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[...] Marketers plot to tout beauty products at moments of the day that women feel least attractive. There’s little to stop them from compiling digital dossiers of the vulnerabilities of each of us. In the hall of mirrors of online marketing, discrimination can easily masquerade as innovation.
using data to overcome more of our natural defenses against advertising
[...] Runaway data can lead to cascading disadvantages as digital alchemy creates new analog realities. Once one piece of software has inferred that a person is a bad credit risk, a shirking worker, or a marginal consumer, that attribute may appear with decision-making clout in other systems all over the economy. [...]
[...] software engineers construct the datasets mined by scoring systems; they define the parameters of data-mining analyses; they create the clusters, links, and decision trees applied; they generate the predictive models applied. Human biases and values are embedded into each and every step of development. Computerization may simply drive discrimination upstream.
[...] Laws prevent the government from collecting certain kinds of information on citizens, but data brokers are not so constrained. And once someone else has collected that information, little stops the government from buying it, demanding it, or even hacking into it.
Our off- and online actions are logged in hundreds of private-sector databases. Aptly called “big brother’s little helpers” by privacy expert Chris Hoofnagle, private-sector data brokers gather files that police would never be able to gather on their own, and then sell them to the police. This is not a “bug” in our surveillance system, but a “feature.” Note that the very definition of fusion centers includes their willingness to receive information from private parties. The Snowden leaks make the shared infrastructure of state and private data collection incontrovertible. Never again can data deregulationists claim that corporate data collection is entirely distinct and far less threatening than government surveillance. They are irreversibly intertwined.
[...] search services, social and not, are “must-have” properties for advertisers as well as users. As such, they have made very deep inroads indeed into the sphere of cultural, economic, and political influence that was once dominated by broadcast networks, radio stations, and newspapers. But their dominance is so complete, and their technology so complex, that they have escaped pressures for transparency and accountability that kept traditional media answerable to the public
We pay no money for Google’s services. But someone pays for its thousands of engineers, and that someone is advertisers. Nearly all the company’s revenue comes from marketers eager to reach the targeted audiences that Google delivers so abundantly. We pay with our attention and with our data, the raw material of marketing. [...]
[...] Google continues to maintain that it doesn’t want human judgment blurring the autonomy of its algorithms. But even spelling suggestions depend on human judgment, and in fact Google developed that feature not only by means of algorithms, but also through a painstaking, iterative interplay between computer science experts and human beta testers who report on their satisfaction with various results configurations.[...]
[...] we can’t hope to reform the information economy without fundamentally changing the incentives at its core. Wu’s postmaterialism would have been a good fit for the roaring nineties, when a rising tide of Internet firm profits seemed to be lifting many parts of the economy. But the economic crisis that has overtaken the United States since 2008 makes our time in many ways more similar to Franklin Roosevelt’s era than Bill Clinton’s. A small cadre of the lucky, the talented, and the ruthless are taking an enormous share of the revenues generated by new Internet technologies. They keep their methods strictly proprietary while reaping huge returns from content put out in the open by others. Like the megafirms and CEOs that the New Deal helped bring to heel, the leaders of our largest tech firms have been very quick to misequate personal enrichment with the public good.
once again, I feel vindicated
From the tech and telecom craze of the late 1990s to house price escalation from 2002 to 2006, asset bubbles are a predictable consequence of black box finance. Insiders who understand their true dynamics can sell at the top, reaping enormous windfalls. But their gains represent “a claim on future wealth that neither had been nor was to be produced.” By creating the illusion of enormous value in securities like CDOs and CDSes, black box financiers make their own fees (ranging from a fraction of a percent to over 30 percent in the case of some hedge funds) seem trivial in comparison. When the mirage dissipates, the desert of zero productive gains becomes clear. But in this harsh new economic reality, the money “earned” by the speculators has all the more purchasing power, arrayed against the smaller incomes of those who did not take advantage of the bubble.
the quote on future wealth comes from an excellent book review by Benjamin Kunkel's https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n09/benjamin-kunkel/forgive-us-our-debts
take the quote from kunkel and repurpose it for the latest tech bubble
In the context of massive Internet firms, competition is unlikely. Most start-ups today aim to be bought by a company like Google or Facebook, not to displace them. [...]