4AAVC101: Digital Economy and Audiences (at KCL)

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These are my notes for 4AAVC101 at King's College London for the 2017-2018 school year. The lecturer, Nick Srnicek, is the author of two excellent books at the intersection of technology and leftist politics: Inventing the Future (with Alex Williams), and Platform Capitalism.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

Taught by Dr Nick Srnicek, Lecturer in Digital Economy in the Digital Humanities department at King's.

1. The Digital Economy (September 26)
2. Cognitive Capitalism and the Attention Economy (October 03)
3. The Value of Data (October 10)
4. Peer Production (October 17)
5. The Rise of Platforms (October 24)
6. Reading week (October 31)
7. Advertising and the surveillance economy (November 07)
8. The data industry (November 14)
9. The sharing economy (November 21)
10. Digital Workers (November 28)
11. The Future of the Digital Economy (December 05)

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The Digital Economy - week 1

(I didn’t attend this lecture because I didn’t consider the possibility of auditing this course until the following week. What follows is a summary of the readings listed in the course handbook.)

Readings

The Second Economy from McKinsey Quarterly, 2011

A fairly light and business-friendly read about the digital economy. The most salient takeaway I got is that technology is not just an industry, but an intelligent system (akin to a nervous system) underneath the entire economy. The challenge, now, is not greater production, but rather better distribution of the prosperity that it can bring us.

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

This was in the “Recommended Reading” section which could be seen as a bit of a cheeky way of boosting sales of his book (it’s relevant to the course, obviously). I read this over the summer and thought it was excellent. You can find some of my notes, attached to specific passages from the book, on Bookmarker.

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Cognitive Capitalism and the Attention Economy - week 2

Readings

Cognitive Capitalism by Yann Moulier Boutang (chapter 3)

So I started reading this from the beginning and realised that I didn’t just want to read chapter 3, I wanted to read the whole book, which I didn’t have time to do just yet. Luckily, the reading is summarised quite nicely in the lecture notes below.

The Ecology of Attention by Yves Citton (chapter 1)

Notes from the introduction:

• we’re moving from an economy of material goods (governed by the scarcity of the factors of production) to an economy of attention (governed by the scarcity of the capacity for the reception of cultural goods)
• you can see the rise of advertising as a necessary consequence of the need to absorb excess goods coming from rising productivity (and thus excess production relative to needs)
• Herbert Simon is often thought of as the father of the attention economy (he introduced the term in a 1969 conference)
  • a wealth of information means a dearth of attention (our attention is, in fact, consumed by this information)
  • given where scarcity lies these days, content creators (authors, musicians, etc) should really be paying consumers for their attention, not the other way around
  • a spin on “if a product is free, then the real product is you”: the real product is your attention
• given how much $ is in advertising, we know that our attention has a high price, but that price is not paid to us—in exchange, we receive at best a useful free service (Google, Twitter) and at worst a massive time sink that corrupts our minds and souls (Candy Crush, also Twitter)
• of course, the new attention economy won’t ever replace the material economy—that needs to keep existing underneath
• the trend of prescribing Ritalin as a way of increasing our attention span: you can see this as a way of reifying this (frankly stupid) assumption that we should have limitless attention spans
• three types of attention
  1. as a collective phenomenon (I am attentive to what we are collectively attentive to)
  2. within a dyadic relationship (I am attentive to what you are attentive to)
  3. as an individual (attention as a means of individuating the self, creating identity)
• we should try to break free of the economic paradigm of understanding attention, which even infests the way we talk about it (“paying” attention)
• there’s a pretty trenchant critique of Hayek’s liberal Great Society in which everyone can choose their own idea of happiness: “attentional processes are inextricably linked to our process of valorization”, which results in a vicious/virtuous cycle as we value what we pay attention to and we pay attention to what we value (both as individuals and collectively)
• attention is an interaction, an essential mediator of our relationship with the environment around us; some degree of attention is needed just to survive

Chapter 1

• from the POV of an alien looking at earth (you can call this technique estrangement I think)
• we see lots of communal valorization—entire generations taking up the same (material) trends, primarily as the result of the mediasphere
  • in order for factories to sell the physical goods they’ve manufactured, the media itself must manufacture consumers
  • he coins the term echosystem to describe an infrastructure of resonances conditioning our attention and its circulation
  • our “freedom” is severely constrained by the media that conditions us and shapes even our most intimate thoughts
• because our attention is finite, we can never pay enough attention to be truly “rational” the way free market economists would imagine us to be
• there’s a nice subtle critique of GDP as an indicator of prosperity here (cool related concept that I thought of afterwards, while typing this up: Goodhart’s law, though I don’t think the author uses that term here)
• 4 main attention regimes, according to Dominique Bouillier, which you can think of as the ends of axes on a Cartesian plane (not entirely sure why these are useful though, maybe that’ll come later)
  • alertness: like popups; we perceive them as interruptions, nuisances, threats
  • loyalty: building a long-term relationship of trust and reliability (the opposite side of alertness)
  • projection: holding the environment at arms length and allowing you to apply existing models
  • immersion: being plunged into a new, strange, exotic environment and forcing you to stay vigilant in order to adapt

I now want to read this whole book too, which is a little concerning given that I have so many other readings and (as I’ve been reminded by this book) only a finite amount of attention.

Post-script: I have indeed read the whole book, and my notes are, as always, on Bookmarker.

Lecture

(I missed the first few minutes because the room number was “S-1.06” and I interpreted that as S DASH 1.06 and thus spent several stressful minutes around a very empty first floor that was completely devoid of any classrooms and asking everyone who passed by if they knew where the classroom was, to no avail. Luckily I then noticed that there was a basement floor whose room numbers were prefixed by S-1. I still think it’s a very confusing system.)

Cognitive capitalism

• technological determinism is not enough to explain changes (how technology is deployed is always up to people, never neutral)
• we are entering a stage of cognitive capitalism: knowledge production is a key source of value in the modern economy, and we cannot separate that from society
• one consequence of this is the increasing importance of intangible goods: brands, intellectual property, data, etc
  • huge change from industrial age when most value was contained in material goods
• control of innovation means control of the profits
  • companies are starting to realise that you can’t (as you used to be able to do) just “buy” technology and expect it to magically improve your productivity
  • instead, you have to foster the right workplace culture, which might mean loosening hierarchies or giving employees more freedom to try new things
• companies want to be more flexible and responsive to trends (think fast fashion and their terrifying rapid production cycles)
• in the past, corporations could manage complexity simply by growing the company, but now you have to actually adapt (or risk becoming a dinosaur)
• changing modes of production: users now co-produce (think YouTube videos and tweets and other user-generated content, but also the rise of influencer marketing and how that’s starting to transform the advertising industry)
• blurring of inputs to production (capital/labour), since now we have lots of labour mediated by tech
• emergence of networks for organisation/cooperation … neither hierarchical (like a state) nor anarchic (like the market). biggest example: Wikipedia (a very common example for people writing on this stuff in the mid 2000s, when Wikipedia seemed like a model for the future of everything)
• a shift to cognitive/emotional labour (services over manufacturing). the example given was that of Pret employees being told to cultivate a certain atmosphere in order to please the customer (the company wants control over its employees’ affects)
• the most important resource is “invention power”: the capacity to create and invent
• innovation is now a social process, no longer the result of a lone wolf (if it ever was)—it can be distributed geographically, even between disparate companies (think Silicon Valley as a regional concentration of power)
• crisis of property rights (tension between intellectual property and the open source movement)
• the capturing of positive externalities (in which a third party—i.e., a corporation—gets the benefit of the transaction between two parties)
  • corporations monetise this
  • example of positive externality: we go to university but all of society benefits, at least theoretically, and so this is why we should all get free tuition (Srnicek’s idea, though ofc I wholeheartedly agree)
• centrality of bioproduction: if cognitive capitalism is centred on the production of knowledge, then it must also be concerned with the bio conditions for it
• we’ve moved from mercantilism to industrial capitalism to today’s cognitive capitalism
  • though the question is: how geographically limited is this theory? how much has cognitive capitalism spread into the non-OECD countries, for instance?
  • case in point: China—maybe in the tertiary industries, sure, but there’s still a lot of industrial capitalism going on
• to summarise cognitive capitalism:
  • what is being accumulated: knowledge and the capacity for creativity, not physical property
  • how is production organised: intelligent coordination of minds, not a rigid division of labour
  • who is being exploited: positive externalities created by the “cognitariat”, as opposed to the proletariat
• consequences:
  • blurring of work and non-work: with factory shifts, e.g., scooping cereal into cereal boxes, the line was stark; but with cognitive work, there is potentially no end to the shift
  • the end of scarcity (at least potentially): non-rival, theoretically infinitely replicable; any scarcity is artificially imposed
• even if everything becomes abundant, though, we’re still limited in attention–the last scarcity

The attention economy

• in the early 1800s, newspapers started selling ads … since then, it’s been a race to the bottom
• you can see fake news as less of a contemporary phenomenon and more of an almost immanent consequence of the attention economy (there’s a photo of a news article from 1835 about obviously fake moon people)
• at some point the amount of information available exceeds the amount of attention we could potentially pay to it
  • though my response to this is: doesn’t that depend on what we valorise as “information”? in a way, there was always more information than we could pay attention to. we could sit and watch grass grow or listen to birdcalls all day, if we wanted—that’s still information, in a way. we just don’t valorise that sort of thing as “information”
• important to remember that the attention economy is not applicable to just ads-based tech companies: it really includes anything on a screen
  • quote from Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix: they’re competing with not just YouTube and SnapChat but also, well, sleep
  • and of course these companies try to design for addiction (think Netflix’s autoplay, or endless scroll)
  • question: can we rely on “self-control” when these corporations are employing entire teams of very intelligent people whose job it is to break any self-control we might exhibit? do we really control what we use or watch or has it started controlling us?

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The Value of Data - week 3

Readings

Learning to Immaterial Labour (PDF) by Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus

On the source of MySpace’s ridiculously high valuation at the time of its acquisition by News Corporation ($580 million).

Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy (PDF) by Tiziana Terranova

On knowledge work in the new digital economy and how it relates to classical Marxist ideas. I need to re-read this more carefully but it seems really, really good.

Digital Labour and Karl Marx by Christian Fuchs

It’s a 400-page book (in the Recommended Reading section) so I haven’t had a chance to get to it yet, but it looks pretty awesome and I’m stoked to read it.

Lecture

• an overview of tech companies that sold for ridiculous amounts in recent years
  • MySpace, $580m to News Corp in 2005, never having made a profit; resold for $35m in 2011
  • Instagram, $1b to Facebook in 2012, with $2.7m in losses and 13 employees
  • WhatsApp, $19b to Facebook in 2014, with $138m in losses and 32 employees
  • LinkedIn, $26b to Microsoft in 2016, having lost $166m in 2015
• moving beyond the obvious point that valuations are arbitrary and not necessarily reflective of any sort of “value” that can be agreed on objectivity, we can still find a common factor that explains the seemingly excessive valuations among these companies, and that is user data
• if you look at companies like Google, Twitter, FB: 90%+ of revenue comes from advertising, which means that their audiences are the commodities being sold
• we see a shift from the old TV-based advertising model—where audiences are treated as passive consumers—to a more interactive model where audiences are actively producing content as well (think YouTube, Instagram, Twitter)
• today: focus on platforms with lots of user-generated content (Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, etc). excluding Apple because most of their revenue comes from selling physical phones (although, to be fair, the value of the phones is partly due to the UGC provided by the app development community)
• we can think of this user-generated content as immaterial labour (knowledge, culture, ideas, etc)
  • the work we do is individualised and portrayed to us as “self-investment”: we’re building up our entrepreneurial profile, our “brand”, our cultural capital
  • also usually affective: social, emotional (making connections, reading the “room”, empathy in anticipating reactions, etc)
• and of course this labour produces value for these corporations:
  • when we like pages on FB, we’re telling FB what our preferences are and thus enabling them to target ads better
  • when we Google something and click through to a link, we’re giving Google feedback that it can use to make it search algorithms better
  • thus our entire online activity is a source of profit for these corporations—we are a source of free labour
• so the question is: what can we as consumers, workers, citizens etc do??
  • Wages for Facebook is one campaign (modelled after Wages for Housework in the 60s, which was intended to raise the visibility of unpaid domestic work done primarily by women)
  • show of hands in the class: no one thinks we deserve wages for Facebook
    • in fact one student suggests that if we were paid to use FB, the system could fall victim to manipulation
    • another student says that we’re provided a service (i.e., the ability t use Facebook) in exchange so it’s fair
    • another says that we don’t deserve regular wages, but if Facebook is selling data to third parties, then maybe we should be renumerated for that
    • (in any case, the whole point of the Wages for Facebook campaign is less to actually demand wages from FB and more to get people to realise that FB is exploiting us)
  • Jaron Lanier’s proposal, in Who Owns The Future
    • incidentally, I read this book by happenstance a few days prior, and wrote a fairly negative review on Goodreads which you can read if you’re curious
    • his main idea is that tech companies should compensate people for the value they provide via their personal data
    • result: micropayments, creation of personal data markets
    • basically extending this neoliberal hellscape we live in just a tiny bit farther
    • (you can tell I’m not on board with this idea)
    • Srnicek brings up: does this mean that only rich people will be able to afford privacy, while poor people will have to live in a privacy-less dystopia?
    • how much is personal data worth, anyway? usually each transaction results in only fractions of a cent for each user—will that result in enough value over time to make these micropayments worth implementing?
• Srnicek mentions UBI as a potential response to problems caused by automation, and also in recognition of the fact that a lot of work is currently not being paid
  • my own take on UBI is similar to my take on Jaron Lanier’s micropayment scheme: I see it as a suboptimal solution whose primary function is to preserve this dying capitalist shell a little while longer etc etc, your mileage may vary
• Srnicek’s skepticism of the Wages for Facebook campaign
  • are these companies exploiting unpaid work? it certainly doesn’t feel like work, but of course, just because we don’t think of it as work doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not work
  • if we’re actually providing free labour for which we’re not compensated, you’d think that there would be economic growth as a result; instead, we’re living at a time of secular stagnation
    • my response to that would be the tendency of tech companies to try and shrink markets (which Jaron Lanier does address quite well in his book) but I’d have to think about this some more
  • we should go back to first principles and decide on what “work” even is
  • in capitalism, wage-labour is just a particular way of organising work
    • in it, workers don’t own the means of production, and usually have little input in decisions & no claim to the goods produced
    • therefore, for online work to be exploitative, it needs a certain set of social relations around it
    • if it is exploitative, it’s certainly not the kind of exploitation we’re used to with wage-labour: there’s no boss telling us to get work done
      • my thoughts: doesn’t that just mean it’s self-employment, where the superego is the boss? whether or not it’s ontologically a form of wage-labour doesn’t really matter imo
    • as content creators, we do decide what to produce (within limits), and we have (some) intellectual property rights
    • thus Srnicek concludes that digital content creators aren’t just another form of wage labour (which I agree with to an extent—it kind of depends on your purpose for classifying something as “wage labour”)
• Srnicek concludes that we should be skeptical of the idea that online labour is exploitative, and that we are producing commodities & thus free labour for these companies (at least when it comes to a very specific, academic definition of “labour”)
• question to ponder: should content creators on, say, YouTube, be guaranteed specific workers’ rights?
  • my response is no but that comes from a fairly radical place of wanting to transcend the idea of “work” entirely
  • i also kinda hate the whole influencer culture that YouTube/IG/Snapchat et al have spawned, which is an extremely unequal industry almost entirely funded by selling unnecessary crap to audiences (not that different from the entertainment industry as a whole but it’s just a little more blatant about it)
  • sometimes I’m afraid that I focus too much on sweeping, fundamental changes that need to be made at the expense of being able to propose small steps in the right direction
    • this is one of those cases
    • is it even possible to make tech companies sufficiently “better” without fundamentally transforming the whole economic system? I DONT KNOW AND IT SCARES ME
    • pls tell me if you have any thoughts on this ty

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Peer Production - week 4

Readings

The Wealth of Networks (PDF) by Yochai Benkler, chapter 3

Summarised in the lecture.

The limits of peer production: Some reminders from Max Weber for the network society

Using Max Weber’s theories on bureaucracy to confront weaknesses in contemporary views on the power of peer production to challenge hierarchical structures.

Recommended readings

Only including the ones I’ve read or want to read.

• Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: this book has its flaws (he’s a little too optimistic about the power of technology, imo) , but it’s worth reading. It was the first thing I’d ever read on the topic and so I still have a soft spot for it.
• Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway: I went through a brief Cory Doctorow phase back when I was still mostly in the dark about the wonders of literary fiction and thus spent most of my time reading sci-fi, thinking that was the pinnacle of literary achievement. This book didn’t come out until after I had left that phase, so I haven’t read it yet (though I plan to, at some point). If you like sci-fi/Doctorow you’ll probably enjoy this.
• Massimo De Angelis’ Omnia Sunt Communia: I remember seeing this intriguing-looking book at the London Radical Book Fair in June. I didn’t end up buying it, which is a shame because I now want to read it (I’ll probably just order it from Hive at some point since it’s not available at the LSE library).

Lecture

• today: how to organise disparate group of people & coordinate progress towards a common cause
  • historically, this has been done via a market (using the mechanisms of supply and demand + the profit motive)
  • or, via firms (centralised, managerial command, bureaucracy)
  • or, volunteer self-organisation, mostly commonly in disaster response; historically limited & only ever small-scale
• an obvious question to tackle first: why do firms even exist? why not just let the market coordinate everything?
  • Ronald Coase (famous British economist and LSE grad whose name adorns one of the lecture rooms at LSE, incidentally) had a theory
  • firms emerge to save on transaction costs that show up along the supply chain (legal fees, transport, probably marketing as well)—basically when there are cost savings that result from centralising command
• but peer production (the subject for today) is neither truly hierarchical like a firm or anarchic like a market; it’s a new form of organisation
  • can view it as a consequence of recent changes in our economy, with knowledge production assuming an increasingly key role (cognitive capitalism)
  • plus, w/ the rise of Internet, we can now cheaply create & reproduce information goods
  • collaborative, decentralised, non-profit-driven means of producing non-tangible goods
  • often done for psychological as opposed to purely monetary benefits (though the two can co-exist, ofc—many open source programmers are aware that it might help them get a job later on)
  • not all projects are suitable for this type of production, though
    • must be decomposable—people must be able to contribute small pieces and have them fit cohesively into the larger whole
    • so Wikipedia fits, while writing a novel, not so much
• peer production isn’t quite the same as peer networks—in a network, you assume participants interact with each other, but peer production doesn’t require this (they can and often do just interact with a central server)
• Benkler’s take on peer production
  • allows for the rise of the “amateur”
  • lots of fears in early literature that decentralised amateurs could replace centralised professionals (like Wikipedia alleviating need for domain experts), which haven’t really been realised
  • often results in the creation of the commons, which is a particular institutional way of structuring access to resources (as opposed to property)
  • so peer production is often about using, and producing, commons (free software as another example)
  • (purported) benefits: freedom, democracy, justice, critical culture, autonomy, new ways of working together
    • democracy: users can (at least theoretically) create their own news, thus wider range of views available than through centralised media
    • economic justice: OSS can reduce economic inequality between people, countries, corporations by giving everyone access to the same tool for free (though ofc there are limits to this—other inequalities, like that of time or communication ability, can be countervailing forces)
    • critical culture: as more people participate in the production of culture, they should thus become more critical recipients of it
  • transition from mass, mediated public sphere to a networked one, one that doesn’t have to be dominated by centralised and commercial interests (though I’d argue that you can never escape those, since they’re so fundamental to how society is organised, and you can see this happening in the open source community)
  • Srnicek mentions Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism, which he characterises as quite optimistic (I would readily agree)
    • Mason seems to think that a commons-based model of peer production will take over from the historically profit-oriented managerial firm paradigm of capitalism
• now on the limits of peer prodution
  • does it work for physical goods? so far, not really, though maybe as 3D printing technology develops further that will change
  • doesn’t work for non-decomposable projects, and its efficacy diminishes as the need for hierarchy goes up
  • does it produce better products? sometimes; open source software can be quite good (though ofc quality varies for a bunch of other reasons)
• Carr-Benkler wager made in 2006 over whether the market, or commons, would dominate the Internet in 5 years time
  • question for the audience: do we think platforms are more dominated by amateurs or by professionals nowadays?
    • one take: things are more market-based today as power is concentrated among large tech firms
    • another take: other way around, since we all contribute to the content of the Internet
    • my take: we’ve seen a weird blurring of the amateur-professional dichotomy, where even self-proclaimed amateurs are likely to be motivated by profit (think basically all Internet celebrities)
  • in 2011, both Benkler and Carr thought they had won lol
  • Benkler cites social media, which is primarily driven by free, user-driven content
  • Carr’s rebuttal: that peer production has been co-opted into the market economy
    • the best “peer” producers are paid professionals (or are on their way to becoming so)—for example, see YouTube videos that are just professionally-produced music videos, and even organic YouTube celebrities who are now paid to produce content
• case study of Napster (launched in 1999, shut down a few years later), which contributed to a massive revenue decline for the music industry (~50%)—good example of Benkler’s thesis
  • but ofc in the past 2 years, streaming services have grown drastically, while sales have declined
  • results in consolidation of record labels (they centralise in order to have more negotiating power w/ streaming services)
  • outcome: the market has won in this case
• the sad truth about Benkler’s theory is that he was kind of right, in the sense that peer production is increasingly important
  • but the world we live in is probably not the world he imagined (or would have wanted)
  • peer production is, by and large, NOT producing a commons that’s available all—instead, our work is being exploited by a few large corporations

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The Rise of Platforms - week 5

Readings

Matchmakers by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee (chapter 1)

No notes for this yet.

Bridging differing perspectives on technological platforms by Annabelle Gawer

The economics perspective (two-sided markets, which lets us understand competition) and the engineering perspective (the technical architecture, which lets us understand innovation).

Recommended readings

Only including the ones I’ve read or want to read.

• Benjamin H. Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty which looks pretty interesting
• Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism of course
• Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform. I read a pretty insightful review of this in a 2015 issue of the New Left Review (“Culture After Google”); my Bookmarker notes are here.

Lecture

• last week, we looked at peer production & its limits
  • the model has historically had trouble expanding past a certain point
  • simultaneously, we’ve seen the rise of large corporations
• we can see platforms as the new business model
  • contrast with the Fordist model of mass production and consumption, vertical integration; corporations expanded by buying up suppliers/dealers (1920s-1970s)
  • also contrast with the post-Fordist model, which arise in the 1980s: individualised manufacturing consumption (think designing your own Nike shoe)
    • tied to the lean production model, where the corporation tries to own only the high-profit-margin aspects of the business
    • so Nike will own the brand but outsource the less profitable elements (like manufacturing) to corporations based in less economically privileged areas (i.e., they have no choice but to accept lower profit margins)
• platforms can be intermediaries or infrastructure (or both)
  • they can be intermediaries for passengers/drivers, users/advertisers etc
  • they can also be the infrastructure, giving you tools to build apps/pages/profiles/social connections/etc
  • for the purposes of this analysis, as in Srnicek’s book, we don’t treat Apple as a platform company (since most of their revenue is from selling hardware)
    • (though I’d personally argue that the hardware only has value because of the platform)
  • platforms can also be physical, e.g. shopping malls (which bring together stores and potential customers)
• three important phenomena that arise in the study of platforms
  • network effects: basically the more people on the platform, the better it becomes (incidentally, I thought this was a fairly common term, but as it turns out I was one of the only people who had heard of it before … I guess I’ve just been living in startupland for too long)
  • cross-subsidisation within large platforms, where some arms of the business are offered below cost (subsidised by others)
    • freemium model: those who pay subsidise those who don’t (enticed by better features, usually)
    • direct model: something is available for free but it’s subsidised by something you do pay for (e.g., Amazon’s free shipping)
    • ad-based model: your usage is subsidised by a third-party advertiser (though the subsidisation is only on the individual level, not on the societal level—unless the advertiser is doing something horribly wrong, they will be making enough money off of product sales to offset the advertising costs, and thus society is really subsidising the existence of the advertiser)
  • designed core architecture: platform intermediation is political, not neutral
  • some behaviours are encouraged or discouraged simply by the design of the interface (whether deliberately or not)
  • Uber examples: surge pricing is due to predicted demand at any given point; phantom cars designed to make you think you’ll get a ride faster than you actually will
  • or Facebook A/B testing your newsfeed to get you to engage more
• Srnicek’s hypothesis: platforms are the most appropriate business model for the digital age because they allow you to capture & control data
  • 4 main types of platforms, though of course any corporation can own multiple types among its different arms, and any individual arm can also be more than one (from his book)
    • advertising, where most users don’t pay for the product, and instead “pay” via their data & attention (Facebook)
    • cloud, which provides infrastructure services that you pay for (Amazon Web Services)
    • product, which provides a consumer-facing product that you pay for (Spotify/Netflix)
    • lean, which tries to not own too many assets and instead claims to function as a marketplace (Airbnb/Uber)
• on advertising platforms & privacy concerns:
  • there are always going to be such concerns just because of the economic structural forces (the need to make profit)
  • the economic motives will always butt up against users’ expectations of privacy
  • hence the constant privacy battles with Google/Facebook (it’s not just bad actors—it’s the whole business model)
  • Apple is an interesting somewhat-exception to this—since their business model is mostly hardware, and not advertising-based, they can (and do) make privacy a selling point
• on cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services (which, incredibly, most people in the class hadn’t heard of) runs most of the Internet these days, including many government services
  • profit comes from renting out the platform (including developer tools)
  • AWS is incredibly profitable and in fact kinda cross-subsidises the e-commerce business (though Amazon does sometimes make a loss)
  • an interesting subcategory of this: industrial cloud platforms (Internet of Things, factories); GE and Siemens are both working on versions of this
• on product platforms: goods are transformed into services available for rent
  • examples: Spotify, Zipcar (though of course the economics are different since Zipcar’s goods are hardware, not software, and thus margins might be lower, depending I guess on Spotify’s negotiations with record labels)
  • a really unexpected example: Rolls-Royce, which rents “thrust”—they make jet engines which are provided to airlines, but their business model is a subscription service for these engines; Rolls-Royce owns the data generated, and offers the airline maintenance in exchange
• on lean platforms:
  • also called the “sharing economy”, which is really a misleading moniker as it’s about making money, not about sharing; any attempt at disguising this fact is basically propaganda to hide the exploitation of workers
  • or the “gig economy” which highlights the transition of the economy from careers -> jobs -> tasks (labour becomes even more modularised and flexible, which is of course the ultimate desire of capital)
  • currently, the online gig economy is only a small proportion of the workforce: estimated to be 1% in the US and 3% in the UK (mostly Uber); for perspective, the agricultural sector is 2% (not sure which country)
  • Uber, the largest taxi company, owns no vehicles; Airbnb, the largest accomodation provider, owns no property (yet)
  • these companies are thus virtually assetless—they don’t even own servers most of the time (AWS, often); their only assets are intellectual property (software, brand)
• open question: are advertising platforms sustainable?
  • recent controversy over Facebook ads (though I recently came across a fairly convincing take that it has less to do with Facebook and more to do with the undermining of the idea that capitalism & democracy are compatible)
  • some research has surfaced showing that highly personalised and targeted ads are not that effective
  • my own anecdotal data from using Facebook: people are posting less and less, and so my news feed is increasingly being composed of indirect activity (“X is attending an event”, “X liked this post”), which suggests content on FB has peaked and is in decline
  • there’s also limited room for growth in this industry, since growth in advertising can’t really exceed growth in the economy indefinitely (and economic growth has been sluggish lately, partly because of the market-shrinking powers of the tech industry …) & the market is being close to being maxed out already (how many more ads can we bear to watch before we just unplug forever)
  • Google’s chief economist has said that ads may not be sustainable and they may have to switch to a subscription-based model eventually
  • Facebook has said that it’ll charge publishers fees to have content show up in the news feed as sponsored posts (which is frightening because it raises the question of who they think will pay in the long run? aren’t they just shifting the costs to advertisers on a different platform?)
• another open Q: are lean platforms sustainable?
  • many are sustained by VC funding right now—not profitable
  • also, and this is a fairly important point that I will be writing a longer post about eventually, the fact that so many people are willing to work for them despite shit wages and awful conditions is a historically limited phenomenon that, you could argue, is the result of several decades of neoliberal policy in much of the developed world
    • change the political landscape by implementing pro-worker policies that upend neoliberal doctrine & Uber et al could find it much, much harder to recruit workers
    • they’re already facing severe resistance and backlash (attempts to unionise, etc which I am all about)
  • so many lean platforms have gone bankrupt already (esp in the food & cleaning spaces)
  • Srnicek’s prediction: the sharing economy will disappear in a few years
  • on Uber’s investment in self-driving cars: they’re shifting from a lean platform model toward a product model because the lean platform model isn’t sustainable
    • he predicts that Uber will either nail the self-driving car aspect, or it will go bankrupt
  • I asked about Airbnb’s recent announcement re: branded apartments (i.e., “hotels”) which seems to indicate that Airbnb is also discovering the limits of the lean platform model, and is trying to become more of a product platform
• on Google’s original dilemma: they could have either gone with the ads-based model, or they could have become a subscription-funded product platform
  • they chose the former because it results in quicker growth, but now that they’re hegemonic, they could switch to a fee-based model
  • similarly, if Facebook switched to a subscription-based model, they would feel less economic pressure to sell/use their users’ data (though ofc that doesn’t rule out greed—they could still try to sell/use user data just to increase revenue)
  • incidentally, there’s a great Twitter exchange between sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and the head of Facebook’s News Feed that is quite illuminating

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- week 6

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Advertising and the surveillance economy - week 7

Readings

Big other by Shoshana Zuboff

A paper on surveillance capitalism. Challenges the idea of technological determinism when it comes to big data (it’s shaped by the contours of capitalism etc etc). Focuses on Google’s data extraction practices, as understood via publications written by Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian. Also distinguishes between the economics of high tech corporations (high rev/employee ratio) and the giants in older industries (e.g., Detroit automakers). References Arendt. The “Big Other” as the catch-all term for a totalitarian, computer-mediated surveillance system from which we cannot escape; the biggest consequence is a shift from the means of production as the determinant of power to the means of behavioural modification. The upshot of this kind of technology embodied in a corporation is the undermining of “the historical relationship between markets and democracies”. Pretty great & well worth reading.

The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

Similar to the paper above but written for more of a popular audience. Says that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists constitutes an existential threat, and that we are ceding our sovereignty and capability for individual self-determination to corporations like Google (which capture “behavioral surplus”). Also quite great.

Lecture

• in 2016, almost $80 billion was poured into digital advertising, a 20% increase over 2015
• much of that goes into Facebook and Google, which constitute a duopoly in this field
• the historical context of their case comes from the dotcoom boom
  • most of the companies that rose to prominence during that era had no revenue plan (basically Ponzi schemes preying on the hopes & dreams of investors)
  • in the ensuring collapse, most of these companies died, which had a winnowing effect (chaos is a ladder etc)
  • the ones that remained, or were founded in the wake of the catastrophe, had to be smarter about revenue models
  • especially since VC funding dried up post-crash (with a few exceptions)
  • but it also meant that the field had been sufficiently cleared that the rest were well-poised to become monopolies
• on how ad auctions work: both the cost of the bid & relevance are taken into account (as well as other factors)
  • Srnicek says that data isn’t actually being “sold”, so it’s not a commodity (i.e., it never leaves the confines of FB’s ecosystem)
  • it’s just being used to match you with the optimal advertisements
• FB’s desktop revenue is dropping (as a share of total revenue) and mobile is taking over
  • challenges of mobile ads
    • you’re less likely to click on them (as it means switching out of the current app context) * small screen means they take up more of the screen -> anying
    • cross-device tracking (though device ID allows that to be done deterministically)
    • possibility of accidental clicks (which FB counters by saying that the advertiser is still building brand awareness)
  • my thoughts: on the other hand, it’s harder to block via adblock (mobile apps are usually more locked down)
• on surveillance
  • some defining characteristics
    • focused on individuals, not just groups
    • systematic and deliberate
    • routine and repeated
  • can be based on either private or less obviously private data (mostly metadata—keystrokes, likes, etc—which can still be useful for predictions), or both
• thus FB/Google are the ones who have power in this new advertising-based economy
  • power over users, in the psychological sense (they convince us to buy crap we don’t need)
  • but also power over businesses, as their algorithms can make or break corporations
  • they can also pass on this data to governments/employers
  • and, of course, they can affect politics
    • recall the 2012 voter turnout paper in Nature
  • Zeynep Tufekci says a lot of valid stuff on this

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The data industry - week 8

Readings

Networks of control by Wolfie Christl and Sarah Spiekermann (chapter 5)

A report from 2016 (link to PDF). A very long and thorough chapter on the data broker industry. Proposes an interesting concept: customer lifetime risk (analogous to CLV) resulting from corporations using our personal data in ways we may not anticipate (and which may harm us). Goes into the problems with hashed email addresses (they lull you into a decidedly false sense of security) which I thought was right on the money since I’ve come to similar conclusions myself while dealing with customer/partner-provided hashed emails at Macromeasures … Overall, excellent report & very uncanny to read given how much of this world I had to see in firsthand through Macro :/

The like economy by Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond

On the one-way flow of data (esp likes/shares) from users (for tracking + popularity metrics) & how that’s walled off in Facebookland.

Lecture

• history of the data industry:
  • customer tracking via loyalty cards (esp frequent flyer)
    • even if we get some benefits from these cards, the companies get a lot more benefit (in terms of data on you & convincing you to keep paying them)
  • direct marketing (mail based on demographics, magazine subscriptions) - much coarser
    • acxiom got their start in this field (1969), working for Dems to send politicall messaging
  • the credit bureaus (experian, transunion, equifax), which sell to financial institutions
  • governments collecting data on citizens which is sometimes sold to corporations
• two main types of companies in this industry: the primary data sources, and the aggregators
  • primary sources:
    • consumer-facing corporations (based on purchase history, warranty forms, marketing surveys)
    • web browsing (registration data, web history, cookies, digital fingerprinting, online shopping)
    • governments, still (property, taxation, health, records)
    • cell phone service providers (mostly location), privacy regs prevent this under EU jurisdiction but common in US/Asia
    • internet of things: smart TVs, echos, cars, fitness trackers, nest etc
  • good chart from the FTC, available in this PDF report (page 2)
  • data brokers: acxiom, epsilon, equifax, experian
    • what do they sell?
    • raw data (customer emails etc) but only a small part of the industry
    • they prefer to sell service-style products on top (higher margins + they get to protect their raw data)
      • risk mitigation products (identity verification and fraud detection for businesses & individuals)
      • scoring products: credit, frailty (mortality-related actuarial services), whatever else you can imagine
      • lead generation products
• customers in the data industry
  • financial institutions for determining who’s loan-worthy (centralised data, banks pool together info)
  • employers (background checks)
  • govt (though there are more legal restrictions than with employers - they can’t collect directly, but can buy from corporations)
    • example: acxiom collaborated with US govt after 9/11
    • also the UK govt is prevented from collecting certain forms of personal data on its citizens so it has to outsource that to corporations (which is mindbogglingly inefficient imo)
  • digital ad platforms (including FB: Personicx)
    • Facebook Audience Insights will show you what they have on you and where it comes from
• dynamics of the industry: in order to make money they have to expand data collection, build increasingly byzantine products on top or erect artificial barriers to keep out competition
• problems we see in this industry
  • security breaches: acxiom, epsilon, equifax most recently
    • the worrying thing is that it’s moved from just credit card info to the stuff that’s can be used for identity theft (SSN, name, address, birthdate)
    • by aggregating so much data, they become such a juicy target for hackers, thus security breaches are basically inevitable due to structural dynamics (it’s a race that they won’t always be able to win)
  • ability to use data for discrimination in everyday life (bypassing legal protections by abdicating responsibility to the spectre of the algorithm)
    • lack of accuracy, accountability: these companies are allowed to be incredibly opaque with, say, scoring methods, very hard to challenge/correct
  • manipulation
    • companies collect data on people they know to be gullible (esp elderly) & sell that on
    • but also nudging behaviour
    • predatory pricing
• one solution: increase transparency (centralised db allowing consumers to log in & see what data these companies have on you)
  • some companies, like acxiom, are already doing this
  • but complete transparency (for tracking down original source) isn’t always possible, cus that metadata isn’t always stored
  • attention economy implications: would take us ages to, say, read privacy policies and make “rational decisions” as consumers to opt-in or not
    • also most of the time we don’t really have a choice; there isn’t an actual free market for a lot of services
    • one way to fix this: opt everyone out to begin with (like what the EU is doing with GDPR, enforceable starting may 28, 2018) but honestly that’s kind of BS, this should not be a consumer choice
  • plus transparency is a voluntary and half-hearted attempt at self-regulation in order to stave off harsher, more existential regulation
• a better solution: more strict regulations on collecting data in the first place
  • we as consumers don’t really get enough benefit from this industry to make it worth the risks
  • after all, the real point of this industry is to prop up aggregate demand by extending the reach of advertising, stretching it to its limits
• open q about long-term sustainability of these companies if digital advertising isnt growing that much?
  • think about longer-term implications for capitalism: is it dying or not? how long can we prop this shit up
• also open q about impacts of net neutrality on this industry? will ISPs just kill off the existing companies in this landscape & become the big players instead?

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The sharing economy - week 9

Reading

The Sharing Economy by Arun Sundararajan (chapter 2)

Haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy of this yet. Going to try to read it for my dissertation, though.

What’s Yours Is Mine by Tom Slee (chapter 4)

Same.

Lecture

• mostly uber and uber, plus a bunch of others (Lyft, Gett, TaskRabbit, HomeJoy is mentioned even though it’s shut down now)
• AirPNP for renting out toilets which should be a public service >_>
• at least in priciple, acc to their own values, it’s about empowering individuals
  • on a peer-to-peer exchange level
  • allowing a more sustainable/efficient use of resources
• the term “sharing economy” itself is fairly vacuous, seems to be more of a self-moniker than anything else
  • not actually about sharing (freely) since it’s built on commercial transactions
  • the gig economy isn’t the best term either since there are many firms (not in this space) that also rely on “gigs”
  • better characterisation: use of platform technology (multi-sided marketplace)
  • these companies also tend to be lean (at least for now)
    • though Uber now owns more cars (links) and Airbnb is considering branding hotels
  • thus the best way of thinking of the sharing economy: “lean platforms”
• economic history starting from the 1970s, three major crises
  • profitability of Anglo firms, primarily due to competition from the rising manufacturing powerhouses in Japan/Germany
  • OPEC oil crisis, as a result of the Yom Kippur war in 1973; oil prices quadrupled in a few months
  • Bretton Woods falling apart, mostly because the US fucked up (partly due to budgetary pressures from Vietnam War)
• first factor: corporations’ response: blame the unions (thus began their downfall)
  • wages started to stagnate, jobs increasingly outsourced to lower pay further (at least for tradeable goods)
  • otoh, non-tradeable goods were not outsourced
  • during 90s, technology allows companies to outsource impersonal services, using a lean/just-in-time model (using disposable workers)
    • which, of course, applies equally well to the lean platforms of today—they’re just continuing this trend
• second factor: now, of course, the financial crisis
  • no (or few) mentions of the “sharing economy” until afterwards—recall Uber founded 2009, Deliveroo 2013
    • some older ones founded earlier (like Seamless, etc) but didn’t really take off until after
  • unemployment doubled in the span of about 2 years in the US from 2008-2009, thus creating a pool of people desperate to take any job
  • stats on workforce composition: typically highly educated (70% of TaskRabbit workers have bachelors, 5% have PhDs)
• third factor: central banks slashing interest rates, hence people looking for riskier investments for higher returns
  • plus ofc the role of QE in creating all this excess capital in the first place
  • since 2009, so much VC sloshing around (not just established VC firms but also tech giants)
    • e.g., not just established VC firms but also tech giants’ venture arms
    • though I would argue that in the last case, it’s less about getting a return and more about getting in early in case it turns out to be a competitor/acquisition
• the state of the sharing economy today
  • firms are huge, huge valuations and revenues (even if not profitable)
    • smaller companies are dying or consolidating, think Grubhub/Seamless merging, or IKEA buying TaskRabbit
  • becoming increasingly commercial places, facilitating corporation revenues instead of “individual entrepeneurs”
    • Tom Slee, researching airbnb listings in NYC
      • 13% of listings take up 43% of all visits (how did he get this number??)
      • 60% of rentals are for entire homes (which could still be individuals, but also likely to be managed rentals)
    • NY attorney general report: 38% of revenues from properties rented out more than half the year—commercialised rentals, against state regulations
  • exploitation of workers, due to “independent contractor”/1099 status
  • reputation systems as a mechanism for disciplining workers/providers, as an alternative to actually training employees (which is not allowed for contractors)
    • obviously these reputation systems are affected by societal biases, which can affect livelihoods
• what now? will the sharing economy still be around 5 years from now
  • his theory: it will vanish
  • low profit margins, which is okay if services are used frequently enough (ridesharing, maybe food delivery) but what if that goes down
  • also relies on cheap labour force
    • in the case of AMT, this workforce can be global, and so that’s harder to solve
    • but in the case of face-to-face services, like ridesharing/delivery/cleaning, you rely on a local excess of workers (which isn’t necessarily here to stay, esp with employment regulation changes)
  • infrequent services, CAC/CLV ratio bad (esp in a saturated field where lots of competitors means you have to spend tons on marketing)
  • if the company’s cut is too high, and the tech isn’t that special, employees may decide that they can make more money off-platform (like HomeJoy which died for basically this reason)
  • growth-before-profits model
    • Uber losing so much money, partly to try to defeat Didi Chuxing in China (which failed), partly to defeat competitors & establish market hegemony
  • this era of cheap money may be coming to an end
    • central banks are starting to raise interest rates (find date/link), though srnicek thinks it was a bit premature
    • so the bubble in VC may be starting to deflate
    • which could spell the end of Uber’s growth-before-profits model because that relies on finding more funding to fuel growth
    • you can see this in tech startups cutting back on their stupid workplace perks (link) or even doing layoffs (Twitter, link)
  • regulators starting to catch up
    • airbnb: links to shutting down in paris, etc
    • uber: temporarily banned in london (as a negotiating tactic most likely), impinging on profitability
  • workers also responding to their exploitation: organising (unions-link to callum’s post), workers compensation lawsuits
    • link to uber $100mil settlement + other lawsuits (uber admitted $429m), lyft ($20m), postmates ($800m)
    • but ofc paying workers minimum wage doesn’t work with their assetless balance sheet strategy or business model in general
• student Q about uber trying to do advertising in-ride
  • srnicek thinks they can’t adapt to that quickly enough cus they dont have the data, they’d have to partner with someone else but then their margins are not enough
• student Q: do you think Uber and TFL could merge in the long-run
  • srnicek: TFL should incorporate these apps into theirs, so they could regulate them better

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Digital Workers - week 10

Readings

(Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love by Brooke Erin Duffy (chapter 3)

Described as

An illuminating investigation into a class of enterprising women aspiring to “make it” in the social media economy but often finding only unpaid work

in the press materials. Didn’t read.

Labor in the Global Digital Economy by Ursula Huws (chapter 5)

Going to read this at some point for my dissertation.

Cyber-Proletariat by Nick Dyer-Witheford (recommended)

Same as above

Lecture

On the subjects of the digital world. Introducting basic Marxist theories of class & exploitation and applying them to the digital economy, without too much explicit mention of Marx (presumably to avoid the associated semantic baggage).

• there is a dialectical opposition of the working & the capitalist class (collective categories, not individualistic)
• historical examples of class struggle:
  • welfare state (power resources theory)
  • 2-day weekends (won by workers)
  • deregulation of finance (won by capitalist class)
  • the creation of the EU (born out of the former European Coal and Steel Community, but really a victory for the German industrial capitalist class)
• on Bourdieu’s theory of taste (cultural class signifiers, where what is considered “high culture” is at least partly determined by the ruling class)
• one way to think about class is based on income bracket, but there’s a better way: relationship to the means of production
  • the easiest way to distinguish: capitalist class sees more income more capital; proletarian, from wages
• pre-capitalism, workers (by and large) had ownership of tools needed for production; there was no concept of “unemployment”
  • but capitalism brought about the separation of workers from their tools, in a process called primitive accumulation
  • result: workers need to sell their labour-power in order to survive
• exploitation refers to the general process of capitalists selling goods for more than the worker is paid in wages + is needed for raw materials (the extracted value is called surplus value)
• of course, this is a fairly crude analysis
  • to be more sophisticated, we’d need intermediate classes, and we’d also have to allow liminality
  • there are high-tech workers who are getting paid (high) wages but also often have stock or at least options, which can realise high capital gains
  • we also have middle managers, who ofte promote the class interests of capital even though they’re usually compensated like workers
  • plus, within the capitalist class, we have different categories: industrial/financial/platform which may have opposed views on topics like the deregulation of finance
• operaismo, or “workerism” in Italian: emphasises the centrality of the working class
  • implies that we need to look at the composition of the working class as well
  • technical composition, based on: division of labour; management techniques; machinery; reproduction of labour
  • political composition, based on: self-organising structures (unions and political parties); direct action (strikes, vandalism)
  • operaismo accepts that the composition (technical and political) can change along with the economy, in various cycles
• the Fordist cycle, from 1920s-1970s:
  • assembly lines
  • Taylorist management (deskilled workers given as little control over their work as possible; atomised work units)
  • huge factory machinery (high capital investment)
  • high wages (in order to boost consumption) assuming a male breadwinner model (women at home, doing domestic labour)
  • trade unions divided by industry
  • primary tactic: strikes
  • theory: political composition is determined by technical composition
    • due to centralisation of factories, it’s easy to have a strike that can shut down a nerve centre in a particular industry
    • plus, workers tended to be somewhat homogenous (similarly skilled, male, brought together in factories so they build solidarity that way)
  • (there’s a great article in Catalyst called Management-By-Stress which sees the move from Fordism to Toyotism as a way to deprive workers of these “pressure points”)
• do we have a new worker subjectivity now, due to changes in technology?
  • free labour for the advertising-driven UGC platforms (Facebook/Google/etc): not really
    • (thought: in Marxist terms, is there actually value being produced, or is the more targeted advertising just reducing the cost of circulation in the market?)
  • gig economy workers
    • precarious work
    • digitally managed via app (as opposed to an actual living employer)
    • rarely get to meet each other in person, unless they happen to pass each other by on the street or at waiting points
    • otoh, they are starting to organise and using some clever strategies, so there’s hope
  • content moderators for platforms like FB
    • outsourced to low-wage areas like the Philippines
    • checking for pornographic/violent content
    • high turnover -> harder to organise
  • Amazon warehouse workers
    • product sales cycle highly seasonal (higher Q4 revenue due to Christmas shopping)
    • in order to keep up with this seasonal demand, they have hired a mobile workforce which they call a “CamperForce”
    • basically elderly/retired workers who own their own RVs and who may have lost assets in the financial crisis
  • Coltan mining in the DRC (necessary to produce electronics)—Christian Fuchs writes about this a lot
  • software engineers/data scientists who are in high demand (partly as a result of overaccumulation, tbh) and thus can command high salaries
    • this is very cushy cognitive work, in environments that are intellectually challenging
    • they’re getting paid well so they have no reason to question the status quo (at least as a class)
• on class divisions today
  • cognitariat: selling intellectual labour-power (as opposed to the proletariat which sold physical labour-power)
    • highly educated (overeducated) workers with lots of cultural capital who will likely end up in precarious work
    • (Yann Moulier-Boutang makes an illuminating distinction between the intellectual & physical labour power in Cognitive Capitalism: whereas physical labour-power is, in a sense, “destroyed” in the process, intellectual labour-power builds upon itself as the owner of it accumulates greater skill and know-how)
  • the “multitude”: affective/common labour, connected by digital networks, building commons
    • peer production as an example—don’t need capitalists
    • ofc this is a very optimistic account that abstracts away material elements (not everyone benefits)
• the concept of surplus populations (aka reserve army of labour) is useful for understanding the future of labour
  • people who will be excluded from work due to automation (and other factors)
  • unemployed, marginalised in labour market
  • (this is his research focus right now)
• no focus on the platform capitalist class today; instead, focusing on those below

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The Future of the Digital Economy - week 11

Readings

Splinternet by Scott Malcomson (chapter 3)

Didn’t get around to this.

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek (chapter 3)

Read this over the summer. Notes in Bookmarker.

The Stack by Benjamin Bratton

In the Recommended Reading section. Haven’t read it yet (it’s an imposing 528 pages) but it seems quite seminal so I’m going to work through next semester.

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

In the Recommended Reading section. I read this over the summer and was wildly disappointed. Brief review on Goodreads (longer one coming soon, hopefully).

Socialize the Data Centres! by Evgeny Morozov

its In the Recommended Reading section. An interview with journalist Evgeny Morozov. One of my favourite New Left Review pieces ever. I came across this issue over the summer, while going through old NLR issues at Housman’s, and was very intrigued by the title of this specific piece. Notes in Bookmarker.

Will the Internet Fragment? by Milton Mueller

In the Recommended Reading section. Haven’t read this yet but it looks interesting.

Platform Cooperatism (PDF) by Treboz Scholz

In the Recommended Reading section. Haven’t read this yet either but Scholz’ work has been on my radar for some time (he co-edited Ours to Hack and to Own

Lecture

• in an ideal world, the Internet would be seamless, borderless, and equalizing
  • initially, though, it wasn’t really designed as anything other than a communications protocol between willing devices
• the major idea behind web 2.0 (besides its hallmark design aesthetic, which now looks awful) was that of the open platform
  • think early Twitter, with its embrace of external clients/apps/data
• now, though, it seems like the Internet is starting to move more towards closed platforms (aka walled gardens)
• 3 possible ways the Internet can fragment
  • on a technical level (not the focus of this lecture)
  • on a regulatory level (govt policies etc)
  • on a capitalist level (as the important decisions get made by corporations, rather than democratically-accountable governments)
• on the role of the state in the early development of the Internet (an inevitably US-centric take, given the outsize role the US govt played in the Internet’s creation)
  • from 70s to ~2001, the state mostly stepped back and allowed it to grow on its own
  • we saw a sort of globalisation of the Internet
  • 9/11 changed the state’s relationship with the Internet, as it started building surveillance networks (PATRIOT act etc)
  • at around the same time, China & Russia started asserting control over the Internet within national borders
    • similarly during the Arab Spring, when several states realised that they needed some degree of control over Internet access/content in order to stay in power
  • thus we could see the rise of national borders in?/on? the Internet
    • possibly arising from the location of physical servers (since they could be subject to state regulation based on where the servers are located as well as where the company operates)
    • after Snowden leaks (2013), the dangers of putting all your data under (say) US jurisdiction became clear, spurring a drive toward data localisation
  • data sovereignty: countries have power over their own data since it’s physically stored within the country
    • China/Russia (could? do?) pressure local businesses to use local suppliers
    • “European internet” proposed as a way of avoiding routing data through the US
    • proposals for nationally-run DNS (since right now, it’s very US-centric), akin to phone systems
    • satnav systems are run by the US military (GPS is American-dominated); different states are considering launching their own satellite networks to counter that
    • digital protectionism in China where access to US tech giants is cut off, and development of local alternatives is fostered instead
• on capitalism: is it compatible with fragmentation? does it drive tendencies toward greater or less fragmentation?
  • organisational problem: search engines and online communities are becoming walled gardens, with the goal of keeping you in while keeping others out
  • FB’s free basics program (which violates net neutrality principles) has led to confusion (in the developing nations where it runs amok) between FB & the Internet
  • w/o net neutrality, we could see the rise of a giant toll system for consumers and corporations
  • the FCC’s arg, otoh, is that it would give ISPs an “incentive” to invest in Broadband etc
  • at the time of the lecture, the vote hadn’t yet occurred … we know now how that vote went
  • could have global ramifications, though it’s unclear what exactly or how quickly they’ll diffuse
  • possible benefits of ending net neutrality: the ability to foster creation of regional tech giants as an alternative to the current global ones?
• we should differentiate between illegitimate and valid fragmentation
  • firewalls, blocking spam, privacy etc

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