ron salaj's List: internet

• If Ronald Reagan was the first Teflon President, then Silicon Valley is the first Teflon Industry:  no matter how much dirt one throws at it, nothing seems to stick
• When food activists go after Big Food and accuse those companies of adding too much salt and fat to their snacks to make us crave even more of them, no one dares accuse these activists of being anti-science.
• Silicon Valley firms are building what I call “invisible barbed wire” around our lives.
• Yes, a self-driving car could make our commute less dreadful. But a self-driving car operated by Google would not just be a self-driving car: it would be a shrine to surveillance – on wheels! It would track everywhere we go. It might even prevent us from going to certain places if we our mood – measured through facial expression analysis – suggests that we are too angry or tired or emotional.
• Take  Coursera, a company that was started by a senior Google engineer and that has quickly become one of the leaders in the field. It now uses biometrics -- facial recognition and typing speed analysis – to verify student identity. (This comes in handy when they issue diplomas!) How did we go from universities with open-door policies to universities that check their students with biometrics? As Gilles Deleuze put in a 1990 conversation with Tony Negri, “compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderful happy past.” This connection between the seeming openness of our technological infrastructures and the intensifying degree of control remains poorly understood.
• What does this invisible barbed wire mean in practice? Suppose you want to become a vegetarian. So you go to Facebook and use its Graph Search feature to search for the favorite vegetarian restaurants of all your friends who live nearby. Facebook understands that you are considering an important decision that will affect several industries: great news for the tofu industry but bad news for the meat section of your local supermarket.
• Facebook would be silly not to profit from this knowledge – so it organizes a real-time ad auction to see whether the meat industry wants you more than the tofu industry. This is where your fate is no longer in your own hands. Sounds silly – until you enter your local supermarket and your smartphone shows that the meat section offers you a discount of 20%. The following day, as you pass by the local steak house, your phone buzzes again: you’ve got another discount offer. Come in – have some steak! After a week of deliberation – and lots of cheap meat -- you decide that vegetarianism is not your thing. Case closed.
• The data-centric model of Silicon Valley capitalism seeks to convert every aspect of our everyday existence – what used to be our only respite from the vagaries of work and the anxieties of the marketplace – into a productive asset.
• publicly-run infrastructure
• Privacy is no longer something to be taken for granted or enjoyed for free: you have to expend some resources to master the tools. Those resources could be money, patience, attention – you might even hire a consultant to do all this for you – but the point is that privacy is becoming expensive.
• It inspires the NSA to keep searching for connections in a world of meaningless links, to record every click, to ensure that no interaction goes unnoticed, undocumented and unanalyzed. 

• Like Silicon Valley, NSA assumes that everything is interconnected: if we can’t yet link two pieces of data, it’s because we haven’t looked deep enough – or we need a third piece of data, to be collected in the future, to make sense of it all.

   

  There’s something delusional about this practice – and I don’t use “delusional” metaphorically. For the Italian philosopher Remo Bodei, delusion does not stem from too little psychic activity, as some psychoanalytic theories would have it, but, rather, from too much of it.
• Delirium, he notes, is “the incapacity to filter an enormous quantity of data.”
• Well, it might be “delusion’ for Bodei but as far as Silicon Valley and Washington are concerned, we are talking bout “the semantic Web” and “Big Data”!
• Much importance, at least in America, is attached to the immense potential of smartphones to solve a problem like obesity. How would this work? Well, the idea is that the smartphones already monitor how much we walk – they have sensors that do that – and they can tell us when we are walking less than the norm. They can also – perhaps, in some combination with Google Glass – monitor what we eat and keep track of our diet, telling us to refuse that tempting dessert. The assumption here, derived from behavioral economics, is that we make irrational decisions and that highly-targeted information provided to us at the right time via this new digital infrastructure can finally conquer our irrationality.
• We are not really trying to solve the problem – only to deploy our tools – coding and information – to redefine the problem in the most convenient but also least ambitious way.
• It may be that if you are poor  and you work several jobs and you don’t have a car to go shopping at a farmer’s market, then consuming junk food at a local McDonald’s is a completely rational decision: you get the food you can afford. What’s the point of telling you what you already know: that you are eating cheap and terrible food? The problem that needs addressing here is that of poverty – to be tackled through economic reforms – and not that of under-supply of information.

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• Today, the media constantly bombard us with requests to choose, addressing us as subjects supposed to know what we really want (which book, clothes, TV program, place of holiday . . .)—“press A, if you want this, press B, if you want that,” or, to quote the motto of the recent “reflective” TV publicity campaign for adver- tisement itself, “Advertisement—the right to choose.” However, at a more fundamental level, the new media deprive the subject radically of the knowledge of what he wants: They address a thoroughly malleable subject who has constantly to be told what he wants, i.e., the very evocation of a choice to be made perform- atively creates the need for the object of choice.
• One should bear in mind here that the main function of the Master is to tell the subject what he wants—the need for the Master arises in an- swer to the subject’s confusion, insofar as he does not know what he wants. What, then, happens in the situation of the decline of the Master, when the subject himself is constantly bombarded with the request to give a sign as to what he wants?
• Lacan’s well- known reversal of Dostoyevski (“If there is no God, nothing is permitted at all”): If no forced choice confines the field of free choice, the very freedom of choice disappears.

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• The pieces are coming into place. Freelancers are forming cooperatives to find clients and pool insurance through platforms of their own. Uber drivers are leaving the mothership, organizing in co-ops, and designing their own taxi apps. Photographers are offering their work for fair prices on a platform where they’re in charge, and journalists are crowdfunding news portals co-owned with their audiences. New decentralized networks are enabling people to share their data with each other without relying on a corporate cloud. Contrary to the rules of the dominant algorithmic gatekeepers, platform cooperativism puts the online economic infrastructure into the hands of the people who depend on it most.
• The cooperative platform economy can become one of the counterforces to the defects of the on-demand economy. It is a strategy for reversing wealth inequality, gender inequity, environmental degradation, and systemic racial injustice. The experiments now already underway show that a global ecosystem of cooperatives can stand against the concentration of wealth and the insecurity of workers that yields Silicon Valley’s winner-takes-all economy. They show that the Internet can be owned and governed differently.