Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12
I gave a talk with Jacob Applebaum at last week's Re:publica conference
in Berlin.
It seems it had fallen to us to break a little bad news. Here it is.
- We are not progressing from a primitive era of centralized social
media to an emerging era of decentralized social media, the reverse is
happening.
- Surveillance and control of users is not some sort of unintended
consequence of social media platforms, it is the reason they exist.
- Privacy is not simply a consumer choice, it is a matter of power and
privilege.
Earlier at Re:publica, Eben Moglen, the brilliant and tireless legal
council of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the FreedomBox
Foundation, gave a characteristically excellent speech.
However, in his enthusiasm, he makes makes a claim that seems very
wrong.
Moglen, claims that Facebook's days as a dominant platform are
numbered, because we will soon have decentralized social platforms,
based on projects such as FreedomBox, users will operate their own
federated platforms and form collective social platforms based on their
own hardware, retain control of their own data, etc.
I can understand and share Moglen's enthusiasm for such a vision,
however this is not the observable history of our communications
platforms, not the obvious direction they seem to be headed, and there
is no clear reason to believe this will change.
The trajectory that Moglen is using has centralized social media as the
starting point and distributed social media as the place we are moving
toward. But in actual fact, distributed social media is where we
started, and centralized platforms are where we have arrived.
The Internet is a distributed social media platform. The classic
internet platforms that existed before the commercialization of the web
provided all the features of modern social media monopolies.
Platforms like Usenet, Email, IRC and Finger allowed us to do
everything we do now with Facebook and friends. We could post status
updates, share pictures, send messages, etc. Yet, these platforms have
been more or less abandoned. So the question we need to address is not
so much how we can invent a distributed social platform, but how and why
we started from a fully distributed social platform and replaced it with
centralized social media monopolies.
The answer is quite simple. The early internet was not significantly
capitalist funded, the change in application topology came along with
commercialization, and it is a consequence of the business models
required by capitalist investors to capture profit.
The business model of social media platforms is surveillance and
behavioral control. The internet's original protocols and architecture
made surveillance and behavioral control more difficult. Once capital
became the dominant source of financing it directed investment toward
centralized platforms, which are better at providing such surveillance
and control, the original platforms were starved of financing. The
centralized platforms grew and the decentralized platforms submerged
beneath the rising tides of the capitalist web.
This is nothing new. This was the same business model that capital
devised for media in general, such as network television. The customer
of network television is not the viewer, rather the viewer is the
product, the "audience commodity." The real customer is the advertisers
and lobby groups that want to control this audience.
Network Television didn't provide the surveillance part, so advertisers
needed to employ market research and ratings firms such as Neielson for
that bit. This was a major advantage of social media, richer data from
better surveillance allowed for more effective behavioral control than
ever before possible, using tracking, targeting, machine learning,
behavioral retargeting, among many techniques made possible by the deep
pool of data companies like Facebook and Google have available.
This is not a choice that capitalist made, this is the only way that
profit-driven organizations can provide a public good like a
communication platform. Capitalist investors must capture profit or lose
their capital. If their platforms can not capture profit, they vanish.
So, if capitalism will not fund free, federated social platforms, what
will? For Moglen's optimistic trajectory to pan out, this implies that
funds can come from the public sector, or from volunteers/donators etc?
But if these sectors where capable of turning the tide on social media
monopolies, wouldn't they have already done so? After all, the internet
started out as a decentralized platform, so it's not like they had to
play catch-up, they had a significant head start. Yet, you could fill
many a curio case with technologies dreamed up and abandoned because
they where unable to be sustained without financing.
http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/
Give the continuous march of neoliberal public sector retrenchment, the
austerity craze and the ever increasing precariousness of most
communities, it seems unlikely the public or voluntary sectors will be
the source of such a dramatic turnaround. Given the general tendency of
capitalist economies toward accumulation and consolidation, such a
turnaround seems even less likely.
Thus, there is no real reason to believe Moglen's trajectory will come
about. The obstacle to decentralized social media is not that it has not
been invented, but the profit-motive itself. Thus to reverse this
trajectory back towards decentralization, requires not so much technical
initiative, but political struggle.
So long as we maintain the social choice to provision our communication
systems according to the profit motive, we will only get communications
platforms that allow for the capture of profit. Free, open systems, that
neither surveil, nor control, nor exclude, will not be funded, as they
do not provide the mechanisms required to capture profit.
Facebook is worth billions precisely because of it's capacity for
surveillance and control. Same with Google.
Thus, like the struggle for other public goods, like education, child
care, and health care, free communication platforms for the masses can
only come from collective political struggle to achieve such platforms.
In the meantime, we have many clever and dedicated people contributing
to inventing alternative platforms, and these platforms can be very
important and worthwhile for the minority that will ever use them, but
we do not have the social will nor capacity to bring these platforms to
the masses, and given the dominance of capital in our society, it's not
clear where such capacity will come from.
As surveillance and control is enforced by the powerful interests of
capital, privacy and autonomy become a question of power and privilege,
not just consumer choice.
It's not simply a question of choosing to use certain platforms over
others, it's not a question of openness and visibility being the new way
people live in a networked society. Rather it's a fact that our
platforms are financed for the purpose of watching people and pushing
them to behave in ways that benefit the operators of the platform and
their real customers, the advertisers, and the industrial and political
lobbies. The platform exists to shape society according to the interests
of these advertisers and lobbies.
As such, how coercive these platforms are largely depend on the degree
to which your behaviour is aligned with the platform-operators'
profit-driven objectives, and thus privacy and autonomy is not just a
feature any given platforms my or may not offer, but determine the
possibility of resistance, determine our ability to work against
powerful interests' efforts to shape society in ways we disagree with.
As Jake said at our talk "We can't have post-privacy until we are
post-privilege"http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/
Eliminating privilege is a political struggle, not a technical one.
I'll be at Stammtisch as usual around 9pm, please come by, anybody
still hanging around after #rp12 is more than welcome to join us. You
can find us here: http://bit.ly/buchhandlung
A sharable version of this text can be found here:
http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/
--
Dmytri Kleiner
Venture Communist
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