New World Same Humans #57
How do you fight an algorithm? Welcome to the age of data resistance.
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This week, how the pandemic pushed us deeper inside our troubled relationship with online consumerism. And the emergence of a new way to fight back.
Read on!
Imagine you’re the CEO of one of the big digital platforms. Facebook, say, or Amazon.
One morning, you decide on a daring experiment. You want to create a set of circumstances that will drive people to your platform as never before. Existing users will spend far more time with you. People who’ve never heard of you will sign up in their millions.
What kind of circumstances would you devise? My contention: it’s the pandemic. The global event you’d hit upon is the pandemic.
To avoid any doubt: I’m not suggesting big tech corporations created the coronavirus. But as dawn starts to break on the long COVID night, it’s becoming clear the events of the last 12 months have deepened our relationship with digital technologies in ways few imagined at the start of 2020.
We all sense the shift. Lockdown moved more of our lives online, and so completed our encirclement by a particular kind of 21st-century technoconsumerism: Amazon Fresh for groceries, Deliveroo instead of eating out, Netflix when the children are in bed. The change has touched everyone. Back in January 2020 my 77-year-old mother had never heard of an iPad. Now she messages me on WhatsApp to ask when we’ll FaceTime next.
Facebook saw daily users increase by 12% in 2020. Amazon’s net profits rose by 84%. Netflix signed up 26 million new paid subscribers in the first half of the year, against 28 million for the whole of 2019.
Underneath this reality, a tension is building. In the years leading up to the pandemic the Cambridge Analytica scandal took whatever sheen remained off Facebook. Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff published the book that named, and described as never before, the strange relationship we’d been building with Big Tech: Surveillance Capitalism. Most of my friends put black tape over their laptop webcams.
But then came 2020. I don’t dispute the real value brought to people’s lives by popular digital services. During lockdowns, online delivery services could be the difference between clean clothes and no washing powder. Zoom and FaceTime allowed elderly parents to stay in touch with children and grandchildren. Netflix dulled the boredom.
But we all know these services come at a hidden price. Armed with oceans of data, a few big platforms now mediate vast swathes of human life: the news we read, the products we buy, the influencers we listen to. These platforms are becoming a new form of power, as mighty as national governments if not more. No one is sure what all this means for our societies, or our freedoms.
So my question: when does this tension become unbearable? We say we’re concerned about Big Tech, but we’re not doing anything about it. When does the gap between thought and inaction become too much? A global survey conducted by polling company Ipsos just before the pandemic found that concern over the way companies use our data had risen by 8% since 2013; an increase, sure, but a modest one. The tension is simmering, but it hasn’t boiled over yet. Will it, ever? And what happens if it does?
This week, the beginnings of an answer came into sharper focus. In New Week Same Humans on Wednesday I mentioned a new paper by researchers at Northwestern University. Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies asks what ordinary people can do to win back some of the power being amassed by the big digital platforms.
One answer? The researchers call it data poisoning: intentionally sending false or meaningless data to Google, Facebook, and others in order to confuse the algorithms they use to make sense of our online behaviour.
It turns out to be an idea that activists have been playing with for a while. A few years ago coder Daniel Howe and Cornell professor Helen Nissenbaum created AdNauseum, a browser plugin that blocks but simultaneously clicks on every online ad served by a web browser. By sending back a continuous flood of clicks, AdNauseum makes it impossible for the big platforms to build a coherent data profile of its user. Howe has continued to iterate the tool, and a recent research paper concluded that it works, and defended it against the accusation that by making advertising impossible it will lead to the demise of free content on the web.
AdNauseum’s creators are surely aware that it’s more a statement of resistance than it is a longterm solution to surveillance capitalism. But in the wake of what happened in 2020, the new form of resistance that it establishes – let’s call it data resistance – feels more urgent than ever.
Privacy-first web tools are nothing new; search engine DuckDuckGo launched way back in 2008. But the new data resistance goes far beyond simple privacy, and instead acts to confound or neutralise the new kinds of algorithmic power that are now forming around us.
Another arresting example is Alias, a device intended to neutralise smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo or Google Home. The creation of Danish technologists Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen, Alias is set on top of a smart speaker and continually ‘whispers’ a stream of inaudible static to it so that the device can’t eavesdrop on those in its vicinity. Users can set their own custom ‘wake word’, which tells Alias to stop whispering and allow the user to interact with their speaker.
Why does all this matter? AdNauseum and Alias aren’t going to change the world. But they – and the new kind of data resistance they exemplify – are powerful signals of the new reality taking shape around us.
Traditionally, political activism could mean anything from campaigning outside the town hall to violent uprising in the streets. But in 2021, we face new forms of power that are less amenable to those kinds of protest. Our ultimate sanction against the big technology companies is to stop giving them our custom. But as 2020 proved, they have insinuated themselves into our lives to such an extent that this feels almost impossible. It’s hard to live without a smartphone in 2021. Will it be possible to have a bank account without one by 2030?
Power is draining away from national governments and towards global technology companies. The implications are new, strange, and hard to fathom. If we don’t like the sound of all of them, then we’ll need new forms of activism – strange in their turn – to fight back.
A new age of data resistance is about to begin. How far will you be willing to go against the power of the algorithm? You’re about to find out.
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I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. See you then,
David.