I am 3/4 of the way through Zuboff's wonderful book on surveillance capitalism and I am half way into this article. I think Corey makes some good points on which parts of surveillance capitalism are most dangerous and deserve the hardest push-back but Zuboff's book is still important and I hope sincerely that this article's critique does not dissuade people from reading the book.
I've been struggling with Doctorow's tech exceptionalism thesis for a while. (One of my geek brothers is a huge fan, so I get plenty of opportunity to founder.) It seems like we're directionally similar, so I really want to be in alliance.
But I just can't figure out what he's talking about.
It's the same feeling of unease I get trying to grok Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Greg Palast, and other curmudgeons.
"Okay! Stop! You've convinced me! Stop! Just tell me what you want me to do! I need action steps!"
I imagine my reaction to Doctorow is how most people react to me.
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That said.
I reject the dichotomy of idealism vs materialism.
My own thesis is still poorly formed. But the nugget is the growing evidence that belief systems are about identity. And that much of today's social pathologies, of most concern to me, are the stimulus which most effectively activate identity.
In other words, using Doctorow's first example of flat earthers, the proclaimed beliefs of those adherents has nothing to do with ideologies, facts, persuasion, whatever. It's only about identity and therefore acceptance by that social group.
Most simply: Cults.
The toxic part is the automated isolation and amplification of those identities. Those machine learning algorithms (aka newsfeed) that finds the difference that makes the difference and ruthlessly exploits that delta for profit.
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Skipping the big section about intellectual property...
(But I will say that I've become a fan of the "information wants to be expensive" school of thought.)
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"We can work to fix the internet by breaking up Big Tech and depriving them of monopoly profits, or we can work to fix Big Tech by making them spend their monopoly profits on governance. But we can’t do both. We have to choose between a vibrant, open internet or a dominated, monopolized internet commanded by Big Tech giants that we struggle with constantly to get them to behave themselves."
There's a lot of daylight between repeated radical cashectomies, which I support, and nationalizing these platforms as utilities, which I also support.
One crazy notion would be to simply treat digital markets like physical markets. Rule of law, consumer protection, right to appeal... You know, the usual stuff found in modern civil society.
Another crazy notion is to identify the undesired feedback loops, then break or bend them. Freemium and targeted advertising seem like two pretty good candidates for the chopping block.
Edit: Sorry, should have included my original radical, and therefore obviously correct, proposal. Extend property rights to personal data. If someone's making a buck off my data, I want my cut.
Doctorow's article prompted me to revisit Zuboff's thesis.
I now think both Doctorow and myself, in different ways, are completely wide of the mark.
Zuboff's analysis is far more potent than I've been able to grasp or articulate. For instance, she moots the "paradox of privacy" by getting back to first principles of market design and choice theory.
I really wish I was better prepared on this topic. Sorry.
