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Web 2017 - Failures At Every Level

(Image: Iraq Oilfields burning)

First, to get us all on the same page, I'd like to survey the landscape of all that is broken in 2017. If you're reading this, you're probably acquianted with many of these. An exhaustive catalogue of the many failings of modern social media would fill an entire book by itself, but a few recent things stand out in particular, spanning many different kinds of tech. Although we might come up with specific, targeted fixes for each one of the failures, I contend they only scratch the surface, and that the problems are all deeply related.

If you get tired of reading the entire Beastiary list, feel free to skip to the Attention Economy section after it.

Contents:

A Beastiary of Obvious Failures

  • Libyan rebels calling in airstrikes by tweeting @NATO - I saw this in an episode of Anthony Bourdian's TV show, of all places, and The Guardian reported on it.

  • Snowden's revelations - To some extent, any of us who have been paying attention since the 1990s, when ECHELON and Room 641 have been discussed endlessly on Slashdot and Reddit, should not be surprised at most of what Snowden revealed.

  • Paywalls for content, auto-play video ads, anti-ad-blocker tech - It's a real shame how many man-centuries were poured into W3C standards that carefully separate content from presentation in HTML, only to have the embed of a general-purpose runtime (Javascript) into what should be a content viewer create an evolutionary battle over creepy access to user behavior.

  • "Fake News" - The "fake news" stuff emerging from the 2016 election is the most severe impact of the failure of social media, but I am worried about different things than the immediate, concrete things which seem to occupy most others. On a basic level, the move to push "fact checkers" was perhaps a decent stopgap, but failed to recognize that the real danger was synchronized hijacking of attention. When everyone is marching in unison over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, it doesn't matter if the song they're marching to is played off-key.

  • Imdb message boards shutting down. - Earlier this year, IMDB shut down its message boards because they were filling with accusations of racism, angry culture flamewars between total strangers, and general trolling. This has nothing to do with "fake news". But it's a related symptom of the overall systemic failure of the Internet as a communications medium to connect humans.

  • Verizon Supercookie - Telcos, which should be safely considered as common carriers for dumb bits, have repeatedly engaged in behavior that makes their users ultra-targetable. Verizon & AT&T track users' location and detailed information. Laws and regulations and fines will not work. Relying on big public corporations with thin margins to police themselves will not work. Even if we could hypothetically assume that they always have pure intentions, rogue employees and buggy implementation are a perpetual vulnerability. Invoking the principle that "Code Is Law", we need a digital communications infrastructure where this sort of exploitation is simply not possible.

  • Apple refused to unlock an iPhone for the FBI - The famous case a few years ago when Apple refused to unlock a suspect's iPhone for the FBI. So, instead, the FBI paid a 3rd party $900,000 and got the job done. Our device manufacturers control too much of an integrated stack, and just like the telcos, we rely on them to self-police.

  • Google deletes Dennis Cooper's blog (second link) - It's not just that Telcos have inappropriate access to private data and give us no choice in yielding sensitive metadata about our browsing habits and physical location. Rather, with Google established as the central namesystem of the internet, it gains incredible, unchecked power. In this case, it is citing violations of its Terms of Service as cause for pulling an artistic blog with controversial content.

  • "Dear Mark, I Shall Not Comply" - Norwegian newspaper posts famous Vietnam War photos, Facebook pulls the photo and the article. When the author of the article creates a new post criticizing the action, Facebook proceeds to kill that article. Even when trying to enforce moral standards and values in another Westernized, European country, Facebook failed.

  • 600Gbps DDoS takes out Krebs on Security, forces it off of CloudFlare - This is not a social media failure. Rather, it's a case where deficiencies in TCP/IP allow for malevolent actors to reach up and kill content.

  • Blue Feed, Red Feed - A Wall Street Journal interactive exploration of what a targetable medium looks like. If only Marshall McLuhan were around to witness this. The medium is truly now massaged.

  • The CIA's "Siren Servers" - AI will definitely emerge, as learning computers have to make predictions and take actions in a network that is as smart or smarter than them.

  • Counterfeiters on Amazon - Because Amazon centralized the online consumer experience, they are now the target of significant counterfeiting. Even with their money and resources, they have to employ manual teams to play Whack a Mole, and they're failing. And ultimately this is on them: in their rush for market share, they reduced the friction for random people on the internet to set up a store and start selling things. The structural failure behind this failure is that we have defaulted to relying on email address and website to be proxies for identity. I want an internet where people know you're a dog, and where I can require that other entities I interact with have some history in my social sphere.

  • Smartphone addiction among teens leads to psychological and emotional problems

  • A web where this kind of thing is possible: Effort to Expose Russia’s ‘Troll Army’ Draws Vicious Retaliation

  • Cyber-bullying and trolling are rampant, and virtually unstoppable. Online communications tools and social networking sites/apps are a substrate on which social expression and dynamics can manifest. Nowhere are social dynamics more chaotic and stressful on individual identity than in high schools. And instead of providing students tools to connect empathetically and build trust, we do the dumbest thing possible ("Anyone can post anything about anyone else and other people can join them in a chorus of abuse!").

    Kids are literally killing themselves because of bad UX design. Facebook and Twitter should feel the blood of those kids on their hands, just as engineers at auto manufacturers feel culpable for deaths resulting from poor design of their vehicles. The communications vehicle that the social media companies have provided to us are blowing up left and right, and they hide behind some weaksauce about "Terms of Service".

The Attention Economy, Servant of Growth Capitalism

We can shake our heads at the above, but they are merely the most obvious and visible failures of current technology. It is harder to see the buried signs of what is to come, and they are far more troubling.

Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins puts out an annual report on the state of the Internet. Her latest report shows a rapid ramp up in advertising ownership by social media platforms. A huge portion of the report then talks about all the different kinds of new approaches and technologies that are being deployed to have pervasive "brand engagement" (i.e. advertising). This includes location tracking, AR/VR, and a host of other tech.

Ultimately, all people really want to do is chat with friends, and meet in the town square, and hang out with real people, without every moment being surrounded by targeted ads. But so long as the cost of operating that technological infrastructure is large, the people who provide such technology will have to monetize it somehow. I think a general principle should be that one should expect to pay for communications infrastructure. Otherwise, the digital commons disappears and turns into a giant Times Square of blinding billboards.

André Staltz has written an excellent blog post, "The Web Began Dying in 2014, Here's How". It summarizes some of the economic dynamics of the largest networking companies: Facebook, Google, Amazon. It references Scott Galloway's excellent presentation, "The Four", which is another must-watch for those who want to understand the economics of how communications and consumption are becoming fused into a Huxleyian monstrosity.

From Connection to Consumption

The 2017 Meeker report states that the average American spends almost 6 hours a day consuming digital media, and nearly half of that is via mobile devices. Our deep-seated human desire for interaction has been funneled into a new kind of scarcity - attention - and all the major technology companies are in the business of coupling attention scarcity to traditional economies of scarcity.

All economic forces within the United States are oriented towards increasing consumption. For at least 30 years now, since the Reagan Revolution, our government at the highest levels has mostly abdicated from any kind of significant social mission, and primarily exists to facilitate corporate economic growth (as measured by dollars transacted). Pollution, mass extinction, climate change, and others are all mere "externalities" of production and Growth Capitalism.

The explosion of Mass Media via cable TV coincidentally occured through the same time period. This created a lot more eyeball-hours to monetize, and coupled with the rise of Chinese manufacturing and the box-store-fication of America, has led to a national zeitgeist of consumption, individual experience, and a divestiture of social involvement in local institutions. We don't buy local, we don't read local, we don't sell local. Instead, we aggregate demand, attention, dollars up to ever higher, ever larger global entities.

This sea change in the tapestry of American life has been gradual but its effects are devastating. America, more so than any other country, has a fixation on the glory of individual freedom and achievement. But no one really thought through what happens when we destroy the social institutions that provide a culture and a medium for individuals to attain higher levels in their Maslow pyramids.

While many people are discontent with this state of affairs, there are many more who are less resilient, and fall prey to the engagement tricks and gamification of social media platforms. It is an open question whether we have passed the point where we could truly innoculate the full population to such manipulation. As a point of pragmatism, those who are interested in fixing the situation may have to factor into their model that some large percentage of the population will remain digital herd animals, whose mental states are being micro-auctioned off to the highest bidder.

We now know that in 2016, the Facebook and Google platforms auctioned off portions of our fellow Americans' brains to Russian manipulation and false propaganda. If they were Japanese companies, where shame and honor are meaningful concepts, the entire board would have come out and committed seppuku. The fact that they have not, tells us all we need to know about the future trajectory of these attention markets.

The Chinese Model

But we don't need a time machine to see what comes next; we just need to look at China. China has a set of domestic social apps that perform similar functions to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Ebay, and Amazon. The difference is that these apps (WeChat, QQ, etc.) are fully surveilled by the government, and they do not hide this fact. More savvy users will use VPN technologies to circumvent the Great Firewall, and the Chinese government lets them mostly get away with it, because under normal conditions it is fairly harmless. However, they freely exert control when they need to: In the weeks leading up to the Communist Party meeting in October 2017, they started locking down VPN services to reduce risk of agitators organizing protest.

The Great Firewall itself is an amazing piece of technology. When the Chinese government tries to remove information about the bloody Tiannamen Square protests in 1989, they have to really work at it, because the information is spread around in so many places. But when news of the Panama Papers broke last year, they blocked it instantly across the entire Chinese Internet and with exceptional efficacy within hours of the news breaking. They have content filters at every service and every tier, and shamelessly track every second of user engagement with any online resource. They have even wired up an entire province into a police state, forcing residents to install surveillance apps onto their phones.

We do not know how much access the backend surveillance system provides to Communist Party officials of different levels. One can only imagine the breathtaking levels of power, backstabbing, and intrigue that govern the operations of the Ministry of Information.

An American Model?

Of course, we imagine America would not put up with such overt surveillance, but the danger is that we won't even be asked. AI will make this 100x worse because it's good enough to fool us into not realizing it's there.

Law enforcement officials at every level of jurisdiction are starting to look to data science and machine learning to better predict crime. Even without new surveillance technology like drones and low-flying aircraft, there is significant gray area to be encroached. The first time that Facebook or Google or Verizon reveal that they have statistical modeling that can predict potential shootings with 90% accuracy, or domestic violence with 95% accuracy, we're going to enter a whole new world.

Furthermore, there's no reason why government actors wouldn't create games and ads and other kinds of "engagement honeypots" that refine their crime likelihood models. Imagine: a group of suspected "at risk" folks get sponsored ads for a gun show in their area, and they linger just a tad longer over the ad as they scroll by, compared to their baseline response from months prior. A data breach of Pornhub reveals browsing habits by IP address block, and gets cross-correlated with sex offender address records. A new kind of browser fingerprinting reveals when children are potentially in violent domestic situations.

Our AI future is one where law enforcement and governments, acting under the best of intentions, will lead us incrementally down a road to hell: each of us lingering over every keystroke, every swipe, wondering what it's doing to our model weights in some giant, opaque model of our potential for crime.

Further Reading and Sources