Shoshana Zuboff: Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism

Over the past two years I have kept trying to explain to people that Google is appropriating the commons and is building value on something that isn’t theirs. Another way of saying the same thing is that Google is using you as a sensor to build knowledge about the world as a whole. The example I usually bring up is how any action you take on Google Maps furthers Google’s knowledge about what the world looks like and how people (want to) operate in it.

Zuboff has written an article that I wished I was capable of writing. She made the mechanism way more explicit and has called it: surveillance capitalism. I can’t wait to read her forthcoming book.

On the problem:

The equation: First, the push for more users and more channels, services, devices, places, and spaces is imperative for access to an ever-expanding range of behavioral surplus. Users are the human nature-al resource that provides this free raw material. Second, the application of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science for continuous algorithmic improvement constitutes an immensely expensive, sophisticated, and exclusive twenty-first century “means of production.” Third, the new manufacturing process converts behavioral surplus into prediction products designed to predict behavior now and soon. Fourth, these prediction products are sold into a new kind of meta-market that trades exclusively in future behavior. The better (more predictive) the product, the lower the risks for buyers, and the greater the volume of sales. Surveillance capitalism’s profits derive primarily, if not entirely, from such markets for future behavior.

On the solution:

In undertaking this challenge we must be mindful that contesting Google, or any other surveillance capitalist, on the grounds of monopoly is a 20th century solution to a 20th century problem that, while still vitally important, does not necessarily disrupt surveillance capitalism’s commercial equation. We need new interventions that interrupt, outlaw, or regulate 1) the initial capture of behavioral surplus, 2) the use of behavioral surplus as free raw material, 3) excessive and exclusive concentrations of the new means of production, 4) the manufacture of prediction products, 5) the sale of prediction products, 6) the use of prediction products for third-order operations of modification, influence, and control, and 5) the monetization of the results of these operations. This is necessary for society, for people, for the future, and it is also necessary to restore the healthy evolution of capitalism itself.

Source: Shoshana Zuboff: Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism

The Dunk’s Yin to the 3-pointer’s Yang

A wonderful 99% Invisible episode on the height of the basket, how this led to an inbalance in the game through the invention of the dunk (and to some clearly racist reactions) and how the 3-pointer came from the ABA to save the day and open up the game.

This episode is part of a podcast series by ESPN. I am off to listen to more of the ‘Dunkumentaries‘…

There was a political dimension to all of this as well. The dunk was becoming popular at a turbulent time in the country. The Black Panthers were organizing and arming themselves in Oakland and some white Americans were worried a revolution was about to take place. The rise of dunking was seen by some racist critics as a literal manifestation of “Black Power,” embodied in masters of the dunk like Lew Alcindor, who would later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Under pressure from critics of the dunk, the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) made a decision to ban the dunk in 1967. The NBA (National Basketball Association) did not ban the dunk, but still faced criticism about the slowness of play in the league.

Source: The Yin and Yang of Basketball – 99% Invisible

The Books I Read in 2015

Covers of some of the books I've read in 2015

At the end of each year I list the books that I have read during that year. Earlier years were 2012, 2013 and 2014. Below you will find the list of books that I’ve read in 2015. Like last year I have also included my other media consumption (podcasts, RSS feeds and magazines).

My goal was to read 50 books of which at least half would be written by women and half by non-American authors. I managed to read 48 books (so close!) of which 12 were written by women (so far!) and 32 by authors that weren’t born in the US. Although I did read nearly twice as many women as last year, I really should do better. Here is the list of books and what I thought of them.

Digital Rights

I’ve read some wonderful books in this category. I now recommend Schneier’s book as a great introduction to current issues in digital rights. Brunton and Nissembaum published a beautiful little book with obfuscation tactics from many different domains. Van Gunsteren shows clearly how much damage a strong government focus on safety can do (and why we should always have a healthy distrust of our secret services). Levy’s history of the development of strong public crypto is a must-read to be able to understand the current crypto wars.

Bruce Schneier — Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (link)
Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum — Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (link)
Herman van Gunsteren — Gevaarlijk veilig (link)
Steven Levy — Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government — Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (link)
Hans Schnitzler — Het digitale proletariaat (link)
James Gleick — The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (link)
Maurits Martijn and Cees Wiebes — Operatie leunstoel (link)
Mireille Hildebrandt — Smart Technologies And The End(s) Of Law, Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology (link)
Neil Richards — Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age (link)
Privacy in the Modern Age (link)

B00k C7ub 4 N3rd$

This year, like last year, we managed to read seven books in our book club. Brunton has shown me how every phase of the internet has its own version of spam, I can’t wait to read his forthcoming book on digital cash. Bostrom’s book was by far the most scary book that I’ve read all year, whereas Ronson’s was the funniest. Graeber’s book on bureaucracy wasn’t as strong as his book on debt.

Finn Brunton — Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (link)
Nick Bostrom — Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (link)
Ashlee Vance — Elon Musk (link)
David Graeber — The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (link)
Gabriella Coleman — Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (link)
Jon Ronson — So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (link)
Edwin Giltay — De doofpotgeneraal (link)

Fiction

Bulawayo’s book was the one that I couldn’t forget this year. Her first-person perspective of a little girl in Zimbabwe (and then later in the US) was soul crushing at times. Naipaul’s famous novel about the African interior was harrowing. I loved reading Van Leeuwen’s timeless children book to a young boy in my family. Houellebecq’s take on a near future France where a moderate Islamic party has come to power was thought provoking.

NoViolet Bulawayo — We Need New Names (link)
Joke van Leeuwen — Het verhaal van Bobbel die in een bakfiets woonde en rijk wilde worden (link)
V.S. Naipaul — A Bend in the River (link)
عاشقانه‌ها – اشعار عاشقانه ایرانی (link)
Jhumpa Lahiri — The Namesake (link)
Matthijs Ponte — Gemeenschap (link)
Michel Houellebecq — Onderworpen (link)

Non-fiction

Krog was a witness at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation commission and has written a masterpiece about the process. This is where you would start to try and understand South Africa I guess (and damn do I love Desmond Tutu). Most people will not have read Piketty’s book after buying it. They are wrong: it is a brilliant lesson in macro economics and the details are worth the effort. I’ve learned a few practical skills from books this year: Marie Kondo has changed my life with her distinctively Japanese take on organizing your house, Pro Git has taught me how to use Git productively and Practical Vim has finally managed to turn me into a decent Vim user. All men should read Solnit’s essay on ‘mansplaining’. Finally, Westerman has written a book with an insightful reflection on race. It is very meaningful voice in the current Dutch debates on racism.

Antjie Krog — Country Of My Skull (link)
Christopher McDougall — Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, The Ultra-runners, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (link)
Drew Neil — Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought (link)
Frank Westerman — El negro en ik (link)
Marie Kondo — The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (link)
Scott Chacon — Pro Git (link)
Thomas Piketty — Capital in the Twenty-First Century (link)
Bruce Sterling — Shaping Things (link)
Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown — A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change (link)
Haruki Murakami — What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (link)
Ineke Holtwijk — De mannen van de droomfabriek (link)
James Lovelock — The Revenge of Gaia (link)
Karen Armstrong — Islam: A Short History (link)
Marcel van Roosmalen — Op Pad Met Pim (link)
Miriam Sluis — Zoutrif (link)
Mortimer J. Adler — How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (link)
Naomi Wolf — The Beauty Myth (link)
Rebecca Solnit — Men Explain Things to Me (link)
Sandra Sprott and Janice Deul — Little black hair book (link)
Diederick Janse and Marco Bogers — Getting teams done (link)
Joan de Windt — Weg met Mental Slavery (link)
Simon Garfield — Just My Type: A Book about Fonts (link)
Roland Lazenby — Michael Jordan: The Life (link)

My consumption of other media

I had three subscriptions in 2015 and they were the same as the year before: Wired Magazine, The New York Review of Books and De Correspondent. The latter has really matured in the last year and I enjoy their pieces every single morning.

On my Podcast player I still had This American Life and This Week in Tech on the top two spots. New podcasts that I don’t skip are Note to Self and Reply All. I still listen religiously to 99% Invisible and RadioLab, check out an occasional Planet Money episode and enjoyed Kritische Massa, the only Dutch podcast that I listened to.

My favourite feeds in my RSS Reader (shout out to Tiny Tiny RSS) are Morozov in The Guardian, Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing and Prosthetic Knowledge on Tumblr. In the digital rights space I follow EDRi, the EFF, Open Rights Group, Slashdot’s Your Rights Online, Privacy Nieuws, Privacy Barometer, Tactical Tech, Greenhost, Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Hans Schnitzler, Bruce Schneier, the Privacy Surgeon and Axel Arnbak. To see what evil they are up to I check out Facebook’s newsroom and the Google Blog. I also make sure I keep up to date with the self-hosted open source projects I use like Owncloud, Lychee, Yourls and Wallabag. The NRC decided to wall their garden and kill their RSS feeds. That meant I stopped reading Bas Heijne and Marcel van Roosmalen and that I switched to Trouw as my regular source of news.

As long as they keep writing newsletters I will keep reading Stephen Downes and Audrey Watters.

A goodbye to Goodreads

For quite a few years I have used Goodreads to keep track of what books I read and wanted to read. I was increasingly uncomfortable with feeding Amazon’s algorithms and databases so decided to code my own book management system with the features that I like. With a little help from PHP, Bootstrap and SQLite you can see the result at books.hansdezwart.nl. It isn’t completely finished yet (RSS feeds are the most important missing feature), but it is getting close and already is making me very happy.

What will I be reading in 2016?

I want to make even more conscious decisions about what I read in the coming year. I want to read more female, more non-Western and more non-white authors. I also want to read more books that are at least 30 years old. I’ve written it two times before, but next year should now really be a year in which I’ll read more McLuhan. One book a week is the quantitive goal.

The “Pyramid Scheme Economy”

The first few times I used Airbnb to stay with somebody, I brought my hosts stroopwafels and some very old Dutch cheese. Over the past few years I’ve lost that sentiment. Now, I see what has been termed the ‘sharing economy’ as a way for large information monopolies to monetize any excess social capital, while outsourcing all risks to their workers (they don’t call them workers, as workers have rights).

I’ve read a lot about how impossible it is to earn a decent living in this ‘sharing economy’ (read Morozov for example) but Benjamin Walker’s Theory of Everything trilogy of podcasts titled ‘Instaserfs’ still really made me think. In the series Andrew Callaway is asked to “drive, shop, clean, deliver, and serve for a whole month” and to record his experiences.

Ethan Zuckerman has done an excellent job explaining why you should listen to the shows, below are just a few things that I noticed.

Andrew could have probably made a lot more money if he had invested more time in referrals. Nearly all the companies he worked for spent a lot of time trying to teach him how to find other people who would do the same. This is why he starts calling it the ‘pyramid scheme economy’ at some point.

I used to think that these services were dehumanizing the workers (basically letting them do the pattern recognition tasks that the algorithms can’t do yet), but the show makes a convincing case that the customers are the ones that are becoming less human. At some point Andrew has to wait is getting a burrito for someone. First he can’t find parking and then he has to wait in line. Everything is taking a long time, so he knows that both the service he is working for and the customer are getting upset. He then asks himself the question: how can you ever learn empathy if you don’t never have to share the experience of waiting in line.

The final episode is a little bit too designed for my taste, but I did appreciate Mary Gray’s commentary on the general precariousness of work. Will this be something that most of us will have to start dealing with in the next few years?

You can find the episodes here: Instaserfs part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Image by Flickr user ironpoison, CC BY-NC 2.0. Oh, and if you haven’t read Adam Greenfield’s Uber, or: The technics and politics of socially corrosive mobility, then you should.

Managing Unconscious Bias at Facebook

I’ve written before about how the lack of diversity in the companies that are shaping our world is literally hurting people. I specifically referred to Eric Meyer being confronted with his deceased daughter. Facebook does realise their lack of diversity is also hurting their business. So they’ve started an internal course to battle what they term unconscious bias. They’ve put an interesting set of videos of the course online. From their blogpost:

To reflect the diversity of the 1.4 billion people using our products, we need to have people with different backgrounds, races, genders and points of view working at Facebook. Diverse teams have better results, so this is not only the right thing to do – it’s also good for our business.

and:

One of the most important things we can do to promote diversity in the workplace is to correct for the unconscious bias that all of us have.

Google is focusing on unconscious bias too.

I am aware that so-called affirmitive action has gotten a bad reputation, but if I were to change a company’s culture on this topic, this isn’t where I would start. To really make an impact these information giants will have to start directly addressing the structural societal problems that lead the lack of diversity.

Interested to learn more about diversity in the technology sector? Check out these resources.