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+ }</style></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>
+ Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört, von Cory Doctorow.
+ </p><p>
+ Published by Petter Reinholdtsen.
+ </p><p>
+ ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (hard cover)
+ </p><p>
+ ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (paperback)
+ </p><p>
+ ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)
+ </p><p>
+ Dieses Buch kann unter <a class="ulink" href="https://www.lulu.com/" target="_top">https://www.lulu.com/</a> erworben werden.
+ </p><p>
+ Falls du Rechtschreibfehler oder sonstige Fehler findest, oder falls du
+Verbesserungsvorschläge die Übersetzung betreffend hast, pflege diese auf
+<a class="ulink" href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/rms-personal-data-safe/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/de/" target="_top">https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/rms-personal-data-safe/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/de/</a>
+ein.
+ </p><p>
+ <span class="inlinemediaobject"><img src="images/cc-some-rights-reserved.png" align="middle" height="38" alt="Creative Commons, einige Rechte vorbehalten"></span>
+ </p><p>
+ Dieses Buch steht unter einer Creative-Commons-Lizenz. Diese Lizenz erlaubt
+beliebige Nutzung dieses Werks, so lange eine Namensnennung erfolgt und
+keine Bearbeitungen erfolgen. Weitere Informationen über diese Lizenz
+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>.
+ </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, in einem Vierteljahrhundert</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">What is persuasion?</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#segmenting">1. Segmenting</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#deception">2. Deception</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#domination">3. Domination</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#bypassing-our-rational-faculties">4. Bypassing our rational faculties</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#if-data-is-the-new-oil-then-surveillance-capitalisms-engine-has-a-leak">If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-facebook">What is Facebook?</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopoly-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Monopoly and the right to the future tense</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#search-order-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Search order and the right to the future tense</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopolists-can-afford-sleeping-pills-for-watchdogs">Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#privacy-and-monopoly">Privacy and monopoly</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ronald-reagan-pioneer-of-tech-monopolism">Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers">Steering with the windshield wipers</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#surveillance-still-matters">Surveillance still matters</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dignity-and-sanctuary">Dignity and sanctuary</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#afflicting-the-afflicted">Afflicting the afflicted</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#any-data-you-collect-and-retain-will-eventually-leak">Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#critical-tech-exceptionalism-is-still-tech-exceptionalism">Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#how-monopolies-not-mind-control-drive-surveillance-capitalism-the-snapchat-story">How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The
+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>
+ Am meisten überrascht am Wiederaufkommen der „Flat Earther“ im
+21. Jahrhundert, wie allgegenwärtig die Beweise gegen diese Theorie
+sind. Man mag noch einsehen, dass vor hunderten von Jahren Leute
+vernünftigerweise denken durften, dass die Erde flach sei, da sie keinen
+ausreichend hohen Beobachtungspunkt erreichen konnten, von dem aus sie die
+Erdkrümmung hätten sehen können.
+ </p><p>
+ Aber heutzutage braucht es schon einen außergewöhnlichen Glauben, um
+weiterhin an die Theorie der Flachen Erde zu glauben - wo man doch bereits
+in Grundschulen GoPro-Kameras an Ballons befestigt und sie hoch genug
+aufsteigen lässt, um die Erdkrümmung zu fotografieren, vom gewöhnlichen
+Ausblick aus einem Flugzeugfenster ganz zu schweigen.
+ </p><p>
+ Ähnlich verhält es sich mit Weißem Nationalismus und Eugenik: In einem
+Zeitalter, in dem jeder durch eine Postsendung eines Rachenabstrichs und
+etwas Geld an eine DNA-Sequenzierungs-Firma zu einem Genom-Datenpunkt werden
+kann, war das Wiederlegen von <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Rassentheorie</span>“</span> noch nie so
+einfach.
+ </p><p>
+ Wir durchleben ein goldenes Zeitalter von sowohl sofort verfügbaren Fakten
+als auch deren Leugnung. Furchtbare, randständige Vorstellungen, die
+Jahrzehnte oder gar Jahrhunderte geschlummert haben, haben es
+augenscheinlich über Nacht in den Mainstream geschafft.
+ </p><p>
+ Wenn eine obskure Idee an Auftrieb erlangt, gibt es nur zwei Erklärungen
+dafür: Entweder ist die Person, die die Idee verbeitet, besser darin
+geworden, ihre Ansicht zu vertreten, oder die Ansicht ist angesichts sich
+anhäufender Beweise schwerer zu leugnen geworden. Anders gesagt: Wenn wir
+möchten, dass die Leute den Klimawandel ernst nehmen, können wir einen
+Haufen Greta Thunbergs wortgewandte, emotionale Reden auf Podien halten
+lassen und damit unsere Herzen und unseren Verstand gewinnen, oder wir
+können Fluten, Feuersbrünste, eine mörderische Sonne und Pandemien für uns
+sprechen lassen. In der Praxis sollten wir wohl von beidem etwas tun: Je
+mehr wir schmoren, brennen, ertrinken und dahinschwinden, umso einfacher
+wird es für die Greta Thunbergs dieser Welt, uns zu überzeugen.
+ </p><p>
+ Die Argumente für den absurden Glauben an hasserfüllte Verschwörungen wie
+Impfgegnerschaft, Klimaleugnung, eine flache Erde und Eugenik sind nicht
+besser als vor einer Generation. Sie sind sogar schlechter, weil sie Leuten
+schmackhaft gemacht werden, die wenigstens ein Gespür für die widerlegenden
+Fakten haben.
+ </p><p>
+ Impfgegnerschaft gibt es bereits seit den ersten Impfstoffen, aber frühere
+Impfgegner hatten es auf Leute abgesehen, die nicht einmal ein grundlegendes
+Verständnis von Mikrobiologie hatten, und überdies waren jene Impfgegner
+nicht Zeugen massenmörderischer Krankheiten wie Polio, Pocken und Masern
+geworden. Impfgegner von heute sind nicht eloquenter als frührere Impfgegner
+und haben es heute schwieriger.
+ </p><p>
+ Können diese Verschwörungstheoretiker wirklich im Ansatz ihrer wichtigsten
+Argumente erfolgreich sein?
+ </p><p>
+ Manche denken ja. Heutzutage gibt es den weitverbreiteten Glauben, dass
+maschinelles Lernen und kommerzielle Überwachung sogar den schwurbelnsten
+Verschwörungstheoretiker in einen Marionettenspieler verwandeln können, der
+anfälligen Leuten mit K.I.-gestützten, das rationale Denken austricksenden
+Argumenten die Wahrnehmung verbiegt und sie, normale Leute, schließlich in
+Flacherdler, Impfgegner oder gar Nazis verwandelt. Wenn die
+RAND-Corporation<a class="ulink" href="https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf" target="_top">
+Facebook für <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Radikalisierung</span>“</span></a> verantwortlich macht und
+wenn Facebook das Verbreiten von Falschinformationen in Bezug auf SARS-CoV-2
+<a class="ulink" href="https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_threat_health/" target="_top">seinen
+Algorithmen in die Schuhe schiebt</a>, dann ist die verdeckte Botschaft,
+dass maschinelles Lernen und Überwachung die Änderungen in unserem Konsens
+darüber hervorrufen, was wahr ist.
+ </p><p>
+ Schließlich muss in einer Welt, in der wuchernde und inkohärente
+Verschwörungstheorien wie Pizzagate und sein Nachfolger QAnon zahlreiche
+Anhänger haben, <span class="emphasis"><em> einiges </em></span> im Gange sein.
+ </p><p>
+ Aber was, wenn es eine andere Erklärung gibt? Was, wenn es die wesentlichen
+Umstände und nicht die Argumente sind, die diesen Verschwörungstheoretikern
+Aufwind geben? Was, wenn die Traumata vom Durchleben <span class="emphasis"><em>echter
+Verschwörungen</em></span> um uns herum - Verschwörungen zwischen Reichen,
+deren Lobbyisten und Gesetzemachern, um unangenehme Fakten und Beweise von
+unlauterem Verhalten zu vertuschen (solche Verschwörungen nennt man
+üblicherweise <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Korruption</span>“</span>) - Leute anfällig für
+Verschwörungstheorien macht?
+ </p><p>
+ Wenn es Trauma und keine ansteckende Krankheit - materielle Umstände und
+nicht Ideologie - ist, die heutzutage den Unterschied macht und abstoßenden
+Falschinformationen angesichts leicht beobachtbarer Fakten Auftrieb gibt,
+heißt das nicht, dass unsere Computernetzwerke keine Schuld haben. Sie
+tragen immer noch den Großteil dazu bei, indem sie anfällige Leute
+identifizieren und sie nach und nach zu immer extremeren Ideen und
+Communities führen.
+ </p><p>
+ Der Glaube an Verschwörungen ist ein wütendes Feuer, das reellen Schaden
+angerichtet hat und eine echte Bedrohung für unseren Planeten und unsere
+Spezies ist, von Epidemien <a class="ulink" href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html" target="_top">, die von Impfgegnern
+ausgelöst wurden,</a> bis zu Massenmorden <a class="ulink" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html" target="_top">,
+ausgelöst von rassistischen Verschwörungstheorien,</a> bis zum Sterben
+unseres Planeten, ausgelöst von Klimawandel-leugnerischer Passivität. Unsere
+Welt brennt, und wir müssen diese Brände löschen - indem wir herausfinden,
+wir die Leute die Wahrheit der Welt durch die Verschwörungen erkennen lassen
+können, durch sie verwirrt wurden.
+ </p><p>
+ Aber das Löschen von Bränden ist reaktiv. Wir müssen die
+<span class="emphasis"><em>Prävention</em></span> befeuern. Wir müssen auf die traumatischen
+realen Umstände abzielen, die Leute anfällig für die Pandemie von
+Verschwörungstheorien machen. Auch darin spielt Technologie eine Rolle.
+ </p><p>
+ Vorschläge hierfür gibt es genug. Von der <a class="ulink" href="https://edri.org/tag/terreg/" target="_top">Terrorist Content Regulation</a> der
+Europäischen Union, welche Plattformen zwingt, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">extremistische</span>“</span>
+Inhalte zu überwachen und zu entfernen, über die Vorschläge der Vereinigten
+Staaten, wonach <a class="ulink" href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution" target="_top">Tech-Firmen
+ihre Nutzer ausspähen</a> und <a class="ulink" href="https://www.natlawreview.com/article/repeal-cda-section-230" target="_top">für deren
+„bad speech“</a> haftbar zu machen, gibt es zahlreiche Anstrengunen, um
+Tech-Firmen dazu zu zwingen, die Probleme zu lösen, die sie selbst
+geschaffen haben.
+ </p><p>
+ Dennoch fehlt ein wesentlicher Aspekt in dieser Debatte. All diese Lösungen
+setzen voraus, dass Techfirmen ein Fixum sind, dass ihre Dominanz über das
+Internet ein dauerhaftes Faktum ist. Vorschläge, „Big Tech”-Firmen mit einem
+dezentralerem, pluralistischerem Internet zu ersetzen, finden sich
+nirgendwo. Die <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Lösungen</span>“</span>, die heute zur Debatte stehen,
+<span class="emphasis"><em>setzen voraus</em></span>, dass Big Tech „big“ bleibt, weil nur die
+größten Unternehmen es sich leisten können, entsprechende gesetzeskonforme
+Systeme zu etablieren.
+ </p><p>
+ Wir müssen herausfinden, wie unsere Technologie aussehen soll, wenn wir aus
+diesem Schlamassel wieder herauskommen wollen. Wir stehen heute an einem
+Scheideweg, wo wir uns entscheiden müssen, ob wir die „Big Tech“-Firmen
+reparieren wollen, die das Internet kontrollieren, oder ob wir das Internet
+reparieren wollen, indem wir es aus dem Klammergriff von „Big Tech“
+befreien. Beides gleichzeitig geht nicht, so dass wir uns entscheiden
+müssen.
+ </p><p>
+ Ich möchte, dass wir uns weise entscheiden. Zur Reparatur ist es essentiell,
+dass „Big Tech“ gezähmt wird, und dafür brauchen wir
+Digitalen-Rechte-Aktivismus.
+ </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, in einem Vierteljahrhundert</h2></div></div></div><p>
+ Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus ist mehr als 30 Jahre alt. Die Eletronic
+Frontier Foundation ist in diesem Jahr 30 Jahre alt geworden; die Free
+Software Foundation wurde 1985 gegründet. Das am meisten im Laufe der
+Geschichte der Bewegung gegen sie vorgebrachte Argument war, dass sie
+irrelevant sei: Die Themen „echter“ Aktivisten wären auch
+„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&text=(July%206%2C%202010)%20On,connection%20100%20MBPS%20by%202015." target="_top">Finnland
+im Jahr 2010 einen Breitbandinternetzugang zum Menschenrecht erklärte
+</a>), und „echter-Welt“-Aktivismus noch als Stiefel-Aktivismus („shoe
+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
+für <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Clicktivism</span>“</span></a>). Aber je zentraler Technologien für
+unseren Alltag wurde, desto mehr sind die Irrelevanz-Vorwürfe Vorwürfen von
+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
+Technologie-Unternehmen Werbung machen
+möchtest</a></span>“</span>). (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Wie konntest du nur nicht vorhersehen,
+dass Tech solch eine zerstörerische Kraft sein kann?</span>“</span>). Aber
+Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus steht nach wie vor dafür: auf die Menschen in
+einer Welt achtgeben, die unausweichlich von Technologie übernommen wird.
+ </p><p>
+ Die neueste Form dieser Kritik kommt in der Form des
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überwachungskapitalismus</span>“</span>, einem Begriff, der von der
+Business-Professorin Shoshana Zuboff in ihrem langen und einflussreichen
+Buch <span class="emphasis"><em>Das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus</em></span> geprägt
+wurde, das 2019 erschienen ist. Zuboff argumentiert, dass
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überwachungskapitalismus</span>“</span> ein einzigartigs Geschöpf der
+Tech-Industrie sei und dass es es sich von allen anderen ausbeuterischen
+kommerziellen Praktiken Geschichte unterscheide; ein Geschöpf, das <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">
+sich aus unerwarteten und unverständlichen Mechanismen aus Extrahierung,
+Kommodifizierung und Kontrolle zusammensetze, das Menschen schließlich von
+ihrem eigenen Verhalten loslöse und dabei neue Märkte von
+Verhaltensvorhersage und -manipulation schaffe.</span>“</span> Es handelt sich
+dabei um eine neue tödliche Form von Kapitalismus, einen
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">schurkenhaften Kapitalismus</span>“</span>, und unsere Unfähigkeit, dessen
+einzigartigen Fähigkeiten und Gefahren zu verstehen, stellt eine
+existenzielle und speziesweite Bedrohung dar. Sie hat insofern recht, als
+Kapitalismus unsere Spezies heute bedroht, und sie hat auch recht insofern,
+als Technologie unsere Spezies und Zivilisation vor einzigartige
+Herausforderungen stellt, aber sie irrt sich darin, inwiefern Technologie
+andersartig ist und warum es unsere Spezies bedroht.
+ </p><p>
+ Genauer gesagt, denke ich, dass ihre falsche Diagnose uns einen Weg
+hinabführt, der Big Tech stärker macht, nicht schwächer. Wir müssen Big Tech
+zu Fall bringen, und um das zu tun, müssen wir zunächst das Problem korrekt
+identifizieren.
+ </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>
+ Frühe Kritiker des Digitalen-Rechte-Managements - die am wohl am besten
+durch Organisationen wie die Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free
+Software Foundation, Public Knowledge und andere vertreten werden, die ihren
+Fokus auf die Bewahrung und Stärkung elementarer Menschenrechte in der
+digitalen Welt legen - verurteilten Aktivisten für die Ausübung von
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Tech-Exzeptionalismus</span>“</span>. Um die Jahrtausendwende machten
+bedeutende Leute jegliche Behauptung, dass Tech-Regularien in der
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">echten Welt</span>“</span> eine Rolle spielten, lächerlich. Behauptungen,
+wonach Tech-Regularien Folgen für Speech, Zusammenschlüsse, Privatsphäre,
+Durchsuchungen und Konfiskationen, sowie für grundlegende Rechte und
+Gleichheit haben konnten, wurden verlacht - verlacht als Besorgnis, die von
+traurigen Nerds, die sonst in Webforen über <span class="emphasis"><em> Star Trek</em></span>
+diskutierten, geschürt und gar über die Freiheitskämpfe der Freedom Rider,
+Nelson Mandela oder des Warschauer Ghetto-Aufstandes erhoben würden.
+ </p><p>
+ In den seitdem vergangenen Jahrzehnten wurden die Vorwürfe von
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Tech-Exzeptionalismus</span>“</span> schärfer, zumal sich die Bedeutung von
+Technologie im Alltag ausgeweitet hat: Jetzt, da Technologie jede Nische
+unseres Lebens infiltriert hat und unsere Online-Leben von einer Handvoll
+Giganten monopolisiert wurden, werden die Verteidiger der digitalen
+Freiheiten Beschuldigt, Wasserträger von „Big Tech“ zu sein und Deckung für
+dessen von eigenen Interessen geleiteter Fahrlässigkeit (oder schlimmer
+noch: ruchlose Pläne) zu bieten.
+ </p><p>
+ Nach meiner Aufassung ist die Digitale-Rechte-Bewegung stehen geblieben,
+während der Rest der Welt sich weiterbewegt hat. Von den frühesten Tagen an
+war das Anliegen der Bewegung, dass Nutzer und Programmierer ihre
+grundlegenden Rechte verwirklichen Rechte können. Digitale-Rechte-Aktivisten
+kümmerten sich nur soweit um Firmen, als sie die Rechte ihrer Nutzen
+achteten (oder, wie so oft, wenn sich Unternehmen so töricht verhielten und
+neue Regularien zu Fall zu bringen drohten, was es auch guten Akteuren
+schwerer gemacht hätte, Nutzen zu helfen).
+ </p><p>
+ Der Kritiker des <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überwachungskapitalismus</span>“</span> lässt die
+Digitale-Rechte-Bewegung erneut in einem neuen Licht erscheinen: nicht als
+Alarmisten, die die Wichtigkeit ihrer Spielzeuge überschätzen oder als
+Sprecher für Big Tech, sondern als gelassene Sessel-Aktivisten, deren
+langjähriger Aktivismus zur Last geworden ist, weil es sie unfähig macht,
+neuartige Bedrohungen zu erkennen, während sie weiterhin Tech-Schlachten des
+vorigen Jahrhunderts schlagen.
+ </p><p>
+ Aber Tech-Exzeptionalismus ist eine Sünde, unabhängig davon, wer ihn
+betreibt.
+ </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>
+ Du hast wahrscheinlich schon einmal gehört, dass <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">du das Produkt bist,
+wenn du nicht für das Produkt bezahlst </span>“</span>. Wie wir noch sehen werden,
+ist diese Aussage im Grunde richtig, aber nicht vollständig. Aber es
+stimmt<span class="emphasis"><em>definitiv</em></span> , dass die Kunden von Big Tech
+Werbeunternehmen sind, und das Geschäftsmodell von Google und Facebook ist
+letztlich ihre Fähigkeit, <span class="emphasis"><em>dich</em></span> zu Käufen zu
+verleiten. Das Produkt von Big Tech ist die Überzeugungskunst. Die Dienste -
+soziale Medien, Suchmaschinen, Karten- und Kurznachrichtendienste und
+weitere - sind schlicht Vehikel, um dessen Nutzer von etwas zu überzeugen
+und zu etwas zu verleiten.
+ </p><p>
+ Die Angst vor Überwachungskapitalismus basiert zunächst auf der (korrekten)
+Annahme, dass alles, was Big Tech über sich selbst sagt, wahrscheinlich eine
+Lüge ist. Aber der Kritiker des Überwachungskapitalismus macht hiervon eine
+Ausnahme, soweit es Big Techs eigene Behauptungen in seinen
+Verkaufsprospekten sind - der atemlose Hype, der potentiellen
+Werbeunternehmen online und in Werbetechnologie-Seminaren über die
+Wirksamkeit seiner Produkte angedient wird: Dem Hype zufolge kann uns Big
+Tech so gut wie von ihm behauptet beeinflussen. Das ist jedoch falsch, weil
+Verkaufsprospekte kein zuverlässiger Indikator für die Wirksamkeit eines
+Produkts ist.
+ </p><p>
+ Überwachungskapitalismus geht davon aus, dass Big Tech etwas Reales
+verkauft, weil Werbeunternehmen viel von dem kaufen, was Big Tech
+verkauft. Aber die massiven Umsatzzahlen von Big Tech könnten einfach auch
+nur das Produkt einer weit verbreiteten Täuschung sein, oder schlimmer noch:
+eines monopolistischen Kontrolle über unser aller Kommunikation und Handel.
+ </p><p>
+ Being watched changes your behavior, and not for the better. It creates
+risks for our social progress. Zuboff’s book features beautifully wrought
+explanations of these phenomena. But Zuboff also claims that surveillance
+literally robs us of our free will — that when our personal data is mixed
+with machine learning, it creates a system of persuasion so devastating that
+we are helpless before it. That is, Facebook uses an algorithm to analyze
+the data it nonconsensually extracts from your daily life and uses it to
+customize your feed in ways that get you to buy stuff. It is a mind-control
+ray out of a 1950s comic book, wielded by mad scientists whose
+supercomputers guarantee them perpetual and total world domination.
+ </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="what-is-persuasion"></a>What is persuasion?</h2></div></div></div><p>
+ To understand why you shouldn’t worry about mind-control rays — but why you
+<span class="emphasis"><em>should</em></span> worry about surveillance
+<span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> Big Tech — we must start by unpacking what we mean
+by <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">persuasion.</span>“</span>
+ </p><p>
+ Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists promise their customers
+(the advertisers) that if they use machine-learning tools trained on
+unimaginably large data sets of nonconsensually harvested personal
+information, they will be able to uncover ways to bypass the rational
+faculties of the public and direct their behavior, creating a stream of
+purchases, votes, and other desired outcomes.
+ </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
+ The impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be
+central to our analysis and any remedies we seek.
+ </p></blockquote></div><p>
+ But there’s little evidence that this is happening. Instead, the predictions
+that surveillance capitalism delivers to its customers are much less
+impressive. Rather than finding ways to bypass our rational faculties,
+surveillance capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg mostly do one or more of three
+things:
+ </p><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="segmenting"></a>1. Segmenting</h3></div></div></div><p>
+ If you’re selling diapers, you have better luck if you pitch them to people
+in maternity wards. Not everyone who enters or leaves a maternity ward just
+had a baby, and not everyone who just had a baby is in the market for
+diapers. But having a baby is a really reliable correlate of being in the
+market for diapers, and being in a maternity ward is highly correlated with
+having a baby. Hence diaper ads around maternity wards (and even pitchmen
+for baby products, who haunt maternity wards with baskets full of freebies).
+ </p><p>
+ Surveillance capitalism is segmenting times a billion. Diaper vendors can go
+way beyond people in maternity wards (though they can do that, too, with
+things like location-based mobile ads). They can target you based on
+whether you’re reading articles about child-rearing, diapers, or a host of
+other subjects, and data mining can suggest unobvious keywords to advertise
+against. They can target you based on the articles you’ve recently
+read. They can target you based on what you’ve recently purchased. They can
+target you based on whether you receive emails or private messages about
+these subjects — or even if you speak aloud about them (though Facebook and
+the like convincingly claim that’s not happening — yet).
+ </p><p>
+ This is seriously creepy.
+ </p><p>
+ But it’s not mind control.
+ </p><p>
+ It doesn’t deprive you of your free will. It doesn’t trick you.
+ </p><p>
+ Think of how surveillance capitalism works in politics. Surveillance
+capitalist companies sell political operatives the power to locate people
+who might be receptive to their pitch. Candidates campaigning on finance
+industry corruption seek people struggling with debt; candidates campaigning
+on xenophobia seek out racists. Political operatives have always targeted
+their message whether their intentions were honorable or not: Union
+organizers set up pitches at factory gates, and white supremacists hand out
+fliers at John Birch Society meetings.
+ </p><p>
+ But this is an inexact and thus wasteful practice. The union organizer can’t
+know which worker to approach on the way out of the factory gates and may
+waste their time on a covert John Birch Society member; the white
+supremacist doesn’t know which of the Birchers are so delusional that making
+it to a meeting is as much as they can manage and which ones might be
+convinced to cross the country to carry a tiki torch through the streets of
+Charlottesville, Virginia.
+ </p><p>
+ Because targeting improves the yields on political pitches, it can
+accelerate the pace of political upheaval by making it possible for everyone
+who has secretly wished for the toppling of an autocrat — or just an 11-term
+incumbent politician — to find everyone else who feels the same way at very
+low cost. This has been critical to the rapid crystallization of recent
+political movements including Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street as
+well as less savory players like the far-right white nationalist movements
+that marched in Charlottesville.
+ </p><p>
+ It’s important to differentiate this kind of political organizing from
+influence campaigns; finding people who secretly agree with you isn’t the
+same as convincing people to agree with you. The rise of phenomena like
+nonbinary or otherwise nonconforming gender identities is often
+characterized by reactionaries as the result of online brainwashing
+campaigns that convince impressionable people that they have been secretly
+queer all along.
+ </p><p>
+ But the personal accounts of those who have come out tell a different story
+where people who long harbored a secret about their gender were emboldened
+by others coming forward and where people who knew that they were different
+but lacked a vocabulary for discussing that difference learned the right
+words from these low-cost means of finding people and learning about their
+ideas.
+ </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="deception"></a>2. Deception</h3></div></div></div><p>
+ Lies and fraud are pernicious, and surveillance capitalism supercharges them
+through targeting. If you want to sell a fraudulent payday loan or subprime
+mortgage, surveillance capitalism can help you find people who are both
+desperate and unsophisticated and thus receptive to your pitch. This
+accounts for the rise of many phenomena, like multilevel marketing schemes,
+in which deceptive claims about potential earnings and the efficacy of sales
+techniques are targeted at desperate people by advertising against search
+queries that indicate, for example, someone struggling with ill-advised
+loans.
+ </p><p>
+ Surveillance capitalism also abets fraud by making it easy to locate other
+people who have been similarly deceived, forming a community of people who
+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
+forums</a> where people who are being victimized by multilevel marketing
+frauds gather to trade tips on how to improve their luck in peddling the
+product.
+ </p><p>
+ Sometimes, online deception involves replacing someone’s correct beliefs
+with incorrect ones, as it does in the anti-vaccination movement, whose
+victims are often people who start out believing in vaccines but are
+convinced by seemingly plausible evidence that leads them into the false
+belief that vaccines are harmful.
+ </p><p>
+ But it’s much more common for fraud to succeed when it doesn’t have to
+displace a true belief. When my daughter contracted head lice at daycare,
+one of the daycare workers told me I could get rid of them by treating her
+hair and scalp with olive oil. I didn’t know anything about head lice, and I
+assumed that the daycare worker did, so I tried it (it didn’t work, and it
+doesn’t work). It’s easy to end up with false beliefs when you simply don’t
+know any better and when those beliefs are conveyed by someone who seems to
+know what they’re doing.
+ </p><p>
+ This is pernicious and difficult — and it’s also the kind of thing the
+internet can help guard against by making true information available,
+especially in a form that exposes the underlying deliberations among parties
+with sharply divergent views, such as Wikipedia. But it’s not brainwashing;
+it’s fraud. In the <a class="ulink" href="https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/" target="_top">majority of cases</a>,
+the victims of these fraud campaigns have an informational void filled in
+the customary way, by consulting a seemingly reliable source. If I look up
+the length of the Brooklyn Bridge and learn that it is 5,800 feet long, but
+in reality, it is 5,989 feet long, the underlying deception is a problem,
+but it’s a problem with a simple remedy. It’s a very different problem from
+the anti-vax issue in which someone’s true belief is displaced by a false
+one by means of sophisticated persuasion.
+ </p></div><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="domination"></a>3. Domination</h3></div></div></div><p>
+ Surveillance capitalism is the result of monopoly. Monopoly is the cause,
+and surveillance capitalism and its negative outcomes are the effects of
+monopoly. I’ll get into this in depth later, but for now, suffice it to say
+that the tech industry has grown up with a radical theory of antitrust that
+has allowed companies to grow by merging with their rivals, buying up their
+nascent competitors, and expanding to control whole market verticals.
+ </p><p>
+ One example of how monopolism aids in persuasion is through dominance:
+Google makes editorial decisions about its algorithms that determine the
+sort order of the responses to our queries. If a cabal of fraudsters have
+set out to trick the world into thinking that the Brooklyn Bridge is 5,800
+feet long, and if Google gives a high search rank to this group in response
+to queries like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">How long is the Brooklyn Bridge?</span>“</span> then the
+first eight or 10 screens’ worth of Google results could be wrong. And since
+most people don’t go beyond the first couple of results — let alone the
+first <span class="emphasis"><em>page</em></span> of results — Google’s choice means that many
+people will be deceived.
+ </p><p>
+ Google’s dominance over search — more than 86% of web searches are performed
+through Google — means that the way it orders its search results has an
+outsized effect on public beliefs. Ironically, Google claims this is why it
+can’t afford to have any transparency in its algorithm design: Google’s
+search dominance makes the results of its sorting too important to risk
+telling the world how it arrives at those results lest some bad actor
+discover a flaw in the ranking system and exploit it to push its point of
+view to the top of the search results. There’s an obvious remedy to a
+company that is too big to audit: break it up into smaller pieces.
+ </p><p>
+ Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> whose
+data-hoarding and machine-learning techniques rob us of our free will. But
+influence campaigns that seek to displace existing, correct beliefs with
+false ones have an effect that is small and temporary while monopolistic
+dominance over informational systems has massive, enduring
+effects. Controlling the results to the world’s search queries means
+controlling access both to arguments and their rebuttals and, thus, control
+over much of the world’s beliefs. If our concern is how corporations are
+foreclosing on our ability to make up our own minds and determine our own
+futures, the impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and
+should be central to our analysis and any remedies we seek.
+ </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>
+ <span class="emphasis"><em>This</em></span> is the good stuff: using machine learning,
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">dark patterns,</span>“</span> engagement hacking, and other techniques to
+get us to do things that run counter to our better judgment. This is mind
+control.
+ </p><p>
+ Some of these techniques have proven devastatingly effective (if only in the
+short term). The use of countdown timers on a purchase completion page can
+create a sense of urgency that causes you to ignore the nagging internal
+voice suggesting that you should shop around or sleep on your decision. The
+use of people from your social graph in ads can provide <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">social
+proof</span>“</span> that a purchase is worth making. Even the auction system
+pioneered by eBay is calculated to play on our cognitive blind spots,
+letting us feel like we <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">own</span>“</span> something because we bid on it,
+thus encouraging us to bid again when we are outbid to ensure that
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">our</span>“</span> things stay ours.
+ </p><p>
+ Games are extraordinarily good at this. <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Free to play</span>“</span> games
+manipulate us through many techniques, such as presenting players with a
+series of smoothly escalating challenges that create a sense of mastery and
+accomplishment but which sharply transition into a set of challenges that
+are impossible to overcome without paid upgrades. Add some social proof to
+the mix — a stream of notifications about how well your friends are faring —
+and before you know it, you’re buying virtual power-ups to get to the next
+level.
+ </p><p>
+ Companies have risen and fallen on these techniques, and the
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">fallen</span>“</span> part is worth paying attention to. In general, living
+things adapt to stimulus: Something that is very compelling or noteworthy
+when you first encounter it fades with repetition until you stop noticing it
+altogether. Consider the refrigerator hum that irritates you when it starts
+up but disappears into the background so thoroughly that you only notice it
+when it stops again.
+ </p><p>
+ That’s why behavioral conditioning uses <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">intermittent reinforcement
+schedules.</span>“</span> Instead of giving you a steady drip of encouragement or
+setbacks, games and gamified services scatter rewards on a randomized
+schedule — often enough to keep you interested and random enough that you
+can never quite find the pattern that would make it boring.
+ </p><p>
+ Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful behavioral tool, but it also
+represents a collective action problem for surveillance capitalism. The
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">engagement techniques</span>“</span> invented by the behaviorists of
+surveillance capitalist companies are quickly copied across the whole sector
+so that what starts as a mysteriously compelling fillip in the design of a
+service—like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">pull to refresh</span>“</span> or alerts when someone likes
+your posts or side quests that your characters get invited to while in the
+midst of main quests—quickly becomes dully ubiquitous. The
+impossible-to-nail-down nonpattern of randomized drips from your phone
+becomes a grey-noise wall of sound as every single app and site starts to
+make use of whatever seems to be working at the time.
+ </p><p>
+ From the surveillance capitalist’s point of view, our adaptive capacity is
+like a harmful bacterium that deprives it of its food source — our attention
+— and novel techniques for snagging that attention are like new antibiotics
+that can be used to breach our defenses and destroy our
+self-determination. And there <span class="emphasis"><em>are</em></span> techniques like
+that. Who can forget the Great Zynga Epidemic, when all of our friends were
+caught in <span class="emphasis"><em>FarmVille</em></span>’s endless, mindless dopamine loops?
+But every new attention-commanding technique is jumped on by the whole
+industry and used so indiscriminately that antibiotic resistance sets
+in. Given enough repetition, almost all of us develop immunity to even the
+most powerful techniques — by 2013, two years after Zynga’s peak, its user
+base had halved.
+ </p><p>
+ Not everyone, of course. Some people never adapt to stimulus, just as some
+people never stop hearing the hum of the refrigerator. This is why most
+people who are exposed to slot machines play them for a while and then move
+on while a small and tragic minority liquidate their kids’ college funds,
+buy adult diapers, and position themselves in front of a machine until they
+collapse.
+ </p><p>
+ But surveillance capitalism’s margins on behavioral modification
+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
+the base rate is way less than 1%</a> with an improved rate of… still
+less than 1%. Even penny slot machines pull down pennies for every spin
+while surveillance capitalism rakes in infinitesimal penny fractions.
+ </p><p>
+ Slot machines’ high returns mean that they can be profitable just by
+draining the fortunes of the small rump of people who are pathologically
+vulnerable to them and unable to adapt to their tricks. But surveillance
+capitalism can’t survive on the fractional pennies it brings down from that
+vulnerable sliver — that’s why, after the Great Zynga Epidemic had finally
+burned itself out, the small number of still-addicted players left behind
+couldn’t sustain it as a global phenomenon. And new powerful attention
+weapons aren’t easy to find, as is evidenced by the long years since the
+last time Zynga had a hit. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that
+Zynga has to spend on developing new tools to blast through our adaptation,
+it has never managed to repeat the lucky accident that let it snag so much
+of our attention for a brief moment in 2009. Powerhouses like Supercell have
+fared a little better, but they are rare and throw away many failures for
+every success.
+ </p><p>
+ The vulnerability of small segments of the population to dramatic, efficient
+corporate manipulation is a real concern that’s worthy of our attention and
+energy. But it’s not an existential threat to society.
+ </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>
+ This adaptation problem offers an explanation for one of surveillance
+capitalism’s most alarming traits: its relentless hunger for data and its
+endless expansion of data-gathering capabilities through the spread of
+sensors, online surveillance, and acquisition of data streams from third
+parties.
+ </p><p>
+ Zuboff observes this phenomenon and concludes that data must be very
+valuable if surveillance capitalism is so hungry for it. (In her words:
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous
+intensification of the means of production, so surveillance capitalists and
+their market players are now locked into the continuous intensification of
+the means of behavioral modification and the gathering might of
+instrumentarian power.</span>“</span>) But what if the voracious appetite is
+because data has such a short half-life — because people become inured so
+quickly to new, data-driven persuasion techniques — that the companies are
+locked in an arms race with our limbic system? What if it’s all a Red
+Queen’s race where they have to run ever faster — collect ever-more data —
+just to stay in the same spot?
+ </p><p>
+ Of course, all of Big Tech’s persuasion techniques work in concert with one
+another, and collecting data is useful beyond mere behavioral trickery.
+ </p><p>
+ If someone wants to recruit you to buy a refrigerator or join a pogrom, they
+might use profiling and targeting to send messages to people they judge to
+be good sales prospects. The messages themselves may be deceptive, making
+claims about things you’re not very knowledgeable about (food safety and
+energy efficiency or eugenics and historical claims about racial
+superiority). They might use search engine optimization and/or armies of
+fake reviewers and commenters and/or paid placement to dominate the
+discourse so that any search for further information takes you back to their
+messages. And finally, they may refine the different pitches using machine
+learning and other techniques to figure out what kind of pitch works best on
+someone like you.
+ </p><p>
+ Each phase of this process benefits from surveillance: The more data they
+have, the more precisely they can profile you and target you with specific
+messages. Think of how you’d sell a fridge if you knew that the warranty on
+your prospect’s fridge just expired and that they were expecting a tax
+rebate in April.
+ </p><p>
+ Also, the more data they have, the better they can craft deceptive messages
+— if I know that you’re into genealogy, I might not try to feed you
+pseudoscience about genetic differences between <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">races,</span>“</span>
+sticking instead to conspiratorial secret histories of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">demographic
+replacement</span>“</span> and the like.
+ </p><p>
+ Facebook also helps you locate people who have the same odious or antisocial
+views as you. It makes it possible to find other people who want to carry
+tiki torches through the streets of Charlottesville in Confederate
+cosplay. It can help you find other people who want to join your militia and
+go to the border to look for undocumented migrants to terrorize. It can help
+you find people who share your belief that vaccines are poison and that the
+Earth is flat.
+ </p><p>
+ There is one way in which targeted advertising uniquely benefits those
+advocating for socially unacceptable causes: It is invisible. Racism is
+widely geographically dispersed, and there are few places where racists —
+and only racists — gather. This is similar to the problem of selling
+refrigerators in that potential refrigerator purchasers are geographically
+dispersed and there are few places where you can buy an ad that will be
+primarily seen by refrigerator customers. But buying a refrigerator is
+socially acceptable while being a Nazi is not, so you can buy a billboard or
+advertise in the newspaper sports section for your refrigerator business,
+and the only potential downside is that your ad will be seen by a lot of
+people who don’t want refrigerators, resulting in a lot of wasted expense.
+ </p><p>
+ But even if you wanted to advertise your Nazi movement on a billboard or
+prime-time TV or the sports section, you would struggle to find anyone
+willing to sell you the space for your ad partly because they disagree with
+your views and partly because they fear censure (boycott, reputational
+damage, etc.) from other people who disagree with your views.
+ </p><p>
+ Targeted ads solve this problem: On the internet, every ad unit can be
+different for every person, meaning that you can buy ads that are only shown
+to people who appear to be Nazis and not to people who hate Nazis. When
+there’s spillover — when someone who hates racism is shown a racist
+recruiting ad — there is some fallout; the platform or publication might get
+an angry public or private denunciation. But the nature of the risk assumed
+by an online ad buyer is different than the risks to a traditional publisher
+or billboard owner who might want to run a Nazi ad.
+ </p><p>
+ Online ads are placed by algorithms that broker between a diverse ecosystem
+of self-serve ad platforms that anyone can buy an ad through, so the Nazi ad
+that slips onto your favorite online publication isn’t seen as their moral
+failing but rather as a failure in some distant, upstream ad supplier. When
+a publication gets a complaint about an offensive ad that’s appearing in one
+of its units, it can take some steps to block that ad, but the Nazi might
+buy a slightly different ad from a different broker serving the same
+unit. And in any event, internet users increasingly understand that when
+they see an ad, it’s likely that the advertiser did not choose that
+publication and that the publication has no idea who its advertisers are.
+ </p><p>
+ These layers of indirection between advertisers and publishers serve as
+moral buffers: Today’s moral consensus is largely that publishers shouldn’t
+be held responsible for the ads that appear on their pages because they’re
+not actively choosing to put those ads there. Because of this, Nazis are
+able to overcome significant barriers to organizing their movement.
+ </p><p>
+ Data has a complex relationship with domination. Being able to spy on your
+customers can alert you to their preferences for your rivals and allow you
+to head off your rivals at the pass.
+ </p><p>
+ More importantly, if you can dominate the information space while also
+gathering data, then you make other deceptive tactics stronger because it’s
+harder to break out of the web of deceit you’re spinning. Domination — that
+is, ultimately becoming a monopoly — and not the data itself is the
+supercharger that makes every tactic worth pursuing because monopolistic
+domination deprives your target of an escape route.
+ </p><p>
+ If you’re a Nazi who wants to ensure that your prospects primarily see
+deceptive, confirming information when they search for more, you can improve
+your odds by seeding the search terms they use through your initial
+communications. You don’t need to own the top 10 results for <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">voter
+suppression</span>“</span> if you can convince your marks to confine their search
+terms to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">voter fraud,</span>“</span> which throws up a very different set of
+search results.
+ </p><p>
+ Surveillance capitalists are like stage mentalists who claim that their
+extraordinary insights into human behavior let them guess the word that you
+wrote down and folded up in your pocket but who really use shills, hidden
+cameras, sleight of hand, and brute-force memorization to amaze you.
+ </p><p>
+ Or perhaps they’re more like pick-up artists, the misogynistic cult that
+promises to help awkward men have sex with women by teaching them
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">neurolinguistic programming</span>“</span> phrases, body language
+techniques, and psychological manipulation tactics like
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">negging</span>“</span> — offering unsolicited negative feedback to women to
+lower their self-esteem and prick their interest.
+ </p><p>
+ Some pick-up artists eventually manage to convince women to go home with
+them, but it’s not because these men have figured out how to bypass women’s
+critical faculties. Rather, pick-up artists’ <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">success</span>“</span> stories
+are a mix of women who were incapable of giving consent, women who were
+coerced, women who were intoxicated, self-destructive women, and a few women
+who were sober and in command of their faculties but who didn’t realize
+straightaway that they were with terrible men but rectified the error as
+soon as they could.
+ </p><p>
+ Pick-up artists <span class="emphasis"><em>believe</em></span> they have figured out a secret
+back door that bypasses women’s critical faculties, but they haven’t. Many
+of the tactics they deploy, like negging, became the butt of jokes (just
+like people joke about bad ad targeting), and there’s a good chance that
+anyone they try these tactics on will immediately recognize them and dismiss
+the men who use them as irredeemable losers.
+ </p><p>
+ Pick-up artists are proof that people can believe they have developed a
+system of mind control <span class="emphasis"><em>even when it doesn’t
+work</em></span>. Pick-up artists simply exploit the fact that
+one-in-a-million chances can come through for you if you make a million
+attempts, and then they assume that the other 999,999 times, they simply
+performed the technique incorrectly and commit themselves to doing better
+next time. There’s only one group of people who find pick-up artist lore
+reliably convincing: other would-be pick-up artists whose anxiety and
+insecurity make them vulnerable to scammers and delusional men who convince
+them that if they pay for tutelage and follow instructions, then they will
+someday succeed. Pick-up artists assume they fail to entice women because
+they are bad at being pick-up artists, not because pick-up artistry is
+bullshit. Pick-up artists are bad at selling themselves to women, but
+they’re much better at selling themselves to men who pay to learn the
+secrets of pick-up artistry.
+ </p><p>
+ Department store pioneer John Wanamaker is said to have lamented,
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I
+don’t know which half.</span>“</span> The fact that Wanamaker thought that only
+half of his advertising spending was wasted is a tribute to the
+persuasiveness of advertising executives, who are <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span>
+better at convincing potential clients to buy their services than they are
+at convincing the general public to buy their clients’ wares.
+ </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>
+ Facebook is heralded as the origin of all of our modern plagues, and it’s
+not hard to see why. Some tech companies want to lock their users in but
+make their money by monopolizing access to the market for apps for their
+devices and gouging them on prices rather than by spying on them (like
+Apple). Some companies don’t care about locking in users because they’ve
+figured out how to spy on them no matter where they are and what they’re
+doing and can turn that surveillance into money (Google). Facebook alone
+among the Western tech giants has built a business based on locking in its
+users <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> spying on them all the time.
+ </p><p>
+ Facebook’s surveillance regime is really without parallel in the Western
+world. Though Facebook tries to prevent itself from being visible on the
+public web, hiding most of what goes on there from people unless they’re
+logged into Facebook, the company has nevertheless booby-trapped the entire
+web with surveillance tools in the form of Facebook <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Like</span>“</span>
+buttons that web publishers include on their sites to boost their Facebook
+profiles. Facebook also makes various libraries and other useful code
+snippets available to web publishers that act as surveillance tendrils on
+the sites where they’re used, funneling information about visitors to the
+site — newspapers, dating sites, message boards — to Facebook.
+ </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
+ Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but
+because it is <span class="emphasis"><em>big</em></span>.
+ </p></blockquote></div><p>
+ Facebook offers similar tools to app developers, so the apps — games, fart
+machines, business review services, apps for keeping abreast of your kid’s
+schooling — you use will send information about your activities to Facebook
+even if you don’t have a Facebook account and even if you don’t download or
+use Facebook apps. On top of all that, Facebook buys data from third-party
+brokers on shopping habits, physical location, use of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">loyalty</span>“</span>
+programs, financial transactions, etc., and cross-references that with the
+dossiers it develops on activity on Facebook and with apps and the public
+web.
+ </p><p>
+ Though it’s easy to integrate the web with Facebook — linking to news
+stories and such — Facebook products are generally not available to be
+integrated back into the web itself. You can embed a tweet in a Facebook
+post, but if you embed a Facebook post in a tweet, you just get a link back
+to Facebook and must log in before you can see it. Facebook has used extreme
+technological and legal countermeasures to prevent rivals from allowing
+their users to embed Facebook snippets in competing services or to create
+alternative interfaces to Facebook that merge your Facebook inbox with those
+of other services that you use.
+ </p><p>
+ And Facebook is incredibly popular, with 2.3 billion claimed users (though
+many believe this figure to be inflated). Facebook has been used to organize
+genocidal pogroms, racist riots, anti-vaccination movements, flat Earth
+cults, and the political lives of some of the world’s ugliest, most brutal
+autocrats. There are some really alarming things going on in the world, and
+Facebook is implicated in many of them, so it’s easy to conclude that these
+bad things are the result of Facebook’s mind-control system, which it rents
+out to anyone with a few bucks to spend.
+ </p><p>
+ To understand what role Facebook plays in the formulation and mobilization
+of antisocial movements, we need to understand the dual nature of Facebook.
+ </p><p>
+ Because it has a lot of users and a lot of data about those users, Facebook
+is a very efficient tool for locating people with hard-to-find traits, the
+kinds of traits that are widely diffused in the population such that
+advertisers have historically struggled to find a cost-effective way to
+reach them. Think back to refrigerators: Most of us only replace our major
+appliances a few times in our entire lives. If you’re a refrigerator
+manufacturer or retailer, you have these brief windows in the life of a
+consumer during which they are pondering a purchase, and you have to somehow
+reach them. Anyone who’s ever registered a title change after buying a house
+can attest that appliance manufacturers are incredibly desperate to reach
+anyone who has even the slenderest chance of being in the market for a new
+fridge.
+ </p><p>
+ Facebook makes finding people shopping for refrigerators a
+<span class="emphasis"><em>lot</em></span> easier. It can target ads to people who’ve
+registered a new home purchase, to people who’ve searched for refrigerator
+buying advice, to people who have complained about their fridge dying, or
+any combination thereof. It can even target people who’ve recently bought
+<span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> kitchen appliances on the theory that someone
+who’s just replaced their stove and dishwasher might be in a fridge-buying
+kind of mood. The vast majority of people who are reached by these ads will
+not be in the market for a new fridge, but — crucially — the percentage of
+people who <span class="emphasis"><em>are</em></span> looking for fridges that these ads reach
+is <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span> larger than it is than for any group that might
+be subjected to traditional, offline targeted refrigerator marketing.
+ </p><p>
+ Facebook also makes it a lot easier to find people who have the same rare
+disease as you, which might have been impossible in earlier eras — the
+closest fellow sufferer might otherwise be hundreds of miles away. It makes
+it easier to find people who went to the same high school as you even though
+decades have passed and your former classmates have all been scattered to
+the four corners of the Earth.
+ </p><p>
+ Facebook also makes it much easier to find people who hold the same rare
+political beliefs as you. If you’ve always harbored a secret affinity for
+socialism but never dared utter this aloud lest you be demonized by your
+neighbors, Facebook can help you discover other people who feel the same way
+(and it might just demonstrate to you that your affinity is more widespread
+than you ever suspected). It can make it easier to find people who share
+your sexual identity. And again, it can help you to understand that what
+you thought was a shameful secret that affected only you was really a widely
+shared trait, giving you both comfort and the courage to come out to the
+people in your life.
+ </p><p>
+ All of this presents a dilemma for Facebook: Targeting makes the company’s
+ads more effective than traditional ads, but it also lets advertisers see
+just how effective their ads are. While advertisers are pleased to learn
+that Facebook ads are more effective than ads on systems with less
+sophisticated targeting, advertisers can also see that in nearly every case,
+the people who see their ads ignore them. Or, at best, the ads work on a
+subconscious level, creating nebulous unmeasurables like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">brand
+recognition.</span>“</span> This means that the price per ad is very low in nearly
+every case.
+ </p><p>
+ To make things worse, many Facebook groups spark precious little
+discussion. Your little-league soccer team, the people with the same rare
+disease as you, and the people you share a political affinity with may
+exchange the odd flurry of messages at critical junctures, but on a daily
+basis, there’s not much to say to your old high school chums or other
+hockey-card collectors.
+ </p><p>
+ With nothing but <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">organic</span>“</span> discussion, Facebook would not
+generate enough traffic to sell enough ads to make the money it needs to
+continually expand by buying up its competitors while returning handsome
+sums to its investors.
+ </p><p>
+ So Facebook has to gin up traffic by sidetracking its own forums: Every time
+Facebook’s algorithm injects controversial materials — inflammatory
+political articles, conspiracy theories, outrage stories — into a group, it
+can hijack that group’s nominal purpose with its desultory discussions and
+supercharge those discussions by turning them into bitter, unproductive
+arguments that drag on and on. Facebook is optimized for engagement, not
+happiness, and it turns out that automated systems are pretty good at
+figuring out things that people will get angry about.
+ </p><p>
+ Facebook <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> modify our behavior but only in a couple
+of trivial ways. First, it can lock in all your friends and family members
+so that you check and check and check with Facebook to find out what they
+are up to; and second, it can make you angry and anxious. It can force you
+to choose between being interrupted constantly by updates — a process that
+breaks your concentration and makes it hard to be introspective — and
+staying in touch with your friends. This is a very limited form of mind
+control, and it can only really make us miserable, angry, and anxious.
+ </p><p>
+ This is why Facebook’s targeting systems — both the ones it shows to
+advertisers and the ones that let users find people who share their
+interests — are so next-gen and smooth and easy to use as well as why its
+message boards have a toolset that seems like it hasn’t changed since the
+mid-2000s. If Facebook delivered an equally flexible, sophisticated
+message-reading system to its users, those users could defend themselves
+against being nonconsensually eyeball-fucked with Donald Trump headlines.
+ </p><p>
+ The more time you spend on Facebook, the more ads it gets to show you. The
+solution to Facebook’s ads only working one in a thousand times is for the
+company to try to increase how much time you spend on Facebook by a factor
+of a thousand. Rather than thinking of Facebook as a company that has
+figured out how to show you exactly the right ad in exactly the right way to
+get you to do what its advertisers want, think of it as a company that has
+figured out how to make you slog through an endless torrent of arguments
+even though they make you miserable, spending so much time on the site that
+it eventually shows you at least one ad that you respond to.
+ </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>
+ Zuboff and her cohort are particularly alarmed at the extent to which
+surveillance allows corporations to influence our decisions, taking away
+something she poetically calls <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">the right to the future tense</span>“</span>
+— that is, the right to decide for yourself what you will do in the future.
+ </p><p>
+ It’s true that advertising can tip the scales one way or another: When
+you’re thinking of buying a fridge, a timely fridge ad might end the search
+on the spot. But Zuboff puts enormous and undue weight on the persuasive
+power of surveillance-based influence techniques. Most of these don’t work
+very well, and the ones that do won’t work for very long. The makers of
+these influence tools are confident they will someday refine them into
+systems of total control, but they are hardly unbiased observers, and the
+risks from their dreams coming true are very speculative.
+ </p><p>
+ By contrast, Zuboff is rather sanguine about 40 years of lax antitrust
+practice that has allowed a handful of companies to dominate the internet,
+ushering in an information age with, <a class="ulink" href="https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040" target="_top">as one person
+on Twitter noted</a>, five giant websites each filled with screenshots
+of the other four.
+ </p><p>
+ However, if we are to be alarmed that we might lose the right to choose for
+ourselves what our future will hold, then monopoly’s nonspeculative,
+concrete, here-and-now harms should be front and center in our debate over
+tech policy.
+ </p><p>
+ Start with <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">digital rights management.</span>“</span> In 1998, Bill Clinton
+signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. It’s a complex
+piece of legislation with many controversial clauses but none more so than
+Section 1201, the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">anti-circumvention</span>“</span> rule.
+ </p><p>
+ This is a blanket ban on tampering with systems that restrict access to
+copyrighted works. The ban is so thoroughgoing that it prohibits removing a
+copyright lock even when no copyright infringement takes place. This is by
+design: The activities that the DMCA’s Section 1201 sets out to ban are not
+copyright infringements; rather, they are legal activities that frustrate
+manufacturers’ commercial plans.
+ </p><p>
+ For example, Section 1201’s first major application was on DVD players as a
+means of enforcing the region coding built into those devices. DVD-CCA, the
+body that standardized DVDs and DVD players, divided the world into six
+regions and specified that DVD players must check each disc to determine
+which regions it was authorized to be played in. DVD players would have
+their own corresponding region (a DVD player bought in the U.S. would be
+region 1 while one bought in India would be region 5). If the player and the
+disc’s region matched, the player would play the disc; otherwise, it would
+reject it.
+ </p><p>
+ However, watching a lawfully produced disc in a country other than the one
+where you purchased it is not copyright infringement — it’s the
+opposite. Copyright law imposes this duty on customers for a movie: You must
+go into a store, find a licensed disc, and pay the asking price. Do that —
+and <span class="emphasis"><em>nothing else</em></span> — and you and copyright are square
+with one another.
+ </p><p>
+ The fact that a movie studio wants to charge Indians less than Americans or
+release in Australia later than it releases in the U.K. has no bearing on
+copyright law. Once you lawfully acquire a DVD, it is no copyright
+infringement to watch it no matter where you happen to be.
+ </p><p>
+ So DVD and DVD player manufacturers would not be able to use accusations of
+abetting copyright infringement to punish manufacturers who made
+noncompliant players that would play discs from any region or repair shops
+that modified players to let you watch out-of-region discs or software
+programmers who created programs to let you do this.
+ </p><p>
+ That’s where Section 1201 of the DMCA comes in: By banning tampering with an
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">access control,</span>“</span> the rule gave manufacturers and rights
+holders standing to sue competitors who released superior products with
+lawful features that the market demanded (in this case, region-free
+players).
+ </p><p>
+ This is an odious scam against consumers, but as time went by, Section 1201
+grew to encompass a rapidly expanding constellation of devices and services
+as canny manufacturers have realized certain things:
+ </p><div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist compact" style="list-style-type: disc; "><li class="listitem"><p>
+ Any device with software in it contains a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">copyrighted work</span>“</span> —
+i.e., the software.
+ </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
+ A device can be designed so that reconfiguring the software requires
+bypassing an <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">access control for copyrighted works,</span>“</span> which is a
+potential felony under Section 1201.
+ </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
+ Thus, companies can control their customers’ behavior after they take home
+their purchases by designing products so that all unpermitted uses require
+modifications that fall afoul of Section 1201.
+ </p></li></ul></div><p>
+ Section 1201 then becomes a means for manufacturers of all descriptions to
+force their customers to arrange their affairs to benefit the manufacturers’
+shareholders instead of themselves.
+ </p><p>
+ This manifests in many ways: from a new generation of inkjet printers that
+use countermeasures to prevent third-party ink that cannot be bypassed
+without legal risks to similar systems in tractors that prevent third-party
+technicians from swapping in the manufacturer’s own parts that are not
+recognized by the tractor’s control system until it is supplied with a
+manufacturer’s unlock code.
+ </p><p>
+ Closer to home, Apple’s iPhones use these measures to prevent both
+third-party service and third-party software installation. This allows Apple
+to decide when an iPhone is beyond repair and must be shredded and
+landfilled as opposed to the iPhone’s purchaser. (Apple is notorious for its
+environmentally catastrophic policy of destroying old electronics rather
+than permitting them to be cannibalized for parts.) This is a very useful
+power to wield, especially in light of CEO Tim Cook’s January 2019 warning
+to investors that the company’s profits are endangered by customers choosing
+to hold onto their phones for longer rather than replacing them.
+ </p><p>
+ Apple’s use of copyright locks also allows it to establish a monopoly over
+how its customers acquire software for their mobile devices. The App Store’s
+commercial terms guarantee Apple a share of all revenues generated by the
+apps sold there, meaning that Apple gets paid when you buy an app from its
+store and then continues to get paid every time you buy something using that
+app. This comes out of the bottom line of software developers, who must
+either charge more or accept lower profits for their products.
+ </p><p>
+ Crucially, Apple’s use of copyright locks gives it the power to make
+editorial decisions about which apps you may and may not install on your own
+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
+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
+political speech</a>, especially from apps that make sensitive political
+commentary such as an app that notifies you every time a U.S. drone kills
+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
+to a game</a> that commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
+ </p><p>
+ Apple often justifies monopoly power over software installation in the name
+of security, arguing that its vetting of apps for its store means that it
+can guard its users against apps that contain surveillance code. But this
+cuts both ways. In China, the government <a class="ulink" href="https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc" target="_top">ordered
+Apple to prohibit the sale of privacy tools</a> like VPNs with the
+exception of VPNs that had deliberately introduced flaws designed to let the
+Chinese state eavesdrop on users. Because Apple uses technological
+countermeasures — with legal backstops — to block customers from installing
+unauthorized apps, Chinese iPhone owners cannot readily (or legally) acquire
+VPNs that would protect them from Chinese state snooping.
+ </p><p>
+ Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism.</span>“</span>
+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
+the form of consumers’ decisions</a>, producing efficient
+markets. Surveillance capitalism’s supposed power to rob its victims of
+their free will through computationally supercharged influence campaigns
+means that our markets no longer aggregate customers’ decisions because we
+customers no longer decide — we are given orders by surveillance
+capitalism’s mind-control rays.
+ </p><p>
+ If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no
+longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at
+<span class="emphasis"><em>least</em></span> as much as influence campaigns. An influence
+campaign might nudge you to buy a certain brand of phone; but the copyright
+locks on that phone absolutely determine where you get it serviced, which
+apps can run on it, and when you have to throw it away rather than fixing
+it.
+ </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>
+ Markets are posed as a kind of magic: By discovering otherwise hidden
+information conveyed by the free choices of consumers, those consumers’
+local knowledge is integrated into a self-correcting system that makes
+efficient allocations—more efficient than any computer could calculate. But
+monopolies are incompatible with that notion. When you only have one app
+store, the owner of the store — not the consumer — decides on the range of
+choices. As Boss Tweed once said, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">I don’t care who does the electing,
+so long as I get to do the nominating.</span>“</span> A monopolized market is an
+election whose candidates are chosen by the monopolist.
+ </p><p>
+ This ballot rigging is made more pernicious by the existence of monopolies
+over search order. Google’s search market share is about 90%. When Google’s
+ranking algorithm puts a result for a popular search term in its top 10,
+that helps determine the behavior of millions of people. If Google’s answer
+to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are vaccines dangerous?</span>“</span> is a page that rebuts anti-vax
+conspiracy theories, then a sizable portion of the public will learn that
+vaccines are safe. If, on the other hand, Google sends those people to a
+site affirming the anti-vax conspiracies, a sizable portion of those
+millions will come away convinced that vaccines are dangerous.
+ </p><p>
+ Google’s algorithm is often tricked into serving disinformation as a
+prominent search result. But in these cases, Google isn’t persuading people
+to change their minds; it’s just presenting something untrue as fact when
+the user has no cause to doubt it.
+ </p><p>
+ This is true whether the search is for <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are vaccines
+dangerous?</span>“</span> or <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">best restaurants near me.</span>“</span> Most users
+will never look past the first page of search results, and when the
+overwhelming majority of people all use the same search engine, the ranking
+algorithm deployed by that search engine will determine myriad outcomes
+(whether to adopt a child, whether to have cancer surgery, where to eat
+dinner, where to move, where to apply for a job) to a degree that vastly
+outstrips any behavioral outcomes dictated by algorithmic persuasion
+techniques.
+ </p><p>
+ Many of the questions we ask search engines have no empirically correct
+answers: <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Where should I eat dinner?</span>“</span> is not an objective
+question. Even questions that do have correct answers (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are vaccines
+dangerous?</span>“</span>) don’t have one empirically superior source for that
+answer. Many pages affirm the safety of vaccines, so which one goes first?
+Under conditions of competition, consumers can choose from many search
+engines and stick with the one whose algorithmic judgment suits them best,
+but under conditions of monopoly, we all get our answers from the same
+place.
+ </p><p>
+ Google’s search dominance isn’t a matter of pure merit: The company has
+leveraged many tactics that would have been prohibited under classical,
+pre-Ronald-Reagan antitrust enforcement standards to attain its
+dominance. After all, this is a company that has developed two major
+products: a really good search engine and a pretty good Hotmail clone. Every
+other major success it’s had — Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. — has
+come through an acquisition of a nascent competitor. Many of the company’s
+key divisions, such as the advertising technology of DoubleClick, violate
+the historical antitrust principle of structural separation, which forbade
+firms from owning subsidiaries that competed with their
+customers. Railroads, for example, were barred from owning freight companies
+that competed with the shippers whose freight they carried.
+ </p><p>
+ If we’re worried about giant companies subverting markets by stripping
+consumers of their ability to make free choices, then vigorous antitrust
+enforcement seems like an excellent remedy. If we’d denied Google the right
+to effect its many mergers, we would also have probably denied it its total
+search dominance. Without that dominance, the pet theories, biases, errors
+(and good judgment, too) of Google search engineers and product managers
+would not have such an outsized effect on consumer choice.
+ </p><p>
+ This goes for many other companies. Amazon, a classic surveillance
+capitalist, is obviously the dominant tool for searching Amazon — though
+many people find their way to Amazon through Google searches and Facebook
+posts — and obviously, Amazon controls Amazon search. That means that
+Amazon’s own self-serving editorial choices—like promoting its own house
+brands over rival goods from its sellers as well as its own pet theories,
+biases, and errors— determine much of what we buy on Amazon. And since
+Amazon is the dominant e-commerce retailer outside of China and since it
+attained that dominance by buying up both large rivals and nascent
+competitors in defiance of historical antitrust rules, we can blame the
+monopoly for stripping consumers of their right to the future tense and the
+ability to shape markets by making informed choices.
+ </p><p>
+ Not every monopolist is a surveillance capitalist, but that doesn’t mean
+they’re not able to shape consumer choices in wide-ranging ways. Zuboff
+lauds Apple for its App Store and iTunes Store, insisting that adding price
+tags to the features on its platforms has been the secret to resisting
+surveillance and thus creating markets. But Apple is the only retailer
+allowed to sell on its platforms, and it’s the second-largest mobile device
+vendor in the world. The independent software vendors that sell through
+Apple’s marketplace accuse the company of the same surveillance sins as
+Amazon and other big retailers: spying on its customers to find lucrative
+new products to launch, effectively using independent software vendors as
+free-market researchers, then forcing them out of any markets they discover.
+ </p><p>
+ Because of its use of copyright locks, Apple’s mobile customers are not
+legally allowed to switch to a rival retailer for its apps if they want to
+do so on an iPhone. Apple, obviously, is the only entity that gets to decide
+how it ranks the results of search queries in its stores. These decisions
+ensure that some apps are often installed (because they appear on page one)
+and others are never installed (because they appear on page one
+million). Apple’s search-ranking design decisions have a vastly more
+significant effect on consumer behaviors than influence campaigns delivered
+by surveillance capitalism’s ad-serving bots.
+ </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>
+ Only the most extreme market ideologues think that markets can self-regulate
+without state oversight. Markets need watchdogs — regulators, lawmakers, and
+other elements of democratic control — to keep them honest. When these
+watchdogs sleep on the job, then markets cease to aggregate consumer choices
+because those choices are constrained by illegitimate and deceptive
+activities that companies are able to get away with because no one is
+holding them to account.
+ </p><p>
+ But this kind of regulatory capture doesn’t come cheap. In competitive
+sectors, where rivals are constantly eroding one another’s margins,
+individual firms lack the surplus capital to effectively lobby for laws and
+regulations that serve their ends.
+ </p><p>
+ Many of the harms of surveillance capitalism are the result of weak or
+nonexistent regulation. Those regulatory vacuums spring from the power of
+monopolists to resist stronger regulation and to tailor what regulation
+exists to permit their existing businesses.
+ </p><p>
+ Here’s an example: When firms over-collect and over-retain our data, they
+are at increased risk of suffering a breach — you can’t leak data you never
+collected, and once you delete all copies of that data, you can no longer
+leak it. For more than a decade, we’ve lived through an endless parade of
+ever-worsening data breaches, each one uniquely horrible in the scale of
+data breached and the sensitivity of that data.
+ </p><p>
+ But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for three
+reasons:
+ </p><p>
+ <span class="strong"><strong>1. They are locked in the aforementioned limbic arms
+race with our capacity to shore up our attentional defense systems to resist
+their new persuasion techniques.</strong></span> They’re also locked in an arms
+race with their competitors to find new ways to target people for sales
+pitches. As soon as they discover a soft spot in our attentional defenses (a
+counterintuitive, unobvious way to target potential refrigerator buyers),
+the public begins to wise up to the tactic, and their competitors leap on
+it, hastening the day in which all potential refrigerator buyers have been
+inured to the pitch.
+ </p><p>
+ <span class="strong"><strong>2. They believe the surveillance capitalism
+story.</strong></span> Data is cheap to aggregate and store, and both proponents
+and opponents of surveillance capitalism have assured managers and product
+designers that if you collect enough data, you will be able to perform
+sorcerous acts of mind control, thus supercharging your sales. Even if you
+never figure out how to profit from the data, someone else will eventually
+offer to buy it from you to give it a try. This is the hallmark of all
+economic bubbles: acquiring an asset on the assumption that someone else
+will buy it from you for more than you paid for it, often to sell to someone
+else at an even greater price.
+ </p><p>
+ <span class="strong"><strong>3. The penalties for leaking data are
+negligible.</strong></span> Most countries limit these penalties to actual
+damages, meaning that consumers who’ve had their data breached have to show
+actual monetary harms to get a reward. In 2014, Home Depot disclosed that it
+had lost credit-card data for 53 million of its customers, but it settled
+the matter by paying those customers about $0.34 each — and a third of that
+$0.34 wasn’t even paid in cash. It took the form of a credit to procure a
+largely ineffectual credit-monitoring service.
+ </p><p>
+ But the harms from breaches are much more extensive than these
+actual-damages rules capture. Identity thieves and fraudsters are wily and
+endlessly inventive. All the vast breaches of our century are being
+continuously recombined, the data sets merged and mined for new ways to
+victimize the people whose data was present in them. Any reasonable,
+evidence-based theory of deterrence and compensation for breaches would not
+confine damages to actual damages but rather would allow users to claim
+these future harms.
+ </p><p>
+ However, even the most ambitious privacy rules, such as the EU General Data
+Protection Regulation, fall far short of capturing the negative
+externalities of the platforms’ negligent over-collection and
+over-retention, and what penalties they do provide are not aggressively
+pursued by regulators.
+ </p><p>
+ This tolerance of — or indifference to — data over-collection and
+over-retention can be ascribed in part to the sheer lobbying muscle of the
+platforms. They are so profitable that they can handily afford to divert
+gigantic sums to fight any real change — that is, change that would force
+them to internalize the costs of their surveillance activities.
+ </p><p>
+ And then there’s state surveillance, which the surveillance capitalism story
+dismisses as a relic of another era when the big worry was being jailed for
+your dissident speech, not having your free will stripped away with machine
+learning.
+ </p><p>
+ But state surveillance and private surveillance are intimately related. As
+we saw when Apple was conscripted by the Chinese government as a vital
+collaborator in state surveillance, the only really affordable and tractable
+way to conduct mass surveillance on the scale practiced by modern states —
+both <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">free</span>“</span> and autocratic states — is to suborn commercial
+services.
+ </p><p>
+ Whether it’s Google being used as a location tracking tool by local law
+enforcement across the U.S. or the use of social media tracking by the
+Department of Homeland Security to build dossiers on participants in
+protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s family separation
+practices, any hard limits on surveillance capitalism would hamstring the
+state’s own surveillance capability. Without Palantir, Amazon, Google, and
+other major tech contractors, U.S. cops would not be able to spy on Black
+people, ICE would not be able to manage the caging of children at the U.S.
+border, and state welfare systems would not be able to purge their rolls by
+dressing up cruelty as empiricism and claiming that poor and vulnerable
+people are ineligible for assistance. At least some of the states’
+unwillingness to take meaningful action to curb surveillance should be
+attributed to this symbiotic relationship. There is no mass state
+surveillance without mass commercial surveillance.
+ </p><p>
+ Monopolism is key to the project of mass state surveillance. It’s true that
+smaller tech firms are apt to be less well-defended than Big Tech, whose
+security experts are drawn from the tops of their field and who are given
+enormous resources to secure and monitor their systems against
+intruders. But smaller firms also have less to protect: fewer users whose
+data is more fragmented across more systems and have to be suborned one at a
+time by state actors.
+ </p><p>
+ A concentrated tech sector that works with authorities is a much more
+powerful ally in the project of mass state surveillance than a fragmented
+one composed of smaller actors. The U.S. tech sector is small enough that
+all of its top executives fit around a single boardroom table in Trump Tower
+in 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Most of its biggest players bid
+to win JEDI, the Pentagon’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense
+Infrastructure cloud contract. Like other highly concentrated industries,
+Big Tech rotates its key employees in and out of government service, sending
+them to serve in the Department of Defense and the White House, then hiring
+ex-Pentagon and ex-DOD top staffers and officers to work in their own
+government relations departments.
+ </p><p>
+ They can even make a good case for doing this: After all, when there are
+only four or five big companies in an industry, everyone qualified to
+regulate those companies has served as an executive in at least a couple of
+them — because, likewise, when there are only five companies in an industry,
+everyone qualified for a senior role at any of them is by definition working
+at one of the other ones.
+ </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
+ While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly abet
+surveillance.
+ </p></blockquote></div><p>
+ Industries that are competitive are fragmented — composed of companies that
+are at each other’s throats all the time and eroding one another’s margins
+in bids to steal their best customers. This leaves them with much more
+limited capital to use to lobby for favorable rules and a much harder job of
+getting everyone to agree to pool their resources to benefit the industry as
+a whole.
+ </p><p>
+ Surveillance combined with machine learning is supposed to be an existential
+crisis, a species-defining moment at which our free will is just a few more
+advances in the field from being stripped away. I am skeptical of this
+claim, but I <span class="emphasis"><em>do</em></span> think that tech poses an existential
+threat to our society and possibly our species.
+ </p><p>
+ But that threat grows out of monopoly.
+ </p><p>
+ One of the consequences of tech’s regulatory capture is that it can shift
+liability for poor security decisions onto its customers and the wider
+society. It is absolutely normal in tech for companies to obfuscate the
+workings of their products, to make them deliberately hard to understand,
+and to threaten security researchers who seek to independently audit those
+products.
+ </p><p>
+ IT is the only field in which this is practiced: No one builds a bridge or a
+hospital and keeps the composition of the steel or the equations used to
+calculate load stresses a secret. It is a frankly bizarre practice that
+leads, time and again, to grotesque security defects on farcical scales,
+with whole classes of devices being revealed as vulnerable long after they
+are deployed in the field and put into sensitive places.
+ </p><p>
+ The monopoly power that keeps any meaningful consequences for breaches at
+bay means that tech companies continue to build terrible products that are
+insecure by design and that end up integrated into our lives, in possession
+of our data, and connected to our physical world. For years, Boeing has
+struggled with the aftermath of a series of bad technology decisions that
+made its 737 fleet a global pariah, a rare instance in which bad tech
+decisions have been seriously punished in the market.
+ </p><p>
+ These bad security decisions are compounded yet again by the use of
+copyright locks to enforce business-model decisions against
+consumers. Recall that these locks have become the go-to means for shaping
+consumer behavior, making it technically impossible to use third-party ink,
+insulin, apps, or service depots in connection with your lawfully acquired
+property.
+ </p><p>
+ Recall also that these copyright locks are backstopped by legislation (such
+as Section 1201 of the DMCA or Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive)
+that ban tampering with (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">circumventing</span>“</span>) them, and these
+statutes have been used to threaten security researchers who make
+disclosures about vulnerabilities without permission from manufacturers.
+ </p><p>
+ This amounts to a manufacturer’s veto over safety warnings and
+criticism. While this is far from the legislative intent of the DMCA and its
+sister statutes around the world, Congress has not intervened to clarify the
+statute nor will it because to do so would run counter to the interests of
+powerful, large firms whose lobbying muscle is unstoppable.
+ </p><p>
+ Copyright locks are a double whammy: They create bad security decisions that
+can’t be freely investigated or discussed. If markets are supposed to be
+machines for aggregating information (and if surveillance capitalism’s
+notional mind-control rays are what make it a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue
+capitalism</span>“</span> because it denies consumers the power to make decisions),
+then a program of legally enforced ignorance of the risks of products makes
+monopolism even more of a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> than surveillance
+capitalism’s influence campaigns.
+ </p><p>
+ And unlike mind-control rays, enforced silence over security is an
+immediate, documented problem, and it <span class="emphasis"><em>does</em></span> constitute
+an existential threat to our civilization and possibly our species. The
+proliferation of insecure devices — especially devices that spy on us and
+especially when those devices also can manipulate the physical world by,
+say, steering your car or flipping a breaker at a power station — is a kind
+of technology debt.
+ </p><p>
+ In software design, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">technology debt</span>“</span> refers to old, baked-in
+decisions that turn out to be bad ones in hindsight. Perhaps a long-ago
+developer decided to incorporate a networking protocol made by a vendor that
+has since stopped supporting it. But everything in the product still relies
+on that superannuated protocol, and so, with each revision, the product team
+has to work around this obsolete core, adding compatibility layers,
+surrounding it with security checks that try to shore up its defenses, and
+so on. These Band-Aid measures compound the debt because every subsequent
+revision has to make allowances for <span class="emphasis"><em>them</em></span>, too, like
+interest mounting on a predatory subprime loan. And like a subprime loan,
+the interest mounts faster than you can hope to pay it off: The product team
+has to put so much energy into maintaining this complex, brittle system that
+they don’t have any time left over to refactor the product from the ground
+up and <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">pay off the debt</span>“</span> once and for all.
+ </p><p>
+ Typically, technology debt results in a technological bankruptcy: The
+product gets so brittle and unsustainable that it fails
+catastrophically. Think of the antiquated COBOL-based banking and accounting
+systems that fell over at the start of the pandemic emergency when
+confronted with surges of unemployment claims. Sometimes that ends the
+product; sometimes it takes the company down with it. Being caught in the
+default of a technology debt is scary and traumatic, just like losing your
+house due to bankruptcy is scary and traumatic.
+ </p><p>
+ But the technology debt created by copyright locks isn’t individual debt;
+it’s systemic. Everyone in the world is exposed to this over-leverage, as
+was the case with the 2008 financial crisis. When that debt comes due — when
+we face a cascade of security breaches that threaten global shipping and
+logistics, the food supply, pharmaceutical production pipelines, emergency
+communications, and other critical systems that are accumulating technology
+debt in part due to the presence of deliberately insecure and deliberately
+unauditable copyright locks — it will indeed pose an existential risk.
+ </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>
+ Many tech companies are gripped by an orthodoxy that holds that if they just
+gather enough data on enough of our activities, everything else is possible
+— the mind control and endless profits. This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis:
+If data gives a tech company even a tiny improvement in behavior prediction
+and modification, the company declares that it has taken the first step
+toward global domination with no end in sight. If a company
+<span class="emphasis"><em>fails</em></span> to attain any improvements from gathering and
+analyzing data, it declares success to be just around the corner, attainable
+once more data is in hand.
+ </p><p>
+ Surveillance tech is far from the first industry to embrace a nonsensical,
+self-serving belief that harms the rest of the world, and it is not the
+first industry to profit handsomely from such a delusion. Long before
+hedge-fund managers were claiming (falsely) that they could beat the
+S&P 500, there were plenty of other <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">respectable</span>“</span>
+industries that have been revealed as quacks in hindsight. From the makers
+of radium suppositories (a real thing!) to the cruel sociopaths who claimed
+they could <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">cure</span>“</span> gay people, history is littered with the
+formerly respectable titans of discredited industries.
+ </p><p>
+ This is not to say that there’s nothing wrong with Big Tech and its
+ideological addiction to data. While surveillance’s benefits are mostly
+overstated, its harms are, if anything, <span class="emphasis"><em>understated</em></span>.
+ </p><p>
+ There’s real irony here. The belief in surveillance capitalism as a
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> is driven by the belief that markets
+wouldn’t tolerate firms that are gripped by false beliefs. An oil company
+that has false beliefs about where the oil is will eventually go broke
+digging dry wells after all.
+ </p><p>
+ But monopolists get to do terrible things for a long time before they pay
+the price. Think of how concentration in the finance sector allowed the
+subprime crisis to fester as bond-rating agencies, regulators, investors,
+and critics all fell under the sway of a false belief that complex
+mathematics could construct <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">fully hedged</span>“</span> debt instruments
+that could not possibly default. A small bank that engaged in this kind of
+malfeasance would simply go broke rather than outrunning the inevitable
+crisis, perhaps growing so big that it averted it altogether. But large
+banks were able to continue to attract investors, and when they finally
+<span class="emphasis"><em>did</em></span> come a-cropper, the world’s governments bailed them
+out. The worst offenders of the subprime crisis are bigger than they were in
+2008, bringing home more profits and paying their execs even larger sums.
+ </p><p>
+ Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but
+because it is <span class="emphasis"><em>big</em></span>. The reason every web publisher
+embeds a Facebook <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Like</span>“</span> button is that Facebook dominates the
+internet’s social media referrals — and every one of those
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Like</span>“</span> buttons spies on everyone who lands on a page that
+contains them (see also: Google Analytics embeds, Twitter buttons, etc.).
+ </p><p>
+ The reason the world’s governments have been slow to create meaningful
+penalties for privacy breaches is that Big Tech’s concentration produces
+huge profits that can be used to lobby against those penalties — and Big
+Tech’s concentration means that the companies involved are able to arrive at
+a unified negotiating position that supercharges the lobbying.
+ </p><p>
+ The reason that the smartest engineers in the world want to work for Big
+Tech is that Big Tech commands the lion’s share of tech industry jobs.
+ </p><p>
+ The reason people who are aghast at Facebook’s and Google’s and Amazon’s
+data-handling practices continue to use these services is that all their
+friends are on Facebook; Google dominates search; and Amazon has put all the
+local merchants out of business.
+ </p><p>
+ Competitive markets would weaken the companies’ lobbying muscle by reducing
+their profits and pitting them against each other in regulatory forums. It
+would give customers other places to go to get their online services. It
+would make the companies small enough to regulate and pave the way to
+meaningful penalties for breaches. It would let engineers with ideas that
+challenged the surveillance orthodoxy raise capital to compete with the
+incumbents. It would give web publishers multiple ways to reach audiences
+and make the case against Facebook and Google and Twitter embeds.
+ </p><p>
+ In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies
+certainly abet surveillance.
+ </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>
+ Technology exceptionalism is a sin, whether it’s practiced by technology’s
+blind proponents or by its critics. Both of these camps are prone to
+explaining away monopolistic concentration by citing some special
+characteristic of the tech industry, like network effects or first-mover
+advantage. The only real difference between these two groups is that the
+tech apologists say monopoly is inevitable so we should just let tech get
+away with its abuses while competition regulators in the U.S. and the EU say
+monopoly is inevitable so we should punish tech for its abuses but not try
+to break up the monopolies.
+ </p><p>
+ To understand how tech became so monopolistic, it’s useful to look at the
+dawn of the consumer tech industry: 1979, the year the Apple II Plus
+launched and became the first successful home computer. That also happens to
+be the year that Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail for the 1980
+presidential race — a race he won, leading to a radical shift in the way
+that antitrust concerns are handled in America. Reagan’s cohort of
+politicians — including Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Brian Mulroney in
+Canada, Helmut Kohl in Germany, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile — went on to
+enact similar reforms that eventually spread around the world.
+ </p><p>
+ Antitrust’s story began nearly a century before all that with laws like the
+Sherman Act, which took aim at monopolists on the grounds that monopolies
+were bad in and of themselves — squeezing out competitors, creating
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">diseconomies of scale</span>“</span> (when a company is so big that its
+constituent parts go awry and it is seemingly helpless to address the
+problems), and capturing their regulators to such a degree that they can get
+away with a host of evils.
+ </p><p>
+ Then came a fabulist named Robert Bork, a former solicitor general who
+Reagan appointed to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
+and who had created an alternate legislative history of the Sherman Act and
+its successors out of whole cloth. Bork insisted that these statutes were
+never targeted at monopolies (despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary,
+including the transcribed speeches of the acts’ authors) but, rather, that
+they were intended to prevent <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">consumer harm</span>“</span> — in the form of
+higher prices.
+ </p><p>
+ Bork was a crank, but he was a crank with a theory that rich people really
+liked. Monopolies are a great way to make rich people richer by allowing
+them to receive <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">monopoly rents</span>“</span> (that is, bigger profits) and
+capture regulators, leading to a weaker, more favorable regulatory
+environment with fewer protections for customers, suppliers, the
+environment, and workers.
+ </p><p>
+ Bork’s theories were especially palatable to the same power brokers who
+backed Reagan, and Reagan’s Department of Justice and other agencies began
+to incorporate Bork’s antitrust doctrine into their enforcement decisions
+(Reagan even put Bork up for a Supreme Court seat, but Bork flunked the
+Senate confirmation hearing so badly that, 40 years later, D.C. insiders use
+the term <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">borked</span>“</span> to refer to any catastrophically bad
+political performance).
+ </p><p>
+ Little by little, Bork’s theories entered the mainstream, and their backers
+began to infiltrate the legal education field, even putting on junkets where
+members of the judiciary were treated to lavish meals, fun outdoor
+activities, and seminars where they were indoctrinated into the consumer
+harm theory of antitrust. The more Bork’s theories took hold, the more money
+the monopolists were making — and the more surplus capital they had at their
+disposal to lobby for even more Borkian antitrust influence campaigns.
+ </p><p>
+ The history of Bork’s antitrust theories is a really good example of the
+kind of covertly engineered shifts in public opinion that Zuboff warns us
+against, where fringe ideas become mainstream orthodoxy. But Bork didn’t
+change the world overnight. He played a very long game, for over a
+generation, and he had a tailwind because the same forces that backed
+oligarchic antitrust theories also backed many other oligarchic shifts in
+public opinion. For example, the idea that taxation is theft, that wealth is
+a sign of virtue, and so on — all of these theories meshed to form a
+coherent ideology that elevated inequality to a virtue.
+ </p><p>
+ Today, many fear that machine learning allows surveillance capitalism to
+sell <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Bork-as-a-Service,</span>“</span> at internet speeds, so that you can
+contract a machine-learning company to engineer <span class="emphasis"><em>rapid</em></span>
+shifts in public sentiment without needing the capital to sustain a
+multipronged, multigenerational project working at the local, state,
+national, and global levels in business, law, and philosophy. I do not
+believe that such a project is plausible, though I agree that this is
+basically what the platforms claim to be selling. They’re just lying about
+it. Big Tech lies all the time, <span class="emphasis"><em>including</em></span> in their
+sales literature.
+ </p><p>
+ The idea that tech forms <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">natural monopolies</span>“</span> (monopolies that
+are the inevitable result of the realities of an industry, such as the
+monopolies that accrue the first company to run long-haul phone lines or
+rail lines) is belied by tech’s own history: In the absence of
+anti-competitive tactics, Google was able to unseat AltaVista and Yahoo;
+Facebook was able to head off Myspace. There are some advantages to
+gathering mountains of data, but those mountains of data also have
+disadvantages: liability (from leaking), diminishing returns (from old
+data), and institutional inertia (big companies, like science, progress one
+funeral at a time).
+ </p><p>
+ Indeed, the birth of the web saw a mass-extinction event for the existing
+giant, wildly profitable proprietary technologies that had capital, network
+effects, and walls and moats surrounding their businesses. The web showed
+that when a new industry is built around a protocol, rather than a product,
+the combined might of everyone who uses the protocol to reach their
+customers or users or communities outweighs even the most massive
+products. CompuServe, AOL, MSN, and a host of other proprietary walled
+gardens learned this lesson the hard way: Each believed it could stay
+separate from the web, offering <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">curation</span>“</span> and a guarantee of
+consistency and quality instead of the chaos of an open system. Each was
+wrong and ended up being absorbed into the public web.
+ </p><p>
+ Yes, tech is heavily monopolized and is now closely associated with industry
+concentration, but this has more to do with a matter of timing than its
+intrinsically monopolistic tendencies. Tech was born at the moment that
+antitrust enforcement was being dismantled, and tech fell into exactly the
+same pathologies that antitrust was supposed to guard against. To a first
+approximation, it is reasonable to assume that tech’s monopolies are the
+result of a lack of anti-monopoly action and not the much-touted unique
+characteristics of tech, such as network effects, first-mover advantage, and
+so on.
+ </p><p>
+ In support of this thesis, I offer the concentration that every
+<span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> industry has undergone over the same period. From
+professional wrestling to consumer packaged goods to commercial property
+leasing to banking to sea freight to oil to record labels to newspaper
+ownership to theme parks, <span class="emphasis"><em>every</em></span> industry has undergone
+a massive shift toward concentration. There’s no obvious network effects or
+first-mover advantage at play in these industries. However, in every case,
+these industries attained their concentrated status through tactics that
+were prohibited before Bork’s triumph: merging with major competitors,
+buying out innovative new market entrants, horizontal and vertical
+integration, and a suite of anti-competitive tactics that were once illegal
+but are not any longer.
+ </p><p>
+ Again: When you change the laws intended to prevent monopolies and then
+monopolies form in exactly the way the law was supposed to prevent, it is
+reasonable to suppose that these facts are related. Tech’s concentration
+can be readily explained without recourse to radical theories of network
+effects — but only if you’re willing to indict unregulated markets as
+tending toward monopoly. Just as a lifelong smoker can give you a hundred
+reasons why their smoking didn’t cause their cancer (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">It was the
+environmental toxins</span>“</span>), true believers in unregulated markets have a
+whole suite of unconvincing explanations for monopoly in tech that leave
+capitalism intact.
+ </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>
+ It’s been 40 years since Bork’s project to rehabilitate monopolies achieved
+liftoff, and that is a generation and a half, which is plenty of time to
+take a common idea and make it seem outlandish and vice versa. Before the
+1940s, affluent Americans dressed their baby boys in pink while baby girls
+wore blue (a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">delicate and dainty</span>“</span> color). While gendered
+colors are obviously totally arbitrary, many still greet this news with
+amazement and find it hard to imagine a time when pink connoted masculinity.
+ </p><p>
+ After 40 years of studiously ignoring antitrust analysis and enforcement,
+it’s not surprising that we’ve all but forgotten that antitrust exists, that
+in living memory, growth through mergers and acquisitions were largely
+prohibited under law, that market-cornering strategies like vertical
+integration could land a company in court.
+ </p><p>
+ Antitrust is a market society’s steering wheel, the control of first resort
+to keep would-be masters of the universe in their lanes. But Bork and his
+cohort ripped out our steering wheel 40 years ago. The car is still
+barreling along, and so we’re yanking as hard as we can on all the
+<span class="emphasis"><em>other</em></span> controls in the car as well as desperately
+flapping the doors and rolling the windows up and down in the hopes that one
+of these other controls can be repurposed to let us choose where we’re
+heading before we careen off a cliff.
+ </p><p>
+ It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in a
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">generation ship,</span>“</span> plying its way across the stars, a ship once
+piloted by their ancestors; and now, after a great cataclysm, the ship’s
+crew have forgotten that they’re in a ship at all and no longer remember
+where the control room is. Adrift, the ship is racing toward its extinction,
+and unless we can seize the controls and execute emergency course
+correction, we’re all headed for a fiery death in the heart of a sun.
+ </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>
+ None of this is to minimize the problems with surveillance. Surveillance
+matters, and Big Tech’s use of surveillance <span class="emphasis"><em>is</em></span> an
+existential risk to our species, but that’s not because surveillance and
+machine learning rob us of our free will.
+ </p><p>
+ Surveillance has become <span class="emphasis"><em>much</em></span> more efficient thanks to
+Big Tech. In 1989, the Stasi — the East German secret police — had the whole
+country under surveillance, a massive undertaking that recruited one out of
+every 60 people to serve as an informant or intelligence operative.
+ </p><p>
+ Today, we know that the NSA is spying on a significant fraction of the
+entire world’s population, and its ratio of surveillance operatives to the
+surveilled is more like 1:10,000 (that’s probably on the low side since it
+assumes that every American with top-secret clearance is working for the NSA
+on this project — we don’t know how many of those cleared people are
+involved in NSA spying, but it’s definitely not all of them).
+ </p><p>
+ How did the ratio of surveillable citizens expand from 1:60 to 1:10,000 in
+less than 30 years? It’s thanks to Big Tech. Our devices and services gather
+most of the data that the NSA mines for its surveillance project. We pay for
+these devices and the services they connect to, and then we painstakingly
+perform the data-entry tasks associated with logging facts about our lives,
+opinions, and preferences. This mass surveillance project has been largely
+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
+point to a single minor success story</a> in which it used its data
+collection program to foil an attempt by a U.S. resident to wire a few
+thousand dollars to an overseas terror group. It’s ineffective for much the
+same reason that commercial surveillance projects are largely ineffective at
+targeting advertising: The people who want to commit acts of terror, like
+people who want to buy a refrigerator, are extremely rare. If you’re trying
+to detect a phenomenon whose base rate is one in a million with an
+instrument whose accuracy is only 99%, then every true positive will come at
+the cost of 9,999 false positives.
+ </p><p>
+ Let me explain that again: If one in a million people is a terrorist, then
+there will only be about one terrorist in a random sample of one million
+people. If your test for detecting terrorists is 99% accurate, it will
+identify 10,000 terrorists in your million-person sample (1% of one million
+is 10,000). For every true positive, you’ll get 9,999 false positives.
+ </p><p>
+ In reality, the accuracy of algorithmic terrorism detection falls far short
+of the 99% mark, as does refrigerator ad targeting. The difference is that
+being falsely accused of wanting to buy a fridge is a minor nuisance while
+being falsely accused of planning a terror attack can destroy your life and
+the lives of everyone you love.
+ </p><p>
+ Mass state surveillance is only feasible because of surveillance capitalism
+and its extremely low-yield ad-targeting systems, which require a constant
+feed of personal data to remain barely viable. Surveillance capitalism’s
+primary failure mode is mistargeted ads while mass state surveillance’s
+primary failure mode is grotesque human rights abuses, tending toward
+totalitarianism.
+ </p><p>
+ State surveillance is no mere parasite on Big Tech, sucking up its data and
+giving nothing in return. In truth, the two are symbiotes: Big Tech sucks up
+our data for spy agencies, and spy agencies ensure that governments don’t
+limit Big Tech’s activities so severely that it would no longer serve the
+spy agencies’ needs. There is no firm distinction between state surveillance
+and surveillance capitalism; they are dependent on one another.
+ </p><p>
+ To see this at work today, look no further than Amazon’s home surveillance
+device, the Ring doorbell, and its associated app, Neighbors. Ring — a
+product that Amazon acquired and did not develop in house — makes a
+camera-enabled doorbell that streams footage from your front door to your
+mobile device. The Neighbors app allows you to form a neighborhood-wide
+surveillance grid with your fellow Ring owners through which you can share
+clips of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">suspicious characters.</span>“</span> If you’re thinking that this
+sounds like a recipe for letting curtain-twitching racists supercharge their
+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
+right</a>. Ring has become a <span class="emphasis"><em>de facto,</em></span>
+off-the-books arm of the police without any of the pesky oversight or rules.
+ </p><p>
+ In mid-2019, a series of public records requests revealed that Amazon had
+struck confidential deals with more than 400 local law enforcement agencies
+through which the agencies would promote Ring and Neighbors and in exchange
+get access to footage from Ring cameras. In theory, cops would need to
+request this footage through Amazon (and internal documents reveal that
+Amazon devotes substantial resources to coaching cops on how to spin a
+convincing story when doing so), but in practice, when a Ring customer turns
+down a police request, Amazon only requires the agency to formally request
+the footage from the company, which it will then produce.
+ </p><p>
+ Ring and law enforcement have found many ways to intertwine their
+activities. Ring strikes secret deals to acquire real-time access to 911
+dispatch and then streams alarming crime reports to Neighbors users, which
+serve as convincers for anyone who’s contemplating a surveillance doorbell
+but isn’t sure whether their neighborhood is dangerous enough to warrant it.
+ </p><p>
+ The more the cops buzz-market the surveillance capitalist Ring, the more
+surveillance capability the state gets. Cops who rely on private entities
+for law-enforcement roles then brief against any controls on the deployment
+of that technology while the companies return the favor by lobbying against
+rules requiring public oversight of police surveillance technology. The more
+the cops rely on Ring and Neighbors, the harder it will be to pass laws to
+curb them. The fewer laws there are against them, the more the cops will
+rely on them.
+ </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>
+ But even if we could exercise democratic control over our states and force
+them to stop raiding surveillance capitalism’s reservoirs of behavioral
+data, surveillance capitalism would still harm us.
+ </p><p>
+ This is an area where Zuboff shines. Her chapter on <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">sanctuary</span>“</span>
+— the feeling of being unobserved — is a beautiful hymn to introspection,
+calmness, mindfulness, and tranquility.
+ </p><p>
+ When you are watched, something changes. Anyone who has ever raised a child
+knows this. You might look up from your book (or more realistically, from
+your phone) and catch your child in a moment of profound realization and
+growth, a moment where they are learning something that is right at the edge
+of their abilities, requiring their entire ferocious concentration. For a
+moment, you’re transfixed, watching that rare and beautiful moment of focus
+playing out before your eyes, and then your child looks up and sees you
+seeing them, and the moment collapses. To grow, you need to be and expose
+your authentic self, and in that moment, you are vulnerable like a hermit
+crab scuttling from one shell to the next. The tender, unprotected tissues
+you expose in that moment are too delicate to reveal in the presence of
+another, even someone you trust as implicitly as a child trusts their
+parent.
+ </p><p>
+ In the digital age, our authentic selves are inextricably tied to our
+digital lives. Your search history is a running ledger of the questions
+you’ve pondered. Your location history is a record of the places you’ve
+sought out and the experiences you’ve had there. Your social graph reveals
+the different facets of your identity, the people you’ve connected with.
+ </p><p>
+ To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your
+authentic self.
+ </p><p>
+ There’s another way in which surveillance capitalism robs us of our capacity
+to be our authentic selves: by making us anxious. Surveillance capitalism
+isn’t really a mind-control ray, but you don’t need a mind-control ray to
+make someone anxious. After all, another word for anxiety is agitation, and
+to make someone experience agitation, you need merely to agitate them. To
+poke them and prod them and beep at them and buzz at them and bombard them
+on an intermittent schedule that is just random enough that our limbic
+systems never quite become inured to it.
+ </p><p>
+ Our devices and services are <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">general purpose</span>“</span> in that they can
+connect anything or anyone to anything or anyone else and that they can run
+any program that can be written. This means that the distraction rectangles
+in our pockets hold our most precious moments with our most beloved people
+and their most urgent or time-sensitive communications (from <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">running
+late can you get the kid?</span>“</span> to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">doctor gave me bad news and I
+need to talk to you RIGHT NOW</span>“</span>) as well as ads for refrigerators and
+recruiting messages from Nazis.
+ </p><p>
+ All day and all night, our pockets buzz, shattering our concentration and
+tearing apart the fragile webs of connection we spin as we think through
+difficult ideas. If you locked someone in a cell and agitated them like
+this, we’d call it <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">sleep deprivation torture,</span>“</span> and it would be
+<a class="ulink" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKpRbvnx6g" target="_top">a war crime under
+the Geneva Conventions</a>.
+ </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>
+ The effects of surveillance on our ability to be our authentic selves are
+not equal for all people. Some of us are lucky enough to live in a time and
+place in which all the most important facts of our lives are widely and
+roundly socially acceptable and can be publicly displayed without the risk
+of social consequence.
+ </p><p>
+ But for many of us, this is not true. Recall that in living memory, many of
+the ways of being that we think of as socially acceptable today were once
+cause for dire social sanction or even imprisonment. If you are 65 years
+old, you have lived through a time in which people living in <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">free
+societies</span>“</span> could be imprisoned or sanctioned for engaging in
+homosexual activity, for falling in love with a person whose skin was a
+different color than their own, or for smoking weed.
+ </p><p>
+ Today, these activities aren’t just decriminalized in much of the world,
+they’re considered normal, and the fallen prohibitions are viewed as
+shameful, regrettable relics of the past.
+ </p><p>
+ How did we get from prohibition to normalization? Through private, personal
+activity: People who were secretly gay or secret pot-smokers or who secretly
+loved someone with a different skin color were vulnerable to retaliation if
+they made their true selves known and were limited in how much they could
+advocate for their own right to exist in the world and be true to
+themselves. But because there was a private sphere, these people could form
+alliances with their friends and loved ones who did not share their
+disfavored traits by having private conversations in which they came out,
+disclosing their true selves to the people around them and bringing them to
+their cause one conversation at a time.
+ </p><p>
+ The right to choose the time and manner of these conversations was key to
+their success. It’s one thing to come out to your dad while you’re on a
+fishing trip away from the world and another thing entirely to blurt it out
+over the Christmas dinner table while your racist Facebook uncle is there to
+make a scene.
+ </p><p>
+ Without a private sphere, there’s a chance that none of these changes would
+have come to pass and that the people who benefited from these changes would
+have either faced social sanction for coming out to a hostile world or would
+have never been able to reveal their true selves to the people they love.
+ </p><p>
+ The corollary is that, unless you think that our society has attained social
+perfection — that your grandchildren in 50 years will ask you to tell them
+the story of how, in 2020, every injustice had been righted and no further
+change had to be made — then you should expect that right now, at this
+minute, there are people you love, whose happiness is key to your own, who
+have a secret in their hearts that stops them from ever being their
+authentic selves with you. These people are sorrowing and will go to their
+graves with that secret sorrow in their hearts, and the source of that
+sorrow will be the falsity of their relationship to you.
+ </p><p>
+ A private realm is necessary for human progress.
+ </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>
+ The lack of a private life can rob vulnerable people of the chance to be
+their authentic selves and constrain our actions by depriving us of
+sanctuary, but there is another risk that is borne by everyone, not just
+people with a secret: crime.
+ </p><p>
+ Personally identifying information is of very limited use for the purpose of
+controlling peoples’ minds, but identity theft — really a catchall term for
+a whole constellation of terrible criminal activities that can destroy your
+finances, compromise your personal integrity, ruin your reputation, or even
+expose you to physical danger — thrives on it.
+ </p><p>
+ Attackers are not limited to using data from one breached source,
+either. Multiple services have suffered breaches that exposed names,
+addresses, phone numbers, passwords, sexual tastes, school grades, work
+performance, brushes with the criminal justice system, family details,
+genetic information, fingerprints and other biometrics, reading habits,
+search histories, literary tastes, pseudonymous identities, and other
+sensitive information. Attackers can merge data from these different
+breaches to build up extremely detailed dossiers on random subjects and then
+use different parts of the data for different criminal purposes.
+ </p><p>
+ For example, attackers can use leaked username and password combinations to
+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
+been fitted with anti-theft GPS trackers and immobilizers</a> or to
+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
+toddlers with the audio tracks from pornography</a>. Attackers use
+leaked data to trick phone companies into giving them your phone number,
+then they intercept SMS-based two-factor authentication codes in order to
+take over your email, bank account, and/or cryptocurrency wallets.
+ </p><p>
+ Attackers are endlessly inventive in the pursuit of creative ways to
+weaponize leaked data. One common use of leaked data is to penetrate
+companies in order to access <span class="emphasis"><em>more</em></span> data.
+ </p><p>
+ Like spies, online fraudsters are totally dependent on companies
+over-collecting and over-retaining our data. Spy agencies sometimes pay
+companies for access to their data or intimidate them into giving it up, but
+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
+companies’ databases</a>.
+ </p><p>
+ The over-collection of data has a host of terrible social consequences, from
+the erosion of our authentic selves to the undermining of social progress,
+from state surveillance to an epidemic of online crime. Commercial
+surveillance is also a boon to people running influence campaigns, but
+that’s the least of our troubles.
+ </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>
+ Big Tech has long practiced technology exceptionalism: the idea that it
+should not be subject to the mundane laws and norms of
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">meatspace.</span>“</span> Mottoes like Facebook’s <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">move fast and break
+things</span>“</span> attracted justifiable scorn of the companies’ self-serving
+rhetoric.
+ </p><p>
+ Tech exceptionalism got us all into a lot of trouble, so it’s ironic and
+distressing to see Big Tech’s critics committing the same sin.
+ </p><p>
+ Big Tech is not a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> that cannot be cured
+through the traditional anti-monopoly remedies of trustbusting (forcing
+companies to divest of competitors they have acquired) and bans on mergers
+to monopoly and other anti-competitive tactics. Big Tech does not have the
+power to use machine learning to influence our behavior so thoroughly that
+markets lose the ability to punish bad actors and reward superior
+competitors. Big Tech has no rule-writing mind-control ray that necessitates
+ditching our old toolbox.
+ </p><p>
+ The thing is, people have been claiming to have perfected mind-control rays
+for centuries, and every time, it turned out to be a con — though sometimes
+the con artists were also conning themselves.
+ </p><p>
+ For generations, the advertising industry has been steadily improving its
+ability to sell advertising services to businesses while only making
+marginal gains in selling those businesses’ products to prospective
+customers. John Wanamaker’s lament that <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">50% of my advertising budget
+is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%</span>“</span> is a testament to the triumph
+of <span class="emphasis"><em>ad executives</em></span>, who successfully convinced Wanamaker
+that only half of the money he spent went to waste.
+ </p><p>
+ The tech industry has made enormous improvements in the science of
+convincing businesses that they’re good at advertising while their actual
+improvements to advertising — as opposed to targeting — have been pretty
+ho-hum. The vogue for machine learning — and the mystical invocation of
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">artificial intelligence</span>“</span> as a synonym for straightforward
+statistical inference techniques — has greatly boosted the efficacy of Big
+Tech’s sales pitch as marketers have exploited potential customers’ lack of
+technical sophistication to get away with breathtaking acts of overpromising
+and underdelivering.
+ </p><p>
+ It’s tempting to think that if businesses are willing to pour billions into
+a venture that the venture must be a good one. Yet there are plenty of times
+when this rule of thumb has led us astray. For example, it’s virtually
+unheard of for managed investment funds to outperform simple index funds,
+and investors who put their money into the hands of expert money managers
+overwhelmingly fare worse than those who entrust their savings to index
+funds. But managed funds still account for the majority of the money
+invested in the markets, and they are patronized by some of the richest,
+most sophisticated investors in the world. Their vote of confidence in an
+underperforming sector is a parable about the role of luck in wealth
+accumulation, not a sign that managed funds are a good buy.
+ </p><p>
+ The claims of Big Tech’s mind-control system are full of tells that the
+enterprise is a con. For example, <a class="ulink" href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01415/full" target="_top">the
+reliance on the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Big Five</span>“</span> personality traits</a> as a
+primary means of influencing people even though the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Big Five</span>“</span>
+theory is unsupported by any large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is
+<a class="ulink" href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/" target="_top">mostly
+the realm of marketing hucksters and pop psych</a>.
+ </p><p>
+ Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms can
+accurately perform <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">sentiment analysis</span>“</span> or detect peoples’
+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
+are marketing claims, not scientific ones</a>. These methods are largely
+untested by independent scientific experts, and where they have been tested,
+they’ve been found sorely wanting. Microexpressions are particularly
+suspect as the companies that specialize in training people to detect them
+<a class="ulink" href="https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/" target="_top">have
+been shown</a> to underperform relative to random chance.
+ </p><p>
+ Big Tech has been so good at marketing its own supposed superpowers that
+it’s easy to believe that they can market everything else with similar
+acumen, but it’s a mistake to believe the hype. Any statement a company
+makes about the quality of its products is clearly not impartial. The fact
+that we distrust all the things that Big Tech says about its data handling,
+compliance with privacy laws, etc., is only reasonable — but why on Earth
+would we treat Big Tech’s marketing literature as the gospel truth? Big Tech
+lies about just about <span class="emphasis"><em>everything</em></span>, including how well
+its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work.
+ </p><p>
+ That skepticism should infuse all of our evaluations of Big Tech and its
+supposed abilities, including our perusal of its patents. Zuboff vests these
+patents with enormous significance, pointing out that Google claimed
+extensive new persuasion capabilities in <a class="ulink" href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050131762A1/en" target="_top">its patent
+filings</a>. These claims are doubly suspect: first, because they are so
+self-serving, and second, because the patent itself is so notoriously an
+invitation to exaggeration.
+ </p><p>
+ Patent applications take the form of a series of claims and range from broad
+to narrow. A typical patent starts out by claiming that its authors have
+invented a method or system for doing every conceivable thing that anyone
+might do, ever, with any tool or device. Then it narrows that claim in
+successive stages until we get to the actual <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">invention</span>“</span> that
+is the true subject of the patent. The hope is that the patent examiner —
+who is almost certainly overworked and underinformed — will miss the fact
+that some or all of these claims are ridiculous, or at least suspect, and
+grant the patent’s broader claims. Patents for unpatentable things are still
+incredibly useful because they can be wielded against competitors who might
+license that patent or steer clear of its claims rather than endure the
+lengthy, expensive process of contesting it.
+ </p><p>
+ What’s more, software patents are routinely granted even though the filer
+doesn’t have any evidence that they can do the thing claimed by the
+patent. That is, you can patent an <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">invention</span>“</span> that you haven’t
+actually made and that you don’t know how to make.
+ </p><p>
+ With these considerations in hand, it becomes obvious that the fact that a
+Big Tech company has patented what it <span class="emphasis"><em>says</em></span> is an
+effective mind-control ray is largely irrelevant to whether Big Tech can in
+fact control our minds.
+ </p><p>
+ Big Tech collects our data for many reasons, including the diminishing
+returns on existing stores of data. But many tech companies also collect
+data out of a mistaken tech exceptionalist belief in the network effects of
+data. Network effects occur when each new user in a system increases its
+value. The classic example is fax machines: A single fax machine is of no
+use, two fax machines are of limited use, but every new fax machine that’s
+put to use after the first doubles the number of possible fax-to-fax links.
+ </p><p>
+ Data mined for predictive systems doesn’t necessarily produce these
+dividends. Think of Netflix: The predictive value of the data mined from a
+million English-speaking Netflix viewers is hardly improved by the addition
+of one more user’s viewing data. Most of the data Netflix acquires after
+that first minimum viable sample duplicates existing data and produces only
+minimal gains. Meanwhile, retraining models with new data gets progressively
+more expensive as the number of data points increases, and manual tasks like
+labeling and validating data do not get cheaper at scale.
+ </p><p>
+ Businesses pursue fads to the detriment of their profits all the time,
+especially when the businesses and their investors are not motivated by the
+prospect of becoming profitable but rather by the prospect of being acquired
+by a Big Tech giant or by having an IPO. For these firms, ticking faddish
+boxes like <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">collects as much data as possible</span>“</span> might realize a
+bigger return on investment than <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">collects a business-appropriate
+quantity of data.</span>“</span>
+ </p><p>
+ This is another harm of tech exceptionalism: The belief that more data
+always produces more profits in the form of more insights that can be
+translated into better mind-control rays drives firms to over-collect and
+over-retain data beyond all rationality. And since the firms are behaving
+irrationally, a good number of them will go out of business and become ghost
+ships whose cargo holds are stuffed full of data that can harm people in
+myriad ways — but which no one is responsible for antey longer. Even if the
+companies don’t go under, the data they collect is maintained behind the
+minimum viable security — just enough security to keep the company viable
+while it waits to get bought out by a tech giant, an amount calculated to
+spend not one penny more than is necessary on protecting data.
+ </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
+Snapchat story</h2></div></div></div><p>
+ For the first decade of its existence, Facebook competed with the social
+media giants of the day (Myspace, Orkut, etc.) by presenting itself as the
+pro-privacy alternative. Indeed, Facebook justified its walled garden —
+which let users bring in data from the web but blocked web services like
+Google Search from indexing and caching Facebook pages — as a pro-privacy
+measure that protected users from the surveillance-happy winners of the
+social media wars like Myspace.
+ </p><p>
+ Despite frequent promises that it would never collect or analyze its users’
+data, Facebook periodically created initiatives that did just that, like the
+creepy, ham-fisted Beacon tool, which spied on you as you moved around the
+web and then added your online activities to your public timeline, allowing
+your friends to monitor your browsing habits. Beacon sparked a user
+revolt. Every time, Facebook backed off from its surveillance initiative,
+but not all the way; inevitably, the new Facebook would be more surveilling
+than the old Facebook, though not quite as surveilling as the intermediate
+Facebook following the launch of the new product or service.
+ </p><p>
+ The pace at which Facebook ramped up its surveillance efforts seems to have
+been set by Facebook’s competitive landscape. The more competitors Facebook
+had, the better it behaved. Every time a major competitor foundered,
+Facebook’s behavior <a class="ulink" href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362" target="_top">got
+markedly worse</a>.
+ </p><p>
+ All the while, Facebook was prodigiously acquiring companies, including a
+company called Onavo. Nominally, Onavo made a battery-monitoring mobile
+app. But the permissions that Onavo required were so expansive that the app
+was able to gather fine-grained telemetry on everything users did with their
+phones, including which apps they used and how they were using them.
+ </p><p>
+ Through Onavo, Facebook discovered that it was losing market share to
+Snapchat, an app that — like Facebook a decade before — billed itself as the
+pro-privacy alternative to the status quo. Through Onavo, Facebook was able
+to mine data from the devices of Snapchat users, including both current and
+former Snapchat users. This spurred Facebook to acquire Instagram — some
+features of which competed with Snapchat — and then allowed Facebook to
+fine-tune Instagram’s features and sales pitch to erode Snapchat’s gains and
+ensure that Facebook would not have to face the kinds of competitive
+pressures it had earlier inflicted on Myspace and Orkut.
+ </p><p>
+ The story of how Facebook crushed Snapchat reveals the relationship between
+monopoly and surveillance capitalism. Facebook combined surveillance with
+lax antitrust enforcement to spot the competitive threat of Snapchat on its
+horizon and then take decisive action against it. Facebook’s surveillance
+capitalism let it avert competitive pressure with anti-competitive
+tactics. Facebook users still want privacy — Facebook hasn’t used
+surveillance to brainwash them out of it — but they can’t get it because
+Facebook’s surveillance lets it destroy any hope of a rival service emerging
+that competes on privacy features.
+ </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>
+ A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of Facebook and
+other Big Tech companies by fielding <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">indieweb</span>“</span> alternatives —
+Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, Diaspora as a Facebook alternative,
+etc. — but these efforts have failed to attain any kind of liftoff.
+ </p><p>
+ Fundamentally, each of these services is hamstrung by the same problem:
+Every potential user for a Facebook or Twitter alternative has to convince
+all their friends to follow them to a decentralized web alternative in order
+to continue to realize the benefit of social media. For many of us, the only
+reason to have a Facebook account is that our friends have Facebook
+accounts, and the reason they have Facebook accounts is that
+<span class="emphasis"><em>we</em></span> have Facebook accounts.
+ </p><p>
+ All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant platforms —
+into <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">kill zones</span>“</span> that investors will not fund new entrants
+for.
+ </p><p>
+ And yet, all of today’s tech giants came into existence despite the
+entrenched advantage of the companies that came before them. To understand
+how that happened, you have to understand both interoperability and
+adversarial interoperability.
+ </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
+ The hard problem of our species is coordination.
+ </p></blockquote></div><p>
+ <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Interoperability</span>“</span> is the ability of two technologies to work
+with one another: Anyone can make an LP that will play on any record player,
+anyone can make a filter you can install in your stove’s extractor fan,
+anyone can make gasoline for your car, anyone can make a USB phone charger
+that fits in your car’s cigarette lighter receptacle, anyone can make a
+light bulb that works in your light socket, anyone can make bread that will
+toast in your toaster.
+ </p><p>
+ Interoperability is often a source of innovation and consumer benefit: Apple
+made the first commercially successful PC, but millions of independent
+software vendors made interoperable programs that ran on the Apple II
+Plus. The simple analog antenna inputs on the back of TVs first allowed
+cable operators to connect directly to TVs, then they allowed game console
+companies and then personal computer companies to use standard televisions
+as displays. Standard RJ-11 telephone jacks allowed for the production of
+phones from a variety of vendors in a variety of forms, from the free
+football-shaped phone that came with a <span class="emphasis"><em>Sports
+Illustrated</em></span> subscription to business phones with speakers, hold
+functions, and so on and then answering machines and finally modems, paving
+the way for the internet revolution.
+ </p><p>
+ <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Interoperability</span>“</span> is often used interchangeably with
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">standardization,</span>“</span> which is the process when manufacturers and
+other stakeholders hammer out a set of agreed-upon rules for implementing a
+technology, such as the electrical plug on your wall, the CAN bus used by
+your car’s computer systems, or the HTML instructions that your browser
+interprets.
+ </p><p>
+ But interoperability doesn’t require standardization — indeed,
+standardization often proceeds from the chaos of ad hoc interoperability
+measures. The inventor of the cigarette-lighter USB charger didn’t need to
+get permission from car manufacturers or even the manufacturers of the
+dashboard lighter subcomponent. The automakers didn’t take any
+countermeasures to prevent the use of these aftermarket accessories by their
+customers, but they also didn’t do anything to make life easier for the
+chargers’ manufacturers. This is a kind of <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">neutral
+interoperability.</span>“</span>
+ </p><p>
+ Beyond neutral interoperability, there is <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">adversarial
+interoperability.</span>“</span> That’s when a manufacturer makes a product that
+interoperates with another manufacturer’s product <span class="emphasis"><em>despite the
+second manufacturer’s objections</em></span> and <span class="emphasis"><em>even if that means
+bypassing a security system designed to prevent interoperability</em></span>.
+ </p><p>
+ Probably the most familiar form of adversarial interoperability is
+third-party printer ink. Printer manufacturers claim that they sell printers
+below cost and that the only way they can recoup the losses they incur is by
+charging high markups on ink. To prevent the owners of printers from buying
+ink elsewhere, the printer companies deploy a suite of anti-customer
+security systems that detect and reject both refilled and third-party
+cartridges.
+ </p><p>
+ Owners of printers take the position that HP and Epson and Brother are not
+charities and that customers for their wares have no obligation to help them
+survive, and so if the companies choose to sell their products at a loss,
+that’s their foolish choice and their consequences to live with. Likewise,
+competitors who make ink or refill kits observe that they don’t owe printer
+companies anything, and their erosion of printer companies’ margins are the
+printer companies’ problems, not their competitors’. After all, the printer
+companies shed no tears when they drive a refiller out of business, so why
+should the refillers concern themselves with the economic fortunes of the
+printer companies?
+ </p><p>
+ Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the history of
+the tech industry: from the founding of the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">alt.*</span>“</span> Usenet
+hierarchy (which was started against the wishes of Usenet’s maintainers and
+which grew to be bigger than all of Usenet combined) to the browser wars
+(when Netscape and Microsoft devoted massive engineering efforts to making
+their browsers incompatible with the other’s special commands and
+peccadilloes) to Facebook (whose success was built in part by helping its
+new users stay in touch with friends they’d left behind on Myspace because
+Facebook supplied them with a tool that scraped waiting messages from
+Myspace and imported them into Facebook, effectively creating an
+Facebook-based Myspace reader).
+ </p><p>
+ Today, incumbency is seen as an unassailable advantage. Facebook is where
+all of your friends are, so no one can start a Facebook competitor. But
+adversarial compatibility reverses the competitive advantage: If you were
+allowed to compete with Facebook by providing a tool that imported all your
+users’ waiting Facebook messages into an environment that competed on lines
+that Facebook couldn’t cross, like eliminating surveillance and ads, then
+Facebook would be at a huge disadvantage. It would have assembled all
+possible ex-Facebook users into a single, easy-to-find service; it would
+have educated them on how a Facebook-like service worked and what its
+potential benefits were; and it would have provided an easy means for
+disgruntled Facebook users to tell their friends where they might expect
+better treatment.
+ </p><p>
+ Adversarial interoperability was once the norm and a key contributor to the
+dynamic, vibrant tech scene, but now it is stuck behind a thicket of laws
+and regulations that add legal risks to the tried-and-true tactics of
+adversarial interoperability. New rules and new interpretations of existing
+rules mean that a would-be adversarial interoperator needs to steer clear of
+claims under copyright, terms of service, trade secrecy, tortious
+interference, and patent.
+ </p><p>
+ In the absence of a competitive market, lawmakers have resorted to assigning
+expensive, state-like duties to Big Tech firms, such as automatically
+filtering user contributions for copyright infringement or terrorist and
+extremist content or detecting and preventing harassment in real time or
+controlling access to sexual material.
+ </p><p>
+ These measures put a floor under how small we can make Big Tech because only
+the very largest companies can afford the humans and automated filters
+needed to perform these duties.
+ </p><p>
+ But that’s not the only way in which making platforms responsible for
+policing their users undermines competition. A platform that is expected to
+police its users’ conduct must prevent many vital adversarial
+interoperability techniques lest these subvert its policing measures. For
+example, if someone using a Twitter replacement like Mastodon is able to
+push messages into Twitter and read messages out of Twitter, they could
+avoid being caught by automated systems that detect and prevent harassment
+(such as systems that use the timing of messages or IP-based rules to make
+guesses about whether someone is a harasser).
+ </p><p>
+ To the extent that we are willing to let Big Tech police itself — rather
+than making Big Tech small enough that users can leave bad platforms for
+better ones and small enough that a regulation that simply puts a platform
+out of business will not destroy billions of users’ access to their
+communities and data — we build the case that Big Tech should be able to
+block its competitors and make it easier for Big Tech to demand legal
+enforcement tools to ban and punish attempts at adversarial
+interoperability.
+ </p><p>
+ Ultimately, we can try to fix Big Tech by making it responsible for bad acts
+by its users, or we can try to fix the internet by cutting Big Tech down to
+size. But we can’t do both. To replace today’s giant products with
+pluralistic protocols, we need to clear the legal thicket that prevents
+adversarial interoperability so that tomorrow’s nimble, personal,
+small-scale products can federate themselves with giants like Facebook,
+allowing the users who’ve left to continue to communicate with users who
+haven’t left yet, reaching tendrils over Facebook’s garden wall that
+Facebook’s trapped users can use to scale the walls and escape to the
+global, open web.
+ </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>
+ Tech is not the only industry that has undergone massive concentration since
+the Reagan era. Virtually every major industry — from oil to newspapers to
+meatpacking to sea freight to eyewear to online pornography — has become a
+clubby oligarchy that just a few players dominate.
+ </p><p>
+ At the same time, every industry has become something of a tech industry as
+general-purpose computers and general-purpose networks and the promise of
+efficiencies through data-driven analysis infuse every device, process, and
+firm with tech.
+ </p><p>
+ This phenomenon of industrial concentration is part of a wider story about
+wealth concentration overall as a smaller and smaller number of people own
+more and more of our world. This concentration of both wealth and industries
+means that our political outcomes are increasingly beholden to the parochial
+interests of the people and companies with all the money.
+ </p><p>
+ That means that whenever a regulator asks a question with an obvious,
+empirical answer (<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Are humans causing climate change?</span>“</span> or
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Should we let companies conduct commercial mass surveillance?</span>“</span>
+or <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Does society benefit from allowing network neutrality
+violations?</span>“</span>), the answer that comes out is only correct if that
+correctness meets with the approval of rich people and the industries that
+made them so wealthy.
+ </p><p>
+ Rich people have always played an outsized role in politics and more so
+since the Supreme Court’s <span class="emphasis"><em>Citizens United</em></span> decision
+eliminated key controls over political spending. Widening inequality and
+wealth concentration means that the very richest people are now a lot richer
+and can afford to spend a lot more money on political projects than ever
+before. Think of the Koch brothers or George Soros or Bill Gates.
+ </p><p>
+ But the policy distortions of rich individuals pale in comparison to the
+policy distortions that concentrated industries are capable of. The
+companies in highly concentrated industries are much more profitable than
+companies in competitive industries — no competition means not having to
+reduce prices or improve quality to win customers — leaving them with bigger
+capital surpluses to spend on lobbying.
+ </p><p>
+ Concentrated industries also find it easier to collaborate on policy
+objectives than competitive ones. When all the top execs from your industry
+can fit around a single boardroom table, they often do. And
+<span class="emphasis"><em>when</em></span> they do, they can forge a consensus position on
+regulation.
+ </p><p>
+ Rising through the ranks in a concentrated industry generally means working
+at two or three of the big companies. When there are only relatively few
+companies in a given industry, each company has a more ossified executive
+rank, leaving ambitious execs with fewer paths to higher positions unless
+they are recruited to a rival. This means that the top execs in concentrated
+industries are likely to have been colleagues at some point and socialize in
+the same circles — connected through social ties or, say, serving as
+trustees for each others’ estates. These tight social bonds foster a
+collegial, rather than competitive, attitude.
+ </p><p>
+ Highly concentrated industries also present a regulatory conundrum. When an
+industry is dominated by just four or five companies, the only people who
+are likely to truly understand the industry’s practices are its veteran
+executives. This means that top regulators are often former execs of the
+companies they are supposed to be regulating. These turns in government are
+often tacitly understood to be leaves of absence from industry, with former
+employers welcoming their erstwhile watchdogs back into their executive
+ranks once their terms have expired.
+ </p><p>
+ All this is to say that the tight social bonds, small number of firms, and
+regulatory capture of concentrated industries give the companies that
+comprise them the power to dictate many, if not all, of the regulations that
+bind them.
+ </p><p>
+ 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
+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
+the right to decide who can fix your phone</a> or Google and Facebook
+winning the right to breach your private data without suffering meaningful
+consequences or victories for pipeline companies or impunity for opioid
+manufacturers or massive tax subsidies for incredibly profitable dominant
+businesses, it’s increasingly apparent that many of our official,
+evidence-based truth-seeking processes are, in fact, auctions for sale to
+the highest bidder.
+ </p><p>
+ It’s really impossible to overstate what a terrifying prospect this is. We
+live in an incredibly high-tech society, and none of us could acquire the
+expertise to evaluate every technological proposition that stands between us
+and our untimely, horrible deaths. You might devote your life to acquiring
+the media literacy to distinguish good scientific journals from corrupt
+pay-for-play lookalikes and the statistical literacy to evaluate the quality
+of the analysis in the journals as well as the microbiology and epidemiology
+knowledge to determine whether you can trust claims about the safety of
+vaccines — but that would still leave you unqualified to judge whether the
+wiring in your home will give you a lethal shock <span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span>
+whether your car’s brakes’ software will cause them to fail unpredictably
+<span class="emphasis"><em>and</em></span> whether the hygiene standards at your butcher are
+sufficient to keep you from dying after you finish your dinner.
+ </p><p>
+ In a world as complex as this one, we have to defer to authorities, and we
+keep them honest by making those authorities accountable to us and binding
+them with rules to prevent conflicts of interest. We can’t possibly acquire
+the expertise to adjudicate conflicting claims about the best way to make
+the world safe and prosperous, but we <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> determine
+whether the adjudication process itself is trustworthy.
+ </p><p>
+ Right now, it’s obviously not.
+ </p><p>
+ The past 40 years of rising inequality and industry concentration, together
+with increasingly weak accountability and transparency for expert agencies,
+has created an increasingly urgent sense of impending doom, the sense that
+there are vast conspiracies afoot that operate with tacit official approval
+despite the likelihood they are working to better themselves by ruining the
+rest of us.
+ </p><p>
+ For example, it’s been decades since Exxon’s own scientists concluded that
+its products would render the Earth uninhabitable by humans. And yet those
+decades were lost to us, in large part because Exxon lobbied governments and
+sowed doubt about the dangers of its products and did so with the
+cooperation of many public officials. When the survival of you and everyone
+you love is threatened by conspiracies, it’s not unreasonable to start
+questioning the things you think you know in an attempt to determine whether
+they, too, are the outcome of another conspiracy.
+ </p><p>
+ The collapse of the credibility of our systems for divining and upholding
+truths has left us in a state of epistemological chaos. Once, most of us
+might have assumed that the system was working and that our regulations
+reflected our best understanding of the empirical truths of the world as
+they were best understood — now we have to find our own experts to help us
+sort the true from the false.
+ </p><p>
+ If you’re like me, you probably believe that vaccines are safe, but you
+(like me) probably also can’t explain the microbiology or statistics. Few of
+us have the math skills to review the literature on vaccine safety and
+describe why their statistical reasoning is sound. Likewise, few of us can
+review the stats in the (now discredited) literature on opioid safety and
+explain how those stats were manipulated. Both vaccines and opioids were
+embraced by medical authorities, after all, and one is safe while the other
+could ruin your life. You’re left with a kind of inchoate constellation of
+rules of thumb about which experts you trust to fact-check controversial
+claims and then to explain how all those respectable doctors with their
+peer-reviewed research on opioid safety <span class="emphasis"><em>were</em></span> an
+aberration and then how you know that the doctors writing about vaccine
+safety are <span class="emphasis"><em>not</em></span> an aberration.
+ </p><p>
+ I’m 100% certain that vaccinating is safe and effective, but I’m also at
+something of a loss to explain exactly, <span class="emphasis"><em>precisely,</em></span> why
+I believe this, given all the corruption I know about and the many times the
+stamp of certainty has turned out to be a parochial lie told to further
+enrich the super rich.
+ </p><p>
+ Fake news — conspiracy theories, racist ideologies, scientific denialism —
+has always been with us. What’s changed today is not the mix of ideas in the
+public discourse but the popularity of the worst ideas in that
+mix. Conspiracy and denial have skyrocketed in lockstep with the growth of
+Big Inequality, which has also tracked the rise of Big Tech and Big Pharma
+and Big Wrestling and Big Car and Big Movie Theater and Big Everything Else.
+ </p><p>
+ No one can say for certain why this has happened, but the two dominant camps
+are idealism (the belief that the people who argue for these conspiracies
+have gotten better at explaining them, maybe with the help of
+machine-learning tools) or materialism (the ideas have become more
+attractive because of material conditions in the world).
+ </p><p>
+ I’m a materialist. I’ve been exposed to the arguments of conspiracy
+theorists all my life, and I have not experienced any qualitative leap in
+the quality of those arguments.
+ </p><p>
+ The major difference is in the world, not the arguments. In a time where
+actual conspiracies are commonplace, conspiracy theories acquire a ring of
+plausibility.
+ </p><p>
+ We have always had disagreements about what’s true, but today, we have a
+disagreement over how we know whether something is true. This is an
+epistemological crisis, not a crisis over belief. It’s a crisis over the
+credibility of our truth-seeking exercises, from scientific journals (in an
+era where the biggest journal publishers have been caught producing
+pay-to-play journals for junk science) to regulations (in an era where
+regulators are routinely cycling in and out of business) to education (in an
+era where universities are dependent on corporate donations to keep their
+lights on).
+ </p><p>
+ Targeting — surveillance capitalism — makes it easier to find people who are
+undergoing this epistemological crisis, but it doesn’t create the
+crisis. For that, you need to look to corruption.
+ </p><p>
+ And, conveniently enough, it’s corruption that allows surveillance
+capitalism to grow by dismantling monopoly protections, by permitting
+reckless collection and retention of personal data, by allowing ads to be
+targeted in secret, and by foreclosing on the possibility of going somewhere
+else where you might continue to enjoy your friends without subjecting
+yourself to commercial surveillance.
+ </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>
+ I reject both iterations of technological exceptionalism. I reject the idea
+that tech is uniquely terrible and led by people who are greedier or worse
+than the leaders of other industries, and I reject the idea that tech is so
+good — or so intrinsically prone to concentration — that it can’t be blamed
+for its present-day monopolistic status.
+ </p><p>
+ I think tech is just another industry, albeit one that grew up in the
+absence of real monopoly constraints. It may have been first, but it isn’t
+the worst nor will it be the last.
+ </p><p>
+ But there’s one way in which I <span class="emphasis"><em>am</em></span> a tech
+exceptionalist. I believe that online tools are the key to overcoming
+problems that are much more urgent than tech monopolization: climate change,
+inequality, misogyny, and discrimination on the basis of race, gender
+identity, and other factors. The internet is how we will recruit people to
+fight those fights, and how we will coordinate their labor. Tech is not a
+substitute for democratic accountability, the rule of law, fairness, or
+stability — but it’s a means to achieve these things.
+ </p><p>
+ The hard problem of our species is coordination. Everything from climate
+change to social change to running a business to making a family work can be
+viewed as a collective action problem.
+ </p><p>
+ The internet makes it easier than at any time before to find people who want
+to work on a project with you — hence the success of free and open-source
+software, crowdfunding, and racist terror groups — and easier than ever to
+coordinate the work you do.
+ </p><p>
+ The internet and the computers we connect to it also possess an exceptional
+quality: general-purposeness. The internet is designed to allow any two
+parties to communicate any data, using any protocol, without permission from
+anyone else. The only production design we have for computers is the
+general-purpose, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Turing complete</span>“</span> computer that can run every
+program we can express in symbolic logic.
+ </p><p>
+ This means that every time someone with a special communications need
+invests in infrastructure and techniques to make the internet faster,
+cheaper, and more robust, this benefit redounds to everyone else who is
+using the internet to communicate. And this also means that every time
+someone with a special computing need invests to make computers faster,
+cheaper, and more robust, every other computing application is a potential
+beneficiary of this work.
+ </p><p>
+ For these reasons, every type of communication is gradually absorbed into
+the internet, and every type of device — from airplanes to pacemakers —
+eventually becomes a computer in a fancy case.
+ </p><p>
+ While these considerations don’t preclude regulating networks and computers,
+they do call for gravitas and caution when doing so because changes to
+regulatory frameworks could ripple out to have unintended consequences in
+many, many other domains.
+ </p><p>
+ The upshot of this is that our best hope of solving the big coordination
+problems — climate change, inequality, etc. — is with free, fair, and open
+tech. Our best hope of keeping tech free, fair, and open is to exercise
+caution in how we regulate tech and to attend closely to the ways in which
+interventions to solve one problem might create problems in other domains.
+ </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>
+ Big Tech has a funny relationship with information. When you’re generating
+information — anything from the location data streaming off your mobile
+device to the private messages you send to friends on a social network — it
+claims the rights to make unlimited use of that data.
+ </p><p>
+ But when you have the audacity to turn the tables — to use a tool that
+blocks ads or slurps your waiting updates out of a social network and puts
+them in another app that lets you set your own priorities and suggestions or
+crawls their system to allow you to start a rival business — they claim that
+you’re stealing from them.
+ </p><p>
+ The thing is, information is a very bad fit for any kind of private property
+regime. Property rights are useful for establishing markets that can lead to
+the effective development of fallow assets. These markets depend on clear
+titles to ensure that the things being bought and sold in them can, in fact,
+be bought and sold.
+ </p><p>
+ Information rarely has such a clear title. Take phone numbers: There’s
+clearly something going wrong when Facebook slurps up millions of users’
+address books and uses the phone numbers it finds in them to plot out social
+graphs and fill in missing information about other users.
+ </p><p>
+ But the phone numbers Facebook nonconsensually acquires in this transaction
+are not the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">property</span>“</span> of the users they’re taken from nor do
+they belong to the people whose phones ring when you dial those numbers. The
+numbers are mere integers, 10 digits in the U.S. and Canada, and they
+appear in millions of places, including somewhere deep in pi as well as
+numerous other contexts. Giving people ownership titles to integers is an
+obviously terrible idea.
+ </p><p>
+ Likewise for the facts that Facebook and other commercial surveillance
+operators acquire about us, like that we are the children of our parents or
+the parents to our children or that we had a conversation with someone else
+or went to a public place. These data points can’t be property in the sense
+that your house or your shirt is your property because the title to them is
+intrinsically muddy: Does your mom own the fact that she is your mother? Do
+you? Do both of you? What about your dad — does he own this fact too, or
+does he have to license the fact from you (or your mom or both of you) in
+order to use this fact? What about the hundreds or thousands of other people
+who know these facts?
+ </p><p>
+ If you go to a Black Lives Matter demonstration, do the other demonstrators
+need your permission to post their photos from the event? The online fights
+over <a class="ulink" href="https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-take-photos-at-protests/" target="_top">when and
+how to post photos from demonstrations</a> reveal a nuanced, complex
+issue that cannot be easily hand-waved away by giving one party a property
+right that everyone else in the mix has to respect.
+ </p><p>
+ The fact that information isn’t a good fit with property and markets doesn’t
+mean that it’s not valuable. Babies aren’t property, but they’re inarguably
+valuable. In fact, we have a whole set of rules just for babies as well as a
+subset of those rules that apply to humans more generally. Someone who
+argues that babies won’t be truly valuable until they can be bought and sold
+like loaves of bread would be instantly and rightfully condemned as a
+monster.
+ </p><p>
+ It’s tempting to reach for the property hammer when Big Tech treats your
+information like a nail — not least because Big Tech are such prolific
+abusers of property hammers when it comes to <span class="emphasis"><em>their</em></span>
+information. But this is a mistake. If we allow markets to dictate the use
+of our information, then we’ll find that we’re sellers in a buyers’ market
+where the Big Tech monopolies set a price for our data that is so low as to
+be insignificant or, more likely, set at a nonnegotiable price of zero in a
+click-through agreement that you don’t have the opportunity to modify.
+ </p><p>
+ Meanwhile, establishing property rights over information will create
+insurmountable barriers to independent data processing. Imagine that we
+require a license to be negotiated when a translated document is compared
+with its original, something Google has done and continues to do billions of
+times to train its automated language translation tools. Google can afford
+this, but independent third parties cannot. Google can staff a clearances
+department to negotiate one-time payments to the likes of the EU (one of the
+major repositories of translated documents) while independent watchdogs
+wanting to verify that the translations are well-prepared, or to root out
+bias in translations, will find themselves needing a staffed-up legal
+department and millions for licenses before they can even get started.
+ </p><p>
+ The same goes for things like search indexes of the web or photos of
+peoples’ houses, which have become contentious thanks to Google’s Street
+View project. Whatever problems may exist with Google’s photographing of
+street scenes, resolving them by letting people decide who can take pictures
+of the facades of their homes from a public street will surely create even
+worse ones. Think of how street photography is important for newsgathering —
+including informal newsgathering, like photographing abuses of authority —
+and how being able to document housing and street life are important for
+contesting eminent domain, advocating for social aid, reporting planning and
+zoning violations, documenting discriminatory and unequal living conditions,
+and more.
+ </p><p>
+ The ownership of facts is antithetical to many kinds of human progress. It’s
+hard to imagine a rule that limits Big Tech’s exploitation of our collective
+labors without inadvertently banning people from gathering data on online
+harassment or compiling indexes of changes in language or simply
+investigating how the platforms are shaping our discourse — all of which
+require scraping data that other people have created and subjecting it to
+scrutiny and analysis.
+ </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>
+ The platforms may oversell their ability to persuade people, but obviously,
+persuasion works sometimes. Whether it’s the private realm that LGBTQ people
+used to recruit allies and normalize sexual diversity or the decadeslong
+project to convince people that markets are the only efficient way to solve
+complicated resource allocation problems, it’s clear that our societal
+attitudes <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> change.
+ </p><p>
+ The project of shifting societal attitudes is a game of inches and
+years. For centuries, svengalis have purported to be able to accelerate this
+process, but even the most brutal forms of propaganda have struggled to make
+permanent changes. Joseph Goebbels was able to subject Germans to daily,
+mandatory, hourslong radio broadcasts, to round up and torture and murder
+dissidents, and to seize full control over their children’s education while
+banning any literature, broadcasts, or films that did not comport with his
+worldview.
+ </p><p>
+ Yet, after 12 years of terror, once the war ended, Nazi ideology was largely
+discredited in both East and West Germany, and a program of national truth
+and reconciliation was put in its place. Racism and authoritarianism were
+never fully abolished in Germany, but neither were the majority of Germans
+irrevocably convinced of Nazism — and the rise of racist authoritarianism in
+Germany today tells us that the liberal attitudes that replaced Nazism were
+no more permanent than Nazism itself.
+ </p><p>
+ Racism and authoritarianism have also always been with us. Anyone who’s
+reviewed the kind of messages and arguments that racists put forward today
+would be hard-pressed to say that they have gotten better at presenting
+their ideas. The same pseudoscience, appeals to fear, and circular logic
+that racists presented in the 1980s, when the cause of white supremacy was
+on the wane, are to be found in the communications of leading white
+nationalists today.
+ </p><p>
+ If racists haven’t gotten more convincing in the past decade, then how is it
+that more people were convinced to be openly racist at that time? I believe
+that the answer lies in the material world, not the world of ideas. The
+ideas haven’t gotten more convincing, but people have become more
+afraid. Afraid that the state can’t be trusted to act as an honest broker in
+life-or-death decisions, from those regarding the management of the economy
+to the regulation of painkillers to the rules for handling private
+information. Afraid that the world has become a game of musical chairs in
+which the chairs are being taken away at a never-before-seen rate. Afraid
+that justice for others will come at their expense. Monopolism isn’t the
+cause of these fears, but the inequality and material desperation and policy
+malpractice that monopolism contributes to is a significant contributor to
+these conditions. Inequality creates the conditions for both conspiracies
+and violent racist ideologies, and then surveillance capitalism lets
+opportunists target the fearful and the conspiracy-minded.
+ </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>
+ As the old saw goes, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the
+product.</span>“</span>
+ </p><p>
+ It’s a commonplace belief today that the advent of free, ad-supported media
+was the original sin of surveillance capitalism. The reasoning is that the
+companies that charged for access couldn’t <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">compete with free</span>“</span>
+and so they were driven out of business. Their ad-supported competitors,
+meanwhile, declared open season on their users’ data in a bid to improve
+their ad targeting and make more money and then resorted to the most
+sensationalist tactics to generate clicks on those ads. If only we’d pay for
+media again, we’d have a better, more responsible, more sober discourse that
+would be better for democracy.
+ </p><p>
+ But the degradation of news products long precedes the advent of
+ad-supported online news. Long before newspapers were online, lax antitrust
+enforcement had opened the door for unprecedented waves of consolidation and
+roll-ups in newsrooms. Rival newspapers were merged, reporters and ad sales
+staff were laid off, physical plants were sold and leased back, leaving the
+companies loaded up with debt through leveraged buyouts and subsequent
+profit-taking by the new owners. In other words, it wasn’t merely shifts in
+the classified advertising market, which was long held to be the primary
+driver in the decline of the traditional newsroom, that made news companies
+unable to adapt to the internet — it was monopolism.
+ </p><p>
+ Then, as news companies <span class="emphasis"><em>did</em></span> come online, the ad
+revenues they commanded dropped even as the number of internet users (and
+thus potential online readers) increased. That shift was a function of
+consolidation in the ad sales market, with Google and Facebook emerging as
+duopolists who made more money every year from advertising while paying less
+and less of it to the publishers whose work the ads appeared
+alongside. Monopolism created a buyer’s market for ad inventory with
+Facebook and Google acting as gatekeepers.
+ </p><p>
+ Paid services continue to exist alongside free ones, and often it is these
+paid services — anxious to prevent people from bypassing their paywalls or
+sharing paid media with freeloaders — that exert the most control over their
+customers. Apple’s iTunes and App Stores are paid services, but to maximize
+their profitability, Apple has to lock its platforms so that third parties
+can’t make compatible software without permission. These locks allow the
+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
+political material</a>) and technological control, including control
+over who can repair the devices it makes. If we’re worried that ad-supported
+products deprive people of their right to self-determination by using
+persuasion techniques to nudge their purchase decisions a few degrees in one
+direction or the other, then the near-total control a single company holds
+over the decision of who gets to sell you software, parts, and service for
+your iPhone should have us very worried indeed.
+ </p><p>
+ We shouldn’t just be concerned about payment and control: The idea that
+paying will improve discourse is also dangerously wrong. The poor success
+rate of targeted advertising means that the platforms have to incentivize
+you to <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">engage</span>“</span> with posts at extremely high levels to generate
+enough pageviews to safeguard their profits. As discussed earlier, to
+increase engagement, platforms like Facebook use machine learning to guess
+which messages will be most inflammatory and make a point of shoving those
+into your eyeballs at every turn so that you will hate-click and argue with
+people.
+ </p><p>
+ Perhaps paying would fix this, the reasoning goes. If platforms could be
+economically viable even if you stopped clicking on them once your
+intellectual and social curiosity had been slaked, then they would have no
+reason to algorithmically enrage you to get more clicks out of you, right?
+ </p><p>
+ There may be something to that argument, but it still ignores the wider
+economic and political context of the platforms and the world that allowed
+them to grow so dominant.
+ </p><p>
+ Platforms are world-spanning and all-encompassing because they are
+monopolies, and they are monopolies because we have gutted our most
+important and reliable anti-monopoly rules. Antitrust was neutered as a key
+part of the project to make the wealthy wealthier, and that project has
+worked. The vast majority of people on Earth have a negative net worth, and
+even the dwindling middle class is in a precarious state, undersaved for
+retirement, underinsured for medical disasters, and undersecured against
+climate and technology shocks.
+ </p><p>
+ In this wildly unequal world, paying doesn’t improve the discourse; it
+simply prices discourse out of the range of the majority of people. Paying
+for the product is dandy, if you can afford it.
+ </p><p>
+ If you think today’s filter bubbles are a problem for our discourse, imagine
+what they’d be like if rich people inhabited free-flowing Athenian
+marketplaces of ideas where you have to pay for admission while everyone
+else lives in online spaces that are subsidized by wealthy benefactors who
+relish the chance to establish conversational spaces where the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">house
+rules</span>“</span> forbid questioning the status quo. That is, imagine if the
+rich seceded from Facebook, and then, instead of running ads that made money
+for shareholders, Facebook became a billionaire’s vanity project that also
+happened to ensure that nobody talked about whether it was fair that only
+billionaires could afford to hang out in the rarified corners of the
+internet.
+ </p><p>
+ Behind the idea of paying for access is a belief that free markets will
+address Big Tech’s dysfunction. After all, to the extent that people have a
+view of surveillance at all, it is generally an unfavorable one, and the
+longer and more thoroughly one is surveilled, the less one tends to like
+it. Same goes for lock-in: If HP’s ink or Apple’s App Store were really
+obviously fantastic, they wouldn’t need technical measures to prevent users
+from choosing a rival’s product. The only reason these technical
+countermeasures exist is that the companies don’t believe their customers
+would <span class="emphasis"><em>voluntarily</em></span> submit to their terms, and they want
+to deprive them of the choice to take their business elsewhere.
+ </p><p>
+ Advocates for markets laud their ability to aggregate the diffused knowledge
+of buyers and sellers across a whole society through demand signals, price
+signals, and so on. The argument for surveillance capitalism being a
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism</span>“</span> is that machine-learning-driven persuasion
+techniques distort decision-making by consumers, leading to incorrect
+signals — consumers don’t buy what they prefer, they buy what they’re
+tricked into preferring. It follows that the monopolistic practices of
+lock-in, which do far more to constrain consumers’ free choices, are even
+more of a <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">rogue capitalism.</span>“</span>
+ </p><p>
+ The profitability of any business is constrained by the possibility that its
+customers will take their business elsewhere. Both surveillance and lock-in
+are anti-features that no customer wants. But monopolies can capture their
+regulators, crush their competitors, insert themselves into their customers’
+lives, and corral people into <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">choosing</span>“</span> their services
+regardless of whether they want them — it’s fine to be terrible when there
+is no alternative.
+ </p><p>
+ Ultimately, surveillance and lock-in are both simply business strategies
+that monopolists can choose. Surveillance companies like Google are
+perfectly capable of deploying lock-in technologies — just look at the
+onerous Android licensing terms that require device-makers to bundle in
+Google’s suite of applications. And lock-in companies like Apple are
+perfectly capable of subjecting their users to surveillance if it means
+keeping the Chinese government happy and preserving ongoing access to
+Chinese markets. Monopolies may be made up of good, ethical people, but as
+institutions, they are not your friend — they will do whatever they can get
+away with to maximize their profits, and the more monopolistic they are, the
+more they <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> get away with.
+ </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>
+ If we’re going to break Big Tech’s death grip on our digital lives, we’re
+going to have to fight monopolies. That may sound pretty mundane and
+old-fashioned, something out of the New Deal era, while ending the use of
+automated behavioral modification feels like the plotline of a really cool
+cyberpunk novel.
+ </p><p>
+ Meanwhile, breaking up monopolies is something we seem to have forgotten how
+to do. There is a bipartisan, trans-Atlantic consensus that breaking up
+companies is a fool’s errand at best — liable to mire your federal
+prosecutors in decades of litigation — and counterproductive at worst,
+eroding the <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">consumer benefits</span>“</span> of large companies with massive
+efficiencies of scale.
+ </p><p>
+ But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing
+robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies’ all-powerful grip
+on our society. The trustbusting era could not begin until we found the
+political will — until the people convinced politicians they’d have their
+backs when they went up against the richest, most powerful men in the world.
+ </p><p>
+ Could we find that political will again?
+ </p><p>
+ Copyright scholar James Boyle has described how the term
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> marked a turning point in environmental
+activism. Prior to the adoption of this term, people who wanted to preserve
+whale populations didn’t necessarily see themselves as fighting the same
+battle as people who wanted to protect the ozone layer or fight freshwater
+pollution or beat back smog or acid rain.
+ </p><p>
+ But the term <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> welded these disparate causes together
+into a single movement, and the members of this movement found solidarity
+with one another. The people who cared about smog signed petitions
+circulated by the people who wanted to end whaling, and the anti-whalers
+marched alongside the people demanding action on acid rain. This uniting
+behind a common cause completely changed the dynamics of environmentalism,
+setting the stage for today’s climate activism and the sense that preserving
+the habitability of the planet Earth is a shared duty among all people.
+ </p><p>
+ I believe we are on the verge of a new <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">ecology</span>“</span> moment
+dedicated to combating monopolies. After all, tech isn’t the only
+concentrated industry nor is it even the <span class="emphasis"><em>most</em></span>
+concentrated of industries.
+ </p><p>
+ You can find partisans for trustbusting in every sector of the
+economy. Everywhere you look, you can find people who’ve been wronged by
+monopolists who’ve trashed their finances, their health, their privacy,
+their educations, and the lives of people they love. Those people have the
+same cause as the people who want to break up Big Tech and the same
+enemies. When most of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a very few, it
+follows that nearly every large company will have overlapping shareholders.
+ </p><p>
+ That’s the good news: With a little bit of work and a little bit of
+coalition building, we have more than enough political will to break up Big
+Tech and every other concentrated industry besides. First we take Facebook,
+then we take AT&T/WarnerMedia.
+ </p><p>
+ But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech
+<span class="emphasis"><em>instead</em></span> of breaking up the big companies also
+forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later.
+ </p><p>
+ Big Tech’s concentration currently means that their inaction on harassment,
+for example, leaves users with an impossible choice: absent themselves from
+public discourse by, say, quitting Twitter or endure vile, constant
+abuse. Big Tech’s over-collection and over-retention of data results in
+horrific identity theft. And their inaction on extremist recruitment means
+that white supremacists who livestream their shooting rampages can reach an
+audience of billions. The combination of tech concentration and media
+concentration means that artists’ incomes are falling even as the revenue
+generated by their creations are increasing.
+ </p><p>
+ Yet governments confronting all of these problems all inevitably converge on
+the same solution: deputize the Big Tech giants to police their users and
+render them liable for their users’ bad actions. The drive to force Big Tech
+to use automated filters to block everything from copyright infringement to
+sex-trafficking to violent extremism means that tech companies will have to
+allocate hundreds of millions to run these compliance systems.
+ </p><p>
+ These rules — the EU’s new Directive on Copyright, Australia’s new terror
+regulation, America’s FOSTA/SESTA sex-trafficking law and more — are not
+just death warrants for small, upstart competitors that might challenge Big
+Tech’s dominance but who lack the deep pockets of established incumbents to
+pay for all these automated systems. Worse still, these rules put a floor
+under how small we can hope to make Big Tech.
+ </p><p>
+ That’s because any move to break up Big Tech and cut it down to size will
+have to cope with the hard limit of not making these companies so small that
+they can no longer afford to perform these duties — and it’s
+<span class="emphasis"><em>expensive</em></span> to invest in those automated filters and
+outsource content moderation. It’s already going to be hard to unwind these
+deeply concentrated, chimeric behemoths that have been welded together in
+the pursuit of monopoly profits. Doing so while simultaneously finding some
+way to fill the regulatory void that will be left behind if these
+self-policing rulers were forced to suddenly abdicate will be much, much
+harder.
+ </p><p>
+ Allowing the platforms to grow to their present size has given them a
+dominance that is nearly insurmountable — deputizing them with public duties
+to redress the pathologies created by their size makes it virtually
+impossible to reduce that size. Lather, rinse, repeat: If the platforms
+don’t get smaller, they will get larger, and as they get larger, they will
+create more problems, which will give rise to more public duties for the
+companies, which will make them bigger still.
+ </p><p>
+ We can work to fix the internet by breaking up Big Tech and depriving them
+of monopoly profits, or we can work to fix Big Tech by making them spend
+their monopoly profits on governance. But we can’t do both. We have to
+choose between a vibrant, open internet or a dominated, monopolized internet
+commanded by Big Tech giants that we struggle with constantly to get them to
+behave themselves.
+ </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>
+ Trustbusting is hard. Breaking big companies into smaller ones is expensive
+and time-consuming. So time-consuming that by the time you’re done, the
+world has often moved on and rendered years of litigation irrelevant. From
+1969 to 1982, the U.S. government pursued an antitrust case against IBM over
+its dominance of mainframe computing — but the case collapsed in 1982
+because mainframes were being speedily replaced by PCs.
+ </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
+ A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to
+enforce the law as it was written.
+ </p></blockquote></div><p>
+ It’s far easier to prevent concentration than to fix it, and reinstating the
+traditional contours of U.S. antitrust enforcement will, at the very least,
+prevent further concentration. That means bans on mergers between large
+companies, on big companies acquiring nascent competitors, and on platform
+companies competing directly with the companies that rely on the platforms.
+ </p><p>
+ These powers are all in the plain language of U.S. antitrust laws, so in
+theory, a future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general
+to enforce the law as it was written. But after decades of judicial
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">education</span>“</span> in the benefits of monopolies, after multiple
+administrations that have packed the federal courts with lifetime-appointed
+monopoly cheerleaders, it’s not clear that mere administrative action would
+do the trick.
+ </p><p>
+ If the courts frustrate the Justice Department and the president, the next
+stop would be Congress, which could eliminate any doubt about how antitrust
+law should be enforced in the U.S. by passing new laws that boil down to
+saying, <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert
+Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, <span class="emphasis"><em>fuck that
+guy</em></span>.</span>“</span> In other words, the problem with monopolies is
+<span class="emphasis"><em>monopolism</em></span> — the concentration of power into too few
+hands, which erodes our right to self-determination. If there is a monopoly,
+the law wants it gone, period. Sure, get rid of monopolies that create
+<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">consumer harm</span>“</span> in the form of higher prices, but also,
+<span class="emphasis"><em>get rid of other monopolies, too</em></span>.
+ </p><p>
+ But this only prevents things from getting worse. To help them get better,
+we will have to build coalitions with other activists in the anti-monopoly
+ecology movement — a pluralism movement or a self-determination movement —
+and target existing monopolies in every industry for breakup and structural
+separation rules that prevent, for example, the giant eyewear monopolist
+Luxottica from dominating both the sale and the manufacture of spectacles.
+ </p><p>
+ In an important sense, it doesn’t matter which industry the breakups begin
+in. Once they start, shareholders in <span class="emphasis"><em>every</em></span> industry
+will start to eye their investments in monopolists skeptically. As
+trustbusters ride into town and start making lives miserable for
+monopolists, the debate around every corporate boardroom’s table will
+shift. People within corporations who’ve always felt uneasy about monopolism
+will gain a powerful new argument to fend off their evil rivals in the
+corporate hierarchy: <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">If we do it my way, we make less money; if we do
+it your way, a judge will fine us billions and expose us to ridicule and
+public disapprobation. So even though I get that it would be really cool to
+do that merger, lock out that competitor, or buy that little company and
+kill it before it can threaten it, we really shouldn’t — not if we don’t
+want to get tied to the DOJ’s bumper and get dragged up and down Trustbuster
+Road for the next 10 years.</span>“</span>
+ </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>
+ Fixing Big Tech will require a lot of iteration. As cyber lawyer Lawrence
+Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, <span class="emphasis"><em>Code and Other Laws of
+Cyberspace</em></span>, our lives are regulated by four forces: law (what’s
+legal), code (what’s technologically possible), norms (what’s socially
+acceptable), and markets (what’s profitable).
+ </p><p>
+ If you could wave a wand and get Congress to pass a law that re-fanged the
+Sherman Act tomorrow, you could use the impending breakups to convince
+venture capitalists to fund competitors to Facebook, Google, Twitter, and
+Apple that would be waiting in the wings after they were cut down to size.
+ </p><p>
+ But getting Congress to act will require a massive normative shift, a mass
+movement of people who care about monopolies — and pulling them apart.
+ </p><p>
+ Getting people to care about monopolies will take technological
+interventions that help them to see what a world free from Big Tech might
+look like. Imagine if someone could make a beloved (but unauthorized)
+third-party Facebook or Twitter client that dampens the anxiety-producing
+algorithmic drumbeat and still lets you talk to your friends without being
+spied upon — something that made social media more sociable and less
+toxic. Now imagine that it gets shut down in a brutal legal battle. It’s
+always easier to convince people that something must be done to save a thing
+they love than it is to excite them about something that doesn’t even exist
+yet.
+ </p><p>
+ Neither tech nor law nor code nor markets are sufficient to reform Big
+Tech. But a profitable competitor to Big Tech could bankroll a legislative
+push; legal reform can embolden a toolsmith to make a better tool; the tool
+can create customers for a potential business who value the benefits of the
+internet but want them delivered without Big Tech; and that business can get
+funded and divert some of its profits to legal reform. 20 GOTO 10 (or
+lather, rinse, repeat). Do it again, but this time, get farther! After all,
+this time you’re starting with weaker Big Tech adversaries, a constituency
+that understands things can be better, Big Tech rivals who’ll help ensure
+their own future by bankrolling reform, and code that other programmers can
+build on to weaken Big Tech even further.
+ </p><p>
+ The surveillance capitalism hypothesis — that Big Tech’s products really
+work as well as they say they do and that’s why everything is so screwed up
+— is way too easy on surveillance and even easier on capitalism. Companies
+spy because they believe their own BS, and companies spy because governments
+let them, and companies spy because any advantage from spying is so
+short-lived and minor that they have to do more and more of it just to stay
+in place.
+ </p><p>
+ As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism
+that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a
+form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to
+inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason
+companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to
+both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall
+to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not
+piss off the monopolists.
+ </p><p>
+ Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule
+begets surveillance. Surveillance isn’t bad because it lets people
+manipulate us. It’s bad because it crushes our ability to be our authentic
+selves — and because it lets the rich and powerful figure out who might be
+thinking of building guillotines and what dirt they can use to discredit
+those embryonic guillotine-builders before they can even get to the
+lumberyard.
+ </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>
+ With all the problems of Big Tech, it’s tempting to imagine solving the
+problem by returning to a world without tech at all. Resist that temptation.
+ </p><p>
+ The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is
+not reliant upon high tech, it will be because civilization has fallen. Big
+Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the
+proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the
+existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it’s up to us to seize
+the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under
+democratic, accountable control.
+ </p><p>
+ I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not
+in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize
+because it has <span class="quote">„<span class="quote">economies of scale</span>“</span> or some other nebulous
+feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right
+matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe — and
+doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our
+civilization, our species, and our planet.
+ </p></div></div></body></html>
projects / text-destroy-surveillance.git / commitdiff