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How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse | Electronic Frontier Foundation: Deeplinks

Source: How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse | Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com, by Cory Doctorow
RE: How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse | Electronic Frontier Foundation: Deeplinks, by Cory Doctorow

In a nutshell, my dispute with the “surveillance capitalism” hypothesis is that I think it overstates how effective Big Tech is at changing our minds with advanced machine learning techniques, while underplaying the role that monopoly plays in allowing Big Tech to poison and distort our public discourse.

I think this is a distinction with a difference, because if Big Tech has figured out how to use data to rob us of our free will, anti-monopoly enforcement won’t solve the problem – it’ll just create lots of smaller companies with their own Big Data mind-control rays. But if the problem rests in monopoly itself, then we can solve the problem with anti-monopoly techniques that have been used to counter every other species of robber-baron, from oil to aluminum to groceries to telephones.

Everything I’ve learned about solar storm risk and EMP attacks, by Chris Said

Source: Everything I’ve learned about solar storm risk and EMP attacks, by Chris Said
RE: “An assessment of threats to the American power grid” | Energy, Sustainability and Society volume 9, by Matthew Weiss & Martin Weiss

When I read this paper, I was stunned. Is the risk of prolonged grid collapse really that high? And is it true that, just as the CDC failed to stockpile masks for a pandemic that we were all warned about, we are equally unprepared for a grid failure that could lead to societal collapse and mass starvation?

To answer these questions, I did some homework. I read congressional testimony, think tank technical reports, a book, academic papers, insurance company assessments, several industry technical reports, and multiple reports in the trade media. What I found was at times contradictory. Somewhat troublingly, both sides of the issue accused each other of bias from financial incentives. Overall, my view is that while some of the EMP and solar storm risk is overhyped, it remains a serious issue, and one of the main tail risks we should be preparing for.
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My own view is that while the ‘mainstream’ view is probably correct, and while there certainly has been some fearmongering, I am philosophically aligned with the alarmists. The mainstream belief at NASA in 1986 was that the Challenger was safe. The mainstream belief at Chernobyl in 1986 was that the reactor core could never rupture. The mainstream belief on Wall Street in 2007 was that mortgage-backed securities were safe.

Now that we have seen our preparedness level for Covid-19, who are you going to believe: The people saying “Don’t worry, we have this unpredictable and complex system under control” or the people waving their hands and shouting “correlated risk!” I’m with the people shouting “correlated risk!”, even though they’ll probably end up being wrong.

We’re losing the war against surveillance capitalism | Salon

Source: We’re losing the war against surveillance capitalism | Salon, by Michael Corn

Many headlines call out the demise of privacy, but what they really mean is that some of your personal information is being sold, or stolen, or simply misused. The two concepts are not quite the same. It is reasonable to consider the loss of personal information under the general heading of privacy, but separating the two concepts opens the door to a more effective conversation about how to protect them both.

When we read about Facebook or Google (or our own government) wanting to listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, or review your Facebook feed, we’re talking about privacy, pure and simple. Privacy in this case means freedom to engage in conversation or thought without unwanted or unknown surveillance.
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Protecting one’s personal information takes us into a different realm with more everyday practical implications. When I give Google my phone number in exchange for a Gmail or Google Voice account, I’m exchanging my data for a service. And I suspect most of us are fine with this type of value-based trade-off. Google needs to know where to route my Google Voice phone calls or how to text me an alert related to my account. It’s Google’s subsequent reuse of this information where things start to go awry.

What does it mean to see privacy as a civil rights struggle? The collapse of our privacy is exposing each of us to palpable risks: the erosion of the right to pray, to study, to congregate, or to participate in our democracy. In a digital world, privacy is the barrier between civil society and racial, political, or religious profiling writ large. … Privacy violations are a gateway to identity-based targeting, which singles out individuals by race, religion, or gender identity.
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Oppression originates whenever one group marks another group as “other,” then uses that “otherness” to isolate, discriminate, and disempower. Often the markers for discriminatory behavior are obvious: darker skin, for example, or observation of gender. But what if every marker of your individuality were known and sold, accessible to advertisers without your knowledge? The potential for manipulation or oppression is palpable, as one could easily use personal information for these suspect marking purposes.

All of the regulations imposed on the major data brokers suffer from one fatal flaw: they reflect a belief that a statutory, regulatory response to this problem can succeed. … none of these proposals fundamentally address when it is permissible to collect personal information and what can be done with it.

Imagine you come to work one day, and find someone has put a nude picture of you on the wall. You quickly have it removed but the embarrassment and anger lingers. Eventually, even that fades — maybe you even move to a new job where no one knows you as “the naked person.” Embarrassing, but you recover. For those who have had their personal information stolen, there is no “but you recover.” It is impossible to fully remove published information from the digital web. Even if you could miraculously convince every legitimate web service to remove your data, you can never convince those who illicitly deal in personal data to erase it. This immutability of stolen personal data is part of the horror of modern crimes such as revenge porn.

This is again why an incremental, regulatory based approach to protecting personal information will always fail: because a wound to our digital privacy never heals. We can’t wait for a loss, then regulate the circumstances that led to it. By then it is too late.

Imagine a world where we didn’t have to figure out how to reign in Facebook. Where creating a set of regulations wasn’t something we had to do, but rather Facebook (or Google, or the furniture store down the street) had to figure out how to operate with the principle that personal information may not be bought or sold. That is, we preserve our privacy by simply forbidding our personal information from being used as a commodity. Would this eliminate the need for statutes protecting our personal information? No, we’d still want to regulate how and when a service provider could ask for and how they must secure your personal data. But we’d have a principled floor — a bright line not to be crossed — eliminating some of the worst abuses.
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Preventing the sale of our personal information is the only effective tool left to preserve our civil rights as they are assailed by both commercial and governmental bodies. People are not a commodity, and we need to legislate that it is wrong to imbue humans with attributes we reserve for property. It is deeply saddening that we need to call for laws to say: I am not for sale.

The Importance of India, by Alex Kolchinski

Source: The Importance of India

A significant factor in the power of states throughout history has been sheer numbers. … Of course, many factors other than population influence the power of states, including economic productivity and the strength of institutions. But population is a multiplier for those factors, and a country with a large enough population can exercise comparable or greater power than more developed but less populous countries.
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if China succeeds in sustaining its growth trajectory economically and militarily, it will grow to overshadow the United States, wielding the same ~5x population advantage over the US that the US now enjoys over its predecessor power, the United Kingdom. This also means that the repressive and authoritarian Chinese model will increasingly prevail over the free democratic model that America has championed.

However, America is not the most populous democracy in the world. That honor belongs to India.
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In a world that is quickly going from unipolar to multipolar, it is worth considering which states will wield influence in the century to come, and on behalf of which values (if any, other than self-interest!) they will wield it. If China rises to heights of power that eclipse the US completely, only India may be strong enough to speak for liberal democracy.