Dick Pountain/ Idealog298/ 3rd May 2019 14:21:19
To say that the shine has worn off Social Media would be something of an understatement: in fact we appear to be on the verge of what sociologist Stan Cohen memorably labelled a ‘moral panic’ that might end up severely curtailing the freedom of web communication in some countries (though probably not this one). I’ve mentioned before that I review books for another, rather dustier, journal than PC Pro, and I’ve just completed a blockbuster on three that describe the darker side of the internet: Martin Moore’s ‘Democracy Hacked’, Susan Landau’s ‘Listening In’ and Matthew Hindman’s ‘The Internet Trap’. I still feel slightly sick and keep looking over my shoulder more than is healthy. Moore’s book in particular is an eye-opener, and one that I heartily recommend.
One of his central chapters traces the history of online culture all the way from the hippy ideals of the Whole Earth Catalog, through Perry Barlow, Stallman, ‘information wants to be free’ and Open Source, right up through its discovery by libertarian billionaires Koch brothers, Peter Thiel and Richard Mercer, to Cambridge Analytica, Trump and Brexit. The irony is of course that we got the internet we wished for, free and unfettered, but that didn’t make it a force for good (or even for middling).
In the bad old days our information was controlled by large corporations, from News International to the BBC, who imposed their own values via the professional journalists they employed to write, speak and film it. In short they policed the information stream for ‘our own good’. Nowadays we’re free as birds to communicate anything we want to whoever we want thanks to the marvellous WWW. On YouTube I can indulge my cravings, as confessed last month, for Japanese street-food and rusty old tools, and can post my own avant-garde computer-generated music for no-one to listen to. I can swap pithy witticisms with my hundreds of ‘friends’ on Facebook, listen to almost any music in the world instantly on Spotify, and buy all my electronic bits on Amazon instead of schlepping all the way to Maplins (who they put out of business). Of course YouTube happens to be owned by Google, a bigger and more profitable corporation than any of those old ones, and unlike them neither it nor Facebook polices anything very much, enabling all the world’s most dangerous nutjobs to get heard on the same terms as sensible folk.
Matthew Hindman’s book is more wonkish than Moore’s, and hence may possibly interest readers of this column more. He performs experiments on large web traffic datasets, like the results of the Netflix Prize Competition, which reinforce the idea that though the internet may open up production and dissemination of information to everyone, it inexorably siphons all the revenue into a handful of new monopolies every bit as powerful as the old. This is due not only to ‘network effects’, which he believes have been overemphasised, but mostly to ‘stickiness’ – the tendency of users to become loyal to one website thanks to the mental cost of switching. His experiments quantify just how hard and expensive stickiness is to achieve, so that only very large companies, which admittedly got that big through network effects, can afford it through better design and faster response than competitors. Their server farms are every bit as huge and expensive as the factories of previous industrial revolutions.
A monopoly on stickiness inevitably leads to attention-based business models, where user information is harvested to target programmatic adverts. Everything we buy, read or watch provides information that is sold to advertisers, and Google and Facebook between them collect 70% of this colossal revenue. Hindman worries about the effect on news gathering and dissemination: local papers could once attract sufficient ad revenue, thanks to their targeted readerships, but the Net lets digital giants grab practically all of it and push the locals out of business. Digital news sites that are replacing them, like BuzzFeed and Vice are financed by investors and major brand advertisers – lacking a tradition of separation between editorial and business, their tiny in-house staffs generate ‘native’ ads that look like editorial (and often go viral), while deleting or redacting anything that might offend advertisers.
Susan Landau’s book is an equally excellent overview of hacking, encryption and surveillance issues that I won’t need to explain in such detail to readers of Davey Winder’s Pro column (she was an expert witness for Apple over the FBI’s request to decrypt those terrorists’ iPhone). Guy Debord once remarked that “Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and flourishing profession.” These authors agree, and urge us to curb the power of the corporations while the choice is still ours to make.
[If Dick Pountain had a penny for every penny he’d made from online content, he wouldn’t have a penny]
