--- /dev/null
+# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE
+# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
+# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
+#
+#, fuzzy
+msgid ""
+msgstr ""
+"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
+"POT-Creation-Date: 2020-09-06 11:38+0200\n"
+"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
+"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
+"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
+"Language: \n"
+"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
+"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
+"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
+
+#. type: Attribute 'lang' of: <book>
+#: complete-book.xml:4
+msgid "en"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><bookinfo><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:6
+msgid "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><bookinfo>
+#: complete-book.xml:8
+msgid "<pubdate>2020-??-??</pubdate> <edition>1</edition>"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><bookinfo><releaseinfo>
+#: complete-book.xml:10
+msgid "git-utgaven"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><bookinfo><authorgroup><author><firstname>
+#: complete-book.xml:13
+msgid "Cory"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><bookinfo><authorgroup><author><surname>
+#: complete-book.xml:14
+msgid "Doctorow"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><bookinfo><publisher><address>
+#: complete-book.xml:19
+#, no-wrap
+msgid "<city>Oslo</city>"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><bookinfo>
+#: complete-book.xml:17
+msgid ""
+"<publisher> <publishername>Petter Reinholdtsen</publishername> <placeholder "
+"type=\"address\" id=\"0\"/> </publisher>"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><bookinfo><legalnotice><para><inlinemediaobject>
+#: complete-book.xml:25
+msgid ""
+"<imageobject> <imagedata fileref=\"images/cc.png\" contentdepth=\"3em\" "
+"width=\"100%\" align=\"center\"/> </imageobject> <imageobject> <imagedata "
+"fileref=\"images/cc.svg\" contentdepth=\"3em\" width=\"100%\" "
+"align=\"center\"/> </imageobject>"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><bookinfo><legalnotice><para><inlinemediaobject><textobject><phrase>
+#: complete-book.xml:32
+msgid "Creative Commons, Some rights reserved"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><bookinfo><legalnotice><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:24
+msgid "<placeholder type=\"inlinemediaobject\" id=\"0\"/>"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><bookinfo><legalnotice><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:38
+msgid ""
+"This book is licensed under a Creative Commons license. This license permits "
+"any use of this work, so long as attribution is given. For more information "
+"about the license visit <ulink "
+"url=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/\"/>."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:46
+msgid "The net of a thousand lies"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:48
+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 ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:56
+msgid ""
+"But today, when elementary schools routinely dangle GoPro cameras from "
+"balloons and loft them high enough to photograph the Earth’s curve — to say "
+"nothing of the unexceptional sight of the curved Earth from an airplane "
+"window — it takes a heroic effort to maintain the belief that the world is "
+"flat."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:63
+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, “race science” "
+"has never been easier to refute."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:69
+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 ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:75
+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 ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:88
+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 ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:95
+msgid ""
+"Anti-vax has been around since the first vaccines, but the early "
+"anti-vaxxers were pitching people who were less equipped to understand even "
+"the most basic ideas from microbiology, and moreover, those people had not "
+"witnessed the extermination of mass-murdering diseases like polio, smallpox, "
+"and measles. Today’s anti-vaxxers are no more eloquent than their forebears, "
+"and they have a much harder job."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:104
+msgid ""
+"So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding on the "
+"basis of superior arguments?"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:108
+msgid ""
+"Some people think so. Today, there is a widespread belief that machine "
+"learning and commercial surveillance can turn even the most fumble-tongued "
+"conspiracy theorist into a svengali who can warp your perceptions and win "
+"your belief by locating vulnerable people and then pitching them with "
+"A.I.-refined arguments that bypass their rational faculties and turn "
+"everyday people into flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, or even Nazis. When the "
+"RAND Corporation <ulink "
+"url=\"https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf\">blames "
+"Facebook for “radicalization”</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 ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:124
+msgid ""
+"After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories "
+"like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread followings, "
+"<emphasis>something</emphasis> must be afoot."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:129
+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 "
+"“corruption”) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy theories?"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:139
+msgid ""
+"If it’s trauma and not contagion — material conditions and not ideology — "
+"that is making the difference today and enabling a rise of repulsive "
+"misinformation in the face of easily observed facts, that doesn’t mean our "
+"computer networks are blameless. They’re still doing the heavy work of "
+"locating vulnerable people and guiding them through a series of "
+"ever-more-extreme ideas and communities."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:147
+msgid ""
+"Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses "
+"real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics <ulink "
+"url=\"https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html\">kicked off by "
+"vaccine denial</ulink> to genocides <ulink "
+"url=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html\">kicked "
+"off by racist conspiracies</ulink> to planetary meltdown caused by "
+"denial-inspired climate inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to "
+"put the fires out — to figure out how to help people see the truth of the "
+"world through the conspiracies they’ve been confused by."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:159
+msgid ""
+"But firefighting is reactive. We need fire "
+"<emphasis>prevention</emphasis>. We need to strike at the traumatic material "
+"conditions that make people vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here, "
+"too, tech has a role to play."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:165
+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 “extremist” content, to the "
+"U.S. proposals to <ulink "
+"url=\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution\">force "
+"tech companies to spy on their users</ulink> and hold them liable <ulink "
+"url=\"https://www.natlawreview.com/article/repeal-cda-section-230\">for "
+"their users’ bad speech</ulink>, there’s a lot of energy to force tech "
+"companies to solve the problems they created."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:176
+msgid ""
+"There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these "
+"solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance "
+"over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a "
+"more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The "
+"“solutions” on the table today <emphasis>require</emphasis> Big Tech to stay "
+"big because only the very largest companies can afford to implement the "
+"systems these laws demand."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:186
+msgid ""
+"Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to "
+"get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to "
+"figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our "
+"internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big "
+"Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:194
+msgid ""
+"I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the "
+"internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:198
+msgid "Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:200
+msgid ""
+"Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic "
+"Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free Software Foundation "
+"launched in 1985. For most of the history of the movement, the most "
+"prominent criticism leveled against it was that it was irrelevant: The real "
+"activist causes were real-world causes (think of the skepticism when <ulink "
+"url=\"https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/finland-legal-right-to-broadband-for-all-citizens/#:~:text=Global%20Legal%20Monitor,-Home%20%7C%20Search%20%7C%20Browse&text=(July%206%2C%202010)%20On,connection%20100%20MBPS%20by%202015.\">Finland "
+"declared broadband a human right in 2010</ulink>), and real-world activism "
+"was shoe-leather activism (think of Malcolm Gladwell’s <ulink "
+"url=\"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell\">contempt "
+"for “clicktivism”</ulink>). But as tech has grown more central to our daily "
+"lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way first to accusations "
+"of insincerity (“You only care about tech because you’re <ulink "
+"url=\"https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-google-patent-reform/id=98007/\">shilling "
+"for tech companies</ulink>”) to accusations of negligence (“Why didn’t you "
+"foresee that tech could be such a destructive force?”). But digital rights "
+"activism is right where it’s always been: looking out for the humans in a "
+"world where tech is inexorably taking over."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:221
+msgid ""
+"The latest version of this critique comes in the form of “surveillance "
+"capitalism,” 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 “surveillance capitalism” is a unique creature of the tech "
+"industry and that it is unlike any other abusive commercial practice in "
+"history, one that is “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.” It is a new and deadly form of capitalism, a “rogue "
+"capitalism,” and our lack of understanding of its unique capabilities and "
+"dangers represents an existential, species-wide threat. She’s right that "
+"capitalism today threatens our species, and she’s right that tech poses "
+"unique challenges to our species and civilization, but she’s really wrong "
+"about how tech is different and why it threatens our species."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:242
+msgid ""
+"What’s more, I think that her incorrect diagnosis will lead us down a path "
+"that ends up making Big Tech stronger, not weaker. We need to take down Big "
+"Tech, and to do that, we need to start by correctly identifying the problem."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:248
+msgid "Tech exceptionalism, then and now"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:250
+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 “tech exceptionalism.” Around the turn of the millennium, serious "
+"people ridiculed any claim that tech policy mattered in the “real world.” "
+"Claims that tech rules had implications for speech, association, privacy, "
+"search and seizure, and fundamental rights and equities were treated as "
+"ridiculous, an elevation of the concerns of sad nerds arguing about "
+"<emphasis>Star Trek</emphasis> on bulletin board systems above the struggles "
+"of the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela, or the Warsaw ghetto uprising."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:265
+msgid ""
+"In the decades since, accusations of “tech exceptionalism” have only "
+"sharpened as tech’s role in everyday life has expanded: Now that tech has "
+"infiltrated every corner of our life and our online lives have been "
+"monopolized by a handful of giants, defenders of digital freedoms are "
+"accused of carrying water for Big Tech, providing cover for its "
+"self-interested negligence (or worse, nefarious plots)."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:273
+msgid ""
+"From my perspective, the digital rights movement has remained stationary "
+"while the rest of the world has moved. From the earliest days, the "
+"movement’s concern was users and the toolsmiths who provided the code they "
+"needed to realize their fundamental rights. Digital rights activists only "
+"cared about companies to the extent that companies were acting to uphold "
+"users’ rights (or, just as often, when companies were acting so foolishly "
+"that they threatened to bring down new rules that would also make it harder "
+"for good actors to help users)."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:284
+msgid ""
+"The “surveillance capitalism” critique recasts the digital rights movement "
+"in a new light again: not as alarmists who overestimate the importance of "
+"their shiny toys nor as shills for big tech but as serene deck-chair "
+"rearrangers whose long-standing activism is a liability because it makes "
+"them incapable of perceiving novel threats as they continue to fight the "
+"last century’s tech battles."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:292
+msgid "But tech exceptionalism is a sin no matter who practices it."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:295
+msgid "Don’t believe the hype"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:297
+msgid ""
+"You’ve probably heard that “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the "
+"product.” As we’ll see below, that’s true, if incomplete. But what is "
+"<emphasis>absolutely</emphasis> true is that ad-driven Big Tech’s customers "
+"are advertisers, and what companies like Google and Facebook sell is their "
+"ability to convince <emphasis>you</emphasis> to buy stuff. Big Tech’s "
+"product is persuasion. The services — social media, search engines, maps, "
+"messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:307
+msgid ""
+"The fear of surveillance capitalism starts from the (correct) presumption "
+"that everything Big Tech says about itself is probably a lie. But the "
+"surveillance capitalism critique makes an exception for the claims Big Tech "
+"makes in its sales literature — the breathless hype in the pitches to "
+"potential advertisers online and in ad-tech seminars about the efficacy of "
+"its products: It assumes that Big Tech is as good at influencing us as they "
+"claim they are when they’re selling influencing products to credulous "
+"customers. That’s a mistake because sales literature is not a reliable "
+"indicator of a product’s efficacy."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:319
+msgid ""
+"Surveillance capitalism assumes that because advertisers buy a lot of what "
+"Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something real. But Big Tech’s "
+"massive sales could just as easily be the result of a popular delusion or "
+"something even more pernicious: monopolistic control over our communications "
+"and commerce."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:326
+msgid ""
+"Being watched changes your behavior, and not for the better. It creates "
+"risks for our social progress. Zuboff’s book features beautifully wrought "
+"explanations of these phenomena. But Zuboff also claims that surveillance "
+"literally robs us of our free will — that when our personal data is mixed "
+"with machine learning, it creates a system of persuasion so devastating that "
+"we are helpless before it. That is, Facebook uses an algorithm to analyze "
+"the data it nonconsensually extracts from your daily life and uses it to "
+"customize your feed in ways that get you to buy stuff. It is a mind-control "
+"ray out of a 1950s comic book, wielded by mad scientists whose "
+"supercomputers guarantee them perpetual and total world domination."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:340
+msgid "What is persuasion?"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:342
+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 “persuasion.”"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:348
+msgid ""
+"Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists promise their customers "
+"(the advertisers) that if they use machine-learning tools trained on "
+"unimaginably large data sets of nonconsensually harvested personal "
+"information, they will be able to uncover ways to bypass the rational "
+"faculties of the public and direct their behavior, creating a stream of "
+"purchases, votes, and other desired outcomes."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><blockquote><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:357
+msgid ""
+"The impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be "
+"central to our analysis and any remedies we seek."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:362
+msgid ""
+"But there’s little evidence that this is happening. Instead, the predictions "
+"that surveillance capitalism delivers to its customers are much less "
+"impressive. Rather than finding ways to bypass our rational faculties, "
+"surveillance capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg mostly do one or more of three "
+"things:"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><sect1><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:369
+msgid "1. Segmenting"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:371
+msgid ""
+"If you’re selling diapers, you have better luck if you pitch them to people "
+"in maternity wards. Not everyone who enters or leaves a maternity ward just "
+"had a baby, and not everyone who just had a baby is in the market for "
+"diapers. But having a baby is a really reliable correlate of being in the "
+"market for diapers, and being in a maternity ward is highly correlated with "
+"having a baby. Hence diaper ads around maternity wards (and even pitchmen "
+"for baby products, who haunt maternity wards with baskets full of freebies)."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:382
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:396
+msgid "This is seriously creepy."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:399
+msgid "But it’s not mind control."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:402
+msgid "It doesn’t deprive you of your free will. It doesn’t trick you."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:405
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:416
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:426
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:437
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:446
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:455
+msgid "2. Deception"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:457
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:469
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:479
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:486
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:497
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:514
+msgid "3. Domination"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:516
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:525
+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 “How long is the Brooklyn Bridge?” 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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:538
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:550
+msgid ""
+"Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a “rogue capitalism” 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: <book><chapter><sect1><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:565
+msgid "4. Bypassing our rational faculties"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:567
+msgid ""
+"<emphasis>This</emphasis> is the good stuff: using machine learning, “dark "
+"patterns,” 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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:573
+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 “social proof” 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 "
+"“own” something because we bid on it, thus encouraging us to bid again when "
+"we are outbid to ensure that “our” things stay ours."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:586
+msgid ""
+"Games are extraordinarily good at this. “Free to play” 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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:597
+msgid ""
+"Companies have risen and fallen on these techniques, and the “fallen” 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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:607
+msgid ""
+"That’s why behavioral conditioning uses “intermittent reinforcement "
+"schedules.” 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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:615
+msgid ""
+"Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful behavioral tool, but it also "
+"represents a collective action problem for surveillance capitalism. The "
+"“engagement techniques” 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 "
+"“pull to refresh” 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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:630
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:645
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:653
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:663
+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: <book><chapter><sect1><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:681
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:688
+msgid "If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:691
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:698
+msgid ""
+"Zuboff observes this phenomenon and concludes that data must be very "
+"valuable if surveillance capitalism is so hungry for it. (In her words: "
+"“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.”) "
+"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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:713
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:718
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:732
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:739
+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 “races,” sticking instead to "
+"conspiratorial secret histories of “demographic replacement” and the like."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:746
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:756
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:771
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:779
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:790
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:804
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:812
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:817
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:826
+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 “voter "
+"suppression” if you can convince your marks to confine their search terms to "
+"“voter fraud,” which throws up a very different set of search results."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:835
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:842
+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 "
+"“neurolinguistic programming” phrases, body language techniques, and "
+"psychological manipulation tactics like “negging” — offering unsolicited "
+"negative feedback to women to lower their self-esteem and prick their "
+"interest."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:850
+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’ “success” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:861
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:870
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:888
+msgid ""
+"Department store pioneer John Wanamaker is said to have lamented, “Half the "
+"money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which "
+"half.” 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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:898
+msgid "What is Facebook?"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:900
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:912
+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 “Like” 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: <book><chapter><blockquote><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:926
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:931
+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 “loyalty” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:942
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:954
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:965
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:970
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:985
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1001
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1009
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1022
+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 “brand "
+"recognition.” This means that the price per ad is very low in nearly every "
+"case."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1033
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1041
+msgid ""
+"With nothing but “organic” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1047
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1058
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1069
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1079
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:1091
+msgid "Monopoly and the right to the future tense"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1093
+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 “the right to the future tense” — that is, "
+"the right to decide for yourself what you will do in the future."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1100
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1111
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1119
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1125
+msgid ""
+"Start with “digital rights management.” 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 “anti-circumvention” rule."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1131
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1139
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1151
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1159
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1166
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1174
+msgid ""
+"That’s where Section 1201 of the DMCA comes in: By banning tampering with an "
+"“access control,” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1181
+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: <book><chapter><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1189
+msgid ""
+"Any device with software in it contains a “copyrighted work” — i.e., the "
+"software."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1195
+msgid ""
+"A device can be designed so that reconfiguring the software requires "
+"bypassing an “access control for copyrighted works,” which is a potential "
+"felony under Section 1201."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><itemizedlist><listitem><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1202
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1210
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1215
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1224
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1237
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1247
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1260
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1274
+msgid ""
+"Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a “rogue capitalism.” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1285
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:1294
+msgid "Search order and the right to the future tense"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1296
+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, “I don’t care who does the electing, so "
+"long as I get to do the nominating.” A monopolized market is an election "
+"whose candidates are chosen by the monopolist."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1308
+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 “Are vaccines dangerous?” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1320
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1326
+msgid ""
+"This is true whether the search is for “Are vaccines dangerous?” or “best "
+"restaurants near me.” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1337
+msgid ""
+"Many of the questions we ask search engines have no empirically correct "
+"answers: “Where should I eat dinner?” is not an objective question. Even "
+"questions that do have correct answers (“Are vaccines dangerous?”) 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1348
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1364
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1374
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1389
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1404
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:1416
+msgid "Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1418
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1428
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1434
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1440
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1449
+msgid ""
+"But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for three "
+"reasons:"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1453
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1465
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1478
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1489
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1499
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1506
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1514
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1520
+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 “free” and autocratic states — is to suborn commercial services."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1528
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1546
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1555
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1569
+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: <book><chapter><blockquote><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1578
+msgid ""
+"While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly abet "
+"surveillance."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1583
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1591
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1599
+msgid "But that threat grows out of monopoly."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1602
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1610
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1619
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1629
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1637
+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 (“circumventing”) them, and these statutes have been "
+"used to threaten security researchers who make disclosures about "
+"vulnerabilities without permission from manufacturers."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1645
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1653
+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 “rogue capitalism” 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 "
+"“rogue capitalism” than surveillance capitalism’s influence campaigns."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1663
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1672
+msgid ""
+"In software design, “technology debt” 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 “pay off "
+"the debt” once and for all."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1690
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1701
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:1713
+msgid "Privacy and monopoly"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1715
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1727
+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 “respectable” 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 “cure” gay people, history is littered with the formerly respectable "
+"titans of discredited industries."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1739
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1745
+msgid ""
+"There’s real irony here. The belief in surveillance capitalism as a “rogue "
+"capitalism” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1752
+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 “fully hedged” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1767
+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 “Like” button is that Facebook dominates the internet’s "
+"social media referrals — and every one of those “Like” buttons spies on "
+"everyone who lands on a page that contains them (see also: Google Analytics "
+"embeds, Twitter buttons, etc.)."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1776
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1784
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1789
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1795
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1806
+msgid ""
+"In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies "
+"certainly abet surveillance."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:1810
+msgid "Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1812
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1824
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1836
+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 "
+"“diseconomies of scale” (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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1845
+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 “consumer harm” — in the form of higher "
+"prices."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1855
+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 “monopoly rents” (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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1863
+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 “borked” to refer to any catastrophically bad political "
+"performance)."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1872
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1882
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1894
+msgid ""
+"Today, many fear that machine learning allows surveillance capitalism to "
+"sell “Bork-as-a-Service,” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1907
+msgid ""
+"The idea that tech forms “natural monopolies” (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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1919
+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 “curation” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1933
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1945
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1960
+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 (“It was the "
+"environmental toxins”), true believers in unregulated markets have a whole "
+"suite of unconvincing explanations for monopoly in tech that leave "
+"capitalism intact."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:1972
+msgid "Steering with the windshield wipers"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1974
+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 “delicate and dainty” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1984
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:1992
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2002
+msgid ""
+"It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: People stuck in a "
+"“generation ship,” 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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:2012
+msgid "Surveillance still matters"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2014
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2021
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2028
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2037
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2058
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2066
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2073
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2081
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2090
+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 “suspicious characters.” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2106
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2118
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2126
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:2137
+msgid "Dignity and sanctuary"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2139
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2144
+msgid ""
+"This is an area where Zuboff shines. Her chapter on “sanctuary” — the "
+"feeling of being unobserved — is a beautiful hymn to introspection, "
+"calmness, mindfulness, and tranquility."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2149
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2165
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2173
+msgid ""
+"To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your "
+"authentic self."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2177
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2188
+msgid ""
+"Our devices and services are “general purpose” 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 “running late can "
+"you get the kid?” to “doctor gave me bad news and I need to talk to you "
+"RIGHT NOW”) as well as ads for refrigerators and recruiting messages from "
+"Nazis."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2198
+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 “sleep deprivation torture,” 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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:2207
+msgid "Afflicting the afflicted"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2209
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2216
+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 “free "
+"societies” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2226
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2231
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2244
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2251
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2258
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2270
+msgid "A private realm is necessary for human progress."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:2273
+msgid "Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2275
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2281
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2289
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2301
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2314
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2319
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2327
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:2335
+msgid "Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2338
+msgid ""
+"Big Tech has long practiced technology exceptionalism: the idea that it "
+"should not be subject to the mundane laws and norms of “meatspace.” Mottoes "
+"like Facebook’s “move fast and break things” attracted justifiable scorn of "
+"the companies’ self-serving rhetoric."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2344
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2348
+msgid ""
+"Big Tech is not a “rogue capitalism” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2358
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2364
+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 “50% of my advertising budget is "
+"wasted, I just don’t know which 50%” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2374
+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 "
+"“artificial intelligence” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2386
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2400
+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 “Big Five” personality traits</ulink> as a primary means of "
+"influencing people even though the “Big Five” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2410
+msgid ""
+"Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms can "
+"accurately perform “sentiment analysis” or detect peoples’ moods based on "
+"their “microexpressions,” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2423
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2435
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2445
+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 “invention” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2460
+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 “invention” that you haven’t actually "
+"made and that you don’t know how to make."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2466
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2473
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2483
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2494
+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 “collects as much data as possible” might realize a bigger return "
+"on investment than “collects a business-appropriate quantity of data.”"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2503
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:2517
+msgid ""
+"How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The "
+"Snapchat story"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2520
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2530
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2542
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2550
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2558
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2570
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:2582
+msgid "A monopoly over your friends"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2584
+msgid ""
+"A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of Facebook and "
+"other Big Tech companies by fielding “indieweb” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2591
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2601
+msgid ""
+"All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant platforms — "
+"into “kill zones” that investors will not fund new entrants for."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2606
+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: <book><chapter><blockquote><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2613
+msgid "The hard problem of our species is coordination."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2617
+msgid ""
+"“Interoperability” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2626
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2641
+msgid ""
+"“Interoperability” is often used interchangeably with “standardization,” "
+"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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2649
+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 “neutral interoperability.”"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2660
+msgid ""
+"Beyond neutral interoperability, there is “adversarial interoperability.” "
+"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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2668
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2677
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2690
+msgid ""
+"Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the history of "
+"the tech industry: from the founding of the “alt.*” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2704
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2719
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2729
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2737
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2742
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2754
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2764
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:2776
+msgid "Fake news is an epistemological crisis"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2778
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2785
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2791
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2799
+msgid ""
+"That means that whenever a regulator asks a question with an obvious, "
+"empirical answer (“Are humans causing climate change?” or “Should we let "
+"companies conduct commercial mass surveillance?” or “Does society benefit "
+"from allowing network neutrality violations?”), 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2808
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2817
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2826
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2833
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2845
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2856
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2862
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2876
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2893
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2902
+msgid "Right now, it’s obviously not."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2905
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2913
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2924
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2933
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2950
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2958
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2967
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2975
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2980
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2985
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:2996
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3001
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:3010
+msgid "Tech is different"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3012
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3020
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3025
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3036
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3041
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3047
+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, “Turing complete” computer that can run every program we "
+"can express in symbolic logic."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3056
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3065
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3070
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3076
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:3084
+msgid "Ownership of facts"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3086
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3093
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3100
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3107
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3114
+msgid ""
+"But the phone numbers Facebook nonconsensually acquires in this transaction "
+"are not the “property” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3123
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3136
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3145
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3154
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3165
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3180
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3194
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:3204
+msgid "Persuasion works… slowly"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3206
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3215
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3226
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3236
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3245
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:3264
+msgid "Paying won’t help"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3266
+msgid ""
+"As the old saw goes, “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the "
+"product.”"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3270
+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 “compete with free” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3282
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3295
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3305
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3324
+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 “engage” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3335
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3342
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3347
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3358
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3363
+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 “house rules” "
+"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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3377
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3390
+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 “rogue "
+"capitalism” 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 “rogue capitalism.”"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3402
+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 “choosing” their services regardless of "
+"whether they want them — it’s fine to be terrible when there is no "
+"alternative."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3412
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:3427
+msgid "An “ecology” moment for trustbusting"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3429
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3436
+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 “consumer benefits” of large companies with massive efficiencies "
+"of scale."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3444
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3452
+msgid "Could we find that political will again?"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3455
+msgid ""
+"Copyright scholar James Boyle has described how the term “ecology” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3463
+msgid ""
+"But the term “ecology” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3474
+msgid ""
+"I believe we are on the verge of a new “ecology” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3480
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3490
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3496
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3501
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3513
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3522
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3531
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3543
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3553
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:3561
+msgid "Make Big Tech small again"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3563
+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: <book><chapter><blockquote><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3573
+msgid ""
+"A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to "
+"enforce the law as it was written."
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3578
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3586
+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 "
+"“education” 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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3595
+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, “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>.” 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 "
+"“consumer harm” in the form of higher prices, but also, <emphasis>get rid of "
+"other monopolies, too.</emphasis>"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3609
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3618
+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: “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.”"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:3635
+msgid "20 GOTO 10"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3637
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3644
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3651
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3656
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3668
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3682
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3691
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3702
+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: <book><chapter><title>
+#: complete-book.xml:3711
+msgid "Up and through"
+msgstr ""
+
+#. type: Content of: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3713
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3718
+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: <book><chapter><para>
+#: complete-book.xml:3728
+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 “economies of scale” 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 ""
projects / text-destroy-surveillance.git / commitdiff