by
Jaron Lanier
archive/dissertation
Nick Srnicek,
Douglas Rushkoff,
Robert W. McChesney,
Christian Fuchs,
Tim O'Reilly,
Franklin Foer,
McKenzie Wark,
Mark Andrejevic,
Evgeny Morozov,
Wolfgang Streeck
possibly relevant for my dissertation
An amazing number of people offer an amazing amount of value over networks. But the lion's share of wealth now flows to those who aggregate and route those offerings, rather than those who provide the "raw materials." A new kind of middle class, and a more genuine, growing information economy, could come about if we could break out of the "free information" idea and into a universal micropayment system. We might even be able to strengthen individual liberty and self-determination even when the machines get very good.
I mean this is true but it's the centrist's way out. It's the Hillary Clinton route: overly focused on the middle class and not inspiring. It might be better than the alternative of the middle class slowly dying, but if we're in such a dire situation that that's actually a possibility, why not consider the more radical project of abolishing classes entirely?
[...] Undoing the Siren Server pattern is the only way back to a truer form of capitalism.
Let's unpack (or maybe deconstruct this) because it's a really fascinating point. What does he mean by a truer form of capitalism? One in which workers are still exploited and corporations still make gigantic profits, but we expand the definition of "workers" to include basically anyone who generates data?
To me, it sounds like he wants to go back to the Golden Ages (which he didn't live through) or maybe the pre-crash years. But what if there is no truer form of capitalism to go back to? What if the capitalism he thinks of as "good" only exists in his head, an as idyllic paradise whose real costs are borne by outsiders he never has to think about?
Like him, I'm also very much against high-frequency trading and other manifestations of financialisation in this era of late-stage capitalism. Unlike him, I recognise that there are factors other than this "Siren Server" pattern: there are structural forces endogenous to capitalism that will prevent us moving toward the better, more human-driven world he takes as his telos. We can't simply "undo" this pattern. We have to understand how this pattern came to be, and what that tells us about the existence of a "truer" form of capitalism. After all, perhaps the "Siren Server" is the logical consequence of developing particular technologies within our current economic system. And if that's the case, how can we undo it without completely changing the way we perceive the economy?
Facebook's mission statement commits the company "to make the world more open and connected." Google's official mission is to "organize the world's information." No high-frequency trading server has issued a public mission statement that I know of, but when I speak to the proprietors, they claim they are optimizing what is spent where in "the world." The conceit of optimizing the world is self-serving and deceptive. The optimizations approximated in the real world as a result of Siren Servers are optimal only from the points of view of those servers.
this is an extremely good point
Once the data measured off a person creates a debt to that person, a number of systemic benefits will accrue. For just one example, for the first time there will be accurate accounting of who has gathered what information about whom. No amount of privacy and disclosure law will accomplish what accounting will do when money is at stake.
HOW IS THIS ENFORCED??????
no analysis of power at all, jesus
Extending the commercial sphere genuinely into the information space will lead to a more moderate, balanced world. What we've been doing instead is treating information commerce as a glaring exception to the equity that underlies democracy.
noooooooo it will not, it will just keep propping up capitalism and all its inherent tendencies towards inequality
So an ATTENTION ARMS RACE is set up: the more a market society becomes mediatized, the more it must dedicate a significant proportion of its activity to the production of demand, investing ever greater resources into the machinery of attention attraction. Like military arms races, this attention arms race is in itself a tragic waste, thanks to a sub-optimal organization of inter-human relations. [...]
fb/etc investing in making the product more addictive, and making it possible to show more ads (extract more ad-watching time from the viewer) in order to ensure revenue growth
[...] the phenomena of alignment, convergence, synchronization and concentration of attention brought about by PageRank would remain innocent enough if the attention economy wasn't completely overdetermined by the quest for financial profit that has now been elevated to a condition of survival.
[...] the PRINCIPLE OF COMMODIFICATION which seeks to submit attentional flows to needs and desires that will maximize financial returns. If, as an attention condenser, PageRank exemplifies the extraordinary power of the digitalization of our minds, as a capitalist enterprise, Google exemplifies the most harmful control that it is possible to imagine the vectoralist class exercising over our collective attention. [...]
The problem is that we don't have many levers of control over big tech companies. The traditional stuff doesn't work. Usually, if a company is doing something a lot of people think is unethical, you can boycott them. You can't really boycott Google or Facebook. You're not their customer to begin with. Their customers are advertisers and publishers. Also, they're monopolies. They're centralized and they benefit from network effects. Boycotting them means cutting yourself off from the online world. People just won't do it in numbers.
And shareholder revolts won’t work because these companies are structured so that the founders always have full voting rights. Zuckerberg is going to run Facebook no matter if he only has one share. That’s how it’s written. As for the media, the press isn’t going to say anything bad about Facebook or Google because those are the main outlets for journalism right now.
That really just leaves the employees. Tech employees have an outsize force because they’re very expensive to hire and it takes a long time to train people up. Even for very skilled workers, it takes months and months to become fully productive at a place like Google because you have to learn the internal tooling, you have to learn how things are done, you have to learn the culture. It’s a competitive job market and employee morale is vital. If people start fleeing your company, it’s hard to undo the damage.
So tech workers are a powerful lever. And knowing that fact, it seems unwise not to use the best tools at our disposal. The point isn’t to improve our economic well-being, but to pursue an ethical agenda.
Maciej on why a tech workers union is important
There's long been an ambition that the internet should be about democracy. This goes back to the beginning—to geeks swapping code, to open protocols that let users post whatever. But notice that when people in tech talk about "democratizing" some tool or service, they almost always mean just allowing more people to access that thing. Gone are the usual connotations of democracy: shared ownership and governance. This is because the internet's openness has rarely extended to its underlying economy, which has tended to be an investor-controlled extraction game based on surveillance and abuse of vulnerable workers.
However, discussions of the peddling of digital selves by gray-market data companies and Silicon Valley giants are usually separate from conversations about increasingly exploitative working conditions or the burgeoning market for precarious, degrading work. But these are not separate phenomena — they are intricately linked, all pieces in the puzzle of modern capitalism.
[...]
But the degradation of work is not a given. Increasing exploitation and immiseration are tendencies, not fixed outcomes ordained by the rules of capitalism. They are the result of battles lost by workers and won by capitalists. The ubiquitous use of smartphones to extend the workday and expand the market for shit jobs is a result of the weakness of both workers and working-class movements. The compulsion and willingness of increasing numbers of workers to engage with their employers through their phones normalizes and justifies the use of smartphones as a tool of exploitation, and solidifies constant availability as a requirement for earning a wage.
[...]
The smartphone is central to this process. It provides a physical mechanism to allow constant access to our digital selves and opens a nearly uncharted frontier of commodification.
Individuals don’t get paid in wages for creating and maintaining digital selves — they get paid in the satisfaction of participating in rituals, and the control afforded them over their social interactions. They get paid in the feeling of floating in the vast virtual connectivity, even as their hand machines mediate social bonds, helping people imagine togetherness while keeping them separate as distinct productive entities. The voluntary nature of these new rituals does not make them any less important, or less profitable for capital.
"they are intricately linked, all pieces in the puzzle of modern capitalism" similar to what I say in my tech dev for the many piece