Tech

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    [post_content] => Working from home under lockdown has highlighted some unanticipated gender and class issues.

I have a vivid memory of a 1990s television commercial for a then-state-of-the-art cordless phone. It portrayed an industrious young businesswoman working her way through the weekend from home. Her three young daughters appear and beg her to drive them to the beach. The woman is torn; she loves her kids, but she’s also a dedicated Career Woman, and, weekend or no, she has work to do.

The last shot of the ad shows the woman taking her daughters to the beach—and joining a conference call from her new cordless phone as they frolic in the waves. Technology, the ad suggested, would set a new generation of women free by allowing them to work from anywhere: with the right phone, you could spend time with your kids without sacrificing that promotion!



Fast forward to 2020 and a world reeling from a global pandemic. The ad now seems both dated and antithetical to modern concepts of gender roles and work-life balance (why can’t the children’s other parent take them to the beach? why is the person struggling to balance work and family always a woman? why should anyone have to join a conference call on a Saturday?). Now facing a grim choice between economic pain and physical risk are the huge number of people whose jobs cannot be performed from home—grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, transit workers, and health care providers, to name a few—as well as those whose employers are refusing to let them work from home, even in cases where their jobs can be done remotely.

Those who can work from home are the lucky minority. According to a survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 29 percent of wage and salary workers had the option of working from home in 2017-18, and 25 percent did so at least some of the time. Most of them are high-earning white collar workers. Of civilian workers, a category comprised of both private industry and state and local government workers, only 7 percent have access to “flexible” work, or telework.

The COVID-19 crisis has transformed a white-collar job perk into a necessary means of protecting the health of workers, businesses, and the overall economy. This is why, in the span of a few weeks, so many companies have gone from resisting to mandating it.

Organizations seeking to advance women in the workplace have been pushing for companies to allow flexible and/or at-home work since the 1970s. Women would benefit the most from these arrangements, the theory went, because they were expected to perform a greater share of domestic labor. Why should an ambitious, hardworking woman be held back in her career simply because she had to pick up the kids at 3pm or get dinner on the table by 7?

Today, women still do more child care and housework than men, but many fathers are playing a greater role in their children’s lives than did men of previous generations. Male and female, single and married, parents and child-free, many workers value the flexibility and freedom of working from home at least some of the time—being able to let in the plumber, sign for a package, go to the gym, walk the dog, or prepare a home-cooked meal reduces stress across the board.

Before the pandemic—and even now, in the midst of it—many organizations were and are reluctant to allow staff to work from home. Although more companies have been allowing at-home work in the last 20 years, the last decade saw a small backlash, led most notably by Marissa Mayer, who banned remote work when she took over Yahoo in 2013. Some employers worried that workers didn’t have the training or equipment necessary to work productively from home, or that being at home would be too distracting. Some managers feared a loss of control and didn’t trust employees to get work done. Mayer, Steve Jobs, and others believed that collaboration, connectedness, and innovation suffer when employees aren’t interacting with each other in person.

Now that working from home has, in some cases, gone from a reward reserved for upper management to a requirement of the job, more people are discovering its downsides. As a young entrepreneur named Adam Simmons told CBC News in 2019, "I think [working at home] is really damaging for your mental health…It definitely was for mine. I felt very, very lonely.”

When Simmons worked from home, he was alone. But due to pandemic-induced school and day care closures, many of today’s office workers are trying to meet the demands of full-time jobs while caring for children. An acquaintance recently described a meltdown her toddler son had while she was working from home. “He asked for a snack WHILE eating a snack,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “I said, ‘You’re already eating an apple,’ and he threw himself on the ground, moaning, ‘No, I need a snaaaaaaack!’” Never has the professor whose children famously interrupted a live BBC News interview in 2017 been more relatable.

Newer technologies like instant chat and video conferencing have made it easier than ever to work from home, if not necessarily more pleasant. Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford and founding director of the university’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, wrote about why so many people find Zoom meetings more exhausting than in-person ones in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Bailenson’s research suggests that employees now attending hours of Zoom meetings per week are experiencing “nonverbal overload.” The grid format of ten-person Zoom meetings, in which each participant stares at you from the screen for the entire time in an eerie echo of “The Brady Bunch,” can be “draining,” he wrote. In real-life meetings, we can “control our personal space,” whereas “for every minute we are in Zoom, we have staring faces inches from our own.”

Employers resist allowing people to work from home in part because they fear a dip in productivity. But research and workers’ experiences during the pandemic indicate that allowing (or requiring) work from home is in fact a boon to management. As Bailenson wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “people are forced to pay attention” on Zoom to a greater degree than in person. Even Kevin Roose, author of a recent New York Times op-ed entitled, “Sorry, but Working From Home is Overrated,” acknowledged that studies show remote workers are more efficient and productive and “tend to take shorter breaks and fewer sick days” than their on-site peers.

Advocates have emphasized for years that allowing employees to work from home at least some of the time can save companies money—e.g., by reducing office size or eliminating the need to rent one and slashing the cost of utilities, janitorial services, supplies, equipment, and furniture. According to a 2014 NBC News story, a typical business would save, on average, $11,000 per year by allowing employees to work from home just half of the time.

As Roose pointed out, having trouble separating work life from home life is a downside for workers, but not for bosses looking to “squeeze extra efficiency out of [their] employees.” Indeed, employees who now have to work from home because of the pandemic are encountering what one described in a recent career advice column as, “expectations that because we’re at home all the time anyway, we should be online and available at almost all times” and “being asked to do extra work during the evenings…because everyone knows we’re all here anyway.”

Without “the normal excuse of having plans,” the advice seeker wrote, “I'm finding it hard to say no.” Overwhelmed and/or abusive managers are already taking advantage of this situation; more than one person has noticed that they are working more hours now than they were before the pandemic, often because they’re replacing their daily commute with another hour or three of work.

Extra hours aside, working from home is not for everyone. Some—extroverts, parents of young children, people who value a clear separation between work and home—will be delighted to return to their offices as soon as it is safe to do so. Others, having discovered that they can work just as well (or better) from home, will not easily give up their newfound freedom.

For many companies, allowing people to work remotely at least some of the time makes sense for employers and employees alike, with or without a global pandemic. And it will be difficult for management to continue insisting it’s not feasible when workers have been doing it for months. Forcing adults to spend eight or more hours a day on-site is as outdated and ludicrous as running an ad that equates weekend work with women’s liberation.
    [post_title] => What the pandemic is teaching us about working from home
    [post_excerpt] => Now that working from home has, in some cases, gone from a privilege reserved for upper management to a requirement of the job, more people are discovering its downsides.
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What the pandemic is teaching us about working from home

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_content] => With security risks and data-leaks, why do some serving soldiers bring smartphones on deployment, and how do countries differ?

A few years ago, my husband deployed to Afghanistan where the British Army had categorically banned all soldiers from using their phones. He called once a week at most, and our conversations were stilted and short. It’s hard to share sweet nothings in front of a line of soldiers waiting their turn. All was well until one morning I had coffee with another army wife. Her husband was working in the US Marine Corps Camp Leatherneck, and she got to facetime him every. single. morning. What I’d thought was an iron law of deployment – no personal communications devices for anyone, anywhere, anytime – turned out to be more an evolving set of practices.

Cell phones are wildly insecure. They’re the most vulnerable node in a network designed to generate and exploit user-data and share it with a wide range of actors, from device manufacturers, operating system owners, content-creators, software and app-designers, phone companies and partner networks. And those are just the organizations officially permitted to pull down mobile device data. Many apps leak data continually, as a consequence of either poor design or the user’s failure to install updates. We also have a perennial problem of apps that access and share personal and device data they have collected unnecessarily.

Cell phones use several different families of communications protocol — SMS, MMS, WiFi, Bluetooth and GSM – each with its own security vulnerabilities and unpredictable interaction effects. Then there are the network exploits: network providers use signalling protocols that  have known and more or less unfixable weaknesses. This means that more than half the attempts to tap calls made on 3G networks succeed, while nine out of ten SMS messages can be intercepted.

Attackers can exploit all of these weaknesses. Spyware such as NSO Group’s infamous Pegasus software can allegedly read text messages, track calls, collect passwords, track the location of the phone, access its microphone and camera and suck up information from apps. No wonder so many militaries ban personal cell phones for soldiers in action, while some ban their use altogether.

For soldiers, however, a cellphone can seem essential. These are young people who exercise a lot, often using apps, are typically far from home and often bored — and they really, really like to show off to their friends by posting videos and photographs. But the morale boost of a cellphone can undermine operational security:

    
 	
  • Researchers for Bellingcat, the open-source intelligence website, used soldiers’ social media posts to forensically trace the entire journey of the Russian military unit that transported the Buk missile launcher, which likely shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over eastern Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat used painstaking geolocation work on selfies the soldiers uploaded to popular Russian social media platforms VK and Odnoklassniki to determine the whole route. Some soldiers made the job a lot easier by photographing themselves in front of place-name signs along the way.
    • 
 	
  • In January this year, during a military exercise in the Mojave Desert, a US Marine Corps lance corporal ‘got his whole unit killed’ – hypothetically — by posting a picture of them on Facebook. Nowadays, every conflict zone is “an electronic warfare-type environment,” said the Marine Corps’ head of education, in a widely syndicated article clearly intended to get the message across the whole US military.
    • 
 	
  • But it’s not all soldier selfies. The 2018 Strava case showed that a popular fitness tracker, used by many in the US military and diplomatic services to record their favourite running routes for other app users, had exposed the locations of military and intelligence installations around the world.
    • 


Different militaries have varied in their responses, often in ways that seem to track their broader culture and politics. Turkey banned smartphone use by soldiers on-base in 2015, and Russia followed suit in 2019 when its parliament unanimously voted to ban tablets and smartphone use by on-duty armed forces. The Russian law also forbids men and women in the military from sharing information and photos about their service, because this content had been used by others “to shape a biased assessment of the Russian Federation's state policies."

A more liberal outlier is China, where the People’s Liberation Army decided in 2016 to limit where and when soldiers on domestic bases can use their smartphones, and only after they realized that the taxi-hailing apps soldiers used to get back at night were collecting personally identifiable location data around military installations. Some bans are specific to location; Indian soldiers along the “Line of Actual Control” between Indian and Chinese-controlled parts of the Himalayas are forbidden to use Chinese apps like Weibo and WeChat. Countries that are more likely to use internet shutdowns also seem more likely to implement blanket-bans on soldiers using smartphones. Turkey, for example, recently blocked access to Twitter during a bombardment in Syria. In India, Kashmir is now in its six-month of a government-imposed internet shutdown.

Authoritarian countries tend to be more absolutist in their policies regarding communications. They also lack the institutional capacity to consistently police their draconian rules, so smartphone bans may be observed more in the breach. Already, Bellingcat has easily identified many Russian soldiers’ pseudonymous profiles, and the weakest link in the chain — as I can attest — is often the proud or just emotionally needy wives and girlfriends who share pictures or insist on frequent phone calls.

The US seems more permissive on communications devices than the UK’s military, based on my experience of a friend’s husband buying and using an iPad on a US base in Afghanistan. One reason could be that US deployments tend to be longer and more frequent. But as our cell phones become increasingly integrated into every aspect of our lives, they represent an increasing threat — which is why the rules are tightening. Since 2018, the US has forbidden GPS-enabled functioning of personal devices on deployment, although this unintentionally hilarious education video – “Don’t end up like this guy”– suggests the ban is more honoured in the breach. Decisions to ban devices altogether, and not just specific GPS functionality on the devices, seem to be determined on a case by case basis. A recent 82nd Airborne deployment to the Middle East that banned all smartphones and devices was sufficiently newsworthy to be reported on CNN.

One factor quietly influencing phones and deployment is geography. Typically, a soldier is deploying to somewhere far away. Distance tends to lower the expectation of frequent contact, and it also complicates the matter of the cell phone service provider. Soldiers from the US or UK who deployed to Afghanistan could, in theory, buy a local prepaid SIM card and put it in their own smuggled phone. This would be a bad move. A unique identifier in the phone, verifiable via a global industry database, would immediately allow the local phone provider to determine the phone’s provenance. With Russian, Iranian and Chinese intelligence agencies widely believed to be perched on Afghan networks, they could build up a picture not just of troop movements but possibly of identified individuals to track when they went home. Following the soldier home electronically doesn’t seem to have happened Afghanistan, but it’s been reported to have happened to NATO personnel in the Baltics, whose families were apparently traced by Russian entities.

Not being able to trust the local cell phone provider can have a big impact, and it can happen even if the conflict is in the military’s own territory. The Kenya Defence Force (KDF) operates in Al Shabab-contested parts of north-eastern Kenya, near Somalia, and seem to have an active feud with Hormuud, the main Somali telecoms provider. The KDF frequently targets Hormuud cellphone towers across the border in Somalia. Al Shabab, which has long been suspected of being close to the cellphone operator Hormuud, returns the favour, frequently blowing up Safaricom towers inside the Kenyan border. This knocks out some of the KDF’s communications, and often happens just before attacks. Researcher Rashid Abdi has suggested that the battles over these cellphone towers could be some combination of a proxy war between the governments of Kenya and Somalia, and the Somali telecoms provider Hormuud using Al Shabab to “gain commercial advantage or to avenge previous attacks” on Hormuud’s cellphone towers. Either way, KDF soldiers cannot reliably and securely communicate with cellphones while on Kenyan turf.

The Israeli Defence Forces’ unusually liberal policy regarding cell phone use during active service may be partly because their soldiers stay relatively close to home and can use their own domestic service providers. A recent alleged catfishing attempt by Hamas tried to tempt Israeli soldiers to share information with fake profiles of attractive young women on social media sites. Like the US Marine whose unit selfie ‘got his whole unit killed’ and became a cautionary tale on the evening news, the thwarted Hamas attack on a known vulnerability – the infinite vanity and ever-hopefulness of horny young men far from home – seems to have been publicised as a lesson for the troops. A widespread ban on personal cell phones in the IDF seems unlikely, not least because in a small country with near-universal conscription, parents are eager to keep tabs on their children during military service.

Military chiefs often focus on the operational security problems of cell phones, but downplay another reason for their disquiet — i.e., soldiers using them to highlight bad treatment or conditions. Soldiers in India and Turkey have reportedly uploaded pictures or videos of bad food or poor shelter.

Even when conditions are fine, cell phones are an escape from military life, and not all countries welcome that. South Korea banned its conscripts from having mobile phones at all during their two years’ service, and rigorously enforced it. But in 2018 the ban was reviewed and partly relaxed as part of a wider effort to reduce the isolation and total control over conscripted soldiers. Now, soldiers are allowed to use cell phones for an hour or two per day in barracks, enforced not by the military itself, but by specialised subscriptions from telecoms providers. Both the conscripted soldiers and their families back home report being happier, and time will tell if lessening the total control over soldiers affects their morale or cohesion.

Enemies will always exploit vulnerabilities – both technological and human. Official policies on soldiers and cell phones will go on evolving as the demands of operational security change, the places they’re deployed to vary, and our expectations about connectedness to serving loved ones develop. And as the rules evolve, the ways people break them will, too.
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    [post_excerpt] => Half the attempts to tap calls made on 3G networks succeed, while nine out of ten SMS messages can be intercepted.
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Soldiers with smartphones can be a gift to the enemy

by Maria Farrell

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    [post_content] => The tech executive turned data justice warrior is celebrated as a truth-telling hero, but there's something a bit too smooth about this narrative arc.

A few months ago, I was contacted by a senior executive who was about to leave a marketing firm. He got in touch because I’ve worked on the non-profit side of tech for a long time, with lots of volunteering on digital and human rights. He wanted to ‘give back’. Could I put him in touch with digital rights activists? Sure. We met for coffee and I made some introductions. It was a perfectly lovely interaction with a perfectly lovely man. Perhaps he will do some good, sharing his expertise with the people working to save democracy and our private lives from the surveillance capitalism machine of his former employers. The way I rationalized helping him was: firstly, it’s nice to be nice; and secondly, movements are made of people who start off far apart but converge on a destination. And isn’t it an unqualified good when an insider decides to do the right thing, however late?

The Prodigal Son is a New Testament parable about two sons. One stays home to work the farm. The other cashes in his inheritance and gambles it away. When the gambler comes home, his father slaughters the fattened calf to celebrate, leaving the virtuous, hard-working brother to complain that all these years he wasn’t even given a small goat to share with his friends. His father replies that the prodigal son ‘was dead, now he’s alive; lost, now he’s found’. Cue party streamers. It’s a touching story of redemption, with a massive payload of moral hazard. It’s about coming home, saying sorry, being joyfully forgiven and starting again. Most of us would love to star in it, but few of us will be given the chance.

The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with invitations to write opeds for major newspapers, for think tank funding, book deals and TED talks. These guys – and yes, they are all guys – are generally thoughtful and well-meaning, and I wish them well. But I question why they seize so much attention and are awarded scarce resources, and why they’re given not just a second chance, but also the mantle of moral and expert authority.

I’m glad that Roger McNamee, the early Facebook investor, has testified to the U.S. Congress about Facebook’s wildly self-interested near-silence about its amplification of Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. I’m thrilled that Google’s ex-‘design ethicist’, Tristan Harris, “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,"(startlingly faint praise) now runs a Center for Humane Technology, exposing the mind-hacking tricks of his former employer. I even spoke —critically but, I hope, warmly—at the book launch of James Williams, another ex-Googler turned attention evangelist, who “co-founded the movement”of awareness of designed-in addiction. I wish all these guys well. I also wish that the many, exhausted activists who didn’t take money from Google or Facebook could have even a quarter of the attention, status and authority the Prodigal Techbro assumes is his birth-right.

Today, when the tide of public opinion on Big Tech is finally turning, the brothers (and sisters) who worked hard in the field all those years aren’t even invited to the party. No fattened calf for you, my all but unemployable tech activist. The moral hazard is clear; why would anyone do the right thing from the beginning when they can take the money, have their fun, and then, when the wind changes, convert their status and relative wealth into special pleading and a whole new career?

Just half an hour flipping through my contacts produced half a dozen friends and acquaintances who didn’t require a ‘road to Damascus’ conversion to see what was wrong with big tech or the ways governments abuse it. Nighat Dad runs the Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan, defending online freedom of expression and privacy for women, minorities and dissidents. That’s real courage. Gus Hosein has worked in tech and human rights for over 20 years, runs Privacy International, the UK-based non-profit, and is the most visionary thinker I know on how to shake up our assumptions about why things are as they are.  Bianca Wylie founded the volunteer-run Open Data Institute Toronto, and works on open data, citizen privacy and civic engagement. The “Jane Jacobs of the Smart Cities Age,” she’s been a key figure in opening up and slowing down Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs juggernaut in Toronto. Aral Balkan runs Small Technology Foundation and works on both the tools and the policies to resist surveillance capitalism. Unafraid of being unpopular, even with other activists, Balkan freely hammers rights organizations or conferences for taking big tech’s sponsorship money while criticizing the companies’ practices. In the western Balkans, hvale vale works tirelessly and cheerfully on women's rights, sexual rights and the political and practical path to a feminist internet. Robin Gross,  a Californian intellectual property lawyer, could have put her persistence and sheer pizazz to work defending big entertainment companies, but instead she’s worked for decades against the copyright maximalism that strangles artists’ creativity and does nothing to increase their incomes. I would love to hear their voices amplified, not (just) the voices of those who took a decade and more to work out the rottenness at the core of big tech.

Ex-Google lobbyist Ross Lajeunesse left the company in 2019 over its censored search engine for China and also because of homophobic, sexist and racist work practices. He’s now running for a Democratic senate nomination, and recently wrote a classic of the ‘scales have fallen from my eyes’ genre, called “I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left.” Its lede is “The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.”

Really? Has Google really changed? Lajeunesse joined in 2008, years into Google’s multi-billion dollar tax avoidance, sexist labor practices and privacy hostility and continued to work there through the years of antitrust fines, misuse of personal health data, wage fixing, and financially pressuring think tanks. Google didn’t change. It just started treating some of its insiders like it already treated outsiders. That only looks like radical change if you’ve never thought too hard about what you are doing and to whom.

One hundred thousand people work for Google/Alphabet; some of them have much more power than others. The point isn’t whether Lajeunesse is or isn’t culpable for the many acts of the enormous company he represented—as its chief lobbyist in Asia for several years—it’s that of all the people who spent the decade of 2010-20 working thanklessly to expose and reduce the firm’s monopolistic abuse and assault on global privacy, it’s the ex-lobbyist who gets our attention now.

We all need second chances. Even if we don’t need those fresh starts ourselves, we want to live in a world where people have a reason to do better. But the prodigal tech bro’s redemption arc is so quick and smooth it’s barely a road bump. That’s because we keep skipping the most important part of the prodigal son story—where he hits rock bottom. In the original parable, the prodigal son wakes up in a pig sty, starving, and realizes his father’s servants now live better than he does. He resolves to go home to the people and place he did not value or respect before. He will beg to be one of his father’s servants. He accepts his complete loss of status. But instead of chastising and punishing his prodigal son, the rejoicing father greets him joyfully and heads off the apology with a huge party. It’s a great metaphor for how to run a religion, but a lousy way to run everything else.

Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse.  But the bit where you say you got things wrong and people were hurt? That’s the most important part. It’s why these corporatized reinventions feel so slick and tinny, and why so many of the comments on Lajeunesse’s train wreck post on Medium were critical. The journey feels fake. These ‘I was lost but now I’m found, please come to my TED talk’ accounts typically miss most of the actual journey, yet claim the moral authority of one who’s ‘been there’ but came back. It’s a teleportation machine, but for ethics.

(While we’re thinking about the neatly elided parts of the prodigal tech bro story, let’s dwell for one moment on the deletion of the entire stories of so many women and people of color barely given a first chance in Silicon Valley, let alone multiple reinventions.)

The only thing more fungible than cold, hard cash is privilege. The prodigal tech bro doesn’t so much take an off-ramp from the relatively high status and well-paid job he left when the scales fell from his eyes, as zoom up an on-ramp into a new sector that accepts the reputational currency he has accumulated. He’s not joining the resistance. He’s launching a new kind of start-up using his industry contacts for seed-funding in return for some reputation-laundering.

So what? Sure, it’s a little galling, but where’s the harm?

Allowing people who share responsibility for our tech dystopia to keep control of the narrative means we never get to the bottom of how and why we got here, and we artificially narrow the possibilities for where we go next. And centering people who were insiders before and claim to be leading the outsiders now doesn’t help the overall case for tech accountability. It just reinforces the industry’s toxic dynamic that some people are worth more than others, that power is its own justification.

The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent. Sure, we got some things wrong, he says, but that’s because we were over-optimistic / moved too fast / have a growth mindset. Just put the engineers back in charge / refocus on the original mission / get marketing out of the c-suite. Government “needs to step up”, but just enough to level the playing field / tweak the incentives. Because the prodigal techbro is a moderate, centrist, regular guy. Dammit, he’s a Democrat. Those others who said years ago what he’s telling you right now? They’re troublemakers, disgruntled outsiders obsessed with scandal and grievance. He gets why you ignored them. Hey, he did, too. He knows you want to fix this stuff. But it’s complicated. It needs nuance. He knows you’ll listen to him. Dude, he’s just like you…

I’m re-assessing how often I help out well-established men suddenly interested in my insights and contact book. It’s ridiculous how many ‘and I truly mean them well’s I cut out of this piece, but I really do, while also realizing I help them because they ask, or because other people ask for them. And that coffee, those introductions, that talk I gave and so much more of my attention and care—it needs to go instead to activists I know and care about but who would never presume to ask. Sometimes the prodigal daughter has her regrets, too.

So, if you’re a prodigal tech bro, do us all a favour and, as Rebecca Solnit says, help “turn down the volume a little on the people who always got heard”:

    
 	
  • Do the reading and do the work. Familiarize yourself with the research and what we’ve already tried, on your own time. Go join the digital rights and inequality-focused organizations that have been working to limit the harms of your previous employers and – this is key – sit quietly at the back and listen.
    • 
 	
  • Use your privilege and status and the 80 percent of your network that’s still talking to you to big up activists who have been in the trenches for years already—especially women and people of colour. Say ‘thanks but no thanks’ to that invitation and pass it along to someone who’s done the work and paid the price.
    • 
 	
  • Understand that if you are doing this for the next phase of your career, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing this to explain away the increasingly toxic names on your resumé, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing it because you want to ‘give back,’ you are doing it wrong.
    • 


Do this only because you recognize and can say out loud that you are not ‘giving back’, you are making amends for having already taken far, far too much.

 
    [post_title] => The Prodigal Techbro
    [post_excerpt] => Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse.  
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The Prodigal Techbro

by Maria Farrell

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(CC BY 2.0)

The claim that social media is a neutral platform for the amplification of free speech does not hold up to scrutiny. 

Does it matter that Mark Zuckerberg dines with far-right politicians and activists, or that he genuinely seems to believe their websites are trustworthy fact-checkers? Does it matter that Jack Dorsey personally overrules Twitter bans on white supremacists but allows Donald Trump to ignore the acceptable use rules that the rest of us must obey?

Yes and no. Yes, it matters because the political preferences and blind spots of social media C.E.O.s influence their businesses. And no, because leaders’ opinions matter less than how right-favoring ideas, incentives and ways of organizing are baked into social media’s business models in ways those executives don’t even seem fully aware of.

We know that Facebook’s Washington D.C. lobby-shop and electoral integrity work is dominated by Republican party operatives and members, and we know Twitter prefers to give Nazi sympathizers a blue check mark rather than the boot. Google funds climate change deniers and YouTube is a right-wing radicalization engine. There is no shortage of evidence that America’s West Coast tech unicorns qualify as liberal only on a narrow range of identity issues. They’ll stand up for LGBTQ rights, but they’ll come down hard on any union activism among their own employees.

Less obvious is the fact that social media itself is structurally right-wing. Not because its CEOs are tech-bro libertarians or even because of their suspiciously agile pivot to Trump, but because social media affords advantages to the ideas, feelings and organizing principles of the hard-right. Oh, and also because of the money.

Structure

First, some heavy lifting. Social media as we currently organize it is trivially easy to weaponize in ways that favour autocracy and damage democracy. Political scientist Henry Farrell* and information security expert Bruce Schneier recently explained why democracies are so easily harmed by disinformation attacks while autocracies are actually strengthened by them. It’s because democracies and autocracies rely on people having two different kinds of shared knowledge; and social media disinformation disrupts one and favours the other.

In an autocracy, you know who’s in charge and what they want, but you’re not sure who the different political movers in society are, how much power they have and who you could form a coalition with. Certainly, political conflict occurs in societies that are dominated by the power vertical, but mostly off-stage or in ways only insiders can interpret. That’s why we still use the term ‘Kremlinology’ to describe the study of subtle public signs of largely secret power struggles. In an autocracy, shared knowledge about other people’s political views is low. This makes it risky and difficult to organize an opposition. In 2010, democracy activists in Tunisia had very little idea how many other people felt the same and were prepared to rise up against the regime until Mohamed Bouazizi, that fateful vegetable seller, set himself on fire and triggered the entire Arab Spring. Social media did help those protests to go viral — though its role has been exaggerated — but autocratic rulers learned quickly how to turn social media against citizens.

The main tactic autocrats use is "flooding," sending huge numbers of often contradictory political messages via automated social media accounts to drown out discourse and make it impossible to figure out who’s friend, who’s foe, or who’s even a human. The Chinese government strategically uses social media flooding both as a censorship tool — "who knows what’s really true?" —  and to distract and divide people, weakening them as a political force. Autocracies are strengthened by divisions that prevent people coming together as a political force. The tactics autocrats use at home can quickly become part of their strategy abroad. Russia is known to have used flooding to undermine shared belief in the validity of electoral politics in Ukraine and also in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany. Social media makes flooding cheap and successful because increasing the quantity of noise degrades the quality of discourse. It might even make it impossible to sustain. When a tactic becomes a strategy, things can change, sometimes very quickly.

An aside: I recently heard a well-connected U.K. conservative saying something I’ve heard from at least a dozen people in powerful positions: "Social media doesn’t do anything new. It just lets people express themselves, for good and for ill." Wrong. Different technologies — embedded in different business models — have different affordances. They encourage certain kinds of behavior, ways to make money and means to concentrate power. Those who benefit from these affordances seem to be almost unaware of the advantages thus bestowed, as though they’re used to playing the game of life on "easy." The same person later regretfully confided that yes, it was dreadful their own party was going to fight an election campaign that would pit parliament against "the people," but no, there was nothing to be done about it. Nothing at all.

Farrell and Schneier’s article explains that democracy is so vulnerable because flooding destroys precisely the kind of information democracy depends on. In a stable democracy we disagree about who should be in charge, but we share — and depend on — common knowledge about who the political actors are, how much support they have and how we can form coalitions. That shared knowledge allows us to have a functioning political opposition. We also share the knowledge that our electoral systems are basically fair, that outcomes approximate what enough people really feel, and that if we lose this year’s election we still have a good chance of winning the next one. If that knowledge goes away, then the institutions that depend on it can, too.

All very interesting, you might say, but this shows that social media helps autocrats, and autocracy can be of the left, too, at least in its self-justifying propaganda. What is peculiar to how social media helps right-wing autocracy?

Social media is structurally disposed to weaken our real-life horizontal ties with one other, to poison our ability even to imagine a social contract, to disrupt our drive to discover shared interests and shape them into collective political action. Social media is great for democracy only if you think democracy is a an exercise in ticking all the boxes for crowning a strongman. I say social media is inherently right-wing because it is structurally predisposed to making social democracy impossible.

Social democracy depends on the ability to form rolling coalitions of different groups around broadly shared goals. If I’m the middle-class parent of a disabled child, I can make common cause with an unemployed miner hundreds of miles away. We both want the state to be a social safety net for when life throws us a curveball. We don’t want all the same things, but we agree on enough to vote for or even belong to the same political party. And it’s not purely transactional. In our kinder moments, we feel solidarity, even though we are in different places and belong to different social classes. But what happens if I start seeing that ex-miner as an enemy, and vice versa? If our tribal identities have become so narrow and hardened that we no longer feel we’re on the same side? Hell, that we no longer even live the same world? If the broad-based coalitions that built social democracy can no longer recognize each other as allies, then it’s devil take the hindmost in a world of an unchecked and punitive state. Goodbye fraternity, hello Koch brothers.

Social media is the ideal medium and amplifier for the actively divisive and zero-sum politics of the hard, populist right. It disadvantages any politics based on compromise, on solidarity, on a forgivingly broad concept of who ‘the people’ are. Social media’s methods structurally favour Duterte, Trump, Orban et al the way tennis disinterestedly favours athletes with long arms.

Methods

Facebook and Google act as advertising consolidators, collecting vast amounts of personal data on users and renting that data and access to their users to advertisers. So the more you use their services, the more data they can gather and ads they can sell. This is called adtech, and it is social media’s chosen business model.  The official version regarding the unique selling point (USP) of adtech is that social media firms can target ads to us more closely because they know so much about us. The private, and more accurate, USP to advertisers is that they have finely segmented the markets we inhabit in order to identify the tiniest possible groups for advertisers to target. The key to adtech is market segmentation— i.e., breaking people down into ever smaller groups to sell things to. We sell things to people by convincing them of the importance and uniqueness of their group. What sells is making people feel they are different, special and even superior. They deserve things most others don’t. In society at large we call this "fomenting division." Social media, the pill we swallow to ingest adtech, is based on creating and exploiting social division. So too, it turns out, is the right-wing project whose goal and working methods are to create in-groups and out-groups for an ever-smaller number of people who count as ‘people’. Social media’s business model is to make us feel more divided than ever, and monetize the finest of distinctions we can be made to feel.

Feelings

And what keeps us clicking? Strong emotions like fear, anger and even hate. By now, most of us know that YouTube and others drive "engagement" by presenting the most emotive content, with most of us barely three clicks away from politically extremist content.

Social media divides us ever more finely, all the better to market our profiles to its real customers, the advertisers, and then it makes us internalize distinction and divisions by force-feeding us hateful clickbait.

Xenophobia and conspiratorial distrust create clicks. These are the signature emotions of the far right. It's anger with no purpose except to be monetized. Clickability almost always leads to the dark side. The political radicalization that helps make social media so wildly profitable is almost exclusively to the right. As well as fomenting division and making political solidarity harder to evoke, the dark emotional palette social media spatters everywhere has a deeper effect on what we think politics is actually for.

Firehosing is a technique used by disinformation merchants to pump out a stream of often contradictory lies. No one has the time, energy or resources to dispute each lie, and airing out lies to debunk them can make even more people believe them. This method is used by anti-vaxxers, far-right media sites and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Firehosing floods what used to be a conversation with wacky grimdark lies that cumulatively insist that nothing really works, everyone is on the make and no organization or authority can be trusted. It implies that nothing we do to collectively improve the state of the world can work, because someone, somewhere is gaming the system and that someone is probably brown or female or educated.

Firehosing helps explain why people who think the government should slash taxes and drop environmental regulations also think it should kidnap immigrants’ children and micro-manage women’s uteruses. The world of the firehose is one in which reality is not true and almost everyone is bad. In this world, the only useful way to use state power is to punish, to coerce, and to hurt. It reinforces a world where states can do no positive good because it will be taken advantage of — someone, somewhere is getting stuff for free that you have to pay for. If the only effective state power is violence, the only role of politics is to decide who to target. This isn’t an intentional effect of the medium, but it is a real world consequence of the quality and sheer volume of the messages it transmits. Social media is rightwing because its amplified nihilism makes far-right misanthropy sound like a fundamental truth and ushers its dream into being; a world where the state exists only to punish outsiders and throttle the poor, not to rebalance wild excesses of inequality.

Organizing

But if social media companies are making money from advertisers, and advertisers – most of them aggregators – are making money from the companies whose ads they place, who is making money from the emotive content that keeps people clicking? Who is paying to feed the beast? All those videos, images and stories that trigger and sustain the outrage cycle aren’t going to just make themselves.

New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel asked whether the Democrats can compete with Trump’s Twitter feed and concluded that “one of the few ways to power right now is to never, ever stop making content."

A Photoshopped image of a dog getting the Medal of Honor. Sharpiegate. A Fourth of July military parade. They’re all attention spectacles.

To "win" social media you must spew out content optimized for virality. Individuals can only do so much. Volunteer organizations don’t have the time and are too busy firefighting (and, let’s be honest, infighting). The organizations manning the firehose are top-heavy political outfits with strong message control – typically the preserve of the hierarchical right — and astro-turf fronts pretending to be grassroots organizations. Yes, there is an ecosystem of ad aggregators and content amplifiers. But the optimal organizational form to create firehose content at scale isn’t the pyramid of large and unwieldy membership organizations so beloved of the left, but a thorn — rigid, narrow and sharpened to a point — all the better to sink deep into the flesh of the body politic.

Social media lets small, well-funded organizations convert grey and dark money into attention. It makes big money’s ideas look like they’re backed by the masses. People on the left almost never have hundreds of millions of dollars sitting around waiting for a vast, anonymizing influence engine to convert money into power. People on the right do. Fake organizations are more effective than real ones. Sock puppets, amplification accounts and automatic reply-guys work 24/7, never disagree with the leader, get disillusioned or split into factions. Social media makes fake organizations look real, and real ones look like dinosaurs. Only on the right is there a sufficient concentration of capital with the means and motivation to exploit this.

Ideas

None of this can be unknown to those running the big social media companies. Their job is to understand what works on their websites in ways we outsiders can only guess at. Science writer James Gleick recently observed that “people on the left and people on the right BOTH understand that Facebook’s policy of allowing lies benefits the right.” Monetizing lies drives profit. How can anyone possibly defend that?

In the US, free speech absolutism is a feature of the right. Liberals argue for laws banning hate speech and incitement, while conservatives and the far right insist freedom of expression is enshrined without condition in the U.S. constitution, even if that means people are hurt or sometimes die. This year, as the clamour has grown against Facebook’s damage to democracies around the world, the company has doubled down on its insistence that advertising is protected speech. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, has said: “We believe that ads are a big part of [freedom of expression]."

Social media executives’ insistence that their companies are just neutral bystanders but that the most important value of all is free speech shows how closely aligned their interests now are to the right. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t invite Tucker Carlson home to try and understand the alien mindset of America’s hard right, but because they share a common financial interest in protecting the peculiar political ecosystem of which Facebook is the apex predator.

Social media companies share ideas with the right not because they are awkward fellow travellers but because they share fundamental interests. But just as my conservative acquaintance couldn’t admit, even to themselves, that social media’s affordances privilege the ideas and organizations from which they personally and politically benefit, so social media executives seem to believe their pursuit of self-interest is simply the acting out of self-evident philosophical imperatives like the absolute value of freedom of speech.

But guess what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether Mark Zuckerberg holds his nose when he dines with the far right, if Jack Dorsey torments himself about open Nazis he keeps inviting back in, or if Susan Woijicki truly believes YouTube is a force for good. It is wholly irrelevant whether these individuals believe they are speaking in good faith or how deep any self-deception may go. Their interests are fully those of their companies, and their companies exist to make money. Their companies are once-in-a-century concentrations of capital whose only imperative is survival and growth. Capital doesn’t care if the boss still thinks he’s one of the good guys, if, in his heart of hearts, he’s truly not a racist but just happens to run a company that monetizes racism. Capital doesn’t care if he can’t sleep at night. Capital calls to capital everywhere.

Social media empires are big business and history shows us that big business doesn’t have a problem with the far right. They want many of the same things; to act unfettered, to weaken horizontal social ties, to re-shape the world in their own twisted image. Social media driven by adtech will only, always serve capital, however many beanbags they have in the office.

* Henry Farrell is the writer's brother.


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Social media’s right wing bias is baked into its business model

by Maria Farrell

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    [post_content] => How to fix our disturbingly unequal relationship with smartphones

 A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk in Austria on smartphones and cybersecurity.

 “Put up your hand if you like or maybe even love your smartphone,” I asked the audience of policymakers, industrialists and students.

Nearly every hand in the room shot up.

“Now, please put up your hand if you trust your smartphone.”

One young guy at the back put his hand in the air, then faltered as it became obvious he was alone. I thanked him for his honesty and paused before saying,“We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship.”

We are right not to trust our phones. They serve several masters, the least of whom is us. They constantly collect data about us that is not strictly necessary to do their job. They send data to the phone company, to the manufacturer, to the operating system owner, to the app platform, and to all the apps we use. And then those companies sell or rent that data to thousands of other companies we will never see. Our phones lie to us about what they are doing, they conceal their true intentions, they monitor and manipulate our emotions, social interaction and even our movements. We tell ourselves ‘it’s okay, I chose this’ when we know it really, really isn’t okay, and we can’t conceive of a way out, or even of a world in which our most intimate device isn’t also a spy. 

Let’s face the truth. We are in an abusive relationship with our phones.

Ask yourself the first three questions that UK non-profit Women’s Aid suggests to determine if you’re in an abusive relationship:

    
 	
  • Has your partner tried to keep you from seeing your friends or family?
    • 
 	
  • Has your partner prevented you or made it hard for you to continue or start studying, or from going to work?
    • 
 	
  • Does your partner constantly check up on you or follow you?
    • 


If you substitute ‘phone’ for ‘partner’, you could answer yes to each question. And then you’ll probably blame yourself.

 If this feels dangerously close to trivializing abuse and intimate partner violence, then stick with me just a minute more. What our smartphones and relationship abusers share is that they both exert power over us in a world shaped to tip the balance in their favour, and they both work really, really hard to obscure this fact and keep us confused and blaming ourselves. Here are some of the ways our unequal relationship with our smartphones is like an abusive relationship: 

    
 	
  • They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact – ‘user engagement’ – that keeps their hold on us strong. Working with social media, they insidiously curate our social lives, manipulating us emotionally with dark patterns to keep us scrolling.
    • 
 	
  • They tell us the onus is on us to manage their behavior. It’s our job to tiptoe around them and limit their harms. Spending too much time on a literally-designed-to-be-behaviorally-addictive phone? They send company-approved messages about our online time, but ban from their stores the apps that would really cut our use. We just need to use willpower. We just need to be good enough to deserve them.
    • 
 	
  • They betray us, leaking data / spreading secrets. What we shared privately with them is suddenly public. Sometimes this destroys lives, but hey, we only have ourselves to blame. They fight nasty and under-handed, and are so, so sorry when they get caught that we’re meant to feel bad for them. But they never truly change, and each time we take them back, we grow weaker.
    • 
 	
  • They love-bomb us when we try to break away, piling on the free data or device upgrades, making us click through page after page of dark pattern, telling us no one understands us like they do, no one else sees everything we really are, no one else will want us.  
    • 
 	
  • It’s impossible to just cut them off. They’ve wormed themselves into every part of our lives, making life without them unimaginable. And anyway, the relationship is complicated. There is love in it, or there once was. Surely we can get back to that if we just manage them the way they want us to?
    • 


 Nope. Our devices are basically gaslighting us. They tell us they work for and care about us, and if we just treat them right then we can learn to trust them. But all the evidence shows the opposite is true. This cognitive dissonance confuses and paralyses us. And look around. Everyone has a smartphone. So it’s probably not so bad, and anyway, that’s just how things work. Right?

Feminism is a secret super-power

Feminists are often the canary in the coalmine, warning us years in advance of coming threats. Feminist analysis of Gamergate first exposed the online radicalization of legions of angry young men for whom misogyny was a gateway drug to far-right politics. More practically, when the US military finally realised the enemy could use running app, Strava, to track the habits and route-maps of soldiers based in hostile environments, domestic violence activists collectively sighed. They’d been pointing out for years that the app is used by stalkers and aggrieved exes to track women. I’m not the first person to notice that in cyber-security, feminism is a secret super-power. Checking every app, data-set and shiny new use-case for how men will use it to endanger women and girls is a great way to expose novel flaws and vulnerabilities the designers almost certainly missed. So, while looking at our relationship with our phones through a feminist lens may be disconcerting, it’s incredibly useful, and in a deliciously counter-intuitive way.

Feminists know about power. Specifically, they know a lot about unequal power relationships; how they are systematically used, and how they are rationalised or explained away as ‘just the way things are’. Long before individual men abuse women, they internalise the logic of “unequal power relationships between men, women and children embedded in social organisations like the family”. Abuse isn’t just pathological. It’s political. Where others might just see some behavioral problems that need fixing, one to one, a feminist sees the abuse of women and girls as something inevitable – even intentional – in patriarchy. So, just as we don’t fix climate change by individually eschewing plastic straws, we don’t fix our smartphones’ designed-in lack of trust by individually trying to spend a bit less time on Twitter.

But that’s just entry-level feminist analysis. It explains why individual solutions won’t fix the structural problem of our trust-wrecking smartphone business model, but it doesn’t get at why the model exists.

Emotional labour holds up patriarchy just as ‘attentional labour’ fuels surveillance capitalism

Australian philosopher Kate Manne points out how misogyny is based on the care, attention, support and service women are expected to give to men. Emotional labour is the currency that patriarchy extracts from us and stockpiles for the winners. There’s a clear parallel between the emotional labour of women under patriarchy and the ‘attentional labour’ extracted from all of us under surveillance capitalism. We’re required to keep clicking on ads, serving up our behavioral data and spending hours every day scrolling, tweeting, liking, surveying and high-fiving.

 Because if we ever stop? Well then the whole damn thing will come falling down. Without adtech the internet will fail. Without the freemium model, there will be no services, no content, no innovation. Big Tech and the phone companies and all the downstream data-brokers have to lie to us about how our devices really work – and who they really work for — because otherwise everything good they’ve built would go away. We must go on sharing more of our lives with devices we love but cannot trust, because even trying to fix it will cause the whole social order to combust. Next thing you know, women will be wearing trousers and thinking they can vote.

Which is to say, everything is impossible until it’s inevitable. One more thing feminists have taught us; to get out of an abusive relationship you first have to see it for what it is. And to change the economic and political order a corrupt business model depends on, you first have to realise that it can be done. Twenty or thirty years ago ‘rape in marriage’ was considered an oxymoron in most Western countries, something that couldn’t be a crime because those in power couldn’t even conceive of wives being able to with-hold consent. Today we have changed mindsets so much it’s almost hard to imagine ourselves back into that moment. And we can do it again.

What would a trustworthy smartphone be like?

We have to imagine a future we want to live in so we can build it.

 A smartphone worthy of both our love and our trust would be a smartphone that is primarily loyal to us. It wouldn’t share our data with random companies that want to exploit or manipulate us, or with governments whose acts can harm us. It would tell us in plain language what it’s doing and why. It wouldn’t run background software on behalf of organizations that don’t work for us, and it wouldn’t hide what it was doing because it knew we wouldn’t like it. It wouldn’t be pockmarked with vulnerabilities that hostile agents exploit and sell to the highest bidder. It would give access to our data as and when we wanted, but also not bug us too much with opt-ins. That’s because it would use machine-learning to understand and enact what we want, instead of to manipulate us into serving others first.

A smartphone worthy of our love and trust would want the best for us and would actively help us to achieve it. Smartphones can be our second and third and fourth brains. They help people with memory loss or processing deficits to build work-arounds. Similarly, they could help the rest of us extend our memories and build our concentration. Instead of monetizing our distraction, a trustworthy smartphone would help us do the sustained intellectual and creative work that gives our life meaning. It would deepen and broaden our relationships, not exploit them for a social graph. It would dive into immersive storytelling and communication with the goal to make new ways for us to love and be loved.

A smartphone worthy of our love and trust would not just waste less time or wreck less privacy or extract fewer monopoly rents. It would work with us to make us better humans and help squeeze our species through the narrow survival gate of the next hundred years.

 Yes, this is all very utopian. But you know what else was? Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a feminist utopia written in 1915 that imagined and helped make possible the world of 2015. Imagining better futures is the only way we have ever managed to shrug off settled wisdom and build better lives. 

How do we get there?

There are different ways to configure the financial and political ecosystems our phones dwell in and suck us into. We can pay the full cost of them while also reducing the gargantuan, irrational and once-in-a-millennium returns on capital Big Tech has made for the past twenty years. We can treat the services that run on them more like utilities, with revenue caps and universal service requirements, because that is how grown-up countries deal with life-critical public goods. We can wildly ramp up privacy and data-portability and competition rules, and we can start actually enforcing them. All this requires a change in mindset, what some would call a revolution.

Seeing that our relationship with our smartphones is not healthy and not right is the first step. Understanding that we are not individually at fault for it is the next. Abusive relationships depend on mystification, “the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident.”  Using a feminist lens brings the unequal power relationship into focus, shows just how weird it is and reminds us how we’ve dealt with this kind of problem before.  It’s not for us to tweak who we are, but for our phones to radically change so they are worthy of our love and trust.

 
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This is your phone on feminism

by Maria Farrell

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-13 15:06:55
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    [post_content] => Social media platforms and authoritarian populists have a troubled, tangled, symbiotic relationship

Evgeny Morozov, a prominent culture critic and social media expert, argues in a recent opinion piece for The Guardian that the global right-wing populist movement is divided over Big Tech companies. Globally, populists see the platforms as a way to subvert mainstream media, but in the United States the right wing sees it as a target to attack.  Morozov's analysis overlooks, however, the fact that American extremists have been having it both ways: they capitalize off the opportunity to radicalize individuals on social media, while cynically complaining about “far-left” ideologues, as demonstrated by recent events.

Last week, YouTube initially declined to sanction the right-wing comedian Stephen Crowder for posting videos filled with racist and homophobic attacks against a Vox journalist. As HuffPo reporter Andy Campbell observes, this is a really bad sign for the company’s new anti-hate policy.

Then the company proceeded to prove, as Will Oremus describes it, “The One Rule of Content Moderation”: Namely, if a decision is too controversial, reverse it. YouTube’s decision to take away Crowder’s ability to make money off his videos is neither a “hard-won victory” nor “mob rule,” but merely more evidence that the tech companies have no idea what they’re doing.

As this story by New York Times reporter Kevin Roose demonstrates, the recommendation engines that power platforms like YouTube are as influential as content moderation — if less visible. Roose reports that a series of tweaks to the recommendation system on YouTube made it even easier for white supremacists and other right-wing populists to radicalize their audiences.

However, Roose also reports that some left-wing YouTubers are hacking the system by mimicking the video style, lingo, and subject matter of right-wing populists, and then debunking their messages. These activists are modeling their tactics on successful de-radicalization by co-opting the medium, meme by meme. While this community-driven strategy is promising, its creators are ultimately at the mercy of the same algorithms as their far-right colleagues: if YouTube switches things up again, who knows whether they can still get their videos in front of the people who need them.

In other news:

States race to ban styrofoam in the latest skirmish of the much-needed war on plastic. Read more.

How an “innovation team” is ending blight in Mobile, Alabama. Learn more.

The small Hawaiian island of Moloka‘i is modeling a post-carbon future for us all. Here’s how.
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How the far right games social media platforms

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_date] => 2019-05-30 14:56:40
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    [post_content] => In the age of increasing government surveillance and declining privacy, can citizens take back their right to live an unwatched life?

This weekend I had the dubious honor of coming face-to-face with one of the robots being rolled out by the supermarket chain Stop & Shop. The purpose of the tower of cameras and lasers is purportedly to keep an eye on spills and litter in the aisles, as the Boston Globe credulously reported, but presumably it could also watch customers and employees. The encounter got me thinking about the many forms of surveillance takes in this day and age, and how individuals and governments can push back.

One of the most extreme examples of a surveillance state is the province of Kashgar in northwest China. New York Times reporters created this audio-visual essay in an attempt to convey the extent of perpetual, all-consuming surveillance and its restrictive effect on residents. There are cameras, everywhere; and checkpoints, everywhere. Residents are required to install software on devices so the state can monitor their calls and other movements; and they are subject to random, unannounced visits by police and other monitors at any hour of the day or night. As the Times points out, the effect is as much about “intimidation as monitoring.”

Should you worry about facial recognition technology? Technologist Shelly Palmer says we should not be, arguing that “we live in a post-privacy world of our own creation, and there’s no going back.” Essentially, he says, things are already bad, so there’s no reason to try to fix it.

But people aren’t buying what Palmer and others are selling. As the New York Times recently reported, shareholders have taken an activist role in pressuring Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology to government agencies, and to conduct an independent investigation into potential violations of civil, human and privacy rights. In many ways, the perpetual surveillance Palmer describes as normal and everyday has raised awareness of how the technology can be abused. Since facial recognition is not-yet-ubiquitous, now is the time for individuals, governments and organizations to take a stand against it.

In another example of this anti-surveillance trend, CNET reports that cities across the United States are passing or considering legislation that would require public approval for new surveillance technologies that police departments are considering purchasing. Voters are asserting their right to decide whether surveillance systems are reasonable and acceptable.

In other news:

Infant mortality rates have dropped in states that expanded Medicaid access, according to a new study from the Georgetown University Center of Health Policy. Read more.

Fully one-half of retirement-age Americans can’t afford to stop working, but there are bills and other proposals on deck that could alleviate the crisis. Learn more.

The daughter of the man who coined the term “regenerative agriculture” wants to rethink the way we treat poop (specifically animal poop) in agriculture. Our food systems and health may depend on it. Read more.
    [post_title] => Reclaiming their privacy
    [post_excerpt] => While some shrug off perpetual surveillance as the new normal, others are taking action to prevent government abuse
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Reclaiming their privacy

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_date] => 2019-04-26 11:42:00
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    [post_content] => Smart Cities are controversial because they are sponsored by Big Tech, which is offering 'free services' in exchange for detailed private information. But there is a way to overhaul the concept so that it serves ordinary citizens. The real issue is finding the political will to tackle those necessary changes

From Toronto to Singapore, and New York City to Malta, municipalities flying the “smart city” flag are on the rise across the globe, promising to improve the quality of life for urban residents. Using artificial intelligence to analyze data collected from Internet-connected cameras, sensors, license plate readers, drones, digital identification cards, personal electronic devices, and mobile crowd sourcing, smart cities can, advocates say, eliminate traffic jams, improve energy conservation, assist in crime detection, better respond to weather conditions, and provide faster and better citizen services.

But the massive amount of data needed for smart cities to work has given the concept a bad name among those concerned about personal privacy. Tech companies supplying software and hardware to smart cities are hungry for citizens’ data, which they want to monetize and share with partners. For law enforcement agencies and municipal governments, data collected for smart cities represent a treasure trove of information about people’s movements, preferences, associations, and habits. Suddenly smart cities are starting to sound more like surveillance cities with less traffic jams. And there are plenty of people who’d prefer the traffic jams to the loss of control over their privacy.

Smart cities for the people?

Whether smart cities can truly benefit people in a meaningful way without handing over their private information to AT&T, Google, Amazon, and other corporations is unclear. We need to rethink the smart city concept to offer smart services to people without allowing corporations to exploit and profit off their data in the process.


At present, cities that want to become “smart” rely heavily on vendors that can supply the technical know-how about networking systems, AI algorithms, data optimization, cloud storage, infrastructure technologies, risk management, high-speed broadband, and security, just to name a few. City officials and municipal information technology departments don’t have the technical expertise to build and manage smart cities on their own. That’s where companies like Google come in.

The city of Toronto contracted with Sidewalk Labs in October 2017 to design a neighborhood on the city’s waterfront “from the Internet up." Sidewalk Labs is owned by Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company. According to the plan for this smart city initiative, a network of sensors will collect real-time data about the environment, while it also gathers location-based information about buildings and infrastructure. Citizens would access services through a personalized portal. The project will be a “global testbed where people can use data about how the neighbourhood works to make it work better,” Sidewalk said. 

Almost immediately, Toronto's residents began asking questions about data collection and privacy. Who would own the data, and how would it be protected? A privacy expert hired by Sidewalk to assist with these issues resigned a year after project launch, telling the Global News newspaper that she couldn’t support the project after learning that third parties might have access to identifiable data collected. Another technologist resigned her post on the project’s digital strategy advisory panel, saying it had disregarded residents’ concern about data. Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff said earlier this month that the company has no interest in monetizing personal information, just as a citizens’ group in Toronto launched #BlockSidewalk.

Citizens should be involved

There are more than a few lessons to be learned from Toronto. People are rightly concerned about their personal data being used without their knowledge and permission, and being tracked online. Recent privacy scandals at Facebook, numerous data breaches, and online misinformation campaigns have heightened those concerns.  Cities going “smart” should be prepared to respond with specifics about whether they or their technology partners, or those partners’ partners, will have access to identifiable data. And they should expect a public backlash if the answer is yes, or “we don’t know yet.”

Citizens should be involved in the planning and development of data collection efforts from Day One. They should have a strong say in how and where they are being surveilled rather than be told that Vendor X’s cameras will be installed on every corner filming 24 hours a day, and the feed will go into a massive data base to be kept indefinitely.

Cities need experts who can defend citizens’ privacy and challenge inadequate safeguards over private information. They must incoluate themselves before signing contracts or entering into agreements with vendors, by engaging with top-notch security and privacy experts who can match the tech smarts of Google engineers and demand a privacy and human rights framework for smart city projects. To accomplish this, cities would have to make big investments in their IT departments, hiring cryptography and experts in data anonymization. 

Smart city projects should start with the fewest privacy invasive methods of data collection, instead of using the most invasive and then winnowing that down. Vendors and developers would have to think creatively, in order to come up with ways to obtain data for smart city applications without defaulting to facial scans and license plate readers. 

Municipal governments need to get tough about rules regarding data privacy. The effective way to do this is as follows:

    
 	
  •  Pass ordinances or establish regulations that prohibit vendors from sharing citizens’ information
    • 
 	
  • Place strict limitations on turning data over to law enforcement or ICE
    • 
 	
  • Require vendors to anonymize personal data and purge it soon after use;
    • 
 	
  • Allow citizens to opt out of the collection of their locations, images, biometric data, and other personal information;
    • 
 	
  • Appoint executive level privacy and security czars to oversee data handling and storage and enforce data privacy practices. 
    • 


We have become accustomed to “free” technology — email, social media accounts, instant messaging and photo sharing platform — but of course we are paying for it with our personal information. It's a high price to pay. 

Data collection for smart city implementation presents the same uneven exchange, but on a much larger scale. Your commute home becomes faster because cameras are capturing, analyzing, and storing scans of your license plates and the plates of the drivers around you, which are used to predict congestion and trigger modifications to traffic lights and lane closures to avoid jam ups. You get a seat on the bus because facial scans of you and your fellow riders are stored in the cloud indefinitely to help city transportation departments predict when to deploy more buses during periods of peak ridership. We have become convinced that a high quality of life is predicated on convenience. Perhaps it is time to question that assumption — to ask whether the price for all this convenience is just a bit too high.
    [post_title] => Who's benefitting from Smart Cities?
    [post_excerpt] => Smart city projects should start with the fewest privacy invasive methods of data collection, instead of using the most invasive and then winnowing that down. Vendors and developers would have to think creatively, in order to come up with ways to obtain data for smart city applications without defaulting to facial scans and license plate readers. 
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Who’s benefitting from Smart Cities?

by Karen Gullo

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    [post_content] => In honor of Earth Day this week, we’ve collected stories about environmental activists who are having an impact on policy. These individuals, companies, and organizations are refusing to succumb to inertia and fatalism 

Mass-produced cleaning solution tablets that consumers mix with water at home can drastically reduce the environmental damage caused by toxic chemicals. Several new companies are now producing those tablets, which consumers can use in reusable cleaning bottles instead of relying on disposable plastic. A little change can go a long way. Learn more here.

In London, climate activists showed that the act of disruption is a powerful tactic. After police arrested more than 1,000 protesters with the Extinction Rebellion movement, the movement leaders “paused” the protests, saying they have enough momentum and support to “enter into negotiations with those in power.” Read more.

The Guardian profiled nine of the “ordinary people” arrested for standing up for the climate. Read those here.

Disrupting business as usual doesn’t always take the form of marching in the streets. The increasing number of climate-change-related lawsuits suggests that the sheer volume of such cases could force corporations and governments to change their ways. Read more here.

Researchers are using mushrooms to clean up toxic messes, like oil spills. Check out this fun infographic to find out how it works.

Can science fiction help us envision better worlds? This article looks at what the world would look like after we’ve solved climate change. On a practical level, it could help policy-makers and politicians set appropriate goals and priorities. Read about the possible future here.

 
    [post_title] => Climate change disrupted
    [post_excerpt] => This week's roundup is about environmental activists whose disruptive tactics succeeded in changing policy
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Climate change disrupted

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_date] => 2019-04-17 15:19:23
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    [post_content] => Technology is a seemingly overwhelming force in our personal lives and society, but as these stories show, people are working to check Big Tech’s power at every turn, whether by resisting expansion to new American cities or by introducing legislation to force companies into implementing more user-friendly design.

[caption id="attachment_847" align="alignnone" width="4608"]Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash[/caption]

America’s love affair with Big Tech is finally over, asserts Micah Sifry in his review of three books that look at surveillance of capitalism. But now that we are re-evaluating our relationship with Facebook, Amazon, and other social media apps that have traded convenience for our money and our attention, will we insist on real change? Perhaps. But only if we put some effort into understanding, describing, and analyzing the impact it has had on our lives. Read the review here.

Here is a fun, not entirely unrelated thought experiment: Could we blow up the internet? As we consider its ubiquitousness in our lives and how to mediate and improve the internet’s influence, perhaps it’s important to recognize that no, actually just blowing it up (probably) isn’t an option. Read more here.

Regulating Big Tech is a more likely scenario than blowing it up and starting over. Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) have introduced a bill that is meant to outlaw some of the most manipulative design tricks employed by technology companies to get users to hand over more of the data or personal information than they might otherwise choose to, if they understood that they had a choice. Learn more about the bill here.

The U.K. is also taking steps to limit the worst features of technology companies, particularly as it relates to users under the age of 18. The Information Commissioner's Office also wants internet companies to make privacy settings high by default, to turn location tracking off when the app is not in use and make it clear when it’s on, and explain how personal data is used, among other proposed changes. Learn more here.

Opposition to tech companies can actually have a unifying effect on groups that otherwise espouse ideologically opposed worldviews. That is what is happening in Nashville, where free-market libertarians and union-backed activists are both working to oppose a deal in which Nashville will give public money to Amazon in exchange for jobs. Activists are pressuring Amazon to prove to the public that they have followed through on their promises to the city. Read more here.
    [post_title] => The People v Big Tech
    [post_excerpt] => 				Blind love for Big Tech is over as people re-assess the high price they pay for convenience 		
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The People v Big Tech

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => Google is not known for self-sacrifice. That is why New York should be more skeptical of its latest 'free' offer

Earlier this week, Google opened their temporary "Grow with Google New York City Learning Center" on the first floor of the company's Chelsea offices. The "pop-up" space embodies techno-optimism: well-lit classrooms with nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, decorated in neutrals with occasional pops of primary colors, and well-stocked with Google Chromebooks. For five months, the technology company will provide free and open-to-the-public classes on topics like "Manage Projects More Effectively with Online Tools" and "Make Your Website Work For You."

The vast majority of classes are based on Google products: Learn to manage projects with Google Sheets; get your business online with Google My Business; discover new job opportunities with Google Search. In other words, Google is further entrenching their business monopoly under the pretence of helping entrepreneurs and job seekers. The company is  cynically deploying the American dream of hard work and the self-made success story for its own benefit, expecting New Yorkers to thank them for the opportunity to help make Google even richer and more powerful.

But, you say, knowing how to use Google products effectively is a great and marketable skill! Why shouldn’t we accept trickle-down education? Perhaps because to do so is to cede another facet of our society to a company that already has an outsized influence on our lives. The money spent on this glorified PR stunt could have been used to support the original programming of the initiative’s partner organizations, like the New York Public Library, which already offers free classes on subjects like basic computer skills, creating a resume, and social media marketing. Unlike the Google Learning Center, the NYPL won’t close up shop in five months.

Exploiting our fears

Enthusiasm for technology skills programs often stems from our collective anxieties about the future of work, or what will happen when the robots come for our jobs. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," goes this line of thinking. Google is subtly playing to these fears, to our desire to come out on top in a tech-dominated world.

"Tech related skills are essential for people looking for jobs in the modern economy, and Grow with Google will go far toward helping New Yorkers gain the expertise they need to thrive," Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer said in a statement given to a local reporter.

The cause-and-effect is made even more explicit in another article on a tech news website that covered the center's launch. "The Google NYC Learning Center is part of the "Grow with Google" initiative, first launched in 2017," AJ Dellinger writes for Engadget. "As part of that project, Google has pledged to spend $1 billion to help people adapt to an increasingly digital world and learn new skills that may place them in suitable jobs should their current career get wiped out by automation." Even if Google hasn’t made such a promise, the company has let the misconception stand.

Google describes the material taught at the learning center as "digital skills.” The phrase is almost meaningless given that nearly every facet of our lives is mediated by digital devices, but it conveys the impression that the company is generously preparing New York workers for an automated future — the very future they're doing their best to bring about.

The reality is not quite so cutting-edge: In addition to the Google product-based courses, there are classes like "Design an Effective Resume" and "Optimize Your Energy for High Performance" and "Coach Your Team to Success." These are important and valuable skills, to be sure — but they are not "digital skills." The marketing of this project is an ingenious and insidious bait and switch: offer glitzy and in-demand tech skills, but limit the actual courses to the walled garden of Google products, which has the additional benefit (for Google) of drumming up more customers for their services. The model is similar to Facebook's Free Basics program, whereby Facebook subsidizes free internet access, but only to an incomplete and partial internet that is mediated by Facebook. Thus neophyte users conflate Facebook with the internet, and become captive users of the social media platform.

Google's spokespeople have been more careful about what they promise. Ruth Porat, the Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Google and Alphabet, characterizes the pop-up shop as part of their commitment to "STEM education, workforce development and access to technology." Porat describes Grow With Google as "our initiative to create economic opportunities for all Americans" — an ambitious goal that is so vague, it becomes meaningless. 

Torrence Boone, the NYC site lead, describes Grow with Google as "our program to help individuals and small businesses gain the skills that can set them up for success, today and in the future."

Digital robber barons

Even this seemingly innocuous statement is based on an outdated fantasy; it perpetuates the myth that it's easy to pull yourself up by the bootstraps in contemporary America.

In the United States between 1978 and 2012, the number of startups (companies less than a year old) plummeted, their share of all businesses falling nearly 44 percent. While there are a number of factors at play, the most significant is that the largest players are crowding out the little guys. Google is among those big baddies. As Robert Levine reported for The Boston Globe, Google controls 90 percent of the search market. It operates the most popular online video site, mapping application, and internet browser. The company has used their market dominance to stifle the competition — by giving Google products preference in the Google search engine, for example.

As Open Markets Institute outlines in this explainer on "Entrepreneurship and Monopoly," market concentration centralizes resources, talent, and money while squeezing out potential up-and-comers. This happens at the expense of the larger job market; nearly two-thirds of the nation's net jobs created over the past 15 years have been at smaller companies.

In other words, we have a monopolistic company with a track record of self-promotion and stifling competition dispersing crumbs of knowledge to the unskilled masses, while creating more revenue opportunities for Google.

And what Google is offering truly is just crumbs — not even a full loaf of bread. Students are limited to just three classes at the learning center, a fact that is not mentioned either in Google's promotional material or in any of the launch publicity. (Some partner organizations are using the space to hold their own private or public classes, which may run over three classes, but registration for those appears to be handled by the partners, not Google.) It's not clear from the class registration page if prospective students are limited to just three classes over the five weeks, or if one can only sign up for three classes at one time. Either way, three classes on any topic is hardly sufficient to prepare someone for a job they weren't already qualified to do.

Judging by the registration page, nearly every class at the learning center — through April 27 — is entirely full. There is clearly a demand for this kind of programming. Google worked with local partners like the New York Public Library to design course offerings that would be worthwhile for New Yorkers, but one might be justified in seeing this as a case of a tech giant having rebranded programming suggestions from local experts and taking the credit. But only a grinch would deny kids the opportunity to learn to code, so what’s the problem?

Gifts with strings attached

The gap between what has been promised and is provided is a problem, especially if Google is getting more from the programming than the company is giving. There is a question of what goodwill or favors initiatives like this will buy the company as they expand their New York City footprint. A $5 million investment in workforce development and job training was part of the deal with Amazon that fell through; what will Google get when they point to their generous free programming and say "Look what we did for you, NYC"? The same could be said for any of the cities and towns where Google has disseminated their “Grow With” programming, albeit over the course of weeks, not months.

Anxiety about the future of work is real. As local governments seek to prepare residents for potentially grim employment prospects, they will surely be tempted to cede responsibility to the tech giants. After all, local officials aren't usually known for being particularly tech-savvy, so why not let the experts handle it?

But when those experts are monopolistic corporate giants upon which society is already reliant and beholden in so many ways, we cannot trust them to fix the problems that their business models exacerbate. Their track record proves they are unwilling to share information that will help anyone but themselves. If we've learned anything from the surveillance economy, it's that nothing is ever really free.

Local government officials should follow Google’s example: look to public libraries to help create equitable paths to prosperity and ongoing education. Empower them and fund them. Don’t let the corporate monopolies stifling innovation and throttling the American dream determine the future of workforce development solely to their benefit and not ours.

Jessica McKenzie is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. You can follow her on Twitter @jessimckenzi.
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Beware of Google bearing gifts

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => The following stories all address ways in which expectations, precedents, and like-begets-like can stifle, hinder, and hold back society — and how breaking from tradition can be revolutionary. Cara Marsh Sheffler broached this issue in an article for the Anti-Nihilist Institute that made the case for diversifying the liberal media, but this problem is not limited to news and storytelling: it extends to politics, elections, and to personal technology.

“Flooding” is a term to describe the effect of tens or hundreds of media outlets reporting the same story simultaneously, all with the same point of view. The result is an echo chamber that drowns out dissent and sidelines important stories. How can we outsmart the algorithms and be better informed? Read more.

Big Tech is eroding our expectations of privacy by offering us convenience. When ordinary people try to resist — as in the case of an English village that tried to stop Google Street View from mapping their village, Big Tech wears down opposition with “years of litigation, media misdirection, and political manipulation, until the land grab becomes established fact.” The only response to this can be: “Create friction”; do not go gently, etc. Read more.

Speaking of obsolete structures and habits holding society back — shall we consider the electoral college? As the debate over the future of our elections rages, it's worth considering the pros and cons, and why some people are so invested in the status quo. Read the op-ed.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Tina Brown makes the case that women leading like women can pave the way for a more just, even-keeled society — she points to Jacinda Ardern's response to the Christchurch massacre as an example. Read the op-ed, "What Happens When Women Stop Leading Like Men."

Jessica McKenzie is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. You can follow her on Twitter @jessimckenzi.
    [post_title] => How to beat the algorithms and become a better-informed person
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How to beat the algorithms and become a better-informed person

by Jessica McKenzie

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