Searching for "democracy"

The monopoly of the tech giants

Here’s the real danger that Facebook, Google, and the other tech monopolies pose to our society

Jamie Bartlett, October 1, 2018, https://blog.ed.ted.com/2018/10/01/heres-the-real-danger-that-facebook-google-and-the-other-tech-monopolies-pose-to-our-society/

distributed computing + power encryption = the future of Internet

the Dark Net is going mainstream, liberty, freedom, democracy; neither entirely dark, not entirely light, both things

The threat that tech monopolies pose to democracies is about more than the prices they charge: it’s the concentration of power, data and control over the public space — and their ability to wield this power over a growing number of economic activities, especially in the infrastructure and technologies of the future. The following companies operate as either monopolies or oligopolies in their respective fields: Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Spotify. Integrated into everything, everywhere, their technology will blanket the world.

cultural hegemony.” That is, where domination can be achieved through controlling the ideas and assumptions available to the public. The idea, associated with philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci

In 1995, left-wing academics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron detailed the philosophy and ideas of the new tech wunderkinds, christening it “The Californian Ideology.” This ideology represented a fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco and entrepreneurial free market zeal.

All you needed to get to utopia was a belief in “disruption,” the idea that progress is achieved through smashing up old industries and institutions and replacing them with something new and digital.

Money and ideas in Silicon Valley have a very complicated relationship. Silicon Valley runs according to a Faustian pact: money in exchange for world-changing ideas.

Over the years, the big tech firms have very carefully cultivated the Californian Ideology. Even though they are massive multi-billion-dollar corporations with huge PR teams, they pitch themselves as anti-establishment.The worse these companies behave and the richer they become, the more they spend on looking cool and talking about fairness and community.

And to whom do we look in order to solve our collective social problems? It’s no longer the state, but the modern tech-geek superhero.

Total victory for the monopoly is not over economics or politics. It’s over assumptions, ideas and possible futures.

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more on social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media

ordoliberalism

Germany’s iron cage

Germany adopted the social market system of economic rules separated from political democracy, known as ordoliberalism, after 1945; it was later used as the ideological basis of Europe Union economic policy.

by François Denord, Rachel Knaebel & Pierre Rimbert

https://mondediplo.com/2015/08/03ordoliberalism

Ordoliberals, like the Anglo-Saxon advocates of laissez-faire, believe the state should not distort the workings of the markets, but they also believe that free competition does not develop spontaneously. The state should establish a legal, technical, social, moral and cultural framework for the markets, and make sure everyone follows the rules.

The rise of ordoliberalism was part of a vast international renewal of liberal thought in the 1930s — neoliberalism. In this context, the ordos opposed those nostalgic for laissez-faire — Ludwig von Mises and his disciple Friedrich Hayek — who, Rüstow complained, “found nothing to criticise or to change in traditional liberalism.”

 

collaboration creates mediocrity

‘Collaboration’ Creates Mediocrity, Not Excellence, According to Science

Far from being a productivity panacea, a collaborative culture will drive your top performers away.

psychology fake news

The Psychology Of Fake News

March 27, 201810:21 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/03/27/597263367/the-psychology-of-fake-news

During the past two years, fake news has been a frequent topic of real news, with articles considering the role of social media in spreading fake news, the advent of fake videos and the role these play in the political process.

Lazer, D. M. J., Baum, M. A., Benkler, Y., Berinsky, A. J., Greenhill, K. M., Menczer, F., … Zittrain, J. L. (2018). The science of fake news. Science, 359(6380), 1094–1096. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao2998
Baum and David Lazer, M. A. (2017, May 11). Social media must be held to account on fake news. Winnipeg Free Press (MB). p. A7.
In a paper published in March in the journal Science, David Lazer, Matthew Baum and 14 co-authors consider what we do and don’t know about the science of fake news. They define fake news as “fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent,” and they go on to discuss problems at multiple levels: individual, institutional and societal. What do we know about individuals’ exposure to fake news and its influence upon them? How can Internet platforms help limit the dissemination of fake news? And most fundamentally: How can we succeed in creating and perpetuating a culture that values and promotes truth?
 Steven Sloman, professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University, and one of the paper’s 16 authors. Sloman is also author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, a book about the merits and failings of our collaborative minds, published in 2017 with co-author Philip Fernbach.
Sloman, S. A. (2017). The knowledge illusion: Why we never think alone. New York: Riverhead Books.

 

 

bots, big data and the future

Computational Propaganda: Bots, Targeting And The Future

February 9, 201811:37 AM ET 

https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/02/09/584514805/computational-propaganda-yeah-that-s-a-thing-now

Combine the superfast calculational capacities of Big Compute with the oceans of specific personal information comprising Big Data — and the fertile ground for computational propaganda emerges. That’s how the small AI programs called bots can be unleashed into cyberspace to target and deliver misinformation exactly to the people who will be most vulnerable to it. These messages can be refined over and over again based on how well they perform (again in terms of clicks, likes and so on). Worst of all, all this can be done semiautonomously, allowing the targeted propaganda (like fake news stories or faked images) to spread like viruses through communities most vulnerable to their misinformation.

According to Bolsover and Howard, viewing computational propaganda only from a technical perspective would be a grave mistake. As they explain, seeing it just in terms of variables and algorithms “plays into the hands of those who create it, the platforms that serve it, and the firms that profit from it.”

Computational propaganda is a new thing. People just invented it. And they did so by realizing possibilities emerging from the intersection of new technologies (Big Compute, Big Data) and new behaviors those technologies allowed (social media). But the emphasis on behavior can’t be lost.

People are not machines. We do things for a whole lot of reasons including emotions of loss, anger, fear and longing. To combat computational propaganda’s potentially dangerous effects on democracy in a digital age, we will need to focus on both its howand its why.

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more on big data in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=big+data

more on bots in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=bot

more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news

liberalism

Liberalism is the most successful idea of the past 400 years

But its best years are behind it, according to a new book

https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21735578-its-best-years-are-behind-it-according-new-book-liberalism-most

quality of opportunity has produced a new meritocratic aristocracy that has all the aloofness of the old aristocracy with none of its sense of noblesse oblige. Democracy has degenerated into a theatre of the absurd. And technological advances are reducing ever more areas of work into meaningless drudgery

Mr Deneen’s fixation on the essence of liberalism leads to the second big problem of his book: his failure to recognise liberalism’s ability to reform itself and address its internal problems. The late 19th century saw America suffering from many of the problems that are reappearing today, including the creation of a business aristocracy, the rise of vast companies, the corruption of politics and the sense that society was dividing into winners and losers. But a wide variety of reformers, working within the liberal tradition, tackled these problems head on. Theodore Roosevelt took on the trusts. Progressives cleaned up government corruption. University reformers modernised academic syllabuses and built ladders of opportunity. Rather than dying, liberalism reformed itself.

blockchain

35 Amazing Real World Examples Of How Blockchain Is Changing Our World

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/01/22/35-amazing-real-world-examples-of-how-blockchain-is-changing-our-world

My note: nothing about education by this author. Here it is from our IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/01/12/blockchain-for-libraries/

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/09/27/blockchain-credentialing-in-higher-ed/

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/10/03/blockchain-credentialing/

Cybersecurity

Guardtime – This company is creating “keyless” signature systems using blockchain which is currently used to secure the health records of one million Estonian citizens.

REMME is a decentralized authentication system which aims to replace logins and passwords with SSL certificates stored on a blockchain.

Healthcare

Gem – This startup is working with the Centre for Disease Control to put disease outbreak data onto a blockchain which it says will increase the effectiveness of disaster relief and response.

SimplyVital Health – Has two health-related blockchain products in development, ConnectingCare which tracks the progress of patients after they leave the hospital, and Health Nexus, which aims to provide decentralized blockchain patient records.

MedRec – An MIT project involving blockchain electronic medical records designed to manage authentication, confidentiality and data sharing.

Financial services

ABRA – A cryptocurrency wallet which uses the Bitcoin blockchain to hold and track balances stored in different currencies.

Bank Hapoalim – A collaboration between the Israeli bank and Microsoft to create a blockchain system for managing bank guarantees.

Barclays – Barclays has launched a number of blockchain initiatives involving tracking financial transactions, compliance and combating fraud. It states that “Our belief …is that blockchain is a fundamental part of the new operating system for the planet.”

Maersk – The shipping and transport consortium has unveiled plans for a blockchain solution for streamlining marine insurance.

Aeternity – Allows the creation of smart contracts which become active when network consensus agrees that conditions have been met – allowing for automated payments to be made when parties agree that conditions have been met, for example.

Augur – Allows the creation of blockchain-based predictions markets for the trading of derivatives and other financial instruments in a decentralized ecosystem.

Manufacturing and industrial

Provenance – This project aims to provide a blockchain-based provenance record of transparency within supply chains.

Jiocoin – India’s biggest conglomerate, Reliance Industries, has said that it is developing a blockchain-based supply chain logistics platform along with its own cryptocurrency, Jiocoin.

Hijro – Previously known as Fluent, aims to create a blockchain framework for collaborating on prototyping and proof-of-concept.

SKUChain – Another blockchain system for allowing tracking and tracing of goods as they pass through a supply chain.

Blockverify –  A blockchain platform which focuses on anti-counterfeit measures, with initial use cases in the diamond, pharmaceuticals and luxury goods markets.

Transactivgrid – A business-led community project based in Brooklyn allowing members to locally produce and cell energy, with the goal of reducing costs involved in energy distribution.

STORJ.io – Distributed and encrypted cloud storage, which allows users to share unused hard drive space.

Government

DubaiDubai has set sights on becoming the world’s first blockchain-powered state. In 2016 representatives of 30 government departments formed a committee dedicated to investigating opportunities across health records, shipping, business registration and preventing the spread of conflict diamonds.

Estonia – The Estonian government has partnered with Ericsson on an initiative involving creating a new data center to move public records onto the blockchain. 20

South Korea – Samsung is creating blockchain solutions for the South Korean government which will be put to use in public safety and transport applications.

Govcoin – The UK Department of Work and Pensions is investigating using blockchain technology to record and administer benefit payments.

Democracy.earth – This is an open-source project aiming to enable the creation of democratically structured organizations, and potentially even states or nations, using blockchain tools.

Followmyvote.com – Allows the creation of secure, transparent voting systems, reducing opportunities for voter fraud and increasing turnout through improved accessibility to democracy.

Charity

Bitgive – This service aims to provide greater transparency to charity donations and clearer links between giving and project outcomes. It is working with established charities including Save The Children, The Water Project and Medic Mobile.

Retail

OpenBazaar – OpenBazaar is an attempt to build a decentralized market where goods and services can be traded with no middle-man.

Loyyal – This is a blockchain-based universal loyalty framework, which aims to allow consumers to combine and trade loyalty rewards in new ways, and retailers to offer more sophisticated loyalty packages.

Blockpoint.io – Allows retailers to build payment systems around blockchain currencies such as Bitcoin, as well as blockchain derived gift cards and loyalty schemes.

Real Estate

Ubiquity – This startup is creating a blockchain-driven system for tracking the complicated legal process which creates friction and expense in real estate transfer.

Transport and Tourism

IBM Blockchain Solutions – IBM has said it will go public with a number of non-finance related blockchain initiatives with global partners in 2018. This video envisages how efficiencies could be driven in the vehicle leasing industry.

Arcade City – An application which aims to beat Uber at their own game by moving ride sharing and car hiring onto the blockchain.

La’Zooz – A community-owned platform for synchronizing empty seats with passengers in need of a lift in real-time.

Webjet – The online travel portal is developing a blockchain solution to allow stock of empty hotel rooms to be efficiently tracked and traded, with payment fairly routed to the network of middle-men sites involved in filling last-minute vacancies.

Media

Kodak – Kodak recently sent its stock soaring after announcing that it is developing a blockchain system for tracking intellectual property rights and payments to photographers.

Ujomusic – Founded by singer-songwriter Imogen Heap to record and track royalties for musicians, as well as allowing them to create a record of ownership of their work.

It is exciting to see all these developments. I am sure not all of these will make it into successful long-term ventures but if they indicate one thing, then it is the vast potential the blockchain technology is offering.

Bernard Marr is a best-selling author & keynote speaker on business, technology and big data. His new book is Data Strategy. To read his future posts simply join his network here.

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more on blockchain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=blockchain

free speech and privacy

IT’S THE (DEMOCRACY-POISONING) GOLDEN AGE OF FREE SPEECH

Jan 16, 2018

https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-new-censorship/

My note: the author uses the 1960 military junta in Turkey as an example. Here it is the 2014 “modern” ideological fight of increasingly becoming dictatorial Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan against his citizens by shutting off Twitter: http://time.com/33393/turkey-recep-tayyip-erdogan-twitter/
Here is more on civil disobedience and social media: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=civil+disobedience

until recently, broadcasting and publishing were difficult and expensive affairs, their infrastructures riddled with bottlenecks and concentrated in a few hands.

When protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, a single livestreamer named Mustafa Hussein reportedly garnered an audience comparable in size to CNN’s for a short while. If a Bosnian Croat war criminal drinks poison in a courtroom, all of Twitter knows about it in minutes.

In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech.

And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by alt-right trolls or a swarm of Russian bots?
My note: see the ability to create fake audio and video footage:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/07/15/fake-news-and-video/

HERE’S HOW THIS golden age of speech actually works: In the 21st century, the capacity to spread ideas and reach an audience is no longer limited by access to expensive, centralized broadcasting infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.

at their core, their business is mundane: They’re ad brokers

They use massive surveillance of our behavior, online and off, to generate increasingly accurate, automated predictions of what advertisements we are most susceptible to and what content will keep us clicking, tapping, and scrolling down a bottomless feed.

in reality, posts are targeted and delivered privately, screen by screen by screen. Today’s phantom public sphere has been fragmented and submerged into billions of individual capillaries. Yes, mass discourse has become far easier for everyone to participate in—but it has simultaneously become a set of private conversations happening behind your back. Behind everyone’s backs.

It’s important to realize that, in using these dark posts, the Trump campaign wasn’t deviantly weaponizing an innocent tool. It was simply using Facebook exactly as it was designed to be used. The campaign did it cheaply, with Facebook staffers assisting right there in the office, as the tech company does for most large advertisers and political campaigns.

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more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy

more on free speech in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=free+speech

social media election fake news

Election Strife, Protest And Noise: In 2017, Russia Cranked Up The Volume

The Russian Facebook scandal damages liberals as much as the right

The Republicans might have been tarnished by the St Petersburg troll factory, but Democratic fantasies about social media were rubbished in the process
The ads in question were memes, manufactured and posted to a number of bluntly named, pseudo-American Facebook accounts in 2016 by workers at a troll farm in St Petersburg, Russia. There were thousands of these ads, it seems, plus parallel efforts on Instagram and Twitter. Between them, they reached over 100 million people.
The memes were big news for a while because they showed what Russian interference in the 2016 election actually looked like, in vivid color. Eventually the story faded, though, in part because it was superseded by other stories, but also, I think, because the Russian ad story was deeply distasteful to both sides of our atrophied political debate.
The ads were clumsily written. They were rife with spelling errors and poor grammar. Their grasp of American history was awful. And over them all hovered a paranoid fear that the powerful were scheming to flip the world upside-down in the most outlandish ways: to turn our country over to the undocumented … to punish the hardworking … to crack down on patriots and Christians … to enact Sharia law right here at home.
The social media platforms aren’t neutral arbiters, selflessly serving the needs of society. As is all too obvious now, they are monopolies that manipulate us in a hundred different ways, selecting our news, steering us towards what we need to buy. The corporate entities behind them wield enormous power in Washington, too, filling Democratic campaign coffers and keeping the revolving door turning for trusted servants. Those who don’t comply get disciplined.
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Russia calls for answers after Chechen leader’s Instagram is blocked

Internet watchdog demands explanation after Ramzan Kadyrov claimed Facebook also suspended him without explanation

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/26/chechnya-ramzan-kadyrov-social-media-russia-instagram-facebook

Kadyrov has accused the US government of pressuring the social networks to disable his accounts, which he said were blocked on Saturday without explanation. The US imposed travel and financial sanctions on Kadyrov last week over numerous allegations of human rights abuses.

The former rebel fighter, who is now loyal to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is a fan of social media, particularly Instagram, which he has used in recent years to make barely veiled death threats against Kremlin critics.

Leonid Levin, the head of the Russian parliament’s information technologies and communications committee, suggested the move by Facebook and Instagram was an attack on freedom of speech.

Dzhambulat Umarov, the Chechen press and information minister, described the blocking of Kadyrov’s accounts as a “vile” cyber-attack by the US.

Neither Instagram nor Facebook had commented at the time of publication.

In 2015, Kadyrov urged Chechen men not to let their wives use the WhatsApp messaging service after an online outcry over the forced marriage of a 17-year-old Chechen to a 47-year-old police chief. “Do not write such things. Men, take your women out of WhatsApp,” he said.

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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news

corporate monopoly or public control net neutrality

Net Neutrality is just the beginning

Interview with Victor Pickard

Victor Pickard, associate professor of communication at the University Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School, whose research focuses on internet policy and the political economy of media.

https://www.academia.edu/35305972/Net_Neutrality_Is_Just_the_Beginning

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/11/net-neutrality-fcc-ajit-pai-monopoly

with each new victory for the American telecommunications oligopoly, that digital optimism fades further from view.

Definition:

Net neutrality protections are essentially safeguards that prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from interfering with the internet. Net neutrality gives the FCC the regulatory authority to prevent ISPs like Comcast and Verizon from slowing down or blocking certain types of content. It also prevents them from offering what’s known as paid prioritization, where an ISP could let particular websites or content creators pay more for faster streaming and download times. With paid prioritization an ISP could shake down a company like Netflix or an individual website owner, coercing them to pay more in order to be in the fast lane.

Net neutrality often gets treated as a sort of technocratic squabble over ownership and control of internet pipes. But in fact it speaks to a core social contract between government, corporations, and the public. What it really comes down to is, how can members of the public obtain information and services, and express ourselves creatively and politically, without interference from massive corporations?

Should we think of the internet as a good, a service, an infrastructure, or something else?

It’s all of the above.

The internet has been radically privatized. It wasn’t inevitable, but through policy decisions over the years, the internet has become increasingly commodified. Meanwhile it’s really difficult to imagine living in modern society without fast internet services — it’s no longer a luxury but a necessity for everything ranging from education to health to livelihood. The “digital divide” is a phrase that sounds like it’s from the 1990s, but it’s still very relevant. Somewhere around one fifth of American households don’t have access to wireline broadband services. It’s a social problem. We should be thinking about the internet as a public service and subsidizing it to make sure that everyone has access.

In your recent book on media democracy, you discuss the rise of what you call “corporate libertarianism.” What is corporate libertarianism and how does it relate to net neutrality?

Corporate libertarianism is an ideological project that has origins at a core moment in the 1940s. It sees corporations as having individual freedoms, like those in the First Amendment, which they can use to shield themselves from public interest oversight and regulation. It’s also often connected to this assumption that the government should never intervene in markets, and media markets in particular. (My note: Milton Friedman)

Of course, this is a libertarian mythology — the government is always involved. The question ought to be how it should be involved. Under corporate libertarianism it’s assumed that the government should only be involved in ways that enhance profit maximization for communication oligopolies.

There are clear dangers associated with vertical integration, where the company that owns the pipes is able to control the dissemination of information, and able to set the terms by which we access that information.
There have been cases like this already. In 2005, the company Telus, which is the second largest telecommunications company in Canada, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website that supported a labor strike against Telus.

Net neutrality is just one part of the story. What other regulations, policies and interventions could resist corporate control of the internet?

Roughly half of Americans live in communities that have access to only one ISP.  My note: Ha Ha Ha, “pick me, pick me,” as Dori from “Finding Nemo” will say… Charter, whatever they will rename themselves again, is the crass example in Central MN.

Strategies to contain and confront monopolies:

  • break them up, and to prevent monopolies and oligopolies from happening in the first place by blocking mergers and acquisitions.
  • if we’re not going to outright nationalize them then we want to heavily regulate them, and enforce some kind of social contract where they’re compelled to provide a public service in exchange for the right to operate.
  • create public alternatives, like municipal wireless networks that can circumvent and compete with corporate monopolies. There’s a growing number of these publicly owned and governed internet infrastructures, and building more is crucial.

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more on #netNeutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality

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