<nettime> Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>]

Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12


I gave a talk with Jacob Applebaum at last week's Re:publica conference 
in Berlin.

It seems it had fallen to us to break a little bad news. Here it is.

- We are not progressing from a primitive era of centralized social 
media to an emerging era of decentralized social media, the reverse is 
happening.

- Surveillance and control of users is not some sort of unintended 
consequence of social media platforms, it is the reason they exist.

- Privacy is not simply a consumer choice, it is a matter of power and 
privilege.

Earlier at Re:publica, Eben Moglen, the brilliant and tireless legal 
council of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the FreedomBox 
Foundation, gave a characteristically excellent speech.

However, in his enthusiasm, he makes makes a claim that seems very 
wrong.

Moglen, claims that Facebook's days as a dominant platform are 
numbered, because we will soon have decentralized social platforms, 
based on projects such as FreedomBox, users will operate their own 
federated platforms and form collective social platforms based on their 
own hardware, retain control of their own data, etc.

I can understand and share Moglen's enthusiasm for such a vision, 
however this is not the observable history of our communications 
platforms, not the obvious direction they seem to be headed, and there 
is no clear reason to believe this will change.

The trajectory that Moglen is using has centralized social media as the 
starting point and distributed social media as the place we are moving 
toward. But in actual fact, distributed social media is where we 
started, and centralized platforms are where we have arrived.

The Internet is a distributed social media platform. The classic 
internet platforms that existed before the commercialization of the web 
provided all the features of modern social media monopolies.

Platforms like Usenet, Email, IRC and Finger allowed us to do 
everything we do now with Facebook and friends. We could post status 
updates, share pictures, send messages, etc. Yet, these platforms have 
been more or less abandoned. So the question we need to address is not 
so much how we can invent a distributed social platform, but how and why 
we started from a fully distributed social platform and replaced it with 
centralized social media monopolies.

The answer is quite simple. The early internet was not significantly 
capitalist funded, the change in application topology came along with 
commercialization, and it is a consequence of the business models 
required by capitalist investors to capture profit.

The business model of social media platforms is surveillance and 
behavioral control. The internet's original protocols and architecture 
made surveillance and behavioral control more difficult. Once capital 
became the dominant source of financing it directed investment toward 
centralized platforms, which are better at providing such surveillance 
and control, the original platforms were starved of financing. The 
centralized platforms grew and the decentralized platforms submerged 
beneath the rising tides of the capitalist web.

This is nothing new. This was the same business model that capital 
devised for media in general, such as network television. The customer 
of network television is not the viewer, rather the viewer is the 
product, the "audience commodity." The real customer is the advertisers 
and lobby groups that want to control this audience.

Network Television didn't provide the surveillance part, so advertisers 
needed to employ market research and ratings firms such as Neielson for 
that bit. This was a major advantage of social media, richer data from 
better surveillance allowed for more effective behavioral control than 
ever before possible, using tracking, targeting, machine learning, 
behavioral retargeting, among many techniques made possible by the deep 
pool of data companies like Facebook and Google have available.

This is not a choice that capitalist made, this is the only way that 
profit-driven organizations can provide a public good like a 
communication platform. Capitalist investors must capture profit or lose 
their capital. If their platforms can not capture profit, they vanish.

So, if capitalism will not fund free, federated social platforms, what 
will? For Moglen's optimistic trajectory to pan out, this implies that 
funds can come from the public sector, or from volunteers/donators etc? 
But if these sectors where capable of turning the tide on social media 
monopolies, wouldn't they have already done so? After all, the internet 
started out as a decentralized platform, so it's not like they had to 
play catch-up, they had a significant head start. Yet, you could fill 
many a curio case with technologies dreamed up and abandoned because 
they where unable to be sustained without financing.
http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/
Give the continuous march of neoliberal public sector retrenchment, the 
austerity craze and the ever increasing precariousness of most 
communities, it seems unlikely the public or voluntary sectors will be 
the source of such a dramatic turnaround. Given the general tendency of 
capitalist economies toward accumulation and consolidation, such a 
turnaround seems even less likely.

Thus, there is no real reason to believe Moglen's trajectory will come 
about. The obstacle to decentralized social media is not that it has not 
been invented, but the profit-motive itself. Thus to reverse this 
trajectory back towards decentralization, requires not so much technical 
initiative, but political struggle.

So long as we maintain the social choice to provision our communication 
systems according to the profit motive,  we will only get communications 
platforms that allow for the capture of profit. Free, open systems, that 
neither surveil, nor control, nor exclude, will not be funded, as they 
do not provide the mechanisms required to capture profit.

Facebook is worth billions precisely because of it's capacity for 
surveillance and control. Same with Google.

Thus, like the struggle for other public goods, like education, child 
care, and health care, free communication platforms for the masses can 
only come from collective political struggle to achieve such platforms.

In the meantime, we have many clever and dedicated people contributing 
to inventing alternative platforms, and these platforms can be very 
important and worthwhile for the minority that will ever use them, but 
we do not have the social will nor capacity to bring these platforms to 
the masses, and given the dominance of capital in our society, it's not 
clear where such capacity will come from.

As surveillance and control is enforced by the powerful interests of 
capital, privacy and autonomy become a question of power and privilege, 
not just consumer choice.

It's not simply a question of choosing to use certain platforms over 
others, it's not a question of openness and visibility being the new way 
people live in a networked society. Rather it's a fact that our 
platforms are financed for the purpose of watching people and pushing 
them to behave in ways that benefit the operators of the platform and 
their real customers, the advertisers, and the industrial and political 
lobbies. The platform exists to shape society according to the interests 
of these advertisers and lobbies.

As such, how coercive these platforms are largely depend on the degree 
to which your behaviour is aligned with the platform-operators' 
profit-driven objectives, and thus privacy and autonomy is not just a 
feature any given platforms my or may not offer, but determine the 
possibility of resistance, determine our ability to work against 
powerful interests' efforts to shape society in ways we disagree with. 
As Jake said at our talk "We can't have post-privacy until we are 
post-privilege"http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/

Eliminating privilege is a political struggle, not a technical one.


I'll be at Stammtisch as usual around 9pm, please come by, anybody 
still hanging around after #rp12 is more than welcome to join us. You 
can find us here: http://bit.ly/buchhandlung


A sharable version of this text can be found here:

http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/

--
Dmytri Kleiner
Venture Communist





#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org