Exorbitant Data > Exorbitant Privilege

[dcarrigg]

Re: Exorbitant Data > Exorbitant Privilege

If supply and demand are logged in real time doesn't that solve the biggest fault in communism? ie The lack of feedback from price signals. I'm not advocating it. Just seems a potential outcome.

To be honest, I think Walmart basically solved the economic calculation problem 30 years ago, and Amazon has only refined the solution since. Neither really uses price signals for feedback. They have realtime JIT inventory management. Price signals are a blunt instrument in comparison. Put another way, nobody bids for stuff there, the prices are set algorithmically, and the volume of goods moving at any time is centrally measured, and they "Rollback" prices or re-arrange shelf space accordingly when the flow of goods slows or speeds up. Amazon is even more crafty. They blatantly violate the Robinson Patman Act and adjust prices based on your browsing behavior and other data. They set prices at a blistering rate, not based on demand or market exchange, but based on a host of behavioral data and profiling. With tools like these, we're already basically running a centrally planned economy. In fact, I don't think most capitalists ever really had much of an issue with that idea. It's the equality part that's dangerous, not the centralization, which is the whole point of having a giant firm in the first place. So I think your underlying point there is totally right. I just also think a lack of communism won't stop the same tools from being used in that same way under other systems of political economy.

[jk]

Re: Exorbitant Data > Exorbitant Privilege

dc, you sound bleak. [not just here, mostly in another thread.] any hopeful scenarios? how about those socially cooperative millenials?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Exorbitant Data > Exorbitant Privilege

dc, you sound bleak. [not just here, mostly in another thread.] any hopeful scenarios? how about those socially cooperative millenials?

I don't mean it to sound so bleak. Maybe take it with an historical analogy:

I spent a while a few years back reading a whole bunch of transcriptions from the early international association of chiefs of police. It's the body that the FBI and Interpol and others grew out of. But it started in the 1890s. MIT had them buried somewhere. I was the first to dig them out in decades. They had a slew of problems to figure out that were created by technology. And they too were operating in a time of high and rising inequality heading for a peak in global trade. But lots of new tech was coming online. Sears. Nationwide credit with nationwide catalogue stores. Automobiles. Telephones. Electricity. Potato digger guns. All sorts of unique problems that may have a policing implications. They're never worried about monopolies or anything, as you'd expect. In fact, they sold add space in the programs. That sort of stuff still becomes political with TR. But they are mostly hyper-focused on technology. And they realize that technology can be the point of social control. So for years they work on it. First they start wiretapping and fingerprinting. Then they argue for automobile restrictions and licensure and all this stuff. Then they really ramp it up after McKinley gets assassinated with the foreigner/anarchist/red scare angle some time later. You see it happen internationally at the same time. 1901 drivers licenses and registrations are required in New York. 1903 in the UK, Germany. The rest follow suit. They get together with the social science research council and build the Uniform Crime Reports and establish a system of both licensing and registration and push for the establishment of the first federal police forces, the FBI in 1908.

What comes out of that? The automobile became the chief form of social control. Wiretapping builds bigger cases. A system of state IDs popped up directly in response to the technology. You and I have never known a world without national police forces, millions of people in jail for non-violent offenses, drivers' licenses that are function like an old 'show me your papers' internal passport. "Probable cause" as thin as "I detect the odor of alcohol" short circuiting warrant requirements. Hell, Miranda rights weren't even in place until the 1960s. Even now, most arrests are affected at traffic stops, and most policing is done by car. I would not describe my life as a dystopian nightmare. But I have never known the freedom of a time before drivers' licenses and checkpoints and all the rest. There are many more ways to offend now than there were before.

So if you look at the recent IACP meeting lineups for the past few years, the talks all have a familiar feel to those 1890s ones. How to handle driverless cars? Using the cloud to disrupt gangs (presented by Microsoft). Controlling the media narrative in the 21st century. Recovering video evidence from multiple sources using machine learning and video analytics (presented by IBM). The darknet and cybercrime. Gathering evidence using big data. Starting a drone program and air drone countermeasures. Band 14 firstnet devices (hardened coverage for first responders). Using DNA as part of an overall crime control strategy. Collaborative computer forensics. Mobile data and devices for real-time situational awareness. Preparing today for the controversial technologies of the 2020s. You get the gist. It has become an obsession. And I imagine that just like back then, we're going to see a lot more laws pop up around it eventually, and a lot more crimes and a lot more ways to get caught for existing crimes as well as a much deeper non-government corporate intrusion into private life is going to be the result. How could it be any other way?

But people are very adaptable. I imagine it will become the new normal soon enough. It's already happening in many ways. The halcyon frontier days of new technology are always fleeting. In 5 years or so rookies on the force will be younger than Facebook. The idea that everything in life is recorded and disseminated won't seem as disagreeable to them as it will to the old codgers. The principal form of social control already seems to be slipping from the car to mobile computing of one kind or another. Only a matter of time until your license and registration are just an app and you have to put your finger on the cops scanner when he pulls you over. I figure only a short time after that until they can scan your face and skip that step. California and Texas already require finger and thumb prints. India's already doing it through their Aadhaar program. In fact, to laekdemonian's original post, Aadhaar is a national ID, bank account number, and biometric database all-in-one. Withdraw money or get paid with a fingerprint or iris scan or face scan even if you don't own a phone to have the app yourself. Since it's the free government version, it's going to be hard for WeChat to get around that in India, I think, although the idea of controlling the platform remains.

It's hard for me to see things going any other way. Sort of requires stuffing the genie back into the bottle.

[sadsack]

Re: Exorbitant Data > Exorbitant Privilege

There's an article in The Guardian discussing Shoshana Zuboff’s recent book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. I'd be interested in dcarrig's take on this - it seems Zuboff is of like mind regarding the dangers the FAANGs represent:

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...oogle-facebook

JN: Our societies seem transfixed by all this: we are like rabbits paralysed in the headlights of an oncoming car.
SZ: Despite surveillance capitalism’s domination of the digital milieu and its illegitimate power to take private experience and to shape human behaviour, most people find it difficult to withdraw, and many ponder if it is even possible. This does not mean, however, that we are foolish, lazy, or hapless. On the contrary, in my book I explore numerous reasons that explain how surveillance capitalists got away with creating the strategies that keep us paralysed. These include the historical, political and economic conditions that allowed them to succeed. And we’ve already discussed some of the other key reasons, including the nature of the unprecedented, conquest by declaration. Other significant reasons are the need for inclusion, identification with tech leaders and their projects, social persuasion dynamics, and a sense of inevitability, helplessness and resignation.

We are trapped in an involuntary merger of personal necessity and economic extraction, as the same channels that we rely upon for daily logistics, social interaction, work, education, healthcare, access to products and services, and much more, now double as supply chain operations for surveillance capitalism’s surplus flows. The result is that the choice mechanisms we have traditionally associated with the private realm are eroded or vitiated. There can be no exit from processes that are intentionally designed to bypass individual awareness and produce ignorance, especially when these are the very same processes upon which we must depend for effective daily life. So our participation is best explained in terms of necessity, dependency, the foreclosure of alternatives, and enforced ignorance.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Exorbitant Data > Exorbitant Privilege

Thanks sadsack, that book just popped up on my radar. My favorite quip: "We used to search Google, now Google searches us."

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Exorbitant Data > Exorbitant Privilege

There's an article in The Guardian discussing Shoshana Zuboff’s recent book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. I'd be interested in dcarrig's take on this - it seems Zuboff is of like mind regarding the dangers the FAANGs represent:

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...oogle-facebook

I just came across that a few days ago.

It’s pretty bleak.

In the west west you can exist and function effectively without social media and there are still a variety of alternatives across much of the digital spectrum(although alternatives with distribution curves akin to Zipf’s Law).

In China, It’s increasingly difficult to function without WeChat due to its near ubiquitous market penetration and utility.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Exorbitant Data > Exorbitant Privilege

I'm generally of like mind, but I'm not sure it's either limited to surveillance or limited to capitalism. In my mind the root of capitalism is in technological advances in surveying and cartography and the establishment of the deed office. Sure, the obvious point is that there'd no longer be a commons. But the more general idea was that no longer would land be a thing that required the owner's physical presence (or the presence of someone who declared fealty to the owner) to possess. Now every town or county would have a deed office. And it's there that title to land would lie. Everything was divvied up into plots and mapped out. They could be bought, sold, traded, borrowed against, etc. You could sell land you've never seen in New York to someone in London. There was no putting that genie back in the bottle either. Even communist countries never really brought back common land or undid the system of deeds and plots. You want to buy a house in Cuba, there's a few more hoops, but generally you can. And any culture that insisted land was not a thing to be owned was pushed aside. Agricultural cooperatives run by collective farming still have mapped out plots and deeds and the rest. The world at this point was carved up into little tradable chunks. Land became a commodity. Technology enabled it.

So I sort of see that process, the commodification of the world, as a long and ongoing one. Sure, human choice plays into it. Sure, there are the rare occasions there's pushback against the trend, as with chattel slavery. But in general, I think the rule is, "that which is measured becomes commodified." As soon as you can have clocks, punchcards and hourly wages aren't far off. Yeomanry and guild apprenticeships wherein apprentices become masters become owners training a new generation of apprentices largely give way to lifelong wage labor with no chance at an ownership stake for most people. Hell, even where there are ESOPs and things that provide a modicum of financial ownership, the power of ownership--the power to lead and make big decisions--is kept out of reach outside of anything other than the occasional kid born into a family-run business.

And that's where I really see the friction. Families. Friendships. These sorts of non-commodity, non-market relationships. The logic of the market is the logic of commodification. And nothing fouls that up like non-commodity interactions. The whole technological-institutional apparatus breaks down. GDP itself cannot handle it. If you work for a wage, then hire a home health care service, and rent out a property to pay for it, now there's taxes on the service and on the rental income and the whole bit. It can all be recorded, therefore commodified, and added into the equation. If you let a friend stay rent free in a property instead, and they provide some home care needs as a friend too, now the same exact amount of work is being done, but all that economic activity no longer exists. There is no tax revenue. There is no record. There is no GDP. There are no bosses. There is only friendship. Kind of like RFK's speech. And even the Soviets had statisticians counting economic output, although they did make a distinction between GNP and what they called "Net Material Product." Either way, transport some firewood for your buddy and it doesn't count. Transport some for your boss and it does.

So it seems to me the whole system is bent to discourage non-commodity transactions, and has been for centuries. Generally, new technologies are employed for those ends. The legal systems worldwide are set up such that everything new begins unregulated, so technological advances always bend towards commodifying first and asking questions later. And I see the primary purpose of the FAANGs and others as accelerating that tendency. Observe and measure previously unmeasured things, and that which you measure becomes a commodity. If the relentless trend is technology enabling ever more precise measurements of every more things over ever shorter timespans, then ever more things are going to become commodified.

You remember Matthew Lesko, the guy with the question mark suit? I read an interview with him once where he said, "My philosophy is to take something that's free and charge as much as I can for it." That's kind of the crux of what's going on. Think of all the activities in your day that aren't market transactions. In the long run, barring a massive change in how we do things, all those activities will be tracked and commodified. You couldn't commodify the act of just reading a book. The book itself was the commodity. Now, thanks to Kindles et all, you can. You can measure how people read it, what parts they skip over, what they highlight, you can track what they read, when, where, and how. You can do so much more than just show them ads, which newspapers had long ago figured out. See what happens? Now the act of reading itself becomes a commodity, not simply the book being read. As these devices proliferate into your life, they will seek to measure, and thereby commodify, ever more acts. Why the hell else would a fridge or a stove or a dryer need wifi? You see what I'm saying? When the Mayflower lands, the Wampanoag think the land they occupy at Plymouth is worth precisely $0. How could one own or trade land? The concept of rent was nonexistent. Well, I see most people who aren't thinking of tech in these terms as being stuck in a mindset like that. How does one own or trade the experience of reading a book? Well, they figured it out. And if you don't realize the game being played, you're likely to get swindled by the people playing it.

I don't know if I'm as keen to use terms like 'surplus,' as SZ does, only because I think they're more modern economic terms that distract from the more concrete reality into the world of hypothetical theory and graphs. I suppose if I was really thirsty and I desperately wanted water and would pay $20 for it at the time, but it was being sold for $1, I technically got $19 in consumer surplus. But if I had been gouged for $20, I'd be pissed off about it, and I would neither feel like I got a surplus, nor would an actual surplus of water ever had existed. In the same vein, her term "behavioral surplus" I think leaves a lot to be desired. Economists will probably eat it up. But I'd prefer to call what she calls "behavioral futures markets" simply something like "social control" and what she calls "behavioral surplus" simply something like "spying on you," rather than abstract into econ jargon.

Because it's always a 2-step. Step one is to measure and commodify and generate capital that way. Step two is to build fences and gates and charge rents and generate capital that way. But you can't charge rents to people who live on the commons, since they know they have every right to be there without paying rents. You need some pretty heavy social control to convince them that the deeds are in fact fair, right? That even though they never owned one lousy handful of dirt, they owed rents to the people who do merely for existing on it. And if they were used to existing on it rent-free, they're going to be pissed off. Well, the same thing's going to happen, I figure. All those "free" services aren't only going to be used to surveil and generate capital that way. Eventually, by hook or by crook, gates are going up and they're no longer going to be free. Surveillance will no longer be what you offer in exchange for free services. It will be the new normal. And services will cost money on top of it. And those with the data from back when the services were free, like those with the deeds to the land that used to be the commons, will start charging rents.

I haven't read the book, but speaking to the term "Surveillance Capitalism" itself rather than the book's contents, I think what it's missing is that the phenomenon probably won't be exclusive to capitalism, and the surveillance is just the first step. Like a literal land surveyor before all the plots and the deeds. Once the measures are taken and the ownership rights are assigned, the hard work of most of the surveying is over. Then you need to normalize the idea that the ownership rights are legitimate. And after you've legitimated them, then you use legal means to defend your stake and begin charging rents. You don't just survey for the sake of it. And the data you gather from surveilling is not just valuable intrinsically. It's valuable when you can do something with it; when you have the rights to it and can buy sell and trade it to begin with, sure. But also when you can use it to alter social relations and insert rents and new industries around it where previously none existed. And in some super creative ways. How many title attorneys or REALTORS® or mortgage originators or flood insurance salesmen or whatever else were there before this happens to land? It's easy to imagine fridge-connected health insurance and social media faux-pas unemployment insurance and INTERNETORS® that take a cut from helping you navigate this nonsense and all other manner of things like that as we move beyond surveilling and commodifying new behaviors into the 2nd stage.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Exorbitant Data > Exorbitant Privilege

Your Post

I'm reminded of Peter Thiel and his statement that if you're not a monopoly, you're a commodity.

And to add I think the velocity of change from monopoly to commodity is accelerating.

Where I think this may differ would be in the rise of hybrid government integrated commercial superplatforms that can artificially enforce monopoly.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Exorbitant Data > Exorbitant Privilege

I'm reminded of Peter Thiel and his statement that if you're not a monopoly, you're a commodity.

And to add I think the velocity of change from monopoly to commodity is accelerating.

Where I think this may differ would be in the rise of hybrid government integrated commercial superplatforms that can artificially enforce monopoly.

Yeah, I think it's an interesting idea for sure. It's my nature to pay less attention to the old 'artificial/natural' descriptions since I don't think markets are natural anyways, but in this case the 'natural monopoly' of controlling the search bar or the operating system etc. could very well be enough to enforce a natural monopoly without government stepping in. Of course, I argue that inaction is a choice too, and refusing to break up monopolies is just as much of an active choice of government policy as breaking them up.

The question is, what if government steps in? In the US at least (where I know the laws best), I could see mandating that people have a platform that meets certain criteria. But I can't see mandating the brand. And they generally like at least the illusion of competition over at the FTC. So we'd need a Pepsi to their Coke, an AMD to their Intel, an Airbus to their Boeing, an OSx to their Windows, so to speak. It becomes harder for even the most corporate-friendly, revolving door, paid-off hacks to justify this type of thing under existing law without at least a duopoly or a product substitution argument.

So the next question I'd have is, "Does it have to be one platform?" or more specifically, "Does it have to be one platform in a given geography?" Because since the 80s the US has gotten increasingly good at ignoring anti-trust legislation, or at least at looking the other way while it's violated. But they still tend to need the cover of plausible deniability, and Congress still hasn't had the guts to simply repeal it and make monopoly legal again. So the whole apparatus, and most of the largest companies today, rely exclusively on executive (and to a lesser extent, judicial) non-enforcement of the laws on the books. If we ever had a president who believed in anti-trust again, without asking for a single thing from Congress, they could smash Google and Verizon and a hundred others into a thousand pieces with Thor's hammer.

So the second question is, being deep in the middle of Reagan/Thatcher; Clinton/Blair neoliberal era, we're taking for granted that anti-trust legislation will never be enforced in assuming this type of thing is possible. Should we? Could that change? It's much less of an issue in China where the state owns controlling shares in so many of the biggest companies. In the west it's at least possible that anti-trust could come back again. There hasn't been a Sherman Act Section II case initiated by the Justice Department since the H.W. Bush administration. But that doesn't mean whoever takes that office in 2020 or 2024 or whenever couldn't start it up again. And the EU seems more eager to take action, and I'm certain would follow the US's lead. So I'm curious about that angle too--at least in terms of what I think will happen vs. what I think should happen.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Exorbitant Data > Exorbitant Privilege

Yeah, I think it's an interesting idea for sure. It's my nature to pay less attention to the old 'artificial/natural' descriptions since I don't think markets are natural anyways, but in this case the 'natural monopoly' of controlling the search bar or the operating system etc. could very well be enough to enforce a natural monopoly without government stepping in. Of course, I argue that inaction is a choice too, and refusing to break up monopolies is just as much of an active choice of government policy as breaking them up.

The question is, what if government steps in? In the US at least (where I know the laws best), I could see mandating that people have a platform that meets certain criteria. But I can't see mandating the brand. And they generally like at least the illusion of competition over at the FTC. So we'd need a Pepsi to their Coke, an AMD to their Intel, an Airbus to their Boeing, an OSx to their Windows, so to speak. It becomes harder for even the most corporate-friendly, revolving door, paid-off hacks to justify this type of thing under existing law without at least a duopoly or a product substitution argument.

So the next question I'd have is, "Does it have to be one platform?" or more specifically, "Does it have to be one platform in a given geography?" Because since the 80s the US has gotten increasingly good at ignoring anti-trust legislation, or at least at looking the other way while it's violated. But they still tend to need the cover of plausible deniability, and Congress still hasn't had the guts to simply repeal it and make monopoly legal again. So the whole apparatus, and most of the largest companies today, rely exclusively on executive (and to a lesser extent, judicial) non-enforcement of the laws on the books. If we ever had a president who believed in anti-trust again, without asking for a single thing from Congress, they could smash Google and Verizon and a hundred others into a thousand pieces with Thor's hammer.

So the second question is, being deep in the middle of Reagan/Thatcher; Clinton/Blair neoliberal era, we're taking for granted that anti-trust legislation will never be enforced in assuming this type of thing is possible. Should we? Could that change? It's much less of an issue in China where the state owns controlling shares in so many of the biggest companies. In the west it's at least possible that anti-trust could come back again. There hasn't been a Sherman Act Section II case initiated by the Justice Department since the H.W. Bush administration. But that doesn't mean whoever takes that office in 2020 or 2024 or whenever couldn't start it up again. And the EU seems more eager to take action, and I'm certain would follow the US's lead. So I'm curious about that angle too--at least in terms of what I think will happen vs. what I think should happen.

Hence the purpose of me starting this thread.....

China’s authoritarian environment and deep integration of BAT(Bandung, Alibaba, Tencent) commercial platforms with government provides a significant strategic advantage in potential global growth and influence over FAANG(Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) due to the polar opposite friction that exists between FAANG and government.

China’s BAT may thus far be limited to only 100-200m outside of China, but inside China they are 100% dominant and integrated.

US’s FAANG may have double the reach of BAT, especially outside of home markets, but there is zero integration, alignment, or long-term geopolitical strategy.

I think we are on the cusp of a global war(non kinetic) for digitally integrated trade and influence.

FAANG acting like independent competitive companies opposed by government

BAT acting in unison with government with aligned interest and strategy

To your questions:

”Does it have to be one platform?”

Nope.

I don’t think it will ever be a single Orwellian 1984 platform. But I do think it will move to a Zipf’s Law distribution curve.

I think we will face a choice of the devil we know over the devil we don’t.

And unless we see an alignment of interests and a unified strategy FAANG could be akin to a group of warlords fighting with each other and their own sovereign, opposed by a united and integrated opponent.

Another way of looking at it it is a digital only version of the military. FAANG and US org/doctrine/strategy is like each being a branch of the military but acting independently of each other and government. Not an effective model for driving growth and global influence.

BAT/China on the other hand are much more integrated at every level.

“Does it have to be one platform in a given geography?”

Nope.

But as we are seeing in Russia right now, Western social media are being pressured and pushed to either comply or leave because of their potential for influence within that given environment.

I suspect India and Russia will be the most resilient to being overwhelmed by Superplatform influence due to their emphasis on strategic geopolitical influence.

But they will both be vulnerable, especially Russia, to missing out on a growing geopolitical(perhaps start calling it geodigital) network effect.

So I see numerous platforms.

1 dominant superplatform(China) covering China, much of East Asia(excluding Vietnam and Japan), West/South Asia(excluding India), Africa.

2-4 counter superplatform(US, India, perhaps EU, perhaps Brazil), but with a distribution curve that hints at being an analog to Zipf’s Law distribution. US/Brazil to lock up Western Hemisphere like a digital Monroe Doctine perhaps and loosely aligned with India? EU perhaps expanding the Estonian e-residency model?

Several failed attempts(Russia, Japan, Turkey, Indonesia, Iran, GCC) with zero reach outside of national borders.

Just my 0.02c