the bureaucratic threat to big tech

By | December 9, 2020
0 Comment

Image from page 156 of “Book of martyrs, or, A history of the lives, sufferings, and triumphant deaths of the primitive as well as Protestant martyrs” Source

Sometimes it’s helpful to remove the technology layer in technology companies and trends and try to see what’s really going on. We talk a lot about platforms and disintermediation but what every company — and increasingly every institution — is trying to do is remove, or automate, unwanted bureaucracy. But is this every going to really work?

Let’s walk our way through it.

The history of bureaucracy is a surprising one. Its modern origins can be found in The Inquisition, set up in the early 13th century to hunt down dissent and enforce Papal control. It developed a system of record-keeping and -discovery that became the model for government, and later business, and is still in use today. It’s not that kings and queens didn’t have their own bureaucracies; it’s that they weren’t efficient in managing, and retrieving useful information from, the mountain of documents created.

Together with the new coherence of canon law there came a revolution in record-keeping as Church chancery clerks developed the art of paperwork—composing in the same legible script, making copies of documents, depositing them in archives, and inventing techniques for retrieving information that had been written down and stored away. They were creating a rudimentary form of something so fundamental to life today—bureaucracy—that we rarely give it a moment’s thought.

(Murphy, Cullen. God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (p. 41). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.)

And here lies a key oddity. The Vatican set up this extraordinary bureaucracy to manage a vast international system of repression, creating along the way a codified legal system to enforce uniformity of punishment and justification. They recorded everything, including the price of ropes, wood, branches, straw, and executioner’s fees for each burning at the stake. We may not feel the same way from the outside, but bureaucracy and the pursuit of efficiency are intimately tied together. And no goal is too shabby that it cannot benefit from from efficiency and/or automation: the Nazis used IBM punch-cards to better manage the Holocaust, the U.S. under Robert McNamara used computers to win the war in Vietnam, Stalin’s Soviet Union relied on a bureaucracy to run the gulags (so thoroughly, “the increase in the Gulag bureaucracy appeared to outrun the number of prisoners” (Paul Gregory, An Introduction to the Economics of the Gulag) in part because it was a major source of labour to the rest of the economy.

Hamlet security ratings, Vietnam, Nov 30 1970 Source

These may sound like horror shows from history, but similar principles are being applied today. It can be seen in the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ policy towards immigrants, which relied on government bureaucracy becoming more uncaring and more, well, bureaucratic (what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the ‘the rightward tilting of the bureaucratic field’, see Crawford, Joe; Leahy, Sharon; McKee, Kim, More Than a Hostile Environment: exploring the impact of the Right to Rent part of the Immigration Act 2016, PDF). And don’t get me started on the DHS. Bureaucracies are there to be used, and it seems they excel at dehumanising the task, however many distraught humans are involved.

So a bureaucracy’s passion is to make things more efficient. And companies long ago adopted this model. Indeed, British rule of India was, until 1858, conducted by the East India Company with its own army, bureaucracy and courts (and laws). (see The English East India Company and the Modern Corporation: Legacies, Lessons, and Limitations by Philip J. Stern. PDF)

Technology — from the Inquisition’s cross-references and keywords in the margin to IBM’SystemJ360 for running the Hamlet Evaluation System — has always been the efficiency-obsessed bureaucracy’s handmaiden. Apple is in part the world’s most successful company because of its efficient supply chains. Google updated the Inquisition’s boxed synopses and indexes into a search engine, which has made it tolerably rich. Facebook’s algorithms have focused efficiency on maximising the value from our screen addiction. Amazon’s customer obsession has ensured that we never quite satiate our buying fix. Microsoft may not have quite found its own niche, but it’s trying: its 365 product allows managers to evaluate employees for productivity by monitoring how much they collaborate on documents, participate in group chats and email colleagues.

Indeed, this is perhaps the most obvious connection between The Inquisition and modern-day tech: It doesn’t make processes more efficient as much as codifying and entrenching them: eventually everything ends up looking like a nail. The Inquisition spun out of control in part because of its bureaucracy, which as it standardised procedures, so it standardised what being a heretic was, widening the definition until it became a self-fulfilling dynamic. (Cullen Murphy points to the same trend in the McCarthy Red Scare of the 1950s, and life post 9/11 where just learning Arabic is considered worthy of suspicion.)

Here we enter the world of algorithms, which are modern efficiency’s hammer. Microsoft’s 365 productivity scores show both how problematic the world of measuring something is, and also how companies and institutions would love to measure their most expensive factor of production. The irony, of course, is that the components of a bureaucracy are innately hostile to the notion of measuring themselves. It’s a rare manager who fires himself in the cause of efficiency. Bureaucracy’s first and foremost goal is to preserve themselves. Take it from the Mother of all Bureaucracies: The Inquisition lasted, more or less, 700 years (1231-1908). One might wonder whether Microsoft uses its productivity scores on its own employees?

The obvious solution to this is to have two different structures: a bureaucracy within the institution, for ‘managing’ the company, and another, less prized and largely out-sourced machine for doing the awkward parts. Apple is probably best at this. There are few Apple employees who actually make Apple products. Those who do are scattered around the world, and subject to the whims of their ultimate master: a few hours before I wrote this Reuters’ Yimou Lee reported that Foxconn, Apple’s long-time main supplier, is moving some iPad and MacBook assembly to Vietnam from China at the request of Apple Inc, as the U.S. firm diversifies production to minimise the impact of a Sino-U.S. trade war. No mention is made of the employees affected, the layoffs involved, but that’s because none of them are part of the 137,000-strong Apple bureaucracy.

Amazon (1.2 million employees) has also done wonders in this space. In fact, it has its own internal police to patrol threats to itself. According to documents leaked to Vice, Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center, “the company’s security division tasked with protecting Amazon employees, vendors, and assets at Amazon facilities around the world”, in the words of Lauren Kaori Gurley, obsessively monitors its workers’ involvement in union-organising activities. In the somewhat Orwellian language that red tape tends to create, an Amazon spokesperson described the goal to “highlight potential risks/hazards that may impact Amazon operations, in order to meet customer expectation.” No mention is made of the actual workers themselves.

Unsurprising, then, that Gurley reports today (Friday Nov 27, 2020) Amazon warehouse workers and social and environmental justice activists around the world would be staging coordinated protests, strikes, and actions to demand the online retailer respect workers’ rights to participate in union activity, stop circumventing tax laws, and commit to higher environmental standards, according to the event’s organizers. (In their defence, Amazon has given workers a one-time bonus.)

It would be wise, then, to ring-fence the two structures. Indeed. these tech behemoths have largely outsourced what they can, and everyone else is following suit. Amazon outsourced customer service for its Ring internet-connected camera product to a French-owned company in the Philippines, where workers ended up having to sleep on the floor because of a local lockdown, according to an April story by the FT’s Dave Lee (paywall). Amazon said it was urgently investigating it, but whatever they did wasn’t enough to change the minds of workers, who seven months on joined Friday’s protest, albeit virtually. (It’s a strange world where a company which sells automated remote surveillance outsources to another firm in another country the process of helping customers set up and run this service, while its own internal police watch on and try to snuff out dissent. Maybe ‘strange’ isn’t the word. Inquisitorial, perhaps?)

Facebook (56,653 employees), meanwhile outsources most of the stuff it doesn’t like to do, according to Charlotte Jee of the Technology Review:

The overwhelming majority of the 15,000 people who spend all day deciding what can and can’t be on Facebook don’t even work for Facebook. The whole function of content moderation is farmed out to third-party vendors, who employ temporary workers on precarious contracts at over 20 sites worldwide.

This is not pleasant business, but it makes bureaucratic sense. Working for Facebook, Google, Apple and the like are considered high-status jobs, something to get excited about (though some tell me the excitement doesn’t always last; it would be a mistake to think that the free lunches, sleep-pods and logos don’t hide the usual bureaucratic realities). Why would you mess that up by bringing inhouse the messy grunt work of moderating, customer service and actually building products?

Which brings us to automation. In a perfect world all this would be automated, and possibly production lines for iPhones and Rings will be entirely robotic. Customer service and moderating have proved harder. Where they can Facebook has tried to outsource this to the content creators, but the U.S. election has dashed any lingering hopes that algorithms would be enough to manage the rest.

And this is where I believe the tech behemoths’ unseen Achilles Heel lies. Bureaucracies tend to protect themselves, not just in terms of providing work, but in terms of ensuring that the work is, if not pleasant, then at least not unpleasant. Most of the guards patrolling the gulags were prisoners themselves; the executioners of the Inquisition were hired hands. The Nazis were forever refining the mode of murdering concentration camp inmates so their own hands weren’t sullied. Companies like Siemens helped out (they built the electrical infrastructure for camps, while Bosch installed plumbing and water, according to author Karen Bartlett), while a company called Topf & Sons built highly efficient “eight-muffle ovens” operated by prisoners themselves, and was working on an entirely self-contained oven system where incineration would be fuelled by heated corpses when the war ended.

I’m of course not conflating Facebook and any other tech behemoth with the Third Reich and the Final Solution. But there’s an inevitable tendency of large bureaucracies to assign the unsightly work to others, while preserving itself. And this is where I think these companies will encounter problems. Because ultimately, as governments scrutinise big tech more carefully, they will demand more of them, which will challenge the paradigm of efficiency that these companies have pursued.

Amazon is feeling the heat as its owner becomes ever richer. Facebook is feeling the heat as understanding of its impact on democracy and public belief grows. Google too is feeling the heat for Youtube and the way it redirects traffic back to itself. Apple may get to keep its outsourced production of devices, but as it moves more into services, so will it find that outsourcing doesn’t work so well.

In the end big institutions are essentially bureaucracies that protect their own. Technology helps but only so much. Ultimately there is a contradiction there between the notions of platforms and disintermediation. You cannot have both. Tech disruptors big and small think they can remove intermediaries but they only do that by building a competing platform. It may be simpler and better than what exists, but it merely moves the intermediary layer, it doesn’t remove it entirely. And so while every startup dreams of becoming a platform, they will find like all the tech behemoths that the platform ends up becoming a bureaucracy of its own. It may be a fabulously lucrative one, but that merely disguises it. Behind it lie the same inertia, self-justification and passion for efficiency coupled with self-preservation.

the hypernormalisation of america

By | December 9, 2020
0 Comment

People didn’t need to believe Trump, they just needed him to confirm that their decision to believe in nothing was right. A conspiracy theory isn’t about believing something — it’s about believing that what is in front of you is not the truth, not the reality. So a conspiracy theory is a bamboo scaffolding flexible enough to frame anything you like, so long as it fits your core suspicion that the world is not as it seems. Trump’s embrace of the Birther lie — one that 3/4 of Republicans, and ⅓ of Americans believe is true — enabled him, and therefore them — to reject Obama’s presidency as a fraud. As Anne Applebaum put it:

That third of Americans went on to become Trump’s base. Over four years, they continued to applaud him, no matter what he did, not because they necessarily believed everything he said, but often because they didn’t believe anything at all. If everything is a scam, who cares if the president is a serial liar? If all American politicians are corrupt, then so what if the president is too? If everyone has always broken the rules, then why can’t he do that too?

This is not dissimilar to the analysis presented by Adam Curtis in “HyperNormalisation“, which merits watching a few times. The title is taken from that grim fairyland of the Soviet Union:

The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no-one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it “hypernormalisation”. You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal.

But Curtis realised it applied to a lot more than a decaying communist empire. Hypernormalisation had evolved to embrace Putin’s Russia, where opposing sides in the battle were being funded and directed by the same hand, and even Trump’s America. Curtis’ genius is to chart this path and see the common thread: leaders who could sell any version of reality they wanted. The situation now is in some ways the natural conclusion of his analysis — the documentary appeared in 2016, before Trump’s victory. Here’s how Curtis effectively concluded his screed:

But underneath the liberal disdain, both Donald Trump in America, and Vladislav Surkov in Russia, had realised the same thing – that the version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable, that the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense. And in the face of that, you could play with reality, constantly shifting and changing, and in the process, further undermine and weaken the old forms of power.

We have been constantly frustrated by Trump’s asserting lies as truth, by his accusing the other of crimes he has (instead) committed himself. This is a playbook as old as authoritarianism itself, but in the Information Age, we had hoped would be one that would be harder and harder to use. But a surplus of information is the same as a deficit; it is as hard to find needle in a haystack as it is in an empty field. Trump’s instinctive genius has been to pull out the rug of legitimacy from the presidency, and by exposing the holder of it as a fraud, cheapen it enough to turn the votes that fill it into junk as well. As Anne Applebaum says, he was throwing shade on fertile ground. The institutions had already ceased to matter for many Americans.

So Trump played with reality, and will continue to do so, because that is the hallmark of demagogues; charismatic leaders wrap themselves in the trappings of office, but those trappings, and those offices, are largely fictional affairs. More important for him, and all instinctive autocrats, is to ridicule all institutions — including those outside government, like the media — so there is no credible alternative. Part of the trick is to create momentum — or the illusion of it — by always shifting gear, always throwing sand in the eyes of opponents, to turn politicians, civil servants, generals into lickspittles, and — his own twist on it — to turn it into a reality show, where we’re always ‘waiting to see what will happen’. There is no finale, only more addictive dramatic tension.

We still don’t quite understand this. We still imagine there is some rational level upon which all this operates — Trump, his followers, Russia, Johnson, populism — and that that is where we fight our battles, with well-honed reason and rules-based politicking. But as Curtis has pointed out, the version of reality that conventional politics presented is no longer believable. This is not cynicism at work here, it’s the algorithm. As Curtis describes:

The liberals were outraged by Trump. But they expressed their anger in cyberspace, so it had no effect – because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead, ironically, their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. One online analyst put it simply, “Angry people click more.” It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead, it was becoming a fuel that was feeding the new systems of power and making them ever more powerful. But none of the liberals could possibly imagine that Donald Trump could ever win the nomination. It was just a giant pantomime.

This is old news now, and we are hoping that it will be addressed. After all Twitter and Facebook are being proactive about flagging and removing offensive content, even if it’s from the President of the United States, right? I can’t help thinking of horses and barn-doors and bolts. The issue is no longer trying to prevent misleading information from social media. Social media itself is, by definition, unfiltered information and so therefore misleading. If I watch a video on Youtube titled ‘Buffaloes Rescue Baby Elephant from Lions‘ am I sure what I’m seeing is that? Or Buffaloes Stop 2 Male Lions From Killing Another Lion? Is that really buffaloes protecting an elephant or a lion, or something else entirely? Just as likely, at least in the second case, is that the buffaloes want the lion for themselves. In the first case, it’s just as likely the buffaloes just want the lions out of there. But I have no way of knowing from the video, the caption or the comments. I’m no wiser at the end of it as I was at the start.

Social media, is by definition social, and so it’s unfortunately open ended, subject to discussion, trolling, misdirection and confusion. To extend what Curtis says, all this largely contextless ‘information’ merely feeds the new systems of power which rely on confusion, and a lack of respect — even contempt — for institutions.

When you believe your president should never have been elected president, then why should you have any respect for him, for the office, and for all the arms of government under his control? And now we are faced with the reverse image of this. Where Trump won the presidency by denigrating it as an institution and ridiculing all those who challenged him for it, so he will create a new fiction, as Applebaum explains:

Even if Trump is forced to make a grudging concession speech, even if Biden is sworn in as president on January 20, even if the Trump family is forced to pack its Louis Vuitton suitcases and flee to Mar-a-Lago, it is in Trump’s interest, and a part of the Republican Party’s interest, to maintain the fiction that the election was stolen. That’s because the same base, the base that distrusts American democracy, could still be extremely useful to Trump, as well as to the Republican Party, in years to come.

Trump, and those who may see political or financial profit, will plough this furrow for as long as they can. But there’s a worse outcome, and one that seems to be playing out as I write this. It’s one highlighted by Barton Gellman, and it’s entirely consistent with Adam Curtis’ portrayal of a world where nothing is as it seems.

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Now I’m not here to write a political screed. I’m here to focus on the technological aspects of this. All narratives which try to define the reality in front of us were, before the era of social media, largely in the hands of those with power — political, financial, or otherwise. By power, I mean the establishment. Most of the media is free — I know, I worked for it — but it has always hewed along the same grain as the establishment it reports on, and which it holds to account. The standards it adheres to, the rules it checks for abuses of, are agreed upon. When Woodstein took on Nixon, they were accusing him of breaking very specific laws and norms, ones that (nearly) everyone agreed on.

These did change over time, as Curtis shows, and sometimes the reality, the norms, seemed to crack, as if The Matrix was buckling. We can see them clearly in the rear-view mirror: the demonisation of regimes (and their rehabilitation, or the reverse): Gaddafi, Saddam, Noriega. And before them the Soviet Union, whose sudden collapse surprised everyone. As Curtis put it:

Reality became less and less of an important factor in American politics. It wasn’t what was real that was driving anything or the facts driving anything. It was how you could turn those facts or twist those facts or even make up the facts to make your opponent look bad. So, perception management became a device and the facts could be twisted. Anything could be anything. It becomes how can you manipulate the American people? And, in the process, reality becomes what? Reality becomes simply something to play with to achieve that end. Reality is not important in this context.

But now this warped reality is coming home. No longer is it about “over There”, it’s about Here. Trump, Giuliani, Barr, and now McConnell are all feeding a narrative that takes us into new territory: Americans are being persuaded to believe there was no clear outcome to the election. That is essentially doing away with democracy, replacing that flimsy but long-adhered to scaffold with another: the reality that not only does your vote not matter, but the count doesn’t matter either.

And the tools being used to forge that new uncertainty are largely online.

Steve Bannon’s call for Anthony Fauci to be beheaded was on Facebook for 10 hours. Only when journalists quizzed Facebook did it take down a group calling for members to ready their weapons should Trump lost his bid to stay in power. According to Reuters

Such rhetoric was not uncommon in the run-up to the election in Facebook Groups, a key booster of engagement for the world’s biggest social network, but it did not always get the same treatment.

A survey of U.S.-based Facebook Groups between September and October conducted by digital intelligence firm CounterAction at the request of Reuters found rhetoric with violent overtones in thousands of politically oriented public groups with millions of members.

Even Fox (admittedly for its own reasons) cut away from a White House press conference alleging voter fraud without any substantiation, while Facebook ran it unmediated. After being prompted Facebook added a closable label to it.

I’ve said it before: eventually social media must become media, in that it will have to police itself and content on it in the same way a media organisation does. But that day may be too late. Social media has been shown to be a clear and present danger to democracy. It is easily manipulated — by professionals like Putin, and demagogues like Trump — and can quickly subsume us. It’s not because it radicalises, although it can do that, but because it can breed a sort of existential despair, in which disinformation, misdirection and the hypernormalisation of ambiguity, uncertainty, and alternative facts.

COVID’s other long shadow

By | October 21, 2020
0 Comment

The Nettox. ( Photo courtesy of Irfan Budi Satria)

It will take some time for the true toll of the coronavirus pandemic to be known, but for me one of the most invidious, and unnecessary, costs will be for the generation of kids uneducated and lost to screen addiction. Nowhere is it more visible than in Indonesia.

Take the daughter of a friend: let’s call her Aneesa (not her real name), a 12-year old who will shortly be shipped off to an Islamic boarding school, or pesantren, where she will spend three years memorising the Koran. This is because her state school has been shut since the end of March, and she has been left by her parents and teacher to study online, which mostly means alone. The teacher will send instructions by WhatsApp of what to read and students will send in their assignment the same way. Which means the students will effectively have a phone by their side from 7 am to 2 pm, without interruption or supervision.

Under such conditions it’s unsurprising she had become addicted to games, Youtube and social media; even her three year-old cousin has access to a phone and is similarly addicted. Although I don’t think the solution, to pack her off to a pesantren, was necessarily the right one, you can understand the frustration — and the lack of resources — that led to it.

Cellphone addiction is nothing new in Indonesia. A study published last year1 by researchers at the University of North Sumatra found that three quarters of boys and girls in Aneesa’s age-group were addicted to their smartphones. A study (PDF) by researchers at Padjadjaran University in Bandung2 the same year found that 26% of students they studied had “mental, emotional disorders with smartphone addiction.” They found a clear correlation between smartphone addiction and mental and emotional problems of early adolescents.

This is depressing, but unsurprising. COVID aggravates the problem in particularly pernicious ways. On the one hand children are being pushed towards their gadgets to study remotely. But it’s those same gadgets that they are being drawn to. So the school-work doesn’t relieve them of their addiction, it just reminds them of it, and is an obstacle to be overcome.

The other problem is time. At what point does playing with a gadget become an addiction? A study (PDF) by different researchers at the University of North Sumatra in 2019 of elementary school students3 found “a significant relationship between the respondent’s mental emotionality on the number of hours of gadget usage in a week.” It concluded that children should play with gadgets less than 40 minutes a day, less than three times per day and between 1 and 3 days a week. It found that 28% of the kids studied registered on the mental emotional scale as abnormal, and 36% were borderline.

The problem with lockdown is that time is no longer a scarce resource. And with parents harried and distracted, under-resourced or -motivated teachers either phoning it in or not phoning in at all, kids have easily scaled the walls of any constraint on screen time. A study (PDF) by Chinese researchers in Changsha4 found a doubling in the frequency of using electronic devices recreationally among children and adolescents during COVID. (More than half of those considered addictive users were on their devices more than six hours a day.) (You can see the table here.)

This is a whirlwind that will reap away a generation of kids and adolescents. My friend Aneesa will miss a vital three years of education, but truth be told she wasn’t getting much anyway. None of this is her fault. The lack of government effort to ensure children’s education is not too damaged by COVID is in part to blame. But not all.

For we have helped create this beast. The addiction to these devices, like cigarettes, is not an unfortunate byproduct of their success. It is the reason for their success. Every game, every Facebook tweak, every Youtube video suggestion and autoplay on-by- default setting, all feed addiction. Each is an ingredient in the nicotine of the reason for these gadgets.

We need to take a long hard look at who and what is responsible for this, and who and what we should be cheering. Indonesia has long been an early adopter of technology and has one of the highest smartphone usage rates in the world. Back in 2014 it topped a survey (PDF) of device usage in 30 countries compiled by Millward Brown AdReaction, with Indonesians spending an average 3 hours a day on their phone, and a total 9 hours across TV, tablet, smartphone computer.

The thing is this addiction is seen as a good thing, commercially. Mobile commerce has really taken off in Indonesia, and addiction has fed this. See this headline for an “Indonesia Investments” newsletter: Indonesians’ Addiction to Smartphones Allows for Rapid Development of the Digital Economy.

No real effort has been made to wean kids off this addiction: a worthy effort by a team of Indonesian students got some press in late 2019, but the inventor behind Nettox, Irfan Budi Satria, told me “the invention itself was a product developed for a student competition, and early on it was never really our intention to commercialize it.” An initiative by the government of Bandung, a city southeast of Jakarta, handed out chicks to seventh-graders in December in the hope of building their character and diverting their attention from the screen. It was, inevitably, called chickenisation, and its fate is not known.

Addiction is good. For some (screenshot)

So frankly no one comes out looking good from this, and no one gets off the hook: Even device manufacturers. We have been encouraged to fetishise our gadgets, and to upgrade them as much as we can. Because we tend to hand back, pass on, or shove in a drawer our previous devices, we don’t quite realise what kind of footprint this covetousness leaves, and how much it costs us. I’ve not bought a new Apple device in years, but still I have a cupboard full of discarded cables, plugs and adapters:

Apple debris. Each plug and cable costs about $20, each adaptor up to $100. (author photo)

This is a vicious cycle of addictive devices, designed for lust and obsolescence, addictive services which push new content, nudge us into interaction, dangle rewards ahead of us, from which even the smartest and most mature of us are defenceless. And then give it to a three-year old, an eight-year old, a 12-year old. It was never going to be a fair fight.

I would like to see some justice. My confession is that I’ve been remiss in thinking that the more internet there was, the better off everyone would be. I remember CD-ROMs of Wikipedia being delivered to remote villages, of SMS being the poor businesswoman’s email lifeline. Now I see a device that is casting an addictive glow over the face of a generation of schoolchildren, from Jakarta to Djibouti.

Someone somewhere should hang their head in shame.

  1. Arthy CC, Effendy E, Amin MM, Loebis B, Camellia V, Husada MS. Indonesian Version of Addiction Rating Scale of Smartphone Usage Adapted from Smartphone Addiction Scale-Short Version (SAS-SV) In Junior High School. Open Access Maced J Med Sci. 2019 Oct 15; 7(19):3235-3239. https://doi.org/10.3889/oamjms.2019.691 ↩
  2. Influence of Adolescents’ Smartphone Addiction on Mental and Emotional Development in West Java, Indonesia, March 2019, Majalah Kedokteran Bandung 51(1):46-52 ↩
  3. Wahyuni AS, Siahaan FB, Arfa M, Alona I, Nerdy N. The Relationship between the Duration of Playing Gadget and Mental Emotional State of Elementary School Students. Open Access Maced J Med Sci. 2019 Jan 15; ↩
  4. Dong H, Yang F, Lu X and Hao W (2020) Internet Addiction and Related Psychological Factors Among Children and Adolescents in China During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Epidemic. Front. Psychiatry 11:00751. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00751 ↩

engagement’s battleground has shifted to groups

By | October 2, 2020
1 Comment

It’s always been about groups. Photo of Minitel by Nicolas Nova

It was ever thus: the internet was always about gathering and sharing. Even before the internet, the attraction of being connected was always less about access to services and information, and more for communing and community. The Chicago blizzard of 1978 helped propel bulletin boards, or BBS, into the mainstream. Usenet groups appeared a year later. The French makers of Minitel discovered around the same time that their test bed of users in Strasbourg preferred to hack the little desktop monitor and keyboard to chat with other users in the same building than find out when the post office was open. Two tools survived the internet’s shift to the web: email and usenet newsgroups.

So it’s no surprise that Facebook has woken up to the fact that if it’s stickiness you’re after, it’s better to build your business around people with shared interest than a shared history. (Of course the two can overlap.) As my friend Mar Pages has shown in her Facebook for groups – Everything you need to know page, this shift to groups goes back to (at least) 2017, when Mark Zuckerberg said that he wanted “develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.” Of course, he would say that, but behind that was the obvious goal of trying to increase engagement. Groups had been around for at least a decade (turns out I am admin of at least four, though I can’t remember ever setting them up) but most (90%, according to Mar’s math) were not “meaningful communities” by whatever metric Facebook used, with a membership of only 100 million users. Facebook groups, in other words, were a wasteland.

So Facebook has been working on this, vowing in 2018 to boost membership to 1 billion members of meaningful communities and, in Mark’s (ironic, given what has happened since) words, “not only turn around the whole decline in community membership we’ve seen for decades, it will start to strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” Overnight it announced that there were 70 million administrators of what it called “active” groups — seemingly abandoning the term “meaningful” — and that there were 1.8 billion people using groups every month. This doesn’t really shed much light on how much progress they’re making, though it’s an advance on a 1.4 billion figure they released a year ago. It’s not unusual to move the goalposts but it suggests to me that Facebook realise that getting from 100 million to 1 billion in five years was a little too demanding, so now we’re getting something much more vague.

That said, there’s no denying the effort being put into Groups, and the boost it’s getting from Covid. But there are questions here that go deeper into the technopolistic world I wallow around in. What lengths will Facebook go to push people into Groups, how will it monetise this space, and when will it move to connect it to a much more active group-based app in its stable — WhatsApp? Finally, I’m wondering where the lines are going to be drawn when it comes to responsibility — will Facebook find it’s becoming more akin to a publisher, or will Groups allow it to offload that responsibility to admins and moderators, and if so, how does it reward them?

how far is Facebook going to go?

So, first question: how far will Facebook go to push us into groups? At the moment groups don’t contain in-line ads, so this is part of what Facebook has identified as an area which has seen increased engagement without monetization. Its announcement overnight was mostly focused on public groups — one you can see and browse without being a member — which will increase their visibility to non-members. It’s also allowing public group admins to generate revenue by allowing them to link up with companies to carrying branded content — sponsored content, to you and I. This does address part of the riddle of groups, which is why should admins and moderators dedicate so much of their time to these communities without any clear way to monetise it? Branded content goes some way to addressing that, though clearly Facebook is wary of allowing ads in private groups, since the subject matter may be sensitive and an ad unsuitable, ill-timed or worse, offensive.

To me the biggest challenge for Facebook is how to monetise WhatsApp which outside the U.S. has largely replaced SMS and is much more popular as a messaging app than Facebook Messenger or any other messaging app. I am a member of dozens of groups, often very specific to an event, a location, an interest or a relationship. It seems obvious that at some point Facebook, obsessed with monetizing ‘engagement’, has to try to lure this group of people into one of its money-making funnels. The Verge reported earlier this week reported that Facebook is now making it easier for people to post messages across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, an early step in a plan announced last year to essentially combine the three with WhatsApp into a private services platform, not unlike something like WeChat. While Groups isn’t ostensibly part of this, in my mind there’s not much difference. To me there’s a much greater difference between a public Facebook and a private one, than with a private Facebook group and a WhatsApp group. The former is Twitter, essentially, where what you say is by default public, and you know it is (and behave or misbehave accordingly.) Private groups are where you know, or feel you know, the other people on that group, and behave quite differently. While WhatsApp groups are always going to be relatively small, they’re still a huge chunk of our “engagement time” and they’re an advertiser’s dream, as are the private Facebook groups, since they’re focused on a specific interest.

Responsibility

So finally, responsibility. Who is responsible for the content of Facebook groups? Mar tells me there’s a lot of automated culling and cuffing on groups, where even administrators find themselves suspended for activity that looks to Facebook’s bots as spammy. And of course Facebook has deleted thousands of perceived hate groups. So it’s hard for Facebook to claim it’s not responsible for content in these groups, even if most of the actual moderating is left to administrators and moderators, who are not Facebook employees, are not paid or compensated by Facebook, and who are doing the work — often quite time-consuming, not to mention wreaking an emotional toll. A sign of the tide may be an Australian court’s decision in June which holds media companies liable for defamatory posts on their Facebook page. While the lawsuit doesn’t include Facebook, the case led to Australia saying it might treat platforms like Twitter and Facebook as publishers and therefore liable for defamation for anything posted on their pages.

So where does this leave us, and where is this going? For all its fancy talk, clearly Facebook can see the writing on the wall: that the future of social networking lies in shared interests, just like the internet discovered itself. The shift to newsletters has shown that interests cannot be too niche, and that people love to talk to other people who have the same interest. But at the same time there’s a problem: Facebook has lasted this long, in my view, for two reasons: there are still a lot of people who haven’t signed up, and until everyone on the planet has joined Facebook the growth numbers will always look good. But the effort to keep people active on Facebook is like a hamster wheel: you have to keep feeding them compelling content, and there’s only so many foodie photos a user can take. This has led Facebook into rabbit hole not unlike the rabbit holes its algorithms such users into. If you have to rely on increasingly click-baity headlines and assertions to keep people engaged, at some point the snake starts to eat itself.

So there has to be an alternative. And that’s what groups are. Public groups are one thing, but that is not where the value is. That lies in the private groups, where passion, knowledge and value lie. But at the same time, who is in the driving seat for that? If the pull is strong enough for users, what’s to stop the owner of the group moving it to another platform, one which they are able to monetize and which offers more features? Think of a group as a walled garden within Facebook’s walled garden; if people already have to jump over one wall to access it, why not just move the inner walled garden somewhere else, since the friction — the effort required to reach the group — would be no different.

That said, I’m sure this won’t happen, at least immediately. But at some point the owner of a group of hundreds of thousands of passionate users is going to recognise that none of them are there because it’s Facebook, but because Facebook happens to be the platform. Somehow Facebook will have to find a way to lock in group owners with golden handcuffs, or win them over.

a solution to facebook: regulation, yes, but also a simpler tech

By | September 18, 2020
0 Comment

(Facebook HQ, 2024) Rust | Ampersand72 | Flickr)

The Social Dilemma (Netflix) does a great job explaining how Facebook and Google work, and, dare I say it, completes the picture I’ve been trying to paint in previous blog posts better than I could. It’s definitely worth a watch: essentially, the business model of both (and therefore nearly all digital-only business) relies on capturing, retaining, diverting and monetizing your attention. The sleight of hand is to make you feel that you’re connecting to your friends and interests. Whereas in reality you’re being sucked into interacting long enough to get your attention diverted to advertising.

So we knew that, we just didn’t necessarily know exactly how it worked, and how sophisticated and relentless it was. The documentary’s conclusion: It can’t be beat with technology. It needs regulation.

That’s where I’d disagree. Definitely there needs to be regulation. The Buzzfeed piece on the leaked memo of a fired Facebook employee (I don’t really see the need to share her name as she didn’t consent to it being used) illustrates just how little effort and resources Facebook has put into patrolling itself.

Indeed, the opposite: Bloomberg Businessweek this week shows how much effort Facebook has put into not having to patrol itself. Here’s the piece’s broad assertion:

Zuckerberg isn’t easily influenced by politics. But what he does care about—more than anything else perhaps—is Facebook’s ubiquity and its potential for growth. The result, critics say, has been an alliance of convenience between the world’s largest social network and the White House, in which Facebook looks the other way while Trump spreads misinformation about voting that could delegitimize the winner or even swing the election.

In other words, not only is the world’s largest social platform aware of the extent to which misinformation and misdirection can shape an individual’s beliefs — about themselves, about other people, about their country’s leadership — but that this can actually become a lever for political cover to support the company’s growth.

So it’s obvious, a no-brainer, that regulation has to happen. Regulation needs to be in place holding these platforms responsible, effectively, for every piece of content that is on there, in the same way any publisher or broadcaster is responsible. While some of this could be automated — searching for bots, tweaking algorithms so conspiracy theories don’t become memes that suck the vulnerable further down a lucrative but self-destructive wormhole — much of it is going to have be manual. As the leaked memo illustrates, a lot of this is just too hard to leave to computers; nor can it be done by outsourced drones. I don’t see any other way around it.

Sure, it’s going to hurt their margins, may even make parts of it unprofitable, but I believe the equation is quite a simple one. If Facebook alters in any way content that we post to it then it becomes a publisher, and so acquires the rights and responsibilities of a publisher. It does that all the time, prioritising some stuff over others, converting the links you add — checking first whether it is a banned link or not — to one that will then, when you click on it, warn you that you’re leaving Facebook. All of this is the hallmark of a publisher, so it’s obvious that eventually Facebook, and every digital platform like it, will be required to comply with the law affecting publications.

Not all of this will be good. In some countries restrictions on publications are politically onerous, but it’s inevitable. It will be a test of Facebook’s mettle about whether it will allow itself to become a quasi state broadcaster or publisher under such conditions, but that’s talk for another day.

For now I want to offer a simple alternative. We already have a solution to the problem of Facebook, Twitter etc, if all we’re looking for is a simple way to stay in touch with people, institutions and news. It’s called RSS.

RSS, or rich site syndication/really simple syndication, is a standard allowing updates to be fed from a source to a recipient without lots of complicated clutter in between (accounts, passwords, cookies etc, unless you want them). For a while it was the darling of the world. Certainly mine. It’s been around since the halcyon days of 2000/1, when there was little interest in monetizing content, or dumpster-diving for personal information. Indeed part of its beauty lay in the fact that you could subscribe to something without the producer of that content needing to even know your email address.

Indeed, RSS was the (technical) model that Facebook and Twitter drew on. Arguably it was the failure of RSS to adapt (and get itself out of a fratricidal hole) that opened the space up for Facebook and Twitter to move in. But essentially the principle has always remained the same: a river of content, selected by the user, pushed rather than pulled, which can include text and multimedia.

I haven’t ditched Facebook yet because it helps me understand the scale of the problem a little, but it’s largely a wasteland for my friends, most of whom are no longer on Facebook, or have disappeared from my feed because of poor algorithms (yes, the black box eventually disappears up its own ass, I suspect, as it tries to dig us every deeper rabbit holes).

Facebook, and to a certain extent Twitter, have left the door open to an alternative in part by fiddling with that river model, which leaves open an opportunity. There’s no reason RSS couldn’t rise to the occasion and replace it.

If I could easily subscribe to a personal RSS feeds of my friends in a simple, secure environment, free of sneaky attention-seeking widgets, I would be deliriously happy. We would be free of the neediness of desperately seeking approval, the worry that we may have missed something, the ads, the distractions.

Perhaps someone has done this already. And of course there would be issues. But we have to start somewhere. I’m not talking about a platform; I’m talking about a standard, that could be used by any app, even existing ones like email or chat, or a browser.

And I do agree with two other points made on The Social Dilemma:

  • that this technology is not going to go away. That the ability to influence us, to outsmart us, is not going to remain at this level. It’s going to improve. And we aren’t showing any signs of getting smarter, definitely not at the same rate;
  • that we shouldn’t allow those with technology to try to kid us into thinking they have the solution to the problem they have created.

But those points to me suggest another solution: an appropriate technology solution. Perhaps we don’t need something so complicated to stay in touch with our friends. I have resurrected an old (non-digital) birthday calendar and I try to make a point of sending birthday greetings to anyone on it. I feel that is cheating less than having a digital calendar, or Facebook, do it. So perhaps staying in touch with our friends, either on a daily basis or an annual one, doesn’t need to be overly complex either.

Anyone care to start the ball rolling?