The escalating promise of technological transcendence is … well, bullshit.
In Greek mythology, Pandora had a box containing all manner of misery and evil.
25 October 2022 – – Forty-five years ago, the radical historian of science and technology David F. Noble observed a consistent pattern in modern American life:
“Each major scientific advance, while appearing to presage an entirely new society, attests rather to the vigor and resilience of the old order that produced it.”
Those words were written on the cusp of the personal computer revolution, which led to our dismally networked society of consumer-citizens addicted to disinformation and content-trash injected into our brain stems by powerful, pocket-sized devices, on hand at all times. Rather than delivering, in Noble’s words, on the “escalating promise of technological transcendence,” the twin forces of scientific technology and corporate capitalism gave rise to global behemoths – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft – – that reproduced the same “corporate monopolization of technological intelligence” that marked the industrial age. We’re living in what Noble described in “America By Design” as “a remarkably dynamic society that, as a society, goes nowhere.”
Our politics certainly reflects it. As just two examples, in the U.S. you have an American meritocracy so structurally involved in deep inequality that it undercuts both its own promise and democracy’s promise. That will never change no matter the outcome of any election. It’s why elections really do not matter. In the UK, they call it “The Great British Wank Off”. The UK’s routine convulsions since its Brexit vote in 2016 should ultimately be seen as the domestic squabbles of an entrenched plutocracy over the scraps of a stagnant economy that is now, largely by its own choice, of declining relevance to the rest of the world – but still incredibly gifted at comedy.
And in America, especially, data has always been a political tool. But today it’s more the “undisciplining of data” – modern data-collection and surveillance that can deny our humanity, our human aspirations, especially those at the margins of society.
But politics is not central to this piece. It’s technology. And why of why oh why can anyone possibly believe that this time, this “technology era” will be different? Do the enthusiasts for all the latest varieties of technological utopianism not know the past? So much of what goes on in tech solutionism is, well, bananas. Virtual reality? Life in the metaverse? To hear Zuck talk about it, you will be expected to participate in this brave new world – and to like it. For those who can pay, Club Zuck may well offer a few hours of diverting yet ultimately sad grinding in a hallucinated discotheque. My God, how dispiriting to see the human species continue to run away from itself, draining more and more enchantment from the real world just to prop up commodified fantasies of disembodied contentment in places that do not actually exist. Anybody here old enough to recall the holodecks on Star Trek?
That kind of arrested development distinguishes so many visionary tycoons leading us against our wishes into their idea of the future. And how can we not include the new Brat-King of Twitter, Elon Musk. Yes, he might or might not end up owning his shiny toy, but in proposing to sink billions into a platform for short-form bloviating – a company that Musk uses to juice Tesla’s stock price but that for the most part creates nothing of value – one begins to wonder about the idea of wealth without worth. But whether he buys it or not, he has already won, as I will explain below.
Plus we have growing artificial intelligence use cases, rule-by-algorithm, augmented reality, algorithmic wizardry … yada yada yada. It’s not all in the distant future. It’s happening now, and these systems provide cover to governments that prefer to spend money on technology-as-magic – rather than the hard work of grappling with social inequality and dysfunction.
It’s a natural human urge to invent new tools, of course. As I explained in the post that started this series, over the last 10-12 years I’ve had the opportunity to read numerous books and long-form essays that question mankind’s relation to the machine – best friend or worst enemy, saving grace or engine of doom? Such questions have been with us since James Watt’s introduction of the first efficient steam engine in the same year that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. My primary authors have been Charles Arthur, Ugo Bardi, James Beniger, Wendy Chun, Jacques Ellul, Thomas Kuhn, Lewis Lapham, Donella Meadows, Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Negroponte, Neil Postman, Maël Renouard, Matt Stoller, Alvin Toffler, Jerome Wiesner, and Simon Winchester. And, yes, you need to read all of them. To know why, read the intro to this series which I have linked in the first sentence of this paragraph.
Then there is the farce of government regulation of any of the stuff – ah, the comedy relief. Reality? Very little of even the most apparently dramatic technology laws under discussion would actually represent a fundamental change in how tech works and what most people spend their time working on.
And so we are living through technological change on the scale of the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution, but it is occurring in only a fraction of the time. What we are experiencing today – the breakdown of all existing authority, primarily but not exclusively governmental – is if not a predictable result, at least an unsurprising one.
And all of this change appears as mere spikes on the longer sine wave of history. Events that should be seared into our brains and conversations are mere blips on our screen. Social media has led us to skate over the surface of life, touching things lightly but never getting caught in the real essence of what is going on, and why. How short our attention spans have become as news coverage darts from one massive event to another.
But it is the ogres that have mastered language and culture. And ogres are gonna ogre. Rhetoric is as liquid and useful for the worst as it is for the best. The humanities, unfortunately, belong to humanity. And you can’t put that genie back in the bottle.
And it gets worse. As I have noted before, we have entered an age of atomised and labyrinthine knowledge. Many of us are forced to lay claim only to competence in partial, local, limited domains. We get stuck in set affiliations, set identities, modest reason, fractal logic, and cogs in complex networks. So you must step outside all of the usual lanes and to cross disciplines, social silos, political tribes and cultural boundaries. Those myriad spheres I have noted before – orientations, value sets, law, art, science, eros, economy, politics, just to name a few – are on different and often conflicting trajectories, but overlapping.
For purposes of this post, I need to slow myself down. So I shall limit myself to 5 topics:
1. The Metaverse and its slow uptake
2. The Brat-King of Twitter, Elon Musk
3. A few more (briefs) thoughts on AI image generators
4. Algorithmic politics in the U.S.
5. The regulation of technology
1. The Metaverse and its slow uptake
I was only on Facebook for 1 year … and I was 64 at the time. So I pretty much relied on the “youngins” because it was their thing. Oh, I commented on some posts, put up my own content (not a lot), went through my newly tagged photos, read some articles, joined maybe a group or two, and eventually watched some short viral videos there although my advertising/media cohort told me “Get on Instagram!” Frankly, I found it all pretty boring so I left after 1 year.
And apparently my declining interest in the site was in line with the kids and everyone else’s. In 2013, people were spending about 30 minutes a day on Facebook. By 2017, it was about 45 minutes a day. Now, as of the summer of 2022 metrics, that number has fallen back down to about 31 minutes. Which is still a lot, but a decent drop.
I wouldn’t describe anything I was doing on the site as particularly important, but for my kids it was the most convenient place to do a bunch of different things they liked or needed to do on the internet. But for me, instead of any big dramatic reason for leaving Facebook behind, it simply became I was bored – and found it much easier (and more fun) to use different platforms to do those things. I still use a special curated Twitter feed for news, use Linkedin to communicate with my core cyber / journalism / media / software development cohort … and TikTok because it has better videos. Although the average age of my followers seems to be 22, much to my wife’s consternation.
But let’s play a little exercise. Think back to why you last opened up Facebook. And now imagine that instead of pulling it up on your phone or opening a new tab on your desktop, ask yourself if you would still feel the urge to check Facebook if it meant sliding on a bulky (and weirdly heavy) plastic helmet to do so. Which belies the central contradiction of Zuckerberg’s big metaverse project: he is touting it as a revolutionary shift in the way we interface with the internet, complete with new mixed reality VR headsets that are more expensive than iPhones. And, yet, all he seems capable of imagining with this new technology is a conference call where you can see everyone’s legs.
There are a lot of different factors as to why Facebook took over the world, but as someone who has worked in digital publishing for 40+ years and who saw the platform shoot to the top of the referral traffic list one day out of the blue, I can tell you why it initially took off. It was simply there. It was easy to use, it was free, and it was able to onboard a lot of college students. By the time most of my kids and their friends got “real” jobs, an entire generation of students had used it to make friends and they were now suddenly young adults out in the world, still using it. So when Facebook launched a new suped-up app in 2012, announcing that “the future was mobile” — boom, the rest is history. Facebook made mobile “THE THING”. And everything that happened to Facebook after 2012 was simply about following that momentum by acquiring other companies and adding portal features to keep users coming back, forcing Apple and Google and Microsoft to follow.
But that strategy can’t work again now. Instead of a new app to monopolize the experience of someone else’s hardware, they’re trying to make the hardware too. They don’t just want to launch a definitive mobile app, they want to invent the iPhone at the same time. But they can’t acquire anymore and they’ve never been very good at innovating, so here we are: a $1500 headset that will let you have a weird cartoon Zoom call. But at least you’ll have legs.
In this blurb I simply cannot devote enough space to this topic. But for those of you heavily invested (at least via time) in the technology ecosystem I think you’ll see my bigger picture. A few brief thoughts struggling to form a narrative:
1. If you read all of Meta’s announcements over the last 2 weeks + their key events, presentation and podcasts over the past few years, it’s clear that Zuck was trying to build a roadmap for a decade of Moore’s Law and engineering to take us to devices with a much better experience, just as there was for mobile. And Meta’s thesis for those devices of the future was simple: a lot of investment, sheer force of will, and “we can make all of the rest work, too”.
2. Well, the problem (as always) is tech adoption. As Ben Thompson, the well-known tech pundit, said: “We don’t all own a personal camera drone. Those devices get better and better, but does that mean we’ll all use them?”
3. Or just the very, very basics. PCs, Macs, the web, smartphones – they are all 2D. Pictures and text are 2D. Games can be 3D, but our mainstream computing and internet experience is not. You can use Instagram on a PC, but not in VR. Smartphone sensors make the experience much richer … but will you shift your experience to a headset? Remember Microsoft’s mega-launch of its (long-forgotten) Surface Studio? Yes, it was amazing tech. But how many people’s jobs really involved drawing? And how does a stylus make Salesforce better? Yes, VR has lots of interesting niche industrial use cases – but most people aren’t surgeons or industrial designers. Does Salesforce really work better in 3D?
4. Or to be a bit more prosaic. I can put on a VR headset and see a ten-foot monitor (and yes, the displays will get good enough for that). But I don’t think the direction of travel in software is to let you see 100 rows in your spreadsheet instead of 50. Rather, all the most important new software does the opposite – it shows you the one column that matters, or abstracts it away entirely. Is that abstraction a 3D visualisation? Perhaps. Or is that 3D, again, showing you more, rather than less? Does automation, workflow, networking and machine learning mean more 3D? We’ll find out, but it certainly doesn’t mean giant virtual VR screens.
I need to close it off here and will leave you with these last 3 points.
1. I keep hearing “immersive” as in the sentence “It’s immersive, so it will be better!” But is that true? Some people argue that computing steadily moves towards more immersive experiences, but I think we could also ask “Is a smartphone more immersive than a PC, or less?” The damn thing is with you EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME, but mostly it’s asleep in your pocket until you need it. Wherever you are, you can use it. It takes computing to you, when you want it. Conversely, VR means climbing inside the computer.
2. There is also a painful contrast between the inorganic, top-down, deterministic slideware of “metaverse” and the grassroots, bottom-up, organic, creative enthusiasm of thousands of clever engineers building stuff in crypto and generative ML which will lead to something at a faster pace.
3. I am not blowing off the Metaverse and VR entirely. Going back to Moore’s Law, we tried VR in the early 1990s but the hardware wasn’t good enough, and then, a decade or so ago, people realised that the chips and screens had caught up with the dream. But it’s also possible that the chips and screens today only get us to a product with 100m users. There could very well be another wave of technology – neural interfaces, contact lenses or something else entirely – that will really make a universal device, and maybe that’s another twenty years away. And maybe most people will use that to rate a virtual smartphone.
2. The Brat-King of Twitter, Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s extended siege of Twitter seems doomed to succeed, perhaps against Musk’s own wishes. Whether he wants to scrap the deal entirely, which would cost him at minimum a $1 billion breakup fee, or negotiate a lower purchase price, or gets neither because the court forces his hand is all … unknown. Various court-imposed deadlines will soon hit so let’s see.
But in a way, irrelevant. No matter who owns Twitter after it survives this current storm, it will either be a public company controlled by a shifting cast of unaccountable CEOs, billionaire board members, investment firms, and shadowy major shareholders – or it will be a private company controlled by one unaccountable billionaire and his pliant supporting cast.
A Musk-led takeover of the platform would be a triumph for a group of reactionary right-wing techno-capitalists that has become increasingly vocal about its perceived victimhood in the face of abruptly shifting social mores. It’s also an opportunistic power grab: while a shift in ownership is glazed in a populist message of restoring free speech to a censorious platform, it’s really a familiar assertion of influence by would-be profiteers who smell opportunity.
Viewed in context, concerns provoked by Musk’s Twitter-grab shouldn’t be considered novel. Taxonomize what’s going on here and you’ll recognize some familiar elements: a multi-billionaire makes an aggressive play for an important but slightly tarnished media asset that he happens to be personally obsessed with. In the process, he mobilizes a potent tranche of public opinion, drawing on the culture-warring right, along with his usual power base of innovation-happy customers, obsequious tech-mogul allies, and worshipful true believers. This particular media platform has already been an effective force in burnishing the very cult of personality that’s boosted the stock price of Musk’s prized company. It’s also where he’s clashed with regulators for writing posts that may have had similar market-manipulating effects. Taking over the entire platform is a no-brainer, at almost any price.
And just when we thought we saw the worse … “Katy bar the door!”
By worse I refer to Twitter being an unsafe place for many of its users, the happy hunting grounds of intelligence operations employed by authoritarian regimes. As was well documented a few years back, an associate of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ran a spy ring that operated in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and helped yield information on pseudonymous dissidents. According to Canadian-based Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, himself a victim of this spying, some of these users were later arrested or disappeared. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned Twitter in 2016 that it had a mole problem, the company’s leadership ignored the FBI’s recommendation and confronted one of the spies directly.
Following his browbeating by Twitter executives, the spy contacted his handler and absconded to Saudi Arabia, where it’s been reported that he now works for MBS’s personal foundation, MiSK (and still has a Twitter account). The other spy was arrested – but Twitter has never offered a full accounting of its role in this debacle, including why then-CEO Jack Dorsey met with MBS in New York only six months later. In the meantime, billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal remains one of Twitter’s largest outside shareholders—though the shares may now be controlled by MBS, who once imprisoned Prince Alwaleed as part of a mass asset-seizure effort.
It’s hard to say what Musk’s concerns about free speech on Twitter – repeated frequently but rarely elaborated upon – actually mean. The Saudi issue is perhaps the most prominent, if unacknowledged, foreign entanglement for Twitter. It’s a reminder that the company’s problems are not confined to the cable-news-driven standards of free speech and wokeness in the United States. Its issues and influence are global, and the result of its corporate intrigue is felt accordingly. While Dorsey spent much of the Trump administration preaching the Bitcoin gospel, Twitter devolved into a spam-ridden information warfare zone, with its overlapping currents of government influence operations, low-grade right-wing propaganda, viral junk, and other bilge still poorly charted.
As Jacob Silverman, a free-lance journalist, noted in his book The Price of Constant Connection (recently reprinted with a chapter on Twitter):
“This is really about ego, power, and Musk’s ability to win on his own terms. To control Twitter would be to conquer the supposedly censorious, emotionally fragile political left that stands in the way of — what exactly? No one’s quite sure, but it’s been a useful front of the culture wars to draft from, as Musk makes common cause with Fox News hosts and transphobic posters. Succeeding on those terms would get a lot of likes and maybe sell some cars.
Beyond that victory, to control Twitter would be to sit astride a powerful node in the information wars and have access to events as they happen, as well as Twitter’s massive store of sentiment data and its private messages exchanged between influential people.
By acquiring Twitter, Musk would have at his disposal what amounts to a vast intelligence operation, which he can bend to his benefit, manipulating stock prices, boosting preferred crypto tokens, demonizing his enemies before a limitless audience, and casting doubt on the very rule of law.
That powerful brand of insouciance may not be enough to skirt the ire of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but America’s premier financial regulator seems reluctant to do more than slap Musk on the wrist, even though he almost certainly committed securities fraud by ignoring reporting requirements when he built up his initial stake in Twitter and filed the required paperwork eleven days late”.
Platforms like Twitter are deluged with spam and ghastly material depicting every manner of crime and abuse. Even supposedly sophisticated automated systems can’t catch everything, nor do poorly paid human moderators, laboring under great mental stress and a veil of corporate secrecy, sitting in front of screens all day parsing hate speech and flagging pictures of animal and human abuse. It’s a terrible situation that even the most well-resourced tech companies have failed, or been unwilling, to solve.
And so we’ll face even more halfway-sentient people, an unmoderated feed—again, thanks to the endless number of bad actors online, filled with the worst shit you could imagine. Yep, the perfect environment in which to exercise your speech rights.
And worse – much worse – for any person from a marginalized group subject to violence — including people living in non-democracies— the threats are real. Twitter is simply not some abstract separate place, hived off from the world. In occupied Palestine, or Modi’s India, or in a dozen other authoritarian regimes, stories abound of activists doxxed and banned and physically attacked through the very tech tools supposed to liberate them. Similarly, many tech companies maintain uncomfortably chummy relationships with less-than-democratic politicians abroad. In those countries, tweeting carries a political price – and it’s not a bullshit phone call from the SEC.
In his acquisition of Twitter, Musk will be exercising real political power that will put him more overtly in alignment with the political right. It’s almost reductive to call his latest project cynical or selfish; that is the billionaire’s typical affect. But Musk is no longer a carnival barker-like industrialist profiting off of hyped-up public enthusiasm and government largesse. Instead, he’s emerged as a dangerous kind of power broker – impossibly rich, amoral, full of empty technophilic promises, promising lawfare against his enemies, and able to manipulate asset prices and headlines in a tweet. Yes, his takeover of Twitter has probably been far more turbulent than he would have hoped. But under Musk’s prosperity gospel, he’s already won.
3. A few (brief) thoughts on AI image generators
ABOVE: Created with the simple AI text prompt “a teddy bear painting a portrait”
As I noted in my AI overview a few weeks ago, something significant has happened in AI in the most recent weeks. Generative systems – ones that automatically produce text and images from simple text prompts, as well as videos – have advanced to a level where they could have wide-ranging business uses. A partner in one leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, who describes the recent history of AI as a graveyard for start-up investors, now reports that the race is on to find breakthrough applications for this new technology. Please refer to that piece for some background.
I have been fascinated by the AI animation artwork being made. Here is just one example (you’ll need to click on the “pic.twitter” link) :
"A Year"
AI animation artwork made in colab using my custom stable 3D animation algorithm on top of #stablediffusion model. In the thread I share some details about the algo and when i plan to release it, and talk about the joy and future of AI filmmaking
🎶 DakhaBrakha – Vesna pic.twitter.com/OexCG5DCl3
— Dmitrii Tochilkin (@cut_pow) October 3, 2022
And it is getting really interesting on the legal side. Last month Getty Images drew the line and said “No, we’re not doing AI-generated art”.
And then … bang! A major competitor decides to wholeheartedly embrace it, including as a source for royalties. Shutterstock announced a new in-depth partnership with OpenAI, the company that developed DALL-E and launched an initial partnership with the stock photo service a year ago. The deal essentially ensures that AI art can both be sold on Shutterstock, and that Shutterstock members receive financial benefits, such as royalties, for allowing their images to be used in this way. Shutterstock CEO Paul Hennessy made it clear that where Getty Images balked at AI-generated stock photos, his service would not.
But it is complicated. We are dealing with ethical frameworks, including creating checks to reduce bias and methods to ensure that the rights of creators are protected, plus “the creator dilemma”. My good friend Ernie Smith gets into the details in this post.
But, alas, other legal issues will certainly emerge. I wonder how CSAM (child sexual abuse materials) prosecutions will handle somebody who has an open source generative ML model on their computer that doesn’t of itself contain anything illegal, but who also has a text file full of 50-word prompts, that generate videos that are very illegal indeed.
4. Algorithmic politics in the U.S.
Ever since Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” he’s remained the center of America’s political universe. But the continued fixation on the 45th president is now a distraction. He’s only part of the story, especially now that Trumpism has grown larger than Trump himself.
Last week the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol formally subpoenaed Trump, which seems to be the minimum amount of red meat the Democratic base demanded from the panel. It was pure political theatre. No reality to it. While the big reveal of the subpoena – which was leaked to NBC News during the panel’s final hearing earlier this month – garnered headlines and TV hits, it overshadows the misunderstood and still-unfolding story of the digital machinations that fueled the attack and are poised to remake America for years to come, if not forever.
The U.S. has entered an era of algorithmic political warfare, and some of it is dished out in delicious detail by former Republican congressman Denver Riggleman who, until this spring, served as a senior advisor to the January 6 committee. He has a book just out – The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th – which I read over the summer (I am a member of a publisher consortium and so I receive scores of books every year for review purposes). Riggleman is a a former Air Force intelligence officer whom I met via LinkedIn, the cofounder of a very successful data mining and analysis military contracting firm before his election to the House in 2018. I am meeting him this year in my last trip to the U.S. [sniff, sniff]. Riggleman says the panel may have conducted hundreds of interviews, but “they’ve been lapped”. He said:
“The information war moves at the speed of electrons, not at the speed of interviews. That’s it. We’re in a new world. The committee did a great job, but we have to move faster. We have to be more aware of how data can help any investigation into these types of activities when it comes to domestic terrorism or the radicalization pipeline. It’s unfortunate that the select committee devoted the bulk of its time and resources looking backward. They missed what’s afoot — and still to come. It’s the same old, same old. We’re trying to solve today’s problems tomorrow with yesterday’s technology. We’re in an information warfare battlespace and the other side has already changed their tactics. Deplatforming didn’t work. They just go to other platforms. They have gamed the system”.
In his book he details a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into not just the January 6 attack. He also believes he identified the insurrection’s central player: Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Riggleman handed the special committee 2,319 text messages Meadows sent or received from the election through Biden’s inauguration, which he says reveals how deeply conspiracies have now “metastasized” in today’s Republican Party:
“What it shows is that QAnon conspiracy theories have saturated every level of the GOP. The coordination included members of Congress, the wife of a Supreme Court justice, myriad lawyers, little-known aides, and, of course, Trump’s most ardent supporters”.
Riggleman also revealed a mysterious nine-second phone call placed from the White House switchboard at 4:34 pm on January 6 to 26-year-old Anton Lunyk, who has since pleaded guilty to entering the Capitol. Despite these findings, he bemoans not being able to go all the way down the meme- and hashtag-laden rabbit hole due to funding:
“Thousands of documents are great, but millions of lines of data are better. And so when you look at call detail records or open source intelligence research or you look at social media, those types of things can tell you a lot. And I think it can actually direct the way that you investigate more than bringing people in who lie, plead the Fifth, or sometimes conveniently forget things.
And the real story isn’t Trump. If you indict Trump, his polling numbers are going to go up. So good luck. Trumpism is now gospel to an online army of devotees, hundreds of whom are now running for state and local offices. No matter which party comes out in control of Congress once the dust settles on Election Night, the next Congress is guaranteed to have Donald Trump’s stamp on it. The GOP candidates on the ballot next month include 291 who say they wouldn’t have certified Biden’s 2020 victory, according to the Washington Post. Of those, 171 are running in safely Republican districts. Game set match”.
It’s a digital take-over. As I noted in a post last year, thousands of Trump supporters took his post-January 6 deplatforming as their cue to follow their leader off Twitter and Facebook and into a new world of almost-anything-goes social media apps, like Trump’s own struggling Truth Social, or Parler, which Kanye “Ye” West plans to buy. Those apps suck up the most recent coverage, but other apps continue to attract new and frustrated users.
But there’s also Gab (where QAnon devotees feel safe discussing ever-evolving conspiracy theories), GETTR (a “free speech”-focused app founded by former Trump aide Jason Miller), Rumble (think YouTube for the far right), MeWe (think Facebook for Trump Republicans), and CloutHub (if Twitter and Facebook had a baby). Even Reddit is helping Trump successfully spread ungrounded conspiracies about ballot-stuffing in Arizona.
Many on the right are also increasingly employing popular messaging apps like Telegram, which allows private groups to include as many as 200,000 members, and Signal, popular for its promised end-to-end encryption. That includes many of Trump’s most motivated followers, which we know from the dramatic spike in users they both attracted after Silicon Valley firms started their post-insurrection purges.
Then there are forums like 4chan, 8kun, and Endchan. Movement-inspiring memes, dangerous conspiracy theories, celebrations of violence and violent rhetoric all abound on these hubs connecting kindreds who proudly consider themselves social outcasts set on upending the “normie” society most of us inhabit.
As the select committee now prepares its final report on the preparation and planning leading up to the savage assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the right has moved on. And in laying the groundwork to leave a Trump-sized imprint on this year’s midterms—including upending voting laws in countless battleground states and recruiting thousands of new pro-Trump poll workers to “police” local polling locations—the former president’s acolytes are also proving to be a few steps ahead of their opponents in their plan to capture the White House in 2024.
Just as an escalator helped Trump glide into the center of U.S. politics, the real story is the online gears, lubricants, chains, and steps lurking just under our feet. Likewise, unless more attention is paid to these means of political production, this new political order is something we all should get used to. Says Riggleman:
“We’re in a post-truth era, but we’re also in a post-Trump world—where those belief systems are baked in, and we’re going to have to deal with this for decades. We need to look at going faster, harder, and better with more technology and more resources in that arena”.
I’m too scared to get out the popcorn.
5. The regulation of technology
When I look at the traffic to my website, and at those posts which go out via my newsletter service (not all do), it’s vey clear that anything about regulation gets the least engagement. I hear much the same from friends at the big newspapers: stories about tech regulation get less traffic. The government is coming for you, and you don’t care? There are some obvious reasons for this – regulation is boring, mostly – but I think one could also suggest that most of the laws and rules that are being discussed simply won’t affect most people in tech very much at all, nor most tech companies.
At the simplest level, several thousand companies are founded in Silicon Valley alone each year – and very few of them are social networks. Not many more are ad-funded. So, two of the biggest areas of the tech backlash – content moderation and privacy – might not really apply. If you let consumers share files then you need to worry about CSAM (child sexual abuse materials), and if you handle user data you need to think about HIPA, GDPR and so on and so on.
But these are annoyances and a cost of doing business rather than existential problems, and if you’re building enterprise SaaS DevOps they just don’t cross your mind. Equally, there are some consumer businesses where Apple’s App Store policies are an issue, or where its destabilization of mobile advertising is a problem. But these aren’t issues for Databricks or Okta.
Taking this a step further, not only do a large proportion of tech companies sit outside the main areas of political concern, but I think one could also at least suggest that most people inside Meta or Google aren’t really affected by this in their day-to-day jobs either. The EU’s Digital Markets Act says that messaging apps must be interoperable, and if you work in the iMessage team at Apple this is a big deal. But if you’re working on chips or photos, is it on your radar at all?
NOTE TO READERS: that messaging apps will be interoperable is doomed because the EU Commission is just now realizing that encryption will be compromised, sharing technical protocols between vendors is almost impossible, etc. If only they had brought in some tech experts to explain how message apps, networking and platforms work in the real world 🤪
There is conduct regulation, which brings new rules for someone else in your company, or more likely people in other companies, and then there is structural intervention, which means breakups, and that sounds like a bigger deal. “Make Instagram a separate company! Spin off Youtube!” As I have noted in previous posts, this will not actually change the competitive landscape that much (or rather, it might make the online ad market more competitive but not create more competitors to Instagram or YouTube). But such moves still seem very unlikely (or at least, a lot more will need to change in the U.S. political and technology ecosystems) so they are years away. And even if they did happen they’d be very narrowly focused on particular parts of particular companies.
More fundamentally, though, very little of even the most apparently dramatic laws under discussion would actually represent a fundamental change in how tech works and what most people spend their time working on. It’s as though we’ve created safety standards and emissions standards for cars, and shouted about it a lot, but they’re still made from steel, in Detroit, and still burn gasoline. So it’s important to you as a citizen – but not in your job.
Until, of course, they’re not made in Detroit and they don’t burn gasoline. There are new waves of fundamental, structural change in tech, which might even mean crypto, which is a new software architecture, or machine learning (ditto) or “metaverse” (insert your own definition). If web3 ever does deliver any of the dream it would make great chunks of tech regulation obsolete. Then there’s quantum, and LEO satellites, and the complete reconfiguration of the chip industry that’s going on largely unnoticed, plus the mass-unbundling of email, Excel and Salesforce into new productivity software. And all of these things might change what tech companies actually do and how people in tech spend their days. That’s what gets engagement. And makes regulation absurd.
We never escape the celebration of the dynamic entrepreneur or big company with a “Big Idea”. I get that. But some if it is just crap. Musk and Zuck are my poster boys.
And companies? Shell imagines itself becoming a “net-zero emissions energy business” by 2050- not by producing less oil and petrochemicals but by getting credits – for example, by planting more trees – that offset their emissions. It’s been a popular idea among polluters, supposedly “green” think tanks, and state regulators. Yet halting the increase in emissions doesn’t equate with reducing total emissions, which is what the climate emergency requires.
So much of what goes on in tech solutionism is, as I noted above, bananas. David Noble saw in our history of technology a pattern of “change without change.” That’s another way of saying that we are devoted to “innovations” nobody needs while we get nowhere – the decidedly non-Meta lives of most humans slightly less awful for the limited time we each have on this ridiculous planet.
From one perspective, you could argue that all of this tech has made ours an excessively emotional age. Outrage and fear are the currency of public discourse; thoughtfulness and reason appear to be in retreat. It brings up one of the things I detest about the Internet and how it has changed our thinking – something I raise ad nauseam, I fear.
But that is something I shall explore in detail in my book-in-progress “Tales Aboard the Shipwreck Called Civilisation: Our many moments of rupture”. The Introduction / Chapter One will be out next month for your comments.