Category Archives: Surveillance business model

Social media critics who do not separate their objections are cooking up an anti-Big Tech jambalaya confusing regulators about the ‘surveillance capitalism’ that Google did not pioneer

. Big Data collection, Big Tech, Social media, Business models for publishing, Culture after Gutenberg, Regulation of Big Tech, Social media and networking, Surveillance business model, Surveillance capitalism, The future of publishing . , , , , , , , , , , ,

 

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social media postgutenberg@gmail.com

We have to discriminate carefully between light and dark elements of social media platforms

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Here is an indirect reply to a tweet from @nikluac to @postgutenbergB, a few days ago  — which contained a link to a New York Times opinion piece by Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita of the Harvard Business School. Flashing red lights set off by a single paragraph in her essay led to post-Gutenberg.com [pG] ’s first investigation of Professor Zuboff’s hugely influential, best-selling book published a year ago, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 

That work, which offers ‘little by way of a concrete agenda’ for internet-centred reform according to Evgeny Morozov, and other reviewers, is on a very different mission from this pG site — which argues for a specific scheme. The professor has succeeded uniquely and brilliantly at her task of so-called ‘consciousness-raising’. In seven hundred pages, her book explains and condemns the extent and precise mechanisms of what she and other analysts have named surveillance capitalism. 

It is the same phenomenon to which pG has been drawing attention since August of 2013  — with no claims of pioneering insight — in the course of campaigning for a proposal for the democratisation of publishing. This involved — in part — pointing out that like the Big Tech social media platforms, powerful newspapers were also spying on their readers without notification or consent. In posts here, digital invasions of privacy have been referred to variously as commercial surveillance or the surveillance business model — or, for anorexic attention spans incapable of absorbing more than a long header, as the ‘“free” surveillance/advertising-centred/data-cow business model’, or ‘the ‘pay-to-be-spied-on contract for e-commerce.’

Why did the following paragraph in Professor Zuboff’s NYT essay in late January — in the context of its headline and theme — set alarm bells jangling?

You Are Now Remotely Controlled

Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth.

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Only repeated crises have taught us that these platforms are not bulletin boards but hyper-velocity global bloodstreams into which anyone may introduce a dangerous virus without a vaccine. This is how Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, could legally refuse to remove a faked video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and later double down on this decision, announcing that political advertising would not be subject to fact-checking. 

That is an intensely emotive jambalaya, and not a logical argument. It is a fact that the platforms do indeed serve as ‘bulletin boards’ for useful, unobjectionable and frequently important messages from millions of users, every day. The article unreasonably conflates the ‘hate speech’ debate — about the platforms as carriers of social viruses — with the discussion of what needs to be done about regulating commercial surveillance and the theft of our personal data. Professor Zuboff somehow blurs the refusal of social media platforms such as Facebook to control what some individual users post there with not one but two unrelated questions — first, about whether paid political advertising on those sites should be curbed or forbidden; secondly, about what limits should be placed on information-gathering about platform users.

In her book she mashes all those together on the grounds that refusing to censor their users means that the social media platforms attract more users; can keep them on their sites for longer to gather more information about them; and, by growing their audiences in this way, earn more advertising dollars. 

While that is all undoubtedly true, it does not add up to an argument for treating the platforms like the owners of newspapers that are responsible for the work of their employees. Besides, there is something far more critical at stake, here.

Professor Zuboff mostly ignores or pays only cursory attention to the indispensable role that the platforms have assumed for most of us as cyberspace equivalents of town halls, libraries, coffee houses, debating clubs, pubs and soapboxes, and of pamphleteering and other printed means of disseminating facts and opinions — among other institutions and media. 

In an interview with the editor in chief in the latest issue of Wired, the United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, endorses the idea of access to the internet as a basic human right. He explains:

People are saying all the voices must be heard. The idea of a very small group of people can decide for everything is now being put into question very seriously. … [I]n each country, the trigger is different. In some cases it’s an economic-driven occasion, in others it’s pressure on the political system, in others corruption, and people react. But I see more and more people wanting to assume responsibility, wanting their voices to be heard. And that is the best guarantee we have that political systems will not be corrupted.

Here, pG — which has so far been among Facebook’s most relentless critics, most recently, for its new practice of selectively handing out gigantic pots of cash to famous newspapers and magazines — must concede that Mark Zuckerberg is right to say that ‘People of varied political beliefs are trying to define expansive speech as dangerous because it could bring results they don’t accept,’ and that he believes that ‘this is more dangerous to democracy in the long term than almost any speech.’ His idea of trying out ‘a court-style board to rule on site content’ — staffed not by Facebook managers but independent outsiders — is also a good one, as long as the arbiters are genuinely independent, and expensive professional lawyers from the rickety U.S. legal system do not get involved in the sorting out of complaints.

Also in this month’s issue of Wired, Gideon Lewis-Kraus argues in an excellent meditation on the Big Tech controversy that … 

The opportunity to vent on social media, and occasionally to join an outraged online mob, might relieve us of our latent desire to hurt people in real life. It’s easy to dismiss a lot of very online rhetoric that equates social media disagreement with violence, but […] the conflation might reflect an accurate perception of the symbolic stakes: On this view, our tendency to experience online hostility as “real” violence is an evolutionary step to be cheered.

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To worry about whether a particular statement is true or not, as public fact-checkers and media-literacy projects do, is to miss the point. It makes about as much sense as asking whether somebody’s tattoo is true.

By all means let’s urgently make rules or draft laws for curtailing user surveillance and data-gathering by Big Tech. Devious impersonations such as sophisticated, digitally-manipulated misrepresentations of people — such as the fake Nancy Pelosi video mentioned by Professor Zuboff — should be prosecuted like any other form of identity theft. If anything is making people angry enough to ensure all that, it is The Age of Surveillance — succeeding where earlier books drawing attention to the same or similar problems have had no remotely comparable impact.

Among them is one published in 1997 by the Harvard Business School Press — Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never-Satisfied Customer.** In it, the Silicon Valley marketing innovator and investor Regis McKenna shows Professor Zuboff to be mistaken in one of her central assertions, which is that surveillance capitalism was ‘pioneered and elaborated through trial and error’ by Google in 2001.

While search engine technology allowed for a massive refinement of commercial surveillance and made it incommensurably insidious when misused, at least one other company actually hacked out the path to it. Real Time drew attention to ‘an excellent illustration of the shades of interactivity to come.’  This was in a six-month interlude in 1996, in which PepsiCo offered teenage and Generation X consumers of Mountain Dew fizzy drinks radically discounted electronic beepers to use with no communication charges. 

They were also given access to a toll-free telephone hookup over which they could listen to interviews with sports heroes — and the chance to get discounts from twenty other companies keen to sell this demographic group things ranging from tortilla chips to snowboards. PepsiCo paged the 50,000 participants in its scheme once a week to ask them questions in a ‘real-time dialogue with them,’ and anticipated eventually creating ‘an enormous, nonstop, electronic focus group at a remarkably low cost.’ Unfortunately, as Real Time noted, this soon led to ‘a firestorm of unanticipated criticism’ of the soft drink producer,’ for exploitation:

The company had assumed that this, of all communications technologies, would be irresistible to parents — helping two-career couples worried about their children’s whereabouts to keep in touch with them. Instead, the promotion was denounced as disturbingly manipulative by parents and children’s advocates — like the Center for Media Advocacy in Washington, D.C., a watchdog group, and Action for Children’s Television.

The New York Times report on the project said that ‘soliciting information from youths through the Internet and pagers also raises privacy questions.’

A quarter-century later we know that the anxiety was prescient — but now we also have free speech protection to worry about, separately.

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( A later post on the same topic is here ) 

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** Real Time was a short-order project, a book researched, written and edited on a brutal schedule, in less than six months, in 1996 — with the assistance of pG’s writer, who thanks @nikluac for the tweet that led to this excursion into the past.

Do drugs explain George Orwell’s ability to ‘communicate with the future’ from 1949 — and if so, have micro-dosing technologists or other intellectuals shown any sign of matching it?

. Art and science, Psychology of creativity, Surveillance business model . , , , , , , , , , ,

 

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icicles, Orwell, Big Brother posgutenberg@gmail.com

Through a glass, darkly: dystopian anxiety casts a pall of dread over the most innocent scenes, these days

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A question for everyone ready to scream from the tedium of seeing George Orwell’s name coupled yet again with dystopia: yes, yes, but have you tried re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four lately?  If for instance you, like the writer of this pG entry, last immersed yourself in it decades ago, aged about fourteen, shouting with laughter as you read out to your mother passages that struck you as fiendishly funny, which nearly always mentioned Big Brother, an outlandish caricature you couldn’t conceive of as connected in any way to your own rather boring life? 

At the start of 2020, there is not much to laugh about in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It has become too alarming and depressing to re-read voluntarily. Why? Because of its underestimations of the nastiest possibilities of intimate Big Brother surveillance, for one thing; and because we have no believable protection from its deployment by either governments or oversized corporations.

In the novel’s opening pages, when its protagonist Winston Smith starts a diary in a blank notebook — an out-of-date and semi-illicit ‘compromising possession’ — he can carefully seat himself in his living room outside the field of the spying telescreen that is capable of receiving and transmitting simultaneously: ‘Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it.’ Extrapolating from today’s ‘internet of things,’ there will soon be nowhere for a Winston Smith or any of us to hide, as any number of networked ordinary household objects could be doing the telescreen’s job. On the page before that scene, he turns back from the window where he has been reflecting on the malign, barbed wire-clad Ministry of Love and, on his way to his kitchen, ‘set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen,’ on which Big Brother could be watching him. 

Only last month, a prominent UK newspaper reported behind its paywall, that ‘emotion recognition is the latest thing in surveillance,’ and that systems designed for this form of monitoring have been installed in the Chinese province of Xinjiang to ‘identify signs of aggression and nervousness as well as stress levels …’.

Orwell, writing in the late 1940s, has Winston worrying, as he begins his diary and considers its prospective readers far off in time, ‘How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible.’ He fears that it could be so different from the present as to make his dystopian predicament ‘meaningless’. Very much to the contrary, as we nearly all realise by now, it could hardly be more significant. Winston’s creator has no equal for writerly prescience about our moment, almost anywhere on the globe, even if one participant in an online discussion last January, @WMD, remarked that in the West, ‘we do seem to be much closer to the drug-induced, zonked out, sheep-like mentality’ of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was published in 1932, nearly two decades before Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Narcotics, the indispensable element in Huxley’s nightmare future — his imaginary drug called soma, used by World Controllers to lull the population into blissful, hazy, submissive detachment from the consequences of their manipulations — came to mind recently in an untidy clump of wondering about how reminders of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and only that work of futuristic literary fiction, become more unavoidable each day. This led naturally to the question of what explains the steel-tipped accuracy of so much of its envisioning. Recalling Orwell’s four years as an officer with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (Myanmar) in the 1920s was part of the associative clump, and trailing in its wake came thoughts of opium, of which Burma was then and is to this day a dominant producer. Ah! But then, what was the generally accepted understanding among Orwell experts about any connection — or lack thereof — between George and this narcotic, or any other mind-altering substance stronger than nicotine, caffeine or alcohol? 

The specific trigger for the meditation was probably a casual, intermittent discussion over several weeks about a friend who made a first pilgrimage to Burning Man last summer, and reportedly came away impressed by the high-wattage brainiacs from Silicon Valley, investment banking, and academia with whom he shared an ultra-exclusive tent for the duration of the celebration in the Nevada desert — with some of those minds seemingly amplified by full doses of psychedelics, not the micro-dosing said to be part of the ordinary work week at the office, for many of them. 

Imagine the surprise of finding no consideration by Orwell scholars of any role that drugs might have played in shaping Orwell’s flow of ideas about Nineteen Eighty-Four — unless anything like that is beyond easy reach, through search engines. Nothing, that is, except for a diligently researched, persuasive argument on the website of Darcy Moore  — an Australian school administrator, Orwell-admirer and memorabilia collector — that the novelist almost certainly had more than theoretical and imaginative experience of opium use. It reminds us that because Sonia Orwell, his widow, ensured at his request that no one was able to write his biography for over thirty years after he died, attempts to sift through his personal habits were obstructed while the information about them was still fresh. 

Among the facts Moore has assembled are these:

• Orwell’s father spent his working life as a supervisor of opium production, quality control and trade in India, when it was part of the British Empire.

• Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘has the protagonist agreeing “to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases…” before being given a political manifesto which mentions “the truth-producing effects of drugs”.’

• In reviewing the memoir of a well-known opium addict of his time, Orwell said that the bliss of using this substance was ‘indescribable,’ and Moore asks — reasonably — whether a man ‘who was prepared to quit his career against his father’s wishes to become a writer, steel himself to go down a coal mine with working men, get purposefully arrested, associate with a criminal underclass in Paris and London, spend time with the poor and homeless as well as risk his life in a time of civil war in Spain …’ would have hesitated to sample the drug himself. 

But none of the known facts about the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World establish any direct connection between drug use and sublime artistic inspiration. Those of us who are abysmally ignorant about risky, habit-forming drugs — and who have been shocked by observing their worst effects directly — find it easier to relate to Aldous Huxley’s depictions of their deeply negative consequences in his famous futurama, apparently written before he had any personal experience of ingesting them. He did, however, become a radical convert to, and advocate of, the joys of psychedelics after he lost his virginity as an experimenter with controlled substances. Sadly for him, his novel Island, published in 1962, exactly three decades after Brave New World and a radical contradiction of it — since it depicts a drug-enhanced utopia — appears to have had few readers (not including this writer). The novelist and literary scholar Margaret Drabble has summed up the justifiable criticism by detractors of Huxley’s works — other than BNW — that they are ‘smart and superficial, a symptom rather than an interpretation of a hollow age.’

If only that were not so. If only experimenters with mind-expanding chemicals among today’s policy-shapers and influencers had more to offer us than testimonials virtually identical to Huxley’s about glorious, life-changing alterations in perspectives on the world and fellow human beings, but — also like him — with no specific great work in any field to point to for an illustration of such benefits. If only the British Psychological Society Research Digest, last August, had not concluded, about the most recent scientific investigations into this trend, that ‘no placebo-controlled study has found statistically significant effects of microdosing on creativity.’

If only the opposite were true, and someone was capable of writing, now, a counter-imagining of Nineteen Eighty-Four powerful enough and influential enough to accomplish what Orwell hoped to, when he wrote it — which was to head off the possibility of privacy-smashing, totalitarian mind control that instead, looks well set for conditioning our everyday existence in the not so distant future.

How a well-meaning Angela Merkel choosing the wrong tactic for protecting Europe from Big (U.S.) Tech’s incursions could make Orwell’s dystopia our reality

. Big Data collection, Big Tech, Social media, Regulation of Big Tech, Surveillance business model, Surveillance capitalism, Take Back Your Data movement . , , , ,

 

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What is the one essential step required for George Orwell’s nightmare of totalitarian centralisation — Nineteen Eighty-Four — to become even more plausible than it is already, in freedom-loving western countries? 

That is, the step that would determine exactly how we get to One power to rule them all: a single, giant database or store of personal information about us, created by merging all the facts the government has with all the data that the social media and other technology giants have been gathering — to give a Big Brother-for-real absolute control? 

A scoop by The Financial Times last week — Google lists no other source, and FT.com was offering free access to the piece when pG last checked — suggested, for an answer, a superficially innocent and at first glance, desirable proposal by a European leader. Proceeding with that proposal would create a  route to deadly centralisation far easier and more straightforward than the possibility sketched in the last pG entry: 

Who in the traditional Establishment could we count on to oppose a deadly merging of government and commerce — by, say, a government trying to invoke emergency powers to requisition Big Tech’s vast and ever-expanding stores of data about us? Invoke those powers illegitimately?

In its report titled ‘Angela Merkel urges EU to seize control of data from US tech titans,’ The Financial Times said:

Angela Merkel has urged Europe to seize control of its data from Silicon Valley tech giants, in an intervention that highlights the EU’s growing willingness to challenge the US dominance of the digital economy.

The German chancellor said the EU should claim “digital sovereignty” by developing its own platform to manage data and reduce its reliance on the US-based cloud services run by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

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Ms Merkel was speaking just two weeks after Berlin unveiled plans for a European cloud computing initiative, dubbed Gaia-X, which it has described as a “competitive, safe and trustworthy data infrastructure for Europe”.

… Peter Altmaier, economy minister, said the data of companies such as Volkswagen, and that of the German interior ministry and social security system, were increasingly stored on the servers of Microsoft and Amazon. “And in this we are losing part of our sovereignty,” he added.

He said 40 companies had signed up for Gaia-X, including Deutsche Telekom, SAP and Bosch, and the new platform would be ready by the end of the year. “We want to be able to offer companies . . . ministries and governments the chance to store their data in Europe, according to transparent, clearly recognisable standards.” 

[ continues here … ]

Yes, her remarks were about corporations, not private citizens, but the identical argument — digital sovereignty — could be used by the EU or some other government to justify commandeering the intimate personal facts that the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter are hoovering up about us all day long. With or without our permission, and whether or not we are paying for their services.

Why didn’t it occur to Frau Merkel (or her policy advisors) to throw all her weight behind decentralising the net as the solution — proposed by none other than the inventor of the World Wide Web, (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee — ? 

For an outline of his ideas on that subject, scroll down this post:

‘Mystery solved? Famous newspapers that ignored the Social Media Strike of 2019 have agreed to accept regular payments of millions of dollars from Facebook’

O happy day! The ‘free’ surveillance/advertising-centred/data-cow business model has been superseded by the pay-to-be-spied-on contract for e-commerce

. Big Data collection, Big Tech, Social media, Keiretsu-cooperative, Surveillance business model, Surveillance capitalism . , , , , , ,
+++ dog + blonde postgutenberg@gmail.com

A watchful pair: he was too intent on his task to move a single canine muscle **

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The tale of Big Brother at A Certain Newspaper (ACN.com), the last entry on this site,  omitted a crucial fact because it deserves its own post.

It is this: access to the visitor-sleuthing, visitor-interrogating ACN site is not free, but requires a subscription. Reader, if you haven’t noticed, this should tell you that things have gone from bad to dire — well beyond the normalisation of the surveillance business model’s (SBM) unwritten contract, in which the actual cost of ‘free’ admission and use of a site’s services is the loss of our privacy.

Bowing to the SBM meant accepting that when we pay no cash to use  Facebook — and innumerable other web services, including search engines — these companies can make records of our every click and cursor twitch. In many cases they do worse, following us wherever we go on the net, even after we have signed out of their domains. We have effectively told them, do come in and help yourselves to anything you’d like to know about us — or, as post-Gutenberg has observed before: by all means, please milk us like dumb data cows.

In the SBM’s successor, the pay-to-be-spied-on model for e-commerce that we are now bowing to in an almost imperceptible transition, we are giving them money to exploit us. In our delight with the discount on sub-zero winter boots and free shipping that the online retailer offers us, we do not object to being hooked up to the automated data-milking machines that our cash helps to finance ***.

The media version of this shift entails a striking switch in the terms of trade that our ACN.com encounter dramatised. In the old days of print, a newspaper handed over pages filled with news and analysis in exchange for our coins — and those paper pages had countless secondary uses. The exchange between buyer and seller ended, there. Today, a newspaper can believe that the sum billed to a credit card entitles it to monitor and record exactly how the owner of that plastic rectangle reads its online pages — to facilitate ‘personalising content and ads,’ as the ACN.com site informs visitors, ‘and to analyse how our sites are being used’ — today, tomorrow, … whenever.

What we call data-milking is blandly referred to by digital commerce specialists as ‘data-gathering.’ One such expert, Josh Bernoff, writes about ‘the data equation’ — implying that there is a fair and just equivalence in Facebook users paying with undefined ‘data and attention’ to upload what they want to communicate or ‘share’ on the social media platform. But saying ‘equation’ is applying a misleading euphemism to what the average Facebook user grasps, since that user does not understand the SBM, or know that it is also the advertising business model. Users do not understand how they enrich social media giants by letting them hawk facts about their behaviour and demographic and psychological profiles to other companies that use the information to maximise their advertisements’ ability to seduce them into buying their products.

In a perceptive post on Medium.com, Bernoff suddenly swerves sharply from tip-toeing around the sensitivities of e-commerce giants to making the critical point that users ‘are happy to give up an infinite amount of data’ to social media platforms and predicts — sadly, without exaggeration — that most of them will not stop doing this until ‘Facebook starts taking naked pictures of everyone in the shower and posting them without permission.’

That was a point made in his ruminations in early October about whether the software that Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) has been developing to return control of their data to internet users will be usable and used by enough people to reverse the soaring trend of exploitation, manipulation and restriction. Bernoff concludes that this will not happen unless a rich, dominant company can adopt and deploy it to support TBL’s project.

He nominates Apple for the task.

We cannot imagine a better use for Apple’s cash mountains than destroying the surveillance business model. But surely putting Apple in charge of creating ‘new devices, new experiences, new apps, and new ways to entertain yourself and experience life without requiring you to give up all your data’ would be a move in the wrong direction — further centralising power, when TBL is trying to take the web back to the freeing open space it was originally?

Today’s Tim Cook-led Apple appears to have high ethical standards, but what guarantee is there that this company’s tremendous potential for doing good would not be misused if he were replaced by — say, someone like Mark Zuckerberg, whose actions seldom match the high humanitarian ideals he claims to believe in, and who chronically breaks promises about protecting and respecting the privacy of Facebook users?

What might be more compatible with TBL’s aims? Putting Apple’s cash and managerial resources behind social media platforms that their users jointly own. Apple could assist with and finance their design and launch. 

See: ‘The media establishment has begun to see sense in a user-owned Facebook …’ An extract:

… [L]ast 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.’

[ continues here … ]      

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** like any other well-trained ceramic dog

*** Why are we permitting this? See John Logan’s reference, in his comment on the last post-Gutenberg post, to soma — the drug crucial to subjugating the masses in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), which creates ‘a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds’. Imagining themselves as ‘celebrities’ on their Facebook pages, and riding waves of happiness from online shopping discounts that let them buy-buy-buy probably works a similar dark magic on real, live, people in our time.