28 TECH FEED Audience Data
ETHICAL RESPONSE You can call it paranoia, but such ideas are now part of the mainstream cultural dialogue. The current season of Homeland is themed around the insidious dangers of fake news and its dissemination on social networks. A group of Silicon Valley insiders intends to put a check on this runaway train. “What began as a race to monetise our attention is now eroding the pillars of our society: mental health, democracy, social relationships and our children,” states The Center for Humane Technology. This organisation is headed by Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist (a position specially created for him after he distributed an in-house email questioning the effects of Google tech design on society) and is arguing for an ethical response to what it sees as society’s addiction to clicks. “Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google… are caught in a zero-sum race for our finite attention, which they need to make money,” the Center contends. “Constantly forced to outperform their competitors, they must use increasingly persuasive techniques to keep us glued. content grows exponentially, platform companies must rely increasingly on automation: YouTube automates billions of videos to play next for 1.5 billion users; Facebook automates millions of ads to its 2 billion users; Twitter automates showing millions of #trending topics to hundreds of millions of users. Humane Tech says these automatic algorithms are “easily gamed” to manipulate society at a massive scale, “because platforms lack the capacity to reliably check for conspiracies, lies and fake users. We can’t expect attention-extraction companies like YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter to change, because it’s against their business model,” says the group. The collapse of public trust in Facebook is welcome news to those who have warned about the perils of ‘data extractivism’. Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, argues in The Guardian that the data debate presents the political left with an opportunity to rethink many of its positions: “on how to organise the provision of welfare in the age of predictive analytics; how to organise bureaucracy They point AI-driven news feeds, content and notifications at our minds, continually learning how to hook us more deeply – from our own behaviour.” The organisation notes that as
WHAT BEGAN AS A RACE TO MONETISE OUR ATTENTION IS NOW ERODING THE PILLARS OF OUR SOCIETY
of liberated behaviour. “True they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce but they cannot reimpose the hierarchical propaganda driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago,” he writes. “By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history – the educated and connected human being.”
and the public sector in the age of citizens equipped with sensors and, often, superior technologies; how to organise new kinds of trade unions in the age of ubiquitous automation; how to organise a centralised political party in the age of decentralised and horizontal communications.” This chimes with commentators like Paul Mason. In his book Postcapitalism , that info-tech will deliver socialist projects from co-operatives to communes to outbreaks
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