Category: Politics

An Open Response to Peter Sunde

Dear Peter:

I read this morning on Motherboard that you have “given up your fight for the Internet.”  This is the second time I’ve come across a public statement in which you say you are throwing in the towel on the ideological principles you, your partners, and your political allies believe were manifest by operating The Pirate Bay. And it’s the second time I’ve been motivated to respond.

The aspect of your recent statement that I find most striking is that one of your core complaints about the Internet we have today—the money-for-nothing Internet—is actually aligned with many of the same criticisms that I and my copyright-supporting colleagues have of the business models that tend to dominate Silicon Valley enterprises.  But the thing you clearly don’t get, Peter, is that this is the Internet you helped create.  You say the following:

“Look at all the biggest companies in the world, they are all based on the internet. Look at what they are selling: nothing. Facebook has no product. Airbnb, the biggest hotel chain in the world, has no hotels. Uber, the biggest taxi company in the world, has no taxis whatsoever.

The amount of employees in these companies are smaller then ever before and the profits are, in turn, larger. Apple and Google are passing oil companies by far. Minecraft got sold for $2.6 billion and WhatsApp for like $19 billion. These are insane amounts of money for nothing. That is why the internet and capitalism are so in love with each other.”

In a sense, you’re exactly right.  The stock market valuation of these companies is insane and most likely toxic. Many of these Internet giants that produce neither goods nor jobs nor any real progress, are designed predominantly to cannibalize what already exists in the market; and they entice investors with short-term ROI while creating no apparent long-term value.   But Peter, this is the culture you and your colleagues promoted.  This is what comes of evangelizing the idea that it’s okay to exploit other people’s investment of real labor and real capital in goods and services that would otherwise have regenerative value. And exploiting these types of investments is precisely what you and your colleagues did with The Pirate Bay.

At least part of the Internet you don’t like is what comes of preaching to a whole generation that they can have whatever they want, free of charge, as long as it’s just a mouse click away.  And indeed, we are lately seeing the wheels come off that naive (and frankly predatory) idea. As the leaders of Pandora and Spotify begin to see that “freemium” isn’t a business model; as Facebook’s video service “freeboots” the promised ad-share value out of the pockets of YouTube creators; and as the global network of pirate sites is revealed to be a malware-infested and sophisticated black market that preys on individual consumers, you seem to have missed the point, Peter. The “fight” you lost is not with the MPAA and the principles of real capitalism—but with the unfettered greed you helped foster on the Internet you asked for.

Capitalism isn’t really the problem. Done right, capitalism is by-and-large how a truly free society prospers.  And I believe that in my country—which is both free and capitalist—we have unfortunately regressed since the late-20th century in striking the right balance between the free market and necessary boundaries imposed upon that market. As a result, we have fostered a dangerous state of wealth consolidation and a corporate influence on public policy almost matching that of the Robber Barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These forces are fueling a reactionary and populist trend in my country’s politics that you have stated you hope gets worse quickly so the whole capitalist system fails fast, so that people like you still have time to “fix” the world.  You say that you have failed, Peter, and you have. But you don’t understand why.

You do not recognize that you and your friends already ran a computer model on the world you envision and watched it fail.  Yet, you have learned nothing from your experiment.  You say, “I know Marx and communism did not work before, but I think in the future you have the possibility of having total communism and equal access to everything for everybody.”  This may be one of the most revealing statements that an evangelist of the “pirate ethos” has ever made.  Because, Peter, you have already personified—even dabbled in—the worst ills of capitalism that Marx accurately identified, but you are also mucking about in the absurdity of communism to which Marx was entirely blind.

As founder/operator of The Pirate Bay, you became a rapacious capitalist, exploiting human labor and rejecting certain legal boundaries designed to protect the rights of that labor.  Marx warned against this kind of exploitation, and he was right.  But in your persistent belief that technology alone—like Marx’s abolition of private property—will naturally create “equal access to everything for everybody,” you are as naive as Marx in that you forget to do the rest of the math. You fail to ask the question, “Who is going to produce the everything to which everyone is entitled equal access?”

Perhaps you forget that Karl Marx lived a great deal of his life sponging off the generosity of his pal Friedrich Engels, much as you perhaps still don’t seem to understand that The Pirate Bay only existed by sponging off the works of filmmakers, musicians, etc.  And even as you admit defeat in what you believe was a fight for the soul of the Internet, it’s interesting that you do not see a parallel between the collapsed Soviet Union and your failed experiment in media piracy. Both quite expectedly transitioned from a centralized—perhaps even idealized—form of labor exploitation to what is now a broadly distributed network of corruption and organized criminal activity.

I realize that your native Sweden is among the most socialist nations in Europe, that it enjoys a very high standard of living due to its unique fortune to maintain a golden balance between socialist and capitalist policy. I also recognize that a belief that “communism could still work” is a popular notion among many millennials, including some number in the United States.  But I strongly believe this sentiment is partly due to pure naiveté; it is partly a reaction to our failure to reign in the worst abuses of capitalism; and it is partly the result of your generation growing up spoiled by all the free stuff available via your digital toys.  (And that last part is your fault, Peter.)  While I do believe my country might learn a few things (e.g. in areas like education and healthcare) from our more socialist cousins in Europe, there is always a danger in failing to at least understand whence things come, whether we’re talking about a habitable planet or a work of fiction or even those digital toys themselves.

In fact, the computer or smart phone in your hand, which has so profoundly shaped the world view of your contemporaries, would not exist without the very systems you hope come crashing to a halt so that you can presume to “fix” them. I know I cited these details in another post, but do you even know what’s in an iPhone, Peter?  Five metals that have to be mined in places like Chile, Peru, South Africa, and Australia; eight rare earth minerals, nearly all of which are mined in China; human labor performed in conditions of varying degrees of decency and depravity around the world; global shipping protected by international navies; stevedore and trucking and other labor regulated by various local unions or other systems of commerce; and a staggering array of international trade agreements and treaties, all so you can have a device on which you may tweet that you hope we have a “total system collapse.” Really?

Like so many people in your generation, Peter, you have passion and you have talent.  But if you want to change the world, you first have to grow up and get real about how it actually works.

Donald Trump: A Candidate for Our Times

Years ago, I heard a great discussion among a group of veteran, political journalists; and they were talking about the cliché in which candidates say, “I don’t want to get into a character debate. Let’s talk about the issues.”  Although that particular sentiment was a byproduct of the “family values” rhetoric of the GOP, one of the journalists made a very sound argument that, in fact, character, in the true meaning of the word, is probably a more valid indicator as to how a candidate is likely to govern than anything he or she says about a particular issue during the campaign.  Candidates, he suggested, will campaign on agendas they want to achieve; but given the realities of governance, which is filled with obstacles and unpredictable events, the character of the individual is a pretty reliable indicator as to the kinds of moment-of-truth decisions a leader will have to make while in office.

How that insight is helpful is another matter, since Americans will be as divided on assessments of character as they are on any policy issue, which is one reason I think it’s a shame that we’ve demoted veteran political reporters—those people who traditionally live with candidates on the campaign trail—to the pejorative status of elitist in favor of the more populist platforms of social media.  And so, it strikes me as just a little too perfect that the GOP front-runner happens to be a guy vying to be Asshole-in-Chief of the United States. By “too perfect” I mean that Donald Trump’s present shooting-star status (soon to burn out, I imagine) is a predictable manifestation of what political discourse has become despite living in—or perhaps because we live in—the Information Age.  It’s no surprise Trump appeals to a lot of voters. After all, he sounds just like so many citizens on social media sites and comment threads, who like to make smug, uninformed, and even offensive statements.  Trump is basically a troll.

Okay. Nate Silver beat me to this particular accusation with his article aptly titled Donald Trump is the World’s Biggest Troll.  I had a similar thought a while back, but Silver did actual work, like research and stuff; and so, his article compares and contrasts some of the mechanics that seem to be driving the—presumably temporary—dominance of candidate Trump with populists of the recent past, who have rapidly risen and fallen during primary season.  Silver makes a number of interesting points, but I was particularly drawn to the questions posed in this paragraph:

“Social media allows candidates to make news without the filter of the press. It may also encourage groupthink among and between reporters and readers, however. And access to real-time traffic statistics can mean that everyone is writing the same “takes” and chasing the same eyeballs at once. Is the tyranny of the Twitter mob better or worse than the “Boys on the Bus” model of a group of (mostly white, male, upper-middle-class, left-of-center) reporters deigning to determine what’s news and what isn’t? I don’t know, but it’s certainly different. And it seems to be producing a higher velocity of movement in the polls and in the tenor of media coverage.”

No doubt American politics today is different, though there is an argument to be made that the contemporary tone reflects a regression to the volatility of the late 19th century rather than progress made since the more moderated late 20th.  So, although Silver is reluctant to say whether or not the “tyranny of Twitter” is better or worse than the traditional filter of the press, I’m less inclined to be so neutral on the matter.  If things are not worse, I have to ask why it is that literally every subject—I mean every subject—has become aggressively politicized to the extent that both liberals and conservatives seem willing to ignore any number of technically apolitical realities in order to stand firm in their often futile convictions?  Isn’t that the opposite result of what a “better informed electorate” was supposed to produce?  Every day on Facebook, I see declarations of both left and right-wing outrage based solely on a misleading headline from some dubious source that is predicated on a complete distortion of facts that should never have been political in the first place.

But every topic feeds the circus now, and I guess that’s good for the people who own the proverbial tents, rings, cotton candy concessions, and sideshows; but it should be no surprise, then, when the most outrageous clown in the act winds up becoming the main attraction. Because, of course, Trump is troll-like inasmuch as his obnoxious comments lead serious people to wonder whether he means what he says, or if he’s purposely using divisiveness as a tactic. But this is hardly a distinction worth making because there is arguably no presidential material behind the troll, even if it isn’t an act.  (I mean, you could almost hear the collective spit-take by the Joint Chiefs the day he casually suggested “bombing Iraq’s oil fields.”) But I think Trump is serious about his candidacy, which means he’s technically not a troll. To the contrary, he is a known quantity — a character who’s been part of our culture, for better or worse, for nearly 40 years. I’ve often thought of him as my generation’s Malcolm Forbes, but without being, y’know, interesting.

And this is perhaps the real reason Trump’s polling status is such a natural byproduct of our times:  because he is a pre-digital-age master of what we might today call YouTube entrepreneurism. Trump has been “cultivating his personal brand” since long before the people were born, who now evangelize that idea on the stages of TEDx. His ego has been front and center since his earliest days developing real estate in New York City, and he has nurtured his personal brand into an icon of the American Boss—a cult of personality bizarrely based on the kind of guy you’d think nobody would ever want to work for in real life. Trump’s brand is being one of America’s biggest assholes, a role he has thoroughly embraced and even monetized. He trademarked the declaration “You’re fired”™ for crying out loud.  Trump is to American politics as Kim Kardashian’s ass is to American culture, and maybe it’s working for now because we’ve migrated from the shallow waters of the sound-bite to the dry lake beds of click-bait.

Do Solidarity Profile Pics Mean Anything?

Did you rainbow yourself on the day the Supreme Court upheld marriage rights for same-sex couples?  I did. Though I assumed Facebook had only provided the filter in order to conduct one of its studies in online behavior.  According to this story by J. Nathan Matias, writing for The Atlantic, data scientists at Facebook have not analyzed the trends in the rainbowing of millions of profile pictures, but it might at some point in the future in the ongoing attempt to understand how online behaviors reflect (or don’t) substantive political action.

I admit to being a bit of a skeptic about the value of some of these studies and the conclusions that might be drawn from them; but I also wonder how any relevant data might ultimately be used.  If we can learn anything at all about ourselves from behavioral analyses by social media companies, will the information be used to empower people with an awareness of their own vulnerabilities to manipulation, to group-think, to disinformation campaigns; or will the data simply be organized into play books for marketers, corporate PR teams, and political campaign professionals? Matias cites a study done by Stanford PhD Bogdan State and Facebook data scientist Lana Adamic, who researched data from the 2013 campaign in which many of us showed solidarity with the LGBT community by turning our profile pictures into some variation of the red equal sign.  Based on my own experience, and what I believe I can presume about many of my friends and family, I am dubious about the initial hypotheses proposed in that study, described by Matias thus:

In their study, State and Adamic asked the question: how many times do you need to see a friend change their profile picture before deciding to change your own? They set up two competing hypotheses. The first possibility was that profile changes spread like funny pictures and other online memes, falling off in influence as more people share them. The second possibility they considered was that people need to see others make the change before they follow suit, that “multiple exposures are most effective in determining the adoption of… [costly] behaviors.”

This line of inquiry is based on the assumption that the individual is taking some measure of risk by publicly stating a position on a controversial issue. This line of inquiry seems to be based on the assumption that the Facebook user bears some measure of risk by publicly taking a stance on a controversial issue. Thus, the study seeks to quantify the bandwagon effect looking by looking at profile picture data.  And while the bandwagon effect is not to be underestimated — I have criticized it throughout this blog with regard to far more complex decisions than changing one’s profile picture — I am suspicious of the initial assumption that there is much social risk at all for most individuals in this case. To the contrary, it is widely observed that, if anything, social media platforms tend to break down even ordinary barriers of common courtesy when it comes to expressing opinions and views any subject we can name. Yet, according to Matias, the data reviewed in the study of the equal sign campaign is interpreted as follows:

While users are quick to share funny pictures and text, the influence of a typical meme on individuals doesn’t build over time. But with the marriage-equality profile images in March 2013, users apparently needed “social proof”—they needed to see that others also supported marriage equality—before joining in. As more people changed their profiles, individuals who had seen their friends change their photos were more likely to do the same themselves.

No doubt the data do reveal that individuals change their profile pictures to these images of solidarity only after seeing several friends doing so, but this may reflect thought processes more mundane than the initial hypotheses imply.  Speaking for myself in the case of the rainbow example,I simply didn’t notice that Facebook had created the filter until I saw at least 4-5 friends had changed their existing profile pictures in a consistent way.  Additionally, I suspect that if there is any psychology at play in the decision to change a profile pic in these instances, it may have more to do with not wanting to be left out than any hesitation about going first.  If dozens of friends are showing solidarity with some cause that we also support, we may not want to appear opposed; and this motivation would produce the same data the researchers are studying but reveals a different decision-making process.  Finally, there is an element of innocuous bullshit that should not be ignored when it comes to this kind of “activism,” as was summed up by one of my gay friends when he wrote, “How come it’s only my straight friends who have changed their images to rainbow?”  Answer:  Because people are very comfortable wearing their beliefs on their sleeves, especially when there is absolutely no risk involved whatsoever.  Yet, Matias asks rhetorically:

“…Facebook’s past research on marriage equality has helped answer a question we all face when deciding to act politically: Does the courage to visibly—if virtually—stand up for what a person believes in have an effect on that person’s social network, or is it just cheap, harmless posturing?”

But why does it have to be either one?  A word like courage is probably overstating the significance of declaring a position on Facebook, while words like cheap and posturing may be too dismissive.  In his article, Matias cites research by Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam on the effects of peer involvement in Freedom Summer, the 1964 civil rights initiative that sent mostly white college kids from the North into the South to help get out the black vote.  While McAdam’s methodologies may be useful guides for data scientists looking at social media activism, it seems more than a stretch to employ the language we use to describe political action that gets people killed as we might use to describe the changing of a profile picture — even if it might result in a summary un-friending!

Still, I do believe the bandwagon effect in the age of social media is a critical and interesting area of study. And I think Matias is correct when he refers to data like profile pic changes providing insight akin to a super-poll. The sudden shift to the equal sign, for instance, does reveal something about how many people already supported same-sex marriage rights at that time; but there was also plenty of other evidence that provided the same information.  More intriguing — as I referenced in my last post — is the way in which social media very rapidly and tangibly revealed a latent disdain for the confederate battle flag the moment an act of violence catalyzed those emotions into action. That event, I think, is more representative of digital-age “activism” because the issue wasn’t even on the table 24 hours before it went viral.  And those of us who feel we’re right about the flag can enjoy the rapid turnaround of a previously intractable issue; but we should also be mindful of the hazardous volatility of high-speed bandwagons.

I started writing this blog in part because I saw my progressive, well-meaning, well-educated friends jumping on a rather cacophonous bandwagon to stop a bill (SOPA) that they grossly misunderstood.  More importantly, my friends bought into implausible, fear-mongering claims that had been handcrafted by an industry protecting its own interests; and this reflected a failure of epistemology that I found worth examining. Or at least trying to.  Today, many of those same friends have, for instance, boarded the anti-TPP wagon, not necessarily because they can say with certainty why they’re against it — and in fact many of the claims about its dangers are false — but because there appears to be broad consensus among progressives that it is a bad thing.  As a result, I noticed several friends inject criticism into Obama’s recent political victories, suggesting that while we were celebrating SCOTUS decisions on same-sex marriage and the ACA, we didn’t notice that the President “rammed” Trade Promotion Authority through Congress.

But global trade agreements aren’t binary the way flag up v flag down is; or same-sex marriage, yes v no; or the decision to rainbow or not to rainbow one’s face.  Some policy — in fact most policy — has less to do with how we feel about things than it does with weighing the imperfect pros and cons of proceeding or not with practical initiatives.  And it is in this regard that I think social media often fails us because it seems to foster and thrive on binary perspectives in contradiction of a geo-political reality that historically functions on compromise.  In this New York Times Op-Ed, David Brooks raises concerns that ought to at least provide food for thought with regard to the humanitarian costs of not entering into foreign trade deals. But such considerations appear almost entirely drowned out by the sheer volume of comments, quotes, memes, and headlines — the illusion of consensus among political peers — that validate the absolute certainty that this trade deal must be killed without further ado.  When it comes to complex decisions, I’m in favor of more ado rather than more corroboration that my friends and I just generally agree with one another.