Data Land Grab

FB-vs-Google

‘Good for the world’? Facebook emails reveal what really drives the site

As we can read from this article and Facebook’s internal management debates, Web 2.0 (of which the GAFA companies are the archetypes) is built on a data land grab. It’s rather similar to the actual land grab that the European powers battled over for the New World, then with the colonization of Africa and Asia.

Data is now a valuable resource that has been priced up there with land and capital. Naturally, the tech oligopolies and their startup wannabes all want to grab as much as possible. And who are they grabbing it from? The network users of course.

Web 3.0 is all about democratizing the value and monetization of personal networked data. It’s about decentralized ownership and control, much like the desire to own and control the fruits of one’s labor that ended slavery. Web 3.0 is the future, because Web 2.0 is unsustainable.

 

Data Privacy

facebook lobby

Good, thorough, and l-o-o-o-o-ng article on data privacy issues, legislation, and network value. From the NYT Magazine. Read about what’s being done to you behind closed doors…

The Unlikely Activists Who Took On Silicon Valley — and Won

Some excerpts:

Almost by accident, though, Mactaggart had thrust himself into the greatest resource grab of the 21st century. To Silicon Valley, personal information had become a kind of limitless natural deposit, formed in the digital ether by ordinary people as they browsed, used apps and messaged their friends. Like the oil barons before them, they had collected and refined that resource to build some of the most valuable companies in the world, including Facebook and Google, an emerging duopoly that today controls more than half of the worldwide market in online advertising. But the entire business model — what the philosopher and business theorist Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” — rests on untrammeled access to your personal data. The tech industry didn’t want to give up its powers of surveillance. It wanted to entrench them. And as Mactaggart would soon learn, Silicon Valley almost always got what it wanted.

Through the Obama years, the tech industry enjoyed extraordinary cachet in Washington, not only among Republicans but also among Democrats. Partnering with Silicon Valley allowed Democrats to position themselves as pro-business and forward-thinking. The tech industry was both an American economic success story and a political ally to Democrats on issues like immigration. Google enjoyed particularly close ties to the Obama administration: Dozens of Google alumni would serve in the White House or elsewhere in the administration, and by one estimate Google representatives visited the White House an average of about once a week.

Mactaggart … faced an American political establishment that saw the key to its future in companies like Google and Facebook — not because of whom they supported but because of what they did. The surveillance capitalists didn’t just sell more deodorant; they had built one of the most powerful tools ever invented for winning elections. Roughly the same suite of technologies helped elect Obama, a pragmatic liberal who promised racial progress and a benevolent globalism, and Trump, a strident nationalist who adeptly employs social media to stoke racial panic and has set out to demolish the American-led world order.

In the end, not a single lawmaker in either chamber voted against the compromise.

Political power is a malleable thing, … an elaborate calculation of artifice and argument, votes and money. People and institutions — in politics, in Silicon Valley — can seem all-powerful right up to the moment they are not. And sometimes, … a thing that can’t possibly happen suddenly becomes a thing that cannot be stopped.

The promise of blockchain is to disrupt this Monopoly game.

The Real Scandal?

likenolike

The Real Scandal Isn’t What Cambridge Analytica Did

It’s what Facebook made possible.

A couple of excerpts:

Sinister as it sounds, “psychographic” targeting—advertising to people based on information about their attitudes, interests, and personality traits—is an imprecise science at best and “snake oil” at worst.

….

If you think of that data, and the ads, as a relatively small price to pay for the privilege of seamless connection to everyone you know and care about, then Facebook looks like the wildly successful, path-breaking company that made it all possible. But if you start to think of the bargain as Faustian—with hidden long-term costs that overshadow the obvious benefits—then that would make Facebook the devil.

What this scandal did, then, was make the grand bargain of the social web look a little more Faustian than it did before.

From that perspective, the real scandal is that this wasn’t a data breach or some egregious isolated error on Facebook’s part. What Cambridge Analytica did was, in many ways, what Facebook was optimized for—collating personal information about vast numbers of people in handy packets that could then be used to try to sell them something.

Yes, the real scandal is that most of us are giving away real value that we need to survive in the digital economy.