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