A former team owner in the US National Football League, which splits its massive TV revenues equally between popular and bottom-feeder teams, once described the organisation’s team owners as “32 Republicans who all vote socialist”.
There appears to have been a similar moment occurring among the right regarding corporate control. Pausing deregulation and “cutting green tape” for a moment, they’ve been shocked — shocked! — to find that big tech is a series of interlocking monopolies with an agenda of its own.
Suddenly, with Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google’s limits on Donald Trump, sundry fascist nob heads, and the Twitter-alternative app Parler, the right has discovered its inner Ralph Nader.
Earlier remarks to the effect that big tech was led by transcendental visionaries drawing out the dynamism of capitalism who couldn’t be restrained by unions, etc, have now been, gasp, cancelled.
It’s the tech giants who are the dead hand now, restricting the free flow of ideas by various mavericks. They need to be, gasp, protected from the, gasp, private sector.
By contrast, and with more than a hint of schadenfreude, a great number of progressives are pointing out precisely the opposite: that Twitter et al are private companies that can select their content in the same manner as a newspaper once limited letters to the editor.
Meanwhile, a smaller section of the left warned against cheering this on, noting that a ban on “extremist” language would not differentiate between calls for a race war and those for resistance and activist struggle.
This has all been put into play by last week’s invasion of the US Capitol building and Trump’s wink and nod encouragement of it, but the confrontation has been coming for some time.
Something will have to be done about the big tech three — Twitter, Facebook and Google — sooner or later, simply because their business is social communication, the fundamental practice of linguistic/symbolic interaction.
Because these businesses involved infinitely interactive, self-aggregating processes — once you get social connection right, and call it Facebook, it spreads autonomously (capital helps, but it didn’t help Myspace much) — they could totalise in a way that high capitalism never could, not even oil or railways.
If you translated tech’s speech control to the physical world, it’s as if someone controlled all roads, we were all chip-tagged, and the right to use the streets could suddenly be withdrawn.
Communicative tech is so imminently, absolutely social that it has only existed for two decades before serious conversations have started about the socialisation of it.
That’s all the more so because it has fairly complex effects that can only be comprehended and discussed at a social and collective level.
The rise and crest of these effects — the sudden prominence of the QAnon conspiracy theory, for example — seem inexplicable if the default understanding of big tech is the liberal, individualist ideal that it itself projects, i.e. that it’s nothing more than a marketplace of ideas, level playing field, etc.
What’s really happening is that the form of big tech is transformative psychologically and socially, in a manner that compensates for the sort of society in which its rise is possible — one so distorting of human needs and human nature that a version of it can be “sold” back to some, on a mass basis, and with a de facto addiction model.
Long story short, the concrete, mythical and paranoic will tend to propagate and crowd out the abstract, rational and reflective faster than it can be contested. That is especially so in a society where knowledge and its technology have become the main line of division, and a principal source of power and dominant class.
So a loose sketch of what’s going on in all this strange repositioning is: traditional authority (i.e. of the cultural right) has become detached from the power of capital, which has reattached itself to the cultural energies of the left, arising from the ’60s; yet private social media has relied on turbocharged right-wing mythologising as a disproportionate driver of volume and revenue.
Simultaneously, the “progressive” or knowledge class, now that capital is on its side, has become detached from what remains of a political left.
The left, as a stopgap, is arguing for a more libertarian model of social media, while progressives are relaxed and comfortable with eliminating tens of thousands of noxious accounts, websites etc — even if a few radical left sources get swept up in the purge.
Thus the sudden “enough is enough” moment for progressives with the Capitol invasion last week.
Twitter’s leadership didn’t unilaterally throw Trump and thousands of others off the platform last week; it was responding to an internal letter from 350 key staff who keep Twitter up and running.
President-elect Joe Biden’s suggestion of a distinct “domestic terror” crime also gained wide support, even though it should be obvious it will eventually be used against groups like Black Lives Matter, which many progressives support.
Hence the unusual spectacle of the left defending private social media against potential state regulation, as the right tries to promote crackpot laws which would remove its capacity to edit noxious and violent content.
But sooner or later, social media is going to have to be socialised in some form — especially if its totalitarian character limits fragmentation, as per the evisceration of Parler.
One doubts this would involve simple nationalisation; nor would that be desirable. More likely it would involve government and other institutions having some material stake in the major platforms, while a number of parallel “civic boards” oversee matters of content regulation, with standardised processes — i.e. if you get thrown off, you get the chance to appeal.
Such a parallel public framework would develop a reflexive process in which an established and arguable set of standards would be established as reference. This might still have a progressive bias — in some ways it might cement it further than the current ad hoc process of squawking angry DMs @jack — and it would make it possible to argue, at length, the difference between “extreme” positions and abhorrent and violent ones.
Above all, one needs a social-reflexive process of steering to match and make visible the unreflexive process which is not merely a forum for events such as last week’s Capitol putsch, but produces them out of the whirl of algorithm, aggregation and myth, the game that grows out of the myth of the level playing field.
Doing that (social control of the socials) doesn’t sound like something that can reasonably accommodate national rules and expectations, or even separate identifiable trans-national and intra-national groups.
In fact it’s something that armies of smart people have been trying to figure out for a while. Perhaps they haven’t had quite as much incentive as exists right now, but it’s not a “new” problem. Facebook introduced their council-of-elders a while ago.
It seems more likely, to me, that it just isn’t a solvable problem, and that they’re going to have to be shut down. Making them publishers (rather than common carriers) seems like the most likely way to make that happen.
Lots of people will be unhappy whichever way it goes, but I suppose lots already are.
There’s an interview with the ex Guardian editor now on that Council of Elders here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszc31
Most of the ‘distortions’ that grow out the info-swirl of ‘algorithm, aggregation and myth’ online are exactly the same that have always grown out of the banal epistemological sleight-of-hand that is ‘mass meeja’. Whether it’s radio talkback, mass circulation newspapers, tabloid TV, any kind of agit-prop….it’s purely a matter of info-mode scale, reach…and ease-of-consumption/circulation. The tech giants’ media business-as-usual model – accumulate as vast a monetisable audience as fast as you can – is predicated on exactly the same principle as every other mass meeja iteration that preceded it: make your mode of mass meeja still easier to consume, use, participate in, thasn the last. Key to this in turn is audience ‘anonymity en masse’.
Social Media is nothing new. It’s just better at ‘mass meeja’ than all the ‘mass meeja’ modes that preceded it.
And it’s now so fast and so big and so ‘real’ (a real time parallel simulcrum even more uncanny than the telly) that, yeah, sure, it needs to be managed. But you won’t do it by endless arguments over ‘free speech’ that focus obsessively on ‘content’.
As I started saying twenty years ago on this here very same Teh Interwebz and will just keep on saying until I drop dead…instead of wasting timer and energy ‘free speech’ debates over ‘content’ that is and isn’t acceptable, and who should and shouldn’t be ‘censored’ and ‘banned’ based on what they might have/had to say…and rather imply make it an offence to publicly publish ANY piece of information without a readily identifiable author attached to it…then civic society will go an awfully long way to extracting itself from the epistemological catastrophe its engineered for itself. Blogs, FB, Tweets, newspaper editorials or reportage quotes, talkback, vox pops, TV audiences…you gotta identify yourself, or you just don’t get entry to public conversation. The legislative trade-off being that you also nullify all ‘content’ based restrictions, too – ie you ditch all defamation, hate speech and security-derived laws. We’re all allowed to say and write whatever we like. So long as we attach our authorial selves to it.
‘Free speech’ is a verb, not a noun. ‘Free speech’ is simply and solely what – whatever – you produce whenever you ‘speak freely’. ‘Speaking freely’ must include ‘speaking out in the open’. What you actually say when you ‘speak freely’ thus is of no relevance/concern to ‘free speech’ issues, whatsoever. We’ll each police that ourselves and wear the consequences accordingly. Which sure, might at worse case include our death. Helluva way to underscore how strongly we feel about something we add to the public conversation, if nothing else.
Don’t shout it down without thinking it through.
It will work. Better than anything else available to us.
Jack has never ceased pushing the point of the danger of anonymity of opinion, aka incitement.
I would go further and demand that each person have sole copyright to their “thoughts” – ie rights plus responsibility.
Hell, it’s easily enough done for monetary reasons so let’s implement it for something worth while.
Only techniques can be patiented and not “ideas” Agni. As to copyright it was DL who described all artists as thieves. The imperative of your assertions requires my knowing (with certainty) what is in your head (and v. v. for that matter)!
As an aside : copyright does NOT extend to or imply a Right to intellectual property as any employment contract with a hi-tech company will make clear. At best, there will be a concession to copyright but the company is to own what is produced.
If you don’t care for that state of affairs you will need to write to Michaela. Good luck.
I intend that everyone ‘own’ their data – the monetising of which is the lubricant of the Intertoob.
I was not referring to copyrighting ideas for gain – I meant it as a shackle for the intemperate.
Perhaps ‘copyright’ isn’t a useful quality here recognising that ideas cannot be subject to copyright. Both of us could write a book on the same subject for example.
The fundamental laws of slander and lible do insist on responsibility. The problem is that once upon a time Ethics was taught (from the Georgios) if only by osmosis. Now, as I conveyed to someone about an hour ago, with no redress to authorities, what falls into the public domain is opinion.
One other interesting wrinkle in the whole social situation is that the size (corporate) of the current crop of global communication intermediaries is mostly a function of their business interests. The actual cost of running a non-algorithmic messaging service is very nearly trivial. At the point where it was bought by Facebook, and had its first half-billion subscribers, WhatsApp ran on one machine with one (fat) connection to the internet backbone and a total staff of twelve engineers. It originally proposed to keep itself afloat by charging users $1/year, which would have made them all rich anyway. The system the French government built for themselves, when they decided they couldn’t trust the American corporations, is based on an open-standard thing called Matrix. I believe that anyone who cares can stand one of those up and start collecting users.
My point of mentioning all this is that the incumbents aren’t either necessary or particularly firmly rooted. Change the rules by much and the landscape will change before you even notice. With the shutting-down of Parler, I suspect that this has already happened, or will be starting to.
Of course, if you want to make a big advertising business out of it too, and use AI to profile your users to “drive engagement” or whatever, then that’s probably a lot more expensive, but none of that seems necessary to the task of assisting the social communication of people and groups, who I dare say would mostly be glad to not have it.
Interesting ,thanks.
“My point of mentioning all this is that the incumbents aren’t either necessary or particularly firmly rooted.”
Fully agree Andrew, and have made that point quite often. Of all of them, the most pointless by far is Facebook. If everyone gave it up the world would be a different and happier place. It has no actual function that can’t be quite easily duplicated or similar tech found that doesn’t obsessively follow you and make you a goose. As much as Facebook looks impossibly large and an essential fabric of modern life now, it could be MySpace all over again by 1930, or earlier. It’s only a subtle shift in consciousness required to be rid of it, or to find just a small pathetic rump of humanity left using it.
I watch with interest, but no skin in the game.
Power and influence and the control of information output is the gateway that Rupert has been able to amass a fortune with.
Editorial control depends very much on who pays the editor.
Andrew Reilly mentions Facebook’s council of elders.
Ethics and social responsibility , the impact of logarithms in marketing ,need to be closely looked at in our education system.
It is the sort of conversation that a public broadcaster needs to develop in mainstream media.
The importance of the integrity of these social platforms difficult to convey.
We need free debate with adjudication capable of identifying psychological manipulation and its source, be it via logarithms or more traditional emotive language manipulation, the unethical search for weak spots.
We all need to get our heads around new and old ways of manipulating people. That “science” is booming.
Bugger, algorithms
Interesting how Australia is compelled or prefers to look at the US for a solution meaning the foxes are managing the hen house?
One would suggest that the EU has already started with regulations that protect the privacy and rights of those who access internet and related social media, with constraints on providers or platforms.
Presently the EU is drafting the Digital Markets Act. to regulate ‘big tech’ or the gatekeepers, along with the existing EU’s GDPR General Data Protection Regulation which puts consumers first e.g. clear choice of opting in vs. opting out later.
However, it appears that any resistance to these draft EU laws is emanating from US ‘big tech’ itself where the US does not have the same clout as it would in Australia or the UK; while NewsCorp cannot operate freely in the EU due to trust and/or competition rules.
There is the dilemma for out own political parties and gatekeepers who want the best of both worlds, restrictions for others but not for themselves?