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   1 <html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört</title><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.79.1"></head><body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><div lang="de" class="article"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="index"></a>Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört</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>
   2       Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört, von Cory Doctorow.
   3     </p><p>
   4       Herausgegeben von Petter Reinholdtsen.
   5     </p><p>
   6       <a class="ulink" href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/" target="_top">http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/</a>.
   7     </p><p>
   8       ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (Taschenbuch)
   9     </p><p>
  10       ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)
  11     </p><p>
  12       Dieses Buch kann unter <a class="ulink" href="https://www.lulu.com/" target="_top">https://www.lulu.com/</a> erworben werden.
  13     </p><p>
  14       <span class="inlinemediaobject"><img src="images/cc-some-rights-reserved.png" align="middle" height="38" alt="Creative Commons, einige Rechte vorbehalten"></span>
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  16       Dieses Buch steht unter einer Creative-Commons-Lizenz. Diese Lizenz erlaubt
  17 beliebige Nutzung dieses Werks, so lange eine Namensnennung erfolgt und
  18 keine Bearbeitungen erfolgen. Weitere Informationen über diese Lizenz
  19 findest du unter <a class="ulink" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/" target="_top">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/</a>.
  20     </p></div></div></div><hr></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Inhaltsverzeichnis</b></p><dl class="toc"><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#the-net-of-a-thousand-lies">Das Netz aus tausend Lügen</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#digital-rights-activism-a-quarter-century-on">Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus, ein Vierteljahrhundert später</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-exceptionalism-then-and-now">Tech-Exzeptionalismus, damals und heute</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dont-believe-the-hype">Glaube nicht an den Hype</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-persuasion">Was ist Überzeugung?</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#segmenting">1. Aufteilung</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#deception">2. Deception</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#domination">3. Domination</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#bypassing-our-rational-faculties">4. Bypassing our rational faculties</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#if-data-is-the-new-oil-then-surveillance-capitalisms-engine-has-a-leak">If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-facebook">What is Facebook?</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopoly-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Monopoly and the right to the future tense</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#search-order-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Search order and the right to the future tense</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopolists-can-afford-sleeping-pills-for-watchdogs">Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#privacy-and-monopoly">Privacy and monopoly</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ronald-reagan-pioneer-of-tech-monopolism">Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers">Steering with the windshield wipers</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#surveillance-still-matters">Surveillance still matters</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dignity-and-sanctuary">Dignity and sanctuary</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#afflicting-the-afflicted">Afflicting the afflicted</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#any-data-you-collect-and-retain-will-eventually-leak">Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#critical-tech-exceptionalism-is-still-tech-exceptionalism">Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#how-monopolies-not-mind-control-drive-surveillance-capitalism-the-snapchat-story">How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The
  21 Snapchat story</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#a-monopoly-over-your-friends">A monopoly over your friends</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#fake-news-is-an-epistemological-crisis">Fake news is an epistemological crisis</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-is-different">Tech is different</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ownership-of-facts">Ownership of facts</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#persuasion-works-slowly">Persuasion works… slowly</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#paying-wont-help">Paying won’t help</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#an-ecology-moment-for-trustbusting">An <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> moment for trustbusting</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#make-big-tech-small-again">Make Big Tech small again</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#goto-10">20 GOTO 10</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#up-and-through">Up and through</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="the-net-of-a-thousand-lies"></a>Das Netz aus tausend Lügen</h2></div></div></div><p>
  22     Am meisten überrascht am Wiederaufkommen der „Flat Earther“ im
  23 21. Jahrhundert, wie allgegenwärtig die Beweise gegen diese Theorie
  24 sind. Man mag noch einsehen, dass vor hunderten von Jahren Leute
  25 vernünftigerweise denken durften, dass die Erde flach sei, da sie keinen
  26 ausreichend hohen Beobachtungspunkt erreichen konnten, von dem aus sie die
  27 Erdkrümmung hätten sehen können.
  28   </p><p>
  29     Aber heutzutage braucht es schon einen außergewöhnlichen Glauben, um
  30 weiterhin an die Theorie der Flachen Erde zu glauben – wo man doch bereits
  31 in Grundschulen GoPro-Kameras an Ballons befestigt und sie hoch genug
  32 aufsteigen lässt, um die Erdkrümmung zu fotografieren, vom gewöhnlichen
  33 Ausblick aus einem Flugzeugfenster ganz zu schweigen.
  34   </p><p>
  35     Ähnlich verhält es sich mit Weißem Nationalismus und Eugenik: In einem
  36 Zeitalter, in dem jeder durch eine Postsendung eines Rachenabstrichs und
  37 etwas Geld an eine DNA-Sequenzierungs-Firma zu einem Genom-Datenpunkt werden
  38 kann, war das Wiederlegen von <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Rassentheorie</span>“</span> noch nie so
  39 einfach.
  40   </p><p>
  41     Wir durchleben ein goldenes Zeitalter von sowohl sofort verfügbaren Fakten
  42 als auch deren Leugnung. Furchtbare, randständige Vorstellungen, die
  43 Jahrzehnte oder gar Jahrhunderte geschlummert haben, haben es
  44 augenscheinlich über Nacht in den Mainstream geschafft.
  45   </p><p>
  46     Wenn eine obskure Idee an Auftrieb erlangt, gibt es nur zwei Erklärungen
  47 dafür: Entweder ist die Person, die die Idee verbeitet, besser darin
  48 geworden, ihre Ansicht zu vertreten, oder die Ansicht ist angesichts sich
  49 anhäufender Beweise schwerer zu leugnen geworden. Anders gesagt: Wenn wir
  50 möchten, dass die Leute den Klimawandel ernst nehmen, können wir einen
  51 Haufen Greta Thunbergs wortgewandte, emotionale Reden auf Podien halten
  52 lassen und damit unsere Herzen und unseren Verstand gewinnen, oder wir
  53 können Fluten, Feuersbrünste, eine mörderische Sonne und Pandemien für uns
  54 sprechen lassen. In der Praxis sollten wir wohl von beidem etwas tun: Je
  55 mehr wir schmoren, brennen, ertrinken und dahinschwinden, umso einfacher
  56 wird es für die Greta Thunbergs dieser Welt, uns zu überzeugen.
  57   </p><p>
  58     Die Argumente für den absurden Glauben an hasserfüllte Verschwörungen wie
  59 Impfgegnerschaft, Klimaleugnung, eine flache Erde und Eugenik sind nicht
  60 besser als vor einer Generation. Sie sind sogar schlechter, weil sie Leuten
  61 schmackhaft gemacht werden, die wenigstens ein Gespür für die widerlegenden
  62 Fakten haben.
  63   </p><p>
  64     Impfgegnerschaft gibt es bereits seit den ersten Impfstoffen, aber frühere
  65 Impfgegner hatten es auf Leute abgesehen, die nicht einmal ein grundlegendes
  66 Verständnis von Mikrobiologie hatten, und überdies waren jene Impfgegner
  67 nicht Zeugen massenmörderischer Krankheiten wie Polio, Pocken und Masern
  68 geworden. Impfgegner von heute sind nicht eloquenter als frührere Impfgegner
  69 und haben es heute schwieriger.
  70   </p><p>
  71     Können diese Verschwörungstheoretiker wirklich im Ansatz ihrer wichtigsten
  72 Argumente erfolgreich sein?
  73   </p><p>
  74     Manche denken ja. Heutzutage gibt es den weitverbreiteten Glauben, dass
  75 maschinelles Lernen und kommerzielle Überwachung sogar den schwurbelnsten
  76 Verschwörungstheoretiker in einen Marionettenspieler verwandeln können, der
  77 anfälligen Leuten mit K.I.-gestützten, das rationale Denken austricksenden
  78 Argumenten die Wahrnehmung verbiegt und sie, normale Leute, schließlich in
  79 Flacherdler, Impfgegner oder gar Nazis verwandelt. Wenn die
  80 RAND-Corporation<a class="ulink" href="https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf" target="_top">
  81 Facebook für <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Radikalisierung</span>“</span></a> verantwortlich macht und
  82 wenn Facebook das Verbreiten von Falschinformationen in Bezug auf SARS-CoV-2
  83 <a class="ulink" href="https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_threat_health/" target="_top">seinen
  84 Algorithmen in die Schuhe schiebt</a>, dann ist die verdeckte Botschaft,
  85 dass maschinelles Lernen und Überwachung die Änderungen in unserem Konsens
  86 darüber hervorrufen, was wahr ist.
  87   </p><p>
  88     Schließlich muss in einer Welt, in der wuchernde und inkohärente
  89 Verschwörungstheorien wie Pizzagate und sein Nachfolger QAnon zahlreiche
  90 Anhänger haben, <span class="emphasis"><em> einiges </em></span> im Gange sein.
  91   </p><p>
  92     Aber was, wenn es eine andere Erklärung gibt? Was, wenn es die wesentlichen
  93 Umstände und nicht die Argumente sind, die diesen Verschwörungstheoretikern
  94 Aufwind geben? Was, wenn die Traumata vom Durchleben <span class="emphasis"><em>echter
  95 Verschwörungen</em></span> um uns herum - Verschwörungen zwischen Reichen,
  96 deren Lobbyisten und Gesetzemachern, um unangenehme Fakten und Beweise von
  97 unlauterem Verhalten zu vertuschen (solche Verschwörungen nennt man
  98 üblicherweise <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Korruption</span>“</span>) - Leute anfällig für
  99 Verschwörungstheorien macht?
 100   </p><p>
 101     Wenn es Trauma und keine ansteckende Krankheit - materielle Umstände und
 102 nicht Ideologie - ist, die heutzutage den Unterschied macht und abstoßenden
 103 Falschinformationen angesichts leicht beobachtbarer Fakten Auftrieb gibt,
 104 heißt das nicht, dass unsere Computernetzwerke keine Schuld haben. Sie
 105 tragen immer noch den Großteil dazu bei, indem sie anfällige Leute
 106 identifizieren und sie nach und nach zu immer extremeren Ideen und
 107 Communities führen.
 108   </p><p>
 109     Der Glaube an Verschwörungen ist ein wütendes Feuer, das reellen Schaden
 110 angerichtet hat und eine echte Bedrohung für unseren Planeten und unsere
 111 Spezies ist, von Epidemien <a class="ulink" href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html" target="_top">, die von Impfgegnern
 112 ausgelöst wurden,</a> bis zu Massenmorden <a class="ulink" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html" target="_top">,
 113 ausgelöst von rassistischen Verschwörungstheorien,</a> bis zum Sterben
 114 unseres Planeten, ausgelöst von Klimawandel-leugnerischer Passivität. Unsere
 115 Welt brennt, und wir müssen diese Brände löschen - indem wir herausfinden,
 116 wir die Leute die Wahrheit der Welt durch die Verschwörungen erkennen lassen
 117 können, durch sie verwirrt wurden.
 118   </p><p>
 119     Aber das Löschen von Bränden ist reaktiv. Wir müssen die
 120 <span class="emphasis"><em>Prävention</em></span> befeuern. Wir müssen auf die traumatischen
 121 realen Umstände abzielen, die Leute anfällig für die Pandemie von
 122 Verschwörungstheorien machen. Auch darin spielt Technologie eine Rolle.
 123   </p><p>
 124     Vorschläge hierfür gibt es genug. Von der <a class="ulink" href="https://edri.org/tag/terreg/" target="_top">Terrorist Content Regulation</a> der
 125 Europäischen Union, welche Plattformen zwingt, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">extremistische</span>“</span>
 126 Inhalte zu überwachen und zu entfernen, über die Vorschläge der Vereinigten
 127 Staaten, wonach <a class="ulink" href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution" target="_top">Tech-Firmen
 128 ihre Nutzer ausspähen</a> und <a class="ulink" href="https://www.natlawreview.com/article/repeal-cda-section-230" target="_top">für deren
 129 „bad speech“</a> haftbar zu machen, gibt es zahlreiche Anstrengunen, um
 130 Tech-Firmen dazu zu zwingen, die Probleme zu lösen, die sie selbst
 131 geschaffen haben.
 132   </p><p>
 133     Dennoch fehlt ein wesentlicher Aspekt in dieser Debatte. All diese Lösungen
 134 setzen voraus, dass Techfirmen ein Fixum sind, dass ihre Dominanz über das
 135 Internet ein dauerhaftes Faktum ist. Vorschläge, „Big Tech”-Firmen mit einem
 136 dezentralerem, pluralistischerem Internet zu ersetzen, finden sich
 137 nirgendwo. Die <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Lösungen</span>“</span>, die heute zur Debatte stehen,
 138 <span class="emphasis"><em>setzen voraus</em></span>, dass Big Tech „big“ bleibt, weil nur die
 139 größten Unternehmen es sich leisten können, entsprechende gesetzeskonforme
 140 Systeme zu etablieren.
 141   </p><p>
 142     Wir müssen herausfinden, wie unsere Technologie aussehen soll, wenn wir aus
 143 diesem Schlamassel wieder herauskommen wollen. Wir stehen heute an einem
 144 Scheideweg, wo wir uns entscheiden müssen, ob wir die „Big Tech“-Firmen
 145 reparieren wollen, die das Internet kontrollieren, oder ob wir das Internet
 146 reparieren wollen, indem wir es aus dem Klammergriff von „Big Tech“
 147 befreien. Beides gleichzeitig geht nicht, so dass wir uns entscheiden
 148 müssen.
 149   </p><p>
 150     Ich möchte, dass wir uns weise entscheiden. Zur Reparatur ist es essentiell,
 151 dass „Big Tech“ gezähmt wird, und dafür brauchen wir
 152 Digitalen-Rechte-Aktivismus.
 153   </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>Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus, ein Vierteljahrhundert später</h2></div></div></div><p>
 154     Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus ist mehr als 30 Jahre alt. Die Eletronic
 155 Frontier Foundation ist in diesem Jahr 30 Jahre alt geworden; die Free
 156 Software Foundation wurde 1985 gegründet. Das am meisten im Laufe der
 157 Geschichte der Bewegung gegen sie vorgebrachte Argument war, dass sie
 158 irrelevant sei: Die Themen „echter“ Aktivisten wären auch
 159 „echte-Welt“-Probleme (man denke an den Skeptizismus, als <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">Finnland
 160 im Jahr 2010 einen Breitbandinternetzugang zum Menschenrecht erklärte
 161 </a>), und „echter-Welt“-Aktivismus noch als Stiefel-Aktivismus („shoe
 162 leather activism”) galt (man denke an Malcolm Gladwells <a class="ulink" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell" target="_top">Geringschätzung
 163 für  <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Clicktivism</span>“</span></a>). Aber je zentraler Technologien für
 164 unseren Alltag wurde, desto mehr sind die Irrelevanz-Vorwürfe Vorwürfen von
 165 Unehrlichkeit gewichen (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Du sorgst dich nur um Tech, weil du  <a class="ulink" href="https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-google-patent-reform/id=98007/" target="_top">für
 166 Technologie-Unternehmen Werbung machen
 167 möchtest</a></span>“</span>). (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Wie konntest du nur nicht vorhersehen,
 168 dass Tech solch eine zerstörerische Kraft sein kann?</span>“</span>). Aber
 169 Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus steht nach wie vor dafür: auf die Menschen in
 170 einer Welt achtgeben, die unausweichlich von Technologie übernommen wird.
 171   </p><p>
 172     Die neueste Form dieser Kritik kommt in der Form des
 173 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überwachungskapitalismus</span>“</span>, einem Begriff, der von der
 174 Business-Professorin Shoshana Zuboff in ihrem langen und einflussreichen
 175 Buch <span class="emphasis"><em>Das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus</em></span> geprägt
 176 wurde, das 2019 erschienen ist. Zuboff argumentiert, dass
 177 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überwachungskapitalismus</span>“</span> ein einzigartigs Geschöpf der
 178 Tech-Industrie sei und dass es sich von allen anderen ausbeuterischen
 179 kommerziellen Praktiken Geschichte unterscheide; ein Geschöpf, das <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">
 180 sich aus unerwarteten und unverständlichen Mechanismen aus Extrahierung,
 181 Kommodifizierung und Kontrolle zusammensetze, das Menschen schließlich von
 182 ihrem eigenen Verhalten loslöse und dabei neue Märkte von
 183 Verhaltensvorhersage und -manipulation schaffe.</span>“</span> Es handelt sich
 184 dabei um eine neue tödliche Form von Kapitalismus, einen
 185 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">schurkenhaften Kapitalismus</span>“</span>, und unsere Unfähigkeit, dessen
 186 einzigartigen Fähigkeiten und Gefahren zu verstehen, stellt eine
 187 existenzielle und speziesweite Bedrohung dar. Sie hat insofern recht, als
 188 Kapitalismus unsere Spezies heute bedroht, und sie hat auch recht insofern,
 189 als Technologie unsere Spezies und Zivilisation vor einzigartige
 190 Herausforderungen stellt, aber sie irrt sich darin, inwiefern Technologie
 191 andersartig ist und warum es unsere Spezies bedroht.
 192   </p><p>
 193     Genauer gesagt, denke ich, dass ihre falsche Diagnose uns einen Weg
 194 hinabführt, der Big Tech stärker macht, nicht schwächer. Wir müssen Big Tech
 195 zu Fall bringen, und um das zu tun, müssen wir zunächst das Problem korrekt
 196 identifizieren.
 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>Tech-Exzeptionalismus, damals und heute</h2></div></div></div><p>
 198     Frühe Kritiker des Digitalen-Rechte-Managements - die am wohl am besten
 199 durch Organisationen wie die Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free
 200 Software Foundation, Public Knowledge und andere vertreten werden, die ihren
 201 Fokus auf die Bewahrung und Stärkung elementarer Menschenrechte in der
 202 digitalen Welt legen - verurteilten Aktivisten für die Ausübung von
 203 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Tech-Exzeptionalismus</span>“</span>. Um die Jahrtausendwende machten
 204 bedeutende Leute jegliche Behauptung, dass Tech-Regularien in der
 205 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">echten Welt</span>“</span> eine Rolle spielten, lächerlich. Behauptungen,
 206 wonach Tech-Regularien Folgen für Speech, Zusammenschlüsse, Privatsphäre,
 207 Durchsuchungen und Konfiskationen, sowie für grundlegende Rechte und
 208 Gleichheit haben konnten, wurden verlacht - verlacht als Besorgnis, die von
 209 traurigen Nerds, die sonst in Webforen über <span class="emphasis"><em> Star Trek</em></span>
 210 diskutierten, geschürt und gar über die Freiheitskämpfe der Freedom Rider,
 211 Nelson Mandela oder des Warschauer Ghetto-Aufstandes erhoben würden.
 212   </p><p>
 213     In den seitdem vergangenen Jahrzehnten wurden die Vorwürfe von
 214 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Tech-Exzeptionalismus</span>“</span> schärfer, zumal sich die Bedeutung von
 215 Technologie im Alltag ausgeweitet hat: Jetzt, da Technologie jede Nische
 216 unseres Lebens infiltriert hat und unsere Online-Leben von einer Handvoll
 217 Giganten monopolisiert wurden, werden die Verteidiger der digitalen
 218 Freiheiten Beschuldigt, Wasserträger von „Big Tech“ zu sein und Deckung für
 219 dessen von eigenen Interessen geleiteter Fahrlässigkeit (oder schlimmer
 220 noch: ruchlose Pläne) zu bieten.
 221   </p><p>
 222     Nach meiner Aufassung ist die Digitale-Rechte-Bewegung stehen geblieben,
 223 während der Rest der Welt sich weiterbewegt hat. Von den frühesten Tagen an
 224 war das Anliegen der Bewegung, dass Nutzer und Programmierer ihre
 225 grundlegenden Rechte verwirklichen Rechte können. Digitale-Rechte-Aktivisten
 226 kümmerten sich nur soweit um Firmen, als sie die Rechte ihrer Nutzen
 227 achteten (oder, wie so oft, wenn sich Unternehmen so töricht verhielten und
 228 neue Regularien zu Fall zu bringen drohten, was es auch guten Akteuren
 229 schwerer gemacht hätte, Nutzen zu helfen).
 230   </p><p>
 231     Der Kritiker des <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überwachungskapitalismus</span>“</span> lässt die
 232 Digitale-Rechte-Bewegung erneut in einem neuen Licht erscheinen: nicht als
 233 Alarmisten, die die Wichtigkeit ihrer Spielzeuge überschätzen oder als
 234 Sprecher für Big Tech, sondern als gelassene Sessel-Aktivisten, deren
 235 langjähriger Aktivismus zur Last geworden ist, weil es sie unfähig macht,
 236 neuartige Bedrohungen zu erkennen, während sie weiterhin Tech-Schlachten des
 237 vorigen Jahrhunderts schlagen.
 238   </p><p>
 239     Aber Tech-Exzeptionalismus ist eine Sünde, unabhängig davon, wer ihn
 240 betreibt.
 241   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="dont-believe-the-hype"></a>Glaube nicht an den Hype</h2></div></div></div><p>
 242     Du hast wahrscheinlich schon einmal gehört, dass <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">du das Produkt bist,
 243 wenn du nicht für das Produkt bezahlst </span>“</span>. Wie wir noch sehen werden,
 244 ist diese Aussage im Grunde richtig, aber nicht vollständig. Aber es
 245 stimmt<span class="emphasis"><em>definitiv</em></span> ,  dass die Kunden von Big Tech
 246 Werbeunternehmen sind, und das Geschäftsmodell von Google und Facebook ist
 247 letztlich ihre Fähigkeit, <span class="emphasis"><em>dich</em></span> zu Käufen zu
 248 verleiten. Das Produkt von Big Tech ist die Überzeugungskunst. Die Dienste -
 249 soziale Medien, Suchmaschinen, Karten- und Kurznachrichtendienste und
 250 weitere - sind  schlicht Vehikel, um dessen Nutzer von etwas zu überzeugen
 251 und zu etwas zu verleiten.
 252   </p><p>
 253     Die Angst vor Überwachungskapitalismus basiert zunächst auf der (korrekten)
 254 Annahme, dass alles, was Big Tech über sich selbst sagt, wahrscheinlich eine
 255 Lüge ist. Aber der Kritiker des Überwachungskapitalismus macht hiervon eine
 256 Ausnahme, soweit es Big Techs eigene Behauptungen in seinen
 257 Verkaufsprospekten sind - der atemlose Hype, der potentiellen
 258 Werbeunternehmen online und in Werbetechnologie-Seminaren über die
 259 Wirksamkeit seiner Produkte angedient wird: Dem Hype zufolge kann uns Big
 260 Tech so gut wie von ihm behauptet beeinflussen. Das ist jedoch falsch, weil
 261 Verkaufsprospekte kein zuverlässiger Indikator für die Wirksamkeit eines
 262 Produkts ist.
 263   </p><p>
 264     Überwachungskapitalismus geht davon aus, dass Big Tech etwas Reales
 265 verkauft, weil Werbeunternehmen viel von dem kaufen, was Big Tech
 266 verkauft. Aber die massiven Umsatzzahlen von Big Tech könnten einfach auch
 267 nur das Produkt einer weit verbreiteten Täuschung sein, oder schlimmer noch:
 268 eines monopolistischen Kontrolle über unser aller Kommunikation und Handel.
 269   </p><p>
 270     Überwachung führt zu Verhaltensveränderungen, und zwar nicht zu
 271 positiven. Sie gefähdet unseren gesellschaftlichen Fortschritt. Zuboffs Buch
 272 arbeitet Erklärungen dieser Phänomene eindrucksvoll heraus. Aber Zuboff
 273 behauptet auch, dass Überwachung uns unseres freien Willens beraubt - dass,
 274 wenn unsere persönlichen Daten mit maschinellem Lernen kombiniert werden,
 275 ein System fataler Überzeugungskunst entsteht, in dessen Angesicht wir
 276 hilflos sind. Sprich, Facebook nutzt einen Algorithmus, um die Daten zu
 277 analysieren, welche ohne unsere Zustimmung aus deinem Alltag extrahiert
 278 werden, und nutzt diese, um deinen Feed so anzupassen, dass du Sachen
 279 kaufst. Es handelt sich um einen Strahl zur Gedankensteuerung wie aus einem
 280 Comic der 1950er Jahre, der von verrückten Wissenschaftlern bedient wird,
 281 deren Supercomputer ihnen ewige und umfassende Weltherrschaft garantiert.
 282   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="what-is-persuasion"></a>Was ist Überzeugung?</h2></div></div></div><p>
 283     Um zu verstehen, weshalb du dich nicht um Strahlen zur Gedankenkontrolle –
 284 aber weshalb du dich um Überwachung <span class="emphasis"><em>und</em></span> Big Tech sorgen
 285 <span class="emphasis"><em>solltest</em></span> -, müssen wir einordnen, was wir mit
 286 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überzeugung</span>“</span> meinen.
 287   </p><p>
 288     Google, Facebook und andere Überwachungkapitalisten versprechen ihren Kunden
 289 (den Werbeunternehmen), dass sich diesen – durch Werkzeuge maschinellen
 290 Lernes, die mit unvorstellbar großen Mengen an persönlichen Daten ohne
 291 Zustimmung trainier wurden – Wege eröffnen, um das rationale Denken der
 292 Öffentlichkeit umgehen und ihr Verhalten lenken zu können, so dass ein ein
 293 Strom an Käufen, Stimmen und anderer erwünschter Ergebnisse erzeugt wird.
 294   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
 295       Die Auswirkungen von Vorherrschaft überwiegt die der Manipulation bei weitem
 296 und sie sollen im Mittelpunkt unserer Analyse und etwaiger Gegenmittel
 297 stehen, die wir zu finden suchen.
 298     </p></blockquote></div><p>
 299     Aber es gibt wenige Beweise dafür, dass dies geschieht. Stattdessen sind die
 300 Vorhersagen, die Überwachungskapitalisten ihren Kunden liefern, viel weniger
 301 beeindruckend. Anstelle Wege zu finden, die unser rationales Denken umgehen,
 302 tun Überwachungskapitlisten meistens eines oder mehrere der folgenden drei
 303 Dinge:
 304   </p><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="segmenting"></a>1. Aufteilung</h3></div></div></div><p>
 305       Falls du Windeln verkaufst, bist du besser beraten, diese Leuten auf
 306 Entbindungsstationen anzubieten. Nicht jeder, der eine Entbindungsstation
 307 betritt oder eine solche verlässt, hat gerade ein Kind entbunden, und nicht
 308 jeder, der gerade ein Kind entbunden hat, ist im Windelmarkt vertreten. Aber
 309 die Geburt eines Kindes ist ein sehr zuverlässiges Korrelat zur Teilnahme am
 310 „Windelmarkt“, und der Aufenthalt in einer Entbindungsstation steht in hoher
 311 Korrelation zur Geburt eines Kindes. Deshalb Windelwerbung im Bereich von
 312 Entbindungsstationen (und sogar Promoter, die auf Entbindungsstationen mit
 313 Körben voller Gratisproben herumspuken).
 314     </p><p>
 315       Surveillance capitalism is segmenting times a billion. Diaper vendors can go
 316 way beyond people in maternity wards (though they can do that, too, with
 317 things like location-based mobile ads).  They can target you based on
 318 whether you’re reading articles about child-rearing, diapers, or a host of
 319 other subjects, and data mining can suggest unobvious keywords to advertise
 320 against. They can target you based on the articles you’ve recently
 321 read. They can target you based on what you’ve recently purchased. They can
 322 target you based on whether you receive emails or private messages about
 323 these subjects — or even if you speak aloud about them (though Facebook and
 324 the like convincingly claim that’s not happening — yet).
 325     </p><p>
 326       Das ist wirklich beängstigend.
 327     </p><p>
 328       Aber dies ist keine Gedankenkontrolle.
 329     </p><p>
 330       Es beraubt dich nicht deines freien Willens. Es führt dich nicht hinters
 331 Licht.
 332     </p><p>
 333       Think of how surveillance capitalism works in politics.  Surveillance
 334 capitalist companies sell political operatives the power to locate people
 335 who might be receptive to their pitch.  Candidates campaigning on finance
 336 industry corruption seek people struggling with debt; candidates campaigning
 337 on xenophobia seek out racists. Political operatives have always targeted
 338 their message whether their intentions were honorable or not: Union
 339 organizers set up pitches at factory gates, and white supremacists hand out
 340 fliers at John Birch Society meetings.
 341     </p><p>
 342       But this is an inexact and thus wasteful practice. The union organizer can’t
 343 know which worker to approach on the way out of the factory gates and may
 344 waste their time on a covert John Birch Society member; the white
 345 supremacist doesn’t know which of the Birchers are so delusional that making
 346 it to a meeting is as much as they can manage and which ones might be
 347 convinced to cross the country to carry a tiki torch through the streets of
 348 Charlottesville, Virginia.
 349     </p><p>
 350       Because targeting improves the yields on political pitches, it can
 351 accelerate the pace of political upheaval by making it possible for everyone
 352 who has secretly wished for the toppling of an autocrat — or just an 11-term
 353 incumbent politician — to find everyone else who feels the same way at very
 354 low cost. This has been critical to the rapid crystallization of recent
 355 political movements including Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street as
 356 well as less savory players like the far-right white nationalist movements
 357 that marched in Charlottesville.
 358     </p><p>
 359       It’s important to differentiate this kind of political organizing from
 360 influence campaigns; finding people who secretly agree with you isn’t the
 361 same as convincing people to agree with you. The rise of phenomena like
 362 nonbinary or otherwise nonconforming gender identities is often
 363 characterized by reactionaries as the result of online brainwashing
 364 campaigns that convince impressionable people that they have been secretly
 365 queer all along.
 366     </p><p>
 367       But the personal accounts of those who have come out tell a different story
 368 where people who long harbored a secret about their gender were emboldened
 369 by others coming forward and where people who knew that they were different
 370 but lacked a vocabulary for discussing that difference learned the right
 371 words from these low-cost means of finding people and learning about their
 372 ideas.
 373     </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="deception"></a>2. Deception</h3></div></div></div><p>
 374       Lies and fraud are pernicious, and surveillance capitalism supercharges them
 375 through targeting. If you want to sell a fraudulent payday loan or subprime
 376 mortgage, surveillance capitalism can help you find people who are both
 377 desperate and unsophisticated and thus receptive to your pitch. This
 378 accounts for the rise of many phenomena, like multilevel marketing schemes,
 379 in which deceptive claims about potential earnings and the efficacy of sales
 380 techniques are targeted at desperate people by advertising against search
 381 queries that indicate, for example, someone struggling with ill-advised
 382 loans.
 383     </p><p>
 384       Surveillance capitalism also abets fraud by making it easy to locate other
 385 people who have been similarly deceived, forming a community of people who
 386 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
 387 forums</a> where people who are being victimized by multilevel marketing
 388 frauds gather to trade tips on how to improve their luck in peddling the
 389 product.
 390     </p><p>
 391       Sometimes, online deception involves replacing someone’s correct beliefs
 392 with incorrect ones, as it does in the anti-vaccination movement, whose
 393 victims are often people who start out believing in vaccines but are
 394 convinced by seemingly plausible evidence that leads them into the false
 395 belief that vaccines are harmful.
 396     </p><p>
 397       But it’s much more common for fraud to succeed when it doesn’t have to
 398 displace a true belief. When my daughter contracted head lice at daycare,
 399 one of the daycare workers told me I could get rid of them by treating her
 400 hair and scalp with olive oil. I didn’t know anything about head lice, and I
 401 assumed that the daycare worker did, so I tried it (it didn’t work, and it
 402 doesn’t work). It’s easy to end up with false beliefs when you simply don’t
 403 know any better and when those beliefs are conveyed by someone who seems to
 404 know what they’re doing.
 405     </p><p>
 406       This is pernicious and difficult — and it’s also the kind of thing the
 407 internet can help guard against by making true information available,
 408 especially in a form that exposes the underlying deliberations among parties
 409 with sharply divergent views, such as Wikipedia. But it’s not brainwashing;
 410 it’s fraud. In the <a class="ulink" href="https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/" target="_top">majority of cases</a>,
 411 the victims of these fraud campaigns have an informational void filled in
 412 the customary way, by consulting a seemingly reliable source. If I look up
 413 the length of the Brooklyn Bridge and learn that it is 5,800 feet long, but
 414 in reality, it is 5,989 feet long, the underlying deception is a problem,
 415 but it’s a problem with a simple remedy. It’s a very different problem from
 416 the anti-vax issue in which someone’s true belief is displaced by a false
 417 one by means of sophisticated persuasion.
 418     </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="domination"></a>3. Domination</h3></div></div></div><p>
 419       Surveillance capitalism is the result of monopoly. Monopoly is the cause,
 420 and surveillance capitalism and its negative outcomes are the effects of
 421 monopoly. I’ll get into this in depth later, but for now, suffice it to say
 422 that the tech industry has grown up with a radical theory of antitrust that
 423 has allowed companies to grow by merging with their rivals, buying up their
 424 nascent competitors, and expanding to control whole market verticals.
 425     </p><p>
 426       One example of how monopolism aids in persuasion is through dominance:
 427 Google makes editorial decisions about its algorithms that determine the
 428 sort order of the responses to our queries. If a cabal of fraudsters have
 429 set out to trick the world into thinking that the Brooklyn Bridge is 5,800
 430 feet long, and if Google gives a high search rank to this group in response
 431 to queries like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">How long is the Brooklyn Bridge?</span>“</span> then the
 432 first eight or 10 screens’ worth of Google results could be wrong. And since
 433 most people don’t go beyond the first couple of results — let alone the
 434 first <span class="emphasis"><em>page</em></span> of results — Google’s choice means that many
 435 people will be deceived.
 436     </p><p>
 437       Google’s dominance over search — more than 86% of web searches are performed
 438 through Google — means that the way it orders its search results has an
 439 outsized effect on public beliefs. Ironically, Google claims this is why it
 440 can’t afford to have any transparency in its algorithm design: Google’s
 441 search dominance makes the results of its sorting too important to risk
 442 telling the world how it arrives at those results lest some bad actor
 443 discover a flaw in the ranking system and exploit it to push its point of
 444 view to the top of the search results. There’s an obvious remedy to a
 445 company that is too big to audit: break it up into smaller pieces.
 446     </p><p>
 447       Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> whose
 448 data-hoarding and machine-learning techniques rob us of our free will. But
 449 influence campaigns that seek to displace existing, correct beliefs with
 450 false ones have an effect that is small and temporary while monopolistic
 451 dominance over informational systems has massive, enduring
 452 effects. Controlling the results to the world’s search queries means
 453 controlling access both to arguments and their rebuttals and, thus, control
 454 over much of the world’s beliefs. If our concern is how corporations are
 455 foreclosing on our ability to make up our own minds and determine our own
 456 futures, the impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and
 457 should be central to our analysis and any remedies we seek.
 458     </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="bypassing-our-rational-faculties"></a>4. Bypassing our rational faculties</h3></div></div></div><p>
 459       <span class="emphasis"><em>This</em></span> is the good stuff: using machine learning,
 460 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">dark patterns,</span>“</span> engagement hacking, and other techniques to
 461 get us to do things that run counter to our better judgment. This is mind
 462 control.
 463     </p><p>
 464       Some of these techniques have proven devastatingly effective (if only in the
 465 short term). The use of countdown timers on a purchase completion page can
 466 create a sense of urgency that causes you to ignore the nagging internal
 467 voice suggesting that you should shop around or sleep on your decision. The
 468 use of people from your social graph in ads can provide <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">social
 469 proof</span>“</span> that a purchase is worth making. Even the auction system
 470 pioneered by eBay is calculated to play on our cognitive blind spots,
 471 letting us feel like we <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">own</span>“</span> something because we bid on it,
 472 thus encouraging us to bid again when we are outbid to ensure that
 473 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">our</span>“</span> things stay ours.
 474     </p><p>
 475       Games are extraordinarily good at this. <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Free to play</span>“</span> games
 476 manipulate us through many techniques, such as presenting players with a
 477 series of smoothly escalating challenges that create a sense of mastery and
 478 accomplishment but which sharply transition into a set of challenges that
 479 are impossible to overcome without paid upgrades. Add some social proof to
 480 the mix — a stream of notifications about how well your friends are faring —
 481 and before you know it, you’re buying virtual power-ups to get to the next
 482 level.
 483     </p><p>
 484       Companies have risen and fallen on these techniques, and the
 485 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">fallen</span>“</span> part is worth paying attention to. In general, living
 486 things adapt to stimulus: Something that is very compelling or noteworthy
 487 when you first encounter it fades with repetition until you stop noticing it
 488 altogether. Consider the refrigerator hum that irritates you when it starts
 489 up but disappears into the background so thoroughly that you only notice it
 490 when it stops again.
 491     </p><p>
 492       That’s why behavioral conditioning uses <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">intermittent reinforcement
 493 schedules.</span>“</span> Instead of giving you a steady drip of encouragement or
 494 setbacks, games and gamified services scatter rewards on a randomized
 495 schedule — often enough to keep you interested and random enough that you
 496 can never quite find the pattern that would make it boring.
 497     </p><p>
 498       Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful behavioral tool, but it also
 499 represents a collective action problem for surveillance capitalism. The
 500 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">engagement techniques</span>“</span> invented by the behaviorists of
 501 surveillance capitalist companies are quickly copied across the whole sector
 502 so that what starts as a mysteriously compelling fillip in the design of a
 503 service—like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">pull to refresh</span>“</span> or alerts when someone likes
 504 your posts or side quests that your characters get invited to while in the
 505 midst of main quests—quickly becomes dully ubiquitous. The
 506 impossible-to-nail-down nonpattern of randomized drips from your phone
 507 becomes a grey-noise wall of sound as every single app and site starts to
 508 make use of whatever seems to be working at the time.
 509     </p><p>
 510       From the surveillance capitalist’s point of view, our adaptive capacity is
 511 like a harmful bacterium that deprives it of its food source — our attention
 512 — and novel techniques for snagging that attention are like new antibiotics
 513 that can be used to breach our defenses and destroy our
 514 self-determination. And there <span class="emphasis"><em>are</em></span> techniques like
 515 that. Who can forget the Great Zynga Epidemic, when all of our friends were
 516 caught in <span class="emphasis"><em>FarmVille</em></span>’s endless, mindless dopamine loops?
 517 But every new attention-commanding technique is jumped on by the whole
 518 industry and used so indiscriminately that antibiotic resistance sets
 519 in. Given enough repetition, almost all of us develop immunity to even the
 520 most powerful techniques — by 2013, two years after Zynga’s peak, its user
 521 base had halved.
 522     </p><p>
 523       Not everyone, of course. Some people never adapt to stimulus, just as some
 524 people never stop hearing the hum of the refrigerator.  This is why most
 525 people who are exposed to slot machines play them for a while and then move
 526 on while a small and tragic minority liquidate their kids’ college funds,
 527 buy adult diapers, and position themselves in front of a machine until they
 528 collapse.
 529     </p><p>
 530       But surveillance capitalism’s margins on behavioral modification
 531 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
 532 the base rate is way less than 1%</a> with an improved rate of… still
 533 less than 1%. Even penny slot machines pull down pennies for every spin
 534 while surveillance capitalism rakes in infinitesimal penny fractions.
 535     </p><p>
 536       Slot machines’ high returns mean that they can be profitable just by
 537 draining the fortunes of the small rump of people who are pathologically
 538 vulnerable to them and unable to adapt to their tricks. But surveillance
 539 capitalism can’t survive on the fractional pennies it brings down from that
 540 vulnerable sliver — that’s why, after the Great Zynga Epidemic had finally
 541 burned itself out, the small number of still-addicted players left behind
 542 couldn’t sustain it as a global phenomenon. And new powerful attention
 543 weapons aren’t easy to find, as is evidenced by the long years since the
 544 last time Zynga had a hit. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that
 545 Zynga has to spend on developing new tools to blast through our adaptation,
 546 it has never managed to repeat the lucky accident that let it snag so much
 547 of our attention for a brief moment in 2009. Powerhouses like Supercell have
 548 fared a little better, but they are rare and throw away many failures for
 549 every success.
 550     </p><p>
 551       The vulnerability of small segments of the population to dramatic, efficient
 552 corporate manipulation is a real concern that’s worthy of our attention and
 553 energy. But it’s not an existential threat to society.
 554     </p></div></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="if-data-is-the-new-oil-then-surveillance-capitalisms-engine-has-a-leak"></a>If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak</h2></div></div></div><p>
 555     This adaptation problem offers an explanation for one of surveillance
 556 capitalism’s most alarming traits: its relentless hunger for data and its
 557 endless expansion of data-gathering capabilities through the spread of
 558 sensors, online surveillance, and acquisition of data streams from third
 559 parties.
 560   </p><p>
 561     Zuboff observes this phenomenon and concludes that data must be very
 562 valuable if surveillance capitalism is so hungry for it. (In her words:
 563 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous
 564 intensification of the means of production, so surveillance capitalists and
 565 their market players are now locked into the continuous intensification of
 566 the means of behavioral modification and the gathering might of
 567 instrumentarian power.</span>“</span>) But what if the voracious appetite is
 568 because data has such a short half-life — because people become inured so
 569 quickly to new, data-driven persuasion techniques — that the companies are
 570 locked in an arms race with our limbic system? What if it’s all a Red
 571 Queen’s race where they have to run ever faster — collect ever-more data —
 572 just to stay in the same spot?
 573   </p><p>
 574     Of course, all of Big Tech’s persuasion techniques work in concert with one
 575 another, and collecting data is useful beyond mere behavioral trickery.
 576   </p><p>
 577     If someone wants to recruit you to buy a refrigerator or join a pogrom, they
 578 might use profiling and targeting to send messages to people they judge to
 579 be good sales prospects. The messages themselves may be deceptive, making
 580 claims about things you’re not very knowledgeable about (food safety and
 581 energy efficiency or eugenics and historical claims about racial
 582 superiority). They might use search engine optimization and/or armies of
 583 fake reviewers and commenters and/or paid placement to dominate the
 584 discourse so that any search for further information takes you back to their
 585 messages.  And finally, they may refine the different pitches using machine
 586 learning and other techniques to figure out what kind of pitch works best on
 587 someone like you.
 588   </p><p>
 589     Each phase of this process benefits from surveillance: The more data they
 590 have, the more precisely they can profile you and target you with specific
 591 messages. Think of how you’d sell a fridge if you knew that the warranty on
 592 your prospect’s fridge just expired and that they were expecting a tax
 593 rebate in April.
 594   </p><p>
 595     Also, the more data they have, the better they can craft deceptive messages
 596 — if I know that you’re into genealogy, I might not try to feed you
 597 pseudoscience about genetic differences between <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">races,</span>“</span>
 598 sticking instead to conspiratorial secret histories of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">demographic
 599 replacement</span>“</span> and the like.
 600   </p><p>
 601     Facebook also helps you locate people who have the same odious or antisocial
 602 views as you. It makes it possible to find other people who want to carry
 603 tiki torches through the streets of Charlottesville in Confederate
 604 cosplay. It can help you find other people who want to join your militia and
 605 go to the border to look for undocumented migrants to terrorize. It can help
 606 you find people who share your belief that vaccines are poison and that the
 607 Earth is flat.
 608   </p><p>
 609     There is one way in which targeted advertising uniquely benefits those
 610 advocating for socially unacceptable causes: It is invisible.  Racism is
 611 widely geographically dispersed, and there are few places where racists —
 612 and only racists — gather. This is similar to the problem of selling
 613 refrigerators in that potential refrigerator purchasers are geographically
 614 dispersed and there are few places where you can buy an ad that will be
 615 primarily seen by refrigerator customers. But buying a refrigerator is
 616 socially acceptable while being a Nazi is not, so you can buy a billboard or
 617 advertise in the newspaper sports section for your refrigerator business,
 618 and the only potential downside is that your ad will be seen by a lot of
 619 people who don’t want refrigerators, resulting in a lot of wasted expense.
 620   </p><p>
 621     But even if you wanted to advertise your Nazi movement on a billboard or
 622 prime-time TV or the sports section, you would struggle to find anyone
 623 willing to sell you the space for your ad partly because they disagree with
 624 your views and partly because they fear censure (boycott, reputational
 625 damage, etc.) from other people who disagree with your views.
 626   </p><p>
 627     Targeted ads solve this problem: On the internet, every ad unit can be
 628 different for every person, meaning that you can buy ads that are only shown
 629 to people who appear to be Nazis and not to people who hate Nazis. When
 630 there’s spillover — when someone who hates racism is shown a racist
 631 recruiting ad — there is some fallout; the platform or publication might get
 632 an angry public or private denunciation. But the nature of the risk assumed
 633 by an online ad buyer is different than the risks to a traditional publisher
 634 or billboard owner who might want to run a Nazi ad.
 635   </p><p>
 636     Online ads are placed by algorithms that broker between a diverse ecosystem
 637 of self-serve ad platforms that anyone can buy an ad through, so the Nazi ad
 638 that slips onto your favorite online publication isn’t seen as their moral
 639 failing but rather as a failure in some distant, upstream ad supplier. When
 640 a publication gets a complaint about an offensive ad that’s appearing in one
 641 of its units, it can take some steps to block that ad, but the Nazi might
 642 buy a slightly different ad from a different broker serving the same
 643 unit. And in any event, internet users increasingly understand that when
 644 they see an ad, it’s likely that the advertiser did not choose that
 645 publication and that the publication has no idea who its advertisers are.
 646   </p><p>
 647     These layers of indirection between advertisers and publishers serve as
 648 moral buffers: Today’s moral consensus is largely that publishers shouldn’t
 649 be held responsible for the ads that appear on their pages because they’re
 650 not actively choosing to put those ads there.  Because of this, Nazis are
 651 able to overcome significant barriers to organizing their movement.
 652   </p><p>
 653     Data has a complex relationship with domination. Being able to spy on your
 654 customers can alert you to their preferences for your rivals and allow you
 655 to head off your rivals at the pass.
 656   </p><p>
 657     More importantly, if you can dominate the information space while also
 658 gathering data, then you make other deceptive tactics stronger because it’s
 659 harder to break out of the web of deceit you’re spinning. Domination — that
 660 is, ultimately becoming a monopoly — and not the data itself is the
 661 supercharger that makes every tactic worth pursuing because monopolistic
 662 domination deprives your target of an escape route.
 663   </p><p>
 664     If you’re a Nazi who wants to ensure that your prospects primarily see
 665 deceptive, confirming information when they search for more, you can improve
 666 your odds by seeding the search terms they use through your initial
 667 communications. You don’t need to own the top 10 results for <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">voter
 668 suppression</span>“</span> if you can convince your marks to confine their search
 669 terms to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">voter fraud,</span>“</span> which throws up a very different set of
 670 search results.
 671   </p><p>
 672     Surveillance capitalists are like stage mentalists who claim that their
 673 extraordinary insights into human behavior let them guess the word that you
 674 wrote down and folded up in your pocket but who really use shills, hidden
 675 cameras, sleight of hand, and brute-force memorization to amaze you.
 676   </p><p>
 677     Or perhaps they’re more like pick-up artists, the misogynistic cult that
 678 promises to help awkward men have sex with women by teaching them
 679 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">neurolinguistic programming</span>“</span> phrases, body language
 680 techniques, and psychological manipulation tactics like
 681 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">negging</span>“</span> — offering unsolicited negative feedback to women to
 682 lower their self-esteem and prick their interest.
 683   </p><p>
 684     Some pick-up artists eventually manage to convince women to go home with
 685 them, but it’s not because these men have figured out how to bypass women’s
 686 critical faculties. Rather, pick-up artists’ <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">success</span>“</span> stories
 687 are a mix of women who were incapable of giving consent, women who were
 688 coerced, women who were intoxicated, self-destructive women, and a few women
 689 who were sober and in command of their faculties but who didn’t realize
 690 straightaway that they were with terrible men but rectified the error as
 691 soon as they could.
 692   </p><p>
 693     Pick-up artists <span class="emphasis"><em>believe</em></span> they have figured out a secret
 694 back door that bypasses women’s critical faculties, but they haven’t. Many
 695 of the tactics they deploy, like negging, became the butt of jokes (just
 696 like people joke about bad ad targeting), and there’s a good chance that
 697 anyone they try these tactics on will immediately recognize them and dismiss
 698 the men who use them as irredeemable losers.
 699   </p><p>
 700     Pick-up artists are proof that people can believe they have developed a
 701 system of mind control <span class="emphasis"><em>even when it doesn’t
 702 work</em></span>. Pick-up artists simply exploit the fact that
 703 one-in-a-million chances can come through for you if you make a million
 704 attempts, and then they assume that the other 999,999 times, they simply
 705 performed the technique incorrectly and commit themselves to doing better
 706 next time. There’s only one group of people who find pick-up artist lore
 707 reliably convincing: other would-be pick-up artists whose anxiety and
 708 insecurity make them vulnerable to scammers and delusional men who convince
 709 them that if they pay for tutelage and follow instructions, then they will
 710 someday succeed. Pick-up artists assume they fail to entice women because
 711 they are bad at being pick-up artists, not because pick-up artistry is
 712 bullshit. Pick-up artists are bad at selling themselves to women, but
 713 they’re much better at selling themselves to men who pay to learn the
 714 secrets of pick-up artistry.
 715   </p><p>
 716     Department store pioneer John Wanamaker is said to have lamented,
 717 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I
 718 don’t know which half.</span>“</span> The fact that Wanamaker thought that only
 719 half of his advertising spending was wasted is a tribute to the
 720 persuasiveness of advertising executives, who are <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span>
 721 better at convincing potential clients to buy their services than they are
 722 at convincing the general public to buy their clients’ wares.
 723   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="what-is-facebook"></a>What is Facebook?</h2></div></div></div><p>
 724     Facebook is heralded as the origin of all of our modern plagues, and it’s
 725 not hard to see why. Some tech companies want to lock their users in but
 726 make their money by monopolizing access to the market for apps for their
 727 devices and gouging them on prices rather than by spying on them (like
 728 Apple). Some companies don’t care about locking in users because they’ve
 729 figured out how to spy on them no matter where they are and what they’re
 730 doing and can turn that surveillance into money (Google). Facebook alone
 731 among the Western tech giants has built a business based on locking in its
 732 users <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> spying on them all the time.
 733   </p><p>
 734     Facebook’s surveillance regime is really without parallel in the Western
 735 world. Though Facebook tries to prevent itself from being visible on the
 736 public web, hiding most of what goes on there from people unless they’re
 737 logged into Facebook, the company has nevertheless booby-trapped the entire
 738 web with surveillance tools in the form of Facebook <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Like</span>“</span>
 739 buttons that web publishers include on their sites to boost their Facebook
 740 profiles. Facebook also makes various libraries and other useful code
 741 snippets available to web publishers that act as surveillance tendrils on
 742 the sites where they’re used, funneling information about visitors to the
 743 site — newspapers, dating sites, message boards — to Facebook.
 744   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
 745       Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but
 746 because it is <span class="emphasis"><em>big</em></span>.
 747     </p></blockquote></div><p>
 748     Facebook offers similar tools to app developers, so the apps — games, fart
 749 machines, business review services, apps for keeping abreast of your kid’s
 750 schooling — you use will send information about your activities to Facebook
 751 even if you don’t have a Facebook account and even if you don’t download or
 752 use Facebook apps. On top of all that, Facebook buys data from third-party
 753 brokers on shopping habits, physical location, use of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">loyalty</span>“</span>
 754 programs, financial transactions, etc., and cross-references that with the
 755 dossiers it develops on activity on Facebook and with apps and the public
 756 web.
 757   </p><p>
 758     Though it’s easy to integrate the web with Facebook — linking to news
 759 stories and such — Facebook products are generally not available to be
 760 integrated back into the web itself. You can embed a tweet in a Facebook
 761 post, but if you embed a Facebook post in a tweet, you just get a link back
 762 to Facebook and must log in before you can see it. Facebook has used extreme
 763 technological and legal countermeasures to prevent rivals from allowing
 764 their users to embed Facebook snippets in competing services or to create
 765 alternative interfaces to Facebook that merge your Facebook inbox with those
 766 of other services that you use.
 767   </p><p>
 768     And Facebook is incredibly popular, with 2.3 billion claimed users (though
 769 many believe this figure to be inflated). Facebook has been used to organize
 770 genocidal pogroms, racist riots, anti-vaccination movements, flat Earth
 771 cults, and the political lives of some of the world’s ugliest, most brutal
 772 autocrats. There are some really alarming things going on in the world, and
 773 Facebook is implicated in many of them, so it’s easy to conclude that these
 774 bad things are the result of Facebook’s mind-control system, which it rents
 775 out to anyone with a few bucks to spend.
 776   </p><p>
 777     To understand what role Facebook plays in the formulation and mobilization
 778 of antisocial movements, we need to understand the dual nature of Facebook.
 779   </p><p>
 780     Because it has a lot of users and a lot of data about those users, Facebook
 781 is a very efficient tool for locating people with hard-to-find traits, the
 782 kinds of traits that are widely diffused in the population such that
 783 advertisers have historically struggled to find a cost-effective way to
 784 reach them. Think back to refrigerators: Most of us only replace our major
 785 appliances a few times in our entire lives. If you’re a refrigerator
 786 manufacturer or retailer, you have these brief windows in the life of a
 787 consumer during which they are pondering a purchase, and you have to somehow
 788 reach them. Anyone who’s ever registered a title change after buying a house
 789 can attest that appliance manufacturers are incredibly desperate to reach
 790 anyone who has even the slenderest chance of being in the market for a new
 791 fridge.
 792   </p><p>
 793     Facebook makes finding people shopping for refrigerators a
 794 <span class="emphasis"><em>lot</em></span> easier. It can target ads to people who’ve
 795 registered a new home purchase, to people who’ve searched for refrigerator
 796 buying advice, to people who have complained about their fridge dying, or
 797 any combination thereof. It can even target people who’ve recently bought
 798 <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> kitchen appliances on the theory that someone
 799 who’s just replaced their stove and dishwasher might be in a fridge-buying
 800 kind of mood. The vast majority of people who are reached by these ads will
 801 not be in the market for a new fridge, but — crucially — the percentage of
 802 people who <span class="emphasis"><em>are</em></span> looking for fridges that these ads reach
 803 is <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span> larger than it is than for any group that might
 804 be subjected to traditional, offline targeted refrigerator marketing.
 805   </p><p>
 806     Facebook also makes it a lot easier to find people who have the same rare
 807 disease as you, which might have been impossible in earlier eras — the
 808 closest fellow sufferer might otherwise be hundreds of miles away. It makes
 809 it easier to find people who went to the same high school as you even though
 810 decades have passed and your former classmates have all been scattered to
 811 the four corners of the Earth.
 812   </p><p>
 813     Facebook also makes it much easier to find people who hold the same rare
 814 political beliefs as you. If you’ve always harbored a secret affinity for
 815 socialism but never dared utter this aloud lest you be demonized by your
 816 neighbors, Facebook can help you discover other people who feel the same way
 817 (and it might just demonstrate to you that your affinity is more widespread
 818 than you ever suspected). It can make it easier to find people who share
 819 your sexual identity.  And again, it can help you to understand that what
 820 you thought was a shameful secret that affected only you was really a widely
 821 shared trait, giving you both comfort and the courage to come out to the
 822 people in your life.
 823   </p><p>
 824     All of this presents a dilemma for Facebook: Targeting makes the company’s
 825 ads more effective than traditional ads, but it also lets advertisers see
 826 just how effective their ads are. While advertisers are pleased to learn
 827 that Facebook ads are more effective than ads on systems with less
 828 sophisticated targeting, advertisers can also see that in nearly every case,
 829 the people who see their ads ignore them. Or, at best, the ads work on a
 830 subconscious level, creating nebulous unmeasurables like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">brand
 831 recognition.</span>“</span> This means that the price per ad is very low in nearly
 832 every case.
 833   </p><p>
 834     To make things worse, many Facebook groups spark precious little
 835 discussion. Your little-league soccer team, the people with the same rare
 836 disease as you, and the people you share a political affinity with may
 837 exchange the odd flurry of messages at critical junctures, but on a daily
 838 basis, there’s not much to say to your old high school chums or other
 839 hockey-card collectors.
 840   </p><p>
 841     With nothing but <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">organic</span>“</span> discussion, Facebook would not
 842 generate enough traffic to sell enough ads to make the money it needs to
 843 continually expand by buying up its competitors while returning handsome
 844 sums to its investors.
 845   </p><p>
 846     So Facebook has to gin up traffic by sidetracking its own forums: Every time
 847 Facebook’s algorithm injects controversial materials — inflammatory
 848 political articles, conspiracy theories, outrage stories — into a group, it
 849 can hijack that group’s nominal purpose with its desultory discussions and
 850 supercharge those discussions by turning them into bitter, unproductive
 851 arguments that drag on and on. Facebook is optimized for engagement, not
 852 happiness, and it turns out that automated systems are pretty good at
 853 figuring out things that people will get angry about.
 854   </p><p>
 855     Facebook <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> modify our behavior but only in a couple
 856 of trivial ways. First, it can lock in all your friends and family members
 857 so that you check and check and check with Facebook to find out what they
 858 are up to; and second, it can make you angry and anxious. It can force you
 859 to choose between being interrupted constantly by updates — a process that
 860 breaks your concentration and makes it hard to be introspective — and
 861 staying in touch with your friends. This is a very limited form of mind
 862 control, and it can only really make us miserable, angry, and anxious.
 863   </p><p>
 864     This is why Facebook’s targeting systems — both the ones it shows to
 865 advertisers and the ones that let users find people who share their
 866 interests — are so next-gen and smooth and easy to use as well as why its
 867 message boards have a toolset that seems like it hasn’t changed since the
 868 mid-2000s. If Facebook delivered an equally flexible, sophisticated
 869 message-reading system to its users, those users could defend themselves
 870 against being nonconsensually eyeball-fucked with Donald Trump headlines.
 871   </p><p>
 872     The more time you spend on Facebook, the more ads it gets to show you. The
 873 solution to Facebook’s ads only working one in a thousand times is for the
 874 company to try to increase how much time you spend on Facebook by a factor
 875 of a thousand. Rather than thinking of Facebook as a company that has
 876 figured out how to show you exactly the right ad in exactly the right way to
 877 get you to do what its advertisers want, think of it as a company that has
 878 figured out how to make you slog through an endless torrent of arguments
 879 even though they make you miserable, spending so much time on the site that
 880 it eventually shows you at least one ad that you respond to.
 881   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="monopoly-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense"></a>Monopoly and the right to the future tense</h2></div></div></div><p>
 882     Zuboff and her cohort are particularly alarmed at the extent to which
 883 surveillance allows corporations to influence our decisions, taking away
 884 something she poetically calls <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">the right to the future tense</span>“</span>
 885 — that is, the right to decide for yourself what you will do in the future.
 886   </p><p>
 887     It’s true that advertising can tip the scales one way or another: When
 888 you’re thinking of buying a fridge, a timely fridge ad might end the search
 889 on the spot. But Zuboff puts enormous and undue weight on the persuasive
 890 power of surveillance-based influence techniques. Most of these don’t work
 891 very well, and the ones that do won’t work for very long. The makers of
 892 these influence tools are confident they will someday refine them into
 893 systems of total control, but they are hardly unbiased observers, and the
 894 risks from their dreams coming true are very speculative.
 895   </p><p>
 896     By contrast, Zuboff is rather sanguine about 40 years of lax antitrust
 897 practice that has allowed a handful of companies to dominate the internet,
 898 ushering in an information age with, <a class="ulink" href="https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040" target="_top">as one person
 899 on Twitter noted</a>, five giant websites each filled with screenshots
 900 of the other four.
 901   </p><p>
 902     However, if we are to be alarmed that we might lose the right to choose for
 903 ourselves what our future will hold, then monopoly’s nonspeculative,
 904 concrete, here-and-now harms should be front and center in our debate over
 905 tech policy.
 906   </p><p>
 907     Start with <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">digital rights management.</span>“</span> In 1998, Bill Clinton
 908 signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. It’s a complex
 909 piece of legislation with many controversial clauses but none more so than
 910 Section 1201, the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">anti-circumvention</span>“</span> rule.
 911   </p><p>
 912     This is a blanket ban on tampering with systems that restrict access to
 913 copyrighted works. The ban is so thoroughgoing that it prohibits removing a
 914 copyright lock even when no copyright infringement takes place. This is by
 915 design: The activities that the DMCA’s Section 1201 sets out to ban are not
 916 copyright infringements; rather, they are legal activities that frustrate
 917 manufacturers’ commercial plans.
 918   </p><p>
 919     For example, Section 1201’s first major application was on DVD players as a
 920 means of enforcing the region coding built into those devices. DVD-CCA, the
 921 body that standardized DVDs and DVD players, divided the world into six
 922 regions and specified that DVD players must check each disc to determine
 923 which regions it was authorized to be played in. DVD players would have
 924 their own corresponding region (a DVD player bought in the U.S. would be
 925 region 1 while one bought in India would be region 5). If the player and the
 926 disc’s region matched, the player would play the disc; otherwise, it would
 927 reject it.
 928   </p><p>
 929     However, watching a lawfully produced disc in a country other than the one
 930 where you purchased it is not copyright infringement — it’s the
 931 opposite. Copyright law imposes this duty on customers for a movie: You must
 932 go into a store, find a licensed disc, and pay the asking price. Do that —
 933 and <span class="emphasis"><em>nothing else</em></span> — and you and copyright are square
 934 with one another.
 935   </p><p>
 936     The fact that a movie studio wants to charge Indians less than Americans or
 937 release in Australia later than it releases in the U.K.  has no bearing on
 938 copyright law. Once you lawfully acquire a DVD, it is no copyright
 939 infringement to watch it no matter where you happen to be.
 940   </p><p>
 941     So DVD and DVD player manufacturers would not be able to use accusations of
 942 abetting copyright infringement to punish manufacturers who made
 943 noncompliant players that would play discs from any region or repair shops
 944 that modified players to let you watch out-of-region discs or software
 945 programmers who created programs to let you do this.
 946   </p><p>
 947     That’s where Section 1201 of the DMCA comes in: By banning tampering with an
 948 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">access control,</span>“</span> the rule gave manufacturers and rights
 949 holders standing to sue competitors who released superior products with
 950 lawful features that the market demanded (in this case, region-free
 951 players).
 952   </p><p>
 953     This is an odious scam against consumers, but as time went by, Section 1201
 954 grew to encompass a rapidly expanding constellation of devices and services
 955 as canny manufacturers have realized certain things:
 956   </p><div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist compact" style="list-style-type: disc; "><li class="listitem"><p>
 957         Any device with software in it contains a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">copyrighted work</span>“</span> —
 958 i.e., the software.
 959       </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
 960         A device can be designed so that reconfiguring the software requires
 961 bypassing an <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">access control for copyrighted works,</span>“</span> which is a
 962 potential felony under Section 1201.
 963       </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
 964         Thus, companies can control their customers’ behavior after they take home
 965 their purchases by designing products so that all unpermitted uses require
 966 modifications that fall afoul of Section 1201.
 967       </p></li></ul></div><p>
 968     Section 1201 then becomes a means for manufacturers of all descriptions to
 969 force their customers to arrange their affairs to benefit the manufacturers’
 970 shareholders instead of themselves.
 971   </p><p>
 972     This manifests in many ways: from a new generation of inkjet printers that
 973 use countermeasures to prevent third-party ink that cannot be bypassed
 974 without legal risks to similar systems in tractors that prevent third-party
 975 technicians from swapping in the manufacturer’s own parts that are not
 976 recognized by the tractor’s control system until it is supplied with a
 977 manufacturer’s unlock code.
 978   </p><p>
 979     Closer to home, Apple’s iPhones use these measures to prevent both
 980 third-party service and third-party software installation. This allows Apple
 981 to decide when an iPhone is beyond repair and must be shredded and
 982 landfilled as opposed to the iPhone’s purchaser. (Apple is notorious for its
 983 environmentally catastrophic policy of destroying old electronics rather
 984 than permitting them to be cannibalized for parts.) This is a very useful
 985 power to wield, especially in light of CEO Tim Cook’s January 2019 warning
 986 to investors that the company’s profits are endangered by customers choosing
 987 to hold onto their phones for longer rather than replacing them.
 988   </p><p>
 989     Apple’s use of copyright locks also allows it to establish a monopoly over
 990 how its customers acquire software for their mobile devices. The App Store’s
 991 commercial terms guarantee Apple a share of all revenues generated by the
 992 apps sold there, meaning that Apple gets paid when you buy an app from its
 993 store and then continues to get paid every time you buy something using that
 994 app. This comes out of the bottom line of software developers, who must
 995 either charge more or accept lower profits for their products.
 996   </p><p>
 997     Crucially, Apple’s use of copyright locks gives it the power to make
 998 editorial decisions about which apps you may and may not install on your own
 999 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
1000 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
1001 political speech</a>, especially from apps that make sensitive political
1002 commentary such as an app that notifies you every time a U.S. drone kills
1003 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
1004 to a game</a> that commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
1005   </p><p>
1006     Apple often justifies monopoly power over software installation in the name
1007 of security, arguing that its vetting of apps for its store means that it
1008 can guard its users against apps that contain surveillance code. But this
1009 cuts both ways. In China, the government <a class="ulink" href="https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc" target="_top">ordered
1010 Apple to prohibit the sale of privacy tools</a> like VPNs with the
1011 exception of VPNs that had deliberately introduced flaws designed to let the
1012 Chinese state eavesdrop on users. Because Apple uses technological
1013 countermeasures — with legal backstops — to block customers from installing
1014 unauthorized apps, Chinese iPhone owners cannot readily (or legally) acquire
1015 VPNs that would protect them from Chinese state snooping.
1016   </p><p>
1017     Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism.</span>“</span>
1018 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
1019 the form of consumers’ decisions</a>, producing efficient
1020 markets. Surveillance capitalism’s supposed power to rob its victims of
1021 their free will through computationally supercharged influence campaigns
1022 means that our markets no longer aggregate customers’ decisions because we
1023 customers no longer decide — we are given orders by surveillance
1024 capitalism’s mind-control rays.
1025   </p><p>
1026     If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no
1027 longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at
1028 <span class="emphasis"><em>least</em></span> as much as influence campaigns. An influence
1029 campaign might nudge you to buy a certain brand of phone; but the copyright
1030 locks on that phone absolutely determine where you get it serviced, which
1031 apps can run on it, and when you have to throw it away rather than fixing
1032 it.
1033   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="search-order-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense"></a>Search order and the right to the future tense</h2></div></div></div><p>
1034     Markets are posed as a kind of magic: By discovering otherwise hidden
1035 information conveyed by the free choices of consumers, those consumers’
1036 local knowledge is integrated into a self-correcting system that makes
1037 efficient allocations—more efficient than any computer could calculate. But
1038 monopolies are incompatible with that notion. When you only have one app
1039 store, the owner of the store — not the consumer — decides on the range of
1040 choices. As Boss Tweed once said, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">I don’t care who does the electing,
1041 so long as I get to do the nominating.</span>“</span> A monopolized market is an
1042 election whose candidates are chosen by the monopolist.
1043   </p><p>
1044     This ballot rigging is made more pernicious by the existence of monopolies
1045 over search order. Google’s search market share is about 90%. When Google’s
1046 ranking algorithm puts a result for a popular search term in its top 10,
1047 that helps determine the behavior of millions of people. If Google’s answer
1048 to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are vaccines dangerous?</span>“</span> is a page that rebuts anti-vax
1049 conspiracy theories, then a sizable portion of the public will learn that
1050 vaccines are safe. If, on the other hand, Google sends those people to a
1051 site affirming the anti-vax conspiracies, a sizable portion of those
1052 millions will come away convinced that vaccines are dangerous.
1053   </p><p>
1054     Google’s algorithm is often tricked into serving disinformation as a
1055 prominent search result. But in these cases, Google isn’t persuading people
1056 to change their minds; it’s just presenting something untrue as fact when
1057 the user has no cause to doubt it.
1058   </p><p>
1059     This is true whether the search is for <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are vaccines
1060 dangerous?</span>“</span> or <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">best restaurants near me.</span>“</span> Most users
1061 will never look past the first page of search results, and when the
1062 overwhelming majority of people all use the same search engine, the ranking
1063 algorithm deployed by that search engine will determine myriad outcomes
1064 (whether to adopt a child, whether to have cancer surgery, where to eat
1065 dinner, where to move, where to apply for a job) to a degree that vastly
1066 outstrips any behavioral outcomes dictated by algorithmic persuasion
1067 techniques.
1068   </p><p>
1069     Many of the questions we ask search engines have no empirically correct
1070 answers: <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Where should I eat dinner?</span>“</span> is not an objective
1071 question. Even questions that do have correct answers (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are vaccines
1072 dangerous?</span>“</span>) don’t have one empirically superior source for that
1073 answer. Many pages affirm the safety of vaccines, so which one goes first?
1074 Under conditions of competition, consumers can choose from many search
1075 engines and stick with the one whose algorithmic judgment suits them best,
1076 but under conditions of monopoly, we all get our answers from the same
1077 place.
1078   </p><p>
1079     Google’s search dominance isn’t a matter of pure merit: The company has
1080 leveraged many tactics that would have been prohibited under classical,
1081 pre-Ronald-Reagan antitrust enforcement standards to attain its
1082 dominance. After all, this is a company that has developed two major
1083 products: a really good search engine and a pretty good Hotmail clone. Every
1084 other major success it’s had — Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. — has
1085 come through an acquisition of a nascent competitor. Many of the company’s
1086 key divisions, such as the advertising technology of DoubleClick, violate
1087 the historical antitrust principle of structural separation, which forbade
1088 firms from owning subsidiaries that competed with their
1089 customers. Railroads, for example, were barred from owning freight companies
1090 that competed with the shippers whose freight they carried.
1091   </p><p>
1092     If we’re worried about giant companies subverting markets by stripping
1093 consumers of their ability to make free choices, then vigorous antitrust
1094 enforcement seems like an excellent remedy. If we’d denied Google the right
1095 to effect its many mergers, we would also have probably denied it its total
1096 search dominance. Without that dominance, the pet theories, biases, errors
1097 (and good judgment, too) of Google search engineers and product managers
1098 would not have such an outsized effect on consumer choice.
1099   </p><p>
1100     This goes for many other companies. Amazon, a classic surveillance
1101 capitalist, is obviously the dominant tool for searching Amazon — though
1102 many people find their way to Amazon through Google searches and Facebook
1103 posts — and obviously, Amazon controls Amazon search.  That means that
1104 Amazon’s own self-serving editorial choices—like promoting its own house
1105 brands over rival goods from its sellers as well as its own pet theories,
1106 biases, and errors— determine much of what we buy on Amazon. And since
1107 Amazon is the dominant e-commerce retailer outside of China and since it
1108 attained that dominance by buying up both large rivals and nascent
1109 competitors in defiance of historical antitrust rules, we can blame the
1110 monopoly for stripping consumers of their right to the future tense and the
1111 ability to shape markets by making informed choices.
1112   </p><p>
1113     Not every monopolist is a surveillance capitalist, but that doesn’t mean
1114 they’re not able to shape consumer choices in wide-ranging ways. Zuboff
1115 lauds Apple for its App Store and iTunes Store, insisting that adding price
1116 tags to the features on its platforms has been the secret to resisting
1117 surveillance and thus creating markets. But Apple is the only retailer
1118 allowed to sell on its platforms, and it’s the second-largest mobile device
1119 vendor in the world. The independent software vendors that sell through
1120 Apple’s marketplace accuse the company of the same surveillance sins as
1121 Amazon and other big retailers: spying on its customers to find lucrative
1122 new products to launch, effectively using independent software vendors as
1123 free-market researchers, then forcing them out of any markets they discover.
1124   </p><p>
1125     Because of its use of copyright locks, Apple’s mobile customers are not
1126 legally allowed to switch to a rival retailer for its apps if they want to
1127 do so on an iPhone. Apple, obviously, is the only entity that gets to decide
1128 how it ranks the results of search queries in its stores. These decisions
1129 ensure that some apps are often installed (because they appear on page one)
1130 and others are never installed (because they appear on page one
1131 million). Apple’s search-ranking design decisions have a vastly more
1132 significant effect on consumer behaviors than influence campaigns delivered
1133 by surveillance capitalism’s ad-serving bots.
1134   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="monopolists-can-afford-sleeping-pills-for-watchdogs"></a>Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs</h2></div></div></div><p>
1135     Only the most extreme market ideologues think that markets can self-regulate
1136 without state oversight. Markets need watchdogs — regulators, lawmakers, and
1137 other elements of democratic control — to keep them honest. When these
1138 watchdogs sleep on the job, then markets cease to aggregate consumer choices
1139 because those choices are constrained by illegitimate and deceptive
1140 activities that companies are able to get away with because no one is
1141 holding them to account.
1142   </p><p>
1143     But this kind of regulatory capture doesn’t come cheap. In competitive
1144 sectors, where rivals are constantly eroding one another’s margins,
1145 individual firms lack the surplus capital to effectively lobby for laws and
1146 regulations that serve their ends.
1147   </p><p>
1148     Many of the harms of surveillance capitalism are the result of weak or
1149 nonexistent regulation. Those regulatory vacuums spring from the power of
1150 monopolists to resist stronger regulation and to tailor what regulation
1151 exists to permit their existing businesses.
1152   </p><p>
1153     Here’s an example: When firms over-collect and over-retain our data, they
1154 are at increased risk of suffering a breach — you can’t leak data you never
1155 collected, and once you delete all copies of that data, you can no longer
1156 leak it. For more than a decade, we’ve lived through an endless parade of
1157 ever-worsening data breaches, each one uniquely horrible in the scale of
1158 data breached and the sensitivity of that data.
1159   </p><p>
1160     But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for three
1161 reasons:
1162   </p><p>
1163     <span class="strong"><strong>1. They are locked in the aforementioned limbic arms
1164 race with our capacity to shore up our attentional defense systems to resist
1165 their new persuasion techniques.</strong></span> They’re also locked in an arms
1166 race with their competitors to find new ways to target people for sales
1167 pitches. As soon as they discover a soft spot in our attentional defenses (a
1168 counterintuitive, unobvious way to target potential refrigerator buyers),
1169 the public begins to wise up to the tactic, and their competitors leap on
1170 it, hastening the day in which all potential refrigerator buyers have been
1171 inured to the pitch.
1172   </p><p>
1173     <span class="strong"><strong>2. They believe the surveillance capitalism
1174 story.</strong></span> Data is cheap to aggregate and store, and both proponents
1175 and opponents of surveillance capitalism have assured managers and product
1176 designers that if you collect enough data, you will be able to perform
1177 sorcerous acts of mind control, thus supercharging your sales. Even if you
1178 never figure out how to profit from the data, someone else will eventually
1179 offer to buy it from you to give it a try. This is the hallmark of all
1180 economic bubbles: acquiring an asset on the assumption that someone else
1181 will buy it from you for more than you paid for it, often to sell to someone
1182 else at an even greater price.
1183   </p><p>
1184     <span class="strong"><strong>3. The penalties for leaking data are
1185 negligible.</strong></span> Most countries limit these penalties to actual
1186 damages, meaning that consumers who’ve had their data breached have to show
1187 actual monetary harms to get a reward. In 2014, Home Depot disclosed that it
1188 had lost credit-card data for 53 million of its customers, but it settled
1189 the matter by paying those customers about $0.34 each — and a third of that
1190 $0.34 wasn’t even paid in cash. It took the form of a credit to procure a
1191 largely ineffectual credit-monitoring service.
1192   </p><p>
1193     But the harms from breaches are much more extensive than these
1194 actual-damages rules capture. Identity thieves and fraudsters are wily and
1195 endlessly inventive. All the vast breaches of our century are being
1196 continuously recombined, the data sets merged and mined for new ways to
1197 victimize the people whose data was present in them.  Any reasonable,
1198 evidence-based theory of deterrence and compensation for breaches would not
1199 confine damages to actual damages but rather would allow users to claim
1200 these future harms.
1201   </p><p>
1202     However, even the most ambitious privacy rules, such as the EU General Data
1203 Protection Regulation, fall far short of capturing the negative
1204 externalities of the platforms’ negligent over-collection and
1205 over-retention, and what penalties they do provide are not aggressively
1206 pursued by regulators.
1207   </p><p>
1208     This tolerance of — or indifference to — data over-collection and
1209 over-retention can be ascribed in part to the sheer lobbying muscle of the
1210 platforms. They are so profitable that they can handily afford to divert
1211 gigantic sums to fight any real change — that is, change that would force
1212 them to internalize the costs of their surveillance activities.
1213   </p><p>
1214     And then there’s state surveillance, which the surveillance capitalism story
1215 dismisses as a relic of another era when the big worry was being jailed for
1216 your dissident speech, not having your free will stripped away with machine
1217 learning.
1218   </p><p>
1219     But state surveillance and private surveillance are intimately related. As
1220 we saw when Apple was conscripted by the Chinese government as a vital
1221 collaborator in state surveillance, the only really affordable and tractable
1222 way to conduct mass surveillance on the scale practiced by modern states —
1223 both <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">free</span>“</span> and autocratic states — is to suborn commercial
1224 services.
1225   </p><p>
1226     Whether it’s Google being used as a location tracking tool by local law
1227 enforcement across the U.S. or the use of social media tracking by the
1228 Department of Homeland Security to build dossiers on participants in
1229 protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s family separation
1230 practices, any hard limits on surveillance capitalism would hamstring the
1231 state’s own surveillance capability. Without Palantir, Amazon, Google, and
1232 other major tech contractors, U.S. cops would not be able to spy on Black
1233 people, ICE would not be able to manage the caging of children at the U.S.
1234 border, and state welfare systems would not be able to purge their rolls by
1235 dressing up cruelty as empiricism and claiming that poor and vulnerable
1236 people are ineligible for assistance. At least some of the states’
1237 unwillingness to take meaningful action to curb surveillance should be
1238 attributed to this symbiotic relationship.  There is no mass state
1239 surveillance without mass commercial surveillance.
1240   </p><p>
1241     Monopolism is key to the project of mass state surveillance. It’s true that
1242 smaller tech firms are apt to be less well-defended than Big Tech, whose
1243 security experts are drawn from the tops of their field and who are given
1244 enormous resources to secure and monitor their systems against
1245 intruders. But smaller firms also have less to protect: fewer users whose
1246 data is more fragmented across more systems and have to be suborned one at a
1247 time by state actors.
1248   </p><p>
1249     A concentrated tech sector that works with authorities is a much more
1250 powerful ally in the project of mass state surveillance than a fragmented
1251 one composed of smaller actors. The U.S. tech sector is small enough that
1252 all of its top executives fit around a single boardroom table in Trump Tower
1253 in 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Most of its biggest players bid
1254 to win JEDI, the Pentagon’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense
1255 Infrastructure cloud contract. Like other highly concentrated industries,
1256 Big Tech rotates its key employees in and out of government service, sending
1257 them to serve in the Department of Defense and the White House, then hiring
1258 ex-Pentagon and ex-DOD top staffers and officers to work in their own
1259 government relations departments.
1260   </p><p>
1261     They can even make a good case for doing this: After all, when there are
1262 only four or five big companies in an industry, everyone qualified to
1263 regulate those companies has served as an executive in at least a couple of
1264 them — because, likewise, when there are only five companies in an industry,
1265 everyone qualified for a senior role at any of them is by definition working
1266 at one of the other ones.
1267   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
1268       While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly abet
1269 surveillance.
1270     </p></blockquote></div><p>
1271     Industries that are competitive are fragmented — composed of companies that
1272 are at each other’s throats all the time and eroding one another’s margins
1273 in bids to steal their best customers. This leaves them with much more
1274 limited capital to use to lobby for favorable rules and a much harder job of
1275 getting everyone to agree to pool their resources to benefit the industry as
1276 a whole.
1277   </p><p>
1278     Surveillance combined with machine learning is supposed to be an existential
1279 crisis, a species-defining moment at which our free will is just a few more
1280 advances in the field from being stripped away. I am skeptical of this
1281 claim, but I <span class="emphasis"><em>do</em></span> think that tech poses an existential
1282 threat to our society and possibly our species.
1283   </p><p>
1284     But that threat grows out of monopoly.
1285   </p><p>
1286     One of the consequences of tech’s regulatory capture is that it can shift
1287 liability for poor security decisions onto its customers and the wider
1288 society. It is absolutely normal in tech for companies to obfuscate the
1289 workings of their products, to make them deliberately hard to understand,
1290 and to threaten security researchers who seek to independently audit those
1291 products.
1292   </p><p>
1293     IT is the only field in which this is practiced: No one builds a bridge or a
1294 hospital and keeps the composition of the steel or the equations used to
1295 calculate load stresses a secret. It is a frankly bizarre practice that
1296 leads, time and again, to grotesque security defects on farcical scales,
1297 with whole classes of devices being revealed as vulnerable long after they
1298 are deployed in the field and put into sensitive places.
1299   </p><p>
1300     The monopoly power that keeps any meaningful consequences for breaches at
1301 bay means that tech companies continue to build terrible products that are
1302 insecure by design and that end up integrated into our lives, in possession
1303 of our data, and connected to our physical world. For years, Boeing has
1304 struggled with the aftermath of a series of bad technology decisions that
1305 made its 737 fleet a global pariah, a rare instance in which bad tech
1306 decisions have been seriously punished in the market.
1307   </p><p>
1308     These bad security decisions are compounded yet again by the use of
1309 copyright locks to enforce business-model decisions against
1310 consumers. Recall that these locks have become the go-to means for shaping
1311 consumer behavior, making it technically impossible to use third-party ink,
1312 insulin, apps, or service depots in connection with your lawfully acquired
1313 property.
1314   </p><p>
1315     Recall also that these copyright locks are backstopped by legislation (such
1316 as Section 1201 of the DMCA or Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive)
1317 that ban tampering with (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">circumventing</span>“</span>) them, and these
1318 statutes have been used to threaten security researchers who make
1319 disclosures about vulnerabilities without permission from manufacturers.
1320   </p><p>
1321     This amounts to a manufacturer’s veto over safety warnings and
1322 criticism. While this is far from the legislative intent of the DMCA and its
1323 sister statutes around the world, Congress has not intervened to clarify the
1324 statute nor will it because to do so would run counter to the interests of
1325 powerful, large firms whose lobbying muscle is unstoppable.
1326   </p><p>
1327     Copyright locks are a double whammy: They create bad security decisions that
1328 can’t be freely investigated or discussed. If markets are supposed to be
1329 machines for aggregating information (and if surveillance capitalism’s
1330 notional mind-control rays are what make it a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue
1331 capitalism</span>“</span> because it denies consumers the power to make decisions),
1332 then a program of legally enforced ignorance of the risks of products makes
1333 monopolism even more of a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> than surveillance
1334 capitalism’s influence campaigns.
1335   </p><p>
1336     And unlike mind-control rays, enforced silence over security is an
1337 immediate, documented problem, and it <span class="emphasis"><em>does</em></span> constitute
1338 an existential threat to our civilization and possibly our species. The
1339 proliferation of insecure devices — especially devices that spy on us and
1340 especially when those devices also can manipulate the physical world by,
1341 say, steering your car or flipping a breaker at a power station — is a kind
1342 of technology debt.
1343   </p><p>
1344     In software design, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">technology debt</span>“</span> refers to old, baked-in
1345 decisions that turn out to be bad ones in hindsight. Perhaps a long-ago
1346 developer decided to incorporate a networking protocol made by a vendor that
1347 has since stopped supporting it. But everything in the product still relies
1348 on that superannuated protocol, and so, with each revision, the product team
1349 has to work around this obsolete core, adding compatibility layers,
1350 surrounding it with security checks that try to shore up its defenses, and
1351 so on. These Band-Aid measures compound the debt because every subsequent
1352 revision has to make allowances for <span class="emphasis"><em>them</em></span>, too, like
1353 interest mounting on a predatory subprime loan. And like a subprime loan,
1354 the interest mounts faster than you can hope to pay it off: The product team
1355 has to put so much energy into maintaining this complex, brittle system that
1356 they don’t have any time left over to refactor the product from the ground
1357 up and <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">pay off the debt</span>“</span> once and for all.
1358   </p><p>
1359     Typically, technology debt results in a technological bankruptcy: The
1360 product gets so brittle and unsustainable that it fails
1361 catastrophically. Think of the antiquated COBOL-based banking and accounting
1362 systems that fell over at the start of the pandemic emergency when
1363 confronted with surges of unemployment claims.  Sometimes that ends the
1364 product; sometimes it takes the company down with it. Being caught in the
1365 default of a technology debt is scary and traumatic, just like losing your
1366 house due to bankruptcy is scary and traumatic.
1367   </p><p>
1368     But the technology debt created by copyright locks isn’t individual debt;
1369 it’s systemic. Everyone in the world is exposed to this over-leverage, as
1370 was the case with the 2008 financial crisis. When that debt comes due — when
1371 we face a cascade of security breaches that threaten global shipping and
1372 logistics, the food supply, pharmaceutical production pipelines, emergency
1373 communications, and other critical systems that are accumulating technology
1374 debt in part due to the presence of deliberately insecure and deliberately
1375 unauditable copyright locks — it will indeed pose an existential risk.
1376   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="privacy-and-monopoly"></a>Privacy and monopoly</h2></div></div></div><p>
1377     Many tech companies are gripped by an orthodoxy that holds that if they just
1378 gather enough data on enough of our activities, everything else is possible
1379 — the mind control and endless profits. This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis:
1380 If data gives a tech company even a tiny improvement in behavior prediction
1381 and modification, the company declares that it has taken the first step
1382 toward global domination with no end in sight. If a company
1383 <span class="emphasis"><em>fails</em></span> to attain any improvements from gathering and
1384 analyzing data, it declares success to be just around the corner, attainable
1385 once more data is in hand.
1386   </p><p>
1387     Surveillance tech is far from the first industry to embrace a nonsensical,
1388 self-serving belief that harms the rest of the world, and it is not the
1389 first industry to profit handsomely from such a delusion. Long before
1390 hedge-fund managers were claiming (falsely)  that they could beat the
1391 S&amp;P 500, there were plenty of other <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">respectable</span>“</span>
1392 industries that have been revealed as quacks in hindsight. From the makers
1393 of radium suppositories (a real thing!)  to the cruel sociopaths who claimed
1394 they could <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">cure</span>“</span> gay people, history is littered with the
1395 formerly respectable titans of discredited industries.
1396   </p><p>
1397     This is not to say that there’s nothing wrong with Big Tech and its
1398 ideological addiction to data. While surveillance’s benefits are mostly
1399 overstated, its harms are, if anything, <span class="emphasis"><em>understated</em></span>.
1400   </p><p>
1401     There’s real irony here. The belief in surveillance capitalism as a
1402 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> is driven by the belief that markets
1403 wouldn’t tolerate firms that are gripped by false beliefs. An oil company
1404 that has false beliefs about where the oil is will eventually go broke
1405 digging dry wells after all.
1406   </p><p>
1407     But monopolists get to do terrible things for a long time before they pay
1408 the price. Think of how concentration in the finance sector allowed the
1409 subprime crisis to fester as bond-rating agencies, regulators, investors,
1410 and critics all fell under the sway of a false belief that complex
1411 mathematics could construct <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">fully hedged</span>“</span> debt instruments
1412 that could not possibly default. A small bank that engaged in this kind of
1413 malfeasance would simply go broke rather than outrunning the inevitable
1414 crisis, perhaps growing so big that it averted it altogether. But large
1415 banks were able to continue to attract investors, and when they finally
1416 <span class="emphasis"><em>did</em></span> come a-cropper, the world’s governments bailed them
1417 out. The worst offenders of the subprime crisis are bigger than they were in
1418 2008, bringing home more profits and paying their execs even larger sums.
1419   </p><p>
1420     Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but
1421 because it is <span class="emphasis"><em>big</em></span>. The reason every web publisher
1422 embeds a Facebook <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Like</span>“</span> button is that Facebook dominates the
1423 internet’s social media referrals — and every one of those
1424 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Like</span>“</span> buttons spies on everyone who lands on a page that
1425 contains them (see also: Google Analytics embeds, Twitter buttons, etc.).
1426   </p><p>
1427     The reason the world’s governments have been slow to create meaningful
1428 penalties for privacy breaches is that Big Tech’s concentration produces
1429 huge profits that can be used to lobby against those penalties — and Big
1430 Tech’s concentration means that the companies involved are able to arrive at
1431 a unified negotiating position that supercharges the lobbying.
1432   </p><p>
1433     The reason that the smartest engineers in the world want to work for Big
1434 Tech is that Big Tech commands the lion’s share of tech industry jobs.
1435   </p><p>
1436     The reason people who are aghast at Facebook’s and Google’s and Amazon’s
1437 data-handling practices continue to use these services is that all their
1438 friends are on Facebook; Google dominates search; and Amazon has put all the
1439 local merchants out of business.
1440   </p><p>
1441     Competitive markets would weaken the companies’ lobbying muscle by reducing
1442 their profits and pitting them against each other in regulatory forums. It
1443 would give customers other places to go to get their online services. It
1444 would make the companies small enough to regulate and pave the way to
1445 meaningful penalties for breaches. It would let engineers with ideas that
1446 challenged the surveillance orthodoxy raise capital to compete with the
1447 incumbents. It would give web publishers multiple ways to reach audiences
1448 and make the case against Facebook and Google and Twitter embeds.
1449   </p><p>
1450     In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies
1451 certainly abet surveillance.
1452   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="ronald-reagan-pioneer-of-tech-monopolism"></a>Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism</h2></div></div></div><p>
1453     Technology exceptionalism is a sin, whether it’s practiced by technology’s
1454 blind proponents or by its critics. Both of these camps are prone to
1455 explaining away monopolistic concentration by citing some special
1456 characteristic of the tech industry, like network effects or first-mover
1457 advantage. The only real difference between these two groups is that the
1458 tech apologists say monopoly is inevitable so we should just let tech get
1459 away with its abuses while competition regulators in the U.S. and the EU say
1460 monopoly is inevitable so we should punish tech for its abuses but not try
1461 to break up the monopolies.
1462   </p><p>
1463     To understand how tech became so monopolistic, it’s useful to look at the
1464 dawn of the consumer tech industry: 1979, the year the Apple II Plus
1465 launched and became the first successful home computer. That also happens to
1466 be the year that Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail for the 1980
1467 presidential race — a race he won, leading to a radical shift in the way
1468 that antitrust concerns are handled in America. Reagan’s cohort of
1469 politicians — including Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Brian Mulroney in
1470 Canada, Helmut Kohl in Germany, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile — went on to
1471 enact similar reforms that eventually spread around the world.
1472   </p><p>
1473     Antitrust’s story began nearly a century before all that with laws like the
1474 Sherman Act, which took aim at monopolists on the grounds that monopolies
1475 were bad in and of themselves — squeezing out competitors, creating
1476 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">diseconomies of scale</span>“</span> (when a company is so big that its
1477 constituent parts go awry and it is seemingly helpless to address the
1478 problems), and capturing their regulators to such a degree that they can get
1479 away with a host of evils.
1480   </p><p>
1481     Then came a fabulist named Robert Bork, a former solicitor general who
1482 Reagan appointed to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
1483 and who had created an alternate legislative history of the Sherman Act and
1484 its successors out of whole cloth. Bork insisted that these statutes were
1485 never targeted at monopolies (despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary,
1486 including the transcribed speeches of the acts’ authors) but, rather, that
1487 they were intended to prevent <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">consumer harm</span>“</span> — in the form of
1488 higher prices.
1489   </p><p>
1490     Bork was a crank, but he was a crank with a theory that rich people really
1491 liked. Monopolies are a great way to make rich people richer by allowing
1492 them to receive <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">monopoly rents</span>“</span> (that is, bigger profits) and
1493 capture regulators, leading to a weaker, more favorable regulatory
1494 environment with fewer protections for customers, suppliers, the
1495 environment, and workers.
1496   </p><p>
1497     Bork’s theories were especially palatable to the same power brokers who
1498 backed Reagan, and Reagan’s Department of Justice and other agencies began
1499 to incorporate Bork’s antitrust doctrine into their enforcement decisions
1500 (Reagan even put Bork up for a Supreme Court seat, but Bork flunked the
1501 Senate confirmation hearing so badly that, 40 years later, D.C. insiders use
1502 the term <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">borked</span>“</span> to refer to any catastrophically bad
1503 political performance).
1504   </p><p>
1505     Little by little, Bork’s theories entered the mainstream, and their backers
1506 began to infiltrate the legal education field, even putting on junkets where
1507 members of the judiciary were treated to lavish meals, fun outdoor
1508 activities, and seminars where they were indoctrinated into the consumer
1509 harm theory of antitrust. The more Bork’s theories took hold, the more money
1510 the monopolists were making — and the more surplus capital they had at their
1511 disposal to lobby for even more Borkian antitrust influence campaigns.
1512   </p><p>
1513     The history of Bork’s antitrust theories is a really good example of the
1514 kind of covertly engineered shifts in public opinion that Zuboff warns us
1515 against, where fringe ideas become mainstream orthodoxy.  But Bork didn’t
1516 change the world overnight. He played a very long game, for over a
1517 generation, and he had a tailwind because the same forces that backed
1518 oligarchic antitrust theories also backed many other oligarchic shifts in
1519 public opinion. For example, the idea that taxation is theft, that wealth is
1520 a sign of virtue, and so on — all of these theories meshed to form a
1521 coherent ideology that elevated inequality to a virtue.
1522   </p><p>
1523     Today, many fear that machine learning allows surveillance capitalism to
1524 sell <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Bork-as-a-Service,</span>“</span> at internet speeds, so that you can
1525 contract a machine-learning company to engineer <span class="emphasis"><em>rapid</em></span>
1526 shifts in public sentiment without needing the capital to sustain a
1527 multipronged, multigenerational project working at the local, state,
1528 national, and global levels in business, law, and philosophy. I do not
1529 believe that such a project is plausible, though I agree that this is
1530 basically what the platforms claim to be selling. They’re just lying about
1531 it. Big Tech lies all the time, <span class="emphasis"><em>including</em></span> in their
1532 sales literature.
1533   </p><p>
1534     The idea that tech forms <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">natural monopolies</span>“</span> (monopolies that
1535 are the inevitable result of the realities of an industry, such as the
1536 monopolies that accrue the first company to run long-haul phone lines or
1537 rail lines) is belied by tech’s own history: In the absence of
1538 anti-competitive tactics, Google was able to unseat AltaVista and Yahoo;
1539 Facebook was able to head off Myspace. There are some advantages to
1540 gathering mountains of data, but those mountains of data also have
1541 disadvantages: liability (from leaking), diminishing returns (from old
1542 data), and institutional inertia (big companies, like science, progress one
1543 funeral at a time).
1544   </p><p>
1545     Indeed, the birth of the web saw a mass-extinction event for the existing
1546 giant, wildly profitable proprietary technologies that had capital, network
1547 effects, and walls and moats surrounding their businesses. The web showed
1548 that when a new industry is built around a protocol, rather than a product,
1549 the combined might of everyone who uses the protocol to reach their
1550 customers or users or communities outweighs even the most massive
1551 products. CompuServe, AOL, MSN, and a host of other proprietary walled
1552 gardens learned this lesson the hard way: Each believed it could stay
1553 separate from the web, offering <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">curation</span>“</span> and a guarantee of
1554 consistency and quality instead of the chaos of an open system. Each was
1555 wrong and ended up being absorbed into the public web.
1556   </p><p>
1557     Yes, tech is heavily monopolized and is now closely associated with industry
1558 concentration, but this has more to do with a matter of timing than its
1559 intrinsically monopolistic tendencies. Tech was born at the moment that
1560 antitrust enforcement was being dismantled, and tech fell into exactly the
1561 same pathologies that antitrust was supposed to guard against. To a first
1562 approximation, it is reasonable to assume that tech’s monopolies are the
1563 result of a lack of anti-monopoly action and not the much-touted unique
1564 characteristics of tech, such as network effects, first-mover advantage, and
1565 so on.
1566   </p><p>
1567     In support of this thesis, I offer the concentration that every
1568 <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> industry has undergone over the same period. From
1569 professional wrestling to consumer packaged goods to commercial property
1570 leasing to banking to sea freight to oil to record labels to newspaper
1571 ownership to theme parks, <span class="emphasis"><em>every</em></span> industry has undergone
1572 a massive shift toward concentration. There’s no obvious network effects or
1573 first-mover advantage at play in these industries. However, in every case,
1574 these industries attained their concentrated status through tactics that
1575 were prohibited before Bork’s triumph: merging with major competitors,
1576 buying out innovative new market entrants, horizontal and vertical
1577 integration, and a suite of anti-competitive tactics that were once illegal
1578 but are not any longer.
1579   </p><p>
1580     Again: When you change the laws intended to prevent monopolies and then
1581 monopolies form in exactly the way the law was supposed to prevent, it is
1582 reasonable to suppose that these facts are related.  Tech’s concentration
1583 can be readily explained without recourse to radical theories of network
1584 effects — but only if you’re willing to indict unregulated markets as
1585 tending toward monopoly. Just as a lifelong smoker can give you a hundred
1586 reasons why their smoking didn’t cause their cancer (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">It was the
1587 environmental toxins</span>“</span>), true believers in unregulated markets have a
1588 whole suite of unconvincing explanations for monopoly in tech that leave
1589 capitalism intact.
1590   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="steering-with-the-windshield-wipers"></a>Steering with the windshield wipers</h2></div></div></div><p>
1591     It’s been 40 years since Bork’s project to rehabilitate monopolies achieved
1592 liftoff, and that is a generation and a half, which is plenty of time to
1593 take a common idea and make it seem outlandish and vice versa. Before the
1594 1940s, affluent Americans dressed their baby boys in pink while baby girls
1595 wore blue (a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">delicate and dainty</span>“</span> color). While gendered
1596 colors are obviously totally arbitrary, many still greet this news with
1597 amazement and find it hard to imagine a time when pink connoted masculinity.
1598   </p><p>
1599     After 40 years of studiously ignoring antitrust analysis and enforcement,
1600 it’s not surprising that we’ve all but forgotten that antitrust exists, that
1601 in living memory, growth through mergers and acquisitions were largely
1602 prohibited under law, that market-cornering strategies like vertical
1603 integration could land a company in court.
1604   </p><p>
1605     Antitrust is a market society’s steering wheel, the control of first resort
1606 to keep would-be masters of the universe in their lanes. But Bork and his
1607 cohort ripped out our steering wheel 40 years ago. The car is still
1608 barreling along, and so we’re yanking as hard as we can on all the
1609 <span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> controls in the car as well as desperately
1610 flapping the doors and rolling the windows up and down in the hopes that one
1611 of these other controls can be repurposed to let us choose where we’re
1612 heading before we careen off a cliff.
1613   </p><p>
1614     It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in a
1615 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">generation ship,</span>“</span> plying its way across the stars, a ship once
1616 piloted by their ancestors; and now, after a great cataclysm, the ship’s
1617 crew have forgotten that they’re in a ship at all and no longer remember
1618 where the control room is. Adrift, the ship is racing toward its extinction,
1619 and unless we can seize the controls and execute emergency course
1620 correction, we’re all headed for a fiery death in the heart of a sun.
1621   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="surveillance-still-matters"></a>Surveillance still matters</h2></div></div></div><p>
1622     None of this is to minimize the problems with surveillance.  Surveillance
1623 matters, and Big Tech’s use of surveillance <span class="emphasis"><em>is</em></span> an
1624 existential risk to our species, but that’s not because surveillance and
1625 machine learning rob us of our free will.
1626   </p><p>
1627     Surveillance has become <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span> more efficient thanks to
1628 Big Tech. In 1989, the Stasi — the East German secret police — had the whole
1629 country under surveillance, a massive undertaking that recruited one out of
1630 every 60 people to serve as an informant or intelligence operative.
1631   </p><p>
1632     Today, we know that the NSA is spying on a significant fraction of the
1633 entire world’s population, and its ratio of surveillance operatives to the
1634 surveilled is more like 1:10,000 (that’s probably on the low side since it
1635 assumes that every American with top-secret clearance is working for the NSA
1636 on this project — we don’t know how many of those cleared people are
1637 involved in NSA spying, but it’s definitely not all of them).
1638   </p><p>
1639     How did the ratio of surveillable citizens expand from 1:60 to 1:10,000 in
1640 less than 30 years? It’s thanks to Big Tech. Our devices and services gather
1641 most of the data that the NSA mines for its surveillance project. We pay for
1642 these devices and the services they connect to, and then we painstakingly
1643 perform the data-entry tasks associated with logging facts about our lives,
1644 opinions, and preferences. This mass surveillance project has been largely
1645 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
1646 point to a single minor success story</a> in which it used its data
1647 collection program to foil an attempt by a U.S. resident to wire a few
1648 thousand dollars to an overseas terror group. It’s ineffective for much the
1649 same reason that commercial surveillance projects are largely ineffective at
1650 targeting advertising: The people who want to commit acts of terror, like
1651 people who want to buy a refrigerator, are extremely rare. If you’re trying
1652 to detect a phenomenon whose base rate is one in a million with an
1653 instrument whose accuracy is only 99%, then every true positive will come at
1654 the cost of 9,999 false positives.
1655   </p><p>
1656     Let me explain that again: If one in a million people is a terrorist, then
1657 there will only be about one terrorist in a random sample of one million
1658 people. If your test for detecting terrorists is 99% accurate, it will
1659 identify 10,000 terrorists in your million-person sample (1% of one million
1660 is 10,000). For every true positive, you’ll get 9,999 false positives.
1661   </p><p>
1662     In reality, the accuracy of algorithmic terrorism detection falls far short
1663 of the 99% mark, as does refrigerator ad targeting. The difference is that
1664 being falsely accused of wanting to buy a fridge is a minor nuisance while
1665 being falsely accused of planning a terror attack can destroy your life and
1666 the lives of everyone you love.
1667   </p><p>
1668     Mass state surveillance is only feasible because of surveillance capitalism
1669 and its extremely low-yield ad-targeting systems, which require a constant
1670 feed of personal data to remain barely viable.  Surveillance capitalism’s
1671 primary failure mode is mistargeted ads while mass state surveillance’s
1672 primary failure mode is grotesque human rights abuses, tending toward
1673 totalitarianism.
1674   </p><p>
1675     State surveillance is no mere parasite on Big Tech, sucking up its data and
1676 giving nothing in return. In truth, the two are symbiotes: Big Tech sucks up
1677 our data for spy agencies, and spy agencies ensure that governments don’t
1678 limit Big Tech’s activities so severely that it would no longer serve the
1679 spy agencies’ needs. There is no firm distinction between state surveillance
1680 and surveillance capitalism; they are dependent on one another.
1681   </p><p>
1682     To see this at work today, look no further than Amazon’s home surveillance
1683 device, the Ring doorbell, and its associated app, Neighbors. Ring — a
1684 product that Amazon acquired and did not develop in house — makes a
1685 camera-enabled doorbell that streams footage from your front door to your
1686 mobile device. The Neighbors app allows you to form a neighborhood-wide
1687 surveillance grid with your fellow Ring owners through which you can share
1688 clips of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">suspicious characters.</span>“</span> If you’re thinking that this
1689 sounds like a recipe for letting curtain-twitching racists supercharge their
1690 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
1691 right</a>. Ring has become a <span class="emphasis"><em>de facto,</em></span>
1692 off-the-books arm of the police without any of the pesky oversight or rules.
1693   </p><p>
1694     In mid-2019, a series of public records requests revealed that Amazon had
1695 struck confidential deals with more than 400 local law enforcement agencies
1696 through which the agencies would promote Ring and Neighbors and in exchange
1697 get access to footage from Ring cameras. In theory, cops would need to
1698 request this footage through Amazon (and internal documents reveal that
1699 Amazon devotes substantial resources to coaching cops on how to spin a
1700 convincing story when doing so), but in practice, when a Ring customer turns
1701 down a police request, Amazon only requires the agency to formally request
1702 the footage from the company, which it will then produce.
1703   </p><p>
1704     Ring and law enforcement have found many ways to intertwine their
1705 activities. Ring strikes secret deals to acquire real-time access to 911
1706 dispatch and then streams alarming crime reports to Neighbors users, which
1707 serve as convincers for anyone who’s contemplating a surveillance doorbell
1708 but isn’t sure whether their neighborhood is dangerous enough to warrant it.
1709   </p><p>
1710     The more the cops buzz-market the surveillance capitalist Ring, the more
1711 surveillance capability the state gets. Cops who rely on private entities
1712 for law-enforcement roles then brief against any controls on the deployment
1713 of that technology while the companies return the favor by lobbying against
1714 rules requiring public oversight of police surveillance technology. The more
1715 the cops rely on Ring and Neighbors, the harder it will be to pass laws to
1716 curb them. The fewer laws there are against them, the more the cops will
1717 rely on them.
1718   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="dignity-and-sanctuary"></a>Dignity and sanctuary</h2></div></div></div><p>
1719     But even if we could exercise democratic control over our states and force
1720 them to stop raiding surveillance capitalism’s reservoirs of behavioral
1721 data, surveillance capitalism would still harm us.
1722   </p><p>
1723     This is an area where Zuboff shines. Her chapter on <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">sanctuary</span>“</span>
1724 — the feeling of being unobserved — is a beautiful hymn to introspection,
1725 calmness, mindfulness, and tranquility.
1726   </p><p>
1727     When you are watched, something changes. Anyone who has ever raised a child
1728 knows this. You might look up from your book (or more realistically, from
1729 your phone) and catch your child in a moment of profound realization and
1730 growth, a moment where they are learning something that is right at the edge
1731 of their abilities, requiring their entire ferocious concentration. For a
1732 moment, you’re transfixed, watching that rare and beautiful moment of focus
1733 playing out before your eyes, and then your child looks up and sees you
1734 seeing them, and the moment collapses. To grow, you need to be and expose
1735 your authentic self, and in that moment, you are vulnerable like a hermit
1736 crab scuttling from one shell to the next. The tender, unprotected tissues
1737 you expose in that moment are too delicate to reveal in the presence of
1738 another, even someone you trust as implicitly as a child trusts their
1739 parent.
1740   </p><p>
1741     In the digital age, our authentic selves are inextricably tied to our
1742 digital lives. Your search history is a running ledger of the questions
1743 you’ve pondered. Your location history is a record of the places you’ve
1744 sought out and the experiences you’ve had there. Your social graph reveals
1745 the different facets of your identity, the people you’ve connected with.
1746   </p><p>
1747     To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your
1748 authentic self.
1749   </p><p>
1750     There’s another way in which surveillance capitalism robs us of our capacity
1751 to be our authentic selves: by making us anxious.  Surveillance capitalism
1752 isn’t really a mind-control ray, but you don’t need a mind-control ray to
1753 make someone anxious. After all, another word for anxiety is agitation, and
1754 to make someone experience agitation, you need merely to agitate them. To
1755 poke them and prod them and beep at them and buzz at them and bombard them
1756 on an intermittent schedule that is just random enough that our limbic
1757 systems never quite become inured to it.
1758   </p><p>
1759     Our devices and services are <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">general purpose</span>“</span> in that they can
1760 connect anything or anyone to anything or anyone else and that they can run
1761 any program that can be written. This means that the distraction rectangles
1762 in our pockets hold our most precious moments with our most beloved people
1763 and their most urgent or time-sensitive communications (from <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">running
1764 late can you get the kid?</span>“</span> to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">doctor gave me bad news and I
1765 need to talk to you RIGHT NOW</span>“</span>) as well as ads for refrigerators and
1766 recruiting messages from Nazis.
1767   </p><p>
1768     All day and all night, our pockets buzz, shattering our concentration and
1769 tearing apart the fragile webs of connection we spin as we think through
1770 difficult ideas. If you locked someone in a cell and agitated them like
1771 this, we’d call it <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">sleep deprivation torture,</span>“</span> and it would be
1772 <a class="ulink" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKpRbvnx6g" target="_top">a war crime under
1773 the Geneva Conventions</a>.
1774   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="afflicting-the-afflicted"></a>Afflicting the afflicted</h2></div></div></div><p>
1775     The effects of surveillance on our ability to be our authentic selves are
1776 not equal for all people. Some of us are lucky enough to live in a time and
1777 place in which all the most important facts of our lives are widely and
1778 roundly socially acceptable and can be publicly displayed without the risk
1779 of social consequence.
1780   </p><p>
1781     But for many of us, this is not true. Recall that in living memory, many of
1782 the ways of being that we think of as socially acceptable today were once
1783 cause for dire social sanction or even imprisonment.  If you are 65 years
1784 old, you have lived through a time in which people living in <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">free
1785 societies</span>“</span> could be imprisoned or sanctioned for engaging in
1786 homosexual activity, for falling in love with a person whose skin was a
1787 different color than their own, or for smoking weed.
1788   </p><p>
1789     Today, these activities aren’t just decriminalized in much of the world,
1790 they’re considered normal, and the fallen prohibitions are viewed as
1791 shameful, regrettable relics of the past.
1792   </p><p>
1793     How did we get from prohibition to normalization? Through private, personal
1794 activity: People who were secretly gay or secret pot-smokers or who secretly
1795 loved someone with a different skin color were vulnerable to retaliation if
1796 they made their true selves known and were limited in how much they could
1797 advocate for their own right to exist in the world and be true to
1798 themselves. But because there was a private sphere, these people could form
1799 alliances with their friends and loved ones who did not share their
1800 disfavored traits by having private conversations in which they came out,
1801 disclosing their true selves to the people around them and bringing them to
1802 their cause one conversation at a time.
1803   </p><p>
1804     The right to choose the time and manner of these conversations was key to
1805 their success. It’s one thing to come out to your dad while you’re on a
1806 fishing trip away from the world and another thing entirely to blurt it out
1807 over the Christmas dinner table while your racist Facebook uncle is there to
1808 make a scene.
1809   </p><p>
1810     Without a private sphere, there’s a chance that none of these changes would
1811 have come to pass and that the people who benefited from these changes would
1812 have either faced social sanction for coming out to a hostile world or would
1813 have never been able to reveal their true selves to the people they love.
1814   </p><p>
1815     The corollary is that, unless you think that our society has attained social
1816 perfection — that your grandchildren in 50 years will ask you to tell them
1817 the story of how, in 2020, every injustice had been righted and no further
1818 change had to be made — then you should expect that right now, at this
1819 minute, there are people you love, whose happiness is key to your own, who
1820 have a secret in their hearts that stops them from ever being their
1821 authentic selves with you. These people are sorrowing and will go to their
1822 graves with that secret sorrow in their hearts, and the source of that
1823 sorrow will be the falsity of their relationship to you.
1824   </p><p>
1825     A private realm is necessary for human progress.
1826   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="any-data-you-collect-and-retain-will-eventually-leak"></a>Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak</h2></div></div></div><p>
1827     The lack of a private life can rob vulnerable people of the chance to be
1828 their authentic selves and constrain our actions by depriving us of
1829 sanctuary, but there is another risk that is borne by everyone, not just
1830 people with a secret: crime.
1831   </p><p>
1832     Personally identifying information is of very limited use for the purpose of
1833 controlling peoples’ minds, but identity theft — really a catchall term for
1834 a whole constellation of terrible criminal activities that can destroy your
1835 finances, compromise your personal integrity, ruin your reputation, or even
1836 expose you to physical danger — thrives on it.
1837   </p><p>
1838     Attackers are not limited to using data from one breached source,
1839 either. Multiple services have suffered breaches that exposed names,
1840 addresses, phone numbers, passwords, sexual tastes, school grades, work
1841 performance, brushes with the criminal justice system, family details,
1842 genetic information, fingerprints and other biometrics, reading habits,
1843 search histories, literary tastes, pseudonymous identities, and other
1844 sensitive information. Attackers can merge data from these different
1845 breaches to build up extremely detailed dossiers on random subjects and then
1846 use different parts of the data for different criminal purposes.
1847   </p><p>
1848     For example, attackers can use leaked username and password combinations to
1849 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
1850 been fitted with anti-theft GPS trackers and immobilizers</a> or to
1851 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
1852 toddlers with the audio tracks from pornography</a>. Attackers use
1853 leaked data to trick phone companies into giving them your phone number,
1854 then they intercept SMS-based two-factor authentication codes in order to
1855 take over your email, bank account, and/or cryptocurrency wallets.
1856   </p><p>
1857     Attackers are endlessly inventive in the pursuit of creative ways to
1858 weaponize leaked data. One common use of leaked data is to penetrate
1859 companies in order to access <span class="emphasis"><em>more</em></span> data.
1860   </p><p>
1861     Like spies, online fraudsters are totally dependent on companies
1862 over-collecting and over-retaining our data. Spy agencies sometimes pay
1863 companies for access to their data or intimidate them into giving it up, but
1864 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
1865 companies’ databases</a>.
1866   </p><p>
1867     The over-collection of data has a host of terrible social consequences, from
1868 the erosion of our authentic selves to the undermining of social progress,
1869 from state surveillance to an epidemic of online crime. Commercial
1870 surveillance is also a boon to people running influence campaigns, but
1871 that’s the least of our troubles.
1872   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="critical-tech-exceptionalism-is-still-tech-exceptionalism"></a>Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism</h2></div></div></div><p>
1873     Big Tech has long practiced technology exceptionalism: the idea that it
1874 should not be subject to the mundane laws and norms of
1875 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">meatspace.</span>“</span> Mottoes like Facebook’s <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">move fast and break
1876 things</span>“</span> attracted justifiable scorn of the companies’ self-serving
1877 rhetoric.
1878   </p><p>
1879     Tech exceptionalism got us all into a lot of trouble, so it’s ironic and
1880 distressing to see Big Tech’s critics committing the same sin.
1881   </p><p>
1882     Big Tech is not a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> that cannot be cured
1883 through the traditional anti-monopoly remedies of trustbusting (forcing
1884 companies to divest of competitors they have acquired) and bans on mergers
1885 to monopoly and other anti-competitive tactics. Big Tech does not have the
1886 power to use machine learning to influence our behavior so thoroughly that
1887 markets lose the ability to punish bad actors and reward superior
1888 competitors. Big Tech has no rule-writing mind-control ray that necessitates
1889 ditching our old toolbox.
1890   </p><p>
1891     The thing is, people have been claiming to have perfected mind-control rays
1892 for centuries, and every time, it turned out to be a con — though sometimes
1893 the con artists were also conning themselves.
1894   </p><p>
1895     For generations, the advertising industry has been steadily improving its
1896 ability to sell advertising services to businesses while only making
1897 marginal gains in selling those businesses’ products to prospective
1898 customers. John Wanamaker’s lament that <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">50% of my advertising budget
1899 is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%</span>“</span> is a testament to the triumph
1900 of <span class="emphasis"><em>ad executives</em></span>, who successfully convinced Wanamaker
1901 that only half of the money he spent went to waste.
1902   </p><p>
1903     The tech industry has made enormous improvements in the science of
1904 convincing businesses that they’re good at advertising while their actual
1905 improvements to advertising — as opposed to targeting — have been pretty
1906 ho-hum. The vogue for machine learning — and the mystical invocation of
1907 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">artificial intelligence</span>“</span> as a synonym for straightforward
1908 statistical inference techniques — has greatly boosted the efficacy of Big
1909 Tech’s sales pitch as marketers have exploited potential customers’ lack of
1910 technical sophistication to get away with breathtaking acts of overpromising
1911 and underdelivering.
1912   </p><p>
1913     It’s tempting to think that if businesses are willing to pour billions into
1914 a venture that the venture must be a good one. Yet there are plenty of times
1915 when this rule of thumb has led us astray.  For example, it’s virtually
1916 unheard of for managed investment funds to outperform simple index funds,
1917 and investors who put their money into the hands of expert money managers
1918 overwhelmingly fare worse than those who entrust their savings to index
1919 funds. But managed funds still account for the majority of the money
1920 invested in the markets, and they are patronized by some of the richest,
1921 most sophisticated investors in the world. Their vote of confidence in an
1922 underperforming sector is a parable about the role of luck in wealth
1923 accumulation, not a sign that managed funds are a good buy.
1924   </p><p>
1925     The claims of Big Tech’s mind-control system are full of tells that the
1926 enterprise is a con. For example, <a class="ulink" href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01415/full" target="_top">the
1927 reliance on the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Big Five</span>“</span> personality traits</a> as a
1928 primary means of influencing people even though the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Big Five</span>“</span>
1929 theory is unsupported by any large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is
1930 <a class="ulink" href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/" target="_top">mostly
1931 the realm of marketing hucksters and pop psych</a>.
1932   </p><p>
1933     Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms can
1934 accurately perform <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">sentiment analysis</span>“</span> or detect peoples’
1935 moods based on their <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">microexpressions,</span>“</span> but <a class="ulink" href="https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647040758/advertising-on-facebook-is-it-worth-it" target="_top">these
1936 are marketing claims, not scientific ones</a>. These methods are largely
1937 untested by independent scientific experts, and where they have been tested,
1938 they’ve been found sorely wanting.  Microexpressions are particularly
1939 suspect as the companies that specialize in training people to detect them
1940 <a class="ulink" href="https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/" target="_top">have
1941 been shown</a> to underperform relative to random chance.
1942   </p><p>
1943     Big Tech has been so good at marketing its own supposed superpowers that
1944 it’s easy to believe that they can market everything else with similar
1945 acumen, but it’s a mistake to believe the hype. Any statement a company
1946 makes about the quality of its products is clearly not impartial. The fact
1947 that we distrust all the things that Big Tech says about its data handling,
1948 compliance with privacy laws, etc., is only reasonable — but why on Earth
1949 would we treat Big Tech’s marketing literature as the gospel truth? Big Tech
1950 lies about just about <span class="emphasis"><em>everything</em></span>, including how well
1951 its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work.
1952   </p><p>
1953     That skepticism should infuse all of our evaluations of Big Tech and its
1954 supposed abilities, including our perusal of its patents. Zuboff vests these
1955 patents with enormous significance, pointing out that Google claimed
1956 extensive new persuasion capabilities in <a class="ulink" href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050131762A1/en" target="_top">its patent
1957 filings</a>. These claims are doubly suspect: first, because they are so
1958 self-serving, and second, because the patent itself is so notoriously an
1959 invitation to exaggeration.
1960   </p><p>
1961     Patent applications take the form of a series of claims and range from broad
1962 to narrow. A typical patent starts out by claiming that its authors have
1963 invented a method or system for doing every conceivable thing that anyone
1964 might do, ever, with any tool or device. Then it narrows that claim in
1965 successive stages until we get to the actual <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">invention</span>“</span> that
1966 is the true subject of the patent.  The hope is that the patent examiner —
1967 who is almost certainly overworked and underinformed — will miss the fact
1968 that some or all of these claims are ridiculous, or at least suspect, and
1969 grant the patent’s broader claims. Patents for unpatentable things are still
1970 incredibly useful because they can be wielded against competitors who might
1971 license that patent or steer clear of its claims rather than endure the
1972 lengthy, expensive process of contesting it.
1973   </p><p>
1974     What’s more, software patents are routinely granted even though the filer
1975 doesn’t have any evidence that they can do the thing claimed by the
1976 patent. That is, you can patent an <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">invention</span>“</span> that you haven’t
1977 actually made and that you don’t know how to make.
1978   </p><p>
1979     With these considerations in hand, it becomes obvious that the fact that a
1980 Big Tech company has patented what it <span class="emphasis"><em>says</em></span> is an
1981 effective mind-control ray is largely irrelevant to whether Big Tech can in
1982 fact control our minds.
1983   </p><p>
1984     Big Tech collects our data for many reasons, including the diminishing
1985 returns on existing stores of data. But many tech companies also collect
1986 data out of a mistaken tech exceptionalist belief in the network effects of
1987 data. Network effects occur when each new user in a system increases its
1988 value. The classic example is fax machines: A single fax machine is of no
1989 use, two fax machines are of limited use, but every new fax machine that’s
1990 put to use after the first doubles the number of possible fax-to-fax links.
1991   </p><p>
1992     Data mined for predictive systems doesn’t necessarily produce these
1993 dividends. Think of Netflix: The predictive value of the data mined from a
1994 million English-speaking Netflix viewers is hardly improved by the addition
1995 of one more user’s viewing data. Most of the data Netflix acquires after
1996 that first minimum viable sample duplicates existing data and produces only
1997 minimal gains. Meanwhile, retraining models with new data gets progressively
1998 more expensive as the number of data points increases, and manual tasks like
1999 labeling and validating data do not get cheaper at scale.
2000   </p><p>
2001     Businesses pursue fads to the detriment of their profits all the time,
2002 especially when the businesses and their investors are not motivated by the
2003 prospect of becoming profitable but rather by the prospect of being acquired
2004 by a Big Tech giant or by having an IPO.  For these firms, ticking faddish
2005 boxes like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">collects as much data as possible</span>“</span> might realize a
2006 bigger return on investment than <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">collects a business-appropriate
2007 quantity of data.</span>“</span>
2008   </p><p>
2009     This is another harm of tech exceptionalism: The belief that more data
2010 always produces more profits in the form of more insights that can be
2011 translated into better mind-control rays drives firms to over-collect and
2012 over-retain data beyond all rationality. And since the firms are behaving
2013 irrationally, a good number of them will go out of business and become ghost
2014 ships whose cargo holds are stuffed full of data that can harm people in
2015 myriad ways — but which no one is responsible for antey longer. Even if the
2016 companies don’t go under, the data they collect is maintained behind the
2017 minimum viable security — just enough security to keep the company viable
2018 while it waits to get bought out by a tech giant, an amount calculated to
2019 spend not one penny more than is necessary on protecting data.
2020   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="how-monopolies-not-mind-control-drive-surveillance-capitalism-the-snapchat-story"></a>How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The
2021 Snapchat story</h2></div></div></div><p>
2022     For the first decade of its existence, Facebook competed with the social
2023 media giants of the day (Myspace, Orkut, etc.) by presenting itself as the
2024 pro-privacy alternative. Indeed, Facebook justified its walled garden —
2025 which let users bring in data from the web but blocked web services like
2026 Google Search from indexing and caching Facebook pages — as a pro-privacy
2027 measure that protected users from the surveillance-happy winners of the
2028 social media wars like Myspace.
2029   </p><p>
2030     Despite frequent promises that it would never collect or analyze its users’
2031 data, Facebook periodically created initiatives that did just that, like the
2032 creepy, ham-fisted Beacon tool, which spied on you as you moved around the
2033 web and then added your online activities to your public timeline, allowing
2034 your friends to monitor your browsing habits. Beacon sparked a user
2035 revolt. Every time, Facebook backed off from its surveillance initiative,
2036 but not all the way; inevitably, the new Facebook would be more surveilling
2037 than the old Facebook, though not quite as surveilling as the intermediate
2038 Facebook following the launch of the new product or service.
2039   </p><p>
2040     The pace at which Facebook ramped up its surveillance efforts seems to have
2041 been set by Facebook’s competitive landscape. The more competitors Facebook
2042 had, the better it behaved. Every time a major competitor foundered,
2043 Facebook’s behavior <a class="ulink" href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362" target="_top">got
2044 markedly worse</a>.
2045   </p><p>
2046     All the while, Facebook was prodigiously acquiring companies, including a
2047 company called Onavo. Nominally, Onavo made a battery-monitoring mobile
2048 app. But the permissions that Onavo required were so expansive that the app
2049 was able to gather fine-grained telemetry on everything users did with their
2050 phones, including which apps they used and how they were using them.
2051   </p><p>
2052     Through Onavo, Facebook discovered that it was losing market share to
2053 Snapchat, an app that — like Facebook a decade before — billed itself as the
2054 pro-privacy alternative to the status quo. Through Onavo, Facebook was able
2055 to mine data from the devices of Snapchat users, including both current and
2056 former Snapchat users. This spurred Facebook to acquire Instagram — some
2057 features of which competed with Snapchat — and then allowed Facebook to
2058 fine-tune Instagram’s features and sales pitch to erode Snapchat’s gains and
2059 ensure that Facebook would not have to face the kinds of competitive
2060 pressures it had earlier inflicted on Myspace and Orkut.
2061   </p><p>
2062     The story of how Facebook crushed Snapchat reveals the relationship between
2063 monopoly and surveillance capitalism. Facebook combined surveillance with
2064 lax antitrust enforcement to spot the competitive threat of Snapchat on its
2065 horizon and then take decisive action against it. Facebook’s surveillance
2066 capitalism let it avert competitive pressure with anti-competitive
2067 tactics. Facebook users still want privacy — Facebook hasn’t used
2068 surveillance to brainwash them out of it — but they can’t get it because
2069 Facebook’s surveillance lets it destroy any hope of a rival service emerging
2070 that competes on privacy features.
2071   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="a-monopoly-over-your-friends"></a>A monopoly over your friends</h2></div></div></div><p>
2072     A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of Facebook and
2073 other Big Tech companies by fielding <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">indieweb</span>“</span> alternatives —
2074 Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, Diaspora as a Facebook alternative,
2075 etc. — but these efforts have failed to attain any kind of liftoff.
2076   </p><p>
2077     Fundamentally, each of these services is hamstrung by the same problem:
2078 Every potential user for a Facebook or Twitter alternative has to convince
2079 all their friends to follow them to a decentralized web alternative in order
2080 to continue to realize the benefit of social media. For many of us, the only
2081 reason to have a Facebook account is that our friends have Facebook
2082 accounts, and the reason they have Facebook accounts is that
2083 <span class="emphasis"><em>we</em></span> have Facebook accounts.
2084   </p><p>
2085     All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant platforms —
2086 into <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">kill zones</span>“</span> that investors will not fund new entrants
2087 for.
2088   </p><p>
2089     And yet, all of today’s tech giants came into existence despite the
2090 entrenched advantage of the companies that came before them. To understand
2091 how that happened, you have to understand both interoperability and
2092 adversarial interoperability.
2093   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
2094       The hard problem of our species is coordination.
2095     </p></blockquote></div><p>
2096     <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Interoperability</span>“</span> is the ability of two technologies to work
2097 with one another: Anyone can make an LP that will play on any record player,
2098 anyone can make a filter you can install in your stove’s extractor fan,
2099 anyone can make gasoline for your car, anyone can make a USB phone charger
2100 that fits in your car’s cigarette lighter receptacle, anyone can make a
2101 light bulb that works in your light socket, anyone can make bread that will
2102 toast in your toaster.
2103   </p><p>
2104     Interoperability is often a source of innovation and consumer benefit: Apple
2105 made the first commercially successful PC, but millions of independent
2106 software vendors made interoperable programs that ran on the Apple II
2107 Plus. The simple analog antenna inputs on the back of TVs first allowed
2108 cable operators to connect directly to TVs, then they allowed game console
2109 companies and then personal computer companies to use standard televisions
2110 as displays. Standard RJ-11 telephone jacks allowed for the production of
2111 phones from a variety of vendors in a variety of forms, from the free
2112 football-shaped phone that came with a <span class="emphasis"><em>Sports
2113 Illustrated</em></span> subscription to business phones with speakers, hold
2114 functions, and so on and then answering machines and finally modems, paving
2115 the way for the internet revolution.
2116   </p><p>
2117     <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Interoperability</span>“</span> is often used interchangeably with
2118 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">standardization,</span>“</span> which is the process when manufacturers and
2119 other stakeholders hammer out a set of agreed-upon rules for implementing a
2120 technology, such as the electrical plug on your wall, the CAN bus used by
2121 your car’s computer systems, or the HTML instructions that your browser
2122 interprets.
2123   </p><p>
2124     But interoperability doesn’t require standardization — indeed,
2125 standardization often proceeds from the chaos of ad hoc interoperability
2126 measures. The inventor of the cigarette-lighter USB charger didn’t need to
2127 get permission from car manufacturers or even the manufacturers of the
2128 dashboard lighter subcomponent. The automakers didn’t take any
2129 countermeasures to prevent the use of these aftermarket accessories by their
2130 customers, but they also didn’t do anything to make life easier for the
2131 chargers’ manufacturers. This is a kind of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">neutral
2132 interoperability.</span>“</span>
2133   </p><p>
2134     Beyond neutral interoperability, there is <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">adversarial
2135 interoperability.</span>“</span> That’s when a manufacturer makes a product that
2136 interoperates with another manufacturer’s product <span class="emphasis"><em>despite the
2137 second manufacturer’s objections</em></span> and <span class="emphasis"><em>even if that means
2138 bypassing a security system designed to prevent interoperability</em></span>.
2139   </p><p>
2140     Probably the most familiar form of adversarial interoperability is
2141 third-party printer ink. Printer manufacturers claim that they sell printers
2142 below cost and that the only way they can recoup the losses they incur is by
2143 charging high markups on ink. To prevent the owners of printers from buying
2144 ink elsewhere, the printer companies deploy a suite of anti-customer
2145 security systems that detect and reject both refilled and third-party
2146 cartridges.
2147   </p><p>
2148     Owners of printers take the position that HP and Epson and Brother are not
2149 charities and that customers for their wares have no obligation to help them
2150 survive, and so if the companies choose to sell their products at a loss,
2151 that’s their foolish choice and their consequences to live with. Likewise,
2152 competitors who make ink or refill kits observe that they don’t owe printer
2153 companies anything, and their erosion of printer companies’ margins are the
2154 printer companies’ problems, not their competitors’. After all, the printer
2155 companies shed no tears when they drive a refiller out of business, so why
2156 should the refillers concern themselves with the economic fortunes of the
2157 printer companies?
2158   </p><p>
2159     Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the history of
2160 the tech industry: from the founding of the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">alt.*</span>“</span> Usenet
2161 hierarchy (which was started against the wishes of Usenet’s maintainers and
2162 which grew to be bigger than all of Usenet combined)  to the browser wars
2163 (when Netscape and Microsoft devoted massive engineering efforts to making
2164 their browsers incompatible with the other’s special commands and
2165 peccadilloes) to Facebook (whose success was built in part by helping its
2166 new users stay in touch with friends they’d left behind on Myspace because
2167 Facebook supplied them with a tool that scraped waiting messages from
2168 Myspace and imported them into Facebook, effectively creating an
2169 Facebook-based Myspace reader).
2170   </p><p>
2171     Today, incumbency is seen as an unassailable advantage. Facebook is where
2172 all of your friends are, so no one can start a Facebook competitor. But
2173 adversarial compatibility reverses the competitive advantage: If you were
2174 allowed to compete with Facebook by providing a tool that imported all your
2175 users’ waiting Facebook messages into an environment that competed on lines
2176 that Facebook couldn’t cross, like eliminating surveillance and ads, then
2177 Facebook would be at a huge disadvantage. It would have assembled all
2178 possible ex-Facebook users into a single, easy-to-find service; it would
2179 have educated them on how a Facebook-like service worked and what its
2180 potential benefits were; and it would have provided an easy means for
2181 disgruntled Facebook users to tell their friends where they might expect
2182 better treatment.
2183   </p><p>
2184     Adversarial interoperability was once the norm and a key contributor to the
2185 dynamic, vibrant tech scene, but now it is stuck behind a thicket of laws
2186 and regulations that add legal risks to the tried-and-true tactics of
2187 adversarial interoperability. New rules and new interpretations of existing
2188 rules mean that a would-be adversarial interoperator needs to steer clear of
2189 claims under copyright, terms of service, trade secrecy, tortious
2190 interference, and patent.
2191   </p><p>
2192     In the absence of a competitive market, lawmakers have resorted to assigning
2193 expensive, state-like duties to Big Tech firms, such as automatically
2194 filtering user contributions for copyright infringement or terrorist and
2195 extremist content or detecting and preventing harassment in real time or
2196 controlling access to sexual material.
2197   </p><p>
2198     These measures put a floor under how small we can make Big Tech because only
2199 the very largest companies can afford the humans and automated filters
2200 needed to perform these duties.
2201   </p><p>
2202     But that’s not the only way in which making platforms responsible for
2203 policing their users undermines competition. A platform that is expected to
2204 police its users’ conduct must prevent many vital adversarial
2205 interoperability techniques lest these subvert its policing measures. For
2206 example, if someone using a Twitter replacement like Mastodon is able to
2207 push messages into Twitter and read messages out of Twitter, they could
2208 avoid being caught by automated systems that detect and prevent harassment
2209 (such as systems that use the timing of messages or IP-based rules to make
2210 guesses about whether someone is a harasser).
2211   </p><p>
2212     To the extent that we are willing to let Big Tech police itself — rather
2213 than making Big Tech small enough that users can leave bad platforms for
2214 better ones and small enough that a regulation that simply puts a platform
2215 out of business will not destroy billions of users’ access to their
2216 communities and data — we build the case that Big Tech should be able to
2217 block its competitors and make it easier for Big Tech to demand legal
2218 enforcement tools to ban and punish attempts at adversarial
2219 interoperability.
2220   </p><p>
2221     Ultimately, we can try to fix Big Tech by making it responsible for bad acts
2222 by its users, or we can try to fix the internet by cutting Big Tech down to
2223 size. But we can’t do both. To replace today’s giant products with
2224 pluralistic protocols, we need to clear the legal thicket that prevents
2225 adversarial interoperability so that tomorrow’s nimble, personal,
2226 small-scale products can federate themselves with giants like Facebook,
2227 allowing the users who’ve left to continue to communicate with users who
2228 haven’t left yet, reaching tendrils over Facebook’s garden wall that
2229 Facebook’s trapped users can use to scale the walls and escape to the
2230 global, open web.
2231   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="fake-news-is-an-epistemological-crisis"></a>Fake news is an epistemological crisis</h2></div></div></div><p>
2232     Tech is not the only industry that has undergone massive concentration since
2233 the Reagan era. Virtually every major industry — from oil to newspapers to
2234 meatpacking to sea freight to eyewear to online pornography — has become a
2235 clubby oligarchy that just a few players dominate.
2236   </p><p>
2237     At the same time, every industry has become something of a tech industry as
2238 general-purpose computers and general-purpose networks and the promise of
2239 efficiencies through data-driven analysis infuse every device, process, and
2240 firm with tech.
2241   </p><p>
2242     This phenomenon of industrial concentration is part of a wider story about
2243 wealth concentration overall as a smaller and smaller number of people own
2244 more and more of our world. This concentration of both wealth and industries
2245 means that our political outcomes are increasingly beholden to the parochial
2246 interests of the people and companies with all the money.
2247   </p><p>
2248     That means that whenever a regulator asks a question with an obvious,
2249 empirical answer (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are humans causing climate change?</span>“</span> or
2250 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Should we let companies conduct commercial mass surveillance?</span>“</span>
2251 or <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Does society benefit from allowing network neutrality
2252 violations?</span>“</span>), the answer that comes out is only correct if that
2253 correctness meets with the approval of rich people and the industries that
2254 made them so wealthy.
2255   </p><p>
2256     Rich people have always played an outsized role in politics and more so
2257 since the Supreme Court’s <span class="emphasis"><em>Citizens United</em></span> decision
2258 eliminated key controls over political spending. Widening inequality and
2259 wealth concentration means that the very richest people are now a lot richer
2260 and can afford to spend a lot more money on political projects than ever
2261 before. Think of the Koch brothers or George Soros or Bill Gates.
2262   </p><p>
2263     But the policy distortions of rich individuals pale in comparison to the
2264 policy distortions that concentrated industries are capable of.  The
2265 companies in highly concentrated industries are much more profitable than
2266 companies in competitive industries — no competition means not having to
2267 reduce prices or improve quality to win customers — leaving them with bigger
2268 capital surpluses to spend on lobbying.
2269   </p><p>
2270     Concentrated industries also find it easier to collaborate on policy
2271 objectives than competitive ones. When all the top execs from your industry
2272 can fit around a single boardroom table, they often do. And
2273 <span class="emphasis"><em>when</em></span> they do, they can forge a consensus position on
2274 regulation.
2275   </p><p>
2276     Rising through the ranks in a concentrated industry generally means working
2277 at two or three of the big companies. When there are only relatively few
2278 companies in a given industry, each company has a more ossified executive
2279 rank, leaving ambitious execs with fewer paths to higher positions unless
2280 they are recruited to a rival. This means that the top execs in concentrated
2281 industries are likely to have been colleagues at some point and socialize in
2282 the same circles — connected through social ties or, say, serving as
2283 trustees for each others’ estates. These tight social bonds foster a
2284 collegial, rather than competitive, attitude.
2285   </p><p>
2286     Highly concentrated industries also present a regulatory conundrum.  When an
2287 industry is dominated by just four or five companies, the only people who
2288 are likely to truly understand the industry’s practices are its veteran
2289 executives. This means that top regulators are often former execs of the
2290 companies they are supposed to be regulating. These turns in government are
2291 often tacitly understood to be leaves of absence from industry, with former
2292 employers welcoming their erstwhile watchdogs back into their executive
2293 ranks once their terms have expired.
2294   </p><p>
2295     All this is to say that the tight social bonds, small number of firms, and
2296 regulatory capture of concentrated industries give the companies that
2297 comprise them the power to dictate many, if not all, of the regulations that
2298 bind them.
2299   </p><p>
2300     This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders <a class="ulink" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/25/how-payday-lending-industry-insider-tilted-academic-research-its-favor/" target="_top">winning
2301 the right to practice predatory lending</a> or Apple <a class="ulink" href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxayp/source-apple-will-fight-right-to-repair-legislation" target="_top">winning
2302 the right to decide who can fix your phone</a> or Google and Facebook
2303 winning the right to breach your private data without suffering meaningful
2304 consequences or victories for pipeline companies or impunity for opioid
2305 manufacturers or massive tax subsidies for incredibly profitable dominant
2306 businesses, it’s increasingly apparent that many of our official,
2307 evidence-based truth-seeking processes are, in fact, auctions for sale to
2308 the highest bidder.
2309   </p><p>
2310     It’s really impossible to overstate what a terrifying prospect this is. We
2311 live in an incredibly high-tech society, and none of us could acquire the
2312 expertise to evaluate every technological proposition that stands between us
2313 and our untimely, horrible deaths. You might devote your life to acquiring
2314 the media literacy to distinguish good scientific journals from corrupt
2315 pay-for-play lookalikes and the statistical literacy to evaluate the quality
2316 of the analysis in the journals as well as the microbiology and epidemiology
2317 knowledge to determine whether you can trust claims about the safety of
2318 vaccines — but that would still leave you unqualified to judge whether the
2319 wiring in your home will give you a lethal shock <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span>
2320 whether your car’s brakes’ software will cause them to fail unpredictably
2321 <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> whether the hygiene standards at your butcher are
2322 sufficient to keep you from dying after you finish your dinner.
2323   </p><p>
2324     In a world as complex as this one, we have to defer to authorities, and we
2325 keep them honest by making those authorities accountable to us and binding
2326 them with rules to prevent conflicts of interest. We can’t possibly acquire
2327 the expertise to adjudicate conflicting claims about the best way to make
2328 the world safe and prosperous, but we <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> determine
2329 whether the adjudication process itself is trustworthy.
2330   </p><p>
2331     Right now, it’s obviously not.
2332   </p><p>
2333     The past 40 years of rising inequality and industry concentration, together
2334 with increasingly weak accountability and transparency for expert agencies,
2335 has created an increasingly urgent sense of impending doom, the sense that
2336 there are vast conspiracies afoot that operate with tacit official approval
2337 despite the likelihood they are working to better themselves by ruining the
2338 rest of us.
2339   </p><p>
2340     For example, it’s been decades since Exxon’s own scientists concluded that
2341 its products would render the Earth uninhabitable by humans. And yet those
2342 decades were lost to us, in large part because Exxon lobbied governments and
2343 sowed doubt about the dangers of its products and did so with the
2344 cooperation of many public officials.  When the survival of you and everyone
2345 you love is threatened by conspiracies, it’s not unreasonable to start
2346 questioning the things you think you know in an attempt to determine whether
2347 they, too, are the outcome of another conspiracy.
2348   </p><p>
2349     The collapse of the credibility of our systems for divining and upholding
2350 truths has left us in a state of epistemological chaos.  Once, most of us
2351 might have assumed that the system was working and that our regulations
2352 reflected our best understanding of the empirical truths of the world as
2353 they were best understood — now we have to find our own experts to help us
2354 sort the true from the false.
2355   </p><p>
2356     If you’re like me, you probably believe that vaccines are safe, but you
2357 (like me) probably also can’t explain the microbiology or statistics. Few of
2358 us have the math skills to review the literature on vaccine safety and
2359 describe why their statistical reasoning is sound. Likewise, few of us can
2360 review the stats in the (now discredited) literature on opioid safety and
2361 explain how those stats were manipulated. Both vaccines and opioids were
2362 embraced by medical authorities, after all, and one is safe while the other
2363 could ruin your life. You’re left with a kind of inchoate constellation of
2364 rules of thumb about which experts you trust to fact-check controversial
2365 claims and then to explain how all those respectable doctors with their
2366 peer-reviewed research on opioid safety <span class="emphasis"><em>were</em></span> an
2367 aberration and then how you know that the doctors writing about vaccine
2368 safety are <span class="emphasis"><em>not</em></span> an aberration.
2369   </p><p>
2370     I’m 100% certain that vaccinating is safe and effective, but I’m also at
2371 something of a loss to explain exactly, <span class="emphasis"><em>precisely,</em></span> why
2372 I believe this, given all the corruption I know about and the many times the
2373 stamp of certainty has turned out to be a parochial lie told to further
2374 enrich the super rich.
2375   </p><p>
2376     Fake news — conspiracy theories, racist ideologies, scientific denialism —
2377 has always been with us. What’s changed today is not the mix of ideas in the
2378 public discourse but the popularity of the worst ideas in that
2379 mix. Conspiracy and denial have skyrocketed in lockstep with the growth of
2380 Big Inequality, which has also tracked the rise of Big Tech and Big Pharma
2381 and Big Wrestling and Big Car and Big Movie Theater and Big Everything Else.
2382   </p><p>
2383     No one can say for certain why this has happened, but the two dominant camps
2384 are idealism (the belief that the people who argue for these conspiracies
2385 have gotten better at explaining them, maybe with the help of
2386 machine-learning tools) or materialism (the ideas have become more
2387 attractive because of material conditions in the world).
2388   </p><p>
2389     I’m a materialist. I’ve been exposed to the arguments of conspiracy
2390 theorists all my life, and I have not experienced any qualitative leap in
2391 the quality of those arguments.
2392   </p><p>
2393     The major difference is in the world, not the arguments. In a time where
2394 actual conspiracies are commonplace, conspiracy theories acquire a ring of
2395 plausibility.
2396   </p><p>
2397     We have always had disagreements about what’s true, but today, we have a
2398 disagreement over how we know whether something is true. This is an
2399 epistemological crisis, not a crisis over belief. It’s a crisis over the
2400 credibility of our truth-seeking exercises, from scientific journals (in an
2401 era where the biggest journal publishers have been caught producing
2402 pay-to-play journals for junk science) to regulations (in an era where
2403 regulators are routinely cycling in and out of business) to education (in an
2404 era where universities are dependent on corporate donations to keep their
2405 lights on).
2406   </p><p>
2407     Targeting — surveillance capitalism — makes it easier to find people who are
2408 undergoing this epistemological crisis, but it doesn’t create the
2409 crisis. For that, you need to look to corruption.
2410   </p><p>
2411     And, conveniently enough, it’s corruption that allows surveillance
2412 capitalism to grow by dismantling monopoly protections, by permitting
2413 reckless collection and retention of personal data, by allowing ads to be
2414 targeted in secret, and by foreclosing on the possibility of going somewhere
2415 else where you might continue to enjoy your friends without subjecting
2416 yourself to commercial surveillance.
2417   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="tech-is-different"></a>Tech is different</h2></div></div></div><p>
2418     I reject both iterations of technological exceptionalism. I reject the idea
2419 that tech is uniquely terrible and led by people who are greedier or worse
2420 than the leaders of other industries, and I reject the idea that tech is so
2421 good — or so intrinsically prone to concentration — that it can’t be blamed
2422 for its present-day monopolistic status.
2423   </p><p>
2424     I think tech is just another industry, albeit one that grew up in the
2425 absence of real monopoly constraints. It may have been first, but it isn’t
2426 the worst nor will it be the last.
2427   </p><p>
2428     But there’s one way in which I <span class="emphasis"><em>am</em></span> a tech
2429 exceptionalist. I believe that online tools are the key to overcoming
2430 problems that are much more urgent than tech monopolization: climate change,
2431 inequality, misogyny, and discrimination on the basis of race, gender
2432 identity, and other factors. The internet is how we will recruit people to
2433 fight those fights, and how we will coordinate their labor. Tech is not a
2434 substitute for democratic accountability, the rule of law, fairness, or
2435 stability — but it’s a means to achieve these things.
2436   </p><p>
2437     The hard problem of our species is coordination. Everything from climate
2438 change to social change to running a business to making a family work can be
2439 viewed as a collective action problem.
2440   </p><p>
2441     The internet makes it easier than at any time before to find people who want
2442 to work on a project with you — hence the success of free and open-source
2443 software, crowdfunding, and racist terror groups — and easier than ever to
2444 coordinate the work you do.
2445   </p><p>
2446     The internet and the computers we connect to it also possess an exceptional
2447 quality: general-purposeness. The internet is designed to allow any two
2448 parties to communicate any data, using any protocol, without permission from
2449 anyone else. The only production design we have for computers is the
2450 general-purpose, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Turing complete</span>“</span> computer that can run every
2451 program we can express in symbolic logic.
2452   </p><p>
2453     This means that every time someone with a special communications need
2454 invests in infrastructure and techniques to make the internet faster,
2455 cheaper, and more robust, this benefit redounds to everyone else who is
2456 using the internet to communicate. And this also means that every time
2457 someone with a special computing need invests to make computers faster,
2458 cheaper, and more robust, every other computing application is a potential
2459 beneficiary of this work.
2460   </p><p>
2461     For these reasons, every type of communication is gradually absorbed into
2462 the internet, and every type of device — from airplanes to pacemakers —
2463 eventually becomes a computer in a fancy case.
2464   </p><p>
2465     While these considerations don’t preclude regulating networks and computers,
2466 they do call for gravitas and caution when doing so because changes to
2467 regulatory frameworks could ripple out to have unintended consequences in
2468 many, many other domains.
2469   </p><p>
2470     The upshot of this is that our best hope of solving the big coordination
2471 problems — climate change, inequality, etc. — is with free, fair, and open
2472 tech. Our best hope of keeping tech free, fair, and open is to exercise
2473 caution in how we regulate tech and to attend closely to the ways in which
2474 interventions to solve one problem might create problems in other domains.
2475   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="ownership-of-facts"></a>Ownership of facts</h2></div></div></div><p>
2476     Big Tech has a funny relationship with information. When you’re generating
2477 information — anything from the location data streaming off your mobile
2478 device to the private messages you send to friends on a social network — it
2479 claims the rights to make unlimited use of that data.
2480   </p><p>
2481     But when you have the audacity to turn the tables — to use a tool that
2482 blocks ads or slurps your waiting updates out of a social network and puts
2483 them in another app that lets you set your own priorities and suggestions or
2484 crawls their system to allow you to start a rival business — they claim that
2485 you’re stealing from them.
2486   </p><p>
2487     The thing is, information is a very bad fit for any kind of private property
2488 regime. Property rights are useful for establishing markets that can lead to
2489 the effective development of fallow assets. These markets depend on clear
2490 titles to ensure that the things being bought and sold in them can, in fact,
2491 be bought and sold.
2492   </p><p>
2493     Information rarely has such a clear title. Take phone numbers: There’s
2494 clearly something going wrong when Facebook slurps up millions of users’
2495 address books and uses the phone numbers it finds in them to plot out social
2496 graphs and fill in missing information about other users.
2497   </p><p>
2498     But the phone numbers Facebook nonconsensually acquires in this transaction
2499 are not the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">property</span>“</span> of the users they’re taken from nor do
2500 they belong to the people whose phones ring when you dial those numbers. The
2501 numbers are mere integers, 10 digits in the U.S.  and Canada, and they
2502 appear in millions of places, including somewhere deep in pi as well as
2503 numerous other contexts. Giving people ownership titles to integers is an
2504 obviously terrible idea.
2505   </p><p>
2506     Likewise for the facts that Facebook and other commercial surveillance
2507 operators acquire about us, like that we are the children of our parents or
2508 the parents to our children or that we had a conversation with someone else
2509 or went to a public place.  These data points can’t be property in the sense
2510 that your house or your shirt is your property because the title to them is
2511 intrinsically muddy: Does your mom own the fact that she is your mother? Do
2512 you? Do both of you? What about your dad — does he own this fact too, or
2513 does he have to license the fact from you (or your mom or both of you) in
2514 order to use this fact? What about the hundreds or thousands of other people
2515 who know these facts?
2516   </p><p>
2517     If you go to a Black Lives Matter demonstration, do the other demonstrators
2518 need your permission to post their photos from the event? The online fights
2519 over <a class="ulink" href="https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-take-photos-at-protests/" target="_top">when and
2520 how to post photos from demonstrations</a> reveal a nuanced, complex
2521 issue that cannot be easily hand-waved away by giving one party a property
2522 right that everyone else in the mix has to respect.
2523   </p><p>
2524     The fact that information isn’t a good fit with property and markets doesn’t
2525 mean that it’s not valuable. Babies aren’t property, but they’re inarguably
2526 valuable. In fact, we have a whole set of rules just for babies as well as a
2527 subset of those rules that apply to humans more generally. Someone who
2528 argues that babies won’t be truly valuable until they can be bought and sold
2529 like loaves of bread would be instantly and rightfully condemned as a
2530 monster.
2531   </p><p>
2532     It’s tempting to reach for the property hammer when Big Tech treats your
2533 information like a nail — not least because Big Tech are such prolific
2534 abusers of property hammers when it comes to <span class="emphasis"><em>their</em></span>
2535 information. But this is a mistake. If we allow markets to dictate the use
2536 of our information, then we’ll find that we’re sellers in a buyers’ market
2537 where the Big Tech monopolies set a price for our data that is so low as to
2538 be insignificant or, more likely, set at a nonnegotiable price of zero in a
2539 click-through agreement that you don’t have the opportunity to modify.
2540   </p><p>
2541     Meanwhile, establishing property rights over information will create
2542 insurmountable barriers to independent data processing. Imagine that we
2543 require a license to be negotiated when a translated document is compared
2544 with its original, something Google has done and continues to do billions of
2545 times to train its automated language translation tools. Google can afford
2546 this, but independent third parties cannot.  Google can staff a clearances
2547 department to negotiate one-time payments to the likes of the EU (one of the
2548 major repositories of translated documents) while independent watchdogs
2549 wanting to verify that the translations are well-prepared, or to root out
2550 bias in translations, will find themselves needing a staffed-up legal
2551 department and millions for licenses before they can even get started.
2552   </p><p>
2553     The same goes for things like search indexes of the web or photos of
2554 peoples’ houses, which have become contentious thanks to Google’s Street
2555 View project. Whatever problems may exist with Google’s photographing of
2556 street scenes, resolving them by letting people decide who can take pictures
2557 of the facades of their homes from a public street will surely create even
2558 worse ones. Think of how street photography is important for newsgathering —
2559 including informal newsgathering, like photographing abuses of authority —
2560 and how being able to document housing and street life are important for
2561 contesting eminent domain, advocating for social aid, reporting planning and
2562 zoning violations, documenting discriminatory and unequal living conditions,
2563 and more.
2564   </p><p>
2565     The ownership of facts is antithetical to many kinds of human progress. It’s
2566 hard to imagine a rule that limits Big Tech’s exploitation of our collective
2567 labors without inadvertently banning people from gathering data on online
2568 harassment or compiling indexes of changes in language or simply
2569 investigating how the platforms are shaping our discourse — all of which
2570 require scraping data that other people have created and subjecting it to
2571 scrutiny and analysis.
2572   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="persuasion-works-slowly"></a>Persuasion works… slowly</h2></div></div></div><p>
2573     The platforms may oversell their ability to persuade people, but obviously,
2574 persuasion works sometimes. Whether it’s the private realm that LGBTQ people
2575 used to recruit allies and normalize sexual diversity or the decadeslong
2576 project to convince people that markets are the only efficient way to solve
2577 complicated resource allocation problems, it’s clear that our societal
2578 attitudes <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> change.
2579   </p><p>
2580     The project of shifting societal attitudes is a game of inches and
2581 years. For centuries, svengalis have purported to be able to accelerate this
2582 process, but even the most brutal forms of propaganda have struggled to make
2583 permanent changes. Joseph Goebbels was able to subject Germans to daily,
2584 mandatory, hourslong radio broadcasts, to round up and torture and murder
2585 dissidents, and to seize full control over their children’s education while
2586 banning any literature, broadcasts, or films that did not comport with his
2587 worldview.
2588   </p><p>
2589     Yet, after 12 years of terror, once the war ended, Nazi ideology was largely
2590 discredited in both East and West Germany, and a program of national truth
2591 and reconciliation was put in its place. Racism and authoritarianism were
2592 never fully abolished in Germany, but neither were the majority of Germans
2593 irrevocably convinced of Nazism — and the rise of racist authoritarianism in
2594 Germany today tells us that the liberal attitudes that replaced Nazism were
2595 no more permanent than Nazism itself.
2596   </p><p>
2597     Racism and authoritarianism have also always been with us. Anyone who’s
2598 reviewed the kind of messages and arguments that racists put forward today
2599 would be hard-pressed to say that they have gotten better at presenting
2600 their ideas. The same pseudoscience, appeals to fear, and circular logic
2601 that racists presented in the 1980s, when the cause of white supremacy was
2602 on the wane, are to be found in the communications of leading white
2603 nationalists today.
2604   </p><p>
2605     If racists haven’t gotten more convincing in the past decade, then how is it
2606 that more people were convinced to be openly racist at that time? I believe
2607 that the answer lies in the material world, not the world of ideas. The
2608 ideas haven’t gotten more convincing, but people have become more
2609 afraid. Afraid that the state can’t be trusted to act as an honest broker in
2610 life-or-death decisions, from those regarding the management of the economy
2611 to the regulation of painkillers to the rules for handling private
2612 information. Afraid that the world has become a game of musical chairs in
2613 which the chairs are being taken away at a never-before-seen rate. Afraid
2614 that justice for others will come at their expense. Monopolism isn’t the
2615 cause of these fears, but the inequality and material desperation and policy
2616 malpractice that monopolism contributes to is a significant contributor to
2617 these conditions. Inequality creates the conditions for both conspiracies
2618 and violent racist ideologies, and then surveillance capitalism lets
2619 opportunists target the fearful and the conspiracy-minded.
2620   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="paying-wont-help"></a>Paying won’t help</h2></div></div></div><p>
2621     As the old saw goes, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the
2622 product.</span>“</span>
2623   </p><p>
2624     It’s a commonplace belief today that the advent of free, ad-supported media
2625 was the original sin of surveillance capitalism.  The reasoning is that the
2626 companies that charged for access couldn’t <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">compete with free</span>“</span>
2627 and so they were driven out of business. Their ad-supported competitors,
2628 meanwhile, declared open season on their users’ data in a bid to improve
2629 their ad targeting and make more money and then resorted to the most
2630 sensationalist tactics to generate clicks on those ads. If only we’d pay for
2631 media again, we’d have a better, more responsible, more sober discourse that
2632 would be better for democracy.
2633   </p><p>
2634     But the degradation of news products long precedes the advent of
2635 ad-supported online news. Long before newspapers were online, lax antitrust
2636 enforcement had opened the door for unprecedented waves of consolidation and
2637 roll-ups in newsrooms. Rival newspapers were merged, reporters and ad sales
2638 staff were laid off, physical plants were sold and leased back, leaving the
2639 companies loaded up with debt through leveraged buyouts and subsequent
2640 profit-taking by the new owners. In other words, it wasn’t merely shifts in
2641 the classified advertising market, which was long held to be the primary
2642 driver in the decline of the traditional newsroom, that made news companies
2643 unable to adapt to the internet — it was monopolism.
2644   </p><p>
2645     Then, as news companies <span class="emphasis"><em>did</em></span> come online, the ad
2646 revenues they commanded dropped even as the number of internet users (and
2647 thus potential online readers) increased. That shift was a function of
2648 consolidation in the ad sales market, with Google and Facebook emerging as
2649 duopolists who made more money every year from advertising while paying less
2650 and less of it to the publishers whose work the ads appeared
2651 alongside. Monopolism created a buyer’s market for ad inventory with
2652 Facebook and Google acting as gatekeepers.
2653   </p><p>
2654     Paid services continue to exist alongside free ones, and often it is these
2655 paid services — anxious to prevent people from bypassing their paywalls or
2656 sharing paid media with freeloaders — that exert the most control over their
2657 customers. Apple’s iTunes and App Stores are paid services, but to maximize
2658 their profitability, Apple has to lock its platforms so that third parties
2659 can’t make compatible software without permission. These locks allow the
2660 company to exercise both editorial control (enabling it to exclude <a class="ulink" href="https://ncac.org/news/blog/does-apples-strict-app-store-content-policy-limit-freedom-of-expression" target="_top">controversial
2661 political material</a>) and technological control, including control
2662 over who can repair the devices it makes. If we’re worried that ad-supported
2663 products deprive people of their right to self-determination by using
2664 persuasion techniques to nudge their purchase decisions a few degrees in one
2665 direction or the other, then the near-total control a single company holds
2666 over the decision of who gets to sell you software, parts, and service for
2667 your iPhone should have us very worried indeed.
2668   </p><p>
2669     We shouldn’t just be concerned about payment and control: The idea that
2670 paying will improve discourse is also dangerously wrong. The poor success
2671 rate of targeted advertising means that the platforms have to incentivize
2672 you to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">engage</span>“</span> with posts at extremely high levels to generate
2673 enough pageviews to safeguard their profits. As discussed earlier, to
2674 increase engagement, platforms like Facebook use machine learning to guess
2675 which messages will be most inflammatory and make a point of shoving those
2676 into your eyeballs at every turn so that you will hate-click and argue with
2677 people.
2678   </p><p>
2679     Perhaps paying would fix this, the reasoning goes. If platforms could be
2680 economically viable even if you stopped clicking on them once your
2681 intellectual and social curiosity had been slaked, then they would have no
2682 reason to algorithmically enrage you to get more clicks out of you, right?
2683   </p><p>
2684     There may be something to that argument, but it still ignores the wider
2685 economic and political context of the platforms and the world that allowed
2686 them to grow so dominant.
2687   </p><p>
2688     Platforms are world-spanning and all-encompassing because they are
2689 monopolies, and they are monopolies because we have gutted our most
2690 important and reliable anti-monopoly rules. Antitrust was neutered as a key
2691 part of the project to make the wealthy wealthier, and that project has
2692 worked. The vast majority of people on Earth have a negative net worth, and
2693 even the dwindling middle class is in a precarious state, undersaved for
2694 retirement, underinsured for medical disasters, and undersecured against
2695 climate and technology shocks.
2696   </p><p>
2697     In this wildly unequal world, paying doesn’t improve the discourse; it
2698 simply prices discourse out of the range of the majority of people. Paying
2699 for the product is dandy, if you can afford it.
2700   </p><p>
2701     If you think today’s filter bubbles are a problem for our discourse, imagine
2702 what they’d be like if rich people inhabited free-flowing Athenian
2703 marketplaces of ideas where you have to pay for admission while everyone
2704 else lives in online spaces that are subsidized by wealthy benefactors who
2705 relish the chance to establish conversational spaces where the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">house
2706 rules</span>“</span> forbid questioning the status quo. That is, imagine if the
2707 rich seceded from Facebook, and then, instead of running ads that made money
2708 for shareholders, Facebook became a billionaire’s vanity project that also
2709 happened to ensure that nobody talked about whether it was fair that only
2710 billionaires could afford to hang out in the rarified corners of the
2711 internet.
2712   </p><p>
2713     Behind the idea of paying for access is a belief that free markets will
2714 address Big Tech’s dysfunction. After all, to the extent that people have a
2715 view of surveillance at all, it is generally an unfavorable one, and the
2716 longer and more thoroughly one is surveilled, the less one tends to like
2717 it. Same goes for lock-in: If HP’s ink or Apple’s App Store were really
2718 obviously fantastic, they wouldn’t need technical measures to prevent users
2719 from choosing a rival’s product. The only reason these technical
2720 countermeasures exist is that the companies don’t believe their customers
2721 would <span class="emphasis"><em>voluntarily</em></span> submit to their terms, and they want
2722 to deprive them of the choice to take their business elsewhere.
2723   </p><p>
2724     Advocates for markets laud their ability to aggregate the diffused knowledge
2725 of buyers and sellers across a whole society through demand signals, price
2726 signals, and so on. The argument for surveillance capitalism being a
2727 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> is that machine-learning-driven persuasion
2728 techniques distort decision-making by consumers, leading to incorrect
2729 signals — consumers don’t buy what they prefer, they buy what they’re
2730 tricked into preferring. It follows that the monopolistic practices of
2731 lock-in, which do far more to constrain consumers’ free choices, are even
2732 more of a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism.</span>“</span>
2733   </p><p>
2734     The profitability of any business is constrained by the possibility that its
2735 customers will take their business elsewhere. Both surveillance and lock-in
2736 are anti-features that no customer wants.  But monopolies can capture their
2737 regulators, crush their competitors, insert themselves into their customers’
2738 lives, and corral people into <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">choosing</span>“</span> their services
2739 regardless of whether they want them — it’s fine to be terrible when there
2740 is no alternative.
2741   </p><p>
2742     Ultimately, surveillance and lock-in are both simply business strategies
2743 that monopolists can choose. Surveillance companies like Google are
2744 perfectly capable of deploying lock-in technologies — just look at the
2745 onerous Android licensing terms that require device-makers to bundle in
2746 Google’s suite of applications. And lock-in companies like Apple are
2747 perfectly capable of subjecting their users to surveillance if it means
2748 keeping the Chinese government happy and preserving ongoing access to
2749 Chinese markets.  Monopolies may be made up of good, ethical people, but as
2750 institutions, they are not your friend — they will do whatever they can get
2751 away with to maximize their profits, and the more monopolistic they are, the
2752 more they <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> get away with.
2753   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="an-ecology-moment-for-trustbusting"></a>An <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> moment for trustbusting</h2></div></div></div><p>
2754     If we’re going to break Big Tech’s death grip on our digital lives, we’re
2755 going to have to fight monopolies. That may sound pretty mundane and
2756 old-fashioned, something out of the New Deal era, while ending the use of
2757 automated behavioral modification feels like the plotline of a really cool
2758 cyberpunk novel.
2759   </p><p>
2760     Meanwhile, breaking up monopolies is something we seem to have forgotten how
2761 to do. There is a bipartisan, trans-Atlantic consensus that breaking up
2762 companies is a fool’s errand at best — liable to mire your federal
2763 prosecutors in decades of litigation — and counterproductive at worst,
2764 eroding the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">consumer benefits</span>“</span> of large companies with massive
2765 efficiencies of scale.
2766   </p><p>
2767     But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing
2768 robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies’ all-powerful grip
2769 on our society. The trustbusting era could not begin until we found the
2770 political will — until the people convinced politicians they’d have their
2771 backs when they went up against the richest, most powerful men in the world.
2772   </p><p>
2773     Could we find that political will again?
2774   </p><p>
2775     Copyright scholar James Boyle has described how the term
2776 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> marked a turning point in environmental
2777 activism. Prior to the adoption of this term, people who wanted to preserve
2778 whale populations didn’t necessarily see themselves as fighting the same
2779 battle as people who wanted to protect the ozone layer or fight freshwater
2780 pollution or beat back smog or acid rain.
2781   </p><p>
2782     But the term <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> welded these disparate causes together
2783 into a single movement, and the members of this movement found solidarity
2784 with one another. The people who cared about smog signed petitions
2785 circulated by the people who wanted to end whaling, and the anti-whalers
2786 marched alongside the people demanding action on acid rain. This uniting
2787 behind a common cause completely changed the dynamics of environmentalism,
2788 setting the stage for today’s climate activism and the sense that preserving
2789 the habitability of the planet Earth is a shared duty among all people.
2790   </p><p>
2791     I believe we are on the verge of a new <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> moment
2792 dedicated to combating monopolies. After all, tech isn’t the only
2793 concentrated industry nor is it even the <span class="emphasis"><em>most</em></span>
2794 concentrated of industries.
2795   </p><p>
2796     You can find partisans for trustbusting in every sector of the
2797 economy. Everywhere you look, you can find people who’ve been wronged by
2798 monopolists who’ve trashed their finances, their health, their privacy,
2799 their educations, and the lives of people they love.  Those people have the
2800 same cause as the people who want to break up Big Tech and the same
2801 enemies. When most of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a very few, it
2802 follows that nearly every large company will have overlapping shareholders.
2803   </p><p>
2804     That’s the good news: With a little bit of work and a little bit of
2805 coalition building, we have more than enough political will to break up Big
2806 Tech and every other concentrated industry besides. First we take Facebook,
2807 then we take AT&amp;T/WarnerMedia.
2808   </p><p>
2809     But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech
2810 <span class="emphasis"><em>instead</em></span> of breaking up the big companies also
2811 forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later.
2812   </p><p>
2813     Big Tech’s concentration currently means that their inaction on harassment,
2814 for example, leaves users with an impossible choice: absent themselves from
2815 public discourse by, say, quitting Twitter or endure vile, constant
2816 abuse. Big Tech’s over-collection and over-retention of data results in
2817 horrific identity theft. And their inaction on extremist recruitment means
2818 that white supremacists who livestream their shooting rampages can reach an
2819 audience of billions. The combination of tech concentration and media
2820 concentration means that artists’ incomes are falling even as the revenue
2821 generated by their creations are increasing.
2822   </p><p>
2823     Yet governments confronting all of these problems all inevitably converge on
2824 the same solution: deputize the Big Tech giants to police their users and
2825 render them liable for their users’ bad actions. The drive to force Big Tech
2826 to use automated filters to block everything from copyright infringement to
2827 sex-trafficking to violent extremism means that tech companies will have to
2828 allocate hundreds of millions to run these compliance systems.
2829   </p><p>
2830     These rules — the EU’s new Directive on Copyright, Australia’s new terror
2831 regulation, America’s FOSTA/SESTA sex-trafficking law and more — are not
2832 just death warrants for small, upstart competitors that might challenge Big
2833 Tech’s dominance but who lack the deep pockets of established incumbents to
2834 pay for all these automated systems. Worse still, these rules put a floor
2835 under how small we can hope to make Big Tech.
2836   </p><p>
2837     That’s because any move to break up Big Tech and cut it down to size will
2838 have to cope with the hard limit of not making these companies so small that
2839 they can no longer afford to perform these duties — and it’s
2840 <span class="emphasis"><em>expensive</em></span> to invest in those automated filters and
2841 outsource content moderation. It’s already going to be hard to unwind these
2842 deeply concentrated, chimeric behemoths that have been welded together in
2843 the pursuit of monopoly profits. Doing so while simultaneously finding some
2844 way to fill the regulatory void that will be left behind if these
2845 self-policing rulers were forced to suddenly abdicate will be much, much
2846 harder.
2847   </p><p>
2848     Allowing the platforms to grow to their present size has given them a
2849 dominance that is nearly insurmountable — deputizing them with public duties
2850 to redress the pathologies created by their size makes it virtually
2851 impossible to reduce that size. Lather, rinse, repeat: If the platforms
2852 don’t get smaller, they will get larger, and as they get larger, they will
2853 create more problems, which will give rise to more public duties for the
2854 companies, which will make them bigger still.
2855   </p><p>
2856     We can work to fix the internet by breaking up Big Tech and depriving them
2857 of monopoly profits, or we can work to fix Big Tech by making them spend
2858 their monopoly profits on governance. But we can’t do both. We have to
2859 choose between a vibrant, open internet or a dominated, monopolized internet
2860 commanded by Big Tech giants that we struggle with constantly to get them to
2861 behave themselves.
2862   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="make-big-tech-small-again"></a>Make Big Tech small again</h2></div></div></div><p>
2863     Trustbusting is hard. Breaking big companies into smaller ones is expensive
2864 and time-consuming. So time-consuming that by the time you’re done, the
2865 world has often moved on and rendered years of litigation irrelevant. From
2866 1969 to 1982, the U.S. government pursued an antitrust case against IBM over
2867 its dominance of mainframe computing — but the case collapsed in 1982
2868 because mainframes were being speedily replaced by PCs.
2869   </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
2870       A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to
2871 enforce the law as it was written.
2872     </p></blockquote></div><p>
2873     It’s far easier to prevent concentration than to fix it, and reinstating the
2874 traditional contours of U.S. antitrust enforcement will, at the very least,
2875 prevent further concentration. That means bans on mergers between large
2876 companies, on big companies acquiring nascent competitors, and on platform
2877 companies competing directly with the companies that rely on the platforms.
2878   </p><p>
2879     These powers are all in the plain language of U.S. antitrust laws, so in
2880 theory, a future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general
2881 to enforce the law as it was written. But after decades of judicial
2882 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">education</span>“</span> in the benefits of monopolies, after multiple
2883 administrations that have packed the federal courts with lifetime-appointed
2884 monopoly cheerleaders, it’s not clear that mere administrative action would
2885 do the trick.
2886   </p><p>
2887     If the courts frustrate the Justice Department and the president, the next
2888 stop would be Congress, which could eliminate any doubt about how antitrust
2889 law should be enforced in the U.S. by passing new laws that boil down to
2890 saying, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert
2891 Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, <span class="emphasis"><em>fuck that
2892 guy</em></span>.</span>“</span> In other words, the problem with monopolies is
2893 <span class="emphasis"><em>monopolism</em></span> — the concentration of power into too few
2894 hands, which erodes our right to self-determination. If there is a monopoly,
2895 the law wants it gone, period. Sure, get rid of monopolies that create
2896 <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">consumer harm</span>“</span> in the form of higher prices, but also,
2897 <span class="emphasis"><em>get rid of other monopolies, too</em></span>.
2898   </p><p>
2899     But this only prevents things from getting worse. To help them get better,
2900 we will have to build coalitions with other activists in the anti-monopoly
2901 ecology movement — a pluralism movement or a self-determination movement —
2902 and target existing monopolies in every industry for breakup and structural
2903 separation rules that prevent, for example, the giant eyewear monopolist
2904 Luxottica from dominating both the sale and the manufacture of spectacles.
2905   </p><p>
2906     In an important sense, it doesn’t matter which industry the breakups begin
2907 in. Once they start, shareholders in <span class="emphasis"><em>every</em></span> industry
2908 will start to eye their investments in monopolists skeptically. As
2909 trustbusters ride into town and start making lives miserable for
2910 monopolists, the debate around every corporate boardroom’s table will
2911 shift. People within corporations who’ve always felt uneasy about monopolism
2912 will gain a powerful new argument to fend off their evil rivals in the
2913 corporate hierarchy: <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">If we do it my way, we make less money; if we do
2914 it your way, a judge will fine us billions and expose us to ridicule and
2915 public disapprobation. So even though I get that it would be really cool to
2916 do that merger, lock out that competitor, or buy that little company and
2917 kill it before it can threaten it, we really shouldn’t — not if we don’t
2918 want to get tied to the DOJ’s bumper and get dragged up and down Trustbuster
2919 Road for the next 10 years.</span>“</span>
2920   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="goto-10"></a>20 GOTO 10</h2></div></div></div><p>
2921     Fixing Big Tech will require a lot of iteration. As cyber lawyer Lawrence
2922 Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, <span class="emphasis"><em>Code and Other Laws of
2923 Cyberspace</em></span>, our lives are regulated by four forces: law (what’s
2924 legal), code (what’s technologically possible), norms (what’s socially
2925 acceptable), and markets (what’s profitable).
2926   </p><p>
2927     If you could wave a wand and get Congress to pass a law that re-fanged the
2928 Sherman Act tomorrow, you could use the impending breakups to convince
2929 venture capitalists to fund competitors to Facebook, Google, Twitter, and
2930 Apple that would be waiting in the wings after they were cut down to size.
2931   </p><p>
2932     But getting Congress to act will require a massive normative shift, a mass
2933 movement of people who care about monopolies — and pulling them apart.
2934   </p><p>
2935     Getting people to care about monopolies will take technological
2936 interventions that help them to see what a world free from Big Tech might
2937 look like. Imagine if someone could make a beloved (but unauthorized)
2938 third-party Facebook or Twitter client that dampens the anxiety-producing
2939 algorithmic drumbeat and still lets you talk to your friends without being
2940 spied upon — something that made social media more sociable and less
2941 toxic. Now imagine that it gets shut down in a brutal legal battle. It’s
2942 always easier to convince people that something must be done to save a thing
2943 they love than it is to excite them about something that doesn’t even exist
2944 yet.
2945   </p><p>
2946     Neither tech nor law nor code nor markets are sufficient to reform Big
2947 Tech. But a profitable competitor to Big Tech could bankroll a legislative
2948 push; legal reform can embolden a toolsmith to make a better tool; the tool
2949 can create customers for a potential business who value the benefits of the
2950 internet but want them delivered without Big Tech; and that business can get
2951 funded and divert some of its profits to legal reform. 20 GOTO 10 (or
2952 lather, rinse, repeat). Do it again, but this time, get farther! After all,
2953 this time you’re starting with weaker Big Tech adversaries, a constituency
2954 that understands things can be better, Big Tech rivals who’ll help ensure
2955 their own future by bankrolling reform, and code that other programmers can
2956 build on to weaken Big Tech even further.
2957   </p><p>
2958     The surveillance capitalism hypothesis — that Big Tech’s products really
2959 work as well as they say they do and that’s why everything is so screwed up
2960 — is way too easy on surveillance and even easier on capitalism. Companies
2961 spy because they believe their own BS, and companies spy because governments
2962 let them, and companies spy because any advantage from spying is so
2963 short-lived and minor that they have to do more and more of it just to stay
2964 in place.
2965   </p><p>
2966     As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism
2967 that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a
2968 form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to
2969 inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason
2970 companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to
2971 both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall
2972 to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not
2973 piss off the monopolists.
2974   </p><p>
2975     Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule
2976 begets surveillance. Surveillance isn’t bad because it lets people
2977 manipulate us. It’s bad because it crushes our ability to be our authentic
2978 selves — and because it lets the rich and powerful figure out who might be
2979 thinking of building guillotines and what dirt they can use to discredit
2980 those embryonic guillotine-builders before they can even get to the
2981 lumberyard.
2982   </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="up-and-through"></a>Up and through</h2></div></div></div><p>
2983     With all the problems of Big Tech, it’s tempting to imagine solving the
2984 problem by returning to a world without tech at all. Resist that temptation.
2985   </p><p>
2986     The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is
2987 not reliant upon high tech, it will be because civilization has fallen. Big
2988 Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the
2989 proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the
2990 existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it’s up to us to seize
2991 the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under
2992 democratic, accountable control.
2993   </p><p>
2994     I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not
2995 in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize
2996 because it has <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">economies of scale</span>“</span> or some other nebulous
2997 feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right
2998 matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe — and
2999 doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our
3000 civilization, our species, and our planet.
3001   </p></div></div></body></html>