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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"
-
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-msgid "Doctorow"
-msgstr "Doctorow"
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-"<publisher> <publishername>Petter Reinholdtsen</publishername> <placeholder "
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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/\"/>."
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-
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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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-msgid "Creative Commons, Some rights reserved"
-msgstr "Creative Commons, einige Rechte vorbehalten"
-
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-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>
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-"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."
-
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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, "
-"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/"
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-"<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."
-
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-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>
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-"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 "
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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."
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-"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 "
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-"Wir müssen herausfinden, wie unsere Technologie aussehen soll, wenn wir aus "
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-
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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"
-
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-msgid ""
-"Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic "
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-"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."
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-"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>
-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 (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 "
-#~ "Verbesserungsvorschläge die Übersetzung betreffend hast, pflege diese auf "
-#~ "<ulink url=\"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/rms-personal-data-safe/"
-#~ "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 "
-#~ "associated with logging facts about our lives, opinions, and preferences."
-#~ msgstr ""
-#~ "Die von uns genutzten Geräte und Dienste sammeln den Großteil der Daten, "
-#~ "welche die NSA für ihr Überwachungsprojekt nutzt. Wir bezahlen für diese "
-#~ "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"
projects / text-destroy-surveillance.git / commitdiff