by
Alfie Bown
archive/mc433
Franklin Foer,
Christian Fuchs,
Wolfgang Streeck,
Frank Pasquale,
Evgeny Morozov,
George Ritzer,
Nick Srnicek,
Nancy Fraser,
Arjun Appadurai,
Yann Moulier-Boutang
tech and justice essay quotes
[...] Our mobile phones pretend to be about fulfilling every desire [...] yet what is much scarier than the fact that the user can fulfill desire via the mobile phone is the possibility that the phone creates those desires in the first place. While the user thinks they are doing what they want, as if desires already exist and are simply facilitated by the device, in fact Google has an even greater power: the ability to create and organize desire itself. [...]
Turow draws a rather depressing conclusion from all of this, but it’s hard to disagree: “We are entering a world of intensively customized content, a world in which publishers and even marketers will package personalized advertisements with soft news or entertainment that is tailored to fit both the selling needs of the ads and the reputation of the particular individual.” [...]
The implications of such shifts for our public life are profound: the kind of personalization described above might destroy the opportunities for solidarity and informed debate that occur when the entire polis has access to the same stories. But it’s even more important to keep certain modes of debate about these issues alive; we cannot just give in to the temptation to view such problems from the perspective of efficiency alone. Under the old system, where there was no way to measure the audience’s reaction to particular articles, the advertisers were engaging in practices that were terrifically inefficient—they had to place their ads in the newspaper without seeing the breakdown of how many people read each article—but this inefficiency was rather beneficial.
[...] yes, some of us might find ingenious engineering solutions to resist insidious marketing, but in all this celebration of modern technology, shouldn’t we also do something about the marketing itself? Why force consumers to monitor themselves and hone their willpower techniques if we can make it harder for food companies to sell unhealthy food or target children? Instead, political action all but disappears; rather than reforming the system, we just tinker with ourselves and tend to our reservoirs of willpower the way Swiss bankers tend to their vaults.
[...] The biggest tech companies are, among other things, the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known. Google helps us sort the Internet by providing a sense of hierarchy to information; Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to sort the news we encounter; Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market.
Over the decades, the Internet revolutionized reading patterns. Instead of beginning with the home pages for Slate or the New York Times, a growing swath of readers now encounters articles through Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple. Sixty-two percent of Americans get their news through social media, and most of it through Facebook; a third of all traffic to media sites flows from Google. This has placed media in a state of abject financial dependence on tech companies. To survive, media companies lost track of their values. Even journalists of the highest integrity have internalized a new mind-set; they worry about how to successfully pander to Google's and Facebook's algorithms. [...]
need to find citations
[...] Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation, but that's a surface trait. In reality, Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioral experiments. While it creates the impression that it offers choice, Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that thoroughly addicts them. [...]
[...] Google has explicitly built its search engine to reflect values that it holds dear. It believes that the popularity of a Web site gives a good sense of its utility; it chooses to suppress pornography in its search results and not, say, anti-Semitic conspiracists; it believes that users will benefit from finding recent articles more than golden oldies. These are legitimate choices--and perhaps wise business decisions--but they are choices, not science.
Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction. [...]
the belief may be condescending but it's true tbh
the new knowledge monopolies [...] don't actually produce knowledge; they just sift and organize it. We rely on a small handful of companies to provide us with a sense of hierarchy, to identify what we read and what we should ignore, to pick informational winners and losers. It's incredible economic and cultural power that they have amassed because of a sudden change in the strange economics of the commodity they traffic in, a change they hastened.
attention economy implications!!! and the problem is that these choices are dictated almost purely based on profit-based concerns
It wouldn't take much for a search engine to tip public opinion. One study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, attempted to simulate the workings of Google [...] the authors kept reordering search results and then asking respondents to divulge their opinions. Placement in the search engine, it turns out, matters a lot: "On all measures, opinions shifted in the direction of the candidate who was favored in the rankings. Trust, liking and voting preferences all shifted predictably."
paper by Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson, "The Search Engine Manipulation Effect" 2015