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