Wrestling with Big Tech

I finished the book World Without Mind; the Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer. He is a former magazine editor and had direct experience into what Facebook did to the content of what he produced.

I keep a book in my car for times I know I’m going to have to wait, such as before a movie. This was one of those books. Sometimes it takes a while to get through the book. I started this one well before my summer travels, so there was a six week gap in the middle of reading it. I read the first parts of the book quite a while ago.

Foer begins by looking at Big Tech as a whole and their reasons why they say they need to be huge monopolies as they assure us they do what they do for the benefit of humans, a world healed by technology – healing that was needed because of earlier technology. Computer tech would free us from the shackles of industrial tech and the misery of capitalist overlords. Those promoting these ideas, beginning in the 1960s, tended to use lofty language to say how wonderful our future in a global village would be.

But we weren’t freed from monopolies, we were captured by new ones. Along the way the idea of a monopoly was was trimmed of its negative meanings. Competition means strife, they say. It keeps us from appreciating the value of monopolies. Without rivals a monopoly can focus on the important things, such as treating their workers well and generating world-changing innovation. Monopolies are natural and desirable, as the Silicon Valley thinking goes.

As Foer examines each tech giant he delves into the thinkers from the past on whose foundation these modern giants built. Some of these philosophers lived a couple hundred years ago. I won’t go into them much.

The leaders at Google have a core belief, even more central than allowing users to find their way around the web. That belief is that they can create an artificial intelligence that will move beyond and then merge with humanity in what is known as the Singularity (I’ll let you explore that one on your own). Their project to scan all the books in all the libraries isn’t just to allow humans access to all that knowledge. It’s to provide comprehensive teaching material to their AI. The folks at Google, when a bit unguarded, talk of a time when it has a million employees, 20 times larger than it is now. It appears to be a boast to dominate, to impose its values on the world.

Facebook runs on algorithms that feed on Big Data. They have amassed huge mounds of tidbits about each of its users (and likely even those who, like me, refuse to use it). These algorithms can sort through all this data to find connections and do analysis that a human simply could not do. In some cases, this is a good thing, such as quickly finding an obscure fact or locating a long lost friend.

Algorithms and the mounds of data are also behind the recommendations one gets from Amazon and Netflix. I’m encountering that recommendation system right now as I listen to music on YouTube – and I’m a bit frustrated with the narrowness of what thinks I would like to hear next. These algorithms might guide us to something new (or guide us to something less expensive for the company to deliver). If we let them, these algorithms do our thinking for us.

But when we outsource our thinking to algorithms, we’re really outsourcing our thinking to the people who built the algorithms. Facebook and others like to talk up their algorithms as independent and unbiased arbiters of what we would like in our recommendations and newsfeeds. Facebook may also say (though they won’t say it very loudly) that they have scientists to adjust and perfect the algorithms. So Facebook can put together a complete social psychological understanding of us.

But those algorithms are created and tweaked by humans. They display the biases of their creators. Through its algorithms, recommendations, and newsfeeds Facebook can guide us into not thinking and nudge us into accepting the direction it wants to take us. And it wants to take us into a more perfect social world. Under its control.

Organizing the vast mound of knowledge on the internet is indeed necessary and useful. A lot of human activity run on knowledge, including newspapers (obviously), music, and art (not so obviously). What Amazon and the others have done is to knock out the support of knowledge. Musicians don’t make much money for their music anymore. But iTunes does. Authors and publishers rarely made big money selling books. But Amazon does. They do it by providing the only access to sales and then squeezing the creators for every possible penny. Amazon becomes an arbiter of what is available by choosing what it provides. If you don’t play their game (you get the risk, they get the reward) you don’t appear to the wider world.

Big Tech likes to say they are eliminating the gatekeepers. Amazon would bust the cartel of New York book publishers. As a group they would shatter the grip of the American elite. The idea of gatekeepers became popular after WWII. Social scientists wanted to determine if a dictator could exploit public opinion in America. One study determined that newspaper editors acted like gatekeepers and what was published reflected their biases. Editors determined if a story had enough interest to their readers to make publishing worthwhile. But these gatekeepers could also simply exclude a story they thought was damaging to an important person. Or a gatekeeper could amplify a story and take down a president, as the *Washington Post* did with Nixon. A lot of power there.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s owner, now owns the Washington Post. Though he denies it, he is acting like a gatekeeper. He may not (yet) be doing it at his newspaper, but he is doing it to the book publishing business. He may not be doing it based on the content of the books, but he is doing it based on the crushing deals he can extract. Don’t play by the rules Bezos creates and your books don’t appear on his website. Amazon has such a huge part of the bookselling market that a publisher severely limits his options if he doesn’t play along. Before Big Tech there were lots of gatekeepers. Now Amazon is working towards there being one gate – theirs.

Can media control politics? When the telegraph was big, Western Union was the monopoly. They joined with the Associated Press, which allowed newspapers to fill their pages. The AP demanded its customers not use any other wire service and never say anything bad about the AP. The AP was very pro Republican, so while the AP archives are full of GOP malfeasance, but little of that reached the public. In the 1876 election the AP set out to install Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House. The Convention was grueling and the final election even more so – the results weren’t confirmed for four months. Behind the scenes Western Union passed along telegrams between Democratic strategists and the AP steered the negotiations. Hayes won. But the price was agreeing to pull federal troops out of the South, ending Reconstruction and allowing the start of Jim Crow. So, yeah, it has happened here.

Now consider a modern scenario, which probably hasn’t happened yet. We come up to an election. The results look close. So Facebook starts showing ads to remind people to vote – but does so only for users it knows will vote for the candidate Facebook wants.

These Big Tech companies have shown to be indifferent to democracy. Yet, they have acquired an outsize role in it.

As news became accessed through Facebook and news aggregate sites the “worth” of an article was reduced to the number of times people clicked on it. So all journalistic standards were dumped to embrace research on how to attract the click and how to appear in the list of what’s trending. Writers are rated on how well they attract clicks. Solid, thoughtful reporting and analysis didn’t attract clicks. Big Tech has engulfed journalism.

Big Tech likes to talk about shared creativity, about literature that is crowdsourced – various users can add their ideas and commentary. Big Tech also believes content should be free. That means an author has no way of earning a living from his writing. He can no longer afford to be a professional. Great works of literature cannot be crowdsourced. They have to spring from a single mind that can afford to sit at the keyboard perhaps for years. If an author can’t afford to do that we lose the great works he might have produced. We are also left with works that can be dashed off quickly. Or writing becomes the playground of those who are rich enough to not need to work. And the types of stories and the diversity of voices we encounter are lost. We hear only the stories that the rich want to tell – without dissent.

Big Tech has mastered Washington. They get laws passed and rules adjusted so they pay little tax (partly by threatening to take their office space elsewhere). They are barely regulated. But The Big One, a very disruptive security breach, is coming and Big Tech is bracing for it (a wise move). It could be a Big One because Big Tech has such a vast hoard of information about us. Even without a catastrophe all that data can be a source of invisible discrimination. It is time for a Data Protection Authority, similar to the recently created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Europeans have already done it. We need to do the same.

Can we get out of the mess Big Data has put us in? Foer says America has, in the past, turned away from its monopolies. Back in the 1970s Big Food made things more convenient, but at the cost of sameness and health. Big Food isn’t gone, but the artisan and organic food markets have grown by quite a lot. In the same way we have become careful about what we put into our mouths we can be persuaded to be careful about what we put into our brains.

Journalists should start charging for content and stop chasing clicks. They will be able to improve the quality of what they offer and consumers will respect it more. Perhaps you’re skeptical that is possible? Consider that the growth in ebooks has dropped. Books, and the contemplation that comes with their use, are not going away (Foer includes a history of bookshelves in houses). Contemplating with paper in hand means Big Tech is not learning your secrets and not trying to sell you stuff. We can set aside convenience and efficiency and focus on things and ideas that last. Many of us are finding the things that last aren’t on the internet.