Our country’s most enigmatic robot overlord, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is scheduled to appear before Congress today to answer questions about, among other things, Facebook’s complicity with Russian bots, sock-puppets, and fake-news generators as well as the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. As I’ve said before on this blog, we really ought not underestimate the importance of either of these matters, both of which– if you’ll permit me to employ the most grossly-overused descriptor of late– pose a real threat to American democracy. However, as Zeynep Tufekci rightly noted in her New York Times piece earlier today, dragging Zuckerberg before Congress to answer questions like “Have you no decency, sir?!” from elected representatives, who have themselves sat idly by while the horses escaped the barn, is unlikely to accomplish much.
The truth is, Zuckerberg won’t provide any actionable information that we (and our elected representatives) don’t already know. He won’t offer any concrete advice for legislation that might help ordinary citizens protect their privacy, avoid exploitative use of their data, or weed out the rapid dissemination of lies and propaganda. (Advice which Zuckerberg alone is perhaps uniquely capable of providing.) He won’t disclose the dangers that he himself, smart as he is, must certainly see forthcoming. He absolutely will not volunteer to redesign the basic struts and girders of the Facebook architecture, which is chiefly responsible for the mess in which we find ourselves.
Zuckerberg has been called before Congress to play his part in a Morality Theater performance for the so-called “benefit” of the American public. Congress will wag their fingers and feign outrage. Zuckerberg will apologize and promise to do better. The rest of us plebes will have a satisfying moment of schadenfreude.
And tomorrow, on Wednesday, we’ll be exactly where we were yesterday, on Monday. Where is that, you ask? Right here (see below). Just bits and bytes of information, being processed as countless algorithms in countless rows of countless CPU’s in the countless data centers that Facebook still owns.
What we need right now is less Morality Theater, and a lot more collective reckoning with how we have failed to think about, much less regulate and legislate, what Tim Wu (the man most famous for coining the phrase “net neutrality”) identified as the “attention merchants” industry. Attention merchants are corporations that profit, not from selling us some thing or another, but rather by capturing our attention, and then subsequently selling our captured attention (via advertising, platform exposure, or data access) to other corporations who then either sell us some thing or another or help shape us as the sorts of subjects interested in buying some thing or another. With almost limitless and largely unregulated control of the personal data of its 2 billion users, Facebook is the 800-lb. gorilla in the attention merchants’ boardroom.
There are a number of systemic, structural, and seemingly insurmountable problems in the United States today. Chief among them, inextricable from one another and in no particular order, are:
(1) abject poverty and extremely concentrated wealth,
(2) inadequate and unaffordable health care,
(3) segregated, underfunded, and failing public education, and
(4) a deeply racist and almost completely broken justice system, most notably evident in widespread police violence, mass incarceration, and civil rights regress.
Add all of those up and you have the recipe for a demoralized and thus eminently controllable population. What happens when the demos is indebted, sick, ignorant, and afraid? They find themselves behind the eight-ball, so to speak, almost exclusively concerned with how to pay the next month’s rent or the next doctor’s visit, how they (or their kids) will perform on the next assessment exam, how to steer clear of the police, how to avoid court, or how to get out of jail.
In other words, they become perfect targets for attention merchants, who fleece and exploit and profit off of the public’s desperation by providing to them the preeminent salve: distraction.
Now add in (5) on the list of America’s most-pressing problems: our collective unwillingness or inability to think ahead of technology.
Given the combined corporate, bureaucratic, and political forces working against us, I’m not sure how much you can really blame the average citizen for thinking and living behind the eight-ball. Nevertheless, if we don’t start making a concerted effort to get ahead of the curve with regard to emergent technologies, not to mention already-extant ones, we’re going to be sunk.
We don’t need Congress to publicly shame Zuckerberg at this point, as much as we might enjoy the spectacle of that. We need change.
We could start with many of the suggestions that Tufekci offered today, including requiring exclusively “opt-in” mechanisms for personal data sharing, transparency with regard to corporations’ acquisition and use of personal data, regulation of aggregate data collection, and something like a “sunset clause” for data access permissions. All of Tufekci’s recommendations are eminently necessary and immediately do-able. They are also, unfortunately, evidence of the fact that we’re still playing catch-up.
As a university professor, one of my constant worries is that we’re training (read: coercing) students to work within the parameters that today’s labor industries have set for them — especially business, science, technology, engineering, and medicine– without ALSO insisting that students think ahead to how those industries will change in the near-future or ask questions about how those industries should change. We train students to be businessmen and businesswomen without asking them to question the fundamental tenets of capitalism. (I never cease to be shocked and appalled by my students’ utter inability to generate challenges to the idea of “private property” as an inalienable right, or even to understand that the claim “if costs/wages rise, prices must also rise” is manifestly false.) We train students to be chemists without asking them to take a moral position with regard chemical weapons. We train students to be biologists without asking them to take a moral position with regard to genetic engineering or cloning (or even Ancestry.com for goodness sake). We train students to be engineers without asking them to think ahead about the moral and political implications of self-driving cars, or surveillance devices, or city planning. We train students to be medical professionals without ever requiring them to them to settle in their own mind when life begins or ends.
Make it first. Think about it later. That has been our unofficial national policy with respect to emergent technologies for the last three decades. And it will no doubt be our final undoing if we don’t revise it post haste.
Here are some easy things that you can do that actually matter after you get through watching the Congress/Zuckerberg Morality Theater:
- VOTE for state and federal representatives who are knowledgeable, attentive, and forward-thinking about technology.
- DO NOT VOTE for most of the idiots who are now elected officials.
- RESEARCH what the digital divide looks like in your local community. Find ways to diminish it.
- ADVOCATE for net neutrality.
- READ the “terms and conditions,” in their entirety, every time.
Here are some less-easy things that you can do to make a difference:
- Stop thinking about your personal data as simply “private property.” That is an unimaginative, unproductive, and unhelpful way to think about the mess we’re in, and it will only reproduce exactly the sorts of problems enabled by capitalist logic that got us here.
- Educate yourself about current and emergent technologies like machine learning/machine intelligence. Learn what algorithms are and how they work. Learn what metadata is and how it works. Ask someone if you don’t understand.
- Don’t ignore or avoid technologies that you do not understand. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that if you’re not “using” it, it’s not “using” you.
- Try not to think of technology as merely a “tool.” You are now living in an age when almost every technology is thoroughly saturated with some ideology or another. (Not every idea needs a tool, but every tool needs an idea!) Make an effort to decipher the world-view implied by the technologies that comprise your world.
- Start thinking, long and hard, about what you think separates you from machines. (Also, btw, stop calling machine learning and machine intelligence “artificial.”) The human/non-human divide is a rapidly diminishing one.