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   1 <html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>Jak zniszczyć kapitalizm oparty na inwigilacyjnych systemach nadzoru</title><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.79.1"><meta name="description" content="Our devices and services gather most of the data that the NSA mines for its surveillance project. We pay for these devices and the services they connect to, and then we painstakingly perform the data-entry tasks associated with logging facts about our lives, opinions, and preferences. Thanks to Big Tech, Surveillance capitalism is everywhere. This is not because it is really good at manipulating our behaviour, or the rogue abuse of corporate power. It is the result of unchecked monopolism and the abusive behavior it abets. It is the system working as intended and expected. Cory Doctorow has written an extended critique of Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, with a non-magical analysis of the problem leading to a different proposal for a solution."><style type="text/css">
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   9      }</style></head><body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><div lang="en" class="article"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="index"></a>Jak zniszczyć kapitalizm oparty na inwigilacyjnych systemach nadzoru</h2></div><div><div class="authorgroup"><div class="author"><h3 class="author"><span class="firstname">Cory</span> <span class="surname">Doctorow</span></h3></div></div></div><div><p class="copyright">Copyright © 2020 Cory Doctorow</p></div><div><p class="copyright">Copyright © 2020 Petter Reinholdtsen</p></div><div><div class="legalnotice"><a name="idm18"></a><p>
  10       Jak zniszczyć kapitalizm oparty na inwigilacyjnych systemach nadzoru Autor:
  11 Cory Doctorow.
  12     </p><p>
  13       Wydawca: Petter Reinholdtsen.
  14     </p><p>
  15       ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (oprawa twarda)
  16     </p><p>
  17       ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (oprawa papierowa)
  18     </p><p>
  19       ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)
  20     </p><p>
  21       Ta książka jest dostępna w sprzedaży na <a class="ulink" href="https://www.lulu.com/" target="_top">https://www.lulu.com/</a>.
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  28       Ta książka jest wydana na licencji Creative Commons. Licencja ta pozwala na
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  32     </p></div></div><div><div class="abstract"><p class="title"><b>Abstract</b></p><p>
  33       Our devices and services gather most of the data that the NSA mines for its
  34 surveillance project. We pay for these devices and the services they connect
  35 to, and then we painstakingly perform the data-entry tasks associated with
  36 logging facts about our lives, opinions, and preferences.
  37     </p><p>
  38       Thanks to Big Tech, Surveillance capitalism is everywhere.  This is not
  39 because it is really good at manipulating our behaviour, or the rogue abuse
  40 of corporate power.  It is the result of unchecked monopolism and the
  41 abusive behavior it abets.  It is the system working as intended and
  42 expected.  Cory Doctorow has written an extended critique of Shoshana
  43 Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at
  44 the New Frontier of Power, with a non-magical analysis of the problem
  45 leading to a different proposal for a solution.
  46     </p></div></div></div><hr></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl class="toc"><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#the-net-of-a-thousand-lies">Sieć tysięcy kłamstw</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#digital-rights-activism-a-quarter-century-on">Aktywizm praw cyfrowych, krótka historia 25 lat działalności</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-exceptionalism-then-and-now">Wyjątkowość Technologii, dawniej i obecnie</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dont-believe-the-hype">Nie wierz 'szumom' medialnym</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-persuasion">Co to jest przekonywanie?</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#segmenting">1. Segmentacja</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#deception">2. Podstęp</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#domination">3. Dominacja</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#bypassing-our-rational-faculties">4. Omijanie naszych racjonalnych zdolności</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#if-data-is-the-new-oil-then-surveillance-capitalisms-engine-has-a-leak">Jeśli dane są nowym paliwem, to silnik kapitalistycznych systemów nadzoru ma
  47 wyciek</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-facebook">Co to jest Facebook?</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopoly-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Monopol i prawo do czasu przyszłego</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#search-order-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Porządek wyszukiwania i prawo do czasu przyszłego</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopolists-can-afford-sleeping-pills-for-watchdogs">Monopoliści mogą sobie pozwolić na proszki nasenne dla strażników</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#privacy-and-monopoly">Prywatność a monopol</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ronald-reagan-pioneer-of-tech-monopolism">Ronald Reagan, pionier monopolizmu technologicznego</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers">Sterowanie za pomocą wycieraczek przedniej szyby</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#surveillance-still-matters">Systemy nadzoru mają ciągle znaczenie</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dignity-and-sanctuary">Godność i sanktuarium</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#afflicting-the-afflicted">Dręczenie udręczonych</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#any-data-you-collect-and-retain-will-eventually-leak">Jakiekolwiek dane, które zbierasz i przetwarzasz, kiedyś w końcu wyciekną</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#critical-tech-exceptionalism-is-still-tech-exceptionalism">Przełomowa wyjątkowość technologiczna jest nadal technologiczną
  48 wyjątkowością</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#how-monopolies-not-mind-control-drive-surveillance-capitalism-the-snapchat-story">Jak monopole, a nie kontrola umysłu, sterują kapitalizmen opartym na
  49 systemach nadzoru: historia Snapchat</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#a-monopoly-over-your-friends">Monopol sprawowany nad twoimi przyjaciółmi</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#fake-news-is-an-epistemological-crisis">Fałszywe wiadomości to oznaka kryzysu epistemologicznego</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-is-different">Technologia jest czymś odmiennym</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ownership-of-facts">Własność faktów</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#persuasion-works-slowly">Przekonywanie działa… powoli</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#paying-wont-help">Płacenie nie pomoże</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#an-ecology-moment-for-trustbusting"><span class="quote">“<span class="quote"> ekologia</span>”</span> chwila na zerwanie zaufania</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#make-big-tech-small-again">Spraw, aby 'Big Tech' stała się ponownie 'małą' technologią</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#goto-10">20 GOTO 10</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#up-and-through">W górę i na wylot</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="the-net-of-a-thousand-lies"></a>Sieć tysięcy kłamstw</h2></div></div></div><p>
  50     Najbardziej zaskakującą kwestią w dziedzinie powtórnych narodzin płaskich
  51 Ziemian w 21 wieku jest to,  jak szeroko rozpowszechnione są przeciwko nim
  52 dowody. Można teraz zrozumieć, jak przed wiekami ludzie, którzy nigdy nie
  53 mieli okazji zobaczyć Ziemi z orbity ziemskiej, mogli dojść do
  54 zdroworozsądkowego przekonania, że Ziemia - wyglądająca na płaską - jest
  55 faktycznie, płaska.
  56   </p><p>
  57     Lecz dzisiaj, gdy szkoły podstawowe rutynowo podczepiają do balonów kamery
  58 GoPro i umieszczają je na tyle wysoko, aby sfotografować krzywą Ziemi — nie
  59 mówiąc już o niezrównanie wyjątkowym widoku zakrzywionej Ziemi z okna
  60 samolotu — trzeba naprawdę heroicznego wysiłku, aby uwierzyć, że Ziemia jest
  61 płaska.
  62   </p><p>
  63     Podobnie jest z eugeniką i białym nacjonalizmem: w epoce, w której można
  64 stać się obliczeniowym punktem danych genomicznych, poprzez pobranie wymazu
  65 z policzka, i przesłanie go — za pomocą poczty elektronicznej — do firmy
  66 sekwencjonujoącej geny, wraz ze skromną sumą pieniędzy, nigdy nie było
  67 łatwiej zaprzeczyć twierdzeniom wysuwanym podczas <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">naukowego wyścigu
  68 po sukces</span>”</span>.
  69   </p><p>
  70     Żyjemy w złotej epoce, zarówno łatwo dostępnych faktów, jak i zaprzeczenia
  71 tym faktom. Okropne idee, które pozostawały na marginesie przez
  72 dziesięciolecia, a nawet stulecia, z dnia na dzień weszły do głównego nurtu.
  73   </p><p>
  74     Kiedy niejasny pomysł zyskuje na popularności, istnieją tylko dwie rzeczy,
  75 które mogą wyjaśnić jego przewagę: albo osoba wyrażająca ten pomysł znacznie
  76 lepiej radzi sobie z przedstawieniem swojej racji, albo twierdzenie staje
  77 się trudniejsze do zaprzeczenia w obliczu rosnących dowodów. Innymi słowy,
  78 jeśli chcemy, aby ludzie poważnie podchodzili do zmian klimatycznych, możemy
  79 skłonić grupę Grety Thunberg do wyrażenia wymownych, namiętnych argumentów w
  80 sposób publiczny, przez co zdobędzie ona nasze serca i umysły, lub możemy
  81 poczekać na powódź, ogień, palące się słońce i pandemie, aby przemówiła za
  82 nami. W praktyce prawdopodobnie będziemy musieli zrobić jedno i drugie: im
  83 więcej będziemy gotować, palić, topić i marnować, tym łatwiej będzie Grecie
  84 Thunberg nas przekonać.
  85   </p><p>
  86     Argumenty za absurdalnymi wierzeniami w oparciu o teorie spiskowe, takie jak
  87 teoria antyszczepionkowa, teoria negująca zmiany klimatu, teoria o istnieniu
  88 płaskiej Ziemi i teoria eugeniczna, wcale nie są lepsze niż w pokoleniu
  89 wcześniejszym. W rzeczywistości, są gorsze, ponieważ są przedstawiane
  90 ludziom, którzy mają przynajmniej podstawową świadomość faktów obalających
  91 te teorie.
  92   </p><p>
  93     Anti-vax has been around since the first vaccines, but the early
  94 anti-vaxxers were pitching people who were less equipped to understand even
  95 the most basic ideas from microbiology, and moreover, those people had not
  96 witnessed the extermination of mass-murdering diseases like polio, smallpox,
  97 and measles. Today’s anti-vaxxers are no more eloquent than their forebears,
  98 and they have a much harder job.
  99   </p><p>
 100     So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding on the
 101 basis of superior arguments?
 102   </p><p>
 103     Some people think so. Today, there is a widespread belief that machine
 104 learning and commercial surveillance can turn even the most fumble-tongued
 105 conspiracy theorist into a svengali who can warp your perceptions and win
 106 your belief by locating vulnerable people and then pitching them with
 107 A.I.-refined arguments that bypass their rational faculties and turn
 108 everyday people into flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, or even Nazis. When the
 109 RAND Corporation <a class="ulink" href="https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf" target="_top">blames
 110 Facebook for <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">radicalization</span>”</span></a> and when Facebook’s role
 111 in spreading coronavirus misinformation is <a class="ulink" href="https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_threat_health/" target="_top">blamed on
 112 its algorithm</a>, the implicit message is that machine learning and
 113 surveillance are causing the changes in our consensus about what’s true.
 114   </p><p>
 115     After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories
 116 like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread followings,
 117 <span class="emphasis"><em>something</em></span> must be afoot.
 118   </p><p>
 119     But what if there’s another explanation? What if it’s the material
 120 circumstances, and not the arguments, that are making the difference for
 121 these conspiracy pitchmen? What if the trauma of living through
 122 <span class="emphasis"><em>real conspiracies</em></span> all around us — conspiracies among
 123 wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts
 124 and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as
 125 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">corruption</span>”</span>) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy
 126 theories?
 127   </p><p>
 128     If it’s trauma and not contagion — material conditions and not ideology —
 129 that is making the difference today and enabling a rise of repulsive
 130 misinformation in the face of easily observed facts, that doesn’t mean our
 131 computer networks are blameless. They’re still doing the heavy work of
 132 locating vulnerable people and guiding them through a series of
 133 ever-more-extreme ideas and communities.
 134   </p><p>
 135     Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses
 136 real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics <a class="ulink" href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html" target="_top">kicked off by vaccine
 137 denial</a> to genocides <a class="ulink" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html" target="_top">kicked
 138 off by racist conspiracies</a> to planetary meltdown caused by
 139 denial-inspired climate inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to
 140 put the fires out — to figure out how to help people see the truth of the
 141 world through the conspiracies they’ve been confused by.
 142   </p><p>
 143     But firefighting is reactive. We need fire
 144 <span class="emphasis"><em>prevention</em></span>. We need to strike at the traumatic material
 145 conditions that make people vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here,
 146 too, tech has a role to play.
 147   </p><p>
 148     There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s <a class="ulink" href="https://edri.org/tag/terreg/" target="_top">Terrorist Content Regulation</a>,
 149 which requires platforms to police and remove <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">extremist</span>”</span>
 150 content, to the U.S. proposals to <a class="ulink" href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution" target="_top">force
 151 tech companies to spy on their users</a> and hold them liable <a class="ulink" href="https://www.natlawreview.com/article/repeal-cda-section-230" target="_top">for their
 152 users’ bad speech</a>, there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies
 153 to solve the problems they created.
 154   </p><p>
 155     There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these
 156 solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance
 157 over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a
 158 more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The
 159 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">solutions</span>”</span> on the table today <span class="emphasis"><em>require</em></span> Big
 160 Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to
 161 implement the systems these laws demand.
 162   </p><p>
 163     Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to
 164 get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to
 165 figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our
 166 internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big
 167 Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose.
 168   </p><p>
 169     I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the
 170 Internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism.
 171   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="digital-rights-activism-a-quarter-century-on"></a>Aktywizm praw cyfrowych, krótka historia 25 lat działalności</h2></div></div></div><p>
 172     Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic
 173 Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free Software Foundation
 174 launched in 1985. For most of the history of the movement, the most
 175 prominent criticism leveled against it was that it was irrelevant: The real
 176 activist causes were real-world causes (think of the skepticism when <a class="ulink" href="https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/finland-legal-right-to-broadband-for-all-citizens/#:~:text=Global%20Legal%20Monitor,-Home%20%7C%20Search%20%7C%20Browse&amp;text=(July%206%2C%202010)%20On,connection%20100%20MBPS%20by%202015." target="_top">Finland
 177 declared broadband a human right in 2010</a>), and real-world activism
 178 was shoe-leather activism (think of Malcolm Gladwell’s <a class="ulink" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell" target="_top">contempt
 179 for <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">clicktivism</span>”</span></a>). But as tech has grown more central
 180 to our daily lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way first to
 181 accusations of insincerity (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">You only care about tech because you’re
 182 <a class="ulink" href="https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-google-patent-reform/id=98007/" target="_top">shilling
 183 for tech companies</a></span>”</span>) to accusations of negligence (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Why
 184 didn’t you foresee that tech could be such a destructive force?</span>”</span>).
 185 But digital rights activism is right where it’s always been: looking out for
 186 the humans in a world where tech is inexorably taking over.
 187   </p><p>
 188     The latest version of this critique comes in the form of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">surveillance
 189 capitalism,</span>”</span> a term coined by business professor Shoshana Zuboff in
 190 her long and influential 2019 book, <span class="emphasis"><em>The Age of Surveillance
 191 Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of
 192 Power</em></span>. Zuboff argues that <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">surveillance capitalism</span>”</span>
 193 is a unique creature of the tech industry and that it is unlike any other
 194 abusive commercial practice in history, one that is <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">constituted by
 195 unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification,
 196 and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while
 197 producing new markets of behavioral prediction and
 198 modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and
 199 departs in key ways from the centuries-long evolution of market
 200 capitalism.</span>”</span> It is a new and deadly form of capitalism, a
 201 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism,</span>”</span> and our lack of understanding of its unique
 202 capabilities and dangers represents an existential, species-wide
 203 threat. She’s right that capitalism today threatens our species, and she’s
 204 right that tech poses unique challenges to our species and civilization, but
 205 she’s really wrong about how tech is different and why it threatens our
 206 species.
 207   </p><p>
 208     What’s more, I think that her incorrect diagnosis will lead us down a path
 209 that ends up making Big Tech stronger, not weaker. We need to take down Big
 210 Tech, and to do that, we need to start by correctly identifying the problem.
 211   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="tech-exceptionalism-then-and-now"></a>Wyjątkowość Technologii, dawniej i obecnie</h2></div></div></div><p>
 212     Early critics of the digital rights movement — perhaps best represented by
 213 campaigning organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free
 214 Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, and others that focused on preserving
 215 and enhancing basic human rights in the digital realm — damned activists for
 216 practicing <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">tech exceptionalism.</span>”</span> Around the turn of the
 217 millennium, serious people ridiculed any claim that tech policy mattered in
 218 the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">real world.</span>”</span> Claims that tech rules had implications for
 219 speech, association, privacy, search and seizure, and fundamental rights and
 220 equities were treated as ridiculous, an elevation of the concerns of sad
 221 nerds arguing about <span class="emphasis"><em>Star Trek</em></span> on bulletin board systems
 222 above the struggles of the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela, or the Warsaw
 223 ghetto uprising.
 224   </p><p>
 225     In the decades since, accusations of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">tech exceptionalism</span>”</span> have
 226 only sharpened as tech’s role in everyday life has expanded: Now that tech
 227 has infiltrated every corner of our life and our online lives have been
 228 monopolized by a handful of giants, defenders of digital freedoms are
 229 accused of carrying water for Big Tech, providing cover for its
 230 self-interested negligence (or worse, nefarious plots).
 231   </p><p>
 232     From my perspective, the digital rights movement has remained stationary
 233 while the rest of the world has moved. From the earliest days, the
 234 movement’s concern was users and the toolsmiths who provided the code they
 235 needed to realize their fundamental rights.  Digital rights activists only
 236 cared about companies to the extent that companies were acting to uphold
 237 users’ rights (or, just as often, when companies were acting so foolishly
 238 that they threatened to bring down new rules that would also make it harder
 239 for good actors to help users).
 240   </p><p>
 241     The <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">surveillance capitalism</span>”</span> critique recasts the digital
 242 rights movement in a new light again: not as alarmists who overestimate the
 243 importance of their shiny toys nor as shills for big tech but as serene
 244 deck-chair rearrangers whose long-standing activism is a liability because
 245 it makes them incapable of perceiving novel threats as they continue to
 246 fight the last century’s tech battles.
 247   </p><p>
 248     But tech exceptionalism is a sin no matter who practices it.
 249   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="dont-believe-the-hype"></a>Nie wierz 'szumom' medialnym</h2></div></div></div><p>
 250     You’ve probably heard that <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">if you’re not paying for the product,
 251 you’re the product.</span>”</span> As we’ll see below, that’s true, if incomplete.
 252 But what is <span class="emphasis"><em>absolutely</em></span> true is that ad-driven Big
 253 Tech’s customers are advertisers, and what companies like Google and
 254 Facebook sell is their ability to convince <span class="emphasis"><em>you</em></span> to buy
 255 stuff. Big Tech’s product is persuasion. The services — social media, search
 256 engines, maps, messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion.
 257   </p><p>
 258     The fear of surveillance capitalism starts from the (correct)  presumption
 259 that everything Big Tech says about itself is probably a lie. But the
 260 surveillance capitalism critique makes an exception for the claims Big Tech
 261 makes in its sales literature — the breathless hype in the pitches to
 262 potential advertisers online and in ad-tech seminars about the efficacy of
 263 its products: It assumes that Big Tech is as good at influencing us as they
 264 claim they are when they’re selling influencing products to credulous
 265 customers. That’s a mistake because sales literature is not a reliable
 266 indicator of a product’s efficacy.
 267   </p><p>
 268     Surveillance capitalism assumes that because advertisers buy a lot of what
 269 Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something real. But Big Tech’s
 270 massive sales could just as easily be the result of a popular delusion or
 271 something even more pernicious: monopolistic control over our communications
 272 and commerce.
 273   </p><p>
 274     Being watched changes your behavior, and not for the better. It creates
 275 risks for our social progress. Zuboff’s book features beautifully wrought
 276 explanations of these phenomena. But Zuboff also claims that surveillance
 277 literally robs us of our free will — that when our personal data is mixed
 278 with machine learning, it creates a system of persuasion so devastating that
 279 we are helpless before it.  That is, Facebook uses an algorithm to analyze
 280 the data it nonconsensually extracts from your daily life and uses it to
 281 customize your feed in ways that get you to buy stuff. It is a mind-control
 282 ray out of a 1950s comic book, wielded by mad scientists whose
 283 supercomputers guarantee them perpetual and total world domination.
 284   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="what-is-persuasion"></a>Co to jest przekonywanie?</h2></div></div></div><p>
 285     To understand why you shouldn’t worry about mind-control rays — but why you
 286 <span class="emphasis"><em>should</em></span> worry about surveillance
 287 <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> Big Tech — we must start by unpacking what we mean
 288 by <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">persuasion.</span>”</span>
 289   </p><p>
 290     Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists promise their customers
 291 (the advertisers) that if they use machine-learning tools trained on
 292 unimaginably large data sets of nonconsensually harvested personal
 293 information, they will be able to uncover ways to bypass the rational
 294 faculties of the public and direct their behavior, creating a stream of
 295 purchases, votes, and other desired outcomes.
 296   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
 297       The impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be
 298 central to our analysis and any remedies we seek.
 299     </p></blockquote></div><p>
 300     But there’s little evidence that this is happening. Instead, the predictions
 301 that surveillance capitalism delivers to its customers are much less
 302 impressive. Rather than finding ways to bypass our rational faculties,
 303 surveillance capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg mostly do one or more of three
 304 things:
 305   </p><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="segmenting"></a>1. Segmentacja</h3></div></div></div><p>
 306       If you’re selling diapers, you have better luck if you pitch them to people
 307 in maternity wards. Not everyone who enters or leaves a maternity ward just
 308 had a baby, and not everyone who just had a baby is in the market for
 309 diapers. But having a baby is a really reliable correlate of being in the
 310 market for diapers, and being in a maternity ward is highly correlated with
 311 having a baby. Hence diaper ads around maternity wards (and even pitchmen
 312 for baby products, who haunt maternity wards with baskets full of freebies).
 313     </p><p>
 314       Surveillance capitalism is segmenting times a billion. Diaper vendors can go
 315 way beyond people in maternity wards (though they can do that, too, with
 316 things like location-based mobile ads).  They can target you based on
 317 whether you’re reading articles about child-rearing, diapers, or a host of
 318 other subjects, and data mining can suggest unobvious keywords to advertise
 319 against. They can target you based on the articles you’ve recently
 320 read. They can target you based on what you’ve recently purchased. They can
 321 target you based on whether you receive emails or private messages about
 322 these subjects — or even if you speak aloud about them (though Facebook and
 323 the like convincingly claim that’s not happening — yet).
 324     </p><p>
 325       This is seriously creepy.
 326     </p><p>
 327       But it’s not mind control.
 328     </p><p>
 329       It doesn’t deprive you of your free will. It doesn’t trick you.
 330     </p><p>
 331       Think of how surveillance capitalism works in politics.  Surveillance
 332 capitalist companies sell political operatives the power to locate people
 333 who might be receptive to their pitch.  Candidates campaigning on finance
 334 industry corruption seek people struggling with debt; candidates campaigning
 335 on xenophobia seek out racists. Political operatives have always targeted
 336 their message whether their intentions were honorable or not: Union
 337 organizers set up pitches at factory gates, and white supremacists hand out
 338 fliers at John Birch Society meetings.
 339     </p><p>
 340       But this is an inexact and thus wasteful practice. The union organizer can’t
 341 know which worker to approach on the way out of the factory gates and may
 342 waste their time on a covert John Birch Society member; the white
 343 supremacist doesn’t know which of the Birchers are so delusional that making
 344 it to a meeting is as much as they can manage and which ones might be
 345 convinced to cross the country to carry a tiki torch through the streets of
 346 Charlottesville, Virginia.
 347     </p><p>
 348       Because targeting improves the yields on political pitches, it can
 349 accelerate the pace of political upheaval by making it possible for everyone
 350 who has secretly wished for the toppling of an autocrat — or just an 11-term
 351 incumbent politician — to find everyone else who feels the same way at very
 352 low cost. This has been critical to the rapid crystallization of recent
 353 political movements including Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street as
 354 well as less savory players like the far-right white nationalist movements
 355 that marched in Charlottesville.
 356     </p><p>
 357       It’s important to differentiate this kind of political organizing from
 358 influence campaigns; finding people who secretly agree with you isn’t the
 359 same as convincing people to agree with you. The rise of phenomena like
 360 nonbinary or otherwise nonconforming gender identities is often
 361 characterized by reactionaries as the result of online brainwashing
 362 campaigns that convince impressionable people that they have been secretly
 363 queer all along.
 364     </p><p>
 365       But the personal accounts of those who have come out tell a different story
 366 where people who long harbored a secret about their gender were emboldened
 367 by others coming forward and where people who knew that they were different
 368 but lacked a vocabulary for discussing that difference learned the right
 369 words from these low-cost means of finding people and learning about their
 370 ideas.
 371     </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="deception"></a>2. Podstęp</h3></div></div></div><p>
 372       Lies and fraud are pernicious, and surveillance capitalism supercharges them
 373 through targeting. If you want to sell a fraudulent payday loan or subprime
 374 mortgage, surveillance capitalism can help you find people who are both
 375 desperate and unsophisticated and thus receptive to your pitch. This
 376 accounts for the rise of many phenomena, like multilevel marketing schemes,
 377 in which deceptive claims about potential earnings and the efficacy of sales
 378 techniques are targeted at desperate people by advertising against search
 379 queries that indicate, for example, someone struggling with ill-advised
 380 loans.
 381     </p><p>
 382       Surveillance capitalism also abets fraud by making it easy to locate other
 383 people who have been similarly deceived, forming a community of people who
 384 reinforce one another’s false beliefs.  Think of <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/the-dream-podcast-review.html" target="_top">the
 385 forums</a> where people who are being victimized by multilevel marketing
 386 frauds gather to trade tips on how to improve their luck in peddling the
 387 product.
 388     </p><p>
 389       Sometimes, online deception involves replacing someone’s correct beliefs
 390 with incorrect ones, as it does in the anti-vaccination movement, whose
 391 victims are often people who start out believing in vaccines but are
 392 convinced by seemingly plausible evidence that leads them into the false
 393 belief that vaccines are harmful.
 394     </p><p>
 395       But it’s much more common for fraud to succeed when it doesn’t have to
 396 displace a true belief. When my daughter contracted head lice at daycare,
 397 one of the daycare workers told me I could get rid of them by treating her
 398 hair and scalp with olive oil. I didn’t know anything about head lice, and I
 399 assumed that the daycare worker did, so I tried it (it didn’t work, and it
 400 doesn’t work). It’s easy to end up with false beliefs when you simply don’t
 401 know any better and when those beliefs are conveyed by someone who seems to
 402 know what they’re doing.
 403     </p><p>
 404       This is pernicious and difficult — and it’s also the kind of thing the
 405 internet can help guard against by making true information available,
 406 especially in a form that exposes the underlying deliberations among parties
 407 with sharply divergent views, such as Wikipedia. But it’s not brainwashing;
 408 it’s fraud. In the <a class="ulink" href="https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/" target="_top">majority of cases</a>,
 409 the victims of these fraud campaigns have an informational void filled in
 410 the customary way, by consulting a seemingly reliable source. If I look up
 411 the length of the Brooklyn Bridge and learn that it is 5,800 feet long, but
 412 in reality, it is 5,989 feet long, the underlying deception is a problem,
 413 but it’s a problem with a simple remedy. It’s a very different problem from
 414 the anti-vax issue in which someone’s true belief is displaced by a false
 415 one by means of sophisticated persuasion.
 416     </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="domination"></a>3. Dominacja</h3></div></div></div><p>
 417       Surveillance capitalism is the result of monopoly. Monopoly is the cause,
 418 and surveillance capitalism and its negative outcomes are the effects of
 419 monopoly. I’ll get into this in depth later, but for now, suffice it to say
 420 that the tech industry has grown up with a radical theory of antitrust that
 421 has allowed companies to grow by merging with their rivals, buying up their
 422 nascent competitors, and expanding to control whole market verticals.
 423     </p><p>
 424       One example of how monopolism aids in persuasion is through dominance:
 425 Google makes editorial decisions about its algorithms that determine the
 426 sort order of the responses to our queries. If a cabal of fraudsters have
 427 set out to trick the world into thinking that the Brooklyn Bridge is 5,800
 428 feet long, and if Google gives a high search rank to this group in response
 429 to queries like <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">How long is the Brooklyn Bridge?</span>”</span> then the
 430 first eight or 10 screens’ worth of Google results could be wrong. And since
 431 most people don’t go beyond the first couple of results — let alone the
 432 first <span class="emphasis"><em>page</em></span> of results — Google’s choice means that many
 433 people will be deceived.
 434     </p><p>
 435       Google’s dominance over search — more than 86% of web searches are performed
 436 through Google — means that the way it orders its search results has an
 437 outsized effect on public beliefs. Ironically, Google claims this is why it
 438 can’t afford to have any transparency in its algorithm design: Google’s
 439 search dominance makes the results of its sorting too important to risk
 440 telling the world how it arrives at those results lest some bad actor
 441 discover a flaw in the ranking system and exploit it to push its point of
 442 view to the top of the search results. There’s an obvious remedy to a
 443 company that is too big to audit: break it up into smaller pieces.
 444     </p><p>
 445       Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>”</span> whose
 446 data-hoarding and machine-learning techniques rob us of our free will. But
 447 influence campaigns that seek to displace existing, correct beliefs with
 448 false ones have an effect that is small and temporary while monopolistic
 449 dominance over informational systems has massive, enduring
 450 effects. Controlling the results to the world’s search queries means
 451 controlling access both to arguments and their rebuttals and, thus, control
 452 over much of the world’s beliefs. If our concern is how corporations are
 453 foreclosing on our ability to make up our own minds and determine our own
 454 futures, the impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and
 455 should be central to our analysis and any remedies we seek.
 456     </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="bypassing-our-rational-faculties"></a>4. Omijanie naszych racjonalnych zdolności</h3></div></div></div><p>
 457       <span class="emphasis"><em>This</em></span> is the good stuff: using machine learning,
 458 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">dark patterns,</span>”</span> engagement hacking, and other techniques to
 459 get us to do things that run counter to our better judgment. This is mind
 460 control.
 461     </p><p>
 462       Some of these techniques have proven devastatingly effective (if only in the
 463 short term). The use of countdown timers on a purchase completion page can
 464 create a sense of urgency that causes you to ignore the nagging internal
 465 voice suggesting that you should shop around or sleep on your decision. The
 466 use of people from your social graph in ads can provide <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">social
 467 proof</span>”</span> that a purchase is worth making. Even the auction system
 468 pioneered by eBay is calculated to play on our cognitive blind spots,
 469 letting us feel like we <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">own</span>”</span> something because we bid on it,
 470 thus encouraging us to bid again when we are outbid to ensure that
 471 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">our</span>”</span> things stay ours.
 472     </p><p>
 473       Games are extraordinarily good at this. <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Free to play</span>”</span> games
 474 manipulate us through many techniques, such as presenting players with a
 475 series of smoothly escalating challenges that create a sense of mastery and
 476 accomplishment but which sharply transition into a set of challenges that
 477 are impossible to overcome without paid upgrades. Add some social proof to
 478 the mix — a stream of notifications about how well your friends are faring —
 479 and before you know it, you’re buying virtual power-ups to get to the next
 480 level.
 481     </p><p>
 482       Companies have risen and fallen on these techniques, and the
 483 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">fallen</span>”</span> part is worth paying attention to. In general, living
 484 things adapt to stimulus: Something that is very compelling or noteworthy
 485 when you first encounter it fades with repetition until you stop noticing it
 486 altogether. Consider the refrigerator hum that irritates you when it starts
 487 up but disappears into the background so thoroughly that you only notice it
 488 when it stops again.
 489     </p><p>
 490       That’s why behavioral conditioning uses <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">intermittent reinforcement
 491 schedules.</span>”</span> Instead of giving you a steady drip of encouragement or
 492 setbacks, games and gamified services scatter rewards on a randomized
 493 schedule — often enough to keep you interested and random enough that you
 494 can never quite find the pattern that would make it boring.
 495     </p><p>
 496       Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful behavioral tool, but it also
 497 represents a collective action problem for surveillance capitalism. The
 498 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">engagement techniques</span>”</span> invented by the behaviorists of
 499 surveillance capitalist companies are quickly copied across the whole sector
 500 so that what starts as a mysteriously compelling fillip in the design of a
 501 service—like <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">pull to refresh</span>”</span> or alerts when someone likes
 502 your posts or side quests that your characters get invited to while in the
 503 midst of main quests—quickly becomes dully ubiquitous. The
 504 impossible-to-nail-down nonpattern of randomized drips from your phone
 505 becomes a grey-noise wall of sound as every single app and site starts to
 506 make use of whatever seems to be working at the time.
 507     </p><p>
 508       From the surveillance capitalist’s point of view, our adaptive capacity is
 509 like a harmful bacterium that deprives it of its food source — our attention
 510 — and novel techniques for snagging that attention are like new antibiotics
 511 that can be used to breach our defenses and destroy our
 512 self-determination. And there <span class="emphasis"><em>are</em></span> techniques like
 513 that. Who can forget the Great Zynga Epidemic, when all of our friends were
 514 caught in <span class="emphasis"><em>FarmVille</em></span>’s endless, mindless dopamine loops?
 515 But every new attention-commanding technique is jumped on by the whole
 516 industry and used so indiscriminately that antibiotic resistance sets
 517 in. Given enough repetition, almost all of us develop immunity to even the
 518 most powerful techniques — by 2013, two years after Zynga’s peak, its user
 519 base had halved.
 520     </p><p>
 521       Not everyone, of course. Some people never adapt to stimulus, just as some
 522 people never stop hearing the hum of the refrigerator.  This is why most
 523 people who are exposed to slot machines play them for a while and then move
 524 on while a small and tragic minority liquidate their kids’ college funds,
 525 buy adult diapers, and position themselves in front of a machine until they
 526 collapse.
 527     </p><p>
 528       But surveillance capitalism’s margins on behavioral modification
 529 suck. Tripling the rate at which someone buys a widget sounds great <a class="ulink" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2018/03/09/the-advertising-conversion-rates-for-every-major-tech-platform/#2f6a67485957" target="_top">unless
 530 the base rate is way less than 1%</a> with an improved rate of… still
 531 less than 1%. Even penny slot machines pull down pennies for every spin
 532 while surveillance capitalism rakes in infinitesimal penny fractions.
 533     </p><p>
 534       Slot machines’ high returns mean that they can be profitable just by
 535 draining the fortunes of the small rump of people who are pathologically
 536 vulnerable to them and unable to adapt to their tricks. But surveillance
 537 capitalism can’t survive on the fractional pennies it brings down from that
 538 vulnerable sliver — that’s why, after the Great Zynga Epidemic had finally
 539 burned itself out, the small number of still-addicted players left behind
 540 couldn’t sustain it as a global phenomenon. And new powerful attention
 541 weapons aren’t easy to find, as is evidenced by the long years since the
 542 last time Zynga had a hit. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that
 543 Zynga has to spend on developing new tools to blast through our adaptation,
 544 it has never managed to repeat the lucky accident that let it snag so much
 545 of our attention for a brief moment in 2009. Powerhouses like Supercell have
 546 fared a little better, but they are rare and throw away many failures for
 547 every success.
 548     </p><p>
 549       The vulnerability of small segments of the population to dramatic, efficient
 550 corporate manipulation is a real concern that’s worthy of our attention and
 551 energy. But it’s not an existential threat to society.
 552     </p></div></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="if-data-is-the-new-oil-then-surveillance-capitalisms-engine-has-a-leak"></a>Jeśli dane są nowym paliwem, to silnik kapitalistycznych systemów nadzoru ma
 553 wyciek</h2></div></div></div><p>
 554     This adaptation problem offers an explanation for one of surveillance
 555 capitalism’s most alarming traits: its relentless hunger for data and its
 556 endless expansion of data-gathering capabilities through the spread of
 557 sensors, online surveillance, and acquisition of data streams from third
 558 parties.
 559   </p><p>
 560     Zuboff observes this phenomenon and concludes that data must be very
 561 valuable if surveillance capitalism is so hungry for it. (In her words:
 562 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous
 563 intensification of the means of production, so surveillance capitalists and
 564 their market players are now locked into the continuous intensification of
 565 the means of behavioral modification and the gathering might of
 566 instrumentarian power.</span>”</span>) But what if the voracious appetite is
 567 because data has such a short half-life — because people become inured so
 568 quickly to new, data-driven persuasion techniques — that the companies are
 569 locked in an arms race with our limbic system? What if it’s all a Red
 570 Queen’s race where they have to run ever faster — collect ever-more data —
 571 just to stay in the same spot?
 572   </p><p>
 573     Of course, all of Big Tech’s persuasion techniques work in concert with one
 574 another, and collecting data is useful beyond mere behavioral trickery.
 575   </p><p>
 576     If someone wants to recruit you to buy a refrigerator or join a pogrom, they
 577 might use profiling and targeting to send messages to people they judge to
 578 be good sales prospects. The messages themselves may be deceptive, making
 579 claims about things you’re not very knowledgeable about (food safety and
 580 energy efficiency or eugenics and historical claims about racial
 581 superiority). They might use search engine optimization and/or armies of
 582 fake reviewers and commenters and/or paid placement to dominate the
 583 discourse so that any search for further information takes you back to their
 584 messages.  And finally, they may refine the different pitches using machine
 585 learning and other techniques to figure out what kind of pitch works best on
 586 someone like you.
 587   </p><p>
 588     Each phase of this process benefits from surveillance: The more data they
 589 have, the more precisely they can profile you and target you with specific
 590 messages. Think of how you’d sell a fridge if you knew that the warranty on
 591 your prospect’s fridge just expired and that they were expecting a tax
 592 rebate in April.
 593   </p><p>
 594     Also, the more data they have, the better they can craft deceptive messages
 595 — if I know that you’re into genealogy, I might not try to feed you
 596 pseudoscience about genetic differences between <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">races,</span>”</span>
 597 sticking instead to conspiratorial secret histories of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">demographic
 598 replacement</span>”</span> and the like.
 599   </p><p>
 600     Facebook also helps you locate people who have the same odious or antisocial
 601 views as you. It makes it possible to find other people who want to carry
 602 tiki torches through the streets of Charlottesville in Confederate
 603 cosplay. It can help you find other people who want to join your militia and
 604 go to the border to look for undocumented migrants to terrorize. It can help
 605 you find people who share your belief that vaccines are poison and that the
 606 Earth is flat.
 607   </p><p>
 608     There is one way in which targeted advertising uniquely benefits those
 609 advocating for socially unacceptable causes: It is invisible.  Racism is
 610 widely geographically dispersed, and there are few places where racists —
 611 and only racists — gather. This is similar to the problem of selling
 612 refrigerators in that potential refrigerator purchasers are geographically
 613 dispersed and there are few places where you can buy an ad that will be
 614 primarily seen by refrigerator customers. But buying a refrigerator is
 615 socially acceptable while being a Nazi is not, so you can buy a billboard or
 616 advertise in the newspaper sports section for your refrigerator business,
 617 and the only potential downside is that your ad will be seen by a lot of
 618 people who don’t want refrigerators, resulting in a lot of wasted expense.
 619   </p><p>
 620     But even if you wanted to advertise your Nazi movement on a billboard or
 621 prime-time TV or the sports section, you would struggle to find anyone
 622 willing to sell you the space for your ad partly because they disagree with
 623 your views and partly because they fear censure (boycott, reputational
 624 damage, etc.) from other people who disagree with your views.
 625   </p><p>
 626     Targeted ads solve this problem: On the internet, every ad unit can be
 627 different for every person, meaning that you can buy ads that are only shown
 628 to people who appear to be Nazis and not to people who hate Nazis. When
 629 there’s spillover — when someone who hates racism is shown a racist
 630 recruiting ad — there is some fallout; the platform or publication might get
 631 an angry public or private denunciation. But the nature of the risk assumed
 632 by an online ad buyer is different than the risks to a traditional publisher
 633 or billboard owner who might want to run a Nazi ad.
 634   </p><p>
 635     Online ads are placed by algorithms that broker between a diverse ecosystem
 636 of self-serve ad platforms that anyone can buy an ad through, so the Nazi ad
 637 that slips onto your favorite online publication isn’t seen as their moral
 638 failing but rather as a failure in some distant, upstream ad supplier. When
 639 a publication gets a complaint about an offensive ad that’s appearing in one
 640 of its units, it can take some steps to block that ad, but the Nazi might
 641 buy a slightly different ad from a different broker serving the same
 642 unit. And in any event, internet users increasingly understand that when
 643 they see an ad, it’s likely that the advertiser did not choose that
 644 publication and that the publication has no idea who its advertisers are.
 645   </p><p>
 646     These layers of indirection between advertisers and publishers serve as
 647 moral buffers: Today’s moral consensus is largely that publishers shouldn’t
 648 be held responsible for the ads that appear on their pages because they’re
 649 not actively choosing to put those ads there.  Because of this, Nazis are
 650 able to overcome significant barriers to organizing their movement.
 651   </p><p>
 652     Data has a complex relationship with domination. Being able to spy on your
 653 customers can alert you to their preferences for your rivals and allow you
 654 to head off your rivals at the pass.
 655   </p><p>
 656     More importantly, if you can dominate the information space while also
 657 gathering data, then you make other deceptive tactics stronger because it’s
 658 harder to break out of the web of deceit you’re spinning. Domination — that
 659 is, ultimately becoming a monopoly — and not the data itself is the
 660 supercharger that makes every tactic worth pursuing because monopolistic
 661 domination deprives your target of an escape route.
 662   </p><p>
 663     If you’re a Nazi who wants to ensure that your prospects primarily see
 664 deceptive, confirming information when they search for more, you can improve
 665 your odds by seeding the search terms they use through your initial
 666 communications. You don’t need to own the top 10 results for <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">voter
 667 suppression</span>”</span> if you can convince your marks to confine their search
 668 terms to <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">voter fraud,</span>”</span> which throws up a very different set of
 669 search results.
 670   </p><p>
 671     Surveillance capitalists are like stage mentalists who claim that their
 672 extraordinary insights into human behavior let them guess the word that you
 673 wrote down and folded up in your pocket but who really use shills, hidden
 674 cameras, sleight of hand, and brute-force memorization to amaze you.
 675   </p><p>
 676     Or perhaps they’re more like pick-up artists, the misogynistic cult that
 677 promises to help awkward men have sex with women by teaching them
 678 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">neurolinguistic programming</span>”</span> phrases, body language
 679 techniques, and psychological manipulation tactics like
 680 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">negging</span>”</span> — offering unsolicited negative feedback to women to
 681 lower their self-esteem and prick their interest.
 682   </p><p>
 683     Some pick-up artists eventually manage to convince women to go home with
 684 them, but it’s not because these men have figured out how to bypass women’s
 685 critical faculties. Rather, pick-up artists’ <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">success</span>”</span> stories
 686 are a mix of women who were incapable of giving consent, women who were
 687 coerced, women who were intoxicated, self-destructive women, and a few women
 688 who were sober and in command of their faculties but who didn’t realize
 689 straightaway that they were with terrible men but rectified the error as
 690 soon as they could.
 691   </p><p>
 692     Pick-up artists <span class="emphasis"><em>believe</em></span> they have figured out a secret
 693 back door that bypasses women’s critical faculties, but they haven’t. Many
 694 of the tactics they deploy, like negging, became the butt of jokes (just
 695 like people joke about bad ad targeting), and there’s a good chance that
 696 anyone they try these tactics on will immediately recognize them and dismiss
 697 the men who use them as irredeemable losers.
 698   </p><p>
 699     Pick-up artists are proof that people can believe they have developed a
 700 system of mind control <span class="emphasis"><em>even when it doesn’t
 701 work</em></span>. Pick-up artists simply exploit the fact that
 702 one-in-a-million chances can come through for you if you make a million
 703 attempts, and then they assume that the other 999,999 times, they simply
 704 performed the technique incorrectly and commit themselves to doing better
 705 next time. There’s only one group of people who find pick-up artist lore
 706 reliably convincing: other would-be pick-up artists whose anxiety and
 707 insecurity make them vulnerable to scammers and delusional men who convince
 708 them that if they pay for tutelage and follow instructions, then they will
 709 someday succeed. Pick-up artists assume they fail to entice women because
 710 they are bad at being pick-up artists, not because pick-up artistry is
 711 bullshit. Pick-up artists are bad at selling themselves to women, but
 712 they’re much better at selling themselves to men who pay to learn the
 713 secrets of pick-up artistry.
 714   </p><p>
 715     Department store pioneer John Wanamaker is said to have lamented,
 716 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I
 717 don’t know which half.</span>”</span> The fact that Wanamaker thought that only
 718 half of his advertising spending was wasted is a tribute to the
 719 persuasiveness of advertising executives, who are <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span>
 720 better at convincing potential clients to buy their services than they are
 721 at convincing the general public to buy their clients’ wares.
 722   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="what-is-facebook"></a>Co to jest Facebook?</h2></div></div></div><p>
 723     Facebook is heralded as the origin of all of our modern plagues, and it’s
 724 not hard to see why. Some tech companies want to lock their users in but
 725 make their money by monopolizing access to the market for apps for their
 726 devices and gouging them on prices rather than by spying on them (like
 727 Apple). Some companies don’t care about locking in users because they’ve
 728 figured out how to spy on them no matter where they are and what they’re
 729 doing and can turn that surveillance into money (Google). Facebook alone
 730 among the Western tech giants has built a business based on locking in its
 731 users <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> spying on them all the time.
 732   </p><p>
 733     Facebook’s surveillance regime is really without parallel in the Western
 734 world. Though Facebook tries to prevent itself from being visible on the
 735 public web, hiding most of what goes on there from people unless they’re
 736 logged into Facebook, the company has nevertheless booby-trapped the entire
 737 web with surveillance tools in the form of Facebook <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Like</span>”</span>
 738 buttons that web publishers include on their sites to boost their Facebook
 739 profiles. Facebook also makes various libraries and other useful code
 740 snippets available to web publishers that act as surveillance tendrils on
 741 the sites where they’re used, funneling information about visitors to the
 742 site — newspapers, dating sites, message boards — to Facebook.
 743   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
 744       Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but
 745 because it is <span class="emphasis"><em>big</em></span>.
 746     </p></blockquote></div><p>
 747     Facebook offers similar tools to app developers, so the apps — games, fart
 748 machines, business review services, apps for keeping abreast of your kid’s
 749 schooling — you use will send information about your activities to Facebook
 750 even if you don’t have a Facebook account and even if you don’t download or
 751 use Facebook apps. On top of all that, Facebook buys data from third-party
 752 brokers on shopping habits, physical location, use of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">loyalty</span>”</span>
 753 programs, financial transactions, etc., and cross-references that with the
 754 dossiers it develops on activity on Facebook and with apps and the public
 755 web.
 756   </p><p>
 757     Though it’s easy to integrate the web with Facebook — linking to news
 758 stories and such — Facebook products are generally not available to be
 759 integrated back into the web itself. You can embed a tweet in a Facebook
 760 post, but if you embed a Facebook post in a tweet, you just get a link back
 761 to Facebook and must log in before you can see it. Facebook has used extreme
 762 technological and legal countermeasures to prevent rivals from allowing
 763 their users to embed Facebook snippets in competing services or to create
 764 alternative interfaces to Facebook that merge your Facebook inbox with those
 765 of other services that you use.
 766   </p><p>
 767     And Facebook is incredibly popular, with 2.3 billion claimed users (though
 768 many believe this figure to be inflated). Facebook has been used to organize
 769 genocidal pogroms, racist riots, anti-vaccination movements, flat Earth
 770 cults, and the political lives of some of the world’s ugliest, most brutal
 771 autocrats. There are some really alarming things going on in the world, and
 772 Facebook is implicated in many of them, so it’s easy to conclude that these
 773 bad things are the result of Facebook’s mind-control system, which it rents
 774 out to anyone with a few bucks to spend.
 775   </p><p>
 776     To understand what role Facebook plays in the formulation and mobilization
 777 of antisocial movements, we need to understand the dual nature of Facebook.
 778   </p><p>
 779     Because it has a lot of users and a lot of data about those users, Facebook
 780 is a very efficient tool for locating people with hard-to-find traits, the
 781 kinds of traits that are widely diffused in the population such that
 782 advertisers have historically struggled to find a cost-effective way to
 783 reach them. Think back to refrigerators: Most of us only replace our major
 784 appliances a few times in our entire lives. If you’re a refrigerator
 785 manufacturer or retailer, you have these brief windows in the life of a
 786 consumer during which they are pondering a purchase, and you have to somehow
 787 reach them. Anyone who’s ever registered a title change after buying a house
 788 can attest that appliance manufacturers are incredibly desperate to reach
 789 anyone who has even the slenderest chance of being in the market for a new
 790 fridge.
 791   </p><p>
 792     Facebook makes finding people shopping for refrigerators a
 793 <span class="emphasis"><em>lot</em></span> easier. It can target ads to people who’ve
 794 registered a new home purchase, to people who’ve searched for refrigerator
 795 buying advice, to people who have complained about their fridge dying, or
 796 any combination thereof. It can even target people who’ve recently bought
 797 <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> kitchen appliances on the theory that someone
 798 who’s just replaced their stove and dishwasher might be in a fridge-buying
 799 kind of mood. The vast majority of people who are reached by these ads will
 800 not be in the market for a new fridge, but — crucially — the percentage of
 801 people who <span class="emphasis"><em>are</em></span> looking for fridges that these ads reach
 802 is <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span> larger than it is than for any group that might
 803 be subjected to traditional, offline targeted refrigerator marketing.
 804   </p><p>
 805     Facebook also makes it a lot easier to find people who have the same rare
 806 disease as you, which might have been impossible in earlier eras — the
 807 closest fellow sufferer might otherwise be hundreds of miles away. It makes
 808 it easier to find people who went to the same high school as you even though
 809 decades have passed and your former classmates have all been scattered to
 810 the four corners of the Earth.
 811   </p><p>
 812     Facebook also makes it much easier to find people who hold the same rare
 813 political beliefs as you. If you’ve always harbored a secret affinity for
 814 socialism but never dared utter this aloud lest you be demonized by your
 815 neighbors, Facebook can help you discover other people who feel the same way
 816 (and it might just demonstrate to you that your affinity is more widespread
 817 than you ever suspected). It can make it easier to find people who share
 818 your sexual identity.  And again, it can help you to understand that what
 819 you thought was a shameful secret that affected only you was really a widely
 820 shared trait, giving you both comfort and the courage to come out to the
 821 people in your life.
 822   </p><p>
 823     All of this presents a dilemma for Facebook: Targeting makes the company’s
 824 ads more effective than traditional ads, but it also lets advertisers see
 825 just how effective their ads are. While advertisers are pleased to learn
 826 that Facebook ads are more effective than ads on systems with less
 827 sophisticated targeting, advertisers can also see that in nearly every case,
 828 the people who see their ads ignore them. Or, at best, the ads work on a
 829 subconscious level, creating nebulous unmeasurables like <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">brand
 830 recognition.</span>”</span> This means that the price per ad is very low in nearly
 831 every case.
 832   </p><p>
 833     To make things worse, many Facebook groups spark precious little
 834 discussion. Your little-league soccer team, the people with the same rare
 835 disease as you, and the people you share a political affinity with may
 836 exchange the odd flurry of messages at critical junctures, but on a daily
 837 basis, there’s not much to say to your old high school chums or other
 838 hockey-card collectors.
 839   </p><p>
 840     With nothing but <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">organic</span>”</span> discussion, Facebook would not
 841 generate enough traffic to sell enough ads to make the money it needs to
 842 continually expand by buying up its competitors while returning handsome
 843 sums to its investors.
 844   </p><p>
 845     So Facebook has to gin up traffic by sidetracking its own forums: Every time
 846 Facebook’s algorithm injects controversial materials — inflammatory
 847 political articles, conspiracy theories, outrage stories — into a group, it
 848 can hijack that group’s nominal purpose with its desultory discussions and
 849 supercharge those discussions by turning them into bitter, unproductive
 850 arguments that drag on and on. Facebook is optimized for engagement, not
 851 happiness, and it turns out that automated systems are pretty good at
 852 figuring out things that people will get angry about.
 853   </p><p>
 854     Facebook <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> modify our behavior but only in a couple
 855 of trivial ways. First, it can lock in all your friends and family members
 856 so that you check and check and check with Facebook to find out what they
 857 are up to; and second, it can make you angry and anxious. It can force you
 858 to choose between being interrupted constantly by updates — a process that
 859 breaks your concentration and makes it hard to be introspective — and
 860 staying in touch with your friends. This is a very limited form of mind
 861 control, and it can only really make us miserable, angry, and anxious.
 862   </p><p>
 863     This is why Facebook’s targeting systems — both the ones it shows to
 864 advertisers and the ones that let users find people who share their
 865 interests — are so next-gen and smooth and easy to use as well as why its
 866 message boards have a toolset that seems like it hasn’t changed since the
 867 mid-2000s. If Facebook delivered an equally flexible, sophisticated
 868 message-reading system to its users, those users could defend themselves
 869 against being nonconsensually eyeball-fucked with Donald Trump headlines.
 870   </p><p>
 871     The more time you spend on Facebook, the more ads it gets to show you. The
 872 solution to Facebook’s ads only working one in a thousand times is for the
 873 company to try to increase how much time you spend on Facebook by a factor
 874 of a thousand. Rather than thinking of Facebook as a company that has
 875 figured out how to show you exactly the right ad in exactly the right way to
 876 get you to do what its advertisers want, think of it as a company that has
 877 figured out how to make you slog through an endless torrent of arguments
 878 even though they make you miserable, spending so much time on the site that
 879 it eventually shows you at least one ad that you respond to.
 880   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="monopoly-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense"></a>Monopol i prawo do czasu przyszłego</h2></div></div></div><p>
 881     Zuboff and her cohort are particularly alarmed at the extent to which
 882 surveillance allows corporations to influence our decisions, taking away
 883 something she poetically calls <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">the right to the future tense</span>”</span>
 884 — that is, the right to decide for yourself what you will do in the future.
 885   </p><p>
 886     It’s true that advertising can tip the scales one way or another: When
 887 you’re thinking of buying a fridge, a timely fridge ad might end the search
 888 on the spot. But Zuboff puts enormous and undue weight on the persuasive
 889 power of surveillance-based influence techniques. Most of these don’t work
 890 very well, and the ones that do won’t work for very long. The makers of
 891 these influence tools are confident they will someday refine them into
 892 systems of total control, but they are hardly unbiased observers, and the
 893 risks from their dreams coming true are very speculative.
 894   </p><p>
 895     By contrast, Zuboff is rather sanguine about 40 years of lax antitrust
 896 practice that has allowed a handful of companies to dominate the internet,
 897 ushering in an information age with, <a class="ulink" href="https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040" target="_top">as one person
 898 on Twitter noted</a>, five giant websites each filled with screenshots
 899 of the other four.
 900   </p><p>
 901     However, if we are to be alarmed that we might lose the right to choose for
 902 ourselves what our future will hold, then monopoly’s nonspeculative,
 903 concrete, here-and-now harms should be front and center in our debate over
 904 tech policy.
 905   </p><p>
 906     Start with <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">digital rights management.</span>”</span> In 1998, Bill Clinton
 907 signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. It’s a complex
 908 piece of legislation with many controversial clauses but none more so than
 909 Section 1201, the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">anti-circumvention</span>”</span> rule.
 910   </p><p>
 911     This is a blanket ban on tampering with systems that restrict access to
 912 copyrighted works. The ban is so thoroughgoing that it prohibits removing a
 913 copyright lock even when no copyright infringement takes place. This is by
 914 design: The activities that the DMCA’s Section 1201 sets out to ban are not
 915 copyright infringements; rather, they are legal activities that frustrate
 916 manufacturers’ commercial plans.
 917   </p><p>
 918     For example, Section 1201’s first major application was on DVD players as a
 919 means of enforcing the region coding built into those devices. DVD-CCA, the
 920 body that standardized DVDs and DVD players, divided the world into six
 921 regions and specified that DVD players must check each disc to determine
 922 which regions it was authorized to be played in. DVD players would have
 923 their own corresponding region (a DVD player bought in the U.S. would be
 924 region 1 while one bought in India would be region 5). If the player and the
 925 disc’s region matched, the player would play the disc; otherwise, it would
 926 reject it.
 927   </p><p>
 928     However, watching a lawfully produced disc in a country other than the one
 929 where you purchased it is not copyright infringement — it’s the
 930 opposite. Copyright law imposes this duty on customers for a movie: You must
 931 go into a store, find a licensed disc, and pay the asking price. Do that —
 932 and <span class="emphasis"><em>nothing else</em></span> — and you and copyright are square
 933 with one another.
 934   </p><p>
 935     The fact that a movie studio wants to charge Indians less than Americans or
 936 release in Australia later than it releases in the U.K.  has no bearing on
 937 copyright law. Once you lawfully acquire a DVD, it is no copyright
 938 infringement to watch it no matter where you happen to be.
 939   </p><p>
 940     So DVD and DVD player manufacturers would not be able to use accusations of
 941 abetting copyright infringement to punish manufacturers who made
 942 noncompliant players that would play discs from any region or repair shops
 943 that modified players to let you watch out-of-region discs or software
 944 programmers who created programs to let you do this.
 945   </p><p>
 946     That’s where Section 1201 of the DMCA comes in: By banning tampering with an
 947 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">access control,</span>”</span> the rule gave manufacturers and rights
 948 holders standing to sue competitors who released superior products with
 949 lawful features that the market demanded (in this case, region-free
 950 players).
 951   </p><p>
 952     This is an odious scam against consumers, but as time went by, Section 1201
 953 grew to encompass a rapidly expanding constellation of devices and services
 954 as canny manufacturers have realized certain things:
 955   </p><div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist compact" style="list-style-type: disc; "><li class="listitem"><p>
 956         Any device with software in it contains a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">copyrighted work</span>”</span> —
 957 i.e., the software.
 958       </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
 959         A device can be designed so that reconfiguring the software requires
 960 bypassing an <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">access control for copyrighted works,</span>”</span> which is a
 961 potential felony under Section 1201.
 962       </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
 963         Thus, companies can control their customers’ behavior after they take home
 964 their purchases by designing products so that all unpermitted uses require
 965 modifications that fall afoul of Section 1201.
 966       </p></li></ul></div><p>
 967     Section 1201 then becomes a means for manufacturers of all descriptions to
 968 force their customers to arrange their affairs to benefit the manufacturers’
 969 shareholders instead of themselves.
 970   </p><p>
 971     This manifests in many ways: from a new generation of inkjet printers that
 972 use countermeasures to prevent third-party ink that cannot be bypassed
 973 without legal risks to similar systems in tractors that prevent third-party
 974 technicians from swapping in the manufacturer’s own parts that are not
 975 recognized by the tractor’s control system until it is supplied with a
 976 manufacturer’s unlock code.
 977   </p><p>
 978     Closer to home, Apple’s iPhones use these measures to prevent both
 979 third-party service and third-party software installation. This allows Apple
 980 to decide when an iPhone is beyond repair and must be shredded and
 981 landfilled as opposed to the iPhone’s purchaser. (Apple is notorious for its
 982 environmentally catastrophic policy of destroying old electronics rather
 983 than permitting them to be cannibalized for parts.) This is a very useful
 984 power to wield, especially in light of CEO Tim Cook’s January 2019 warning
 985 to investors that the company’s profits are endangered by customers choosing
 986 to hold onto their phones for longer rather than replacing them.
 987   </p><p>
 988     Apple’s use of copyright locks also allows it to establish a monopoly over
 989 how its customers acquire software for their mobile devices. The App Store’s
 990 commercial terms guarantee Apple a share of all revenues generated by the
 991 apps sold there, meaning that Apple gets paid when you buy an app from its
 992 store and then continues to get paid every time you buy something using that
 993 app. This comes out of the bottom line of software developers, who must
 994 either charge more or accept lower profits for their products.
 995   </p><p>
 996     Crucially, Apple’s use of copyright locks gives it the power to make
 997 editorial decisions about which apps you may and may not install on your own
 998 device. Apple has used this power to <a class="ulink" href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/5982243/Apple-bans-dictionary-from-App-Store-over-swear-words.html" target="_top">reject
 999 dictionaries</a> for containing obscene words; to <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just-banned-the-app-that-tracks-us-drone-strikes-again" target="_top">limit
1000 political speech</a>, especially from apps that make sensitive political
1001 commentary such as an app that notifies you every time a U.S. drone kills
1002 someone somewhere in the world; and to <a class="ulink" href="https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-05-19-palestinian-indie-game-must-not-be-called-a-game-apple-says" target="_top">object
1003 to a game</a> that commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
1004   </p><p>
1005     Apple often justifies monopoly power over software installation in the name
1006 of security, arguing that its vetting of apps for its store means that it
1007 can guard its users against apps that contain surveillance code. But this
1008 cuts both ways. In China, the government <a class="ulink" href="https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc" target="_top">ordered
1009 Apple to prohibit the sale of privacy tools</a> like VPNs with the
1010 exception of VPNs that had deliberately introduced flaws designed to let the
1011 Chinese state eavesdrop on users. Because Apple uses technological
1012 countermeasures — with legal backstops — to block customers from installing
1013 unauthorized apps, Chinese iPhone owners cannot readily (or legally) acquire
1014 VPNs that would protect them from Chinese state snooping.
1015   </p><p>
1016     Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism.</span>”</span>
1017 Theoreticians of capitalism claim that its virtue is that it <a class="ulink" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal" target="_top">aggregates information in
1018 the form of consumers’ decisions</a>, producing efficient
1019 markets. Surveillance capitalism’s supposed power to rob its victims of
1020 their free will through computationally supercharged influence campaigns
1021 means that our markets no longer aggregate customers’ decisions because we
1022 customers no longer decide — we are given orders by surveillance
1023 capitalism’s mind-control rays.
1024   </p><p>
1025     If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no
1026 longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at
1027 <span class="emphasis"><em>least</em></span> as much as influence campaigns. An influence
1028 campaign might nudge you to buy a certain brand of phone; but the copyright
1029 locks on that phone absolutely determine where you get it serviced, which
1030 apps can run on it, and when you have to throw it away rather than fixing
1031 it.
1032   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="search-order-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense"></a>Porządek wyszukiwania i prawo do czasu przyszłego</h2></div></div></div><p>
1033     Markets are posed as a kind of magic: By discovering otherwise hidden
1034 information conveyed by the free choices of consumers, those consumers’
1035 local knowledge is integrated into a self-correcting system that makes
1036 efficient allocations—more efficient than any computer could calculate. But
1037 monopolies are incompatible with that notion. When you only have one app
1038 store, the owner of the store — not the consumer — decides on the range of
1039 choices. As Boss Tweed once said, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">I don’t care who does the electing,
1040 so long as I get to do the nominating.</span>”</span> A monopolized market is an
1041 election whose candidates are chosen by the monopolist.
1042   </p><p>
1043     This ballot rigging is made more pernicious by the existence of monopolies
1044 over search order. Google’s search market share is about 90%. When Google’s
1045 ranking algorithm puts a result for a popular search term in its top 10,
1046 that helps determine the behavior of millions of people. If Google’s answer
1047 to <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Are vaccines dangerous?</span>”</span> is a page that rebuts anti-vax
1048 conspiracy theories, then a sizable portion of the public will learn that
1049 vaccines are safe. If, on the other hand, Google sends those people to a
1050 site affirming the anti-vax conspiracies, a sizable portion of those
1051 millions will come away convinced that vaccines are dangerous.
1052   </p><p>
1053     Google’s algorithm is often tricked into serving disinformation as a
1054 prominent search result. But in these cases, Google isn’t persuading people
1055 to change their minds; it’s just presenting something untrue as fact when
1056 the user has no cause to doubt it.
1057   </p><p>
1058     This is true whether the search is for <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Are vaccines
1059 dangerous?</span>”</span> or <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">best restaurants near me.</span>”</span> Most users
1060 will never look past the first page of search results, and when the
1061 overwhelming majority of people all use the same search engine, the ranking
1062 algorithm deployed by that search engine will determine myriad outcomes
1063 (whether to adopt a child, whether to have cancer surgery, where to eat
1064 dinner, where to move, where to apply for a job) to a degree that vastly
1065 outstrips any behavioral outcomes dictated by algorithmic persuasion
1066 techniques.
1067   </p><p>
1068     Many of the questions we ask search engines have no empirically correct
1069 answers: <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Where should I eat dinner?</span>”</span> is not an objective
1070 question. Even questions that do have correct answers (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Are vaccines
1071 dangerous?</span>”</span>) don’t have one empirically superior source for that
1072 answer. Many pages affirm the safety of vaccines, so which one goes first?
1073 Under conditions of competition, consumers can choose from many search
1074 engines and stick with the one whose algorithmic judgment suits them best,
1075 but under conditions of monopoly, we all get our answers from the same
1076 place.
1077   </p><p>
1078     Google’s search dominance isn’t a matter of pure merit: The company has
1079 leveraged many tactics that would have been prohibited under classical,
1080 pre-Ronald-Reagan antitrust enforcement standards to attain its
1081 dominance. After all, this is a company that has developed two major
1082 products: a really good search engine and a pretty good Hotmail clone. Every
1083 other major success it’s had — Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. — has
1084 come through an acquisition of a nascent competitor. Many of the company’s
1085 key divisions, such as the advertising technology of DoubleClick, violate
1086 the historical antitrust principle of structural separation, which forbade
1087 firms from owning subsidiaries that competed with their
1088 customers. Railroads, for example, were barred from owning freight companies
1089 that competed with the shippers whose freight they carried.
1090   </p><p>
1091     If we’re worried about giant companies subverting markets by stripping
1092 consumers of their ability to make free choices, then vigorous antitrust
1093 enforcement seems like an excellent remedy. If we’d denied Google the right
1094 to effect its many mergers, we would also have probably denied it its total
1095 search dominance. Without that dominance, the pet theories, biases, errors
1096 (and good judgment, too) of Google search engineers and product managers
1097 would not have such an outsized effect on consumer choice.
1098   </p><p>
1099     This goes for many other companies. Amazon, a classic surveillance
1100 capitalist, is obviously the dominant tool for searching Amazon — though
1101 many people find their way to Amazon through Google searches and Facebook
1102 posts — and obviously, Amazon controls Amazon search.  That means that
1103 Amazon’s own self-serving editorial choices—like promoting its own house
1104 brands over rival goods from its sellers as well as its own pet theories,
1105 biases, and errors— determine much of what we buy on Amazon. And since
1106 Amazon is the dominant e-commerce retailer outside of China and since it
1107 attained that dominance by buying up both large rivals and nascent
1108 competitors in defiance of historical antitrust rules, we can blame the
1109 monopoly for stripping consumers of their right to the future tense and the
1110 ability to shape markets by making informed choices.
1111   </p><p>
1112     Not every monopolist is a surveillance capitalist, but that doesn’t mean
1113 they’re not able to shape consumer choices in wide-ranging ways. Zuboff
1114 lauds Apple for its App Store and iTunes Store, insisting that adding price
1115 tags to the features on its platforms has been the secret to resisting
1116 surveillance and thus creating markets. But Apple is the only retailer
1117 allowed to sell on its platforms, and it’s the second-largest mobile device
1118 vendor in the world. The independent software vendors that sell through
1119 Apple’s marketplace accuse the company of the same surveillance sins as
1120 Amazon and other big retailers: spying on its customers to find lucrative
1121 new products to launch, effectively using independent software vendors as
1122 free-market researchers, then forcing them out of any markets they discover.
1123   </p><p>
1124     Because of its use of copyright locks, Apple’s mobile customers are not
1125 legally allowed to switch to a rival retailer for its apps if they want to
1126 do so on an iPhone. Apple, obviously, is the only entity that gets to decide
1127 how it ranks the results of search queries in its stores. These decisions
1128 ensure that some apps are often installed (because they appear on page one)
1129 and others are never installed (because they appear on page one
1130 million). Apple’s search-ranking design decisions have a vastly more
1131 significant effect on consumer behaviors than influence campaigns delivered
1132 by surveillance capitalism’s ad-serving bots.
1133   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="monopolists-can-afford-sleeping-pills-for-watchdogs"></a>Monopoliści mogą sobie pozwolić na proszki nasenne dla strażników</h2></div></div></div><p>
1134     Only the most extreme market ideologues think that markets can self-regulate
1135 without state oversight. Markets need watchdogs — regulators, lawmakers, and
1136 other elements of democratic control — to keep them honest. When these
1137 watchdogs sleep on the job, then markets cease to aggregate consumer choices
1138 because those choices are constrained by illegitimate and deceptive
1139 activities that companies are able to get away with because no one is
1140 holding them to account.
1141   </p><p>
1142     But this kind of regulatory capture doesn’t come cheap. In competitive
1143 sectors, where rivals are constantly eroding one another’s margins,
1144 individual firms lack the surplus capital to effectively lobby for laws and
1145 regulations that serve their ends.
1146   </p><p>
1147     Many of the harms of surveillance capitalism are the result of weak or
1148 nonexistent regulation. Those regulatory vacuums spring from the power of
1149 monopolists to resist stronger regulation and to tailor what regulation
1150 exists to permit their existing businesses.
1151   </p><p>
1152     Here’s an example: When firms over-collect and over-retain our data, they
1153 are at increased risk of suffering a breach — you can’t leak data you never
1154 collected, and once you delete all copies of that data, you can no longer
1155 leak it. For more than a decade, we’ve lived through an endless parade of
1156 ever-worsening data breaches, each one uniquely horrible in the scale of
1157 data breached and the sensitivity of that data.
1158   </p><p>
1159     But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for three
1160 reasons:
1161   </p><p>
1162     <span class="strong"><strong>1. They are locked in the aforementioned limbic arms
1163 race with our capacity to shore up our attentional defense systems to resist
1164 their new persuasion techniques.</strong></span> They’re also locked in an arms
1165 race with their competitors to find new ways to target people for sales
1166 pitches. As soon as they discover a soft spot in our attentional defenses (a
1167 counterintuitive, unobvious way to target potential refrigerator buyers),
1168 the public begins to wise up to the tactic, and their competitors leap on
1169 it, hastening the day in which all potential refrigerator buyers have been
1170 inured to the pitch.
1171   </p><p>
1172     <span class="strong"><strong>2. They believe the surveillance capitalism
1173 story.</strong></span> Data is cheap to aggregate and store, and both proponents
1174 and opponents of surveillance capitalism have assured managers and product
1175 designers that if you collect enough data, you will be able to perform
1176 sorcerous acts of mind control, thus supercharging your sales. Even if you
1177 never figure out how to profit from the data, someone else will eventually
1178 offer to buy it from you to give it a try. This is the hallmark of all
1179 economic bubbles: acquiring an asset on the assumption that someone else
1180 will buy it from you for more than you paid for it, often to sell to someone
1181 else at an even greater price.
1182   </p><p>
1183     <span class="strong"><strong>3. The penalties for leaking data are
1184 negligible.</strong></span> Most countries limit these penalties to actual
1185 damages, meaning that consumers who’ve had their data breached have to show
1186 actual monetary harms to get a reward. In 2014, Home Depot disclosed that it
1187 had lost credit-card data for 53 million of its customers, but it settled
1188 the matter by paying those customers about $0.34 each — and a third of that
1189 $0.34 wasn’t even paid in cash. It took the form of a credit to procure a
1190 largely ineffectual credit-monitoring service.
1191   </p><p>
1192     But the harms from breaches are much more extensive than these
1193 actual-damages rules capture. Identity thieves and fraudsters are wily and
1194 endlessly inventive. All the vast breaches of our century are being
1195 continuously recombined, the data sets merged and mined for new ways to
1196 victimize the people whose data was present in them.  Any reasonable,
1197 evidence-based theory of deterrence and compensation for breaches would not
1198 confine damages to actual damages but rather would allow users to claim
1199 these future harms.
1200   </p><p>
1201     However, even the most ambitious privacy rules, such as the EU General Data
1202 Protection Regulation, fall far short of capturing the negative
1203 externalities of the platforms’ negligent over-collection and
1204 over-retention, and what penalties they do provide are not aggressively
1205 pursued by regulators.
1206   </p><p>
1207     This tolerance of — or indifference to — data over-collection and
1208 over-retention can be ascribed in part to the sheer lobbying muscle of the
1209 platforms. They are so profitable that they can handily afford to divert
1210 gigantic sums to fight any real change — that is, change that would force
1211 them to internalize the costs of their surveillance activities.
1212   </p><p>
1213     And then there’s state surveillance, which the surveillance capitalism story
1214 dismisses as a relic of another era when the big worry was being jailed for
1215 your dissident speech, not having your free will stripped away with machine
1216 learning.
1217   </p><p>
1218     But state surveillance and private surveillance are intimately related. As
1219 we saw when Apple was conscripted by the Chinese government as a vital
1220 collaborator in state surveillance, the only really affordable and tractable
1221 way to conduct mass surveillance on the scale practiced by modern states —
1222 both <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">free</span>”</span> and autocratic states — is to suborn commercial
1223 services.
1224   </p><p>
1225     Whether it’s Google being used as a location tracking tool by local law
1226 enforcement across the U.S. or the use of social media tracking by the
1227 Department of Homeland Security to build dossiers on participants in
1228 protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s family separation
1229 practices, any hard limits on surveillance capitalism would hamstring the
1230 state’s own surveillance capability. Without Palantir, Amazon, Google, and
1231 other major tech contractors, U.S. cops would not be able to spy on Black
1232 people, ICE would not be able to manage the caging of children at the U.S.
1233 border, and state welfare systems would not be able to purge their rolls by
1234 dressing up cruelty as empiricism and claiming that poor and vulnerable
1235 people are ineligible for assistance. At least some of the states’
1236 unwillingness to take meaningful action to curb surveillance should be
1237 attributed to this symbiotic relationship.  There is no mass state
1238 surveillance without mass commercial surveillance.
1239   </p><p>
1240     Monopolism is key to the project of mass state surveillance. It’s true that
1241 smaller tech firms are apt to be less well-defended than Big Tech, whose
1242 security experts are drawn from the tops of their field and who are given
1243 enormous resources to secure and monitor their systems against
1244 intruders. But smaller firms also have less to protect: fewer users whose
1245 data is more fragmented across more systems and have to be suborned one at a
1246 time by state actors.
1247   </p><p>
1248     A concentrated tech sector that works with authorities is a much more
1249 powerful ally in the project of mass state surveillance than a fragmented
1250 one composed of smaller actors. The U.S. tech sector is small enough that
1251 all of its top executives fit around a single boardroom table in Trump Tower
1252 in 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Most of its biggest players bid
1253 to win JEDI, the Pentagon’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense
1254 Infrastructure cloud contract. Like other highly concentrated industries,
1255 Big Tech rotates its key employees in and out of government service, sending
1256 them to serve in the Department of Defense and the White House, then hiring
1257 ex-Pentagon and ex-DOD top staffers and officers to work in their own
1258 government relations departments.
1259   </p><p>
1260     They can even make a good case for doing this: After all, when there are
1261 only four or five big companies in an industry, everyone qualified to
1262 regulate those companies has served as an executive in at least a couple of
1263 them — because, likewise, when there are only five companies in an industry,
1264 everyone qualified for a senior role at any of them is by definition working
1265 at one of the other ones.
1266   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
1267       While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly abet
1268 surveillance.
1269     </p></blockquote></div><p>
1270     Industries that are competitive are fragmented — composed of companies that
1271 are at each other’s throats all the time and eroding one another’s margins
1272 in bids to steal their best customers. This leaves them with much more
1273 limited capital to use to lobby for favorable rules and a much harder job of
1274 getting everyone to agree to pool their resources to benefit the industry as
1275 a whole.
1276   </p><p>
1277     Surveillance combined with machine learning is supposed to be an existential
1278 crisis, a species-defining moment at which our free will is just a few more
1279 advances in the field from being stripped away. I am skeptical of this
1280 claim, but I <span class="emphasis"><em>do</em></span> think that tech poses an existential
1281 threat to our society and possibly our species.
1282   </p><p>
1283     But that threat grows out of monopoly.
1284   </p><p>
1285     One of the consequences of tech’s regulatory capture is that it can shift
1286 liability for poor security decisions onto its customers and the wider
1287 society. It is absolutely normal in tech for companies to obfuscate the
1288 workings of their products, to make them deliberately hard to understand,
1289 and to threaten security researchers who seek to independently audit those
1290 products.
1291   </p><p>
1292     IT is the only field in which this is practiced: No one builds a bridge or a
1293 hospital and keeps the composition of the steel or the equations used to
1294 calculate load stresses a secret. It is a frankly bizarre practice that
1295 leads, time and again, to grotesque security defects on farcical scales,
1296 with whole classes of devices being revealed as vulnerable long after they
1297 are deployed in the field and put into sensitive places.
1298   </p><p>
1299     The monopoly power that keeps any meaningful consequences for breaches at
1300 bay means that tech companies continue to build terrible products that are
1301 insecure by design and that end up integrated into our lives, in possession
1302 of our data, and connected to our physical world. For years, Boeing has
1303 struggled with the aftermath of a series of bad technology decisions that
1304 made its 737 fleet a global pariah, a rare instance in which bad tech
1305 decisions have been seriously punished in the market.
1306   </p><p>
1307     These bad security decisions are compounded yet again by the use of
1308 copyright locks to enforce business-model decisions against
1309 consumers. Recall that these locks have become the go-to means for shaping
1310 consumer behavior, making it technically impossible to use third-party ink,
1311 insulin, apps, or service depots in connection with your lawfully acquired
1312 property.
1313   </p><p>
1314     Recall also that these copyright locks are backstopped by legislation (such
1315 as Section 1201 of the DMCA or Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive)
1316 that ban tampering with (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">circumventing</span>”</span>) them, and these
1317 statutes have been used to threaten security researchers who make
1318 disclosures about vulnerabilities without permission from manufacturers.
1319   </p><p>
1320     This amounts to a manufacturer’s veto over safety warnings and
1321 criticism. While this is far from the legislative intent of the DMCA and its
1322 sister statutes around the world, Congress has not intervened to clarify the
1323 statute nor will it because to do so would run counter to the interests of
1324 powerful, large firms whose lobbying muscle is unstoppable.
1325   </p><p>
1326     Copyright locks are a double whammy: They create bad security decisions that
1327 can’t be freely investigated or discussed. If markets are supposed to be
1328 machines for aggregating information (and if surveillance capitalism’s
1329 notional mind-control rays are what make it a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue
1330 capitalism</span>”</span> because it denies consumers the power to make decisions),
1331 then a program of legally enforced ignorance of the risks of products makes
1332 monopolism even more of a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>”</span> than surveillance
1333 capitalism’s influence campaigns.
1334   </p><p>
1335     And unlike mind-control rays, enforced silence over security is an
1336 immediate, documented problem, and it <span class="emphasis"><em>does</em></span> constitute
1337 an existential threat to our civilization and possibly our species. The
1338 proliferation of insecure devices — especially devices that spy on us and
1339 especially when those devices also can manipulate the physical world by,
1340 say, steering your car or flipping a breaker at a power station — is a kind
1341 of technology debt.
1342   </p><p>
1343     In software design, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">technology debt</span>”</span> refers to old, baked-in
1344 decisions that turn out to be bad ones in hindsight. Perhaps a long-ago
1345 developer decided to incorporate a networking protocol made by a vendor that
1346 has since stopped supporting it. But everything in the product still relies
1347 on that superannuated protocol, and so, with each revision, the product team
1348 has to work around this obsolete core, adding compatibility layers,
1349 surrounding it with security checks that try to shore up its defenses, and
1350 so on. These Band-Aid measures compound the debt because every subsequent
1351 revision has to make allowances for <span class="emphasis"><em>them</em></span>, too, like
1352 interest mounting on a predatory subprime loan. And like a subprime loan,
1353 the interest mounts faster than you can hope to pay it off: The product team
1354 has to put so much energy into maintaining this complex, brittle system that
1355 they don’t have any time left over to refactor the product from the ground
1356 up and <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">pay off the debt</span>”</span> once and for all.
1357   </p><p>
1358     Typically, technology debt results in a technological bankruptcy: The
1359 product gets so brittle and unsustainable that it fails
1360 catastrophically. Think of the antiquated COBOL-based banking and accounting
1361 systems that fell over at the start of the pandemic emergency when
1362 confronted with surges of unemployment claims.  Sometimes that ends the
1363 product; sometimes it takes the company down with it. Being caught in the
1364 default of a technology debt is scary and traumatic, just like losing your
1365 house due to bankruptcy is scary and traumatic.
1366   </p><p>
1367     But the technology debt created by copyright locks isn’t individual debt;
1368 it’s systemic. Everyone in the world is exposed to this over-leverage, as
1369 was the case with the 2008 financial crisis. When that debt comes due — when
1370 we face a cascade of security breaches that threaten global shipping and
1371 logistics, the food supply, pharmaceutical production pipelines, emergency
1372 communications, and other critical systems that are accumulating technology
1373 debt in part due to the presence of deliberately insecure and deliberately
1374 unauditable copyright locks — it will indeed pose an existential risk.
1375   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="privacy-and-monopoly"></a>Prywatność a monopol</h2></div></div></div><p>
1376     Many tech companies are gripped by an orthodoxy that holds that if they just
1377 gather enough data on enough of our activities, everything else is possible
1378 — the mind control and endless profits. This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis:
1379 If data gives a tech company even a tiny improvement in behavior prediction
1380 and modification, the company declares that it has taken the first step
1381 toward global domination with no end in sight. If a company
1382 <span class="emphasis"><em>fails</em></span> to attain any improvements from gathering and
1383 analyzing data, it declares success to be just around the corner, attainable
1384 once more data is in hand.
1385   </p><p>
1386     Surveillance tech is far from the first industry to embrace a nonsensical,
1387 self-serving belief that harms the rest of the world, and it is not the
1388 first industry to profit handsomely from such a delusion. Long before
1389 hedge-fund managers were claiming (falsely)  that they could beat the
1390 S&amp;P 500, there were plenty of other <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">respectable</span>”</span>
1391 industries that have been revealed as quacks in hindsight. From the makers
1392 of radium suppositories (a real thing!)  to the cruel sociopaths who claimed
1393 they could <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">cure</span>”</span> gay people, history is littered with the
1394 formerly respectable titans of discredited industries.
1395   </p><p>
1396     This is not to say that there’s nothing wrong with Big Tech and its
1397 ideological addiction to data. While surveillance’s benefits are mostly
1398 overstated, its harms are, if anything, <span class="emphasis"><em>understated</em></span>.
1399   </p><p>
1400     There’s real irony here. The belief in surveillance capitalism as a
1401 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>”</span> is driven by the belief that markets
1402 wouldn’t tolerate firms that are gripped by false beliefs. An oil company
1403 that has false beliefs about where the oil is will eventually go broke
1404 digging dry wells after all.
1405   </p><p>
1406     But monopolists get to do terrible things for a long time before they pay
1407 the price. Think of how concentration in the finance sector allowed the
1408 subprime crisis to fester as bond-rating agencies, regulators, investors,
1409 and critics all fell under the sway of a false belief that complex
1410 mathematics could construct <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">fully hedged</span>”</span> debt instruments
1411 that could not possibly default. A small bank that engaged in this kind of
1412 malfeasance would simply go broke rather than outrunning the inevitable
1413 crisis, perhaps growing so big that it averted it altogether. But large
1414 banks were able to continue to attract investors, and when they finally
1415 <span class="emphasis"><em>did</em></span> come a-cropper, the world’s governments bailed them
1416 out. The worst offenders of the subprime crisis are bigger than they were in
1417 2008, bringing home more profits and paying their execs even larger sums.
1418   </p><p>
1419     Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but
1420 because it is <span class="emphasis"><em>big</em></span>. The reason every web publisher
1421 embeds a Facebook <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Like</span>”</span> button is that Facebook dominates the
1422 internet’s social media referrals — and every one of those
1423 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Like</span>”</span> buttons spies on everyone who lands on a page that
1424 contains them (see also: Google Analytics embeds, Twitter buttons, etc.).
1425   </p><p>
1426     The reason the world’s governments have been slow to create meaningful
1427 penalties for privacy breaches is that Big Tech’s concentration produces
1428 huge profits that can be used to lobby against those penalties — and Big
1429 Tech’s concentration means that the companies involved are able to arrive at
1430 a unified negotiating position that supercharges the lobbying.
1431   </p><p>
1432     The reason that the smartest engineers in the world want to work for Big
1433 Tech is that Big Tech commands the lion’s share of tech industry jobs.
1434   </p><p>
1435     The reason people who are aghast at Facebook’s and Google’s and Amazon’s
1436 data-handling practices continue to use these services is that all their
1437 friends are on Facebook; Google dominates search; and Amazon has put all the
1438 local merchants out of business.
1439   </p><p>
1440     Competitive markets would weaken the companies’ lobbying muscle by reducing
1441 their profits and pitting them against each other in regulatory forums. It
1442 would give customers other places to go to get their online services. It
1443 would make the companies small enough to regulate and pave the way to
1444 meaningful penalties for breaches. It would let engineers with ideas that
1445 challenged the surveillance orthodoxy raise capital to compete with the
1446 incumbents. It would give web publishers multiple ways to reach audiences
1447 and make the case against Facebook and Google and Twitter embeds.
1448   </p><p>
1449     In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies
1450 certainly abet surveillance.
1451   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="ronald-reagan-pioneer-of-tech-monopolism"></a>Ronald Reagan, pionier monopolizmu technologicznego</h2></div></div></div><p>
1452     Technology exceptionalism is a sin, whether it’s practiced by technology’s
1453 blind proponents or by its critics. Both of these camps are prone to
1454 explaining away monopolistic concentration by citing some special
1455 characteristic of the tech industry, like network effects or first-mover
1456 advantage. The only real difference between these two groups is that the
1457 tech apologists say monopoly is inevitable so we should just let tech get
1458 away with its abuses while competition regulators in the U.S. and the EU say
1459 monopoly is inevitable so we should punish tech for its abuses but not try
1460 to break up the monopolies.
1461   </p><p>
1462     To understand how tech became so monopolistic, it’s useful to look at the
1463 dawn of the consumer tech industry: 1979, the year the Apple II Plus
1464 launched and became the first successful home computer. That also happens to
1465 be the year that Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail for the 1980
1466 presidential race — a race he won, leading to a radical shift in the way
1467 that antitrust concerns are handled in America. Reagan’s cohort of
1468 politicians — including Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Brian Mulroney in
1469 Canada, Helmut Kohl in Germany, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile — went on to
1470 enact similar reforms that eventually spread around the world.
1471   </p><p>
1472     Antitrust’s story began nearly a century before all that with laws like the
1473 Sherman Act, which took aim at monopolists on the grounds that monopolies
1474 were bad in and of themselves — squeezing out competitors, creating
1475 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">diseconomies of scale</span>”</span> (when a company is so big that its
1476 constituent parts go awry and it is seemingly helpless to address the
1477 problems), and capturing their regulators to such a degree that they can get
1478 away with a host of evils.
1479   </p><p>
1480     Then came a fabulist named Robert Bork, a former solicitor general who
1481 Reagan appointed to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
1482 and who had created an alternate legislative history of the Sherman Act and
1483 its successors out of whole cloth. Bork insisted that these statutes were
1484 never targeted at monopolies (despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary,
1485 including the transcribed speeches of the acts’ authors) but, rather, that
1486 they were intended to prevent <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">consumer harm</span>”</span> — in the form of
1487 higher prices.
1488   </p><p>
1489     Bork was a crank, but he was a crank with a theory that rich people really
1490 liked. Monopolies are a great way to make rich people richer by allowing
1491 them to receive <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">monopoly rents</span>”</span> (that is, bigger profits) and
1492 capture regulators, leading to a weaker, more favorable regulatory
1493 environment with fewer protections for customers, suppliers, the
1494 environment, and workers.
1495   </p><p>
1496     Bork’s theories were especially palatable to the same power brokers who
1497 backed Reagan, and Reagan’s Department of Justice and other agencies began
1498 to incorporate Bork’s antitrust doctrine into their enforcement decisions
1499 (Reagan even put Bork up for a Supreme Court seat, but Bork flunked the
1500 Senate confirmation hearing so badly that, 40 years later, D.C. insiders use
1501 the term <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">borked</span>”</span> to refer to any catastrophically bad
1502 political performance).
1503   </p><p>
1504     Little by little, Bork’s theories entered the mainstream, and their backers
1505 began to infiltrate the legal education field, even putting on junkets where
1506 members of the judiciary were treated to lavish meals, fun outdoor
1507 activities, and seminars where they were indoctrinated into the consumer
1508 harm theory of antitrust. The more Bork’s theories took hold, the more money
1509 the monopolists were making — and the more surplus capital they had at their
1510 disposal to lobby for even more Borkian antitrust influence campaigns.
1511   </p><p>
1512     The history of Bork’s antitrust theories is a really good example of the
1513 kind of covertly engineered shifts in public opinion that Zuboff warns us
1514 against, where fringe ideas become mainstream orthodoxy.  But Bork didn’t
1515 change the world overnight. He played a very long game, for over a
1516 generation, and he had a tailwind because the same forces that backed
1517 oligarchic antitrust theories also backed many other oligarchic shifts in
1518 public opinion. For example, the idea that taxation is theft, that wealth is
1519 a sign of virtue, and so on — all of these theories meshed to form a
1520 coherent ideology that elevated inequality to a virtue.
1521   </p><p>
1522     Today, many fear that machine learning allows surveillance capitalism to
1523 sell <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Bork-as-a-Service,</span>”</span> at internet speeds, so that you can
1524 contract a machine-learning company to engineer <span class="emphasis"><em>rapid</em></span>
1525 shifts in public sentiment without needing the capital to sustain a
1526 multipronged, multigenerational project working at the local, state,
1527 national, and global levels in business, law, and philosophy. I do not
1528 believe that such a project is plausible, though I agree that this is
1529 basically what the platforms claim to be selling. They’re just lying about
1530 it. Big Tech lies all the time, <span class="emphasis"><em>including</em></span> in their
1531 sales literature.
1532   </p><p>
1533     The idea that tech forms <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">natural monopolies</span>”</span> (monopolies that
1534 are the inevitable result of the realities of an industry, such as the
1535 monopolies that accrue the first company to run long-haul phone lines or
1536 rail lines) is belied by tech’s own history: In the absence of
1537 anti-competitive tactics, Google was able to unseat AltaVista and Yahoo;
1538 Facebook was able to head off Myspace. There are some advantages to
1539 gathering mountains of data, but those mountains of data also have
1540 disadvantages: liability (from leaking), diminishing returns (from old
1541 data), and institutional inertia (big companies, like science, progress one
1542 funeral at a time).
1543   </p><p>
1544     Indeed, the birth of the web saw a mass-extinction event for the existing
1545 giant, wildly profitable proprietary technologies that had capital, network
1546 effects, and walls and moats surrounding their businesses. The web showed
1547 that when a new industry is built around a protocol, rather than a product,
1548 the combined might of everyone who uses the protocol to reach their
1549 customers or users or communities outweighs even the most massive
1550 products. CompuServe, AOL, MSN, and a host of other proprietary walled
1551 gardens learned this lesson the hard way: Each believed it could stay
1552 separate from the web, offering <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">curation</span>”</span> and a guarantee of
1553 consistency and quality instead of the chaos of an open system. Each was
1554 wrong and ended up being absorbed into the public web.
1555   </p><p>
1556     Yes, tech is heavily monopolized and is now closely associated with industry
1557 concentration, but this has more to do with a matter of timing than its
1558 intrinsically monopolistic tendencies. Tech was born at the moment that
1559 antitrust enforcement was being dismantled, and tech fell into exactly the
1560 same pathologies that antitrust was supposed to guard against. To a first
1561 approximation, it is reasonable to assume that tech’s monopolies are the
1562 result of a lack of anti-monopoly action and not the much-touted unique
1563 characteristics of tech, such as network effects, first-mover advantage, and
1564 so on.
1565   </p><p>
1566     In support of this thesis, I offer the concentration that every
1567 <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> industry has undergone over the same period. From
1568 professional wrestling to consumer packaged goods to commercial property
1569 leasing to banking to sea freight to oil to record labels to newspaper
1570 ownership to theme parks, <span class="emphasis"><em>every</em></span> industry has undergone
1571 a massive shift toward concentration. There’s no obvious network effects or
1572 first-mover advantage at play in these industries. However, in every case,
1573 these industries attained their concentrated status through tactics that
1574 were prohibited before Bork’s triumph: merging with major competitors,
1575 buying out innovative new market entrants, horizontal and vertical
1576 integration, and a suite of anti-competitive tactics that were once illegal
1577 but are not any longer.
1578   </p><p>
1579     Again: When you change the laws intended to prevent monopolies and then
1580 monopolies form in exactly the way the law was supposed to prevent, it is
1581 reasonable to suppose that these facts are related.  Tech’s concentration
1582 can be readily explained without recourse to radical theories of network
1583 effects — but only if you’re willing to indict unregulated markets as
1584 tending toward monopoly. Just as a lifelong smoker can give you a hundred
1585 reasons why their smoking didn’t cause their cancer (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">It was the
1586 environmental toxins</span>”</span>), true believers in unregulated markets have a
1587 whole suite of unconvincing explanations for monopoly in tech that leave
1588 capitalism intact.
1589   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="steering-with-the-windshield-wipers"></a>Sterowanie za pomocą wycieraczek przedniej szyby</h2></div></div></div><p>
1590     It’s been 40 years since Bork’s project to rehabilitate monopolies achieved
1591 liftoff, and that is a generation and a half, which is plenty of time to
1592 take a common idea and make it seem outlandish and vice versa. Before the
1593 1940s, affluent Americans dressed their baby boys in pink while baby girls
1594 wore blue (a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">delicate and dainty</span>”</span> color). While gendered
1595 colors are obviously totally arbitrary, many still greet this news with
1596 amazement and find it hard to imagine a time when pink connoted masculinity.
1597   </p><p>
1598     After 40 years of studiously ignoring antitrust analysis and enforcement,
1599 it’s not surprising that we’ve all but forgotten that antitrust exists, that
1600 in living memory, growth through mergers and acquisitions were largely
1601 prohibited under law, that market-cornering strategies like vertical
1602 integration could land a company in court.
1603   </p><p>
1604     Antitrust is a market society’s steering wheel, the control of first resort
1605 to keep would-be masters of the universe in their lanes. But Bork and his
1606 cohort ripped out our steering wheel 40 years ago. The car is still
1607 barreling along, and so we’re yanking as hard as we can on all the
1608 <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> controls in the car as well as desperately
1609 flapping the doors and rolling the windows up and down in the hopes that one
1610 of these other controls can be repurposed to let us choose where we’re
1611 heading before we careen off a cliff.
1612   </p><p>
1613     It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in a
1614 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">generation ship,</span>”</span> plying its way across the stars, a ship once
1615 piloted by their ancestors; and now, after a great cataclysm, the ship’s
1616 crew have forgotten that they’re in a ship at all and no longer remember
1617 where the control room is. Adrift, the ship is racing toward its extinction,
1618 and unless we can seize the controls and execute emergency course
1619 correction, we’re all headed for a fiery death in the heart of a sun.
1620   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="surveillance-still-matters"></a>Systemy nadzoru mają ciągle znaczenie</h2></div></div></div><p>
1621     None of this is to minimize the problems with surveillance.  Surveillance
1622 matters, and Big Tech’s use of surveillance <span class="emphasis"><em>is</em></span> an
1623 existential risk to our species, but that’s not because surveillance and
1624 machine learning rob us of our free will.
1625   </p><p>
1626     Surveillance has become <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span> more efficient thanks to
1627 Big Tech. In 1989, the Stasi — the East German secret police — had the whole
1628 country under surveillance, a massive undertaking that recruited one out of
1629 every 60 people to serve as an informant or intelligence operative.
1630   </p><p>
1631     Today, we know that the NSA is spying on a significant fraction of the
1632 entire world’s population, and its ratio of surveillance operatives to the
1633 surveilled is more like 1:10,000 (that’s probably on the low side since it
1634 assumes that every American with top-secret clearance is working for the NSA
1635 on this project — we don’t know how many of those cleared people are
1636 involved in NSA spying, but it’s definitely not all of them).
1637   </p><p>
1638     How did the ratio of surveillable citizens expand from 1:60 to 1:10,000 in
1639 less than 30 years? It’s thanks to Big Tech. Our devices and services gather
1640 most of the data that the NSA mines for its surveillance project. We pay for
1641 these devices and the services they connect to, and then we painstakingly
1642 perform the data-entry tasks associated with logging facts about our lives,
1643 opinions, and preferences. This mass surveillance project has been largely
1644 useless for fighting terrorism: The NSA can <a class="ulink" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-cites-case-as-success-of-phone-data-collection-program/2013/08/08/fc915e5a-feda-11e2-96a8-d3b921c0924a_story.html" target="_top">only
1645 point to a single minor success story</a> in which it used its data
1646 collection program to foil an attempt by a U.S. resident to wire a few
1647 thousand dollars to an overseas terror group. It’s ineffective for much the
1648 same reason that commercial surveillance projects are largely ineffective at
1649 targeting advertising: The people who want to commit acts of terror, like
1650 people who want to buy a refrigerator, are extremely rare. If you’re trying
1651 to detect a phenomenon whose base rate is one in a million with an
1652 instrument whose accuracy is only 99%, then every true positive will come at
1653 the cost of 9,999 false positives.
1654   </p><p>
1655     Let me explain that again: If one in a million people is a terrorist, then
1656 there will only be about one terrorist in a random sample of one million
1657 people. If your test for detecting terrorists is 99% accurate, it will
1658 identify 10,000 terrorists in your million-person sample (1% of one million
1659 is 10,000). For every true positive, you’ll get 9,999 false positives.
1660   </p><p>
1661     In reality, the accuracy of algorithmic terrorism detection falls far short
1662 of the 99% mark, as does refrigerator ad targeting. The difference is that
1663 being falsely accused of wanting to buy a fridge is a minor nuisance while
1664 being falsely accused of planning a terror attack can destroy your life and
1665 the lives of everyone you love.
1666   </p><p>
1667     Mass state surveillance is only feasible because of surveillance capitalism
1668 and its extremely low-yield ad-targeting systems, which require a constant
1669 feed of personal data to remain barely viable.  Surveillance capitalism’s
1670 primary failure mode is mistargeted ads while mass state surveillance’s
1671 primary failure mode is grotesque human rights abuses, tending toward
1672 totalitarianism.
1673   </p><p>
1674     State surveillance is no mere parasite on Big Tech, sucking up its data and
1675 giving nothing in return. In truth, the two are symbiotes: Big Tech sucks up
1676 our data for spy agencies, and spy agencies ensure that governments don’t
1677 limit Big Tech’s activities so severely that it would no longer serve the
1678 spy agencies’ needs. There is no firm distinction between state surveillance
1679 and surveillance capitalism; they are dependent on one another.
1680   </p><p>
1681     To see this at work today, look no further than Amazon’s home surveillance
1682 device, the Ring doorbell, and its associated app, Neighbors. Ring — a
1683 product that Amazon acquired and did not develop in house — makes a
1684 camera-enabled doorbell that streams footage from your front door to your
1685 mobile device. The Neighbors app allows you to form a neighborhood-wide
1686 surveillance grid with your fellow Ring owners through which you can share
1687 clips of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">suspicious characters.</span>”</span> If you’re thinking that this
1688 sounds like a recipe for letting curtain-twitching racists supercharge their
1689 suspicions of people with brown skin who walk down their blocks, <a class="ulink" href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/amazons-ring-enables-over-policing-efforts-some-americas-deadliest-law-enforcement" target="_top">you’re
1690 right</a>. Ring has become a <span class="emphasis"><em>de facto,</em></span>
1691 off-the-books arm of the police without any of the pesky oversight or rules.
1692   </p><p>
1693     In mid-2019, a series of public records requests revealed that Amazon had
1694 struck confidential deals with more than 400 local law enforcement agencies
1695 through which the agencies would promote Ring and Neighbors and in exchange
1696 get access to footage from Ring cameras. In theory, cops would need to
1697 request this footage through Amazon (and internal documents reveal that
1698 Amazon devotes substantial resources to coaching cops on how to spin a
1699 convincing story when doing so), but in practice, when a Ring customer turns
1700 down a police request, Amazon only requires the agency to formally request
1701 the footage from the company, which it will then produce.
1702   </p><p>
1703     Ring and law enforcement have found many ways to intertwine their
1704 activities. Ring strikes secret deals to acquire real-time access to 911
1705 dispatch and then streams alarming crime reports to Neighbors users, which
1706 serve as convincers for anyone who’s contemplating a surveillance doorbell
1707 but isn’t sure whether their neighborhood is dangerous enough to warrant it.
1708   </p><p>
1709     The more the cops buzz-market the surveillance capitalist Ring, the more
1710 surveillance capability the state gets. Cops who rely on private entities
1711 for law-enforcement roles then brief against any controls on the deployment
1712 of that technology while the companies return the favor by lobbying against
1713 rules requiring public oversight of police surveillance technology. The more
1714 the cops rely on Ring and Neighbors, the harder it will be to pass laws to
1715 curb them. The fewer laws there are against them, the more the cops will
1716 rely on them.
1717   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="dignity-and-sanctuary"></a>Godność i sanktuarium</h2></div></div></div><p>
1718     But even if we could exercise democratic control over our states and force
1719 them to stop raiding surveillance capitalism’s reservoirs of behavioral
1720 data, surveillance capitalism would still harm us.
1721   </p><p>
1722     This is an area where Zuboff shines. Her chapter on <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">sanctuary</span>”</span>
1723 — the feeling of being unobserved — is a beautiful hymn to introspection,
1724 calmness, mindfulness, and tranquility.
1725   </p><p>
1726     When you are watched, something changes. Anyone who has ever raised a child
1727 knows this. You might look up from your book (or more realistically, from
1728 your phone) and catch your child in a moment of profound realization and
1729 growth, a moment where they are learning something that is right at the edge
1730 of their abilities, requiring their entire ferocious concentration. For a
1731 moment, you’re transfixed, watching that rare and beautiful moment of focus
1732 playing out before your eyes, and then your child looks up and sees you
1733 seeing them, and the moment collapses. To grow, you need to be and expose
1734 your authentic self, and in that moment, you are vulnerable like a hermit
1735 crab scuttling from one shell to the next. The tender, unprotected tissues
1736 you expose in that moment are too delicate to reveal in the presence of
1737 another, even someone you trust as implicitly as a child trusts their
1738 parent.
1739   </p><p>
1740     In the digital age, our authentic selves are inextricably tied to our
1741 digital lives. Your search history is a running ledger of the questions
1742 you’ve pondered. Your location history is a record of the places you’ve
1743 sought out and the experiences you’ve had there. Your social graph reveals
1744 the different facets of your identity, the people you’ve connected with.
1745   </p><p>
1746     To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your
1747 authentic self.
1748   </p><p>
1749     There’s another way in which surveillance capitalism robs us of our capacity
1750 to be our authentic selves: by making us anxious.  Surveillance capitalism
1751 isn’t really a mind-control ray, but you don’t need a mind-control ray to
1752 make someone anxious. After all, another word for anxiety is agitation, and
1753 to make someone experience agitation, you need merely to agitate them. To
1754 poke them and prod them and beep at them and buzz at them and bombard them
1755 on an intermittent schedule that is just random enough that our limbic
1756 systems never quite become inured to it.
1757   </p><p>
1758     Our devices and services are <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">general purpose</span>”</span> in that they can
1759 connect anything or anyone to anything or anyone else and that they can run
1760 any program that can be written. This means that the distraction rectangles
1761 in our pockets hold our most precious moments with our most beloved people
1762 and their most urgent or time-sensitive communications (from <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">running
1763 late can you get the kid?</span>”</span> to <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">doctor gave me bad news and I
1764 need to talk to you RIGHT NOW</span>”</span>) as well as ads for refrigerators and
1765 recruiting messages from Nazis.
1766   </p><p>
1767     All day and all night, our pockets buzz, shattering our concentration and
1768 tearing apart the fragile webs of connection we spin as we think through
1769 difficult ideas. If you locked someone in a cell and agitated them like
1770 this, we’d call it <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">sleep deprivation torture,</span>”</span> and it would be
1771 <a class="ulink" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKpRbvnx6g" target="_top">a war crime under
1772 the Geneva Conventions</a>.
1773   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="afflicting-the-afflicted"></a>Dręczenie udręczonych</h2></div></div></div><p>
1774     The effects of surveillance on our ability to be our authentic selves are
1775 not equal for all people. Some of us are lucky enough to live in a time and
1776 place in which all the most important facts of our lives are widely and
1777 roundly socially acceptable and can be publicly displayed without the risk
1778 of social consequence.
1779   </p><p>
1780     But for many of us, this is not true. Recall that in living memory, many of
1781 the ways of being that we think of as socially acceptable today were once
1782 cause for dire social sanction or even imprisonment.  If you are 65 years
1783 old, you have lived through a time in which people living in <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">free
1784 societies</span>”</span> could be imprisoned or sanctioned for engaging in
1785 homosexual activity, for falling in love with a person whose skin was a
1786 different color than their own, or for smoking weed.
1787   </p><p>
1788     Today, these activities aren’t just decriminalized in much of the world,
1789 they’re considered normal, and the fallen prohibitions are viewed as
1790 shameful, regrettable relics of the past.
1791   </p><p>
1792     How did we get from prohibition to normalization? Through private, personal
1793 activity: People who were secretly gay or secret pot-smokers or who secretly
1794 loved someone with a different skin color were vulnerable to retaliation if
1795 they made their true selves known and were limited in how much they could
1796 advocate for their own right to exist in the world and be true to
1797 themselves. But because there was a private sphere, these people could form
1798 alliances with their friends and loved ones who did not share their
1799 disfavored traits by having private conversations in which they came out,
1800 disclosing their true selves to the people around them and bringing them to
1801 their cause one conversation at a time.
1802   </p><p>
1803     The right to choose the time and manner of these conversations was key to
1804 their success. It’s one thing to come out to your dad while you’re on a
1805 fishing trip away from the world and another thing entirely to blurt it out
1806 over the Christmas dinner table while your racist Facebook uncle is there to
1807 make a scene.
1808   </p><p>
1809     Without a private sphere, there’s a chance that none of these changes would
1810 have come to pass and that the people who benefited from these changes would
1811 have either faced social sanction for coming out to a hostile world or would
1812 have never been able to reveal their true selves to the people they love.
1813   </p><p>
1814     The corollary is that, unless you think that our society has attained social
1815 perfection — that your grandchildren in 50 years will ask you to tell them
1816 the story of how, in 2020, every injustice had been righted and no further
1817 change had to be made — then you should expect that right now, at this
1818 minute, there are people you love, whose happiness is key to your own, who
1819 have a secret in their hearts that stops them from ever being their
1820 authentic selves with you. These people are sorrowing and will go to their
1821 graves with that secret sorrow in their hearts, and the source of that
1822 sorrow will be the falsity of their relationship to you.
1823   </p><p>
1824     Prywatna rzeczywistość jest konieczna dla rozwoju ludzkości.
1825   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="any-data-you-collect-and-retain-will-eventually-leak"></a>Jakiekolwiek dane, które zbierasz i przetwarzasz, kiedyś w końcu wyciekną</h2></div></div></div><p>
1826     The lack of a private life can rob vulnerable people of the chance to be
1827 their authentic selves and constrain our actions by depriving us of
1828 sanctuary, but there is another risk that is borne by everyone, not just
1829 people with a secret: crime.
1830   </p><p>
1831     Personally identifying information is of very limited use for the purpose of
1832 controlling peoples’ minds, but identity theft — really a catchall term for
1833 a whole constellation of terrible criminal activities that can destroy your
1834 finances, compromise your personal integrity, ruin your reputation, or even
1835 expose you to physical danger — thrives on it.
1836   </p><p>
1837     Attackers are not limited to using data from one breached source,
1838 either. Multiple services have suffered breaches that exposed names,
1839 addresses, phone numbers, passwords, sexual tastes, school grades, work
1840 performance, brushes with the criminal justice system, family details,
1841 genetic information, fingerprints and other biometrics, reading habits,
1842 search histories, literary tastes, pseudonymous identities, and other
1843 sensitive information. Attackers can merge data from these different
1844 breaches to build up extremely detailed dossiers on random subjects and then
1845 use different parts of the data for different criminal purposes.
1846   </p><p>
1847     For example, attackers can use leaked username and password combinations to
1848 hijack whole fleets of commercial vehicles that <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmpx4x/hacker-monitor-cars-kill-engine-gps-tracking-apps" target="_top">have
1849 been fitted with anti-theft GPS trackers and immobilizers</a> or to
1850 hijack baby monitors in order to <a class="ulink" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/23/how-nest-designed-keep-intruders-out-peoples-homes-effectively-allowed-hackers-get/?utm_term=.15220e98c550" target="_top">terrorize
1851 toddlers with the audio tracks from pornography</a>. Attackers use
1852 leaked data to trick phone companies into giving them your phone number,
1853 then they intercept SMS-based two-factor authentication codes in order to
1854 take over your email, bank account, and/or cryptocurrency wallets.
1855   </p><p>
1856     Attackers are endlessly inventive in the pursuit of creative ways to
1857 weaponize leaked data. One common use of leaked data is to penetrate
1858 companies in order to access <span class="emphasis"><em>more</em></span> data.
1859   </p><p>
1860     Like spies, online fraudsters are totally dependent on companies
1861 over-collecting and over-retaining our data. Spy agencies sometimes pay
1862 companies for access to their data or intimidate them into giving it up, but
1863 sometimes they work just like criminals do — by <a class="ulink" href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24751821" target="_top">sneaking data out of
1864 companies’ databases</a>.
1865   </p><p>
1866     The over-collection of data has a host of terrible social consequences, from
1867 the erosion of our authentic selves to the undermining of social progress,
1868 from state surveillance to an epidemic of online crime. Commercial
1869 surveillance is also a boon to people running influence campaigns, but
1870 that’s the least of our troubles.
1871   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="critical-tech-exceptionalism-is-still-tech-exceptionalism"></a>Przełomowa wyjątkowość technologiczna jest nadal technologiczną
1872 wyjątkowością</h2></div></div></div><p>
1873     Big Tech has long practiced technology exceptionalism: the idea that it
1874 should not be subject to the mundane laws and norms of
1875 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">meatspace.</span>”</span> Mottoes like Facebook’s <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">move fast and break
1876 things</span>”</span> attracted justifiable scorn of the companies’ self-serving
1877 rhetoric.
1878   </p><p>
1879     Tech exceptionalism got us all into a lot of trouble, so it’s ironic and
1880 distressing to see Big Tech’s critics committing the same sin.
1881   </p><p>
1882     Big Tech is not a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>”</span> that cannot be cured
1883 through the traditional anti-monopoly remedies of trustbusting (forcing
1884 companies to divest of competitors they have acquired) and bans on mergers
1885 to monopoly and other anti-competitive tactics. Big Tech does not have the
1886 power to use machine learning to influence our behavior so thoroughly that
1887 markets lose the ability to punish bad actors and reward superior
1888 competitors. Big Tech has no rule-writing mind-control ray that necessitates
1889 ditching our old toolbox.
1890   </p><p>
1891     The thing is, people have been claiming to have perfected mind-control rays
1892 for centuries, and every time, it turned out to be a con — though sometimes
1893 the con artists were also conning themselves.
1894   </p><p>
1895     For generations, the advertising industry has been steadily improving its
1896 ability to sell advertising services to businesses while only making
1897 marginal gains in selling those businesses’ products to prospective
1898 customers. John Wanamaker’s lament that <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">50% of my advertising budget
1899 is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%</span>”</span> is a testament to the triumph
1900 of <span class="emphasis"><em>ad executives</em></span>, who successfully convinced Wanamaker
1901 that only half of the money he spent went to waste.
1902   </p><p>
1903     The tech industry has made enormous improvements in the science of
1904 convincing businesses that they’re good at advertising while their actual
1905 improvements to advertising — as opposed to targeting — have been pretty
1906 ho-hum. The vogue for machine learning — and the mystical invocation of
1907 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">artificial intelligence</span>”</span> as a synonym for straightforward
1908 statistical inference techniques — has greatly boosted the efficacy of Big
1909 Tech’s sales pitch as marketers have exploited potential customers’ lack of
1910 technical sophistication to get away with breathtaking acts of overpromising
1911 and underdelivering.
1912   </p><p>
1913     It’s tempting to think that if businesses are willing to pour billions into
1914 a venture that the venture must be a good one. Yet there are plenty of times
1915 when this rule of thumb has led us astray.  For example, it’s virtually
1916 unheard of for managed investment funds to outperform simple index funds,
1917 and investors who put their money into the hands of expert money managers
1918 overwhelmingly fare worse than those who entrust their savings to index
1919 funds. But managed funds still account for the majority of the money
1920 invested in the markets, and they are patronized by some of the richest,
1921 most sophisticated investors in the world. Their vote of confidence in an
1922 underperforming sector is a parable about the role of luck in wealth
1923 accumulation, not a sign that managed funds are a good buy.
1924   </p><p>
1925     The claims of Big Tech’s mind-control system are full of tells that the
1926 enterprise is a con. For example, <a class="ulink" href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01415/full" target="_top">the
1927 reliance on the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Big Five</span>”</span> personality traits</a> as a
1928 primary means of influencing people even though the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Big Five</span>”</span>
1929 theory is unsupported by any large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is
1930 <a class="ulink" href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/" target="_top">mostly
1931 the realm of marketing hucksters and pop psych</a>.
1932   </p><p>
1933     Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms can
1934 accurately perform <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">sentiment analysis</span>”</span> or detect peoples’
1935 moods based on their <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">microexpressions,</span>”</span> but <a class="ulink" href="https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647040758/advertising-on-facebook-is-it-worth-it" target="_top">these
1936 are marketing claims, not scientific ones</a>. These methods are largely
1937 untested by independent scientific experts, and where they have been tested,
1938 they’ve been found sorely wanting.  Microexpressions are particularly
1939 suspect as the companies that specialize in training people to detect them
1940 <a class="ulink" href="https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/" target="_top">have
1941 been shown</a> to underperform relative to random chance.
1942   </p><p>
1943     Big Tech has been so good at marketing its own supposed superpowers that
1944 it’s easy to believe that they can market everything else with similar
1945 acumen, but it’s a mistake to believe the hype. Any statement a company
1946 makes about the quality of its products is clearly not impartial. The fact
1947 that we distrust all the things that Big Tech says about its data handling,
1948 compliance with privacy laws, etc., is only reasonable — but why on Earth
1949 would we treat Big Tech’s marketing literature as the gospel truth? Big Tech
1950 lies about just about <span class="emphasis"><em>everything</em></span>, including how well
1951 its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work.
1952   </p><p>
1953     That skepticism should infuse all of our evaluations of Big Tech and its
1954 supposed abilities, including our perusal of its patents. Zuboff vests these
1955 patents with enormous significance, pointing out that Google claimed
1956 extensive new persuasion capabilities in <a class="ulink" href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050131762A1/en" target="_top">its patent
1957 filings</a>. These claims are doubly suspect: first, because they are so
1958 self-serving, and second, because the patent itself is so notoriously an
1959 invitation to exaggeration.
1960   </p><p>
1961     Patent applications take the form of a series of claims and range from broad
1962 to narrow. A typical patent starts out by claiming that its authors have
1963 invented a method or system for doing every conceivable thing that anyone
1964 might do, ever, with any tool or device. Then it narrows that claim in
1965 successive stages until we get to the actual <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">invention</span>”</span> that
1966 is the true subject of the patent.  The hope is that the patent examiner —
1967 who is almost certainly overworked and underinformed — will miss the fact
1968 that some or all of these claims are ridiculous, or at least suspect, and
1969 grant the patent’s broader claims. Patents for unpatentable things are still
1970 incredibly useful because they can be wielded against competitors who might
1971 license that patent or steer clear of its claims rather than endure the
1972 lengthy, expensive process of contesting it.
1973   </p><p>
1974     What’s more, software patents are routinely granted even though the filer
1975 doesn’t have any evidence that they can do the thing claimed by the
1976 patent. That is, you can patent an <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">invention</span>”</span> that you haven’t
1977 actually made and that you don’t know how to make.
1978   </p><p>
1979     With these considerations in hand, it becomes obvious that the fact that a
1980 Big Tech company has patented what it <span class="emphasis"><em>says</em></span> is an
1981 effective mind-control ray is largely irrelevant to whether Big Tech can in
1982 fact control our minds.
1983   </p><p>
1984     Big Tech collects our data for many reasons, including the diminishing
1985 returns on existing stores of data. But many tech companies also collect
1986 data out of a mistaken tech exceptionalist belief in the network effects of
1987 data. Network effects occur when each new user in a system increases its
1988 value. The classic example is fax machines: A single fax machine is of no
1989 use, two fax machines are of limited use, but every new fax machine that’s
1990 put to use after the first doubles the number of possible fax-to-fax links.
1991   </p><p>
1992     Data mined for predictive systems doesn’t necessarily produce these
1993 dividends. Think of Netflix: The predictive value of the data mined from a
1994 million English-speaking Netflix viewers is hardly improved by the addition
1995 of one more user’s viewing data. Most of the data Netflix acquires after
1996 that first minimum viable sample duplicates existing data and produces only
1997 minimal gains. Meanwhile, retraining models with new data gets progressively
1998 more expensive as the number of data points increases, and manual tasks like
1999 labeling and validating data do not get cheaper at scale.
2000   </p><p>
2001     Businesses pursue fads to the detriment of their profits all the time,
2002 especially when the businesses and their investors are not motivated by the
2003 prospect of becoming profitable but rather by the prospect of being acquired
2004 by a Big Tech giant or by having an IPO.  For these firms, ticking faddish
2005 boxes like <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">collects as much data as possible</span>”</span> might realize a
2006 bigger return on investment than <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">collects a business-appropriate
2007 quantity of data.</span>”</span>
2008   </p><p>
2009     This is another harm of tech exceptionalism: The belief that more data
2010 always produces more profits in the form of more insights that can be
2011 translated into better mind-control rays drives firms to over-collect and
2012 over-retain data beyond all rationality. And since the firms are behaving
2013 irrationally, a good number of them will go out of business and become ghost
2014 ships whose cargo holds are stuffed full of data that can harm people in
2015 myriad ways — but which no one is responsible for antey longer. Even if the
2016 companies don’t go under, the data they collect is maintained behind the
2017 minimum viable security — just enough security to keep the company viable
2018 while it waits to get bought out by a tech giant, an amount calculated to
2019 spend not one penny more than is necessary on protecting data.
2020   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="how-monopolies-not-mind-control-drive-surveillance-capitalism-the-snapchat-story"></a>Jak monopole, a nie kontrola umysłu, sterują kapitalizmen opartym na
2021 systemach nadzoru: historia Snapchat</h2></div></div></div><p>
2022     For the first decade of its existence, Facebook competed with the social
2023 media giants of the day (Myspace, Orkut, etc.) by presenting itself as the
2024 pro-privacy alternative. Indeed, Facebook justified its walled garden —
2025 which let users bring in data from the web but blocked web services like
2026 Google Search from indexing and caching Facebook pages — as a pro-privacy
2027 measure that protected users from the surveillance-happy winners of the
2028 social media wars like Myspace.
2029   </p><p>
2030     Despite frequent promises that it would never collect or analyze its users’
2031 data, Facebook periodically created initiatives that did just that, like the
2032 creepy, ham-fisted Beacon tool, which spied on you as you moved around the
2033 web and then added your online activities to your public timeline, allowing
2034 your friends to monitor your browsing habits. Beacon sparked a user
2035 revolt. Every time, Facebook backed off from its surveillance initiative,
2036 but not all the way; inevitably, the new Facebook would be more surveilling
2037 than the old Facebook, though not quite as surveilling as the intermediate
2038 Facebook following the launch of the new product or service.
2039   </p><p>
2040     The pace at which Facebook ramped up its surveillance efforts seems to have
2041 been set by Facebook’s competitive landscape. The more competitors Facebook
2042 had, the better it behaved. Every time a major competitor foundered,
2043 Facebook’s behavior <a class="ulink" href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362" target="_top">got
2044 markedly worse</a>.
2045   </p><p>
2046     All the while, Facebook was prodigiously acquiring companies, including a
2047 company called Onavo. Nominally, Onavo made a battery-monitoring mobile
2048 app. But the permissions that Onavo required were so expansive that the app
2049 was able to gather fine-grained telemetry on everything users did with their
2050 phones, including which apps they used and how they were using them.
2051   </p><p>
2052     Through Onavo, Facebook discovered that it was losing market share to
2053 Snapchat, an app that — like Facebook a decade before — billed itself as the
2054 pro-privacy alternative to the status quo. Through Onavo, Facebook was able
2055 to mine data from the devices of Snapchat users, including both current and
2056 former Snapchat users. This spurred Facebook to acquire Instagram — some
2057 features of which competed with Snapchat — and then allowed Facebook to
2058 fine-tune Instagram’s features and sales pitch to erode Snapchat’s gains and
2059 ensure that Facebook would not have to face the kinds of competitive
2060 pressures it had earlier inflicted on Myspace and Orkut.
2061   </p><p>
2062     The story of how Facebook crushed Snapchat reveals the relationship between
2063 monopoly and surveillance capitalism. Facebook combined surveillance with
2064 lax antitrust enforcement to spot the competitive threat of Snapchat on its
2065 horizon and then take decisive action against it. Facebook’s surveillance
2066 capitalism let it avert competitive pressure with anti-competitive
2067 tactics. Facebook users still want privacy — Facebook hasn’t used
2068 surveillance to brainwash them out of it — but they can’t get it because
2069 Facebook’s surveillance lets it destroy any hope of a rival service emerging
2070 that competes on privacy features.
2071   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="a-monopoly-over-your-friends"></a>Monopol sprawowany nad twoimi przyjaciółmi</h2></div></div></div><p>
2072     A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of Facebook and
2073 other Big Tech companies by fielding <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">indieweb</span>”</span> alternatives —
2074 Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, Diaspora as a Facebook alternative,
2075 etc. — but these efforts have failed to attain any kind of liftoff.
2076   </p><p>
2077     Fundamentally, each of these services is hamstrung by the same problem:
2078 Every potential user for a Facebook or Twitter alternative has to convince
2079 all their friends to follow them to a decentralized web alternative in order
2080 to continue to realize the benefit of social media. For many of us, the only
2081 reason to have a Facebook account is that our friends have Facebook
2082 accounts, and the reason they have Facebook accounts is that
2083 <span class="emphasis"><em>we</em></span> have Facebook accounts.
2084   </p><p>
2085     All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant platforms —
2086 into <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">kill zones</span>”</span> that investors will not fund new entrants
2087 for.
2088   </p><p>
2089     And yet, all of today’s tech giants came into existence despite the
2090 entrenched advantage of the companies that came before them. To understand
2091 how that happened, you have to understand both interoperability and
2092 adversarial interoperability.
2093   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
2094       Trudnym problemem naszego gatunku jest koordynacja.
2095     </p></blockquote></div><p>
2096     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Interoperability</span>”</span> is the ability of two technologies to work
2097 with one another: Anyone can make an LP that will play on any record player,
2098 anyone can make a filter you can install in your stove’s extractor fan,
2099 anyone can make gasoline for your car, anyone can make a USB phone charger
2100 that fits in your car’s cigarette lighter receptacle, anyone can make a
2101 light bulb that works in your light socket, anyone can make bread that will
2102 toast in your toaster.
2103   </p><p>
2104     Interoperability is often a source of innovation and consumer benefit: Apple
2105 made the first commercially successful PC, but millions of independent
2106 software vendors made interoperable programs that ran on the Apple II
2107 Plus. The simple analog antenna inputs on the back of TVs first allowed
2108 cable operators to connect directly to TVs, then they allowed game console
2109 companies and then personal computer companies to use standard televisions
2110 as displays. Standard RJ-11 telephone jacks allowed for the production of
2111 phones from a variety of vendors in a variety of forms, from the free
2112 football-shaped phone that came with a <span class="emphasis"><em>Sports
2113 Illustrated</em></span> subscription to business phones with speakers, hold
2114 functions, and so on and then answering machines and finally modems, paving
2115 the way for the internet revolution.
2116   </p><p>
2117     <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Interoperability</span>”</span> is often used interchangeably with
2118 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">standardization,</span>”</span> which is the process when manufacturers and
2119 other stakeholders hammer out a set of agreed-upon rules for implementing a
2120 technology, such as the electrical plug on your wall, the CAN bus used by
2121 your car’s computer systems, or the HTML instructions that your browser
2122 interprets.
2123   </p><p>
2124     But interoperability doesn’t require standardization — indeed,
2125 standardization often proceeds from the chaos of ad hoc interoperability
2126 measures. The inventor of the cigarette-lighter USB charger didn’t need to
2127 get permission from car manufacturers or even the manufacturers of the
2128 dashboard lighter subcomponent. The automakers didn’t take any
2129 countermeasures to prevent the use of these aftermarket accessories by their
2130 customers, but they also didn’t do anything to make life easier for the
2131 chargers’ manufacturers. This is a kind of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">neutral
2132 interoperability.</span>”</span>
2133   </p><p>
2134     Beyond neutral interoperability, there is <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">adversarial
2135 interoperability.</span>”</span> That’s when a manufacturer makes a product that
2136 interoperates with another manufacturer’s product <span class="emphasis"><em>despite the
2137 second manufacturer’s objections</em></span> and <span class="emphasis"><em>even if that means
2138 bypassing a security system designed to prevent interoperability</em></span>.
2139   </p><p>
2140     Probably the most familiar form of adversarial interoperability is
2141 third-party printer ink. Printer manufacturers claim that they sell printers
2142 below cost and that the only way they can recoup the losses they incur is by
2143 charging high markups on ink. To prevent the owners of printers from buying
2144 ink elsewhere, the printer companies deploy a suite of anti-customer
2145 security systems that detect and reject both refilled and third-party
2146 cartridges.
2147   </p><p>
2148     Owners of printers take the position that HP and Epson and Brother are not
2149 charities and that customers for their wares have no obligation to help them
2150 survive, and so if the companies choose to sell their products at a loss,
2151 that’s their foolish choice and their consequences to live with. Likewise,
2152 competitors who make ink or refill kits observe that they don’t owe printer
2153 companies anything, and their erosion of printer companies’ margins are the
2154 printer companies’ problems, not their competitors’. After all, the printer
2155 companies shed no tears when they drive a refiller out of business, so why
2156 should the refillers concern themselves with the economic fortunes of the
2157 printer companies?
2158   </p><p>
2159     Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the history of
2160 the tech industry: from the founding of the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">alt.*</span>”</span> Usenet
2161 hierarchy (which was started against the wishes of Usenet’s maintainers and
2162 which grew to be bigger than all of Usenet combined)  to the browser wars
2163 (when Netscape and Microsoft devoted massive engineering efforts to making
2164 their browsers incompatible with the other’s special commands and
2165 peccadilloes) to Facebook (whose success was built in part by helping its
2166 new users stay in touch with friends they’d left behind on Myspace because
2167 Facebook supplied them with a tool that scraped waiting messages from
2168 Myspace and imported them into Facebook, effectively creating an
2169 Facebook-based Myspace reader).
2170   </p><p>
2171     Today, incumbency is seen as an unassailable advantage. Facebook is where
2172 all of your friends are, so no one can start a Facebook competitor. But
2173 adversarial compatibility reverses the competitive advantage: If you were
2174 allowed to compete with Facebook by providing a tool that imported all your
2175 users’ waiting Facebook messages into an environment that competed on lines
2176 that Facebook couldn’t cross, like eliminating surveillance and ads, then
2177 Facebook would be at a huge disadvantage. It would have assembled all
2178 possible ex-Facebook users into a single, easy-to-find service; it would
2179 have educated them on how a Facebook-like service worked and what its
2180 potential benefits were; and it would have provided an easy means for
2181 disgruntled Facebook users to tell their friends where they might expect
2182 better treatment.
2183   </p><p>
2184     Adversarial interoperability was once the norm and a key contributor to the
2185 dynamic, vibrant tech scene, but now it is stuck behind a thicket of laws
2186 and regulations that add legal risks to the tried-and-true tactics of
2187 adversarial interoperability. New rules and new interpretations of existing
2188 rules mean that a would-be adversarial interoperator needs to steer clear of
2189 claims under copyright, terms of service, trade secrecy, tortious
2190 interference, and patent.
2191   </p><p>
2192     In the absence of a competitive market, lawmakers have resorted to assigning
2193 expensive, state-like duties to Big Tech firms, such as automatically
2194 filtering user contributions for copyright infringement or terrorist and
2195 extremist content or detecting and preventing harassment in real time or
2196 controlling access to sexual material.
2197   </p><p>
2198     These measures put a floor under how small we can make Big Tech because only
2199 the very largest companies can afford the humans and automated filters
2200 needed to perform these duties.
2201   </p><p>
2202     But that’s not the only way in which making platforms responsible for
2203 policing their users undermines competition. A platform that is expected to
2204 police its users’ conduct must prevent many vital adversarial
2205 interoperability techniques lest these subvert its policing measures. For
2206 example, if someone using a Twitter replacement like Mastodon is able to
2207 push messages into Twitter and read messages out of Twitter, they could
2208 avoid being caught by automated systems that detect and prevent harassment
2209 (such as systems that use the timing of messages or IP-based rules to make
2210 guesses about whether someone is a harasser).
2211   </p><p>
2212     To the extent that we are willing to let Big Tech police itself — rather
2213 than making Big Tech small enough that users can leave bad platforms for
2214 better ones and small enough that a regulation that simply puts a platform
2215 out of business will not destroy billions of users’ access to their
2216 communities and data — we build the case that Big Tech should be able to
2217 block its competitors and make it easier for Big Tech to demand legal
2218 enforcement tools to ban and punish attempts at adversarial
2219 interoperability.
2220   </p><p>
2221     Ultimately, we can try to fix Big Tech by making it responsible for bad acts
2222 by its users, or we can try to fix the internet by cutting Big Tech down to
2223 size. But we can’t do both. To replace today’s giant products with
2224 pluralistic protocols, we need to clear the legal thicket that prevents
2225 adversarial interoperability so that tomorrow’s nimble, personal,
2226 small-scale products can federate themselves with giants like Facebook,
2227 allowing the users who’ve left to continue to communicate with users who
2228 haven’t left yet, reaching tendrils over Facebook’s garden wall that
2229 Facebook’s trapped users can use to scale the walls and escape to the
2230 global, open web.
2231   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="fake-news-is-an-epistemological-crisis"></a>Fałszywe wiadomości to oznaka kryzysu epistemologicznego</h2></div></div></div><p>
2232     Tech is not the only industry that has undergone massive concentration since
2233 the Reagan era. Virtually every major industry — from oil to newspapers to
2234 meatpacking to sea freight to eyewear to online pornography — has become a
2235 clubby oligarchy that just a few players dominate.
2236   </p><p>
2237     At the same time, every industry has become something of a tech industry as
2238 general-purpose computers and general-purpose networks and the promise of
2239 efficiencies through data-driven analysis infuse every device, process, and
2240 firm with tech.
2241   </p><p>
2242     This phenomenon of industrial concentration is part of a wider story about
2243 wealth concentration overall as a smaller and smaller number of people own
2244 more and more of our world. This concentration of both wealth and industries
2245 means that our political outcomes are increasingly beholden to the parochial
2246 interests of the people and companies with all the money.
2247   </p><p>
2248     That means that whenever a regulator asks a question with an obvious,
2249 empirical answer (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Are humans causing climate change?</span>”</span> or
2250 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Should we let companies conduct commercial mass surveillance?</span>”</span>
2251 or <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Does society benefit from allowing network neutrality
2252 violations?</span>”</span>), the answer that comes out is only correct if that
2253 correctness meets with the approval of rich people and the industries that
2254 made them so wealthy.
2255   </p><p>
2256     Rich people have always played an outsized role in politics and more so
2257 since the Supreme Court’s <span class="emphasis"><em>Citizens United</em></span> decision
2258 eliminated key controls over political spending. Widening inequality and
2259 wealth concentration means that the very richest people are now a lot richer
2260 and can afford to spend a lot more money on political projects than ever
2261 before. Think of the Koch brothers or George Soros or Bill Gates.
2262   </p><p>
2263     But the policy distortions of rich individuals pale in comparison to the
2264 policy distortions that concentrated industries are capable of.  The
2265 companies in highly concentrated industries are much more profitable than
2266 companies in competitive industries — no competition means not having to
2267 reduce prices or improve quality to win customers — leaving them with bigger
2268 capital surpluses to spend on lobbying.
2269   </p><p>
2270     Concentrated industries also find it easier to collaborate on policy
2271 objectives than competitive ones. When all the top execs from your industry
2272 can fit around a single boardroom table, they often do. And
2273 <span class="emphasis"><em>when</em></span> they do, they can forge a consensus position on
2274 regulation.
2275   </p><p>
2276     Rising through the ranks in a concentrated industry generally means working
2277 at two or three of the big companies. When there are only relatively few
2278 companies in a given industry, each company has a more ossified executive
2279 rank, leaving ambitious execs with fewer paths to higher positions unless
2280 they are recruited to a rival. This means that the top execs in concentrated
2281 industries are likely to have been colleagues at some point and socialize in
2282 the same circles — connected through social ties or, say, serving as
2283 trustees for each others’ estates. These tight social bonds foster a
2284 collegial, rather than competitive, attitude.
2285   </p><p>
2286     Highly concentrated industries also present a regulatory conundrum.  When an
2287 industry is dominated by just four or five companies, the only people who
2288 are likely to truly understand the industry’s practices are its veteran
2289 executives. This means that top regulators are often former execs of the
2290 companies they are supposed to be regulating. These turns in government are
2291 often tacitly understood to be leaves of absence from industry, with former
2292 employers welcoming their erstwhile watchdogs back into their executive
2293 ranks once their terms have expired.
2294   </p><p>
2295     All this is to say that the tight social bonds, small number of firms, and
2296 regulatory capture of concentrated industries give the companies that
2297 comprise them the power to dictate many, if not all, of the regulations that
2298 bind them.
2299   </p><p>
2300     This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders <a class="ulink" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/25/how-payday-lending-industry-insider-tilted-academic-research-its-favor/" target="_top">winning
2301 the right to practice predatory lending</a> or Apple <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxayp/source-apple-will-fight-right-to-repair-legislation" target="_top">winning
2302 the right to decide who can fix your phone</a> or Google and Facebook
2303 winning the right to breach your private data without suffering meaningful
2304 consequences or victories for pipeline companies or impunity for opioid
2305 manufacturers or massive tax subsidies for incredibly profitable dominant
2306 businesses, it’s increasingly apparent that many of our official,
2307 evidence-based truth-seeking processes are, in fact, auctions for sale to
2308 the highest bidder.
2309   </p><p>
2310     It’s really impossible to overstate what a terrifying prospect this is. We
2311 live in an incredibly high-tech society, and none of us could acquire the
2312 expertise to evaluate every technological proposition that stands between us
2313 and our untimely, horrible deaths. You might devote your life to acquiring
2314 the media literacy to distinguish good scientific journals from corrupt
2315 pay-for-play lookalikes and the statistical literacy to evaluate the quality
2316 of the analysis in the journals as well as the microbiology and epidemiology
2317 knowledge to determine whether you can trust claims about the safety of
2318 vaccines — but that would still leave you unqualified to judge whether the
2319 wiring in your home will give you a lethal shock <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span>
2320 whether your car’s brakes’ software will cause them to fail unpredictably
2321 <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> whether the hygiene standards at your butcher are
2322 sufficient to keep you from dying after you finish your dinner.
2323   </p><p>
2324     In a world as complex as this one, we have to defer to authorities, and we
2325 keep them honest by making those authorities accountable to us and binding
2326 them with rules to prevent conflicts of interest. We can’t possibly acquire
2327 the expertise to adjudicate conflicting claims about the best way to make
2328 the world safe and prosperous, but we <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> determine
2329 whether the adjudication process itself is trustworthy.
2330   </p><p>
2331     Right now, it’s obviously not.
2332   </p><p>
2333     The past 40 years of rising inequality and industry concentration, together
2334 with increasingly weak accountability and transparency for expert agencies,
2335 has created an increasingly urgent sense of impending doom, the sense that
2336 there are vast conspiracies afoot that operate with tacit official approval
2337 despite the likelihood they are working to better themselves by ruining the
2338 rest of us.
2339   </p><p>
2340     For example, it’s been decades since Exxon’s own scientists concluded that
2341 its products would render the Earth uninhabitable by humans. And yet those
2342 decades were lost to us, in large part because Exxon lobbied governments and
2343 sowed doubt about the dangers of its products and did so with the
2344 cooperation of many public officials.  When the survival of you and everyone
2345 you love is threatened by conspiracies, it’s not unreasonable to start
2346 questioning the things you think you know in an attempt to determine whether
2347 they, too, are the outcome of another conspiracy.
2348   </p><p>
2349     The collapse of the credibility of our systems for divining and upholding
2350 truths has left us in a state of epistemological chaos.  Once, most of us
2351 might have assumed that the system was working and that our regulations
2352 reflected our best understanding of the empirical truths of the world as
2353 they were best understood — now we have to find our own experts to help us
2354 sort the true from the false.
2355   </p><p>
2356     If you’re like me, you probably believe that vaccines are safe, but you
2357 (like me) probably also can’t explain the microbiology or statistics. Few of
2358 us have the math skills to review the literature on vaccine safety and
2359 describe why their statistical reasoning is sound. Likewise, few of us can
2360 review the stats in the (now discredited) literature on opioid safety and
2361 explain how those stats were manipulated. Both vaccines and opioids were
2362 embraced by medical authorities, after all, and one is safe while the other
2363 could ruin your life. You’re left with a kind of inchoate constellation of
2364 rules of thumb about which experts you trust to fact-check controversial
2365 claims and then to explain how all those respectable doctors with their
2366 peer-reviewed research on opioid safety <span class="emphasis"><em>were</em></span> an
2367 aberration and then how you know that the doctors writing about vaccine
2368 safety are <span class="emphasis"><em>not</em></span> an aberration.
2369   </p><p>
2370     I’m 100% certain that vaccinating is safe and effective, but I’m also at
2371 something of a loss to explain exactly, <span class="emphasis"><em>precisely,</em></span> why
2372 I believe this, given all the corruption I know about and the many times the
2373 stamp of certainty has turned out to be a parochial lie told to further
2374 enrich the super rich.
2375   </p><p>
2376     Fake news — conspiracy theories, racist ideologies, scientific denialism —
2377 has always been with us. What’s changed today is not the mix of ideas in the
2378 public discourse but the popularity of the worst ideas in that
2379 mix. Conspiracy and denial have skyrocketed in lockstep with the growth of
2380 Big Inequality, which has also tracked the rise of Big Tech and Big Pharma
2381 and Big Wrestling and Big Car and Big Movie Theater and Big Everything Else.
2382   </p><p>
2383     No one can say for certain why this has happened, but the two dominant camps
2384 are idealism (the belief that the people who argue for these conspiracies
2385 have gotten better at explaining them, maybe with the help of
2386 machine-learning tools) or materialism (the ideas have become more
2387 attractive because of material conditions in the world).
2388   </p><p>
2389     I’m a materialist. I’ve been exposed to the arguments of conspiracy
2390 theorists all my life, and I have not experienced any qualitative leap in
2391 the quality of those arguments.
2392   </p><p>
2393     The major difference is in the world, not the arguments. In a time where
2394 actual conspiracies are commonplace, conspiracy theories acquire a ring of
2395 plausibility.
2396   </p><p>
2397     We have always had disagreements about what’s true, but today, we have a
2398 disagreement over how we know whether something is true. This is an
2399 epistemological crisis, not a crisis over belief. It’s a crisis over the
2400 credibility of our truth-seeking exercises, from scientific journals (in an
2401 era where the biggest journal publishers have been caught producing
2402 pay-to-play journals for junk science) to regulations (in an era where
2403 regulators are routinely cycling in and out of business) to education (in an
2404 era where universities are dependent on corporate donations to keep their
2405 lights on).
2406   </p><p>
2407     Targeting — surveillance capitalism — makes it easier to find people who are
2408 undergoing this epistemological crisis, but it doesn’t create the
2409 crisis. For that, you need to look to corruption.
2410   </p><p>
2411     And, conveniently enough, it’s corruption that allows surveillance
2412 capitalism to grow by dismantling monopoly protections, by permitting
2413 reckless collection and retention of personal data, by allowing ads to be
2414 targeted in secret, and by foreclosing on the possibility of going somewhere
2415 else where you might continue to enjoy your friends without subjecting
2416 yourself to commercial surveillance.
2417   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="tech-is-different"></a>Technologia jest czymś odmiennym</h2></div></div></div><p>
2418     I reject both iterations of technological exceptionalism. I reject the idea
2419 that tech is uniquely terrible and led by people who are greedier or worse
2420 than the leaders of other industries, and I reject the idea that tech is so
2421 good — or so intrinsically prone to concentration — that it can’t be blamed
2422 for its present-day monopolistic status.
2423   </p><p>
2424     I think tech is just another industry, albeit one that grew up in the
2425 absence of real monopoly constraints. It may have been first, but it isn’t
2426 the worst nor will it be the last.
2427   </p><p>
2428     But there’s one way in which I <span class="emphasis"><em>am</em></span> a tech
2429 exceptionalist. I believe that online tools are the key to overcoming
2430 problems that are much more urgent than tech monopolization: climate change,
2431 inequality, misogyny, and discrimination on the basis of race, gender
2432 identity, and other factors. The internet is how we will recruit people to
2433 fight those fights, and how we will coordinate their labor. Tech is not a
2434 substitute for democratic accountability, the rule of law, fairness, or
2435 stability — but it’s a means to achieve these things.
2436   </p><p>
2437     The hard problem of our species is coordination. Everything from climate
2438 change to social change to running a business to making a family work can be
2439 viewed as a collective action problem.
2440   </p><p>
2441     The internet makes it easier than at any time before to find people who want
2442 to work on a project with you — hence the success of free and open-source
2443 software, crowdfunding, and racist terror groups — and easier than ever to
2444 coordinate the work you do.
2445   </p><p>
2446     The internet and the computers we connect to it also possess an exceptional
2447 quality: general-purposeness. The internet is designed to allow any two
2448 parties to communicate any data, using any protocol, without permission from
2449 anyone else. The only production design we have for computers is the
2450 general-purpose, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Turing complete</span>”</span> computer that can run every
2451 program we can express in symbolic logic.
2452   </p><p>
2453     This means that every time someone with a special communications need
2454 invests in infrastructure and techniques to make the internet faster,
2455 cheaper, and more robust, this benefit redounds to everyone else who is
2456 using the internet to communicate. And this also means that every time
2457 someone with a special computing need invests to make computers faster,
2458 cheaper, and more robust, every other computing application is a potential
2459 beneficiary of this work.
2460   </p><p>
2461     For these reasons, every type of communication is gradually absorbed into
2462 the internet, and every type of device — from airplanes to pacemakers —
2463 eventually becomes a computer in a fancy case.
2464   </p><p>
2465     While these considerations don’t preclude regulating networks and computers,
2466 they do call for gravitas and caution when doing so because changes to
2467 regulatory frameworks could ripple out to have unintended consequences in
2468 many, many other domains.
2469   </p><p>
2470     The upshot of this is that our best hope of solving the big coordination
2471 problems — climate change, inequality, etc. — is with free, fair, and open
2472 tech. Our best hope of keeping tech free, fair, and open is to exercise
2473 caution in how we regulate tech and to attend closely to the ways in which
2474 interventions to solve one problem might create problems in other domains.
2475   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="ownership-of-facts"></a>Własność faktów</h2></div></div></div><p>
2476     Big Tech has a funny relationship with information. When you’re generating
2477 information — anything from the location data streaming off your mobile
2478 device to the private messages you send to friends on a social network — it
2479 claims the rights to make unlimited use of that data.
2480   </p><p>
2481     But when you have the audacity to turn the tables — to use a tool that
2482 blocks ads or slurps your waiting updates out of a social network and puts
2483 them in another app that lets you set your own priorities and suggestions or
2484 crawls their system to allow you to start a rival business — they claim that
2485 you’re stealing from them.
2486   </p><p>
2487     The thing is, information is a very bad fit for any kind of private property
2488 regime. Property rights are useful for establishing markets that can lead to
2489 the effective development of fallow assets. These markets depend on clear
2490 titles to ensure that the things being bought and sold in them can, in fact,
2491 be bought and sold.
2492   </p><p>
2493     Information rarely has such a clear title. Take phone numbers: There’s
2494 clearly something going wrong when Facebook slurps up millions of users’
2495 address books and uses the phone numbers it finds in them to plot out social
2496 graphs and fill in missing information about other users.
2497   </p><p>
2498     But the phone numbers Facebook nonconsensually acquires in this transaction
2499 are not the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">property</span>”</span> of the users they’re taken from nor do
2500 they belong to the people whose phones ring when you dial those numbers. The
2501 numbers are mere integers, 10 digits in the U.S.  and Canada, and they
2502 appear in millions of places, including somewhere deep in pi as well as
2503 numerous other contexts. Giving people ownership titles to integers is an
2504 obviously terrible idea.
2505   </p><p>
2506     Likewise for the facts that Facebook and other commercial surveillance
2507 operators acquire about us, like that we are the children of our parents or
2508 the parents to our children or that we had a conversation with someone else
2509 or went to a public place.  These data points can’t be property in the sense
2510 that your house or your shirt is your property because the title to them is
2511 intrinsically muddy: Does your mom own the fact that she is your mother? Do
2512 you? Do both of you? What about your dad — does he own this fact too, or
2513 does he have to license the fact from you (or your mom or both of you) in
2514 order to use this fact? What about the hundreds or thousands of other people
2515 who know these facts?
2516   </p><p>
2517     If you go to a Black Lives Matter demonstration, do the other demonstrators
2518 need your permission to post their photos from the event? The online fights
2519 over <a class="ulink" href="https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-take-photos-at-protests/" target="_top">when and
2520 how to post photos from demonstrations</a> reveal a nuanced, complex
2521 issue that cannot be easily hand-waved away by giving one party a property
2522 right that everyone else in the mix has to respect.
2523   </p><p>
2524     The fact that information isn’t a good fit with property and markets doesn’t
2525 mean that it’s not valuable. Babies aren’t property, but they’re inarguably
2526 valuable. In fact, we have a whole set of rules just for babies as well as a
2527 subset of those rules that apply to humans more generally. Someone who
2528 argues that babies won’t be truly valuable until they can be bought and sold
2529 like loaves of bread would be instantly and rightfully condemned as a
2530 monster.
2531   </p><p>
2532     It’s tempting to reach for the property hammer when Big Tech treats your
2533 information like a nail — not least because Big Tech are such prolific
2534 abusers of property hammers when it comes to <span class="emphasis"><em>their</em></span>
2535 information. But this is a mistake. If we allow markets to dictate the use
2536 of our information, then we’ll find that we’re sellers in a buyers’ market
2537 where the Big Tech monopolies set a price for our data that is so low as to
2538 be insignificant or, more likely, set at a nonnegotiable price of zero in a
2539 click-through agreement that you don’t have the opportunity to modify.
2540   </p><p>
2541     Meanwhile, establishing property rights over information will create
2542 insurmountable barriers to independent data processing. Imagine that we
2543 require a license to be negotiated when a translated document is compared
2544 with its original, something Google has done and continues to do billions of
2545 times to train its automated language translation tools. Google can afford
2546 this, but independent third parties cannot.  Google can staff a clearances
2547 department to negotiate one-time payments to the likes of the EU (one of the
2548 major repositories of translated documents) while independent watchdogs
2549 wanting to verify that the translations are well-prepared, or to root out
2550 bias in translations, will find themselves needing a staffed-up legal
2551 department and millions for licenses before they can even get started.
2552   </p><p>
2553     The same goes for things like search indexes of the web or photos of
2554 peoples’ houses, which have become contentious thanks to Google’s Street
2555 View project. Whatever problems may exist with Google’s photographing of
2556 street scenes, resolving them by letting people decide who can take pictures
2557 of the facades of their homes from a public street will surely create even
2558 worse ones. Think of how street photography is important for newsgathering —
2559 including informal newsgathering, like photographing abuses of authority —
2560 and how being able to document housing and street life are important for
2561 contesting eminent domain, advocating for social aid, reporting planning and
2562 zoning violations, documenting discriminatory and unequal living conditions,
2563 and more.
2564   </p><p>
2565     The ownership of facts is antithetical to many kinds of human progress. It’s
2566 hard to imagine a rule that limits Big Tech’s exploitation of our collective
2567 labors without inadvertently banning people from gathering data on online
2568 harassment or compiling indexes of changes in language or simply
2569 investigating how the platforms are shaping our discourse — all of which
2570 require scraping data that other people have created and subjecting it to
2571 scrutiny and analysis.
2572   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="persuasion-works-slowly"></a>Przekonywanie działa… powoli</h2></div></div></div><p>
2573     The platforms may oversell their ability to persuade people, but obviously,
2574 persuasion works sometimes. Whether it’s the private realm that LGBTQ people
2575 used to recruit allies and normalize sexual diversity or the decadeslong
2576 project to convince people that markets are the only efficient way to solve
2577 complicated resource allocation problems, it’s clear that our societal
2578 attitudes <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> change.
2579   </p><p>
2580     The project of shifting societal attitudes is a game of inches and
2581 years. For centuries, svengalis have purported to be able to accelerate this
2582 process, but even the most brutal forms of propaganda have struggled to make
2583 permanent changes. Joseph Goebbels was able to subject Germans to daily,
2584 mandatory, hourslong radio broadcasts, to round up and torture and murder
2585 dissidents, and to seize full control over their children’s education while
2586 banning any literature, broadcasts, or films that did not comport with his
2587 worldview.
2588   </p><p>
2589     Yet, after 12 years of terror, once the war ended, Nazi ideology was largely
2590 discredited in both East and West Germany, and a program of national truth
2591 and reconciliation was put in its place. Racism and authoritarianism were
2592 never fully abolished in Germany, but neither were the majority of Germans
2593 irrevocably convinced of Nazism — and the rise of racist authoritarianism in
2594 Germany today tells us that the liberal attitudes that replaced Nazism were
2595 no more permanent than Nazism itself.
2596   </p><p>
2597     Racism and authoritarianism have also always been with us. Anyone who’s
2598 reviewed the kind of messages and arguments that racists put forward today
2599 would be hard-pressed to say that they have gotten better at presenting
2600 their ideas. The same pseudoscience, appeals to fear, and circular logic
2601 that racists presented in the 1980s, when the cause of white supremacy was
2602 on the wane, are to be found in the communications of leading white
2603 nationalists today.
2604   </p><p>
2605     If racists haven’t gotten more convincing in the past decade, then how is it
2606 that more people were convinced to be openly racist at that time? I believe
2607 that the answer lies in the material world, not the world of ideas. The
2608 ideas haven’t gotten more convincing, but people have become more
2609 afraid. Afraid that the state can’t be trusted to act as an honest broker in
2610 life-or-death decisions, from those regarding the management of the economy
2611 to the regulation of painkillers to the rules for handling private
2612 information. Afraid that the world has become a game of musical chairs in
2613 which the chairs are being taken away at a never-before-seen rate. Afraid
2614 that justice for others will come at their expense. Monopolism isn’t the
2615 cause of these fears, but the inequality and material desperation and policy
2616 malpractice that monopolism contributes to is a significant contributor to
2617 these conditions. Inequality creates the conditions for both conspiracies
2618 and violent racist ideologies, and then surveillance capitalism lets
2619 opportunists target the fearful and the conspiracy-minded.
2620   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="paying-wont-help"></a>Płacenie nie pomoże</h2></div></div></div><p>
2621     As the old saw goes, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the
2622 product.</span>”</span>
2623   </p><p>
2624     It’s a commonplace belief today that the advent of free, ad-supported media
2625 was the original sin of surveillance capitalism.  The reasoning is that the
2626 companies that charged for access couldn’t <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">compete with free</span>”</span>
2627 and so they were driven out of business. Their ad-supported competitors,
2628 meanwhile, declared open season on their users’ data in a bid to improve
2629 their ad targeting and make more money and then resorted to the most
2630 sensationalist tactics to generate clicks on those ads. If only we’d pay for
2631 media again, we’d have a better, more responsible, more sober discourse that
2632 would be better for democracy.
2633   </p><p>
2634     But the degradation of news products long precedes the advent of
2635 ad-supported online news. Long before newspapers were online, lax antitrust
2636 enforcement had opened the door for unprecedented waves of consolidation and
2637 roll-ups in newsrooms. Rival newspapers were merged, reporters and ad sales
2638 staff were laid off, physical plants were sold and leased back, leaving the
2639 companies loaded up with debt through leveraged buyouts and subsequent
2640 profit-taking by the new owners. In other words, it wasn’t merely shifts in
2641 the classified advertising market, which was long held to be the primary
2642 driver in the decline of the traditional newsroom, that made news companies
2643 unable to adapt to the internet — it was monopolism.
2644   </p><p>
2645     Then, as news companies <span class="emphasis"><em>did</em></span> come online, the ad
2646 revenues they commanded dropped even as the number of internet users (and
2647 thus potential online readers) increased. That shift was a function of
2648 consolidation in the ad sales market, with Google and Facebook emerging as
2649 duopolists who made more money every year from advertising while paying less
2650 and less of it to the publishers whose work the ads appeared
2651 alongside. Monopolism created a buyer’s market for ad inventory with
2652 Facebook and Google acting as gatekeepers.
2653   </p><p>
2654     Paid services continue to exist alongside free ones, and often it is these
2655 paid services — anxious to prevent people from bypassing their paywalls or
2656 sharing paid media with freeloaders — that exert the most control over their
2657 customers. Apple’s iTunes and App Stores are paid services, but to maximize
2658 their profitability, Apple has to lock its platforms so that third parties
2659 can’t make compatible software without permission. These locks allow the
2660 company to exercise both editorial control (enabling it to exclude <a class="ulink" href="https://ncac.org/news/blog/does-apples-strict-app-store-content-policy-limit-freedom-of-expression" target="_top">controversial
2661 political material</a>) and technological control, including control
2662 over who can repair the devices it makes. If we’re worried that ad-supported
2663 products deprive people of their right to self-determination by using
2664 persuasion techniques to nudge their purchase decisions a few degrees in one
2665 direction or the other, then the near-total control a single company holds
2666 over the decision of who gets to sell you software, parts, and service for
2667 your iPhone should have us very worried indeed.
2668   </p><p>
2669     We shouldn’t just be concerned about payment and control: The idea that
2670 paying will improve discourse is also dangerously wrong. The poor success
2671 rate of targeted advertising means that the platforms have to incentivize
2672 you to <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">engage</span>”</span> with posts at extremely high levels to generate
2673 enough pageviews to safeguard their profits. As discussed earlier, to
2674 increase engagement, platforms like Facebook use machine learning to guess
2675 which messages will be most inflammatory and make a point of shoving those
2676 into your eyeballs at every turn so that you will hate-click and argue with
2677 people.
2678   </p><p>
2679     Perhaps paying would fix this, the reasoning goes. If platforms could be
2680 economically viable even if you stopped clicking on them once your
2681 intellectual and social curiosity had been slaked, then they would have no
2682 reason to algorithmically enrage you to get more clicks out of you, right?
2683   </p><p>
2684     There may be something to that argument, but it still ignores the wider
2685 economic and political context of the platforms and the world that allowed
2686 them to grow so dominant.
2687   </p><p>
2688     Platforms are world-spanning and all-encompassing because they are
2689 monopolies, and they are monopolies because we have gutted our most
2690 important and reliable anti-monopoly rules. Antitrust was neutered as a key
2691 part of the project to make the wealthy wealthier, and that project has
2692 worked. The vast majority of people on Earth have a negative net worth, and
2693 even the dwindling middle class is in a precarious state, undersaved for
2694 retirement, underinsured for medical disasters, and undersecured against
2695 climate and technology shocks.
2696   </p><p>
2697     In this wildly unequal world, paying doesn’t improve the discourse; it
2698 simply prices discourse out of the range of the majority of people. Paying
2699 for the product is dandy, if you can afford it.
2700   </p><p>
2701     If you think today’s filter bubbles are a problem for our discourse, imagine
2702 what they’d be like if rich people inhabited free-flowing Athenian
2703 marketplaces of ideas where you have to pay for admission while everyone
2704 else lives in online spaces that are subsidized by wealthy benefactors who
2705 relish the chance to establish conversational spaces where the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">house
2706 rules</span>”</span> forbid questioning the status quo. That is, imagine if the
2707 rich seceded from Facebook, and then, instead of running ads that made money
2708 for shareholders, Facebook became a billionaire’s vanity project that also
2709 happened to ensure that nobody talked about whether it was fair that only
2710 billionaires could afford to hang out in the rarified corners of the
2711 internet.
2712   </p><p>
2713     Behind the idea of paying for access is a belief that free markets will
2714 address Big Tech’s dysfunction. After all, to the extent that people have a
2715 view of surveillance at all, it is generally an unfavorable one, and the
2716 longer and more thoroughly one is surveilled, the less one tends to like
2717 it. Same goes for lock-in: If HP’s ink or Apple’s App Store were really
2718 obviously fantastic, they wouldn’t need technical measures to prevent users
2719 from choosing a rival’s product. The only reason these technical
2720 countermeasures exist is that the companies don’t believe their customers
2721 would <span class="emphasis"><em>voluntarily</em></span> submit to their terms, and they want
2722 to deprive them of the choice to take their business elsewhere.
2723   </p><p>
2724     Advocates for markets laud their ability to aggregate the diffused knowledge
2725 of buyers and sellers across a whole society through demand signals, price
2726 signals, and so on. The argument for surveillance capitalism being a
2727 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>”</span> is that machine-learning-driven persuasion
2728 techniques distort decision-making by consumers, leading to incorrect
2729 signals — consumers don’t buy what they prefer, they buy what they’re
2730 tricked into preferring. It follows that the monopolistic practices of
2731 lock-in, which do far more to constrain consumers’ free choices, are even
2732 more of a <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism.</span>”</span>
2733   </p><p>
2734     The profitability of any business is constrained by the possibility that its
2735 customers will take their business elsewhere. Both surveillance and lock-in
2736 are anti-features that no customer wants.  But monopolies can capture their
2737 regulators, crush their competitors, insert themselves into their customers’
2738 lives, and corral people into <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">choosing</span>”</span> their services
2739 regardless of whether they want them — it’s fine to be terrible when there
2740 is no alternative.
2741   </p><p>
2742     Ultimately, surveillance and lock-in are both simply business strategies
2743 that monopolists can choose. Surveillance companies like Google are
2744 perfectly capable of deploying lock-in technologies — just look at the
2745 onerous Android licensing terms that require device-makers to bundle in
2746 Google’s suite of applications. And lock-in companies like Apple are
2747 perfectly capable of subjecting their users to surveillance if it means
2748 keeping the Chinese government happy and preserving ongoing access to
2749 Chinese markets.  Monopolies may be made up of good, ethical people, but as
2750 institutions, they are not your friend — they will do whatever they can get
2751 away with to maximize their profits, and the more monopolistic they are, the
2752 more they <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> get away with.
2753   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="an-ecology-moment-for-trustbusting"></a><span class="quote">“<span class="quote"> ekologia</span>”</span> chwila na zerwanie zaufania</h2></div></div></div><p>
2754     If we’re going to break Big Tech’s death grip on our digital lives, we’re
2755 going to have to fight monopolies. That may sound pretty mundane and
2756 old-fashioned, something out of the New Deal era, while ending the use of
2757 automated behavioral modification feels like the plotline of a really cool
2758 cyberpunk novel.
2759   </p><p>
2760     Meanwhile, breaking up monopolies is something we seem to have forgotten how
2761 to do. There is a bipartisan, trans-Atlantic consensus that breaking up
2762 companies is a fool’s errand at best — liable to mire your federal
2763 prosecutors in decades of litigation — and counterproductive at worst,
2764 eroding the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">consumer benefits</span>”</span> of large companies with massive
2765 efficiencies of scale.
2766   </p><p>
2767     But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing
2768 robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies’ all-powerful grip
2769 on our society. The trustbusting era could not begin until we found the
2770 political will — until the people convinced politicians they’d have their
2771 backs when they went up against the richest, most powerful men in the world.
2772   </p><p>
2773     Czy moglibyśmy ponownie znaleźć tę wolę polityczną?
2774   </p><p>
2775     Copyright scholar James Boyle has described how the term
2776 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">ecology</span>”</span> marked a turning point in environmental
2777 activism. Prior to the adoption of this term, people who wanted to preserve
2778 whale populations didn’t necessarily see themselves as fighting the same
2779 battle as people who wanted to protect the ozone layer or fight freshwater
2780 pollution or beat back smog or acid rain.
2781   </p><p>
2782     But the term <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">ecology</span>”</span> welded these disparate causes together
2783 into a single movement, and the members of this movement found solidarity
2784 with one another. The people who cared about smog signed petitions
2785 circulated by the people who wanted to end whaling, and the anti-whalers
2786 marched alongside the people demanding action on acid rain. This uniting
2787 behind a common cause completely changed the dynamics of environmentalism,
2788 setting the stage for today’s climate activism and the sense that preserving
2789 the habitability of the planet Earth is a shared duty among all people.
2790   </p><p>
2791     I believe we are on the verge of a new <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">ecology</span>”</span> moment
2792 dedicated to combating monopolies. After all, tech isn’t the only
2793 concentrated industry nor is it even the <span class="emphasis"><em>most</em></span>
2794 concentrated of industries.
2795   </p><p>
2796     You can find partisans for trustbusting in every sector of the
2797 economy. Everywhere you look, you can find people who’ve been wronged by
2798 monopolists who’ve trashed their finances, their health, their privacy,
2799 their educations, and the lives of people they love.  Those people have the
2800 same cause as the people who want to break up Big Tech and the same
2801 enemies. When most of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a very few, it
2802 follows that nearly every large company will have overlapping shareholders.
2803   </p><p>
2804     That’s the good news: With a little bit of work and a little bit of
2805 coalition building, we have more than enough political will to break up Big
2806 Tech and every other concentrated industry besides. First we take Facebook,
2807 then we take AT&amp;T/WarnerMedia.
2808   </p><p>
2809     But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech
2810 <span class="emphasis"><em>instead</em></span> of breaking up the big companies also
2811 forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later.
2812   </p><p>
2813     Big Tech’s concentration currently means that their inaction on harassment,
2814 for example, leaves users with an impossible choice: absent themselves from
2815 public discourse by, say, quitting Twitter or endure vile, constant
2816 abuse. Big Tech’s over-collection and over-retention of data results in
2817 horrific identity theft. And their inaction on extremist recruitment means
2818 that white supremacists who livestream their shooting rampages can reach an
2819 audience of billions. The combination of tech concentration and media
2820 concentration means that artists’ incomes are falling even as the revenue
2821 generated by their creations are increasing.
2822   </p><p>
2823     Yet governments confronting all of these problems all inevitably converge on
2824 the same solution: deputize the Big Tech giants to police their users and
2825 render them liable for their users’ bad actions. The drive to force Big Tech
2826 to use automated filters to block everything from copyright infringement to
2827 sex-trafficking to violent extremism means that tech companies will have to
2828 allocate hundreds of millions to run these compliance systems.
2829   </p><p>
2830     These rules — the EU’s new Directive on Copyright, Australia’s new terror
2831 regulation, America’s FOSTA/SESTA sex-trafficking law and more — are not
2832 just death warrants for small, upstart competitors that might challenge Big
2833 Tech’s dominance but who lack the deep pockets of established incumbents to
2834 pay for all these automated systems. Worse still, these rules put a floor
2835 under how small we can hope to make Big Tech.
2836   </p><p>
2837     That’s because any move to break up Big Tech and cut it down to size will
2838 have to cope with the hard limit of not making these companies so small that
2839 they can no longer afford to perform these duties — and it’s
2840 <span class="emphasis"><em>expensive</em></span> to invest in those automated filters and
2841 outsource content moderation. It’s already going to be hard to unwind these
2842 deeply concentrated, chimeric behemoths that have been welded together in
2843 the pursuit of monopoly profits. Doing so while simultaneously finding some
2844 way to fill the regulatory void that will be left behind if these
2845 self-policing rulers were forced to suddenly abdicate will be much, much
2846 harder.
2847   </p><p>
2848     Allowing the platforms to grow to their present size has given them a
2849 dominance that is nearly insurmountable — deputizing them with public duties
2850 to redress the pathologies created by their size makes it virtually
2851 impossible to reduce that size. Lather, rinse, repeat: If the platforms
2852 don’t get smaller, they will get larger, and as they get larger, they will
2853 create more problems, which will give rise to more public duties for the
2854 companies, which will make them bigger still.
2855   </p><p>
2856     We can work to fix the internet by breaking up Big Tech and depriving them
2857 of monopoly profits, or we can work to fix Big Tech by making them spend
2858 their monopoly profits on governance. But we can’t do both. We have to
2859 choose between a vibrant, open internet or a dominated, monopolized internet
2860 commanded by Big Tech giants that we struggle with constantly to get them to
2861 behave themselves.
2862   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="make-big-tech-small-again"></a>Spraw, aby 'Big Tech' stała się ponownie 'małą' technologią</h2></div></div></div><p>
2863     Trustbusting is hard. Breaking big companies into smaller ones is expensive
2864 and time-consuming. So time-consuming that by the time you’re done, the
2865 world has often moved on and rendered years of litigation irrelevant. From
2866 1969 to 1982, the U.S. government pursued an antitrust case against IBM over
2867 its dominance of mainframe computing — but the case collapsed in 1982
2868 because mainframes were being speedily replaced by PCs.
2869   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
2870       A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to
2871 enforce the law as it was written.
2872     </p></blockquote></div><p>
2873     It’s far easier to prevent concentration than to fix it, and reinstating the
2874 traditional contours of U.S. antitrust enforcement will, at the very least,
2875 prevent further concentration. That means bans on mergers between large
2876 companies, on big companies acquiring nascent competitors, and on platform
2877 companies competing directly with the companies that rely on the platforms.
2878   </p><p>
2879     These powers are all in the plain language of U.S. antitrust laws, so in
2880 theory, a future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general
2881 to enforce the law as it was written. But after decades of judicial
2882 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">education</span>”</span> in the benefits of monopolies, after multiple
2883 administrations that have packed the federal courts with lifetime-appointed
2884 monopoly cheerleaders, it’s not clear that mere administrative action would
2885 do the trick.
2886   </p><p>
2887     If the courts frustrate the Justice Department and the president, the next
2888 stop would be Congress, which could eliminate any doubt about how antitrust
2889 law should be enforced in the U.S. by passing new laws that boil down to
2890 saying, <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert
2891 Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, <span class="emphasis"><em>fuck that
2892 guy</em></span>.</span>”</span> In other words, the problem with monopolies is
2893 <span class="emphasis"><em>monopolism</em></span> — the concentration of power into too few
2894 hands, which erodes our right to self-determination. If there is a monopoly,
2895 the law wants it gone, period. Sure, get rid of monopolies that create
2896 <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">consumer harm</span>”</span> in the form of higher prices, but also,
2897 <span class="emphasis"><em>get rid of other monopolies, too</em></span>.
2898   </p><p>
2899     But this only prevents things from getting worse. To help them get better,
2900 we will have to build coalitions with other activists in the anti-monopoly
2901 ecology movement — a pluralism movement or a self-determination movement —
2902 and target existing monopolies in every industry for breakup and structural
2903 separation rules that prevent, for example, the giant eyewear monopolist
2904 Luxottica from dominating both the sale and the manufacture of spectacles.
2905   </p><p>
2906     In an important sense, it doesn’t matter which industry the breakups begin
2907 in. Once they start, shareholders in <span class="emphasis"><em>every</em></span> industry
2908 will start to eye their investments in monopolists skeptically. As
2909 trustbusters ride into town and start making lives miserable for
2910 monopolists, the debate around every corporate boardroom’s table will
2911 shift. People within corporations who’ve always felt uneasy about monopolism
2912 will gain a powerful new argument to fend off their evil rivals in the
2913 corporate hierarchy: <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">If we do it my way, we make less money; if we do
2914 it your way, a judge will fine us billions and expose us to ridicule and
2915 public disapprobation. So even though I get that it would be really cool to
2916 do that merger, lock out that competitor, or buy that little company and
2917 kill it before it can threaten it, we really shouldn’t — not if we don’t
2918 want to get tied to the DOJ’s bumper and get dragged up and down Trustbuster
2919 Road for the next 10 years.</span>”</span>
2920   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="goto-10"></a>20 GOTO 10</h2></div></div></div><p>
2921     Fixing Big Tech will require a lot of iteration. As cyber lawyer Lawrence
2922 Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, <span class="emphasis"><em>Code and Other Laws of
2923 Cyberspace</em></span>, our lives are regulated by four forces: law (what’s
2924 legal), code (what’s technologically possible), norms (what’s socially
2925 acceptable), and markets (what’s profitable).
2926   </p><p>
2927     If you could wave a wand and get Congress to pass a law that re-fanged the
2928 Sherman Act tomorrow, you could use the impending breakups to convince
2929 venture capitalists to fund competitors to Facebook, Google, Twitter, and
2930 Apple that would be waiting in the wings after they were cut down to size.
2931   </p><p>
2932     But getting Congress to act will require a massive normative shift, a mass
2933 movement of people who care about monopolies — and pulling them apart.
2934   </p><p>
2935     Getting people to care about monopolies will take technological
2936 interventions that help them to see what a world free from Big Tech might
2937 look like. Imagine if someone could make a beloved (but unauthorized)
2938 third-party Facebook or Twitter client that dampens the anxiety-producing
2939 algorithmic drumbeat and still lets you talk to your friends without being
2940 spied upon — something that made social media more sociable and less
2941 toxic. Now imagine that it gets shut down in a brutal legal battle. It’s
2942 always easier to convince people that something must be done to save a thing
2943 they love than it is to excite them about something that doesn’t even exist
2944 yet.
2945   </p><p>
2946     Neither tech nor law nor code nor markets are sufficient to reform Big
2947 Tech. But a profitable competitor to Big Tech could bankroll a legislative
2948 push; legal reform can embolden a toolsmith to make a better tool; the tool
2949 can create customers for a potential business who value the benefits of the
2950 internet but want them delivered without Big Tech; and that business can get
2951 funded and divert some of its profits to legal reform. 20 GOTO 10 (or
2952 lather, rinse, repeat). Do it again, but this time, get farther! After all,
2953 this time you’re starting with weaker Big Tech adversaries, a constituency
2954 that understands things can be better, Big Tech rivals who’ll help ensure
2955 their own future by bankrolling reform, and code that other programmers can
2956 build on to weaken Big Tech even further.
2957   </p><p>
2958     The surveillance capitalism hypothesis — that Big Tech’s products really
2959 work as well as they say they do and that’s why everything is so screwed up
2960 — is way too easy on surveillance and even easier on capitalism. Companies
2961 spy because they believe their own BS, and companies spy because governments
2962 let them, and companies spy because any advantage from spying is so
2963 short-lived and minor that they have to do more and more of it just to stay
2964 in place.
2965   </p><p>
2966     As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism
2967 that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a
2968 form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to
2969 inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason
2970 companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to
2971 both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall
2972 to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not
2973 piss off the monopolists.
2974   </p><p>
2975     Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule
2976 begets surveillance. Surveillance isn’t bad because it lets people
2977 manipulate us. It’s bad because it crushes our ability to be our authentic
2978 selves — and because it lets the rich and powerful figure out who might be
2979 thinking of building guillotines and what dirt they can use to discredit
2980 those embryonic guillotine-builders before they can even get to the
2981 lumberyard.
2982   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="up-and-through"></a>W górę i na wylot</h2></div></div></div><p>
2983     With all the problems of Big Tech, it’s tempting to imagine solving the
2984 problem by returning to a world without tech at all. Resist that temptation.
2985   </p><p>
2986     The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is
2987 not reliant upon high tech, it will be because civilization has fallen. Big
2988 Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the
2989 proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the
2990 existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it’s up to us to seize
2991 the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under
2992 democratic, accountable control.
2993   </p><p>
2994     I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not
2995 in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize
2996 because it has <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">economies of scale</span>”</span> or some other nebulous
2997 feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right
2998 matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe — and
2999 doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our
3000 civilization, our species, and our planet.
3001   </p></div></div></body></html>