Notes EM

Fiction vs reality

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 07:26:23 -0700

Too much assault and battery creates a more serious problem: wrongful appropriation, as Morozov tends to borrow heavily, without attribution, from those he attacks. His critique of Google and other firms engaged in “algorithmic gatekeeping”is basically taken from Lessig’s first book, “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” in which Lessig argued that technology is necessarily ideological and that choices embodied in code, unlike law, are dangerously insulated from political debate. Morozov presents these ideas as his own and, instead of crediting Lessig, bludgeons him repeatedly. Similarly, Morozov warns readers of the dangers of excessively perfect technologies as if Jonathan Zittrain hadn’t been saying the same thing for the past 10 years. His failure to credit his targets gives the misimpression that Morozov figured it all out himself and that everyone else is an idiot.

What my book actually says:

Alas, Internet-centrism prevents us from grasping many of these issues as clearly as we must. To their credit, Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain have written extensively about digital preemption (and Lessig even touched on the future of civil disobedience). However, both of them, enthralled with the epochalist proclamations of Internet-centrism, seem to operate under the false assumption that digital preemption is mostly a new phenomenon that owes its existence to “the Internet,” e-books, and MP3 files. Code is law—but so are turnstiles. Lessig does note that buildings and architecture can and do regulate, but he makes little effort to explain whether the possible shift to code-based regulation is the product of unique contemporary circumstances or merely the continuation of various long-term trends in criminological thinking.

As Daniel Rosenthal notes in discussing the work of both Lessig and Zittrain, “Academics have sometimes portrayed digital preemption as an unfamiliar and novel prospect… In truth, digital preemption is less of a revolution than an extension of existing regulatory techniques.” In Zittrain’s case, his fascination with “the Internet” and its values of “openness” and “generativity,” as well as his belief that “the Internet” has important lessons to teach us, generates the kind of totalizing discourse that refuses to see that some attempts to work in the technological register might indeed be legitimate and do not necessarily lead to moral depravity.

Recycle the Cycle - II

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 19:58:00 -0700

Oh I completely forgot that my book had an even more damning section on Tim Wu than the one I posted a few hours ago. So here it is for your amusement:

***

Openness and Its Messiahs

Perhaps some of the worst problems of information reductionism could be avoided if only the solutionists’ transparency vocabulary didn’t brim with ambiguous terms. Appeals for “transparency” no longer look problematic once solutionists start to talk about “openness.” It’s bad enough that our cultural and intellectual heritage makes us view those concepts as worth pursuing in their own right. Solutionists—especially those of the geek persuasion—regularly develop and consume their own myths about how “openness” contributes to progress and success, which only adds to the confusion.

It might be tempting to view this openness fetish as originating in communities promoting open-source software. But according to Chris Kelty, the UCLA anthropologist who studies geek cultures, there is not much agreement about the value of openness—about whether it’s worth pursuing as its own end or only instrumental to some higher goods—even in geek circles. As Kelty points out, “Open tends toward obfuscation. Everyone claims to be open, everyone has something to share, everyone agrees that being open is the obvious thing to do—after all, openness is the other half of ‘open source’—but for all its obviousness, being ‘open’ is perhaps the most complex component of Free Software.” Thus, as we have already noticed with the transparency rhetoric, it is never quite clear whether being open is a means or an end.

As a result, notes Kelty, there is no geek consensus on the merits of openness at all. “Is openness good in itself, or is openness a means to achieve something else—and if so what? Who wants to achieve openness, and for what purpose? Is openness a goal? Or is it a means by which a different goal—say, ‘interoperability’ or ‘integration’—is achieved? Whose goals are these, and who sets them? Are the goals of corporations different from or at odds with the goals of university researchers or government officials?” So, if Kelty is to be believed, the community that has done the most to infuse technology debates with respect for “openness” is itself torn about its merits and meanings.

Our Internet debates, in contrast, tend to be dominated by a form of openness fundamentalism, whereby “openness” is seen as a fail-safe solution to virtually any problem. Instead of debating how openness may be fostering or harming innovation, promoting or demoting justice, facilitating or complicating deliberation—the kinds of debates we are likely to have about the uses of openness in the messy world that we live in—“openness” in networks and technological systems is presumed to be always good and its opposite—it’s quite telling that we can’t quite define what that is—always bad.

This Manichean tendency to view every technological issue in open-versus-closed terms leads to almost religious celebration of companies that embrace openness for tactical purposes and use it to their own advantage. The tactic here is once again very similar to what Elizabeth Eisenstein did with attributing qualities like fixity to “print culture.” Openness is presumed to be an “Internet” value, so whenever it can be read into the actions of “Internet ambassadors”—the Googles and Facebooks of this world—it’s invoked to explain their success. Then, this success is itself invoked to prove that “openness” is indeed an Internet value. This explains why our Internet theorists are never wrong.

Take Tim Wu, who celebrates Google, an arch-open company in his view, as if it were a divine creature. In The Master Switch, Wu writes that Google’s birth was “audacious” and its ideas are “vaguely messianic.” Its founders—perhaps like Jesus?—“style themselves the challengers to the existing order, to the most basic assumptions about the proper organization of information, the nature of property, the duties of the American corporation, and even the purpose of life.” Google represents nothing less than the “utopia of openness,” which aims to “plant the flag of openness deep in the heart of the telephone territory” and never dares to “resist or subdue the Internet’s essential structure” (remember: resistance is futile; the network, with its “essential structure” and “architecture,” is not going away). It is “the greatest corporate champion of openness,” the leader of the “openness movement,” and “the incarnation of the Internet gospel of openness.” Wu’s Google is also one of the “apostles of openness”—very much unlike Steve Jobs, the “apostle of perfectibility”; former FCC chairman Reed Hundt, who is a “competition apostle”; and former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin, who is “an apostle par excellence of [the] control model.”

Gospel, messiah, apostle, incarnation—Wu writes as if he had some kind of spiritual awakening while visiting Google’s temple in the holy city of Mountain View. Oddly enough, he never mentions that he himself has been an (unpaid) adviser for Google and helped greatly to shape its early strategy on, well, “openness.” (In 2007 Chris Sacca, then head of special initiatives at Google, told Businessweek, “Tim helped us catalyze a strategy… He’s a singular force in this space. You’re just seeing the start of what he’s going to accomplish.”) Such disclosures make it difficult at times to tell whether Wu is praising Google’s genius or his own.

Wu’s effervescent analysis portrays Google’s predilection for openness as natural and inevitable; its executives simply saw the structure of the network and couldn’t resist it. It’s the print debate all over again, with Google’s “openness” being just a by-product of “the Internet’s essential structure,” much like fixity, in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s account, was just a manifestation of some eternal quality of print. That Google may have played a role in shaping or maintaining this very structure of “the Internet,” positioning it as “essential” rather than “contingent,” that it might have spent a lot of marketing and think tank money to be seen as an “evangelist of openness,” that it surrounded itself with an army of “openness” evangelists—none of this enters Wu’s analysis (but then, he’s one of the evangelists in question).

Compare Wu’s messianic pronouncements with a very different kind of empirical analysis that makes no a priori assumptions about Google’s divine status in the pantheon of openness gods and instead tries to explain what that status does for Google and how it has been achieved. Kimberley Spreeuwenberg and Thomas Poell, two Dutch academics, conducted a detailed study of how Google has created, managed, and positioned the work done within the Open Handset Alliance—a consortium of eighty-four companies that develop software and hardware for Google’s Android platform. Google and its executives never miss a chance to brag that their approach to mobile platforms, unlike that of Apple, is dominated by “openness.”

Yet, as the Dutch study points out, “open” in Open Handset Alliance might be something of a misnomer, for “it is highly questionable whether Android, in the light of the ideals of open source, can in fact be characterized as an ‘open source project.’” Thus, the authors note, “while Android was publicly introduced as a project aimed at preventing any ‘industry player to restrict or control the innovations of any other,’ within the Android ecology Google clearly has control over the other involved actors.”

This control is achieved through tricky software licenses and restrictive technological specifications for how software and hardware should be designed, all of them wrapped in the stale language of “compatibility.” Furthermore, leaked communication between Google and one of the hardware partners in the Open Handset Alliance illustrated that Google can exercise control over its partners in a nominally “open” ecosystem by tinkering with various carrots and sticks, for instance, by allowing well-behaving partners to acquire certain features ahead of the competition or threatening to disable certain features for partners that do not behave.

Likewise, since Google’s interest in expanding into mobile handsets is partly driven by its desire to remain a powerful player in advertising, the company has no strategic interest in following the “open-source” playbook down to the last rule. Instead, it picks the rules it wants to follow based on its own corporate strategy (e.g., it won’t let independent developers code the operating system itself, as this might weaken its control over development and, indirectly, its utility for harvesting user data—which would make achieving its advertising goals much harder).

This is not unexpected, but instead of celebrating what Google does for openness, it’s important to investigate what openness does for Google. As one perceptive observer noted of Google, “‘Openness’ and ‘connectedness’ are not the principles on which it is organized so much as the products that it sells.” Why this market for openness and connectedness exists, how it relates to other tenets of Internet-centrism, and how this market is manipulated: all of these are not the kinds of questions one is likely to ask when the occurrence of “openness” on “the Internet” is presumed to be natural and unproblematic. To use the dreadful language of social theory, ideas like “openness” and “the Internet” are constructed—and mutually co-constructed at that—and they do not drop down on us from the sky. Unless we are prepared to trace how such construction happens, not only will we write bad history of technology, but we will end up with extremely confused policy making that treats contingent and fluid phenomena (which, of course, might be worth defending) as permanent and natural fixtures of the environment.

Thus, while Internet-centrists assume that Google is “open” by default, their opponents—let’s call them Internet realists—assume that Google does a lot of work to look “open” and investigate what that work involves. While Internet-centrists tend to be populist and unempirical, Internet realists start with no assumptions about the intrinsic values of “openness” and “transparency”—let alone their inherent presence in digital networks—and pay particular attention to how these notions are involved and manifested in particular debates and technologies. While Internet-centrists believe that “openness” is good in itself, Internet realists investigate what the rhetoric of “openness” does for governments and companies—and what they do for it.

On Kevin Kelly

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:30:14 -0700

As a follow-up to the previous post - on Tim Wu - I’ve also decided to post another long section from the book - this time on Kevin Kelly. (Wu’s own thoughts on Kelly are here; my even longer review of Kelly’s “What Technology Wants” can be found here). See just what an “ambitious work of tech philosophy” - as Wu calls it in his review - Kelly’s book is!

***

Against Technological Defeatism

Viewed in the abstract, it may seem that the tides of digital preemption, situational crime prevention, and reputation-based controls are unstoppable and irreversible. Information is everywhere, and it’s getting cheaper. All of us are carrying mobile phones. Technology seems to be moving in accordance with its own law—Moore’s law—and we, the humans, can only conform and tinker with our laws to meet technology’s demands.

This sentiment pervades our public debate about technology. Thus, the Wall Street Journal ’s Gordon Crovitz writes that “whatever the mix of good and bad, technology only advances and cannot be put back.” The New York Times’s Nick Bilton, writing of multitasking, notes that “whether it’s good for society or bad … is somewhat irrelevant at this point.” Parag and Ayesha Khanna argue in Hybrid Reality that “the flow of technology is at most slowed by reluctant governments, but it is more accurate to say that technology simply evades or ignores them in search of willing receivers.” All these commentators adopt the stance of what I call “digital defeatism,” which—by arguing that this amorphous and autonomous creature called “Technology” with a capital T has its own agenda—tends to acknowledge implicitly or explicitly that there’s little we humans can do about it.

This view of technology as an autonomous force has its own rather long intellectual pedigree; in 1978 Langdon Winner offered perhaps the best summary in his Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of- Control as a Theme in Political Thought. This view has been debunked hundreds of times as a lazy, unempirical approach to studying technological change, and yet it has never really left the popular discourse about technology. It has recently made a forceful appearance in Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, and Kelly’s thought is not a bad place to observe technological defeatism up close, if only because he is a Silicon Valley maven and the first executive editor of Wired. Besides, very diverse thinkers about “the Internet”—from Tim Wu to Steven Johnson—cite Kelly’s What Technology Wants as an influence. Thus, it won’t be such a great stretch to say that Kelly’s theories do provide the intellectual grounds on which Internet-centrism grows and flourishes.

The defining feature of Kelly’s thought is its explicit denial of its own defeatism. Kelly, using a fancy word, “technium,” as a stand-in for “Technology” with a capital T, reassures his readers that “the technium wants what we design it to want and what we try to direct it to do.” This sounds like a rather uplifting, humanist message—but the very next sentence shatters it: “But in addition to those drives, the technium has its own wants. It wants to sort itself out, to self-assemble into hierarchical levels, just as most large, deeply interconnected systems do. The technium also wants what every living system wants: to perpetuate itself, to keep itself going. And as it grows, those inherent wants are gaining in complexity and force.”

Kelly offers the best of all possible worlds: technology is both what we make it of it and an autonomous force with its own wants and desires and largely independent of humans. Kelly’s thought is full of such doublespeak, by which we are simultaneously promised control over technology and assured that we need no such control because it’s too late. Thus, he can write that “our concern should not be about whether to embrace [technology]. We are beyond embrace; we are already symbiotic with it,” only to follow with “and most of the time, after we’ve weighed downsides and upsides in the balance of our experience, we find that technology offers a greater benefit, but not by much. In other words, we freely choose to embrace it—and pay the price.” So we get both mysticism—we are symbiotic with technology; we’ve already embraced it!—and radical empowerment—whenever we embrace technology, it’s because we want to!—which is a rather odd combination.

But, promises Kelly, none of this actually matters, because technology wants the same things as evolution, for technology is just evolution by other means. Thus, he notes that “with minor differences, the evolution of the technium—the organism of ideas—mimics the evolution of genetic organisms.” Technology is nature, and nature is technology; resistance is futile—who would want to challenge nature? With this simple insight, Kelly develops a whole theory that can explain literally every development—from malware like Stuxnet to Google glasses—by claiming that this is just what technology wants.

All we have to do is to develop the right listening tools—and the rest will follow. Hence, notes Kelly, “only by listening to technology’s story, divining its tendencies and biases, and tracing its current direction can we hope to solve our personal puzzles.” Elsewhere, he writes, “We can choose to modify our legal and political and economic assumptions to meet the ordained [technological] trajectories ahead. But we cannot escape from them.” So, what he is saying here is this: technology has a story to tell; we should listen to it and modify our political and economic assumptions accordingly.

But why, one might ask, should we modify our political and economic assumptions if we can instead shape those trajectories? What if they are not ordained? Why alter our conception of privacy if we can regulate Facebook and Google? Why accept the proliferation of measures inspired by situational crime prevention and digital preemption everywhere if we can instead limit them only to instances in which they do not undermine dissent and deliberation? And how far should we go in modifying our assumptions? What if the voice of technology that Kelly pretends to hear is actually the marketing speak of Silicon Valley’s public relations departments? Kelly doesn’t bother with such questions; instead, he succumbs to the pro-innovation bias and declares that no meme should ever go to waste: “The first response to a new idea should be to immediately try it out. And to keep trying it out, and testing it, as long as it exists.” Do you hear that, the land mine?

Concerns over distribution never appear in Kelly’s analysis. Instead of discussing who should get to play the proverbial Aristotelian flute—the rich? the talented? the random?—Kelly imagines that technology will simply produce enough flutes so that questions of distribution will themselves become obsolete. Like Peter Diamandis, Kelly depicts a world in which technology will guarantee abundance, and abundance will make conflicts over resources unnecessary. This seems a rather shallow reading of human nature, for when everyone has a flute, some people will certainly want two, if only to stand out from their neighbors. Abundance in the absence of robust political institutions means little.

What’s most disturbing about Kelly’s ideas—and here he’s quite representative of many other technology pundits—is that he thinks beyond local communities and even nation-states. His playing field is the whole of humanity, the entire cosmos. It’s a philosophy best described as macroscopism: everything is analyzed based on how well it fulfills the needs of humanity as a whole. Thus, local communities that choose to restrict certain technologies or prohibit them outright are portrayed as essentially stealing something from humanity. By the same logic, Europeans are holding back possibilities for all of us because they regulate genetically modified food or have tougher environmental standards. It’s one of those cases in which the vacuity of rhetoric surrounding global justice empties existing local practices of any meaning and space for maneuver.

This is most pronounced in Kelly’s discussion of the Amish and their notoriously limited—some might say well-thought-out—use of technology. What bothers Kelly about the Amish is that, by refusing to use certain technologies, they are actually slowing down innovation everywhere: “By constraining the suite of acceptable occupations and narrowing education, the Amish are holding back possibilities not just for their children but indirectly for all.” The idea never occurs to Kelly that political communities might be entitled to self-determination and that, as long as they arrive at some restrictions on technology in a democratic fashion—alas, this is not always the case with the Amish—it might actually be good for humanity. Instead of criticizing the undemocratic means, he is only concerned with the ends.

Likewise, when discussing restrictions on technology, Kelly views all of them as ineffective, even harmful. “If we take a global view of technology, prohibition seems very ephemeral. While an item may be banned in one place, it will thrive in another.” He continues, “In a global marketplace, nothing is eliminated. Where a technology is banned locally, it slips away to pool somewhere else on the globe.” But why should we take a global view of technology when we live in a world where technology is regulated by local communities? A certain technology might disappear in one place but appear in another because, in the former case, the community deemed it unacceptable and was powerful enough to enforce the ban, while in the latter case, the community either embraced the technology of its own will or was simply to weak or corrupt to resist the marketing talk of whoever came pitching.

The problem with Kelly’s thought is that, while nominally about technology, it’s actually deeply political; what’s worse, it traffics in rather obnoxious politics. No one liked the idea that technology is just an extension of nature more than the Nazis (well, at least before the possibility of defeat forced them into a more pragmatic mode). Here is Kelly on nature and technology: “Technology’s dominance ultimately stems … from its origin in the same self-organization that brought galaxies, planets, life, and minds into existence.” Or consider this passage: “We tend to isolate manufactured technology from nature, even to the point of thinking of it as anti-nature, only because it has grown to rival the impact and power of its home. But in its origins and fundamentals, a tool is as natural as our life.” Now compare Kelly’s proclamations with philosophizing by the Nazi technology functionary Fritz Todt: “It would be paradoxical if the works of technology stood in contradiction to nature in their outward expression since the real essence of technology is a consequence of the laws of nature… The works of technology must be erected in harmony with nature; they may not be permitted to come into conflict with nature as thoughtless, egotistical measures.” The Nazis heard the voice of technology: it informed them about gas chambers.

Likewise, the laissez-faire part of Kelly’s thought comes directly from Ayn Rand, even though he doesn’t acknowledge the connection.

Rand’s name rarely comes up in the context of technology theory, but she did write one essay, “The New Anti-Industrial Revolution,” that addressed the subject of technology regulation head-on. The crux of Rand’s argument can be boiled down to one pithy saying: “A ‘restricted’ technology is the equivalent of a censored mind.” Thus, Rand writes, in the best tradition of macroscopism, that “restrictions [on technology] mean the attempt to regulate the unknown, to limit the unborn, to set rules for the undiscovered.” Because we never know what new innovation a technology regulation might thwart, we should never attempt it in the first place. “Who can predict when, where or how a given bit of information will strike an active mind and what it will produce?” wonders Rand before warning that the “ecological crusade” would rid us of our toothbrushes, and “computers programmed by a bunch of hippies” (she actually wrote that—in 1971!) would retard human progress. By this logic, societies should not restrict the use of biological weapons or asbestos because we don’t know what good might come of them.

To support the idea that technologies—and now “the Internet”—develop in accordance with their own rules, Kelly and other pundits usually invoke Moore’s law. For Kelly, “the curve [behind Moore’s law] is one way the technium speaks to us.” The idea that Moore’s law is akin to a natural law is widespread in Silicon Valley—it’s one of the original myths of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity movement—and it has long spread beyond the technology industry, frequently invoked to justify some course of action.

There are few empirically rigorous studies of Moore’s law, but Finnish innovation scholar Ilkka Tuomi has done perhaps the most impressive work, digging up industry data, calculating actual growth rates, and tracking various expressions and references to Moore’s law in the media. Tuomi’s conclusion? “Strictly speaking there is no such Law. Most discussions that quote Moore’s Law are historically inaccurate and extend its scope far beyond available empirical evidence,” he writes. Furthermore, notes Tuomi, “sociologically Moore’s Law is a fascinating case of how myths are manufactured in the modern society and how such myths rapidly propagate into scientific articles, speeches of leading industrialists, and government policy reports around the world.”

In its original 1965 formulation by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, the law stated that the number of components on chips with the smallest manufacturing costs per component would double roughly every twelve months. Ten years later Moore significantly revised his estimates, updating the growth rate to twenty-four months. But he also changed what was being measured. Thus, writes Tuomi, while still counting the number of components on semiconductor chips, Moore now no longer focused on optimal-cost circuits but rather mapped the evolution of the maximum complexity of existing chips. In 1979 he revised the law yet again. The industry, in the meantime, took his law to mean whatever it wanted, even embracing a different time estimate of eighteen months. As most media reports will attest, many still believe that eighteen months is what Moore said—even Intel’s site used to claim this—but Moore never said any such thing, and he is usually the first to point it out (“I never said eighteen months. I said one year and then two years.”).

By analyzing the actual growth rates, Tuomi found that while the semiconductor industry was experiencing significant growth, it was anything but neat and exponential. The growth in the 1970s exhibited different patterns from that in the 1980s; growth patterns in the 1990s differed again. There was even more diversity across individual microprocessors. To question Moore’s law, then, is not to deny that important changes have happened over the last five decades but only to see how well those changes fit a singular pattern that a “law” predicts. As Tuomi points out, Moore’s law has always been about the future, not about the past; historical accuracy has never really bothered the semiconductor industry.

One intriguing interpretation of Tuomi’s work is that the semiconductor industry greatly benefited from the rhetoric surrounding Moore’s law, for it promised ever-cheaper semiconductors and helped ease concerns about where they would actually be used, thus boosting the initially weak demand for the industry’s products. In retrospect, this may have been for the better. “The industry has been continuously falling forward, hoping that Moore’s Law will hold, economically save the day, and justify the belief in technical progress,” notes Tuomi. “Instead of filling a market need, the semiconductor industry has actively and aggressively created markets.” But we shouldn’t mistake the clever marketing and rhetorical tricks of the semiconductor and computer industries for divine laws that inform us about the future.

A concept like Moore’s law doesn’t just fall from the sky; nor does it stay around for so long simply because of its accuracy (which, at any rate, isn’t great). Instead of postulating that technology speaks to us through Moore’s law, why not study who else—perhaps Intel?—might be doing the talking. That this “what technology wants” kind of discourse allows technology companies to present their business strategies as a natural unfolding of history is not something we should treat lightly. Technology wants nothing—and neither does “the Internet.”

Recycle the Cycle

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:14:02 -0700

Following Tim Wu’s review of my book in The Washington Post, I thought it would be fun to post the long section from the book where I’m critiquing Wu. No wonder he sounds so annoyed: the empire of bullshit that is “the Internet” is slowly beginning to crumble. The section is called “Recycle the Cycle” (a reference to Wu’s “cycle” theory - which, surprisingly, I don’t find very convincing).

***

Recycle the Cycle

If Eisenstein’s print culture is an example of how clumsily history can be appropriated to frame the present debate about “the Internet,” the traffic occasionally goes in the other direction as well—as in when our Internet commentators start with contemporary anxieties and travel back in history to show how many of the modern debates associated with “the Internet” are themselves just a subset of much greater, longer debates about networks, information, and technology. There is nothing wrong with their mission per se—some might even argue that this is what history is for—but most such accounts are peculiar in that, in their quest to tell a certain story about “the Internet,” they misrepresent and badly mangle the past, leaving us with an impoverished reading of history and a confused game plan for the future.

This should make us pause to ponder if Internet-centrism—whatever its own origins in bad history—might be nudging us to rewrite the history of other, pre-Internet periods with one simple purpose: to establish a coherent teleological account of how all other technologies paved the way for “the Internet” and how their own governance failed to embrace “Internet values” and may have delayed the arrival of this “network of all networks.” This is the ideology of Internet-centrism at its purest: it suggests what kinds of questions we could and should be asking of the past. As an ideology, it has no need to dictate the answers, for we already know what we need to find in order to complete the grand narrative of “the Internet” itself.

A troubling example of what Internet-centrism does to history—in terms of both mangling the content and giving a second life to arcane, long-forgotten methodologies—can be found in Tim Wu’s much-acclaimed The Master Switch. Wu, a legal scholar who coined the term “net neutrality,” is a leading contributor to unfolding debates about “the Internet”; The Master Switch is his attempt to explore the history of other technologies—the telegraph, telephone, radio, cinema, television—and illuminate what those technologies can tell us about our current predicaments. This sounds like a noble mission, but anyone undertaking it should be aware of the immense difficulty of engaging with the past on its own terms. At worst, an attempt to illuminate the present by studying the past can turn into a fishing expedition, where the past becomes just a giant toxic aquarium, storing enough factoids and exotic characters to buttress any interpretation of virtually any contemporary trend or phenomenon.

Wu’s argument in The Master Switch goes like this: There’s something peculiar about information industries, for they tend to be dominated (and intellectually ravaged) by “information emperors”—Steve Jobs–like personalities who strive for absolute control. The dictatorial rule of such emperors and several structural qualities of their information empires usually lead to what Wu calls “the Cycle,” which is the inevitable closing of the once open and innovative industries. It happens either because the information emperors are clever but ruthless businessmen or because they co-opt the government into giving them protection from competition. This is how we got Hollywood’s studio system, which exercised unprecedented control over what films to make and what issues to censor; a closed telephone network, where AT&T banned users from plugging in their own devices, thereby potentially delaying the advent of “the Internet”; and, more recently, Apple’s world of apps, in which a politburo sitting somewhere in Cupertino reviews and approves the apps it likes and deletes those it doesn’t.

Wu’s proposed solution to this problem is to prevent companies in the information business from integrating vertically—that is, to prohibit companies that create information from owning or creating infrastructure for its dissemination and vice versa. But the government’s involvement would end there: Wu’s reading of history suggests that government involvement has been mostly detrimental to the growth of information industries. His ideal is to keep both big government and big business out of the information industries; this, according to Wu, is how all successful information industries have developed, including “the Internet,” and this is how it should be in the future. Amen.

This might seem like an appealing and elegant argument, but in reality it’s just an attempt to come up with one of those “theories of everything.” In this instance, “everything” is to be explained by a fixed set of concerns—in Wu’s case, concerns over openness and innovation—that have come to dominate our thinking about “the Internet.” First of all, Wu conveniently leaves aside those information industries—like book publishing—in which no dominant information emperor has emerged. The Cycle doesn’t go there; it’s too crowded. Curiously, one such emperor might emerge very soon—his name is Jeff Bezos, and he runs a small start-up called Amazon—but Wu himself seems to be enamored of Amazon and the price efficiencies it brings. Second, by limiting his history only to America—and why would “the Cycle,” if it were real, unfold in America only?—he misses many foreign cases in which information emperors have done much good.

Wasn’t André Malraux, France’s powerful minister of cultural affairs under Charles de Gaulle and the godfather of New Wave cinema, one such emperor, albeit perhaps of a public-service variety? Zooming in on Malraux’s career would reveal that the success of the French film industry in the 1960s was the direct consequence of the government’s eagerness to subsidize risky low-budget films and support maisons de la culture, where such films could be shown. It’s not a story of market-led innovation; quite the opposite. Information emperors don’t have to be seen as evil (perhaps they don’t have to be seen at all; Internet-centrism, in Wu’s hands, has miraculously resuscitated the much discredited “great-man-of-history” style of narrating the past). Likewise, governments, despite the many conspiratorial suspicions that geeks harbor about them, can be powerful and benevolent players in the information industry.

One doesn’t have to travel to France to see that; in fact, a more comprehensive look at the history of information empires in America reveals as much. As Paul Starr has shown in his devastating review of The Master Switch in the American Prospect, even a cursory look at the history of the post office—a communications network created by the government to foster free expression—is enough to disprove many of Wu’s theories. The post office was conceived of as a monopoly, and it’s been extremely successful in its mission. According to Starr, “The government didn’t invite rival postal firms to compete; in fact, it created a monopoly. That monopoly, however, was conducive to free expression because of the policies Congress adopted, which subsidized the circulation of newspapers irrespective of their viewpoint and spread postal service throughout the country.” But on “the Internet,” no one likes monopolies—they smack of Microsoft and IBM—so this chapter of telecommunications history simply gets thrown overboard. Internet-centrism tolerates no competing hypotheses.

As Starr points out, had the US government followed Wu’s dictum that “government’s only proper role is as a check on private power, never as an aid to it,” it “would not have created the Post Office or fostered the rapid development of newspapers, and American democracy would have suffered. More recently, the United States would not have developed the Internet or public broadcasting”—both of which required massive public financing. Such strong antigovernment sentiment—that it’s always a parasite on innovation—is a recurring feature of the geek mentality, which is partly responsible for the disgust many geeks feel toward politics. As Starr notes, “Government policy, in Wu’s distorted recounting, is mostly a record of regulatory capture and craven mistakes that Americans should be ashamed of—even though, strangely enough, the United States has for much of its history been a leader in communications, partly because of the constructive role government has played.” Is it really that surprising, then, that a recent column on the technology site Info World was titled “Why Politicians Should Never Make Laws about Technology”? If geeks learn their history from Tim Wu, this sentiment follows quite naturally.

Methodologically, Wu’s treatment of information industries is very close to Eisenstein’s treatment of print culture: he starts by simply projecting the qualities he associates with “the Internet” back into the past and assuming that the industries and technologies he studies have a nature, a fixed set of qualities and propensities, then proceeds to celebrate selectively those examples that support those qualities and discard those that don’t. So Wu starts with the hunch that the openness of “the Internet” is under threat, travels back in history to find trends that suggest all information industries have experienced similar pressures, and returns to the present to announce that history reveals that openness is indeed under threat on “the Internet.”

That this is the very premise on which he starts his intellectual journey doesn’t much matter in the end because such history has a very clear activist bend; the goal is not to understand the history of technology but to find enough historical arguments in order to—just like in Jonathan Zittrain’s case—make “the Internet” live forever. Such Internet-centrism would be bad in itself, but it is also exerting a very unhealthy influence on technology and media history, where everything that transpired before “the Internet” is now reexamined according to its benchmarks. Historical accounts inspired by Internet-centrism are simply bad history, even if they occasionally make for effective policy advocacy on issues like net neutrality. That Internet-centrism makes us blind to this reality is a reason to worry, not celebrate.

My FT oped: Google Revolution Isn't Worth Our Privacy

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:42:01 -0700

Let’s give credit where it is due: Google is not hiding its revolutionary ambitions. As its co-founder Larry Page put it in 2004, eventually its search function “will be included in people’s brains” so that “when you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information”.

Science fiction? The implant is a rhetorical flourish but Mr Page’s utopian project is not a distant dream. In reality, the implant does not have be connected to our brains. We carry it in our pockets – it’s called a smartphone.

So long as Google can interpret – and predict – our intentions, Mr Page’s vision of a continuous and frictionless information supply could be fulfilled. However, to realise this vision, Google needs a wealth of data about us. Knowing what we search for helps – but so does knowing about our movements, our surroundings, our daily routines and our favourite cat videos.

Some of this information has been collected through our browsers but in a messy, disaggregated form. Back in 1996, Google didn’t set out with a strategy for world domination. Its acquisition of services such as YouTube was driven by tactics more than strategy. While it was collecting a lot of data from its many services, from email to calendar, such data were kept in separate databases – which made the implant scenario hard to accomplish.

Thus, when last year Google announced its privacy policy, which would bring the data collected through its more than 60 online services under one roof, that move made sense. The obvious reason for doing so is to make individual user profiles even more appealing to advertisers: when Google tracks you it can predict what ads to serve you much better than when it tracks you only across one such service.

But there is another reason, of course – and it has to do with the Grand Implant Agenda: the more Google knows about us, the easier it can make predictions about what we want – or will want in the near future. Google Now, the company’s latest offering, is meant to do just that: by tracking our every email, appointment and social networking activity, it can predict where we need to be, when, and with whom. Perhaps, it might even order a car to drive us there – the whole point is to relieve us of active decision-making. The implant future is already here – it’s just not evenly resisted.

This week, data protection authorities from six European countries showed some such resistance when they announced an effort to investigate if Google’s policy violates their national privacy laws. This announcement follows several months of consultation – preceded by a letter that EU data regulators sent to Mr Page in October – which yielded little response from Google. The letter urged the company to disclose how it processes personal data in each service and to clarify why and how it combines data that come from its multiple services.

Google believes it has met all the formal requirements on announcing the policy back in 2012. Under the current legal regime, Google, even if fined, doesn’t stand to lose much from these investigations. However, if the recent proposal to create a new single EU data regulator that can fine companies up to 2 per cent of their global turnover goes through, it might present Google with a bill as high as $1bn, if any breaches were found. Even if their investigations fail, European regulators must be applauded for embarking on a mission that their colleagues across the Atlantic wouldn’t even dare contemplate.

Europe, with its unflinching defence of privacy as a fundamental human value, cannot afford to act disjointedly – not at a time when the most powerful company in Silicon Valley is amassing a fleet of self-driving cars and releasing Google Glass, a line of smart glasses that some privacy advocates rightfully compare to stylish CCTV cameras that, for reasons unknown, we have accepted to wear on our heads.

Google’s intrusion into the physical world means that, were its privacy policy to stay in place and cover self-driving cars and Google Glass, our internet searches might be linked to our driving routes, while our favourite cat videos might be linked to the actual cats we see in the streets. It also means that everything that Google already knows about us based on our search, email and calendar would enable it to serve us ads linked to the actual physical products and establishments we encounter via Google Glass.

For many this may be a very enticing future. We can have it, but we must also find a way to know – in great detail, not just in summary form – what happens to our data once we share it with Google, and to retain some control over what it can track and for how long.

It would also help if one could drive through the neighbourhood in one of Google’s autonomous vehicles without having to log into Google Plus, the company’s social network, or any other Google service.

The European regulators are not planning to thwart Google’s agenda or nip innovation in the bud. This is an unflattering portrayal that might benefit Google’s lobbying efforts but has no bearing in reality. Quite the opposite: it is only by taking full stock of the revolutionary nature of Google’s agenda that we can get the company to act more responsibly towards its users.

Engineering, as the tech historian Ken Alder once put it, “operates on a simple, but radical assumption: that the present is nothing more than the raw material from which to construct a better future”. This might well be the case but not all raw materials are alike; if European history teaches us anything, it’s that some raw materials – and privacy is certainly among them – are worth cherishing and preserving in their own right, even if it means that the much-anticipated future will take somewhat more effort and energy to construct. A revolutionary future built on shaky foundations: to that, we must say a resounding No.

The writer is author of ‘To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism’

THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE IS HERE

Disorder as resistance

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 17:42:00 -0700

I found this in the Letters section of the latest issue of The Times Literary Supplement (dated March 15, 2013). It doesn’t seem to be online:

Binder families

Sir, - In David Winters’s review of The Demon of Writing by Ben Kafka he mentions a clerk who saved the actors of the Comédie-Française during the Terror, by soaking their death warrants in a tub and throwing the balls of pulp out of the window (February 15). In the 1960s I worked as a welfare case worker, along with several hundred others, in a vast office in downtown Chicago. Each of the families of my 300 clients existed, bureaucratically speaking, as a large binder filled with forms and written notes. When the families had been on welfare for several generations, the binders were equivalent to two or three large telephone books.

Overwhelmed with an avalanche of forms, telephone calls, clients waiting for hours downstairs to see me, home visits to the high-rise housing projects in which they lived, I was taught by the veteran case workers to simply go into the huge library where the binders were stored, alphabetically on endless shelves, and “accidentally” file binders out of place. Then I could innocently plead that I was unable to take any action on the case because I could not find the binder. Without the binder nothing in the status of the clients could change, their cheques would continue to arrive, and I could “miraculously” locate their binder if I needed to. Sadly, we were on the verge of the computer age, the information was beginning to appear on IBM punch cards, and the binders were soon to become obsolete, signalling the beginning of a far more ruthless era in which no clerk could make inconvenient facts disappear.

MICHAEL LIPSEY 75 San Marino Drive, San Rafael, California 94901.

Need some research assistance

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 11:29:31 -0700

I’m in the early stages of another book project and I need some help with basic research. (See this for a similar call about my previous book, “To Save Everything, Click Here.” That call has worked out fine - the names of my four research assistants did make it into my Acknowledgements section!)

Basically, you’ll be a good fit if

* You can spare 10 hours a week or so on creating various “research dossiers” - those would mostly consist of all relevant articles (mostly published in the popular press/tech blogs) on a given subject. In the first week or two, you’d also spend a lot of time on Twitter compiling various user lists (will explain more once you start).

* Occasionally, you’d also need to spend time hunting down academic articles and book reviews - ideally, I expect you to have access to things like JSTOR, Ebsco, etc but we can talk about it if you don’t. Ideally, you’d also have access to the archives of NYRB, LRB, New Yorker and a few other similar publications.

I expect that most of the work will be done in April, May and June. July might be downtime and we might need to do some extra research work in August/September. Basically, we’ll know more as we progress, so you need to have some flexibility. Also, some weeks might require more work than others (e.g. 15 hours one week versus 5 another week).

I’ll pay per hour.

What I want from you when you apply is a) one-two page resume b) one paragraph summarizing your research experience and research interests.

I hope to receive everything by March 25th and make up by mind by April 1st. I might want to chat to you on the phone or Skype before committing. (I’m looking for one-two people this time). Send your stuff to evgenymore@gmail.com

"The Second Industrial Revolution is here!": the 1960 edition

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 20:10:25 -0800

Henry Boettinger, vice-president of Michigan Bell, addressing a group of bankers in 1960:

“It is one of the clichés of our literature that automation is accounting for the phenomenon known as the second Industrial Revolution.”

Spotted in Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy: The Emergence of “Information Technology” as a Keyword, 1948-1985

Stewart Brand's definition of "feedback"

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 18:13:00 -0800

Here goes:

FEEDBACK: An unpoetic inexpressive word that shrieks for replacement. Correct use of the term would refer to eating your own vomit. ‘Positive feedback’ and ‘negative feedback’ would signify whether you like the vomit or not.

Found in “Cybernetics of Cybernetics“

Another close reading of Steven Johnson

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 19:19:00 -0800

Steven Johnson has flagged a few sentences in my review of his book, claiming that I misrepresent his views. Below you can see what he actually writes in the book - along with the exact language that I used to summarize his positions. I’ll grant it to Johnson: he’s inserted enough hedges into his text to claim that his arguments are not at all what these quotes purport to say. Fine - but I’m not sure that inconsistency is a quality to be prized in a serious thinker. So below is a breakdown of all of his complaints.

***

Johnson in his own words:

“To be a peer progressive, then, is to live with the conviction that Wikipedia is just the beginning, that we can learn from its success to build new systems that solve problems in education, governance, health, local communities, and countless other regions of human experience. This is why we are optimistic: because we know it can be done.”

My summary that prompted Johnson’s complaint:

“Projects such as Wikipedia are just another reminder that Internet logic is the correct way to run the world.”

***

Johnson in his own words:

“The Internet and the Web were built, and are maintained, by peer networks: dense, diverse, and distributed networks of open collaboration and exchange. And while it is certainly possible to use the Internet to strengthen your hierarchical organization, the Internet seems to have a bias toward peer networks, if only because it makes it so much easier to assemble them. We didn’t have Kickstarter or Wikipedia before the Web came along because the organizational costs of connecting all those people were prohibitive.”

My summary that prompted Johnson’s complaint:

“Now that the costs have fallen, there are no good reasons for hierarchies to exist.” (where the “hierarchies” are projects like Britannica and the National Endowment for the Arts).

***

My summary:

“The same criticism applies to his treatment of the Internet. Had Johnson chosen to look closer at any of the projects he is celebrating, he would find plenty of centralization efforts at work.”

Johnson countering this with this line from the book:

“Facebook is a private corporation; the social graph that Zuckerberg celebrates is a proprietary technology, an asset owned by the shareholders of Facebook itself. And as far as corporations go, Facebook is astonishingly top-heavy: the S-1 revealed that Zuckerberg personally controls 57 percent of Facebook’s voting stock, giving him control over the company’s destiny that far exceeds anything Bill Gates or Steve Jobs ever had. The cognitive dissonance could drown out a Sonic Youth concert: Facebook believes in peer-to-peer networks for the world, but within its own walls, the company prefers top-down control centralized in a charismatic leader.”

my comment on the above quote: How Facebook is run is peripheral to arguments about “Internet logic” - the paragraph he quotes in defense refers explicitly to Facebook’s corporate structure, not its products.

***

Johnson in his own words:

“I was not alone in sensing a meaningful connection between the Seattle protesters and the decentralized peer networks of the digital age. Writing in The Nation at the time, Naomi Klein had observed, “What emerged on the streets of Seattle and Washington was an activist model that mirrors the organic, interlinked pathways of the Internet.” It seemed clear to some of us at that early stage that the model of information sharing that the Internet had popularized was too potent and protean not to spawn offline organizational structures that emulated its core qualities. Seattle seemed just a preview of coming attractions; as the Internet grew to become the dominant communications medium of our age, social movements would increasingly look like the Internet, even when they were chanting slogans in the middle of a city park.”

My summary:

“But even assuming that Johnson is right and the idea of the Internet does indeed inform how social movements form and operate these days, it is not immediately obvious why this is a model worth pursuing. Not everyone believes that Occupy Wall Street was a runaway success.”

***

Johnson in his own words:

“The number of individuals and groups that are actively building new peer-progressive organizations is still small, but the values associated with the movement are shared much more widely throughout the population. Yet because the parties are institutions stuck in older ways of organizing the world, the electorate has to distort the square peg of its true political worldview to fit the round holes of the two parties…The parties have failed to adapt to emerging attitudes and beliefs within their constituencies…that is ultimately what being a peer progressive is all about: the belief that new institutions and new social architectures are now available to us in a way that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, and that our continued progress as a society will come from our adopting those institutions in as many facets of modern life as possible.”

my summary:

” This anti-institutional bias is most visible in Johnson’s discussion of American politics. He sincerely believes that one way to improve it is to get rid of the hassle that comes with political parties, leaders, and other mediating institutions… Johnson believes that the old party system is bad simply because it is Internet-incompatible. “

***

As for the points about 311 and political philosophy, I address them in my TNR exchange with Johnson. Had he included these points into his TNR response, I’d have gladly addressed them there but, for some odd reason, he chose to publish them on this blog the day before our TNR exchange went up.

quote of the month

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 08:19:00 -0800

From Warren McCulloch, one of the founding fathers of cybernetics:

“I don’t particularly like people, never have. Man to my mind is about the nastiest, most destructive of all animals. I don’t see any reason, if he can evolve machines that can have more fun than he himself can, why they shouldn’t take over, enslave us, quite happily. They might have a lot more fun, invent better games than we ever did.”

quoted in Mary Catherine Bateson, Our Own Metaphor (New York: Knopf, 1972)

my FT oped on Google and "algorithmic nudging"

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 09:24:05 -0800

The original (paywalled) is here.

Google Should Not Choose Right and Wrong

By Evgeny Morozov

Oscar Wilde once wrote that “on mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends”. The Irishman would have been a fan of Google Now, the web company’s rival to Siri, Apple’s snarky voice-activated virtual personal assistant.

Google Now is less chatty than Siri. It pre-empts your questions by analysing what Google already knows about you. It then selects the snippets of information you need at the moment, presenting them as beautiful index cards. Available on Android phones, Google Now might soon also be coming to our browsers.

It is the archetypal anti-hassle machine. Catching a flight later? Since your reservation is in your Google-run inbox or your Google-run calendar, Google Now would show a reminder, tell you what weather to expect on arrival and map the best route to the airport, checking traffic conditions beforehand.

This is all possible because Google can anticipate your information needs. Its predictions rest on some theory about who you are, what you want and where you want to be. For many activities such a theory doesn’t have to be deep to produce accurate predictions. Google doesn’t need to guess your politics to notice that you drive to the airport on Mondays.

But the latest version of Google Now also generates a very different reminder. At the end of each month, Google happily reports – without you ever asking for it! – how many miles you’ve walked or cycled. This intervention is no simple weather trivia. Here Google assumes that walking is more important – perhaps, even more moral – than, say, driving. It explicitly “bakes” morality into its app, engaging in what one might term “algorithmic nudging”.

Had governments advocated such surveillance-powered interventions, many would find them intrusive, not least because their terms must be subject to public debate. Are we measuring the right things? Are we unfairly blaming individuals for failures of institutions? Walking is undoubtedly easier in Manhattan than in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

With Google at the helm, however, resistance is minimal. We don’t mind our phones spying on us – at least not when Google needs this data to tell us about flight delays. Likewise, we have been persuaded by Google’s efforts to recast the information it collects as objective and simply existing “out there” – in nature – unaffected by their recording devices or systems of measurement.

Google’s power and temptation to do good are only poised to increase. As its services are integrated under one umbrella – maps, emails, calendars, videos, books – it knows even more about our moral failings. And as Google begins to mediate our interactions with the built environment – through its self-driving cars, smart glasses, smartphones – the scope for “algorithmic nudging” also expands.

Google doesn’t hide its aims. As Eric Schmidt, its executive chairman, put it: “Technology is not really about hardware and software any more. It’s really about the mining and use of this enormous data to make the world a better place.”

Policy makers might also be interested, since the company can take “nudging” – the application of behavioural economics to policy – a step further. (An example of a “nudge” is a change in a default option for a pension contribution.) In a recent paper, Cass Sunstein, a former official in the Obama administration, celebrates the new, highly personalised defaults possible in an information-rich world. Google could be his natural ally.

Imagine dining out wearing the company’s latest innovation – its smart glasses. The moment you walk in, Google already knows if you’ve met your calorie target for the day. It also knows that fatty foods are bad for you. Should it play the benevolent Big Brother and tell you what menu items to avoid? Should it make those items invisible? Why have you battled the temptation?

In a Google-run world, there’s no need to ban outsized soda drinks either, as the smart glasses can make you believe that the soda cup in your hand is actually larger than it is. It isn’t science fiction: Japanese researchers have recently unveiled a head-mounted optical system that does exactly that with food portions.

Such technologies endorse a rather impoverished view of their human masters. Humans, no longer seen as citizens capable of deliberation, are treated as cogs in a system preoccupied with self-optimisation, as if the very composition of that system was uncontroversial.

But will Google, with its rhetoric of personal empowerment, do a better job at fighting obesity or climate change than government-led reforms? Corporate-led “algorithmic nudging” promotes the illusion that problems can be solved through individual action alone. It is an Oprah Winfrey-style model of social change – a Silicon Valley fantasy.

As befits a corporation, Google treats us as utility-maximising consumers and not as citizens, who might care about other members of the community. But shouldn’t we, as citizens, also reflect on those who can’t afford to eat healthy food or live within walkable distance to a farmers’ market? Or should we just give them an Android phone?

We must set clear limits to corporate do-goodism and protect our political process from well-meaning Google’s engineers. The latter can, perhaps, build a card to remind our politicians why we elect them.

The writer is author of the forthcoming ‘To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism’

Some uplifting prose

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:04:00 -0700

Max Horkheimer, always an optimist:

“As their telescopes and microscopes, their tapes and radios become more sensitive, individuals become blinder, more hard of hearing, less responsive, and society more opaque, hopeless, its misdeeds (those just committed and those that threaten) larger, more superhuman than ever before.”

From Dawn and Decline

The Internet explained

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 07:15:06 -0700

Pithy and sharp:

Yes, the internet is democratizing in that sense that the cheap equipment is democratizing. But just because a football is cheap and anyone can kick one around, it doesn’t mean that everybody is Ronaldo.

Franny Armstrong, British documentary filmmaker

SOURCE

Prison reform according to Eric Schmidt

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 11:26:00 -0700

From Harvard Business Review’s “List of Audacious Ideas for Solving the World’s Problems”:

“Technology could also help get nonviolent offenders out of jail faster, so they could begin their reintegration into society. Tamper-proof ankle bracelets that offer GPS tracking and constant monitoring are coming onto the market at prices of $5 to $10. We could ensure that sentences are carried out but slash the cost of keeping those people locked up.”

Yes, we can do that - perhaps, Google could even design a cool bracelet with WiFi - but we can also try locking up fewer people. But, hey, who wants such unfashionable non-technological fixes when it’s so easy to hand out a bracelet to everyone?

And since when is Harvard Business Review dedicated to solving the world’s problems rather than just creating them?

Source: here and here for the PDF

My new links feed

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 05:19:00 -0700

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I frequently post links to academic articles, new books, working papers. While I still plan to keep doing that from my main account, from now on most of such links will appear on my new “links” account - @morozov_links.

While I’ll try to be selective with my main account, @morozov_links will have fresh links every day. Apologies in advance if they lead you to some kind of paywall - that’s modern academic publishing for you.

This new Twitter feed is the result of my collaboration with the Information Program at the Open Society Foundations (where, until earlier this year, I’ve been on the board). As a result of this collaboration, every week I’ll be preparing a brief digest of interesting new papers and books about the Internet, media and technology. This new Twitter feed would feature my top choices plus all the new stuff that doesn’t fit into the digest.

So once again: subscribe.

The Nicholas Carr of 1913: "The telephone changes the structure of the brain"

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:11:57 -0700

Spotted on p.65 of “Crowds; a moving-picture of democracy“(1913) by Gerald Stanley Lee:

“We are not only inventing new machines, but our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men. The telephone changes the structure of the brain. Men live in wider distances, and think in larger figures, and become eligible to nobler and wider motives.”

The author seems to have a somewhat more upbeat view of affairs than Nick Carr but still….

My oped in today's Financial Times

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 01:13:00 -0700

This piece runs in today’s FT:

Beware the unholy alliance of state and internet

By Evgeny Morozov

Surveillance means safety. This is the argument wherever and whenever governments seek new powers to monitor their citizens. Proposed legislation in the UK to enable police and intelligence services to access emails, Skype calls and Facebook messages is another such example. It is also another case of the unnecessary and dangerous expansion of state power, in collaboration with companies, into our online – and offline – lives.

The UK government has said that without a warrant it could only get “who, when and where” forms of data – times, dates, numbers and addresses of communications – not the content of emails, chat messages or Skype calls. The latter would still require a warrant, according to the government. Some critics are sceptical, and rightly so.

However, the controversy over warrants is not the only problem. The authorities may finally get real-time access to communication channels that are currently off-limits. The most straightforward way to do this would be to force technology companies to build “back doors” into their services, making it possible to “wiretap” an online exchange as if it was a conversation via telephone.

Nick Clegg, UK deputy prime minister, hints at this in his justification for the law: “All we are doing is updating the rules which currently apply to mobile telephone calls to allow the police and security services to go after terrorists and serious criminals and updating that to apply to technology like Skype.” This suggests Skype would need to build a “back door” to allow intelligence services to track who is talking to whom and, provided they have a warrant, to eavesdrop on the content of those conversations.

The problem here is that a third party might also be abusing such “back doors” without anyone noticing. In Greece, for almost six months between 2004 and 2005, someone was secretly wiretapping more than 100 senior officials by exploiting vulnerabilities in Vodafone’s network. The procession of phone-hacking cases involving News International and the accompanying failure of the police suggest Britain should be especially concerned about such developments.

The fear, according to intelligence agencies in the US and UK, is that the internet has put them on the verge of “going dark”, the term used by the FBI and others to describe losing access to information on suspects who are hiding online.

However, this “going dark” argument is untenable, for it doesn’t accurately describe the internet. When a growing number of users are lured into disclosing their location via smartphones, when all of their friends are listed on Facebook, when browsing history can tell companies about a teenager’s pregnancy before her parents, it’s hard to believe the state is short-changed by the net.

Take the case of grassroots privacy campaigner Max Schrems. In June 2011 the 24-year-old filed a complaint with the Irish data regulator and used a provision in Irish law to ask Facebook to send him everything it knew about him. He received a file 1,200 pages long. “Going dark” is a myth; we live in a golden age of surveillance. Intelligence services have access to more data than ever before – it just happens to be gathered by the private sector.

Instead of granting intelligence services more power, we need to worry about the coming convergence of the data-gathering demands of the state and the business imperatives of internet companies. Take a recent example: a few weeks ago, Google was granted a patent that would potentially allow it to use our phones to study the environment around us – to record noise levels, lighting conditions, temperature – and customise adverts accordingly. It’s easy to imagine that the folks at intelligence agencies would be quite delighted if Google developed this idea – at the very least, it would save them money on wiretaps.

Google has an interest in keeping some of its stored data unencrypted. As Vint Cerf, the company’s “chief internet evangelist”, said in 2011: “We couldn’t run our system if everything in it were encrypted because then we wouldn’t know which ads to show you.”

This is unfortunate. If encrypted, stored data would be out of reach for most governments. Imagine what this means in the context of Google’s highly anticipated self-driving cars. Will the route of the car be automatically recorded and stored on Google’s servers? If so, the police and intelligence agencies don’t need to install GPS trackers on suspects’ cars; Google would have us record all of this information voluntarily. The state could just ask for it.

The idea that we need to make it easier for governments to do this, in the UK and elsewhere, is ludicrous. We need to be doing the exact opposite. It is only by anticipating the consequences of this coming unholy alliance between internet companies and intelligence agencies that our freedoms can be defended.

The writer is author of ‘The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World’

My piece on the history of facial recognition technologies

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 06:15:00 -0700

The essay below runs in the April 5 issue of the London Review of Books. I post it here for educational purposes only!

In Your Face

Evgeny Morozov

Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance by Kelly Gates

NYU Press, 261 pp, £15.99, March 2011, ISBN 978 0 8147 3210 6

Until last summer, hi-tech riots – broadcast on YouTube and organised by BlackBerry – were mostly the preserve of enterprising dissidents in Iran and China. But in June hordes of ice hockey fans in Vancouver, outraged by the local team’s loss to a Boston rival, filmed themselves smashing cars and burning shops. Then it happened here. The crackdowns that follow such riots are equally hi-tech. In both Britain and Canada ordinary members of the public set up Facebook groups to share pictures and videos from the riots, using Twitter to name any identified perpetrators and alert the police. This was cyber-vigilantism at its most creative.

The day after the Vancouver riots, the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia – a state-owned insurance company which also handles drivers’ licences and vehicle registration – offered to help the Vancouver police by running its facial-recognition software on photos from the riots, comparing them with its database, a collection of photos of more than three million individuals, normally used in investigations of fraud and identity theft. Not much came of it: there were no reports of any arrests made thanks to the database. Attempts to automate the process of facial recognition after the British riots failed too: most rioters, after all, didn’t already have their mugshots in police records. Since the UK doesn’t (yet?) have a Canada-style photo database and Canada doesn’t (yet?) have a UK-style CCTV surveillance infrastructure, such efforts in both countries were probably doomed. China and Iran – where excessive surveillance goes hand in hand with excessive documentation requirements and weak or non-existent privacy laws – are a different story. And the technology is improving.

In September 2010, satellite photos of Abbottabad showed a man who looked a lot like Osama bin Laden exercising in a yard; the satellite’s facial recognition system confirmed it was him. It’s said that after shooting him, the Navy Seals ran his picture through another facial recognition system, which reported that there was a 95 per cent chance they had got the right man. Given that half of bin Laden’s face was presumably missing, they must be rather proud of their technology. The Navy Seals may have been using gear similar to the Robocop-style glasses the Brazilian police have developed in preparation for the 2014 World Cup. Fitted with a small camera that sees as far as 12 miles, the glasses can capture 400 images a second and compare them with a central computer database of 13 million faces – or so the police claim. The surest sign that facial recognition technology has made it comes from China, where at last year’s Sex Culture Exhibition in Xi’an a firm called the Love Sex Company presented a £3000 sex doll that speaks in a variety of languages and, thanks to onboard software, can recognise its ‘owner’.

It isn’t easy to teach a computer to recognise a face. Definitions don’t help: if you describe a face as ‘a blob-like region with two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth’, you still need to define an eye, a nose, an ear and a mouth. Humans can easily locate a face in a picture even if parts of it aren’t clearly visible; for computers this is very hard. What computers can recognise is the similarity between specific regions in two or more pictures. Given enough computational resources, they can be trained to calculate what a particular segment might look like under certain abnormal conditions – e.g. when the lighting is low or when the person in the photo has aged. As the number of potential differences between any two pictures of the same face is infinite, it’s impossible to write an algorithm that can take account of all such variations. However, even imperfect FRT can be useful.

Suppose you have just photographed a man who claims to be John Smith. How can a computer establish whether he is the same John Smith who exists in your database? First, it needs to find the man’s face in the picture – by looking for blob-like regions with consistent brightness and colour. Then it has to find facial landmarks – nose, mouth, eyes etc (there are more than a hundred significant features). Then the face must be ‘normalised’ by making it look like other images in the database with regard to size, pose, colour intensity and illumination. Finally, the computer has to produce a numerical representation of the face and compare it with the equivalent representation of the picture associated with the John Smith inthe database. There are two ways to generate such representations. One is geometric, relying on the shape and position of facial landmarks; the other is photometric, using statistics to distil an image into values.

This kind of verification exercise is one of the simplest tasks in automated facial recognition. But it would be of little use to police investigators after a riot or demonstration. All they have are the photos and footage they shot of protesters, to match against their database of pictures taken at previous protests. They don’t even know if a given rioter is in their database, so if the computer doesn’t find any matches, it’s hard to say whether it has made an error or the matching face is indeed missing. The investigators’ best hope is to generate a similarity score between the new photo and photos in the database, by comparing its mathematical representation with those of previous images. At this point, it may be safest to have a human operator decide whether the face in the new photo actually matches any of the possible candidates in the database. To achieve full automation – to outsource this judgment to the computer completely – would require deciding on an acceptable threshold of error, of which there are two kinds: false positives and false negatives. A high false positive rate means too many innocent suspects having to explain themselves; a high false negative rate means too many actual rioters would be let off the hook. False positives are common in facial recognition; one recent case in the US involved a driver who had to spend ten days wrangling with the authorities after a system used by the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles mistook him for another driver and revoked his licence.

Given its spotty track record, it’s hard to see why facial recognition technology has so quickly become one of the most widely used forms of biometrics (second only to fingerprints). Kelly Gates’s Our Biometric Future, a thorough exploration of FRT’s relatively short history, provides some clues. Compared to other biometric technologies, FRT has one enormous advantage – it doesn’t require consent, co-operation or even the subject’s knowledge – and many smaller ones. Unlike fingerprinting, it has no criminal connotations. Hand geometry, sometimes suggested as an alternative to fingerprinting, is unreliable, as hand measurements are not unique to individuals. Voice recognition has a significant drawback too – our voices change quite often – while retinal scanning triggers unfounded fears that one’s eyesight may be damaged.

‘The banality of the portrait’, as Gates puts it, has also helped. FRT relies on a ubiquitous medium – photography – that has been part of bureaucratic identification schemes for more than a century (the idea of using images of faces as tokens of identity dates back to the mid-1850s; the first photographic passports were issued around the time of the First World War). The work of Alphonse Bertillon, a police official working inParis from the 1880s onwards, helped lay the ground for modern FRT. Unlike the eugenicist Francis Galton or the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who believed it was possible to read a person’s criminal type off his face, Bertillon was mundanely preoccupied with identifying criminals by recording their bodily measurements and taking mugshots under controlled lighting conditions. To that end, he developed a sophisticated system of measurements – Bertillonage. Bertillon’s standardised mugshot was used by police worldwide, but the absence of efficient indexing and the decreasing costs of photography created unanticipated problems. Eventually, there were too many photos to search, organise and analyse. The advent of applied computing in the 1950s promised to change all that. Computers – in theory – could solve the problems that plagued Bertillonage by automating the process.

Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, conducted one of the first experiments with computer-based facial recognition in 1964 (he had already done some significant work on text recognition). He had a human operator mark important facial landmarks on a set of two thousand pictures containing at least two separate images of each test subject. This produced a list of twenty distances for each face – width of mouth, pupil-to-pupil distance between the eyes etc – which were entered into a database next to the subject’s name. The computer was then given a list of distances for a new image of one of the subjects and prompted to find a match. Bledsoe grasped the challenge involved in automating facial recognition: the greater the variation between the compared images, the worse the system’s performance. FRT is particularly sensitive to differences in illumination; shadows and intrusive backgrounds are hard to process. Other variations abound too: people age, grow beards, use make-up or simply turn their heads away from the camera.

Despite a few minor breakthroughs in the early 1970s computer scientists came to accept that there would be no great improvement in FRT until cheaper computing power, better algorithms and higher-quality images were available. As the whole project of artificial intelligence was increasingly put in question – by computer scientists among others – a less ambitious goal was settled on. It may have been preposterous to think that computers could be taught to ‘see’ like humans, but there were still plenty of ways to profit from what Gates calls ‘human-computer divisions of perceptual labour’. In the 1980s the loose collective of companies and academics working in the field of ‘automated personal identification’ – or biometrics, as it became known – acquired the markings of a fully fledged industry, with its own conventions, associations and newsletters. The US government was its one and only godparent, defining technology standards, handing out lucrative tenders and subsidising research. The first meeting of the Biometric Consortium – a group set up with the aim of fostering closer ties between the government and industry – was organised in1992 by the research division of the National Security Agency.

Various defence and intelligence agencies funded most of the early work in the field, including Bledsoe’s experiments. The situation hasn’t changed: the FBI is funding a system that can distinguish between the faces of identical twins, while In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, has also been a significant supporter of FRT. But the most important government contribution to the commercialisation of the technology was administering tests to evaluate the viability of using it for real-world purposes. The tests were first conducted in 1993 and are still held every few years. The results were soon thought to be good enough for FRT vendors to branch out of the defence industry. The public sector was identified as an important target, since, according to the CEO of one FRT vendor, ‘that’s where the money is and the faces are.’ Agencies operating large-scale identification systems – the State and Justice Departments, individual states’ Departments of Motor Vehicles, police departments and prisons – were the unlucky guinea pigs. The systems they bought rarely lived up to the modest promises of the official tests, let alone to the vendors’ overblown claims. (‘In the future,’ one company promised, ‘facial recognition systems could allow drivers to renew their licences at an unattended kiosk in local supermarkets.’)

The possibility of integrating FRT with close-circuit television cameras – ‘smart CCTV’ – brought on even more hyperbole. One company announced a product that ‘revolutionises the functionality of conventional CCTV’, providing ‘active, real-time identification for today’s passive CCTV systems’. But reality didn’t match the marketing brochures. In 1998 smart CCTV technology was installed in the London borough of Newham. It was superior to humans in many respects: its eyes never got tired and, as the manufacturer pointed out, ‘it never goes to the loo, either.’ Whether the system actually worked seemed to be of secondary importance to the Newham police; according to Newham’s security chief, ‘the need was to reduce the public fear of becoming a victim of crime and increase the criminals’ perception of the chance they would be detected.’ Six years later, Newham’s smart CCTV still hadn’t made any positive identifications, and it failed to spot a Guardian journalist whose picture was in the database and who walked around in front of the cameras in two zones covered by the system. The crime rate in the area had dropped but not because criminals genuinely had anything to fear. A smart CCTV experiment in Tampa, Florida in 2001 brought similar results: no arrests were made and the system was scrapped after only two years of operation. This time the crime rate didn’t drop.

Why were people so ready to believe what the FRT vendors claimed? Perhaps because these companies were brimming with PhD-carrying scientists who, sensing that the US government was getting interested in their field, didn’t hesitate to switch to more lucrative careers. The archetypal figure of scientist turned entrepreneur here is Joseph Atick. In 1994, Atick – along with two other researchers from the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory at Rockefeller University – formed Visionics Corporation; Atick was the CEO. He made the most of his impressive credentials: a child prodigy, he was known to have written a 600-page physics textbook at the age of 16 and earned a PhD from Stanford at 21. But even stars like Atick couldn’t put a positive spin on failures like Tampa. And privacy advocates were finally mobilising against any new deployments of smart CCTV. At that rate, FRT might have died of natural causes just a few years later.

Then came 9/11, presenting FRT vendors with a once-in-a-lifetime marketing opportunity. On 24 September 2001 – two weeks after the attacks – Visionics released a brochure called ‘Protecting Civilisation from the Faces of Terror’, which presented automated facial recognition as a fully functioning technology that should be integrated into airport security systems. Visionics’s technology, the brochure claimed, would allow security officials to ‘rapidly, and in an automated manner, use video feeds from an unlimited number of cameras and search all faces against databases created from various intelligence sources and formats’. On 1 October Atick appeared on CNN: ‘Terror,’ he proclaimed, ‘is not faceless.’ Had systems like his been installed in airports, he said, ‘I can’t help but imagine that we could have identified and intercepted at least some of these [terrorists].’ ‘The faces of terror’ was a popular trope in post-9/11 America. When he announced the FBI’s ‘most wanted terrorists’ list on 10 October, Bush used one of Atick’s talking points: ‘Terrorism has a face, and today we expose it for the world to see.’ A Harris poll taken shortly afterwards found that 86 per cent of respondents favoured ‘the use of facial recognition technology to scan for suspected terrorists at various locations and public events’; six months later, that number still stood at 81 per cent.

Another technology was also on the rise: automated analysis of facial expressions. The system is based on the premise that all emotions trigger facial movements that give the game away. A sophisticated classification system – called Facial Action Coding System – developed in the 1970s by the psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen helps to translate facial movements into corresponding emotions. It is currently in use inAmerican airports under a programme called Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT): specially trained officers look out for passengers exhibiting abnormal facial expressions and bodily signs. Ekman’s system was designed to be used by human operators, but humans are expensive: training one observer takes more than a hundred hours and to mark up one minute of video according to the system takes about an hour of manual coding. Ekman now wants to replace human operators with machines, and his work has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the CIA. In 2006 he predicted in the Washington Post that ‘within the next year or two, maybe sooner, it will be possible to program surveillance cameras hooked to computers that spit out FACS data to identify anyone whose facial expressions are different from the previous two dozen people’. It hasn’t happened yet, but not for want of money being poured into it.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been a further blessing for the biometric industry. The need to identify local populations which the occupying armies had little understanding of led to the deployment of portable systems that work with multiple biometrics – such as fingerprint, face and iris – and so are more resistant to fraud. As is typical of innovations produced by the war on terror, the idea of portable biometrics has attracted much interest from law enforcement agencies back in America: police in Massachusetts are already using a biometric system to check people’s identities by taking photos on a slightly modified iPhone. Thanks to 9/11 and the two wars, the market for biometrics has been growing handsomely. Its total size in 2010 was around $4.2 billion, compared with $395 million in 2000. Not all of this money – much of it government money – has been wasted: today’s FRT is far more reliable than that of ten years ago. The 2006 industry test found that the new algorithms were ten times more accurate than those of 2002 and a hundred times more accurate than those of 1995. Some algorithms outperformed humans – especially in telling identical twins apart.

Conventional facial recognition can now also be combined with newer methods such as skin-texture analysis (a patch of skin is captured, then broken into smaller blocks and converted into mathematical space) and 3D facial recognition (which captures information about the shape of the skull and so is immune to changes in lighting). These hybrid systems do much better than either technology when used by itself. Face hallucination, another novel technique, allows a computer to ‘guess’ what a low-resolution picture of the face (or its missing parts) may look like in higher resolution. Other new systems allow for better handling of wrinkles. Casinos – which seek to ban cheats from their premises – have been trying to make FRT work in low light with the help of infrared technology. Scientists at UCLA – with funding from the Chinese government – have built an ‘image to text’ system that automatically produces text summaries of what is taking place in captured video. It means that CCTV footage can easily be searched, in China’s case boosting its sprawling complex of video surveillance.

For all the innovations, there have been few successful real-world deployments of facial recognition. Failure is still far more common. Last year Manchester Airport shut down its facial-recognition scanners after the robot guard let through a couple who had swapped passports. A 2009 research paper found that heavy plastic surgery reduced the success rate of facial recognition systems to just 2 per cent. So why is FRT so ubiquitous when it performs so poorly? The reason is that FRT doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. For many purposes, having a computer that can guess a person’s gender or age by looking at their face is good enough. This means advertising hoardings that change their ads depending on who – a teenage girl or a middle-aged man – stands in front of them; vending machines that tell you what fizzy drink to buy based on what people who look like you are buying; web services that match the faces of abandoned dogs to those of humans looking for canine companions; car prototypes that fasten your seatbelt and start beeping at you when they suspect you might be drunk or are about to doze off. (Much of this sci-fi stuff originates in Japan, where a company called Omron is selling ‘smile-scan’ technology that allows service industry firms to evaluate the quality of their employees’ smiles.) The Cowcam application developed at the University of Queensland uses FRT-like technology to separate farm animals on their way to water: cattle are good to go while goats and pigs are barred. Leafsnap, a mobile app launched by the Smithsonian Institution, uses FRT to recognise photos of leaves and load detailed information about the leaf’s parent tree onto your iPhone. What self-respecting hipster wouldn’t want a mobile app that tells them the gender ratio – computed in real time – at their favourite bar, based on the pictures gathered by cameras installed at the bar’s entrance and exit? (That would be the popular SceneTap app.) What PowerPoint aficionado wouldn’t want to try teleconferencing software from Alcatel-Lucent that sends a warning when people on the other end of a conference call start looking bored?

Many companies seek to capitalise on the aura of ‘cool’ around such technologies and leverage the intelligence of human users to improve their system’s ability to recognise objects and faces. Until recently Google ran an online game called Image Labeller, in which people competed to find words to describe a picture and got points if their descriptions matched. Everyone wins: humans are mildly diverted while Google generates descriptions for the images it crawls. But Gates worries that projects like this allow institutional users of FRT – security agencies, governments and corporations – to encourage users ‘to contribute their free labour and technical skills to the process of developing more effective forms of image retrieval’. Social networks and photo-sharing sites can be ‘test beds for defining new social uses of facial recognition technology and optimising its functionality’. Gates’s impressive book would have been even stronger had she fully addressed the likely future impact of companies like Facebook, Google and Apple on the industry. The iPhone is a powerful biometric technology: several mobile apps are already capable of tagging photos of one’s friends on the go. SocialCamera, one such app, can even be trained: the more pictures of a friend you tag, the fewer mistakes it makes in the future.

Facebook has an even bigger advantage in FRT: the enormous number of photos it handles (four billion pictures are uploaded to the site every month). Since it knows who your friends are, Facebook can predict the names of people who are likely to appear in your photos; since it knows where you study, live, work and travel, it can predict the most likely backgrounds of your photos. These bits of data – along with your age, gender, sexual orientation and a heap of other facts – may help it build the ultimate facial recognition system or, at least, the ultimate face search engine. Google, too, could revolutionise the field if it chose to. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, claimed to find the technology ‘creepy’, but his company has nevertheless acquired several start-ups specialising in various forms of visual recognition. (‘Technically, we can pretty much do all of these things,’ Google’s top image recognition engineer told CNN last year.) Google has also secured several valuable patents, including one to boost the accuracy of facial recognition by tapping into the data from social networks. Last December the company made a major move into the field by introducing some basic FRT functionality to its Google Plus social networking site. If Facebook succeeds in convincing the public that FRT is OK, Google is likely to act too. What was once the stuff of civil libertarians’ nightmares – the integration of one spooky technology (facial recognition) with another (data-mining) – may soon become a reality. It won’t be long before Facebook, Google and others unleash such services on consumers, wrapping them in ‘user empowerment’ rhetoric.

How to sound like an Internet pundit: 1974 edition

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:08:23 -0700

From Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s 1974 collection of essays “The Consciousness Industry; On Literature, Politics and the Media”

The open secret of the new electronic media, the decisive political factor, which has been waiting, suppressed or crippled, for its moment to come is their mobilizing power. When I say mobilize, I mean mobilize, make men more mobile than they are. As free as dances, as aware as football players, as surprising as guerillas…For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves.