26 ms·

Mark Zuckerberg and his empire of oily rags

417 points by laurex 8y ago

crispyambulance 8y ago
I keep wanting to pull the trigger. Mr Doctorow's article is perhaps the last straw... Q: How do I permanently delete my account? A: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674 https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674
- 32qwef 8y ago
  Don't know how much you use FB but I highly recommend it. When I got rid of mine, all I lost was status updates from people who weren't really my friends to begin with. Your close friends will stick by you and your social life will grow richer, with more face-to-face meetings. Quitting Facebook is great.
  - tapoxi 8y ago
    My issue with deleting Facebook is that a lot of services depend on it for authentication and friend/contact discovery. I wish there were an open standard for a social graph.
    - cptskippy 8y ago
      Apart from developing Facebook integrations for Work, I have never once used Facebook to sign into a site and do not allow anything to rummage through my contacts and "discover" things. So I'm confused as to why this is a necessity. What services do you use that won't function without your Facebook account?
      - hluska 8y ago
        I once had a conversation with a junior developer who told me that he would rather die than give up Tinder. To this day, I honestly don't think he was joking...
        paulie_a 8y ago
        I am going to assume a junior developer is younger in age so it isn't that surprising that getting laid is a high priority.
        hluska 8y ago
        True, and I don't think you can use Tinder without a Facebook account. :)
    - 32qwef 8y ago
      There should be, I agree. The best features of facebook are events, and friend recommendations. It would be great if we had an open standard for the social graph, and then other companies could make services like events or friend discovery, and you could pick and choose which ones you subscribed to. As for authentication, thankfully most sites let you register an account with them. It's a little inconvenient, but with a password manager it's simple. Still, I wish OpenID was more widespread.
    - testvox 8y ago
      I don't think too many services have a hard dependency on FB. I haven't had an account for years and while many services do their best to convince you to use FB for auth I've only run into a few very early stage projects that absolutely requires it.
- datalus 8y ago
  I can confirm, deleting FB was a good thing overall, but YMMV. I was largely using it as an event planner, but found that I could just subscribe via email lists or other ways for the venues I cared about keeping up with. It also helps that I don't know a majority of my outer circle's daily status updates and when I see them at mutual engagements like birthday parties or house warmings, I'm more interested in talking to them and catching up.
- karmelapple 8y ago
  I’d like to, but it’s a valuable way to get my ideas out to friends and family and to have discussions. It’s more valuable and more personal than, say, a blog, because: * my post + all the comments show up in the same UI where people go to see dumb videos or cute photos of friends’ families * I can share a link or thought, and have more follow up with these friends and family, because they know me on a personal level, and know that the conversation is limited to people who at least somewhat know me, rather than all manner of internet trolls. They trust me more than random other person on the Internet who might share the exact same information... just like I trust them more than random people on the internet. If Facebook is going to keep a shadow profile on me anyway, I want to get a little something out of it. Whether they should be allowed to keep the shadow profile on me or not, though, is a different question altogether. And I think only legislation could decide that effectively.
  - TACIXAT 8y ago
    >I’d like to, but it’s a valuable way to get my ideas out to friends and family and to have discussions. My friends and family aren't interested in most the stuff I'm interested in. I'll call and text them, talk to them about our lives. I'll post my interests in places where people who share them can consume. I mostly just felt paralyzed by the platform. Not wanting to put personal info because it would be used to build a profile on me, and not wanting to interact with a lot of media because it would then use that as an excuse to promote it to my friends and family.
- bsenftner 8y ago
  Yeah, you'll wait till it's too late. Just freaking quit. You'll find how to reach those that matter to you anyway. And those contacts will be more meaningful, because you're not on FB, where communications have degenerated to less than authentic.
- flowless 8y ago
  Just did it after 2 years of ignoring it - had to accept GDPR stuff and face recognition to get in and be able to hit delete. Feels good anyway.
oblio 8y ago
> That’s because dossiers on billions of people hold the power to wreak almost unimaginable harm, and yet, each dossier brings in just a few dollars a year. For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains. > There’s an old-fashioned word for this: corruption. In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear. Spot on. Google's in exactly the same boat, it's just that they provide a few services which are legitimately useful (Search, Gmail), so they're targeted less right now. How we will get out of this, I have no idea...
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  > How we will get out of this, I have no idea... I don't know. It was a faustian bargain we all made. It was fun for a while, but now it is getting increasingly ugly. How does one get out of a Faustian Bargain, anyway?
  - clouddrover 8y ago
    > It was a faustian bargain we all made. I didn't make that bargain, but I think the real problem these days is that it doesn't matter if you made it or not. All it takes is one weak link in the chain and suddenly you're under surveillance from a company you had no intention of being involved with. I don't, for example, use GMail but if I communicate with people who do then my mail falls under Google surveillance. I don't use Google Drive but if I do business with a company that does then some of my data has been forked over to Google and I'm unlikely to ever know about it. I don't use Facebook but if I appear in a photo that someone else uploads and annotates then Facebook has a photo ID of me without my say-so. It's difficult to stay clear of surveillance companies when you're constantly being undermined by the unintentional (or, perhaps more precisely, unthinking) actions of even just a few people. My data's being bought and sold every day and there is no way I can control that, opt out of it, or even get a list of companies who have my information or what they're doing with it. If this is the information age and if information has value, then my information is my asset and I want control of it. Without the ability for a person to assert sovereignty over their own data, how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data?
RobertoG 8y ago
" [..] given enough surveillance, companies can sell us anything: Brexit, Trump, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, and successful election bids for absolute bastards like Turkey’s Erdogan and Hungary’s Orban." The same as the author, I have serious problems believing this but it has become a common place now even in mainstream media. In a way, I worry more about this, than about the others dangers that we can read in the article (I agree with those also). It seems that, now, whenever people vote for somebody or something that they are not "suppose" to vote, they have been "manipulated" and it's the fault of Russian bots. I'm not saying that, like always, there are not forces in play trying to move things their way, but I find worrisome how easily that narrative is accepted. It's a kind of mainstream paranoia conspiracy or, maybe, a too convenient excuse for not finding the real reasons why people feel disgruntled.
- turnitoff 8y ago
  I mean, it's kind of a half-truth, isn't it? We know that this sort of manipulation is going on in an organized way: Sybil attacks are pretty common in politics. But it's insidious precisely because of this Patomkin-effect: it makes it unclear how many real supporters the issue has, and it gives an easy cop-out for people who would be otherwise responsible for their own defeat. In a way, it becomes a scapegoat that can unite friend and foe. (Although I think Doctorow is steering clear from the very stupid interpretation of this effect)
  - RobertoG 8y ago
    >>"[..] it's kind of a half-truth, isn't it?" More like a quarter-truth that allow to forget the other three quarters. Economic policies dismantle the welfare state in the U.K. but the people vote Brexit because some adds. Part of the population in the USA is left economically behind but the reason Trump is elected is because some Facebook advertisements. One thousand years of history but part of the Catalan people search independence from Spain because the 'Russian bots'. The economy is not working but people is sceptic about the European Union 'because Internet'. And you heard all that in mainstream media and in the mouths or politics. It seems to me that happy people don't vote revolutions, never mind the advertisements. It's when people is angry or scared that they search for "strong leaders" and "guilty parties".
forgottenpass 8y ago
I read the first half of this. I can't decide if I think Doctorow is dancing around the more important idea that goes unsaid, or if this really is the best way to present it so people will accept it. Everyone is a whole lot more susceptible to propaganda than anyone admits. Doctorow presents this as Klansman getting the message that Trump is their guy. Mao, Goebbels and any other obvious-baddies are perfect for making the point. By pretending like it doesn't happen TO YOU, you'll accept that it can possibly happen to humans (that are not you). But it happens to everybody, all the time. The only propaganda we notice is the stuff that is so far from targeting us we see it's comically incongruity. But propaganda isn't meant for the hard sell. Propaganda doesn't change your mind. Propaganda gets you to cross the threshold and do something you were already positioned to do, by giving you meaning for doing it.
- klez 8y ago
  > Propaganda doesn't change your mind, it gets you to cross the threshold and do something you were already positioned to do, by giving you meaning for doing it. Read the rest of the article, it kinda goes there.
- i_am_nomad 8y ago
  Agreed, and in an earlier comment I intimated that Doctorow doesn’t really object to propaganda, he just objects to other people’s propaganda. (And his objection in fact contains some propaganda itself.)
  - forgottenpass 8y ago
    I kinda got that impression as I was reading it, but had hoped I was wrong. There is a line of criticism I see often that goes something like this "$thing is convincing people $bad_idea." (Sorry for the vague way of presenting this, but I can't abstract it more clearly.) I take that criticism and see the natural next step as reducing the amount of influence that $thing has over people in specific, and in general give them the tools to evaluate unfounded ideas and manipulation. I find this conclusion blindingly obvious, and is where I depart from would-be political allies who conclude with the same obviousness: "lets re-engineer $thing to manipulatively spread $good_idea."
wiz21c 8y ago
FTA : >>> Facebook isn’t a mind-control ray. Cory is fine but here, he's wrong. FaceBook is a mind control tool. It is a mind control because when you send it some information, you know that friends, facebook employees, facebook algorithm, potentially marketeers, potentially state agencies, etc. will read read it. So you inflict yourself some degree of censorship. You basically alter your behaviour. So, in a sense, it is a mind control machine.
- amarkov 8y ago
  Most people aren't particularly tempted to shape their behavior to Facebook. They just use other channels for things they don't specifically want everyone to see. If some people are so uninvested in their thoughts that "open up a group chat" is an insurmountable barrier... well, they were going to be mind controlled by a stiff breeze, so it's hard to blame Facebook.
- smt88 8y ago
  Any effective advertising is mind control, in a sense. It convinces you to take an action you wouldn't have otherwise taken. Sometimes that action is bad for you, but the advertising has convinced you that it's good for you (or that the alternative is scarier). The better Facebook can convince you to take an action, the more value its platform has. The Darwinism of the ad industry meant that the top ad-tech companies were eventually going to be really, really good at changing people's behavior.
- theyinwhy 8y ago
  You don't know who will read it because of algorithms or just because someone did not log in and so on... Those tools are just media and offer you visibility to a certain degree. And of course you adapt your presentation style to reach a specific audience.
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
  The information economy as self-inflicted panopticon?
  - badbug 8y ago
zerostar07 8y ago
I wish facebook could be outright extinguished from the internet. Then a lot of people would realize that those barbarians were a kind of solution.
i_am_nomad 8y ago
Doctorow is right, of course, but it’s lamentable that he declares the ugly rise of Trump as only a feat of media influence, when in fact it’s also a reaction to it. No one had a problem with the Obama campaign’s heavy use of social media, a strategy that harvested racial tensions just as much as Trump’s did.
- gfodor 8y ago
  Agreed these otherwise great criticisms of social media seem to always fall into this trap. Turning this into a partisan issue is going to backfire, I promise you that. Make this about a political party and it is going to be all too easy to divide people on this issue. Right now the left and the right are aligned in their loathing of Facebook -- but every time the message "Facebook helped Trump get elected because his supporters are racists and easily manipulated" is parrotted it serves to encourage them to take the opposing side to defend themselves and claim Facebook's tactics are being overblown. They'll never defend Zuck, but they will fight against clamping down on tech companies in the name of defending capitalism and American jobs (and, without saying so, as a way to assert they were not manipulated and resent being called racists.)
  - trocadero 8y ago
    This is definitely a partisan issue. It's true that there was always a low level pro-privacy/anti-fb sentiment, but it's the perception that FB was used to get Trump elected turned it into an inferno. If Clinton had won the election there would be far less attention paid to FB.
- cabaalis 8y ago
  Trump did and said many things during his campaign that would have been political suicide before. The media is still struggling to understand why people support him in the face of what they consider detestable. They also fear what politically incorrect things will become fair game in the next crop, since it has been proven you can do and say those things and still win. I think the result was largely in support of pushing back against the ideas of political correctness. I know many fine people who voted and support Trump. It isn't that they are racist, bigoted, etc. It's that they believe our country was spiraling into a state where you couldn't be, and that was too much an affront to free speech. (For example, wanting to secure our borders so that your own children born here would have a better chance at finding a job was becoming "racist")
fortythirteen 8y ago
(Argues that social media and data tracking is a dangerous combination that can serve to further alienate us from our humanity) (Proceeds to inject his political agenda that, while it has many truths, is written in a way that will completely alienate anyone not far-left)
- tclancy 8y ago
  When did suggesting government oversight of companies that have shown themselves to be bad actors become a far-left belief? Why does it feel like these appellations come from people that aren’t so much right or left politically, but just want to keep their fingers in their ears out of fear?
  - fortythirteen 8y ago
    Did you read the article? He literally gave every example of maliciousness as right wing and provided no examples of how the left is equally manipulated.
    - crispyambulance 8y ago
      So, is there an "equal opportunity" rule now? Do all citations of evil, atrocity, and maliciousness require both a "right-wing" and "left-wing" example just for the sake of fairness?
      - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        In the current environment, yes, they do. Why? Because too often, each side tries to paint the other as the center of all evil. And people of both sides get really tired of being painted that way. They tune out very quickly when they run into something that paints them that way. So if you want both sides to hear you, you have to not shoot only at one side.
        crispyambulance 8y ago
malvosenior 8y ago
I think articles like this do a lot more to build support for Trump than anything Facebook has done. Is it really that hard to believe that people voted for something you don’t like because they think you’re wrong and not because they were brainwashed?
- Spearchucker 8y ago
  Is like he said in his conclusion - social media didn't convince people to become racists. It convinced racists to vote.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    Or, calling people racists convinced them to vote against the people attacking them.
mtgx 8y ago
> For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains. That's the biggest insight of the article. That's exactly what the likes of Facebook and Google (and telecoms, and data brokers, etc) are doing.
- Jyaif 8y ago
  Can somebody help me understand this sentence? What is "commercial surveillance"? What are "risks associated with mass surveillance"?
  - droopyEyelids 8y ago
    Throughout history there has never been an organization that lasted forever, let alone one that lasted forever with benign leadership. Any organization with massive surveillance data that lacks beneficent leaders may harm people.
  - munificent 8y ago
    > What is "commercial surveillance"? When a for-profit company ("commercial") gathers large, detailed dossiers of millions of people ("surveillance"). For example, if you use Twitter, go to https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data and look at the stuff under "Interests and ads data". That's the tip of the iceberg. > What are "risks associated with mass surveillance"? Like the article says, when a company has access to detailed personal information about lots and lots of people, many bad things can happen: * That information can be stolen by hackers and then used for identity theft or social engineering to gain access to private accounts. Think about how to reset your bank password your bank asks you questions like "where did you meet your first significant other?" Then consider how that event is probably on your Facebook feed. * Companies like Cambridge Analytica can buy "ads" that are precisely targeted using that data to persuade certain groups of people to show up or not show up at polls and influence elections in non-Democratic ways. Etc.
- tough_cookies 8y ago
  While I want to agree with this, it's hard to argue that Facebook and Google "privatize all the gains." If you added up all of the economic value that google's zero-dollar-cost products provide globally (even ignoring Facebook which IMO has a much more dubious net value), that's going to be a pretty big number.
deleted 8y ago
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ggdG 8y ago
FTA: > absolute bastards like Turkey’s Erdogan and Hungary’s Orban. I wonder what Viktor Orbán has done according to Doctorow to be put in the same ballpark as Erdogan. From https://turkeypurge.com/ https://turkeypurge.com/ : Turkey’s post-coup crackdown: 151,967 dismissed / 140,452 detained / 79,774 arrested / 3,003 schools, dormitories and universities shut down / 5,822 academics lost jobs / 4,463 judges, prosecutors dismissed / 189 media outlets shut down / 319 journalists arrested since July 15, 2016 / as of June 25, 2018
- pjc50 8y ago
  This kind of thing: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/democracy-is-on-the-brink-in-hungary-so-why-is-no-one-talking-about-it-a7883876.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/democracy-is-o... It's not quite so advanced in violence as Turkey, but it's definitely along the same path.
  - tim333 8y ago
    Yeah it took a decade or so for Erdogan to start doing really bad stuff. Give Orban time to get in his swing.
  - ggdG 8y ago
    I read nothing in that article that hints at any government violence in Hungary, so I don't get why you even bring this up. Sure, there's lots of innuendo about how the EU is trying to teach a lesson about democracy and human rights to a reluctant Hungary. The thing is, if we have to choose among Orbán and Jüncker the leader with the most democratic legitimacy, then Orbán wins hands down. Hardly anyone in the EU voted for Jüncker, except for a few Luxemburgers. Hardly anyone knew what the program of his party, the EPP, was at the time of the election. Orbán on the other hand enjoys a huge amount of support from the Hungarians. You may disagree with his viewpoints, but that doesn't make his leadership any less democratic. He is careful not to follow the example of Western Europe with its disastrous policies of mass immigration and - as a result - islamisation. This viewpoint is shared with all governments in Eastern Europe and - at last - a growing number of people in Western Europe. He tries to raise awareness about the Soros-funded no-borders NGOs, which are an attempt from outside the country to make the Hungarian press and politicians talk and behave a certain way. The article in the Independent tries to paint this as anti-Semitism, but in another article they admit that even Israel disagrees with this viewpoint: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/george-soros-israel-hungary-posters-defence-anti-immigrant-campaign-vilify-businessman-a7836316.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/george-soros... The only reason the unelected leaders of the EU put pressure on Orbán is because he poses a threat to their power. Of course they use words like "human rights" and "democracy" to cover their real motivations. Look at the non-reaction of the EU when the Spanish Rajoy government locked up Catalonian political prisoners (by the way, do you know of any polical prisoners in Hungary?). Why didn't they defend democracy and human rights at that time? The reason is that the current EU leaders see the Catalonian independence movement as a threat to their power.
deleted 8y ago
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brookhaven_dude 8y ago
Most people I talk to (even the tech savvy) don't really care about their data being collected by all these companies. They feel it's a fair trade. Ironically an extremely tech-UNsavvy young woman I know makes sure to minimize her usage of these services (never had FB, instagram etc.) and is actually quite protective of her data.
- beager 8y ago
  I think personal attitudes toward collection of one’s personal data are orthogonal to the issue here, which is the weaponization of data collected in the aggregate. This is why I believe that personal boycotts of Facebook and the like, while responsible on an individual level, represent a slow and inefficient way of stopping the corruptible dynamics of large-scale data-collection ad model companies like FB. Regulation and accountability would be more effective. I know both of those words are four-letter words in the modern tech world zeitgeist.
- fullshark 8y ago
  The vast majority of people don't care, and many of those that claim to care, reveal they don't through their actions.
dnomad 8y ago
> Rather, the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George Soros. This is where the argument collapses. It's well known that the right-wing have carefully and diligently constructed their own parallel reality [1]. There are endless right-wing news sites, blogs, and forums that tirelessly aggregate these people and pump them full of propaganda [2]. Facebook here is acting, at best, as a viral multiplier. Even if Facebook were to disappear tomorrow there are a plethora of sites ready to leap in at a moment's notice. Facebook's disappearance would not degrade the propaganda effort. Heck, there's always email. Cory doesn't have the courage to say it but his real issue must be with the internet as a whole. Propaganda is the internet's real killer app. You can see just how nicely this works: propaganda relies completely on repetition and copying [3]. And what is the one thing the internet does better than anything else? It may feel good to blame Facebook but this will ultimately accomplish nothing. Propagandists will literally build their own social networking sites if Facebook goes away. The sort of people who obsess over immigration aren't going to simply log off. They are connected now and there are plenty of people out there eager to connect with these people and validate their most elaborate paranoid fantasies. Where there is demand, there will be supply. [1] https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017/03/15/politics-government/major-new-study-shows-political-polarization-mainly-right-wing https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017/03/15/politics-government/maj... [2] http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-partisanship-and-junk-news/ http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-partisansh... [3] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...
- nerfhammer 8y ago
  yea he's trying to conflate propaganda with "sophisticated targeting" when it's really AFAICT people sharing shitposts with each other reinforcing their beliefs. if you look at, say 4chan or fox news there's no "sophisticated targeting" going on there at all
- hluska 8y ago
  Have you ever tried to purchase an ad on Facebook? If so, please give me examples of the type of targeting you used. (I should note that I'm genuinely not being an ass, I'm just trying to figure out your level of experience with the platform. My education is in marketing, I've run many campaigns across many platforms, yet I have never found a tool anywhere that lets me target ads the way Facebook does.)
micimize 8y ago
While I am also concerned about the growing depth of surveillance, there hasn't been any _real_ evidence that Cambridge Analytica's methods were effective (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment_of_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment...). That they were mostly ineffective seems to me the more reasonable null hypothesis. Why assume these shady micro-targeting campaigns are such a big deal in the face of the huge, multidimensional propaganda wars that are political campaigns? Without the presumption that the micro-targeting is super effective, nothing looks like it's on fire.
- coryfklein 8y ago
  The article specifically claims that Cambridge Analytica's techniques _didn't_ sway opinion, merely that they allowed them to locate specific voters. The wikipedia section you linked says much the same: > Research discussed by Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College showed that it is extremely hard to alter voters' preferences, because many likely voters are already committed partisans; as a result, it is easier to simply mobilize partisan voters.
  - zerostar07 8y ago
    that doesnt explain anything though, it just kicks the can a bit further down. He's not clear whether the problem is facebook, the fact that majority of voters are gullible idiots, or democracy itself?
    - coryfklein 8y ago
      There's a distinction between changing someone else's political views and inflaming their existing views via outrage, fake news, etc. If one is easier than the other, then this article does indeed explain things. Cambridge Analytica may be unable to change political views, but it may have been capable of mobilizing a select group of disenfranchised voters that it carefully selected. Given low voter turnouts, you can increase chances of your candidate winning by merely improving turnout for a select group.
jbb67 8y ago
I don't get this article at all. It talk about brexit, yet we voted for it despite all the incredible amount of lies being spread about it being a bad thing.
- usuallymatt 8y ago
  You....you don't think Brexit was a bad thing?????
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    Many, many people don't think it's a bad thing. As an American I look at things like GDPR and the proposed copyright law and completely understand why a sovereign country wouldn't want to be part of the EU. You may not agree, but it shouldn't be mindblowing that reasonable people hold this view.
    - lotsofcows 8y ago
      You seem to be under the impression that opting out of it somehow removes us from it's effects. As an American you have presumably been affected by eg GDPR and should therefore recognise this is not true. Leaving the EU means we have removed ourselves from that decision making process. We will still be affected by any decisions they make.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - eyeinthepyramid 8y ago
      Didn't the UK create GDPR like regulations first?
    - mehh 8y ago
      No one knows if it is actually a bad thing to leave yet, give it 50 years. For some reason people read a couple of articles and become experts on really complicated, multi faceted, non deterministic systems and decide to expound their opinions on those around them.
robrenaud 8y ago
Trump is president because 1) Facebook made easy to find the "latent Klansman" in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. OR 2) There are large swaths of working class white people in the middle of the country unhappy with how their economic prospects have been trending in the last 10 years.
- minikites 8y ago
  It's not about their economic prospects: https://twitter.com/stevenvmiller/status/1014967443813519360 https://twitter.com/stevenvmiller/status/1014967443813519360 https://github.com/svmiller/earr https://github.com/svmiller/earr https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-racism-economic-anxiety-study https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-rac... https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/04/25/debunking-election-economic-anxiety-myth/BnrFb0K14C62VrPZgKDR6M/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/04/25/debunking-ele... https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-make-people-vote-trump-racism-did/ https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-mak...
  - trocadero 8y ago
    >https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-mak.. https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-mak.... >We created a stereotyping scale which measures views like believing people of color are more violent or lazier than whites, but it was not included in our final models because it did not predict voting behavior. Let's just ignore the thing that disproves our premise.
- tclancy 8y ago
  Even if one accepts your proposal only one of those is true and it must be the less offensive one, why aren’t those working class white folks rising up en masse given the group they voted for have done nothing good for them economically and seem transfixed on driving out nonwhites from the country?
- alejohausner 8y ago
  Option 2, for sure. Remember Bill Clinton's slogan during his 1992 campaign: "It's the economy, stupid." People vote with their wallets first. The recession at the time lost Bush the presidency. The lousy job market cost Hillary the presidency too. Trump is a protest candidate. His supporters are not knuckle-dragging troglodytes who crawled to the voting booth, drooled on the voting machine, and grunted "make America great again!". They are rational beings, who looked back at Obama's presidency, and were not impressed. Yes, employment improved during Obama's tenure, but new jobs have been low-paying and low-status. No bankers went to prison. The corporate-friendly policies of the Obama era didn't earn him friends in the working class. And Hillary promised more of the same. Targeted advertising can prod racists to vote, as the OP suggests, but that only works if the non-racist voting majority feels some hope.
kilo_bravo_3 8y ago
>It’s as though Mark Zuckerberg woke up one morning and realized that the oily rags he’d been accumulating in his garage could be refined for an extremely low-grade, low-value crude oil. No one would pay very much for this oil, but there were a lot of oily rags, and provided no one asked him to pay for the inevitable horrific fires that would result from filling the world’s garages with oily rags, he could turn a tidy profit. Given the number of trackers that my ad-blocker blocked while reading this, isn't this article, Locusmag.com, and Cory Doctorow himself sprinkling just a little more oil on the pile of rags? Don't forget to smash that share button!
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  That's a tricky one. At this point, there are very few media outlets that haven't made a deal with the de^H^H ad and social media networks. As a result, any freelance writer, even one who is also a privacy advocate, has to make a choice between avoiding any involvement of their work in surveillance capitalism, and getting paid and having their work be read. I have a hard time faulting Doctorow for choosing to be relevant.
- kbenson 8y ago
  > Cory Doctorow himself sprinkling just a little more oil on the pile of rags? I just looked, and this is mirrored on his blog[1], and it appears to have very little or no tracking set up. Feel free to read it there. https://craphound.com/news/2018/07/02/mark-zuckerberg-and-his-empire-of-oily-rags/ https://craphound.com/news/2018/07/02/mark-zuckerberg-and-hi...
  - disqard 8y ago
    Thank you for this link. Thanks GP also, for pointing out the irony that an article discussing our digital society's deep dependence on advertising is itself hosted on a space that has to rely on advertising to stay afloat (and thereby engages in precisely the sort of pernicious tracking that the article is dissecting).
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    That's a much better link!
CountSessine 8y ago
Controversial opinion: 'racists' are citizens too, and are entitled to vote in elections. If Cambridge Analytica and the people who employed them were at all effective, it was because they identified personality traits that some voters have and spoke to them about things they were concerned about. What really motivated Trump supporters was a message that there is an epidemic of illegal immigration which rule-followers view as lawlessness and rule-breaking. Obviously, in their minds, this is caused by innumerate, one-world leftists who care nothing about cultural dissolution because they have no culture and observe no traditions themselves, and love moral hazard as long as they're not the ones paying. This is a bit silly, of course, but calling people bastards isn't going to convince this group to Vote Democrat next time around.
- snarf21 8y ago
  I agree but I think the less focused part of the Trump platform was that these illegals are stealing your jobs. They are the reason that you don't have better paying work or pay less taxes. Obviously all of the "bringing back coal jobs" has not happened (and I don't think it ever can again) but the Democrats seemed content to campaign on "Trump is crazy" and never really confronted the economic divide. Most of the people locally (in PA) that have soured on Trump some is because he hasn't come through on the job promises.
- mpweiher 8y ago
  > 'racists' are citizens too, and are entitled to vote in elections. (1) Sadly, yes. However, racism shouldn't really have won the election as it isn't a majority viewpoint. (2) Even if racists are allowed to vote, there is a limit to the racism that you can put into public policy, at least with a simple majority. (3) A democracy is actually allowed, and even required, to defend itself against certain types of ideas, for example fascism. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streitbare_Demokratie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streitbare_Demokratie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
digi_owl 8y ago
Maybe i have just not paid attention, but i get the sense that Doctorow has throttled back his activities since moving to LA...
quadyeast 8y ago
It's ironic that the tool to increase friendship is evil.
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  >tool to increase friendship Media company with built-in social proof.
alejohausner 8y ago
Doctorow assumes that racists got Trump elected, because Trump and his Russian cronies persuaded them to vote, using targeted advertising. He is insulting large swathes of reasonable non-racist voters, who chose Trump as a protest to the status quo. They looked at Hillary, and saw four more years of kowtowing to corporate interests, and ignoring working class voters. They saw crappy jobs replacing the jobs they'd had before the recession. They saw that no bankers went to prison. They saw the Democrats' shoddy treatment of Sanders, and figured the Dems needed a spanking. That's why we're stuck with this self-promoting windbag: not because voters are stupid, but because they made a rational decision, and chose a clown over a corporate crony.
- varjag 8y ago
  Trump ran on the platform of racism, xenophobia and hatred. To support him (aside from whatever legitimate grievance one had) is to support that. Everyone who voted for him is responsible for his policies, and it's really doubtful that many of them regret it.
- Izkata 8y ago
  > They saw the Democrats' shoddy treatment of Sanders This is one part of the protest voting that's consistently left out, but I think is more important than people realize. Trump and Sanders had one thing in common: They didn't pander to corporations, though for different reasons. Sanders wanted to get that money out of politics, and Trump had no use for their donations. After Sanders was out of the running, the mixture of how he was treated and the DNC having chosen the corporate candidate led quite a few in my circles to vote Trump specifically in protest.
zizek23 8y ago
The tech community have become bad actors, and a lot of apologism and hand-waving happens here. At the moment they are just trading on the reputation of early pioneers who at least professed some ethics and commitment to public good to pretend they are part of the same group. They continue to posture on public discussions while implementing dark patterns and surveillance as a matter of course in their workplace. This is the fact, the tech community led by SV have sold out and they know it. Their main priority is pretending its not happening or diminishing the consequences. If there is a backlash it will be well deserved as these people are selling out the rest of the world for profit, greed and personal gain.
- tmpz22 8y ago
  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair "Everybody wants to believe they are a good person, if you try to convince them otherwise they will attack you and refuse to listen" - tmpz22
ljw1001 8y ago
Worth a read if for no other reason than that the phrase "surveillance capitalism" should be as widely known as possible.

417 points by laurex 8y ago

I keep wanting to pull the trigger. Mr Doctorow's article is perhaps the last straw... Q: How do I permanently delete my account? A: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674 https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674

32qwef 8y ago
Don't know how much you use FB but I highly recommend it. When I got rid of mine, all I lost was status updates from people who weren't really my friends to begin with. Your close friends will stick by you and your social life will grow richer, with more face-to-face meetings. Quitting Facebook is great.
- tapoxi 8y ago
  My issue with deleting Facebook is that a lot of services depend on it for authentication and friend/contact discovery. I wish there were an open standard for a social graph.
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    Apart from developing Facebook integrations for Work, I have never once used Facebook to sign into a site and do not allow anything to rummage through my contacts and "discover" things. So I'm confused as to why this is a necessity. What services do you use that won't function without your Facebook account?
    - hluska 8y ago
      I once had a conversation with a junior developer who told me that he would rather die than give up Tinder. To this day, I honestly don't think he was joking...
      - paulie_a 8y ago
        I am going to assume a junior developer is younger in age so it isn't that surprising that getting laid is a high priority.
        hluska 8y ago
        True, and I don't think you can use Tinder without a Facebook account. :)
  - 32qwef 8y ago
    There should be, I agree. The best features of facebook are events, and friend recommendations. It would be great if we had an open standard for the social graph, and then other companies could make services like events or friend discovery, and you could pick and choose which ones you subscribed to. As for authentication, thankfully most sites let you register an account with them. It's a little inconvenient, but with a password manager it's simple. Still, I wish OpenID was more widespread.
  - testvox 8y ago
    I don't think too many services have a hard dependency on FB. I haven't had an account for years and while many services do their best to convince you to use FB for auth I've only run into a few very early stage projects that absolutely requires it.
datalus 8y ago
I can confirm, deleting FB was a good thing overall, but YMMV. I was largely using it as an event planner, but found that I could just subscribe via email lists or other ways for the venues I cared about keeping up with. It also helps that I don't know a majority of my outer circle's daily status updates and when I see them at mutual engagements like birthday parties or house warmings, I'm more interested in talking to them and catching up.
karmelapple 8y ago
I’d like to, but it’s a valuable way to get my ideas out to friends and family and to have discussions. It’s more valuable and more personal than, say, a blog, because: * my post + all the comments show up in the same UI where people go to see dumb videos or cute photos of friends’ families * I can share a link or thought, and have more follow up with these friends and family, because they know me on a personal level, and know that the conversation is limited to people who at least somewhat know me, rather than all manner of internet trolls. They trust me more than random other person on the Internet who might share the exact same information... just like I trust them more than random people on the internet. If Facebook is going to keep a shadow profile on me anyway, I want to get a little something out of it. Whether they should be allowed to keep the shadow profile on me or not, though, is a different question altogether. And I think only legislation could decide that effectively.
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  >I’d like to, but it’s a valuable way to get my ideas out to friends and family and to have discussions. My friends and family aren't interested in most the stuff I'm interested in. I'll call and text them, talk to them about our lives. I'll post my interests in places where people who share them can consume. I mostly just felt paralyzed by the platform. Not wanting to put personal info because it would be used to build a profile on me, and not wanting to interact with a lot of media because it would then use that as an excuse to promote it to my friends and family.
bsenftner 8y ago
Yeah, you'll wait till it's too late. Just freaking quit. You'll find how to reach those that matter to you anyway. And those contacts will be more meaningful, because you're not on FB, where communications have degenerated to less than authentic.
flowless 8y ago
Just did it after 2 years of ignoring it - had to accept GDPR stuff and face recognition to get in and be able to hit delete. Feels good anyway.

oblio 8y ago

> That’s because dossiers on billions of people hold the power to wreak almost unimaginable harm, and yet, each dossier brings in just a few dollars a year. For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains. > There’s an old-fashioned word for this: corruption. In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear. Spot on. Google's in exactly the same boat, it's just that they provide a few services which are legitimately useful (Search, Gmail), so they're targeted less right now. How we will get out of this, I have no idea...

crispyambulance 8y ago
> How we will get out of this, I have no idea... I don't know. It was a faustian bargain we all made. It was fun for a while, but now it is getting increasingly ugly. How does one get out of a Faustian Bargain, anyway?
- clouddrover 8y ago
  > It was a faustian bargain we all made. I didn't make that bargain, but I think the real problem these days is that it doesn't matter if you made it or not. All it takes is one weak link in the chain and suddenly you're under surveillance from a company you had no intention of being involved with. I don't, for example, use GMail but if I communicate with people who do then my mail falls under Google surveillance. I don't use Google Drive but if I do business with a company that does then some of my data has been forked over to Google and I'm unlikely to ever know about it. I don't use Facebook but if I appear in a photo that someone else uploads and annotates then Facebook has a photo ID of me without my say-so. It's difficult to stay clear of surveillance companies when you're constantly being undermined by the unintentional (or, perhaps more precisely, unthinking) actions of even just a few people. My data's being bought and sold every day and there is no way I can control that, opt out of it, or even get a list of companies who have my information or what they're doing with it. If this is the information age and if information has value, then my information is my asset and I want control of it. Without the ability for a person to assert sovereignty over their own data, how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data?

RobertoG 8y ago

" [..] given enough surveillance, companies can sell us anything: Brexit, Trump, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, and successful election bids for absolute bastards like Turkey’s Erdogan and Hungary’s Orban." The same as the author, I have serious problems believing this but it has become a common place now even in mainstream media. In a way, I worry more about this, than about the others dangers that we can read in the article (I agree with those also). It seems that, now, whenever people vote for somebody or something that they are not "suppose" to vote, they have been "manipulated" and it's the fault of Russian bots. I'm not saying that, like always, there are not forces in play trying to move things their way, but I find worrisome how easily that narrative is accepted. It's a kind of mainstream paranoia conspiracy or, maybe, a too convenient excuse for not finding the real reasons why people feel disgruntled.

turnitoff 8y ago
I mean, it's kind of a half-truth, isn't it? We know that this sort of manipulation is going on in an organized way: Sybil attacks are pretty common in politics. But it's insidious precisely because of this Patomkin-effect: it makes it unclear how many real supporters the issue has, and it gives an easy cop-out for people who would be otherwise responsible for their own defeat. In a way, it becomes a scapegoat that can unite friend and foe. (Although I think Doctorow is steering clear from the very stupid interpretation of this effect)
- RobertoG 8y ago
  >>"[..] it's kind of a half-truth, isn't it?" More like a quarter-truth that allow to forget the other three quarters. Economic policies dismantle the welfare state in the U.K. but the people vote Brexit because some adds. Part of the population in the USA is left economically behind but the reason Trump is elected is because some Facebook advertisements. One thousand years of history but part of the Catalan people search independence from Spain because the 'Russian bots'. The economy is not working but people is sceptic about the European Union 'because Internet'. And you heard all that in mainstream media and in the mouths or politics. It seems to me that happy people don't vote revolutions, never mind the advertisements. It's when people is angry or scared that they search for "strong leaders" and "guilty parties".

forgottenpass 8y ago

I read the first half of this. I can't decide if I think Doctorow is dancing around the more important idea that goes unsaid, or if this really is the best way to present it so people will accept it. Everyone is a whole lot more susceptible to propaganda than anyone admits. Doctorow presents this as Klansman getting the message that Trump is their guy. Mao, Goebbels and any other obvious-baddies are perfect for making the point. By pretending like it doesn't happen TO YOU, you'll accept that it can possibly happen to humans (that are not you). But it happens to everybody, all the time. The only propaganda we notice is the stuff that is so far from targeting us we see it's comically incongruity. But propaganda isn't meant for the hard sell. Propaganda doesn't change your mind. Propaganda gets you to cross the threshold and do something you were already positioned to do, by giving you meaning for doing it.

klez 8y ago
> Propaganda doesn't change your mind, it gets you to cross the threshold and do something you were already positioned to do, by giving you meaning for doing it. Read the rest of the article, it kinda goes there.
i_am_nomad 8y ago
Agreed, and in an earlier comment I intimated that Doctorow doesn’t really object to propaganda, he just objects to other people’s propaganda. (And his objection in fact contains some propaganda itself.)
- forgottenpass 8y ago
  I kinda got that impression as I was reading it, but had hoped I was wrong. There is a line of criticism I see often that goes something like this "$thing is convincing people $bad_idea." (Sorry for the vague way of presenting this, but I can't abstract it more clearly.) I take that criticism and see the natural next step as reducing the amount of influence that $thing has over people in specific, and in general give them the tools to evaluate unfounded ideas and manipulation. I find this conclusion blindingly obvious, and is where I depart from would-be political allies who conclude with the same obviousness: "lets re-engineer $thing to manipulatively spread $good_idea."

wiz21c 8y ago

FTA : >>> Facebook isn’t a mind-control ray. Cory is fine but here, he's wrong. FaceBook is a mind control tool. It is a mind control because when you send it some information, you know that friends, facebook employees, facebook algorithm, potentially marketeers, potentially state agencies, etc. will read read it. So you inflict yourself some degree of censorship. You basically alter your behaviour. So, in a sense, it is a mind control machine.

amarkov 8y ago
Most people aren't particularly tempted to shape their behavior to Facebook. They just use other channels for things they don't specifically want everyone to see. If some people are so uninvested in their thoughts that "open up a group chat" is an insurmountable barrier... well, they were going to be mind controlled by a stiff breeze, so it's hard to blame Facebook.
smt88 8y ago
Any effective advertising is mind control, in a sense. It convinces you to take an action you wouldn't have otherwise taken. Sometimes that action is bad for you, but the advertising has convinced you that it's good for you (or that the alternative is scarier). The better Facebook can convince you to take an action, the more value its platform has. The Darwinism of the ad industry meant that the top ad-tech companies were eventually going to be really, really good at changing people's behavior.
theyinwhy 8y ago
You don't know who will read it because of algorithms or just because someone did not log in and so on... Those tools are just media and offer you visibility to a certain degree. And of course you adapt your presentation style to reach a specific audience.
frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
The information economy as self-inflicted panopticon?
- badbug 8y ago

zerostar07 8y ago

I wish facebook could be outright extinguished from the internet. Then a lot of people would realize that those barbarians were a kind of solution.

i_am_nomad 8y ago

Doctorow is right, of course, but it’s lamentable that he declares the ugly rise of Trump as only a feat of media influence, when in fact it’s also a reaction to it. No one had a problem with the Obama campaign’s heavy use of social media, a strategy that harvested racial tensions just as much as Trump’s did.

gfodor 8y ago
Agreed these otherwise great criticisms of social media seem to always fall into this trap. Turning this into a partisan issue is going to backfire, I promise you that. Make this about a political party and it is going to be all too easy to divide people on this issue. Right now the left and the right are aligned in their loathing of Facebook -- but every time the message "Facebook helped Trump get elected because his supporters are racists and easily manipulated" is parrotted it serves to encourage them to take the opposing side to defend themselves and claim Facebook's tactics are being overblown. They'll never defend Zuck, but they will fight against clamping down on tech companies in the name of defending capitalism and American jobs (and, without saying so, as a way to assert they were not manipulated and resent being called racists.)
- trocadero 8y ago
  This is definitely a partisan issue. It's true that there was always a low level pro-privacy/anti-fb sentiment, but it's the perception that FB was used to get Trump elected turned it into an inferno. If Clinton had won the election there would be far less attention paid to FB.
cabaalis 8y ago
Trump did and said many things during his campaign that would have been political suicide before. The media is still struggling to understand why people support him in the face of what they consider detestable. They also fear what politically incorrect things will become fair game in the next crop, since it has been proven you can do and say those things and still win. I think the result was largely in support of pushing back against the ideas of political correctness. I know many fine people who voted and support Trump. It isn't that they are racist, bigoted, etc. It's that they believe our country was spiraling into a state where you couldn't be, and that was too much an affront to free speech. (For example, wanting to secure our borders so that your own children born here would have a better chance at finding a job was becoming "racist")

fortythirteen 8y ago

(Argues that social media and data tracking is a dangerous combination that can serve to further alienate us from our humanity) (Proceeds to inject his political agenda that, while it has many truths, is written in a way that will completely alienate anyone not far-left)

tclancy 8y ago
When did suggesting government oversight of companies that have shown themselves to be bad actors become a far-left belief? Why does it feel like these appellations come from people that aren’t so much right or left politically, but just want to keep their fingers in their ears out of fear?
- fortythirteen 8y ago
  Did you read the article? He literally gave every example of maliciousness as right wing and provided no examples of how the left is equally manipulated.
  - crispyambulance 8y ago
    So, is there an "equal opportunity" rule now? Do all citations of evil, atrocity, and maliciousness require both a "right-wing" and "left-wing" example just for the sake of fairness?
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      In the current environment, yes, they do. Why? Because too often, each side tries to paint the other as the center of all evil. And people of both sides get really tired of being painted that way. They tune out very quickly when they run into something that paints them that way. So if you want both sides to hear you, you have to not shoot only at one side.
      - crispyambulance 8y ago

malvosenior 8y ago

I think articles like this do a lot more to build support for Trump than anything Facebook has done. Is it really that hard to believe that people voted for something you don’t like because they think you’re wrong and not because they were brainwashed?

Spearchucker 8y ago
Is like he said in his conclusion - social media didn't convince people to become racists. It convinced racists to vote.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Or, calling people racists convinced them to vote against the people attacking them.

mtgx 8y ago

> For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains. That's the biggest insight of the article. That's exactly what the likes of Facebook and Google (and telecoms, and data brokers, etc) are doing.

Jyaif 8y ago
Can somebody help me understand this sentence? What is "commercial surveillance"? What are "risks associated with mass surveillance"?
- droopyEyelids 8y ago
  Throughout history there has never been an organization that lasted forever, let alone one that lasted forever with benign leadership. Any organization with massive surveillance data that lacks beneficent leaders may harm people.
- munificent 8y ago
  > What is "commercial surveillance"? When a for-profit company ("commercial") gathers large, detailed dossiers of millions of people ("surveillance"). For example, if you use Twitter, go to https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data and look at the stuff under "Interests and ads data". That's the tip of the iceberg. > What are "risks associated with mass surveillance"? Like the article says, when a company has access to detailed personal information about lots and lots of people, many bad things can happen: * That information can be stolen by hackers and then used for identity theft or social engineering to gain access to private accounts. Think about how to reset your bank password your bank asks you questions like "where did you meet your first significant other?" Then consider how that event is probably on your Facebook feed. * Companies like Cambridge Analytica can buy "ads" that are precisely targeted using that data to persuade certain groups of people to show up or not show up at polls and influence elections in non-Democratic ways. Etc.
tough_cookies 8y ago
While I want to agree with this, it's hard to argue that Facebook and Google "privatize all the gains." If you added up all of the economic value that google's zero-dollar-cost products provide globally (even ignoring Facebook which IMO has a much more dubious net value), that's going to be a pretty big number.

deleted 8y ago

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ggdG 8y ago

FTA: > absolute bastards like Turkey’s Erdogan and Hungary’s Orban. I wonder what Viktor Orbán has done according to Doctorow to be put in the same ballpark as Erdogan. From https://turkeypurge.com/ https://turkeypurge.com/ : Turkey’s post-coup crackdown: 151,967 dismissed / 140,452 detained / 79,774 arrested / 3,003 schools, dormitories and universities shut down / 5,822 academics lost jobs / 4,463 judges, prosecutors dismissed / 189 media outlets shut down / 319 journalists arrested since July 15, 2016 / as of June 25, 2018

pjc50 8y ago
This kind of thing: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/democracy-is-on-the-brink-in-hungary-so-why-is-no-one-talking-about-it-a7883876.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/democracy-is-o... It's not quite so advanced in violence as Turkey, but it's definitely along the same path.
- tim333 8y ago
  Yeah it took a decade or so for Erdogan to start doing really bad stuff. Give Orban time to get in his swing.
- ggdG 8y ago
  I read nothing in that article that hints at any government violence in Hungary, so I don't get why you even bring this up. Sure, there's lots of innuendo about how the EU is trying to teach a lesson about democracy and human rights to a reluctant Hungary. The thing is, if we have to choose among Orbán and Jüncker the leader with the most democratic legitimacy, then Orbán wins hands down. Hardly anyone in the EU voted for Jüncker, except for a few Luxemburgers. Hardly anyone knew what the program of his party, the EPP, was at the time of the election. Orbán on the other hand enjoys a huge amount of support from the Hungarians. You may disagree with his viewpoints, but that doesn't make his leadership any less democratic. He is careful not to follow the example of Western Europe with its disastrous policies of mass immigration and - as a result - islamisation. This viewpoint is shared with all governments in Eastern Europe and - at last - a growing number of people in Western Europe. He tries to raise awareness about the Soros-funded no-borders NGOs, which are an attempt from outside the country to make the Hungarian press and politicians talk and behave a certain way. The article in the Independent tries to paint this as anti-Semitism, but in another article they admit that even Israel disagrees with this viewpoint: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/george-soros-israel-hungary-posters-defence-anti-immigrant-campaign-vilify-businessman-a7836316.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/george-soros... The only reason the unelected leaders of the EU put pressure on Orbán is because he poses a threat to their power. Of course they use words like "human rights" and "democracy" to cover their real motivations. Look at the non-reaction of the EU when the Spanish Rajoy government locked up Catalonian political prisoners (by the way, do you know of any polical prisoners in Hungary?). Why didn't they defend democracy and human rights at that time? The reason is that the current EU leaders see the Catalonian independence movement as a threat to their power.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

brookhaven_dude 8y ago

Most people I talk to (even the tech savvy) don't really care about their data being collected by all these companies. They feel it's a fair trade. Ironically an extremely tech-UNsavvy young woman I know makes sure to minimize her usage of these services (never had FB, instagram etc.) and is actually quite protective of her data.

beager 8y ago
I think personal attitudes toward collection of one’s personal data are orthogonal to the issue here, which is the weaponization of data collected in the aggregate. This is why I believe that personal boycotts of Facebook and the like, while responsible on an individual level, represent a slow and inefficient way of stopping the corruptible dynamics of large-scale data-collection ad model companies like FB. Regulation and accountability would be more effective. I know both of those words are four-letter words in the modern tech world zeitgeist.
fullshark 8y ago
The vast majority of people don't care, and many of those that claim to care, reveal they don't through their actions.

dnomad 8y ago

> Rather, the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George Soros. This is where the argument collapses. It's well known that the right-wing have carefully and diligently constructed their own parallel reality [1]. There are endless right-wing news sites, blogs, and forums that tirelessly aggregate these people and pump them full of propaganda [2]. Facebook here is acting, at best, as a viral multiplier. Even if Facebook were to disappear tomorrow there are a plethora of sites ready to leap in at a moment's notice. Facebook's disappearance would not degrade the propaganda effort. Heck, there's always email. Cory doesn't have the courage to say it but his real issue must be with the internet as a whole. Propaganda is the internet's real killer app. You can see just how nicely this works: propaganda relies completely on repetition and copying [3]. And what is the one thing the internet does better than anything else? It may feel good to blame Facebook but this will ultimately accomplish nothing. Propagandists will literally build their own social networking sites if Facebook goes away. The sort of people who obsess over immigration aren't going to simply log off. They are connected now and there are plenty of people out there eager to connect with these people and validate their most elaborate paranoid fantasies. Where there is demand, there will be supply. [1] https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017/03/15/politics-government/major-new-study-shows-political-polarization-mainly-right-wing https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017/03/15/politics-government/maj... [2] http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-partisanship-and-junk-news/ http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-partisansh... [3] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...

nerfhammer 8y ago
yea he's trying to conflate propaganda with "sophisticated targeting" when it's really AFAICT people sharing shitposts with each other reinforcing their beliefs. if you look at, say 4chan or fox news there's no "sophisticated targeting" going on there at all
hluska 8y ago
Have you ever tried to purchase an ad on Facebook? If so, please give me examples of the type of targeting you used. (I should note that I'm genuinely not being an ass, I'm just trying to figure out your level of experience with the platform. My education is in marketing, I've run many campaigns across many platforms, yet I have never found a tool anywhere that lets me target ads the way Facebook does.)

micimize 8y ago

While I am also concerned about the growing depth of surveillance, there hasn't been any _real_ evidence that Cambridge Analytica's methods were effective (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment_of_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment...). That they were mostly ineffective seems to me the more reasonable null hypothesis. Why assume these shady micro-targeting campaigns are such a big deal in the face of the huge, multidimensional propaganda wars that are political campaigns? Without the presumption that the micro-targeting is super effective, nothing looks like it's on fire.

coryfklein 8y ago
The article specifically claims that Cambridge Analytica's techniques _didn't_ sway opinion, merely that they allowed them to locate specific voters. The wikipedia section you linked says much the same: > Research discussed by Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College showed that it is extremely hard to alter voters' preferences, because many likely voters are already committed partisans; as a result, it is easier to simply mobilize partisan voters.
- zerostar07 8y ago
  that doesnt explain anything though, it just kicks the can a bit further down. He's not clear whether the problem is facebook, the fact that majority of voters are gullible idiots, or democracy itself?
  - coryfklein 8y ago
    There's a distinction between changing someone else's political views and inflaming their existing views via outrage, fake news, etc. If one is easier than the other, then this article does indeed explain things. Cambridge Analytica may be unable to change political views, but it may have been capable of mobilizing a select group of disenfranchised voters that it carefully selected. Given low voter turnouts, you can increase chances of your candidate winning by merely improving turnout for a select group.

jbb67 8y ago

I don't get this article at all. It talk about brexit, yet we voted for it despite all the incredible amount of lies being spread about it being a bad thing.

usuallymatt 8y ago
You....you don't think Brexit was a bad thing?????
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Many, many people don't think it's a bad thing. As an American I look at things like GDPR and the proposed copyright law and completely understand why a sovereign country wouldn't want to be part of the EU. You may not agree, but it shouldn't be mindblowing that reasonable people hold this view.
  - lotsofcows 8y ago
    You seem to be under the impression that opting out of it somehow removes us from it's effects. As an American you have presumably been affected by eg GDPR and should therefore recognise this is not true. Leaving the EU means we have removed ourselves from that decision making process. We will still be affected by any decisions they make.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - eyeinthepyramid 8y ago
    Didn't the UK create GDPR like regulations first?
  - mehh 8y ago
    No one knows if it is actually a bad thing to leave yet, give it 50 years. For some reason people read a couple of articles and become experts on really complicated, multi faceted, non deterministic systems and decide to expound their opinions on those around them.

robrenaud 8y ago

Trump is president because 1) Facebook made easy to find the "latent Klansman" in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. OR 2) There are large swaths of working class white people in the middle of the country unhappy with how their economic prospects have been trending in the last 10 years.

minikites 8y ago
It's not about their economic prospects: https://twitter.com/stevenvmiller/status/1014967443813519360 https://twitter.com/stevenvmiller/status/1014967443813519360 https://github.com/svmiller/earr https://github.com/svmiller/earr https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-racism-economic-anxiety-study https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-rac... https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/04/25/debunking-election-economic-anxiety-myth/BnrFb0K14C62VrPZgKDR6M/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/04/25/debunking-ele... https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-make-people-vote-trump-racism-did/ https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-mak...
- trocadero 8y ago
  >https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-mak.. https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-mak.... >We created a stereotyping scale which measures views like believing people of color are more violent or lazier than whites, but it was not included in our final models because it did not predict voting behavior. Let's just ignore the thing that disproves our premise.
tclancy 8y ago
Even if one accepts your proposal only one of those is true and it must be the less offensive one, why aren’t those working class white folks rising up en masse given the group they voted for have done nothing good for them economically and seem transfixed on driving out nonwhites from the country?
alejohausner 8y ago
Option 2, for sure. Remember Bill Clinton's slogan during his 1992 campaign: "It's the economy, stupid." People vote with their wallets first. The recession at the time lost Bush the presidency. The lousy job market cost Hillary the presidency too. Trump is a protest candidate. His supporters are not knuckle-dragging troglodytes who crawled to the voting booth, drooled on the voting machine, and grunted "make America great again!". They are rational beings, who looked back at Obama's presidency, and were not impressed. Yes, employment improved during Obama's tenure, but new jobs have been low-paying and low-status. No bankers went to prison. The corporate-friendly policies of the Obama era didn't earn him friends in the working class. And Hillary promised more of the same. Targeted advertising can prod racists to vote, as the OP suggests, but that only works if the non-racist voting majority feels some hope.

kilo_bravo_3 8y ago

>It’s as though Mark Zuckerberg woke up one morning and realized that the oily rags he’d been accumulating in his garage could be refined for an extremely low-grade, low-value crude oil. No one would pay very much for this oil, but there were a lot of oily rags, and provided no one asked him to pay for the inevitable horrific fires that would result from filling the world’s garages with oily rags, he could turn a tidy profit. Given the number of trackers that my ad-blocker blocked while reading this, isn't this article, Locusmag.com, and Cory Doctorow himself sprinkling just a little more oil on the pile of rags? Don't forget to smash that share button!

bunderbunder 8y ago
That's a tricky one. At this point, there are very few media outlets that haven't made a deal with the de^H^H ad and social media networks. As a result, any freelance writer, even one who is also a privacy advocate, has to make a choice between avoiding any involvement of their work in surveillance capitalism, and getting paid and having their work be read. I have a hard time faulting Doctorow for choosing to be relevant.
kbenson 8y ago
> Cory Doctorow himself sprinkling just a little more oil on the pile of rags? I just looked, and this is mirrored on his blog[1], and it appears to have very little or no tracking set up. Feel free to read it there. https://craphound.com/news/2018/07/02/mark-zuckerberg-and-his-empire-of-oily-rags/ https://craphound.com/news/2018/07/02/mark-zuckerberg-and-hi...
- disqard 8y ago
  Thank you for this link. Thanks GP also, for pointing out the irony that an article discussing our digital society's deep dependence on advertising is itself hosted on a space that has to rely on advertising to stay afloat (and thereby engages in precisely the sort of pernicious tracking that the article is dissecting).
- jacquesm 8y ago
  That's a much better link!

CountSessine 8y ago

Controversial opinion: 'racists' are citizens too, and are entitled to vote in elections. If Cambridge Analytica and the people who employed them were at all effective, it was because they identified personality traits that some voters have and spoke to them about things they were concerned about. What really motivated Trump supporters was a message that there is an epidemic of illegal immigration which rule-followers view as lawlessness and rule-breaking. Obviously, in their minds, this is caused by innumerate, one-world leftists who care nothing about cultural dissolution because they have no culture and observe no traditions themselves, and love moral hazard as long as they're not the ones paying. This is a bit silly, of course, but calling people bastards isn't going to convince this group to Vote Democrat next time around.

snarf21 8y ago
I agree but I think the less focused part of the Trump platform was that these illegals are stealing your jobs. They are the reason that you don't have better paying work or pay less taxes. Obviously all of the "bringing back coal jobs" has not happened (and I don't think it ever can again) but the Democrats seemed content to campaign on "Trump is crazy" and never really confronted the economic divide. Most of the people locally (in PA) that have soured on Trump some is because he hasn't come through on the job promises.
mpweiher 8y ago
> 'racists' are citizens too, and are entitled to vote in elections. (1) Sadly, yes. However, racism shouldn't really have won the election as it isn't a majority viewpoint. (2) Even if racists are allowed to vote, there is a limit to the racism that you can put into public policy, at least with a simple majority. (3) A democracy is actually allowed, and even required, to defend itself against certain types of ideas, for example fascism. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streitbare_Demokratie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streitbare_Demokratie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

digi_owl 8y ago

Maybe i have just not paid attention, but i get the sense that Doctorow has throttled back his activities since moving to LA...

quadyeast 8y ago

It's ironic that the tool to increase friendship is evil.

TACIXAT 8y ago
>tool to increase friendship Media company with built-in social proof.

alejohausner 8y ago

Doctorow assumes that racists got Trump elected, because Trump and his Russian cronies persuaded them to vote, using targeted advertising. He is insulting large swathes of reasonable non-racist voters, who chose Trump as a protest to the status quo. They looked at Hillary, and saw four more years of kowtowing to corporate interests, and ignoring working class voters. They saw crappy jobs replacing the jobs they'd had before the recession. They saw that no bankers went to prison. They saw the Democrats' shoddy treatment of Sanders, and figured the Dems needed a spanking. That's why we're stuck with this self-promoting windbag: not because voters are stupid, but because they made a rational decision, and chose a clown over a corporate crony.

varjag 8y ago
Trump ran on the platform of racism, xenophobia and hatred. To support him (aside from whatever legitimate grievance one had) is to support that. Everyone who voted for him is responsible for his policies, and it's really doubtful that many of them regret it.
Izkata 8y ago
> They saw the Democrats' shoddy treatment of Sanders This is one part of the protest voting that's consistently left out, but I think is more important than people realize. Trump and Sanders had one thing in common: They didn't pander to corporations, though for different reasons. Sanders wanted to get that money out of politics, and Trump had no use for their donations. After Sanders was out of the running, the mixture of how he was treated and the DNC having chosen the corporate candidate led quite a few in my circles to vote Trump specifically in protest.

zizek23 8y ago

The tech community have become bad actors, and a lot of apologism and hand-waving happens here. At the moment they are just trading on the reputation of early pioneers who at least professed some ethics and commitment to public good to pretend they are part of the same group. They continue to posture on public discussions while implementing dark patterns and surveillance as a matter of course in their workplace. This is the fact, the tech community led by SV have sold out and they know it. Their main priority is pretending its not happening or diminishing the consequences. If there is a backlash it will be well deserved as these people are selling out the rest of the world for profit, greed and personal gain.

tmpz22 8y ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair "Everybody wants to believe they are a good person, if you try to convince them otherwise they will attack you and refuse to listen" - tmpz22

ljw1001 8y ago

Worth a read if for no other reason than that the phrase "surveillance capitalism" should be as widely known as possible.