Nothing annoys me more than statements that start with “the Internet is...”. Well, no, there’s something that annoys me more - it’s when journalists attribute such statements to me, when I say - repeatedly throughout the interview ! - that I don’t do such statements.
Here is a good example: an interview I’ve done many months ago with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, which they have only published now, in much abridged form (no complaints there).
Below is the full text of my responses to their questions. Yet I challenge you to find how anything I say below can be summed up as “the Internet is useful for dictators” (which is, supposedly, a quote from me which they used as the headline - something I never said!). In fact, I do say in the interview that such statements of “the Internet is... “ variety make no sense -- and I repeat that probably half a dozen times -- and yet, they end up attributing that sentence to me!!!!
El Mundo: What are the most important political dangers of the internet?
EM: Well, before I say anything, let me point out that my work in the last few years has tried to dispel this notion that there is a singular entity called “the Internet” that can be analyzed as if it had some kind of coherent, easy-to-understand effects. Whatever effects the totality of the services and platforms that we use in our daily life might have, those are not the effects of the Internet – rather, they effects of the business models of the companies and platforms that we are using. I can easily imagine a world full of algorithms, big data, sensors and so on that will promote not the selfishness or individuality or cynicism and alienation that we see being promoted today, but, rather, things like solidarity, trust, belonging, fulfillment. But this will happen only if there platforms and technologies are decoupled from the neoliberal fully privatized model - with data serving as the main asset and currency - under which they exist today. On the other hand, it would be easy to point out some of the dangers associated with Silicon Valley - I prefer to speak of Silicon Valley rather than the Internet, for this is where the problem lies; it does not lie the level of technology. The problems of Silicon Valley are many: from the role that it plays in enabling surveillance to the ultimate commodification of everything in our life, which happens as every single gesture or thought, in every single interaction that we engage in, would soon be captured and optimized by these companies.
El Mundo: How internet can support dictatorships or weak democracies?
EM: Well as I've said in response to my previous question for me this is not really a very useful way to pose the question, solely because I refuse to accept the idea that the Internet is a medium with coherent properties. Let me give an example: if you look at the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring, for example, we saw that various digital media digital platforms - Google, Facebook, Twitter – all of them were used both by the protesters and governments. Governments used it to identify their opponents; protesters, of course, to mobilize even more people into the streets. Doesn’t this tell us anything about the utility of the Internet to democracy or dictatorships? I would say no because it's very easy to build the same platforms but in a way to make them more secure, with more privacy and encryption.
Why is it not the case? Well, because ultimately these platforms have a business model that happens to revolve around advertising. This means that ultimately nothing can be really private and secure because if it is private and secure, then it will be impossible for these companies to look inside your datastream and make money by showing you ads. That also means that the utility of these platforms to dictators is significantly greater than could have been otherwise.
Thus, I think we have to stop using this extremely apolitical language to talk about technology. By now, even a term like “the Internet” has become part of this apolitical vocabulary that seeks to hide the fact that we are talking about giant private corporations that feed right off the public infrastructure, that are very close to the national security state in the US, that wouldn't even exist at least in Europe if our own politicians and the European Commission were not so keen on privatizing everything. To use a term like “the Internet” to talk about all those developments, to me this means that we are basically seeking to forget that all of these technologies and platforms have a deep history and that that history in itself is the product of numerous political decisions – many of them perhaps made an error but made nonetheless.
El Mundo: In Spain Podemos party have a great number of followers in Facebook and Twitter and they connect better with young people than traditional parties. How politicals have to use social media to communicate with voters?
EM: Well, I think we have to distinguish between short-term and long-term strategy. First, it's obvious that to reach young people today any political party would be better off doing something with the digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and so on. This is where the people are. I do not see how any political party that wants to be in touch with the times can keep out these platforms now.
Now, my argument about Silicon Valley-and especially as it pertains to Google and Facebook and IBM and Microsoft – has been that they are more than just a collection of platforms of services. There is a whole logic guiding their business strategy. And, increasingly, that logic revolves around collection, aggregation, and eventual sale of data. That has all sorts of connections to processes like financialization and commodification, whereby the most intimate moments and behaviors of our everyday existence turn into assets and commodities and become guided by the logic of the market. Ultimately, it's obvious to me that Silicon Valley as a group of companies and services will be key to how we – or, rather, our mostly neoliberal governments – think about the provision of welfare services. From the organization of labor to the organization of work, they will also be key to the work of social movements.
From this perspective, I do not like the fact that so much of our public infrastructure will be so highly dependent on a bunch of American technology companies. If you are a proper radical leftist and if you're concerned about imperialism or Wall Street or the Pentagon, I see no reason why you shouldn't be concerned about Silicon Valley. As for Podemos, I haven't really seen them articulate a strong critique of Silicon Valley. They see them from a very short-term instrumental perspective as platforms that can help them gain advantage over the mainstream media or perhaps to circumvent some of the attitudes towards the party that might have been exhibited by Spanish mainstream media. And I can really understand such a stance on behalf of Podemos, but it's not enough to think of Facebook and Google and Microsoft merely as the next and more democratized media, the way somebody like Manuel Castells often does. We have to understand them as something much bigger. Otherwise, we will not be able to understand where capitalism and neoliberalism are heading in the future.
El Mundo: Is technology the nearest way to human loneliness?
EM: Once again, I do not think that we have to be focusing so much on technology, if only because technologies can deliver very different experiences using the same technological components. I think the best way to understand what I'm getting at is to think about the Silicon Valley and the technology industry in the same critical terms in which we think about, say, the junk food companies or big food companies. They have an interest to make us addicted to their products, so they deliberately manipulate what goes into them. This means that they deliberately add too much salt and too much sugar, so that we want more and more.
By the same logic, you can understand how a service like twitter, for example, wants to make you click on more and more messages and encourages you to constantly go and see if somebody has interacted with you I'll send you an update, which, of course, might actually increase alienation, but this in itself, is not really a natural way for us to develop a microblogging service; neither is it a natural way for us to organize our communication. It just stems from the fact that Twitter's business model is tied to a particular commodity, the commodity being user data, which can then be sold to advertisers. Thus, the more data twitter accumulates, the more it can actually charge for the data from the advertisers. Which means that they are interested in you revealing as much information as you can about them, which, by extension, also means that they want you to click as much as possible in let's say a minute, because the more you click the more information you reveal.
This is what I mean when I say that it's not very useful to talk about technology in the abstract, as if it was disconnected from the broader business imperatives of the platforms that are running it. The technologies that surround us today, they are not like hammers. You know, I think I wouldn't really care whether hammer is produced by Microsoft or a cooperative down my street or by the government. A hammer is a hammer – it's not very hard to make. When you think about something that is central to our life and our communication, to our subjectivity, to how we perceive ourselves and our fellow citizens out there in the world, I'm not sure that the default answer to virtually every single question about how we would like to organize our communication infrastructure, should be: oh, let's just have a bunch of American companies do it in the most profitable manner that seems available to them.
El Mundo: Could you tell me in only two or three lines what are the dangers and benefits of next internet icons? Facebook, Uber, Wikipedia, Airbnb.
EM: First of all, I think we should treat Wikipedia differently from the other three, if only because Wikipedia technically is a nonprofit and they do pursue a somewhat different agenda than the other three firms. But even there, I think we have to understand that Facebook in a sense is capitalizing on the nature of human instinct to share information, Uber is capitalizing on the other natural human instinct to travel; Airbnb is also capitalizing on something very human -- hospitality -- which I think will not sound as extraordinary normal to most of us. Of course, these platforms do it in a very different manner, with a very different set of rules and different set of practices with regards to unemployment, aggregation of personal personal data, respect for public space.
I don't want to sound too much like a critic and a hater of these companies. But, I think, we have to understand that they essentially parasitic on existing social activities. They are basically taking social activities that we already engage in and then they are inserting themselves as platforms through which we can carry on these activities further. I don't think that cities in particular need their services. I think that cities should be able to pull the data of the citizens together into a pool; they should be able to offer many of the same services on their own terms as they see fit, with excellent worker protection, with same nondiscrimination clauses, with all sorts of regulatory interventions that we have traditionally expected from the social state or social Europe.
If we do not offer citizens such alternatives at the level of the city, of course, then we’ll face a situation where citizens will become unwilling partners of this firms, especially when it comes to defeating any efforts to regulate them, for any effort to regulate them will be seen as just something that will benefit the existing providers of the services, whether it's hotels or taxi companies.
With Facebook, I think we have to look at the broader picture, and stress services like Internet.org, which, basically seek to position themselves almost like the next World Bank. This, I would argue, is another dangerous undertaking, because I don't want Facebook to be the provider of my connectivity which might be the case for a lot of citizens in the developing world. We do not have the same degree of rigor and critical thinking on these matters as we do about existing developmental institutions like the World Bank just for the sake of example. In other words, I think that this pseud humanitarianism, underwritten by venture capital, the facing in Silicon Valley today is extremely dangerous. I'm not saying that it will not deliver some benefits-it clearly will just like junk food delivers some benefits it satisfies hunger-but in the long run, I think, countries and regions the fully surrender themselves to the likes of Facebook and Google will pay dearly.
El Mundo: Big data is transforming individual privacy—and not in equal ways for all. Can poor people ‘survive’ in the future without selling privacy to internet companies? How?
EM: Well the question of data ownership is actually very interesting, I've been studying it in quite some detail lately. Right now, we basically have these two rather grim visions in front of us. Option number one is to basically let Google and Facebook develop the most advanced infrastructure for data collection and data analysis ever known to mankind, so that we will see these companies basically offering us free diagnostic healthcare, energy savings, and son. At the same time, the other option is for all of us to become individual data entrepreneurs, trying to sell out data to the next highest bidder. A lot of those bidders, of course, will be other big advertising companies or even companies like Google or Facebook themselves.
Despite be somewhat emancipatory rhetoric that often goes together with this second option, I actually think that this is horrible, because it will lead to complete financialization and marketization of our everyday life, so that virtually everything we do will be evaluated -by us ourselves-from the perspective of how much money we can actually make from it. This, I find another dangerous development, because ultimately it accepts the implicit logic and reasoning that Silicon Valley has already put in front of us: namely, that data is a commodity that can be bought and sold.
I would like cities and governments to explore ways in which they can think beyond this status of data as a commodity. Perhaps, data is more like air or water, in that even though they might be plenty of efforts to privatize it and run it as a private good, we would all be far better off if it's not privatized and if that is reasonable way in which the same kind of for benefits and the same kind of goods that currently accrue from the collection and aggregation of this data can still be delivered but in a manner that does not lead to complete privatization and marketization of our everyday existence. I don't think that such an option, especially in a national regional scale, is currently possible in Europe. That said, I think that it can actually be feasible and possible in specific cities is upset, or it can be implementable in other regions, which are much more prepared to tackle the challenges that neoliberalism presents to the old ways of socialization.
El Mundo: How policymakers could recognize the different burdens placed on individuals to protect their data?
EM: The answer depends very much on what policymakers we are talking about. I have very little faith in the current generation of European leaders and their ability to actually do anything about this matter. To me, they represent precisely the kind of political elite that was the one that embraced privatization, neoliberalism, and marketization. I do not know why anyone would expect them to suddenly reverse their views on these matters, and to jump to defend a different social logic and rhetoric—the one that will be all about public goods, communal ownership, and things like that. I just do not think that the centrist parties, and certainly not the rightist parties in Europe, have any interest in taking on Silicon Valley as a political economic force. The only country where such debates are currently running at the other high level is Germany, and this is happening only because the German industry, German banks, German car manufacturers, and German media companies are extremely unhappy with the possibility that Silicon Valley might disrupt them. I'm not sure that I want to be part of that fight that their fighting.
To me, ultimately, Silicon Valley is not a cause but the effect of the underlying political and economic dynamic, which generates this pressure to privatize, this pressure to introduce the market logic to every domain of existence, to basically prevent alternative, nonmarket forms of social relation-and that logic is neoliberalism. And I'm afraid, that there is very little about the way in which Europe functions today-and here, Spain would probably not be a big exception, even though your recent municipal elections, and the possibility that parties like Podemos might actually gain a sizable presence in parliament – that suggests that things turn out differently.
El Mundo: Cyberspace newspapers are here to stay. Will journalism's highest values survive the change? How you see the future of journalism?
EM: Once again, to me talking about cyberspace makes very little sense, for we have a new generation of players, which make a lot of money from traffic. Again, this is all tied to their ability to basically identify the various vital trends that are happening on known platforms like Facebook or Google, early on, and then to commission the writers, or bloggers to write stories about those trends in almost real time. This guarantees, that there is always some traffic, there are always some visitors, with some eyeballs present on their site.
There have been some remarkable breakthroughs and some interesting journalism that has been generated with this kind of model. I can also see how this kind of moral can help subsidize some other deeper activities that are not tied to traffic-driven real-time commissioning of stories.
That said, again, we're talking about the logic of the market invading a domain, where it was previously possible to commission stories about unpopular but somewhat civically and publicly important subjects-and get away with it. Now, this seems no longer possible, for the sole reason that these newspapers can now monitor these figures – and expected to morning them – by the advertisers. Thus, it becomes impossible to argue why unpopular stories, regardless of how important they might be for public life or how important they might be for generating a public debate, will remain unpublished and underexplored.
This is where we have to think of supplemental public funding to media that is ready to push you deeper nonprofit stories. This, however, I feel, will not happen. In the meantime, we will end up perhaps being surrounded by more and more media that is visual, that is based around memes, that seems to have some transglobal aspects, if only because it's built on memes that go global. I don't think that this will result in our better understanding of the regions of the world - those things are still much better explained by experience and seasoned journalists in correspondence. Of course, even there, there are all sorts of issues with subjectivity, with hegemony of certain ideologies, with certain political biases of certain media and so force. All of this is true, it is just that Silicon Valley and digital capitalism as we have it today, does not really do anything to improve any of those things, even if they do offer a new model of journalism.
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