Most AI is not artificial or intelligent | James Bridle and Cory Doctorow

it is my job to say things used to be better but I really think they used to be better we didn't always have an internet made it a five-time websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four most people have no idea at all that Alternatives exist that lack of awareness of how complex and how powerful the tools that we use are every day that ripples up into a lot of our kind of political and social relationships as well it just seems like the service is getting worse like there are these ads and then there's the stuff you didn't ask for and some of the people you're following they don't show up and you go and you you try and toggle the settlement settings you switch them around you try to find something that works for you and then in the background Facebook can just change the setting hi I'm James Bridal um I'm I wrote a book called new Dark Age that first came out about five years ago and is now re-released uh into a world that hasn't changed that much it's a book about the way in which computation has come to dominate everyday life and a small number of people and companies have come to dominate computation and all of us are kind of living within their imaginations um and that has deep effects on pretty much every aspect of our daily lives and on the planet that we live in and I'm interested in the ways in which we can understand the history of how that came to be what it feels like to live within it now and how we can be honest about the situation that we're in uh so that we can start to think about the changes we might make uh to imagine a different world and I'm Corey doctorow uh mostly I write science fiction novels but I've spent more than two decades working with various non-profits primarily the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the UK open Rights group on issues related to Tech policy and digital human rights and and after 20 years I'm old I'm over 50 I have two artificial hips as soon as I can stop touring with new books I'm getting both my eyes fixed because I got cataracts so it is my job to say things used to be better but I really think they used to be better I really think that we didn't always have an internet made out of five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four and I don't think that happened because you know the great forces of History bore down on the moment to to insidify the web I think that we created that circumstance through specific policies and that there are policies that can get us out of it so I've written this book called the internet con how to seize the means of computation that's about how the tech companies ended up dominating so much of our digital lives and and how we can do something about it that goes beyond what we're currently doing which is primarily focused on making the tech companies better like we've elected them Kings for life and now we just want them to be wise Kings and I I really want to overthrow them I want to abolish Pig Tech and to do that we need policies that are administratable that like Regulators can administer that don't require like 10 years to figure out if they're violating them and we need policies that don't create what are called compliance modes that's where like it costs so much to be a tech company that only big Tech can be a tech company which means that we have to keep them around for the rest of time and so the internet con it's a long form argument about what tech fears the most which is things that bust open their silos and how we can get it and how we can keep it I've been really struck um particularly just in the last couple of years by by some by one of the effects that you mentioned there which is how um the tech companies basically the only people capable of doing the kind of tech that we assume to be Tech right now so like the current version of AI that we have is that this Mass data thing like there's been no huge revolution in how we imagine what AI might be in in decades but what there has been is this like huge accumulation of data these vast buildings of kind of processing power plants that have allowed a few tech companies to build this particular technology that they're selling to us as AI um and it's a huge hype Market but it only they could do it because only they have like the power the money and the data to do it so they've constructed this world that's kind of their imagination of computation um yeah oh sorry go ahead well no I just want to say like because because the subtitle of your new book is seizing the means of computation and in mine I kind of look quite a lot about like how that idea of what computation is has become so powerful I wonder why you use the word computation rather than like technology or something like like because it is kind of the technical term a little bit because Marx called on us to seize the means of production and sees the means of computation sounds like sees the means of production in a way that sees the means of Technology doesn't it's just a better phrase it's it's you need to read too deeply into it but I think that you know this this um this thing that you're describing right this this anxiety about AI is well placed and I also fear that it is another opportunity for us to do the same thing that we've always done only harder and hope for a different outcome so you know a lot of arts groups I think are very rightly worried that um these I hate calling them AI they're not artificial they're not intelligent they're not learning so they're not machine learning I don't know if you can expand the acronym off the cuff but there's This Acronym salami that this Italian Member of Parliament came up with it's like self-actualizing machine something something anyway the point is that when you call it hype yeah I I just like I think like salami generated image has the correct degree of Gravitas as compared to like AI generated image so I think that there's like there's a reasonable concern that the that the reason that firms that currently employ creative laborers are so excited about AI is not because they want to make funny memes right it's because they want to zero out their wage Bill and they are really like that's the you know the entire whenever you hear someone from Goldman Sachs go off and say this is a trillion dollar market what they mean is a trillion dollars can be shifted from uh labor to Capital uh they're probably lying right they think they're overestimating they always add several zeros just to justify the the their salaries but that that's what people are hoping for and my concern is that if we take that seriously which I think we should and then approach it with an unserious solution which is to say we're going to create a new exclusive right to think really hard about art right to go and measure all the noses and come up with a statistical picture of all the possible noses that are recognizable as a nose uh and and we're going to create that right we're going to give it to creative workers uh and then we're going to hope that those creative workers can bargain with that right to make sure that they keep their jobs that we're going to be very disappointed and we know that's the case because there are a bunch of people who work in in voice acting who are rightfully worried that their employers would like to put them out of a job who have argued vociferously for this new right to basically think really hard about their voice and who are now going into recording sessions with the games companies that constitute the largest plurality of voice actor work and every session is required to begin with a phrase to the effect of my name is Corey doctorow and I hereby assign in perpetuity freely and of my own will the right to train a machine Learning System with the recording from this session right and that has just become the boilerplate for these large concentrated firms so my concern is that if we just create this right and we give it to people who have no bargaining power and we say go and bargain with it that they'll just bargain it away that it's just a roundabout way of telling companies here go make some AI right only you only the companies that can command enough of the labor of creative workers can do it but once they have then no one has to hire a creative worker again and and I think that that is the the Trap that we keep getting ourselves into that we we keep giving large firms whether they're Tech firms or entertainment firms the policies that are supposed to control them and end up enshrining them whether that's telling Facebook that they have to police all of their content for harassment which requires that you need an army of moderators which requires that you be the size of Facebook or whether it's this new thing that we're about to do with with salami where we say uh you know you have the right to control who can make salami out of your stuff and then all the people who you rely on for your pay pay packet say great give us that right now right so there's no there's no bargaining with these with these the the setup that we have at the present which is why you wagy for the the dismantling of these companies rather than essentially to kind of bargain with them um it's not entirely uh a dismantling right it's also the construction of of alternative structures um there has to be like something that we we move across to there's a phrase I I saw in one of your recent pieces which is like the right to exit um and uh it struck me really hard um that that's a real extension of something that we do poorly in the real world but I've always recognized as kind of really incredibly important um I think one of the a really formative experience I had like a few decades ago was actually um was going to Cuba which is a place that I thought I would be I would be I would enjoy more than I did essentially like aesthetically politically everything um and and the thing that really horrified me uh about um about going there was that most people couldn't leave um and that I suddenly I had this realization that stuck with me ever since and informs almost all of my politics that the freedom of movement is the First Freedom like it's above freedom of speech uh it's above all other things because if you could just get away then you then you have these other possibilities but you're kind of the way you describe this kind of insertification process um is is you know a big part of that is like stopping movement right it's like it's preventing anyone getting out in the first place yeah I I mean so you know we've had monopolies before um they're not novel they're not novel in arts markets they're not novel in in infrastructure they're not novel in manufacturing and heavy Goods right whether that's rail companies or uh energy companies or or even the entertainment industry before the digital world right back when the The Beatles used to have to share one penny for every LP they sold but not the whole Penny because Emi kept 15 of the penny against their marketing expenses right there we've had abusive firms that had lots of Market power before but the digital world has got a couple of really important um uh tools at its disposal one being Technical and the other one being policy uh so the technical tool is that digital firms can alter the shape of the or the physics of the system from moment to moment right so say you um uh join Facebook because it makes this implicit promise when you join that if you merely tell Facebook who the people are that matter to you it will uh order all of the things that those people have said in a feed and let you know about them uh and moreover that they'll make this promise as they did when they first opened up to the wider public that they'll never spy on you that was Facebook's old pitch right don't use MySpace the crapulin Australian billionaire owns Myspace he spies on you all the time to sell ads will never spine you or Facebook we're the good guys um and uh you know you join up and then like it just seems like the service is getting worse like they're these ads and then there's the stuff you didn't ask for and some of your follow some of the people you're following they don't show up and you go and you you try and toggle The Settle settings you switch them around you try to find something that works for you and then in the background Facebook can just change the settings right they they I call it twiddling they have like a million knobs and they can just touch their knobs all day long and twiddle them until uh all the rules have changed this is why like people who work for the platforms right the people whose job is an out whose boss is an algorithm right like go go spend thousands of pounds and how hundreds of hours making a video and maybe we'll show it to your followers those people all act like rats who spend too much time in a intermittent reinforcement Skinner box right they're just completely mad because everything that works today stops working tomorrow like they're you know YouTube is like well today if you're like if your icon for your video has got a lot of primary colors in it we're gonna show it to everyone but tomorrow it's gonna have to have like at least 40 percent gray uh or we're not going to show it to people these people are just like trapped in this endless kind of game and so you've got the platforms twiddling all day long and that makes it very hard for people to seize the means of computation to control their technological experience and then you've got a a policy prohibition against twiddling back right um reverse engineering uh at using Bots and scraping to grab your data and bring it to some other service so that you can quit Facebook go to a service where they don't spy on you read all the messages that are waiting for you on Facebook because a bot went and got them reply to them and the bot will go and send them to them and you never have to do anything where Mark Zuckerberg can see it again that has become illegal it wasn't illegal when Facebook started that was how Facebook started they gave you a tool that would go and get your Myspace messages and put them in your space Facebook inbox now it's illegal and so we can't twiddle back so you have firms that are not constrained by regulation not constrained by competition who can twiddle with every hour that God sends and we can't twiddle back we can't create a new service like anyone can create a new service but you can't create a new service that talks to the existing ones so that anyone who leaves Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or any of these other big platforms has to say goodbye to everything that's there otherwise because because none of that stuff is accessible from that new platform not for technical reasons but because as a policy matter we prohibit it um and and and that means that people are locked in they can't leave they can't leave for the same reason you know my grandmother um left the Soviet Union after the war she and my grandfather deserted from army they destroyed their papers so they could be displaced people they made their way from Azerbaijan to Poland to Frankfurt to Canada but none of their family did right they all stayed my grandmother lost touch with her mother and her little brother for 15 years my dad tells us like hair stands up in the back your next story about being in Toronto and the phone ring and my grandmother just going Mama Mama because she didn't know if her mother was alive or dead the reason her family stayed in Leningrad was because to leave meant giving up everything right which is what my grandmother did right and so all of them held each other hostage and so the the what we need to do is lower the transaction costs lower the switching costs so that people aren't imprisoned in situations they don't like by the people they love so that people can go somewhere else and do the things that they love and so that the ferns themselves become disciplined so that they're not um secure in the knowledge that if they treat you badly you won't go because you've you if you leave it's not that you have nowhere else to go but if you leave you'll have to give up everything [Music] are the experiences of people on on more social media by which I mean people chatting to their friends allegedly on Twitter and Facebook and so on comparable like are they the same as the experiences of people who are content creators who are like who are deliberately monetizing their experiences because it does strike me that those are two different ways of being online and one of the thing that one of the things it feels that um the big tech companies have done over the years has convinced us that we are kind of all content creators to some extent and certainly if we're professionals in any way there's a part of our being social is selling ourselves and there's not much differentiation between those kind of things but I know I'm just I'm not sure how and I'm fully up and I I would really like to start discussing more like the Alternatives um but like if there is really an alternative if you're if you're if your work which for Content creators and I think I know we know what I mean by that um is to make money is there really like an alternative system of doing that that isn't so crushing or is there like um um or do we have to maybe look at the you know the social experience of something a little bit different from that because we're talking we're talking about loved ones and we're talking about audiences in a bit in a blurred way I feel so let me reframe that very slightly because I I think that there is a sense that what we lack is designs for Alternatives right that that like we're trapped in this like kind of hegemonic view of Engagement and Facebook and whatever and that we don't we we are our imagination for a different way of being online whether it's with our friends or as people who perceive ourselves as having an audience right having a networked public because the sociologists say that um that that is the thing that we're trapped in I actually don't think that's true I mean there are so many visions of what social media could be whether that is something that is oriented around a purely sociable experience or an experience where you perceive yourself as being in an audience or being a part of a community of of of creators or some mix of both you know in the like the internet is full of them in fact every time I talk about this stuff I get a dozen emails from people who are like I would like to give you a tour of my platform that I have built that has a completely different sort of physics of interaction and many of them look like places that I would happily settle into the problem with these isn't that they they don't exist and that we can't imagine them problem is that we can't leave where we're at to get to them and so I am I mean I hear what you're saying uh in in that um you know there is something very uh sweaty and and and awful about the way that creators creators have to conceive of themselves and comport themselves on these platforms that um is untenable and you see this with you know burnout and even the ones that are you know the most lovable and kind and and and glorious ones you know I'm thinking of like say Hank Green or something you know they they're quite candid about how hard it is on them and and the the pressures that they face and we've all seen flame outs of these people and what I want to say is that like there's not one way of being a Creator and making your living from creative labor there are lots and lots of ways and so there are lots and lots of different Arrangements of the physics of interaction that will suit those different creators that what we've done by collapsing again and I want to stress like by by policy not by technology collapsing all the possibilities down to one or one model or one model with minor variations right you can you can have this is like that scene in The Blues Brothers we've got both kinds country and western right we've got YouTube and Tick Tock uh is is that um everyone either has to be that Creator or has to shoehorn themselves into it I think that there are spaces that people want to be in where the physics of interaction do not require or uh um even permit that kind of performer and audience situation and there are other people whose proclivities and priorities are different and that they'll change from moment to moment and that there is no one right answer and that there is no uh enduring answer and that the problem isn't uh the one model right we have that model is fine for some people there are some people for whom it works very well the problem is that it's the only model and that um the policies that prevent us from building interoperable tools that build up building ways to leave without paying that high cost that that prevents the immersion the the um the emergence of those other models yeah so I mean this this this idea of the only being one model is is is super powerful to me I I've spent quite a lot of time looking at um it's the reason I I brought up computation right at the origin of this is because I spent a lot of time thinking about alternative models for computation itself yeah um and um not because well and to explain that a little bit more so looking back for example at turing's early papers where he both outlines the the what's come to be known as the universal turing machine this thing that we all use and this defines everything including I feel kind of the way that we think about the world um uh but he also describes these kind of Alternatives that were never really explored Beyond very limited kind of theoretical ideas that proposes that all the computation we have could look something entirely radically different and my reason for exploring those things you know which leads to all kinds of fascinating ideas is is not that I think we're about to suddenly build computers made out of crabs or computers made out of pipes and and you know a kind of half waterfall half calculator although we could do those things and those things exist and they're marvelous I think it's important just to always remember and to continually assert that radical alternatives are possible have been imagined and I I feel that while a huge amount of the work to make this exit this transfer possible is really important I also feel that most people have no idea at all that Alternatives exist and I also think that just telling them that Alternatives exist is woefully insufficient because actually if people get excited and interested about the possibility of Alternatives and change they're capable of bearing quite a lot of cost in that they're capable of experimenting it in ways that that you know that may lead them to lose something but gain something else and the bed I'm quite interested in is like what is the what is it that and I think this is a much bigger question than just like how you get people to switch Technologies or these are important questions and the much bigger questions about our relationship to governance to politics to climate change a whole bunch of other stuff what is it that you need to give to people in order to allow them to think imagine and make those Alternatives happen for themselves because for me I think it's very much not like information about this possibility it's not just telling them that there's something wrong or that there's some kind of alternative available it's actually giving them certain tools and training in them that they can actually kind of deploy um and so for me for a long time that was um teaching people like simple bits of code but it was also it's things like crypto parties where people learn to install ad blockers or use basic encryption and the point of those those things is in part to like protect people like at the end of it they'll come out like with better passwords or like having to understand encryption but it's also to kind of increase their confidence and their agency within these complex systems that most of people most people are so like brutalized by that they can't really imagine any kind of change so um as well as the kind of like big you know governance level Law changes that can be and you know absolutely should be done and we can talk about those like what where do you see it's really difficult because I don't want to put this all on to individual action which is really not my intention at all which is also where this often gets stuck it's like well if only individuals would act like this we'd be able to kind of move forward but at the same time there's some kind of lesson or learning or skills that are required to imagine these Alternatives um and I feel like a lot of your books talk about that particularly in your fiction particularly in the in the young adult stuff perhaps or in books like walk away like you're talking about like what's the what are the skills necessary just to get us up to the level of kind of making those those changing um yeah what do you do you have any thoughts so you know you're right I I love uh the idea that science fiction can help us imagine other worlds uh I I often say that you know science fiction is like the opposite of neoliberalism because neoliberalisms uh you know canonical statement from Thatcher is there is no alternative right which is uh uh uh demand disguises an observation right there is no alternative as a way of saying stop trying to imagine an alternative right that's all we got that's the that's the position we're in with those big tech companies there is no attentive to their particular offering in the present moment yeah yeah and so there are people who who feel that way even people who are critics of the firms um the the critically vinsol has got a very useful term Critter hype which is basically like um when you take a firm's uh claims at face value and then use them to criticize it so you know canonically the big one would be saying look at Facebook they built a mind control Ray we know because uh Cambridge analytica told their customers that um isn't it terrible that these people have a mind control Ray and it's possible for them to be terrible and also not have a mind control Ray it's possible that the reason that you know your uncle became a q a on brexiter is because he was always a q a on brexit or racist and that what what maybe they made it easier to do was for him to find other people uh and also maybe at the same time we let our institutions Decay so that all that stuff sounded more plausible than it had earlier in his in his life um but you know my experience of Technology users well let me step back a step I think one of the most odious and telling phrases in uh technological discussion and I'm not saying that you said it I know you you this is nothing you would ever come into your mouth is this technology is so easy your mom could use it and the reason it's so odious is not merely because it's sexist but because of the embedded sexism in technological development which means that no one is you know inviting the the person we think of when we say your mom into the room when we design the technology right the technology like famously the First Technology ever developed for moms was this Honeywell kitchen computer that cost you know a hundred thousand dollars took up your entire kitchen and allowed you to retrieve recipes with Punch Cards it was designed by like six blokes and they never sold one because no one wanted that computer right and uh and oh and just to step back one thing I loved I loved your description of Turing machines and it reminded me that Alan Turing invented the turing machine and the non-touring Machine which I think is great and Von Neumann invented the Von knowing machine and the non-vonne Neumann machine which is just terrific Sunday I want to invent the docker machine and the non-doctoral Machine but um you know the the um you know your your mom to the extent that she makes computer or anyone who is not included in the design briefing and in the the equities of the technology to the extent that they use Technologies it's because they work so much harder than people like me who are front and center in the technological design thinking of anyone designing a technology and and my experience of people at the margins is that they are much better at using technology than I am right so the first person I ever met who had a phone that could accommodate two Sims and that had a mod in it that allowed you to say this Sim is from a carrier that gives me free unlimited texting and this Sim is from a carrier that gives me free unlimited voice calls automatically switch among them where the minimum wage Nursery ladies at my daughter's Nursery in Hackney right and the reason for that is because they no one had built a phone that took account of their equities right the phones are all designed around the assumption that you are um not price sensitive to this stuff that it just you know you just Bait A Hook free free texting and then they'll make it up on on gouging on calling you know GB WhatsApp is this alternative WhatsApp client it was developed on the battlefields of Syria by free software hackers it's currently maintained primarily in West Africa it is the most popular version of WhatsApp there it's more popular in Facebook Messenger it has a bunch of uh built-in tools that are locally contextual it supports multiple Sims it has some extra privacy features whatever and like no one's marketing it there right it's just it's just spreading because there is like a an indigenous need for a technology that has Contours and affordances that are not present in the main technology I'm not saying that we should be callous about the needs of marginal people or assume that everyone's going to get it and absolutely having helped run some crypto parties I know that that knowledge is incomplete right people might be very skilled at understanding their immediate needs about having two Sims and less skilled about understanding the surveillance risks of the operating system mod they installed in fact many GB WhatsApp versions that you install come with a bunch of surveillance wear in them because there isn't a central repository and people don't understand those risks because they require a degree of technical sophistication but I'm not which is by way of saying that where I want the regulation where I want the controls is in making sure that if you do take a flutter on something and just switch to something else that seems new that your friends are using that that seems like it suits you better that it doesn't destroy your life with you know technological poison right that's the thing I think we need to be very focused on but that but I'm less worried about people who are ill-served by the current technology discovering those Alternatives because I think they know about them and I think that they're they're motivated to to to find them in a way that people are complacent aren't I mean that's why pornographers are the first to use technology it's not because being in the sex trade makes you technologically savvy it's because they keep getting chased off of all the other platforms so they're always looking for something new just like kids just like um terrorists you know anyone who's anyone who's not welcome is always looking for something new yeah I mean my position on on the kind of big regulation is that is is much like yours it's like we live in a um I think is that we live in a um in communities uh National scales uh where we have a responsibility to protect one another and uh and that you should be able to drink the water or other things has come back to is um you know I did a lot of work looking at the kind of really horrific stuff that appears on YouTube and um and the way it has um uh traumatized and done incredible damage to children like straight up there's no question like horrible things have been done to the minds of small children because content that YouTube is allowed to exist because it makes the money um YouTube's argument is that it's impossible to moderate that um uh and it's at scale and anyway technology moves too fast for regulation and blah blah blah they never talk about the fact that YouTube and Facebook are the big single biggest political donors in Washington DC these days and they have lawmakers in their pockets and so on and so forth they just talk about the fact it's actually impossible to regulate this stuff and of course it's not impossible to regulate it um my my the example I use is um you've lived in the UK you know what boots is boots is a High Street pharmacist drugstore that um is on every single High Street and is just like part of the fabric of everyday life people get their you know medicines there they get their sandwiches there whatever you don't think about it very much but if every fifth person who went out went into boots came out believing in the superiority of the white right you'd shut it down like it's just not you you would just deal with it in a way that we don't deal with technology at all and I think that's like really quite fundamental um but the the other the other thing that um I was thinking when you when you're speaking about this like we made it so easy that X could use it what I hear in that statement is like we made it so easy so that you don't have to think about it um that we we removed all of the friction from this situation so that there is no there's no critique kind of enters any point and that does this massive disservice because um it it erases like everything that's going on there the classic example being like delivery services doordash ubereats whatever it is we made it so easy to order food that you don't see the dark kitchens you don't see the breakdown in labor relations you don't see all of that happening um uh so a lot gets erased when things get easy but also like we lose the opportunity to be educated by the tools that we use um the lack of friction means that there's no possibility of of learning from the things that we use every day which are these incredibly powerful tools that we could be in charge of in more powerful ways but that agency is like deliberately Stripped Away by the things that we use every day and that like disempowerment that lack of awareness of how both how complex and how powerful the tools that we use are every day like I think that that ripples up into a lot of our kind of political and social relationships as well and that I think one of the values of a lot of the kind of alternative technologies that we could talk about whether that's something like Mastodon or the other WhatsApp client you use um look anyone who engages with those things one of the reasons that some people maybe a lot of people don't is they're a little bit harder to use you have to put in that like little bit of extra effort to use them but that little bit of effort has this incredible reward right not just in the thing that you're using but in this like increased ability to use all kinds of things like it to like understand a little bit more about the system that you're actually engaged with that is itself kind of empowering in this way and for me that's really a huge part of what's lost um when you know the big the tools the big media systems that we're engaged with all the time strip away so much of um like the reality of what we're doing because because all other forms of Education have basically been blasted out the way right so we kind of have to build that education into the tools that we use um so that um so that we're capable of you so that we're capable of using those tools for the actual empowerment that they they present yeah yeah you really hit on something there um you know I think when when you started talking about this I kind of had a a knee-jerk reaction which was um well there's there's no virtue in things being hard to use and when I think of something being hard to use I mean obscure emac syntax or uh you know badly written documentation or an app that crashes and so you have to with no auto save so you have to save your work like I use the to edit all my images and it has no auto save function if you don't save you just lose it right and it crashes from town and I'm like there's no virtue in that but what it struck but then you started talking about doordash and the other delivery services and this this reminded me of the sleight of hand that the tech sector does which is a kind of inevitablism of its own which says that if you want to have a service free from harassment it has to be the scale of Facebook if you want to have a tool that people who don't have a lot of technical expertise can use to form communities to discuss their rare diseases or their parenting struggles or their immigration woes or whatever it is they're going to do you have to also accept surveillance and Monopoly and all these other things and and you know another one is if you want to if you wanna graphic editing program that doesn't crash and is easy to use then I suppose you won't mind it being easy to use a delivery service that requires that some poor bloke be in a bag because he's not allowed to take a toilet break uh while he delivers your your your pizza right and and for me the miracle of interoperability of being able to plug an ad Locker in or use an alternative client to access a service like there's a program called Og app it doesn't exist anymore because the app stores put it out of business and what Og app did was it asked you to log into Instagram by throwing up a web browser and then when Instagram gave back What's called the session key which is like how it knows that you're successfully logged in it dropped it into its app and then it went to Instagram and it pulled all the messages waiting for you at Instagram threw away everything that was like a fake Tick Tock video threw away all the ads threw away all the algorithmic suggestions what was left was a kind of refined ore of just the things of the people you liked had to say put them in Reverse chronological order and just show them to you and then unlike the Instagram app which every time you scroll you tap or do anything it's sending that information back to Facebook your battery level your location everything it just gave no data unless you liked something and then it gave them the data that you liked it or if you commented on something and send it the comment but nothing that you didn't intentionally send so for me this is a way of prizing apart this uh inevitable list you know unitary version right this this um you know pre-reformation version of the Instagram faith and bringing in a kind of Protestant Reformation where you can reconfigure your relationship to these tools and the people that they bring you to whether it's social media or a way to experience a connection with a creative laborer or a way to organize groups to do group projects be they um running a you know family holiday or running a workers Cooperative a way for you to reconfigure them around your needs by drawing on a variety of vendors and individuals and tinkerers whose conducts outer boundaries are set by democratically accountable regulations so what they can do with your private information and how they can act in respect of you so that you know that you're not going to get poisoned um and and that you can get what you want now one of the problems with this is that it's going to also produce people who are like I would like to reconfigure my social media to make me as much of a white nationalist as possible right that that is one of the problems and it is the problem of having any space in which people are allowed to conduct a social round without the uh supervision and control of the state is that people will do odious things in those places and the degree to which we impinge on that is something that we have contested I mean really forever you know the the fourth amendment in the U.S Constitution goes back to these these um uh General warrants right which was a warrant for any officer of the law to enter any premises and search anything without any particular eye suspicion right that is like this is a centrioles fight that a century centuries-old fight that we may not be able to resolve in this digital realm but at the very least like that would be a better fight to be having than whether Mark Zuckerberg should be allowed to do this um yeah absolutely um uh oh I had a I had a thought about that oh yeah so one of the examples that I use when so you've given a really good example there of of how like Bill building a different piece of software to access a um an existing service like an alternative um uh client essentially to existing service allows for like this very different relationship with that service an example that I often give of kind of um uh the ways in which alternatives to kind of big centralized systems like shift things is um is uh is in video clients in the difference between um though this applies to a lot of social media essentially between centralized and decentralized services or like server-based versus peer-to-peer systems and I'm often doing this as so many of us done for the last few years like on Zoom um because somehow despite all the opportunities of covid like breaking apart everything we've ended up with like it seems even bigger monopolies amongst other bad things at the end than we did at the beginning and so I I talk all the time on Zoom to people about like decentralizing the internet but I explained to them like what we're doing right now is we are talking through um a someone else's tougher like one Central thing that sits at the center of the network and by talking through it we are making it more powerful like we are contributing to it by doing this and like and they said there are alternative versions to this that there are um peer-to-peer video services that connect through all these kind of weird trickly networks we connect directly to one each other through a bunch of kind of weird side roads that avoid that kind of total centralization and what's really powerful about this and what I think people do get when I explain this is that by doing that you're not just taking power away from that big Central thing you actually strengthening an entirely different kind of network that you are like shifting you're changing the Topography of the network right because actually that network is formed constantly by the interactions that we have with it the network is reshaped by the actions that we take and that for me is like something that I think people do get quite a lot when you're trying to explain to them about like why these these systems matter is that because it's actually one of those things that kind of bridges the gap between like individual action and Collective action people see that like taking an individual action does do this kind of much bigger thing and that maybe it is worth kind of doing that kind of little weird thing that they need to do that um that may make that may be a little bit complicated but like makes a change so this is where the the I want to distinguish between like seizing someone else's computation and just building your own because I think I I quite like the idea of seizing other people's computation right so like we have this incredibly centralized service Amazon that has done a whole bunch of things among them is they've assigned a unique identifier to effectively every product in the Stream of Commerce right the Asin number which started off as a variant on the ISBN because they used to just sell books and now it's this metastatic um alphanumeric code that describes everything so imagine if you could uh integrate into all of the major point of sale and inventory software something that could translate between everything that you as a merchant had whether you were someone like Argos or just the local Corner Shop had on the shelves and the Amazon um uh asins and then me as someone who lives in the neighborhood could install a plug-in that when I searched for something on Amazon uh if anyone in the neighborhood had that thing it replaced the buy it with Amazon to buy it from the corner shop button right so this is basically turning Amazon into a dumb pipe right and just using it as infrastructure and you know Amazon might try and renumber all of its asins that's going to be a hell of a project for them because they've got all these that you know part of the Amazon strength is getting all these other sellers to use those asins so they're pretty locked into those asins their counter moves are pretty limited there really the thing that stands in the way is you know claims about tortious interference with contract and misappropriation of Ip and a bunch of other nonsense right it's not a technical matter the technical matter is pretty easy in fact because we have so much monopolization and concentration and point of sale software you'd really only have to integrate it with like two or three pieces of software you get nearly every Merchant because they're also locked into these things and then we do it again to the point of sale software right or Uber right everyone's got the Uber client because everyone's all the drivers have the Uber uh client the the driver's side thing and it sucks and they're super predatory and they're awful so but if you land in a new city and you want to get a cab you're pretty stuck right it's going to be very hard to to try something else and so what if we had a third-party piece of software that you could run on your phone and the drivers could run on their phone that that was the driver's Cooperative software that when you booked an Uber it would grab the identity the identifier that Uber Associates with that transaction and then go to a lookup somewhere and say like is the person who made this transaction the driver who made the transaction of the passenger made this transaction are they running the driver's Co-op app if they are we're going to automatically cancel the Uber tear down the the ride and rebuild it as a driver's Co-op ride so you know you wouldn't have to like become a a kind of uh vegan of of you know taxis right you could you could just uh you could just stay with what you got right you could get that you wouldn't have to like stand on a corner for an hour in the rain because you'd steadfastly refuse to use the non-fair trade taxi service but what you could do is make it so that anyone who is using the fair trade taxi service and anyone who wanted a fair trade taxi service could parasite off of uber and Bleed it dry one ride at a time by using it as dumb pipe right the again the barriers to that are not technical the barriers to that are legal well one of my absolute favorite examples of parasitic on an app was the delivery protests in London a few years ago when um uh one of the hardest problems that delivery drivers had in in advocating for better circumstances um better working conditions was that they couldn't meet up they didn't know who each other were um they couldn't they couldn't form a union they never met each other and so what some of them did was a few of them managed to get together on internet Forum they agreed to me to the particular points of the particular time um and then they started ordering pizza to where they were and they started bringing in drivers uh to to where they were um and then basically radicalizing them on arrival um and that did lead to uh to some to uh further protests and some like negotiations and stuff like this um what what does it look like once that parasitism has done its work when Uber has collapsed and this is getting into science fiction territory and I'm not actually much of a futurist and I don't like crazy predictions but I I do like to have some idea of what it would feel like to be in a situation where the Uber has collapsed where it's only the co-op where it is only um like this network of local stores uh that fulfill all those needs because they're all that world Network like what does that what does that look like what does that feel like so let's not yeah I mean let's not uh so so first of all I also agree futurism's nonsense the future is uh not predictable because what we do matters means yeah they're they're fatalism we can change the future future is ours to to grab not not something that's going to come as a kind of deterministic outcome this is the difference between being a novelist and an activist is you have to you have to not get high on your own Supply here and think that you could just plot the future the way you would a a short story um you know the thing about all of those actors right small Merchants individual delivery people whatever is that some of them are bastards right like there's nothing like intrinsically great about being a small Merchant right I I you know when I was a kid there was the local Corner Shop that was just unbelievably horrible to the children who went in even though we just went in and spent our money the way that grown-ups did they could they did it because they they could right um and the difference isn't that this suddenly makes everyone who operates a serve as virtuous is that it makes them less important right it makes it makes the it it it cabins off the harm they can do because with a right of exit and a right to modify then you can do what you can to Tinker away at the service to reduce the harms that they do and if and if that doesn't suit you then you can go somewhere else at a low cost and and here again like the point is to make sure that our policies are administratable right that we don't want that that while there are some things that are going to turn on some extremely subtle fact-intensive questions like privacy questions there are other ones that we can create very bright line tests right like so you mentioned the fediverse and Mastodon I think the most important feature Mastered on the federal verse more important than everything else about it is the fact that you can save out the list of the people who follow you and the people that you follow go to another service upload it and all of those followers and followers just move over in an eye blink right it's like two clicks else is less important once you've got that right because like yeah the moderator might be a jerk the moderator might tolerate Nazis the moderator might you know interfere with your messages and do bad things to you and we can leave and go somewhere else and we can administer a rule that says if someone wants to leave you have to give them that data and the reason we could administer that rule is because if I'm running a server and you leave and you say hey Corey didn't give me my data all the regulator has to do is say hey Corey James says he doesn't have his data can you give him another copy I know you say you gave it to him I know you say he's a liar I don't give a just give him his data again if that's if you're going to insist that we add the word again to that sentence to satisfy your honor fine give them his data again which means that I can run a server for 10 people without needing a giant uh legal department and compliance Department it doesn't it means that you don't have to be the size of Facebook which means that I might have a weird idea and you might have a weird idea about how we conduct ourselves socially with the the physics of the interaction should be and we can build that you can build it and I can build it um and if we're wrong the people who take a flutter aren't stuck forever [Music] who has the power to do that um I noticed for example that um in America a certain critiques of tech in America there's an idea that the EU seems to be quite have a head start on this kind of stuff like they do big stuff like gdpr but they also do this kind of slightly odd almost strange and beautiful things like the right to be forgotten like there's at least a belief in Europe that um that Tech can be regulated even if it's not done terribly well um uh and I think the situation is quite different in Europe and the US um uh but like what what yeah who who who's closest to doing this who could see the means of making legislation so what what's happened is that there are lawmakers and Regulators everywhere so the digital markets unit of the competition markets Authority in the UK the Federal Trade Commission and the um uh the Department of Justice in the United States the European commission the Chinese cyberspace regulator is like really bullish on this stuff um you know all of the all of these different Regulators all over have the bit in their teeth and they need political will and they need uh so they they need protection right so the the EU is doing the digital markets Act and the Digital Services act which are like everything the EU does a mixed bag right they've got some good stuff and some bad stuff in there you mentioned the right to be forgotten it's a lovely sounding idea until you find out that the primary beneficiaries of it are war criminals who make newspapers take down articles about them right that's that's like less good you know um the the cocaine Runners who built the illegal hotel next to my flat in London uh used right to be forgotten it took a long time to find out that they were cocaine Runners who just gotten out of prison uh you know that that's that that's that's the the primary outcome of it but it is a it is a mixed bag to enforce it though they're going to need a lot of political will right so you mentioned the gdpr the gdpr failed because of European federalism because the Irish political situation is such that they are completely dependent on big Tech using them as a tax Haven and big Tech basically said if you fully fund your privacy commissioner then we're going to take our business to Malta or wherever Cyprus and so they've got a data commissioner here 17 cases a year while Germany's here's 500 and so since every case got brought against these tech companies in their headquarters in Dublin and since the Irish you know regulator basically gets out of bed at midday never takes off their pajamas and eats cereal and watches cartoons all day we never got gdpr enforcement so you know it is going to require this this uh International effort of regulators and the good news is that these companies are terrible in the same way everywhere they operate so that the digital Market unit of the competition and markets authorities 80 full-time Engineers paid out by his Majesty's Treasury uh but they never passed a secondary legislation to give them any enforcement Powers so all they do is research and write these 400 page incredible reports on the rot in the ad tech industry in the mobile industry and so on uh but they can't enforce with them on the other hand the European commission has got all the enforcement Powers you want and no Engineers so they pick them up and run with them because everything rotten about these Tech sectors in the UK is equally rotten in the EU and so since they're so homogenized since these Tech platforms are so homogenized everywhere anything that you do that works one place works everywhere this is why Uber anytime someone said hey it would be nice to have the tiniest Iota infinitesimal spec of regulation on Uber Uber was like Jesus Christ no like we will we will destroy this city before we let it pass any regulation at all because they knew that any regulation would be a template everywhere because they were terrible in the same way everywhere that sounds like decentralization uh is the like that is the secret power also in this case to uh that you could have a team working over here that it allows to like formulate a legislation that is then upload over here that you can build out templates in this way that um yeah because I don't know it's only a prison it's only a prisoner's dilemma if you can't talk to each other right and the thing is these Regulators can all talk to each other like hilariously capital is very bad at the at the prisoners dilemmas we just saw with Silicon Valley Bank where I was just say if all these these weirdos had just like not pulled their money out of the bank the bank would have been fine and they were allowed to talk to each other they were playing like the easiest prisoners dilemma where they're all on Twitter together in a group chat and they still failed like that should give us incredible hope a group of people who can't win the prisoners dilemma when they're allowed to talk to each other as much as they like are actually going to be pretty easy to knock over I hope so I hope so too

Channel: Verso Books

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Id: VPvHjvZz7l0

Length: 56min 19sec (3379 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2023