I tend to believe that if we focus too much on the second-by-second zeitgeist of the news cycle, we can sometimes miss the forest for the trees. David Webb, whose excellent “Webb-site” has become part of my routine, writes for a Hong Kong-based audience, but I think his international focus might help Americans see through the blind spot in their local coverage. In his post “Facebook, Big Brother and China” he reminds us that Facebook users – and users of all the other free internet Goliaths – are themselves the product. Your time and data monetised, and your digital presence rendered into essential but somehow superficial characteristics; a reductive funhouse mirror that reflects the unwavering gaze of advertisers and data scientists.
I was recently contacted by a friend who works at Amazon, another titan of data gathering and analysis. She told me that a favorite Amazon Video show of mine (for which she has given me grief in the past, not being a fan herself) had recently been closely studied by their data scientists to determine the average viewer profile. She shared an age range and sex of the average viewer – both of which were correct, as applied to me. As far as those two pieces of information go, I don’t have a problem with being assigned a group. My rule of thumb is that if a private company, via the internet, is trying to categorize me in the same way a government census worker might, I’m alright with that, even if the means is somewhat shadowy. Next she said that viewers of this show “liked to try new restaurants.” Age/sex/location…cuisine? Definitely not a census worker question. Also, are there people who don’t like to try new restaurants, who have been going to the same three or four places forever? Viewers of this show also like “reading.” The juxtaposition of these two things made me narrow my eyes – the portrait painted of someone who reads and likes to try new restaurants is, to me, a boring, house-bound mouth-breather for whom trying a new restaurant is the height of adventure and quite the thrill. After a meal at their exciting new spot, the reader speedwalks home (careful to check the crosswalks along the way, of course) in order to plop down for some alone time with that lovely book he or she has been working on. I could tell from my friend’s reaction (to quote directly, “hahahahahaha”) this was just the image she got as well. The icing on the cake was that, per Amazon, the bookish unisex gourmands who watch this show are “ordinary and to be found in every neighborhood.”
Now, I understand there’s not much point in taking this personally. No one wants to be told they’re pretty average and people like them abound even though, by definition, this has to be true for most people regarding most things! The leveling influence of the internet means it’s harder to be one of the literati who consumes only the most avant-garde, off-beat, unique media. Does Amazon have shows for which it categorizes the average viewer as “extraordinary, to be found only in Brooklyn literary salons and certain converted lofts in Oakland, California”? Probably not. I’m not a data scientist, but from my cursory acquaintance with statistics, the idiosyncratic parts of the data aren’t what get the focus – by definition, you’re looking for the explanatory power of the systemic. Nonetheless, thinking about the labels being applied to me by these anonymous employees was somewhat disconcerting, rather like imagining employees at the NSA crowding around their desk to laugh at your sexting (it’s like The Lives of Others except no one actually cares and I don’t live under threat of detention because I like bad television). I don’t know how anonymous data analysis is inside these companies – perhaps that’s one of the points they would do well to explain. Does my name ever appear on a whiteboard? Does my name appear in a spreadsheet with all my labels, for some junior analyst to scroll through and slowly shake his or her head at? Unknown. But in any case, I can see reasonable business purposes behind Amazon’s decision to determine who likes books or new restaurants. However, what you do with a list of ordinaries found in every neighborhood – or as we refer to ourselves within the community, “people” – is beyond me. If these sorts of profiles are what drive all the advertising and junk mail in our online experience, I for one am curious just how I am reduced, and what I am reduced to, when my information is sold to third parties or even used by the company whose “terms and conditions” I agreed to. More on that below. Age and sex are one thing, but the impersonal, sometimes callous portraits outlined by algorithms and colored by data scientists defeat the whole purpose of my consumerist escapism. If I wanted to consider my own ordinariness I wouldn’t put down my book to watch the show!
Webb points out that for all of Mark Zuckerberg’s mea culpa-ing (of which there has been remarkably little, I think – they need a better crisis PR firm) Facebook could not be more upfront about the fact that political campaigns are a specific vertical to which the company markets. A user is rendered into one of five categories as well as measured by his or her ability to amplify a message, such that campaigners overt and hidden can choose their targets that much more easily. As an aside, I think the amplification score is what really twists the screws here. In the same way that many Americans are tired of the absurd sums of money poured into the swing state or district of the moment (looking at you, Ohio) simply because it’s competitive, we might resent the work put into capturing the attention of our loud friend who shares altogether too many links. If you want to tell me I’m liberal or conservative and bombard me accordingly, that’s fine – after all, if I’m partisan, I’m more likely to be consuming partisan news sources. Throwing fuel on a fire isn’t necessarily taking the moral high ground, but it’s better than starting new fires. By telling me that my annoying friend is going to receive refined ads and articles such that he or she shares them, you are starting a fire. More than that, it seems to be calculating and ruthless in a way that directly contradicts you believing in the merit of your position. Blast me with your banner ads and email reminders, the modern equivalent of the whistlestop politician shouting to the crowd from the train’s rear platform. If instead you pick the town gossip out of the crowd, escort them into the train for a private briefing, and then leave them behind to parrot your message while you slink away to the next town…can’t you at least take me seriously enough to give me your position yourself? I recognize that metaphor is fundamentally flawed. These days, politicians do stump themselves, AND blast you with banner ads, AND try to influence your loud friend to blast you with opinions as well. So do corporations, nonprofits, and anyone else who has a voice they want heard in the growing cacophony of a connected world. The small but critical (to me) issue is that, for the first time, the voices in that cacophony are starting to use what’s in my own head against me, to determine if they should scream more loudly at me or my neighbor, what to scream, how loudly to scream, and so on. And I didn’t invite them into your head. That’s the point. It’s not the message they’re shouting so much as the lack of consent.
A point dealt with in a preview of the forthcoming issue of the London Review of Books. William Davies, in a piece whose title – Why The Outrage – belies the tone of the first several hundred words, thinks we are too focused on Cambridge Analytica and President Trump in the current Facebook scandal. I think his stridency on Trump vs. Hilary risks burying the lede, but his observations about the internet and capitalism are excellent; moreover, current and future critics of the Facebooks of the world risk future charges of hypocrisy if they choose to engage in this discussion on the basis of politics, rather than the larger underlying issue. Davies hammers the fact that these are corporations, driven by corporate – not political – motives, and that if we are outraged we need to understand what capitalistic – not ideological – thrust got us here. He points out that “Using data in novel (and secretive) ways is virtually the governing principle of the digital economy.” And, related to my point above on consent, the argument that users of Facebook and other online services have consented to have their data gathered isn’t truly fair because we can’t understand how that data might be used – data’s “potential value and use emerges after one has collected it, not before.” I wholeheartedly endorse that point. I don’t think the average consumer could understand, even if Facebook became totally transparent about how his or her data is collected and analyzed, the sophistication of the techniques used to extract value from that information, nor still to think about its long-term effects and persistence. Is there a parallel with Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cancer cells proved so compelling as a research medium that the medical community immortalized them and continue to use them in labs some six decades after her death? Perhaps Ms. Lacks didn’t have the medical knowledge to make a truly informed decision about the merits of preserving her cells for posterity, to clone them innumerable times and use them to – hopefully – make progress against the very disease that afflicted her. You could argue that the experts made the best decision they could, that their specialist knowledge on balance helped them make a decision that has helped the world. But they didn’t even tell her. And regardless of what forms she filled out and boxes she checked, I certainly don’t think you can argue that they asked.
In any case, Webb’s point about us missing the forest for the trees on this one is well taken. Facebook and its ilk sell user data. Period. To ask them to fix their service such that other people don’t steal your data is missing the point – it’s not the illegal part of this that is most concerning, it’s the mundane commercial part, and the fact that our data is treated as a resource that doesn’t require our consent to use. As Davies argues – “Just as environmentalists demand that the fossil fuel industry ‘leave it in the ground,’ the ultimate demand to be levelled at Silicon Valley should be ‘leave it in our heads.” I hope we are at the beginning of a process that leads to something like a Clean Air Act for data privacy. I don’t know if the Cambridge Analytica scandal is the Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon of internet firms, but I hope we can look back at this and see it as an inflection point, rather than a sign of things to come.
smq.world 