The founders of Facebook and Google are horrified by what they have wrought. John Naughton writes:
Put simply, what Google and Facebook have built is a pair of amazingly sophisticated, computer-driven engines for extracting users’ personal information and data trails, refining them for sale to advertisers in high-speed data-trading auctions that are entirely unregulated and opaque to everyone except the companies themselves.
The purpose of this infrastructure was to enable companies to target people with carefully customised commercial messages and, as far as we know, they are pretty good at that. (Though some advertisers are beginning to wonder if these systems are quite as good as Google and Facebook claim.) And in doing this, Zuckerberg, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and co wrote themselves licences to print money and build insanely profitable companies.
It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters. Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid?
The answer, Naughton suggests, lies in the education each of the founders of these technological giants received:
Sergey Brin studied mathematics and computer science. His partner, Larry Page, studied engineering and computer science. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, where he was studying psychology and computer science, but seems to have been more interested in the latter.
As one perceptive observer Bob O’Donnell puts it, “a liberal arts major familiar with works like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, or even the work of ancient Greek historians, might have been able to recognise much sooner the potential for the ‘tyranny of the majority’ or other disconcerting sociological phenomena that are embedded into the very nature of today’s social media platforms. While seemingly democratic at a superficial level, a system in which the lack of structure means that all voices carry equal weight, and yet popularity, not experience or intelligence, actually drives influence, is clearly in need of more refinement and thought than it was first given.”
We are still living in the world C.P. Snow described in The Two Cultures, where the sciences and the humanities are not on speaking terms:
He lamented the fact that the intellectual life of the whole of western society was scarred by the gap between the opposing cultures of science and engineering on the one hand, and the humanities on the other – with the latter holding the upper hand among contemporary ruling elites. Snow thought that this perverse dominance would deprive Britain of the intellectual capacity to thrive in the postwar world and he clearly longed to reverse it.
Snow believed that the truly educated person should be steeped in both the sciences and the humanities. And so, here we are, in a world where some very bright and influential people make stupid decisions.
Image:wikipedia
10 comments:
The prowess of the particular technocrats responsible for this mess reminds me of how Mussolini was able to make the trains run on time and how efficient the Nazis were in delivering people to the death camps. Very proficient, and utterly soulless, Owen.
Whoa, one of the founders said they both used psychology to make exactly what we have now. Facebook should be banned canned split up and made into morning prayers.
Thank Gawd the internet wasn't around in the 1920's and 1930's. It might have filled people's heads up with dangerous ideas.
In all seriousness, we never should have allowed the printing press to be developed. It allowed Martin Luther's half-educated heresies to spread like a plague ("go viral" is the kid's expression for that) and upset the careful teachings of the One True Church and drown Europe (and the world) in blood for centuries.
In all seriousness (seriously this time) I think the article you link to is just propaganda for the selective targeting of "fake news." $50,000 in ruble-denominated social media ads did NOT swing the election to Trump. It was just people who couldn't stomach voting for a piece of shit like Hillary Clinton staying home that did it. It was serial betrayal of everything progressives believe in on the part of the Democrats, the blatant rigging of the system against Sanders, the kow-towing to Wall Street, and on and on, that caused Clinton to lose.
Joseph Conrad understood these characters very well, Lorne. Mr. Kurtz lives on.
Any organization which replaces judgment with a logarithm, will eventually wind up in deep trouble, Steve.
I agree that Hillary was a poor candidate, thwap. But when I read what some of my American relatives post on Facebook about Trump, I have to wonder. P.T. Barnum might not have said it. But whoever did say it was right. A sucker really is born every minute.
There is nothing inherently wrong with social media or search engines. The problem is a business model built on tracking individual users; think spying. The people who designed Internet protocols never expected that they would be so terribly abused. They probably should have since all technologies get abused. The early printing press spawned a lot of Bibles and pornography. C'est la vie. It is possible to have an Internet with Freedom for the user. The Tor browser uses a network that hides one's tracks. Virtual Private Networks (VPN) do something similar. One can choose to stay off of social media, choose to use a search engine that doesn't track users (StartPage, Duckduckgo) choose to use ad blockers.
Really, the best offense is an educated population.
Precisely, Toby. The best defence for democracy is an educated population.
"Any organization which replaces judgment with a logarithm."
Speaking as an engineer, I'd say logarithms have nothing to do with it. ALGORITHM is the word you want, the current fancypants word for a mathematical model of a system, expressed in computer code. Just like an APP is the hipster word for a computer program which does about one thing and often not very well, and which in earlier times were known as subroutines until they were commercialized for money to hang off an existing operating system and needed a snappy new name for application.
A logarithm and an algorithm are nowhere near being the same thing.
I avoid Facebook and Twitter like the plague - surely you all could see where this stuff was heading a decade ago when MySpace was au courant? Data mining. Pure and simple, under the guise of focused ads, while in fact being 1984-style poking into your personal business. Focused ads are bad enough, but the rest is just evil. "We use cookies to improve your experience on our site and to provide you personal content." Wowee, thanks so much.
Today, all I see is students going to Dal and Saint Mary's here in Halifax trudging down the streets with backpacks, their schnozzes stuck deep in smartphones, reading and texting god knows what, what breakfast they had or something. It's one thing for kids to decide early they hate school and couldn't be bothered being interested in any of the subjects out of sheer laziness or feelings of inadequacy, but so far as I can observe, today's outcome is walking zombies uninterested even in social interaction face-to-face, let alone today's Bigger Questions. An actual phone call is a dreaded thing for them - gosh, they'll have to speak!
No, life is something to be burdened with, tolerated, rather than to revel in all that is around us, whether it be arts, humanities, science or engineering. You know the world's gone to hell in a handbasket when the popular word is Technology, which means what, exactly? It's what people who struggle to understand anything in the science or engineering world call all the stuff they cannot be bothered to understand. And who mistake a 4 year old's ability to master a touch screen as a sign of "technological" prowess.
The result is a people unable to clearly say aloud what they mean. Repeated "Like, y'knows" are not an explanation nor an argument. People fifty years ago were not so tongue-tied, and when stopped by a Roving Reporter actually could recall the names of the ten provinces, and who the premier of theirs was. Not today. Dumb clucks abound, and grin without embarrassment for the camera. Logical processing and understanding of political events cannot be expected from these sucked-dry minds.
I'm all for a meeting of the minds between arts and science, but not expecting it - the structural damage is already far beyond that in my view. Most people are quite uninquisitive except for their social scene, and just cannot be bothered. They are quite happy being uninformed on almost everything as a way of coping with life, which for most people is a foreseeable endless nightmare of paying monthly to the overlords for merely existing. Looked at from that perspective, interest in sports and Hollywood stars and what Mrs Smith opposite is up to and Netflix/FB/Snapchat/Twitter etc constitutes a full life. Concerning oneself with more cerebral stuff is of little interest, and might constitute an additional burden on the mind they're not willing to shoulder.
BM
Thanks for educating me, BM, on the difference between a logarithm and an algorithm. When I went to school -- in the last century -- we only had logarithms. It strikes me that you have bridged the two cultures nicely.
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