SO478 - week 9
« Back to SO478These are my notes from November 21 for SO478 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.
The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.
Algorithmic inequality
Readings
Skeggs and Yuill paper on Facebook
This paper was summarised at an LSE public lecture back in September:
You Are Being Tracked, Evaluated and Sold: an analysis of digital inequalities
Weapons of Math Destruction
Read it a while back but don’t have notes for it yet.
Lecture and seminar
This lecture (and subsequent seminar) was given by Beverly Skeggs, Visiting Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She used the same slides from her LSE public lecture but skipped some of the content due to time constraints + went into some other topics as well. Below is a brief summary of what wasn’t covered in the public lecture (& includes my personal notes).
- recently, we’ve seen a big shift in global capitalism
- similar to the trend toward financialisation (she cites Costas Lapavista’s Profiting Without Producing here)
- but now instead of a financial bubble it’s an advertising one
- of course, the way it’s sustained & grown is by people consuming more than what they really need to live
- thus the advertising industry, seen holistically, is something that cannot be justified exogenously—it’s just a way to prop up aggregate demand for frankly unnecessary goods (the self-sustaining logic of capitalism)
- social media, which is fueled by advertising, is creating stratification based on the value that different groups provide to advertisers (in terms of potential purchasing power)
- tracking is done sometimes for the purpose of trading (selling) data, but sometimes for the purpose of control (both by the market & by the state)
- these companies are also putting massive amounts of $ into lobbying which makes it harder to hold them accountable
- my take: the problem isn’t necessarily that this data is being collected, it’s that these companies have the ability to use it because they hold our attention
- best software engineers get scooped up by tech companies because they’re able to pay so much
- thought: imagine if you could implement some sort of wage control system (based on total compensation), maybe that would help
- on the whole Russia-influencing-politics thing (that Twitter, Facebook etc got tangled up in)
- imo it’s just a scapegoat for liberals who realise how bad things are but would rather put it down to foreign meddling in a decent system, because the alternative is to blame capitalism
- there’s a general air of resignation toward technology because the average person just doesn’t understand how it really works (by design)
- my take on the adtech industry (and everything that relies on it) is that it’s really just the hidden desires of capitalism equipped with the technology it needs to make those dreams a reality
- so its worst excesses are nothing more than the worst excesses of capitalism
- which ofc means we can’t really combat its problems on a fundamental level without confronting capitalism
- approaches that don’t change structural incentives will never succeed except temporarily
- risk of political capture, esp as some of these companies become “too big to fail” (just like the banks)
- otoh, there’s hope in the case of India pushing back against Facebook’s Free Basics, and regulators finally catching up to Uber
- in the end, only states have power to really regulate, we can pair that with a bottom-up approach of changing public image (because these companies do care about that) but alone it won’t be sufficient
- Skeggs ended on a nice note: we need to move from a politics of resignation to a politics of the yet-to-come
- follow-up from someone else: we can expose the gap between ideology and what’s really happening (since capitalism runs on ideology & doesn’t function unless enough people believe that it works the way it’s claimed to)