net.wars

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).

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

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?

Guarding the peace

Police are increasingly attempting to prevent crime by using social media targeting tools to shape public behavior, says a new report from the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (PDF) written by a team of academic researchers led by Ben Collier at the University of Edinburgh. There is no formal regulation of these efforts, and the report found many examples of what is genteelly calls “unethical practice”.

On the one hand, “behavioral change marketing” seems an undeniably clever use of new technological tools. If bad actors can use targeted ads to scam, foment division, and incite violence, why shouldn’t police use them to encourage the opposite? The tools don’t care whether you’re a Russian hacker targeting 70-plus white pensioners with anti-immigrant rhetoric or a charity trying to reach vulnerable people to offer help. Using them is a logical extension of the drive toward preventing, rather than solving, crime. Governments have long used PR techniques to influence the public, from benign health PSAs on broadcast media to Theresa May’s notorious , widely cricised, and unsuccessful 2013 campaign of van ads telling illegal immigrants to go home.

On the other hand, it sounds creepy as hell. Combining police power with poorly-evidenced assumptions about crime and behavior and risk and the manipulation and data gathering of surveillance capitalism…yikes.

The idea of influence policing derives at least in part from Cass R. Sunstein‘s and Richard H. Thaler‘s 2008 book Nudge. The “nudge theory” it promoted argued that the use of careful design (“choice architecture”) could push people into making more desirable decisions.

The basic contention seems unarguable; using design to push people toward decisions they might not make by themselves is the basis of many large platforms’ design decisions. Dark patterns are all about that.

Sunstein and Thaler published their theory at the post-financial crisis moment when governments were looking to reduce costs. As early as 2010, the UK’s Cabinet Office set up the Behavioural Insights Team to improve public compliance with government policies. The “Nudge Unit” has been copied widely across the world.

By 2013, it was being criticized for forcing job seekers to fill out a scientifically invalid psychometric test. In 2021, Observer columnist Sonia Sodha called its record “mixed”, deploring the expansion of nudge theory into complex, intractable social problems. In 2022, new research cast doubt on the whole idea that nudges have little effect on personal behavior.

The SIRP report cites the Government Communications Service, the outgrowth of decades of government work to gain public compliance with policy. The GCS itself notes its incorporation of marketing science and other approaches common in the commercial sector. Its 7,000 staff work in departments across government.

This has all grown up alongside the increasing adoption of digital marketing practices across the UK’s public sector, including the tax authorities (HMRC), the Department of Work and Pensions, and especially, the Home Office – and alongside the rise of sophisticated targeting tools for online advertising.

The report notes: “Police are able to develop ‘patchwork profiles’ built up of multiple categories provided by ad platforms and detailed location-based categories using the platform targeting categories to reach extremely specific groups.”

The report’s authors used the Meta Ad Library to study the ads, the audiences and profiles police targeted, and the cost. London’s Metropolitan Police, which a recent scathing report found endemically racist and misogynist, was an early adopter and is the heaviest studied user of digitally targeted ads on Meta.

Many of the cample campaigns these organizations run sound mostly harmless. Campaigns intended to curb domestic violence, for example, may aim at encouraging bystanders to come forward with concerns. Others focus on counter-radicalisation and security themes or, increasingly, preventing online harms and violence against women and girls.

As a particular example of the potential for abuse, the report calls out the Home Office Migrants on the Move campaign, a collaboration with a “migration behavior change” agency called Seefar. This targeted people in France seeking asylum in the UK and attempted to frighten them out of trying to cross the Channel in small boats. The targeting was highly specific, with many ads aimed at as few as 100 to 1,000 people, chosen for their language and recent travel in or through Brussels and Calais.

The report’s authors raise concerns: the harm implicit in frightening already-extremely vulnerable people, the potential for damaging their trust in authorities to help them, and the privacy implications of targeting such specific groups. In the report’s example, Arabic speakers in Brussels might see the Home Office ads but their French neighbors would not – and those Arabic speakers would be unlikely to be seeking asylum. The Home Office’s digital equivalent of May’s van ads, therefore, would be seen only by a selection of microtargeted individuals.

The report concludes: “We argue that this campaign is a central example of the potential for abuse of these methods, and the need for regulation.”

The report makes a number of recommendations including improved transparency, formalized regulation and oversight, better monitoring, and public engagement in designing campaigns. One key issue is coming up with better ways of evaluating the results. Surprise, surprise: counting clicks, which is what digital advertising largely sells as a metric, is not a useful way to measure social change.

All of these arguments make sense. Improving transparency in particular seems crucial, as does working with the relevant communities. Deterring crime doesn’t require tricks and secrecy; it requires collaboration and openness.

Illustrations: Theresa May’s notorious van ad telling illegal immigrants to go home.

Book review: Beyond Measure

Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement
Author: James Vincent
Publisher: Faber and Faber
ISBN: 978-0-571-35421-4

In 2022, then-government minister Jacob Rees-Mogg proposed that Britain should return to imperial measurements – pounds, ounces, yay Brexit! This was a ship that had long since sailed; 40-something friends learned only the metric system at school. Even those old enough to remember imperial measures had little nostalgia for them.

As James Vincent explains in Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement, and as most of us assume instinctively, measuring physical objects began with comparisons to pieces of the human body: feet, hands, cubits (elbow to fingertip), fathoms (the span of outstretched arms). Other forms of measurement were functional, such as the Irish collop, the amount of land needed to graze one cow. Such imprecise measurements had their benefits, such as convenient availability and immediately understandable context-based value.

Quickly, though, the desire to trade led to the need for consistency, which in turn fed the emergence of centralized state power. The growth of science increased the pressure for more and more consistent and precise measurements – Vincent spends a chapter on the surprisingly difficult quest to pin down a number we now learn as children: the temperature at which water boils. Perversely, though, each new generation of more precise measurement reveals new errors that require even more precise measurement to correct.

The history of measurement is also the history of power. Surveying the land enabled governments to decide its ownership; the world-changing discovery of statistics and the understanding they brought of social trends, and the resulting empowerment of governments, which could afford to amass the biggest avalanches of numbers.

Perhaps the quirkiest and most unexpected material is Vincent’s chapter on Standard Reference Materials. At the US National Institute for Standards and Measurement, Vincent finds carefully studied jars of peanut butter and powdered radioactive human lung. These, it turns out, provide standards against which manufacturers can check their products.

Often, Vincent observes, changes in measurement systems accompany moments of social disruption. The metric system, for example, was born in France at the time of the revolution. Defining units of measurement in terms of official weights and measures made standards egalitarian rather than dependent on one man’s body parts. By 2018, when Vincent visits the official kilo weight and meter stick in Paris, however, even that seemed too elite. Today, both kilogram and meter are defined in terms of constants of nature – the meter, for example, is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458th of a second (itself now defined in terms of the decay of caesium-133). These are units that anyone with appropriate equipment can derive at any time without needing to check it against a single stick in a vault. Still elite, but a much larger elite.

But still French, which may form part of Rees-Mogg’s objection to it. And, possibly, as Vincent finds some US Republicans have complained, *communist* because of its global adoption. Nonetheless, and despite anti-metric sentiments expressed even by futurists like Stewart Brand, the US is still more metric than most people think. The road system’s miles and retail stores’ pounds and ounces are mostly a veneer; underneath, industry and science have voted for global compatibility – and the federal government has, since 1893, defined feet and inches by metric units.

The arc of surveillance

“What is the point of introducing contestability if the system is illegal?” a questioner asked at this year’s Compiuters, Privacy, and Data Protection, or more or less.

This question could have been asked in any number of sessions where tweaks to surface problems leave the underlying industry undisturbed. In fact, the questioner raised it during the panel on enforcement, GDPR, and the newly-in-force Digital Markets Act. Maria Luisa Stasi explained the DMA this way: it’s about business models. It’s a step into a deeper layer.
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The key question: will these new laws – the DMA, the recent Digital Services Act, which came into force in November, the in-progress AI Act – be enforced better than GDPR has been?

The frustration has been building all five years of GDPR’s existence. Even though this week, Meta was fined €1.2 billion for transferring European citizens’ data to the US, Noyb reports that 85% of its 800-plus cases remain undecided, 58% of them for more than 18 months. Even that €1.2 billion decision took ten years, €10 million, and three cases against the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to push through – and will now be appealed. Noyb has an annotated map of the various ways EU countries make litigation hard. The post-Snowden political will that fueled GDPR’s passage has had ten years to fade.

It’s possible to find the state of privacy circa 2023 depressing. In the 30ish years I’ve been writing about privacy, numerous laws have been passed, privacy has become a widespread professional practice and area of study in numerous fields, and the number of activists has grown from a literal handful to tens of thousands around the world. But overall the big picture is one of escalating surveillance of all types and by all sorts of players. At the 2000 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, Neal Stephenson warned not to focus on governments. Watch the “Little Brothers”, he said. Google was then a tiny self-funded startup, and Mark Zuckerberg was 16. Stephenson was prescient.

And yet, that surveillance can be weirdly patchy. In a panel on children online, Leanda Barrington-Leach noted platforms’ selective knowledge: “How do they know I like red Nike trainers but don’t know I’m 12?” A partial answer came later: France’s CNIL has looked at age verification technologies and concluded that none are “mature enough” to both do the job and protect privacy.

In a discussion of deceptive practices, paraphrasing his recent paper, Mark Leiser pinpointed a problem: “We’re stuck with a body of law that looks at online interface as a thing where you look for dark patterns, but there’s increasing evidence that they’re being embedded in the systems architecture underneath and I’d argue we’re not sufficiently prepared to regulate that.”

As a response, Woody Hartzog and Neil Richards have proposed the concept of “data loyalty”. Similar to a duty of care, the “loyalty” in this case is owed by the platform to its users. “Loyalty is the requirement to make the interests of the trusted party [the platform] subservient to those of the trustee or vulnerable one [the user],” Hartzog explained. And the more vulnerable you are the greater the obligation on the powerful party.

The tone was set early with a keynote from Julie Cohen that highlighted structural surveillance and warned against accepting the Big Tech mantra that more technology naturally brings improved human social welfare..

“What happens to surveillance power as it moves into the information infrastructure?” she asked. Among other things, she concluded, it disperses accountability, making it harder to challenge but easier to embed. And once embedded, well…look how much trouble people are having just digging Huawei equipment out of mobile networks.

Cohen’s comments resonate. A couple of years ago, when smart cities were the hot emerging technology, it became clear that many of the hyped ideas were only really relevant to large, dense urban areas. In smaller cities, there’s no scope for plotting more efficient delivery routes, for example, because there aren’t enough options. As a result, congestion is worse in a small suburban city than in Manhattan, where parallel routes draw off traffic. But even a small town has scope for surveillance, and so some of us concluded that this was the technology that would trickle down. This is exactly what’s happening now: the Fusus technology platform even boasts openly of bringing the surveillance city to the suburbs.

Laws will not be enough to counter structural surveillance. In a recent paper, Cohen wrote, “Strategies for bending the arc of surveillance toward the safe and just space for human wellbeing must include both legal and technical components.”

And new approaches, as was shown by an unusual panel on sustainability, raised by the computational and environmental costs of today’s AI. This discussion suggested a new convergence: the intersection, as Katrin Fritsch put it, of digital rights, climate justice, infrastructure, and sustainability.

In the deception panel, Roseamunde van Brakel similarly said we need to adopt a broader conception of surveillance harm that includes social harm and risks for society and democracy and also the impact on climate of use of all these technologies. Surveillance, in other words, has environmental costs that everyone has ignored.

I find this convergence hopeful. The arc of surveillance won’t bend without the strength of allies..

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

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. Follow on Mastodon or Twitter.

Appropriate privacy

At a workshop this week, one of the organizers posed a question that included the term “appropriate”. As in: “lawful access while maintaining appropriate user privacy”. We were there to think about approaches that could deliver better privacy and security over the next decade, with privacy defined as “the embedding of encryption or anonymization in software or devices”.

I had to ask: What work is “appropriate” doing in that sentence?

I had to ask because last weekend’s royal show was accompanied by preemptive arrests well before events began – at 7:30 AM. Most of the arrested were anti-monarchy protesters armed with luggage straps and placards, climate change protesters whose T-shirts said “Just Stop Oil”, and volunteers for the Night Stars on suspicion that the rape whistles they hand out to vulnerable women might be used to disrupt the parading horses. All of these had coordinated with the Metropolitan Police in advance or actually worked with them…which made no difference. All were held for many hours. Since then, the news has broken that an actual monarchist was arrested, DNA-sampled, fingerprinted, and held for 13 hours just for standing *near* some protesters.

It didn’t help the look of the thing that several days before the Big Show, the Met tweeted a warning that: “Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low.”

The arrests were facilitated by the last-minute passage of the Public Order Act just days before with the goal of curbing “disruptive” protests. Among the now-banned practices is “locking on” – that is, locking oneself to a physical structure, a tactic the suffragettes used. among many others in campaigning for women’s right to vote. Because that right is now so thoroughly accepted, we tend to forget how radical and militant the Suffragists had to be to get their point across and how brutal the response was. A century from now, the mainstream may look back and marvel at the treatment meted out to climate change activists. We all know they’re *right*, whether or not we like their tactics.

Since the big event, the House of Lords has published its report on current legislation. The government is seeking to expand the Public Order Act even further by lowering the bar for “serious disruption” from “significant” and “prolonged” to “more than minor” and may include the cumulative impact of repeated protests in the same area. The House of Lords is unimpressed by these amendments via secondary legislation, first because of their nature, and second because they were rejected during the scrutiny of the original bill, which itself is only days old. Secondary legislation gets looked at less closely; the Lords suggest that using this route to bring back rejected provisions “raises possible constitutional issues”. All very Polite for accusing the government of abusing the system.

In the background, we’re into the fourth decade of the same argument between governments and technical experts over encryption. Technical experts by and large take the view that opening a hole for law enforcement access to encrypted content fatally compromises security; law enforcement by and large longs for the old days when they could implement a wiretap with a single phone call to a major national telephone company. One of the technical experts present at the workshop phrased all this gently by explaining that providing access enlarges the attack surface, and the security of such a system will always be weaker because there are more “moving parts”. Adding complexity always makes security harder.

This is, of course, a live issue because of the Online Safety bill, a sprawling mess of 262 pages that includes a requirement to scan public and private messaging for child sexual abuse material, whether or not the communications are encrypted.

None of this is the fault of the workshop we began with, which is part of a genuine attempt to find a way forward on a contentious topic, and whose organizers didn’t have any of this in mind when they chose their words. But hearing “appropriate” in that way at that particular moment raised flags: you can justify anything if the level of disruption that’s allowed to trigger action is vague and you’re allowed to use “on suspicion of” indiscriminately as an excuse. “Police can do what they want to us now,” George Monbiot writes at the Guardian of the impact of the bill.

Lost in the upset about the arrests was the Met’s decision to scan the crowds with live facial recognition. It’s impossible to overstate the impact of this technology. There will be no more recurring debates about ID cards because our faces will do the job. Nothing has been said about how the Met used it on the day, whether its use led to arrests (or on what grounds), or what the Met plans to do with the collected data. The police – and many private actors – have certainly inhaled the Silicon Valley ethos of “ask forgiveness, not permission”.

In this direction of travel, many things we have taken for granted as rights become privileges that can be withdrawn at will, and what used to be public spaces open to all become restricted like an airport or a small grocery store in Whitley Bay. This is the sliding scale in which “appropriate user privacy” may be defined.

Illustrations: Protesters at the coronation (by Alisdair Hickson at Wikimedia .

Strike two

Whatever happens with the Hollywood writers’ strike that began on Tuesday, the recent golden era of American TV, which arguably began with The Sopranos, is ending for viewers as well as creators.

A big reason for that golden era was that Hollywood’s loss of interest in grown-up movies pushed actors and writers who formerly looked down on TV to move across to where the more interesting work was finding a home. Another was the advent of streaming services, which competed with existing channels by offering creators greater freedom – and more money. It was never sustainable.

Streaming services’ business models are different. For nearly a decade, Netflix depended on massive debt to build a library to protect itself when the major studios ended their licensing deals. The company has so far gotten away with it because of (now ended) low interest rates and Wall Street’s focus on subscriber numbers in valuing its shares. Newer arrivals such as Amazon, Apple, and Disney can all finance loss-making startup streaming services from their existing businesses. All of these are members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, along with broadcast networks, cable providers, and motion picture studios. For the purposes of the strike, they are the “enemy”.

This landscape could not be more different than that of the last writers’ strike, in 2007-2008, when DVD royalties were important and streaming was the not-yet future. Of the technology companies refusing to bargain today, only Netflix was a player in 2007 – and it was then sending out DVDs by mail.

Essentially, what is happening to Hollywood writers is what happened to songwriters when music streaming services took over the music biz: income shrinkage. In 2021, veteran screenwriter Ken Levine, gave the detail of his persistently shrinking residuals (declining royalties paid for reuse). When American Airlines included an episode he directed of Everyone Loves Raymond in its transcontinental in-flight package for six months, his take from the thousands of airings was $1.19. He also documented, until he ended his blog in 2022, other ways writers are being squeezed; at Disconnect, Paris Marx provides a longer list. The Writers Guild of America’s declared goals are to redress these losses and bring residuals and other pay on streaming services into line with older broadcasters.

Even an outsider can see the bigger picture: broadcast networks, traditionally the biggest payers, are watching their audiences shrink and retrenching, and cable and streaming services commission shorter seasons, which they renew at a far more leisurely pace. Also a factor is the shift in which broadcast networks reair their new shows a day or two later on their streaming service. The DVD royalties that mattered in the 2007-2008 strike are dying away, and just as in music royalties from streaming are a fraction of the amount. Overall, the WGA says that in the last decade writers’ average incomes have dropped by 4% – 23% if you include inflation. Meanwhile, industry profits have continued to rise.

The new issue on the block is AI – not because large language models are good enough to generate good scripts (as if), but because writers fear the studios will use them to generate crappy scripts and then demand that the writers rewrite them into quality for a pittance. Freelance journalists have already reported seeing publishers try this gambit.

In 2007, 2007, and again in 2017, Levine noted that the studios control the situation. They can make a deal and end the strike any time they decide it’s getting too expensive or disruptive. Eventually, he said, the AMPTP will cut a deal, writers will get some of what they need, and everyone will go back to work. Until then, the collateral damage will mount to writers and staff in adjacent industries and California’s economy. At Business Insider, Lucia Moses suggests that Netflix, Amazon, and Disney all have enough content stockpiled to see them through.

Longer-term, there will be less predictable consequences. In 2007-2008, Leigh Blickley reported in a ten-years-later lookback at the Huffington Post, these included the boom in “unscripted” reality TV and the death of pathways into the business for new writers.

Underlying all this is a simple but fundamental change. Broadcast networks cared what Americans watched because their revenues depended on attracting large audiences that advertisers would pay to reach. Until VCRs arrived to liberate us from the tyranny of schedules, the networks competed on the quality and appeal of their programming in each time slot. Streaming services compete on their whole catalogue, and care only that you subscribe; ratings don’t count.

The WGA warns that the studios’ long-term goal is to turn screenwriting into gig economy work. In 2019, at BIG, Matt Stoller warned that Netflix was predatorily killing Hollywood, first by using debt financing to corner the market, and second by vertically integrating its operation. Like the the studios that were forced to divest their movie theaters in 1948, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple own content, controls its distribution, and sells retail access. It should be no surprise if a vertically integrated industry with a handful of monopolistic players cuts costs by treating writers the way Uber treats drivers: enshittification.

The WGA’s 12,000 members know their skills, which underpin a trillion-dollar industry, are rare. They have a strong union and a long history of solidarity. If they can’t win against modern corporate extraction, what hope for the rest of us?

Illustrations: WGA members picketing in 2007 (by jengod at Wikimedia).

The privacy price of food insecurity

One of the great unsolved questions continues to be: what is my data worth? Context is always needed: worth to whom, under what circumstances, for what purpose? Still, supermarkets may give us a clue.

At Novara Media, Jake Hurfurt, who runs investigations for Big Brother Watch, has been studying suprmarket loyalty cards. He finds that increasingly only loyalty card holders have access to special offers, which used to be open to any passing customer.

Tesco now and Sainsburys soon, he says, “are turning the cost-of-living crisis into a cost-of-privacy crisis”,

Neat phrasing, but I’d say it differently: these retailers are taking advantage of the cost-of-living crisis to extort desperate people ito giving up their data. The average value of the discounts might – for now – give a clue to the value supermarkets place on it.

But not for long, since the pattern going forward is a predictable one of monopoly power: as the remaining supermarkets follow suit and smaller independent shops thin out under the weight of rising fuel bills and shrinking margins, and people have fewer choices, the savings from the loyalty card-only special offers will shrink. Not so much that they won’t be worth having, but it seems obvious they’ll be more generous with the discounts – if “generous” is the word – in the sign-up phase than they will once they’ve achieved customer lock-in.

The question few shoppers are in a position to answer while they’re strying to lower the cost of filling their shopping carts is what the companies do with the data they collect. BBW took the time to analyze Tesco’s and Sainsburys’ privacy policies, and found that besides identity data they collect detailed purchase histories as well as bank accounts and payment information…which they share with “retail partners, media partners, and service providers”. In Tesco’s case, these include Facebook, Google, and, for those who subscribe to them, Virgin Media and Sky. Hyper-targeted personal ads right there on your screen!

All that sounds creepy enough. But consider what could well come next. Also this week, a cross-party group of 50 MPs and peers and cosinged by BBW, Privacy International and Liberty, wrote to Frasers Group deploring that company’s use of live facial recognition in its stores, which include Sports Direct and the department store chain House of Fraser. Frasers Group’s purpose, like retailers and pub chains were trialing a decade ago , is effectively to keep out people suspected of shoplifting and bad behavior. Note that’s “suspected”, not “convicted”.

What happens as these different privacy invasions start to combine?

A store equipped with your personal shopping history and financial identity plus live facial recognition cameras, knows the instant you walk into the store who you are, what you like to buy, and how valuable a customer your are. Such a system, equipped with some sort of socring, could make very fine judgments. Such as: this customer is suspected of stealing another customer’s handbag, but they’re highly profitable to us, so we’ll let that go. Or: this customer isn’t suspected of anything much but they look scruffy and although they browse they never buy anything – eject! Or even: this journalist wrote a story attacking our company. Show them the most expensive personalized prices. One US entertainment company is already using live facial recognition to bar entry to its venues to anyone who works for any law firm involved in litigation against it. Britain’s data protection laws should protect us against that sort of abuse, but will they survive the upcoming bonfire of retained EU law?

And, of course, what starts with relatively anodyne product advertising becomes a whole lot more sinister when it starts getting applied to politics, voter manipulation and segmentation, and the “pre-crime” systems

Add the possibilities of technology that allows retailers to display personalized pricing in-store, just like an online retailer could do in the privacy of your own browser, Could we get to a scenario where a retailer, able to link your real world identity and purchasing power to your online nd offline movements could perform a detailed calculation of what you’d be willing to pay for a particular item? What would surge pricing for the last remaining stock of the year’s hottest toy on Christmas Eve look like?

This idea allows me to imagine shopping partnerships, where the members compare prices and the partner with the cheapest prices buys that item for the whole group. In this dystopian future, I imagine such gambits would be banned.

Most of this won’t affect people rich enough to grandly refuse to sign up for loyalty cards, and none of it will affect people rich and eccentric enough to do source everything from local, independent shops – and, if they’re allowed, pay cash.

Four years ago, Jaron Lanier toured with the proposal that we should be paid for contributing to commercial social media sites. The problem with this idea was and is that payment creates a perverse incentive for users to violate their own privacy even more than they do already, and that fair payment can’t be calculated when the consequences of disclosure are perforce unknown.

The supermarket situation is no different. People need food security and affordability, They should not have to pay for that with their privacy.

Illustrations: .London supermarket checkout, 2006 (via Wikimedia.

Excluding the vote

“You have to register at home, where your parents live,” said the clerk at the Board of Elections office.

I was 18, and registering to vote for the first time. It was 1972.

“I don’t live there,” I said. “I live here.” “Here” was Ithaca, NY, a town that, I learned later, was hyper-conscious that college students – Cornell, Ithaca College – outnumbered local residents. They didn’t want us interlopers overwhelming their preferences.

We had a couple more back-and-forths like this, and then she picked up the phone and called the state authorities in Albany for an official ruling. I knew – or thought I knew – that the law was on my side.

It was. I registered. I voted.

In about a month, the UK will hold local elections. For the first time, anyone presenting themselves to vote at the polls will be required to show an ID card with a photograph. This is a policy purely imported from American Republicans, and it has no basis in necessity. The Electoral Commission, in recommending its introduction, admitted that the issue was public perception. The big issues with respect to elections are around dark money and the processes by which candidates are chosen.

For 49 days in the fall of 2022, Liz Truss served as prime minister; she was chosen by 81,326 Tory party members. Out of the country’s roughly 68 million people, only 141,725 (out of an estimated 172,000 party members) voted in that contest because, since the Conservatives had decisively won the 2019 election, they were just electing a new leader. Rishi Sunak was voted in by 202 MPs.

The government’s proximate excuse for bringing in voter ID is the fraud-riddled May 2014 mayoral election in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. Four local residents risked their own money to challenge the outcome, and in 2015 won an Election Court ruling voiding the election and barring the cheating winner from standing for public office for five years. Their complaints; included vote-rigging, false statements made by the winning candidates about his rival, bribery, and religious influence.

The High Court of Justice’s judgment in the case says: “…in practice, where electoral malpractice is established, particularly in the field of vote-rigging, it is very rare indeed to find members of the general public engaging in DIY vote-rigging on behalf of a candidate. Generally speaking, if there is widespread personation or false registration or misuse of postal votes, it will have been organised by the candidate or by someone who is, in law, his agent.”

Surely a more logical response to the Tower Hamlets case would be to make it easier – or at least quicker – for individuals to challenge election results and examine ways to ensure better behavior by *candidates*, not voters.

The judgment also notes that personation – assuming someone else’s identity in order to vote – was far more of a risk when fewer people qualified to vote. There followed a long period when it was too labor-intensive for too little reward; you need a lot of impersonators to change the result. In recent years, however, postal voting has made it viable again; in two wards of a 2008 Birmingham election Labour candidates committed 15 types of fraud involving postal ballots. The election in those two wards was re-run.

In his book Security Engineering, Cambridge professor Ross Anderson notes that the likelihood that expanded use of postal ballots would open the way for vote-buying an intimidation was predicted even as first Margaret Thatcher and then Tony Blair pursued the policy. But the main point is clear: the big problem is postal ballots, which you can’t solve by requiring voter ID from those who vote in person. It’s the wrong threat model. As Anderson observes, “…it’s typically the incumbent who tweaks the laws, buys the voting machines, and creates as many advantages for their own side, small and large, as the local political culture will tolerate.”

But voter ID is the policy that Boris Johnson used his 80-seat majority to push through in the form of the Elections Act (2022), which also weakens the independence of the Electoral Commission. As the bill went through Parliament, estimates were that about 3.5 million people lacked any qualifying form of ID, and that those 3.5 million skew heavily toward people who are not expected to vote Conservative.

This was all maddening enough – and then they published the list of acceptable forms of ID. Tl;dr: the list blatantly skews in favor of older and richer people, who are presumed to be more likely to vote Conservative. Passports, driving licenses, and travel passes 60+ for people are all acceptable. Student ID cards and travel cards and passesare not. The government says they are not secure enough, a bit like saying a lock on the door is pointless because it’s not a burglar alarm.

There is a scheme for issuing free voter cards; applications must be in by April 25. People can also vote by post or by proxy without ID. And there are third parties pushing paid ID cards, too. But what it comes down to is next month a bunch of people are going to go to vote and will be barred. And this from the same people who wanted online voting to “increase access”.

Illustrations: London polling station 2017 (by Mramoeba at Wikimedia.

Unclear and unpresent dangers

Monthly computer magazines used to fret that their news pages would be out of date by the time the new issue reached readers. This week in AI, a blog posting is out of date before you hit send.

This – Friday – morning, the Italian data protection authority, Il Garante, has ordered ChatGPT to stop processing the data of Italian users until it complies with the General Data Protection Regulation. Il Garante’s objections, per Apple’s translation, posted by Ian Brown: ChatGPT provides no legal basis for collecting and processing its massive store of the personal data used to train the model, and that it fails to filter out users under 13.

This may be the best possible answer to the complaint I’d been writing below.

On Wednesday, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling for a six-month pause on developing systems more powerful than Open AI’s current state of the art, GPT4. Barring Elon Musk, Steve Wozniack, and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, most of the signatories are unfamiliar names to most of us, though the companies and institutions they represent aren’t – Pinterest, the MIT Center for Artificial Intelligence, UC Santa Cruz, Ripple, ABN-Amro Bank. Almost immediately, there was a dispute over the validity of the signatures..

My first reaction was on the order of: huh? The signatories are largely people who are inventing this stuff. They don’t have to issue a call. They can just *stop*, work to constrain the negative impacts of the services they provide, and lead by example. Or isn’t that sufficiently performative?

A second reaction: what about all those AI ethics teams that Silicon Valley companies are disbanding? Just in the last few weeks, these teams have been axed or cut at Microsoft and Twitch; Twitter of course ditched such fripperies last November in Musk’s inaugural wave of cost-cutting. The letter does not call to reinstate these.

The problem, as familiar critics such as Emily Bender pointed out almost immediately, is that the threats the letter focuses on are distant not-even-thunder. As she went on to say in a Twitter thread, the artificial general intelligence of the Singularitarian’s rapture is nowhere in sight. By focusing on distant threats – longtermism – we ignore the real and present problems whose roots are being continuously more deeply embedded into the new-building infrastructure: exploited workers, culturally appropriated data, lack of transparency around the models and algorithms used to build these systems….basically, all the ways they impinge upon human rights.

This isn’t the first time such a letter has been written and circulated. In 2015, Stephen Hawking, Musk, and about 150 others similarly warned of the dangers of the rise of “superintelligences”. Just a year later, in 2016, Pro Publica investigated the algorithm behind COMPAS, a risk-scoring criminal justice system in use in US courts in several states. Under Julia Angwin‘s scrutiny, the algorithm failed at both accuracy and fairness; it was heavily racially biased. *That*, not some distant fantasy, was the real threat to society.

“Threat” is the key issue here. This is, at heart, a letter about a security issue, and solutions to security issues are – or should be – responses to threat models. What is *this* threat model, and what level of resources to counter it does it justify?

Today, I’m far more worried by the release onto public roads of Teslas running Full Self Drive helmed by drivers with an inflated sense of the technology’s reliability than I am about all of human work being wiped away any time soon. This matters because, as Jessie Singal, author of There Are No Accidents, keeps reminding us, what we call “accidents” are the results of policy decisions. If we ignore the problems we are presently building in favor of fretting about a projected fantasy future, that, too, is a policy decision, and the collateral damage is not an accident. Can’t we do both? I imagine people saying. Yes. But only if we *do* both.

In a talk this week for a group at the French international research group AI Act. This effort began well before today’s generative tools exploded into public consciousness, and isn’t likely to conclude before 2024. It is, therefore, much more focused on the kinds of risks attached to public sector scandals like COMPAS and those documented in Cathy O’Neil’s 2017 book Weapons of Math Destruction, which laid bare the problems with algorithmic scoring with little to tether it to reality.

With or without a moratorium, what will “AI” look like in 2024? It has changed out of recognition just since the last draft text was published. Prediction from this biological supremacist: it still won’t be sentient.

All this said, as Edwards noted, even if the letter’s proposal is self-serving, a moratorium on development is not necessarily a bad idea. It’s just that if the risk is long-term and existential, what will six months do? If the real risk is the hidden continued centralization of data and power, then those six months could be genuinely destructive. So far, it seems like its major function is as a distraction. Resist.

Illustrations: IBM’s Watson, which beat two of Jeopardy‘s greatest champions in 2011. It has since failed to transform health care.