Category Archives: Big Tech

On Monday, Justice Clarence Thomas announced that the Supreme Court soon will have to put an end to Big Tech tyranny. Amen. If the high court fails to act, it could mean the end of free speech in the 21st century and the shriveling of our constitutional rights to mere paper rights still there on paper but functionally hollowed out.

Thomas cited the problem ofsocial-media platforms like Facebook and Google wielding unlimited power to censorusers whose views they dont like.His opinion offers hope at a time when Democrats controlling Congress are demanding that tech giants censor more.On March 25,Democrats ontheHouse Committee on Energy and Commerceordered tech CEOs to silence views that undermine social-justice movements.

Thomas announcement camein the context of a case involving former President Donald Trump. In office, Trump occasionally blocked his Twitter critics, and some of those critics sued, claiming the presidents Twitter account is a public forum.The high court ruledthe case is now moot, because Trump is out of office. Thomas concurred and agreed with a lower court holding that Trump had violated his critics First Amendment right to be heard.

But Thomas said the more glaring concern isnt what Trump did to a few critics, but rather the power of tech giants to censor or ban users entirely, even the leader of the Free World.The justice expressed astonishment that Facebook and Google could remove Trumps accountat any time for any or no reason.

Wrote Thomas: One person controls Facebook . . . and just two control Google.Three people, in other words, have the power to disappear any of us from the digital public square, even a commander in chief. The Supremes, Thomas concluded, must rein in this unaccountable tyranny.

Big Tech apologists argue that private companies are free to censor as they please. And its true that the First Amendment prohibits only government from silencing viewpoints. But private ownership is never the beginning and end of constitutional analysis, not when there is so much at stake.

As Thomas showed, these companies aremore like common carriers or public utilities than private companies. And they must be regulated as such: AT&T cant refuse to open a phone account for you or limit your conversations based on your worldview. Likewise, Southwest Airlines cant pick and choose who rides its aircraft based on their opinions about transgenderism or #Russiagate. Yet the tech giants get to do exactly that. Why?

Thomas also likenedBig Tech to public accommodations, such as hotels and baseball stadiums, which are legally required to serve everyone and not discriminate.

Nor did Thomas buy free-market absolutists argument about competition limiting Big Tech tyranny. He pointedto the substantial barriers to entry facing newcomers.The fate of Parler proves the justices point.When the Twitter alternative offered a censorship-free platform,Big Tech colluded to crush it.

Were facing a new form of censorship, in some ways far more sinister than the state-directed variety. Democrats and their media allies are happy to deputize Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to censor the deplorables; there is no recourse or appeal, because the people doing the censoring are nameless, faceless Silicon Valley operatives.

And dont count on President Joe Biden. Astaggering 14 of his picksto serve in the transition or in his new government are Big Tech alumni, according to a Daily Caller tally. Indeed, Biden probably owes his presidency in part to Big Tech which rushed to censor this newspapers reporting on the Hunter Files, on the patently false pretext that The Post had peddled disinformation or hacked material.

Its salutary, then, that Thomasbelieves the high court can apply his reasoning without waiting for Congress. Until then, the public will hear only what Silicon Valley wants, and the place is awash with wokesters more dangerous than any college campuses because these people control the levers of information.

Last week, Lara Trump posted an interview with the former president on Facebook. Immediately,Facebook took it down, explaining that further content posted in the voice of Donald Trump will be removed.

Only the high court will restore uncensored discourse, an American ideal.Thomas opinion illumines the way.

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.

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Justice Thomas shows how we can end Big Tech censorship ...

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Letter to the Editor: Big tech regulations | Opinions | capjournal.com - The Capital Journal

from the applying-excessive-force-to-a-horse's-corpse dept

Dame Cressida Dick -- the former National Policing Lead for Counter-Terrorism -- has had an op-ed published by The Telegraph that leverages the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to advocate for less privacy and security for routine targets of terrorist attacks: everyday people without powerful government positions.

Writing from her latest official position -- that of Metropolitan Police Commissioner -- Dame Dick says the War on Terror can be won sort of. (Paywalled but here's an alternate link.)

The future, as ever, is uncertain - as exemplified by the situation in Afghanistan as we wait to see how events there might once again impact on the terrorism landscape. But as I reflect on what has passed since 9/11, I am confident that we continue to develop the exceptional tools and capabilities that will give our counter-terrorism officers the best chance of successfully confronting the threats that will emerge over the next 20 years.

That's just a small part of it. It's headlined by this declaration by the Police Commissioner:

Terrorists seek to divide us -- they won't win

Not so fast, Cressida. Right in the middle of your own op-ed is an admission the terrorists have won, at least using these metrics.

The threat of sophisticated terrorist cells being directed from overseas has been added to by that of the individuals carrying out rudimentary attacks with very little planning or warning. The current focus on encryption by many big tech companies is only serving to make our job to identify and stop these people even harder, if not impossible in some cases.

And there it is: the thing that divides us. Government officials continue to insist that if encryption can be used by terrorists and criminals, then it really shouldn't be accessible to all the non-terrorists who use it to secure their personal information and communications. If the end goal of terrorist attacks is to drive a wedge between the public and their public servants, mission accomplished.

The public would like to have actual security. The government would prefer the illusion of security: a nonexistent form of encryption that only allows good guys to peek in on "secure" communications. And, on the flip side, these officials believe the only people who really "need" encrypted communications are criminals and terrorists since they have the most to hide. If that's the only real market for encryption, then non-terrorists should be happy using insecure communications options because they have nothing to hide and nothing to fear from their governments.

And while we're on the subject of reasoning that's mostly circular, The Telegraph manages to close its own loop by dropping a link in Dame Cressida Dick's op-ed. That link takes you to this article ("Tech giants are making it impossible to stop terrorists, says Dame Cressida Dick"), which opens with this:

Tech giants are making it impossible to identify and stop terrorists carrying out deadly attacks, Dame Cressida Dick warns on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 atrocity.

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner - who was granted a two-year extension on her contract on Friday - said the introduction of end-to-end encryption, which allows users to message one another in complete secrecy, was giving terrorists an advantage over law enforcement.

Companies such as Facebook have argued that introducing encryption will improve privacy for their customers.

But writing in The Telegraph, Dame Cressida warns that terrorists are exploiting such technological advances to radicalise people and direct attacks around the world.

That last link takes you back to Cressida's op-ed, which contains one paragraph about Big Tech and encryption -- a paragraph that is quoted in its entirety further down the page in this separate article. The op-ed links to the article which links to the op-ed which links to the article. It's a neat trick, one that makes one hand clapping sound like applause. One could theoretically spend hours opening each self-referential link, allowing Dick's single argument to become a groundswell movement that gradually consumes every last bit of available RAM (mainly looking at you, Chrome).

And that's as good a metaphor as any for the anti-encryption agitation of officials like the Dame. Like other law enforcement officials who would like to see encryption backdoored if not eliminated completely, the Dame's attacks on encryption appear to operate under the theory that if someone says something often enough, and authoritatively enough, then some people are going to believe these assertions are true.

And at the end of all of this, it must be pointed out that the split between law enforcement officials and security experts continues to increase. But the terrorists didn't cause this split. The War on Terror did. The response to the 9/11 attacks was a power grab by the government, which suddenly had the justification it needed to curtail rights and liberties it often found inconvenient. And now it's Big Government complaining about Big Tech, using terrorism as an excuse to undermine security for everyone.

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Filed Under: cressida dick, encryption, london, metropolitan police, terrorism

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London's Top Cop Says 'Big Tech,' Encryption Are Letting The Terrorists Win - Techdirt

SYSTEM ERRORWhere Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot By Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein

Stop me if youve heard this one: A philosopher, a computer engineer and a government guy walk into a bar and give us a very detailed and overwhelming college lecture about what we need to do about tech, its power and the damaging unintended (and, often, quite intended) consequences of its inventions.

Its a noble effort, but about halfway through this book by three Stanford professors, I felt as if maybe I were the one who needed a stiff drink, given the ceaseless onslaught of studies, factoids and examples of a far too broad swath of the problems that face our country and the world because of the growing hegemony of tech companies and their products.

Dont get me wrong, its critical that we make more connections between tech and the rest of our world, especially as it invades everything from politics to entertainment to communications to travel to, yes, how we fall in love. And its important to recognize how weve become twisted and angry and hopelessly addicted, due in part to the flood of malevolent information that flows over devices and gadgets that we cannot now live without.

That was the impetus of the authors Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein when they joined together at Stanford to create a multidisciplinary undergraduate course called Ethics, Public Policy and Technological Change. Its aim, as described by the school, is to explore the ethical and social impact of technological innovation, marrying the humanities, social science and computer science and from there to bring about a fundamental shift in how students, whatever their choice of major and whatever their professional career pathway, think about their role as enablers and shapers of technological change in society.

Well, sign me up except that in book form and not over a full semester, it becomes a laundry list of very weighty issues, each of which should be (and has been) the subject of its own book. These include, among other things: artificial intelligence, algorithms, facial recognition, self-driving cars, privacy, hate speech and the obvious corruption built into the venture system of capitalization. Even Soylent, the drink invented to minimize the need to prepare food, makes an appearance.

If that sounds like reading an action-packed syllabus, it is exactly like that, minus getting to hang on the lovely Palo Alto campus. Jamming all these topics into one book gives it a blink-and-youll-miss-it quality about the material, although for those not familiar, System Error certainly serves as a very well-written, if superficial, primer for all we need to know about the impact of the tech industry.

Then again, maybe the authors should be applauded for their impulse to write the book at all, to the extent that it challenges readers to think beyond a one-note computer education thats driven by efficiency and optimization, without ethical rigor. Big Tech celebrates ad nauseam the ability to grow fast and scale endlessly rather than asking whether and how we should make some product in the first place. Understanding consequences and taking responsibility for their innovation is scarce in the industry, and that is exactly how the problem mutates to where we are.

The authors who are the ones teaching these wunderkinds do understand that there needs to be some self-reflection, finding a medium somewhere between tech boosterism and the techlash. But in playing out the challenges, they provide only one short chapter about solutions, again like a checklist and far too light to let readers feel as if they can do much about the Silicon Valley freight train headed their way. When complex tech phrases like blitzscaling, privacy paradox, OKRs and success disaster whiz by, its hard to imagine doing anything about it but firing up the iPhone and doomscrolling Twitter.

In other words, Ill take that Soylentini now.

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Whats Wrong With Big Tech? Three Stanford Professors Think They Know. - The New York Times

Every Wednesday morning, Artnet News brings you The Gray Market. The column decodes important stories from the previous weekand offers unparalleled insight into the inner workings of the art industry in the process.

This week, watching cracks form in the dominant narrative

Two closely linked questions loomed large over the return of Armory Week in New York last week: Would collectors show up to the fairs and spend? And, even if they did, would we also find evidence that the shutdown was a permanent inflection point in dealers relationship to art fairs as a whole?

Although healthy sales atthe ArmoryandIndependentindicate that the answer to the former was a strong yes, the non-participation of multiple big-time dealers suggests the same yes applies to the latter question too. To better understand how we got to this stageand why fair defections could accelerate from herea new framework for thinking through the Big Tech ecosystem becomes useful.

More than one fairgoer pointed out to me last week that three of the four mega-galleries were conspicuous in their absence from the Armory Show: Hauser and Wirth, Gagosian, and Pace Gallery. Also opting out was high-end partnership Lvy Gorvy, whose namesakes already signaled that they will strictly show at fairs in Asia once their new venture with Amalia Dayan and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, LGDR, opens next year.

A closer look around town reveals that a slew of other prominent locally headquartered shops were content to bypass the Armory Week expo scene as well. That list includes Tanya Bonakdar, Paula Cooper, Gladstone, Marian Goodman, Greene Naftali, Casey Kaplan, Anton Kern, Lehmann Maupin, Luhring Augustine, Matthew Marks (one of the Armory Shows cofounders long ago), Mitchell-Innes and Nash, Petzel, Salon 94, Jack Shainman, and Sikkema Jenkins and Co.

Reached after the Armory Show closed its run, executive director Nicole Berry said this years comeback edition of the fair was among the most successful in our nearly 30-year history and illustrated why in-person fairs are irreplaceable.

Berry noted that many top New York galleries, including 303 Gallery, Kasmin, and Sean Kelly, among others, have shown unwavering support by exhibiting at the Armory Show year after year, while other New York dealers such as Marianne Boesky, Almine Rech, and David Zwirner returned to the Armory Show this year after a long hiatus because they recognized the opportunity that in-person fairs present. She relayed that exhibitors were uniformly enthusiastic about the show and its new Javits Center home, and that many reported steady foot traffic, collector connections, and robust sales.

For galleries outside New York, including our international exhibitors, the fair has become their primary gateway for accessing New Yorks strong collector base, allowing them to build new relationships and place works with important institutions, Berry said. A cultural capital like New York needs an art fair, and we are proud to provide the Armory Show as New Yorks art fair.

So then what was up with the opt outs? No doubt proximity played a role in some cases. Obviously every New York dealer on the absentee list operates one or more permanent galleries in Manhattan, with most of them in Chelsea, sandwiched between the Armory and Independent (with the upstart Future Fair in their midst). Why spend tens of thousands of dollars on a booth when you can just draft off the fairs momentum and drawing power in your own bigger, better space?

The calendar in this topsy-turvy year may have contributed too. This should be the one and only time that 11 days, not three-plus months, separate the respective premiers of the Armory Week fairs and Art Basels Swiss flagship event. Hauser and Wirth partner Marc Payot alsotold Vanity Fairs Nate Freeman that the mega-gallery chose last week as the time to debut its high-octane Gotham solo exhibitions of Philip Guston and Avery Singer simply because of a desire to open as early as possible not so much thinking about the fairs, really more about maximizing the time for these shows.

Vanessa German, Hammer Head Rage Machine Agony Machine Baptism (2019) at Kasmin, New York, at the 2021 Armory Show at the Javits Center in New York. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

Yet taking Payots explanation at face value ignores that ghosting on the fair scene during Armory Week is not as new as the COVID changed everything narrative tempts us to believe. Of the 19 top-tier galleries on my expo-absentee list, only Gagosian exhibited at the Armory in 2020. Nor does this appear to be a matter of the decision makers simply changing out one of New Yorks art fairs for another; none of these dealers went smaller and more focused by showing at this years Independent, either. (More than half of the 43 exhibitors at Independent, including blue-chippers like Karma, Lisson, and Vito Schnabel, hailed from the Big Apple.)

So, in the full light of day, bailing on the 2021 Armory Week fairs looks much less like either a sudden turn by only the markets few apex predators, or a strict response by a wider swathe of New York dealers to the upheaval of the coronavirus. Instead, it feels more like a structural shiftone that that has maintained traction for multiple yearsandcounters the early 21st-century mantra that more is always more in the gallery sector. It also lives up to the reality that insiders and analysts have been talking about fairtigue in principle, if not in name, for at least 11 years.

Its not as if this situation only applies in New York either. Art Basel global director Marc Spiegler recently confirmed that (as Wet Paint guest columnist Julie Baumgardner phrased it) more than a handful of galleries had the intention of calling it quits on the brands flagship fair this month, but that the extraordinary measures taken by the brand to try to shore up exhibitor supportheadlined by a $1.6 million one-time solidarity fundhad succeeded in getting (in Spieglers words) every single gallery to recommit to the fair.

Still, chatter is already amping up that at least one major seller will forgo Art Basel Miami Beach this December. Saturdays edition of The Canvas (which explored whether Armory Weeks titular event has enough of a unique selling proposition to sustain, under the ominous subject line How Many Years Does the Armory Show Have Left?) mentioned an unconfirmed yet persistent rumor that Pace is the gallery reaching for its parachute ahead of South Florida. Expect plenty more speculation in the next two months of our continuing Delta variant drama, especially now that the U.S. has plummeted to dead last in vaccination rates among G7 countries.

In short, were (finally) dealing with a structural issue. As Independent founder Elizabeth Dee told me, If were talking too much about the future of one art fair, then were not talking enough about the future of art.

But art dealing isnt the only trade where industry-defining actions have begun deviating from a generational narrative. Several of Silicon Valleys most powerful, most valuable firms have quietly moved off the path that the general public and even many top-flight industry analysts assume theyre still traveling. Thats the contention of author and Columbia Business School professor Jonathan A. Knee in his new book, The Platform Delusion: Who Wins and Who Loses in an Age of Tech Titans. His core argument can also help elucidate the newfound selectivity around big-ticket art fairs that galleries may finally be adopting.

Knee offered an overview of the books thesis in the New York Timestwo weeks ago. In his telling, the platform delusion originates in a core misunderstanding of network effects, the supposed driving principle behind so-called platform tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Netflix.

For the uninitiated, network effects (sometimes called the flywheel effect) occur when every new user or customer increases the value of the network to existing users, Knee writes. It isnt just that more users make your product or service bigger,they also make it better for everyone who has already bought in.

Why are network effects so valuable, though? Increasingly, the answer you hear from platforms has to do with their embrace of an asset-light, digital-first business model. Moving in this direction vastly upgrades any companys capacity for collecting data, then exploiting it via machine learning and artificial intelligence. The idea is that more users mean more data, which in turn means more competitive advantages to be gained from mining said data with algorithms. Increase the size of your network enough, and you become unstoppable in your chosen lane, as Amazon et al. now seem to be.

As a result, Knee argues, Wall Street values these Bay Area giants much more richly than their economic fundamentals justify. The storyline also motivates early-stage investors everywhere to push other startups toward a frenzied pursuit of rapid, exponential growth at all costs, including financial and organizational sustainability.

But contrary to what weve been hearing from outside analysts and the platforms themselves for close to 20 years, Knee argues that this thinking is all wrong. He writes:

The problem with this narrative is that it ignores the numerous ways in which the new digital platforms actually make businesses more vulnerable to competitive attack compared with the analog models that they have disrupted. The ease with which customers can switch undermines captivity, and the asset-light nature of these businesses both lowers entry barriers and the level of activity required to break even.

In other words, going strictly digitala move aimed at making a company accessible to everyone, everywhere, all the time, to chase network effectsactually backfires in crucial ways. Its easier for customers to defect to a competitor when all they have to do is click over to a different URL rather than, say, drive 30 miles to a rival store. Eschewing physical infrastructure also means reducing overhead costs, which makes it friendlier for competitors to both enter and stay in the game. No wonder, Knee writes, that right up until the COVID-19 crisis hit, struggling online retailers were increasingly looking to solve their structural woes by opening up mall outlets.

The platform myth obscures these problems with spin. Mostly, the rest of the world falls for it, even as internal correspondence proves the startup kings themselves recognize the narrative is bogus.

Case in point: Out of the five tech giants I mentioned earlier, Knee points out that Facebook is the lone example where network effects legitimately power the business plan. Apple, Amazon, Google, and Netflix are just singing alone to the tune while their hands do something else offstage. In fact, Knee relays that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings admitted to him in an interview that the companys failed pursuit of network effects over nearly two decades confirmed they were nothing more than a competitive fantasy for his company.

A visitor looks at an artwork by Anne Collier entitled Woman Crying (Comic) #7 at Art Basel on June 12, 2019. Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images.

Although its not a one-to-one relationship, the platform delusion has an analogue in what Ill call art-fair folklore: the narrative that showing at a high number of art fairs is the best, most efficient strategy to sustain your gallery thanks to the exposure it gives you to a critical mass of new clients in other regions. And I dont think its a coincidence that both myths are starting to crumble at the same time.

The rationale for exhibiting at as many fairs as possible always hinged on a kind of alternative network effectone based on locations rather than users. Even if some of those locations were temporary, the more of them a dealer operated throughout the year, the more valuable their business theoretically became because of the high-level, in-person buyer outreach they enabled. Going big on art fairs was not quite a way for galleries to make their inventory accessible to everyone, everywhere, all the time (it took the online-viewing-room boom to do that), but it did allow them to get as close to those absolutes as possible in the physical world.

But, like the tech platforms that went fully online to chase network effects, dealers who splashed out on the maximum number of fairs every year gradually began to recognize that, after a certain point, the move made them more vulnerable, not more powerful. One of the reasons was the same, too: it rendered them more interchangeable with their competitors.

This is particularly true at big fairs with hundreds of exhibitors. In those cases, waltzing to the next booth is no more strenuous or time-consuming than typing in a new web address. Consolidating so many rivals into one space therefore becomes more of an advantage for buyers than dealers or their artists, both of whom risk falling victim to what I call the tyranny of options: a monsoon of choices that often overwhelms the distinctions between them. The effect is especially acute when you have so many artists working with multiple dealers around the world rather than opting for exclusive global representation by a single gallery, a privilege only a small number of heavyweight sellers can realistically live up to anyway.

Yet its questionable how much even collectors benefit from giant fairs. Dealer Ed Winkleman observed as far back as 2014 that massive scale and outreach had already led to a scenario where buyers tended to talk about which fairs they acquired from, not which galleries. And while each major expo has a long list of perennial VIPs, that means nothing for whether the scores of potential new clients trawling the aisles will become even one-time clients of the dealers or artists exhibiting there, let alone repeat patrons.

You have to set up the environment for success to take place, and maybe the environments that some of these bigger fairs have been inheriting for decades without changing much are not the environment for human-scale, meaningful, memorable art experiences to take place, Dee said.

At the same time, overloading on art fairs also exposes galleries to one blade that cuts twice even as its counterpart in the platform delusion cuts only once. Whereas digital ubiquity meant the platforms lowered their overhead costs, physical ubiquity at art fairs meant dealers ballooned theirs in a sector where support from outside investors is scant, margins are generally thin, and regularly breaking even (if not turning a profit) matters almost all the time.

But now that fairs and galleries alike have also mounted an ever-spinning year-round carousel of online viewing rooms, they are also galloping headlong into online competition from upstarts who can present and market themselves digitally just as effectively for the same low cost, if not even less. (This is a double cautionary tale for galleries like Pace that are intent on launching their own NFT marketplaces.) So the COVID-induced shift toward digital sales has simultaneously reduced the value of some physical fairs and, as Knee asserts for the platforms, diminished barriers to entry and the endurance threshold faced by scrappier rivals.

Installation view of Independent Art Fair. Courtesy of Independent.

For the most part, I think this strange moment in history has just given dealers license, courage, and/or the financial necessity to finally scale back their booth spending in a way theyve long meant to. Even some of the mightiest galleries have been paying lip service to the idea of reducing their annual fair commitments for years. Some had already started to match words with deeds, at least when it came to smaller regional fairs, before the advent of the social-distancing era.

This is why I think we would have seen the same result whenever the industry faced its next system shock, regardless of whether that shock hinged on public health, macroeconomic instability, or any other societal rupture. This is less about any risks directly linked to superspreader events than it is about the clarity found in a grand economic reckoning.

Knee writes something similar about the platform delusion:

The true danger of believing the various myths of the platform era lies in what happens when market euphoria subsides, as it inevitably does, and making informed distinctions among technology investments becomes essential for financial survival. Whether investing, operating or regulating, it is critical to pinpoint the true source and extent of individual advantage rather than relying on simplistic delusions to guide decision-making.

If this fall indeed marks the beginning of the end of art-fair folklore, and the first steps toward greater selectivity in the sector, then it was past due. If not, then the shift is on its way soonand a whole new set of hard questions about gallery sustainability will follow right behind it.

[Dealbook | The Platform Delusion]

Thats all for this week. Til next time, remember: change happens very slowly, then all at once.

Read more:

How the 'Platform Delusion' of Big Tech Helps Explain Why Galleries Are Finally Turning Away From Art Fairs (and Other Insights) - artnet News

SYSTEM ERROR: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

Authors: Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Price: $27.99

Pages: 319

Stop me if youve heard this one: A philosopher, a computer engineer and a government guy walk into a bar and give us a very detailed and overwhelming college lecture about what we need to do about tech, its power and the damaging unintended (and, often, quite intended) consequences of its inventions.

Its a noble effort, but about halfway through this book by three Stanford professors, I felt as if maybe I were the one who needed a stiff drink, given the ceaseless onslaught of studies, factoids and examples of a far too broad swath of the problems that face our country and the world because of the growing hegemony of tech companies and their products.

Dont get me wrong, its critical that we make more connections between tech and the rest of our world, especially as it invades everything from politics to entertainment to communications to travel to, yes, how we fall in love. And its important to recognise how weve become twisted and angry and hopelessly addicted, due in part to the flood of malevolent information that flows over devices and gadgets that we cannot now live without.

That was the impetus of the authors Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein when they joined together at Stanford to create a multidisciplinary undergraduate course called Ethics, Public Policy and Technological Change. Its aim, as described by the school, is to explore the ethical and social impact of technological innovation, marrying the humanities, social science and computer science and from there to bring about a fundamental shift in how students, whatever their choice of major and whatever their professional career pathway, think about their role as enablers and shapers of technological change in society.

Well, sign me up except that in book form and not over a full semester, it becomes a laundry list of very weighty issues, each of which should be (and has been) the subject of its own book. These include, among other things: artificial intelligence, algorithms, facial recognition, self-driving cars, privacy, hate speech and the obvious corruption built into the venture system of capitalisation. Even Soylent, the drink invented to minimise the need to prepare food, makes an appearance.

If that sounds like reading an action-packed syllabus, it is exactly like that, minus getting to hang on the lovely Palo Alto campus. Jamming all these topics into one book gives it a blink-and-youll-miss-it quality about the material, although for those not familiar, System Error certainly serves as a very well-written, if superficial, primer for all we need to know about the impact of the tech industry.

Then again, maybe the authors should be applauded for their impulse to write the book at all, to the extent that it challenges readers to think beyond a one-note computer education thats driven by efficiency and optimisation, without ethical rigor. Big Tech celebrates ad nauseam the ability to grow fast and scale endlessly rather than asking whether and how we should make some product in the first place.

Understanding consequences and taking responsibility for their innovation is scarce in the industry, and that is exactly how the problem mutates to where we are.

The authors who are the ones teaching these wunderkinds do understand that there needs to be some self-reflection, finding a medium somewhere between tech boosterism and the techlash. But in playing out the challenges, they provide only one short chapter about solutions, again like a checklist and far too light to let readers feel as if they can do much about the Silicon Valley freight train headed their way. When complex tech phrases like blitzscaling, privacy paradox, OKRs and success disaster whiz by, its hard to imagine doing anything about it but firing up the iPhone and doomscrolling Twitter.

In other words, Ill take that Soylentini now.

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What went wrong with Big Tech - Business Standard

Tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have made vast profits from US government contracts since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, according to a new report by three US activists groups.

The report's release was timed to coincide with Saturday's20th anniversary of the atrocities, which killed nearly 3,000 peopleand triggeredthe US-led war on terror.

The "Big Tech Sells War" report documents amassive increase in government contracts with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter since 2004 three years after the war or terror began.

The document, authoredby the Action Center on Race and the Economy and social justice groups LittleSis and MPower Change, detailed how the growth in military and government contracts came at the same time as the tech giants' web platforms became ubiquitous.

The report's authors said the biggest contracts came from the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.

Among all the US agencies, at least $44.5 billion (37.6 billion) in contracts were awarded to Big Techfirms.

According to the report, 86% of Amazon's government contracts and 77% of Google's were central to the war on terror.

In 2019, two tech giantspulled ahead of the others, with Amazon signing nearly five times and Microsoft signing eight times as many federal contracts and subcontractscompared to 2015.

The report pulled its data from Tech Inquiry, an online tool that allows users to explore US government contracts.

The US Department of Defense alone spent $43.8 billion on Big Tech contracts since 2004, according to the report

The activist groupsalso highlighted a "revolving door" betweengovernment agencies and tech giants, detailing how hundreds of government employees have taken positions with the same US multinationals that have received huge contracts.

Among them were former State Department employee Jared Cohen who later founded Google's Jigsaw, a technology incubator that aims to explore "threats to open societies."One of Jigsaw's first projects was to develop counterterrorism tools for social media platforms.

Another example was Steve Pandelides, who worked for the FBI for over 20 years and is now director of security at Amazon Web Services.

The activist groups have called for tighter rules to regulate the revolving door between the government and Silicon Valley.

Al-Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington DConSeptember 11, 2001,triggered new security laws domestically, and an extended military campaign to root out terrorism worldwide.

The campaign became known as the US-led war on terror and sparked the invasion of Afghanistan the hideout of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and later, Iraq, even though Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was not linked to the 9/11 attacks.

Nearly 20 years of post-9/11 wars have cost Washingtonmore than $8 trillion and caused about 900,000 deaths, according to estimates by the Costs of War project at Brown University.

9/11 ushered in an era of increased surveillance, where counterterrorism became the justification for new security laws and monitoring by governments ranging from mass data collection to the growing use of artificial intelligence tools.

Muslims, in particular, have been targeted and continue to facediscrimination,suspicion and human rights breaches as a result of the heightenedsurveillance.

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Big Tech made huge profits from war on terror, US activists say - DW (English)

TLDR/Key Points

As Microsofts Brad Smith points out in Tools and Weapons: The Promise and Peril of the Digital Age, Civilization has always run on data. These data have been largely observational; weather patterns, seasonal relationships to food sources, monitoring threats, like rival neighbors. With language, observational data became both cumulative and trans-generationally transmissible, making it an even more powerful agent of progress. With formal settlement and the rise of civilization, not only were observational data essential, they were increasingly applied towards prediction, particularly for early threat identification, whether internal or external, natural or belligerent. The survival, not only of leadership, but of civilization itself depended on accurate early warning based on the inference of observational data.

Along the way, data also became controlled and restricted. Only certain persons or classes were permitted privileged data. As Rutger Bregman et al point out in Humankind: A Hopeful History, this had the twin benefits of concentrating power, and providing the element of surprise in threat mitigation. A longstanding agency became a formal profession of spies and secrets, to which only an inner leadership circle was privy. The leader cum sovereign or state, alone, had dominion over these privileged data at pain of death.

Lyrics from Little Shop of Horrors

Despite the advent of the free press, privileged data remained an essential asset, and the exclusive domain, of the sovereign power. Until it did not. In 1953, Arthur C Clarke, In Childhoods End, predicted the creation of a personal computing device that one would carry around and would store all of ones data and important information. The rise of personal computing, particularly the iPhone, the internet and the creation of the worldwide web not only made this so, it took things to a whole new level. Big Tech, including Apple and MS, social media, media conglomerates, online retailers (Amazon) and others began to concentrate vast amounts of data that were never before concentrated either in such multi-national swathes or of such multi-sectoral nature.

Unlike the relatively static, limited and periodically updated data obtained by governments (eg census, tax revenue), these data were dynamic and updated in realtime. As Brad Smith argues, cloud computing then concentrated these data at a scale and level of detail never before achieved in human history, with redundancy. These were big data.

More importantly, these data permitted analytic disciplines, like social mapping and engineering, at global scale. Indeed, some argue that governments can now apply machine learning algorithms to such data to identify vulnerabilities and threats to both themselves and their rivals, and that this underlies the driving force behind state sponsored hacks on big data stores. This could elevate prediction of threats and outcomes to a level of precision that not even the Mentats of Frank Herberts Dune could rival. How could any government resist such power?

Gollum, The Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkien

If knowledge is power (scientia potentia est), as Thomas Hobbes penned in Leviathan in 1668, then the possessor of such data as these cloud sources contain could possess ultimate power, and if harnessed and controlled, would perhaps possess the one power to rule them all. However, there is one wrinkle. The state does not own these data; they are in the servers of separate private sector enterprises. Irrespective of the style of government, this presents an irresistible target, if for no other reason than competition with other states, and the disadvantage that might accrue if those states get it first.

For liberal democracies, and otherwise open societies, there are the checks and balances, not only between branches of government, but between the distinct domains of the public sector and the free market in which the private sector resides, as well as the balancing test, if civil order is to be preserved as the product of representative government, between sovereign security and public safety vs individual liberty and privacy. For more authoritarian states, the calculus may be simpler, but no less fraught with peril and the threat of delegitimacy and overthrow, as we have seen when populations conclude that authoritarian governments have over-reached or over-stayed.

The challenge is how to gain access to personal data, freely granted to the private sector, without alarming the public and creating a backlash. Channelling Friedrich Nietzsche, a hero requires a villain. A common enemy is a socially mobilizing and unifying factor, even more so if that villain is opposed to law enforcement, the rule of law, the nation, the people or even common decency and common sense. Governments of every stripe have been adroit at crafting narratives that create villains foreign and domestic, whether individuals, populations and smaller groups, corporations or industries, not to mention other governments.

One approach is to identify a grievance, often around something costly, obligatory and shared, like fees for access to goods and services, and then link that grievance to an identified enemy. Another is to identify a shared harm, such as criminal or terrorist acts, (child pornography, human trafficking, mass killings) and identify an entity as an obstruction to preventing them. Repeat that narrative; loudly and often. Evidence is optional, but circumstantial evidence will suffice.

Once the public accepts the narrative as fact, then make a show of intervening on behalf of the people. Identify the targeted object (in this case, access to user data) as what will relieve their suffering and make them safe. Repeat this until it is echoed in the press and by the common folk. If the entity is too powerful to compel, then weaken it. Most often, its most vulnerable spot will be its revenue stream. If the law is an impediment, rescue the people by changing the law on their behalf. Make sure they understand that by diminishing that revenue stream, the people will benefit (lower costs who doesnt love that?). This tack will almost invariably precipitate back channel discussions, concessions and compromises with said entity.

Then, in public view, and with the full-throated support of the people, wrest control of the objective, in this case, access to the peoples data, for the good of the people. Graciously bow to public applause. Rinse, and repeat.

Mind you, a government need not seize possession of the data, indeed smart governments will not. Rather, they only require access to it as needed, on their terms, whether or not publicly disclosed.

Next: Past Is Prologue, Again

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Clash of the Titans: Government vs. Big Tech Over Your Data - The Mac Observer

Hacker breaking into corporate data(gorodenkoff/Getty Images)

President Joe Biden recently met with Big Tech executives to discuss how to improve cybersecurity after recent cyberattacks in which government software contractor Solarwinds and oil pipeline Colonial Pipeline were targeted. Leading tech corporations, including IBM, Google, and Amazon, will all try to improve cybersecurity by investing in the training of personnel in this field and upgrading their respective encryption and security systems. Microsoft has also committed to investing $150 million in upgrades for cybersecurity systems of government agencies. Big Tech may not always do the right thing, but these plans to enhance cybersecurity are certainly something that we can all stand behind.

In recent years, as the Internet has become increasingly influential and indispensable, cybersecurity has, correspondingly, become an increasingly prominent threat to not only citizens privacy but also to national security. Former national-security adviser John Bolton explained the significance of cybersecurity to national defense in a recent National Review article, in which he characterized threats from cyberspace as a multiplicity of hidden, ever-changing threats. A recent report by the Heritage Foundation raised concern over espionage, trading of secrets, and the disruption of military commands and communication potentially being conducted in the cyber domain.

The effective regulation of cyberspace, a relatively new front for modern warfare characterized by its elusiveness and lack of boundaries, is sometimes challenging. Laxness in cybersecurity, however, has often led to catastrophic consequences. For instance, the WannaCry Ransomware Cyber Attack in 2017, in which files in affected computer systems were locked until ransom was paid for their decryption, affected approximately 200,000 computers in 150 countries and led to enormous financial costs. Victims of the cyber-extortion scheme included entities from government agencies such as the English National Health Service to major international corporates such as Boeing.

It is well established that both the state and leading tech corporations have a legitimate interest in enhancing cybersecurity. The government is responsible for engaging in national defense in the cyber domain and tech corporations are obligated to protect the privacy of their users, whose personal information is often entrusted to them.

Big Techs plans to cooperate with the government to improve cybersecurity through financial investments appears to be promising. While it may be difficult to predict the effectiveness of such investments, the fact that Big Tech and the government are placing the enhancement of cybersecurity close to the top of their agenda and are committing to coordinated efforts is good news. Big Tech, with its financial prowess derived from the sheer size of the industry, and a unique relationship with the use of cyberspace, is uniquely positioned to materially contribute to state-led efforts to secure cyberspace. Furthermore, investing in education on cybersecurity of employees may also be useful in raising awareness and amplifying the industrys collective concern over capacity to combat cyberattacks in the long run.

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Big Tech Is Doing the Right Thing on Cybersecurity - National Review

Heard of the metaverse lately? It has been hard not to.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg mentioned techs latest buzzword 16 times on his companys most recent earnings call last month. The future of Facebook, he said, is a metaversea virtual environment where you can be physically present to hang out, play games, work and create.

But he didnt coin the term. Tech companies ranging from Intel Corp. to Unity Software talked up the metaverse last year. And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discussed the the enterprise metaverse in his companys earnings release last montha day before Facebooks call.

Nvidia has been an especially loud proponent of the idea. Last year, the company launched a platform called Omniverse for connecting 3-D worlds into a shared virtual universe. Chief Executive Jensen Huang used the companys largest annual conference in October to publicly credit Neal Stephensons 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash as the original inspiration for the concept of a virtual reality successor to the Internet, noting the metaverse is coming.

Never mind that, in an interview for a 2017 article about his novel, Mr. Stephenson told Vanity Fair he was just making sht up. Decades after the book was published, technologys leaders are taking his ideas more seriously than ever.

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Big Tech Wants You to Live in a Virtual World. Prepare for Real Problems. - The Wall Street Journal