| We'll be seeing Shoshana Zuboff today, and we're in pretty steady touch with Brett (who is on this list). Shoshana's book is a bestseller now, and Brett's & Evan's deserves to be (especially since it suggests a VRM remedy).
I'm forwarding this from another list, bold-facing the part that matters to us here. I'd point to the sourced piece, but it's behind a paywall.
Doc Begin forwarded message:
<snip> We must train the capitalist algorithm ourselves Governments in the meantime have to become smarter in dealing with the big tech companies
JOHN THORNHILL FEBRUARY 11, 2019
Anyone wishing to future-proof their career should think about becoming an artificial intelligence ethicist. Scarcely a week passes without an event on algorithmic bias being held in some swanky venue. Tech companies are also falling over themselves to hire ethics experts to trumpet how responsible they are.
This fixation on ethics in AI is welcome. Algorithms are playing an increasingly important role in shaping our lives. We need to understand what they do. But this debate is in danger of obscuring discussion about a far bigger, epoch-defining struggle that tech companies are less eager to talk about: the knockdown fight for money and power.
To that extent, Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, has performed a singular service in focusing on how the big tech companies are both rewriting the rules of capitalism and rewiring the circuits of power.
In the view of this professor emerita of Harvard Business School, the Googles, Facebooks, Alibabas and Tencents of our world are ushering in a new form of capitalism by monetising data-derived behavioural insights at an unprecedented scale and effectiveness. More alarmingly, she argues that surveillance capitalism threatens to metastasise into a scary new form of power — “instrumentarianism” — which is taking most visible form in China.
Professor Zuboff doubtless overstates her case. The tech companies would dearly love their micro-targeted ads to work half as well as she suggests they do. But where she is surely right is in advocating the use of a telescope, as well as a microscope, when scrutinising the impact of the latest technologies.
One of her core arguments is that, however regrettable, it was not inevitable that surveillance capitalism ended up as it has. Google’s own founders warned that ad-supported search engines could work against the interests of their users, but they were desperate to make money in the wake of the dotcom crash of 2000. Governments were their complicit partners given their security needs after 9/11.
Unplug the perverse monetisation machine from the back of these digital services and you could end up with far better societal outcomes, Prof Zuboff argues. But it is hard to see how that happens given the massive network effects these tech companies enjoy, to say nothing of their financial clout.
Three things, though, would undoubtedly help us move in a better direction: government regulation, market competition and individual action.
First, governments simply have to become smarter in dealing with tech companies over tax, privacy, data use and competition issues. For the moment, politicians are playing a ham-fisted game of whack-a-mole with the industry. It is a telling sign of the current dysfunction that Google pays more in fines in Europe than in global taxes. Google’s parent company Alphabet paid $5.1bn in EU fines in 2018 compared with $4.2bn in worldwide tax, or 11 per cent of pre-tax income.
Privacy and data use are two areas where it would also help if regulators adopted a more systematic, and less sporadic, approach. Ayden Férdeline, a tech policy fellow at the Mozilla Foundation in Berlin, reckons that 131 countries have now adopted data protection laws.
But many of those laws put too much onus on individuals to defend their own privacy and grant consent to impenetrable terms and conditions. We do not expect every citizen to be responsible for assuring other desirable public goods, such as clean air or water. Why should privacy be different?
Perhaps, the more effective motor for rapid change will be increasing competition between the tech companies themselves as “privacy-by-design” becomes an attractive consumer selling point. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has railed against the “data industrial complex” while other US tech leaders have spoken out in favour of EU-style data protection laws. An intriguing array of privacy-by-design digital architectures and services are now emerging; the critical question is whether any of them can scale quickly enough to challenge the incumbents.
Ultimately, that may be down to us. As citizens, we vote every few years. As consumers, we signal our preferences every minute. We should switch to those privacy-by-design services of which we approve and delete those apps that rely on excessive surveillance. We all provide the training data for the capitalist algorithm.
But voting isn't enough, and privacy-by-design isn't either, because it applies almost entirely to corporations and not to us. We need tech of our own. Rules of our own. #VRM. #Customertech.
Doc On Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 16:08 John Wilson <
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wrote: 27 mins interview, Google title to bypass pay wall:
"shoshana zuboff on surveillance capitalism" In todays financial times
Somewhat. the RINA model, purely as a network architecture, works out to be more of a default opt-in rather than a default opt-out as the Internet is. But that can only go so far. Then it comes down to the Applications. DAFs in RDSA, the more general form of RINA that includes distributed applications, operating systems, and networks, has the same opt-in default, but then it is the design of the application itself that would have to enforce rules on data.
Thanks Doc, thought provoking indeed. Customer Commons is a new proposition to me.
On reading your words, below, the thought of RINA occurs in so far as I gather that this design and architecture for internetworking would enable user controls for privacy, identity, security, trust etc - tho RINA lies beyond my tech grasp; whilst there are list members with expertise to comment on this potential?
Doc:
"I believe the first answer to the surveillance problem is tech on each of our sides, as individuals. That tech should include the ability to proffer easily acceptable terms of engagement (there can be many, most of them simple), and to express our own privacy policies as first parties rather than always as second ones. This is totally do-able. We're working on it at Customer Commons (see here),..."
I've read Shoshana's book, and consider it a magisterial work of great worth. I also said as much in a blurb on the back cover.
I also have two criticisms, both minor compared to the work itself.
First is that it could have been half as long (it's as thick as an old Manhattan phone directory), and might have packed more punch if it had been.
Second is that it's way short on remedy. Basically it calls for the market to rise up and demand policy relief.
A much shorter (but still long) book on roughly the same topic is Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger's Re-Engineering Humanity, which would be terrific even if it didn't conclude with this:
May 25th of last year was when the E.U.'s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect. The main change it has wrought so far is full employment for lawyers working the compliance beat for corporate clients whose sphincters are cramped with fear of potential EU enforcement, and cookie notices on websites that not only misdirect users into clicking "ACCEPT" to the very surveillance the GDPR was meant to thwart, but cause massive collective cognitive and operational overhead for everybody.
Toward finding relief, it may help to imagine thought balloons appearing in spaces above the campuses of MIT and Harvard adjacent to a trip up the Charles River from Boston:
- Above MIT, "The answer is tech. What is the question?"
- Above Harvard Business School, "The answer is markets. What is the question." (That's a corollary to Shockey's Law.)
- Above Harvard Kennedy School, "The answer is policy. What is the question?"
I'm first with MIT on that one. Then second with HBS. And last with HKS.
I believe the first answer to the surveillance problem is tech on each of our sides, as individuals. That tech should include the ability to proffer easily acceptable terms of engagement (there can be many, most of them simple), and to express our own privacy policies as first parties rather than always as second ones. This is totally do-able. We're working on it at Customer Commons (see here), and we've got an IEEE working group on the case as well. (Note: the IEEE approached us for that, which is a very encouraging sign.)
We need the tech horse to pull the carts of norms and laws, in that order.
For lack of personal privacy tech, we got the GDPR cart ahead of the market and the personal tech horse, and because of that the situation is beyond FUBAR. Same goes, by the way, for California's AB 375. Note that to the GDPR each us is a mere "data subject" with no agency beyond what "data controllers" and "data processors" provide from outside, and privacy relief in general is at the surcease of abusers still incentivized economically to preserve the surveillance status quo. As for AB 375, we are mere "consumers" with no more agency that derives from the ability to make demands of abusers.
Doc
David Bray and Dan Geer: Invite to Comments on Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism:
Online Rights, Privacy, Security, Identity:
=====
Gordon requested list comments on his instalment of review notes on Zuboff's recently published Surveillance Capitalism.
Have you an edited version with your conclusions yet Gordon?
I have played devil's advocate in my polemical feedback to the list. Inverting Zuboffs title to Capitalism Under Surveillance... the agenda to emerge beyond Zuboffs exhaustive analysis was that of online privacy, security, trust, identity, and rights, on which issues her redress was a call to dissent and a defense of classical liberal humanism. (My own polemic posited the need for a new framework of jurisprudence for a digital networked economy and society and the framing of individual Rights, beyond a Hobbesian possessive Individualism of market society; and I cited Tim Berners Lee's call for a Digital Magna Carta of Rights). Zuboffs argument needs to move forward on the question What is to be done? Whither our Digital Manifesto? :) I am only too aware that these issues are beyond my area of competence :)
David Bray and Dan Geer, on the other hand, have expertise and are engaged on this front of issues.
David has this week rejoined the list. Welcome back David!
Dan has said he's willing to comment on our list discussion of Zuboff via email through David.
I therefore invite their comment, plus Gordon's editorial response :)
Sparse List comment to date has been in inverse proportion to the momentous challenge of the issues, methinks... ;)
==========
Some quick links for background interest:
Online Rights, Privacy, Security, Identity etc:
+ David Bray Is a lead in the People Centred Internet project with Vint. - Plus here is David's record
+ Dan Geer Recent nyt oped, The End of Privacy
Previous Wired interview, following Black Hat keynote
See also Geer
also this general article Re digital security and rights issues, with ref to Geer:
"The notion of privacy, brokered with the state via the Hobbesian social contract, is dead. For even the nation state struggles to maintain its legitimacy, challenged by a libertarian organ of the world government that is the internet. This contestation, recorded by Geer, pits the individual against both the system and the society, The provision of content from anywhere to anywhere, which is the very purpose of an internetwork, is a challenge to sovereignty. America’s Founders wanted no sovereign at all, and they devised a government that made the center all but powerless and the periphery fully able to thumb its nose at whatever it felt like."
Cheers, John Chapter 18 A Coup from Above
COOK Report: Living in the hive Facebook will know everything about you:
Zuboff: "every book film and song person had ever consumed. and that its predictive models will tell you what bar to go to when you visit a strange city.” as themed of Facebook’s data science team once reflected: ‘this is the first time the world has seen this scale and quality of data about human communication …for he first time we have a microscope ,,that lets us social behavior at a very fine level that we have ever been able to see before..” a top” Facebook wishing still is that surveillance engineer put it succinctly: ‘We are tryingg to map out a graph for everything in the world and how it relates to each other.’”p.497
Zuboff: More astonishing still is that surveillance capital derives from the dispossession of human experience , operationalized in its universal and pervasive programs of rendition: our lives are scraped and sold to fund their freedom and you subjugation, their knowledge and our ignorance once about what they know.” p.498
Zuboff: From the time they went public to 2016, Google and Facebook steadily climbed the heights of market capitalization with Google reaching $532 billion by the end of 2016 and Facebook reaching $332, without Google ever employing more than 75,000 people or Facebook more than 18,000. General Motors took more than 4 decades to reach its highest market capitalization of $221.15 billion in 1965, when it employed more than 75,000 men and women. Most startling is that GM employed more people at the height of the Great Depression than either Google or Facebook employs at their heights of their market capitalization." p. 500
Zuboff: The accumulation of freedom and knowledge combines with the lack of organic reciprocities with people to shape a third unusual feature of surveillance capitalism: a collectivist orientedtation that differs from the long standing values of market capitalization and market democracy, while also departing from surveillance capitalism origins in the neoliberal worldview.” p.504
Zuboff: "in 2016 an internal memo [was] acquired by BuzzFeed. Written by one of the company’s longstanding and most influential executives, Andrew Bosworth, it provided a window into radical indifference as an applied discipline. ‘we talk about the good and bad of our work often. I want to talk bout the ugly,’ Bosworth began. He went on to explain how equivalence wins out over equality in the worldview of ‘an organism among organisms’ that is essential to the march toward totality and thus the growth of surveillance revenues. The ugly truth is that anything that allows us to conet more people more often is de-facto good.” p.505
Zuboff: “as long as content contributes to ‘growth tactics’ Facebook wins,” . . . . So far the greatest challenge to radical indifference has come from Facebook and Googles overreaching ambitions too supplant professional journalism on the Internet.” p.506
Zuboff: Facebooks “news feed wold favor posts from friends and family, especially posts that ‘spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people …. we will predict which posts you might want tu interact with your friends about …. These are posts that inspire back and forth discussion…. Those videos often lead to discussion among viewers…. six times as many interactions as regular videos.” Zuboff speaking: Radical indifference means that it does not matter what's in the pipelines as long as they are full and flowing.” p.512
Zuboff: “Surveillance capitalism’s anti democratic and antiegalitarian juggernaught is best described as a market dive coup from above. COOK Report it is not a coup in the classic sense but rather an overthrow of the people says Zuboff. p513
Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism arrived on the scene with democracy already on the ropes, its early life by neoliberalism’s claims to freedom that set it at a distance from the lives of the people.” p.518
Zuboff: If democracy is to be replenished ˆn the coming decades, it is up to us to replenish the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us. By this I don’t mean only our personal information. What is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one’s own Life and authorship of one’s own experience.” p.521
Zuboff: let there be a digital future but let it be a human feature first. I reject inevitability, and it is my hope that you will too……The future of this narrative will depend on indignant citizens,journalists and scholars drawn to this frontier project……p.522
Zuboff: the decades of economic injustice and immense concentration of wealth that we call the Gilded age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. The knowledge empowered the Gilded age to an end, wielding the aromaents of progressive legislation and the New Deal. Even now when we recall the lordly ‘barons’ of the late 19th century, we call them ‘robbers.’ Surely the Age of Surveillance Capitalism will meet the same fate it teaches us how we do not want to live. p.524
Zboff: the Berlin Wall fell for many reasons , but above all it was because the people of East Berlinsaid, ‘No more!’ We too can be the authors of many ‘great and beautiful’ new facts that reclaim the digital future as humanity’s home. No more! Let this be our declaration. [end of book] p.525 I am thinking of combining these into a COOK Report. To those who commented may I use what you wrote s an appendix or income subordinate fashion?
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