Dick Pountain/The Political Quarterly/ 11th April 2019 12:23:31
Books Reviewed:
‘The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy ’ by Matthew Hindman, Princeton University Press 2018, pp240
‘Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age’ by Susan Landau, Yale University Press 2017, pp221
‘Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age’ by Martin Moore, Oneworld 2018, pp320
Few will dispute that we’re living through a new Industrial Revolution, but there’s still room for doubt about the precise nature of this revolution. Advances in technology stimulated by World War II, in particular the invention of radar and the digital computer, lead during the post-war decades to a revolution in electronics. The transistor and the integrated silicon circuit made computing power cheap and ubiquitous, and in the process has affected almost every area of our societies. The Internet is the effect of this revolution on our ways of communicating; automation, robotics and now AI (Artificial Intelligence) are having a similarly disruptive effect on work and industry; huge advances in materials science are making renewable energy technologies cheap enough to threaten the dominance of fossil fuels. The political implications of all these far-reaching changes are far from easy to fathom.
The debate is hot, with broadly speaking two main categories of protagonist, techno-optimists and techno-pessimists. In itself this is nothing new, for techno-pessimists have been warning us since well before Blake’s ‘satanic mills’, and techno-optimists reaching for the sky from Icarus to the Wright Brothers. However the 20th century’s communications revolution was of unprecedented scope, reaching around the whole world and into the depths of the mind: audio/visual broadcasting technologies spawned mass propaganda and mass surveillance. Orwell, in ‘1984’, foresaw some of the consequences, but the recent invention of television mislead him to depict it as a one-way problem, Big Brother to the masses. A mere five years beyond Orwell’s fictional dystopia, at CERN in Geneva, English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web which works in both directions, and in 1991 he released the first web browser.
One of the most articulate current proponents for the optimistic camp is Paul Mason, whose ‘Post-Capitalism’ emphasises the way in which Internet technology reduces the production and distribution costs of information to almost zero, in the process deposing old media monopolies, and via automation permitting a reduction of necessary work and increase in leisure time. Early Internet libertarians like John Perry Barlow and Richard Stallman have for years promoted the idea of an anarchistic new order based on Internet-enabled direct democracy. However ‘fake news’, election hacking, mass surveillance and technological unemployment must cast doubt over such rosy perspectives, and the books reviewed here examine three different aspects of this darker side of the digital revolution.
Hindman’s argument employs two key concepts – ‘network effect’ and ‘stickiness’ – that require some explanation. A network effect occurs when the utility of a new technology escalates very rapidly with its number of users. The first telephone was useless except as a demonstration, the second telephone made the first useful to a couple of people, but once hundreds adopted it the number of possible conversations, and the value of the technology, grew exponentially (and was monopolised in the USA by Bell Telephone Company, later called AT&T). This ‘increasing returns to scale’ was in evidence through previous industrial revolutions in banking, steam, steel, electricity and oil too, with Rockefellers, Fords and Exxons coming to dominate their sectors – in the digital economy, the commodity being monopolised is users’ attention.
Paul Mason did single out network effects as an obstacle to his optimism, as they lead digital monopolists to seek rents on intellectual property and to stifle competition, but Hindman goes further. He claims that network effects have been overemphasised and that ‘stickiness’ – the tendency of users to remain loyal to one website at the expense of others – is perhaps more important. His experiments show how stickiness is very hard, and very expensive to achieve, so that only the very largest companies (which initially got that big through network effects) can now achieve it. Getting sticky requires better design and better response speed than competitors, through world-wide server farms every bit as massive and as expensive as the factories of previous industrial revolutions.
Google, Amazon and Facebook no longer depend on the common Internet, whose distributed architecture was designed for resilience by the US military, but employ ‘peering’ over their own private cables to bypass congestion and be faster than competitors. Users are most loyal to those sites which offer the most diverse rather than best quality content, and this diversity comes from millions of users donating their content for nothing. The Internet isn’t free, it’s paid for by advertising, almost all of which is captured by these few mammoth corporations, thanks to their stickiness. I purchase second-hand books on Abebooks. I watch video clips – on music from Bill Evans to Alina Ibragimova, on guitar building and repairing, on Japanese street food – and it really does feels like the space the optimists describe, into which anyone can post videos of their special interests for free. But Abebooks is owned by Amazon and all those videos are on YouTube, which is owned by Google. Everything I buy or watch provides information that will be sold to advertisers, and Google and Facebook between them now collect 70% of this revenue.
Hindman is particularly concerned about the Internet’s effect on news gathering and dissemination. Local newspapers could once garner higher advertising revenues than national ones, since their readership was better-targeted, and this supported the whole ecology of local print news. The Internet reversed this position since the giants now target their advertising with uncanny precision and grab practically all the revenue. Local papers are unable to compete effectively in the digital realm and are pushed out of business.
The digital news sites that replace print, like BuzzFeed and Vice, are financed by investors and major brand advertisers: lacking any tradition of separation between editorial and business they employ in-house staff to generate ‘native’ ads in identical style to editorial content, which they hope be shared ‘virally’. They also delete or redact any user posts that might offend advertisers. This absolute dependence on advertising to subsidise free access means that the Internet giants need to garner all the information they can from users, which nowadays is an awful lot, from geographical location to tastes and even political opinions.
The holding of such data poses multiple problems over privacy. Advertisers use it to target ads specifically at you, but it might also be stolen by criminal hackers, or intercepted by the intelligence agencies of both of your own and foreign states. Susan Landau is another professor, of Computer Science at Tufts and Law at the Fletcher School, but previously worked on privacy at Google and engineering at Sun Microsystems. Her book ‘Listening In’ is the most technical of the three, focussed on encryption and the way that intelligence agencies may breach the privacy of individuals in the interests of state security. In 2016 Landau was an expert witness for Apple, before a US House Judiciary Committee, when the FBI sought to force the firm to decrypt an iPhone taken from two dead terrorists in San Bernadino, California. (The hearing was dropped after FBI cracked the phone without Apple’s help). Her book offers an excellent, accessible account of the histories of digital networks, smartphones and the techniques of cryptography, cybersecurity and hacking. Among Landau’s many examples are: the Stuxnet worm, a US/Israeli hack attack that destroyed many of Iran’s uranium refinement centrifuges; the Russian interference in the 2016 US election; and the Snowden/Wikileaks revelations of state spying on US citizens. Landau is a techno-realist who accepts that the state has a responsibility for the security of its citizens that may clash with their right to privacy, and she firmly declares that this trade-off is a matter for democratic political debate rather than technocratic fiat.
Political rather than economic effects are the subject of Martin Moore’s ‘Democracy Hacked’. A senior research fellow at King’s College London, Moore explores how the Internet’s ubiquity, anonymity and freedom from governmental control is eroding the democratic process. Starting from a summary of the counter-cultural origins of the net, he follows its subsequent transmutation into a vehicle for the Alt-Right. He believes that we’re currently moving out of the long era of rule by rigidly-hierarchical, sporadically-elected, centralised parties and entering a new, barely fathomable, era of algorithmically-targeted campaigns that exploit those massive data sets of voter information collected via the Internet as an invisible side-effect of our routine purchases, video viewing and online socialising.
During the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 the Internet proved very effective at mobilizing mass resistance, but tragically ineffective at defining goals or consolidating progressive regime change. In later years the net-assisted triumphs of Trump, Modi and Duterte, and the UK’s Brexit referendum, hinted that the Right was going to benefit as much as the Left, with Corbyn and Macron as possible exceptions. Moore analyses the 2016 US election to identify three different modes of election hacking: by individuals, by plutocrats and by hostile foreign powers.
Plutocratic hackers include billionaire libertarians like the Koch brothers, Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer and who see the Internet as a way to defeat government. Mercer was a virtuoso programmer who worked on computational linguistics at IBM for 20 years, then made his fortune by applying similar machine learning techniques to hedge-fund investment. An early investor in Cambridge Analytica, he helped apply these techniques to the extraction of personality profiles and political susceptibilities from people’s Facebook data. Mercer and the Kochs in the USA and Aaron Banks in the UK purchased masses of voter data, then paid agents like Cambridge Analytica to perform ‘behavioural analytics’. Their key discovery was that in democratic politics it’s not necessary (perhaps not even desirable) to change a person’s mind but merely their behaviour – whether they’ll vote or not and for whom. Personality traits indicate which emotional tone will prove effective in personally-targeted election messages: subversive but not illegal. Pages 60-70 in which Moore explains this process are alone worth the price of the book.
As for Foreign Power hackers, Moore singles out the Russian model of information and disinformation warfare, showing how president Putin’s KGB experience gives him a degree of tech savvy notably lacking in Western leaders. His final chapters examine ‘Platform Democracy’, his term for the ambition of the Internet giants to usurp the powers of the state. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Uber are working hard to penetrate the healthcare, education and transport sectors with innovative and ‘disruptive’ services that parallel what they’ve achieved in retail, entertainment and social media. A case can be made that the extraordinary infrastructures and AI capabilities they’ve invested in are indeed more efficient than any state equivalent, but they remain commercial and unelected enterprises with no commitment except to shareholders. Moore goes further to illustrate what happens when states themselves do apply such technologies to integrate welfare, security and taxation, using as examples India’s Aadhaar system, Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ and Alibaba’s cooperation with Chinese local government to run a Social Credit system. Leaving aside questions over these systems’ actual effectiveness, they grant the state a sinister degree of extra knowledge and power over its citizens: participating in political protests can be punished by loss of benefits.
In 1988, Guy Debord published ‘Comments on the Society of the Spectacle’, an afterword to his famous work, which anticipated the way communications technologies might revolutionise a state’s repressive apparatus: “Networks of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and flourishing profession.” All three of these books testify in different ways to the accuracy of his warning, and urge us to curb the power of the Internet giants and redeploy their technology for the renewal of democracy, while the choice is still ours to make.
