December 4, 2013
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“No one knows who will live in this cage in the future,
or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new
prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and
ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a
sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the fast stage of this
cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without
spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has
attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’”
—Max Weber, 1905
On
November 12 Facebook, Inc. filed its 178th patent application for a
consumer profiling technique the company calls “inferring household
income for users of a social networking system.”
“The amount of
information gathered from users,” explain Facebook programmers Justin
Voskuhl and Ramesh Vyaghrapuri in their patent application, “is
staggering — information describing recent moves to a new city,
graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like.” Facebook and
other so-called tech companies have been warehousing all of this
information since their respective inceptions. In Facebook’s case, its
data vault includes information posted as early as 2004, when the site
first went live. Now in a single month the amount of information forever
recorded by Facebook —dinner plans, vacation destinations, emotional
states, sexual activity, political views, etc.— far surpasses what was
recorded during the company’s first several years of operation. And
while no one outside of the company knows for certain, it is believed
that Facebook has amassed one of the widest and deepest databases in
history. Facebook has over 1,189,000,000 “monthly active users” around
the world as of October 2013, providing considerable width of data. And
Facebook has stored away trillions and trillions of missives and images,
and logged other data about the lives of this billion plus statistical
sample of humanity. Adjusting for bogus or duplicate accounts it all
adds up to about 1/7th of humanity from which some kind of data has been
recorded.
According to Facebook’s programmers like Voskuhl and
Vyaghrapuri, of all the clever uses they have already applied this pile
of data toward, Facebook has so far “lacked tools to synthesize this
information about users for targeting advertisements based on their
perceived income.” Now they have such a tool thanks to the retention and
analysis of variable the company’s positivist specialists believe are
correlated with income levels.
They’ll have many more tools within
the next year to run similar predictions. Indeed, Facebook, Google,
Yahoo, Twitter, and the hundreds of smaller tech lesser-known tech firms
that now control the main portals of social, economic, and political
life on the web (which is now to say everywhere as all economic and much
social activity is made cyber) are only getting started. The Big Data
analytics revolutions has barely begun, and these firms are just
beginning to tinker with rational-instrumental methods of predicting and
manipulating human behavior.
There are few, if any, government
regulations restricting their imaginations at this point. Indeed, the
U.S. President himself is a true believer in Big Data; the brain of
Obama’s election team was a now famous “cave” filled with young Ivy
League men (and a few women) sucking up electioneering information and
crunching demographic and consumer data to target individual voters with
appeals timed to maximize the probability of a vote for the new Big
Blue, not IBM, but the Democratic Party’s candidate of “Hope” and
“Change.” The halls of power are enraptured by the potential of
rational-instrumental methods paired with unprecedented access to data
that describes the social lives of hundreds of millions.
Facebook’s
intellectual property portfolio reads like cliff notes summarizing the
aspirations of all corporations in capitalist modernity; to optimize
efficiency in order to maximize profits and reduce or externalize risk.
Unlike most other corporations, and unlike previous phases in the
development of rational bureaucracies, Facebook and its tech peers have
accumulated never before seen quantities of information about
individuals and groups. Recent breakthroughs in networked computing make
analysis of these gigantic data sets fast and cheap. Facebook’s patent
holdings are just a taste of what’s arriving here and now.
The way
you type, the rate, common mistakes, intervals between certain
characters, is all unique, like your fingerprint, and there are already
cyber robots that can identify you as you peck away at keys. Facebook
has even patented methods of individual identification with obviously
cybernetic overtones, where the machine becomes an appendage of the
person. U.S. Patents 8,306,256, 8,472,662, and 8,503,718, all filed
within the last year, allow Facebook’s web robots to identify a user
based on the unique pixelation and other characteristics of their
smartphone’s camera. Identification of the subject is the first step
toward building a useful data set to file among the billion or so other
user logs. Then comes analysis, then prediction, then efforts to
influence a parting of money.
Many Facebook patents pertain to
advertising techniques that are designed and targeted, and continuously
redesigned with ever-finer calibrations by robot programs, to be
absorbed by the gazes of individuals as they scroll and swipe across
their Facebook feeds, or on third party web sites.
Speaking of
feeds, U.S. Patent 8,352,859, Facebook’s system for “Dynamically
providing a feed of stories about a user of a social networking system”
is used by the company to organize the constantly updated posts and
activities inputted by a user’s “friends.” Of course embedded in this
system are means of inserting advertisements. According to Facebook’s
programmers, a user’s feeds are frequently injected with “a depiction of
a product, a depiction of a logo, a display of a trademark, an
inducement to buy a product, an inducement to buy a service, an
inducement to invest, an offer for sale, a product description, trade
promotion, a survey, a political message, an opinion, a public service
announcement, news, a religious message, educational information, a
coupon, entertainment, a file of data, an article, a book, a picture,
travel information, and the like.” That’s a long list for sure, but what
gets injected is more often than not whatever will boost revenues for
Facebook.
The advantage here, according to Facebook, is that
“rather than having to initiate calls or emails to learn news of another
user, a user of a social networking website may passively receive
alerts to new postings by other users.” The web robot knows best. Sit
back and relax and let sociality wash over you, passively. This is
merely one of Facebook’s many “systems for tailoring connections between
various users” so that these connections ripple with ads uncannily
resonant with desires and needs revealed in the quietly observed flow of
e-mails, texts, images, and clicks captured forever in dark
inaccessible servers of Facebook, Google and the like. These
communications services are free in order to control the freedom of data
that might otherwise crash about randomly, generating few opportunities
for sales.
Where this fails Facebook ratchets up the probability
of influencing the user to behave as a predictable consumer. “Targeted
advertisements often fail to earn a user’s trust in the advertised
product,” explain Facebook’s programmers in U.S. Patent 8,527,344, filed
in September of this year. “For example, the user may be skeptical of
the claims made by the advertisement. Thus, targeted advertisements may
not be very effective in selling an advertised product.” Facebook’s
computer programmers who now profess mastery over sociological forces
add that even celebrity endorsements are viewed with skepticism by the
savvy citizen of the modulated Internet. They’re probably right.
Facebook’s
solution is to mobilize its users as trusted advertisers in their own
right. “Unlike advertisements, most users seek and read content
generated by their friends within the social networking system; thus,”
concludes Facebook’s mathematicians of human inducement, “advertisements
generated by a friend of the user are more likely to catch the
attention of the user, increasing the effectiveness of the
advertisement.” That Facebook’s current So-And-So-likes-BrandX ads are
often so clumsy and ineffective does not negate the qualitative shift in
this model of advertising and the possibilities of un-freedom it
evokes.
Forget iPhones and applications, the tech industry’s core
consumer product is now advertising. Their essential practice is mass
surveillance conducted in real time through continuous and multiple
sensors that pass, for most people, entirely unnoticed. The autonomy and
unpredictability of the individual —in Facebook’s language the
individual is the “user”— is their fundamental business problem.
Reducing autonomy via surveillance and predictive algorithms that can
placate existing desires, and even stimulate and mold new desires is the
tech industry’s reason for being. Selling their capacious surveillance
and consumer stimulus capabilities to the highest bidder is the ultimate
end.
Sounds too dystopian? Perhaps, and this is by no means the
world we live in, not yet. It is, however, a tendency rooted in the tech
economy. The advent of mobile, hand-held, wirelessly networked
computers, called “smartphones,” is still so new that the technology,
and its services feel like a parallel universe, a new layer of existence
added upon our existing social relationships, business activities, and
political affiliations. In many ways it feels liberating and often
playful. Our devices can map geographic routes, identify places and
things, provide information about almost anything in real time, respond
to our voices, and replace our wallets. Who hasn’t consulted “Dr.
Google” to answer a pressing question? Everyone and everything is
seemingly within reach and there is a kind of freedom to this utility.
Most
of Facebook’s “users” have only been registered on the web site since
2010, and so the quintessential social network feels new and fun, and
although perhaps fraught with some privacy concerns, it does not
altogether fell like a threat to the autonomy of the individual. To say
it is, is a cliche sci-fi nightmare narrative of tech-bureaucracy, and
we all tell one another that the reality is more complex.
Privacy
continues, however, too be too narrowly conceptualized as a liberal
right against incursions of government, and while the tech companies
have certainly been involved in a good deal of old-fashioned mass
surveillance for the sake of our federal Big Brother, there’s another
means of dissolving privacy that is more fundamental to the goals of the
tech companies and more threatening to social creativity and political
freedom.
Georgetown University law professor Julie Cohen notes
that pervasive surveillance is inimical to the spaces of privacy that
are required for liberal democracy, but she adds importantly, that the
surveillance and advertising strategies of the tech industry goes
further.
“A society that permits the unchecked ascendancy of
surveillance infrastructures, which dampen and modulate behavioral
variability, cannot hope to maintain a vibrant tradition of cultural and
technical innovation,” writes Cohen in a forthcoming Harvard Law Review
article.
“Modulation” is Cohen’s term for the tech industry’s
practice of using algorithms and other logical machine operations to
mine an individual’s data so as to continuously personalize information
streams. Facebook’s patents are largely techniques of modulation, as are
Google’s and the rest of the industry leaders. Facebook conducts
meticulous surveillance on users, collects their data, tracks their
movements on the web, and feeds the individual specific content that is
determined to best resonate with their desires, behaviors, and predicted
future movements. The point is to perfect the form and function of the
rational-instrumental bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber: to constantly
ratchet up efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. If
they succeed in their own terms, the tech companies stand to create a
feedback loop made perfectly to fit each an every one of us, an
increasingly closed systems of personal development in which the great
algorithms in the cloud endlessly tailor the psychological and social
inputs of humans who lose the gift of randomness and irrationality.
“It
is modulation, not privacy, that poses the greater threat to innovative
practice,” explains Cohen. “Regimes of pervasively distributed
surveillance and modulation seek to mold individual preferences and
behavior in ways that reduce the serendipity and the freedom to tinker
on which innovation thrives.” Cohen has pointed out the obvious irony
here, not that it’s easy to miss; the tech industry is uncritically
labeled America’s hothouse of innovation, but it may in fact be killing
innovation by disenchanting the world and locking inspiration in an
cage.
If there were limits to the reach of the tech industry’s
surveillance and stimuli strategies it would indeed be less worrisome.
Only parts of our lives would be subject to this modulation, and it
could therefore benefit us. But the industry aspires to totalitarian
visions in which universal data sets are constantly mobilized to
transform an individual’s interface with society, family, the economy,
and other institutions. The tech industry’s luminaries are clear in
their desire to observe and log everything, and use every “data point”
to establish optimum efficiency in life as the pursuit of consumer
happiness. Consumer happiness is, in turn, a step toward the rational
pursuit of maximum corporate profit. We are told that the “Internet of
things” is arriving, that soon every object will have embedded within it
a computer that is networked to the sublime cloud, and that the
physical environment will be made “smart” through the same strategy of
modulation so that we might be made free not just in cyberspace, but
also in the meatspace.
Whereas the Internet of the late 1990s
matured as an archipelago of innumerable disjointed and disconnected web
sites and databases, today’s Internet is gripped by a handful of giant
companies that observe much of the traffic and communications, and which
deliver much of the information from an Android phone or laptop
computer, to distant servers, and back. The future Internet being built
by the tech giants —putting aside the Internet of things for the moment—
is already well into its beta testing phase. It’s a seamlessly
integrated quilt of web sites and apps that all absorb “user” data,
everything from clicks and keywords to biometric voice identification
and geolocation.
United States Patent 8,572,174, another of
Facebook’s recent inventions, allows the company to personalize a web
page outside of Facebook’s own system with content from Facebook’s
databases. Facebook is selling what the company calls its “rich set of
social information” to third party web sites in order to “provide
personalized content for their users based on social information about
those users that is maintained by, or otherwise accessible to, the
social networking system.” Facebook’s users generated this rich social
information, worth many billions of dollars as recent quarterly earnings
of the company attest.
In this way the entire Internet becomes
Facebook. The totalitarian ambition here is obvious, and it can be read
in the securities filings, patent applications, and other non-sanitized
business documents crafted by the tech industry for the financial
analysts who supply the capital for further so-called innovation.
Everywhere you go on the web, with your phone or tablet, you’re a
“user,” and your social network data will be mined every second by every
application, site, and service to “enhance your experience,” as
Facebook and others say. The tech industry’s leaders aim to expand this
into the physical world, creating modulated advertising and
environmental experiences as cameras and sensors track our movements.
Facebook
and the rest of the tech industry fear autonomy and unpredictability.
The ultimate expression of these irrational variables that cannot be
mined with algorithmic methods is absence from the networks of
surveillance in which data is collected.
One of Facebook’s
preventative measures is United States Patent 8,560,962, “promoting
participation of low-activity users in social networking system.” This
novel invention devised by programmers in Facebook’s Palo Alto and San
Francisco offices involves a “process of inducing interactions,” that
are meant to maximize the amount of “user-generated content” on Facebook
by getting lapsed users to return, and stimulating all users to produce
more and more data. User generated content is, after all, worth
billions. Think twice before you hit “like” next time, or tap that
conspicuously placed “share” button; a machine likely put that content
and interaction before your eyes after a logical operation determined it
to have the highest probability of tempting you to add to the data
stream, thereby increasing corporate revenues.
Facebook’s patents
on techniques of modulating “user” behavior are few compared to the real
giants of the tech industry’s surveillance and influence agenda.
Amazon, Microsoft, and of course Google hold some of the most
fundamental patents using personal data to attempt to shape an
individual’s behavior into predictable consumptive patterns. Smaller
specialized firms like Choicestream and Gist Communications have filed
dozens more applications for modulation techniques. The rate of this
so-called innovation is rapidly telescoping.
Perhaps we do know
who will live in the iron cage. It might very well be a cage made of our
own user generated content, paradoxically ushering in a new era of
possibilities in shopping convenience and the delivery of satisfactory
experiences even while it eradicates many degrees of chance, and pain,
and struggle (the motive forces of human progress) in a robot-powered
quest to have us construct identities and relationships that yield to
prediction and computer-generated suggestion. Defense of individual
privacy and autonomy today is rightly motivated by the reach of an
Orwellian security state (the NSA, FBI, CIA). This surveillance changes
our behavior by chilling us, by telling us we are always being watched
by authority. Authority thereby represses in us whatever might happen to
be defined as “crime,” or any anti-social behavior at the moment. But
what about the surveillance that does not seek to repress us, the
watching computer eyes and ears that instead hope to stimulate a
particular set of monetized behaviors in us with the intimate knowledge
gained from our every online utterance, even our facial expressions and
finger movements?
Darwin Bond-Graham, a contributing editor to
CounterPunch, is a sociologist and author who lives and works in
Oakland, CA. His essay on economic inequality in the “new” California
economy appears in the
July issue of CounterPunch magazine. He is a contributor to
Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion
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