social media

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

Curated on January 2, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Review by Stuart Jeffries of new book by Byung-Chul Han: “During a commercial break in the 1984 Super Bowl, Apple broadcast an ad directed by Ridley Scott. Glum, grey workers sat in a vast grey hall listening to Big Brother’s declamations on a huge screen. Then a maverick athlete-cum-Steve-Jobs-lackey hurled a sledgehammer at the screen, shattering it and bathing workers in healing light. “On January 24th,” the voiceover announced, “Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like [Orwell’s] Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

The ad’s idea, writes Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, was that the Apple Mac would liberate downtrodden masses from the totalitarian surveillance state. And indeed, the subsequent rise of Apple, the internet, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google Glass means that today we live in nothing like the nightmare Orwell imagined. After all, Big Brother needed electroshock, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, drugs and hectoring propaganda broadcasts to keep power, while his Ministry of Plenty ensured that consumer goods were lacking to make sure subjects were in an artificial state of need.

The new surveillance society that has arisen since 1984, argues Han, works differently yet is more elegantly totalitarian and oppressive than anything described by Orwell or Jeremy Bentham. “Confession obtained by force has been replaced by voluntary disclosure,” he writes. “Smartphones have been substituted for torture chambers.” Well, not quite. Torture chambers still exist, it’s just that we in the neoliberal west have outsourced them (thanks, rendition flights) so that that obscenity called polite society can pretend they don’t exist.

Nonetheless, what capitalism realised in the neoliberal era, Han argues, is that it didn’t need to be tough, but seductive. This is what he calls smartpolitics. Instead of saying no, it says yes: instead of denying us with commandments, discipline and shortages, it seems to allow us to buy what we want when we want, become what we want and realise our dream of freedom. “Instead of forbidding and depriving it works through pleasing and fulfilling. Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent.”…(More)”.

Computational Propaganda and Political Big Data: Moving Toward a More Critical Research Agenda

Curated on December 20, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Gillian Bolsover and Philip Howard in the Journal Big Data: “Computational propaganda has recently exploded into public consciousness. The U.S. presidential campaign of 2016 was marred by evidence, which continues to emerge, of targeted political propaganda and the use of bots to distribute political messages on social media. This computational propaganda is both a social and technical phenomenon. Technical knowledge is necessary to work with the massive databases used for audience targeting; it is necessary to create the bots and algorithms that distribute propaganda; it is necessary to monitor and evaluate the results of these efforts in agile campaigning. Thus, a technical knowledge comparable to those who create and distribute this propaganda is necessary to investigate the phenomenon.

However, viewing computational propaganda only from a technical perspective—as a set of variables, models, codes, and algorithms—plays into the hands of those who create it, the platforms that serve it, and the firms that profit from it. The very act of making something technical and impartial makes it seem inevitable and unbiased. This undermines the opportunities to argue for change in the social value and meaning of this content and the structures in which it exists. Big-data research is necessary to understand the socio-technical issue of computational propaganda and the influence of technology in politics. However, big data researchers must maintain a critical stance toward the data being used and analyzed so as to ensure that we are critiquing as we go about describing, predicting, or recommending changes. If research studies of computational propaganda and political big data do not engage with the forms of power and knowledge that produce it, then the very possibility for improving the role of social-media platforms in public life evaporates.

Definitionally, computational propaganda has two important parts: the technical and the social. Focusing on the technical, Woolley and Howard define computational propaganda as the assemblage of social-media platforms, autonomous agents, and big data tasked with the manipulation of public opinion. In contrast, the social definition of computational propaganda derives from the definition of propaganda—communications that deliberately misrepresent symbols, appealing to emotions and prejudices and bypassing rational thought, to achieve a specific goal of its creators—with computational propaganda understood as propaganda created or disseminated using computational (technical) means…(More) (Full Text HTML; Full Text PDF)

From Territorial to Functional Sovereignty: The Case of Amazon

Curated on December 17, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Frank Pasquale: “…Who needs city housing regulators when AirBnB can use data-driven methods to effectively regulate room-letting, then house-letting, and eventually urban planning generally? Why not let Amazon have its own jurisdiction or charter city, or establish special judicial procedures for Foxconn? Some vanguardists of functional sovereignty believe online rating systems could replace state occupational licensure—so rather than having government boards credential workers, a platform like LinkedIn could collect star ratings on them.

In this and later posts, I want to explain how this shift from territorial to functional sovereignty is creating a new digital political economy. Amazon’s rise is instructive. As Lina Khan explains, “the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it.” The “everything store” may seem like just another service in the economy—a virtual mall. But when a firm combines tens of millions of customers with a “marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house…a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space,” as Khan observes, it’s not just another shopping option.

Digital political economy helps us understand how platforms accumulate power. With online platforms, it’s not a simple narrative of “best service wins.” Network effects have been on the cyberlaw (and digital economics) agenda for over twenty years. Amazon’s dominance has exhibited how network effects can be self-reinforcing. The more merchants there are selling on (or to) Amazon, the better shoppers can be assured that they are searching all possible vendors. The more shoppers there are, the more vendors consider Amazon a “must-have” venue. As crowds build on either side of the platform, the middleman becomes ever more indispensable. Oh, sure, a new platform can enter the market—but until it gets access to the 480 million items Amazon sells (often at deep discounts), why should the median consumer defect to it? If I want garbage bags, do I really want to go over to Target.com to re-enter all my credit card details, create a new log-in, read the small print about shipping, and hope that this retailer can negotiate a better deal with Glad? Or do I, ala Sunstein, want a predictive shopping purveyor that intimately knows my past purchase habits, with satisfaction just a click away?
As artificial intelligence improves, the tracking of shopping into the Amazon groove will tend to become ever more rational for both buyers and sellers. Like a path through a forest trod ever clearer of debris, it becomes the natural default. To examine just one of many centripetal forces sucking money, data, and commerce into online behemoths, play out game theoretically how the possibility of online conflict redounds in Amazon’s favor. If you have a problem with a merchant online, do you want to pursue it as a one-off buyer? Or as someone whose reputation has been established over dozens or hundreds of transactions—and someone who can credibly threaten to deny Amazon hundreds or thousands of dollars of revenue each year? The same goes for merchants: The more tribute they can pay to Amazon, the more likely they are to achieve visibility in search results and attention (and perhaps even favor) when disputes come up. What Bruce Schneier said about security is increasingly true of commerce online: You want to be in the good graces of one of the neo-feudal giants who bring order to a lawless realm. Yet few hesitate to think about exactly how the digital lords might use their data advantages against those they ostensibly protect.

Forward-thinking legal thinkers are helping us grasp these dynamics. For example, Rory van Loo has described the status of the “corporation as courthouse”—that is, when platforms like Amazon run dispute resolution schemes to settle conflicts between buyers and sellers. Van Loo describes both the efficiency gains that an Amazon settlement process might have over small claims court, and the potential pitfalls for consumers (such as opaque standards for deciding cases). I believe that, on top of such economic considerations, we may want to consider the political economic origins of e-commerce feudalism. For example, as consumer rights shrivel, it’s rational for buyers to turn to Amazon (rather than overwhelmed small claims courts) to press their case. The evisceration of class actions, the rise of arbitration, boilerplate contracts—all these make the judicial system an increasingly vestigial organ in consumer disputes. Individuals rationally turn to online giants for powers to impose order that libertarian legal doctrine stripped from the state. And in so doing, they reinforce the very dynamics that led to the state’s etiolation in the first place….(More)”.

‘Big Data’ Tells Thailand More About Jobs Than Low Unemployment

Curated on December 5, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Suttinee Yuvejwattana at Bloomberg: “Thailand has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world, which doesn’t always fit the picture of an emerging-market economy that’s struggling to get growth going.

The Bank of Thailand is building its own employment index based on data from online jobs-search portals and is also creating a property indicator to give it a better sense of supply and demand in the housing market.

“We want to do evidence-based policy so big data is useful,” Jaturong Jantarangs, an assistant governor at the Bank of Thailand, said in an interview in Bangkok. “It’s not only a benefit to monetary policy but financial policy as well.”…

“Official data can’t capture the whole picture of the economy,” said Somprawin Manprasert, Bangkok-based head of research at Bank of Ayudhya Pcl. “We have a big informal sector. Many people are self-employed. This leads to a low unemployment rate.”

“The big data can show all aspects, so it can help us to solve the problems where they are,” he said…

Thailand’s military administration is also trying to harness big data to improve policy decisions, Digital Economy and Society Minister Pichet Durongkaveroj said in an interview last month. Pichet said he’s been tasked to look into digitizing, integrating and analyzing information across more than 200 government departments.

Santitarn Sathirathai, head of emerging Asia economics at Credit Suisse Group AG in Singapore, said big data analytics can be used to better target policy responses as well as allow timely evaluation of past programs. At the same time, he called on authorities to make their data more readily available to the public.

“The government should not just view big data analytics as being solely about it using richer data but also about creating a more open data environment,” he said. That’s to ensure “people can have better access to many government non-sensitive datasets and help conduct analysis that could complement the policy makers,” he said….(More)”.

How Software is Eating the World and Reprogramming Democracy

Curated on December 1, 2017July 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jaime Gómez Ramírez at Open Mind: “Democracy, the government of the majority typically through elected representatives, is undergoing a major crisis. Human societies have experimented with democracy since at least the fifth century BC in the polis of Athens. Whether democracy is scalable is an open question that could help understand the current mistrust in democratic institutions and the rise of populism. The majority rule is a powerful narrative that is fed every few years with elections. In Against elections, the cultural historian Van Reybrouck claims that elections were never meant to make democracy possible, rather the opposite, it was a tool designed for those in power to prevent “the rule of the mob”. Elections created a new elite and power remained in the hands of a minority, but this time endowed with democratic legitimacy….

The 2008 financial crisis have changed the perception of, the once taken for granted, complementary nature of democracy and capitalism. The belief that capitalism and democracy go hand by hand is not credible anymore. The concept of nation is a fiction in need of a continuous stock of intergenerational believers. The nation state successfully assimilated heterogeneous groups of people under a common language and shared cultural values. But this seems today a rather fragile foundation to resist the centrifugal forces that financial capitalism impinges upon the social fabric.

Nation states will not collapse over night, but they are an industrial era device in a digital world. To do not fall into obsolescence they will need to change their operative system. Since the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen coined the phrase “software is eating the world” the logic of financial capitalism has accelerated this trend. Five software companies: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet (FANG) equal more than 10 per cent percent of the S&P 500 cap. Todays dominant industries in entertainment, retail, telecom, marketing companies and others are software companies. Software is also taking a bigger share in industries that traditionally exist in the physical space like automakers and energy. Education and health care have shown more resistance to software-based entrepreneurial change but a very profound transformation is underway. This is already visible with the growing popularity of MOOCs and personalized health monitoring systems.

Software-based business not only have up trending market share but more importantly, software can reprogram the world. The internet of things will allow to have full connectivity of smart devices in an economy with massive deflationary costs in computing. Computing might even become free. This has profound consequences for business, industry and most importantly, for how citizens want to organize society and governance.

The most promising technological innovation in years is the blockchain technology, an encrypted and distributed ledger system. Blockchain is an universal and freely accessible repository of documents including property and insurance contracts, publicly auditable, and resistant to special group interests manipulation and corruption. New kinds of governance models and services could be tested and implemented using the blockchain. The time is ripe for fundamental software-based transformation in governance. Democracy and free society will ignore this at its own peril…(More)”.