Dr Frankenstein goes to Washington

So Mark Zuckerberg testified to the senate on 4/10/18 and the next day he testified to the house. I caught most of the senate testimony live, and I have since read the transcript of the rest of the testimony. As well as a hefty chunk of the inevitable billions of bytes worth of reporting and commentary on the matter. As usual, I have thoughts and opinions, particularly because this specific interaction tells us a lot about the way we have our society set up. The whole saga but particularly the testimony is a fascinating look at where we are right now.

There were a lot of memes going around playing off of the fact that Zuc is a 30 something tech billionaire and congress is mostly a bunch of un-hip old people. This highlights something foundational: the ruling and managing of a country is a slow, complicated thing that requires thousands of people with decades of experience, and a business started by a dude in a dorm room can one day be of national concern. Sure, it’s funny that some senators were technologically a bit illiterate, but it is far more sobering that there is an entire industry that is so far ahead of regulations we don’t even know what may or may not be going on.

Let me give a quick aside here on the idea of being ahead of regulation. NPR reported on a situation where a town was polluted by a factory producing a new compound that released a new pollutant that no-one had done a study on to determine if it was safe. After years and spikes in the area’s cancer rate, the EPA did conclude that the factory produced the nasty stuff at 10-100x what was determined to be a safe level. This is the kind of challenge I think we should be talking about. The factory was not technically, legally polluting until the government said it was, but of course the community felt the bad effects for years prior. And no free-market advocate that I have ever heard speak says that companies should be allowed to pollute such that it hurts the people in the neighborhood. But, this is exactly what happened, and what is happening in the case of Facebook.

No one told Zuc not to allow app developers to gather data. No one told Zuc how to enforce FB’s policy of disallowing the sale of that data. No one has directed Zuc on how to manage “hate speech”. No one has advised Zuc on how to treat individuals or groups using FB to manipulate people in other countries. So, since none of the very serious, very old lawmakers thought to regulate FB till now, Zuc (in union with his board/executives/lawyers) made decisions he thought were “best”. Best, of course, considering FB is a publicly-traded company. Now look, I’m not going to make capilitalists out to be evil and greedy, all I’m going to say that in a boardroom, profit advocates for itself, while other interests do not. There is often a conflict between the thing that will make the most money and the thing that is in the interest of the “common good” especially at the level of FB. Luckily, for most people in most places, the market does a good job of weeding out the unethical actors. It is true that a skeezy plumber will soon go out of business. But this does not seem to be the case on the regional, national, or international scale: we often justify Walmart and its practices with the way we would like the corner store to be allowed to operate.

It just so happens that how FB comported itself is now being deemed unacceptable. Zuc is being ridiculed for betraying a public trust he never really thought he had. This is how it goes with innovative companies that grow to worldwide reach. Is it reasonable? Maybe not, just as it may not be reasonable for that factory to be shut down and that company to be run out of town for retroactive pollution. All that being said, it is supreme justice that FB be held to account here, just as that factory should be held responsible for the cancer it caused. Regardless of mal intent, large actors in the market must be forced to always take care not to harm individuals.

Now, as to the issue of privacy. You know, it’s funny, but back in 2010-ish I remember there being seemingly a rash of people getting fired subsequent to social media pressure on the companies they worked for. Everybody from executives to janitors have been fired from everything from tech giants to the aforementioned local plumber. It’s kind of a cultural thing now, we all kinda accept that you can get fired for things you say online. Some employers “take a stand” against this pressure (the conservative love that) but most employees act more prudently with what they say and post. The thing that bothers me about this is not that people get fired for opinions on the internet or we have a chilling effect on how we use our speech. Rather, I hate the fact that now, acceptability for employment is determined by a marketplace so very large that there is no way any one employee could possibly engage with it. Imagine a stock broker deciding who a farmer should hire, or a doctor on the west coast telling a lawyer on the east coast to fire her paralegal. I it’s bad enough that the economic conditions of any given town are more or less up to the tides of a global market. There is just no way that someone’s ability to facilitate the goods and services a company provides should be evaluated on anything approaching the same scale. But, we are sorta ok with this for the most part.

FB is not the cause of this particular bad thing, but I cannot imagine the situation would be so without them. The nationalization of absolutely everything is anti-human. We are put here on this earth, right here and right now, to deal with the particular set of circumstances that we are presented with, and even a jury of our peers from the same county as us could only do a minimally acceptable job of judging how we comport ourselves. I would actually sooner take a jury formed from people all over the world than I would allow my everyday speech and behaviour be judged by someone from the next state over in the manner we have become accustomed to. And this isn’t FB doing this by the way, this is just what happens when you connect enough people over a large enough network in as intimate a setting as FB allows. We haven't evolved for this.

All that, however, is just me. What is really big news, what’s got all the kiddies talkin’, is the whole Cambridge Analytica thing. FB, being a platform with 2+ billion users, is a whole ecosystem that lots of developers want to build apps for. Also, FB, being run by young tech geniuses, has a lot of info on a lot of users who tend to use social media obsessively. So FB has two products that other companies want to buy: 1) access and 2) data. No one has a problem with FB acting as gatekeeper, withholding and meting out access as it sees fit. Well, no one but Ted. The thing we are all very, very angry about is the data part. AI in general seems to be scarin’ the pants off of our materialistic post modern society. The thought that everything about you could be and is expressed in a million data points and compressed into colorless, shapeless, lifeless bytes is both the logical conclusion of empiricism and its greatest fear. Let alone what some companies might do with this info, just that cold truth gives the less spiritual among us the heebeejeebees.

Over time, FB has us all sorted based on what we liked the other day. So here too I have a divergent thought. The data that is out there about me, well, it is what it is. There isn’t much more I can do other than be more prudent in the future, and pay attention to the policy changes that may or may not happen. The thing that does bother me is this: the algorithm learns what you like so that it can show you what you like. Imagine walking into a library, that cathedral of human thought, billions of words from millions of authors on thousands of subjects. Now imagine only ever being able to see the YA section. Literally being blind to the existence of Shakespeare just because you asked the librarian who Stephany Meyer was. This is why I am concerned about the algorithm: it too supports an inhuman way of being. We change, grow, adapt. We live in the desert and in the tundra. We rap and sonnet, smelt and stroke. Humans are nothing if they are not everything. The algorithm is slower than us. It adapts long after our tastes have changed, and if we are ready for the next level of info or discourse, it will never know. When I was 15, I thought differently than I did at 25, and I expect to be a different person by 45, but by then my youtube feed will have just caught up with my 35 year old self. By the way, this feeds into why I’m not scured of AI. I be smarter no matter whatever.

The previous owner of my house was a democrat, and years later I still get mailers from various Dem big important people. It’s interesting the read the headlines printed on the outside of the envelopes, because they tell me what issues are supposed to get good little democrats riled up. Reading articles from both sides of our (for some reason) dualistic politics on the same topics is eye-opening. Believe it or not, I’ve even talked to people I disagree with. In some ways, FB has helped us with this discourse, and in some ways it hasn’t, much like the internet writ large. I don’t think anyone really disagrees with this milquetoast assessment, what is cause for concern is the combination of over-nationalization and over-concentration. That is what fascism is. The individual lost in larger society, with no identity outside of his political affiliation, and any rough edge that catches on our attention cut off. That is what we should be worried about, and FB is certainly part of the problem, this thing has really been a long time coming.

Sure, sure, ban the Russians, don’t let China know where dissenters are, that’s all good. But those are problems that come with a global social media platform. FB and congress would have to talk about that or any other number of possible bad foreign action at some point. I think the problems that come with just a social media platform are more foundational, more serious, and simply will not be dealt with in our haste to “secure our elections”.

Look, FB clearly did not do what it should have in the case of CA. Zuc himself had to say they could have banned CA, but didn’t, after learning of the illegal transfer of data from an app dev to CA for commercial use. The hammer is coming down, how hard might depend on who gets elected in Nov, but Zuc has already committed to taking the EU privacy protection regs and applying them platform-wide. Makes sense, better to go with one set of stringent regs than 2-4 varying ones cross platform. This action already underway at FB HQ, is all anybody cares about. Senators don’t care that Billy Bob can't get a job because the network says he’s a bad guy, congress doesn’t care that little Susie will be stuck with a narrow view of the world and what’s in it because Google can’t keep up with her wonder. And I’m not sure they should, but we certainly should. We have to care, to pay attention to how we are paying attention. For the first time in human history, a few people are directing the stream of evolution. Our environment to which we adapt is FB, the acceptable mutations determined by the socially constructed network, and becoming unplugged is the same as being left behind in an increasingly global world.