E. Morozov on FB play:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/31/big-data-lie-exposed-simply-blaming-facebook-wont-fix-reclaim-private-information
After the Facebook scandal it’s time to base the digital economy on
public v private ownership of data
Evgeny Morozov
The continuing collapse of public trust in Facebook is welcome news to
those of us who have been warning about the perils of “data
extractivism” for years.
It’s reassuring to have final, definitive proof that beneath Facebook’s
highfalutin rhetoric of “building a global community that works for all
of us” lies a cynical, aggressive project – of building a global data
vacuum cleaner that sucks from all of us. Like others in this industry,
Facebook makes money by drilling deep into our data selves – pokes and
likes is simply how our data comes to the surface – much like energy
firms drill deep into the oil wells: profits first, social and
individual consequences later.
Furthermore, the rosy digital future – where cleverly customised ads
subsidise the provision of what even Mark Zuckerberg calls “social
infrastructure” – is no longer something that many of us will be taking
for granted. While the monetary costs of building and operating this
“social infrastructure” might be zero – for taxpayers anyway – its
social and political costs are, perhaps, even harder to account for than
the costs of cheap petroleum in the 1970s.
Such realisations, as sudden and shocking as they might be, are not
enough. Facebook is a symptom, not a cause of our problems. In the long
run, blaming its corporate culture is likely to prove as futile as
blaming ourselves. Thus, instead of debating whether to send Zuckerberg
into the corporate equivalent of exile, we should do our best to
understand how to reorganise the digital economy to benefit citizens –
and not just a handful of multibillion-dollar firms that view their
users as passive consumers with no political or economic ideas or
aspirations of their own.
The obstacles standing in the way of this transformative agenda are many
and, worse, they are structural – not likely to be solved with a clever
app. These obstacles stem primarily from the disquieting dynamics of
contemporary capitalism – which is more stagnant than our obsession with
innovation and disruption betrays – rather than from our supposed
addiction to social networking or tech companies’ abuse of that addiction.
First of all, while we might keep bashing “big tech” all we like, one
cannot easily ignore the fact that Facebook, along with Alphabet,
Amazon, Microsoft and others, have been key to boosting the US stock
market to record heights. They have ensured a modicum of prosperity at a
time when the rest of the economy is still struggling with the fallout
from the financial crisis.
In some sense, America’s tech markets of the 2010s are not much
different from America’s housing markets of the 2000s: both have tried
to generate wealth, by means of asset appreciation, even when the real
economy struggled. Remove the immense gains in the stock value of big
tech companies over the past few years and there would be little reason
to speak about any meaningful recovery from the crisis. This, if
anything, is the main reason why America is unlikely to do anything to
tie the hands of its tech giants, especially when China’s tech companies
are increasingly flexing their muscles and expanding overseas. Trump
will keep raging about Amazon – until the day he discovers Alibaba.
Facebook can, of course, try to alter its business model. Both Amazon
and Alphabet, for example, have recently diversified into the much more
lucrative services sector, with artificial intelligence and cloud
computing offering them higher profit margins and helping to offset
emerging problems with their main businesses. Facebook, although it has
excellent AI researchers and plenty of data to keep them busy, is very
late to the game. After all the recent scandals, it will have a hard
time convincing its potential corporate customers that their data is safe.
It leaves the company with just one choice, already promoted by some of
its early investors such as Roger McNamee: ditch advertising altogether
and introduce monthly charges – in essence, subscription fees – for its
services. The idea here is that Facebook can kill two birds with one
stone: make it a less rewarding place for spreading fake news, while
also relieving itself of the urge to collect and store so much user
data. The optics of such a move are currently not very favourable – who
wants to pay for Facebook after all it’s done? – but things may change
as the current scandals fade away and a bevy of actors, from governments
to universities to philanthropists, step up to pick up those monthly
Facebook bills.
In the meantime, of course, we’ll be subject to a barrage of promises –
by politicians, especially in Europe, but also by tech executives – that
they will do their best to tighten up controls over our data and even
introduce new laws to punish blatant malpractice. This is a development
we should watch most carefully, for such rhetoric will inevitably try to
restore the sense of normality about the overall state of the digital
economy, trying to convince us that, save for a few bad apples and their
ethical deviations, all the fundamentals look good and nothing major is
at stake.
Such a sense of restored normality will fit well with the worldview
shared by two camps that are often presented as inhabiting two
diametrically opposed universes. However, despite their much-touted
antagonism, European technocrats and Facebook’s techies are quite alike
in their understanding of the world: for both, at its very centre lies
the untouchable and god-like market, where (regulated) corporations
offer all sorts of possible services to the omnipotent and
utility-maximising user-consumers, who, if unsatisfied, can always take
their business elsewhere.
The only interventions allowed in this world are initiatives to
strengthen consumer and data rights, enhance competition, and, perhaps,
extract more taxes (this is where European technocrats come in), or
design even better services and technologies (the turf of Facebook’s
engineers). In this fantastical world, history has truly ended and
global capitalism not just rules supreme, it actually works, delivering
prosperity and meritocracy everywhere it lands.
Thus, there’s no need to consider or imagine any other forms of social
and political organisation – models where, say, cities or citizen groups
or the nation state would play a more prominent role in shaping the
market or deciding what parts of our lives to keep out of it – for, if
those new forms were truly new and useful, the market would have already
thought of them. And why bother, since the market is presumed to be
working flawlessly anyway?
This conception of the world, of course, is directly contradicted by
empirical reality: the success of tech giants in both the US and China,
for example, is the direct consequence of strong state intervention in
how the market operates, not of letting it run its course. In the case
of the US, it took decades of military funding to get Silicon Valley
started and at least as many decades of carefully engineering the global
trade system to make it much harder for other countries to catch up and
develop similar technologies.
The difference between Europeans and Americans, though, is that while
Americans preach one thing and do another, Europeans, foolishly, often
do exactly what they say. So while China and the US have been doing
their best to protect their ever-expanding tech industries, Europe has
been doing its best to make sure that its own industries compete with
theirs on fair terms.
The bad news is that this left the continent without much domestic
technological capacity. The good news is that, unlike the US – where so
much of the domestic economy is tied to tech – and China – where there
is no impact of data extractivism on, say, elections, because there are,
well, no elections – Europe is the only player well-positioned to lead a
very different kind of data revolution – one that can turn the tables on
the tech industry and spur innovation on both technological and
political fronts.
In a nutshell, instead of letting Facebook get away with charging us for
its services or continuing to exploit our data for advertising, we must
find a way to get companies like Facebook to pay for accessing our data
– conceptualised, for the most part, as something we own in common, not
as something we own as individuals.
Many other parties interested in working with that data and building
services on top of it– from universities to libraries, from institutions
of the welfare state to public transport agencies, from entrepreneurs to
municipalities – can have their own conditions of access, sometimes free
and sometimes heavily subsidised including, perhaps, by dedicated
state-run venture capital funds, which might also focus on ensuring that
key capacities to take full advantage of that data, like the development
of artificial intelligence, is lavishly funded.
Where would all these funds come from? Well, it would certainly help
that the likes of Facebook and Alphabet will actually have to pay fees
for accessing the data, instead of just minimising their tax burden as
they do now. The point here, however, would not be to maximise the
revenue raised by this new layer of data (if it were, one might as well
deploy an auction system to sell off “data entitlements” of some kind).
No, the goal would be to “plant” different data trees that would grow on
different logics: if Facebook wants to offer services that monetise
perpetual surveillance, they should be free to do it – at a very high
cost, under complete supervision, and with full consent of their users –
but there should be no reason why other types of models (subscription
fees, subsidised access, completely free access based on income, etc)
shouldn’t be offered around the same datasets.
There are solid arguments to be had about how to balance individual and
collective rights to data ownership. Those arguing that we should simply
become “data shareholders” and earn a financial return on our data, with
Facebook and Google continuing to mine it for advertising or other
purposes, should perhaps grapple with the fact that full value of such
data emerges only once it’s aggregated across many individuals (even
more so in the case of using it for machine learning), so one cannot
simply take the total revenue of these companies and divide it by the
number of individual users to figure out what each of us is due. Plus, a
lot of the data that we generate, when we walk down a tax-funded city
street equipped with tax-funded smart street lights, is perhaps better
conceptualised as data to which we might have social and collective use
rights as citizens, but not necessarily individual ownership rights as
producers or consumers.
The usual argument against such a system is that it’s likely to lead to
abuses by governments, as the data would no longer be in the hands of
companies such as Facebook (Facebook!) and would be stored on some kind
of “public cloud”. This is certainly possible, but the current system
seems to generate no fewer abuses, only that we treat them as
exceptions, rather than the actual rules of the game. And we continue to
do so even in the wake of high-profile revelations about systematic
government abuse revealed by Edward Snowden.
However, there’s no need to scrap Europe’s famed tradition of data
protection; one must only redirect its focus. Instead of continuing on a
path that pretends to exist outside of history, barely registering the
pressures that global capitalism, the rise of China, or the continued
strength of Silicon Valley exercise on the European social democratic
welfare model, one should combine data protection with a proactive
economic and democratic agenda that will seek to ensure that citizens do
not lose control over the precious resource (data) and infrastructure
(artificial intelligence), around which most of the future political and
economic institutions will be built.
The right, at least of the most –creative, fringe variety, has well
understood the stakes of this looming battle. Speaking at a recent
Financial Times event, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief
strategist, listed the fight to restore “digital sovereignty” – which he
defined along the lines of reclaiming our personal intellectual property
from big tech firms – among the three big themes that will define the
populist rage against globalism. Bannon’s anti-globalism is, however, of
the pseudo-variety, for the only way truly to monetise our data and
receive an actual dividend on it would be by leaving the most globalised
of institutions – the world’s financial markets – firmly in place
(further extending their power into areas now dominated by Facebook and
Alphabet, ie the everyday life).
The left, with the exception of a few brave data ownership experiments
on the municipal level, has very little to say on the subject. It’s a
pity because this data debate also presents the left with the unique
opportunity to rethink many of its other positions: on how to organise
the provision of welfare in the age of predictive analytics; how to
organise bureaucracy and the public sector in the age of citizens
equipped with sensors and, often, superior technologies; how to organise
new kinds of trade unions in the age of ubiquitous automation; how to
organise a centralised political party in the age of decentralised and
horizontal communications.
Instead, the left keeps banging the technocratic drums of more data
protection, more taxes and more antitrust (and the sound of those drums,
regardless of the original intent, is increasingly neoliberal). Nothing
wrong about these measures per se, but they are inadequate for the task
ahead, especially considering the multiple crises besetting the very
institutions – the welfare state, the public sector, the trade union,
the political party – that the left has used throughout history to mark
its territory and advance the interests of its disadvantaged
constituents. More regulation, when it’s regulation of the wrong kind,
should not be celebrated, no matter how much it reassures European
officials that the capitalism imagined by their founding fathers in the
1950s keeps working as promised.
We face three political options. We can continue with the current model,
with Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon and others taking over more and more
functions of the state. With time, perhaps, we won’t need to worry that
their technologies are used to influence elections because most of our
lives will depend on what happens in their boardrooms – not on what
happens in our parliaments.
Alternatively, we can opt for the kind of pseudo-antiglobalism endorsed
by Bannon, reclaiming some autonomy from the tech giants by
over-empowering the financial sector (which Bannon, of course, also
wants to tame with cryptocurrencies; we’ll see who will tame whom, but
so far banks seem to have survived – and even swallowed – their
challengers).
Finally, we can use the recent data controversies to articulate a truly
decentralised, emancipatory politics, whereby the institutions of the
state (from the national to the municipal level) will be deployed to
recognise, create, and foster the creation of social rights to data.
These institutions will organise various data sets into pools with
differentiated access conditions. They will also ensure that those with
good ideas that have little commercial viability but promise major
social impact would receive venture funding and realise those ideas on
top of those data pools.
Rethinking many of the existing institutions in which citizens seem to
have lost trust along such lines would go a long way towards addressing
the profound sense of alienation from public and political life felt
across the globe. It won’t be easy but it can still be done. This,
however, might not be the case 10 or even five years from now, as the
long-term political and economic costs of data extractivism come to the
surface. The data wells inside ourselves, like all those other drilling
sites, won’t last for ever either.
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