Don’t Be Evil?

The alarm bells keep ringing on the tech quasi-monopolies that rule the Internet. There are two main issues to address: one is the ownership and control over personal data – this data rightly belongs to consumers, not network servers – and two is the positive network effects that drive these cos. to dominance.

How we analyze these tech titans differs along these two issues. Amazon, Apple and Microsoft sell products and product markets are not easily protected from competition. They are middlemen between producers/suppliers and consumers. I expect we will discover new competitive models to deliver goods and services, which will eat into these cos.’ dominance. The promise of blockchain technology is exactly to eliminate the middleman.

Google and Facebook are different animals. Search is starting to appear to resemble a public good, like public libraries. With the positive externalities of network effects, it also resembles a natural monopoly – the more people use a search engine, the better is the information obtained, meaning the search engine becomes ever more valuable. We probably don’t want to destroy this value. To me, this suggests that Google’s search engine eventually will become a publicly regulated utility – because the politics will demand it. We already see this outside the U.S.

Facebook, the ultimate social network, is going through some ups and downs because of issues of how it collects and uses personal information. My impression is that a single social network for all socializing needs is probably not the ideal solution. If correct, competition will eat into FB, which will start to break up into different targeted functions, reducing its value as a one-stop-fits-all OSN.

We shall see.

How Silicon Valley went from ‘don’t be evil’ to doing evil

March 4, 2018

The Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels, Tuesday March 23, 2010.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

– The Who, “We won’t be fooled again”, 1971

Once seen as the saviors of America’s economy, Silicon Valley is turning into something more of an emerging axis of evil. “Brain-hacking” tech companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, as one prominent tech investor puts it, have become so intrusive as to alarm critics on both right and left.

Firms like Google, which once advertised themselves as committed to being not “evil,” are now increasingly seen as epitomizing Hades’ legions. The tech giants now constitute the world’s five largest companies in market capitalization. Rather than idealistic newcomers, they increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism — squashing competitors, using indentured servants, attempting to fix wagesdepressing incomes, creating ever more social anomie and alienation.

At the same time these firms are fostering what British academic David Lyon has called a “surveillance society” both here and abroad. Companies like Facebook and Google thrive by mining personal data, and their only way to grow, as Wired recently suggested, was, creepily, to “know you better.”

The techie vision of the future is one in which the middle class all but disappears, with those not sufficiently merged with machine intelligence relegated to rent-paying serfs living on “income maintenance.” Theirs is a world in where long-standing local affinities are supplanted by Facebook’s concept of digitally-created “meaningful communities.”

The progressive rebellion

Back during the Obama years, the tech oligarchy was widely admired throughout the progressive circles. Companies like Google gained massive access to the administration’s inner circles, with many top aides eventually entering a “revolving door” for jobs with firms like Google, Facebook, Uber, Lyft and Airbnb.

Although the vast majority of all political contributions from these firms, not surprisingly, go to the Democrats, many progressives — at least not those on their payroll — are expressing alarm about the oligarchs’ move to gain control of whole industries, such as education, finance, groceries, space, print media and entertainment. Left-leaning luminaries like Franklin Foer, former editor of the New Republic, rant against technology firms as a threat to basic liberties and coarsening culture.

Progressives are increasingly calling for ever growing tech monolith to be “broken up,” calling for new regulation to limit their size and scope. Many have embraced European proposals to restrain tech monopolies which now resemble “predatory capitalism” at its worse.

The right also rises

Traditionally, conservatives celebrated entrepreneurial success and opposed governmental intervention in the economy. Yet increasingly even libertarians, like Instapundit’s Glen Reynolds, have suggested that some form of anti-trust action may be necessary to curb oligarchic power. The National Review even recently suggested that these firms be treated as utilities, that is, regulated by government.

Conservatives are also concerned about pervasive political bias in the industry. The Bay Area, the heartland of the industry, has evolved as Facebook co-founder Peter Thiel notes, into a “one party state.” Ideological homogeneity discourages debate and dissent, both inside their companies.

More importantly, conservatives seek to curb their ability — increasingly evident as traditional media declines — to control content on the internet. As the techies expand their domain, America’s media, entertainment and cultural industries would seem destined to become ever less heterogenous in politics and cultural world-view.

A clear and present danger

Whether one sits on the progressive left or the political right, this growing hegemony presents a clear and present danger. It is increasingly clear that the oligarchs have forgotten that Americans are more than a collection of data-bases to be exploited. People, whatever their ideology, generally want to maintain a modicum of privacy, and choose their way of life.

The perfect world of the oligarchs can be seen in the Bay Area, where, despite the massive explosion in employment, even tech workers, due to high costs, do worse than their counterparts elsewhere. Meanwhile San Francisco, among the most unequal places in the country, has evolved into a walking advertisement for a post-modern dystopia, an ultra-expensive city filled with homeless people and streets filled with excrement and needles. It is also increasingly exporting people elsewhere, including many people making high salaries.

Of course, technology is critical to a brighter future, but need not be the province of a handful of companies or concentrated in one or two regions. The great progress in the 1980s and 1990s took place in a highly competitive, and dispersed, environment not one dominated by firms that control 80 or 90 percent of key markets. Not surprisingly, the rise of the oligarchs coincides with a general decline in business startups, including in tech.

We have traveled far from the heroic era of spunky start-ups nurtured in suburban garages. But a future of ever greater robotic dependence — a kind of high-tech feudalism — is not inevitable. Setting aside their many differences, conservatives and progressives need to agree on strategies to limit the oligarch’s stranglehold on our future.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).

From Disruption to Dystopia

Very interesting article by Joel Kotkin, who researches the economics and politics of cities. It portrays a future that resembles feudalism more than free market democratic capitalism. I’d optimistically venture there will eventually be a more humanist backlash against the future dominance of technology.

From Disruption to Dystopia: Silicon Valley Envisions the City of the Future

The unaffordable Bay Area, Google’s new neighborhood ‘built from the internet up,’ and China’s police state each offer glimpses of what the tech giants plan to sell the rest of us.

by Joel Kotkin

The tech oligarchs who already dominate our culture and commerce, manipulate our moods, and shape the behaviors of our children while accumulating capital at a rate unprecedented in at least a century want to fashion our urban future in a way that dramatically extends the reach of the surveillance state already evident in airports and on our phones.

The drive to redesign our cities, however, is not really the end of the agenda of those who Aldous Huxley described as the top of the “scientific caste system.” The oligarchy has also worked to make our homes, our personal space, “connected” to their monitoring and money machines. This may be a multibillion-dollar market soon, but many who have employed such devices at home—appliances that track our activities and speak to us like loyal servants—find them “creepy,” as they should, given that their daily activities are fed back to enrich the high-tech hive mind. Both the city and house the future may owe more to Brave New World than Better Homes and Gardens.

This is a vision of the urban future in which the tech companies’ own workers and whatever other people with skills the machines haven’t yet replaced are a new class of urban serfs living in small apartments, along with a much larger class of dependent persons living on “income maintenance” and housing or housing subsidies provided by the state. “Bees exist on Earth to pollinate flowers, and maybe humans are here to build the machines,” observes professor Andrew Hudson-Smith, from University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. “The city will be one big joined-up urban machine, and humans’ role on Earth will be done.”

Read more

Tech Dystopia?

Below are excerpts from a fascinating series of articles by The Guardian (with links). The articles address many of the ways that Internet 2.0 network media models such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. are transforming, and in many cases undermining, the foundations of a democratic humanistic society. These issues motivate us at tuka to design solutions to the great question of life’s meaning.

Personally, I don’t believe this dystopia will come to pass because humans are quite resilient as a species and eventually our humanist qualities will dominate our biological urges and economic imperatives. We have free will and ultimately, we choose correctly.

Perhaps that is an overly optimistic opinion, but Internet (or Web) 3.0 technology is rewriting the script with applications that reassert human control over the data universe. We will build more humanistic social communities that employ technology, with the emphasis always on the human. We see this now with the growing refusal to surrender to Web 2.0 by tech insiders.

See excerpts and comments below.

“If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.” If Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are gradually chipping away at our ability to control our own minds, could there come a point, I ask, at which democracy no longer functions?

‘Fiction is outperforming reality’: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth

Paul Lewis February 2, 2018

There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 “up next” clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen.

Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth. In one of the few public explanations of how the formula works – an academic paper that sketches the algorithm’s deep neural networks, crunching a vast pool of data about videos and the people who watch them – YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”.

We see here the power of AI data algorithms to filter content. The Google response has been to “expand the army of human moderators.” That’s a necessary method of reasserting human judgment over the network

The primary focus of the article then turns to politics and the electoral influences of disinformation:

Much has been written about Facebook and Twitter’s impact on politics, but in recent months academics have speculated that YouTube’s algorithms may have been instrumental in fuelling disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. “YouTube is the most overlooked story of 2016,” Zeynep Tufekci, a widely respected sociologist and technology critic, tweeted back in October. “Its search and recommender algorithms are misinformation engines.”

Apparently, the sensationalism surrounding the Trump campaign caused YT’s AI algorithms to push more video feeds favorable to Trump and damaging to Hillary Clinton. One doesn’t need to be a partisan to recognize this was probably true for this particular media channel and its business model that values more views more than anything else.

However, this reality can also be distorted to present a particular conspiracy narrative of its own:

Trump won the electoral college as a result of 80,000 votes spread across three swing states. There were more than 150 million YouTube users in the US. The videos contained in Chaslot’s database of YouTube-recommended election videos were watched, in total, more than 3bn times before the vote in November 2016.

This, unfortunately, is cherry-picking statistical inferences concerning the margin of voting support. What was significant in determining the 2016 election outcome was not 80,000 votes across three states, but a run of popular vote wins in 2,623 of 3,112 counties across the U.S. This 85% share could not be an accident, nor could it be due to the single influence of disinformation, Russian or otherwise. The true difference in the election was not revealed by the popular vote total or the Electoral College vote, but by the geographical distribution of support. One can argue about which is more critical to democratic governance, but this post is about electronic media content, not political analysis.

The next article further addresses how technology is influencing our individual behaviors.

‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

Paul Lewis October 6, 2017

Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies.

A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.

The extent of this addiction is cited by research that shows people touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day!

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”

“The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,” Eyal writes. “It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.” None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all “just as their designers intended”.

Tristan Harris, a former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry points out that… “All of us are jacked into this system. All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.”

“I don’t know a more urgent problem than this,” Harris says. “It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.” 

Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.

“Smartphones are useful tools,” says Loren Brichter, a product designer. “But they’re addictive. Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about.”

The two inventors listed on Apple’s patent for “managing notification connections and displaying icon badges” are Justin Santamaria and Chris Marcellino. A few years ago Marcellino, 33, left the Bay Area and is now in the final stages of retraining to be a neurosurgeon. He stresses he is no expert on addiction but says he has picked up enough in his medical training to know that technologies can affect the same neurological pathways as gambling and drug use. “These are the same circuits that make people seek out food, comfort, heat, sex,” he says.

“The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences,” he says. “The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models.

But how can Google and Facebook be forced to abandon the business models that have transformed them into two of the most profitable companies on the planet?

This is exactly the problem – they really can’t. Newer technology, such as distributed social networks tracked by blockchain technology, must be deployed to disrupt the dysfunctional existing technology. New business models will be designed to support this disruption. Human behavioral instincts are crucial to successful new designs that make us more human, rather than less.

James Williams does not believe talk of dystopia is far-fetched. …He says his epiphany came a few years ago when he noticed he was surrounded by technology that was inhibiting him from concentrating on the things he wanted to focus on. “It was that kind of individual, existential realization: what’s going on?” he says. “Isn’t technology supposed to be doing the complete opposite of this?”

The question we ask at tuka is: “What do people really want from technology and social interaction? Distraction or meaning? And how do they find meaning?” Our answer is self-expression through creativity, sharing it, and connecting with communities.

Williams and Harris left Google around the same time and co-founded an advocacy group, Time Well Spent, that seeks to build public momentum for a change in the way big tech companies think about design. 

“Eighty-seven percent of people wake up and go to sleep with their smartphones,” he says. The entire world now has a new prism through which to understand politics, and Williams worries the consequences are profound.

The same forces that led tech firms to hook users with design tricks, he says, also encourage those companies to depict the world in a way that makes for compulsive, irresistible viewing. “The attention economy incentivizes the design of technologies that grab our attention,” he says. “In so doing, it privileges our impulses over our intentions.”

That means privileging what is sensational over what is nuanced, appealing to emotion, anger, and outrage. The news media is increasingly working in service to tech companies, Williams adds, and must play by the rules of the attention economy to “sensationalize, bait and entertain in order to survive”.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning electoral victory, many were quick to question the role of so-called “fake news” on Facebook, Russian-created Twitter bots or the data-centric targeting efforts that companies such as Cambridge Analytica used to sway voters. But Williams sees those factors as symptoms of a deeper problem.

It is not just shady or bad actors who were exploiting the internet to change public opinion. The attention economy itself is set up to promote a phenomenon like Trump, who is masterly at grabbing and retaining the attention of supporters and critics alike, often by exploiting or creating outrage.

Orwellian-style coercion is less of a threat to democracy than the more subtle power of psychological manipulation, and “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.

“The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will,” Williams says. “If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.” If Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are gradually chipping away at our ability to control our own minds, could there come a point, I ask, at which democracy no longer functions?

Our politics will survive and democracy is only one form of governance. The bigger question is how does human civilization survive if our behavior becomes self-destructive and meaningless?