ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Terms of Disservice. Dipayan Ghosh
Читать онлайн.Название Terms of Disservice
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780815737667
Автор произведения Dipayan Ghosh
Издательство Ingram
These examples suggest a silent, commercially driven insidiousness at play behind the exteriors of the biggest Silicon Valley internet firms. To be sure, they are not alone among firms in the U.S. economy attempting systematic exploitation of American consumers.31 All firms attempt it—that is the nature of our economic design. But there can be no doubt that significant regulation of the internet industry is needed at the earliest possible political opportunity, or else we will risk the failure of democracy in favor of the fortunes of a few: the internet barons. There come times throughout history when technology implicates public interests, and in those times we must for a time encourage the law of the suppression of radical potential.32
The internet has been an incredible force for good. The impact that Facebook and Twitter have had on the people of Tunisia and Egypt nearly a decade ago, as the world watched their protests, is a remarkable combination of positive political upheaval and radical economic enablement. Imagine those who experienced the Arab Spring; for the first time in their lives, millions felt intellectually liberated from their governmental oppressors. The aggregate mental release sent shockwaves around the world—and particularly in the Arab world, where many continue to experience turmoil and oppression every day but now have a clear example of what freedom can bring as well as what can be done to achieve it. Social media platforms were instrumental in bringing these positive changes about, as the government’s power to suppress was shaken by the will of a populace. Wael Ghonim, a friend and perhaps the most important organizer of the movement in Egypt, remarked to CNN that “this revolution started online, … it started on Facebook,” adding that “if you want to liberate a government, give them the internet.” By enabling new forms of democratic process, the social media firms have also facilitated progress to counter some of the world’s long-standing injustices.
That said, the focus from here on is the direct and immediate harm that the internet has wrought around the world. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is the most recent, high-resolution illustration of these harms. Most healthcare professionals and media outlets were quick to attempt to resolve points of confusion about the virus, but that did not prevent the tidal waves of misinformation and disinformation that spread over internet platforms and adversely affected an unknown number of people. Some of the hoaxes that have been spread through Facebook ads (including ones created by Consumer Reports to test the platform’s ad review system through a bogus page for a made-up organization called the Self-Preservation Society) suggested that coronavirus is a scam and that social distancing was entirely unnecessary, when in fact this was the single tactic that made the greatest difference in preventing the spread of the virus.33 Others suggested, by showing doctored lab test documents, that former Vice President Joe Biden had contracted the coronavirus.34 Yet more hoaxes indicated that there would soon be food shortages in the United States.35 The list goes on, to the extent that news outlets like NPR found it useful to host numerous segments specifically identifying and screening such misleading information.36 (In the case of Consumer Reports’s investigation, Facebook’s system approved the ads, failing to identify any issues or potential harms. Of course, the organization pulled the ads before Facebook could publish them.)
The main culprit in the spread of misinformation about the virus has been social media, as has come to be the norm. The vast majority of the misinformation concerning the features and spread of the virus has occurred over platforms operated by dominant digital platforms. On a more novel note, however, much of this spread has occurred over messaging threads on WhatsApp, where fake rumors about steps that could be taken to protect oneself had been sent to large groups of people who were then encouraged to send them on to friends and loved ones. Facebook recognized this problem and in turn placed serious limits on the forwarding of such messages,37 a tactic it has enforced in other past situations as well.
But will these kinds of corporate policies—narrow in their conception and application to timely problems—truly be enough to protect a society and the underlying media ecosystem we have worked so hard to guard and cultivate? Or could there be a deeper-lying economic demon within the internet industry that must be extracted and eradicated to diminish these problems in the long run?
Our purpose is to address these very questions. In this book, we will traverse the dark underbelly of the internet—the practices and positions that its leading lights are less proud of touting and that I believe have directly germinated the social harms we now witness, in the context of coronavirus and far beyond. Ultimately, we will also examine possible paths forward to mitigate these harms through progressive policy.
I believe that only with such a redefinition of our social compact with corporate America—and starting in Silicon Valley—can we again realize a world in which the internet is once more a universal gift to humanity.
ONE
The Business Model
Data, Algorithms, and Platform Growth
Civilizations become tied to ideals. As individuals, we become obstinately committed to common and widely accepted ways of thinking; we are inherently inclined to be mentally lazy, and nothing could be lazier than subscribing to rigid social convention. But as we take such convenient routes as individuals, collectively we risk intellectual stagnation. We risk failing to see the truth that lies squarely before us. With the publication in 1962 of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn shared a bold idea that stood the academic world on its head. Seemingly overnight, Kuhn revolutionized the way we would think about the very development of knowledge for decades to come—unsettling the timeworn paradigm of knowledge cultivation and transfer in the process.
The general perception at the time was that the fields of engineering and science, particularly in academia, were the ultimate keepers of knowledge. Society contended, perhaps reasonably so, that if there was anything about the physical world we might wish to learn about, it was to academics that we should turn. In the process, we would subscribe to their methods of teaching—attending universities and signing up for their classes, for example—to entertain hopes of learning neurobiology, or theoretical physics, or accounting. Think of an economics professor who presented his or her own ideas about how the monetary system should be governed and could accept no competing theory—especially a theory projected by a thinker who did not graduate out of the liberal economics tradition largely adopted in the field.
Kuhn contends that because of this mindset, academic contributions overall—such as those made by university professors—are often necessarily minor. Scholars build on a vast body of existing knowledge, such as neuroscience or finance, by tweaking the margins of an already-published theory or experiment and discovering some minor facet of reality that is, at best, a fringe contribution as far as markets are concerned. Kuhn’s theory seems to resonate today: many brilliant students claim that they choose fields outside academia because the typical academic contribution carries little impact on the world outside the academic’s career progression itself. Doctoral graduates frequently opt to work in fields in which they contribute to tangible outcomes rather than pursue the academic profession—or, for that matter, make a lot more money than an academic life can offer.
Kuhn further critiqued that low-impact ideas that by their nature will not significantly advance our understanding of the physical world are in fact the kinds of work that will most likely be published by peer-reviewed journals, because journal publications typically must be endorsed by other academics. Kuhn argues that this dynamic engenders a systemic dilemma whereby big ideas that could truly challenge traditional conceptual frameworks and revolutionarily expand our understanding of the world are unlikely to win the stamp of approval from the academic community. In fact, scholars who attempt to