What do banality, conspiratorial thinking, and elites have in common?
These clippings show opening sentences of numerous articles from Financial Times. I guess that’s how they teach composition at Oxbridge.
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@evgenymorozov
What do banality, conspiratorial thinking, and elites have in common?
These clippings show opening sentences of numerous articles from Financial Times. I guess that’s how they teach composition at Oxbridge.
My FT oped on Apple and FBI
The original oped is here. Apple is right. Our smartphones must be kept secure Evgeny Morozov
To watch the confrontation between the US’s most valuable company and its top law enforcement agency is to find oneself in a state of nearly permanent cognitive dissonance.
Apparently, America’s government agencies are both omnipotent and helpless. Omnipotent because, as this week’s batch of surveillance revelations from WikiLeaks suggests, they have no problems intercepting highly secretive communications between their European allies. Helpless because, as the FBI’s bosses keep repeating, they need Apple’s co-operation in order to break into the iPhone of the shooter in the San Bernardino attacks.
It gets worse. On February 9, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, boasted in his Senate testimony that “in the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials.” Now we learn that such agencies cannot get into our smartphones . . . let alone our smart fridges.
Something in the government’s rhetoric does not add up. The FBI either has solid reasons to break into that phone — in which case it is not obvious why the mighty power of the National Security Agency and other government bodies has not yet been mobilised — or it is simply using the San Bernardino case as an excuse to redefine its relationship with Silicon Valley.
Asked by a judge about its willingness to enlist the help of all the federal agencies in a similar case from 2015, the government responded that “federal prosecutors don’t have an obligation to consult the intelligence community in order to investigate crime.”
And since very little is known about the true capabilities of America’s intelligence community, everyone involved in the current debate has to pretend that the world’s most powerful spying agency does not exist.
While the FBI’s defence has been that their request is extremely narrow — once Apple has facilitated access to that single phone, it is free to destroy the code required to do so — the broader political context in which this battle unfolds suggests that Apple’s stance will have far-reaching implications.
First, the FBI’s request comes at a time when the US government is exerting immense pressure on America’s largest technology companies to join it in the fight against Isis. Both the state department and the Department of Defense have recently expanded their presence in Silicon Valley.
While many such requests are straightforward — removing jihadist propaganda from YouTube or Twitter, for example — there are concerns that such pressure might extend to modifying their algorithms in order to hide certain types of content from easily susceptible users.Google knows what is in your inbox; why should it not modify your search results to make you less of a terrorist?
Second, it is hard to believe that the San Bernardino case will be an isolated episode. Not only are there several similar cases already pending in US courts but many prosecutors have already indicated they have their own backlog of phones to unlock.
Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance said recently that he would “absolutely ... want access to all those phones that are crucial in a criminal investigation.” Even if Apple chose to destroy the code it writes to help the FBI on this occasion, it would need to rewrite it for a new request. Should it keep this code forever, it would be holding on to a magic key to its devices — a highly prized asset for any hacker.
Given the publicity of the case, any terrorists would probably stop using Apple’s products anyway. The only people to suffer would be ordinary users, stuck with their iPhones and iPads.
Third, the FBI’s rationale in this case would make any other manufacturer of smart devices — including all those smart fridges and smart thermostats in your smart home — subject to similar requests.
If Apple can be forced to modify security protocols on its phone, what stops the FBI from asking the manufacturer of the smart smoke detector to trigger a fake smoke alarm? Or asking the manufacturer of the smart car to drive suspects directly to the police station?
All of this would seem neat so long as the government agencies were competent and nobody else could take advantage of such vulnerabilities. This is not so. The San Bernardino case — where the FBI had a chance to break into the phone but blew it by changing the suspect’s Apple password — suggests that the FBI’s technical competence does not yet match the NSA’s.
And it would be suicidal to force technology companies to weaken security at a time when institutions of all sorts are vulnerable to hackers demanding ransoms — earlier this month, a hospital in California paid the bitcoin equivalent of $17,000 to hackers who had breached its computer network.
Apple’s proposed solution is the right one: America needs a comprehensive political debate on the issue — one that would bypass inter-agency squabbling. Alas, given how little the current batch of presidential candidates seems to care, or even understand, these issues, this debate is not likely to happen.
The writer is the author of To Save Everything, Click Here
Interview with El Mundo
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!!!!
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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.
Full English text of my interview with Il Manifesto
I’ve given interview to Il Manifesto, which, in a somewhat abridged form, runs in today’s edition. Below is the full English text.
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Il Manifesto: In Your recent article and texts, You have written that Silicon Valley is a place to hate. A provocative point of view. Why we can hate the firms and the vision of social relations, production of wealth of Silicon Valley?
EM: The main reason why it’s okay to hate Silicon Valley is simple: because these guys have established themselves as some kind of untouchable, noble humanitarian enterprise while, in reality, they are probably a more rapacious and inhumane type of enterprise than Wall Street. My view on this has been quite consistent over the last three years: it's just very hard to make people start asking critical questions about technology companies in Silicon Valley. These companies have managed to discursively construct the field in such a manner that anybody who questions technology and their products is seen as attacking science or enlightenment or modernity itself. So, for example, any time that I attack Google or Facebook, the default assumption is that I must be this technophobe who lives in the forest and hates modern dentistry. Nobody would say anything of the kind if I was attacking, say, Wall Street or the oil companies.
A few years ago, Eric Schmidt of Google had something of a revelation; he said something very interesting. He said that Silicon Valley and startups and Google they all represent capitalism-and how can anybody be against capitalism today? I think that this honest moment of admission is actually very interesting and we have to take this very line of analysis suggested by Eric Schmidt. I think that it's actually very productive to think about Google that way. We have to understand Silicon Valley as a factor and as an actor that's emerging at a particular juncture of time in the history of neoliberalism, in the history of privatization, in the history of capitalism itself. It's only by using that logic that we would be able to help people understand that Google and Facebook, these millions of startups that have emerged in Silicon Valley are not just benevolent actors; they will also shape how we work, they will create new power relationship; they will make us even more dependent on corporations than before. This will result in complete financialization of everyday life – we are looking at a new, much subtler and thus more dangerous, Taylorism. I think that's actually the only avenue left for critics of technology: by showing and revealing the particular place that technology companies occupy in neoliberal capitalism as it exists today. And I'm not particularly optimistic about our ability to resist it.
Il Manifesto: For many people, Google is a devil because our data and personal informations became propriety of the firm of Larry Page and Sergej Brin. For other people, this is the price we pay for the use of search engine. What is Your pont of view?
EM: My view on this is it is very simple: what has happened is this giant privatization of telecom and other services, result being that we have never --- at least in Europe -- put enough thought into creating alternatives to these companies. Take a company like Google: you can clearly see that their entire business model revolves around data. Which means that the more data they can gather, the better for them would be. Okay, they started with email, but it's obvious that they will soon move into other domains: they will move into data about your car company, they will move into data about your health, they will move into data about your garbage can, they'll move into data about virtually anything. Soon, they will be able a lot of services for free. And I think you have to be prepared for a moment when they start offering what used to be public services for free as well.
Thus, I think we should do we prepared to see Google offering you some kind of free diagnostic healthcare in as long as you're willing to share your data with them. This is where things get really tricky. Since Europe never bothered (like, for example, Russia, China and some countries in Latin America) to think of what an alternative strategy for lessening its dependence on Silicon Valley would be, Europeans just have no alternative strategy. This is not just Europe's naivete about technology – it is mostly Europe's naïveté about America, and its inability to actually develop an alternative that does not presuppose being a backyard of the giant American Empire. So the only way to make sense, for example, off the TTIP – where one of its key provisions is a desire to promote the free flow of data – is by analyzing it at some kind of a nexus between geopolitics, imperialism, and technology. There is no way to understand it only as a technological a process, when clearly it is not.
Il Manifesto: The net is also a technology of control. It is used by state, police agency (Fbi, Nsa) to spy and to control citizen. But is used by firms to processing and sell personal and collective information. Nation state and firms have formed a military-digital complex. What do you think about it? Is a danger for democracy?
EM: What we have to realize that the National Security Agency and the US military intelligence complex are actually very happy with the role that Google and other technology companies are playing. If you read the newspapers in America you would think that there people are constantly at war with each other, with these brave technology guys always detesting the spies and the spies always complaining that technologists are hiding data because of encryption. In reality, the situation is much simpler. The deep state or what we used to call the military-industrial complex, they are actually quite happy with where things stand right now, because they understand that it's only by privatization of infrastructure and knowledge itself they can actually take full advantage of monopolists like Google, who are more than happy to centralize and collect all that knowledge in one place.
A lot of people don't understand how it works, but what ultimately Google is helping the NSA to organize quite a lot of data that would otherwise be in a state of entropy and it would take forever for agencies to be able to connect various services and various datasets to each other. In other words, imagine that if we didn't have one company – providing search, providing self-driving cars, providing email, providing smart thermostats like Nest -imagine that all of the services were actually provided in a fully competitive manner as the good neoliberals in America would like us to do. If that were the case, then of course the life of the NSA would be much harder. But of course, this is not how things are.
Which makes me think that we have to spend more time analyzing the relationship between the national security state, privatization, and monopolies. Ultimately all of those are connected to each other. If some of that infrastructure that we use for communication were in public hands, then you would actually be able to run it in a way that would make our communication perfectly secure, encrypted -- thus, again, making the life of the NSA much harder. But that's not how it is, in part because this infrastructure was privatized and we are relying on advertising as a way to pay for it, which means that it will never be. So privatization -- just like monopolies – is a very big factor in the growth of the national security state.
Il Manifesto: Is the privacy the new frontier of the business in the Net? The rich can to buy software to protect their privacy; the poor not. Thus, the privacy isn't a universal right, but a good to buy . What do you think?
The inner logic of contemporary high-tech neoliberal capitalism is to turn everything into a commodity. This is why I think that the traditional discourse around privacy-and this is a discourse that is very much rooted in legalistic discourse and is not grounded in the geopolitical and economic discourse-I don't find it particularly helpful. This is why I think even the Snowden revelations haven't really done much, in part because Snowden himself has been quite unwilling -- unlike, for example, Julian Assange -- to speak critically of capitalism and neoliberalism and imperialism. Which means that the aftermath of the Snowden debate has been this tame legalistic discussion on how we can legally tie the hands of the national security agency- as if everything that I've said about monopolies, geopolitics and about to privatization was not happening in the background.
For Snowden, it seems to me, it doesn't really matter who owns and operates and runs this communication infrastructure. Being a libertarian, he might actually like the fact that it’s most private companies rather than the government. These people, of course, have missed the movement what has been brewing in Europe around the idea the common as a sort of hybrid mode of ownership that goes beyond the private and the public. Thus, for them the only option is either the NSA on steroids, whereby everything will be owned by the government, or the Google on steroids, where everything will be only just the one giant monopolistic company. That things can actually be owned by the people doesn't really occur to most analysts of the subject in America.
So given this historical background, it's not really that surprising that our discussion about the surveillance has a hard time registering – let alone analyzing -- processes and phenomena like financialization and commodification. There are hundreds of startups in Berlin – some of them are nonprofit groups – who are trying to fight surveillance with cool apps. To me, fighting what I perceive to be the cutting edge of neoliberal capitalism with an app is probably as stupid as fighting the European Central Bank and austerity measures with an app; it requires a very different approach. It requires a political campaign, it requires a political force on the ground, it requires social movements and proper analytical and economic analysis of the forces that have produced the problem that you're trying to solve-in this case the problem of privacy.
Unfortunately, we in Europe, for the most part, have been completely caught up in this simplistic mindset, whereby we either opt for new legal solutions, or we encourage entrepreneurs to build apps that will deliver privacy. That will either involve a fee app will be so hard to use that essentially anybody who wants to use those apps will need to pay a fee to learn how to use them.
Il Manifesto: In Your book, You have written that the vision of net as a reign of freedom is a nightmare. How we can oppositive a this situation?
EM: Well to be honest, I never wrote that the net as freedom is a nightmare. What I have written about very critical in my book was what I call I Internet freedom. Internet freedom was a very specific geopolitical agenda ran out of Washington, ran out of the State Department, which aimed to promote regime change or at least some kind of neoliberal democratization and liberalization by means of social media. The people I wrote about in that book have eventually led the government and went to work for companies like Google for example. You can look at the career of a guy who was one of the central characters in one of the chapters of my book, Jared Cohen. H went on to actually be one of the founders, together with Eric Schmidt, of Google Ideas -- this political think=-tank that Google itself has built. In that sense, for me the debate was not really so much a debate about freedom -I would find it actually very hard to define what freedom in these fully privatized platforms actually means. For me, the debate was much more about the geopolitics of the Web and a geopolitics of all these digital technologies. And I have probably become much more radical in my own views, shifting quite significantly to the left since I wrote that book. But ultimately, I think many of my core arguments still hold.
Just an example: there is a tendency in the Western media to overstate the impact of this technologies on protest . There is a tendency to read all of these services coming out of Silicon Valley as essentially proving that capitalism works and delivers -- and if only we let this companies like Google and Facebook to act independently and remain unregulated long enough, they will bring democracy and freedom and development everywhere. Or they well install connectivity everywhere and turn everybody an entrepreneur – all those pitfalls in how we think about digital technologies are still with us; they haven’t disappeared since I wrote the book.
Il Manifesto: In a recent article and interview (New left Review) You have affirmed that the Big data can be expropiated by the state. A socialistic solution for the net. Is the new spectre of communism that to skate around the world?
EM: well, again when it comes to the question of data and who should own it, it does not have to be the state. What I said in my interview is that the state will need to pass certainly a legal regime for the data not to be treated as a commodity. Then, it's a matter of citizens to decide how exactly they would want that data to be run and administered – if there is a common, or for example as some kind of a state owned asset or infrastructure. I don't think that this is actually going to happen in Europe anytime soon. It might happen at the local level in certain European cities but only with particular kinds of data. For example, I can envision data about our movements in the city in public spaces to be somehow harnessed by the city in order to provide a better public transportation service rather than to just to give all the data to Uber.
Of course, there are limits to how much you can accomplish was just this particular type kinds of data. But on a national level, the program I'm proposing here would to diverge quite radically from the kind of neoliberal dogma that the Europe is currently subsisting on. This means that the only actors will be prepared to take this issue on will be probably governments in Latin America, where there is a strong commitment to opposing neoliberalism, and where state-led capitalism that we're seeing in Russia and China has not yet taken root. So, I don't think we will be seeing the specter of communism appearing anytime soon. I think that whatever leftist movements we have left in Europe, they would be far better off to actually take on Silicon Valley and the question of data and the question of infrastructure as extremely important. It should be as important to their strategizing as their activism against the European Central Bank. We do need the left that can grapple with the future of data-driven public (or neoliberal, which, I’m afraid, is more likely) services. And my fear is that unless something is done today, we will have the worst kind of privatization of services set on the terms of Silicon Valley – with dire consequences for our lives that we cannot even imagine, let alone stop.
My FT oped on the Safe Harbor fallout
The original is here.
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The decision by the European Court of Justice to invalidate the “safe harbour” agreement guiding flows of personal data between the EU and the US has angered many American companies and trade officials.
The companies will now face higher compliance costs, potentially having to make arrangements with individual member states. The trade officials can no longer downplay the privacy dimension in their ongoing negotiations with the European Commission (a successor to “safe harbour” was already in the works long before the ECJ ruling).
The technology industry will receive the heaviest blow from the decision, and for Silicon Valley this is yet another unpleasant surprise from the ECJ. US tech companies are still reeling from last year’s decision on the right to be forgotten. And just like they did last year, companies will comply — but not before unleashing a litany of complaints against Europe.
Many of those complaints rest on shaky ground. To single out European courts for destroying cloud computing, for example, would be a mistake, as US courts are also to blame. A legal case against Microsoft currently making its way through the US court system might force American companies to disclose information about their users regardless of where in the world that information is stored. Imagine the outcry in America if China or Russia did this.
US officials have already complained that the ECJ decision seems to be based on misguided, it not misinformed, reading of America’s surveillance laws. The irony is lost on them: before Edward Snowden’s revelations, the European public had no way to be misinformed — it was simply not informed. Why blame the European courts for America’s obsession with secrecy?
The ECJ ruling will not be liked by many European officials either. The court has refused to accept the one (and increasingly only) rationale advanced by commission officials about data — namely that it is of great utility in promoting trade and economic growth. In Brussels, the “free flow of data” has become the slogan du jour — much like the “free flow of goods and services” was a few decades earlier. But personal data, as the ECJ ruling reminds us, does not arise in a vacuum and there is always a human story behind it. Trading data, as we do olives or cars, seems inhumane.
Alas, Europe’s own record on surveillance is disappointing. One would be hard pressed to find the differences between core provisions of the new surveillance law in France — which includes the controversial practice of using algorithms to analyse metadata to identify potential suspects — and those at work in America. France’s high court has found this practice constitutional, even if some prior decisions from the ECJ would suggest such practices do go against European legislation.
In this instance, one can’t blame Americans for complaining about hypocrisy when Europe’s stance on surveillance is full of contradictions. Those contradictions will be exploited by Washington during negotiations for whatever agreement will succeed “safe harbour”. European privacy advocates should not rush to celebrate victory.
The long-term winners of the ECJ decision are to be found elsewhere. The efforts of countries insisting on regaining “technological sovereignty” from Silicon Valley and the National Security Agency — a group that extends from Bolivia to Russia and from China to Argentina — will get a boost from a high-profile European ally.
As long as such attempts lead to more secure and encrypted technological alternatives — providing some relief to those seeking to escape the global reach of American courts, spies and corporations — such efforts are to be celebrated, not condemned. It is a pity that European governments, unlike European courts, are unwilling to endorse them.
A dystopian welfare state funded by clicks
Here is the text of my oped that run in FT a few days ago. The original is here.
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It is the classic Silicon Valley playbook: offer free services so long as you can monetise your own benevolence. A deal struck between Google and the Sri Lankan government to cover the entire country with free WiFi is merely the latest example. In just a few months, the search giant has volunteered to provide fast internet to a scattering of American public housing projects and run free public WiFi for New Yorkers. Facebook is doing something similar, betting that connecting people via its internet.org initiative will eventually pay off via advertising.
This trade-off has become familiar to anyone who uses a search engine or a web-based email provider: a nominally free service in exchange for personal data. But these may just be the beginning. As Silicon Valley aggregates many other types of data related to health, education, transportation, energy, the range of such free services will expand dramatically. It is even possible to imagine that their scope might one day encompass so much as to become a de facto replacement for the welfare state.
Consider, for example, the healthcare business. In the past, its main job has been to cure disease, and in many parts of the world its efforts have been paid for by the government. That is about to change.
Our physical activity can now be constantly monitored by wearable sensors, holding out the promise that the focus of healthcare provision can shift from making people better to preventing them from becoming ill in the first place. Diseases will be detected by patients themselves, at a very early stage, and technology companies rather than governments will foot the bills. What was once a publicly funded safety net will become a private smorgasbord of free services.
Technology giants have already disrupted every industry they have touched. Now the disrupters are turning on social democracy itself.
Granted, the Silicon Valley model of welfare provision might seem strange. For one thing, it is volatile: funded by advertising, it might collapse any day.
And its services are often a mere shadow of the universalist ambitions inherent in a state school system, or a public broadcaster such as the BBC. It might say “free” on the cover, but look inside and there are hidden constraints. Internet.org gets you online and costs you nothing. But this “online” is limited only to a handful of apps — Facebook, of course, among them.
An inferior internet connection is better than none at all — this, at least, is how Silicon Valley justifies itself. The same would go, perhaps, for education and healthcare, too.
If companies can make a profit trading personal data for services that the state used to pay for out of taxes, it is perhaps tempting to let them. But where would it leave today’s political parties?
On past form, parties of the right and centre-right will lean towards the Silicon Valley option; the additional welfare it provides is a nice and unexpected bonus. The radical left will opt to lessen their dependence on internet entrepreneurs in much the same way that a previous generation of leftists fought ExxonMobil and United Fruit.
What of the parties of the centre left? They have most to lose, as an endorsement of the Silicon Valley’s welfare model would be a declaration of their own irrelevance. Broadly sympathetic to the idea of putting more of the economy in private hands, they can neither attack Silicon Valley nor offer better welfare. And they increasingly lack credibility. Germany’s Social Democrats, for instance, might not like the precarity of the “gig economy”. But is it really so different from their own “minijobs” labour reform from a decade ago?
The choice is unenviable. But if Silicon Valley takes on the welfare state at its own game, the champions of social democracy must either disrupt then, or be disrupted themselves.
The writer is the author of ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’
My oped in FT
The original version is here. I'm posting below solely for archival purposes
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Europe is wrong to take a sledgehammer to Big Google Evgeny Morozov
It is the continent’s favourite hobby, and even the European Parliament cannot resist: having a pop at the world’s biggest search engine. In a recent and largely symbolic vote, representatives urged that Google search should be separated from its other services — demanding, in essence, that the company be broken up.
This would benefit Google’s detractors but not, alas, European citizens. Search, like the social networking sector dominated by Facebook, appears to be a natural monopoly. The more Google knows about each query — who is making it, where and why — the more relevant its results become. A company that has organised, say, 90 per cent of the world’s information would naturally do better than a company holding just one-tenth of that information.
But search is only a part of Google’s sprawling portfolio. Smart thermostats and self-driving cars are information businesses, too. Both draw on Google’s bottomless reservoirs of data, sensors such as those embedded in hardware, and algorithms. All feed off each other.
Policy makers do not yet grasp the dilemma. To unbundle search from other Google services is to detach them from the context that improves their accuracy and relevance. But to let Google operate as a natural monopoly is to allow it to invade other domains.
Facebook presents a similar dilemma. If you want to build a service around your online persona — be it finding new music or sharing power tools with neighbours — its identity gateway comes in handy. Mapping our interests and social connections, Facebook is the custodian of our reputations and consumption profiles. It makes our digital identity available to other businesses and, when we interact with those businesses, Facebook itself learns even more.
Given that data about our behaviour might hold the key to solving problems from health to climate change, who should aggregate them? And should they be treated as a commodity and traded at all?
Imagine if such data could accrue to the citizens who actually generate them, in a way that favoured its communal use. So a community could visualise its precise travel needs and organise flexible and efficient bus services — never travelling too empty or too full — to rival innovative transport start-up Uber. Taxis ordered through Uber (in which Google is an investor) can now play songs passengers have previously “liked” on music-streaming service Spotify (Facebook is an ally), an indication of what becomes possible once our digital identity lies at the heart of service provision. But to leave these data in the hands of the Google- Facebook clan is to preclude others from finding better uses for it.
We need a data system that is radically decentralised and secure; no one should be able to obtain your data without permission, and no one but you should own it. Stripped of privacy-compromising identifiers, however, they should be pooled into a common resource. Any aspiring innovator or entrepreneur — not just Google and Facebook — should be able to gain access to that data pool to build their own app. This would bring an abundance of unanticipated features and services.
What Europe needs is not an Airbus to Google’s Boeing but thousands of nimble enterprises that operate on a level playing field with big American companies. This will not happen until we treat certain types of data as part of a common infrastructure, open to all. Imagine the outrage if a large company bought every copy of a particular book, leaving none for the libraries. Why would we accept such a deal with our data?
Basic searches — “Who wrote War and Peace?” — do not require Google’s sophistication and can be provided for free. Unable to hoard user data for advertising purposes, Google could still provide advanced search services, perhaps for a fee (not necessarily charged to citizens). The bill for finding books or articles related to the one you are reading could be picked up by universities, libraries or even your employer.
America will not abandon the current model of centralised, advertising-funded services; its surveillance state needs them. Russia and China have lessened their dependence on Google and Facebook, only to replace them with local equivalents.
Europe should know better. It has a modicum of respect for data protection. Its citizens are uneasy with the rapaciousness of Silicon Valley. But this is no reason to return to the not-so-distant past, when data were expensive and hard to aggregate. European politicians should take a longer term view. The problem with Google is not that it is too big but that it hoovers up data that does not belong to it.
The writer is the author of ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’
More on the Cybersyn essay
1. If you haven’t written for the New Yorker, you might not realize that the maneuver space for sourcing on its pages is somewhat limited. A handful of sources is probably all that you’ll manage to cram in – regardless of whether you have drawn on just two or two hundred. There are no footnotes. There are no end notes. In addition, there are also many invisible demands imposed by the narrative form of an essay for a popular magazine that are not present in academic writing. For example, the exact place where you, the author, decide to interrupt your piece and introduce the source matters – whether you do it in paragraph number three or paragraph number ten affects the overall flow and feel of the argument. My responsibility as an author is both to the readers AND to the sources that I draw upon. “Readability” is a much greater factor in this kind of popular writing than it is in academic prose.
2. As I’ve pointed out in my previous post, there were hundreds of Cybersyn-related resources that I’ve used in writing this piece. The only ones I cite are Medina’s book, Beer’s various essays, and a 1977 essay by Schwember, who was involved in the project. If I didn’t choose to be bound by New Yorker’s format, I’d have loved to cite all the sources that I’ve used. Once again: I do want people to know that I’m drawing upon hundreds of sources – including those found in Beer’s archives – but there’s no way to do it in this format. All I can do is to point to sources that have been most authoritative – and Medina’s book is the only historical study of Project Cybersyn referenced in the piece. You will also notice that none of the Beer quotes that appear in my essay feature in Medina's book: I read all his books and I quote directly from them when I'm summarizing his views.
3. As I’ve already noted, I draw on many other sources. Medina’s book is excellent on Project Cybersyn and cybernetics but she only briefly discusses Beer’s background in operations research and how it has shaped his views on automation. Thus, I’ve drawn on the work of Maurice W. Kirby – especially her book Operational Research in War and Peace: The British Experience from the 1930s to 1970. You will see that it’s not present in Medina’s bibliography. It does contain original research on Beer’s role with United Steel (based on interviews that the author conducted with Beer). I found Kirby’s work very useful – along with Beer’s own essays on Operations Research and much secondary literature about OR in that era (Jonathan Rosenhead’s work is also very good). Alas, I don’t have the luxury of mentioning Kirby’s book in the text of my essay – but I did mention it when submitting my sources to The New Yorker.
4. Likewise, the story of Project Cybersyn itself – from beginning to end – has been told by various members of its team. Somebody has uploaded the last six chapters of Beer’s book, Brain of the Firm, where he himself describes what happened; read that account and compare it with what I say in my piece. There are other accounts – from the Schwember essay that I cite to the many essays written by another member of the team, Raul Espejo. It's a pity that much of this work is not better known in the United States. I wish I could do my bit to popularize it -- hopefully, Project Cybersyn might be a good entry point. Obviously, there is a lot of very interesting factual detail in Medina’s book – there is no better introduction to the subject, which is why this is the only history source that I credit – but it’s not true that it’s the most definitive or expansive source on all things Beer.
5. But there’s also plenty of factual detail in my piece that comes from the archives – or other sources. I wish I had indicated the extent of my own contribution to the piece but again, it's not so easy given various narrative demands.
The detail about the Fibonacci series in Beer's windows? Comes from a long ad the Beer family prepared for their house
The letter to Mugabe? Comes from a letter, found in the archives and not mentioned by Medina
The design of the armrest in the chairs? Comes from many different documents in the archives
The kinds of people Beer hired while he worked at United Steel? It comes from an ad -- found in the archives - that Beer's unit placed in the media
I sent dozens of such pictures -- along with many essays, page scans, books - to fact-checkers at The New Yorker. If you think that the fact-checking process there is a piece of cake, you are mistaken: they call up primary sources on the phone, they email them, they verify every detail.
6. Consider another question I got from an irked reader, namely that I don’t trace the fact that I found the Beer-Eno connection in a 2010 book by Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain. Leaving aside the fact that I cannot cite every source that I’ve used in the New Yorker format, the reason why I did not cite Pickering is because I found the Beer-Eno connection elsewhere: it appears, among many other sources, in a 1995 book on Eno by Eric Tamm. Moreover, it just happens that I’m a big fan of Eno; I’ve read many of his essays; I’ve met him several times and have exchanged many letters with him; and I’ve also been looking into the influence of cybernetics on the arts. I’ve known of the Beer-Eno connection long before I started working on this piece. But, if you don’t know of Tamm, then, of course, the default assumption would be that I found it in Pickering (who does not cite Tamm). The reality, of course, is that I don’t have the luxury to cite either Pickering OR Tamm in a piece of popular writing.
7. Such are the demands of writing for the general audience about complex subjects without being able to use footnotes (which, in the case of this piece, would feature in the hundreds). The New Yorker, I think, solves this problem in an elegant manner. They task the author with documenting every claim, they fact-check them, and they also see to it that attribution is done fairly. Granted, it does not match the level of scrutiny one gets in academic literature and peer review. But by trusting that the author knows best what sources he or she has drawn on and by having a fact-checker go through the entire text – and we have gone through every single sentence in that piece – the magazine can still produce materials of very high quality. Academia and media are two very different epistemic communities, they live by very different citation norms, they handle questions of expertise differently, and they go about creating, enforcing, and adjudicating their own truth regimes differently. They also produce very different products and appeal to very different audiences.
Some notes on my cybernetic socialism essay
I'm lucky enough to occasionally contribute to the New Yorker, where I've published three essays so far – all in their "A Critic at Large" section. It's an interesting and challenging slot. I suspect, though, most people don't know what writing such a piece entails.
The objective is to start with a bunch of books, preferably recent ones, and write a full-fledged essay that can stand on its own. The essay will probably advance an argument that goes far beyond the books under review; the trick is to find something in common between them and comment on some aspect of – as they used to say in the business – the contemporary condition. So, there's quite a bit of creativity involved.
With my piece on makers, for example, I had a good idea about the shape and direction of my argument even before I started writing, so my background readings for the piece – in addition to the books under review which I had read before – were very targeted. With my very first essay for the magazine, on the other hand, I was much less certain at the outset: I was asked to do a piece about some recent Internet books* and, having read A LOT of those, I chose boredom as a unifying theme – a decision that subsequently added a few dozen more books about boredom to my reading list.
This is how such pieces usually work: you start with a basic argument and choose your first set of readings. Then, hopefully, you arrive at some questions and temporary conclusions, which help you to further refine the argument. Then you move to a second round of readings – and so it goes, seemingly ad infinitum, until you hear from your editor-savior, reminding you that, perhaps, it's time to wrap it all up and get your life (or whatever is left of it) back.
The boredom essay took me about four months to complete; the one on makers about three months. The good thing about writing such essays – you have probably guessed it by now – is that they give you an excuse to read the books, academic papers, articles, and much else that that you would not have read otherwise. The bad thing – but I am not complaining here – is that 99% of everything you read never makes into the piece, remaining on the proverbial cutting room floor. And, since there are no footnotes in the New Yorker, there's no way to actually indicate how much work you've put in. (Let me assure you: if you have neither a full time job nor a definitive subject for your essay, you'll probably end up reading A LOT OF books. I actually haven't published any other book reviews while working on my latest – there's simply no time or space in my head for it. Needless to say, writing such essays makes zero financial sense – it's a calling of sorts).
My most recent piece, juxtaposing cybernetics and Big Data by means of Chile's Project Cybersyn, was surely one of the most challenging pieces of writing I've ever done. All in all, that essay took about six months to complete, even though there were periods when I had to put it away, come up with new questions, revise, rewrite, and do many other things in between **.
The challenges were many. First of all, as I already mentioned, the format of the slot presupposes some relevance for the here and now: I could not just write an essay full of historical detail and just leave it there, hoping that readers would themselves draw connections between Chile in the 1970s and Silicon Valley of today. Second, it's a rather obscure topic, even for New Yorker's sophisticated audience: cybernetics is a rather dense subject in itself but management cybernetics even more so (remember: I'm working with 4000 or so words – and I've also got to leave some space to cover contemporary developments).
For example, to understand the thought of Stafford Beer – the founder of management cybernetics – one also needs to grapple with Ross Ashby and his law of requisite variety, as it informs much of Beer's thinking about organizational complexity. However, we figured it would be too much to have both of them in one piece. Likewise, to introduce Beer's Viable Systems Model – the central organizing theme of his management cybernetics – would be to risk losing half of our readers along the way. These are the kind of editorial trade-offs one has to make when writing for the general audience.
In a sense, I was lucky because there's an excellent – and yes, entertaining – history of Project Cybersyn. It's Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina. It came out in 2011, so it's not particularly “recent” to fit into the New Yorker's slot. But we found a way. This was not my first entry point into Beer though. I had already read some of his books, essays, and interviews, as I've also been studying other like-minded cyberneticians – specifically, his older colleague Heinz von Foerster and one of his close early collaborators Gordon Pask (I also namechecked Pask in my boredom essay – a fascinating and unduly forgotten thinker). I've also done a bit of work on the history of cybernetics so I didn't have to waste time on establishing the basics.
So what does it take to write a piece like this? Well, sure, you start with the best and most concise historical material you can find – so I naturally started with Medina's book. That, however, is just the beginning. Then I moved on to this pile of books by Stafford Beer
Just how obscure are those books? Well, try searching for the top two on Amazon.com – you won't find much and you won't find copies of them in any US library either, at least not if WorldCat is to be believed. (I have PDF copies of Beer's “How Many Grapes Went Into The Wine” and “The Heart of Enterprise”– so, alas, they are not in the photo). Are these books dense? Here's a typical diagram, which appears in Beer's first book, Cybernetics and Management. Good luck making sense of it!
Then I moved on to read (or at least skim through) all the published and some unpublished papers by Stafford Beer. It's a very long list (see here for a taste of it). Many of these pieces – like Beer's “Prospects of the Cybernetic Age” essay from a 1969 edited collection “Survey of Cybernetics” – contain some fascinating material that cannot be found elsewhere (in his contribution to that collection, Beer writes of the need to do more research in “automated epistemology” – a fascinating idea that, alas, he does not develop further in his subsequent work.)
Done with Beer's primary materials, I moved on to books written by his closest colleagues and collaborators: Ashby, George, and Pask. Most of those I've already read, but it was fun to re-read them anyway.
At this point, I found that it would be counterproductive to pursue just one line of argument so I pushed in many directions at once. Should I, for example, make a broader argument about cybernetics and socialism – and also look at other countries? Good idea – it pushed me to read the book below (among many others)– but alas not much came out of it as far as my essay was concerned:
I also started looking at the reception of Beer's ideas: debates, reviews, and what not. A very interesting critique of Beer – for some reason, not mentioned by Medina – is an 1981 article by Hans Ulrich, “A Critique of Pure Cybernetic Reason.” But there was much more – not just in cybernetics, but also in systems theory and operations research, where Beer's ideas elicited mixed responses. Interestingly, aside from the media scholars that Medina quotes in her book, there was also a prominent economist, George Hodgson who, in the early 1980s, related Beer's work to ongoing efforts in America and Europe to promote democratic economic planning. It's in this book:
Or take this fascinating essay from the 1960s, which draws on the ideas of Beer and Pask, to make a case for cybernetic anarchism!
Let me give you a hint of what informs most sentences in the essay. There's one line in my piece about East Germany: it's actually a condensed summary of this one book below. Had I 40,000 words and not 4000, that book would be namechecked and I would dedicate a paragraph to it. Alas, all I could do is to summarize it in a line – anonymously.
There are many lines like this. The paragraph on Hayek and Beer? Well, that required A LOT of background reading in the socialist calculation debate – I even had to suffer through two books on cybernetics and economics by Oskar Lange (not to mention Hayek's intellectual biography by Bruce Caldwell and decades – decades! – of research on socialist calculation; finally, this tweet of mine makes sense!). Yes, all that's left of (weeks) of that research are just a couple of sentences but I am not complaining! I still think there's a much longer essay to be written about Big Data/the Internet of Things and the Hayek/Mises-Lange debate (there's an interesting new book on this I can recommend).
The Hayek-Beer connection is itself very interesting: I was aware that they knew each other as, while researching something about Gordon Pask back in 2012, I found this conference photo, where you can see both of them.
Then I stumbled upon Hayek's name while going through Beer's diary of his visit to the US. Given Hayek's own work in Chile – in a direction that was the opposite of Beer's – I found it a most interesting historical episode (not to mention the fact that Hayek, especially later in his life, thought of himself as something of a cybernetic theorist as well).
Speaking of Chile: I did read a lot of background material on Allende's era, starting from the usual suspects like the Allende Reader or his conversation with Debray to Peter Winn's work on Chilean history and Zimbalist's early work on worker participation under Allende. Silva's book on Chilean technocracy was also very useful: alas, after many rounds of editing, it became just a line or two about CORFO – and we didn't end up citing the book at all.
Not to bore you with how I spent all of those six months – let's just say there were many more books and paper – but eventually, I ended up in Beer's archives in Liverpool:
It was a good idea to go there. I spent a few weeks after that visit going through what must be thousands of pictures that I had taken there. And I also had a chance to interview Fernando Flores in Berkeley and Brian Eno in London. I also corresponded with several of Beer's colleagues and friends. I don't think there are many papers on Cybersyn – in English, French, Italian, German or Spanish – that I haven't skimmed through while working on this piece. There are a few of Beer's unpublished papers that are not in his archive – I'd really want to see his unpublished essay on cybernetics and Marxism, for example – but I couldn't access those.
This is just the Cybersyn element of the piece – researching the contemporary aspects of the Big Data craze required its own set of readings (that said, the Walmart reference: you'll get much more of it – and of the entire essay – if you've ever read Fredric Jameson on Walmart!)
So imagine you are sitting on a body of research that big, you cannot use footnotes, and you have to write a 4000-word essay for the general audience, where you are not really allowed to throw around names likes Ross Ashby or Oskar Lange every time you need them. It's a fun and challenging task, to say the least.
To the question that has been raised, on Twitter and elsewhere – why don't I give more credit to Medina's work in the essay? – I can respond as follows. Essentially, it's a combination of two factors
a) I don't have the luxury of either footnotes or 20,000 words to repeat what is already obvious: my essay runs in the back of the magazine, where they publish book reviews, in a section, A Critic at Large, that normally reviews books (yes, they review them in their very unique essay format but still). This fact might not be obvious to people who just found my essay online and didn't understand where it actually runs. But it's a book review essay and I do mention the book under review. Were I to start sourcing all claims in the book, we would end up with footnotes – an idea I wouldn't be against but then it wouldn't be a New Yorker piece.
b) It's probably not obvious to people who haven't read Medina's book AND all the materials that I've read but: I'm not actually drawing on her book when I'm summarizing quite a few things in my piece. When I summarize Beer's approach, for example, I draw on all those Beer books and essays that I've read. When I describe the Operations Room, I partly draw on the actual design brochure of the room – it can be found in the archives – and on Beer's own description of it in the second edition of The Brain of the Firm and also on his later essay, “National government: disseminated regulation in real time, or 'How to run a country',” which is not even referenced in Medina's book (not to mention many other weird materials that I used, like this dissertation, published in German, about the design of Cybersyn; yes it also quotes Medina – but also features lots of original research). When I write of cybernetics, I draw on five shelves of cybernetics books that I have at home. And there's plenty of anecdotal material in the piece – from details like the Fibonacci series in his window mosaic to his letter to Mugabe – that actually come straight from the archives and are not to be found in Medina's book. Again, I'd be all for sourcing every claim – that way, I'd get a lot of credit for the six months of very hard work – but it's not really an option in The New Yorker.
Having said all this, I can easily acknowledge that Medina's book is terrific and she did a tremendous amount of research on it – including interviews in Chile – and you should all go read it. It was very useful in writing this piece – and there's probably a reason why this is the ONLY book on Beer and management cybernetics (of many more that I've drawn upon) that I cite in the piece.
Am I absolutely happy with Medina's book? No. In fact, I even have some minor quibbles with it. I don't think the book does a good job explaining Beer's fascination with epistemology – which can be easily attributed to the influence of his mentor Warren McCulloch – nor shows how it has informed his thinking about the limits of automation. I would have also preferred to hear more about Beer's views on participation: there's a good case to be made that he was a radical democrat at heart – and a similar skepticism about established forms of authority – of political, technological, and epistemic varieties – goes through many of this projects (from his early experiments in chemical computing with Pask to his critique of organized polls and surveys – see his correspondence with Stuart Umpleby in his digitized archives, for example). But, as much as I admire my own opinions, I'm also sure that, on this particular issue, very few readers of The New Yorker actually want to know them. So yes, I could have written a proper book review – but then again it wouldn't work for The New Yorker.
* It's a bit more complicated actually with that boredom assignment - I should have phrased it more precisely. I was initially asked to review a book I had already promised somewhere else. Then I proposed several other books as fodder for this piece. Eventually, a theme - information overload - had crystallized. Soon, it morphed into boredom. Perhaps, I was too bored with the books at hand.
** This is a peak into the writing process. It's not a lit review of everything I've read for this essay. That would take many more pages.
My FT oped on what Europe should do about Google
UPDATE: FT has asked me to link to the original text on their site instead so go there
My FT oped on privacy, subjectivity and Facebook
It's here -- and below
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Facebook invades your personality, not your privacy
By Evgeny Morozov
Facebook’s quarterly earnings, released last month, have surpassed most market expectations, sending its stock price to an all-time high. They have also confirmed the company’s Teflon credentials: no public criticism ever seems to stick.
Wall Street has already forgiven Facebook’s experiment on its users, in which some had more negative posts removed from their feeds while another group had more positive ones removed. This revealed that those exposed to positive posts feel happier and write more positive posts as a result. This, in turn, results in more clicks, which result in more advertising revenue.
Troubling ethics notwithstanding, the experiment has revealed a deeper shift in Facebook’s business model: the company can make money even when it deigns to allow its users a modicum of privacy. It no longer needs to celebrate ubiquitous sharing – only ubiquitous clicking.
At the earnings call, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company now aims to create “private spaces for people to share things and have interactions that they couldn’t have had elsewhere”. So Facebook has recently allowed users to see how they are being tracked, and even to fine tune such tracking in order to receive only those adverts they feel are relevant. The company, once a cheerleader for sharing, has even launched a nifty tool warning users against “oversharing”.
As usual with Facebook, this is not the whole story. For one, it has begun tracking users’ browsing history to identify their interests better. Its latest mobile app can identify songs and films playing nearby, nudging users to write about them. It has acquired the Moves app, which does something similar with physical activity, using sensors to recognise whether users are walking, driving or cycling.
Still, if Facebook is so quick to embrace – and profit from – the language of privacy, should privacy advocates not fear they are the latest group to be “disrupted”? Yes, they should: as Facebook’s modus operandi mutates, their vocabulary ceases to match the magnitude of the task at hand. Fortunately, the “happiness” experiment also shows us where the true dangers lie.
For example, many commentators have attacked Facebook’s experiment for making some users feel sadder; yet the company’s happiness fetish is just as troubling. Facebook’s “obligation to be happy” is the converse of the “right to be forgotten” that Google was accused of trampling over. Both rely on filters. But, while Google has begun to hide negative results because it has been told to do so by European authorities, Facebook hides negative results because it is good for business. Yet since unhappy people make the best dissidents in most dystopian novels, should we not also be concerned with all those happy, all too happy, users?
The happiness experiment confirms that Facebook does not hesitate to tinker with its algorithms if it suits its business or social agenda. Consider how on May 1 2012 it altered its settings to allow users to express their organ donor status, complete with a link to their state’s donor registry. A later study found this led to more than 13,000 registrations on the first day of the initiative alone. Whatever the public benefits, discoveries of this kind could clearly be useful both for companies and politicians. Alas, few nudging initiatives are as ethically unambiguous as organ donation.
The reason to fear Facebook and its ilk is not that they violate our privacy. It is that they define the parameters of the grey and mostly invisible technological infrastructure that shapes our identity. They do not yet have the power to make us happy or sad but they will readily make us happier or sadder if it helps their earnings.
The privacy debate, incapacitated by misplaced pragmatism, defines privacy as individual control over information flows. This treats users as if they exist in a world free of data-hungry insurance companies, banks, advertisers or government nudgers. Can we continue feigning such innocence?
A robust privacy debate should ask who needs our data and why, while proposing institutional arrangements for resisting the path offered by Silicon Valley. Instead of bickering over interpretations of Facebook’s privacy policy as if it were the US constitution, why not ask how our sense of who we are is shaped by algorithms, databases and apps, which extend political, commercial and state efforts to make us – as the dystopian Radiohead song has it – “fitter, happier, more productive”?
This question stands outside the privacy debate, which, in the hands of legal academics, is disconnected from broader political and economic issues. The intellectual ping pong over privacy between corporate counsels and legal academics moonlighting as radicals always avoids the most basic question: why build the “private spaces” celebrated by Mr Zuckerberg if our freedom to behave there as we wish – and not as companies or states nudge us to – is so limited?
The writer is the author of ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’
my oped in tomorrow's FT
Silicon Valley is turning our lives into an asset class
By Evgeny Morozov
Tech titans with better data and engineers will disrupt Wall Street, writes Evgeny Morozov
In the past few decades, Wall Street has made finance a central feature of both the global economy and of our everyday lives – a process often described as “financialisation”. Silicon Valley, almost contemporaneously, has done the same for digital media technologies. That process, too, has a fancy name: “mediatisation”.
With reports that Facebook is seeking to buy a drone-manufacturing company, ostensibly to connect the most remote corners of the globe, the days of blessed disconnection seem firmly behind us.
Understandably, many social critics find this troublesome, blaming technology for invading our lives. But it is a false target: mediatisation is actually financialisation in disguise. Having disrupted Madison Avenue, the likes of Google and Facebook – armed with better data, better engineers and better databases – will disrupt Wall Street next.
Silicon Valley companies sit on a trove of data about our most banal daily pursuits. And the kind of data that they gather will only grow more diverse, as the Faustian bargain that we first accepted in our browsers – letting strangers monitor what we do online in exchange for nominally free services – will be accepted in many other domains, especially as the rise of the “internet of things” makes daily interaction with sensors, screens and other data-capturing devices unavoidable.
There is much to like here. A fridge that not only knows that you are running out of milk but can do something about it sounds empowering. Yet in the longer term there is a more consequential side: sensors and internet connectivity are also turning “dumb” gadgets into powerful vehicles of prediction and speculation. The data they capture can be integrated with data from other gadgets and databases to create new information commodities whose value might eclipse the value of the gadgets used to generate the underlying data. Soon, the devices might even be given away for free.
Consider your toothbrush. Armed with a sensor that knows when you are using it, it can detect behaviour patterns – how often you use it (or not use, as the case might be) – that help determine when you should see the dentist. That prediction would be more accurate if some other sensor-equipped gadget – say, a smart fork – knew how much sugar you consumed. The more data-tracking devices are hooked to the network, the more accurate the predictions.
Needless to say, there is always someone eager to pay for this – and ubiquitous connectivity will also mean ubiquitous and instantaneous data markets. Perhaps there would even be several bidders for such data so that an ad hoc online auction, along the lines Google uses to sell its adverts, is called for.
If Amazon can already study your history, predict your purchases and ship them before you even place an order – the online retailer’s “anticipatory shipping” technique – imagine what predictions other data-heavy companies could make.
For example, in a year or two, Google will be present in your car (thanks to its self-driving vehicles but also to the Android operating system that powers other models); in your bedroom (thanks to its acquisition of Nest, which manufactures smart thermostats and smoke detectors); in your pocket (through Android-powered smartphones); and in your entire visual field (via Google Glass, the wearable camera and screen).
In knowing your routes, your daily patterns and your contacts, Google has a far better picture of risk – for example, the odds that you will have an accident or default on a mortgage – than any insurance company or bank. And, in having unmediated access to you via your phone, Google can also sell you insurance or make you an offer for your personal data on the go, using a price point that you are most likely to accept.
That the financial value of your personal data is unstable, fluctuating based on your location, health and social status, means the spirit of speculation will not just invade our everyday life but will also make self-surveillance of our “data portfolios” highly appealing. We will resemble the confused analysts of the US National Security Agency: unsure of the future value of the data we generate, we will opt to store them for posterity. And, unsure of how to maximise that value, we will keep adding data streams in the vain hope that the value of our data portfolio (the sum total of our life) will rise.
The hope that such precarious data entrepreneurship can mitigate the problems of automation or ease our growing reliance on debt is the utopian conceit of the digital elites. Just because the World Economic Forum argues that personal data are emerging as a new asset class, that does not make it a natural or irreversible development. Nor is this development driven solely by technological innovation: like financialisation, mediatisation is primarily a failure of regulation.
Silicon Valley might, indeed, succeed in disrupting Wall Street. Alas, it has shown no real interest in disrupting its long-term agenda of making our lives tick in sync with the speculative logic of finance.
The writer is the author of ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’
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original is here
My FT oped: "The Snowden saga heralds a radical shift in capitalism"
The Snowden saga heralds a radical shift in capitalism
By Evgeny Morozov
The benefits of personal data to consumers are obvious; the costs are not, writes Evgeny Morozov
Following his revelations this year about Washington’s spying excesses, Edward Snowden now faces a growing wave of surveillance fatigue among the public – and the reason is that the National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower has revealed too many uncomfortable truths about how today’s world works.
Technical infrastructure and geopolitical power; rampant consumerism and ubiquitous surveillance; the lofty rhetoric of “internet freedom” and the sober reality of the ever-increasing internet control – all these are interconnected in ways most of us would rather not acknowledge or think about. Instead, we have focused on just one element in this long chain – state spying – but have mostly ignored all others.
But the spying debate has quickly turned narrow and unbearably technical; issues such as the soundness of US foreign policy, the ambivalent future of digital capitalism, the relocation of power from Washington and Brussels to Silicon Valley have not received due attention. But it is not just the NSA that is broken: the way we do – and pay for – our communicating today is broken as well. And it is broken for political and economic reasons, not just legal and technological ones: too many governments, strapped for cash and low on infrastructural imagination, have surrendered their communications networks to technology companies a tad too soon.
Mr Snowden created an opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the US’s surveillance addiction were met with a rather lacklustre, one-dimensional response. Much of this overheated rhetoric – tinged with anti-Americanism and channelled into unproductive forms of reform – has been useless. Many foreign leaders still cling to the fantasy that, if only the US would promise them a no-spy agreement, or at least stop monitoring their gadgets, the perversions revealed by Mr Snowden would disappear.
Here the politicians are making the same mistake as Mr Snowden himself, who, in his rare but thoughtful public remarks, attributes those misdeeds to the over-reach of the intelligence agencies. Ironically, even he might not be fully aware of what he has uncovered. These are not isolated instances of power abuse that can be corrected by updating laws, introducing tighter checks on spying, building more privacy tools, or making state demands to tech companies more transparent.
Of course, all those things must be done: they are the low-hanging policy fruit that we know how to reach and harvest. At the very least, such measures can create the impression that something is being done. But what good are these steps to counter the much more disturbing trend whereby our personal information – rather than money – becomes the chief way in which we pay for services – and soon, perhaps, everyday objects – that we use?
No laws and tools will protect citizens who, inspired by the empowerment fairy tales of Silicon Valley, are rushing to become data entrepreneurs, always on the lookout for new, quicker, more profitable ways to monetise their own data – be it information about their shopping or copies of their genome. These citizens want tools for disclosing their data, not guarding it. Now that every piece of data, no matter how trivial, is also an asset in disguise, they just need to find the right buyer. Or the buyer might find them, offering to create a convenient service paid for by their data – which seems to be Google’s model with Gmail, its email service.
What eludes Mr Snowden – along with most of his detractors and supporters – is that we might be living through a transformation in how capitalism works, with personal data emerging as an alternative payment regime. The benefits to consumers are already obvious; the potential costs to citizens are not. As markets in personal information proliferate, so do the externalities – with democracy the main victim.
This ongoing transition from money to data is unlikely to weaken the clout of the NSA; on the contrary, it might create more and stronger intermediaries that can indulge its data obsession. So to remain relevant and have some political teeth, the surveillance debate must be linked to debates about capitalism – or risk obscurity in the highly legalistic ghetto of the privacy debate.
Other overlooked dimensions are as crucial. Should we not be more critical of the rationale, advanced by the NSA and other agencies, that they need this data to engage in pre-emptive problem-solving? We should not allow the falling costs of pre-emption to crowd out more systemic attempts to pinpoint the origins of the problems that we are trying to solve. Just because US intelligence agencies hope to one day rank all Yemeni kids based on their propensity to blow up aircraft does not obviate the need to address the sources of their discontent – one of which might be the excessive use of drones to target their fathers.
Unfortunately, these issues are not on today’s agenda, in part because many of us have bought into the simplistic narrative – convenient to both Washington and Silicon Valley – that we just need more laws, more tools, more transparency. What Mr Snowden has revealed is the new tension at the very foundations of modern-day capitalism and democratic life. A bit more imagination is needed to resolve it.
The writer is author of ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’
The ‘sharing economy’ undermines workers’ rights - my FT oped
The “sharing economy” has many fans but Eric Schneiderman, New York State’s attorney-general, is not one of them. He has demanded that Airbnb, a company that allows anyone to rent their property to strangers, hand over records of its 15,000 hosts in New York City to verify that they pay taxes levied on hotels. But the company, a pioneer of the sharing economy, is fighting the order.
Why fear the sharing economy? Why not let people share apartments, cars, drills and washing machines and make some money on the side? Won’t this promote efficiency, create markets and help with problems such as congestion? It might. But as we celebrate the disruption of old industries, we also must inquire into the structural effects of the sharing economy on equality and basic working conditions.
To some, this might seem an odd concern. Has not the sharing economy already helped the middle classes in despair, the unemployed and the uninsured, those on the brink of bankruptcy? Start-ups such as Airbnb flaunt their credentials as latter-day Franklin Roosevelts, highlighting users whose livelihoods were transformed by the service.
But notice how Silicon Valley moguls disrupt with one hand – only to comfort with another. Lost your job as Amazon forced your local bookstore to close? Do not worry: you can rent out your apartment via Airbnb. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, wins either way: he is an investor in Airbnb.
The advocates of the sharing economy invite us to imagine it as a feel-good utopia that, while fully compliant with market logic, is driven by the altruistic spirit of Wikipedia and open-source software. Such parallels are tricky, as many contributors to open-source projects have full-time jobs at for-profit software companies that subsidise their extracurricular activities.
And how altruistic is all this sharing? Is it true that we no longer value profits over human relationships, that we do not pay taxi drivers for getting us from point A to point B but rather “make a donation” to fellow citizens concerned with reducing carbon emissions, that we rent out rooms in our apartments not to make ends meet but to meet new people? “It’s like the UN at every kitchen table,” Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s chief executive, said of the social benefits of his company. “I think we’re in the midst of a revolution,” he hastened to add. Workers of the world, turn on your smartphones!
But for all their rhetoric, many of these start-ups pursue rather un-revolutionary agendas. They are not interested in reorienting the global economy towards a better quality of life – as proposed by Robert and Edward Skidelsky – or human flourishing – as proposed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.
When SF Weekly, a San Francisco newspaper, asked an executive at Uber, an upmarket taxi app, about a protest by Uber drivers concerned by recent firings, he responded that a “driver contracting with Uber is not a bona fide employee” so that “firing, in this case, amounts to deactivating a driver’s account because he’s received low ratings from passengers.” At TaskRabbit, a company that connects those who need their errands run with those who need the money to run them, the “task rabbits” cannot easily communicate with each other. Who knows what trouble they could cause on discovering the subversive Wikipedia page about trade unions?
Or take Airbnb’s resident cosmopolitan, Mr Chesky. Asked how the sharing economy would treat people who “don’t want to be brands”, he did not mince words. “Some people will choose to be anonymous their whole life. That’s OK. But if you don’t opt into this online identity, you’ll have less access to services. The rest of us build a history. We build a brand online.” The power model behind the sharing economy is more Michel Foucault than Joseph Stalin: no one forces you to be part of it – but you may have little choice anyway.
A new UN, indeed: the erosion of full-time employment, the disappearance of healthcare and insurance benefits, the assault on unions and the transformation of workers into always-on self-employed entrepreneurs who must think like brands. The sharing economy amplifies the worst excesses of the dominant economic model: it is neoliberalism on steroids.
Last August, companies including TaskRabbit and Airbnb launched Peers.org – a “grassroots organisation that supports the sharing economy movement”. Ordinary citizens are invited to sign a pledge stating that they “believe the sharing economy should be the biggest economic movement of the 21st century – by building an economy that benefits everyone”.
How exactly one builds an “economy that benefits everyone” was not explained. But Peers.org promised they would not be hiring any lobbyists. And they do not have to: as long as the sharing economy is seen as a logical extension of app-enabled humanitarianism, lobbyists won’t be needed at all – the utopian rhetoric alone will suffice.
The writer is author of ‘To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism’
Review of "Smarter Than You Think"
I've got a short review of Clive Thompson's "Smarter Than You Think" in The Times (of London). Below is full version (it lost a phrase or two after the edit):
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If you doubt the wonders of smart technology, look no further than your inbox. Chances are you are probably sending fewer “forgot-the-attachment” emails than you did five years ago. All it took was for popular email services like Gmail to introduce an extra prompt – “Did you forget to attach a file?” – that pops up every time you type the word “attachment” but click “send” without actually attaching anything. How could one deny progress?
There's something to the idea that technology companies could solve the very problems they've created while enabling us to build richer social connections. If the choice is between “dumb email” of the yesteryear and “smart email” of today, we should probably go with the latter and hope, perhaps naively, that we would never have to choose between “dumb glasses” – that know nothing and say nothing – and “smart glasses” that never tire of nudging us to resist that smoothie.
In “Smarter Than You Think,” Clive Thompson, a prolific US-based technology journalist, explores dozens of latest technologies, from all-remembering wearable cameras to all-manufacturing 3D printers, to argue that they are already changing how we act, think and live. Forget the gloomy prophecies of digital naysayers: on balance, everything is getting better.
Thompson's case is not exactly original. Thanks to small and ubiquitous sensors – present in smartphones but also in simple household appliances – we can collect ever more data. Thanks to cheaper storage devices, we can save and access it in new ways. Thanks to new platforms for sharing, visualizing and discussing this data, we can find and create new connections – between users, ideas, causes – and unleash new waves of innovation (yes, most of the innovation so far is in the sloganeering field but we are only at the early stages!). Condensed to a tweet – Thompson, keen to promote new cognitive formats, would approve– the book's message is: “Don't worry – be appy!”
Published just a few months after Edward Snowden took on the National Security Agency, “Smarter Than You Think” reads, well, odder than you think. Even if one grants that Thompson's picture of the contemporary intellectual renaissance is accurate – if so, museums of the future will have entire galleries dedicated to funny pictures of cats – what exactly are its real costs? A few decades ago, we, somewhat belatedly, realized that, for all the economic benefits of globalization, humanity may not live long enough to enjoy them – not if we don't take the costs of climate change into account.
Arguably, we are reaching a similar realization with regards to information; there are vast hidden costs to all the wonderful trends described in this book and Thompson doesn't broach them. Information might be the oxygen of modern democracies but it doesn't necessarily follow that more information equals more democracy. It's not just privacy and the spooks but also a new generation of digital technocrats, who, confident that information is infallible while citizens are imperfect, would rather put politics on auto-pilot than consult the pesky voters. (Hence the recent nudging craze.)
Still, Thompson agenda is far from modest; “this book maps out 'the future of thought'” announces the very first chapter. Alas, this is not a very reliable map. It could be because Thompson is just too nice to everyone. But could the TED conference – he enthusiastically quotes its curator – have a far more ambiguous effect on “the future of thought” than he lets on? Yes, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia can do wonders but their presumed bottom-up authenticity have also turned them into favorite tools of the PR industry. Yes, there might be benefits to thinking in public but could it also explain why so much commentary about technology is so banal and unoriginal? (Thanks again, Twitter!)
Had Thompson embarked on a tour to celebrate digital projects that excite him, this could have been a wonderful, idiosyncratic travelogue. But – and this might be a sign of the “future of thought” that Thompson seeks to document – this has all the markings of a “big idea” book, with an inevitable thesis, a handful of buzzwords that, with some viral luck, might become memes (he particularly likes “ambient awareness,” “pluralistic ignorance,” and any expression that contains the word “cognitive”) and minor interventions in ongoing debates with only a peripheral connection to his own argument (a section on the future of tech-savvy dissidents in Azerbaijan is only a few pages away from a section on the future of IBM's Watson supercomputer.)
Thompson is a talented storyteller but superb reporting is not enough to back up his ambitious thesis that “on balance...what is happening is deeply positive.” “Deeply positive” is an apt description of the trends on display in this book but the world outside is, on balance, much weirder than you think.
Fiction vs reality
Tim Wu on my book:
Too much assault and battery creates a more serious problem: wrongful appropriation, as Morozov tends to borrow heavily, without attribution, from those he attacks. His critique of Google and other firms engaged in “algorithmic gatekeeping”is basically taken from Lessig’s first book, “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” in which Lessig argued that technology is necessarily ideological and that choices embodied in code, unlike law, are dangerously insulated from political debate. Morozov presents these ideas as his own and, instead of crediting Lessig, bludgeons him repeatedly. Similarly, Morozov warns readers of the dangers of excessively perfect technologies as if Jonathan Zittrain hadn’t been saying the same thing for the past 10 years. His failure to credit his targets gives the misimpression that Morozov figured it all out himself and that everyone else is an idiot.
What my book actually says:
Alas, Internet-centrism prevents us from grasping many of these issues as clearly as we must. To their credit, Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain have written extensively about digital preemption (and Lessig even touched on the future of civil disobedience). However, both of them, enthralled with the epochalist proclamations of Internet-centrism, seem to operate under the false assumption that digital preemption is mostly a new phenomenon that owes its existence to “the Internet,” e-books, and MP3 files. Code is law—but so are turnstiles. Lessig does note that buildings and architecture can and do regulate, but he makes little effort to explain whether the possible shift to code-based regulation is the product of unique contemporary circumstances or merely the continuation of various long-term trends in criminological thinking.
As Daniel Rosenthal notes in discussing the work of both Lessig and Zittrain, “Academics have sometimes portrayed digital preemption as an unfamiliar and novel prospect. . . In truth, digital preemption is less of a revolution than an extension of existing regulatory techniques.” In Zittrain’s case, his fascination with “the Internet” and its values of “openness” and “generativity,” as well as his belief that “the Internet” has important lessons to teach us, generates the kind of totalizing discourse that refuses to see that some attempts to work in the technological register might indeed be legitimate and do not necessarily lead to moral depravity.
Recycle the Cycle - II
Oh I completely forgot that my book had an even more damning section on Tim Wu than the one I posted a few hours ago. So here it is for your amusement:
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Openness and Its Messiahs
Perhaps some of the worst problems of information reductionism could be avoided if only the solutionists’ transparency vocabulary didn’t brim with ambiguous terms. Appeals for “transparency” no longer look problematic once solutionists start to talk about “openness.” It’s bad enough that our cultural and intellectual heritage makes us view those concepts as worth pursuing in their own right. Solutionists—especially those of the geek persuasion—regularly develop and consume their own myths about how “openness” contributes to progress and success, which only adds to the confusion.
It might be tempting to view this openness fetish as originating in communities promoting open-source software. But according to Chris Kelty, the UCLA anthropologist who studies geek cultures, there is not much agreement about the value of openness—about whether it’s worth pursuing as its own end or only instrumental to some higher goods—even in geek circles. As Kelty points out, “Open tends toward obfuscation. Everyone claims to be open, everyone has something to share, everyone agrees that being open is the obvious thing to do—after all, openness is the other half of ‘open source’—but for all its obviousness, being ‘open’ is perhaps the most complex component of Free Software.” Thus, as we have already noticed with the transparency rhetoric, it is never quite clear whether being open is a means or an end.
As a result, notes Kelty, there is no geek consensus on the merits of openness at all. “Is openness good in itself, or is openness a means to achieve something else—and if so what? Who wants to achieve openness, and for what purpose? Is openness a goal? Or is it a means by which a different goal—say, ‘interoperability’ or ‘integration’—is achieved? Whose goals are these, and who sets them? Are the goals of corporations different from or at odds with the goals of university researchers or government officials?” So, if Kelty is to be believed, the community that has done the most to infuse technology debates with respect for “openness” is itself torn about its merits and meanings.
Our Internet debates, in contrast, tend to be dominated by a form of openness fundamentalism, whereby “openness” is seen as a fail-safe solution to virtually any problem. Instead of debating how openness may be fostering or harming innovation, promoting or demoting justice, facilitating or complicating deliberation—the kinds of debates we are likely to have about the uses of openness in the messy world that we live in—“openness” in networks and technological systems is presumed to be always good and its opposite—it’s quite telling that we can’t quite define what that is—always bad.
This Manichean tendency to view every technological issue in open-versus-closed terms leads to almost religious celebration of companies that embrace openness for tactical purposes and use it to their own advantage. The tactic here is once again very similar to what Elizabeth Eisenstein did with attributing qualities like fixity to “print culture.” Openness is presumed to be an “Internet” value, so whenever it can be read into the actions of “Internet ambassadors”—the Googles and Facebooks of this world—it’s invoked to explain their success. Then, this success is itself invoked to prove that “openness” is indeed an Internet value. This explains why our Internet theorists are never wrong.
Take Tim Wu, who celebrates Google, an arch-open company in his view, as if it were a divine creature. In The Master Switch, Wu writes that Google’s birth was “audacious” and its ideas are “vaguely messianic.” Its founders—perhaps like Jesus?—“style themselves the challengers to the existing order, to the most basic assumptions about the proper organization of information, the nature of property, the duties of the American corporation, and even the purpose of life.” Google represents nothing less than the “utopia of openness,” which aims to “plant the flag of openness deep in the heart of the telephone territory” and never dares to “resist or subdue the Internet’s essential structure” (remember: resistance is futile; the network, with its “essential structure” and “architecture,” is not going away). It is “the greatest corporate champion of openness,” the leader of the “openness movement,” and “the incarnation of the Internet gospel of openness.” Wu’s Google is also one of the “apostles of openness”—very much unlike Steve Jobs, the “apostle of perfectibility”; former FCC chairman Reed Hundt, who is a “competition apostle”; and former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin, who is “an apostle par excellence of [the] control model.”
Gospel, messiah, apostle, incarnation—Wu writes as if he had some kind of spiritual awakening while visiting Google’s temple in the holy city of Mountain View. Oddly enough, he never mentions that he himself has been an (unpaid) adviser for Google and helped greatly to shape its early strategy on, well, “openness.” (In 2007 Chris Sacca, then head of special initiatives at Google, told Businessweek, “Tim helped us catalyze a strategy. . . He’s a singular force in this space. You’re just seeing the start of what he’s going to accomplish.”) Such disclosures make it difficult at times to tell whether Wu is praising Google’s genius or his own.
Wu’s effervescent analysis portrays Google’s predilection for openness as natural and inevitable; its executives simply saw the structure of the network and couldn’t resist it. It’s the print debate all over again, with Google’s “openness” being just a by-product of “the Internet’s essential structure,” much like fixity, in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s account, was just a manifestation of some eternal quality of print. That Google may have played a role in shaping or maintaining this very structure of “the Internet,” positioning it as “essential” rather than “contingent,” that it might have spent a lot of marketing and think tank money to be seen as an “evangelist of openness,” that it surrounded itself with an army of “openness” evangelists—none of this enters Wu’s analysis (but then, he’s one of the evangelists in question).
Compare Wu’s messianic pronouncements with a very different kind of empirical analysis that makes no a priori assumptions about Google’s divine status in the pantheon of openness gods and instead tries to explain what that status does for Google and how it has been achieved. Kimberley Spreeuwenberg and Thomas Poell, two Dutch academics, conducted a detailed study of how Google has created, managed, and positioned the work done within the Open Handset Alliance—a consortium of eighty-four companies that develop software and hardware for Google’s Android platform. Google and its executives never miss a chance to brag that their approach to mobile platforms, unlike that of Apple, is dominated by “openness.”
Yet, as the Dutch study points out, “open” in Open Handset Alliance might be something of a misnomer, for “it is highly questionable whether Android, in the light of the ideals of open source, can in fact be characterized as an ‘open source project.’” Thus, the authors note, “while Android was publicly introduced as a project aimed at preventing any ‘industry player to restrict or control the innovations of any other,’ within the Android ecology Google clearly has control over the other involved actors.”
This control is achieved through tricky software licenses and restrictive technological specifications for how software and hardware should be designed, all of them wrapped in the stale language of “compatibility.” Furthermore, leaked communication between Google and one of the hardware partners in the Open Handset Alliance illustrated that Google can exercise control over its partners in a nominally “open” ecosystem by tinkering with various carrots and sticks, for instance, by allowing well-behaving partners to acquire certain features ahead of the competition or threatening to disable certain features for partners that do not behave.
Likewise, since Google’s interest in expanding into mobile handsets is partly driven by its desire to remain a powerful player in advertising, the company has no strategic interest in following the “open-source” playbook down to the last rule. Instead, it picks the rules it wants to follow based on its own corporate strategy (e.g., it won’t let independent developers code the operating system itself, as this might weaken its control over development and, indirectly, its utility for harvesting user data—which would make achieving its advertising goals much harder).
This is not unexpected, but instead of celebrating what Google does for openness, it’s important to investigate what openness does for Google. As one perceptive observer noted of Google, “‘Openness’ and ‘connectedness’ are not the principles on which it is organized so much as the products that it sells.” Why this market for openness and connectedness exists, how it relates to other tenets of Internet-centrism, and how this market is manipulated: all of these are not the kinds of questions one is likely to ask when the occurrence of “openness” on “the Internet” is presumed to be natural and unproblematic. To use the dreadful language of social theory, ideas like “openness” and “the Internet” are constructed—and mutually co-constructed at that—and they do not drop down on us from the sky. Unless we are prepared to trace how such construction happens, not only will we write bad history of technology, but we will end up with extremely confused policy making that treats contingent and fluid phenomena (which, of course, might be worth defending) as permanent and natural fixtures of the environment.
Thus, while Internet-centrists assume that Google is “open” by default, their opponents—let’s call them Internet realists—assume that Google does a lot of work to look “open” and investigate what that work involves. While Internet-centrists tend to be populist and unempirical, Internet realists start with no assumptions about the intrinsic values of “openness” and “transparency”—let alone their inherent presence in digital networks—and pay particular attention to how these notions are involved and manifested in particular debates and technologies. While Internet-centrists believe that “openness” is good in itself, Internet realists investigate what the rhetoric of “openness” does for governments and companies—and what they do for it.