine the "
790 "sort order of the responses to our queries. If a cabal of fraudsters have "
791 "set out to trick the world into thinking that the Brooklyn Bridge is 5,800 "
792 "feet long, and if Google gives a high search rank to this group in response "
793 "to queries like <quote>How long is the Brooklyn Bridge?</quote> then the "
794 "first eight or 10 screens’ worth of Google results could be wrong. And since "
795 "most people don’t go beyond the first couple of results — let alone the "
796 "first <emphasis>page</emphasis> of results — Google’s choice means that many "
797 "people will be deceived."
800 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
802 "Google’s dominance over search — more than 86% of web searches are performed "
803 "through Google — means that the way it orders its search results has an "
804 "outsized effect on public beliefs. Ironically, Google claims this is why it "
805 "can’t afford to have any transparency in its algorithm design: Google’s "
806 "search dominance makes the results of its sorting too important to risk "
807 "telling the world how it arrives at those results lest some bad actor "
808 "discover a flaw in the ranking system and exploit it to push its point of "
809 "view to the top of the search results. There’s an obvious remedy to a "
810 "company that is too big to audit: break it up into smaller pieces."
813 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
815 "Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> whose "
816 "data-hoarding and machine-learning techniques rob us of our free will. But "
817 "influence campaigns that seek to displace existing, correct beliefs with "
818 "false ones have an effect that is small and temporary while monopolistic "
819 "dominance over informational systems has massive, enduring effects. "
820 "Controlling the results to the world’s search queries means controlling "
821 "access both to arguments and their rebuttals and, thus, control over much of "
822 "the world’s beliefs. If our concern is how corporations are foreclosing on "
823 "our ability to make up our own minds and determine our own futures, the "
824 "impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be "
825 "central to our analysis and any remedies we seek."
828 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
829 msgid "4. Bypassing our rational faculties"
830 msgstr "4. Omijanie naszych racjonalnych zdolności"
832 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
834 "<emphasis>This</emphasis> is the good stuff: using machine learning, "
835 "<quote>dark patterns,</quote> engagement hacking, and other techniques to "
836 "get us to do things that run counter to our better judgment. This is mind "
840 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
842 "Some of these techniques have proven devastatingly effective (if only in the "
843 "short term). The use of countdown timers on a purchase completion page can "
844 "create a sense of urgency that causes you to ignore the nagging internal "
845 "voice suggesting that you should shop around or sleep on your decision. The "
846 "use of people from your social graph in ads can provide <quote>social proof</"
847 "quote> that a purchase is worth making. Even the auction system pioneered by "
848 "eBay is calculated to play on our cognitive blind spots, letting us feel "
849 "like we <quote>own</quote> something because we bid on it, thus encouraging "
850 "us to bid again when we are outbid to ensure that <quote>our</quote> things "
854 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
856 "Games are extraordinarily good at this. <quote>Free to play</quote> games "
857 "manipulate us through many techniques, such as presenting players with a "
858 "series of smoothly escalating challenges that create a sense of mastery and "
859 "accomplishment but which sharply transition into a set of challenges that "
860 "are impossible to overcome without paid upgrades. Add some social proof to "
861 "the mix — a stream of notifications about how well your friends are faring — "
862 "and before you know it, you’re buying virtual power-ups to get to the next "
866 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
868 "Companies have risen and fallen on these techniques, and the <quote>fallen</"
869 "quote> part is worth paying attention to. In general, living things adapt to "
870 "stimulus: Something that is very compelling or noteworthy when you first "
871 "encounter it fades with repetition until you stop noticing it altogether. "
872 "Consider the refrigerator hum that irritates you when it starts up but "
873 "disappears into the background so thoroughly that you only notice it when it "
877 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
879 "That’s why behavioral conditioning uses <quote>intermittent reinforcement "
880 "schedules.</quote> Instead of giving you a steady drip of encouragement or "
881 "setbacks, games and gamified services scatter rewards on a randomized "
882 "schedule — often enough to keep you interested and random enough that you "
883 "can never quite find the pattern that would make it boring."
886 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
888 "Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful behavioral tool, but it also "
889 "represents a collective action problem for surveillance capitalism. The "
890 "<quote>engagement techniques</quote> invented by the behaviorists of "
891 "surveillance capitalist companies are quickly copied across the whole sector "
892 "so that what starts as a mysteriously compelling fillip in the design of a "
893 "service—like <quote>pull to refresh</quote> or alerts when someone likes "
894 "your posts or side quests that your characters get invited to while in the "
895 "midst of main quests—quickly becomes dully ubiquitous. The impossible-to-"
896 "nail-down nonpattern of randomized drips from your phone becomes a grey-"
897 "noise wall of sound as every single app and site starts to make use of "
898 "whatever seems to be working at the time."
901 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
903 "From the surveillance capitalist’s point of view, our adaptive capacity is "
904 "like a harmful bacterium that deprives it of its food source — our attention "
905 "— and novel techniques for snagging that attention are like new antibiotics "
906 "that can be used to breach our defenses and destroy our self-determination. "
907 "And there <emphasis>are</emphasis> techniques like that. Who can forget the "
908 "Great Zynga Epidemic, when all of our friends were caught in "
909 "<emphasis>FarmVille</emphasis>’s endless, mindless dopamine loops? But every "
910 "new attention-commanding technique is jumped on by the whole industry and "
911 "used so indiscriminately that antibiotic resistance sets in. Given enough "
912 "repetition, almost all of us develop immunity to even the most powerful "
913 "techniques — by 2013, two years after Zynga’s peak, its user base had halved."
916 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
918 "Not everyone, of course. Some people never adapt to stimulus, just as some "
919 "people never stop hearing the hum of the refrigerator. This is why most "
920 "people who are exposed to slot machines play them for a while and then move "
921 "on while a small and tragic minority liquidate their kids’ college funds, "
922 "buy adult diapers, and position themselves in front of a machine until they "
926 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
928 "But surveillance capitalism’s margins on behavioral modification suck. "
929 "Tripling the rate at which someone buys a widget sounds great <ulink url="
930 "\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2018/03/09/the-advertising-"
931 "conversion-rates-for-every-major-tech-platform/#2f6a67485957\">unless the "
932 "base rate is way less than 1%</ulink> with an improved rate of… still less "
933 "than 1%. Even penny slot machines pull down pennies for every spin while "
934 "surveillance capitalism rakes in infinitesimal penny fractions."
937 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
939 "Slot machines’ high returns mean that they can be profitable just by "
940 "draining the fortunes of the small rump of people who are pathologically "
941 "vulnerable to them and unable to adapt to their tricks. But surveillance "
942 "capitalism can’t survive on the fractional pennies it brings down from that "
943 "vulnerable sliver — that’s why, after the Great Zynga Epidemic had finally "
944 "burned itself out, the small number of still-addicted players left behind "
945 "couldn’t sustain it as a global phenomenon. And new powerful attention "
946 "weapons aren’t easy to find, as is evidenced by the long years since the "
947 "last time Zynga had a hit. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that "
948 "Zynga has to spend on developing new tools to blast through our adaptation, "
949 "it has never managed to repeat the lucky accident that let it snag so much "
950 "of our attention for a brief moment in 2009. Powerhouses like Supercell have "
951 "fared a little better, but they are rare and throw away many failures for "
955 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
957 "The vulnerability of small segments of the population to dramatic, efficient "
958 "corporate manipulation is a real concern that’s worthy of our attention and "
959 "energy. But it’s not an existential threat to society."
962 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
964 "If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak"
966 "Jeśli dane są nowym paliwem, to silnik kapitalistycznych systemów nadzoru ma "
969 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
971 "This adaptation problem offers an explanation for one of surveillance "
972 "capitalism’s most alarming traits: its relentless hunger for data and its "
973 "endless expansion of data-gathering capabilities through the spread of "
974 "sensors, online surveillance, and acquisition of data streams from third "
978 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
980 "Zuboff observes this phenomenon and concludes that data must be very "
981 "valuable if surveillance capitalism is so hungry for it. (In her words: "
982 "<quote>Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous "
983 "intensification of the means of production, so surveillance capitalists and "
984 "their market players are now locked into the continuous intensification of "
985 "the means of behavioral modification and the gathering might of "
986 "instrumentarian power.</quote>) But what if the voracious appetite is "
987 "because data has such a short half-life — because people become inured so "
988 "quickly to new, data-driven persuasion techniques — that the companies are "
989 "locked in an arms race with our limbic system? What if it’s all a Red "
990 "Queen’s race where they have to run ever faster — collect ever-more data — "
991 "just to stay in the same spot?"
994 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
996 "Of course, all of Big Tech’s persuasion techniques work in concert with one "
997 "another, and collecting data is useful beyond mere behavioral trickery."
1000 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1002 "If someone wants to recruit you to buy a refrigerator or join a pogrom, they "
1003 "might use profiling and targeting to send messages to people they judge to "
1004 "be good sales prospects. The messages themselves may be deceptive, making "
1005 "claims about things you’re not very knowledgeable about (food safety and "
1006 "energy efficiency or eugenics and historical claims about racial "
1007 "superiority). They might use search engine optimization and/or armies of "
1008 "fake reviewers and commenters and/or paid placement to dominate the "
1009 "discourse so that any search for further information takes you back to their "
1010 "messages. And finally, they may refine the different pitches using machine "
1011 "learning and other techniques to figure out what kind of pitch works best on "
1015 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1017 "Each phase of this process benefits from surveillance: The more data they "
1018 "have, the more precisely they can profile you and target you with specific "
1019 "messages. Think of how you’d sell a fridge if you knew that the warranty on "
1020 "your prospect’s fridge just expired and that they were expecting a tax "
1024 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1026 "Also, the more data they have, the better they can craft deceptive messages "
1027 "— if I know that you’re into genealogy, I might not try to feed you "
1028 "pseudoscience about genetic differences between <quote>races,</quote> "
1029 "sticking instead to conspiratorial secret histories of <quote>demographic "
1030 "replacement</quote> and the like."
1033 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1035 "Facebook also helps you locate people who have the same odious or antisocial "
1036 "views as you. It makes it possible to find other people who want to carry "
1037 "tiki torches through the streets of Charlottesville in Confederate cosplay. "
1038 "It can help you find other people who want to join your militia and go to "
1039 "the border to look for undocumented migrants to terrorize. It can help you "
1040 "find people who share your belief that vaccines are poison and that the "
1044 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1046 "There is one way in which targeted advertising uniquely benefits those "
1047 "advocating for socially unacceptable causes: It is invisible. Racism is "
1048 "widely geographically dispersed, and there are few places where racists — "
1049 "and only racists — gather. This is similar to the problem of selling "
1050 "refrigerators in that potential refrigerator purchasers are geographically "
1051 "dispersed and there are few places where you can buy an ad that will be "
1052 "primarily seen by refrigerator customers. But buying a refrigerator is "
1053 "socially acceptable while being a Nazi is not, so you can buy a billboard or "
1054 "advertise in the newspaper sports section for your refrigerator business, "
1055 "and the only potential downside is that your ad will be seen by a lot of "
1056 "people who don’t want refrigerators, resulting in a lot of wasted expense."
1059 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1061 "But even if you wanted to advertise your Nazi movement on a billboard or "
1062 "prime-time TV or the sports section, you would struggle to find anyone "
1063 "willing to sell you the space for your ad partly because they disagree with "
1064 "your views and partly because they fear censure (boycott, reputational "
1065 "damage, etc.) from other people who disagree with your views."
1068 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1070 "Targeted ads solve this problem: On the internet, every ad unit can be "
1071 "different for every person, meaning that you can buy ads that are only shown "
1072 "to people who appear to be Nazis and not to people who hate Nazis. When "
1073 "there’s spillover — when someone who hates racism is shown a racist "
1074 "recruiting ad — there is some fallout; the platform or publication might get "
1075 "an angry public or private denunciation. But the nature of the risk assumed "
1076 "by an online ad buyer is different than the risks to a traditional publisher "
1077 "or billboard owner who might want to run a Nazi ad."
1080 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1082 "Online ads are placed by algorithms that broker between a diverse ecosystem "
1083 "of self-serve ad platforms that anyone can buy an ad through, so the Nazi ad "
1084 "that slips onto your favorite online publication isn’t seen as their moral "
1085 "failing but rather as a failure in some distant, upstream ad supplier. When "
1086 "a publication gets a complaint about an offensive ad that’s appearing in one "
1087 "of its units, it can take some steps to block that ad, but the Nazi might "
1088 "buy a slightly different ad from a different broker serving the same unit. "
1089 "And in any event, internet users increasingly understand that when they see "
1090 "an ad, it’s likely that the advertiser did not choose that publication and "
1091 "that the publication has no idea who its advertisers are."
1094 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1096 "These layers of indirection between advertisers and publishers serve as "
1097 "moral buffers: Today’s moral consensus is largely that publishers shouldn’t "
1098 "be held responsible for the ads that appear on their pages because they’re "
1099 "not actively choosing to put those ads there. Because of this, Nazis are "
1100 "able to overcome significant barriers to organizing their movement."
1103 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1105 "Data has a complex relationship with domination. Being able to spy on your "
1106 "customers can alert you to their preferences for your rivals and allow you "
1107 "to head off your rivals at the pass."
1110 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1112 "More importantly, if you can dominate the information space while also "
1113 "gathering data, then you make other deceptive tactics stronger because it’s "
1114 "harder to break out of the web of deceit you’re spinning. Domination — that "
1115 "is, ultimately becoming a monopoly — and not the data itself is the "
1116 "supercharger that makes every tactic worth pursuing because monopolistic "
1117 "domination deprives your target of an escape route."
1120 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1122 "If you’re a Nazi who wants to ensure that your prospects primarily see "
1123 "deceptive, confirming information when they search for more, you can improve "
1124 "your odds by seeding the search terms they use through your initial "
1125 "communications. You don’t need to own the top 10 results for <quote>voter "
1126 "suppression</quote> if you can convince your marks to confine their search "
1127 "terms to <quote>voter fraud,</quote> which throws up a very different set of "
1131 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1133 "Surveillance capitalists are like stage mentalists who claim that their "
1134 "extraordinary insights into human behavior let them guess the word that you "
1135 "wrote down and folded up in your pocket but who really use shills, hidden "
1136 "cameras, sleight of hand, and brute-force memorization to amaze you."
1139 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1141 "Or perhaps they’re more like pick-up artists, the misogynistic cult that "
1142 "promises to help awkward men have sex with women by teaching them "
1143 "<quote>neurolinguistic programming</quote> phrases, body language "
1144 "techniques, and psychological manipulation tactics like <quote>negging</"
1145 "quote> — offering unsolicited negative feedback to women to lower their self-"
1146 "esteem and prick their interest."
1149 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1151 "Some pick-up artists eventually manage to convince women to go home with "
1152 "them, but it’s not because these men have figured out how to bypass women’s "
1153 "critical faculties. Rather, pick-up artists’ <quote>success</quote> stories "
1154 "are a mix of women who were incapable of giving consent, women who were "
1155 "coerced, women who were intoxicated, self-destructive women, and a few women "
1156 "who were sober and in command of their faculties but who didn’t realize "
1157 "straightaway that they were with terrible men but rectified the error as "
1158 "soon as they could."
1161 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1163 "Pick-up artists <emphasis>believe</emphasis> they have figured out a secret "
1164 "back door that bypasses women’s critical faculties, but they haven’t. Many "
1165 "of the tactics they deploy, like negging, became the butt of jokes (just "
1166 "like people joke about bad ad targeting), and there’s a good chance that "
1167 "anyone they try these tactics on will immediately recognize them and dismiss "
1168 "the men who use them as irredeemable losers."
1171 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1173 "Pick-up artists are proof that people can believe they have developed a "
1174 "system of mind control <emphasis>even when it doesn’t work</emphasis>. Pick-"
1175 "up artists simply exploit the fact that one-in-a-million chances can come "
1176 "through for you if you make a million attempts, and then they assume that "
1177 "the other 999,999 times, they simply performed the technique incorrectly and "
1178 "commit themselves to doing better next time. There’s only one group of "
1179 "people who find pick-up artist lore reliably convincing: other would-be pick-"
1180 "up artists whose anxiety and insecurity make them vulnerable to scammers and "
1181 "delusional men who convince them that if they pay for tutelage and follow "
1182 "instructions, then they will someday succeed. Pick-up artists assume they "
1183 "fail to entice women because they are bad at being pick-up artists, not "
1184 "because pick-up artistry is bullshit. Pick-up artists are bad at selling "
1185 "themselves to women, but they’re much better at selling themselves to men "
1186 "who pay to learn the secrets of pick-up artistry."
1189 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1191 "Department store pioneer John Wanamaker is said to have lamented, "
1192 "<quote>Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I "
1193 "don’t know which half.</quote> The fact that Wanamaker thought that only "
1194 "half of his advertising spending was wasted is a tribute to the "
1195 "persuasiveness of advertising executives, who are <emphasis>much</emphasis> "
1196 "better at convincing potential clients to buy their services than they are "
1197 "at convincing the general public to buy their clients’ wares."
1200 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
1201 msgid "What is Facebook?"
1202 msgstr "Co to jest Facebook?"
1204 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1206 "Facebook is heralded as the origin of all of our modern plagues, and it’s "
1207 "not hard to see why. Some tech companies want to lock their users in but "
1208 "make their money by monopolizing access to the market for apps for their "
1209 "devices and gouging them on prices rather than by spying on them (like "
1210 "Apple). Some companies don’t care about locking in users because they’ve "
1211 "figured out how to spy on them no matter where they are and what they’re "
1212 "doing and can turn that surveillance into money (Google). Facebook alone "
1213 "among the Western tech giants has built a business based on locking in its "
1214 "users <emphasis>and</emphasis> spying on them all the time."
1217 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1219 "Facebook’s surveillance regime is really without parallel in the Western "
1220 "world. Though Facebook tries to prevent itself from being visible on the "
1221 "public web, hiding most of what goes on there from people unless they’re "
1222 "logged into Facebook, the company has nevertheless booby-trapped the entire "
1223 "web with surveillance tools in the form of Facebook <quote>Like</quote> "
1224 "buttons that web publishers include on their sites to boost their Facebook "
1225 "profiles. Facebook also makes various libraries and other useful code "
1226 "snippets available to web publishers that act as surveillance tendrils on "
1227 "the sites where they’re used, funneling information about visitors to the "
1228 "site — newspapers, dating sites, message boards — to Facebook."
1231 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
1233 "Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but "
1234 "because it is <emphasis>big</emphasis>."
1237 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1239 "Facebook offers similar tools to app developers, so the apps — games, fart "
1240 "machines, business review services, apps for keeping abreast of your kid’s "
1241 "schooling — you use will send information about your activities to Facebook "
1242 "even if you don’t have a Facebook account and even if you don’t download or "
1243 "use Facebook apps. On top of all that, Facebook buys data from third-party "
1244 "brokers on shopping habits, physical location, use of <quote>loyalty</quote> "
1245 "programs, financial transactions, etc., and cross-references that with the "
1246 "dossiers it develops on activity on Facebook and with apps and the public "
1250 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1252 "Though it’s easy to integrate the web with Facebook — linking to news "
1253 "stories and such — Facebook products are generally not available to be "
1254 "integrated back into the web itself. You can embed a tweet in a Facebook "
1255 "post, but if you embed a Facebook post in a tweet, you just get a link back "
1256 "to Facebook and must log in before you can see it. Facebook has used extreme "
1257 "technological and legal countermeasures to prevent rivals from allowing "
1258 "their users to embed Facebook snippets in competing services or to create "
1259 "alternative interfaces to Facebook that merge your Facebook inbox with those "
1260 "of other services that you use."
1263 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1265 "And Facebook is incredibly popular, with 2.3 billion claimed users (though "
1266 "many believe this figure to be inflated). Facebook has been used to organize "
1267 "genocidal pogroms, racist riots, anti-vaccination movements, flat Earth "
1268 "cults, and the political lives of some of the world’s ugliest, most brutal "
1269 "autocrats. There are some really alarming things going on in the world, and "
1270 "Facebook is implicated in many of them, so it’s easy to conclude that these "
1271 "bad things are the result of Facebook’s mind-control system, which it rents "
1272 "out to anyone with a few bucks to spend."
1275 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1277 "To understand what role Facebook plays in the formulation and mobilization "
1278 "of antisocial movements, we need to understand the dual nature of Facebook."
1281 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1283 "Because it has a lot of users and a lot of data about those users, Facebook "
1284 "is a very efficient tool for locating people with hard-to-find traits, the "
1285 "kinds of traits that are widely diffused in the population such that "
1286 "advertisers have historically struggled to find a cost-effective way to "
1287 "reach them. Think back to refrigerators: Most of us only replace our major "
1288 "appliances a few times in our entire lives. If you’re a refrigerator "
1289 "manufacturer or retailer, you have these brief windows in the life of a "
1290 "consumer during which they are pondering a purchase, and you have to somehow "
1291 "reach them. Anyone who’s ever registered a title change after buying a house "
1292 "can attest that appliance manufacturers are incredibly desperate to reach "
1293 "anyone who has even the slenderest chance of being in the market for a new "
1297 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1299 "Facebook makes finding people shopping for refrigerators a <emphasis>lot</"
1300 "emphasis> easier. It can target ads to people who’ve registered a new home "
1301 "purchase, to people who’ve searched for refrigerator buying advice, to "
1302 "people who have complained about their fridge dying, or any combination "
1303 "thereof. It can even target people who’ve recently bought <emphasis>other</"
1304 "emphasis> kitchen appliances on the theory that someone who’s just replaced "
1305 "their stove and dishwasher might be in a fridge-buying kind of mood. The "
1306 "vast majority of people who are reached by these ads will not be in the "
1307 "market for a new fridge, but — crucially — the percentage of people who "
1308 "<emphasis>are</emphasis> looking for fridges that these ads reach is "
1309 "<emphasis>much</emphasis> larger than it is than for any group that might be "
1310 "subjected to traditional, offline targeted refrigerator marketing."
1313 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1315 "Facebook also makes it a lot easier to find people who have the same rare "
1316 "disease as you, which might have been impossible in earlier eras — the "
1317 "closest fellow sufferer might otherwise be hundreds of miles away. It makes "
1318 "it easier to find people who went to the same high school as you even though "
1319 "decades have passed and your former classmates have all been scattered to "
1320 "the four corners of the Earth."
1323 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1325 "Facebook also makes it much easier to find people who hold the same rare "
1326 "political beliefs as you. If you’ve always harbored a secret affinity for "
1327 "socialism but never dared utter this aloud lest you be demonized by your "
1328 "neighbors, Facebook can help you discover other people who feel the same way "
1329 "(and it might just demonstrate to you that your affinity is more widespread "
1330 "than you ever suspected). It can make it easier to find people who share "
1331 "your sexual identity. And again, it can help you to understand that what "
1332 "you thought was a shameful secret that affected only you was really a widely "
1333 "shared trait, giving you both comfort and the courage to come out to the "
1334 "people in your life."
1337 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1339 "All of this presents a dilemma for Facebook: Targeting makes the company’s "
1340 "ads more effective than traditional ads, but it also lets advertisers see "
1341 "just how effective their ads are. While advertisers are pleased to learn "
1342 "that Facebook ads are more effective than ads on systems with less "
1343 "sophisticated targeting, advertisers can also see that in nearly every case, "
1344 "the people who see their ads ignore them. Or, at best, the ads work on a "
1345 "subconscious level, creating nebulous unmeasurables like <quote>brand "
1346 "recognition.</quote> This means that the price per ad is very low in nearly "
1350 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1352 "To make things worse, many Facebook groups spark precious little discussion. "
1353 "Your little-league soccer team, the people with the same rare disease as "
1354 "you, and the people you share a political affinity with may exchange the odd "
1355 "flurry of messages at critical junctures, but on a daily basis, there’s not "
1356 "much to say to your old high school chums or other hockey-card collectors."
1359 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1361 "With nothing but <quote>organic</quote> discussion, Facebook would not "
1362 "generate enough traffic to sell enough ads to make the money it needs to "
1363 "continually expand by buying up its competitors while returning handsome "
1364 "sums to its investors."
1367 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1369 "So Facebook has to gin up traffic by sidetracking its own forums: Every time "
1370 "Facebook’s algorithm injects controversial materials — inflammatory "
1371 "political articles, conspiracy theories, outrage stories — into a group, it "
1372 "can hijack that group’s nominal purpose with its desultory discussions and "
1373 "supercharge those discussions by turning them into bitter, unproductive "
1374 "arguments that drag on and on. Facebook is optimized for engagement, not "
1375 "happiness, and it turns out that automated systems are pretty good at "
1376 "figuring out things that people will get angry about."
1379 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1381 "Facebook <emphasis>can</emphasis> modify our behavior but only in a couple "
1382 "of trivial ways. First, it can lock in all your friends and family members "
1383 "so that you check and check and check with Facebook to find out what they "
1384 "are up to; and second, it can make you angry and anxious. It can force you "
1385 "to choose between being interrupted constantly by updates — a process that "
1386 "breaks your concentration and makes it hard to be introspective — and "
1387 "staying in touch with your friends. This is a very limited form of mind "
1388 "control, and it can only really make us miserable, angry, and anxious."
1391 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1393 "This is why Facebook’s targeting systems — both the ones it shows to "
1394 "advertisers and the ones that let users find people who share their "
1395 "interests — are so next-gen and smooth and easy to use as well as why its "
1396 "message boards have a toolset that seems like it hasn’t changed since the "
1397 "mid-2000s. If Facebook delivered an equally flexible, sophisticated message-"
1398 "reading system to its users, those users could defend themselves against "
1399 "being nonconsensually eyeball-fucked with Donald Trump headlines."
1402 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1404 "The more time you spend on Facebook, the more ads it gets to show you. The "
1405 "solution to Facebook’s ads only working one in a thousand times is for the "
1406 "company to try to increase how much time you spend on Facebook by a factor "
1407 "of a thousand. Rather than thinking of Facebook as a company that has "
1408 "figured out how to show you exactly the right ad in exactly the right way to "
1409 "get you to do what its advertisers want, think of it as a company that has "
1410 "figured out how to make you slog through an endless torrent of arguments "
1411 "even though they make you miserable, spending so much time on the site that "
1412 "it eventually shows you at least one ad that you respond to."
1415 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
1416 msgid "Monopoly and the right to the future tense"
1417 msgstr "Monopol i prawo do czasu przyszłego"
1419 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1421 "Zuboff and her cohort are particularly alarmed at the extent to which "
1422 "surveillance allows corporations to influence our decisions, taking away "
1423 "something she poetically calls <quote>the right to the future tense</quote> "
1424 "— that is, the right to decide for yourself what you will do in the future."
1427 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1429 "It’s true that advertising can tip the scales one way or another: When "
1430 "you’re thinking of buying a fridge, a timely fridge ad might end the search "
1431 "on the spot. But Zuboff puts enormous and undue weight on the persuasive "
1432 "power of surveillance-based influence techniques. Most of these don’t work "
1433 "very well, and the ones that do won’t work for very long. The makers of "
1434 "these influence tools are confident they will someday refine them into "
1435 "systems of total control, but they are hardly unbiased observers, and the "
1436 "risks from their dreams coming true are very speculative."
1439 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1441 "By contrast, Zuboff is rather sanguine about 40 years of lax antitrust "
1442 "practice that has allowed a handful of companies to dominate the internet, "
1443 "ushering in an information age with, <ulink url=\"https://twitter.com/"
1444 "tveastman/status/1069674780826071040\">as one person on Twitter noted</"
1445 "ulink>, five giant websites each filled with screenshots of the other four."
1448 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1450 "However, if we are to be alarmed that we might lose the right to choose for "
1451 "ourselves what our future will hold, then monopoly’s nonspeculative, "
1452 "concrete, here-and-now harms should be front and center in our debate over "
1456 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1458 "Start with <quote>digital rights management.</quote> In 1998, Bill Clinton "
1459 "signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. It’s a complex "
1460 "piece of legislation with many controversial clauses but none more so than "
1461 "Section 1201, the <quote>anti-circumvention</quote> rule."
1464 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1466 "This is a blanket ban on tampering with systems that restrict access to "
1467 "copyrighted works. The ban is so thoroughgoing that it prohibits removing a "
1468 "copyright lock even when no copyright infringement takes place. This is by "
1469 "design: The activities that the DMCA’s Section 1201 sets out to ban are not "
1470 "copyright infringements; rather, they are legal activities that frustrate "
1471 "manufacturers’ commercial plans."
1474 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1476 "For example, Section 1201’s first major application was on DVD players as a "
1477 "means of enforcing the region coding built into those devices. DVD-CCA, the "
1478 "body that standardized DVDs and DVD players, divided the world into six "
1479 "regions and specified that DVD players must check each disc to determine "
1480 "which regions it was authorized to be played in. DVD players would have "
1481 "their own corresponding region (a DVD player bought in the U.S. would be "
1482 "region 1 while one bought in India would be region 5). If the player and the "
1483 "disc’s region matched, the player would play the disc; otherwise, it would "
1487 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1489 "However, watching a lawfully produced disc in a country other than the one "
1490 "where you purchased it is not copyright infringement — it’s the opposite. "
1491 "Copyright law imposes this duty on customers for a movie: You must go into a "
1492 "store, find a licensed disc, and pay the asking price. Do that — and "
1493 "<emphasis>nothing else</emphasis> — and you and copyright are square with "
1497 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1499 "The fact that a movie studio wants to charge Indians less than Americans or "
1500 "release in Australia later than it releases in the U.K. has no bearing on "
1501 "copyright law. Once you lawfully acquire a DVD, it is no copyright "
1502 "infringement to watch it no matter where you happen to be."
1505 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1507 "So DVD and DVD player manufacturers would not be able to use accusations of "
1508 "abetting copyright infringement to punish manufacturers who made "
1509 "noncompliant players that would play discs from any region or repair shops "
1510 "that modified players to let you watch out-of-region discs or software "
1511 "programmers who created programs to let you do this."
1514 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1516 "That’s where Section 1201 of the DMCA comes in: By banning tampering with an "
1517 "<quote>access control,</quote> the rule gave manufacturers and rights "
1518 "holders standing to sue competitors who released superior products with "
1519 "lawful features that the market demanded (in this case, region-free players)."
1522 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1524 "This is an odious scam against consumers, but as time went by, Section 1201 "
1525 "grew to encompass a rapidly expanding constellation of devices and services "
1526 "as canny manufacturers have realized certain things:"
1529 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
1531 "Any device with software in it contains a <quote>copyrighted work</quote> — "
1532 "i.e., the software."
1535 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
1537 "A device can be designed so that reconfiguring the software requires "
1538 "bypassing an <quote>access control for copyrighted works,</quote> which is a "
1539 "potential felony under Section 1201."
1542 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
1544 "Thus, companies can control their customers’ behavior after they take home "
1545 "their purchases by designing products so that all unpermitted uses require "
1546 "modifications that fall afoul of Section 1201."
1549 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1551 "Section 1201 then becomes a means for manufacturers of all descriptions to "
1552 "force their customers to arrange their affairs to benefit the manufacturers’ "
1553 "shareholders instead of themselves."
1556 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1558 "This manifests in many ways: from a new generation of inkjet printers that "
1559 "use countermeasures to prevent third-party ink that cannot be bypassed "
1560 "without legal risks to similar systems in tractors that prevent third-party "
1561 "technicians from swapping in the manufacturer’s own parts that are not "
1562 "recognized by the tractor’s control system until it is supplied with a "
1563 "manufacturer’s unlock code."
1566 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1568 "Closer to home, Apple’s iPhones use these measures to prevent both third-"
1569 "party service and third-party software installation. This allows Apple to "
1570 "decide when an iPhone is beyond repair and must be shredded and landfilled "
1571 "as opposed to the iPhone’s purchaser. (Apple is notorious for its "
1572 "environmentally catastrophic policy of destroying old electronics rather "
1573 "than permitting them to be cannibalized for parts.) This is a very useful "
1574 "power to wield, especially in light of CEO Tim Cook’s January 2019 warning "
1575 "to investors that the company’s profits are endangered by customers choosing "
1576 "to hold onto their phones for longer rather than replacing them."
1579 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1581 "Apple’s use of copyright locks also allows it to establish a monopoly over "
1582 "how its customers acquire software for their mobile devices. The App Store’s "
1583 "commercial terms guarantee Apple a share of all revenues generated by the "
1584 "apps sold there, meaning that Apple gets paid when you buy an app from its "
1585 "store and then continues to get paid every time you buy something using that "
1586 "app. This comes out of the bottom line of software developers, who must "
1587 "either charge more or accept lower profits for their products."
1590 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1592 "Crucially, Apple’s use of copyright locks gives it the power to make "
1593 "editorial decisions about which apps you may and may not install on your own "
1594 "device. Apple has used this power to <ulink url=\"https://www.telegraph.co."
1595 "uk/technology/apple/5982243/Apple-bans-dictionary-from-App-Store-over-swear-"
1596 "words.html\">reject dictionaries</ulink> for containing obscene words; to "
1597 "<ulink url=\"https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just-banned-the-"
1598 "app-that-tracks-us-drone-strikes-again\">limit political speech</ulink>, "
1599 "especially from apps that make sensitive political commentary such as an app "
1600 "that notifies you every time a U.S. drone kills someone somewhere in the "
1601 "world; and to <ulink url=\"https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-05-19-"
1602 "palestinian-indie-game-must-not-be-called-a-game-apple-says\">object to a "
1603 "game</ulink> that commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict."
1606 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1608 "Apple often justifies monopoly power over software installation in the name "
1609 "of security, arguing that its vetting of apps for its store means that it "
1610 "can guard its users against apps that contain surveillance code. But this "
1611 "cuts both ways. In China, the government <ulink url=\"https://www.ft.com/"
1612 "content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc\">ordered Apple to prohibit the "
1613 "sale of privacy tools</ulink> like VPNs with the exception of VPNs that had "
1614 "deliberately introduced flaws designed to let the Chinese state eavesdrop on "
1615 "users. Because Apple uses technological countermeasures — with legal "
1616 "backstops — to block customers from installing unauthorized apps, Chinese "
1617 "iPhone owners cannot readily (or legally) acquire VPNs that would protect "
1618 "them from Chinese state snooping."
1621 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1623 "Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <quote>rogue capitalism.</quote> "
1624 "Theoreticians of capitalism claim that its virtue is that it <ulink url="
1625 "\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal\">aggregates information in the "
1626 "form of consumers’ decisions</ulink>, producing efficient markets. "
1627 "Surveillance capitalism’s supposed power to rob its victims of their free "
1628 "will through computationally supercharged influence campaigns means that our "
1629 "markets no longer aggregate customers’ decisions because we customers no "
1630 "longer decide — we are given orders by surveillance capitalism’s mind-"
1634 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1636 "If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no "
1637 "longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at "
1638 "<emphasis>least</emphasis> as much as influence campaigns. An influence "
1639 "campaign might nudge you to buy a certain brand of phone; but the copyright "
1640 "locks on that phone absolutely determine where you get it serviced, which "
1641 "apps can run on it, and when you have to throw it away rather than fixing it."
1644 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
1645 msgid "Search order and the right to the future tense"
1646 msgstr "Porządek wyszukiwania i prawo do czasu przyszłego"
1648 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1650 "Markets are posed as a kind of magic: By discovering otherwise hidden "
1651 "information conveyed by the free choices of consumers, those consumers’ "
1652 "local knowledge is integrated into a self-correcting system that makes "
1653 "efficient allocations—more efficient than any computer could calculate. But "
1654 "monopolies are incompatible with that notion. When you only have one app "
1655 "store, the owner of the store — not the consumer — decides on the range of "
1656 "choices. As Boss Tweed once said, <quote>I don’t care who does the electing, "
1657 "so long as I get to do the nominating.</quote> A monopolized market is an "
1658 "election whose candidates are chosen by the monopolist."
1661 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1663 "This ballot rigging is made more pernicious by the existence of monopolies "
1664 "over search order. Google’s search market share is about 90%. When Google’s "
1665 "ranking algorithm puts a result for a popular search term in its top 10, "
1666 "that helps determine the behavior of millions of people. If Google’s answer "
1667 "to <quote>Are vaccines dangerous?</quote> is a page that rebuts anti-vax "
1668 "conspiracy theories, then a sizable portion of the public will learn that "
1669 "vaccines are safe. If, on the other hand, Google sends those people to a "
1670 "site affirming the anti-vax conspiracies, a sizable portion of those "
1671 "millions will come away convinced that vaccines are dangerous."
1674 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1676 "Google’s algorithm is often tricked into serving disinformation as a "
1677 "prominent search result. But in these cases, Google isn’t persuading people "
1678 "to change their minds; it’s just presenting something untrue as fact when "
1679 "the user has no cause to doubt it."
1682 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1684 "This is true whether the search is for <quote>Are vaccines dangerous?</"
1685 "quote> or <quote>best restaurants near me.</quote> Most users will never "
1686 "look past the first page of search results, and when the overwhelming "
1687 "majority of people all use the same search engine, the ranking algorithm "
1688 "deployed by that search engine will determine myriad outcomes (whether to "
1689 "adopt a child, whether to have cancer surgery, where to eat dinner, where to "
1690 "move, where to apply for a job) to a degree that vastly outstrips any "
1691 "behavioral outcomes dictated by algorithmic persuasion techniques."
1694 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1696 "Many of the questions we ask search engines have no empirically correct "
1697 "answers: <quote>Where should I eat dinner?</quote> is not an objective "
1698 "question. Even questions that do have correct answers (<quote>Are vaccines "
1699 "dangerous?</quote>) don’t have one empirically superior source for that "
1700 "answer. Many pages affirm the safety of vaccines, so which one goes first? "
1701 "Under conditions of competition, consumers can choose from many search "
1702 "engines and stick with the one whose algorithmic judgment suits them best, "
1703 "but under conditions of monopoly, we all get our answers from the same place."
1706 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1708 "Google’s search dominance isn’t a matter of pure merit: The company has "
1709 "leveraged many tactics that would have been prohibited under classical, pre-"
1710 "Ronald-Reagan antitrust enforcement standards to attain its dominance. After "
1711 "all, this is a company that has developed two major products: a really good "
1712 "search engine and a pretty good Hotmail clone. Every other major success "
1713 "it’s had — Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. — has come through an "
1714 "acquisition of a nascent competitor. Many of the company’s key divisions, "
1715 "such as the advertising technology of DoubleClick, violate the historical "
1716 "antitrust principle of structural separation, which forbade firms from "
1717 "owning subsidiaries that competed with their customers. Railroads, for "
1718 "example, were barred from owning freight companies that competed with the "
1719 "shippers whose freight they carried."
1722 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1724 "If we’re worried about giant companies subverting markets by stripping "
1725 "consumers of their ability to make free choices, then vigorous antitrust "
1726 "enforcement seems like an excellent remedy. If we’d denied Google the right "
1727 "to effect its many mergers, we would also have probably denied it its total "
1728 "search dominance. Without that dominance, the pet theories, biases, errors "
1729 "(and good judgment, too) of Google search engineers and product managers "
1730 "would not have such an outsized effect on consumer choice."
1733 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1735 "This goes for many other companies. Amazon, a classic surveillance "
1736 "capitalist, is obviously the dominant tool for searching Amazon — though "
1737 "many people find their way to Amazon through Google searches and Facebook "
1738 "posts — and obviously, Amazon controls Amazon search. That means that "
1739 "Amazon’s own self-serving editorial choices—like promoting its own house "
1740 "brands over rival goods from its sellers as well as its own pet theories, "
1741 "biases, and errors— determine much of what we buy on Amazon. And since "
1742 "Amazon is the dominant e-commerce retailer outside of China and since it "
1743 "attained that dominance by buying up both large rivals and nascent "
1744 "competitors in defiance of historical antitrust rules, we can blame the "
1745 "monopoly for stripping consumers of their right to the future tense and the "
1746 "ability to shape markets by making informed choices."
1749 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1751 "Not every monopolist is a surveillance capitalist, but that doesn’t mean "
1752 "they’re not able to shape consumer choices in wide-ranging ways. Zuboff "
1753 "lauds Apple for its App Store and iTunes Store, insisting that adding price "
1754 "tags to the features on its platforms has been the secret to resisting "
1755 "surveillance and thus creating markets. But Apple is the only retailer "
1756 "allowed to sell on its platforms, and it’s the second-largest mobile device "
1757 "vendor in the world. The independent software vendors that sell through "
1758 "Apple’s marketplace accuse the company of the same surveillance sins as "
1759 "Amazon and other big retailers: spying on its customers to find lucrative "
1760 "new products to launch, effectively using independent software vendors as "
1761 "free-market researchers, then forcing them out of any markets they discover."
1764 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1766 "Because of its use of copyright locks, Apple’s mobile customers are not "
1767 "legally allowed to switch to a rival retailer for its apps if they want to "
1768 "do so on an iPhone. Apple, obviously, is the only entity that gets to decide "
1769 "how it ranks the results of search queries in its stores. These decisions "
1770 "ensure that some apps are often installed (because they appear on page one) "
1771 "and others are never installed (because they appear on page one million). "
1772 "Apple’s search-ranking design decisions have a vastly more significant "
1773 "effect on consumer behaviors than influence campaigns delivered by "
1774 "surveillance capitalism’s ad-serving bots."
1777 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
1778 msgid "Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs"
1779 msgstr "Monopoliści mogą sobie pozwolić na proszki nasenne dla strażników"
1781 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1783 "Only the most extreme market ideologues think that markets can self-regulate "
1784 "without state oversight. Markets need watchdogs — regulators, lawmakers, and "
1785 "other elements of democratic control — to keep them honest. When these "
1786 "watchdogs sleep on the job, then markets cease to aggregate consumer choices "
1787 "because those choices are constrained by illegitimate and deceptive "
1788 "activities that companies are able to get away with because no one is "
1789 "holding them to account."
1792 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1794 "But this kind of regulatory capture doesn’t come cheap. In competitive "
1795 "sectors, where rivals are constantly eroding one another’s margins, "
1796 "individual firms lack the surplus capital to effectively lobby for laws and "
1797 "regulations that serve their ends."
1800 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1802 "Many of the harms of surveillance capitalism are the result of weak or "
1803 "nonexistent regulation. Those regulatory vacuums spring from the power of "
1804 "monopolists to resist stronger regulation and to tailor what regulation "
1805 "exists to permit their existing businesses."
1808 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1810 "Here’s an example: When firms over-collect and over-retain our data, they "
1811 "are at increased risk of suffering a breach — you can’t leak data you never "
1812 "collected, and once you delete all copies of that data, you can no longer "
1813 "leak it. For more than a decade, we’ve lived through an endless parade of "
1814 "ever-worsening data breaches, each one uniquely horrible in the scale of "
1815 "data breached and the sensitivity of that data."
1818 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1820 "But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for three "
1824 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1826 "<emphasis role=\"strong\">1. They are locked in the aforementioned limbic "
1827 "arms race with our capacity to shore up our attentional defense systems to "
1828 "resist their new persuasion techniques.</emphasis> They’re also locked in an "
1829 "arms race with their competitors to find new ways to target people for sales "
1830 "pitches. As soon as they discover a soft spot in our attentional defenses (a "
1831 "counterintuitive, unobvious way to target potential refrigerator buyers), "
1832 "the public begins to wise up to the tactic, and their competitors leap on "
1833 "it, hastening the day in which all potential refrigerator buyers have been "
1834 "inured to the pitch."
1837 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1839 "<emphasis role=\"strong\">2. They believe the surveillance capitalism story."
1840 "</emphasis> Data is cheap to aggregate and store, and both proponents and "
1841 "opponents of surveillance capitalism have assured managers and product "
1842 "designers that if you collect enough data, you will be able to perform "
1843 "sorcerous acts of mind control, thus supercharging your sales. Even if you "
1844 "never figure out how to profit from the data, someone else will eventually "
1845 "offer to buy it from you to give it a try. This is the hallmark of all "
1846 "economic bubbles: acquiring an asset on the assumption that someone else "
1847 "will buy it from you for more than you paid for it, often to sell to someone "
1848 "else at an even greater price."
1851 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1853 "<emphasis role=\"strong\">3. The penalties for leaking data are negligible.</"
1854 "emphasis> Most countries limit these penalties to actual damages, meaning "
1855 "that consumers who’ve had their data breached have to show actual monetary "
1856 "harms to get a reward. In 2014, Home Depot disclosed that it had lost credit-"
1857 "card data for 53 million of its customers, but it settled the matter by "
1858 "paying those customers about $0.34 each — and a third of that $0.34 wasn’t "
1859 "even paid in cash. It took the form of a credit to procure a largely "
1860 "ineffectual credit-monitoring service."
1863 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1865 "But the harms from breaches are much more extensive than these actual-"
1866 "damages rules capture. Identity thieves and fraudsters are wily and "
1867 "endlessly inventive. All the vast breaches of our century are being "
1868 "continuously recombined, the data sets merged and mined for new ways to "
1869 "victimize the people whose data was present in them. Any reasonable, "
1870 "evidence-based theory of deterrence and compensation for breaches would not "
1871 "confine damages to actual damages but rather would allow users to claim "
1872 "these future harms."
1875 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1877 "However, even the most ambitious privacy rules, such as the EU General Data "
1878 "Protection Regulation, fall far short of capturing the negative "
1879 "externalities of the platforms’ negligent over-collection and over-"
1880 "retention, and what penalties they do provide are not aggressively pursued "
1884 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1886 "This tolerance of — or indifference to — data over-collection and over-"
1887 "retention can be ascribed in part to the sheer lobbying muscle of the "
1888 "platforms. They are so profitable that they can handily afford to divert "
1889 "gigantic sums to fight any real change — that is, change that would force "
1890 "them to internalize the costs of their surveillance activities."
1893 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1895 "And then there’s state surveillance, which the surveillance capitalism story "
1896 "dismisses as a relic of another era when the big worry was being jailed for "
1897 "your dissident speech, not having your free will stripped away with machine "
1901 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1903 "But state surveillance and private surveillance are intimately related. As "
1904 "we saw when Apple was conscripted by the Chinese government as a vital "
1905 "collaborator in state surveillance, the only really affordable and tractable "
1906 "way to conduct mass surveillance on the scale practiced by modern states — "
1907 "both <quote>free</quote> and autocratic states — is to suborn commercial "
1911 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1913 "Whether it’s Google being used as a location tracking tool by local law "
1914 "enforcement across the U.S. or the use of social media tracking by the "
1915 "Department of Homeland Security to build dossiers on participants in "
1916 "protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s family separation "
1917 "practices, any hard limits on surveillance capitalism would hamstring the "
1918 "state’s own surveillance capability. Without Palantir, Amazon, Google, and "
1919 "other major tech contractors, U.S. cops would not be able to spy on Black "
1920 "people, ICE would not be able to manage the caging of children at the U.S. "
1921 "border, and state welfare systems would not be able to purge their rolls by "
1922 "dressing up cruelty as empiricism and claiming that poor and vulnerable "
1923 "people are ineligible for assistance. At least some of the states’ "
1924 "unwillingness to take meaningful action to curb surveillance should be "
1925 "attributed to this symbiotic relationship. There is no mass state "
1926 "surveillance without mass commercial surveillance."
1929 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1931 "Monopolism is key to the project of mass state surveillance. It’s true that "
1932 "smaller tech firms are apt to be less well-defended than Big Tech, whose "
1933 "security experts are drawn from the tops of their field and who are given "
1934 "enormous resources to secure and monitor their systems against intruders. "
1935 "But smaller firms also have less to protect: fewer users whose data is more "
1936 "fragmented across more systems and have to be suborned one at a time by "
1940 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1942 "A concentrated tech sector that works with authorities is a much more "
1943 "powerful ally in the project of mass state surveillance than a fragmented "
1944 "one composed of smaller actors. The U.S. tech sector is small enough that "
1945 "all of its top executives fit around a single boardroom table in Trump Tower "
1946 "in 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Most of its biggest players bid "
1947 "to win JEDI, the Pentagon’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense "
1948 "Infrastructure cloud contract. Like other highly concentrated industries, "
1949 "Big Tech rotates its key employees in and out of government service, sending "
1950 "them to serve in the Department of Defense and the White House, then hiring "
1951 "ex-Pentagon and ex-DOD top staffers and officers to work in their own "
1952 "government relations departments."
1955 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1957 "They can even make a good case for doing this: After all, when there are "
1958 "only four or five big companies in an industry, everyone qualified to "
1959 "regulate those companies has served as an executive in at least a couple of "
1960 "them — because, likewise, when there are only five companies in an industry, "
1961 "everyone qualified for a senior role at any of them is by definition working "
1962 "at one of the other ones."
1965 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
1967 "While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly abet "
1971 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1973 "Industries that are competitive are fragmented — composed of companies that "
1974 "are at each other’s throats all the time and eroding one another’s margins "
1975 "in bids to steal their best customers. This leaves them with much more "
1976 "limited capital to use to lobby for favorable rules and a much harder job of "
1977 "getting everyone to agree to pool their resources to benefit the industry as "
1981 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1983 "Surveillance combined with machine learning is supposed to be an existential "
1984 "crisis, a species-defining moment at which our free will is just a few more "
1985 "advances in the field from being stripped away. I am skeptical of this "
1986 "claim, but I <emphasis>do</emphasis> think that tech poses an existential "
1987 "threat to our society and possibly our species."
1990 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1991 msgid "But that threat grows out of monopoly."
1994 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
1996 "One of the consequences of tech’s regulatory capture is that it can shift "
1997 "liability for poor security decisions onto its customers and the wider "
1998 "society. It is absolutely normal in tech for companies to obfuscate the "
1999 "workings of their products, to make them deliberately hard to understand, "
2000 "and to threaten security researchers who seek to independently audit those "
2004 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2006 "IT is the only field in which this is practiced: No one builds a bridge or a "
2007 "hospital and keeps the composition of the steel or the equations used to "
2008 "calculate load stresses a secret. It is a frankly bizarre practice that "
2009 "leads, time and again, to grotesque security defects on farcical scales, "
2010 "with whole classes of devices being revealed as vulnerable long after they "
2011 "are deployed in the field and put into sensitive places."
2014 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2016 "The monopoly power that keeps any meaningful consequences for breaches at "
2017 "bay means that tech companies continue to build terrible products that are "
2018 "insecure by design and that end up integrated into our lives, in possession "
2019 "of our data, and connected to our physical world. For years, Boeing has "
2020 "struggled with the aftermath of a series of bad technology decisions that "
2021 "made its 737 fleet a global pariah, a rare instance in which bad tech "
2022 "decisions have been seriously punished in the market."
2025 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2027 "These bad security decisions are compounded yet again by the use of "
2028 "copyright locks to enforce business-model decisions against consumers. "
2029 "Recall that these locks have become the go-to means for shaping consumer "
2030 "behavior, making it technically impossible to use third-party ink, insulin, "
2031 "apps, or service depots in connection with your lawfully acquired property."
2034 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2036 "Recall also that these copyright locks are backstopped by legislation (such "
2037 "as Section 1201 of the DMCA or Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive) "
2038 "that ban tampering with (<quote>circumventing</quote>) them, and these "
2039 "statutes have been used to threaten security researchers who make "
2040 "disclosures about vulnerabilities without permission from manufacturers."
2043 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2045 "This amounts to a manufacturer’s veto over safety warnings and criticism. "
2046 "While this is far from the legislative intent of the DMCA and its sister "
2047 "statutes around the world, Congress has not intervened to clarify the "
2048 "statute nor will it because to do so would run counter to the interests of "
2049 "powerful, large firms whose lobbying muscle is unstoppable."
2052 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2054 "Copyright locks are a double whammy: They create bad security decisions that "
2055 "can’t be freely investigated or discussed. If markets are supposed to be "
2056 "machines for aggregating information (and if surveillance capitalism’s "
2057 "notional mind-control rays are what make it a <quote>rogue capitalism</"
2058 "quote> because it denies consumers the power to make decisions), then a "
2059 "program of legally enforced ignorance of the risks of products makes "
2060 "monopolism even more of a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> than surveillance "
2061 "capitalism’s influence campaigns."
2064 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2066 "And unlike mind-control rays, enforced silence over security is an "
2067 "immediate, documented problem, and it <emphasis>does</emphasis> constitute "
2068 "an existential threat to our civilization and possibly our species. The "
2069 "proliferation of insecure devices — especially devices that spy on us and "
2070 "especially when those devices also can manipulate the physical world by, "
2071 "say, steering your car or flipping a breaker at a power station — is a kind "
2072 "of technology debt."
2075 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2077 "In software design, <quote>technology debt</quote> refers to old, baked-in "
2078 "decisions that turn out to be bad ones in hindsight. Perhaps a long-ago "
2079 "developer decided to incorporate a networking protocol made by a vendor that "
2080 "has since stopped supporting it. But everything in the product still relies "
2081 "on that superannuated protocol, and so, with each revision, the product team "
2082 "has to work around this obsolete core, adding compatibility layers, "
2083 "surrounding it with security checks that try to shore up its defenses, and "
2084 "so on. These Band-Aid measures compound the debt because every subsequent "
2085 "revision has to make allowances for <emphasis>them</emphasis>, too, like "
2086 "interest mounting on a predatory subprime loan. And like a subprime loan, "
2087 "the interest mounts faster than you can hope to pay it off: The product team "
2088 "has to put so much energy into maintaining this complex, brittle system that "
2089 "they don’t have any time left over to refactor the product from the ground "
2090 "up and <quote>pay off the debt</quote> once and for all."
2093 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2095 "Typically, technology debt results in a technological bankruptcy: The "
2096 "product gets so brittle and unsustainable that it fails catastrophically. "
2097 "Think of the antiquated COBOL-based banking and accounting systems that fell "
2098 "over at the start of the pandemic emergency when confronted with surges of "
2099 "unemployment claims. Sometimes that ends the product; sometimes it takes "
2100 "the company down with it. Being caught in the default of a technology debt "
2101 "is scary and traumatic, just like losing your house due to bankruptcy is "
2102 "scary and traumatic."
2105 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2107 "But the technology debt created by copyright locks isn’t individual debt; "
2108 "it’s systemic. Everyone in the world is exposed to this over-leverage, as "
2109 "was the case with the 2008 financial crisis. When that debt comes due — when "
2110 "we face a cascade of security breaches that threaten global shipping and "
2111 "logistics, the food supply, pharmaceutical production pipelines, emergency "
2112 "communications, and other critical systems that are accumulating technology "
2113 "debt in part due to the presence of deliberately insecure and deliberately "
2114 "unauditable copyright locks — it will indeed pose an existential risk."
2117 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
2118 msgid "Privacy and monopoly"
2119 msgstr "Prywatność a monopol"
2121 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2123 "Many tech companies are gripped by an orthodoxy that holds that if they just "
2124 "gather enough data on enough of our activities, everything else is possible "
2125 "— the mind control and endless profits. This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis: "
2126 "If data gives a tech company even a tiny improvement in behavior prediction "
2127 "and modification, the company declares that it has taken the first step "
2128 "toward global domination with no end in sight. If a company <emphasis>fails</"
2129 "emphasis> to attain any improvements from gathering and analyzing data, it "
2130 "declares success to be just around the corner, attainable once more data is "
2134 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2136 "Surveillance tech is far from the first industry to embrace a nonsensical, "
2137 "self-serving belief that harms the rest of the world, and it is not the "
2138 "first industry to profit handsomely from such a delusion. Long before hedge-"
2139 "fund managers were claiming (falsely) that they could beat the S&P 500, "
2140 "there were plenty of other <quote>respectable</quote> industries that have "
2141 "been revealed as quacks in hindsight. From the makers of radium "
2142 "suppositories (a real thing!) to the cruel sociopaths who claimed they "
2143 "could <quote>cure</quote> gay people, history is littered with the formerly "
2144 "respectable titans of discredited industries."
2147 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2149 "This is not to say that there’s nothing wrong with Big Tech and its "
2150 "ideological addiction to data. While surveillance’s benefits are mostly "
2151 "overstated, its harms are, if anything, <emphasis>understated</emphasis>."
2154 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2156 "There’s real irony here. The belief in surveillance capitalism as a "
2157 "<quote>rogue capitalism</quote> is driven by the belief that markets "
2158 "wouldn’t tolerate firms that are gripped by false beliefs. An oil company "
2159 "that has false beliefs about where the oil is will eventually go broke "
2160 "digging dry wells after all."
2163 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2165 "But monopolists get to do terrible things for a long time before they pay "
2166 "the price. Think of how concentration in the finance sector allowed the "
2167 "subprime crisis to fester as bond-rating agencies, regulators, investors, "
2168 "and critics all fell under the sway of a false belief that complex "
2169 "mathematics could construct <quote>fully hedged</quote> debt instruments "
2170 "that could not possibly default. A small bank that engaged in this kind of "
2171 "malfeasance would simply go broke rather than outrunning the inevitable "
2172 "crisis, perhaps growing so big that it averted it altogether. But large "
2173 "banks were able to continue to attract investors, and when they finally "
2174 "<emphasis>did</emphasis> come a-cropper, the world’s governments bailed them "
2175 "out. The worst offenders of the subprime crisis are bigger than they were in "
2176 "2008, bringing home more profits and paying their execs even larger sums."
2179 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2181 "Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but "
2182 "because it is <emphasis>big</emphasis>. The reason every web publisher "
2183 "embeds a Facebook <quote>Like</quote> button is that Facebook dominates the "
2184 "internet’s social media referrals — and every one of those <quote>Like</"
2185 "quote> buttons spies on everyone who lands on a page that contains them (see "
2186 "also: Google Analytics embeds, Twitter buttons, etc.)."
2189 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2191 "The reason the world’s governments have been slow to create meaningful "
2192 "penalties for privacy breaches is that Big Tech’s concentration produces "
2193 "huge profits that can be used to lobby against those penalties — and Big "
2194 "Tech’s concentration means that the companies involved are able to arrive at "
2195 "a unified negotiating position that supercharges the lobbying."
2198 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2200 "The reason that the smartest engineers in the world want to work for Big "
2201 "Tech is that Big Tech commands the lion’s share of tech industry jobs."
2204 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2206 "The reason people who are aghast at Facebook’s and Google’s and Amazon’s "
2207 "data-handling practices continue to use these services is that all their "
2208 "friends are on Facebook; Google dominates search; and Amazon has put all the "
2209 "local merchants out of business."
2212 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2214 "Competitive markets would weaken the companies’ lobbying muscle by reducing "
2215 "their profits and pitting them against each other in regulatory forums. It "
2216 "would give customers other places to go to get their online services. It "
2217 "would make the companies small enough to regulate and pave the way to "
2218 "meaningful penalties for breaches. It would let engineers with ideas that "
2219 "challenged the surveillance orthodoxy raise capital to compete with the "
2220 "incumbents. It would give web publishers multiple ways to reach audiences "
2221 "and make the case against Facebook and Google and Twitter embeds."
2224 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2226 "In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies "
2227 "certainly abet surveillance."
2230 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
2231 msgid "Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism"
2232 msgstr "Ronald Reagan, pionier monopolizmu technologicznego"
2234 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2236 "Technology exceptionalism is a sin, whether it’s practiced by technology’s "
2237 "blind proponents or by its critics. Both of these camps are prone to "
2238 "explaining away monopolistic concentration by citing some special "
2239 "characteristic of the tech industry, like network effects or first-mover "
2240 "advantage. The only real difference between these two groups is that the "
2241 "tech apologists say monopoly is inevitable so we should just let tech get "
2242 "away with its abuses while competition regulators in the U.S. and the EU say "
2243 "monopoly is inevitable so we should punish tech for its abuses but not try "
2244 "to break up the monopolies."
2247 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2249 "To understand how tech became so monopolistic, it’s useful to look at the "
2250 "dawn of the consumer tech industry: 1979, the year the Apple II Plus "
2251 "launched and became the first successful home computer. That also happens to "
2252 "be the year that Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail for the 1980 "
2253 "presidential race — a race he won, leading to a radical shift in the way "
2254 "that antitrust concerns are handled in America. Reagan’s cohort of "
2255 "politicians — including Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Brian Mulroney in "
2256 "Canada, Helmut Kohl in Germany, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile — went on to "
2257 "enact similar reforms that eventually spread around the world."
2260 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2262 "Antitrust’s story began nearly a century before all that with laws like the "
2263 "Sherman Act, which took aim at monopolists on the grounds that monopolies "
2264 "were bad in and of themselves — squeezing out competitors, creating "
2265 "<quote>diseconomies of scale</quote> (when a company is so big that its "
2266 "constituent parts go awry and it is seemingly helpless to address the "
2267 "problems), and capturing their regulators to such a degree that they can get "
2268 "away with a host of evils."
2271 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2273 "Then came a fabulist named Robert Bork, a former solicitor general who "
2274 "Reagan appointed to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit "
2275 "and who had created an alternate legislative history of the Sherman Act and "
2276 "its successors out of whole cloth. Bork insisted that these statutes were "
2277 "never targeted at monopolies (despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, "
2278 "including the transcribed speeches of the acts’ authors) but, rather, that "
2279 "they were intended to prevent <quote>consumer harm</quote> — in the form of "
2283 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2285 "Bork was a crank, but he was a crank with a theory that rich people really "
2286 "liked. Monopolies are a great way to make rich people richer by allowing "
2287 "them to receive <quote>monopoly rents</quote> (that is, bigger profits) and "
2288 "capture regulators, leading to a weaker, more favorable regulatory "
2289 "environment with fewer protections for customers, suppliers, the "
2290 "environment, and workers."
2293 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2295 "Bork’s theories were especially palatable to the same power brokers who "
2296 "backed Reagan, and Reagan’s Department of Justice and other agencies began "
2297 "to incorporate Bork’s antitrust doctrine into their enforcement decisions "
2298 "(Reagan even put Bork up for a Supreme Court seat, but Bork flunked the "
2299 "Senate confirmation hearing so badly that, 40 years later, D.C. insiders use "
2300 "the term <quote>borked</quote> to refer to any catastrophically bad "
2301 "political performance)."
2304 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2306 "Little by little, Bork’s theories entered the mainstream, and their backers "
2307 "began to infiltrate the legal education field, even putting on junkets where "
2308 "members of the judiciary were treated to lavish meals, fun outdoor "
2309 "activities, and seminars where they were indoctrinated into the consumer "
2310 "harm theory of antitrust. The more Bork’s theories took hold, the more money "
2311 "the monopolists were making — and the more surplus capital they had at their "
2312 "disposal to lobby for even more Borkian antitrust influence campaigns."
2315 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2317 "The history of Bork’s antitrust theories is a really good example of the "
2318 "kind of covertly engineered shifts in public opinion that Zuboff warns us "
2319 "against, where fringe ideas become mainstream orthodoxy. But Bork didn’t "
2320 "change the world overnight. He played a very long game, for over a "
2321 "generation, and he had a tailwind because the same forces that backed "
2322 "oligarchic antitrust theories also backed many other oligarchic shifts in "
2323 "public opinion. For example, the idea that taxation is theft, that wealth is "
2324 "a sign of virtue, and so on — all of these theories meshed to form a "
2325 "coherent ideology that elevated inequality to a virtue."
2328 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2330 "Today, many fear that machine learning allows surveillance capitalism to "
2331 "sell <quote>Bork-as-a-Service,</quote> at internet speeds, so that you can "
2332 "contract a machine-learning company to engineer <emphasis>rapid</emphasis> "
2333 "shifts in public sentiment without needing the capital to sustain a "
2334 "multipronged, multigenerational project working at the local, state, "
2335 "national, and global levels in business, law, and philosophy. I do not "
2336 "believe that such a project is plausible, though I agree that this is "
2337 "basically what the platforms claim to be selling. They’re just lying about "
2338 "it. Big Tech lies all the time, <emphasis>including</emphasis> in their "
2342 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2344 "The idea that tech forms <quote>natural monopolies</quote> (monopolies that "
2345 "are the inevitable result of the realities of an industry, such as the "
2346 "monopolies that accrue the first company to run long-haul phone lines or "
2347 "rail lines) is belied by tech’s own history: In the absence of anti-"
2348 "competitive tactics, Google was able to unseat AltaVista and Yahoo; Facebook "
2349 "was able to head off Myspace. There are some advantages to gathering "
2350 "mountains of data, but those mountains of data also have disadvantages: "
2351 "liability (from leaking), diminishing returns (from old data), and "
2352 "institutional inertia (big companies, like science, progress one funeral at "
2356 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2358 "Indeed, the birth of the web saw a mass-extinction event for the existing "
2359 "giant, wildly profitable proprietary technologies that had capital, network "
2360 "effects, and walls and moats surrounding their businesses. The web showed "
2361 "that when a new industry is built around a protocol, rather than a product, "
2362 "the combined might of everyone who uses the protocol to reach their "
2363 "customers or users or communities outweighs even the most massive products. "
2364 "CompuServe, AOL, MSN, and a host of other proprietary walled gardens learned "
2365 "this lesson the hard way: Each believed it could stay separate from the web, "
2366 "offering <quote>curation</quote> and a guarantee of consistency and quality "
2367 "instead of the chaos of an open system. Each was wrong and ended up being "
2368 "absorbed into the public web."
2371 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2373 "Yes, tech is heavily monopolized and is now closely associated with industry "
2374 "concentration, but this has more to do with a matter of timing than its "
2375 "intrinsically monopolistic tendencies. Tech was born at the moment that "
2376 "antitrust enforcement was being dismantled, and tech fell into exactly the "
2377 "same pathologies that antitrust was supposed to guard against. To a first "
2378 "approximation, it is reasonable to assume that tech’s monopolies are the "
2379 "result of a lack of anti-monopoly action and not the much-touted unique "
2380 "characteristics of tech, such as network effects, first-mover advantage, and "
2384 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2386 "In support of this thesis, I offer the concentration that every "
2387 "<emphasis>other</emphasis> industry has undergone over the same period. From "
2388 "professional wrestling to consumer packaged goods to commercial property "
2389 "leasing to banking to sea freight to oil to record labels to newspaper "
2390 "ownership to theme parks, <emphasis>every</emphasis> industry has undergone "
2391 "a massive shift toward concentration. There’s no obvious network effects or "
2392 "first-mover advantage at play in these industries. However, in every case, "
2393 "these industries attained their concentrated status through tactics that "
2394 "were prohibited before Bork’s triumph: merging with major competitors, "
2395 "buying out innovative new market entrants, horizontal and vertical "
2396 "integration, and a suite of anti-competitive tactics that were once illegal "
2397 "but are not any longer."
2400 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2402 "Again: When you change the laws intended to prevent monopolies and then "
2403 "monopolies form in exactly the way the law was supposed to prevent, it is "
2404 "reasonable to suppose that these facts are related. Tech’s concentration "
2405 "can be readily explained without recourse to radical theories of network "
2406 "effects — but only if you’re willing to indict unregulated markets as "
2407 "tending toward monopoly. Just as a lifelong smoker can give you a hundred "
2408 "reasons why their smoking didn’t cause their cancer (<quote>It was the "
2409 "environmental toxins</quote>), true believers in unregulated markets have a "
2410 "whole suite of unconvincing explanations for monopoly in tech that leave "
2411 "capitalism intact."
2414 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
2415 msgid "Steering with the windshield wipers"
2416 msgstr "Sterowanie za pomocą wycieraczek przedniej szyby"
2418 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2420 "It’s been 40 years since Bork’s project to rehabilitate monopolies achieved "
2421 "liftoff, and that is a generation and a half, which is plenty of time to "
2422 "take a common idea and make it seem outlandish and vice versa. Before the "
2423 "1940s, affluent Americans dressed their baby boys in pink while baby girls "
2424 "wore blue (a <quote>delicate and dainty</quote> color). While gendered "
2425 "colors are obviously totally arbitrary, many still greet this news with "
2426 "amazement and find it hard to imagine a time when pink connoted masculinity."
2429 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2431 "After 40 years of studiously ignoring antitrust analysis and enforcement, "
2432 "it’s not surprising that we’ve all but forgotten that antitrust exists, that "
2433 "in living memory, growth through mergers and acquisitions were largely "
2434 "prohibited under law, that market-cornering strategies like vertical "
2435 "integration could land a company in court."
2438 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2440 "Antitrust is a market society’s steering wheel, the control of first resort "
2441 "to keep would-be masters of the universe in their lanes. But Bork and his "
2442 "cohort ripped out our steering wheel 40 years ago. The car is still "
2443 "barreling along, and so we’re yanking as hard as we can on all the "
2444 "<emphasis>other</emphasis> controls in the car as well as desperately "
2445 "flapping the doors and rolling the windows up and down in the hopes that one "
2446 "of these other controls can be repurposed to let us choose where we’re "
2447 "heading before we careen off a cliff."
2450 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2452 "It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in a "
2453 "<quote>generation ship,</quote> plying its way across the stars, a ship once "
2454 "piloted by their ancestors; and now, after a great cataclysm, the ship’s "
2455 "crew have forgotten that they’re in a ship at all and no longer remember "
2456 "where the control room is. Adrift, the ship is racing toward its extinction, "
2457 "and unless we can seize the controls and execute emergency course "
2458 "correction, we’re all headed for a fiery death in the heart of a sun."
2461 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
2462 msgid "Surveillance still matters"
2463 msgstr "Systemy nadzoru mają ciągle znaczenie"
2465 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2467 "None of this is to minimize the problems with surveillance. Surveillance "
2468 "matters, and Big Tech’s use of surveillance <emphasis>is</emphasis> an "
2469 "existential risk to our species, but that’s not because surveillance and "
2470 "machine learning rob us of our free will."
2473 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2475 "Surveillance has become <emphasis>much</emphasis> more efficient thanks to "
2476 "Big Tech. In 1989, the Stasi — the East German secret police — had the whole "
2477 "country under surveillance, a massive undertaking that recruited one out of "
2478 "every 60 people to serve as an informant or intelligence operative."
2481 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2483 "Today, we know that the NSA is spying on a significant fraction of the "
2484 "entire world’s population, and its ratio of surveillance operatives to the "
2485 "surveilled is more like 1:10,000 (that’s probably on the low side since it "
2486 "assumes that every American with top-secret clearance is working for the NSA "
2487 "on this project — we don’t know how many of those cleared people are "
2488 "involved in NSA spying, but it’s definitely not all of them)."
2491 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2493 "How did the ratio of surveillable citizens expand from 1:60 to 1:10,000 in "
2494 "less than 30 years? It’s thanks to Big Tech. Our devices and services gather "
2495 "most of the data that the NSA mines for its surveillance project. We pay for "
2496 "these devices and the services they connect to, and then we painstakingly "
2497 "perform the data-entry tasks associated with logging facts about our lives, "
2498 "opinions, and preferences. This mass surveillance project has been largely "
2499 "useless for fighting terrorism: The NSA can <ulink url=\"https://www."
2500 "washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-cites-case-as-success-of-"
2501 "phone-data-collection-program/2013/08/08/fc915e5a-feda-11e2-96a8-"
2502 "d3b921c0924a_story.html\">only point to a single minor success story</ulink> "
2503 "in which it used its data collection program to foil an attempt by a U.S. "
2504 "resident to wire a few thousand dollars to an overseas terror group. It’s "
2505 "ineffective for much the same reason that commercial surveillance projects "
2506 "are largely ineffective at targeting advertising: The people who want to "
2507 "commit acts of terror, like people who want to buy a refrigerator, are "
2508 "extremely rare. If you’re trying to detect a phenomenon whose base rate is "
2509 "one in a million with an instrument whose accuracy is only 99%, then every "
2510 "true positive will come at the cost of 9,999 false positives."
2513 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2515 "Let me explain that again: If one in a million people is a terrorist, then "
2516 "there will only be about one terrorist in a random sample of one million "
2517 "people. If your test for detecting terrorists is 99% accurate, it will "
2518 "identify 10,000 terrorists in your million-person sample (1% of one million "
2519 "is 10,000). For every true positive, you’ll get 9,999 false positives."
2522 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2524 "In reality, the accuracy of algorithmic terrorism detection falls far short "
2525 "of the 99% mark, as does refrigerator ad targeting. The difference is that "
2526 "being falsely accused of wanting to buy a fridge is a minor nuisance while "
2527 "being falsely accused of planning a terror attack can destroy your life and "
2528 "the lives of everyone you love."
2531 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2533 "Mass state surveillance is only feasible because of surveillance capitalism "
2534 "and its extremely low-yield ad-targeting systems, which require a constant "
2535 "feed of personal data to remain barely viable. Surveillance capitalism’s "
2536 "primary failure mode is mistargeted ads while mass state surveillance’s "
2537 "primary failure mode is grotesque human rights abuses, tending toward "
2541 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2543 "State surveillance is no mere parasite on Big Tech, sucking up its data and "
2544 "giving nothing in return. In truth, the two are symbiotes: Big Tech sucks up "
2545 "our data for spy agencies, and spy agencies ensure that governments don’t "
2546 "limit Big Tech’s activities so severely that it would no longer serve the "
2547 "spy agencies’ needs. There is no firm distinction between state surveillance "
2548 "and surveillance capitalism; they are dependent on one another."
2551 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2553 "To see this at work today, look no further than Amazon’s home surveillance "
2554 "device, the Ring doorbell, and its associated app, Neighbors. Ring — a "
2555 "product that Amazon acquired and did not develop in house — makes a camera-"
2556 "enabled doorbell that streams footage from your front door to your mobile "
2557 "device. The Neighbors app allows you to form a neighborhood-wide "
2558 "surveillance grid with your fellow Ring owners through which you can share "
2559 "clips of <quote>suspicious characters.</quote> If you’re thinking that this "
2560 "sounds like a recipe for letting curtain-twitching racists supercharge their "
2561 "suspicions of people with brown skin who walk down their blocks, <ulink url="
2562 "\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/amazons-ring-enables-over-policing-"
2563 "efforts-some-americas-deadliest-law-enforcement\">you’re right</ulink>. Ring "
2564 "has become a <emphasis>de facto,</emphasis> off-the-books arm of the police "
2565 "without any of the pesky oversight or rules."
2568 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2570 "In mid-2019, a series of public records requests revealed that Amazon had "
2571 "struck confidential deals with more than 400 local law enforcement agencies "
2572 "through which the agencies would promote Ring and Neighbors and in exchange "
2573 "get access to footage from Ring cameras. In theory, cops would need to "
2574 "request this footage through Amazon (and internal documents reveal that "
2575 "Amazon devotes substantial resources to coaching cops on how to spin a "
2576 "convincing story when doing so), but in practice, when a Ring customer turns "
2577 "down a police request, Amazon only requires the agency to formally request "
2578 "the footage from the company, which it will then produce."
2581 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2583 "Ring and law enforcement have found many ways to intertwine their "
2584 "activities. Ring strikes secret deals to acquire real-time access to 911 "
2585 "dispatch and then streams alarming crime reports to Neighbors users, which "
2586 "serve as convincers for anyone who’s contemplating a surveillance doorbell "
2587 "but isn’t sure whether their neighborhood is dangerous enough to warrant it."
2590 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2592 "The more the cops buzz-market the surveillance capitalist Ring, the more "
2593 "surveillance capability the state gets. Cops who rely on private entities "
2594 "for law-enforcement roles then brief against any controls on the deployment "
2595 "of that technology while the companies return the favor by lobbying against "
2596 "rules requiring public oversight of police surveillance technology. The more "
2597 "the cops rely on Ring and Neighbors, the harder it will be to pass laws to "
2598 "curb them. The fewer laws there are against them, the more the cops will "
2602 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
2603 msgid "Dignity and sanctuary"
2604 msgstr "Godność i sanktuarium"
2606 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2608 "But even if we could exercise democratic control over our states and force "
2609 "them to stop raiding surveillance capitalism’s reservoirs of behavioral "
2610 "data, surveillance capitalism would still harm us."
2613 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2615 "This is an area where Zuboff shines. Her chapter on <quote>sanctuary</quote> "
2616 "— the feeling of being unobserved — is a beautiful hymn to introspection, "
2617 "calmness, mindfulness, and tranquility."
2620 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2622 "When you are watched, something changes. Anyone who has ever raised a child "
2623 "knows this. You might look up from your book (or more realistically, from "
2624 "your phone) and catch your child in a moment of profound realization and "
2625 "growth, a moment where they are learning something that is right at the edge "
2626 "of their abilities, requiring their entire ferocious concentration. For a "
2627 "moment, you’re transfixed, watching that rare and beautiful moment of focus "
2628 "playing out before your eyes, and then your child looks up and sees you "
2629 "seeing them, and the moment collapses. To grow, you need to be and expose "
2630 "your authentic self, and in that moment, you are vulnerable like a hermit "
2631 "crab scuttling from one shell to the next. The tender, unprotected tissues "
2632 "you expose in that moment are too delicate to reveal in the presence of "
2633 "another, even someone you trust as implicitly as a child trusts their parent."
2636 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2638 "In the digital age, our authentic selves are inextricably tied to our "
2639 "digital lives. Your search history is a running ledger of the questions "
2640 "you’ve pondered. Your location history is a record of the places you’ve "
2641 "sought out and the experiences you’ve had there. Your social graph reveals "
2642 "the different facets of your identity, the people you’ve connected with."
2645 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2647 "To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your "
2651 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2653 "There’s another way in which surveillance capitalism robs us of our capacity "
2654 "to be our authentic selves: by making us anxious. Surveillance capitalism "
2655 "isn’t really a mind-control ray, but you don’t need a mind-control ray to "
2656 "make someone anxious. After all, another word for anxiety is agitation, and "
2657 "to make someone experience agitation, you need merely to agitate them. To "
2658 "poke them and prod them and beep at them and buzz at them and bombard them "
2659 "on an intermittent schedule that is just random enough that our limbic "
2660 "systems never quite become inured to it."
2663 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2665 "Our devices and services are <quote>general purpose</quote> in that they can "
2666 "connect anything or anyone to anything or anyone else and that they can run "
2667 "any program that can be written. This means that the distraction rectangles "
2668 "in our pockets hold our most precious moments with our most beloved people "
2669 "and their most urgent or time-sensitive communications (from <quote>running "
2670 "late can you get the kid?</quote> to <quote>doctor gave me bad news and I "
2671 "need to talk to you RIGHT NOW</quote>) as well as ads for refrigerators and "
2672 "recruiting messages from Nazis."
2675 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2677 "All day and all night, our pockets buzz, shattering our concentration and "
2678 "tearing apart the fragile webs of connection we spin as we think through "
2679 "difficult ideas. If you locked someone in a cell and agitated them like "
2680 "this, we’d call it <quote>sleep deprivation torture,</quote> and it would be "
2681 "<ulink url=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKpRbvnx6g\">a war crime under "
2682 "the Geneva Conventions</ulink>."
2685 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
2686 msgid "Afflicting the afflicted"
2687 msgstr "Dręczenie udręczonych"
2689 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2691 "The effects of surveillance on our ability to be our authentic selves are "
2692 "not equal for all people. Some of us are lucky enough to live in a time and "
2693 "place in which all the most important facts of our lives are widely and "
2694 "roundly socially acceptable and can be publicly displayed without the risk "
2695 "of social consequence."
2698 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2700 "But for many of us, this is not true. Recall that in living memory, many of "
2701 "the ways of being that we think of as socially acceptable today were once "
2702 "cause for dire social sanction or even imprisonment. If you are 65 years "
2703 "old, you have lived through a time in which people living in <quote>free "
2704 "societies</quote> could be imprisoned or sanctioned for engaging in "
2705 "homosexual activity, for falling in love with a person whose skin was a "
2706 "different color than their own, or for smoking weed."
2709 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2711 "Today, these activities aren’t just decriminalized in much of the world, "
2712 "they’re considered normal, and the fallen prohibitions are viewed as "
2713 "shameful, regrettable relics of the past."
2716 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2718 "How did we get from prohibition to normalization? Through private, personal "
2719 "activity: People who were secretly gay or secret pot-smokers or who secretly "
2720 "loved someone with a different skin color were vulnerable to retaliation if "
2721 "they made their true selves known and were limited in how much they could "
2722 "advocate for their own right to exist in the world and be true to "
2723 "themselves. But because there was a private sphere, these people could form "
2724 "alliances with their friends and loved ones who did not share their "
2725 "disfavored traits by having private conversations in which they came out, "
2726 "disclosing their true selves to the people around them and bringing them to "
2727 "their cause one conversation at a time."
2730 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2732 "The right to choose the time and manner of these conversations was key to "
2733 "their success. It’s one thing to come out to your dad while you’re on a "
2734 "fishing trip away from the world and another thing entirely to blurt it out "
2735 "over the Christmas dinner table while your racist Facebook uncle is there to "
2739 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2741 "Without a private sphere, there’s a chance that none of these changes would "
2742 "have come to pass and that the people who benefited from these changes would "
2743 "have either faced social sanction for coming out to a hostile world or would "
2744 "have never been able to reveal their true selves to the people they love."
2747 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2749 "The corollary is that, unless you think that our society has attained social "
2750 "perfection — that your grandchildren in 50 years will ask you to tell them "
2751 "the story of how, in 2020, every injustice had been righted and no further "
2752 "change had to be made — then you should expect that right now, at this "
2753 "minute, there are people you love, whose happiness is key to your own, who "
2754 "have a secret in their hearts that stops them from ever being their "
2755 "authentic selves with you. These people are sorrowing and will go to their "
2756 "graves with that secret sorrow in their hearts, and the source of that "
2757 "sorrow will be the falsity of their relationship to you."
2760 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2761 msgid "A private realm is necessary for human progress."
2762 msgstr "Prywatna rzeczywistość jest konieczna dla rozwoju ludzkości."
2764 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
2765 msgid "Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak"
2767 "Jakiekolwiek dane, które zbierasz i przetwarzasz, kiedyś w końcu wyciekną"
2769 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2771 "The lack of a private life can rob vulnerable people of the chance to be "
2772 "their authentic selves and constrain our actions by depriving us of "
2773 "sanctuary, but there is another risk that is borne by everyone, not just "
2774 "people with a secret: crime."
2777 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2779 "Personally identifying information is of very limited use for the purpose of "
2780 "controlling peoples’ minds, but identity theft — really a catchall term for "
2781 "a whole constellation of terrible criminal activities that can destroy your "
2782 "finances, compromise your personal integrity, ruin your reputation, or even "
2783 "expose you to physical danger — thrives on it."
2786 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2788 "Attackers are not limited to using data from one breached source, either. "
2789 "Multiple services have suffered breaches that exposed names, addresses, "
2790 "phone numbers, passwords, sexual tastes, school grades, work performance, "
2791 "brushes with the criminal justice system, family details, genetic "
2792 "information, fingerprints and other biometrics, reading habits, search "
2793 "histories, literary tastes, pseudonymous identities, and other sensitive "
2794 "information. Attackers can merge data from these different breaches to build "
2795 "up extremely detailed dossiers on random subjects and then use different "
2796 "parts of the data for different criminal purposes."
2799 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2801 "For example, attackers can use leaked username and password combinations to "
2802 "hijack whole fleets of commercial vehicles that <ulink url=\"https://www."
2803 "vice.com/en_us/article/zmpx4x/hacker-monitor-cars-kill-engine-gps-tracking-"
2804 "apps\">have been fitted with anti-theft GPS trackers and immobilizers</"
2805 "ulink> or to hijack baby monitors in order to <ulink url=\"https://www."
2806 "washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/23/how-nest-designed-keep-intruders-"
2807 "out-peoples-homes-effectively-allowed-hackers-get/?"
2808 "utm_term=.15220e98c550\">terrorize toddlers with the audio tracks from "
2809 "pornography</ulink>. Attackers use leaked data to trick phone companies into "
2810 "giving them your phone number, then they intercept SMS-based two-factor "
2811 "authentication codes in order to take over your email, bank account, and/or "
2812 "cryptocurrency wallets."
2815 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2817 "Attackers are endlessly inventive in the pursuit of creative ways to "
2818 "weaponize leaked data. One common use of leaked data is to penetrate "
2819 "companies in order to access <emphasis>more</emphasis> data."
2822 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2824 "Like spies, online fraudsters are totally dependent on companies over-"
2825 "collecting and over-retaining our data. Spy agencies sometimes pay companies "
2826 "for access to their data or intimidate them into giving it up, but sometimes "
2827 "they work just like criminals do — by <ulink url=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/"
2828 "world-us-canada-24751821\">sneaking data out of companies’ databases</ulink>."
2831 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2833 "The over-collection of data has a host of terrible social consequences, from "
2834 "the erosion of our authentic selves to the undermining of social progress, "
2835 "from state surveillance to an epidemic of online crime. Commercial "
2836 "surveillance is also a boon to people running influence campaigns, but "
2837 "that’s the least of our troubles."
2840 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
2841 msgid "Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism"
2843 "Przełomowa wyjątkowość technologiczna jest nadal technologiczną wyjątkowością"
2845 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2847 "Big Tech has long practiced technology exceptionalism: the idea that it "
2848 "should not be subject to the mundane laws and norms of <quote>meatspace.</"
2849 "quote> Mottoes like Facebook’s <quote>move fast and break things</quote> "
2850 "attracted justifiable scorn of the companies’ self-serving rhetoric."
2853 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2855 "Tech exceptionalism got us all into a lot of trouble, so it’s ironic and "
2856 "distressing to see Big Tech’s critics committing the same sin."
2859 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2861 "Big Tech is not a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> that cannot be cured "
2862 "through the traditional anti-monopoly remedies of trustbusting (forcing "
2863 "companies to divest of competitors they have acquired) and bans on mergers "
2864 "to monopoly and other anti-competitive tactics. Big Tech does not have the "
2865 "power to use machine learning to influence our behavior so thoroughly that "
2866 "markets lose the ability to punish bad actors and reward superior "
2867 "competitors. Big Tech has no rule-writing mind-control ray that necessitates "
2868 "ditching our old toolbox."
2871 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2873 "The thing is, people have been claiming to have perfected mind-control rays "
2874 "for centuries, and every time, it turned out to be a con — though sometimes "
2875 "the con artists were also conning themselves."
2878 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2880 "For generations, the advertising industry has been steadily improving its "
2881 "ability to sell advertising services to businesses while only making "
2882 "marginal gains in selling those businesses’ products to prospective "
2883 "customers. John Wanamaker’s lament that <quote>50% of my advertising budget "
2884 "is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%</quote> is a testament to the triumph "
2885 "of <emphasis>ad executives</emphasis>, who successfully convinced Wanamaker "
2886 "that only half of the money he spent went to waste."
2889 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2891 "The tech industry has made enormous improvements in the science of "
2892 "convincing businesses that they’re good at advertising while their actual "
2893 "improvements to advertising — as opposed to targeting — have been pretty ho-"
2894 "hum. The vogue for machine learning — and the mystical invocation of "
2895 "<quote>artificial intelligence</quote> as a synonym for straightforward "
2896 "statistical inference techniques — has greatly boosted the efficacy of Big "
2897 "Tech’s sales pitch as marketers have exploited potential customers’ lack of "
2898 "technical sophistication to get away with breathtaking acts of overpromising "
2899 "and underdelivering."
2902 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2904 "It’s tempting to think that if businesses are willing to pour billions into "
2905 "a venture that the venture must be a good one. Yet there are plenty of times "
2906 "when this rule of thumb has led us astray. For example, it’s virtually "
2907 "unheard of for managed investment funds to outperform simple index funds, "
2908 "and investors who put their money into the hands of expert money managers "
2909 "overwhelmingly fare worse than those who entrust their savings to index "
2910 "funds. But managed funds still account for the majority of the money "
2911 "invested in the markets, and they are patronized by some of the richest, "
2912 "most sophisticated investors in the world. Their vote of confidence in an "
2913 "underperforming sector is a parable about the role of luck in wealth "
2914 "accumulation, not a sign that managed funds are a good buy."
2917 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2919 "The claims of Big Tech’s mind-control system are full of tells that the "
2920 "enterprise is a con. For example, <ulink url=\"https://www.frontiersin.org/"
2921 "articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01415/full\">the reliance on the <quote>Big "
2922 "Five</quote> personality traits</ulink> as a primary means of influencing "
2923 "people even though the <quote>Big Five</quote> theory is unsupported by any "
2924 "large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is <ulink url=\"https://www.wired.com/"
2925 "story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/\">mostly the realm of "
2926 "marketing hucksters and pop psych</ulink>."
2929 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2931 "Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms can "
2932 "accurately perform <quote>sentiment analysis</quote> or detect peoples’ "
2933 "moods based on their <quote>microexpressions,</quote> but <ulink url="
2934 "\"https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647040758/advertising-on-facebook-is-it-"
2935 "worth-it\">these are marketing claims, not scientific ones</ulink>. These "
2936 "methods are largely untested by independent scientific experts, and where "
2937 "they have been tested, they’ve been found sorely wanting. Microexpressions "
2938 "are particularly suspect as the companies that specialize in training people "
2939 "to detect them <ulink url=\"https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-"
2940 "files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/\">have "
2941 "been shown</ulink> to underperform relative to random chance."
2944 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2946 "Big Tech has been so good at marketing its own supposed superpowers that "
2947 "it’s easy to believe that they can market everything else with similar "
2948 "acumen, but it’s a mistake to believe the hype. Any statement a company "
2949 "makes about the quality of its products is clearly not impartial. The fact "
2950 "that we distrust all the things that Big Tech says about its data handling, "
2951 "compliance with privacy laws, etc., is only reasonable — but why on Earth "
2952 "would we treat Big Tech’s marketing literature as the gospel truth? Big Tech "
2953 "lies about just about <emphasis>everything</emphasis>, including how well "
2954 "its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work."
2957 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2959 "That skepticism should infuse all of our evaluations of Big Tech and its "
2960 "supposed abilities, including our perusal of its patents. Zuboff vests these "
2961 "patents with enormous significance, pointing out that Google claimed "
2962 "extensive new persuasion capabilities in <ulink url=\"https://patents.google."
2963 "com/patent/US20050131762A1/en\">its patent filings</ulink>. These claims are "
2964 "doubly suspect: first, because they are so self-serving, and second, because "
2965 "the patent itself is so notoriously an invitation to exaggeration."
2968 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2970 "Patent applications take the form of a series of claims and range from broad "
2971 "to narrow. A typical patent starts out by claiming that its authors have "
2972 "invented a method or system for doing every conceivable thing that anyone "
2973 "might do, ever, with any tool or device. Then it narrows that claim in "
2974 "successive stages until we get to the actual <quote>invention</quote> that "
2975 "is the true subject of the patent. The hope is that the patent examiner — "
2976 "who is almost certainly overworked and underinformed — will miss the fact "
2977 "that some or all of these claims are ridiculous, or at least suspect, and "
2978 "grant the patent’s broader claims. Patents for unpatentable things are still "
2979 "incredibly useful because they can be wielded against competitors who might "
2980 "license that patent or steer clear of its claims rather than endure the "
2981 "lengthy, expensive process of contesting it."
2984 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2986 "What’s more, software patents are routinely granted even though the filer "
2987 "doesn’t have any evidence that they can do the thing claimed by the patent. "
2988 "That is, you can patent an <quote>invention</quote> that you haven’t "
2989 "actually made and that you don’t know how to make."
2992 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
2994 "With these considerations in hand, it becomes obvious that the fact that a "
2995 "Big Tech company has patented what it <emphasis>says</emphasis> is an "
2996 "effective mind-control ray is largely irrelevant to whether Big Tech can in "
2997 "fact control our minds."
3000 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3002 "Big Tech collects our data for many reasons, including the diminishing "
3003 "returns on existing stores of data. But many tech companies also collect "
3004 "data out of a mistaken tech exceptionalist belief in the network effects of "
3005 "data. Network effects occur when each new user in a system increases its "
3006 "value. The classic example is fax machines: A single fax machine is of no "
3007 "use, two fax machines are of limited use, but every new fax machine that’s "
3008 "put to use after the first doubles the number of possible fax-to-fax links."
3011 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3013 "Data mined for predictive systems doesn’t necessarily produce these "
3014 "dividends. Think of Netflix: The predictive value of the data mined from a "
3015 "million English-speaking Netflix viewers is hardly improved by the addition "
3016 "of one more user’s viewing data. Most of the data Netflix acquires after "
3017 "that first minimum viable sample duplicates existing data and produces only "
3018 "minimal gains. Meanwhile, retraining models with new data gets progressively "
3019 "more expensive as the number of data points increases, and manual tasks like "
3020 "labeling and validating data do not get cheaper at scale."
3023 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3025 "Businesses pursue fads to the detriment of their profits all the time, "
3026 "especially when the businesses and their investors are not motivated by the "
3027 "prospect of becoming profitable but rather by the prospect of being acquired "
3028 "by a Big Tech giant or by having an IPO. For these firms, ticking faddish "
3029 "boxes like <quote>collects as much data as possible</quote> might realize a "
3030 "bigger return on investment than <quote>collects a business-appropriate "
3031 "quantity of data.</quote>"
3034 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3036 "This is another harm of tech exceptionalism: The belief that more data "
3037 "always produces more profits in the form of more insights that can be "
3038 "translated into better mind-control rays drives firms to over-collect and "
3039 "over-retain data beyond all rationality. And since the firms are behaving "
3040 "irrationally, a good number of them will go out of business and become ghost "
3041 "ships whose cargo holds are stuffed full of data that can harm people in "
3042 "myriad ways — but which no one is responsible for antey longer. Even if the "
3043 "companies don’t go under, the data they collect is maintained behind the "
3044 "minimum viable security — just enough security to keep the company viable "
3045 "while it waits to get bought out by a tech giant, an amount calculated to "
3046 "spend not one penny more than is necessary on protecting data."
3049 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
3051 "How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The "
3054 "Jak monopole, a nie kontrola umysłu, sterują kapitalizmen opartym na "
3055 "systemach nadzoru: historia Snapchat"
3057 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3059 "For the first decade of its existence, Facebook competed with the social "
3060 "media giants of the day (Myspace, Orkut, etc.) by presenting itself as the "
3061 "pro-privacy alternative. Indeed, Facebook justified its walled garden — "
3062 "which let users bring in data from the web but blocked web services like "
3063 "Google Search from indexing and caching Facebook pages — as a pro-privacy "
3064 "measure that protected users from the surveillance-happy winners of the "
3065 "social media wars like Myspace."
3068 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3070 "Despite frequent promises that it would never collect or analyze its users’ "
3071 "data, Facebook periodically created initiatives that did just that, like the "
3072 "creepy, ham-fisted Beacon tool, which spied on you as you moved around the "
3073 "web and then added your online activities to your public timeline, allowing "
3074 "your friends to monitor your browsing habits. Beacon sparked a user revolt. "
3075 "Every time, Facebook backed off from its surveillance initiative, but not "
3076 "all the way; inevitably, the new Facebook would be more surveilling than the "
3077 "old Facebook, though not quite as surveilling as the intermediate Facebook "
3078 "following the launch of the new product or service."
3081 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3083 "The pace at which Facebook ramped up its surveillance efforts seems to have "
3084 "been set by Facebook’s competitive landscape. The more competitors Facebook "
3085 "had, the better it behaved. Every time a major competitor foundered, "
3086 "Facebook’s behavior <ulink url=\"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?"
3087 "abstract_id=3247362\">got markedly worse</ulink>."
3090 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3092 "All the while, Facebook was prodigiously acquiring companies, including a "
3093 "company called Onavo. Nominally, Onavo made a battery-monitoring mobile app. "
3094 "But the permissions that Onavo required were so expansive that the app was "
3095 "able to gather fine-grained telemetry on everything users did with their "
3096 "phones, including which apps they used and how they were using them."
3099 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3101 "Through Onavo, Facebook discovered that it was losing market share to "
3102 "Snapchat, an app that — like Facebook a decade before — billed itself as the "
3103 "pro-privacy alternative to the status quo. Through Onavo, Facebook was able "
3104 "to mine data from the devices of Snapchat users, including both current and "
3105 "former Snapchat users. This spurred Facebook to acquire Instagram — some "
3106 "features of which competed with Snapchat — and then allowed Facebook to fine-"
3107 "tune Instagram’s features and sales pitch to erode Snapchat’s gains and "
3108 "ensure that Facebook would not have to face the kinds of competitive "
3109 "pressures it had earlier inflicted on Myspace and Orkut."
3112 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3114 "The story of how Facebook crushed Snapchat reveals the relationship between "
3115 "monopoly and surveillance capitalism. Facebook combined surveillance with "
3116 "lax antitrust enforcement to spot the competitive threat of Snapchat on its "
3117 "horizon and then take decisive action against it. Facebook’s surveillance "
3118 "capitalism let it avert competitive pressure with anti-competitive tactics. "
3119 "Facebook users still want privacy — Facebook hasn’t used surveillance to "
3120 "brainwash them out of it — but they can’t get it because Facebook’s "
3121 "surveillance lets it destroy any hope of a rival service emerging that "
3122 "competes on privacy features."
3125 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
3126 msgid "A monopoly over your friends"
3127 msgstr "Monopol sprawowany nad twoimi przyjaciółmi"
3129 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3131 "A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of Facebook and "
3132 "other Big Tech companies by fielding <quote>indieweb</quote> alternatives — "
3133 "Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, Diaspora as a Facebook alternative, etc. "
3134 "— but these efforts have failed to attain any kind of liftoff."
3137 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3139 "Fundamentally, each of these services is hamstrung by the same problem: "
3140 "Every potential user for a Facebook or Twitter alternative has to convince "
3141 "all their friends to follow them to a decentralized web alternative in order "
3142 "to continue to realize the benefit of social media. For many of us, the only "
3143 "reason to have a Facebook account is that our friends have Facebook "
3144 "accounts, and the reason they have Facebook accounts is that <emphasis>we</"
3145 "emphasis> have Facebook accounts."
3148 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3150 "All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant platforms — "
3151 "into <quote>kill zones</quote> that investors will not fund new entrants for."
3154 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3156 "And yet, all of today’s tech giants came into existence despite the "
3157 "entrenched advantage of the companies that came before them. To understand "
3158 "how that happened, you have to understand both interoperability and "
3159 "adversarial interoperability."
3162 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
3163 msgid "The hard problem of our species is coordination."
3164 msgstr "Trudnym problemem naszego gatunku jest koordynacja."
3166 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3168 "<quote>Interoperability</quote> is the ability of two technologies to work "
3169 "with one another: Anyone can make an LP that will play on any record player, "
3170 "anyone can make a filter you can install in your stove’s extractor fan, "
3171 "anyone can make gasoline for your car, anyone can make a USB phone charger "
3172 "that fits in your car’s cigarette lighter receptacle, anyone can make a "
3173 "light bulb that works in your light socket, anyone can make bread that will "
3174 "toast in your toaster."
3177 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3179 "Interoperability is often a source of innovation and consumer benefit: Apple "
3180 "made the first commercially successful PC, but millions of independent "
3181 "software vendors made interoperable programs that ran on the Apple II Plus. "
3182 "The simple analog antenna inputs on the back of TVs first allowed cable "
3183 "operators to connect directly to TVs, then they allowed game console "
3184 "companies and then personal computer companies to use standard televisions "
3185 "as displays. Standard RJ-11 telephone jacks allowed for the production of "
3186 "phones from a variety of vendors in a variety of forms, from the free "
3187 "football-shaped phone that came with a <emphasis>Sports Illustrated</"
3188 "emphasis> subscription to business phones with speakers, hold functions, and "
3189 "so on and then answering machines and finally modems, paving the way for the "
3190 "internet revolution."
3193 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3195 "<quote>Interoperability</quote> is often used interchangeably with "
3196 "<quote>standardization,</quote> which is the process when manufacturers and "
3197 "other stakeholders hammer out a set of agreed-upon rules for implementing a "
3198 "technology, such as the electrical plug on your wall, the CAN bus used by "
3199 "your car’s computer systems, or the HTML instructions that your browser "
3203 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3205 "But interoperability doesn’t require standardization — indeed, "
3206 "standardization often proceeds from the chaos of ad hoc interoperability "
3207 "measures. The inventor of the cigarette-lighter USB charger didn’t need to "
3208 "get permission from car manufacturers or even the manufacturers of the "
3209 "dashboard lighter subcomponent. The automakers didn’t take any "
3210 "countermeasures to prevent the use of these aftermarket accessories by their "
3211 "customers, but they also didn’t do anything to make life easier for the "
3212 "chargers’ manufacturers. This is a kind of <quote>neutral interoperability.</"
3216 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3218 "Beyond neutral interoperability, there is <quote>adversarial "
3219 "interoperability.</quote> That’s when a manufacturer makes a product that "
3220 "interoperates with another manufacturer’s product <emphasis>despite the "
3221 "second manufacturer’s objections</emphasis> and <emphasis>even if that means "
3222 "bypassing a security system designed to prevent interoperability</emphasis>."
3225 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3227 "Probably the most familiar form of adversarial interoperability is third-"
3228 "party printer ink. Printer manufacturers claim that they sell printers below "
3229 "cost and that the only way they can recoup the losses they incur is by "
3230 "charging high markups on ink. To prevent the owners of printers from buying "
3231 "ink elsewhere, the printer companies deploy a suite of anti-customer "
3232 "security systems that detect and reject both refilled and third-party "
3236 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3238 "Owners of printers take the position that HP and Epson and Brother are not "
3239 "charities and that customers for their wares have no obligation to help them "
3240 "survive, and so if the companies choose to sell their products at a loss, "
3241 "that’s their foolish choice and their consequences to live with. Likewise, "
3242 "competitors who make ink or refill kits observe that they don’t owe printer "
3243 "companies anything, and their erosion of printer companies’ margins are the "
3244 "printer companies’ problems, not their competitors’. After all, the printer "
3245 "companies shed no tears when they drive a refiller out of business, so why "
3246 "should the refillers concern themselves with the economic fortunes of the "
3247 "printer companies?"
3250 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3252 "Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the history of "
3253 "the tech industry: from the founding of the <quote>alt.*</quote> Usenet "
3254 "hierarchy (which was started against the wishes of Usenet’s maintainers and "
3255 "which grew to be bigger than all of Usenet combined) to the browser wars "
3256 "(when Netscape and Microsoft devoted massive engineering efforts to making "
3257 "their browsers incompatible with the other’s special commands and "
3258 "peccadilloes) to Facebook (whose success was built in part by helping its "
3259 "new users stay in touch with friends they’d left behind on Myspace because "
3260 "Facebook supplied them with a tool that scraped waiting messages from "
3261 "Myspace and imported them into Facebook, effectively creating an Facebook-"
3262 "based Myspace reader)."
3265 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3267 "Today, incumbency is seen as an unassailable advantage. Facebook is where "
3268 "all of your friends are, so no one can start a Facebook competitor. But "
3269 "adversarial compatibility reverses the competitive advantage: If you were "
3270 "allowed to compete with Facebook by providing a tool that imported all your "
3271 "users’ waiting Facebook messages into an environment that competed on lines "
3272 "that Facebook couldn’t cross, like eliminating surveillance and ads, then "
3273 "Facebook would be at a huge disadvantage. It would have assembled all "
3274 "possible ex-Facebook users into a single, easy-to-find service; it would "
3275 "have educated them on how a Facebook-like service worked and what its "
3276 "potential benefits were; and it would have provided an easy means for "
3277 "disgruntled Facebook users to tell their friends where they might expect "
3281 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3283 "Adversarial interoperability was once the norm and a key contributor to the "
3284 "dynamic, vibrant tech scene, but now it is stuck behind a thicket of laws "
3285 "and regulations that add legal risks to the tried-and-true tactics of "
3286 "adversarial interoperability. New rules and new interpretations of existing "
3287 "rules mean that a would-be adversarial interoperator needs to steer clear of "
3288 "claims under copyright, terms of service, trade secrecy, tortious "
3289 "interference, and patent."
3292 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3294 "In the absence of a competitive market, lawmakers have resorted to assigning "
3295 "expensive, state-like duties to Big Tech firms, such as automatically "
3296 "filtering user contributions for copyright infringement or terrorist and "
3297 "extremist content or detecting and preventing harassment in real time or "
3298 "controlling access to sexual material."
3301 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3303 "These measures put a floor under how small we can make Big Tech because only "
3304 "the very largest companies can afford the humans and automated filters "
3305 "needed to perform these duties."
3308 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3310 "But that’s not the only way in which making platforms responsible for "
3311 "policing their users undermines competition. A platform that is expected to "
3312 "police its users’ conduct must prevent many vital adversarial "
3313 "interoperability techniques lest these subvert its policing measures. For "
3314 "example, if someone using a Twitter replacement like Mastodon is able to "
3315 "push messages into Twitter and read messages out of Twitter, they could "
3316 "avoid being caught by automated systems that detect and prevent harassment "
3317 "(such as systems that use the timing of messages or IP-based rules to make "
3318 "guesses about whether someone is a harasser)."
3321 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3323 "To the extent that we are willing to let Big Tech police itself — rather "
3324 "than making Big Tech small enough that users can leave bad platforms for "
3325 "better ones and small enough that a regulation that simply puts a platform "
3326 "out of business will not destroy billions of users’ access to their "
3327 "communities and data — we build the case that Big Tech should be able to "
3328 "block its competitors and make it easier for Big Tech to demand legal "
3329 "enforcement tools to ban and punish attempts at adversarial interoperability."
3332 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3334 "Ultimately, we can try to fix Big Tech by making it responsible for bad acts "
3335 "by its users, or we can try to fix the internet by cutting Big Tech down to "
3336 "size. But we can’t do both. To replace today’s giant products with "
3337 "pluralistic protocols, we need to clear the legal thicket that prevents "
3338 "adversarial interoperability so that tomorrow’s nimble, personal, small-"
3339 "scale products can federate themselves with giants like Facebook, allowing "
3340 "the users who’ve left to continue to communicate with users who haven’t left "
3341 "yet, reaching tendrils over Facebook’s garden wall that Facebook’s trapped "
3342 "users can use to scale the walls and escape to the global, open web."
3345 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
3346 msgid "Fake news is an epistemological crisis"
3347 msgstr "Fałszywe wiadomości to oznaka kryzysu epistemologicznego"
3349 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3351 "Tech is not the only industry that has undergone massive concentration since "
3352 "the Reagan era. Virtually every major industry — from oil to newspapers to "
3353 "meatpacking to sea freight to eyewear to online pornography — has become a "
3354 "clubby oligarchy that just a few players dominate."
3357 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3359 "At the same time, every industry has become something of a tech industry as "
3360 "general-purpose computers and general-purpose networks and the promise of "
3361 "efficiencies through data-driven analysis infuse every device, process, and "
3365 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3367 "This phenomenon of industrial concentration is part of a wider story about "
3368 "wealth concentration overall as a smaller and smaller number of people own "
3369 "more and more of our world. This concentration of both wealth and industries "
3370 "means that our political outcomes are increasingly beholden to the parochial "
3371 "interests of the people and companies with all the money."
3374 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3376 "That means that whenever a regulator asks a question with an obvious, "
3377 "empirical answer (<quote>Are humans causing climate change?</quote> or "
3378 "<quote>Should we let companies conduct commercial mass surveillance?</quote> "
3379 "or <quote>Does society benefit from allowing network neutrality violations?</"
3380 "quote>), the answer that comes out is only correct if that correctness meets "
3381 "with the approval of rich people and the industries that made them so "
3385 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3387 "Rich people have always played an outsized role in politics and more so "
3388 "since the Supreme Court’s <emphasis>Citizens United</emphasis> decision "
3389 "eliminated key controls over political spending. Widening inequality and "
3390 "wealth concentration means that the very richest people are now a lot richer "
3391 "and can afford to spend a lot more money on political projects than ever "
3392 "before. Think of the Koch brothers or George Soros or Bill Gates."
3395 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3397 "But the policy distortions of rich individuals pale in comparison to the "
3398 "policy distortions that concentrated industries are capable of. The "
3399 "companies in highly concentrated industries are much more profitable than "
3400 "companies in competitive industries — no competition means not having to "
3401 "reduce prices or improve quality to win customers — leaving them with bigger "
3402 "capital surpluses to spend on lobbying."
3405 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3407 "Concentrated industries also find it easier to collaborate on policy "
3408 "objectives than competitive ones. When all the top execs from your industry "
3409 "can fit around a single boardroom table, they often do. And <emphasis>when</"
3410 "emphasis> they do, they can forge a consensus position on regulation."
3413 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3415 "Rising through the ranks in a concentrated industry generally means working "
3416 "at two or three of the big companies. When there are only relatively few "
3417 "companies in a given industry, each company has a more ossified executive "
3418 "rank, leaving ambitious execs with fewer paths to higher positions unless "
3419 "they are recruited to a rival. This means that the top execs in concentrated "
3420 "industries are likely to have been colleagues at some point and socialize in "
3421 "the same circles — connected through social ties or, say, serving as "
3422 "trustees for each others’ estates. These tight social bonds foster a "
3423 "collegial, rather than competitive, attitude."
3426 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3428 "Highly concentrated industries also present a regulatory conundrum. When an "
3429 "industry is dominated by just four or five companies, the only people who "
3430 "are likely to truly understand the industry’s practices are its veteran "
3431 "executives. This means that top regulators are often former execs of the "
3432 "companies they are supposed to be regulating. These turns in government are "
3433 "often tacitly understood to be leaves of absence from industry, with former "
3434 "employers welcoming their erstwhile watchdogs back into their executive "
3435 "ranks once their terms have expired."
3438 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3440 "All this is to say that the tight social bonds, small number of firms, and "
3441 "regulatory capture of concentrated industries give the companies that "
3442 "comprise them the power to dictate many, if not all, of the regulations that "
3446 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3448 "This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders <ulink url="
3449 "\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/25/how-payday-lending-"
3450 "industry-insider-tilted-academic-research-its-favor/\">winning the right to "
3451 "practice predatory lending</ulink> or Apple <ulink url=\"https://www.vice."
3452 "com/en_us/article/mgxayp/source-apple-will-fight-right-to-repair-legislation"
3453 "\">winning the right to decide who can fix your phone</ulink> or Google and "
3454 "Facebook winning the right to breach your private data without suffering "
3455 "meaningful consequences or victories for pipeline companies or impunity for "
3456 "opioid manufacturers or massive tax subsidies for incredibly profitable "
3457 "dominant businesses, it’s increasingly apparent that many of our official, "
3458 "evidence-based truth-seeking processes are, in fact, auctions for sale to "
3459 "the highest bidder."
3462 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3464 "It’s really impossible to overstate what a terrifying prospect this is. We "
3465 "live in an incredibly high-tech society, and none of us could acquire the "
3466 "expertise to evaluate every technological proposition that stands between us "
3467 "and our untimely, horrible deaths. You might devote your life to acquiring "
3468 "the media literacy to distinguish good scientific journals from corrupt pay-"
3469 "for-play lookalikes and the statistical literacy to evaluate the quality of "
3470 "the analysis in the journals as well as the microbiology and epidemiology "
3471 "knowledge to determine whether you can trust claims about the safety of "
3472 "vaccines — but that would still leave you unqualified to judge whether the "
3473 "wiring in your home will give you a lethal shock <emphasis>and</emphasis> "
3474 "whether your car’s brakes’ software will cause them to fail unpredictably "
3475 "<emphasis>and</emphasis> whether the hygiene standards at your butcher are "
3476 "sufficient to keep you from dying after you finish your dinner."
3479 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3481 "In a world as complex as this one, we have to defer to authorities, and we "
3482 "keep them honest by making those authorities accountable to us and binding "
3483 "them with rules to prevent conflicts of interest. We can’t possibly acquire "
3484 "the expertise to adjudicate conflicting claims about the best way to make "
3485 "the world safe and prosperous, but we <emphasis>can</emphasis> determine "
3486 "whether the adjudication process itself is trustworthy."
3489 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3490 msgid "Right now, it’s obviously not."
3493 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3495 "The past 40 years of rising inequality and industry concentration, together "
3496 "with increasingly weak accountability and transparency for expert agencies, "
3497 "has created an increasingly urgent sense of impending doom, the sense that "
3498 "there are vast conspiracies afoot that operate with tacit official approval "
3499 "despite the likelihood they are working to better themselves by ruining the "
3503 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3505 "For example, it’s been decades since Exxon’s own scientists concluded that "
3506 "its products would render the Earth uninhabitable by humans. And yet those "
3507 "decades were lost to us, in large part because Exxon lobbied governments and "
3508 "sowed doubt about the dangers of its products and did so with the "
3509 "cooperation of many public officials. When the survival of you and everyone "
3510 "you love is threatened by conspiracies, it’s not unreasonable to start "
3511 "questioning the things you think you know in an attempt to determine whether "
3512 "they, too, are the outcome of another conspiracy."
3515 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3517 "The collapse of the credibility of our systems for divining and upholding "
3518 "truths has left us in a state of epistemological chaos. Once, most of us "
3519 "might have assumed that the system was working and that our regulations "
3520 "reflected our best understanding of the empirical truths of the world as "
3521 "they were best understood — now we have to find our own experts to help us "
3522 "sort the true from the false."
3525 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3527 "If you’re like me, you probably believe that vaccines are safe, but you "
3528 "(like me) probably also can’t explain the microbiology or statistics. Few of "
3529 "us have the math skills to review the literature on vaccine safety and "
3530 "describe why their statistical reasoning is sound. Likewise, few of us can "
3531 "review the stats in the (now discredited) literature on opioid safety and "
3532 "explain how those stats were manipulated. Both vaccines and opioids were "
3533 "embraced by medical authorities, after all, and one is safe while the other "
3534 "could ruin your life. You’re left with a kind of inchoate constellation of "
3535 "rules of thumb about which experts you trust to fact-check controversial "
3536 "claims and then to explain how all those respectable doctors with their peer-"
3537 "reviewed research on opioid safety <emphasis>were</emphasis> an aberration "
3538 "and then how you know that the doctors writing about vaccine safety are "
3539 "<emphasis>not</emphasis> an aberration."
3542 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3544 "I’m 100% certain that vaccinating is safe and effective, but I’m also at "
3545 "something of a loss to explain exactly, <emphasis>precisely,</emphasis> why "
3546 "I believe this, given all the corruption I know about and the many times the "
3547 "stamp of certainty has turned out to be a parochial lie told to further "
3548 "enrich the super rich."
3551 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3553 "Fake news — conspiracy theories, racist ideologies, scientific denialism — "
3554 "has always been with us. What’s changed today is not the mix of ideas in the "
3555 "public discourse but the popularity of the worst ideas in that mix. "
3556 "Conspiracy and denial have skyrocketed in lockstep with the growth of Big "
3557 "Inequality, which has also tracked the rise of Big Tech and Big Pharma and "
3558 "Big Wrestling and Big Car and Big Movie Theater and Big Everything Else."
3561 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3563 "No one can say for certain why this has happened, but the two dominant camps "
3564 "are idealism (the belief that the people who argue for these conspiracies "
3565 "have gotten better at explaining them, maybe with the help of machine-"
3566 "learning tools) or materialism (the ideas have become more attractive "
3567 "because of material conditions in the world)."
3570 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3572 "I’m a materialist. I’ve been exposed to the arguments of conspiracy "
3573 "theorists all my life, and I have not experienced any qualitative leap in "
3574 "the quality of those arguments."
3577 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3579 "The major difference is in the world, not the arguments. In a time where "
3580 "actual conspiracies are commonplace, conspiracy theories acquire a ring of "
3584 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3586 "We have always had disagreements about what’s true, but today, we have a "
3587 "disagreement over how we know whether something is true. This is an "
3588 "epistemological crisis, not a crisis over belief. It’s a crisis over the "
3589 "credibility of our truth-seeking exercises, from scientific journals (in an "
3590 "era where the biggest journal publishers have been caught producing pay-to-"
3591 "play journals for junk science) to regulations (in an era where regulators "
3592 "are routinely cycling in and out of business) to education (in an era where "
3593 "universities are dependent on corporate donations to keep their lights on)."
3596 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3598 "Targeting — surveillance capitalism — makes it easier to find people who are "
3599 "undergoing this epistemological crisis, but it doesn’t create the crisis. "
3600 "For that, you need to look to corruption."
3603 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3605 "And, conveniently enough, it’s corruption that allows surveillance "
3606 "capitalism to grow by dismantling monopoly protections, by permitting "
3607 "reckless collection and retention of personal data, by allowing ads to be "
3608 "targeted in secret, and by foreclosing on the possibility of going somewhere "
3609 "else where you might continue to enjoy your friends without subjecting "
3610 "yourself to commercial surveillance."
3613 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
3614 msgid "Tech is different"
3615 msgstr "Technologia jest czymś odmiennym"
3617 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3619 "I reject both iterations of technological exceptionalism. I reject the idea "
3620 "that tech is uniquely terrible and led by people who are greedier or worse "
3621 "than the leaders of other industries, and I reject the idea that tech is so "
3622 "good — or so intrinsically prone to concentration — that it can’t be blamed "
3623 "for its present-day monopolistic status."
3626 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3628 "I think tech is just another industry, albeit one that grew up in the "
3629 "absence of real monopoly constraints. It may have been first, but it isn’t "
3630 "the worst nor will it be the last."
3633 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3635 "But there’s one way in which I <emphasis>am</emphasis> a tech "
3636 "exceptionalist. I believe that online tools are the key to overcoming "
3637 "problems that are much more urgent than tech monopolization: climate change, "
3638 "inequality, misogyny, and discrimination on the basis of race, gender "
3639 "identity, and other factors. The internet is how we will recruit people to "
3640 "fight those fights, and how we will coordinate their labor. Tech is not a "
3641 "substitute for democratic accountability, the rule of law, fairness, or "
3642 "stability — but it’s a means to achieve these things."
3645 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3647 "The hard problem of our species is coordination. Everything from climate "
3648 "change to social change to running a business to making a family work can be "
3649 "viewed as a collective action problem."
3652 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3654 "The internet makes it easier than at any time before to find people who want "
3655 "to work on a project with you — hence the success of free and open-source "
3656 "software, crowdfunding, and racist terror groups — and easier than ever to "
3657 "coordinate the work you do."
3660 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3662 "The internet and the computers we connect to it also possess an exceptional "
3663 "quality: general-purposeness. The internet is designed to allow any two "
3664 "parties to communicate any data, using any protocol, without permission from "
3665 "anyone else. The only production design we have for computers is the general-"
3666 "purpose, <quote>Turing complete</quote> computer that can run every program "
3667 "we can express in symbolic logic."
3670 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3672 "This means that every time someone with a special communications need "
3673 "invests in infrastructure and techniques to make the internet faster, "
3674 "cheaper, and more robust, this benefit redounds to everyone else who is "
3675 "using the internet to communicate. And this also means that every time "
3676 "someone with a special computing need invests to make computers faster, "
3677 "cheaper, and more robust, every other computing application is a potential "
3678 "beneficiary of this work."
3681 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3683 "For these reasons, every type of communication is gradually absorbed into "
3684 "the internet, and every type of device — from airplanes to pacemakers — "
3685 "eventually becomes a computer in a fancy case."
3688 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3690 "While these considerations don’t preclude regulating networks and computers, "
3691 "they do call for gravitas and caution when doing so because changes to "
3692 "regulatory frameworks could ripple out to have unintended consequences in "
3693 "many, many other domains."
3696 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3698 "The upshot of this is that our best hope of solving the big coordination "
3699 "problems — climate change, inequality, etc. — is with free, fair, and open "
3700 "tech. Our best hope of keeping tech free, fair, and open is to exercise "
3701 "caution in how we regulate tech and to attend closely to the ways in which "
3702 "interventions to solve one problem might create problems in other domains."
3705 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
3706 msgid "Ownership of facts"
3707 msgstr "Własność faktów"
3709 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3711 "Big Tech has a funny relationship with information. When you’re generating "
3712 "information — anything from the location data streaming off your mobile "
3713 "device to the private messages you send to friends on a social network — it "
3714 "claims the rights to make unlimited use of that data."
3717 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3719 "But when you have the audacity to turn the tables — to use a tool that "
3720 "blocks ads or slurps your waiting updates out of a social network and puts "
3721 "them in another app that lets you set your own priorities and suggestions or "
3722 "crawls their system to allow you to start a rival business — they claim that "
3723 "you’re stealing from them."
3726 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3728 "The thing is, information is a very bad fit for any kind of private property "
3729 "regime. Property rights are useful for establishing markets that can lead to "
3730 "the effective development of fallow assets. These markets depend on clear "
3731 "titles to ensure that the things being bought and sold in them can, in fact, "
3732 "be bought and sold."
3735 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3737 "Information rarely has such a clear title. Take phone numbers: There’s "
3738 "clearly something going wrong when Facebook slurps up millions of users’ "
3739 "address books and uses the phone numbers it finds in them to plot out social "
3740 "graphs and fill in missing information about other users."
3743 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3745 "But the phone numbers Facebook nonconsensually acquires in this transaction "
3746 "are not the <quote>property</quote> of the users they’re taken from nor do "
3747 "they belong to the people whose phones ring when you dial those numbers. The "
3748 "numbers are mere integers, 10 digits in the U.S. and Canada, and they "
3749 "appear in millions of places, including somewhere deep in pi as well as "
3750 "numerous other contexts. Giving people ownership titles to integers is an "
3751 "obviously terrible idea."
3754 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3756 "Likewise for the facts that Facebook and other commercial surveillance "
3757 "operators acquire about us, like that we are the children of our parents or "
3758 "the parents to our children or that we had a conversation with someone else "
3759 "or went to a public place. These data points can’t be property in the sense "
3760 "that your house or your shirt is your property because the title to them is "
3761 "intrinsically muddy: Does your mom own the fact that she is your mother? Do "
3762 "you? Do both of you? What about your dad — does he own this fact too, or "
3763 "does he have to license the fact from you (or your mom or both of you) in "
3764 "order to use this fact? What about the hundreds or thousands of other people "
3765 "who know these facts?"
3768 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3770 "If you go to a Black Lives Matter demonstration, do the other demonstrators "
3771 "need your permission to post their photos from the event? The online fights "
3772 "over <ulink url=\"https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-take-photos-at-protests/"
3773 "\">when and how to post photos from demonstrations</ulink> reveal a nuanced, "
3774 "complex issue that cannot be easily hand-waved away by giving one party a "
3775 "property right that everyone else in the mix has to respect."
3778 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3780 "The fact that information isn’t a good fit with property and markets doesn’t "
3781 "mean that it’s not valuable. Babies aren’t property, but they’re inarguably "
3782 "valuable. In fact, we have a whole set of rules just for babies as well as a "
3783 "subset of those rules that apply to humans more generally. Someone who "
3784 "argues that babies won’t be truly valuable until they can be bought and sold "
3785 "like loaves of bread would be instantly and rightfully condemned as a "
3789 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3791 "It’s tempting to reach for the property hammer when Big Tech treats your "
3792 "information like a nail — not least because Big Tech are such prolific "
3793 "abusers of property hammers when it comes to <emphasis>their</emphasis> "
3794 "information. But this is a mistake. If we allow markets to dictate the use "
3795 "of our information, then we’ll find that we’re sellers in a buyers’ market "
3796 "where the Big Tech monopolies set a price for our data that is so low as to "
3797 "be insignificant or, more likely, set at a nonnegotiable price of zero in a "
3798 "click-through agreement that you don’t have the opportunity to modify."
3801 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3803 "Meanwhile, establishing property rights over information will create "
3804 "insurmountable barriers to independent data processing. Imagine that we "
3805 "require a license to be negotiated when a translated document is compared "
3806 "with its original, something Google has done and continues to do billions of "
3807 "times to train its automated language translation tools. Google can afford "
3808 "this, but independent third parties cannot. Google can staff a clearances "
3809 "department to negotiate one-time payments to the likes of the EU (one of the "
3810 "major repositories of translated documents) while independent watchdogs "
3811 "wanting to verify that the translations are well-prepared, or to root out "
3812 "bias in translations, will find themselves needing a staffed-up legal "
3813 "department and millions for licenses before they can even get started."
3816 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3818 "The same goes for things like search indexes of the web or photos of "
3819 "peoples’ houses, which have become contentious thanks to Google’s Street "
3820 "View project. Whatever problems may exist with Google’s photographing of "
3821 "street scenes, resolving them by letting people decide who can take pictures "
3822 "of the facades of their homes from a public street will surely create even "
3823 "worse ones. Think of how street photography is important for newsgathering — "
3824 "including informal newsgathering, like photographing abuses of authority — "
3825 "and how being able to document housing and street life are important for "
3826 "contesting eminent domain, advocating for social aid, reporting planning and "
3827 "zoning violations, documenting discriminatory and unequal living conditions, "
3831 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3833 "The ownership of facts is antithetical to many kinds of human progress. It’s "
3834 "hard to imagine a rule that limits Big Tech’s exploitation of our collective "
3835 "labors without inadvertently banning people from gathering data on online "
3836 "harassment or compiling indexes of changes in language or simply "
3837 "investigating how the platforms are shaping our discourse — all of which "
3838 "require scraping data that other people have created and subjecting it to "
3839 "scrutiny and analysis."
3842 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
3843 msgid "Persuasion works… slowly"
3844 msgstr "Przekonywanie działa… powoli"
3846 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3848 "The platforms may oversell their ability to persuade people, but obviously, "
3849 "persuasion works sometimes. Whether it’s the private realm that LGBTQ people "
3850 "used to recruit allies and normalize sexual diversity or the decadeslong "
3851 "project to convince people that markets are the only efficient way to solve "
3852 "complicated resource allocation problems, it’s clear that our societal "
3853 "attitudes <emphasis>can</emphasis> change."
3856 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3858 "The project of shifting societal attitudes is a game of inches and years. "
3859 "For centuries, svengalis have purported to be able to accelerate this "
3860 "process, but even the most brutal forms of propaganda have struggled to make "
3861 "permanent changes. Joseph Goebbels was able to subject Germans to daily, "
3862 "mandatory, hourslong radio broadcasts, to round up and torture and murder "
3863 "dissidents, and to seize full control over their children’s education while "
3864 "banning any literature, broadcasts, or films that did not comport with his "
3868 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3870 "Yet, after 12 years of terror, once the war ended, Nazi ideology was largely "
3871 "discredited in both East and West Germany, and a program of national truth "
3872 "and reconciliation was put in its place. Racism and authoritarianism were "
3873 "never fully abolished in Germany, but neither were the majority of Germans "
3874 "irrevocably convinced of Nazism — and the rise of racist authoritarianism in "
3875 "Germany today tells us that the liberal attitudes that replaced Nazism were "
3876 "no more permanent than Nazism itself."
3879 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3881 "Racism and authoritarianism have also always been with us. Anyone who’s "
3882 "reviewed the kind of messages and arguments that racists put forward today "
3883 "would be hard-pressed to say that they have gotten better at presenting "
3884 "their ideas. The same pseudoscience, appeals to fear, and circular logic "
3885 "that racists presented in the 1980s, when the cause of white supremacy was "
3886 "on the wane, are to be found in the communications of leading white "
3887 "nationalists today."
3890 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3892 "If racists haven’t gotten more convincing in the past decade, then how is it "
3893 "that more people were convinced to be openly racist at that time? I believe "
3894 "that the answer lies in the material world, not the world of ideas. The "
3895 "ideas haven’t gotten more convincing, but people have become more afraid. "
3896 "Afraid that the state can’t be trusted to act as an honest broker in life-or-"
3897 "death decisions, from those regarding the management of the economy to the "
3898 "regulation of painkillers to the rules for handling private information. "
3899 "Afraid that the world has become a game of musical chairs in which the "
3900 "chairs are being taken away at a never-before-seen rate. Afraid that justice "
3901 "for others will come at their expense. Monopolism isn’t the cause of these "
3902 "fears, but the inequality and material desperation and policy malpractice "
3903 "that monopolism contributes to is a significant contributor to these "
3904 "conditions. Inequality creates the conditions for both conspiracies and "
3905 "violent racist ideologies, and then surveillance capitalism lets "
3906 "opportunists target the fearful and the conspiracy-minded."
3909 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
3910 msgid "Paying won’t help"
3911 msgstr "Płacenie nie pomoże"
3913 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3915 "As the old saw goes, <quote>If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the "
3919 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3921 "It’s a commonplace belief today that the advent of free, ad-supported media "
3922 "was the original sin of surveillance capitalism. The reasoning is that the "
3923 "companies that charged for access couldn’t <quote>compete with free</quote> "
3924 "and so they were driven out of business. Their ad-supported competitors, "
3925 "meanwhile, declared open season on their users’ data in a bid to improve "
3926 "their ad targeting and make more money and then resorted to the most "
3927 "sensationalist tactics to generate clicks on those ads. If only we’d pay for "
3928 "media again, we’d have a better, more responsible, more sober discourse that "
3929 "would be better for democracy."
3932 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3934 "But the degradation of news products long precedes the advent of ad-"
3935 "supported online news. Long before newspapers were online, lax antitrust "
3936 "enforcement had opened the door for unprecedented waves of consolidation and "
3937 "roll-ups in newsrooms. Rival newspapers were merged, reporters and ad sales "
3938 "staff were laid off, physical plants were sold and leased back, leaving the "
3939 "companies loaded up with debt through leveraged buyouts and subsequent "
3940 "profit-taking by the new owners. In other words, it wasn’t merely shifts in "
3941 "the classified advertising market, which was long held to be the primary "
3942 "driver in the decline of the traditional newsroom, that made news companies "
3943 "unable to adapt to the internet — it was monopolism."
3946 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3948 "Then, as news companies <emphasis>did</emphasis> come online, the ad "
3949 "revenues they commanded dropped even as the number of internet users (and "
3950 "thus potential online readers) increased. That shift was a function of "
3951 "consolidation in the ad sales market, with Google and Facebook emerging as "
3952 "duopolists who made more money every year from advertising while paying less "
3953 "and less of it to the publishers whose work the ads appeared alongside. "
3954 "Monopolism created a buyer’s market for ad inventory with Facebook and "
3955 "Google acting as gatekeepers."
3958 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3960 "Paid services continue to exist alongside free ones, and often it is these "
3961 "paid services — anxious to prevent people from bypassing their paywalls or "
3962 "sharing paid media with freeloaders — that exert the most control over their "
3963 "customers. Apple’s iTunes and App Stores are paid services, but to maximize "
3964 "their profitability, Apple has to lock its platforms so that third parties "
3965 "can’t make compatible software without permission. These locks allow the "
3966 "company to exercise both editorial control (enabling it to exclude <ulink "
3967 "url=\"https://ncac.org/news/blog/does-apples-strict-app-store-content-policy-"
3968 "limit-freedom-of-expression\">controversial political material</ulink>) and "
3969 "technological control, including control over who can repair the devices it "
3970 "makes. If we’re worried that ad-supported products deprive people of their "
3971 "right to self-determination by using persuasion techniques to nudge their "
3972 "purchase decisions a few degrees in one direction or the other, then the "
3973 "near-total control a single company holds over the decision of who gets to "
3974 "sell you software, parts, and service for your iPhone should have us very "
3978 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3980 "We shouldn’t just be concerned about payment and control: The idea that "
3981 "paying will improve discourse is also dangerously wrong. The poor success "
3982 "rate of targeted advertising means that the platforms have to incentivize "
3983 "you to <quote>engage</quote> with posts at extremely high levels to generate "
3984 "enough pageviews to safeguard their profits. As discussed earlier, to "
3985 "increase engagement, platforms like Facebook use machine learning to guess "
3986 "which messages will be most inflammatory and make a point of shoving those "
3987 "into your eyeballs at every turn so that you will hate-click and argue with "
3991 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
3993 "Perhaps paying would fix this, the reasoning goes. If platforms could be "
3994 "economically viable even if you stopped clicking on them once your "
3995 "intellectual and social curiosity had been slaked, then they would have no "
3996 "reason to algorithmically enrage you to get more clicks out of you, right?"
3999 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4001 "There may be something to that argument, but it still ignores the wider "
4002 "economic and political context of the platforms and the world that allowed "
4003 "them to grow so dominant."
4006 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4008 "Platforms are world-spanning and all-encompassing because they are "
4009 "monopolies, and they are monopolies because we have gutted our most "
4010 "important and reliable anti-monopoly rules. Antitrust was neutered as a key "
4011 "part of the project to make the wealthy wealthier, and that project has "
4012 "worked. The vast majority of people on Earth have a negative net worth, and "
4013 "even the dwindling middle class is in a precarious state, undersaved for "
4014 "retirement, underinsured for medical disasters, and undersecured against "
4015 "climate and technology shocks."
4018 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4020 "In this wildly unequal world, paying doesn’t improve the discourse; it "
4021 "simply prices discourse out of the range of the majority of people. Paying "
4022 "for the product is dandy, if you can afford it."
4025 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4027 "If you think today’s filter bubbles are a problem for our discourse, imagine "
4028 "what they’d be like if rich people inhabited free-flowing Athenian "
4029 "marketplaces of ideas where you have to pay for admission while everyone "
4030 "else lives in online spaces that are subsidized by wealthy benefactors who "
4031 "relish the chance to establish conversational spaces where the <quote>house "
4032 "rules</quote> forbid questioning the status quo. That is, imagine if the "
4033 "rich seceded from Facebook, and then, instead of running ads that made money "
4034 "for shareholders, Facebook became a billionaire’s vanity project that also "
4035 "happened to ensure that nobody talked about whether it was fair that only "
4036 "billionaires could afford to hang out in the rarified corners of the "
4040 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4042 "Behind the idea of paying for access is a belief that free markets will "
4043 "address Big Tech’s dysfunction. After all, to the extent that people have a "
4044 "view of surveillance at all, it is generally an unfavorable one, and the "
4045 "longer and more thoroughly one is surveilled, the less one tends to like it. "
4046 "Same goes for lock-in: If HP’s ink or Apple’s App Store were really "
4047 "obviously fantastic, they wouldn’t need technical measures to prevent users "
4048 "from choosing a rival’s product. The only reason these technical "
4049 "countermeasures exist is that the companies don’t believe their customers "
4050 "would <emphasis>voluntarily</emphasis> submit to their terms, and they want "
4051 "to deprive them of the choice to take their business elsewhere."
4054 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4056 "Advocates for markets laud their ability to aggregate the diffused knowledge "
4057 "of buyers and sellers across a whole society through demand signals, price "
4058 "signals, and so on. The argument for surveillance capitalism being a "
4059 "<quote>rogue capitalism</quote> is that machine-learning-driven persuasion "
4060 "techniques distort decision-making by consumers, leading to incorrect "
4061 "signals — consumers don’t buy what they prefer, they buy what they’re "
4062 "tricked into preferring. It follows that the monopolistic practices of lock-"
4063 "in, which do far more to constrain consumers’ free choices, are even more of "
4064 "a <quote>rogue capitalism.</quote>"
4067 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4069 "The profitability of any business is constrained by the possibility that its "
4070 "customers will take their business elsewhere. Both surveillance and lock-in "
4071 "are anti-features that no customer wants. But monopolies can capture their "
4072 "regulators, crush their competitors, insert themselves into their customers’ "
4073 "lives, and corral people into <quote>choosing</quote> their services "
4074 "regardless of whether they want them — it’s fine to be terrible when there "
4075 "is no alternative."
4078 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4080 "Ultimately, surveillance and lock-in are both simply business strategies "
4081 "that monopolists can choose. Surveillance companies like Google are "
4082 "perfectly capable of deploying lock-in technologies — just look at the "
4083 "onerous Android licensing terms that require device-makers to bundle in "
4084 "Google’s suite of applications. And lock-in companies like Apple are "
4085 "perfectly capable of subjecting their users to surveillance if it means "
4086 "keeping the Chinese government happy and preserving ongoing access to "
4087 "Chinese markets. Monopolies may be made up of good, ethical people, but as "
4088 "institutions, they are not your friend — they will do whatever they can get "
4089 "away with to maximize their profits, and the more monopolistic they are, the "
4090 "more they <emphasis>can</emphasis> get away with."
4093 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
4094 msgid "An <quote>ecology</quote> moment for trustbusting"
4095 msgstr "<quote> ekologia</quote> chwila na zerwanie zaufania"
4097 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4099 "If we’re going to break Big Tech’s death grip on our digital lives, we’re "
4100 "going to have to fight monopolies. That may sound pretty mundane and old-"
4101 "fashioned, something out of the New Deal era, while ending the use of "
4102 "automated behavioral modification feels like the plotline of a really cool "
4106 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4108 "Meanwhile, breaking up monopolies is something we seem to have forgotten how "
4109 "to do. There is a bipartisan, trans-Atlantic consensus that breaking up "
4110 "companies is a fool’s errand at best — liable to mire your federal "
4111 "prosecutors in decades of litigation — and counterproductive at worst, "
4112 "eroding the <quote>consumer benefits</quote> of large companies with massive "
4113 "efficiencies of scale."
4116 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4118 "But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing "
4119 "robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies’ all-powerful grip "
4120 "on our society. The trustbusting era could not begin until we found the "
4121 "political will — until the people convinced politicians they’d have their "
4122 "backs when they went up against the richest, most powerful men in the world."
4125 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4126 msgid "Could we find that political will again?"
4127 msgstr "Czy moglibyśmy ponownie znaleźć tę wolę polityczną?"
4129 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4131 "Copyright scholar James Boyle has described how the term <quote>ecology</"
4132 "quote> marked a turning point in environmental activism. Prior to the "
4133 "adoption of this term, people who wanted to preserve whale populations "
4134 "didn’t necessarily see themselves as fighting the same battle as people who "
4135 "wanted to protect the ozone layer or fight freshwater pollution or beat back "
4136 "smog or acid rain."
4139 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4141 "But the term <quote>ecology</quote> welded these disparate causes together "
4142 "into a single movement, and the members of this movement found solidarity "
4143 "with one another. The people who cared about smog signed petitions "
4144 "circulated by the people who wanted to end whaling, and the anti-whalers "
4145 "marched alongside the people demanding action on acid rain. This uniting "
4146 "behind a common cause completely changed the dynamics of environmentalism, "
4147 "setting the stage for today’s climate activism and the sense that preserving "
4148 "the habitability of the planet Earth is a shared duty among all people."
4151 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4153 "I believe we are on the verge of a new <quote>ecology</quote> moment "
4154 "dedicated to combating monopolies. After all, tech isn’t the only "
4155 "concentrated industry nor is it even the <emphasis>most</emphasis> "
4156 "concentrated of industries."
4159 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4161 "You can find partisans for trustbusting in every sector of the economy. "
4162 "Everywhere you look, you can find people who’ve been wronged by monopolists "
4163 "who’ve trashed their finances, their health, their privacy, their "
4164 "educations, and the lives of people they love. Those people have the same "
4165 "cause as the people who want to break up Big Tech and the same enemies. When "
4166 "most of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a very few, it follows that "
4167 "nearly every large company will have overlapping shareholders."
4170 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4172 "That’s the good news: With a little bit of work and a little bit of "
4173 "coalition building, we have more than enough political will to break up Big "
4174 "Tech and every other concentrated industry besides. First we take Facebook, "
4175 "then we take AT&T/WarnerMedia."
4178 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4180 "But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech "
4181 "<emphasis>instead</emphasis> of breaking up the big companies also "
4182 "forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later."
4185 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4187 "Big Tech’s concentration currently means that their inaction on harassment, "
4188 "for example, leaves users with an impossible choice: absent themselves from "
4189 "public discourse by, say, quitting Twitter or endure vile, constant abuse. "
4190 "Big Tech’s over-collection and over-retention of data results in horrific "
4191 "identity theft. And their inaction on extremist recruitment means that white "
4192 "supremacists who livestream their shooting rampages can reach an audience of "
4193 "billions. The combination of tech concentration and media concentration "
4194 "means that artists’ incomes are falling even as the revenue generated by "
4195 "their creations are increasing."
4198 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4200 "Yet governments confronting all of these problems all inevitably converge on "
4201 "the same solution: deputize the Big Tech giants to police their users and "
4202 "render them liable for their users’ bad actions. The drive to force Big Tech "
4203 "to use automated filters to block everything from copyright infringement to "
4204 "sex-trafficking to violent extremism means that tech companies will have to "
4205 "allocate hundreds of millions to run these compliance systems."
4208 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4210 "These rules — the EU’s new Directive on Copyright, Australia’s new terror "
4211 "regulation, America’s FOSTA/SESTA sex-trafficking law and more — are not "
4212 "just death warrants for small, upstart competitors that might challenge Big "
4213 "Tech’s dominance but who lack the deep pockets of established incumbents to "
4214 "pay for all these automated systems. Worse still, these rules put a floor "
4215 "under how small we can hope to make Big Tech."
4218 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4220 "That’s because any move to break up Big Tech and cut it down to size will "
4221 "have to cope with the hard limit of not making these companies so small that "
4222 "they can no longer afford to perform these duties — and it’s "
4223 "<emphasis>expensive</emphasis> to invest in those automated filters and "
4224 "outsource content moderation. It’s already going to be hard to unwind these "
4225 "deeply concentrated, chimeric behemoths that have been welded together in "
4226 "the pursuit of monopoly profits. Doing so while simultaneously finding some "
4227 "way to fill the regulatory void that will be left behind if these self-"
4228 "policing rulers were forced to suddenly abdicate will be much, much harder."
4231 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4233 "Allowing the platforms to grow to their present size has given them a "
4234 "dominance that is nearly insurmountable — deputizing them with public duties "
4235 "to redress the pathologies created by their size makes it virtually "
4236 "impossible to reduce that size. Lather, rinse, repeat: If the platforms "
4237 "don’t get smaller, they will get larger, and as they get larger, they will "
4238 "create more problems, which will give rise to more public duties for the "
4239 "companies, which will make them bigger still."
4242 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4244 "We can work to fix the internet by breaking up Big Tech and depriving them "
4245 "of monopoly profits, or we can work to fix Big Tech by making them spend "
4246 "their monopoly profits on governance. But we can’t do both. We have to "
4247 "choose between a vibrant, open internet or a dominated, monopolized internet "
4248 "commanded by Big Tech giants that we struggle with constantly to get them to "
4249 "behave themselves."
4252 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
4253 msgid "Make Big Tech small again"
4254 msgstr "Spraw, aby 'Big Tech' stała się ponownie 'małą' technologią"
4256 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4258 "Trustbusting is hard. Breaking big companies into smaller ones is expensive "
4259 "and time-consuming. So time-consuming that by the time you’re done, the "
4260 "world has often moved on and rendered years of litigation irrelevant. From "
4261 "1969 to 1982, the U.S. government pursued an antitrust case against IBM over "
4262 "its dominance of mainframe computing — but the case collapsed in 1982 "
4263 "because mainframes were being speedily replaced by PCs."
4266 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
4268 "A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to "
4269 "enforce the law as it was written."
4272 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4274 "It’s far easier to prevent concentration than to fix it, and reinstating the "
4275 "traditional contours of U.S. antitrust enforcement will, at the very least, "
4276 "prevent further concentration. That means bans on mergers between large "
4277 "companies, on big companies acquiring nascent competitors, and on platform "
4278 "companies competing directly with the companies that rely on the platforms."
4281 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4283 "These powers are all in the plain language of U.S. antitrust laws, so in "
4284 "theory, a future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general "
4285 "to enforce the law as it was written. But after decades of judicial "
4286 "<quote>education</quote> in the benefits of monopolies, after multiple "
4287 "administrations that have packed the federal courts with lifetime-appointed "
4288 "monopoly cheerleaders, it’s not clear that mere administrative action would "
4292 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4294 "If the courts frustrate the Justice Department and the president, the next "
4295 "stop would be Congress, which could eliminate any doubt about how antitrust "
4296 "law should be enforced in the U.S. by passing new laws that boil down to "
4297 "saying, <quote>Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert "
4298 "Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, <emphasis>fuck that "
4299 "guy</emphasis>.</quote> In other words, the problem with monopolies is "
4300 "<emphasis>monopolism</emphasis> — the concentration of power into too few "
4301 "hands, which erodes our right to self-determination. If there is a monopoly, "
4302 "the law wants it gone, period. Sure, get rid of monopolies that create "
4303 "<quote>consumer harm</quote> in the form of higher prices, but also, "
4304 "<emphasis>get rid of other monopolies, too</emphasis>."
4307 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4309 "But this only prevents things from getting worse. To help them get better, "
4310 "we will have to build coalitions with other activists in the anti-monopoly "
4311 "ecology movement — a pluralism movement or a self-determination movement — "
4312 "and target existing monopolies in every industry for breakup and structural "
4313 "separation rules that prevent, for example, the giant eyewear monopolist "
4314 "Luxottica from dominating both the sale and the manufacture of spectacles."
4317 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4319 "In an important sense, it doesn’t matter which industry the breakups begin "
4320 "in. Once they start, shareholders in <emphasis>every</emphasis> industry "
4321 "will start to eye their investments in monopolists skeptically. As "
4322 "trustbusters ride into town and start making lives miserable for "
4323 "monopolists, the debate around every corporate boardroom’s table will shift. "
4324 "People within corporations who’ve always felt uneasy about monopolism will "
4325 "gain a powerful new argument to fend off their evil rivals in the corporate "
4326 "hierarchy: <quote>If we do it my way, we make less money; if we do it your "
4327 "way, a judge will fine us billions and expose us to ridicule and public "
4328 "disapprobation. So even though I get that it would be really cool to do that "
4329 "merger, lock out that competitor, or buy that little company and kill it "
4330 "before it can threaten it, we really shouldn’t — not if we don’t want to get "
4331 "tied to the DOJ’s bumper and get dragged up and down Trustbuster Road for "
4332 "the next 10 years.</quote>"
4335 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
4339 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4341 "Fixing Big Tech will require a lot of iteration. As cyber lawyer Lawrence "
4342 "Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, <emphasis>Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace</"
4343 "emphasis>, our lives are regulated by four forces: law (what’s legal), code "
4344 "(what’s technologically possible), norms (what’s socially acceptable), and "
4345 "markets (what’s profitable)."
4348 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4350 "If you could wave a wand and get Congress to pass a law that re-fanged the "
4351 "Sherman Act tomorrow, you could use the impending breakups to convince "
4352 "venture capitalists to fund competitors to Facebook, Google, Twitter, and "
4353 "Apple that would be waiting in the wings after they were cut down to size."
4356 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4358 "But getting Congress to act will require a massive normative shift, a mass "
4359 "movement of people who care about monopolies — and pulling them apart."
4362 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4364 "Getting people to care about monopolies will take technological "
4365 "interventions that help them to see what a world free from Big Tech might "
4366 "look like. Imagine if someone could make a beloved (but unauthorized) third-"
4367 "party Facebook or Twitter client that dampens the anxiety-producing "
4368 "algorithmic drumbeat and still lets you talk to your friends without being "
4369 "spied upon — something that made social media more sociable and less toxic. "
4370 "Now imagine that it gets shut down in a brutal legal battle. It’s always "
4371 "easier to convince people that something must be done to save a thing they "
4372 "love than it is to excite them about something that doesn’t even exist yet."
4375 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4377 "Neither tech nor law nor code nor markets are sufficient to reform Big Tech. "
4378 "But a profitable competitor to Big Tech could bankroll a legislative push; "
4379 "legal reform can embolden a toolsmith to make a better tool; the tool can "
4380 "create customers for a potential business who value the benefits of the "
4381 "internet but want them delivered without Big Tech; and that business can get "
4382 "funded and divert some of its profits to legal reform. 20 GOTO 10 (or "
4383 "lather, rinse, repeat). Do it again, but this time, get farther! After all, "
4384 "this time you’re starting with weaker Big Tech adversaries, a constituency "
4385 "that understands things can be better, Big Tech rivals who’ll help ensure "
4386 "their own future by bankrolling reform, and code that other programmers can "
4387 "build on to weaken Big Tech even further."
4390 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4392 "The surveillance capitalism hypothesis — that Big Tech’s products really "
4393 "work as well as they say they do and that’s why everything is so screwed up "
4394 "— is way too easy on surveillance and even easier on capitalism. Companies "
4395 "spy because they believe their own BS, and companies spy because governments "
4396 "let them, and companies spy because any advantage from spying is so short-"
4397 "lived and minor that they have to do more and more of it just to stay in "
4401 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4403 "As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism "
4404 "that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a "
4405 "form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to "
4406 "inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason "
4407 "companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to "
4408 "both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall "
4409 "to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not "
4410 "piss off the monopolists."
4413 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4415 "Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule "
4416 "begets surveillance. Surveillance isn’t bad because it lets people "
4417 "manipulate us. It’s bad because it crushes our ability to be our authentic "
4418 "selves — and because it lets the rich and powerful figure out who might be "
4419 "thinking of building guillotines and what dirt they can use to discredit "
4420 "those embryonic guillotine-builders before they can even get to the "
4424 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
4425 msgid "Up and through"
4426 msgstr "W górę i na wylot"
4428 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4430 "With all the problems of Big Tech, it’s tempting to imagine solving the "
4431 "problem by returning to a world without tech at all. Resist that temptation."
4434 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4436 "The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is "
4437 "not reliant upon high tech, it will be because civilization has fallen. Big "
4438 "Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the "
4439 "proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the "
4440 "existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it’s up to us to seize "
4441 "the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under "
4442 "democratic, accountable control."
4445 #. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
4447 "I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not "
4448 "in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize "
4449 "because it has <quote>economies of scale</quote> or some other nebulous "
4450 "feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right "
4451 "matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe — and "
4452 "doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our "
4453 "civilization, our species, and our planet."
4457 #~| msgid "Doctorow"
4458 #~ msgid "Cory Doctorow"
4459 #~ msgstr "Doctorow"