--- /dev/null
+How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
+======================================
+
+The net of a thousand lies
+--------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding on
+the basis of superior arguments?
+
+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 `blames Facebook for
+“radicalization” <https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR400/RR453/RAND_RR453.pdf>`__
+and when Facebook’s role in spreading coronavirus misinformation is
+`blamed on its
+algorithm <https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_threat_health/>`__,
+the implicit message is that machine learning and surveillance are
+causing the changes in our consensus about what’s true.
+
+After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories
+like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread followings,
+*something* must be afoot.
+
+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 *real
+conspiracies* 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?
+
+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.
+
+Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and
+poses real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics `kicked off
+by vaccine denial <https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html>`__
+to genocides `kicked off by racist
+conspiracies <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html>`__
+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.
+
+But firefighting is reactive. We need fire *prevention*. 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.
+
+There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s
+`Terrorist Content Regulation <https://edri.org/tag/terreg/>`__, which
+requires platforms to police and remove “extremist” content, to the U.S.
+proposals to `force tech companies to spy on their
+users <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution>`__
+and hold them liable `for their users’ bad
+speech <https://www.natlawreview.com/article/repeal-cda-section-230>`__,
+there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies to solve the problems
+they created.
+
+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 *require* Big Tech to stay big
+because only the very largest companies can afford to implement the
+systems these laws demand.
+
+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.
+
+I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the
+internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism.
+
+Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on
+---------------------------------------------
+
+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 `Finland declared broadband a human right in
+2010 <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.>`__),
+and real-world activism was shoe-leather activism (think of Malcolm
+Gladwell’s `contempt for
+“clicktivism” <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell>`__).
+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 `shilling for tech
+companies <https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/06/04/report-engine-eff-shills-google-patent-reform/id=98007/>`__\ ”)
+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.
+
+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, *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The
+Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power*. 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.
+
+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.
+
+Tech exceptionalism, then and now
+---------------------------------
+
+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 *Star Trek* on bulletin board
+systems above the struggles of the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela, or
+the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
+
+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).
+
+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).
+
+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.
+
+But tech exceptionalism is a sin no matter who practices it.
+
+Don’t believe the hype
+-----------------------
+
+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 *absolutely* true is that ad-driven Big Tech’s customers are
+advertisers, and what companies like Google and Facebook sell is their
+ability to convince *you* to buy stuff. Big Tech’s product is
+persuasion. The services — social media, search engines, maps,
+messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+What is persuasion?
+-------------------
+
+To understand why you shouldn’t worry about mind-control rays — but why
+you *should* worry about surveillance *and* Big Tech — we must start by
+unpacking what we mean by “persuasion.”
+
+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.
+
+ The impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and
+ should be central to our analysis and any remedies we seek.
+
+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:
+
+1. Segmenting
+-------------
+
+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).
+
+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).
+
+This is seriously creepy.
+
+But it’s not mind control.
+
+It doesn’t deprive you of your free will. It doesn’t trick you.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+2. Deception
+------------
+
+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.
+
+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 `the
+forums <https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/the-dream-podcast-review.html>`__
+where people who are being victimized by multilevel marketing frauds
+gather to trade tips on how to improve their luck in peddling the
+product.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 `majority of
+cases <https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/>`__, 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.
+
+3. Domination
+-------------
+
+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.
+
+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 *page* of results — Google’s choice means that many
+people will be deceived.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+4. Bypassing our rational faculties
+-----------------------------------
+
+*This* 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 *are* techniques like that. Who can forget
+the Great Zynga Epidemic, when all of our friends were caught in
+*FarmVille*\ ’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.
+
+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.
+
+But surveillance capitalism’s margins on behavioral modification suck.
+Tripling the rate at which someone buys a widget sounds great `unless
+the base rate is way less than
+1% <https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2018/03/09/the-advertising-conversion-rates-for-every-major-tech-platform/#2f6a67485957>`__
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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?
+
+Of course, all of Big Tech’s persuasion techniques work in concert with
+one another, and collecting data is useful beyond mere behavioral
+trickery.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Pick-up artists *believe* 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.
+
+Pick-up artists are proof that people can believe they have developed a
+system of mind control *even when it doesn’t work*. 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.
+
+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 *much* better at convincing potential
+clients to buy their services than they are at convincing the general
+public to buy their clients’ wares.
+
+What is Facebook?
+-----------------
+
+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 *and* spying on them all the
+time.
+
+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.
+
+ Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech
+ but because it is *big*.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+To understand what role Facebook plays in the formulation and
+mobilization of antisocial movements, we need to understand the dual
+nature of Facebook.
+
+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.
+
+Facebook makes finding people shopping for refrigerators a *lot* 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 *other* 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 *are* looking
+for fridges that these ads reach is *much* larger than it is than for
+any group that might be subjected to traditional, offline targeted
+refrigerator marketing.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Facebook *can* 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Monopoly and the right to the future tense
+------------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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, `as one person on Twitter
+noted <https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040>`__,
+five giant websites each filled with screenshots of the other four.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 *nothing else* — and you and copyright are square with one
+another.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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).
+
+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:
+
+- Any device with software in it contains a “copyrighted work” — i.e.,
+ the software.
+- 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.
+- 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 `reject
+dictionaries <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/5982243/Apple-bans-dictionary-from-App-Store-over-swear-words.html>`__
+for containing obscene words; to `limit political
+speech <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just-banned-the-app-that-tracks-us-drone-strikes-again>`__,
+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 `object to a
+game <https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-05-19-palestinian-indie-game-must-not-be-called-a-game-apple-says>`__
+that commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
+
+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 `ordered Apple to
+prohibit the sale of privacy
+tools <https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc>`__
+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.
+
+Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a “rogue capitalism.” Theoreticians
+of capitalism claim that its virtue is that it `aggregates information
+in the form of consumers’
+decisions <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal>`__, 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.
+
+If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no
+longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at *least*
+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.
+
+Search order and the right to the future tense
+----------------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs
+---------------------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+But still, firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for
+three reasons:
+
+**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.** 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.
+
+**2. They believe the surveillance capitalism story.** 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.
+
+**3. The penalties for leaking data are negligible.** 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+ While surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly
+ abet surveillance.
+
+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.
+
+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 *do* think that tech poses an existential
+threat to our society and possibly our species.
+
+But that threat grows out of monopoly.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+And unlike mind-control rays, enforced silence over security is an
+immediate, documented problem, and it *does* 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.
+
+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 *them*, 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Privacy and monopoly
+--------------------
+
+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 *fails* 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.
+
+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.
+
+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, *understated*.
+
+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.
+
+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
+*did* 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.
+
+Big Tech is able to practice surveillance not just because it is tech
+but because it is *big*. 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.).
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+In other words, while surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies
+certainly abet surveillance.
+
+Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism
+-----------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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).
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 *rapid* 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, *including* in their sales literature.
+
+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).
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+In support of this thesis, I offer the concentration that every *other*
+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, *every* 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.
+
+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.
+
+Steering with the windshield wipers
+-----------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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
+*other* 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.
+
+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.
+
+Surveillance still matters
+--------------------------
+
+None of this is to minimize the problems with surveillance. Surveillance
+matters, and Big Tech’s use of surveillance *is* an existential risk to
+our species, but that’s not because surveillance and machine learning
+rob us of our free will.
+
+Surveillance has become *much* 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.
+
+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).
+
+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
+`only point to a single minor success
+story <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>`__
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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, `you’re
+right <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/amazons-ring-enables-over-policing-efforts-some-americas-deadliest-law-enforcement>`__.
+Ring has become a *de facto,* off-the-books arm of the police without
+any of the pesky oversight or rules.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Dignity and sanctuary
+---------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your
+authentic self.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 `a war crime under the Geneva
+Conventions <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKpRbvnx6g>`__.
+
+Afflicting the afflicted
+------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+A private realm is necessary for human progress.
+
+Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak
+----------------------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+For example, attackers can use leaked username and password combinations
+to hijack whole fleets of commercial vehicles that `have been fitted
+with anti-theft GPS trackers and
+immobilizers <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmpx4x/hacker-monitor-cars-kill-engine-gps-tracking-apps>`__
+or to hijack baby monitors in order to `terrorize toddlers with the
+audio tracks from
+pornography <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/23/how-nest-designed-keep-intruders-out-peoples-homes-effectively-allowed-hackers-get/?utm_term=.15220e98c550>`__.
+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.
+
+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 *more* data.
+
+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 `sneaking data out
+of companies’
+databases <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24751821>`__.
+
+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.
+
+Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism
+---------------------------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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
+*ad executives*, who successfully convinced Wanamaker that only half of
+the money he spent went to waste.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+The claims of Big Tech’s mind-control system are full of tells that the
+enterprise is a con. For example, `the reliance on the “Big Five”
+personality
+traits <https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01415/full>`__
+as a primary means of influencing people even though the “Big Five”
+theory is unsupported by any large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is
+`mostly the realm of marketing hucksters and pop
+psych <https://www.wired.com/story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting/>`__.
+
+Big Tech’s promotional materials also claim that their algorithms can
+accurately perform “sentiment analysis” or detect peoples’ moods based
+on their “microexpressions,” but `these are marketing claims, not
+scientific
+ones <https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647040758/advertising-on-facebook-is-it-worth-it>`__.
+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 `have been
+shown <https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/>`__
+to underperform relative to random chance.
+
+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 *everything*, including how
+well its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work.
+
+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 `its patent
+filings <https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050131762A1/en>`__. 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+With these considerations in hand, it becomes obvious that the fact that
+a Big Tech company has patented what it *says* is an effective
+mind-control ray is largely irrelevant to whether Big Tech can in fact
+control our minds.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.”
+
+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.
+
+How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The Snapchat story
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 `got markedly
+worse <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362>`__.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+A monopoly over your friends
+----------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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 *we* have Facebook accounts.
+
+All of this has conspired to make Facebook — and other dominant
+platforms — into “kill zones” that investors will not fund new entrants
+for.
+
+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.
+
+ The hard problem of our species is coordination.
+
+“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.
+
+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 *Sports
+Illustrated* 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.
+
+“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.
+
+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.”
+
+Beyond neutral interoperability, there is “adversarial
+interoperability.” That’s when a manufacturer makes a product that
+interoperates with another manufacturer’s product *despite the second
+manufacturer’s objections* and *even if that means bypassing a security
+system designed to prevent interoperability*.
+
+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.
+
+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?
+
+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).
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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).
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Fake news is an epistemological crisis
+--------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Rich people have always played an outsized role in politics and more so
+since the Supreme Court’s *Citizens United* 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.
+
+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.
+
+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
+*when* they do, they can forge a consensus position on regulation.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders `winning the
+right to practice predatory
+lending <https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/25/how-payday-lending-industry-insider-tilted-academic-research-its-favor/>`__
+or Apple `winning the right to decide who can fix your
+phone <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxayp/source-apple-will-fight-right-to-repair-legislation>`__
+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.
+
+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 *and* whether your car’s brakes’ software will cause them
+to fail unpredictably *and* whether the hygiene standards at your
+butcher are sufficient to keep you from dying after you finish your
+dinner.
+
+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 *can*
+determine whether the adjudication process itself is trustworthy.
+
+Right now, it’s obviously not.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 *were* an aberration and then how you know that the doctors
+writing about vaccine safety are *not* an aberration.
+
+I’m 100% certain that vaccinating is safe and effective, but I’m also at
+something of a loss to explain exactly, *precisely,* 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.
+
+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.
+
+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).
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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).
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Tech is different
+-----------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+But there’s one way in which I *am* 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Ownership of facts
+------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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?
+
+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 `when and how to post photos from
+demonstrations <https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-take-photos-at-protests/>`__
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 *their* 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Persuasion works… slowly
+-------------------------
+
+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 *can* change.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Paying won’t help
+------------------
+
+As the old saw goes, “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the
+product.”
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Then, as news companies *did* 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.
+
+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 `controversial political
+material <https://ncac.org/news/blog/does-apples-strict-app-store-content-policy-limit-freedom-of-expression>`__)
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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?
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 *voluntarily* submit to their terms, and they want
+to deprive them of the choice to take their business elsewhere.
+
+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.”
+
+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.
+
+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 *can* get away with.
+
+An “ecology” moment for trustbusting
+---------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Could we find that political will again?
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 *most* concentrated of industries.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech
+*instead* of breaking up the big companies also forecloses on the
+possibility of breaking them up later.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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
+*expensive* 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Make Big Tech small again
+-------------------------
+
+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.
+
+ A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to
+ enforce the law as it was written.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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,
+*fuck that guy*.” In other words, the problem with monopolies is
+*monopolism* — 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, *get rid of other
+monopolies, too.*
+
+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.
+
+In an important sense, it doesn’t matter which industry the breakups
+begin in. Once they start, shareholders in *every* 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.”
+
+20 GOTO 10
+----------
+
+Fixing Big Tech will require a lot of iteration. As cyber lawyer
+Lawrence Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, *Code and Other Laws of
+Cyberspace*, 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).
+
+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.
+
+But getting Congress to act will require a massive normative shift, a
+mass movement of people who care about monopolies — and pulling them
+apart.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Up and through
+--------------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
projects / text-destroy-surveillance.git / commitdiff
