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Fascism is back. Blame the Internet.

It’s polarizing our politics, making us ignore inconvenient facts and impeding real activism.

by Timothy Snyder May 21 Follow TimothyDSnyder  
Timothy Snyder, the Levin professor of history at Yale University, is the author, most recently, of “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.”

Some Americans ask: What is wrong with the Internet? Others ask: Can fascism return? These questions are the same question.

Despite all the happy talk about connecting people, the Internet has not spread liberty around the world. On the contrary, the world is less free, in part because of the Web. In 2005, when about a quarter of the world’s population was online, common sense held that more connectivity would mean more freedom. But while Mark Zuckerberg was calling connectivity a basic human right, the more traditional rights were in decline as the Internet advanced. According to Freedom House, every year since 2005 has seen a retreat in democracy and an advance of authoritarianism. The year 2017, when the Internet reached more than half the world’s population, was marked by Freedom House as particularly disastrous. Young people who came of age with the Internet care less about democracy and are more sympathetic to authoritarianism than any other generation.

It’s also telling that the Internet has become a weapon of choice for those who wish to spread authoritarianism. Russia’s president and its leading propagandist both cite a fascist philosopher who believed that factuality was meaningless. In 2016, Russian Twitter bots spread divisive messages designed to discourage some Americans from voting and encourage others to vote for Russia’s preferred presidential candidate, Donald Trump. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union that same year was substantially influenced by bots from beyond its borders. Germany’s democratic parties, by contrast, have agreed not to use bots during political campaigns. The only party to resist the idea was the extreme right Alternative für Deutschland — which was helped by Russia’s bots in last year’s elections.

Democracy arose as a method of government in a three-dimensional world, where interlocutors could be physically identified and the world could be discussed and verified. Modern democracy relies upon the notion of a “public space” where, even if we can no longer see all our fellow citizens and verify facts together, we have institutions such as science and journalism that can provide joint references for discussion and policy. The Internet breaks the line between the public and private by encouraging us to confuse our private desires with the actual state of affairs. This is a constant human tendency. But in assuming that the Internet would make us more rather than less rational, we have missed the obvious danger: that we can now allow our browsers to lead us into a world where everything we would like to believe is true.

We think of computers as “ours” and imagine that we are the rational ones, using computers as tools. For many of us, much of the time, this may be a disastrously self-flattering perspective. When we run a search or read a feed, we are encountering instead an entity that has run algorithms about our preferences and which presents a version of reality that suits us. Yes, people can also humor us, but not with the same heartless determination, and not with the same flawless and cumulative memory of our weakness. Traditionally we have thought of artificial intelligence as a kind of rival to our own intelligence, emerging in parallel. What is actually happening is not parallel development but interaction, in which entities that are not themselves intelligent can nevertheless make us stupid.

In the famous “Turing test,” designed to determine whether a computer program could convince a human that it was also a human, skeptical humans ask hard questions and consider the output. This is our model of the enlightened person, but it scarcely resembles how we deal with computers. Rather than testing their reason, we concede our own at the outset if we are made to feel good about ourselves. Tellingly, the first computer program to pass the Turing test imitated a psychoanalyst. It turned the tables: We were no longer testing it; it was manipulating us. We believe computers are trustworthy when they seem to care how we feel. We follow sites that amplify our emotions, outraging us or elating us, not asking ourselves whether they are designed to keep us on line so that we see targeted ads — or, for that matter, used as weapons by foreigners to harm us.

Democracy depends upon a certain idea of truth: not the babel of our impulses, but an independent reality visible to all citizens. This must be a goal; it can never fully be achieved. Authoritarianism arises when this goal is openly abandoned, and people conflate the truth with what they want to hear. Then begins a politics of spectacle, where the best liars with the biggest megaphones win. Trump understands this very well. As a businessman he failed, but as a politician he succeeded because he understood how to beckon desire. By deliberately spreading unreality with modern technology, the daily tweet, he outrages some and elates others, eroding the very notion of a common world of facts.

In fascism, feeling is first. Fascists of the 1920s and 1930s wanted to undo the enlightenment and appeal to people as members of a tribe, race or species. What mattered was a story of us and them that could begin a politics of conflict and combat. Fascists proposed that the world was run by conspirators whose mysterious hold must be broken by violence. This could be achieved by a leader (führer, duce) who spoke directly to and for the people, without laws and institutions. Totalitarianism meant domination of the whole self, without respect for private and public.

Our memory of the 20th century grew hazy just as we began the plunge into cyberspace, which is perhaps why we did not notice certain alarming features of the experience. The Internet has revived fascist habits of mind. Smartphones and news feeds structure attention so that we cannot think straight. Their programmers deliberately appeal to psychological tactics such as intermittent reinforcement to keep us online rather than thinking. Is pulling your phone out 80 times a day really a free choice? Companies know that interruptions to flow are more likely to get a response, which is why the experience of a smartphone or a social platform is so jarring. Once attention is gained, it is kept by deliberately bottomless feeds that reinforce what we like and think. Researchers have found users of the Internet believe they know more, but in fact are less able to recall what they think they know.

The fascist psychology of the Internet had obvious political possibilities, some of which have now been consciously exploited. Facebook set the standard in providing fiction as fact before our last election. It and other platforms loops exploit our clicking habits to draw us toward a world of “us and them.” Social and political bots, many of them Russian, exploited our gullibility to deepen our divisions, and spread conspiracy theories. We found it normal to read the email of other people, breaking down the barrier between private and public. And the winning presidential candidate used and uses Twitter to emote with his supporters without mediation.

To be sure, Fascism 2.0 differs from the original. Traditional fascists wanted to conquer both territories and selves; the Internet will settle for your soul. The racist oligarchies that are emerging behind the Internet today want you on the couch, outraged or elated, it doesn’t matter which, so long as you are dissipated at the end of the day. They want society to be polarized, believing in virtual enemies that are inside the gate, rather than actually marching or acting in the physical world. Polarization directs Americans at other Americans, or rather at the Internet caricatures of other Americans, rather than at fundamental problems such as wealth inequality or foreign interference in democratic elections. The Internet creates a sense of “us and them” inside a country, and an experience that feels like politics but involves no actual policy.

By the same logic, the Internet can indeed be used for progressive purposes, as when an activist calls for a protest in Ukraine or Egypt or when public-school teachers use social media to organize strikes in a state where spending in education has fallen by 28 percent in the past decade. The crucial point: In such cases, people are using the Internet against itself, to get their bodies into the real world. The reaction of leaders such as Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin is telling: They immediately call real protesters paid actors or agents of foreign powers, trying to wrap the human world back inside fiction. In the age of the Internet, stretching one’s legs with strangers is a frightening political act.

The most disturbing resemblance between Fascism 1.0 and Fascism 2.0 is authentic popularity. Some Americans want to punish Russia. Others want to punish Silicon Valley. Both impulses are reasonable. But both dodge the fundamental issue. It is we who choose to be fooled, much as Europeans did in the 1930s. Why should the trolls, bots and algorithms respect us when we do not respect ourselves? Fascism played on loneliness and gullibility. That’s a lesson we can learn — but not from machines. We can fix the Internet only by taking an honest look at ourselves.

http://intersectionproject.eu/article/politics/search-putins-philosopher

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Ilyin has not become Putin’s official ideological reference or “Putin’s philosopher”. Putin has quoted Ilyin on only five occasions (in 2005, 2006, 2012, 2013 and 2014); three of these were addresses to the federal assemblies and two to military audiences. This number of quotes is far fewer than those from many other thinkers among the regime’s pantheon. Putin has referred many times to historians such as Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), symbols of classical Russian historiography, or political figures such as Petr Stolypin (1862–1911), the embodiment of Russia’s modernization path at the beginning of the 20th century.
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Rehabilitating Ilyin is part of this faction’s broader agenda of reintegrating the White émigré past into the national master narrative. This policy coincides with the Church’s strategy of advancing conservative, even reactionary values, alongside nostalgia for the Romanov Empire. But these groups are celebrating the cultural continuity with the Tsarist past, not a specific brand of Russian fascism. Obviously, reintegrating White supporters into the national pantheon implies rehabilitating émigrés who collaborated with fascist regimes against the Soviet Union—but that dilemma is not exclusive to Russia. All Eastern European countries face the same difficulties in reintegrating collaborationist movements into their national past. Ilyin earned a posthumous place in the national pantheon because this faction regards him as the personification of White ideology—and Denikin of the White movement per se.

Ivan Ilyin has been held up as the ideological inspiration of this pro-Orthodox, pro-emigration and pro-Romanov faction, but he is not that of the Kremlin, the presidential administration or of Putin himself, which have built a much more plural pantheon of ideological references. Ilyin has been quoted by Putin relatively few times compared to other Russian thinkers, and the selected quotes are harmless statements. Ignoring Putin’s plurality of ideological references to demonstrate his alleged admiration for a ‘fascist’ thinker does not offer meaningful insight into the Kremlin’s thinking or “Putin’s mind”. Weak attempts to blame an obscure dead philosopher for the Kremlin’s alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election are an even more unproductive tactic that intends to restrict other, less name-calling, explanations of the Russian state’s functioning and ideological construction.

US power to rule a digital world ebbs away
Evgeny Morozov

For 30 years the model of a global village dependent on American innovation worked... for the US. Now that illusion is fading fast

Sun 10 Jun 2018 00.03 BST


As Donald Trump’s America gears up for a full-blown trade war with the resurgent China, Washington seems to have forgotten the very mechanisms that assured its dominance in the post-cold war era. Those mechanisms were underpinned not just by America’s military might, but also by its ability to minimise the odds of any anti-systemic dissent.

American policymakers have known perfectly well that the hallmark of effective hegemony is the invisibility of its operations. Getting other people to behave as desired is easier if those others believe that doing so is not only in their interest but also the natural course of history and progress.

Why bother with the messy sale that is colonialism if one could get other countries to surrender through fairytales about the mutual benefits of free trade?

Of all the myths that solidified American hegemony over the past three decades, the myth of technology proved the most potent. It recast technology as a natural, neutral force that could erase power imbalances between countries. Technology was not something to be tinkered with or redirected; one could only adapt to it – much like one would adapt to the vagaries of the market, but with far less resistance.

A global village was in the making, courtesy of networks and bits. “The end of history” sounded tempting in all languages, but no idiom put it quite as eloquently as that of technology. Never had there been a way to be so upbeat about capitalism without ever mentioning it by name. What mattered was not who owned technology, but how one used it.

Such tropes helped conceal many basic truths about the actual relationship between technology and power. First, the global village was global only to the extent that its main patron – the US – needed it to be so. Second, there was nothing natural or neutral about the standards, networks and protocols of the digital universe: emerging from the cold war, most of them aimed at extending US influence.

Third, joining a single, inviolable network was never an easy ticket to national liberation. From cyberweapons to artificial intelligence and surveillance, interconnectivity and digitalisation have, far from eliminating old power imbalances, created many new ones.

Nonetheless, this ideology – that of the internet – served US interests quite well, producing many of the world’s largest technology firms. By 2018, though, it has started running thin.

America’s global village is disintegrating. Just look at digital platforms, which, with their ability to scale everywhere, were supposed to be the apex of US techno-hegemony. The plan worked, but only initially. Then, Silicon Valley discovered that America’s closest allies were successfully funding local challengers to the global expansion of US technology giants.

Consider Uber: its global ambitions have been checked by Ola in India, DiDi in China, 99 in Brazil, Grab in south-east Asia, and Yandex. Taxi in Russia.

And with the exception of Yandex, all of these challengers – including Uber itself – were funded by Japan’s SoftBank and folded into its Vision Fund. The latter pools the money of America’s closest allies, from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates. When Uber found itself burning cash at astronomical rates, it did a deal with Softbank.

China’s ascent challenged many other myths behind American techno-hegemony. Thus, once-neutral tech standards – such as 5G – were suddenly subject to fierce contestation, with Beijing demanding rules favourable to its own champions. Moreover, the global ambitions of Huawei and ZTE and the tremendous growth of other Chinese players such as Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, have also forced Washington to do the unthinkable: exercise hard power, rendering its hegemony visible.

So we saw moves such as Trump’s veto of the Qualcomm-Broadcom merger, the nearly lethal disruption to ZTE, and the controversial White House memo about nationalising America’s 5G network: one could, of course, suppose that this is all just an affirmation of Washington’s superiority.

Perhaps. Robbed of the foundational myths, America won’t find it easy to convince other countries to let their industries be disrupted by US tech firms. Or abandon the development of their own AI capabilities. Or accept the provisions, inserted into trade treaties, demanding the free flow of data from local servers to US ones – in the name of a single, global internet.

The limits to US techno-hegemony were evident to Barack Obama, who upped the ante on America’s “internet freedom” mythology while trying to contain China’s expansion within the framework of US-led global trade regime.

Thanks to Trump, that mythology is no more. He is also threatening US technological supremacy in other ways – cutting research budgets, restricting immigration (much needed in the tech industry), and even preventing the immediate dismantling of China’s ZTE in the hope of gaining more leverage in negotations.

Post-Trump America won’t be going back to Obama’s playbook, though; by then, it will be too late to contest China’s rise. Washington’s probable strategy will be to continue to contest the very global order that has come to thwart Silicon Valley’s expansion ambitions, all the while embracing a more assertive anti-Beijing stance and penalising its allies for relying on China’s tech giants.

At least, when the tech cold war breaks out in earnest, it won’t be so clear which side represents the true interests of global capitalism – and which one those of its opponents.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/09/trade-war-trump-technology-internet-protectionism-web-business-morozov-uber

the hallmark of effective hegemony is the invisibility of its operations

The internet giants depend on our data. A new relationship between us and them could deliver real value to society

by Mariana Mazzucato  June 27, 2018

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Historically, industries naturally prone to monopoly—like railways and water—have been heavily regulated to protect the public against abuses of corporate power such as price gouging. But monopolistic online platforms remain largely unregulated, which means the firms that are first to establish market control can reap extraordinary rewards. The low tax rates that technology companies are typically paying on these large rewards are also perverse, given that their success was built on technologies funded and developed by high-risk public investments: if anything, companies that owe their fortunes to taxpayer--funded investment should be repaying the taxpayer, not seeking tax breaks.

We should ask how the value of these companies has been created, how that value has been measured, and who benefits from it. If we go by national accounts, the contribution of internet platforms to national income (as measured, for example, by GDP) is represented by the advertisement-related services they sell. But does that make sense? It’s not clear that ads really contribute to the national product, let alone to social well--being—which should be the aim of economic activity. Measuring the value of a company like Google or Facebook by the number of ads it sells is consistent with standard neoclassical economics, which interprets any market-based transaction as signaling the production of some kind of output—in other words, no matter what the thing is, as long as a price is received, it must be valuable. But in the case of these internet companies, that’s misleading: if online giants contribute to social well-being, they do it through the services they provide to users, not through the accompanying advertisements.

This way we have of ascribing value to what the internet giants produce is completely confusing, and it’s generating a paradoxical result: their advertising activities are counted as a net contribution to national income, while the more valuable services they provide to users are not.

Let’s not forget that a large part of the technology and necessary data was created by all of us, and should thus belong to all of us. The underlying infrastructure that all these companies rely on was created collectively (via the tax dollars that built the internet), and it also feeds off network effects that are produced collectively. There is indeed no reason why the public’s data should not be owned by a public repository that sells the data to the tech giants, rather than vice versa. But the key issue here is not just sending a portion of the profits from data back to citizens but also allowing them to shape the digital economy in a way that satisfies public needs. Using big data and AI to improve the services provided by the welfare state—from health care to social housing—is just one example.

Only by thinking about digital platforms as collective creations can we construct a new model that offers something of real value, driven by public purpose. We’re never far from a media story that stirs up a debate about the need to regulate tech companies, which creates a sense that there’s a war between their interests and those of national governments. We need to move beyond this narrative. The digital economy must be subject to the needs of all sides; it’s a partnership of equals where regulators should have the confidence to be market shapers and value creators.

Mariana Mazzucato is a professor in the economics of innovation and public value at University College London, where she directs the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. This article is an edited excerpt from her new book The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy.

lalinea wrote:Rekli su da ce im growth usporiti tokom narednih godina i doziveli najveci pad na berzi (u vrednosti) u jednom danu ikad.

Monday was a bad day to be the internet’s most famous conspiracy theorist. After Alex Jones’ Infowars got the boot from Apple’s Podcasts app Sunday evening when the company removed five of the six Infowars podcasts from the platform, Spotify followed suit and removed the Alex Jones Show from its podcast channel, too. From there the purge broadened: Facebook moved to “unpublish” four Infowars pages—not just individual posts, as it had previously done—saying that they had violated its community standards. Then the Google-owned YouTube banned the Alex Jones Channel, which counted 2.4 million followers at the time. Now one of the few major social media platforms that hasn’t kicked out Jones and his Infowars clan is Twitter. No surprise, Jones was all over the social network Monday, shouting about censorship and globalists, while the Infowars website attempted to rally his supporters, declaring that “The war on your mind is happening right now.”

One day after what appeared to be a coordinated attack by media giants Facebook, Apple, Spotify and Google on Alex Jones, whose various social media accounts were banned or suspended in a matter of hours, the crackdown against alternative media figures continued as several Libertarian figures, including the Ron Paul Institute director, found their Twitter accounts suspended.

On Monday, Twitter suspended the editorial director of antiwar.com Scott Horton, former State Department employee Peter Van Buren, and Dan McAdams, the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute.

Horton was reportedly disciplined for the use of "improper language" against journalist Jonathan M. Katz, he said in a brief statement, while McAdams was suspended for retweeting him, he said. Past tweets in both accounts were available to the public at the time of the writing, unlike the account of Van Buren, which was fully suspended.

The suspensions come days after Twitter suspended black conservative Candace Owen from Twitter for highlighting the algorithmic hypocrisy of Twitter by replacing the word “white” with “Jewish” in a series of tweets modeled on those by New York Times editor Sarah Jeong.

No surprise, Jones was all over the social network Monday, shouting about censorship and globalists

Breaking: YouPorn is also banning Alex Jones. This is turning out to be a really tough day for Alex. pic.twitter.com/loieGZMcT5

— Jack Nicas (@jacknicas) August 6, 2018

Here’s how China rules using data, AI, and internet surveillance.

by Christina Larson August 20, 2018

In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen. Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China.

Праче wrote:'Yes,' said Rincewind. A vision of Ankh-Morpork's Patrician floated across his memory. One man, one vote. Yes. 'I've met him. He's definitely got the vote. But—'

Daï Djakman Faré wrote:najbolje je sto public shaming tamo po svoj prilici funkcionise. onaj lik verovatno nece vise dzejvokovati u zivotu.

a ova palestinizacija ujgura sa njihovim (za kineske prilike) kosovsko-albanskim birth rate-om nikako nece dobro da ispadne.

In surveillance valley
An interview with Yasha Levine

31 August 2018


‘Everything that we’ve been sold about the democratic nature of the internet has always been a marketing pitch.’ Yasha Levine on the military origins of the internet, on data modelling and technocratic government, and why the Cambridge Analytica scandal was good for Facebook.

Olivier Jutel: How have you found the reception to your book Surveillance Valley and its central thesis that the internet is essentially a surveillance weapon?

Yasha Levine: My book has come at a really good time, right as people are becoming aware of the ‘dark side’ of the internet. Before Trump it was all good things: Facebook manipulation was a good thing when Obama used it. Surveillance Valley came out two months before the Cambridge Analytica story hit and everything I talk about is a preface to how personal data manipulation is central to our politics and economy. It’s sort of the whole point of the internet, going back 50 years to ARPANET. I hope the book fills some gaps in our knowledge because, as strange as it seems, we have forgotten this history.

The way the internet gets discussed, it’s often as if it were some immaterial phenomenon. What your book does is to explain the material, political and ideological origins of the network. Can you talk about the military imperatives it served?

One thing we have to understand about the internet is that it came out of a research project that started during the Vietnam war, when the US was concerned with counterinsurgencies all around the world. It was a project that would help the Pentagon manage a global military presence.

At the time there were computer systems coming online like ARPANET that functioned as the first early warning radar system in America to alert to a potential Soviet bombing raid. It connected radar arrays and computer systems to allow analysts to watch the entire US from a screen thousands of miles away. This was novel, as all previous systems relied on manual calculation. Once you can do that automatically it’s a totally new way of thinking about the world, because all of sudden you can manage airspace and thousands of miles of border from a computer terminal. This is in the late ’50s and early ’60s. The idea was to expand this technology beyond airplanes to battlefields and societies.

One of things that ARPA was involved with in Vietnam in the ’60s was ‘bugging the battlefield’, as they called it. They’d drop sensors into the jungle in order to detect troop movements hidden from aerial view. These sensors were wireless and would ping back information to a control centre with an IBM computer taking that information, mapping troop movements to help select bombing targets. This became the basis of electronic fence technology that was exported to the US and used on the border with Mexico. It’s still used today.

The internet came out of this military context and the technology that could tie different types of computer networks and databases together. At the time, every computer network was built from scratch in terms of network protocols and the computers themselves. The internet would be a universal networking language to share information.

There seems to be a contradiction in the ideological founding of the internet between anti-communist paranoia and liberal-libertarian optimism about information unlocking human potential. What do you make of this?

It seems like a contradiction, but it really isn’t. The spectre of communism led to the internet and helped accelerate this technology. In rarefied military circles, leftwing politics was seen as taking over the world, domestically too. After Vietnam, the question of counterinsurgency was how to placate societies without giving them what they want. They saw the problem as people not being managed properly: people have certain concerns, there is some inequality and material resources aren’t being distributed properly. America wasn’t seen as facing an ideological challenge or anti-colonial struggle; rather, it had a technocratic problem of management.

And so the computer networks, which became the internet, functioned as sensors in society in order to monitor unrest and demands. The information they ingested could be fed into computer models to map the potential path these feelings and ideas were going to take. Then you could say, ‘OK there’s a problem here; let’s give them a little of what they want’, or ‘Here’s a revolutionary movement; we should take out that cell’.

So the network would create a utopian world where you could manage conflict and strife out of existence. It would never come to armed conflict, since you had a better and kinder form of technocratic management.

I can’t help but think of Hillary Clinton’s tweet about the devastation of Flint, Michigan. ‘Complex intersectional problems’ like racial and class oppression are put into little problem-solving boxes for benevolent technocrats to workshop some ideas.

Yes, and this all begins in the 1960s. You mention the Democrats. There’s this guy Ithiel de Sola Pool, who was an MIT social scientist and a pioneer in using computer modelling, polling and simulations to run political campaigns. Relying on Pool, John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign was the first to use modelling to guide outreach and messaging. What’s interesting is that Pool would go on to play a big role in ARPANET’s first surveillance project, which was then used to process surveillance data on millions of American anti-war protestors in the early ’70s.

He was also a guy who believed that the problem with international and domestic conflict was that government planners and business leaders don’t have enough information; that parts of the world were still opaque to them. The way to get rid of strife and have a perfect system was to have no secrets. He wrote a paper in 1972 where he claimed that the biggest impediment to world peace was secrecy.

If we could design a system where the thoughts and motivations of world leaders and global populations were transparent, then the ruling elite would have the information they needed to properly manage society. But he saw this in utopian terms: it’s better than bombing people. If you can influence people before they pick up Kalashnikovs and have to bombed, gassed and napalmed, it’s the better of the two systems.

How much does our own hyperactivity online, in seeking pleasure, or in scrolling the timeline just one more time like a slot machine, mirror the imperatives and failures of total information awareness? There is a capacity to collect individual pathologies and idiosyncrasies, but it fails in its own terms, right?

If your premise is wrong, whatever information you feed is always going to be wrong. The promise of ‘more information equals better management’ or a better society is where this falls apart. A lot of these cybernetic models and computer systems that are supposed to give managers a better view of the world have blind spots, or are susceptible to being manipulated, while giving the people using them the sense that they are in total control.

This is what happened with Hillary Clinton. Her campaign had the best minds of data modelling and, up until the end, their numbers told them that everything would be great. They weren’t even interacting with the real world anymore, but with their model. It wasn’t the electorate but their own idea of how the electorate would behave. They were fundamentally wrong.

The idea that the more data you have the better your understanding of the world is wrong: data is only ever a representation of that world which is shaped by specific assumptions and values. Take the example of bugging the battlefield. The Viet Cong knew what was happening and saw these sensors. They could trick the system. They’d create vibrations and drive empty trucks by to get airstrikes on empty jungle, allowing the actual convoys to get through. The system was manipulated, but the planners saw the system as working perfectly, and thought they were annihilating the enemy. But the reality was that they were bombing empty jungle.

One of the bright spots of researching this book is that both the boosters and detractors of these systems have over-estimated the effectiveness of these networks. Take Donald Trump and Cambridge Analytica. For people who are horrified by Trump, Cambridge Analytica gives them a way of explaining how he get elected. They take all the anxieties and place it on this company that supposedly zombified the electorate through some Facebook posts.

When the network produces a social reality that we don’t like, it’s as if it were infected by an alien entity or virus. It’s similar to extreme anti-communism in this way.

Hang on a second, this is actually what Facebook wants advertisers to believe about its business. If you can convince voters to vote for Donald Trump just by scraping their profiles and showing them a few targeted ads, then as an advertiser or a political campaign you’ve got to put all your chips on Facebook. This is how powerful they are supposed to be. Putting all this at the feet of Cambridge Analytica is helping Facebook’s bottom line. It’s selling Facebook’s product; access to their user base, renting out users and selling targeted ads. Opponents of Facebook believe that they are much more effective than in reality they are.

An interesting story came out about Facebook in Wired that ads were sold cheaper to Trump than Clinton because of the kinds of user engagement Trump content generates. Trump voters tend to be pretty mad online. Does Facebook privilege seething emotion and the darker side of politics?

Yes, they want people stuck on their platform as long as possible. Anger, outrage, hatred is a big thing that keeps people online. I can tell you as a Twitter user that that’s true! If you are emotionally invested in something, you are engaged with it.

But what you’re describing is not something exclusive to Facebook. You can say cable news gave Trump airtime, covering every ridiculous statement, because of the extraordinary ratings. Like Facebook, everything is about ratings, because it’s all based on ad revenue.

But this is the minutiae. We conceive of the internet as the cloud, disconnected from physical space. But it’s private property, where we have no real rights as users. We exist in data centres and on the wires owned by giant corporations. We have no rights in that space, there is no right to be on the internet. These companies make the rules and we have no recourse. For people on the left thinking about this, it is clearly a toxic place; it has become a means for capital to further control our lives.

What would a holistic, public-oriented and left approach to this form of oligarchic power be?

This might be the hardest question of our time. You can’t focus on reforming the internet without looking at the broader cultural environment in which it exists. It’s a reflection of our values and political culture. It’s dominated by giant corporations, intelligence agencies and spies, because generally speaking our societies are dominated by those forces.

You can’t start with the internet, you have to start deeper: politics, culture. It’s a brutal analysis, sorry. Our conception of politics today is so crude. We are restricted to thinking that ‘we need to regulate something’, ‘we need to pass some laws’. We shouldn’t start with that, we need to start with principles. What does it mean to have communication technologies in a democratic society? How could they help create a democratic world? How does this democratic world take control of these technologies? How can we stop simply taking a defensive position? What does it mean to have an active pose? To have a political culture that says, ‘This is what we want technology to do for society’.

Everything that we’ve been sold about the democratic nature of the internet has always been a marketing pitch grafted on to the technology. To sell the internet as a technology of democracy when it’s owned by giant corporations is ridiculous. The only answer that I have is that we have to figure out what kind of society we want to have, and what kind of role technology can play to that end.

https://www.eurozine.com/in-surveillance-valley/