Frank Pasquale is another author to look at, as well as Tom Slee. Also that Wired article about sharecropping the long tail.
I tend to place blame for most of the concerns raised here not on computing itself, but on proprietary computing itself, or on monetization, if you will. The problem is not so much surveillance as information asymmetry, or unfair informational advantage. This is a direct consequence of the fact that the technologies are being implemented in the for-profit sector. A modern website or mobile app is very intentionally designed to transmit signal (direct observations of behavior, and other actionable data) in one direction and noise (basically bloat) in the other. To forego any monetization opportunity is to leave money on the table, and of course that is a literal sin against the principal-agent principle. If we wanted search to be a utility, content to be a library, communication to be person-to-person, or platforms to come without vendor lock-in, we should have left the Internet in mostly academic hands, as it was in the early 1990s.
Michael MacTaggert is a software developer looking for work, host of a law review podcast called Amicus Lectio, and a moderator of Programming Discussions (invite.progdisc.club). Follow me on Twitter!
I think monetization is an important issue for these reasons, too, but I don't believe these issues would go away without monetization. The social problems are bigger than software and who pays for it. A free system can still erase trans people. An open system designed to centralize the flow of data can still give one party a huge amount of power over the public. I'd also say that centering academics as an alternative to what we have now is misguided, since there's nothing actually stopping academics from doing the same things companies do. There's no magic academic juice that gets rid of systemic racism in their software, and academia itself is a white supremacist institution very much akin to the tech industry, so I'd treat it with exactly the same skepticism.
But these are nitpicks! Thanks for the comment. ^^
I certainly don't think there's such a thing as magic academic juice, but I still see them as a lesser evil than private industry, perhaps incorrectly so. I do think the academic involvement in the middle period of Internet history probably did at least a little more good than harm, as the early Internet was entirely under the auspices of DARPA and post 1993 or so it's been "the business of this Internet is business," which I am absolutely sick and tired of. Around the time of the 2008 crash, in particular, what was left of noncommercial activity online (think blogs) basically disappeared. DIY ethos got replaced by FYPM ethos. I understand why, and I certainly never scold anyone indy for choosing to monetize, but damn, try as I might, I can't erase the memory of a less stingy datascape.
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Frank Pasquale is another author to look at, as well as Tom Slee. Also that Wired article about sharecropping the long tail.
I tend to place blame for most of the concerns raised here not on computing itself, but on proprietary computing itself, or on monetization, if you will. The problem is not so much surveillance as information asymmetry, or unfair informational advantage. This is a direct consequence of the fact that the technologies are being implemented in the for-profit sector. A modern website or mobile app is very intentionally designed to transmit signal (direct observations of behavior, and other actionable data) in one direction and noise (basically bloat) in the other. To forego any monetization opportunity is to leave money on the table, and of course that is a literal sin against the principal-agent principle. If we wanted search to be a utility, content to be a library, communication to be person-to-person, or platforms to come without vendor lock-in, we should have left the Internet in mostly academic hands, as it was in the early 1990s.
I think monetization is an important issue for these reasons, too, but I don't believe these issues would go away without monetization. The social problems are bigger than software and who pays for it. A free system can still erase trans people. An open system designed to centralize the flow of data can still give one party a huge amount of power over the public. I'd also say that centering academics as an alternative to what we have now is misguided, since there's nothing actually stopping academics from doing the same things companies do. There's no magic academic juice that gets rid of systemic racism in their software, and academia itself is a white supremacist institution very much akin to the tech industry, so I'd treat it with exactly the same skepticism.
But these are nitpicks! Thanks for the comment. ^^
I certainly don't think there's such a thing as magic academic juice, but I still see them as a lesser evil than private industry, perhaps incorrectly so. I do think the academic involvement in the middle period of Internet history probably did at least a little more good than harm, as the early Internet was entirely under the auspices of DARPA and post 1993 or so it's been "the business of this Internet is business," which I am absolutely sick and tired of. Around the time of the 2008 crash, in particular, what was left of noncommercial activity online (think blogs) basically disappeared. DIY ethos got replaced by FYPM ethos. I understand why, and I certainly never scold anyone indy for choosing to monetize, but damn, try as I might, I can't erase the memory of a less stingy datascape.