We are at a Crossroads. We can let the billionaires enshittify society or we can stand up for ourselves.

What is Surveillance Capitalism?  [1] It's the businesses that are free to you but support themselves by selling advertising over a network. They sell your attention: You are the product. Their real customers are the advertisers, who pay the Surveillance Capitalist's to throw their messages in front of you. FBook and YouTube were the first to industrialize this business model. It leveraged Google's original business model of advertising on their search page and selling the same advertising to web sites to resell, thus giving sites a way to monetize their views. Surveillance Capitalists are much more intrusive: they design their sight to be addictive (which isn't healthy.) They have AI algorithms tuning the feed of presented nuggets to increase the amount of time you spend online and the likelihood you will click on one of their ads. Even though this could be bad for you and your neighbors. They don't care and they pretend it's "out of their control", but then, who is in control? Who feeds you the one post that is most likely to keep you glued to the site?

Surveillance Capitalism has two directions it could go in. There's the direction that humanity wants it to go: the algorithm (AI) knows us better than we know ourselves. It could maximize our well being and enable our pursuit of happiness; just like it says in the founding documents of our nation. The tragedy is that this will be up to us. Why is it a tragedy? Because if we don't control it, it will control us. There is no reason to sell our attention, except on our own terms. Just as there was no reason to let the Robber Barons own all the industries in the west in the Gilded Age, we solved this problem by inventing anti-trust law; there is no reason today to let these Surveillance Capitalist companies use us as their prey. [2]

What actual direction is Surveillance Capitalism taking off in? It's maximizing its profits: Your time on the system and what someone will pay them to force you to watch. And they don't care how detrimental they make the service for its users, they're a monopoly! Sound familiar? Cigarettes are addictive and we charge for each one they smoke? Make them more addictive! Some people die from cancer? That's only a few percent a year, our polls/sales can barely detect that! These companies are not your friends, they are rapacious, amoral and unable to be restrained. They can be fined, but there is nobody personally responsible for their behavior, despite being controlled and directed by somebody.

A favorite tactic of the new Surveillance Capitalist of our New Gilded Age to get more engagement is to promote nationalism or hatred by dehumanization. This gets much more attention from both sides than almost anything else. That the attention is fear on one side and hatred on the other doesn't make any difference to the algorithm (AI). It doesn't understand whether it's making you sadder or depressed or outraged or incredulous or interested... because it doesn't understand human emotions. It doesn't need to understand human emotion, it only needs to know how to keep you on longer and how to make you click and buy stuff more often. The algorithm doesn't care that it made everyone more miserable. It has to be told that it shouldn't make people feel bad... but it is not. And it is not told this because it would reduce the profits of the owner of the channel, the Surveillance Capitalist.

The AI has been told to increase attention and likelihood to click, and it does it. Efficiently. At an industrial scale. For billions of users. It doesn't have reasons for doing these things, it has metrics that it can use to optimize profits: time spent scrolling, click-rate, click-cost and it knows to multiply all three together to measure profitability. It has been told to optimize that one number. As a result, rather than increasing your pursuit of happiness, the AI increases your time spent on the site times your click rate time your click cost (how much an advertiser will pay to show you an ad), which is their revenue. The Surveillance Capitalists have turned over the control of their channels to an algorithm that edits and tailors your feed to you. And unless we prevent it, it will be to your detriment.

Do they have to piss  you off to get you to spend more time on the site? You ain't seen nothing yet...! When the algorithm's recommendations start spilling out into the real world, that's when the consequences are real lives shattered and destroyed. Think of the pogroms in Bangladesh and Myanmar, India and Turkey, Venezuela and China. The AI just do what they are told to do. They don't understand, they're not conscious. They're just a massive inference machine that tries to influence you to do what it wants using all the information it's gathered about you. 

This is a broken contract. We don't have to keep doing it this way. We get to tell the Surveillance Capitalist how they can use our data and how they can influence us. They have to prove to us that their services are harmless. They can do double-blind studies on their own system to measure the effects of their algorithm. They do. They can share that information with the rest of us. They can show that any changes they make increase our well-being and enable a better pursuit of our happiness. Or they can shut down. It's up to them.

We can take either of these paths. We can pretend to ignore these companies that are stealing the attention of humanity or we can encourage these companies to increase our well-being, to facilitate our pursuit of happiness and make us all happier, healthier and wiser. If we ignore them, they will inevitably enshittify their services even more. [3] Their AI algorithm will attempt to trigger your instinctual emotional triggers to frighten and intrigue you and excite you to click on more ads so they can make more money by making your life more miserable and less free. 

The choice is ours. We can control the entities that are trying to monopolize our attention or they can control us. It's up to you. If you're a Representative or a Senator, Listen to Roger McNamee [4], Cory Doctorow and Shoshana Zuboff. They know of what they speak. They are the experts in what will be the consequences of any regulatory decisions. They know how much better it could be. Is this something you want to leave to the billionaires who are trying to make more money off of our misery? Any responsible American would proclaim, "Hell, No!"

The only way the last Gilded Age ended was when we broke up the monopolies and allowed competition to flourish, both in the consumer market and in the labor market with the support of unions. When Theodore Roosevelt stood up for the people and forced the billionaires to break up their companies, he brought stability and growth to the world for decades, only interrupted by our need to defeat fascism. We defeated fascism then and we've been fighting brush fires ever since, slowly convincing the people of the world that democracy and competition are what delivers Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. We've staved off fascism for eighty years. A new communications channel popped up and the fascists have attempted to use it to take power, again. We can stop them, again. We will.

It will take efforts from each one of us, but nothing extraordinary. We've regulated other industries before. We've set the regulatory environment for these services, we've regulated the airwaves and the roads, the banking industry and the oil industry, every industry has to follow regulations to keep the rest of us safe. We can work together to decide how to control and regulate this industry so that it does what is best for America, not what's best for the billionaires at America's expense.

Thanks for Reading!

 -Dr. Mike

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[1] As described by the master Cory Doctorow: How to destroy Surveillance Capitalism or the original description from Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: A Fight for a Human Future At the new Frontier of Power

[2] Harari's Law of Artificial Intelligence: The ability of AI to impersonate and shout down humans is bad and getting worse.

... and its corollaries.

1. AI can overwhelm any human conversation by counterfeiting a human persona.

2. Free Speech is paramount, impersonating a human is illegal counterfeiting. 

Also relevant are Harari's Laws of Information: 

1. Centrally controlled autocracies are poorer overseers of economies than democracies as they attempt to centralize all information which makes them less efficient, more erratic and thus dangerous.

2. Distributed communications for the masses was necessary before implementing democracy at a national level.

3. The availability of information is proportional to its cost: Truth is expensive, lies are practically free. 

[3] Doctorow's Law of Enshittification: Any Network Offering will tend to Enshittify its Service to maximize its profit.

... and its corollaries.

1. The tendency to enhittify a service increases as it becomes more monopolized.

2. Network effects tend to increase the amount of monopolization.

3. Enshittification should be minimalized as it extracts profit by making other's lives worse. 

This is one of the most basic (secular) sins: greed at the expense of others. Extracting pennies of profit for pound of flesh will not be tolerated. Anti-trust law will be enforced to the full extent of the law.

[4] Roger McNamee: Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.