Tag: tech-utopianism

Bittertweet Symphony

One of my first mantras when I started this blog was I hate Twitter, but that was shorthand for the broader view that social media is a trainwreck. Of course, the existential difficulty presented by these platforms is that while they can be highly toxic, as long as the market remains, one must have a presence if one has a business or anything else to promote. Leaving Twitter or the Meta or Google properties is not an option unless they dwindle to ghost towns. And people keep predicting Twitter is about to do just that, but is it?

Unlike the typically reclusive tech bosses, Elon Musk is all over Twitter all day long. It’s hard to miss his tweets, many of which proclaim to be defending the speech right, including on behalf of the former president, who attempted to overthrow the constitutional order of the Republic. Whether Musk even contemplates that paradox is unknown just as it is unclear whether he believes his own bullshit about the speech right or simply thinks the rhetoric will be good for business. When he complains that an advertiser exercising its speech right is anti-speech, is he really that obtuse, or is he using “speech” as a lever, hoping the market will pressure the advertiser to re-invest in Twitter?

On the other hand, if Zeeshan Aleem writing for MSNBC is correct, Musk is actively willing to lose one market in favor of another. On the subject of reinstating Trump’s account following a poll conducted by Twitter, Aleem writes, “In his presentation of his faux referendum as a win for ‘the people,’ Musk appears to be trying on right-wing populism for size. And it’s only the latest sign that he views Twitter as a platform for advancing his political agenda as he develops increasingly pronounced far-right views.”

If Musk is a right-wing populist in the mode of Trump, then his free speech rhetoric is on target—courting a base that has swapped all comprehension of American civics for a politics of fear, victimhood, and conspiracy mongering. It takes a practiced ignorance to kowtow to a putative authoritarian while arguing that he deserves a platform under the principles of the First Amendment; and I would say that one must be Trump-drunk to so thoroughly misunderstand the speech right, except that isn’t true, is it?

Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter is the logical extension of tech-utopianism just as Trump was a natural biproduct of it—because the erroneous defense that everything is free speech fosters that populist fallacy which alleges there are always two or more sides to every story. Not always. Not every story. For instance, Twitter will no longer enforce its COVID misinformation policy. So, when the market or a news editor or a platform rejects or ignores speech that is objectively false, grotesquely insane, or merely offensive, the speaker naturally colors himself a victim of censorship or “cancel culture.”

But as the new CEO of Twitter, Musk appears as a golem made from the dust and mud slung by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google, Facebook, Fight for the Future, PublicKnowledge, Techdirt, Reddit, Wikimedia Foundation, and every other organization or Big Tech business who preached the gospel that every tittle and jot posted online is fundamentally speech worthy of protection. Yes, Musk is a particular kind of asshole, but the speech nonsense he coughs up today is indistinguishable from anything the tech-utopian/Silicon Valley crowd have been spewing for twenty years.

From the anti-SOPA campaign to the TPP to the incoherent battle over net neutrality to SESTA/FOSTA to the bananas narrative about Section 230 during the Trump administration, the underlying false premise has been the same—that because social platforms are clearly forums for speech, we cannot distinguish, let alone moderate, speech that is harmful or even illegal in this brave new world. But even though that view waned significantly—and deservedly—after 2016, Musk thinks he’s being clever here:

In 2022, that headline is not remotely controversial. The evidence is in and overwhelming. By first allowing every syllable or image to flow freely and then treating it all as protected speech, internet platforms fueled mobs that bullied speakers—very often women with something to say—into silence. Cyber civil rights experts Danielle Citron and Hany Farid wrote earlier this month in Slate:

In 2009, Twitter banned only spam, impersonation, and copyright violations. Then, the lone safety employee, Del Harvey, recruited one of us (Citron) to write a memo about threats, cyberstalking, and harms suffered by people under assault. Harvey wanted to tackle those harms, but the C-suite resisted in the name of being the ‘free speech wing of the free speech party.’

It took many years and multiple shocks to the political system before certain individuals in Big Tech finally admitted that they had helped build insidious machines while platform operators with the help of “digital rights” groups swept every sin under the rug of free speech. Many of the individuals who finally spoke out were whistleblowers and defectors from Facebook, but Jack Dorsey actively sought to change Twitter. Again, Citron and Farid write:

[In 2015], Jack Dorsey returned as CEO and made trust and safety a priority. This was especially evident after the 2016 election. In response to the disinformation and hate speech that plagued the platform during the election season, Dorsey and Gadde gathered a small kitchen cabinet … to map a path forward to ensure that the platform would enhance public discourse rather than destroy it.

It is no longer news that Musk fired the trust and safety folks at the company and has allegedly reversed about a decade’s worth of initiatives designed to make Twitter safer and more accountable. And it is clear from his tweets that he is doubling down on an experiment in laissez-faire speech absolutism that has already failed. In fact, he wrote this spit-take inducing tweet just a few days ago:

Is he really that naïve? Just a tech bro Ozymandias presiding over a village about to become a wasteland? Or is he an ideologue weaponizing the rhetoric of democracy to soften the ground for another run at authoritarianism? Or maybe he’s just a guy with typically inconsistent views filtered through a billionaire’s ego? Whatever Musk envisions for Twitter—a return to the free-for-all that Dorsey et al started to clean up, or a competitor to Parler—for sure he does not have to lose the whole market in order to lose the whole business.

Hazmat suit photo by: Harbucks

Let’s Stop “Fixing Copyright” for the Sake of our Digital Future

As 2021 winds down, and this blog approaches the mid-point of its tenth year, I ask the following question: Can certain folks stop trying to “fix copyright” in deference to the digital age now that the internet experiment has failed?

For over twenty years, the principal argument underlying the “copyright is broken” narrative has been that the legal framework limits the democratizing power of digital technology to improve the world through unfettered access to everything. That premise was always flawed, but it seems especially absurd today, against the backdrop of evidence that the worst consequences of the digital revolution thus far are attributable to blind faith in that utopian ideal. We can see clearly now that there is no “home of Mind,” as Barlow predicted. There is no global public square where a more enlightened civility transcends the anachronistic laws of “weary nations” through the power of information and an ethics requiring nothing more than the Golden Rule.

Like all utopian visions, tech-utopianism did not account for human nature and human folly—for instance, that emotion is stronger than evidence as a motive for action and that no amount of free access to information is going to alter that principle. It is barely controversial at this point to say that social media has been toxic for certain individuals and for whole democratic societies, specifically because of its power to commend ignorance and for that ignorance to form the nuclei of social subgroups who take harmful action.

Yet, despite the dismaying evidence that science and civility are in retreat in the U.S. and other democratic nations, various organizations and individuals still insist that more access to more content is the antidote and that it is copyright law which stands in the way of salvation. Efforts to weaken the copyright statute, as well as efforts to dilute the efficacy of the law as it is, continue unabated, even while standing in the sticky goo of the failed experiment, which subverted so many principles to that alleged virtue of “openness.”

As discussed in an earlier post, a group of academic librarians met in late March with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive and Senator Wyden, and with straight faces, they opined that copyright law needs to change in order to provide better eBook access as an antidote to the disinformation that results in conspiracy theory and violence like the insurrection of January 6. The lack of evidence-based thinking revealed in that conversation alone is an irony that should speak for itself. To imply that making eBook lending cheaper for libraries is any kind of solution to our disinformation problem is magical thinking indistinguishable from the conspiracy theories themselves. And that’s before we address the specific policy flaws in their proposals.

Related to that discussion are the library association-backed eBook licensing bills in New York, Maryland, and Rhode Island, which amount to state compulsory licenses (therefore, likely preempted by federal law); and again, the argument presented for these short-sighted provisions is that communities are “shut out of the marketplace of ideas.” This is rhetoric straight out of the tech-utopian bible—exaggerating the role of the library—valuable as it is—to rescue society from its current perils through more voluminous eBook lending. But as I have previously noted on this topic, the majority of people engaged in some of the most dangerous, idea-free conduct do not suffer from lack of access, and what they do suffer from, librarians surely cannot solve.

Meanwhile, the ALI Restatement of Copyright project presses onward, ignoring criticism from the some of the most respected minds in IP academia, and is another example of an effort to weaken copyright law to serve that chimeric, cultural progress enabled by digital technologies. The 2014 memo articulating the rationale for the Restatement project states, “…it falls to the federal courts to attempt to improve the fit between a mid-20th century copyright law and 21st century digital technologies.” Yes. It falls to the courts. Or to Congress to rewrite the law. But impatient with these core functions of the Republic, a small group of ideologues took it upon themselves to write an alternative copyright law. And in the service of what?

Many of these same ideologues and associated organizations inveighed against passing the CASE Act to provide a small-claim copyright remedy for independent creators. Ironically, this is an amendment to copyright law in response to the digital age—namely, a response to rampant infringement enabled by digital technologies. But the “fixers” of copyright do not support proposals for independent authors to enforce their rights. They will likely continue their opposition as the small claims board begins operating next year, and their attacks will surely reiterate those virtues of digital life which have yet to manifest.

Looking solely at the U.S., it is tough to make the case that the open floodgates on content have, on balance, had a salubrious effect on the quality of discourse. The level of rancor and vitriol, from Capitol Hill to Main Street, has already boiled over in some of the worst spectacles in our history, and it shows no sign of abating. If experiments in copyright “fixing” were a drug trial, and “information” the main ingredient used to fight virulent idiocy, we would have to conclude that the treatment has little or no mitigating effect on the disease. Yet the copyright “fixers” continue to insist that the problem is dosage—that all we need is more.

It is only in the last few years that the American public, Congress, and the press have generally soured on the tech-utopian vision. While complaints vary across the political spectrum about, for instance, the conduct of social media companies, it does seem clear that the policy of laissez-faire for all things internet is about to expire. And a major reason for this change in direction is a broad recognition that the original theory—leading to the experiment in letting everything flow and expecting the good to outweigh the bad—has proven to be deeply flawed. So, in light of the fact that the “fix copyright” agenda was largely founded on the presumed success of that experiment, maybe it’s time to put down the toolbox and take a pause.

Pardon Our Appearance – “Guest Post” by Helena Handbasket

David knows of course that it is the start of a new year—a time when one is expected to write some kind of review of the year gone by and/or a few thoughts anticipating the year to come.  But as 2019 careened toward the obligatory crescendo of December’s final days, I would find him staring blankly at his computer monitor muttering, “We have abandoned all reason” over and over.  I poked him with a cocktail fork a couple of times and wafted small-batch bourbon under his nose but was unable pierce the veil of his melancholic gaze.

I cannot say that I was very surprised to find him in this gloomy state.  Given that the editorial nature of The Illusion of More is a skeptic’s view of tech-utopianism—namely the proposal that the information age is actually improving democratic societies—the events of 2019 can leave one in a fumbling search for enough consensus on the truth just to begin a discussion grounded in reason.   At the start of the New Year in 2017, in the wake of the “techlash” following the last election, David wondered whether people might take a more sober approach to the belief that social media was elevating political discourse.  And to some extent, this sobering did occur.

I know, for instance, that he expressed enthusiasm for the number of stand-up comics—Chappelle, Gervais, Sleshinger, Jeffries to name a few—who were eagerly riffing on the theme that social media beckons the ill-informed and self-righteous.  I even caught him almost break a smile at the opening of Ronny Chieng’s performance, in which (after mocking anti-vaxxers), the Singaporean comedian says,  “Yo, the internet is making people so fucking stupid.  Like who knew that all human knowledge could make people dumber?”  Indeed, who would have thought that?, David muttered.

If I had to pinpoint a moment when I began to notice David yielding to his taciturn despondency, I think it was while he was watching congressional hearings in September.  Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Jamie Raskin referred to executive privilege (in context) as imaginary “like the tooth fairy,” to which Lewandowski responded sarcastically, “Thank you Congressman.  My children are watching.”  

David muted the television and, tilting his head like a contemplative Weimaraner, asked, “Is Lewandowski saying that children young enough to believe in the tooth fairy are watching committee hearings on Capitol Hill?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, “As I certainly do not know the Lewandowski children.”

“Fair enough,” he said, content to let it go for a moment, but then continued, “Okay, but if these political prodigies have in fact chosen C-Span over Clifford, can’t we assume that they have figured out the whole tooth fairy thing?”

“I suppose that would make sense,” I said, “but why does it matter?”

“Because barring those considerations,” David pressed on, “Lewandowski is suggesting that Members of the United States Congress, while conducting the business of the nation, should not speak metaphorically in any way that might disabuse juvenile viewers of their mythical, childhood fantasies.  Or by “his children” did he mean the flock, whose blind adulation of the president demands clinging to illusions no less fictional than the tooth fairy?”  And then, without saying another word, he left and drove to the liquor store.

The Lewandowski/Raskin exchange was a tiny moment of political theater in the scheme of things.  But I suppose David found it both characteristic and symptomatic of the twenty-year acid trip we have been on since the dawn of the digital revolution—an acute example of raw insanity that has become normal conduct for people in positions of influence.  Upon his return with a bottle of Polish vodka, David played The Clash at an impolite volume and presumed to do what he called “writing” for about an hour—an intermittent ack-ack of plastic keys between fits of scatological outbursts and the replenishing of ice cubes in the glass.  He managed to produce the following …

Those in positions of authority and leadership have utterly failed to meet the challenge of galloping bullshit in the digital age.  Instead, they brought bigger shovels.  For instance, what began as bi-partisan congressional hearings to investigate the nature of the Russian hack and disinformation campaigns in the 2016 election soon mutated into a Trumpian (I cannot call those politics Republican) narrative in which Facebook et al should be sanctioned for kicking “conservatives” like Alex Jones off its platform.  

That inversion of the whole purpose of oversight (i.e. to mitigate raving lunacy in public discourse) was a prelude to two major events in 2019:  the Republican party unanimously shedding any hint of integrity in response to a clear abuse of power by the president; and Mark Zuckerberg declaring that the utopian promise of social media can still be fulfilled if we just give the experiment more time—and more of our data.  It was hard to miss the visual of Zuckerberg fiddling at Georgetown while the Capitol in the background was beginning to smolder.

Of course Zuckerberg seized the moment to double down on the tech-utopian narrative in his October speech.  As long as we remain neatly organized into our various competing realities, we can never effectively hold a platform like Facebook accountable for profiting from disinformation.  There is no disinformation because there is no information.  This is exactly why some 40% of Americans will nod, or at least shrug, when Donald Trump says that he knows better than generals, scientists, economists, State Department officials, the FBI, the CIA, etc. about any topic we can name.  Of course this brand of mad hubris works in the digital age:  it is a politics of memes.  The pinnacle of tech-utopianism.

That was probably about when The Clash was exchanged for The Smiths; at least half the vodka was gone; and David slipped back into a dejected silence—a state in which he is frankly a prick, so I left him to it.  But about thirty minutes later, he came bursting into the other room, having read an article by Joseph Bernstein about the failure of the digital age to deliver a new enlightenment.  Reading from his tablet, he quoted, “When they opened their eyes, they did indeed see that the Digital Nation had been born. Only it hadn’t set them free. They were being ruled by it. It hadn’t tamed politics. It sent them berserk.”  

This was ringing in 2020 for The Illusion of More.  Please pardon our appearance.  Restoration is in progress.