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

Tue May 8 00:21:40 PDT 2012

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

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