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-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><title>
-msgid "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism"
-msgstr "Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><authorgroup><author><firstname>
-msgid "Cory"
-msgstr "Cory"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><authorgroup><author><surname>
-msgid "Doctorow"
-msgstr "Doctorow"
-
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-msgid "<city>Oslo</city>"
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-"<holder>Cory Doctorow</holder> </copyright> <copyright> <year>2021</year> "
-"<holder>Petter Reinholdtsen</holder> </copyright>"
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-"<publisher> <publishername>Petter Reinholdtsen</publishername> <placeholder "
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-"<holder>Cory Doctorow</holder> </copyright> <copyright> <year>2021</year> "
-"<holder>Petter Reinholdtsen</holder> </copyright>"
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-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow."
-msgstr "Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört, von Cory Doctorow."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "Published by Petter Reinholdtsen."
-msgstr "Herausgegeben von Petter Reinholdtsen."
-
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-msgid "<ulink url=\"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/\"/>."
-msgstr ""
-
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-msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (paperback)"
-msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (Taschenbuch)"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)"
-msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)"
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-"This book is available for purchase from <ulink url=\"https://www.lulu.com/"
-"\"/>."
-msgstr ""
-"Dieses Buch kann unter <ulink url=\"https://www.lulu.com/\"/> erworben "
-"werden."
-
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-"<imageobject> <imagedata fileref=\"images/cc-some-rights-reserved.png\" "
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-"<imageobject> <imagedata fileref=\"images/cc-some-rights-reserved.png\" "
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-"<imageobject> <imagedata fileref=\"images/cc-some-rights-reserved.svg\" "
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-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para><inlinemediaobject><textobject><phrase>
-msgid "Creative Commons, Some rights reserved"
-msgstr "Creative Commons, einige Rechte vorbehalten"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "<placeholder type=\"inlinemediaobject\" id=\"0\"/>"
-msgstr "<placeholder type=\"inlinemediaobject\" id=\"0\"/>"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid ""
-"This book is licensed under a Creative Commons license. This license permits "
-"any use of this work, so long as attribution is given and no derivatived "
-"material is distributed. For more information about the license visit "
-"<ulink url=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/\"/>."
-msgstr ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/"
-"\"/>."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "The net of a thousand lies"
-msgstr "Das Netz aus tausend Lügen"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the 21st "
-"century is just how widespread the evidence against them is. You can "
-"understand how, centuries ago, people who’d never gained a high-enough "
-"vantage point from which to see the Earth’s curvature might come to the "
-"commonsense belief that the flat-seeming Earth was, indeed, flat."
-msgstr ""
-"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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But today, when elementary schools routinely dangle GoPro cameras from "
-"balloons and loft them high enough to photograph the Earth’s curve — to say "
-"nothing of the unexceptional sight of the curved Earth from an airplane "
-"window — it takes a heroic effort to maintain the belief that the world is "
-"flat."
-msgstr ""
-"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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Likewise for white nationalism and eugenics: In an age where you can become "
-"a computational genomics datapoint by swabbing your cheek and mailing it to "
-"a gene-sequencing company along with a modest sum of money, <quote>race "
-"science</quote> has never been easier to refute."
-msgstr ""
-"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 <quote>Rassentheorie</quote> noch nie so "
-"einfach."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"We are living through a golden age of both readily available facts and "
-"denial of those facts. Terrible ideas that have lingered on the fringes for "
-"decades or even centuries have gone mainstream seemingly overnight."
-msgstr ""
-"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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that can "
-"explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea has gotten a "
-"lot better at stating their case, or the proposition has become harder to "
-"deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other words, if we want people to "
-"take climate change seriously, we can get a bunch of Greta Thunbergs to make "
-"eloquent, passionate arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds, "
-"or we can wait for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case "
-"for us. In practice, we’ll probably have to do some of both: The more we’re "
-"boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier it will be for "
-"the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us."
-msgstr ""
-"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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The arguments for ridiculous beliefs in odious conspiracies like anti-"
-"vaccination, climate denial, a flat Earth, and eugenics are no better than "
-"they were a generation ago. Indeed, they’re worse because they are being "
-"pitched to people who have at least a background awareness of the refuting "
-"facts."
-msgstr ""
-"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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Anti-vax has been around since the first vaccines, but the early anti-"
-"vaxxers were pitching people who were less equipped to understand even the "
-"most basic ideas from microbiology, and moreover, those people had not "
-"witnessed the extermination of mass-murdering diseases like polio, smallpox, "
-"and measles. Today’s anti-vaxxers are no more eloquent than their forebears, "
-"and they have a much harder job."
-msgstr ""
-"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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding on the "
-"basis of superior arguments?"
-msgstr ""
-"Können diese Verschwörungstheoretiker wirklich im Ansatz ihrer wichtigsten "
-"Argumente erfolgreich sein?"
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-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Some people think so. Today, there is a widespread belief that machine "
-"learning and commercial surveillance can turn even the most fumble-tongued "
-"conspiracy theorist into a svengali who can warp your perceptions and win "
-"your belief by locating vulnerable people and then pitching them with A.I.-"
-"refined arguments that bypass their rational faculties and turn everyday "
-"people into flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, or even Nazis. When the RAND "
-"Corporation <ulink url=\"https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/"
-"research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf\">blames Facebook for "
-"<quote>radicalization</quote></ulink> and when Facebook’s role in spreading "
-"coronavirus misinformation is <ulink url=\"https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/"
-"en/facebook_threat_health/\">blamed on its algorithm</ulink>, the implicit "
-"message is that machine learning and surveillance are causing the changes in "
-"our consensus about what’s true."
-msgstr ""
-"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<ulink url=\"https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/"
-"research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf\"> Facebook für "
-"<quote>Radikalisierung</quote></ulink> verantwortlich macht und wenn "
-"Facebook das Verbreiten von Falschinformationen in Bezug auf SARS-CoV-2 "
-"<ulink url=\"https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_threat_health/"
-"\">seinen Algorithmen in die Schuhe schiebt</ulink>, dann ist die verdeckte "
-"Botschaft, dass maschinelles Lernen und Überwachung die Änderungen in "
-"unserem Konsens darüber hervorrufen, was wahr ist."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories "
-"like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread followings, "
-"<emphasis>something</emphasis> must be afoot."
-msgstr ""
-"Schließlich muss in einer Welt, in der wuchernde und inkohärente "
-"Verschwörungstheorien wie Pizzagate und sein Nachfolger QAnon zahlreiche "
-"Anhänger haben, <emphasis> einiges </emphasis> im Gange sein."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But what if there’s another explanation? What if it’s the material "
-"circumstances, and not the arguments, that are making the difference for "
-"these conspiracy pitchmen? What if the trauma of living through "
-"<emphasis>real conspiracies</emphasis> all around us — conspiracies among "
-"wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts "
-"and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as "
-"<quote>corruption</quote>) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy "
-"theories?"
-msgstr ""
-"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 <emphasis>echter "
-"Verschwörungen</emphasis> 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 <quote>Korruption</quote>) - Leute anfällig für "
-"Verschwörungstheorien macht?"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"If it’s trauma and not contagion — material conditions and not ideology — "
-"that is making the difference today and enabling a rise of repulsive "
-"misinformation in the face of easily observed facts, that doesn’t mean our "
-"computer networks are blameless. They’re still doing the heavy work of "
-"locating vulnerable people and guiding them through a series of ever-more-"
-"extreme ideas and communities."
-msgstr ""
-"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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses "
-"real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics <ulink url=\"https://"
-"www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html\">kicked off by vaccine denial</"
-"ulink> to genocides <ulink url=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/"
-"technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html\">kicked off by racist "
-"conspiracies</ulink> to planetary meltdown caused by denial-inspired climate "
-"inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to put the fires out — to "
-"figure out how to help people see the truth of the world through the "
-"conspiracies they’ve been confused by."
-msgstr ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-"
-"outbreaks.html\">, die von Impfgegnern ausgelöst wurden,</ulink> bis zu "
-"Massenmorden <ulink url=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/"
-"myanmar-facebook-genocide.html\">, ausgelöst von rassistischen "
-"Verschwörungstheorien,</ulink> 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."
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-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But firefighting is reactive. We need fire <emphasis>prevention</emphasis>. "
-"We need to strike at the traumatic material conditions that make people "
-"vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here, too, tech has a role to "
-"play."
-msgstr ""
-"Aber das Löschen von Bränden ist reaktiv. Wir müssen die "
-"<emphasis>Prävention</emphasis> befeuern. Wir müssen auf die traumatischen "
-"realen Umstände abzielen, die Leute anfällig für die Pandemie von "
-"Verschwörungstheorien machen. Auch darin spielt Technologie eine Rolle."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s <ulink url="
-"\"https://edri.org/tag/terreg/\">Terrorist Content Regulation</ulink>, which "
-"requires platforms to police and remove <quote>extremist</quote> content, to "
-"the U.S. proposals to <ulink url=\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/"
-"earn-it-act-violates-constitution\">force tech companies to spy on their "
-"users</ulink> and hold them liable <ulink url=\"https://www.natlawreview.com/"
-"article/repeal-cda-section-230\">for their users’ bad speech</ulink>, "
-"there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies to solve the problems they "
-"created."
-msgstr ""
-"Vorschläge hierfür gibt es genug. Von der <ulink url=\"https://edri.org/tag/"
-"terreg/\">Terrorist Content Regulation</ulink> der Europäischen Union, "
-"welche Plattformen zwingt, <quote>extremistische</quote> Inhalte zu "
-"überwachen und zu entfernen, über die Vorschläge der Vereinigten Staaten, "
-"wonach <ulink url=\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-"
-"violates-constitution\">Tech-Firmen ihre Nutzer ausspähen</ulink> und <ulink "
-"url=\"https://www.natlawreview.com/article/repeal-cda-section-230\">für "
-"deren „bad speech“</ulink> haftbar zu machen, gibt es zahlreiche "
-"Anstrengunen, um Tech-Firmen dazu zu zwingen, die Probleme zu lösen, die sie "
-"selbst geschaffen haben."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these "
-"solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance "
-"over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a "
-"more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The "
-"<quote>solutions</quote> on the table today <emphasis>require</emphasis> Big "
-"Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to "
-"implement the systems these laws demand."
-msgstr ""
-"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 <quote>Lösungen</quote>, die heute zur Debatte stehen, "
-"<emphasis>setzen voraus</emphasis>, dass Big Tech „big“ bleibt, weil nur die "
-"größten Unternehmen es sich leisten können, entsprechende gesetzeskonforme "
-"Systeme zu etablieren."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to "
-"get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to "
-"figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our "
-"internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big "
-"Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose."
-msgstr ""
-"Wir müssen herausfinden, wie unsere Technologie aussehen soll, wenn wir aus "
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-"reparieren wollen, indem wir es aus dem Klammergriff von „Big Tech“ "
-"befreien. Beides gleichzeitig geht nicht, so dass wir uns entscheiden müssen."
-
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-msgid ""
-"I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the "
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-msgstr ""
-"Ich möchte, dass wir uns weise entscheiden. Zur Reparatur ist es essentiell, "
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-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on"
-msgstr "Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus, ein Vierteljahrhundert später"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic "
-"Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free Software Foundation "
-"launched in 1985. For most of the history of the movement, the most "
-"prominent criticism leveled against it was that it was irrelevant: The real "
-"activist causes were real-world causes (think of the skepticism when <ulink "
-"url=\"https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/finland-legal-right-to-"
-"broadband-for-all-citizens/#:~:text=Global%20Legal%20Monitor,-Home%20%7C"
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-"%20100%20MBPS%20by%202015.\">Finland declared broadband a human right in "
-"2010</ulink>), and real-world activism was shoe-leather activism (think of "
-"Malcolm Gladwell’s <ulink url=\"https://www.newyorker.com/"
-"magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell\">contempt for "
-"<quote>clicktivism</quote></ulink>). But as tech has grown more central to "
-"our daily lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way first to "
-"accusations of insincerity (<quote>You only care about tech because you’re "
-"<ulink url=\"https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-"
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-"quote>) to accusations of negligence (<quote>Why didn’t you foresee that "
-"tech could be such a destructive force?</quote>). But digital rights "
-"activism is right where it’s always been: looking out for the humans in a "
-"world where tech is inexorably taking over."
-msgstr ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"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.\">Finnland im Jahr 2010 einen Breitbandinternetzugang zum "
-"Menschenrecht erklärte </ulink>), und „echter-Welt“-Aktivismus noch als "
-"Stiefel-Aktivismus („shoe leather activism”) galt (man denke an Malcolm "
-"Gladwells <ulink url=\"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-"
-"change-malcolm-gladwell\">Geringschätzung für <quote>Clicktivism</quote></"
-"ulink>). Aber je zentraler Technologien für unseren Alltag wurde, desto mehr "
-"sind die Irrelevanz-Vorwürfe Vorwürfen von Unehrlichkeit gewichen (<quote>Du "
-"sorgst dich nur um Tech, weil du <ulink url=\"https://www.ipwatchdog."
-"com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-google-patent-reform/id=98007/\">für "
-"Technologie-Unternehmen Werbung machen möchtest</ulink></quote>). "
-"(<quote>Wie konntest du nur nicht vorhersehen, dass Tech solch eine "
-"zerstörerische Kraft sein kann?</quote>). Aber Digitaler-Rechte-Aktivismus "
-"steht nach wie vor dafür: auf die Menschen in einer Welt achtgeben, die "
-"unausweichlich von Technologie übernommen wird."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The latest version of this critique comes in the form of <quote>surveillance "
-"capitalism,</quote> a term coined by business professor Shoshana Zuboff in "
-"her long and influential 2019 book, <emphasis>The Age of Surveillance "
-"Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power</"
-"emphasis>. Zuboff argues that <quote>surveillance capitalism</quote> is a "
-"unique creature of the tech industry and that it is unlike any other abusive "
-"commercial practice in history, one that is <quote>constituted by unexpected "
-"and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control "
-"that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new "
-"markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism "
-"challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long "
-"evolution of market capitalism.</quote> It is a new and deadly form of "
-"capitalism, a <quote>rogue capitalism,</quote> and our lack of understanding "
-"of its unique capabilities and dangers represents an existential, species-"
-"wide threat. She’s right that capitalism today threatens our species, and "
-"she’s right that tech poses unique challenges to our species and "
-"civilization, but she’s really wrong about how tech is different and why it "
-"threatens our species."
-msgstr ""
-"Die neueste Form dieser Kritik kommt in der Form des "
-"<quote>Überwachungskapitalismus</quote>, einem Begriff, der von der Business-"
-"Professorin Shoshana Zuboff in ihrem langen und einflussreichen Buch "
-"<emphasis>Das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus</emphasis> geprägt "
-"wurde, das 2019 erschienen ist. Zuboff argumentiert, dass "
-"<quote>Überwachungskapitalismus</quote> ein einzigartigs Geschöpf der Tech-"
-"Industrie sei und dass es sich von allen anderen ausbeuterischen "
-"kommerziellen Praktiken Geschichte unterscheide; ein Geschöpf, das <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.</quote> Es handelt sich "
-"dabei um eine neue tödliche Form von Kapitalismus, einen "
-"<quote>schurkenhaften Kapitalismus</quote>, 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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"What’s more, I think that her incorrect diagnosis will lead us down a path "
-"that ends up making Big Tech stronger, not weaker. We need to take down Big "
-"Tech, and to do that, we need to start by correctly identifying the problem."
-msgstr ""
-"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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Tech exceptionalism, then and now"
-msgstr "Tech-Exzeptionalismus, damals und heute"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Early critics of the digital rights movement — perhaps best represented by "
-"campaigning organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free "
-"Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, and others that focused on preserving "
-"and enhancing basic human rights in the digital realm — damned activists for "
-"practicing <quote>tech exceptionalism.</quote> Around the turn of the "
-"millennium, serious people ridiculed any claim that tech policy mattered in "
-"the <quote>real world.</quote> Claims that tech rules had implications for "
-"speech, association, privacy, search and seizure, and fundamental rights and "
-"equities were treated as ridiculous, an elevation of the concerns of sad "
-"nerds arguing about <emphasis>Star Trek</emphasis> on bulletin board systems "
-"above the struggles of the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela, or the Warsaw "
-"ghetto uprising."
-msgstr ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>Tech-Exzeptionalismus</quote>. Um die Jahrtausendwende machten "
-"bedeutende Leute jegliche Behauptung, dass Tech-Regularien in der "
-"<quote>echten Welt</quote> 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 <emphasis> Star Trek</emphasis> "
-"diskutierten, geschürt und gar über die Freiheitskämpfe der Freedom Rider, "
-"Nelson Mandela oder des Warschauer Ghetto-Aufstandes erhoben würden."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In the decades since, accusations of <quote>tech exceptionalism</quote> have "
-"only sharpened as tech’s role in everyday life has expanded: Now that tech "
-"has infiltrated every corner of our life and our online lives have been "
-"monopolized by a handful of giants, defenders of digital freedoms are "
-"accused of carrying water for Big Tech, providing cover for its self-"
-"interested negligence (or worse, nefarious plots)."
-msgstr ""
-"In den seitdem vergangenen Jahrzehnten wurden die Vorwürfe von <quote>Tech-"
-"Exzeptionalismus</quote> 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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"From my perspective, the digital rights movement has remained stationary "
-"while the rest of the world has moved. From the earliest days, the "
-"movement’s concern was users and the toolsmiths who provided the code they "
-"needed to realize their fundamental rights. Digital rights activists only "
-"cared about companies to the extent that companies were acting to uphold "
-"users’ rights (or, just as often, when companies were acting so foolishly "
-"that they threatened to bring down new rules that would also make it harder "
-"for good actors to help users)."
-msgstr ""
-"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)."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The <quote>surveillance capitalism</quote> critique recasts the digital "
-"rights movement in a new light again: not as alarmists who overestimate the "
-"importance of their shiny toys nor as shills for big tech but as serene deck-"
-"chair rearrangers whose long-standing activism is a liability because it "
-"makes them incapable of perceiving novel threats as they continue to fight "
-"the last century’s tech battles."
-msgstr ""
-"Der Kritiker des <quote>Überwachungskapitalismus</quote> 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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "But tech exceptionalism is a sin no matter who practices it."
-msgstr ""
-"Aber Tech-Exzeptionalismus ist eine Sünde, unabhängig davon, wer ihn "
-"betreibt."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Don’t believe the hype"
-msgstr "Glaube nicht an den Hype"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"You’ve probably heard that <quote>if you’re not paying for the product, "
-"you’re the product.</quote> As we’ll see below, that’s true, if incomplete. "
-"But what is <emphasis>absolutely</emphasis> true is that ad-driven Big "
-"Tech’s customers are advertisers, and what companies like Google and "
-"Facebook sell is their ability to convince <emphasis>you</emphasis> to buy "
-"stuff. Big Tech’s product is persuasion. The services — social media, search "
-"engines, maps, messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion."
-msgstr ""
-"Du hast wahrscheinlich schon einmal gehört, dass <quote>du das Produkt bist, "
-"wenn du nicht für das Produkt bezahlst </quote>. Wie wir noch sehen werden, "
-"ist diese Aussage im Grunde richtig, aber nicht vollständig. Aber es "
-"stimmt<emphasis>definitiv</emphasis> , dass die Kunden von Big Tech "
-"Werbeunternehmen sind, und das Geschäftsmodell von Google und Facebook ist "
-"letztlich ihre Fähigkeit, <emphasis>dich</emphasis> 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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The fear of surveillance capitalism starts from the (correct) presumption "
-"that everything Big Tech says about itself is probably a lie. But the "
-"surveillance capitalism critique makes an exception for the claims Big Tech "
-"makes in its sales literature — the breathless hype in the pitches to "
-"potential advertisers online and in ad-tech seminars about the efficacy of "
-"its products: It assumes that Big Tech is as good at influencing us as they "
-"claim they are when they’re selling influencing products to credulous "
-"customers. That’s a mistake because sales literature is not a reliable "
-"indicator of a product’s efficacy."
-msgstr ""
-"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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Surveillance capitalism assumes that because advertisers buy a lot of what "
-"Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something real. But Big Tech’s "
-"massive sales could just as easily be the result of a popular delusion or "
-"something even more pernicious: monopolistic control over our communications "
-"and commerce."
-msgstr ""
-"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."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-"Überwachung führt zu Verhaltensveränderungen, und zwar nicht zu positiven. "
-"Sie gefähdet unseren gesellschaftlichen Fortschritt. Zuboffs Buch arbeitet "
-"Erklärungen dieser Phänomene eindrucksvoll heraus. Aber Zuboff behauptet "
-"auch, dass Überwachung uns unseres freien Willens beraubt - dass, wenn "
-"unsere persönlichen Daten mit maschinellem Lernen kombiniert werden, ein "
-"System fataler Überzeugungskunst entsteht, in dessen Angesicht wir hilflos "
-"sind. Sprich, Facebook nutzt einen Algorithmus, um die Daten zu analysieren, "
-"welche ohne unsere Zustimmung aus deinem Alltag extrahiert werden, und nutzt "
-"diese, um deinen Feed so anzupassen, dass du Sachen kaufst. Es handelt sich "
-"um einen Strahl zur Gedankensteuerung wie aus einem Comic der 1950er Jahre, "
-"der von verrückten Wissenschaftlern bedient wird, deren Supercomputer ihnen "
-"ewige und umfassende Weltherrschaft garantiert."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "What is persuasion?"
-msgstr "Was ist Überzeugung?"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"To understand why you shouldn’t worry about mind-control rays — but why you "
-"<emphasis>should</emphasis> worry about surveillance <emphasis>and</"
-"emphasis> Big Tech — we must start by unpacking what we mean by "
-"<quote>persuasion.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-"Um zu verstehen, weshalb du dich nicht um Strahlen zur Gedankenkontrolle – "
-"aber weshalb du dich um Überwachung <emphasis>und</emphasis> Big Tech sorgen "
-"<emphasis>solltest</emphasis> -, müssen wir einordnen, was wir mit "
-"<quote>Überzeugung</quote> meinen."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-"Google, Facebook und andere Überwachungkapitalisten versprechen ihren Kunden "
-"(den Werbeunternehmen), dass sich diesen – durch Werkzeuge maschinellen "
-"Lernes, die mit unvorstellbar großen Mengen an persönlichen Daten ohne "
-"Zustimmung trainier wurden – Wege eröffnen, um das rationale Denken der "
-"Öffentlichkeit umgehen und ihr Verhalten lenken zu können, so dass ein ein "
-"Strom an Käufen, Stimmen und anderer erwünschter Ergebnisse erzeugt wird."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"The impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be "
-"central to our analysis and any remedies we seek."
-msgstr ""
-"Die Auswirkungen von Vorherrschaft überwiegt die der Manipulation bei weitem "
-"und sie sollen im Mittelpunkt unserer Analyse und etwaiger Gegenmittel "
-"stehen, die wir zu finden suchen."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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:"
-msgstr ""
-"Aber es gibt wenige Beweise dafür, dass dies geschieht. Stattdessen sind die "
-"Vorhersagen, die Überwachungskapitalisten ihren Kunden liefern, viel weniger "
-"beeindruckend. Anstelle Wege zu finden, die unser rationales Denken umgehen, "
-"tun Überwachungskapitlisten meistens eines oder mehrere der folgenden drei "
-"Dinge:"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "1. Segmenting"
-msgstr "1. Aufteilung"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-"Falls du Windeln verkaufst, bist du besser beraten, diese Leuten auf "
-"Entbindungsstationen anzubieten. Nicht jeder, der eine Entbindungsstation "
-"betritt oder eine solche verlässt, hat gerade ein Kind entbunden, und nicht "
-"jeder, der gerade ein Kind entbunden hat, ist im Windelmarkt vertreten. Aber "
-"die Geburt eines Kindes ist ein sehr zuverlässiges Korrelat zur Teilnahme am "
-"„Windelmarkt“, und der Aufenthalt in einer Entbindungsstation steht in hoher "
-"Korrelation zur Geburt eines Kindes. Deshalb Windelwerbung im Bereich von "
-"Entbindungsstationen (und sogar Promoter, die auf Entbindungsstationen mit "
-"Körben voller Gratisproben herumspuken)."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid "This is seriously creepy."
-msgstr "Das ist wirklich beängstigend."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid "But it’s not mind control."
-msgstr "Aber dies ist keine Gedankenkontrolle."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid "It doesn’t deprive you of your free will. It doesn’t trick you."
-msgstr ""
-"Es beraubt dich nicht deines freien Willens. Es führt dich nicht hinters "
-"Licht."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "2. Deception"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www."
-"vulture.com/2020/01/the-dream-podcast-review.html\">the forums</ulink> where "
-"people who are being victimized by multilevel marketing frauds gather to "
-"trade tips on how to improve their luck in peddling the product."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/"
-"\">majority of cases</ulink>, 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "3. Domination"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>How long is the Brooklyn Bridge?</quote> 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 <emphasis>page</emphasis> of results — Google’s choice means that many "
-"people will be deceived."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "4. Bypassing our rational faculties"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis>This</emphasis> is the good stuff: using machine learning, "
-"<quote>dark patterns,</quote> engagement hacking, and other techniques to "
-"get us to do things that run counter to our better judgment. This is mind "
-"control."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>social proof</"
-"quote> 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 <quote>own</quote> something because we bid on it, thus encouraging "
-"us to bid again when we are outbid to ensure that <quote>our</quote> things "
-"stay ours."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Games are extraordinarily good at this. <quote>Free to play</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Companies have risen and fallen on these techniques, and the <quote>fallen</"
-"quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"That’s why behavioral conditioning uses <quote>intermittent reinforcement "
-"schedules.</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful behavioral tool, but it also "
-"represents a collective action problem for surveillance capitalism. The "
-"<quote>engagement techniques</quote> 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 <quote>pull to refresh</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>are</emphasis> techniques like that. Who can forget the "
-"Great Zynga Epidemic, when all of our friends were caught in "
-"<emphasis>FarmVille</emphasis>’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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"But surveillance capitalism’s margins on behavioral modification suck. "
-"Tripling the rate at which someone buys a widget sounds great <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2018/03/09/the-advertising-"
-"conversion-rates-for-every-major-tech-platform/#2f6a67485957\">unless the "
-"base rate is way less than 1%</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid ""
-"If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Zuboff observes this phenomenon and concludes that data must be very "
-"valuable if surveillance capitalism is so hungry for it. (In her words: "
-"<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.</quote>) 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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Of course, all of Big Tech’s persuasion techniques work in concert with one "
-"another, and collecting data is useful beyond mere behavioral trickery."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>races,</quote> "
-"sticking instead to conspiratorial secret histories of <quote>demographic "
-"replacement</quote> and the like."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>voter "
-"suppression</quote> if you can convince your marks to confine their search "
-"terms to <quote>voter fraud,</quote> which throws up a very different set of "
-"search results."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>neurolinguistic programming</quote> phrases, body language "
-"techniques, and psychological manipulation tactics like <quote>negging</"
-"quote> — offering unsolicited negative feedback to women to lower their self-"
-"esteem and prick their interest."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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’ <quote>success</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Pick-up artists <emphasis>believe</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Pick-up artists are proof that people can believe they have developed a "
-"system of mind control <emphasis>even when it doesn’t work</emphasis>. 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Department store pioneer John Wanamaker is said to have lamented, "
-"<quote>Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I "
-"don’t know which half.</quote> 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 <emphasis>much</emphasis> "
-"better at convincing potential clients to buy their services than they are "
-"at convincing the general public to buy their clients’ wares."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "What is Facebook?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>and</emphasis> spying on them all the time."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>Like</quote> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but "
-"because it is <emphasis>big</emphasis>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>loyalty</quote> "
-"programs, financial transactions, etc., and cross-references that with the "
-"dossiers it develops on activity on Facebook and with apps and the public "
-"web."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"To understand what role Facebook plays in the formulation and mobilization "
-"of antisocial movements, we need to understand the dual nature of Facebook."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Facebook makes finding people shopping for refrigerators a <emphasis>lot</"
-"emphasis> 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 <emphasis>other</"
-"emphasis> 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 "
-"<emphasis>are</emphasis> looking for fridges that these ads reach is "
-"<emphasis>much</emphasis> larger than it is than for any group that might be "
-"subjected to traditional, offline targeted refrigerator marketing."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>brand "
-"recognition.</quote> This means that the price per ad is very low in nearly "
-"every case."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"With nothing but <quote>organic</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Facebook <emphasis>can</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Monopoly and the right to the future tense"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>the right to the future tense</quote> "
-"— that is, the right to decide for yourself what you will do in the future."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <ulink url=\"https://twitter.com/"
-"tveastman/status/1069674780826071040\">as one person on Twitter noted</"
-"ulink>, five giant websites each filled with screenshots of the other four."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Start with <quote>digital rights management.</quote> 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 <quote>anti-circumvention</quote> rule."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<emphasis>nothing else</emphasis> — and you and copyright are square with "
-"one another."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"That’s where Section 1201 of the DMCA comes in: By banning tampering with an "
-"<quote>access control,</quote> 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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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:"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
-msgid ""
-"Any device with software in it contains a <quote>copyrighted work</quote> — "
-"i.e., the software."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
-msgid ""
-"A device can be designed so that reconfiguring the software requires "
-"bypassing an <quote>access control for copyrighted works,</quote> which is a "
-"potential felony under Section 1201."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.telegraph.co."
-"uk/technology/apple/5982243/Apple-bans-dictionary-from-App-Store-over-swear-"
-"words.html\">reject dictionaries</ulink> for containing obscene words; to "
-"<ulink url=\"https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just-banned-the-"
-"app-that-tracks-us-drone-strikes-again\">limit political speech</ulink>, "
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-05-19-"
-"palestinian-indie-game-must-not-be-called-a-game-apple-says\">object to a "
-"game</ulink> that commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.ft.com/"
-"content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc\">ordered Apple to prohibit the "
-"sale of privacy tools</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <quote>rogue capitalism.</quote> "
-"Theoreticians of capitalism claim that its virtue is that it <ulink url="
-"\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal\">aggregates information in the "
-"form of consumers’ decisions</ulink>, 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no "
-"longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at "
-"<emphasis>least</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Search order and the right to the future tense"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <quote>I don’t care who does the electing, "
-"so long as I get to do the nominating.</quote> A monopolized market is an "
-"election whose candidates are chosen by the monopolist."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>Are vaccines dangerous?</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"This is true whether the search is for <quote>Are vaccines dangerous?</"
-"quote> or <quote>best restaurants near me.</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Many of the questions we ask search engines have no empirically correct "
-"answers: <quote>Where should I eat dinner?</quote> is not an objective "
-"question. Even questions that do have correct answers (<quote>Are vaccines "
-"dangerous?</quote>) 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for three "
-"reasons:"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis role=\"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.</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis role=\"strong\">2. They believe the surveillance capitalism story."
-"</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis role=\"strong\">3. The penalties for leaking data are negligible.</"
-"emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>free</quote> and autocratic states — is to suborn commercial "
-"services."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly abet "
-"surveillance."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>do</emphasis> think that tech poses an existential "
-"threat to our society and possibly our species."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "But that threat grows out of monopoly."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 (<quote>circumventing</quote>) them, and these "
-"statutes have been used to threaten security researchers who make "
-"disclosures about vulnerabilities without permission from manufacturers."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>rogue capitalism</"
-"quote> 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 <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> than surveillance "
-"capitalism’s influence campaigns."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"And unlike mind-control rays, enforced silence over security is an "
-"immediate, documented problem, and it <emphasis>does</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In software design, <quote>technology debt</quote> 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 <emphasis>them</emphasis>, 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 <quote>pay off the debt</quote> once and for all."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Privacy and monopoly"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>fails</"
-"emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>respectable</quote> 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 <quote>cure</quote> gay people, history is littered with the formerly "
-"respectable titans of discredited industries."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <emphasis>understated</emphasis>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"There’s real irony here. The belief in surveillance capitalism as a "
-"<quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>fully hedged</quote> 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 "
-"<emphasis>did</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but "
-"because it is <emphasis>big</emphasis>. The reason every web publisher "
-"embeds a Facebook <quote>Like</quote> button is that Facebook dominates the "
-"internet’s social media referrals — and every one of those <quote>Like</"
-"quote> buttons spies on everyone who lands on a page that contains them (see "
-"also: Google Analytics embeds, Twitter buttons, etc.)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies "
-"certainly abet surveillance."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>diseconomies of scale</quote> (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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>consumer harm</quote> — in the form of "
-"higher prices."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>monopoly rents</quote> (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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>borked</quote> to refer to any catastrophically bad "
-"political performance)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Today, many fear that machine learning allows surveillance capitalism to "
-"sell <quote>Bork-as-a-Service,</quote> at internet speeds, so that you can "
-"contract a machine-learning company to engineer <emphasis>rapid</emphasis> "
-"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, <emphasis>including</emphasis> in their "
-"sales literature."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The idea that tech forms <quote>natural monopolies</quote> (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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>curation</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In support of this thesis, I offer the concentration that every "
-"<emphasis>other</emphasis> 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, <emphasis>every</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 (<quote>It was the "
-"environmental toxins</quote>), true believers in unregulated markets have a "
-"whole suite of unconvincing explanations for monopoly in tech that leave "
-"capitalism intact."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Steering with the windshield wipers"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>delicate and dainty</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<emphasis>other</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in a "
-"<quote>generation ship,</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Surveillance still matters"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"None of this is to minimize the problems with surveillance. Surveillance "
-"matters, and Big Tech’s use of surveillance <emphasis>is</emphasis> an "
-"existential risk to our species, but that’s not because surveillance and "
-"machine learning rob us of our free will."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Surveillance has become <emphasis>much</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"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\">only point to a single minor success story</ulink> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>suspicious characters.</quote> 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, <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/amazons-ring-enables-over-policing-"
-"efforts-some-americas-deadliest-law-enforcement\">you’re right</ulink>. Ring "
-"has become a <emphasis>de facto,</emphasis> off-the-books arm of the police "
-"without any of the pesky oversight or rules."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Dignity and sanctuary"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"This is an area where Zuboff shines. Her chapter on <quote>sanctuary</quote> "
-"— the feeling of being unobserved — is a beautiful hymn to introspection, "
-"calmness, mindfulness, and tranquility."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your "
-"authentic self."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Our devices and services are <quote>general purpose</quote> 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 <quote>running "
-"late can you get the kid?</quote> to <quote>doctor gave me bad news and I "
-"need to talk to you RIGHT NOW</quote>) as well as ads for refrigerators and "
-"recruiting messages from Nazis."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>sleep deprivation torture,</quote> and it would be "
-"<ulink url=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKpRbvnx6g\">a war crime under "
-"the Geneva Conventions</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Afflicting the afflicted"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>free "
-"societies</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "A private realm is necessary for human progress."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"For example, attackers can use leaked username and password combinations to "
-"hijack whole fleets of commercial vehicles that <ulink url=\"https://www."
-"vice.com/en_us/article/zmpx4x/hacker-monitor-cars-kill-engine-gps-tracking-"
-"apps\">have been fitted with anti-theft GPS trackers and immobilizers</"
-"ulink> or to hijack baby monitors in order to <ulink url=\"https://www."
-"washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/23/how-nest-designed-keep-intruders-"
-"out-peoples-homes-effectively-allowed-hackers-get/?"
-"utm_term=.15220e98c550\">terrorize toddlers with the audio tracks from "
-"pornography</ulink>. 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>more</emphasis> data."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/"
-"world-us-canada-24751821\">sneaking data out of companies’ databases</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech has long practiced technology exceptionalism: the idea that it "
-"should not be subject to the mundane laws and norms of <quote>meatspace.</"
-"quote> Mottoes like Facebook’s <quote>move fast and break things</quote> "
-"attracted justifiable scorn of the companies’ self-serving rhetoric."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech is not a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>50% of my advertising budget "
-"is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%</quote> is a testament to the triumph "
-"of <emphasis>ad executives</emphasis>, who successfully convinced Wanamaker "
-"that only half of the money he spent went to waste."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>artificial intelligence</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The claims of Big Tech’s mind-control system are full of tells that the "
-"enterprise is a con. For example, <ulink url=\"https://www.frontiersin.org/"
-"articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01415/full\">the reliance on the <quote>Big "
-"Five</quote> personality traits</ulink> as a primary means of influencing "
-"people even though the <quote>Big Five</quote> theory is unsupported by any "
-"large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is <ulink url=\"https://www.wired.com/"
-"story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/\">mostly the realm of "
-"marketing hucksters and pop psych</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms can "
-"accurately perform <quote>sentiment analysis</quote> or detect peoples’ "
-"moods based on their <quote>microexpressions,</quote> but <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647040758/advertising-on-facebook-is-it-"
-"worth-it\">these are marketing claims, not scientific ones</ulink>. 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 <ulink url=\"https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-"
-"files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/\">have "
-"been shown</ulink> to underperform relative to random chance."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>everything</emphasis>, including how well "
-"its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://patents.google."
-"com/patent/US20050131762A1/en\">its patent filings</ulink>. 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>invention</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>invention</quote> that you haven’t "
-"actually made and that you don’t know how to make."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"With these considerations in hand, it becomes obvious that the fact that a "
-"Big Tech company has patented what it <emphasis>says</emphasis> is an "
-"effective mind-control ray is largely irrelevant to whether Big Tech can in "
-"fact control our minds."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>collects as much data as possible</quote> might realize a "
-"bigger return on investment than <quote>collects a business-appropriate "
-"quantity of data.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid ""
-"How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The "
-"Snapchat story"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?"
-"abstract_id=3247362\">got markedly worse</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "A monopoly over your friends"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of Facebook and "
-"other Big Tech companies by fielding <quote>indieweb</quote> alternatives — "
-"Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, Diaspora as a Facebook alternative, etc. "
-"— but these efforts have failed to attain any kind of liftoff."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>we</"
-"emphasis> have Facebook accounts."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant platforms — "
-"into <quote>kill zones</quote> that investors will not fund new entrants for."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid "The hard problem of our species is coordination."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<quote>Interoperability</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>Sports Illustrated</"
-"emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<quote>Interoperability</quote> is often used interchangeably with "
-"<quote>standardization,</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>neutral interoperability.</"
-"quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Beyond neutral interoperability, there is <quote>adversarial "
-"interoperability.</quote> That’s when a manufacturer makes a product that "
-"interoperates with another manufacturer’s product <emphasis>despite the "
-"second manufacturer’s objections</emphasis> and <emphasis>even if that means "
-"bypassing a security system designed to prevent interoperability</emphasis>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the history of "
-"the tech industry: from the founding of the <quote>alt.*</quote> 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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Fake news is an epistemological crisis"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"That means that whenever a regulator asks a question with an obvious, "
-"empirical answer (<quote>Are humans causing climate change?</quote> or "
-"<quote>Should we let companies conduct commercial mass surveillance?</quote> "
-"or <quote>Does society benefit from allowing network neutrality violations?</"
-"quote>), 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Rich people have always played an outsized role in politics and more so "
-"since the Supreme Court’s <emphasis>Citizens United</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>when</"
-"emphasis> they do, they can forge a consensus position on regulation."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/25/how-payday-lending-"
-"industry-insider-tilted-academic-research-its-favor/\">winning the right to "
-"practice predatory lending</ulink> or Apple <ulink url=\"https://www.vice."
-"com/en_us/article/mgxayp/source-apple-will-fight-right-to-repair-legislation"
-"\">winning the right to decide who can fix your phone</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>and</emphasis> "
-"whether your car’s brakes’ software will cause them to fail unpredictably "
-"<emphasis>and</emphasis> whether the hygiene standards at your butcher are "
-"sufficient to keep you from dying after you finish your dinner."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>can</emphasis> determine "
-"whether the adjudication process itself is trustworthy."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "Right now, it’s obviously not."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>were</emphasis> an aberration "
-"and then how you know that the doctors writing about vaccine safety are "
-"<emphasis>not</emphasis> an aberration."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"I’m 100% certain that vaccinating is safe and effective, but I’m also at "
-"something of a loss to explain exactly, <emphasis>precisely,</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Tech is different"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But there’s one way in which I <emphasis>am</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <quote>Turing complete</quote> computer that can run every program "
-"we can express in symbolic logic."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Ownership of facts"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But the phone numbers Facebook nonconsensually acquires in this transaction "
-"are not the <quote>property</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-take-photos-at-protests/"
-"\">when and how to post photos from demonstrations</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>their</emphasis> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Persuasion works… slowly"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>can</emphasis> change."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Paying won’t help"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"As the old saw goes, <quote>If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the "
-"product.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>compete with free</quote> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Then, as news companies <emphasis>did</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink "
-"url=\"https://ncac.org/news/blog/does-apples-strict-app-store-content-policy-"
-"limit-freedom-of-expression\">controversial political material</ulink>) 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>engage</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>house "
-"rules</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>voluntarily</emphasis> submit to their terms, and they want "
-"to deprive them of the choice to take their business elsewhere."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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 <quote>rogue capitalism.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>choosing</quote> their services "
-"regardless of whether they want them — it’s fine to be terrible when there "
-"is no alternative."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>can</emphasis> get away with."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "An <quote>ecology</quote> moment for trustbusting"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>consumer benefits</quote> of large companies with massive "
-"efficiencies of scale."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "Could we find that political will again?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Copyright scholar James Boyle has described how the term <quote>ecology</"
-"quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But the term <quote>ecology</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"I believe we are on the verge of a new <quote>ecology</quote> moment "
-"dedicated to combating monopolies. After all, tech isn’t the only "
-"concentrated industry nor is it even the <emphasis>most</emphasis> "
-"concentrated of industries."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech "
-"<emphasis>instead</emphasis> of breaking up the big companies also "
-"forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<emphasis>expensive</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Make Big Tech small again"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to "
-"enforce the law as it was written."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>education</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <quote>Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert "
-"Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, <emphasis>fuck that "
-"guy</emphasis>.</quote> In other words, the problem with monopolies is "
-"<emphasis>monopolism</emphasis> — 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 "
-"<quote>consumer harm</quote> in the form of higher prices, but also, "
-"<emphasis>get rid of other monopolies, too</emphasis>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"In an important sense, it doesn’t matter which industry the breakups begin "
-"in. Once they start, shareholders in <emphasis>every</emphasis> 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: <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.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "20 GOTO 10"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Fixing Big Tech will require a lot of iteration. As cyber lawyer Lawrence "
-"Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, <emphasis>Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace</"
-"emphasis>, 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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But getting Congress to act will require a massive normative shift, a mass "
-"movement of people who care about monopolies — and pulling them apart."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Up and through"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>economies of scale</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#~ msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (hard cover)"
-#~ msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (gebundenes Buch)"
-
-#~ msgid ""
-#~ "If you find typos, error or have other corrections to the translated "
-#~ "text, please update on <ulink url=\"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/"
-#~ "rms-personal-data-safe/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/nb_NO/\"/>."
-#~ msgstr ""
-#~ "Falls du Rechtschreibfehler oder sonstige Fehler findest, oder falls du "
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-#~ "how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/de/\"/> ein."
-
-#~ msgid ""
-#~ "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 "
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-#~ "Die von uns genutzten Geräte und Dienste sammeln den Großteil der Daten, "
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-#~ "Geräte und den damit verbundenen Diensten, und schließlich übernehmen wir "
-#~ "auch noch die Lieferung der Daten, die über unsere Leben, Meinungen und "
-#~ "Vorliegen erhoben werden."
-
-#~ msgid ""
-#~ "Thanks to Big Tech, Surveillance capitalism is everywhere. This is not "
-#~ "because it is really good at manipulating our behaviour, or the rogue "
-#~ "abuse of corporate power. It is the result of unchecked monopolism and "
-#~ "the abusive behavior it abets. It is the system working as intended and "
-#~ "expected. Cory Doctorow has written an extended critique of Shoshana "
-#~ "Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future "
-#~ "at the New Frontier of Power, with a non-magical analysis of the problem "
-#~ "leading to a different proposal for a solution."
-#~ msgstr ""
-#~ "Dank Big Tech ist der Überwachungskapitalismus überall. Nicht weil er gut "
-#~ "darin ist, unser Verhalten zu manipulieren, und nicht wegen "
-#~ "schurkenhafter Ausnutzung der Macht der Großunternehmen. Er ist das "
-#~ "Ergebnis ungehemmten Monopolismus und des missbräulichen Agierens, dem er "
-#~ "Vorschub leistet. Es ist das System, das wir beabsichtigt und erwartet "
-#~ "funktioniert. Cory Doctorow hat eine ausschweifende Kritik zu Shoshanas "
-#~ "Zuboffs „Das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus“ verfasst, die eine "
-#~ "unverblümte Analyse des Problems beinhaltet und zu einem alternativen "
-#~ "Lösungsvorschlag führt."
-
-#, fuzzy
-#~| msgid "Doctorow"
-#~ msgid "Cory Doctorow"
-#~ msgstr "Doctorow"
+++ /dev/null
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-msgid "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism"
-msgstr "Comment détruire le capitalisme de la surveillance"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><authorgroup><author><firstname>
-msgid "Cory"
-msgstr "Cory"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><authorgroup><author><surname>
-msgid "Doctorow"
-msgstr "Doctorow"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><publisher><address>
-#, no-wrap
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-"<publisher> <publishername>Petter Reinholdtsen</publishername> <placeholder "
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-"<holder>Cory Doctorow</holder> </copyright> <copyright> <year>2021</year> "
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-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow."
-msgstr "Comment détruire le capitalisme de la surveillance par Cory Doctorow."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "Published by Petter Reinholdtsen."
-msgstr "Publié par Petter Reinholdtsen."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "<ulink url=\"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/\"/>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (paperback)"
-msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (livre de poche)"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)"
-msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
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-msgstr "Creative Commons, certains droits réservés"
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-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
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-msgstr "<placeholder type=\"inlinemediaobject\" id=\"0\"/>"
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-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
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-"This book is licensed under a Creative Commons license. This license permits "
-"any use of this work, so long as attribution is given and no derivatived "
-"material is distributed. For more information about the license visit "
-"<ulink url=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/\"/>."
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-"Ce livre est sous licence Creative Commons. Cette licence permet toute "
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-"matériel dérivé n'est distribué. Pour plus d'informations sur la licence, "
-"visitez <ulink url=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/\"/>."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "The net of a thousand lies"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the 21st "
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-"commonsense belief that the flat-seeming Earth was, indeed, flat."
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-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"window — it takes a heroic effort to maintain the belief that the world is "
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-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"Likewise for white nationalism and eugenics: In an age where you can become "
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-"a gene-sequencing company along with a modest sum of money, <quote>race "
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-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"We are living through a golden age of both readily available facts and "
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-"decades or even centuries have gone mainstream seemingly overnight."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that can "
-"explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea has gotten a "
-"lot better at stating their case, or the proposition has become harder to "
-"deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other words, if we want people to "
-"take climate change seriously, we can get a bunch of Greta Thunbergs to make "
-"eloquent, passionate arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds, "
-"or we can wait for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case "
-"for us. In practice, we’ll probably have to do some of both: The more we’re "
-"boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier it will be for "
-"the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"The arguments for ridiculous beliefs in odious conspiracies like anti-"
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-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"Anti-vax has been around since the first vaccines, but the early anti-"
-"vaxxers were pitching people who were less equipped to understand even the "
-"most basic ideas from microbiology, and moreover, those people had not "
-"witnessed the extermination of mass-murdering diseases like polio, smallpox, "
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-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding on the "
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-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"Some people think so. Today, there is a widespread belief that machine "
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-"research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf\">blames Facebook for "
-"<quote>radicalization</quote></ulink> and when Facebook’s role in spreading "
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-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories "
-"like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread followings, "
-"<emphasis>something</emphasis> must be afoot."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But what if there’s another explanation? What if it’s the material "
-"circumstances, and not the arguments, that are making the difference for "
-"these conspiracy pitchmen? What if the trauma of living through "
-"<emphasis>real conspiracies</emphasis> all around us — conspiracies among "
-"wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts "
-"and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as "
-"<quote>corruption</quote>) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy "
-"theories?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"If it’s trauma and not contagion — material conditions and not ideology — "
-"that is making the difference today and enabling a rise of repulsive "
-"misinformation in the face of easily observed facts, that doesn’t mean our "
-"computer networks are blameless. They’re still doing the heavy work of "
-"locating vulnerable people and guiding them through a series of ever-more-"
-"extreme ideas and communities."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses "
-"real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics <ulink url=\"https://"
-"www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html\">kicked off by vaccine denial</"
-"ulink> to genocides <ulink url=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/"
-"technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html\">kicked off by racist "
-"conspiracies</ulink> to planetary meltdown caused by denial-inspired climate "
-"inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to put the fires out — to "
-"figure out how to help people see the truth of the world through the "
-"conspiracies they’ve been confused by."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But firefighting is reactive. We need fire <emphasis>prevention</emphasis>. "
-"We need to strike at the traumatic material conditions that make people "
-"vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here, too, tech has a role to "
-"play."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s <ulink url="
-"\"https://edri.org/tag/terreg/\">Terrorist Content Regulation</ulink>, which "
-"requires platforms to police and remove <quote>extremist</quote> content, to "
-"the U.S. proposals to <ulink url=\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/"
-"earn-it-act-violates-constitution\">force tech companies to spy on their "
-"users</ulink> and hold them liable <ulink url=\"https://www.natlawreview.com/"
-"article/repeal-cda-section-230\">for their users’ bad speech</ulink>, "
-"there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies to solve the problems they "
-"created."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these "
-"solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance "
-"over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a "
-"more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The "
-"<quote>solutions</quote> on the table today <emphasis>require</emphasis> Big "
-"Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to "
-"implement the systems these laws demand."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to "
-"get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to "
-"figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our "
-"internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big "
-"Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the "
-"Internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic "
-"Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free Software Foundation "
-"launched in 1985. For most of the history of the movement, the most "
-"prominent criticism leveled against it was that it was irrelevant: The real "
-"activist causes were real-world causes (think of the skepticism when <ulink "
-"url=\"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.\">Finland declared broadband a human right in "
-"2010</ulink>), and real-world activism was shoe-leather activism (think of "
-"Malcolm Gladwell’s <ulink url=\"https://www.newyorker.com/"
-"magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell\">contempt for "
-"<quote>clicktivism</quote></ulink>). But as tech has grown more central to "
-"our daily lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way first to "
-"accusations of insincerity (<quote>You only care about tech because you’re "
-"<ulink url=\"https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-"
-"google-patent-reform/id=98007/\">shilling for tech companies</ulink></"
-"quote>) to accusations of negligence (<quote>Why didn’t you foresee that "
-"tech could be such a destructive force?</quote>). But digital rights "
-"activism is right where it’s always been: looking out for the humans in a "
-"world where tech is inexorably taking over."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The latest version of this critique comes in the form of <quote>surveillance "
-"capitalism,</quote> a term coined by business professor Shoshana Zuboff in "
-"her long and influential 2019 book, <emphasis>The Age of Surveillance "
-"Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power</"
-"emphasis>. Zuboff argues that <quote>surveillance capitalism</quote> is a "
-"unique creature of the tech industry and that it is unlike any other abusive "
-"commercial practice in history, one that is <quote>constituted by unexpected "
-"and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control "
-"that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new "
-"markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism "
-"challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long "
-"evolution of market capitalism.</quote> It is a new and deadly form of "
-"capitalism, a <quote>rogue capitalism,</quote> and our lack of understanding "
-"of its unique capabilities and dangers represents an existential, species-"
-"wide threat. She’s right that capitalism today threatens our species, and "
-"she’s right that tech poses unique challenges to our species and "
-"civilization, but she’s really wrong about how tech is different and why it "
-"threatens our species."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"What’s more, I think that her incorrect diagnosis will lead us down a path "
-"that ends up making Big Tech stronger, not weaker. We need to take down Big "
-"Tech, and to do that, we need to start by correctly identifying the problem."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Tech exceptionalism, then and now"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Early critics of the digital rights movement — perhaps best represented by "
-"campaigning organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free "
-"Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, and others that focused on preserving "
-"and enhancing basic human rights in the digital realm — damned activists for "
-"practicing <quote>tech exceptionalism.</quote> Around the turn of the "
-"millennium, serious people ridiculed any claim that tech policy mattered in "
-"the <quote>real world.</quote> Claims that tech rules had implications for "
-"speech, association, privacy, search and seizure, and fundamental rights and "
-"equities were treated as ridiculous, an elevation of the concerns of sad "
-"nerds arguing about <emphasis>Star Trek</emphasis> on bulletin board systems "
-"above the struggles of the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela, or the Warsaw "
-"ghetto uprising."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In the decades since, accusations of <quote>tech exceptionalism</quote> have "
-"only sharpened as tech’s role in everyday life has expanded: Now that tech "
-"has infiltrated every corner of our life and our online lives have been "
-"monopolized by a handful of giants, defenders of digital freedoms are "
-"accused of carrying water for Big Tech, providing cover for its self-"
-"interested negligence (or worse, nefarious plots)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"From my perspective, the digital rights movement has remained stationary "
-"while the rest of the world has moved. From the earliest days, the "
-"movement’s concern was users and the toolsmiths who provided the code they "
-"needed to realize their fundamental rights. Digital rights activists only "
-"cared about companies to the extent that companies were acting to uphold "
-"users’ rights (or, just as often, when companies were acting so foolishly "
-"that they threatened to bring down new rules that would also make it harder "
-"for good actors to help users)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The <quote>surveillance capitalism</quote> critique recasts the digital "
-"rights movement in a new light again: not as alarmists who overestimate the "
-"importance of their shiny toys nor as shills for big tech but as serene deck-"
-"chair rearrangers whose long-standing activism is a liability because it "
-"makes them incapable of perceiving novel threats as they continue to fight "
-"the last century’s tech battles."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "But tech exceptionalism is a sin no matter who practices it."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Don’t believe the hype"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"You’ve probably heard that <quote>if you’re not paying for the product, "
-"you’re the product.</quote> As we’ll see below, that’s true, if incomplete. "
-"But what is <emphasis>absolutely</emphasis> true is that ad-driven Big "
-"Tech’s customers are advertisers, and what companies like Google and "
-"Facebook sell is their ability to convince <emphasis>you</emphasis> to buy "
-"stuff. Big Tech’s product is persuasion. The services — social media, search "
-"engines, maps, messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The fear of surveillance capitalism starts from the (correct) presumption "
-"that everything Big Tech says about itself is probably a lie. But the "
-"surveillance capitalism critique makes an exception for the claims Big Tech "
-"makes in its sales literature — the breathless hype in the pitches to "
-"potential advertisers online and in ad-tech seminars about the efficacy of "
-"its products: It assumes that Big Tech is as good at influencing us as they "
-"claim they are when they’re selling influencing products to credulous "
-"customers. That’s a mistake because sales literature is not a reliable "
-"indicator of a product’s efficacy."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Surveillance capitalism assumes that because advertisers buy a lot of what "
-"Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something real. But Big Tech’s "
-"massive sales could just as easily be the result of a popular delusion or "
-"something even more pernicious: monopolistic control over our communications "
-"and commerce."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "What is persuasion?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"To understand why you shouldn’t worry about mind-control rays — but why you "
-"<emphasis>should</emphasis> worry about surveillance <emphasis>and</"
-"emphasis> Big Tech — we must start by unpacking what we mean by "
-"<quote>persuasion.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"The impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be "
-"central to our analysis and any remedies we seek."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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:"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "1. Segmenting"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-"Le capitalisme de surveillance se segmente par milliard. Les vendeurs de "
-"couches peuvent aller bien au-delà des personnes dans les maternités (bien "
-"qu’ils puissent le faire aussi, avec des choses comme les annonces mobiles "
-"basées sur la localisation). Ils peuvent vous cibler selon que vous lisez "
-"des articles sur l’éducation des enfants, les couches ou une foule d’autres "
-"sujets, et l’exploration de données peut suggérer des mots-clés non évidents "
-"sur lesquels faire de la publicité. Ils peuvent vous cibler en fonction des "
-"articles que vous avez récemment lus. Ils peuvent vous cibler en fonction de "
-"ce que vous avez récemment acheté. Ils peuvent vous cibler selon que vous "
-"recevez des courriels ou des messages privés sur ces sujets – ou même si "
-"vous en parlez à haute voix (bien que Facebook et autres affirment de "
-"manière convaincante que cela ne se produit pas encore)."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid "This is seriously creepy."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid "But it’s not mind control."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid "It doesn’t deprive you of your free will. It doesn’t trick you."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "2. Deception"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www."
-"vulture.com/2020/01/the-dream-podcast-review.html\">the forums</ulink> where "
-"people who are being victimized by multilevel marketing frauds gather to "
-"trade tips on how to improve their luck in peddling the product."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/"
-"\">majority of cases</ulink>, 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "3. Domination"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>How long is the Brooklyn Bridge?</quote> 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 <emphasis>page</emphasis> of results — Google’s choice means that many "
-"people will be deceived."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "4. Bypassing our rational faculties"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis>This</emphasis> is the good stuff: using machine learning, "
-"<quote>dark patterns,</quote> engagement hacking, and other techniques to "
-"get us to do things that run counter to our better judgment. This is mind "
-"control."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>social proof</"
-"quote> 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 <quote>own</quote> something because we bid on it, thus encouraging "
-"us to bid again when we are outbid to ensure that <quote>our</quote> things "
-"stay ours."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Games are extraordinarily good at this. <quote>Free to play</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Companies have risen and fallen on these techniques, and the <quote>fallen</"
-"quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"That’s why behavioral conditioning uses <quote>intermittent reinforcement "
-"schedules.</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful behavioral tool, but it also "
-"represents a collective action problem for surveillance capitalism. The "
-"<quote>engagement techniques</quote> 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 <quote>pull to refresh</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>are</emphasis> techniques like that. Who can forget the "
-"Great Zynga Epidemic, when all of our friends were caught in "
-"<emphasis>FarmVille</emphasis>’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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"But surveillance capitalism’s margins on behavioral modification suck. "
-"Tripling the rate at which someone buys a widget sounds great <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2018/03/09/the-advertising-"
-"conversion-rates-for-every-major-tech-platform/#2f6a67485957\">unless the "
-"base rate is way less than 1%</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid ""
-"If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Zuboff observes this phenomenon and concludes that data must be very "
-"valuable if surveillance capitalism is so hungry for it. (In her words: "
-"<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.</quote>) 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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Of course, all of Big Tech’s persuasion techniques work in concert with one "
-"another, and collecting data is useful beyond mere behavioral trickery."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>races,</quote> "
-"sticking instead to conspiratorial secret histories of <quote>demographic "
-"replacement</quote> and the like."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>voter "
-"suppression</quote> if you can convince your marks to confine their search "
-"terms to <quote>voter fraud,</quote> which throws up a very different set of "
-"search results."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>neurolinguistic programming</quote> phrases, body language "
-"techniques, and psychological manipulation tactics like <quote>negging</"
-"quote> — offering unsolicited negative feedback to women to lower their self-"
-"esteem and prick their interest."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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’ <quote>success</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Pick-up artists <emphasis>believe</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Pick-up artists are proof that people can believe they have developed a "
-"system of mind control <emphasis>even when it doesn’t work</emphasis>. 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Department store pioneer John Wanamaker is said to have lamented, "
-"<quote>Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I "
-"don’t know which half.</quote> 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 <emphasis>much</emphasis> "
-"better at convincing potential clients to buy their services than they are "
-"at convincing the general public to buy their clients’ wares."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "What is Facebook?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>and</emphasis> spying on them all the time."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>Like</quote> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but "
-"because it is <emphasis>big</emphasis>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>loyalty</quote> "
-"programs, financial transactions, etc., and cross-references that with the "
-"dossiers it develops on activity on Facebook and with apps and the public "
-"web."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"To understand what role Facebook plays in the formulation and mobilization "
-"of antisocial movements, we need to understand the dual nature of Facebook."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Facebook makes finding people shopping for refrigerators a <emphasis>lot</"
-"emphasis> 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 <emphasis>other</"
-"emphasis> 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 "
-"<emphasis>are</emphasis> looking for fridges that these ads reach is "
-"<emphasis>much</emphasis> larger than it is than for any group that might be "
-"subjected to traditional, offline targeted refrigerator marketing."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>brand "
-"recognition.</quote> This means that the price per ad is very low in nearly "
-"every case."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"With nothing but <quote>organic</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Facebook <emphasis>can</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Monopoly and the right to the future tense"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>the right to the future tense</quote> "
-"— that is, the right to decide for yourself what you will do in the future."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <ulink url=\"https://twitter.com/"
-"tveastman/status/1069674780826071040\">as one person on Twitter noted</"
-"ulink>, five giant websites each filled with screenshots of the other four."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Start with <quote>digital rights management.</quote> 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 <quote>anti-circumvention</quote> rule."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<emphasis>nothing else</emphasis> — and you and copyright are square with "
-"one another."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"That’s where Section 1201 of the DMCA comes in: By banning tampering with an "
-"<quote>access control,</quote> 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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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:"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
-msgid ""
-"Any device with software in it contains a <quote>copyrighted work</quote> — "
-"i.e., the software."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
-msgid ""
-"A device can be designed so that reconfiguring the software requires "
-"bypassing an <quote>access control for copyrighted works,</quote> which is a "
-"potential felony under Section 1201."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.telegraph.co."
-"uk/technology/apple/5982243/Apple-bans-dictionary-from-App-Store-over-swear-"
-"words.html\">reject dictionaries</ulink> for containing obscene words; to "
-"<ulink url=\"https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just-banned-the-"
-"app-that-tracks-us-drone-strikes-again\">limit political speech</ulink>, "
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-05-19-"
-"palestinian-indie-game-must-not-be-called-a-game-apple-says\">object to a "
-"game</ulink> that commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.ft.com/"
-"content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc\">ordered Apple to prohibit the "
-"sale of privacy tools</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <quote>rogue capitalism.</quote> "
-"Theoreticians of capitalism claim that its virtue is that it <ulink url="
-"\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal\">aggregates information in the "
-"form of consumers’ decisions</ulink>, 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no "
-"longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at "
-"<emphasis>least</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Search order and the right to the future tense"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <quote>I don’t care who does the electing, "
-"so long as I get to do the nominating.</quote> A monopolized market is an "
-"election whose candidates are chosen by the monopolist."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>Are vaccines dangerous?</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"This is true whether the search is for <quote>Are vaccines dangerous?</"
-"quote> or <quote>best restaurants near me.</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Many of the questions we ask search engines have no empirically correct "
-"answers: <quote>Where should I eat dinner?</quote> is not an objective "
-"question. Even questions that do have correct answers (<quote>Are vaccines "
-"dangerous?</quote>) 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for three "
-"reasons:"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis role=\"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.</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis role=\"strong\">2. They believe the surveillance capitalism story."
-"</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis role=\"strong\">3. The penalties for leaking data are negligible.</"
-"emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>free</quote> and autocratic states — is to suborn commercial "
-"services."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly abet "
-"surveillance."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>do</emphasis> think that tech poses an existential "
-"threat to our society and possibly our species."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "But that threat grows out of monopoly."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 (<quote>circumventing</quote>) them, and these "
-"statutes have been used to threaten security researchers who make "
-"disclosures about vulnerabilities without permission from manufacturers."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>rogue capitalism</"
-"quote> 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 <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> than surveillance "
-"capitalism’s influence campaigns."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"And unlike mind-control rays, enforced silence over security is an "
-"immediate, documented problem, and it <emphasis>does</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In software design, <quote>technology debt</quote> 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 <emphasis>them</emphasis>, 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 <quote>pay off the debt</quote> once and for all."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Privacy and monopoly"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>fails</"
-"emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>respectable</quote> 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 <quote>cure</quote> gay people, history is littered with the formerly "
-"respectable titans of discredited industries."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <emphasis>understated</emphasis>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"There’s real irony here. The belief in surveillance capitalism as a "
-"<quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>fully hedged</quote> 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 "
-"<emphasis>did</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but "
-"because it is <emphasis>big</emphasis>. The reason every web publisher "
-"embeds a Facebook <quote>Like</quote> button is that Facebook dominates the "
-"internet’s social media referrals — and every one of those <quote>Like</"
-"quote> buttons spies on everyone who lands on a page that contains them (see "
-"also: Google Analytics embeds, Twitter buttons, etc.)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies "
-"certainly abet surveillance."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>diseconomies of scale</quote> (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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>consumer harm</quote> — in the form of "
-"higher prices."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>monopoly rents</quote> (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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>borked</quote> to refer to any catastrophically bad "
-"political performance)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Today, many fear that machine learning allows surveillance capitalism to "
-"sell <quote>Bork-as-a-Service,</quote> at internet speeds, so that you can "
-"contract a machine-learning company to engineer <emphasis>rapid</emphasis> "
-"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, <emphasis>including</emphasis> in their "
-"sales literature."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The idea that tech forms <quote>natural monopolies</quote> (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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>curation</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In support of this thesis, I offer the concentration that every "
-"<emphasis>other</emphasis> 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, <emphasis>every</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 (<quote>It was the "
-"environmental toxins</quote>), true believers in unregulated markets have a "
-"whole suite of unconvincing explanations for monopoly in tech that leave "
-"capitalism intact."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Steering with the windshield wipers"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>delicate and dainty</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<emphasis>other</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in a "
-"<quote>generation ship,</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Surveillance still matters"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"None of this is to minimize the problems with surveillance. Surveillance "
-"matters, and Big Tech’s use of surveillance <emphasis>is</emphasis> an "
-"existential risk to our species, but that’s not because surveillance and "
-"machine learning rob us of our free will."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Surveillance has become <emphasis>much</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"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\">only point to a single minor success story</ulink> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>suspicious characters.</quote> 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, <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/amazons-ring-enables-over-policing-"
-"efforts-some-americas-deadliest-law-enforcement\">you’re right</ulink>. Ring "
-"has become a <emphasis>de facto,</emphasis> off-the-books arm of the police "
-"without any of the pesky oversight or rules."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Dignity and sanctuary"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"This is an area where Zuboff shines. Her chapter on <quote>sanctuary</quote> "
-"— the feeling of being unobserved — is a beautiful hymn to introspection, "
-"calmness, mindfulness, and tranquility."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your "
-"authentic self."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Our devices and services are <quote>general purpose</quote> 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 <quote>running "
-"late can you get the kid?</quote> to <quote>doctor gave me bad news and I "
-"need to talk to you RIGHT NOW</quote>) as well as ads for refrigerators and "
-"recruiting messages from Nazis."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>sleep deprivation torture,</quote> and it would be "
-"<ulink url=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKpRbvnx6g\">a war crime under "
-"the Geneva Conventions</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Afflicting the afflicted"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>free "
-"societies</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "A private realm is necessary for human progress."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"For example, attackers can use leaked username and password combinations to "
-"hijack whole fleets of commercial vehicles that <ulink url=\"https://www."
-"vice.com/en_us/article/zmpx4x/hacker-monitor-cars-kill-engine-gps-tracking-"
-"apps\">have been fitted with anti-theft GPS trackers and immobilizers</"
-"ulink> or to hijack baby monitors in order to <ulink url=\"https://www."
-"washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/23/how-nest-designed-keep-intruders-"
-"out-peoples-homes-effectively-allowed-hackers-get/?"
-"utm_term=.15220e98c550\">terrorize toddlers with the audio tracks from "
-"pornography</ulink>. 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>more</emphasis> data."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/"
-"world-us-canada-24751821\">sneaking data out of companies’ databases</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech has long practiced technology exceptionalism: the idea that it "
-"should not be subject to the mundane laws and norms of <quote>meatspace.</"
-"quote> Mottoes like Facebook’s <quote>move fast and break things</quote> "
-"attracted justifiable scorn of the companies’ self-serving rhetoric."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech is not a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>50% of my advertising budget "
-"is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%</quote> is a testament to the triumph "
-"of <emphasis>ad executives</emphasis>, who successfully convinced Wanamaker "
-"that only half of the money he spent went to waste."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>artificial intelligence</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The claims of Big Tech’s mind-control system are full of tells that the "
-"enterprise is a con. For example, <ulink url=\"https://www.frontiersin.org/"
-"articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01415/full\">the reliance on the <quote>Big "
-"Five</quote> personality traits</ulink> as a primary means of influencing "
-"people even though the <quote>Big Five</quote> theory is unsupported by any "
-"large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is <ulink url=\"https://www.wired.com/"
-"story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/\">mostly the realm of "
-"marketing hucksters and pop psych</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms can "
-"accurately perform <quote>sentiment analysis</quote> or detect peoples’ "
-"moods based on their <quote>microexpressions,</quote> but <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647040758/advertising-on-facebook-is-it-"
-"worth-it\">these are marketing claims, not scientific ones</ulink>. 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 <ulink url=\"https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-"
-"files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/\">have "
-"been shown</ulink> to underperform relative to random chance."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>everything</emphasis>, including how well "
-"its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://patents.google."
-"com/patent/US20050131762A1/en\">its patent filings</ulink>. 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>invention</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>invention</quote> that you haven’t "
-"actually made and that you don’t know how to make."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"With these considerations in hand, it becomes obvious that the fact that a "
-"Big Tech company has patented what it <emphasis>says</emphasis> is an "
-"effective mind-control ray is largely irrelevant to whether Big Tech can in "
-"fact control our minds."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>collects as much data as possible</quote> might realize a "
-"bigger return on investment than <quote>collects a business-appropriate "
-"quantity of data.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid ""
-"How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The "
-"Snapchat story"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?"
-"abstract_id=3247362\">got markedly worse</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "A monopoly over your friends"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of Facebook and "
-"other Big Tech companies by fielding <quote>indieweb</quote> alternatives — "
-"Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, Diaspora as a Facebook alternative, etc. "
-"— but these efforts have failed to attain any kind of liftoff."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>we</"
-"emphasis> have Facebook accounts."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant platforms — "
-"into <quote>kill zones</quote> that investors will not fund new entrants for."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid "The hard problem of our species is coordination."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<quote>Interoperability</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>Sports Illustrated</"
-"emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<quote>Interoperability</quote> is often used interchangeably with "
-"<quote>standardization,</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>neutral interoperability.</"
-"quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Beyond neutral interoperability, there is <quote>adversarial "
-"interoperability.</quote> That’s when a manufacturer makes a product that "
-"interoperates with another manufacturer’s product <emphasis>despite the "
-"second manufacturer’s objections</emphasis> and <emphasis>even if that means "
-"bypassing a security system designed to prevent interoperability</emphasis>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the history of "
-"the tech industry: from the founding of the <quote>alt.*</quote> 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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Fake news is an epistemological crisis"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"That means that whenever a regulator asks a question with an obvious, "
-"empirical answer (<quote>Are humans causing climate change?</quote> or "
-"<quote>Should we let companies conduct commercial mass surveillance?</quote> "
-"or <quote>Does society benefit from allowing network neutrality violations?</"
-"quote>), 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Rich people have always played an outsized role in politics and more so "
-"since the Supreme Court’s <emphasis>Citizens United</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>when</"
-"emphasis> they do, they can forge a consensus position on regulation."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/25/how-payday-lending-"
-"industry-insider-tilted-academic-research-its-favor/\">winning the right to "
-"practice predatory lending</ulink> or Apple <ulink url=\"https://www.vice."
-"com/en_us/article/mgxayp/source-apple-will-fight-right-to-repair-legislation"
-"\">winning the right to decide who can fix your phone</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>and</emphasis> "
-"whether your car’s brakes’ software will cause them to fail unpredictably "
-"<emphasis>and</emphasis> whether the hygiene standards at your butcher are "
-"sufficient to keep you from dying after you finish your dinner."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>can</emphasis> determine "
-"whether the adjudication process itself is trustworthy."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "Right now, it’s obviously not."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>were</emphasis> an aberration "
-"and then how you know that the doctors writing about vaccine safety are "
-"<emphasis>not</emphasis> an aberration."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"I’m 100% certain that vaccinating is safe and effective, but I’m also at "
-"something of a loss to explain exactly, <emphasis>precisely,</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Tech is different"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But there’s one way in which I <emphasis>am</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <quote>Turing complete</quote> computer that can run every program "
-"we can express in symbolic logic."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Ownership of facts"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But the phone numbers Facebook nonconsensually acquires in this transaction "
-"are not the <quote>property</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-take-photos-at-protests/"
-"\">when and how to post photos from demonstrations</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>their</emphasis> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Persuasion works… slowly"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>can</emphasis> change."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Paying won’t help"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"As the old saw goes, <quote>If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the "
-"product.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>compete with free</quote> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Then, as news companies <emphasis>did</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink "
-"url=\"https://ncac.org/news/blog/does-apples-strict-app-store-content-policy-"
-"limit-freedom-of-expression\">controversial political material</ulink>) 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>engage</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>house "
-"rules</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>voluntarily</emphasis> submit to their terms, and they want "
-"to deprive them of the choice to take their business elsewhere."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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 <quote>rogue capitalism.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>choosing</quote> their services "
-"regardless of whether they want them — it’s fine to be terrible when there "
-"is no alternative."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>can</emphasis> get away with."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "An <quote>ecology</quote> moment for trustbusting"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>consumer benefits</quote> of large companies with massive "
-"efficiencies of scale."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "Could we find that political will again?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Copyright scholar James Boyle has described how the term <quote>ecology</"
-"quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But the term <quote>ecology</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"I believe we are on the verge of a new <quote>ecology</quote> moment "
-"dedicated to combating monopolies. After all, tech isn’t the only "
-"concentrated industry nor is it even the <emphasis>most</emphasis> "
-"concentrated of industries."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech "
-"<emphasis>instead</emphasis> of breaking up the big companies also "
-"forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<emphasis>expensive</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Make Big Tech small again"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to "
-"enforce the law as it was written."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>education</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <quote>Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert "
-"Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, <emphasis>fuck that "
-"guy</emphasis>.</quote> In other words, the problem with monopolies is "
-"<emphasis>monopolism</emphasis> — 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 "
-"<quote>consumer harm</quote> in the form of higher prices, but also, "
-"<emphasis>get rid of other monopolies, too</emphasis>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In an important sense, it doesn’t matter which industry the breakups begin "
-"in. Once they start, shareholders in <emphasis>every</emphasis> 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: <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.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "20 GOTO 10"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Fixing Big Tech will require a lot of iteration. As cyber lawyer Lawrence "
-"Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, <emphasis>Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace</"
-"emphasis>, 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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But getting Congress to act will require a massive normative shift, a mass "
-"movement of people who care about monopolies — and pulling them apart."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Up and through"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>economies of scale</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#~ msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (hard cover)"
-#~ msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (édition reliée)"
-
-#~ msgid ""
-#~ "If you find typos, error or have other corrections to the translated "
-#~ "text, please update on <ulink url=\"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/"
-#~ "rms-personal-data-safe/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/nb_NO/\"/>."
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-#~ "Si vous trouvez des fautes de frappe, des erreurs ou si vous avez "
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-#~ "destroy-surveillance-capitalism/fr/\"/>."
+++ /dev/null
-# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE
-# Copyright (C) YEAR Cory Doctorow
-# This file is distributed under the same license as the How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism package.
-# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
-#
-msgid ""
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-msgid "en"
-msgstr "en"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><title>
-msgid "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism"
-msgstr "Jak zniszczyć kapitalizm oparty na inwigilacyjnych systemach nadzoru"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><authorgroup><author><firstname>
-msgid "Cory"
-msgstr "Cory"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><authorgroup><author><surname>
-msgid "Doctorow"
-msgstr "Doctorow"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><publisher><address>
-#, no-wrap
-msgid "<city>Oslo</city>"
-msgstr "<city>Oslo</city>"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo>
-msgid ""
-"<publisher> <publishername>Petter Reinholdtsen</publishername> <placeholder "
-"type=\"address\" id=\"0\"/> </publisher> <copyright> <year>2020</year> "
-"<holder>Cory Doctorow</holder> </copyright> <copyright> <year>2021</year> "
-"<holder>Petter Reinholdtsen</holder> </copyright>"
-msgstr ""
-"<publisher> <publishername>Petter Reinholdtsen</publishername> <placeholder "
-"type=\"address\" id=\"0\"/> </publisher> <copyright> <year>2020</year> "
-"<holder>Cory Doctorow</holder> </copyright> <copyright> <year>2021</year> "
-"<holder>Petter Reinholdtsen</holder> </copyright>"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow."
-msgstr ""
-"Jak zniszczyć kapitalizm oparty na inwigilacyjnych systemach nadzoru Autor: "
-"Cory Doctorow."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "Published by Petter Reinholdtsen."
-msgstr "Wydawca: Petter Reinholdtsen."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "<ulink url=\"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/\"/>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (paperback)"
-msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (oprawa miękka)"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)"
-msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid ""
-"This book is available for purchase from <ulink url=\"https://www.lulu.com/"
-"\"/>."
-msgstr ""
-"Ta książka jest dostępna w sprzedaży na <ulink url=\"https://www.lulu.com/\"/"
-">."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para><inlinemediaobject>
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-"<imageobject> <imagedata fileref=\"images/cc-some-rights-reserved.png\" "
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-"<imageobject> <imagedata fileref=\"images/cc-some-rights-reserved.svg\" "
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-msgstr ""
-"<imageobject> <imagedata fileref=\"images/cc-some-rights-reserved.png\" "
-"contentdepth=\"3em\" width=\"100%\" align=\"center\"/> </imageobject> "
-"<imageobject> <imagedata fileref=\"images/cc-some-rights-reserved.svg\" "
-"contentdepth=\"3em\" width=\"100%\" align=\"center\"/> </imageobject>"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para><inlinemediaobject><textobject><phrase>
-msgid "Creative Commons, Some rights reserved"
-msgstr "Creative Commons, Pewne prawa zastrzeżone"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid "<placeholder type=\"inlinemediaobject\" id=\"0\"/>"
-msgstr "<placeholder type=\"inlinemediaobject\" id=\"0\"/>"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><articleinfo><legalnotice><para>
-msgid ""
-"This book is licensed under a Creative Commons license. This license permits "
-"any use of this work, so long as attribution is given and no derivatived "
-"material is distributed. For more information about the license visit "
-"<ulink url=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/\"/>."
-msgstr ""
-"Ta książka jest wydana na licencji Creative Commons. Licencja ta pozwala na "
-"dowolny użytek tej pracy tak długo, jak długo podane jest jej autorstwo i "
-"nie jest rozpowszechniany żaden materiał pochodny. Więcej informacji na "
-"temat tej licencji znajdziesz na <ulink url=\"https://creativecommons.org/"
-"licenses/by-nd/4.0/\"/>."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "The net of a thousand lies"
-msgstr "Sieć tysięcy kłamstw"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the 21st "
-"century is just how widespread the evidence against them is. You can "
-"understand how, centuries ago, people who’d never gained a high-enough "
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-"commonsense belief that the flat-seeming Earth was, indeed, flat."
-msgstr ""
-"Najbardziej zaskakującą kwestią w dziedzinie powtórnych narodzin `płaskich` "
-"Ziemian w XXI wieku jest to, jak szeroko rozpowszechnione są przeciwko nim "
-"dowody. Można teraz zrozumieć, jak przed wiekami ludzie, którzy nigdy nie "
-"mieli okazji zobaczyć Ziemi z orbity ziemskiej, mogli dojść do przekonania, "
-"opartego na zdrowym rozsądku, że Ziemia - wyglądająca na płaską - jest "
-"faktycznie, płaska."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But today, when elementary schools routinely dangle GoPro cameras from "
-"balloons and loft them high enough to photograph the Earth’s curve — to say "
-"nothing of the unexceptional sight of the curved Earth from an airplane "
-"window — it takes a heroic effort to maintain the belief that the world is "
-"flat."
-msgstr ""
-"Lecz dzisiaj, gdy szkoły podstawowe rutynowo podczepiają do balonów kamery "
-"GoPro i umieszczają je na tyle wysoko, aby sfotografować krzywą Ziemi — nie "
-"mówiąc już o niezrównanie wyjątkowym widoku zakrzywionej Ziemi z okna "
-"samolotu — trzeba naprawdę heroicznego wysiłku, aby uwierzyć, że Ziemia jest "
-"płaska."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Likewise for white nationalism and eugenics: In an age where you can become "
-"a computational genomics datapoint by swabbing your cheek and mailing it to "
-"a gene-sequencing company along with a modest sum of money, <quote>race "
-"science</quote> has never been easier to refute."
-msgstr ""
-"Podobnie jest z eugeniką i białym nacjonalizmem: w epoce, w której można "
-"stać się obliczeniowym punktem danych genomicznych, poprzez pobranie wymazu "
-"z policzka, i przesłanie go — za pomocą poczty elektronicznej — do firmy "
-"sekwencjonujoącej geny, wraz ze skromną sumą pieniędzy, nigdy nie było "
-"łatwiej zaprzeczyć twierdzeniom wysuwanym podczas <quote>naukowego wyścigu "
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-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"We are living through a golden age of both readily available facts and "
-"denial of those facts. Terrible ideas that have lingered on the fringes for "
-"decades or even centuries have gone mainstream seemingly overnight."
-msgstr ""
-"Żyjemy w złotej epoce, zarówno łatwo dostępnych faktów, jak i zaprzeczenia "
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-"dziesięciolecia, a nawet stulecia, z dnia na dzień weszły do głównego nurtu."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that can "
-"explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea has gotten a "
-"lot better at stating their case, or the proposition has become harder to "
-"deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other words, if we want people to "
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-"eloquent, passionate arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds, "
-"or we can wait for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case "
-"for us. In practice, we’ll probably have to do some of both: The more we’re "
-"boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier it will be for "
-"the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us."
-msgstr ""
-"Kiedy niejasny pomysł zyskuje na popularności, istnieją tylko dwie rzeczy, "
-"które mogą wyjaśnić jego przewagę: albo osoba wyrażająca ten pomysł znacznie "
-"lepiej radzi sobie z przedstawieniem swojej racji, albo twierdzenie staje "
-"się trudniejsze do zaprzeczenia w obliczu rosnących dowodów. Innymi słowy, "
-"jeśli chcemy, aby ludzie poważnie podchodzili do zmian klimatycznych, możemy "
-"skłonić grupę Grety Thunberg do wyrażenia wymownych, namiętnych argumentów w "
-"sposób publiczny, przez co zdobędzie ona nasze serca i umysły, lub możemy "
-"poczekać na powódź, ogień, palące słońce i pandemie, aby przemówiła za nami. "
-"W praktyce prawdopodobnie będziemy musieli zrobić jedno i drugie: im więcej "
-"będziemy gotować, palić, topić i marnować, tym łatwiej będzie Grecie "
-"Thunberg nas przekonać."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The arguments for ridiculous beliefs in odious conspiracies like anti-"
-"vaccination, climate denial, a flat Earth, and eugenics are no better than "
-"they were a generation ago. Indeed, they’re worse because they are being "
-"pitched to people who have at least a background awareness of the refuting "
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-"Argumenty za absurdalnymi wierzeniami w oparciu o teorie spiskowe, takie jak "
-"teoria antyszczepionkowa, teoria negująca zmiany klimatu, teoria o istnieniu "
-"płaskiej Ziemi i teoria eugeniczna, wcale nie są lepsze niż w pokoleniu "
-"wcześniejszym. W rzeczywistości, są gorsze, ponieważ są przedstawiane "
-"ludziom, którzy mają przynajmniej podstawową świadomość faktów obalających "
-"te teorie."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Anti-vax has been around since the first vaccines, but the early anti-"
-"vaxxers were pitching people who were less equipped to understand even the "
-"most basic ideas from microbiology, and moreover, those people had not "
-"witnessed the extermination of mass-murdering diseases like polio, smallpox, "
-"and measles. Today’s anti-vaxxers are no more eloquent than their forebears, "
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-"Antyszczepionkowcy pojawiali się już od czasu wynalezienia pierwszych "
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-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding on the "
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-"A więc, czy ci wyrafinowani zwolennicy teorii spiskowych mogą, tak naprawdę, "
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-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"Some people think so. Today, there is a widespread belief that machine "
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-"conspiracy theorist into a svengali who can warp your perceptions and win "
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-"Niektórzy ludzie myślą, że tak. Obecnie panuje powszechne przekonanie, że "
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-
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-"After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories "
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-"W końcu, w świecie, w którym rozległe i niespójne teorie spiskowe, takie jak "
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-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"But what if there’s another explanation? What if it’s the material "
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-msgstr ""
-"Lecz co zrobić, jeśli jest inne wytłumaczenie? Jeśli są to warunki "
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-"konspiracyjne?"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"If it’s trauma and not contagion — material conditions and not ideology — "
-"that is making the difference today and enabling a rise of repulsive "
-"misinformation in the face of easily observed facts, that doesn’t mean our "
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-msgstr ""
-"Jeśli to trauma, materialne uwarunkowania a nie „zaraza” ideologiczna "
-"stanowią dziś różnicę i umożliwiają tworzenienie odpychających dezinformacji "
-"w obliczu łatwo obserwowalnych faktów, nie oznacza to jeszcze, że nasze "
-"sieci komputerowe są bez winy. Nadal wykonują one ciężką pracę, polegającą "
-"na lokalizowaniu osób bezbronnych i prowadzeniu ich przez serię coraz "
-"bardziej ekstremalnych pomysłów i społeczności."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses "
-"real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics <ulink url=\"https://"
-"www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html\">kicked off by vaccine denial</"
-"ulink> to genocides <ulink url=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/"
-"technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html\">kicked off by racist "
-"conspiracies</ulink> to planetary meltdown caused by denial-inspired climate "
-"inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to put the fires out — to "
-"figure out how to help people see the truth of the world through the "
-"conspiracies they’ve been confused by."
-msgstr ""
-"Wiara w konspirację to szalejący pożar, który wyrządził już rzeczywiste "
-"szkody i stał się realnym zagrożeniem dla naszej planety i jej gatunków w "
-"wyniku epidemii <ulink url=\"https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html"
-"\">rozpoczętej odmową szczepień</ulink> poprzez ludobójstwa <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide."
-"html\">wywołane przez rasistowskich konspiratorów</ulink>. Prowadzi to do "
-"planetarnego stapiającego wszystko tygla, spowodowanego bezczynnością, "
-"zainspirowaną zaprzeczeniem problemu klimatycznego. Nasz świat płonie, więc "
-"musimy ugasić pożary, aby dowiedzieć się, jak pomóc ludziom w zobaczeniu "
-"prawdy o świecie poprzez spiski, które ich zmyliły."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But firefighting is reactive. We need fire <emphasis>prevention</emphasis>. "
-"We need to strike at the traumatic material conditions that make people "
-"vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here, too, tech has a role to "
-"play."
-msgstr ""
-"Ale gaszenie pożarów jest ma reaktywny charakter. Musimy "
-"także<emphasis>zapobiegać</emphasis> pożarom. Musimy uderzyć w traumatyczne "
-"warunki materialne, które czynią ludzi podatnymi na zarażenie konspiracją. "
-"Tutaj również technologia ma do odegrania ważną rolę."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s <ulink url="
-"\"https://edri.org/tag/terreg/\">Terrorist Content Regulation</ulink>, which "
-"requires platforms to police and remove <quote>extremist</quote> content, to "
-"the U.S. proposals to <ulink url=\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/"
-"earn-it-act-violates-constitution\">force tech companies to spy on their "
-"users</ulink> and hold them liable <ulink url=\"https://www.natlawreview.com/"
-"article/repeal-cda-section-230\">for their users’ bad speech</ulink>, "
-"there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies to solve the problems they "
-"created."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these "
-"solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance "
-"over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a "
-"more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The "
-"<quote>solutions</quote> on the table today <emphasis>require</emphasis> Big "
-"Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to "
-"implement the systems these laws demand."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to "
-"get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to "
-"figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our "
-"internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big "
-"Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the "
-"Internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on"
-msgstr "Aktywizm praw cyfrowych, krótka historia 25 lat działalności"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic "
-"Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free Software Foundation "
-"launched in 1985. For most of the history of the movement, the most "
-"prominent criticism leveled against it was that it was irrelevant: The real "
-"activist causes were real-world causes (think of the skepticism when <ulink "
-"url=\"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.\">Finland declared broadband a human right in "
-"2010</ulink>), and real-world activism was shoe-leather activism (think of "
-"Malcolm Gladwell’s <ulink url=\"https://www.newyorker.com/"
-"magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell\">contempt for "
-"<quote>clicktivism</quote></ulink>). But as tech has grown more central to "
-"our daily lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way first to "
-"accusations of insincerity (<quote>You only care about tech because you’re "
-"<ulink url=\"https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-"
-"google-patent-reform/id=98007/\">shilling for tech companies</ulink></"
-"quote>) to accusations of negligence (<quote>Why didn’t you foresee that "
-"tech could be such a destructive force?</quote>). But digital rights "
-"activism is right where it’s always been: looking out for the humans in a "
-"world where tech is inexorably taking over."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The latest version of this critique comes in the form of <quote>surveillance "
-"capitalism,</quote> a term coined by business professor Shoshana Zuboff in "
-"her long and influential 2019 book, <emphasis>The Age of Surveillance "
-"Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power</"
-"emphasis>. Zuboff argues that <quote>surveillance capitalism</quote> is a "
-"unique creature of the tech industry and that it is unlike any other abusive "
-"commercial practice in history, one that is <quote>constituted by unexpected "
-"and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control "
-"that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new "
-"markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism "
-"challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long "
-"evolution of market capitalism.</quote> It is a new and deadly form of "
-"capitalism, a <quote>rogue capitalism,</quote> and our lack of understanding "
-"of its unique capabilities and dangers represents an existential, species-"
-"wide threat. She’s right that capitalism today threatens our species, and "
-"she’s right that tech poses unique challenges to our species and "
-"civilization, but she’s really wrong about how tech is different and why it "
-"threatens our species."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"What’s more, I think that her incorrect diagnosis will lead us down a path "
-"that ends up making Big Tech stronger, not weaker. We need to take down Big "
-"Tech, and to do that, we need to start by correctly identifying the problem."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Tech exceptionalism, then and now"
-msgstr "Wyjątkowość Technologii, dawniej i obecnie"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Early critics of the digital rights movement — perhaps best represented by "
-"campaigning organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free "
-"Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, and others that focused on preserving "
-"and enhancing basic human rights in the digital realm — damned activists for "
-"practicing <quote>tech exceptionalism.</quote> Around the turn of the "
-"millennium, serious people ridiculed any claim that tech policy mattered in "
-"the <quote>real world.</quote> Claims that tech rules had implications for "
-"speech, association, privacy, search and seizure, and fundamental rights and "
-"equities were treated as ridiculous, an elevation of the concerns of sad "
-"nerds arguing about <emphasis>Star Trek</emphasis> on bulletin board systems "
-"above the struggles of the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela, or the Warsaw "
-"ghetto uprising."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In the decades since, accusations of <quote>tech exceptionalism</quote> have "
-"only sharpened as tech’s role in everyday life has expanded: Now that tech "
-"has infiltrated every corner of our life and our online lives have been "
-"monopolized by a handful of giants, defenders of digital freedoms are "
-"accused of carrying water for Big Tech, providing cover for its self-"
-"interested negligence (or worse, nefarious plots)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"From my perspective, the digital rights movement has remained stationary "
-"while the rest of the world has moved. From the earliest days, the "
-"movement’s concern was users and the toolsmiths who provided the code they "
-"needed to realize their fundamental rights. Digital rights activists only "
-"cared about companies to the extent that companies were acting to uphold "
-"users’ rights (or, just as often, when companies were acting so foolishly "
-"that they threatened to bring down new rules that would also make it harder "
-"for good actors to help users)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The <quote>surveillance capitalism</quote> critique recasts the digital "
-"rights movement in a new light again: not as alarmists who overestimate the "
-"importance of their shiny toys nor as shills for big tech but as serene deck-"
-"chair rearrangers whose long-standing activism is a liability because it "
-"makes them incapable of perceiving novel threats as they continue to fight "
-"the last century’s tech battles."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "But tech exceptionalism is a sin no matter who practices it."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Don’t believe the hype"
-msgstr "Nie wierz 'szumom' medialnym"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"You’ve probably heard that <quote>if you’re not paying for the product, "
-"you’re the product.</quote> As we’ll see below, that’s true, if incomplete. "
-"But what is <emphasis>absolutely</emphasis> true is that ad-driven Big "
-"Tech’s customers are advertisers, and what companies like Google and "
-"Facebook sell is their ability to convince <emphasis>you</emphasis> to buy "
-"stuff. Big Tech’s product is persuasion. The services — social media, search "
-"engines, maps, messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The fear of surveillance capitalism starts from the (correct) presumption "
-"that everything Big Tech says about itself is probably a lie. But the "
-"surveillance capitalism critique makes an exception for the claims Big Tech "
-"makes in its sales literature — the breathless hype in the pitches to "
-"potential advertisers online and in ad-tech seminars about the efficacy of "
-"its products: It assumes that Big Tech is as good at influencing us as they "
-"claim they are when they’re selling influencing products to credulous "
-"customers. That’s a mistake because sales literature is not a reliable "
-"indicator of a product’s efficacy."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Surveillance capitalism assumes that because advertisers buy a lot of what "
-"Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something real. But Big Tech’s "
-"massive sales could just as easily be the result of a popular delusion or "
-"something even more pernicious: monopolistic control over our communications "
-"and commerce."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "What is persuasion?"
-msgstr "Co to jest przekonywanie?"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"To understand why you shouldn’t worry about mind-control rays — but why you "
-"<emphasis>should</emphasis> worry about surveillance <emphasis>and</"
-"emphasis> Big Tech — we must start by unpacking what we mean by "
-"<quote>persuasion.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"The impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be "
-"central to our analysis and any remedies we seek."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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:"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "1. Segmenting"
-msgstr "1. Segmentacja"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid "This is seriously creepy."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid "But it’s not mind control."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid "It doesn’t deprive you of your free will. It doesn’t trick you."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "2. Deception"
-msgstr "2. Podstęp"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www."
-"vulture.com/2020/01/the-dream-podcast-review.html\">the forums</ulink> where "
-"people who are being victimized by multilevel marketing frauds gather to "
-"trade tips on how to improve their luck in peddling the product."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/"
-"\">majority of cases</ulink>, 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "3. Domination"
-msgstr "3. Dominacja"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>How long is the Brooklyn Bridge?</quote> 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 <emphasis>page</emphasis> of results — Google’s choice means that many "
-"people will be deceived."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><title>
-msgid "4. Bypassing our rational faculties"
-msgstr "4. Omijanie naszych racjonalnych zdolności"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis>This</emphasis> is the good stuff: using machine learning, "
-"<quote>dark patterns,</quote> engagement hacking, and other techniques to "
-"get us to do things that run counter to our better judgment. This is mind "
-"control."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>social proof</"
-"quote> 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 <quote>own</quote> something because we bid on it, thus encouraging "
-"us to bid again when we are outbid to ensure that <quote>our</quote> things "
-"stay ours."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Games are extraordinarily good at this. <quote>Free to play</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Companies have risen and fallen on these techniques, and the <quote>fallen</"
-"quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"That’s why behavioral conditioning uses <quote>intermittent reinforcement "
-"schedules.</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful behavioral tool, but it also "
-"represents a collective action problem for surveillance capitalism. The "
-"<quote>engagement techniques</quote> 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 <quote>pull to refresh</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>are</emphasis> techniques like that. Who can forget the "
-"Great Zynga Epidemic, when all of our friends were caught in "
-"<emphasis>FarmVille</emphasis>’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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"But surveillance capitalism’s margins on behavioral modification suck. "
-"Tripling the rate at which someone buys a widget sounds great <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2018/03/09/the-advertising-"
-"conversion-rates-for-every-major-tech-platform/#2f6a67485957\">unless the "
-"base rate is way less than 1%</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><sect2><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid ""
-"If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak"
-msgstr ""
-"Jeśli dane są nowym paliwem, to silnik kapitalistycznych systemów nadzoru ma "
-"wyciek"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Zuboff observes this phenomenon and concludes that data must be very "
-"valuable if surveillance capitalism is so hungry for it. (In her words: "
-"<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.</quote>) 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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Of course, all of Big Tech’s persuasion techniques work in concert with one "
-"another, and collecting data is useful beyond mere behavioral trickery."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>races,</quote> "
-"sticking instead to conspiratorial secret histories of <quote>demographic "
-"replacement</quote> and the like."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>voter "
-"suppression</quote> if you can convince your marks to confine their search "
-"terms to <quote>voter fraud,</quote> which throws up a very different set of "
-"search results."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>neurolinguistic programming</quote> phrases, body language "
-"techniques, and psychological manipulation tactics like <quote>negging</"
-"quote> — offering unsolicited negative feedback to women to lower their self-"
-"esteem and prick their interest."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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’ <quote>success</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Pick-up artists <emphasis>believe</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Pick-up artists are proof that people can believe they have developed a "
-"system of mind control <emphasis>even when it doesn’t work</emphasis>. 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Department store pioneer John Wanamaker is said to have lamented, "
-"<quote>Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I "
-"don’t know which half.</quote> 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 <emphasis>much</emphasis> "
-"better at convincing potential clients to buy their services than they are "
-"at convincing the general public to buy their clients’ wares."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "What is Facebook?"
-msgstr "Co to jest Facebook?"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>and</emphasis> spying on them all the time."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>Like</quote> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but "
-"because it is <emphasis>big</emphasis>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>loyalty</quote> "
-"programs, financial transactions, etc., and cross-references that with the "
-"dossiers it develops on activity on Facebook and with apps and the public "
-"web."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"To understand what role Facebook plays in the formulation and mobilization "
-"of antisocial movements, we need to understand the dual nature of Facebook."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Facebook makes finding people shopping for refrigerators a <emphasis>lot</"
-"emphasis> 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 <emphasis>other</"
-"emphasis> 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 "
-"<emphasis>are</emphasis> looking for fridges that these ads reach is "
-"<emphasis>much</emphasis> larger than it is than for any group that might be "
-"subjected to traditional, offline targeted refrigerator marketing."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>brand "
-"recognition.</quote> This means that the price per ad is very low in nearly "
-"every case."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"With nothing but <quote>organic</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Facebook <emphasis>can</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Monopoly and the right to the future tense"
-msgstr "Monopol i prawo do czasu przyszłego"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>the right to the future tense</quote> "
-"— that is, the right to decide for yourself what you will do in the future."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <ulink url=\"https://twitter.com/"
-"tveastman/status/1069674780826071040\">as one person on Twitter noted</"
-"ulink>, five giant websites each filled with screenshots of the other four."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Start with <quote>digital rights management.</quote> 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 <quote>anti-circumvention</quote> rule."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<emphasis>nothing else</emphasis> — and you and copyright are square with "
-"one another."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"That’s where Section 1201 of the DMCA comes in: By banning tampering with an "
-"<quote>access control,</quote> 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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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:"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
-msgid ""
-"Any device with software in it contains a <quote>copyrighted work</quote> — "
-"i.e., the software."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
-msgid ""
-"A device can be designed so that reconfiguring the software requires "
-"bypassing an <quote>access control for copyrighted works,</quote> which is a "
-"potential felony under Section 1201."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.telegraph.co."
-"uk/technology/apple/5982243/Apple-bans-dictionary-from-App-Store-over-swear-"
-"words.html\">reject dictionaries</ulink> for containing obscene words; to "
-"<ulink url=\"https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just-banned-the-"
-"app-that-tracks-us-drone-strikes-again\">limit political speech</ulink>, "
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-05-19-"
-"palestinian-indie-game-must-not-be-called-a-game-apple-says\">object to a "
-"game</ulink> that commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.ft.com/"
-"content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc\">ordered Apple to prohibit the "
-"sale of privacy tools</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a <quote>rogue capitalism.</quote> "
-"Theoreticians of capitalism claim that its virtue is that it <ulink url="
-"\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal\">aggregates information in the "
-"form of consumers’ decisions</ulink>, 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no "
-"longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at "
-"<emphasis>least</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Search order and the right to the future tense"
-msgstr "Porządek wyszukiwania i prawo do czasu przyszłego"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <quote>I don’t care who does the electing, "
-"so long as I get to do the nominating.</quote> A monopolized market is an "
-"election whose candidates are chosen by the monopolist."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>Are vaccines dangerous?</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"This is true whether the search is for <quote>Are vaccines dangerous?</"
-"quote> or <quote>best restaurants near me.</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Many of the questions we ask search engines have no empirically correct "
-"answers: <quote>Where should I eat dinner?</quote> is not an objective "
-"question. Even questions that do have correct answers (<quote>Are vaccines "
-"dangerous?</quote>) 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs"
-msgstr "Monopoliści mogą sobie pozwolić na proszki nasenne dla strażników"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for three "
-"reasons:"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis role=\"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.</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis role=\"strong\">2. They believe the surveillance capitalism story."
-"</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<emphasis role=\"strong\">3. The penalties for leaking data are negligible.</"
-"emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>free</quote> and autocratic states — is to suborn commercial "
-"services."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly abet "
-"surveillance."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>do</emphasis> think that tech poses an existential "
-"threat to our society and possibly our species."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "But that threat grows out of monopoly."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 (<quote>circumventing</quote>) them, and these "
-"statutes have been used to threaten security researchers who make "
-"disclosures about vulnerabilities without permission from manufacturers."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>rogue capitalism</"
-"quote> 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 <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> than surveillance "
-"capitalism’s influence campaigns."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"And unlike mind-control rays, enforced silence over security is an "
-"immediate, documented problem, and it <emphasis>does</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In software design, <quote>technology debt</quote> 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 <emphasis>them</emphasis>, 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 <quote>pay off the debt</quote> once and for all."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Privacy and monopoly"
-msgstr "Prywatność a monopol"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>fails</"
-"emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>respectable</quote> 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 <quote>cure</quote> gay people, history is littered with the formerly "
-"respectable titans of discredited industries."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <emphasis>understated</emphasis>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"There’s real irony here. The belief in surveillance capitalism as a "
-"<quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>fully hedged</quote> 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 "
-"<emphasis>did</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech but "
-"because it is <emphasis>big</emphasis>. The reason every web publisher "
-"embeds a Facebook <quote>Like</quote> button is that Facebook dominates the "
-"internet’s social media referrals — and every one of those <quote>Like</"
-"quote> buttons spies on everyone who lands on a page that contains them (see "
-"also: Google Analytics embeds, Twitter buttons, etc.)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies "
-"certainly abet surveillance."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism"
-msgstr "Ronald Reagan, pionier monopolizmu technologicznego"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>diseconomies of scale</quote> (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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>consumer harm</quote> — in the form of "
-"higher prices."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>monopoly rents</quote> (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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>borked</quote> to refer to any catastrophically bad "
-"political performance)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Today, many fear that machine learning allows surveillance capitalism to "
-"sell <quote>Bork-as-a-Service,</quote> at internet speeds, so that you can "
-"contract a machine-learning company to engineer <emphasis>rapid</emphasis> "
-"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, <emphasis>including</emphasis> in their "
-"sales literature."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The idea that tech forms <quote>natural monopolies</quote> (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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>curation</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"In support of this thesis, I offer the concentration that every "
-"<emphasis>other</emphasis> 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, <emphasis>every</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 (<quote>It was the "
-"environmental toxins</quote>), true believers in unregulated markets have a "
-"whole suite of unconvincing explanations for monopoly in tech that leave "
-"capitalism intact."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Steering with the windshield wipers"
-msgstr "Sterowanie za pomocą wycieraczek przedniej szyby"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>delicate and dainty</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<emphasis>other</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in a "
-"<quote>generation ship,</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Surveillance still matters"
-msgstr "Systemy nadzoru mają ciągle znaczenie"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"None of this is to minimize the problems with surveillance. Surveillance "
-"matters, and Big Tech’s use of surveillance <emphasis>is</emphasis> an "
-"existential risk to our species, but that’s not because surveillance and "
-"machine learning rob us of our free will."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Surveillance has become <emphasis>much</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"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\">only point to a single minor success story</ulink> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>suspicious characters.</quote> 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, <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/amazons-ring-enables-over-policing-"
-"efforts-some-americas-deadliest-law-enforcement\">you’re right</ulink>. Ring "
-"has become a <emphasis>de facto,</emphasis> off-the-books arm of the police "
-"without any of the pesky oversight or rules."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Dignity and sanctuary"
-msgstr "Godność i sanktuarium"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"This is an area where Zuboff shines. Her chapter on <quote>sanctuary</quote> "
-"— the feeling of being unobserved — is a beautiful hymn to introspection, "
-"calmness, mindfulness, and tranquility."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your "
-"authentic self."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Our devices and services are <quote>general purpose</quote> 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 <quote>running "
-"late can you get the kid?</quote> to <quote>doctor gave me bad news and I "
-"need to talk to you RIGHT NOW</quote>) as well as ads for refrigerators and "
-"recruiting messages from Nazis."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>sleep deprivation torture,</quote> and it would be "
-"<ulink url=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKpRbvnx6g\">a war crime under "
-"the Geneva Conventions</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Afflicting the afflicted"
-msgstr "Dręczenie udręczonych"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>free "
-"societies</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "A private realm is necessary for human progress."
-msgstr "Prywatna rzeczywistość jest konieczna dla rozwoju ludzkości."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak"
-msgstr ""
-"Jakiekolwiek dane, które zbierasz i przetwarzasz, kiedyś w końcu wyciekną"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"For example, attackers can use leaked username and password combinations to "
-"hijack whole fleets of commercial vehicles that <ulink url=\"https://www."
-"vice.com/en_us/article/zmpx4x/hacker-monitor-cars-kill-engine-gps-tracking-"
-"apps\">have been fitted with anti-theft GPS trackers and immobilizers</"
-"ulink> or to hijack baby monitors in order to <ulink url=\"https://www."
-"washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/23/how-nest-designed-keep-intruders-"
-"out-peoples-homes-effectively-allowed-hackers-get/?"
-"utm_term=.15220e98c550\">terrorize toddlers with the audio tracks from "
-"pornography</ulink>. 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>more</emphasis> data."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/"
-"world-us-canada-24751821\">sneaking data out of companies’ databases</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism"
-msgstr ""
-"Przełomowa wyjątkowość technologiczna jest nadal technologiczną wyjątkowością"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech has long practiced technology exceptionalism: the idea that it "
-"should not be subject to the mundane laws and norms of <quote>meatspace.</"
-"quote> Mottoes like Facebook’s <quote>move fast and break things</quote> "
-"attracted justifiable scorn of the companies’ self-serving rhetoric."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech is not a <quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>50% of my advertising budget "
-"is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%</quote> is a testament to the triumph "
-"of <emphasis>ad executives</emphasis>, who successfully convinced Wanamaker "
-"that only half of the money he spent went to waste."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>artificial intelligence</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The claims of Big Tech’s mind-control system are full of tells that the "
-"enterprise is a con. For example, <ulink url=\"https://www.frontiersin.org/"
-"articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01415/full\">the reliance on the <quote>Big "
-"Five</quote> personality traits</ulink> as a primary means of influencing "
-"people even though the <quote>Big Five</quote> theory is unsupported by any "
-"large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is <ulink url=\"https://www.wired.com/"
-"story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/\">mostly the realm of "
-"marketing hucksters and pop psych</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms can "
-"accurately perform <quote>sentiment analysis</quote> or detect peoples’ "
-"moods based on their <quote>microexpressions,</quote> but <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647040758/advertising-on-facebook-is-it-"
-"worth-it\">these are marketing claims, not scientific ones</ulink>. 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 <ulink url=\"https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-"
-"files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/\">have "
-"been shown</ulink> to underperform relative to random chance."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>everything</emphasis>, including how well "
-"its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://patents.google."
-"com/patent/US20050131762A1/en\">its patent filings</ulink>. 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>invention</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>invention</quote> that you haven’t "
-"actually made and that you don’t know how to make."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"With these considerations in hand, it becomes obvious that the fact that a "
-"Big Tech company has patented what it <emphasis>says</emphasis> is an "
-"effective mind-control ray is largely irrelevant to whether Big Tech can in "
-"fact control our minds."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>collects as much data as possible</quote> might realize a "
-"bigger return on investment than <quote>collects a business-appropriate "
-"quantity of data.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid ""
-"How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The "
-"Snapchat story"
-msgstr ""
-"Jak monopole, a nie kontrola umysłu, sterują kapitalizmen opartym na "
-"systemach nadzoru: historia Snapchat"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?"
-"abstract_id=3247362\">got markedly worse</ulink>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "A monopoly over your friends"
-msgstr "Monopol sprawowany nad twoimi przyjaciółmi"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of Facebook and "
-"other Big Tech companies by fielding <quote>indieweb</quote> alternatives — "
-"Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, Diaspora as a Facebook alternative, etc. "
-"— but these efforts have failed to attain any kind of liftoff."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>we</"
-"emphasis> have Facebook accounts."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant platforms — "
-"into <quote>kill zones</quote> that investors will not fund new entrants for."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid "The hard problem of our species is coordination."
-msgstr "Trudnym problemem naszego gatunku jest koordynacja."
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<quote>Interoperability</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>Sports Illustrated</"
-"emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"<quote>Interoperability</quote> is often used interchangeably with "
-"<quote>standardization,</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>neutral interoperability.</"
-"quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Beyond neutral interoperability, there is <quote>adversarial "
-"interoperability.</quote> That’s when a manufacturer makes a product that "
-"interoperates with another manufacturer’s product <emphasis>despite the "
-"second manufacturer’s objections</emphasis> and <emphasis>even if that means "
-"bypassing a security system designed to prevent interoperability</emphasis>."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the history of "
-"the tech industry: from the founding of the <quote>alt.*</quote> 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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Fake news is an epistemological crisis"
-msgstr "Fałszywe wiadomości to oznaka kryzysu epistemologicznego"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"That means that whenever a regulator asks a question with an obvious, "
-"empirical answer (<quote>Are humans causing climate change?</quote> or "
-"<quote>Should we let companies conduct commercial mass surveillance?</quote> "
-"or <quote>Does society benefit from allowing network neutrality violations?</"
-"quote>), 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Rich people have always played an outsized role in politics and more so "
-"since the Supreme Court’s <emphasis>Citizens United</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>when</"
-"emphasis> they do, they can forge a consensus position on regulation."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders <ulink url="
-"\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/25/how-payday-lending-"
-"industry-insider-tilted-academic-research-its-favor/\">winning the right to "
-"practice predatory lending</ulink> or Apple <ulink url=\"https://www.vice."
-"com/en_us/article/mgxayp/source-apple-will-fight-right-to-repair-legislation"
-"\">winning the right to decide who can fix your phone</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>and</emphasis> "
-"whether your car’s brakes’ software will cause them to fail unpredictably "
-"<emphasis>and</emphasis> whether the hygiene standards at your butcher are "
-"sufficient to keep you from dying after you finish your dinner."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>can</emphasis> determine "
-"whether the adjudication process itself is trustworthy."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "Right now, it’s obviously not."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>were</emphasis> an aberration "
-"and then how you know that the doctors writing about vaccine safety are "
-"<emphasis>not</emphasis> an aberration."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"I’m 100% certain that vaccinating is safe and effective, but I’m also at "
-"something of a loss to explain exactly, <emphasis>precisely,</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Tech is different"
-msgstr "Technologia jest czymś odmiennym"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But there’s one way in which I <emphasis>am</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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, <quote>Turing complete</quote> computer that can run every program "
-"we can express in symbolic logic."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Ownership of facts"
-msgstr "Własność faktów"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But the phone numbers Facebook nonconsensually acquires in this transaction "
-"are not the <quote>property</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink url=\"https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-take-photos-at-protests/"
-"\">when and how to post photos from demonstrations</ulink> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>their</emphasis> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Persuasion works… slowly"
-msgstr "Przekonywanie działa… powoli"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>can</emphasis> change."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Paying won’t help"
-msgstr "Płacenie nie pomoże"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"As the old saw goes, <quote>If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the "
-"product.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>compete with free</quote> "
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Then, as news companies <emphasis>did</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <ulink "
-"url=\"https://ncac.org/news/blog/does-apples-strict-app-store-content-policy-"
-"limit-freedom-of-expression\">controversial political material</ulink>) 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>engage</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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?"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>house "
-"rules</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>voluntarily</emphasis> submit to their terms, and they want "
-"to deprive them of the choice to take their business elsewhere."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<quote>rogue capitalism</quote> 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 <quote>rogue capitalism.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>choosing</quote> their services "
-"regardless of whether they want them — it’s fine to be terrible when there "
-"is no alternative."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <emphasis>can</emphasis> get away with."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "An <quote>ecology</quote> moment for trustbusting"
-msgstr "<quote> ekologia</quote> chwila na zerwanie zaufania"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 <quote>consumer benefits</quote> of large companies with massive "
-"efficiencies of scale."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid "Could we find that political will again?"
-msgstr "Czy moglibyśmy ponownie znaleźć tę wolę polityczną?"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Copyright scholar James Boyle has described how the term <quote>ecology</"
-"quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But the term <quote>ecology</quote> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"I believe we are on the verge of a new <quote>ecology</quote> moment "
-"dedicated to combating monopolies. After all, tech isn’t the only "
-"concentrated industry nor is it even the <emphasis>most</emphasis> "
-"concentrated of industries."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech "
-"<emphasis>instead</emphasis> of breaking up the big companies also "
-"forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
-"<emphasis>expensive</emphasis> 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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Make Big Tech small again"
-msgstr "Spraw, aby 'Big Tech' stała się ponownie 'małą' technologią"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><blockquote><para>
-msgid ""
-"A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to "
-"enforce the law as it was written."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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 "
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-msgstr ""
-
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-"If the courts frustrate the Justice Department and the president, the next "
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-"saying, <quote>Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert "
-"Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, <emphasis>fuck that "
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-"<emphasis>monopolism</emphasis> — the concentration of power into too few "
-"hands, which erodes our right to self-determination. If there is a monopoly, "
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-
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-"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 "
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-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"In an important sense, it doesn’t matter which industry the breakups begin "
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-"will start to eye their investments in monopolists skeptically. As "
-"trustbusters ride into town and start making lives miserable for "
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-"gain a powerful new argument to fend off their evil rivals in the corporate "
-"hierarchy: <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 "
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-"the next 10 years.</quote>"
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "20 GOTO 10"
-msgstr "20 GOTO 10"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"Fixing Big Tech will require a lot of iteration. As cyber lawyer Lawrence "
-"Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, <emphasis>Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace</"
-"emphasis>, 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)."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"But getting Congress to act will require a massive normative shift, a mass "
-"movement of people who care about monopolies — and pulling them apart."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><title>
-msgid "Up and through"
-msgstr "W górę i na wylot"
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
-msgid ""
-"The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is "
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-"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."
-msgstr ""
-
-#. type: Content of: <article><sect1><para>
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-"I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not "
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-"doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our "
-"civilization, our species, and our planet."
-msgstr ""
-
-#~ msgid "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (hard cover)"
-#~ msgstr "ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (oprawa twarda)"
-
-#~ msgid ""
-#~ "If you find typos, error or have other corrections to the translated "
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-#~ "projects/rms-personal-data-safe/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/"
-#~ "nb_NO/\"/>."
-
-#~ msgid ""
-#~ "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."
-#~ msgstr ""
-#~ "Nasze urządzenia i usługi zbierają większość danych, które NSA następnie "
-#~ "wydobywa w ramach swojego inwigilacyjnego projektu nadzoru. Płacimy za te "
-#~ "urządzenia i usługi, z którymi się łączą, a następnie skrupulatnie "
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-#~ msgid ""
-#~ "Thanks to Big Tech, Surveillance capitalism is everywhere. This is not "
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-#~ "abuse of corporate power. It is the result of unchecked monopolism and "
-#~ "the abusive behavior it abets. It is the system working as intended and "
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-#~ "Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future "
-#~ "at the New Frontier of Power, with a non-magical analysis of the problem "
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-
-#, fuzzy
-#~| msgid "Doctorow"
-#~ msgid "Cory Doctorow"
-#~ msgstr "Doctorow"
+++ /dev/null
-<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört</title><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.79.1"></head><body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><div lang="de" class="article"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="index"></a>Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört</h2></div><div><div class="authorgroup"><div class="author"><h3 class="author"><span class="firstname">Cory</span> <span class="surname">Doctorow</span></h3></div></div></div><div><p class="copyright">Copyright © 2020 Cory Doctorow</p></div><div><p class="copyright">Copyright © 2020 Petter Reinholdtsen</p></div><div><div class="legalnotice"><a name="idm18"></a><p>
- Wie man den Überwachungskapitalismus zerstört, von Cory Doctorow.
- </p><p>
- Herausgegeben von Petter Reinholdtsen.
- </p><p>
- <a class="ulink" href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/" target="_top">http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/</a>.
- </p><p>
- ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (Taschenbuch)
- </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>
- <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, ein Vierteljahrhundert später</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-exceptionalism-then-and-now">Tech-Exzeptionalismus, damals und heute</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dont-believe-the-hype">Glaube nicht an den Hype</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-persuasion">Was ist Überzeugung?</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#segmenting">1. Aufteilung</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#deception">2. Deception</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#domination">3. Domination</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#bypassing-our-rational-faculties">4. Bypassing our rational faculties</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#if-data-is-the-new-oil-then-surveillance-capitalisms-engine-has-a-leak">If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-facebook">What is Facebook?</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopoly-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Monopoly and the right to the future tense</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#search-order-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Search order and the right to the future tense</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopolists-can-afford-sleeping-pills-for-watchdogs">Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#privacy-and-monopoly">Privacy and monopoly</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ronald-reagan-pioneer-of-tech-monopolism">Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers">Steering with the windshield wipers</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#surveillance-still-matters">Surveillance still matters</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dignity-and-sanctuary">Dignity and sanctuary</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#afflicting-the-afflicted">Afflicting the afflicted</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#any-data-you-collect-and-retain-will-eventually-leak">Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#critical-tech-exceptionalism-is-still-tech-exceptionalism">Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#how-monopolies-not-mind-control-drive-surveillance-capitalism-the-snapchat-story">How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The
-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, ein Vierteljahrhundert später</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 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>
- Überwachung führt zu Verhaltensveränderungen, und zwar nicht zu
-positiven. Sie gefähdet unseren gesellschaftlichen Fortschritt. Zuboffs Buch
-arbeitet Erklärungen dieser Phänomene eindrucksvoll heraus. Aber Zuboff
-behauptet auch, dass Überwachung uns unseres freien Willens beraubt - dass,
-wenn unsere persönlichen Daten mit maschinellem Lernen kombiniert werden,
-ein System fataler Überzeugungskunst entsteht, in dessen Angesicht wir
-hilflos sind. Sprich, Facebook nutzt einen Algorithmus, um die Daten zu
-analysieren, welche ohne unsere Zustimmung aus deinem Alltag extrahiert
-werden, und nutzt diese, um deinen Feed so anzupassen, dass du Sachen
-kaufst. Es handelt sich um einen Strahl zur Gedankensteuerung wie aus einem
-Comic der 1950er Jahre, der von verrückten Wissenschaftlern bedient wird,
-deren Supercomputer ihnen ewige und umfassende Weltherrschaft garantiert.
- </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="what-is-persuasion"></a>Was ist Überzeugung?</h2></div></div></div><p>
- Um zu verstehen, weshalb du dich nicht um Strahlen zur Gedankenkontrolle –
-aber weshalb du dich um Überwachung <span class="emphasis"><em>und</em></span> Big Tech sorgen
-<span class="emphasis"><em>solltest</em></span> -, müssen wir einordnen, was wir mit
-<span class="quote">„<span class="quote">Überzeugung</span>“</span> meinen.
- </p><p>
- Google, Facebook und andere Überwachungkapitalisten versprechen ihren Kunden
-(den Werbeunternehmen), dass sich diesen – durch Werkzeuge maschinellen
-Lernes, die mit unvorstellbar großen Mengen an persönlichen Daten ohne
-Zustimmung trainier wurden – Wege eröffnen, um das rationale Denken der
-Öffentlichkeit umgehen und ihr Verhalten lenken zu können, so dass ein ein
-Strom an Käufen, Stimmen und anderer erwünschter Ergebnisse erzeugt wird.
- </p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
- Die Auswirkungen von Vorherrschaft überwiegt die der Manipulation bei weitem
-und sie sollen im Mittelpunkt unserer Analyse und etwaiger Gegenmittel
-stehen, die wir zu finden suchen.
- </p></blockquote></div><p>
- Aber es gibt wenige Beweise dafür, dass dies geschieht. Stattdessen sind die
-Vorhersagen, die Überwachungskapitalisten ihren Kunden liefern, viel weniger
-beeindruckend. Anstelle Wege zu finden, die unser rationales Denken umgehen,
-tun Überwachungskapitlisten meistens eines oder mehrere der folgenden drei
-Dinge:
- </p><div class="sect2"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="segmenting"></a>1. Aufteilung</h3></div></div></div><p>
- Falls du Windeln verkaufst, bist du besser beraten, diese Leuten auf
-Entbindungsstationen anzubieten. Nicht jeder, der eine Entbindungsstation
-betritt oder eine solche verlässt, hat gerade ein Kind entbunden, und nicht
-jeder, der gerade ein Kind entbunden hat, ist im Windelmarkt vertreten. Aber
-die Geburt eines Kindes ist ein sehr zuverlässiges Korrelat zur Teilnahme am
-„Windelmarkt“, und der Aufenthalt in einer Entbindungsstation steht in hoher
-Korrelation zur Geburt eines Kindes. Deshalb Windelwerbung im Bereich von
-Entbindungsstationen (und sogar Promoter, die auf Entbindungsstationen mit
-Körben voller Gratisproben herumspuken).
- </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>
- Das ist wirklich beängstigend.
- </p><p>
- Aber dies ist keine Gedankenkontrolle.
- </p><p>
- Es beraubt dich nicht deines freien Willens. Es führt dich nicht hinters
-Licht.
- </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>
+++ /dev/null
-<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>Comment détruire le capitalisme de la surveillance</title><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.79.1"></head><body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><div lang="fr" class="article"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="index"></a>Comment détruire le capitalisme de la surveillance</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>
- Comment détruire le capitalisme de la surveillance par Cory Doctorow.
- </p><p>
- Publié par Petter Reinholdtsen.
- </p><p>
- <a class="ulink" href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/" target="_top">http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/</a>.
- </p><p>
- ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (livre de poche)
- </p><p>
- ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)
- </p><p>
- Ce livre est disponible à la vente sur <a class="ulink" href="https://www.lulu.com/" target="_top">https://www.lulu.com/</a>.
- </p><p>
- <span class="inlinemediaobject"><img src="images/cc-some-rights-reserved.png" align="middle" height="38" alt="Creative Commons, certains droits réservés"></span>
- </p><p>
- Ce livre est sous licence Creative Commons. Cette licence permet toute
-utilisation de ce travail, tant que l'attribution est donnée et qu'aucun
-matériel dérivé n'est distribué. Pour plus d'informations sur la licence,
-visitez <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>Table des matières</b></p><dl class="toc"><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#the-net-of-a-thousand-lies">The net of a thousand lies</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#digital-rights-activism-a-quarter-century-on">Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-exceptionalism-then-and-now">Tech exceptionalism, then and now</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dont-believe-the-hype">Don’t believe the hype</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-persuasion">What is persuasion?</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#segmenting">1. Segmenting</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#deception">2. Deception</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#domination">3. Domination</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#bypassing-our-rational-faculties">4. Bypassing our rational faculties</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#if-data-is-the-new-oil-then-surveillance-capitalisms-engine-has-a-leak">If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-facebook">What is Facebook?</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopoly-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Monopoly and the right to the future tense</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#search-order-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Search order and the right to the future tense</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopolists-can-afford-sleeping-pills-for-watchdogs">Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#privacy-and-monopoly">Privacy and monopoly</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ronald-reagan-pioneer-of-tech-monopolism">Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers">Steering with the windshield wipers</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#surveillance-still-matters">Surveillance still matters</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dignity-and-sanctuary">Dignity and sanctuary</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#afflicting-the-afflicted">Afflicting the afflicted</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#any-data-you-collect-and-retain-will-eventually-leak">Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#critical-tech-exceptionalism-is-still-tech-exceptionalism">Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#how-monopolies-not-mind-control-drive-surveillance-capitalism-the-snapchat-story">How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The
-Snapchat story</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#a-monopoly-over-your-friends">A monopoly over your friends</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#fake-news-is-an-epistemological-crisis">Fake news is an epistemological crisis</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-is-different">Tech is different</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ownership-of-facts">Ownership of facts</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#persuasion-works-slowly">Persuasion works… slowly</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#paying-wont-help">Paying won’t help</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#an-ecology-moment-for-trustbusting">An <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">ecology</span> »</span> moment for trustbusting</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#make-big-tech-small-again">Make Big Tech small again</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#goto-10">20 GOTO 10</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#up-and-through">Up and through</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="the-net-of-a-thousand-lies"></a>The net of a thousand lies</h2></div></div></div><p>
- The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the 21st
-century is just how widespread the evidence against them is. You can
-understand how, centuries ago, people who’d never gained a high-enough
-vantage point from which to see the Earth’s curvature might come to the
-commonsense belief that the flat-seeming Earth was, indeed, flat.
- </p><p>
- But today, when elementary schools routinely dangle GoPro cameras from
-balloons and loft them high enough to photograph the Earth’s curve — to say
-nothing of the unexceptional sight of the curved Earth from an airplane
-window — it takes a heroic effort to maintain the belief that the world is
-flat.
- </p><p>
- Likewise for white nationalism and eugenics: In an age where you can become
-a computational genomics datapoint by swabbing your cheek and mailing it to
-a gene-sequencing company along with a modest sum of money, <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">race
-science</span> »</span> has never been easier to refute.
- </p><p>
- We are living through a golden age of both readily available facts and
-denial of those facts. Terrible ideas that have lingered on the fringes for
-decades or even centuries have gone mainstream seemingly overnight.
- </p><p>
- When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that can
-explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea has gotten a
-lot better at stating their case, or the proposition has become harder to
-deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other words, if we want people to
-take climate change seriously, we can get a bunch of Greta Thunbergs to make
-eloquent, passionate arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds,
-or we can wait for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case
-for us. In practice, we’ll probably have to do some of both: The more we’re
-boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier it will be for
-the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us.
- </p><p>
- The arguments for ridiculous beliefs in odious conspiracies like
-anti-vaccination, climate denial, a flat Earth, and eugenics are no better
-than they were a generation ago. Indeed, they’re worse because they are
-being pitched to people who have at least a background awareness of the
-refuting facts.
- </p><p>
- Anti-vax has been around since the first vaccines, but the early
-anti-vaxxers were pitching people who were less equipped to understand even
-the most basic ideas from microbiology, and moreover, those people had not
-witnessed the extermination of mass-murdering diseases like polio, smallpox,
-and measles. Today’s anti-vaxxers are no more eloquent than their forebears,
-and they have a much harder job.
- </p><p>
- So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding on the
-basis of superior arguments?
- </p><p>
- Some people think so. Today, there is a widespread belief that machine
-learning and commercial surveillance can turn even the most fumble-tongued
-conspiracy theorist into a svengali who can warp your perceptions and win
-your belief by locating vulnerable people and then pitching them with
-A.I.-refined arguments that bypass their rational faculties and turn
-everyday people into flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, or even Nazis. When the
-RAND Corporation <a class="ulink" href="https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf" target="_top">blames
-Facebook for <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">radicalization</span> »</span></a> and when Facebook’s role
-in spreading coronavirus misinformation is <a class="ulink" href="https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_threat_health/" target="_top">blamed on
-its algorithm</a>, the implicit message is that machine learning and
-surveillance are causing the changes in our consensus about what’s true.
- </p><p>
- After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories
-like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread followings,
-<span class="emphasis"><em>something</em></span> must be afoot.
- </p><p>
- But what if there’s another explanation? What if it’s the material
-circumstances, and not the arguments, that are making the difference for
-these conspiracy pitchmen? What if the trauma of living through
-<span class="emphasis"><em>real conspiracies</em></span> all around us — conspiracies among
-wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts
-and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as
-<span class="quote">« <span class="quote">corruption</span> »</span>) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy
-theories?
- </p><p>
- If it’s trauma and not contagion — material conditions and not ideology —
-that is making the difference today and enabling a rise of repulsive
-misinformation in the face of easily observed facts, that doesn’t mean our
-computer networks are blameless. They’re still doing the heavy work of
-locating vulnerable people and guiding them through a series of
-ever-more-extreme ideas and communities.
- </p><p>
- Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses
-real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics <a class="ulink" href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html" target="_top">kicked off by vaccine
-denial</a> to genocides <a class="ulink" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html" target="_top">kicked
-off by racist conspiracies</a> to planetary meltdown caused by
-denial-inspired climate inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to
-put the fires out — to figure out how to help people see the truth of the
-world through the conspiracies they’ve been confused by.
- </p><p>
- But firefighting is reactive. We need fire
-<span class="emphasis"><em>prevention</em></span>. We need to strike at the traumatic material
-conditions that make people vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here,
-too, tech has a role to play.
- </p><p>
- There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s <a class="ulink" href="https://edri.org/tag/terreg/" target="_top">Terrorist Content Regulation</a>,
-which requires platforms to police and remove <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">extremist</span> »</span>
-content, to the U.S. proposals to <a class="ulink" href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution" target="_top">force
-tech companies to spy on their users</a> and hold them liable <a class="ulink" href="https://www.natlawreview.com/article/repeal-cda-section-230" target="_top">for their
-users’ bad speech</a>, there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies
-to solve the problems they created.
- </p><p>
- There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these
-solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance
-over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a
-more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The
-<span class="quote">« <span class="quote">solutions</span> »</span> on the table today <span class="emphasis"><em>require</em></span> Big
-Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to
-implement the systems these laws demand.
- </p><p>
- Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to
-get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to
-figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our
-internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big
-Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose.
- </p><p>
- I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the
-Internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism.
- </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="digital-rights-activism-a-quarter-century-on"></a>Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on</h2></div></div></div><p>
- Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic
-Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free Software Foundation
-launched in 1985. For most of the history of the movement, the most
-prominent criticism leveled against it was that it was irrelevant: The real
-activist causes were real-world causes (think of the skepticism when <a class="ulink" href="https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/finland-legal-right-to-broadband-for-all-citizens/#:~:text=Global%20Legal%20Monitor,-Home%20%7C%20Search%20%7C%20Browse&text=(July%206%2C%202010)%20On,connection%20100%20MBPS%20by%202015." target="_top">Finland
-declared broadband a human right in 2010</a>), and real-world activism
-was shoe-leather activism (think of Malcolm Gladwell’s <a class="ulink" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell" target="_top">contempt
-for <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">clicktivism</span> »</span></a>). But as tech has grown more central
-to our daily lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way first to
-accusations of insincerity (<span class="quote">« <span class="quote">You only care about tech because you’re
-<a class="ulink" href="https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-google-patent-reform/id=98007/" target="_top">shilling
-for tech companies</a></span> »</span>) to accusations of negligence (<span class="quote">« <span class="quote">Why
-didn’t you foresee that tech could be such a destructive force?</span> »</span>).
-But digital rights activism is right where it’s always been: looking out for
-the humans in a world where tech is inexorably taking over.
- </p><p>
- The latest version of this critique comes in the form of <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">surveillance
-capitalism,</span> »</span> a term coined by business professor Shoshana Zuboff in
-her long and influential 2019 book, <span class="emphasis"><em>The Age of Surveillance
-Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of
-Power</em></span>. Zuboff argues that <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">surveillance capitalism</span> »</span>
-is a unique creature of the tech industry and that it is unlike any other
-abusive commercial practice in history, one that is <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">constituted by
-unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification,
-and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while
-producing new markets of behavioral prediction and
-modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and
-departs in key ways from the centuries-long evolution of market
-capitalism.</span> »</span> It is a new and deadly form of capitalism, a
-<span class="quote">« <span class="quote">rogue capitalism,</span> »</span> and our lack of understanding of its unique
-capabilities and dangers represents an existential, species-wide
-threat. She’s right that capitalism today threatens our species, and she’s
-right that tech poses unique challenges to our species and civilization, but
-she’s really wrong about how tech is different and why it threatens our
-species.
- </p><p>
- What’s more, I think that her incorrect diagnosis will lead us down a path
-that ends up making Big Tech stronger, not weaker. We need to take down Big
-Tech, and to do that, we need to start by correctly identifying the problem.
- </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="tech-exceptionalism-then-and-now"></a>Tech exceptionalism, then and now</h2></div></div></div><p>
- Early critics of the digital rights movement — perhaps best represented by
-campaigning organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free
-Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, and others that focused on preserving
-and enhancing basic human rights in the digital realm — damned activists for
-practicing <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">tech exceptionalism.</span> »</span> Around the turn of the
-millennium, serious people ridiculed any claim that tech policy mattered in
-the <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">real world.</span> »</span> Claims that tech rules had implications for
-speech, association, privacy, search and seizure, and fundamental rights and
-equities were treated as ridiculous, an elevation of the concerns of sad
-nerds arguing about <span class="emphasis"><em>Star Trek</em></span> on bulletin board systems
-above the struggles of the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela, or the Warsaw
-ghetto uprising.
- </p><p>
- In the decades since, accusations of <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">tech exceptionalism</span> »</span> have
-only sharpened as tech’s role in everyday life has expanded: Now that tech
-has infiltrated every corner of our life and our online lives have been
-monopolized by a handful of giants, defenders of digital freedoms are
-accused of carrying water for Big Tech, providing cover for its
-self-interested negligence (or worse, nefarious plots).
- </p><p>
- From my perspective, the digital rights movement has remained stationary
-while the rest of the world has moved. From the earliest days, the
-movement’s concern was users and the toolsmiths who provided the code they
-needed to realize their fundamental rights. Digital rights activists only
-cared about companies to the extent that companies were acting to uphold
-users’ rights (or, just as often, when companies were acting so foolishly
-that they threatened to bring down new rules that would also make it harder
-for good actors to help users).
- </p><p>
- The <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">surveillance capitalism</span> »</span> critique recasts the digital
-rights movement in a new light again: not as alarmists who overestimate the
-importance of their shiny toys nor as shills for big tech but as serene
-deck-chair rearrangers whose long-standing activism is a liability because
-it makes them incapable of perceiving novel threats as they continue to
-fight the last century’s tech battles.
- </p><p>
- But tech exceptionalism is a sin no matter who practices it.
- </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="dont-believe-the-hype"></a>Don’t believe the hype</h2></div></div></div><p>
- You’ve probably heard that <span class="quote">« <span class="quote">if you’re not paying for the product,
-you’re the product.</span> »</span> As we’ll see below, that’s true, if incomplete.
-But what is <span class="emphasis"><em>absolutely</em></span> true is that ad-driven Big
-Tech’s customers are advertisers, and what companies like Google and
-Facebook sell is their ability to convince <span class="emphasis"><em>you</em></span> to buy
-stuff. Big Tech’s product is persuasion. The services — social media, search
-engines, maps, messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion.
- </p><p>
- The fear of surveillance capitalism starts from the (correct) presumption
-that everything Big Tech says about itself is probably a lie. But the
-surveillance capitalism critique makes an exception for the claims Big Tech
-makes in its sales literature — the breathless hype in the pitches to
-potential advertisers online and in ad-tech seminars about the efficacy of
-its products: It assumes that Big Tech is as good at influencing us as they
-claim they are when they’re selling influencing products to credulous
-customers. That’s a mistake because sales literature is not a reliable
-indicator of a product’s efficacy.
- </p><p>
- Surveillance capitalism assumes that because advertisers buy a lot of what
-Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something real. But Big Tech’s
-massive sales could just as easily be the result of a popular delusion or
-something even more pernicious: monopolistic control over our communications
-and commerce.
- </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>
- Le capitalisme de surveillance se segmente par milliard. Les vendeurs de
-couches peuvent aller bien au-delà des personnes dans les maternités (bien
-qu’ils puissent le faire aussi, avec des choses comme les annonces mobiles
-basées sur la localisation). Ils peuvent vous cibler selon que vous lisez
-des articles sur l’éducation des enfants, les couches ou une foule d’autres
-sujets, et l’exploration de données peut suggérer des mots-clés non évidents
-sur lesquels faire de la publicité. Ils peuvent vous cibler en fonction des
-articles que vous avez récemment lus. Ils peuvent vous cibler en fonction de
-ce que vous avez récemment acheté. Ils peuvent vous cibler selon que vous
-recevez des courriels ou des messages privés sur ces sujets – ou même si
-vous en parlez à haute voix (bien que Facebook et autres affirment de
-manière convaincante que cela ne se produit pas encore).
- </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>
+++ /dev/null
-<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>Jak zniszczyć kapitalizm oparty na inwigilacyjnych systemach nadzoru</title><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.79.1"></head><body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><div lang="en" class="article"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="index"></a>Jak zniszczyć kapitalizm oparty na inwigilacyjnych systemach nadzoru</h2></div><div><div class="authorgroup"><div class="author"><h3 class="author"><span class="firstname">Cory</span> <span class="surname">Doctorow</span></h3></div></div></div><div><p class="copyright">Copyright © 2020 Cory Doctorow</p></div><div><p class="copyright">Copyright © 2020 Petter Reinholdtsen</p></div><div><div class="legalnotice"><a name="idm18"></a><p>
- Jak zniszczyć kapitalizm oparty na inwigilacyjnych systemach nadzoru Autor:
-Cory Doctorow.
- </p><p>
- Wydawca: Petter Reinholdtsen.
- </p><p>
- <a class="ulink" href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/" target="_top">http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/</a>.
- </p><p>
- ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (oprawa miękka)
- </p><p>
- ISBN 978-82-93828-XX-X (ePub)
- </p><p>
- Ta książka jest dostępna w sprzedaży na <a class="ulink" href="https://www.lulu.com/" target="_top">https://www.lulu.com/</a>.
- </p><p>
- <span class="inlinemediaobject"><img src="images/cc-some-rights-reserved.png" align="middle" height="38" alt="Creative Commons, Pewne prawa zastrzeżone"></span>
- </p><p>
- Ta książka jest wydana na licencji Creative Commons. Licencja ta pozwala na
-dowolny użytek tej pracy tak długo, jak długo podane jest jej autorstwo i
-nie jest rozpowszechniany żaden materiał pochodny. Więcej informacji na
-temat tej licencji znajdziesz na <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>Table of Contents</b></p><dl class="toc"><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#the-net-of-a-thousand-lies">Sieć tysięcy kłamstw</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#digital-rights-activism-a-quarter-century-on">Aktywizm praw cyfrowych, krótka historia 25 lat działalności</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-exceptionalism-then-and-now">Wyjątkowość Technologii, dawniej i obecnie</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dont-believe-the-hype">Nie wierz 'szumom' medialnym</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-persuasion">Co to jest przekonywanie?</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#segmenting">1. Segmentacja</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#deception">2. Podstęp</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#domination">3. Dominacja</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="#bypassing-our-rational-faculties">4. Omijanie naszych racjonalnych zdolności</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#if-data-is-the-new-oil-then-surveillance-capitalisms-engine-has-a-leak">Jeśli dane są nowym paliwem, to silnik kapitalistycznych systemów nadzoru ma
-wyciek</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#what-is-facebook">Co to jest Facebook?</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopoly-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Monopol i prawo do czasu przyszłego</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#search-order-and-the-right-to-the-future-tense">Porządek wyszukiwania i prawo do czasu przyszłego</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#monopolists-can-afford-sleeping-pills-for-watchdogs">Monopoliści mogą sobie pozwolić na proszki nasenne dla strażników</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#privacy-and-monopoly">Prywatność a monopol</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ronald-reagan-pioneer-of-tech-monopolism">Ronald Reagan, pionier monopolizmu technologicznego</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers">Sterowanie za pomocą wycieraczek przedniej szyby</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#surveillance-still-matters">Systemy nadzoru mają ciągle znaczenie</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#dignity-and-sanctuary">Godność i sanktuarium</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#afflicting-the-afflicted">Dręczenie udręczonych</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#any-data-you-collect-and-retain-will-eventually-leak">Jakiekolwiek dane, które zbierasz i przetwarzasz, kiedyś w końcu wyciekną</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#critical-tech-exceptionalism-is-still-tech-exceptionalism">Przełomowa wyjątkowość technologiczna jest nadal technologiczną
-wyjątkowością</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#how-monopolies-not-mind-control-drive-surveillance-capitalism-the-snapchat-story">Jak monopole, a nie kontrola umysłu, sterują kapitalizmen opartym na
-systemach nadzoru: historia Snapchat</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#a-monopoly-over-your-friends">Monopol sprawowany nad twoimi przyjaciółmi</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#fake-news-is-an-epistemological-crisis">Fałszywe wiadomości to oznaka kryzysu epistemologicznego</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#tech-is-different">Technologia jest czymś odmiennym</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#ownership-of-facts">Własność faktów</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#persuasion-works-slowly">Przekonywanie działa… powoli</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#paying-wont-help">Płacenie nie pomoże</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#an-ecology-moment-for-trustbusting"><span class="quote">“<span class="quote"> ekologia</span>”</span> chwila na zerwanie zaufania</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#make-big-tech-small-again">Spraw, aby 'Big Tech' stała się ponownie 'małą' technologią</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#goto-10">20 GOTO 10</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect1"><a href="#up-and-through">W górę i na wylot</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="the-net-of-a-thousand-lies"></a>Sieć tysięcy kłamstw</h2></div></div></div><p>
- Najbardziej zaskakującą kwestią w dziedzinie powtórnych narodzin `płaskich`
-Ziemian w XXI wieku jest to, jak szeroko rozpowszechnione są przeciwko nim
-dowody. Można teraz zrozumieć, jak przed wiekami ludzie, którzy nigdy nie
-mieli okazji zobaczyć Ziemi z orbity ziemskiej, mogli dojść do przekonania,
-opartego na zdrowym rozsądku, że Ziemia - wyglądająca na płaską - jest
-faktycznie, płaska.
- </p><p>
- Lecz dzisiaj, gdy szkoły podstawowe rutynowo podczepiają do balonów kamery
-GoPro i umieszczają je na tyle wysoko, aby sfotografować krzywą Ziemi — nie
-mówiąc już o niezrównanie wyjątkowym widoku zakrzywionej Ziemi z okna
-samolotu — trzeba naprawdę heroicznego wysiłku, aby uwierzyć, że Ziemia jest
-płaska.
- </p><p>
- Podobnie jest z eugeniką i białym nacjonalizmem: w epoce, w której można
-stać się obliczeniowym punktem danych genomicznych, poprzez pobranie wymazu
-z policzka, i przesłanie go — za pomocą poczty elektronicznej — do firmy
-sekwencjonujoącej geny, wraz ze skromną sumą pieniędzy, nigdy nie było
-łatwiej zaprzeczyć twierdzeniom wysuwanym podczas <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">naukowego wyścigu
-po sukces</span>”</span>.
- </p><p>
- Żyjemy w złotej epoce, zarówno łatwo dostępnych faktów, jak i zaprzeczenia
-tym faktom. Okropne idee, które pozostawały na marginesie przez
-dziesięciolecia, a nawet stulecia, z dnia na dzień weszły do głównego nurtu.
- </p><p>
- Kiedy niejasny pomysł zyskuje na popularności, istnieją tylko dwie rzeczy,
-które mogą wyjaśnić jego przewagę: albo osoba wyrażająca ten pomysł znacznie
-lepiej radzi sobie z przedstawieniem swojej racji, albo twierdzenie staje
-się trudniejsze do zaprzeczenia w obliczu rosnących dowodów. Innymi słowy,
-jeśli chcemy, aby ludzie poważnie podchodzili do zmian klimatycznych, możemy
-skłonić grupę Grety Thunberg do wyrażenia wymownych, namiętnych argumentów w
-sposób publiczny, przez co zdobędzie ona nasze serca i umysły, lub możemy
-poczekać na powódź, ogień, palące słońce i pandemie, aby przemówiła za
-nami. W praktyce prawdopodobnie będziemy musieli zrobić jedno i drugie: im
-więcej będziemy gotować, palić, topić i marnować, tym łatwiej będzie Grecie
-Thunberg nas przekonać.
- </p><p>
- Argumenty za absurdalnymi wierzeniami w oparciu o teorie spiskowe, takie jak
-teoria antyszczepionkowa, teoria negująca zmiany klimatu, teoria o istnieniu
-płaskiej Ziemi i teoria eugeniczna, wcale nie są lepsze niż w pokoleniu
-wcześniejszym. W rzeczywistości, są gorsze, ponieważ są przedstawiane
-ludziom, którzy mają przynajmniej podstawową świadomość faktów obalających
-te teorie.
- </p><p>
- Antyszczepionkowcy pojawiali się już od czasu wynalezienia pierwszych
-szczepionek, lecz pierwsi z nich byli ludźmi słabo przygotowanymi do
-zrozumienia nawet najbardziej podstawowych kwestii mikrobiologii, a –
-ponadto - ludzie ci nie byli świadkami masowej eksterminacji, spowodowanej
-takimi morderczymi chorobami, jak polio, ospa czy odra. Dzisiejsi
-przeciwnicy szczepień nie są bardziej elokwentni niż ich przodkowie, a mają
-znacznie cięższą pracę.
- </p><p>
- A więc, czy ci wyrafinowani zwolennicy teorii spiskowych mogą, tak naprawdę,
-odnieść sukces w oparciu o lepsze argumenty?
- </p><p>
- Niektórzy ludzie myślą, że tak. Obecnie panuje powszechne przekonanie, że
-uczenie maszynowe i komercyjne systemy inwigilacji mogą zmienić nawet
-najbardziej nieudolnego teoretyka spiskowego w `swengali`, osobę, która może
-wypaczyć czyjeś spostrzeżenia i zdobyć jego /jej zaufanie, lokalizując osoby
-wrażliwe, a następnie przedstawiając im wyrafinowane argumenty Sztucznej
-Inteligencji, omijające racjonalne umiejętności ludzi i zmieniające ich w
-`płaskich` Ziemian, przeciwników szczepień, a nawet nazistów. Gdy the RAND
-Corporation <a class="ulink" href="https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf" target="_top">oskarża
-Facebook'a za <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">radykalizację</span>”</span></a>, kiedy Facebook'a oskarża
-się o rozpowszechnianie dezinformacji na temat koronawirusa, <a class="ulink" href="https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_threat_health/" target="_top">a jest to
-spowodowane jego algorytmem</a>, to domyślnym przesłaniem jest fakt, że
-uczenie maszynowe i systemy inwigilacyjnego nadzoru powodują zmiany w naszym
-konsensusie wobec tego, co jest prawdą.
- </p><p>
- W końcu, w świecie, w którym rozległe i niespójne teorie spiskowe, takie jak
-Pizzagate i jej nastepczyni, QAnon, mają szeroko rozpowszechnionych
-następców, <span class="emphasis"><em>coś</em></span>, musi trwać nadal.
- </p><p>
- Lecz co zrobić, jeśli jest inne wytłumaczenie? Jeśli są to warunki
-materialne, a nie argumenty, stanowiące różnicę dla tych wygadanych
-zwolenników konspiracji? A co, jeśli trauma spowodowana życiem w
-<span class="emphasis"><em>rzeczywistych konspiracjach</em></span> wszystkiego wokół nas —
-konspiracjach ludzi bogatych, ich lobbystów i prawników, ukrywających
-niewygodne fakty i dowody wykróczeń (te konspiracje są powszechnie znane
-jako <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">korupcja</span>”</span> — tworzy ludzi podatnych na teorie
-konspiracyjne?
- </p><p>
- Jeśli to trauma, materialne uwarunkowania a nie „zaraza” ideologiczna
-stanowią dziś różnicę i umożliwiają tworzenienie odpychających dezinformacji
-w obliczu łatwo obserwowalnych faktów, nie oznacza to jeszcze, że nasze
-sieci komputerowe są bez winy. Nadal wykonują one ciężką pracę, polegającą
-na lokalizowaniu osób bezbronnych i prowadzeniu ich przez serię coraz
-bardziej ekstremalnych pomysłów i społeczności.
- </p><p>
- Wiara w konspirację to szalejący pożar, który wyrządził już rzeczywiste
-szkody i stał się realnym zagrożeniem dla naszej planety i jej gatunków w
-wyniku epidemii <a class="ulink" href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html" target="_top">rozpoczętej odmową
-szczepień</a> poprzez ludobójstwa <a class="ulink" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html" target="_top">wywołane
-przez rasistowskich konspiratorów</a>. Prowadzi to do planetarnego
-stapiającego wszystko tygla, spowodowanego bezczynnością, zainspirowaną
-zaprzeczeniem problemu klimatycznego. Nasz świat płonie, więc musimy ugasić
-pożary, aby dowiedzieć się, jak pomóc ludziom w zobaczeniu prawdy o świecie
-poprzez spiski, które ich zmyliły.
- </p><p>
- Ale gaszenie pożarów jest ma reaktywny charakter. Musimy
-także<span class="emphasis"><em>zapobiegać</em></span> pożarom. Musimy uderzyć w traumatyczne
-warunki materialne, które czynią ludzi podatnymi na zarażenie
-konspiracją. Tutaj również technologia ma do odegrania ważną rolę.
- </p><p>
- There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s <a class="ulink" href="https://edri.org/tag/terreg/" target="_top">Terrorist Content Regulation</a>,
-which requires platforms to police and remove <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">extremist</span>”</span>
-content, to the U.S. proposals to <a class="ulink" href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution" target="_top">force
-tech companies to spy on their users</a> and hold them liable <a class="ulink" href="https://www.natlawreview.com/article/repeal-cda-section-230" target="_top">for their
-users’ bad speech</a>, there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies
-to solve the problems they created.
- </p><p>
- There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these
-solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance
-over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a
-more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The
-<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">solutions</span>”</span> on the table today <span class="emphasis"><em>require</em></span> Big
-Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to
-implement the systems these laws demand.
- </p><p>
- Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to
-get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to
-figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our
-internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big
-Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose.
- </p><p>
- I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the
-Internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism.
- </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="digital-rights-activism-a-quarter-century-on"></a>Aktywizm praw cyfrowych, krótka historia 25 lat działalności</h2></div></div></div><p>
- Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic
-Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free Software Foundation
-launched in 1985. For most of the history of the movement, the most
-prominent criticism leveled against it was that it was irrelevant: The real
-activist causes were real-world causes (think of the skepticism when <a class="ulink" href="https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/finland-legal-right-to-broadband-for-all-citizens/#:~:text=Global%20Legal%20Monitor,-Home%20%7C%20Search%20%7C%20Browse&text=(July%206%2C%202010)%20On,connection%20100%20MBPS%20by%202015." target="_top">Finland
-declared broadband a human right in 2010</a>), and real-world activism
-was shoe-leather activism (think of Malcolm Gladwell’s <a class="ulink" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell" target="_top">contempt
-for <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">clicktivism</span>”</span></a>). But as tech has grown more central
-to our daily lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way first to
-accusations of insincerity (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">You only care about tech because you’re
-<a class="ulink" href="https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-google-patent-reform/id=98007/" target="_top">shilling
-for tech companies</a></span>”</span>) to accusations of negligence (<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">Why
-didn’t you foresee that tech could be such a destructive force?</span>”</span>).
-But digital rights activism is right where it’s always been: looking out for
-the humans in a world where tech is inexorably taking over.
- </p><p>
- The latest version of this critique comes in the form of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">surveillance
-capitalism,</span>”</span> a term coined by business professor Shoshana Zuboff in
-her long and influential 2019 book, <span class="emphasis"><em>The Age of Surveillance
-Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of
-Power</em></span>. Zuboff argues that <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">surveillance capitalism</span>”</span>
-is a unique creature of the tech industry and that it is unlike any other
-abusive commercial practice in history, one that is <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">constituted by
-unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification,
-and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while
-producing new markets of behavioral prediction and
-modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and
-departs in key ways from the centuries-long evolution of market
-capitalism.</span>”</span> It is a new and deadly form of capitalism, a
-<span class="quote">“<span class="quote">rogue capitalism,</span>”</span> and our lack of understanding of its unique
-capabilities and dangers represents an existential, species-wide
-threat. She’s right that capitalism today threatens our species, and she’s
-right that tech poses unique challenges to our species and civilization, but
-she’s really wrong about how tech is different and why it threatens our
-species.
- </p><p>
- What’s more, I think that her incorrect diagnosis will lead us down a path
-that ends up making Big Tech stronger, not weaker. We need to take down Big
-Tech, and to do that, we need to start by correctly identifying the problem.
- </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="tech-exceptionalism-then-and-now"></a>Wyjątkowość Technologii, dawniej i obecnie</h2></div></div></div><p>
- Early critics of the digital rights movement — perhaps best represented by
-campaigning organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free
-Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, and others that focused on preserving
-and enhancing basic human rights in the digital realm — damned activists for
-practicing <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">tech exceptionalism.</span>”</span> Around the turn of the
-millennium, serious people ridiculed any claim that tech policy mattered in
-the <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">real world.</span>”</span> Claims that tech rules had implications for
-speech, association, privacy, search and seizure, and fundamental rights and
-equities were treated as ridiculous, an elevation of the concerns of sad
-nerds arguing about <span class="emphasis"><em>Star Trek</em></span> on bulletin board systems
-above the struggles of the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela, or the Warsaw
-ghetto uprising.
- </p><p>
- In the decades since, accusations of <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">tech exceptionalism</span>”</span> have
-only sharpened as tech’s role in everyday life has expanded: Now that tech
-has infiltrated every corner of our life and our online lives have been
-monopolized by a handful of giants, defenders of digital freedoms are
-accused of carrying water for Big Tech, providing cover for its
-self-interested negligence (or worse, nefarious plots).
- </p><p>
- From my perspective, the digital rights movement has remained stationary
-while the rest of the world has moved. From the earliest days, the
-movement’s concern was users and the toolsmiths who provided the code they
-needed to realize their fundamental rights. Digital rights activists only
-cared about companies to the extent that companies were acting to uphold
-users’ rights (or, just as often, when companies were acting so foolishly
-that they threatened to bring down new rules that would also make it harder
-for good actors to help users).
- </p><p>
- The <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">surveillance capitalism</span>”</span> critique recasts the digital
-rights movement in a new light again: not as alarmists who overestimate the
-importance of their shiny toys nor as shills for big tech but as serene
-deck-chair rearrangers whose long-standing activism is a liability because
-it makes them incapable of perceiving novel threats as they continue to
-fight the last century’s tech battles.
- </p><p>
- But tech exceptionalism is a sin no matter who practices it.
- </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="dont-believe-the-hype"></a>Nie wierz 'szumom' medialnym</h2></div></div></div><p>
- You’ve probably heard that <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">if you’re not paying for the product,
-you’re the product.</span>”</span> As we’ll see below, that’s true, if incomplete.
-But what is <span class="emphasis"><em>absolutely</em></span> true is that ad-driven Big
-Tech’s customers are advertisers, and what companies like Google and
-Facebook sell is their ability to convince <span class="emphasis"><em>you</em></span> to buy
-stuff. Big Tech’s product is persuasion. The services — social media, search
-engines, maps, messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion.
- </p><p>
- The fear of surveillance capitalism starts from the (correct) presumption
-that everything Big Tech says about itself is probably a lie. But the
-surveillance capitalism critique makes an exception for the claims Big Tech
-makes in its sales literature — the breathless hype in the pitches to
-potential advertisers online and in ad-tech seminars about the efficacy of
-its products: It assumes that Big Tech is as good at influencing us as they
-claim they are when they’re selling influencing products to credulous
-customers. That’s a mistake because sales literature is not a reliable
-indicator of a product’s efficacy.
- </p><p>
- Surveillance capitalism assumes that because advertisers buy a lot of what
-Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something real. But Big Tech’s
-massive sales could just as easily be the result of a popular delusion or
-something even more pernicious: monopolistic control over our communications
-and commerce.
- </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>Co to jest przekonywanie?</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. Segmentacja</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. Podstęp</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. Dominacja</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. Omijanie naszych racjonalnych zdolności</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>Jeśli dane są nowym paliwem, to silnik kapitalistycznych systemów nadzoru ma
-wyciek</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>Co to jest 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>Monopol i prawo do czasu przyszłego</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>Porządek wyszukiwania i prawo do czasu przyszłego</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>Monopoliści mogą sobie pozwolić na proszki nasenne dla strażników</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>Prywatność a monopol</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, pionier monopolizmu technologicznego</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>Sterowanie za pomocą wycieraczek przedniej szyby</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>Systemy nadzoru mają ciągle znaczenie</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>Godność i sanktuarium</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>Dręczenie udręczonych</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>
- Prywatna rzeczywistość jest konieczna dla rozwoju ludzkości.
- </p></div><div class="sect1"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="any-data-you-collect-and-retain-will-eventually-leak"></a>Jakiekolwiek dane, które zbierasz i przetwarzasz, kiedyś w końcu wyciekną</h2></div></div></div><p>
- 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>Przełomowa wyjątkowość technologiczna jest nadal technologiczną
-wyjątkowością</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>Jak monopole, a nie kontrola umysłu, sterują kapitalizmen opartym na
-systemach nadzoru: historia Snapchat</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>Monopol sprawowany nad twoimi przyjaciółmi</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>
- Trudnym problemem naszego gatunku jest koordynacja.
- </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>Fałszywe wiadomości to oznaka kryzysu epistemologicznego</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>Technologia jest czymś odmiennym</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>Własność faktów</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>Przekonywanie działa… powoli</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>Płacenie nie pomoże</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><span class="quote">“<span class="quote"> ekologia</span>”</span> chwila na zerwanie zaufania</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>
- Czy moglibyśmy ponownie znaleźć tę wolę polityczną?
- </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>Spraw, aby 'Big Tech' stała się ponownie 'małą' technologią</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>W górę i na wylot</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>
<a href="https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/cory-doctorow/hvordan-knuse-overv%C3%A5kningskapitalismen/ebook/product-yk8neg.html">ePub (lulu)</a>,
<a href="how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.nb.epub">ePub</a>.</p>
- <p>German edition draft is being worked on:</p>
- <ul>
- <li><a href="how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.de.html">HTML</a></li>
- <li><a href="how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.de.pdf">PDF</a></li>
- <li><a href="how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.de.epub">ePub</a></li>
- </ul>
-
- <p>French edition draft is being worked on (see also <a href="https://framablog.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Doctorow-68p.pdf">French PDF</a> linked to from Craphound and <a href="https://framablog.org/2021/01/23/detruire-le-capitalisme-de-surveillance-6-et-fin/">blog post from Framablog</a>):</p>
- <ul>
- <li><a href="how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.fr.html">HTML</a></li>
- <li><a href="how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.fr.pdf">PDF</a></li>
- <li><a href="how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.fr.epub">ePub</a></li>
- </ul>
-
- <p>Polish edition draft is being worked on:</p>
- <ul>
- <li><a href="how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.pl.html">HTML</a></li>
- <li><a href="how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.pl.pdf">PDF</a></li>
- <li><a href="how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism.pl.epub">ePub</a></li>
- </ul>
-
<p>See also
<a href="https://gitlab.com/pin-no/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism">Gitlab project</a>
and
projects / text-destroy-surveillance.git / commitdiff