net.wars

Review: The Web We Weave

The Web We Weave
By Jeff Jarvis
Basic Books
ISBN: 9781541604124

Sometime in the very early 1990s, someone came up to me at a conference and told me I should read the work of Robert McChesney. When I followed the instruction, I found a history of how radio and TV started as educational media and wound up commercially controlled. Ever since, this is the lens through which I’ve watched the Internet develop: how do we keep the Internet from following that same path? If all you look at is the last 30 years of web development, you might think we can’t.

A similar mission animates retired CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis in his latest book, The Web We Weave. In it, among other things, he advocates reanimating the open web by reviving the blogs many abandoned when Twitter came along and embracing other forms of citizen media. Phenomena such as disinformation, misinformation, and other harms attributed to social media, he writes, have precursor moral panics: novels, comic books, radio, TV, all were once new media whose evils older generations fretted about. (For my parents, it was comic books, which they completely banned while ignoring the hours of TV I watched.) With that past in mind, much of today’s online harms regulation leaves him skeptical.

As a media professor, Jarvis is interested in the broad sweep of history, setting social media into the context that began with the invention of the printing press. That has its benefits when it comes to later chapters where he’s making policy recommendations on what to regulate and how. Jarvis is emphatically a free-speech advocate.

Among his recommendations are those such advocates typically support: users should be empowered, educated, and taught to take responsibility, and we should develop business models that support good speech. Regulation, he writes, should include the following elements: transparency, accountability, disclosure, redress, and behavior rather than content.

On the other hand, Jarvis is emphatically not a technical or design expert, and therefore has little to say about the impact on user behavior of technical design decisions. Some things we know are constants. For example, the willingness of (fully identified) online communicators to attack each other was noted as long ago as the 1980s, when Sara Kiesler studied the first corporate mailing lists.

Others, however, are not. Those developing Mastodon, for example, deliberately chose not to implement the ability to quote and comment on a post because they believed that feature fostered abuse and pile-ons. Similarly, Lawrence Lessig pointed out in 1999 in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspae (PDF) that you couldn’t foment a revolution using AOL chatrooms because they had a limit of 23 simultaneous users.

Understanding the impact of technical decisions requires experience, experimentation, and, above all, time. If you doubt this, read Mike Masnick’s series at Techdirt on Elon Musk’s takeover and destruction of Twitter. His changes to the verification system alone have undermined the ability to understand who’s posting and decide how trustworthy their information is.

Jarvis goes on to suggest we should rediscover human scale and mutual obligation, both crucial as the covid pandemic progressed. The money will always favor mass scale. But we don’t have to go that way.

Sectioned

Social media seems to be having a late-1990s moment, raising flashbacks to the origins of platform liability and the passage of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996). It’s worth making clear at the outset: most of the people talking about S230 seem to have little understanding of what it is and does. It allows sites to moderate content without becoming liable for it. It is what enables all those trust and safety teams to implement sites’ restrictions on acceptable use. When someone wants to take an axe to it because there is vile content circulating, they have not understood this.

So, in one case this week a US appeals court is allowing a lawsuit to proceed that seeks to hold TikTok liable for users’ postings of the “blackout challenge”, the idea being to get an adrenaline rush by reviving from near-asphyxiation. Bloomberg reports that at least 20 children have died trying to accomplish this, at least 15 of them age 12 or younger (TikTok, like all social media, is supposed to be off-limits to under-13s). The people suing are the parents of one of those 20, a ten-year-old girl who died attempting the challenge.

The other case is that of Pavel Durov, CEO of the messaging service Telegram, who has been arrested in France as part of a criminal investigation. He has been formally charged with complicity in managing an online platform “in order to enable an illegal transaction in organized group”, and refusal to cooperate with law enforcement authorities and ordered not to leave France, with bail set at €5 million (is that enough to prevent the flight of a billionaire with four passports?).

While there have been many platform liability cases, there are relatively few examples of platform owners and operators being charged. The first was in 1997, back when “online” still had a hyphen; the German general manager of CompuServe, Felix Somm, was arrested in Bavaria on charges of “trafficking in pornography”. That is, German users of Columbus, Ohio-based CompuServe could access pornography and illegal material on the Internet through the service’s gateway. In 1998, Somm was convicted and given a two-year suspended sentence. In 1999 his conviction was overturned on appeal, partly, the judge wrote, because there was no technology at the time that would have enabled CompuServe to block the material.

The only other example I’m aware of came just this week, when an Arizona judge sentenced Michael Lacey, co-founder of the classified ads site Backpage.com, to five years in prison and fined him $3 million for money laundering. He still faces further charges for prostitution facilitation and money laundering; allegedly he profited from a scheme to promote prostitution on his site. Two other previously convicted Backpages executives were also sentenced this week to ten years in prison.

In Durov’s case, the key point appears to be his refusal to follow industry practice with respect to to reporting child sexual abuse material or cooperate with properly executed legal requests for information. You don’t have to be a criminal to want the social medium of your choice to protect your privacy from unwarranted government snooping – but equally, you don’t have to be innocent to be concerned if billionaire CEOs of large technology companies consider themselves above the law. (See also Elon Musk, whose X platform may be tossed out of Brazil right now.)

Some reports on the Durov case have focused on encryption, but the bigger issue appears to be failure to register to use encryption , as Signal has. More important, although Telegram is often talked about as encrypted, it’s really more like other social media, where groups are publicly visible, and only direct one-on-one messages are encrypted. But even then, they’re only encrypted if users opt in. Given that users notoriously tend to stick with default settings, that means that the percentage of users who turn that encryption on is probably tiny. So it’s not clear yet whether France is seeking to hold Durov responsible for the user-generated content on his platform (which S230 would protect in the US), or accusing him of being part of criminal activity relating to his platform (which it wouldn’t).

Returning to the Arizona case, in allowing the lawsuit to go ahead, the appeals court judgment says that S230 has “evolved away from its original intent”, and argues that because TikTok’s algorithm served up the challenge on the child’s “For You” page, the service can be held responsible. At TechDirt, Mike Masnick blasts this reasoning, saying that it overturns numerous other court rulings upholding S230, and uses the same reasoning as the 1995 decision in Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy. That was the case that led directly to the passage of S230, introduced by then-Congressman Christopher Cox (R-CA) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who are still alive to answer questions about their intent. Rather than evolving away, we’ve evolved back full circle.

The rise of monopolistic Big Tech has tended to obscure the more important point about S230. As Cory Doctorow writes for EFF, killing S230 would kill the small federated communities (like Mastodon and Discord servers) and web boards that offer alternatives to increasing Big Tech’s pwoer. While S230 doesn’t apply outside the US (some Americans have difficulty understanding that other countries have different laws), its ethos is pervasive and the companies it’s enabled are everywhere. In the end, it’s like democracy: the alternatives are worse.

Illustrations: Drunken parrot in Putney (by Simon Bisson).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon.

The fear factor

Be careful what you allow the authorities to do to people you despise, because one day those same tools will be turned against you.

In the last few weeks, the shocking stabbing of three young girls at a dance class in Southport became the spark to ignite riots across the UK by people who apparently believed social media theories that the 17-year-old boy responsible was Muslim, a migrant, or a terrorist. With the boy a week from his 18th birthday, the courts ruled police could release his name in order to make clear he was not Muslim and born in Wales. It failed to stop the riots.

Police and the courts have acted quickly; almost 800 people have been arrested, 350 have been charged, and hundreds are in custody. In a moving development, on a night when more than 100 riots were predicted, tens of thousands of ordinary citizens thronged city streets and formed protective human chains around refugee centers in order to block the extremists. The riots have quieted down, but police are still busy arresting newly-identified suspects. And the inevitable question is being asked: what do we do next to keep the streets safe and calm?

London mayor Sadiq Khan quickly called for a review of the Online Safety Act, saying he doesn’t believe it’s fit for purpose. Cabinet minister Nick Thomas-Symonds (Labour-Torfaen) has suggested the month-old government could change the law.

Meanwhile, prime minister Keir Starmer favours a wider rollout of live facial recognition to track thugs and prevent them from traveling to places where they plan to cause social unrest, copying systems the police use to prevent football hooligans from even boarding trains to matches. This proposal is startling because: before standing for Parliament Starmer was a human rights lawyer. One could reasonably expect him to know that facial recognition systems have a notorious history of inaccuracy due to biases baked into their algorithms via training data, and that in the UK there is no regulatory framework to provide oversight. Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch immediately called the proposal “alarming” and “ineffective”, warning that it turns people into “walking ID cards”.

As the former head of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti used to say when ID cards were last proposed, moves like these fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state. Such a profound change deserves more thought than a reflex fear reaction in a crisis. As Ciaran Thapar argues at the Guardian, today’s violence has many causes, beginning with the decay of public services for youth, mental health, and , and it’s those causes that need to be addressed. Thapar invokes his memories of how his community overcame the “open, violent racism” of the 1980s Thatcher years in making his recommendations.

Much of the discussion of the riots has blamed social media for propagating hate speech and disinformation, along with calls for rethinking the Online Safety Act. This is also frustrating. First of all, the OSA, which was passed in 2023, isn’t even fully implemented yet. When last seen, Ofcom, the regulator designated to enforce it, was in the throes of recruiting people by the dozen, working out what sites will be in scope (about 150,000, they said), and developing guidelines. Until we see the shape of the regulation in practice, it’s too early to say the act needs expansion.

Second, hate speech and incitement to violence are already illegal under other UK laws. Just this week, a woman was jailed for 15 months for a comment to a Facebook group with 5,100 members that advocated violence against mosques and the people inside them. The OSA was not needed to prosecute her.

And third, while Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg definitely deserve to have anger thrown their way, focusing solely on the ills of social media makes no sense given the decades that right-wing newspapers have spent sowing division and hatred. Even before Musk, Twitter often acted as a democratization of the kind of angry, hate-filled coverage long seen in the Daily Mail (and others). These are the wedges that created the divisions that malicious actors can now exploit by disseminating disinformation, a process systematically explained by Renee DiResta in her new book, Invisible Rulers.

The FBI’s investigation of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol provides a good exemplar for how modern investigations can exploit new technologies. Law enforcement applied facial recognition to CCTV footage and massive databases, and studied social media feeds, location data and cellphone tracking, and other data. As Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson wrote at the New York Times in 2021, even though most of us agree with the goal of catching and punishing insurrectionists and rioters, the data “remains vulnerable to use and abuse” against protests of other types – such as this year’s pro-Palestinian encampments.

The same argument applies in the UK. Few want violence in the streets. But the unilateral imposition of live facial recognition, among other tracking technologies, can’t be allowed. There must be limits and safeguards. ID cards issued in wartime could be withdrawn when peace came; surveillance technologies, once put in place, tend to become permanent.

Illustrations: The CCTV camera at 22 Portobello Road, where George Orwell once lived.

Gather ye lawsuits while ye may

Most of us howled with laughter this week when the news broke that Elon Musk is suing companies for refusing to advertise on his exTwitter platform. To be precise, Musk is suing the World Federation of Advertisers, Unilever, Mars, CVS, and Ørsted in a Texas court.

How could Musk, who styles himself a “free speech absolutist”, possibly force companies to advertise on his site? This is pure First Amendment stuff: both the right to free speech (or to remain silent) and freedom of assembly. It adds to the nuttiness of it all that last November Musk was telling advertisers to “go fuck yourselves” if they threatened him with a boycott. Now he’s mad because they responded in kind.

Does the richest man in the world even need advertisers to finance his toy?

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick catalogues the “so much stupid here”.

The WFA initiative that offends Musk is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which develops guidelines for content moderation – things like a standard definition for “hate speech” to help sites operate consistent and transparent policies and reassure advertisers that their logos don’t appear next to horrors like the livestreamed shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. GARM’s site says: membership is voluntary, following its guidelines is voluntary, it does not provide a rating service, and it is apolitical.

Pre-Musk, Twitter was a member. After Musk took over, he pulled exTwitter out of it – but rejoined a month ago. Now, Musk claims that refusing to advertise on his site might be a criminal matter under RICO. So he’s suing himself? Blink.

Enter US Republicans, who are convinced that content moderation exists only to punish conservative speech. On July 10, House Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of Jim Jordan (R-OH), released an interim report on its ongoing investigation of GARM.

The report says GARM appears to “have anti-democratic views of fundamental American freedoms” and likens its work to restraint of trade Among specific examples, it says GARM’s recommended that its members stop advertising on exTwitter, threatened Spotify when podcaster Joe Rogan told his massive audience that young, healthy people don’t need to be vaccinated against covid, and considered blocking news sites such as Fox News, Breitbart, and The Daily Wire. In addition, the report says, GARM advised its members to use fact-checking services like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index “which disproportionately label right-of-center news sites as so-called misinformation”. Therefore, the report concludes, GARM’s work is “likely illegal under the antitrust laws”.

I don’t know what a court would have made of that argument – for one thing, GARM can’t force anyone to follow its guidelines. But now we’ll never know. Two days after Musk filed suit, the WFA announced it’s shuttering GARM immediately because it can’t afford to defend the lawsuit and keep operating even though it believes it’s complied with competition rules. Such is the role of bullies in our public life.

I suppose Musk can hope that advertisers decide it’s cheaper to buy space on his site than to fight the lawsuit?

But it’s not really a laughing matter. GARM is just one of a number of initiatives that’s come under attack as we head into the final three months of campaigning before the US presidential election. In June, Renee DiResta, author of the new book Invisible Rulers, announced that her contract as the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory was not being renewed. Founding director Alex Stamos was already gone. Stanford has said the Observatory will continue under new leadership, but no details have been published. The Washington Post says conspiracy theorists have called DiResta and Stamos part of a government-private censorship consortium.

Meanwhile, one of the Observatory’s projects, a joint effort with the University of Washington called the Election Integrity Partnership, has announced, in response to various lawsuits and attacks, that it will not work on the 2024 or future elections. At the same time, Meta is shutting down CrowdTangle next week, removing a research tool that journalists and academics use to study content on Facebook and Instagram. While CrowdTangle will be replaced with Meta Content Library, access will be limited to academics and non-profits, and those who’ve seen it say it’s missing useful data that was available through CrowdTangle.

The concern isn’t the future of any single initiative; it’s the pattern of these things winking out. As work like DiResta’s has shown, the flow of funds financing online political speech (including advertising) is dangerously opaque. We need access and transparency for those who study it, and in real time, not years after the event.

In this, as so much else, the US continues to clash with the EU, which it accused in December of breaching its rules with respect to disinformation, transparency, and extreme content. Last month, it formally charged Musk’s site for violating the Digital Services Act, for which Musk could be liable for a fine of up to 6% of exTwitter’s global revenue. Among the EU’s complaints is the lack of a searchable and reliable advertisement repository – again, an important element of the transparency we need. Its handling of disinformation and calls to violence during the current UK riots may be added to the investigation.

Musk will be suing *us*, next.

Illustrations: A cartoon caricature of Christina Rossetti by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1862, showing her having a tantrum after reading The Times’ review of her poetry (via Wikimedia).

Selective enforcement

This week, as a rider to the 21st Century Peace Through Strength Act, which provides funding for defense in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, the US Congress passed provisions for banning the distribution of TikTok if owner ByteDance has not divested it within 270 days. President Joe Biden signed it into law on Wednesday, and, as Mike Masnick says at Techdirt, ByteDance’s lawsuit is imminently expected, largely on First Amendment grounds. ACLU agrees. Similar arguments won when ByteDance challenged a 2023 Montana law.

For context: Pew Research says TikTok is the fifth-most popular social media service in the US. An estimated 150 million Americans – and 62% of 18-29-year-olds – use it.

The ban may not be a slam-dunk to fail in court. US law, including the constitution, includes many restrictions on foreign influence, from requiring registration for those acting as agents to requiring presidents to have been born US citizens. Until 2017, foreigners were barred from owning US broadcast networks.

So it seems to this non-lawyer as though a lot hinges on how the court defines TikTok and what precedents apply. This is the kind of debate that goes back to the dawn of the Internet: is a privately-owned service built of user-generated content more like a town square, a broadcaster, a publisher, or a local pub? “Broadcast”, whether over the air or via cable, implies being assigned a channel on a limited resource; this clearly doesn’t apply to apps and services carried over the presumably-infinite Internet. Publishing implies editorial control, which social media lacks. A local pub might be closest: privately owned, it’s where people go to connect with each other. “Congress may make no law…abridging the freedom of speech”…but does that cover denying access to one “place” where speech takes place when there are many other options?

TikTok is already banned in Pakistan, Nepal, and Afghanistan, and also India, where it is one of 500 apps that have been banned since 2020. ByteDance will argue that the ban hurts US creators who use TikTok to build businesses. But as NPR reports, in India YouTube and Instagram rolled out short video features to fill the gap for hyperlocal content that the loss of TikTok opened up, and four years on creators have adapted to other outlets.

It will be more interesting if ByteDance claims the company itself has free speech rights. In a country where commercial companies and other organizations are deemed to have “free speech” rights entitling them to donate as much money as they want to political causes (as per the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), that might make a reasonable argument.

On the other hand, there is no question that this legislation is full of double standards. If another country sought to ban any of the US-based social media, American outrage would be deafening. If the issue is protecting the privacy of Americans against rampant data collection, then, as Free Press argues, pass a privacy law that will protect Americans from *every* service, not just this one. The claim that the ban is to protect national security is weakened by the fact that the Chinese government, like apparently everyone else, can buy data on US citizens even if it’s blocked from collecting it directly from ByteDance.

Similarly, if the issue is the belief that social media inevitably causes harm to teenagers, as author and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt insists in his new book, then again, why only pick on TikTok? Experts who have really studied this terrain, such as Danah Boyd and others, insist that Haidt is oversimplifying and pushing parents to deny their children access to technologies whose influence is largely positive. I’m inclined to agree; between growing economic hardship, expanding wars, and increasing climate disasters young people have more important things to be anxious about than social media. In any case, where’s the evidence that TikTok is a bigger source of harm than any other social medium?

Among digital rights activists, the most purely emotional argument against the TikTok ban revolves around the original idea of the Internet as an open network. Banning access to a service in one country (especially the country that did the most to promote the Internet as a vector for free speech and democratic values) is, in this view, a dangerous step toward the government control John Perry Barlow famously rejected in 1996. And yet, to increasing indifference, no-go signs are all over the Internet. *Six* years after GDPR came into force, Europeans are still blocked from many US media sites that can’t be bothered to comply with it. Many other media links don’t work because of copyright restrictions, and on and on.

The final double standard is this: a big element in the TikTok ban is the fear that the Chinese government, via its control over companies hosted there, will have access to intimate personal information about Americans. Yet for more than 20 years this has been the reality for non-Americans using US technology services outside the US: their data is subject to NSA surveillance. This, and the lack of redress for non-Americans, is what Max Schrems’ legal cases have been about. Do as we say, not as we do?

Illustrations: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, at the European Commission in 2024 (by Lukasz Kobus at Wikimedia).

The toast bubble

To The Big Bang Theory (“The Russian Rocket Reaction”, S5e05):

Howard: Someone has to go up with the telescope as a payload specialist, and guess who that someone is!
Sheldon: Muhammed Li.
Howard: Who’s Muhammed Li?
Sheldon: Muhammed is the most common first name in the world, Li the most common surname, and as I didn’t know the answer I thought that gave me a mathematical edge.

Experts tell me that exchange doesn’t perfectly explain how generative AI works; it’s too simplistic. Generative AI – or a Sheldon made more nuanced by his writers – takes into account contextual information to calculate the probable next word. So it wouldn’t pick from all the first names and surnames in the world. It might, however, pick from the names of all the payload specialists or some other group it correlated, or confect one.

More than a year on, I still can’t find a use for generative “AI” that is so unreliable and inscrutable. At Exponential View, Azeem Azhar has written about the “answer engine” Perplexity.ai. While it’s helpful that Perplexity provides references for its answers, it was producing misinformation by the third question I asked it, and offered no improvement when challenged. Wikipedia spent many years being accused of unreliability, too, but at least there you can read the talk page and understand how the editors arrived at the text they present.

On The Daily Show this week, Jon Stewart ranted about AI and interviewed FTC chair Lina Khan. Well-chosen video clips showed AI company heads’ true colors, telling the public AI is an assistant for humans while telling money people and each other that AI will enable greater productivity with fewer workers and help eliminate “the people tax”.

More interesting, however, was Khan’s note that the FTC is investigating the investments and partnerships in AI to understand if they’re giving current technology giants undue influence in the marketplace. If, in her example, all the competitors in a market outsource their pricing decisions to the same algorithm they may be guilty of price fixing even if they’re not actively colluding. And these markets are consolidating at an ever-earlier stage. Snapchat and WhatsApp had millions of users by the time Facebook thought it prudent to buy them rather than let them become dangerous competitors. AI is pre-consolidating: the usual suspects have been buying up AI startups and models at pace.

“More profound than fire or electricity,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai tells a camera at one point, speaking about AI. The last time I heard this level of hyperbole it was about the Internet in the 1990s, shortly before the bust. A friend’s answer to this sort of thing has never varied: “I’d rather have indoor plumbing.”

***

Last week the Federal District Court in Manhattan sentenced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison for stealing $8 billion. In the end, you didn’t have to understand anything complicated about cryptocurrencies; it was just good old embezzlement.

And then the price of bitcoin went *up*. At the Guardian, Molly White explains that this is because cryptoevangelists are pushing the idea that the sector can reach its full potential, now that Bankman-Fried and other bad apples have been purged. But, as she says, nothing has really changed. No new use case has come along to make cryptocurrencies more useful, more valuable, or more trustworthy.

Both cryptocurrencies and generative AI are bubbles. The difference is that the AI bubble will likely leave behind it some technologies and knowledge that are genuinely useful; it will be like the Internet, which boomed and busted before settling in to change the world. Cryptocurrencies are more like the Dutch tulips. Unfortunately, in the meantime both these bubbles are consuming energy at an insane rate. How many wildfires is bitcoin worth?

I’ve seen a report suggesting that the last known professional words of the late Ross Anderson may have been, “Do they take us for fools?”

He was referring to the plans, debated in the House of Commons on March 25, to amend the Investigatory Powers Act to allow the government to pre-approve (or disapprove) new security features technology firms want to intorduce. The government is of course saying it’s all perfectly innocent, intended to keep the country safe. But recent clashes in the decades-old conflict over strong encryption have seen the technology companies roll out features like end-to-end encryption (Meta) and decide not to implement others, like client-side scanning (Apple). The latest in a long line of UK governments that want access to encrypted text was hardly going to take that quietly. So here we are, debating this yet again. Yet the laws of mathematics still haven’t changed: there is no such thing as a security hole that only “good guys” can use.

***

Returning to AI, it appears that costs may lead Google to charge for access to its AI-enhanced search, as Alex Hern reports at the Guardian. Hern thinks this is good news for its AI-focused startup competitors, which already charge for top-tier tools and who are at risk of being undercut by Google. I think it’s good for users by making it easy to avoid the AI “enhancement”. Of course, DuckDuckGo already does this without all the tracking and monopoly mishegoss.

Illustrations: Jon Stewart uninspired by Mark Zuckerberg’s demonstration of AI making toast.

Competitive instincts

This week – Wednesday, March 6 – saw the EU’s Digital Markets Act come into force. As The Verge reminds us, the law is intended to give users more choice and control by forcing technology’s six biggest “gatekeepers” to embrace interoperability and avoid preferencing their own offerings across 22 specified services. The six: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. Alphabet’s covered list is the longest: advertising, app store, search engine, maps, and shopping, plus Android, Chrome, and YouTube. For Apple, it’s the app store, operating system, and web browser. Meta’s list includes Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, plus Messenger, Ads, and Facebook Marketplace. Amazon: third-party marketplace and advertising business. Microsoft: Windows and internal features. ByteDance just has TikTok.

The point is to enable greater competition by making it easier for us to pick a different web browser, uninstall unwanted features (like Cortana), or refuse the collection and use of data to target us with personalized ads. Some companies are haggling. Meta, for example, is trying to get Messenger and Marketplace off the list, while Apple has managed to get iMessage removed from the list. More notably, though, the changes Apple is making to support third-party app stores have been widely cricitized as undermining any hope of success for independents.

Americans visiting Europe are routinely astonished at the number of cookie consent banners that pop up as they browse the web. Comments on Mastodon this week have reminded that this was their churlish choice to implement the 2009 Cookie Directive and 2018 General Data Protection Regulation in user-hostile ways. It remains to be seen how grown-up the technology companies will be in this new round of legal constraints. Punishing users won’t get the EU law changed.

***

The last couple of weeks have seen a few significant outages among Internet services. Two weeks ago, AT&T’s wireless service went down for many hours across the US after a failed software update. On Tuesday, while millions of Americans were voting in the presidential primaries, it was Meta’s turn, when a “technical issue” took out both Facebook and Instagram (and with the latter, Threads) for a couple of hours. Concurrently but separately, users of Ad Manager had trouble logging in at Google, and users of Microsoft Teams and exTwitter also reported some problems. Ironically, Meta’s outage could have been fixed faster if the engineers trying to fix it hadn’t had trouble gaining remote access to the servers they needed to fix (and couldn’t gain access to the physical building because their passes didn’t work either).

Outages like these should serve as reminders not to put all your login eggs in one virtual container. If you use Facebook to log into other sites, besides the visibility you’re giving Meta into your activities elsewhere, those sites will be inaccessible any time Facebook goes down. In the case of AT&T, one reason this outage was so disturbing – the FTC is formally investigating it – is that the company has applied to get rid of its landlines in California. While lots of people no longer have landlines, they’re important in rural areas where cell service can be spotty, some services such as home alarm systems and other equipment depend on them, and they function in emergencies when electric power fails.

But they should also remind that the infrastructure we’re deprecating in favor of “modern” Internet stuff was more robust than the new systems we’re increasingly relying on. A home with smart devices that cannot function without an uninterrupted Internet connection is far more fragile and has more points of failure than one without them, just as you can read a paper map when your phone is dead. At The Verge, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy tests a bunch of smart kitchen appliances including a faucet you can operate via Alexa or Google voice assistants. As in digital microwave ovens, telling the faucet the exact temperature and flow rate you want…seems unnecessarily detailed. “Connect with your water like never before,” the faucet manufacturer’s website says. Given the direction of travel of many companies today, I don’t want new points of failure between me and water.

***

It has – already! – been three years since Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code led to Facebook and Google signing three-year deals that have primarily benefited Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, owner of most of Australia’s press. A week ago, Meta announced it will not renew the agreement. At The Conversation, Rod Sims, who chaired the commission that formulated the law, argues it’s time to force Meta into the arbitration the code created. At ABC Science, however, James Purtill counters that the often “toxic” relationship between Facebook and news publishers means that forcing the issue won’t solve the core problem of how to pay for news, since advertising has found elsewheres it would rather be. (Separately, in Europe, 32 media organizations covering 17 countries have filed a €2.1 billion lawsuit against Google, matching a similar one filed last year in the UK, alleging that the company abused its dominant position to deprive them of advertising revenue.)

Purtill predicts, I think correctly, that attempting to force Meta to pay up will instead bring Facebook to ban news, as in Canada, following the passage of a similar law. Facebook needed news once; it doesn’t now. But societies do. Suddenly, I’m glad to pay the BBC’s license fee.

Illustrations: Red deer (via Wikimedia.)

Property is theft

If you were to judge just by behavior, you would have to conclude that the entertainment industry’s rights holders are desperate to promote piracy.

The latest instance is that Sony has warned American Playstation owners that shows they purchased – *bought* – from Discovery will, now that Discovery has merged with Warner Brothers, be removed from their video libraries. This isn’t like Netflix losing the license to stream your current favorite show halfway through season 2, which you can maybe fix by joining whichever streaming service the show is now on (assuming there is one). No, this is you (thought you) bought and they took it away.

In other words, the entertainment industry has taken the old anarchist slogan property is theft and turned it into a business model.

This isn’t a one-time occurrence. As Timothy Geigner writes at TechDirt, in 2022 customers in Germany and Austria lost access to hundreds of movies when a deal between Sony and film distributor Studio Canal expired. As in the Warner Brothers/Discovery case, it’s not just that the movies were removed from the list available for purchase; the long, remote arm of Sony reached into individual Playstations and removed them from there, too.

If Warner Brothers sent a minion to come into my house, take a DVD from a shelf, and take it away, that would clearly be theft, even if I had given the company a key so it could come in and update my Blu-Ray player. Why is it different if it’s a digital file held on an electronic device?

This is the kind of question I used to get asked back when these copyright battles were new. “You’re a freelance writer,” said the first person I interviewed on this sort of subject, back in 1991; he was the new head of the Federation Against Software Theft. “You make your living from copyright. Why aren’t you against piracy?” (Or something close to that.)

At the time the big battle in freelance journalism was that publishers were pushing toward all-rights contracts that would let them use whatever we wrote forever without further payment. Freelances were trying to hang onto the old arrangement, under which the publisher just got the right to run the piece once (and *first*), and then the freelance could go on and resell the piece in whole or in part to others and in other markets. Columnists made money by compiling their pieces into books. Magazine writers made money by reselling to other countries or selling reworked versions to specialist publications.

By 1995 you couldn’t really make money that way any more. Today, younger freelances have little idea it was ever possible. This, again, is the future the recent SAG-AFTRA strikes were trying to avoid. The shift is more simply described like this: the old way was pay per use; the new way the studios want is pay once, use forever. This struggle is endemic to every industry, as SAG head Fran Drescher pointed out.

The exact opposite is what’s happening to consumer access. In the old way, because buying physical media conferred ownership of the media (and the fact that the content was only ever licensed was largely moot), consumers bought once and used as much as they wanted until the disc or tape wore out. Even if streaming doesn’t quite open the way for paying for every use (though I bet that’s the hope), it does grant remote control to anyone who has access to the device – even if you thought you only granted permission to put stuff there, not remove it.

If I remember correctly, the first time people realized this kind of power existed was in 2009, when Amazon deleted (irony of ironies) copies of George Orwell’s novel 1984 from thousands of Kindles because the third-party company selling the ebook did not in fact have the rights to it. In this particular case, Amazon did refund the money people had paid. Since then, there’s been a steady trickle of cases where ultimate control of the device stays with its maker and doesn’t transfer to the person who paid to buy it.

You might think that the solution is to go on (or back to) buying the entertainment you love on physical media…but that option is also under threat. Disney announced in July that it would stop selling DVDs and Blu-Ray discs in Australia. In the US, Best buy is about to stop carrying them. Add in the recent trend for deleting even successful shows for tax reasons and the unpredictability of which streaming service might have the thing you’re looking for, and you have an extremely consumer-hostile industry.

For consumers, the perfect service looks something like this: the library is, if not complete, *very* extensive, all indexed in one place, and easily searchable using a simple but effective interface. Downloads are quick and give you a file you can move around, replay, or copy to friends at will. There are no ads. It will play on any device that can play video. Repeated viewings don’t require an Internet connection. *That* is what piracy offers. It’s not that it’s free. It’s that it gives people what they want. And the worse commercial services become, the better piracy looks. If only it paid the artists…

Illustrations: Opera Australia performing The Pirates of Penzance in 2007 (via Wikimedia).

The two of us

The-other-Wendy-Grossman-who-is-a-journalist came to my attention in the 1990s by writing a story about something Internettish while a student at Duke University. Eventually, I got email for her (which I duly forwarded) and, once, a transatlantic phone call from a very excited but misinformed PR person. She got married, changed her name, and faded out of my view.

By contrast, Naomi Klein‘s problem has only inflated over time. The “doppelganger” in her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, is “Other Naomi” – that is, the American author Naomi Wolf, whose career launched in 1990 with The Beauty Myth . “Other Naomi” has spiraled into conspiracy theories, anti-government paranoia, and wild unscientific theories. Klein is Canadian; her books include No Logo (1999) and The Shock Doctrine (2007). There is, as Klein acknowledges a lot of *seeming* overlap in that a keyword search might surface both.

I had them confused myself until Wolf’s 2019 appearance on BBC radio, when a historian dished out a live-on-air teardown of the basis of her latest book. This author’s nightmare is the inciting incident Klein believes turned Wolf from liberal feminist author into a right-wing media star. The publisher withdrew and pulped the book, and Wolf herself was globally mocked. What does a high-profile liberal who’s lost her platform do now?

When the covid pandemic came, Wolf embraced every available mad theory and her liberal past made her a darling of the extremist right wing media. Increasingly obsessed with following Wolf’s exploits, which often popped up in her online mentions, Klein discovered that social media algorithms were exacerbating the confusion. She began to silence herself, fearing that any response she made would increase the algorithms’ tendency to conflate Naomis. She also abandoned an article deploring Bill Gates’s stance protecting corporate patents instead of spreading vaccines as widely as possible (The Gates Foundation later changed its position.)

Klein tells this story honestly, admitting to becoming addictively obsessed, promising to stop, then “relapsing” the first time she was alone in her car.

The appearance of overlap through keyword similarities is not limited to the two Naomis, as Klein finds on further investigation. YouTube stars like Steve Bannon, who founded Breitbart and served as Donald Trump’s chief strategist during his first months in the White House, wrote this playbook: seize on under-acknowledged legitimate grievances, turn them into right wing talking points, and recruit the previously-ignored victims as allies and supporters. The lab leak hypohesis, the advice being given by scientific authorities, why shopping malls were open when schools were closed, the profiteering (she correctly calls out the UK), the behavior of corporate pharma – all of these were and are valid topics for investigation, discussion, and debate. Their twisted adoption as right-wing causes made many on the side of public health harden their stance to avoid sounding like “one of them”. The result: words lost their meaning and their power.

These are problems no amount of content moderation or online safety can solve. And even if it could, is it right to ask underpaid workers in what Klein terms the “Shadowlands” to clean up our society’s nasty side so we don’t have to see it?

Klein begins with a single doppelganger, then expands into psychology, movies, TV, and other fiction, and ends by navigating expanding circles; the extreme right-wing media’s “Mirror World” is our society’s Mr Hyde. As she warns, those who live in what a friend termed “my blue bubble” may never hear about the media and commentators she investigates. After Wolf’s disgrace on the BBC, she “disappeared”, in reality going on to develop a much bigger platform in the Mirror World. But “they” know and watch us, and use our blind spots to expand their reach and recruit new and unexpected sectors of the population. Klein writes that she encounters many people who’ve “lost” a family member to the Mirror World.

This was the ground explored in 2015 by the filmmaker Jen Senko, who found the smae thing when researching her documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad. Senko’s exploration leads from the 1960s John Birch Society through to Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes’s intentional formation of Fox News. Klein here is telling the next stage of that same story. Mirror World is not an accident of technology; it was a plan, then technology came along and helped build it further in new directions.

As Klein searches for an explanation for what she calls “diagnonalism” – the phenomenon that sees a former Obama voter now vote for Trump, or a former liberal feminist shrug at the Dobbs decision – she finds it possible to admire the Mirror World’s inhabitants for one characteristic: “they still believe in the idea of changing reality”.

This is the heart of much of the alienation I see in some friends: those who want structural change say today’s centrist left wing favors the status quo, while those who are more profoundly disaffected dismiss the Bidens and Clintons as almost as corrupt as Trump. The pandemic increased their discontent; it did not take long for early optimistic hopes of “build back better” to fade into “I want my normal”.

Klein ends with hope. As both the US and UK wind toward the next presidential/general election, it’s in scarce supply.

Illustrations: Charlie Chaplin as one of his doppelgangers in The Great Dictator (1940).

Review: The Gutenberg Parenthesis

The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet
By Jeff Jarvis
Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 978-1-5013-9482-9

There’s a great quote I can’t trace in which a source singer from whom Sir Walter Scott collected folk songs told him he’d killed their songs by printing them. Printing had, that is, removed the song from the oral culture of repeated transmission, often with alterations, from singer to singer. Like pinning down a butterfly.

In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, Jeff Jarvis argues that modern digital culture offers the chance of a return to the collaborative culture that dominated most of human history. Jarvis is not the first to suggest that our legacy media are an anomaly. In his 2013 book Writing on the Wall, Tom Standage calls out the last 150 years of corporate-owned for-profit media as an anomaly in the 2,000-year sweep of social media. In his analogy, the earliest form was “Roman broadband” (slaves) carrying messages back and forth. Standage finds other historical social media analogues in the coffeehouses that hatched the scientific revolution. Machines, both print and broadcast, made us consumers instead of participants. In Jarvis’s account, printing made institutions and nation-states, the same ones that now are failing to control the new paradigm.

The “Gutenberg parenthesis” of Jarvis’s title was coined by Lars Ore Sauerberg, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, who argues (in, for example, a 2009 paper for the journal Orbis Literarum) that the arrival of the printing press changed the nature of cognition. Jarvis takes this idea and runs with it: if we are, as he believes, now somewhere in a decades- or perhaps centuries-long process of closing the parenthesis – that is, exiting the era of print bracketed by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and the arrival of digital media – what comes next?

To answer this question, Jarvis begins by examining the transition *into* the era of printing. The invention of movable type and printing presses by themselves brought a step down in price and a step up in scale – what had once been single copies available only to people rich enough to pay a scribe suddenly became hundreds of copies that were still expensive. It took two centuries to arrive at the beginnings of copyright law, and then the industrial revolution to bring printing and corporate ownership at today’s scale.

Jarvis goes on to review the last two centuries of increasingly centralized and commercialized publishing. The institutions print brought provided authority that enabled them to counter misinformation effectively. In our new world, where these institutions are being challenged, many more voices can be heard – good, for obvious reasons of social justice and fairness, but unfortunate in terms of the spread of misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation. Jarvis believes we need to build new institutions that can enable the former and inhibit the latter. Exactly what those will look like is left as an exercise for the reader in the times to come. Could Gutenberg have predicted Entertainment Weekly?