How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism", is a recent "anti-monopoly pamphlet" by Cory Doctorow, 2020, 103 pages, 27k words. It is a quick, easy read.

I am a big admirer of Doctorow. He seems to be a really hardworking guy. In addition to his fiction and non-fiction writing, he has been very active in the EFF and a champion of "right to repair". I just recently found his blog, "Pluralistic", which amazingly has I'd guess an average of 2 articles/day - and they are well-thought-out, well-written, and interesting.

I got to meet Doctorow in maybe 2012-13, when he and Charlie Stross were promoting "Rapture of the Nerds" (released September, 2012), at Joseph-Beth Bookstore in Lexington. I told him that he was a bard of the revolution, and to please keep it up. He totally has not disappointed.

In his blog, he describes this book as "an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution." "Surveillance capitalism" is easy to spot: think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, aka Big Tech.

I tweeted my initial reaction to Doctorow's solution:

This is indeed Doctorow's solution: break up the monopolies, bust the trusts, make Teddy Roosevelt proud.

Why are the online surveillance companies bad? Why are they evil? Well, for starters, they allow Nazis to thrive & prosper. Even when they try to police the content on their platforms, Nazis can add new stuff as fast as Big Tech can take it down.

1 thing Doctorow contends that I thought was really interesting: that Big Tech vastly exaggerates the effectivity of their targetted ads.

Big Tech lies about just about everything, including how well its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work.

Doctorow also contends that, by and large, the vast amounts of data collected by Big Tech are worthless. Location-based data is indeed highly useful (you're right out front, come in our store & buy something), but it has a very short lifespan (oops, you're no longer in front of our store). Seems to me, tho, that collating this data into 2nd order data (this person is often in front of our store between 12 & 2 pm on weekdays) would be less time sensitive. But Doctorow contends that, once the Big Tech companies are broken up, their mountains of data will quickly become worthless.

Whatever happened to antitrust? When was the last time a corporate merger was shot down as being monopolistic?

It seems like, increasingly, you can identify people who basically have been incredibly successful at fucking the rest of us under the radar. Like the Koch Brothers, who, via their minion Mitch McConnell, have succeeded in filling the Supreme Court with Federalist Society indoctrinated judges. If originalism is not lame, I do not know what is. I mean, of course, absolutely nothing meaningful has changed in the world since the US constitution was written [sarcasm]. I'm sure that the slave-owing Founding Fathers all treated their slaves very humanely.

Doctorow introduces us to Robert Bork: The Man Who Destroyed Antitrust. Originally, antitrust legislation defined monopolies as bad - period. Bork's book "The Antitrust Paradox", published in 1978, said, "No, no, no, monopolies are only bad if they adversely affect consumers". In the 4 decades since then, this has become the accepted approach.

But, come on - hire expensive PR firms and lawyers and EVERY merger can be made to look advantageous to consumers. Of course in practice, if it doesn't work out, what happens? Nothing. For the last few decades, I've been asking "Why does the FTC or the SEC not break up {$monopolist}'s monopoly?" Well, now I know the answer. Robert Bork, fucking us from beyond the grave. Well, at least the son of a bitch is dead, as of 2012. He's probably gloating his ass off as he burns in hell.

Doctorow dismisses the argument that we should own and commoditize our own data.

It’s tempting to reach for the property hammer when Big Tech treats your information like a nail—not least because Big Tech are such prolific abusers of property hammers when it comes to their information. But this is a mistake. If we allow markets to dictate the use of our information, then we’ll find that we’re sellers in a buyers’ market where the Big Tech monopolies set a price for our data that is so low as to be insignificant or, more likely, set at a nonnegotiable price of zero in a click-through agreement that you don’t have the opportunity to modify.

Doctorow discusses the roots of current online Nazism, concluding:

Inequality creates the conditions for both conspiracies and violent racist ideologies, and then surveillance capitalism lets opportunists target the fearful and the conspiracy-minded.

...

Antitrust was neutered as a key part of the project to make the wealthy wealthier, and that project has worked. The vast majority of people on Earth have a negative net worth, and even the dwindling middle class is in a precarious state, undersaved for retirement, underinsured for medical disasters, and undersecured against climate and technology shocks.

I am so pleased and hopeful that our new president Uncle Joe appears to be trying to address inequality - or at least trying to make life easier for the working man or particularly woman via things like universal preschool and child care. Hopefully this can restore some faith in government and keep people from giving credence to the lies of wannabe dictators like our prior president. But Doctorow points out that this will be a slow process.

Wouldn't be great to once again have trustbusters, righteously smiting the monopolists!

But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies’ all-powerful grip on our society.

Ha ha, I was thinking about removing the f-bombs above, but I don't think I will. I seem to be following Doctorow's lead:

“Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, fuck that guy.” In other words, the problem with monopolies is monopolism — the concentration of power into too few hands, which erodes our right to self-determination.

In the end, it all flows from 1 wellspring: capitalism.

As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not piss off the monopolists.

Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule begets surveillance.

Doctorow concludes by getting back in touch with his inner geek, and stressing the importance in today's automated and connected world of getting the tech right.

I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize because it has “economies of scale” or some other nebulous feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe—and doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our civilization, our species, and our planet.

Please read this book. Kobo says it only takes 1-2 hours. I have been watching a lot of movies lately, each about the same time investment as this, reading this book is definitely time better spent.