Category Archives: Cooperatives

The let’s-hear-from-everyone media revolution needs Elon Musk as much as he needs Twitter. His guides would be Robert Oppenheimer, Michelangelo and King Crimson

. Big Tech, Social media, Business models for publishing, Cooperatives, Culture after Gutenberg, Keiretsu-cooperative, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , , , , , , , , ,

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Should Elon switch species to a different, less complacent-looking bird for Twitter?

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Musk focuses on what intrigues him as intently as a foraging woodpecker. He is studying an antique Samurai sword here during a 2018 podcast interview with Joe Rogan

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[ 14.10. 2022 A quotation of an article on the Intelligencer site has been corrected for errors of transcription. ** ]

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There could be no one better equipped to run Twitter for the public good than Elon Musk. Not that the link between past and present evidence of this is obvious. His exploits in space transport and electric cars have virtually eclipsed his beginnings as a pioneering new media entrepreneur. Riding on the slogan ‘We Power the Press,’ his maiden venture, Zip2 — a collaboration with his brother Kimbal — sold specialised software that helped US newspapers to dip their toes in the internet in 1995. Customers included The New York Times.

At the end of last month, a quarter-century later, Musk restored uncensored internet access to Iranians being blocked from posting, for instance, video records of police brutality. Deploying satellite technology in an unexpected caped-crusader move on their behalf, he created a communication alternative for citizens fighting steadily tightening state control through surveillance and personal data collection tied to digital identity cards unavoidable in using public health services, or buying rail or plane tickets.

Musk, more than any other technologist or legacy media operator, could engineer exactly the right transformation of mass communication. This will mean letting unmediated and dissenting voices compete with legacy publishing on less unequal terms without destroying what is best in the Fourth Estate tradition — a balancing act that is a crucial preoccupation of this website.

Musk could actually reshape Twitter expressly to democratise media, as he said he hoped to in April:

Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is important to the future of civilisation. […] Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square … It’s really important that people … are able to speak freely, in the bounds of the law.

He could supercharge the evolution of the complacent, smug-looking Twitter bird into an energetic woodpecker pecking apart any anti-social old media cliques, and disrupting their instinctive, tacit collusion — rather than active conspiring, I suspect — in only informing the public about what suits their interests and those of their allies and financial supporters, which now include Big Tech.

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The scheme for phasing out the advertising-centred ‘business model’ for publishing with which this  post-Gutenberg.com (pG) site began eleven years ago aimed to correct that unfortunate tendency towards centralised control and throttling freedom of expression.

Unlike some high-profile attempts at new media creation — for instance, Truth Social and WT Social, started from scratch by a former U.S. president and a Wikipedia co-founder, respectively, at opposite ends of the political spectrum — pG’s proposal of a hybrid keiretsu-cooperative structure would grow new branches and leaves on existing rootstock.

Any significant transformation — however sensitively designed to calm the loss-of-status anxieties of old media — has to be led by an extrovert able to take it from a blueprint to a practical solution for the 21st century. That is certainly not this writer. I was surprised when certain reflexively sceptical thinkers approved of the keiretsu-cooperative’s logic instantaneously, when I sketched its outlines for them in December 2009. I was dispatched to William Dutton, the founder-director of the Oxford Internet Institute, who invited me to set down my proposal for publication as a discussion brief at the start of 2010.

In 2022, the ideas it blends together turn out to be remarkably like those of Elon Musk and some of his keenest supporters — notably, Mathias Döpfner’s. He is chief executive and part-owner of Europe’s largest mass media conglomerate, Axel Springer SE. In March, he texted Musk to say —

Why don’t you buy Twitter? We run it for you. And establish a true platform of free speech.Would be a real contribution to democracy.

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Here are four reasons why Elon Musk could succeed in turning Twitter into something like a keiretsu-cooperative. They might seem a little odd, at first glance:

1. What physicists know about the foundations of the material world — in particular, ‘wave-particle duality’ — supports Musk’s belief that Twitter should be the equivalent of a town square equally open to voices from the political left and right

This correspondence between basic physics and politics occurred to Robert Oppenheimer — the so-called father of the atomic bomb — in the middle of the last century. It would be surprising if Musk, who studied economics and physics at university, did not know about the parallel he drew. 

A British physicist and decoder of Oppenheimer’s thinking, Brian Cox, has testified to the mental struggle of physics undergraduates confronting the bizarre truth that a single atomic particle at the core of seemingly solid material reality sometimes resembles a tiny billiard ball or marble; at others, is most like a water wave on the surface of a pond: ‘Neither description of it is absolutely right or absolutely wrong. They are both necessary.’ 

Just as fundamental science rules out absolutism, Cox has explained, Oppenheimer believed ‘it also has no place in politics or human affairs. It is a dead end.’ The American physicist-philosopher arrived at this conclusion in grappling with the dire, incommensurable weight on his conscience of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Recognising that he had given politics and politicians the power to blow up the whole world, he called for rejecting You’re either for us or against us absolutism in favour of complementarity. 

Almost like a poet, the exceptionally well- and widely-read Oppenheimer spoke in 1953 of ‘the life of the human spirit’ far more abundant than the ‘wealth and variety’ of physics or indeed all the natural sciences; ‘enriched by complementary, not at once compatible ways, irreducible to one another,’ and even so, part of ‘a greater harmony.’ 

2. Musk understands the new media platforms thoroughly from a user’s perspective — and is clearly addicted to Twitter, to which he could owe the vastness of his fortune 

A thoughtful long article on Intelligencer asserts that cannily calculated, massively escalated tweeting has been explosively enriching for him. Though he could be short-changing the Tesla chief’s engineering instincts — possibly, genius — the profiler, Lane Brown, is at least semi-persuasive when he says,

It’s hard to fathom how somebody could make more money faster than anyone ever has by tweeting, yet that’s pretty much what happened: A carrot was dangled, and Musk, likely figuring he would never reach it on the basis of such old-fashioned metrics as quarterly earnings, yoked Tesla’s stock to his Twitter feed and went goblin mode. A little like when Neo from The Matrix realized that reality was a mirage and therefore he could do kung fu without any lessons, Musk intuited the illusory nature of the stock market and social media and ran up a new all-time-high score. If Tesla might have been a $300 billion company under a generic Silicon Valley CEO, it was a $1.2 trillion company with the guy who turned it into a product cult.

3. He could afford to be one of those great revolutionaries who succeed wildly before they fail — on their way to a possible, grand, posthumous triumph 

For example: Einstein, much-quoted for saying that most of his ‘intellectual offspring end up very young in the graveyard of disappointed hopes.’ Long after he won the 1921 Nobel physics prize, he never stopped producing them and on the day before  he died in 1955, was still on his famous thirty-year quest for a unified theory capable of combining electromagnetism and gravity. 

Another example: Michelangelo. He could have luxuriated in retirement after his David and Pietà won him his place in sculpture’s firmament. He continued to hammer out new marvels instead, decade after decade, and spent seventeen of the last twenty years before his exit in 1564, aged eighty-nine, going full-tilt at his supreme accomplishment — the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. He did that keenly aware that he would never see it in limestone, in its finished state. 

It would of course be better if Musk succeeds in his lifetime, but the worst case always bears thinking about.

4. Improvisational — like quicksilver, various, and adaptive — is a quality Elon Musk shares with cerebral-danceable progressive rock (prog) bands such as King Crimson in its earliest (mid-‘70s) incarnation 

It is a characteristic indispensable to successful new media management. 

To observers, Musk’s work and private lives look overwhelmingly chaotic. He already has his (tunnel-)Boring, Neuralink, SpaceX and Tesla companies competing for his attention, with regulators and packs of lawyers — in addition to his nine children and their three mothers; and past and present girlfriends. But this existence that few of us could tolerate for a week is a lot like prog, whose fractured and broken, jazz-like surfaces sound annoying in early encounters, until that breakthrough day when the listener perceives the serene, lush underlying harmonies borrowed by its most gifted musicians from modern classical music. 

‘All barricades are down with King Crimson but mayhem does not result,’ a New York Times reviewer remarked in 1973, after noting that the group ‘gallops into the neoclassical, pulls sharply back into rock, indulges in some just plain pretty music […] changes tempo and mood and comes up with some quirky surrealism in the lyrics.’ 

No matter what turbulence is roiling his families and companies, Musk himself seems to pile up impossible achievements steadily, relentlessly and, it must be said, bafflingly. It’s as though his mind has mysterious underlying harmonies in its depths.

Perhaps this natural sympathy between him and Crimson could encourage him to learn from a legend in prog history about the virtues of staying buttoned-up, at the right time — curbing his tendency to speak and act on impulse, for which his critics lambaste him mercilessly. A tender, exquisitely poignant improvisation for a quartet — ‘Trio’ on Starless and Bible Black — was recorded with only three actual players. 

Every time the drummer, Bill Bruford, wondered whether it was time for him to join in, he sensed that he would be messing with perfection. For never once uncrossing his drumsticks from over his chest for the entire session, his band-mates rewarded him with a co-writing credit for ‘admirable restraint.’

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If the reports leaked in May about Musk’s plans for Twitter are reliable, they include halving the platform’s dependence on advertising for revenue, and introducing monthly user subscriptions to replace the lost cash.

Let us hope that he can do that as a first stage in the reinvention of media. 

How far will he go? 

A far-sighted text to him earlier this year from his friend Jack Dorsey — the Twitter co-founder who became estranged from his creation — said, in part:

Yes, a new platform is needed. It can’t be a company. That is why I left. … It can’t have an advertising model. Otherwise you will have surface area that governments and advertisers will try to influence and control.

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** Huge thanks to John Logan for spotting my confusion of billions and trillions, and misspelling of kung fu. 

Wanted: a brave newspaper, for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders ( updated, 25.5.2019 ). The keiretsu-cooperative is a kind of platform cooperative — an idea getting closer to takeoff 

. Cooperatives, Culture after Gutenberg, Keiretsu-cooperative, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, Search engine algorithms and indexing, The 5th Estate in action, The future of publishing . , , , ,

 

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+Newspaper readers on a poultry farm near Kirchzell, ROY EALES postgutenberg@gmail.com

Like these two on an egg farm in Germany last November, there will be keen newspaper-readers — in some medium — for a few more years, yet. The question for the future is, can we organise a better way of owning and running newspapers and media sites — one better suited to a democracy than conventional corporate ownership? Photograph: Roy Eales

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The purpose of this entry on post-Gutenberg is to reverse the unexplained disappearance from search engines of the headline and link for the site’s very first post, which launched p-G on 5 September 2011. 

Not for the first time, someone appears to have gone to special trouble to make it impossible to find a p-G post in Google or Bing by typing its title into a search box. Adding the site’s name as an additional search term only yields indirect routes to it. Because Google, certainly, does not explain its methods, it is impossible to identify the culprit — inadvertent technical errors or active tampering by human algorithm-tweakers. Human tamperers can hide behind algorithms, which leave no fingerprints.

Riding the most recent wave of interest in ‘platform cooperatives,’ which began in 2016, this month’s print edition of Wired spotlights online workers’ cooperatives — through which operators in the gig (freelance) economy can jointly own and control a website from which they market their services and get paid. This is a radical improvement on working through platforms owned by, say, a classic employment agency for housecleaners — or a cleaning service — cutting fat commissions out of workers’ incomes in exchange for setting up and running the website, and acting as an intermediary.

The writer of the Wired piece, Clive Thompson, pinpoints the solution to the most aggravating obstacle to launching a platform cooperative — which is, getting it organised and ready-to-roll and, in that helpful cliché from physics, achieving critical mass. This did not present a problem for Up & Go, the successful platform cooperative for housecleaners that he singles out for special mention, because ‘the workers were already organised.’

For precisely that reason, post-Gutenberg’s original proposal of a keirestu-cooperative — a collaborative internet platform for newspapers and other media — did away with the idea of starting from scratch. It recommended beginning with an existing newspaper, with its established core of readers and commenters. As a post revisiting this subject last year explained:

These are the principal components of a ‘keiretsu-cooperative,’ or economic structure for the future — a keiretsu being a sort of Japanese industrial club made up of companies pursuing similar or complementary aims:

• A newspaper publisher might create a meta-site with one or more book publishers with which its audience overlaps — and these partners could share this site’s capital improvement and running costs.

• Reader-commenters visiting the site would not be paid for individual comments. Instead, they would buy subscriptions that would also be small financial stakes in the keiretsu publishers’ meta-site.

Here — except for its old introduction — is the original text of the first entry on post-Gutenberg that, at present, cannot easily be found through an internet search:

Newspaper and other print media sites to which I have returned several times a day – or week, depending on what has been happening in my life – have had two things in common:

  • Unusually sharp and entertaining comments sections in site segments dedicated to topics that interest me.
  • A group of stimulating, well-informed debaters among the regular commenters, who often enter into extended wrangles – sometimes, not just with each other, but with the writer of an article.

Unfortunately, commenters tend to come and go unpredictably, then vanish altogether. And I have to start looking for a new equivalent of an online coffee shop.

But what if commenters were given some incentive to keep commenting on a particular site – for years at a time? Two years ago, thinking about what would make contributing posts irresistible to me, my conclusion was: money, and the feeling that I was helping to build a semi-permanent family of debaters. Without some form of payment – or the possibility of being paid in the future – posting frequently on newspaper sites becomes suspiciously like wasting time. I have found it hard to justify time spent commenting, even though joining online discussions has deepened and enlivened my understanding of all sorts of topics.

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In January of last year, I outlined a scheme that a newspaper could run as an experiment in sharing ownership of a part of its site with reader-commenters. In a future entry in this blog, I will describe the reactions of particular publishing organisations to which I sent a link for my proposal. There were, broadly, five reasons for their reluctance to try it out:

  • ‘Too new’ – the scheme diverges too far from their ideas about the future evolution of media.
  • Protectionism. The mistaken belief that the scheme would entail paying commenters at the same rates as professional writers and journalists. That is not what the proposal says at all. The idea is that the arrangement would work very broadly in the way insurance does: people contributing more or less equal sums into a pool of money from which disbursements would be made in accordance with merit and need.
  • Semantics. Interpreting the scheme as ‘socialism’. There is no precise counterpart for the proposed arrangement – certainly not in publishing, as far as I know. But to convey the idea of shared ownership I used the word ‘cooperative’—which unfortunately spells ‘hippie’ utopianism or bankrupt socialist idealism to many people. It says something else entirely to me. For nearly 20 years, I have been a member of a rural electricity cooperative founded 75 years ago by a group of farmers – after the local power company refused to put them on its network. This organisation runs so beautifully that my electricity bills have always been a small fraction of sums I have paid for the identical usage patterns in other places.
  • Fear of losing power. Most publishers of the print era cannot give up the idea of journalists and editors performing on a stage for readers – the audience down in the pit, which is where they would like them to stay. They cannot accept that technology has made it realistic for readers to want – indeed, expect – to share the stage with them, even if only in walk-on parts, in most cases, at the start.
  • Pessimism. Publishers cannot conceive of making a bigger pie – that is, expanding revenue, and even earning profits, with luck – through sharing ownership with reader-commenters. They can only imagine being forced to accept smaller slices of an unchanged or shrunken pie.

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Here is a summary of what a test of a jointly owned site would involve for publishers and reader-commenters at the beginning:

As this is a scheme for helping print media to adapt for the arrival of the 5th Estate, a publisher would have to initiate the experiment, inviting readers to become part of it.

The publisher would set a price for a subscription-cum-stake in the jointly owned site called, say, the Forum. Just one stake per reader. Site visitors who do not buy a subscription-stake would not be shut out from reading articles and discussions but could not, of course, share in any future profits.

The publisher would develop the software tools and infrastructure for the experiment – to collect and record subscription-stakes; run elections and referendums; develop apps, links to social networking sites, and so on – and, if the test site makes a profit from subscriptions and advertising, distribute it to stakeholders.

Both the publisher and readers would nominate a few reader-stakeholders for membership of the Forum’s (say,) eleven-member management board. All reader-stakeholders would elect six of these as their representatives. The other five board members would be appointees of the publisher from within its own executive and editorial ranks.

As noted above, the arrangement would work in roughly the way insurance does. Reader-stakeholders would pay more or less equal sums into a pool of cash. Payments from that pool would be made according to certain criteria. How would classes of subscription-stakes be established? Who would set the criteria? These – and all other rules for the site’s operation – would be proposed by the management board and then voted into existence by subscriber-stakeholders.

So setting rule-making in motion would be the first task of the management board, and the first job for reader-stakeholders after that would be choosing from among alternative rules proposed to them.

A publisher would not have to finance the experiment alone. A newspaper could, for instance, share the costs and administrative burden with a book publisher. Their partnership would resemble a Japanese keiretsu – or arrangement between companies with common or interlocked business interests.

The rationale for this scheme for shared ownership is set out in more detail here.

Any takers? Careful suggestions for refining and improving the experiment would be indescribably welcome, and will be given proper credit in a future post on this site.

Correspondence to postgutenberg@gmail.com, please.

Wanted: a 21st-century version of the cowboy code for Silicon Valley and a cautionary popup for Facebook screens

. Big Tech, Social media, Cooperatives, Social media and networking . , , , ,

 

cowboy -- from myth to reality -- SC -- postgutenberg@gmail.com.jpg
Above: Tribute in a California hardware store to real cowboys (not the techie kind), who do not refer to people who trust them with private information as ‘dumb *ucks’; below: Facebook’s true terms of service, by way of Private Eye: Issue No. 1467, 6-19 April 2018

Private Eye Issue No.1467 6-19 April 2018

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[ Note to readers on mobile devices on 30 April: the site should be working normally again, thanks to kind ‘happiness engineers’ at WordPress. ]

It was once unremarkable to hear the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley called cowboys — as praise, not condemnation, at least as late as the 1980s. They were innovators, independent-minded risk-lovers who made the suits in big corporations look like cowardly dullards. They were the forerunners of the super-millionaires, then billionaires, that the internet spawned.

Real cowboys — the inspiration for the glamorous mythological kind that enchanted audiences around the world in Hollywood westerns — were typically poor hired hands looking after cattle in round-the-clock workdays, often in conditions no workers’ union would tolerate. They found their moral compass in an unwritten Code of the West. This has been summarised in different ways, some a little dated for the few remaining cattle-herders in America, who must travel not just on horseback but on wheels subject to rules of the road — ‘Always drink your whisky with your gun hand,’ for instance, which must follow ‘Always fill your whisky glass to the brim.’

In the less rambunctious version of the essence of the Code by a poet and scholar, E. Martin Pederson, this is the list of ideals which, he says, was intended to draw a firm line of distinction between cowboys and ‘the easy success of the thief or gambler’:

hospitality and assistance to others, faithfulness to the paternalistic employer (with some exceptions), care and affection for horses, a dislike for bragging or complaining, praise for bravery, and pride in skill with horse, rope and gun.

What could the de facto equivalent be for 21st-century technology cowboys?

After last week’s public interrogation in Washington of Mark Zuckerberg, the most famous entrepreneur in contemporary Silicon Valley, Julia Carrie Wong — an old Harvard classmate of his — said that his performance at that hearing showed how little he has changed from his 19 year-old self. She republished the record he unknowingly created for posterity of his own personal code as a student — in a private text exchange with a friend that was later leaked to Silicon Valley Insider. In this extract from it, he tells his friend about his new-found powers, thanks to the website he had launched a few weeks earlier — the project that would become Facebook:

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb fucks

Wong also reminded us that in 2004, the Facebook leader told the Harvard Crimson that his fledgling social network had ‘pretty intensive privacy options … People have very good control over who can see their information.’ His testimony in Washington did not supply any reason to believe the seemingly ashamed and repentant adult Zuckerberg, answering questions from senators, more than the teenage Zuckerberg, in identical false assurances.

Barely a day had passed after that drama than Facebook broke its promise to regulators in Europe not to use its facial recognition technology over there. This is software that lets the company identify you in photographs, alone or with other people, that you never placed on its platform or gave anyone permission to upload there, and proceed to using data capturing details of your appearance to track your movements across the internet. Your consent to its doing all this is taken for granted unless you sign up for a Facebook account — if you don’t already have one — and follow the steps in its opt-out procedure.

What difference could a code of ethics make to technology companies behaving so rottenly? In a paper written for economists**, Stuart Gilman, an international authority on rooting out corruption in public service has explained how the codification of model conduct can improve the government of countries. He notes:

Ethics codes are as old as antiquity. […] They often capture a vision of excellence, of what individuals and societies should be striving for and what they can achieve. […] Effective codes operate at two levels: Institutional and symbolic. Within institutions codes articulate boundaries of behavior as well as expectations for behavior. That is they provide clear markers as to what behavior is prohibited (bribery) and what behavior is expected (showing impartiality to all citizens). They are also highly symbolic. Subscribing to institutional codes is the way we define a model professional not only as we see ourselves but as we want to be seen by others.

He quotes the practical justification of Adam Smith — a founding father of economics (1723-90) — for setting high ethical standards:

To be amiable and to be meritorious; that is, to deserve love and to deserve reward, are the great characters of virtue; and to be odious and punishable, of vice. But all these characters have an immediate reference to the sentiments of others. Virtue is not said to be amiable, or to be meritorious, because it is the object of its own love, or of its own gratitude; but because it excites those sentiments in other men.

In the neverending Facebook scandals, a truly disruptive technology company would impress us — YEEHA! — by making a radical commitment to behaving well and altruistically without any pressure from governments. It would take too long for legislators and the law to catch up with what these companies are doing and the extent of their incursions into the intimate realms of our lives.

The politicians who did not understand the business model or technologies behind the social media heavyweight were widely mocked for not knowing how to grill Zuckerberg  in his appearance before Congress. Facebook reforming itself would have the fastest transformative effect and would change Silicon Valley’s culture for good. How likely is that, on the evidence so far? Fat chance.

It is time to sing this site’s refrain — that Facebook should rightly be owned by its users, to whose data this company has been helping itself liberally for dubious purposes, without the fully-informed permission of those users.

In the meanwhile, we do not expect the US or EU to be capable of much more than slapping a warning on users’ Facebook screens — a popup in the same spirit as the health cautions on bottles of alcohol and cigarette packets. Sadly, government notices are never witty, or we would propose simply borrowing the warning about Facebook’s true terms of service thoughtfully composed by editors in the London offices of Private Eye (above). It should be blown up into a poster plastered everywhere on public transport and, in the company’s home territory in California, where buses and trains are scarce, on extra-large billboards on freeways and interstate highways.

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** ‘Ethics Codes And Codes Of Conduct As Tools For Promoting An Ethical And Professional Public Service: Comparative Successes and Lessons’, Stuart C. Gilman, OECD, 2005 https://www.oecd.org/mena/governance/35521418.pdf

The media establishment has begun to see sense in a user-owned Facebook — but in curbing surveillance capitalism, let’s separate the baby from the bathwater

. Big Tech, Social media, Cooperatives . , , , , , , , , ,

 

silly moos LESS SC postgutenberg@gmail.com.jpg

Social media users must do more than refuse to be stripped of their data like helpless moos — postgutenberg [at] gmail.com

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Let’s not forget — in imposing long overdue restrictions on data-gathering by the social media giants — that without the broadcasting platforms they have given us, the software engineer Susan Fowler might have got nowhere with bearing witness to sexual stalking and degradation at Uber. She might not have galvanised a movement with its silly ‘#metoo’ hash tag** and nonstop, numbing repetition of words like ‘harassment’ and ‘abuse,’ and lent it the gravitas it needed.

In other words, let’s not throw out a near-miraculous baby — direct, unmediated, all-points broadcasting — with the bathwater. Without internet chattering about her clear, self-evidently truthful account of her Uber managers’ attempts to bully her into choking down her anger with her persecutor and living with chronic persecution — because his work was seen as invaluable to the company — intermediaries like media editors and lawyers would have interfered with her choices of words and evidence, and put brakes on her telling us precisely what she wanted us to know.

She also had her well-deserved luck of perfect timing.

Four years ago, almost no one wanted to hear about the grave risks in the massive collection of intimate data about us by Facebook,  that we joined other critics in referring to as the surveillance business model. Almost no one was prepared to do anything about Facebook helping itself to this information without our permission, or offering any form of compensation for it. Or about the fact that this company actually rejected proposals for letting people pay subscriptions for the service it offered us, because it perceived the power in giving it to us in exchange for the unrestricted freedom to delve into our minds to construct detailed psychological profiles of us to sell to advertisers or anyone else prepared to pay for them — the capacity to use ‘likes,’ as John Naughton has reminded us today in The Observer, ‘to predict accurately a range of highly sensitive personal attributes, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and gender.’

Few were moved, then, to support arguments that a Facebook based on other people’s information should rightly be owned by those people — in some form of mutualisation or cooperative venture, as we proposed on this site in 2012 in a post titled ‘A Better Facebook …’ republished here last November.

Five years later, last Wednesday, the New York Times presented, as if this were a brand new idea, the otherwise commendable suggestion by three scholars — Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms and separately, Nathan Schneider in 2016: ‘[W]hat if a social network was truly run by its users?’ In a newly published book they have written together, Heimans and Timms note the unfairness of what we — like many others — have been pointing out for years: the injustice of ‘the creative output of billions of people’ being turned ‘into a giant, centralized enterprise, with most users sharing none of the economic value they create and getting no say in the platform’s governance.’

Nathan Schneider was virtually repeating exactly what post-Gutenberg proposed in 2012, in pointing out that a ‘new, improved Mark Zuckerberg wants to be perceived as a force for good in society — and [… is reportedly …] clashing with the strictly business-oriented senior executives in his company over this…. If he’s serious, why not acknowledge that Facebook’s users supply the personal information about themselves that he has exploited to get rich […] and flip ownership of his company over to Facebook’s members?’

A better justification of the NY Times’ reputation for fair and critically important reporting was in a recent story illustrating the ability of faraway foreign countries to use social media’s records of our exchanges with our friends and acquaintances to control us. No, it was not about evidence of Russia interfering in the U.S. presidential election or in the Brexit vote in Britain, but about China censoring commenters on its policies using social media platforms outside China, and owned by foreign companies, and punishing one company, Mercedes-Benz, for featuring the Dalai Lama in one of its advertisements.

The report by Paul Mozur began: ‘Within its digital borders, China has long censored what its people read and say online. Now, it is increasingly going beyond its own online realms to police what people and companies are saying about it all over the world.’

If the Chinese can do this, anyone can.

We apologise for the irritating, Cassandra-like, we-told-you-so tone of this entry, but post-Gutenberg predicted precisely such a consequence from data-gathering by social media companies — in 2013. As we noted here on 15 January 2014:

Not for ages has there been a pudding quite as over-egged as the one presented as the news story of 2013 – the Orwellian mass surveillance exposé which, as it unravels, shows the UK and US governments hardly initiating nonstop monitoring but, rather, striving to keep up with companies like Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google in gathering intimate information about us and watching what we do.

[…]

Last September, this blog warned that the blinkers needed to come off too many commentators on the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ – to let them appreciate that we should be protesting not just about spooks but anyone amassing personal data about us. In an entry about reader-commenters on newspaper sites correcting the unbalanced coverage of mass surveillance, we said: 

Stores of information, once they are gathered, can acquire new owners. 

Lately, we have seen a suggestion on various sites that the social media giants should be turned into public utilities. This would be the wrong solution. We need distributed, decentralised ownership — by social media users — to avert the abuse of any form of centralised power. Abuse by surveillance capitalists, or our governments, or anyone else’s.

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** We prefer the more constructive, spine-steeling, #NeverthelessShePersisted.