Tag: eric schmidt

Really, DON’T Believe Anything You See on the Internet

When that cliché first entered our consciousness, it wasn’t really fair. The internet between the mid-90s and the mid-aughts wasn’t what it is today. It actually was just a dumb pipe through which content could could be delivered from creator to consumer in a new way. It was silly to imply that one should not believe a news story published by the Washington Post just because it was on a screen instead of  paper — and that principle still holds true for most professional journalism.

But now, every legitimate news source swims in the same stream with all the garbage—from raw clickbait to lazy aggregators to hackers purposely trying to exploit underlying divisions in democracies—and the tools of manipulation are so sophisticated that many of the manipulators themselves don’t have to be. With a little practice using software that anybody can steal, a kid can create a video that makes it look like Hillary Clinton said that “all veterans are pussies,” and…well, here we are.

“One of the things I did not understand was that these systems can be used to manipulate public opinion in ways that are quite inconsistent with what we think of as democracy.”

That’s what Alphabet (Google parent company) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said, recently quoted in an article on FastCompany. And in keeping with the theme of this post, I don’t know what to believe. Were Schmidt and the rest of the leadership at Google honestly so drunk on their own utopian rhetoric about how wonderful their systems are that they failed to imagine—to say nothing of observe—how their products could be toxic for democracy? Or did they recognize it and not care until they were forced to care amid the fallout from the investigations into Russian meddling?

Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker—he was also the co-founder of Napster—told Mike Allen of AXIOS in a recent interview that Facebook was designed to “exploit a vulnerability in human psychology” in order to keep people on the site as much as possible. Parker told Allen that the creators of Facebook understood what they were doing and did it anyway, though perhaps did not quite imagine what the results would be when a billion people voluntarily spend hours in Zuckerberg’s ant farm. “…it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

How much has changed in such a very short time. It seems like only yesterday the cheerleaders of Silicon Valley, with all the confidence of Camel-smoking doctors, kept telling us just how good their products were for democracy and for society overall. All this goodness was packaged into a single generic word innovation, and anything that stood in the way of innovation—like maybe the rule of law—was bad. Now, all of a sudden, we hear a lot of “Wow, we had no idea our systems could be used to totally fuck up the world! We’ll get some people on that right away!”

Of course, these companies either will not or cannot fully address the underlying reasons why their systems can be so toxic; and Parker put his finger on it when he admitted that Facebook was designed to take advantage of human folly. Facebook may clean up its act in certain regards—I actually believe Zuckerberg wants to—and Congress may enforce some effective regulations upon these platforms; but none of this will address the flaw in human nature that makes us more susceptible to emotional triggers than we are to reason and information. That’s why the underlying promise of the information age—that information can only have a moderating effect on discourse and interaction—is proving to be untrue.

There’s something fundamentally harmful about taking complex topics and issues and transforming it all into advertising, but that’s essentially what a platform like Facebook or Twitter does. “The sad truth is that Facebook and Alphabet have behaved irresponsibly in the pursuit of massive profits,” writes Roger McNamee for The Guardian. “They have consciously combined persuasive techniques developed by propagandists and the gambling industry with technology in ways that threaten public health and democracy. The issue, however, is not social networking or search. It is advertising business models.”

McNamee, who is identified as an early investor in Google and Facebook, describes how the advertising revenue models of these platforms drive, for instance, Facebook to deliver content based on user preferences, creating feedback loops called “filter bubbles.” People have been writing about the filter-bubble problem for several years now, but I suspect the problem is far too subtle to expect that the platforms themselves, with or without legislative mandates, will solve it.

Amid the recent flurry of allegations of sexual assault, satirical posts have appeared on Facebook with photos of Tom Hanks and leads saying, “Dozens of women come forward to…” And then, you click on the story, and it completes, “…say that Tom Hanks is a really nice guy.” Variations on this gag appear all the time, like the reports that Keith Richards is still alive. But you can bet the beer money that any number of people just scrolling through a feed on their phone, perhaps waiting in the supermarket line right next the old-school tabloids, will come away with the impression that indeed Tom Hanks was implicated in some sexual abuse claim. Then, the rumor gets repeated to a friend, and that’s more or less the state of “information” in the digital age. It’s the National Enquirer at “Google scale.”

According David Roberts, writing for Vox, America is in the middle of an epistemic crisis, suggesting that at least many citizens are beyond the problem of separating fact from fiction and are instead living in a world in which facts simply don’t matter. It is a mindset he calls “tribal epistemology—the systemic conflation of what is true with what is good for the tribe.”

For the time being, analysis of the online media universe reveals this problem is more prevalent on the political right (see support of Roy Moore even if he did assault a teenager), but the political left is hardly immune to this kind of tribalism. In fact, this blog was inspired five years ago when I witnessed this exact behavior among left-leaning friends, who were willing to share false information because it supported the outcome they believed to be right. So, although it is somewhat encouraging that this year marks the turning point when internet platforms will no longer be given a free pass — either by lawmakers or the public — to simply do what they want “for the greater good,” that hardly addresses how we individually and collectively will learn to cope with “God knows what’s happening to our brains,” as Parker puts it.

Maybe Google Means “See No Evil”

Yesterday, Google chairman Eric Schmidt was interviewed on public radio and simulcast on Google Hangouts.  WAMU’s Diane Rhem threw softballs, slow and over the plate at Schmidt, providing a friendly platform for the chairman to evangelize the many ways Google makes the world a better place.  Coincidentally, I happened to be editing the following:

For those who don’t know, ChillingEffects.org is a database and website managed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Berkman Center for Internet & Society.  It is a presumptive watchdog over the presumptive misuse of DMCA takedown notices — the implication being that free expression is “chilled” whenever such an abuse takes place.  In principle, this might seem like a reasonable thing for the EFF to oversee; after all, we don’t want free speech to get chilly, even if there is diminishing hope that speech is necessarily getting anymore valuable in the digital age.  But it turns out that whenever, say, Google receives a DMCA takedown notice for a link to infringing material, every one of these complaints is sent to ChillingEffects so that users are, in principle anyway, able to read the details of the complaint from the notice sender.   So for example, if you were to search the term “Expendables III,” which was weeks ago leaked before its theatrical release, you would find among the search results a notice from Google that reads as follows:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

In many cases, the link to the complaint will not provide the user with much information, and it’s a bit of a mystery what most users might do with the information anyway.  After all, if you’re the creator of a file like a YouTube video that is taken down by a rights holder, you can have access to the information needed to rectify the fault, if indeed it was a false claim.  What’s truly obnoxious about this notice, and even the name ChillingEffects itself, is the not-very-subtle implication that DMCA takedowns are by default abusive and generally chill free expression. Ya see what they did there?  And by they, I mean Google, which funds ChillingEffects to no one’s surprise I’m sure.  Now, enter the Hollywood hacked photo scandal and a twist on that story that, as Eriq Gardner recently wrote for The Hollywood Reporter, “might reveal something about Google’s policies toward flagged copyrighted content.”

What Garder is referring to is the fact that former Kate Upton beau, Detroit Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander, delivered via his attorneys takedown notices identifying 461 URLs that were hosting racy photos of him and Upton. Of those URLs, Google removed links to 51%, drawing a distinction, according to Gardner, between nude photos and racy-but-clothed photos, irrespective of the fact that all of the photos in question were indeed stolen and are being published without permission.  Never ones to lose an opportunity to be complete tossers about copyright, Google is supposedly relying on an untested legal theory that the copyright holder of a selfie can only be the button pusher at the time of the taking.  This seems hardly relevant with regard to the matter of just acting like decent human beings; if images are known to be stolen, and the subject(s) of those images request that your for-profit search business remove links to them, you ought to do it on principle alone.  But this is not the mindset of the web industry despite its many self-aggrandizing proclamations as the engineers of social change for good.

Google seems to be concerned with a much higher principle than invading the privacy of a baseball star, a supermodel, or frankly you or me, and that’s the principle of doing whatever the hell it wants without consequences.  I think Gardner is right and that Google would love nothing more than a court case to affirm its position that these photos, though acquired illegally, are not the intellectual property of Mr. Verlander and that he, therefore, has no right to request their removal under DMCA.  This could even prove to be technically accurate; the copyright owner of a photo is the individual who exercises sufficient creative control (not the button pusher), so these images could still be the intellectual property of Miss Upton if indeed they were hacked from her account.  But that doesn’t mean Google isn’t benefitting from traffic driven by a prurient interest in seeing photos that were stolen and believed to be secure by their owners.  And Gardner also raises a valid point about ChillingEffects when he writes, “Google has in effect provided a road map for any voyeur looking for sites that refuse to remove stolen photos.”

All of this falls within the scope of the broad agenda maintained and well-funded by the Internet industry to foster a policy of “anything goes.”  As long as we allow them to gloss over privacy invasions, infringements on intellectual property, and profiting from social harm in the name of free speech, we only end up harming free speech in the long run.

Coup du Jour – Eric Schmidt as CEO of America?

Image by RienkPost

In case you missed it, OWS co-founder, now Google software engineer, Justine Tunney is responsible for a petition calling for a coup d’etat that would hand over administrative authority of the United States to the tech industry and appoint Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.  Whether Tunney is trying to be amusing, or she’s deranged, or she’s just another Twitter attention junkie, nobody is taking her too seriously if the comment section below the article in The Guardian is any indication.  In fact, this is one of those side-show moments that I questioned commenting on at all except for the unfortunate fact that so much of what now passes for discourse in the world  comprises so many side shows that mutate into headlines and round-table discussions on once-respectable news programs.  Even more relevant, though, is that even if Tunney herself is dismissible, her appeal might actually touch a few very real nerves running though the body of the American electorate.

For starters, the suggestion that any business leader ought to be president, that the presidency itself is like being a CEO, is a well-entrenched conservative idea also popular with many right-leaning libertarians.  Given that one of the universal complaints about government is that the elected are terrible stewards of “our money,” it’s a natural, albeit narrow-minded, instinct to want to elevate a successful business operator to the presidency so that he or she can “get our house in order.” On purely theoretical grounds, I have always quarreled with this premise because a corporation is not a democracy — I don’t care how flat you say your org chart is — so much as it is a benign dictatorship, usually designed to excel in a limited number of core competencies in the service of profitability.  Democracy isn’t efficient, giving everyone a voice isn’t efficient, balancing competing interests within a nation isn’t efficient; but inefficiency is one of the prices we pay for free speech, the right to redress the government, the right to assemble and organize, and so on.

Conversely, CEOs are conditioned toward efficiency and toward meeting quarterly goals for their shareholders.  As such, CEOs are not necessarily the best collaborators; they’re often not multi-dimensional thinkers; they frequently have egos way too big for Washington (which is saying something); and they’re not particularly oriented toward balancing the needs of the diverse and quarrelsome many. There are and have been CEOs who meet these criteria, but my point is that a strong P&L statement alone does not make a good resume for Leader of the Free World.  Interestingly though, while Tunney is standing on this weatherbeaten plank of the GOP, I think she’s simultaneously echoing sentiments among the left and libertarian left, who have come to think of technologies like social media as the antidote to corporate/government corruption and incompetence.  And this is where the bizarre confluence of Occupy zeal and the idea of appointing a less-than-one-percenter like Eric Schmidt as national leader might actually make some twisted sense in certain minds.

Occupy, after all, was a YouTube protest that was unfortunately almost as fleeting as that damn “What Does the Fox Say” video, and just about as likely to effect any tangible change in the world. At its core, I thought OWS began as a legitimate response to a genuine problem — wealth consolidation and the many systemic ways in which this economic cancer, eating away the middle class, is protected and perpetuated in the U.S.   But Occupy rather quickly manifest as the proverbial rebel without a clue — yet another social media side show in which the lead stories became a handful of viral videos depicting excessive force by certain police officers instead of a narrative relating any kind of clear, advancing agenda.  Thanks in part to the ephemeral nature of social media and its tendency to provoke an increase in conspiracy theory, the story of Occupy became the story of who was trying to shut it down rather than what it was meant to accomplish. Think OWS today, let alone years from now, and what probably remains are a few images of cops misusing pepper spray.  Imagine if all you could say about the civil rights movement is that some cops sprayed people with fire hoses.

Like it or not — and I certainly don’t — the Tea Party made Occupiers look like a bunch of fair-weather activists who seemed to think it was enough to conjure the illusion of a movement with all the trappings and also seemed to confuse mouse clicks with votes.  OWS generated images and buzz and “Likes” and a moment of fleeting outrage while the Tea Party got seats in the House of Representatives.  So, while Justine Tunney may be mockable for her hypocrisy, trying to trade on OWS bona fides from the rarefied heights of Googletopia and anointing the most corporate of corporate guys, the irony is that an event like OWS unwittingly does feed the pseudo-progressive trend toward a technocracy.  OWS was a functionally impotent movement with regard to addressing any serious issues, but one that simultaneously elevated the apparent relevance of citizens using smartphones and social media. By extension, this elevates the importance of the individuals who build those technologies.

In this sense occupy takes on an unintended second meaning.  While it was meant to express a contemporary sit-in whereby people occupy physical space as a form of protest, the millions of people passively engaged online were occupied in the sense that their attention was drawn particularly toward the aforementioned images of police misconduct.  While this is happening, the unseen irony is that the one percent of the one percent who own social media sites are saying “Ka-ching!” while many users are thinking, “Thank goodness for YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, or we would never know about these extraordinary (soon to be forgotten) events.”  Thus, I would argue that on at least a subconscious level, people come to think of a guy like Schmidt as a national leader of sorts.  It reminds me of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which the 19th Century man with his technological prowess is to be given a title that doesn’t quite acknowledge that he’s the most powerful person in the realm.  Arthur remains The King, Merlin remains The Wizard, and the technologically skilled Yankee is given the title The Boss.