Re: <nettime> School of red herrings

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

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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