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Tech monopoly: the long view
Just been listening to a terrific conversation on the ‘Talking Politics’ podcast between the host, David Runciman, and Gary Gerstle (who is the Mellon Professor of American history at Cambridge1) about the great campaigner and journalist Ida Tarbell — the woman who brought down John D Rockefeller and his company, Standard Oil.
The conversation left me musing about why (and how) Tarbell (and her fellow ‘muckrakers’) managed to get so much traction with the American public?
One reason was outrage at the way ordinary smallholders were driven out of business by Rockefeller & Co. (Remember, as David Runciman pointed out in the podcast, that in the early days drilling for oil was what small farmers did in Pennsylvalia.) You could drill for your own oil, but if you needed to get it to market you’d have to pay freight rates determined by the railway monopolist — and beat the prices that Rockefeller could set. So even small folks felt the heat.
Another was that the idea of ‘monopoly’ had unique historical resonance for American citizens: it was linked in the public mind with the American revolution — seen in part as a revolt against the charter-granting proclivities of the English Crown.
Also, the rise of new industrial Titans was seen as a challenge to the American dream — of how lowly immigrants seeking a better life in the New World could flourish by their own efforts with no monarch or grandee to stop them. The big trusts could therefore be portrayed as an attack on the very idea of what the US was supposed to be — and thus as a threat to its democracy.
As a result, Tarbell and her peers may have been preaching to people who were ripe for conversion. At any rate, public hostility to the monopolists of the first Gilded Age seems to have flourished and spread. This was manifested in the 1912 presidential election, for example, where the three main candidates were extremely hostile to the monopolists, though in different ways.
Turning to the present…
The contemporary tech giants are also a threat to democracy but in rather different ways. This means that they might be more difficult to bring under democratic control. Apart from anything else, there is much less public outrage about them than there was in 1912 United States. Among the reasons for this public lassitude are:
- the nature of the threat is more indirect and requires a relatively sophisticated mental model of democratic essentials to be properly appreciated
- Unlike in late 19th-century America, the contemporary public benefits from — and enjoys using — many of the services provided by the modern monopolists (think WhatsApp, Skype, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook); in the late 19th century the benefits to the public of the great wealth and power being accumulated by the Robber Barons were less obvious or perceived as non-existent; the new tech titans may not look like middle-aged bastards in Homburg hats, but they are just as ruthless and acquisitive
- there’s little public understanding of the implications of the implicit Faustian data-bargain that users have struck with the surveillance capitalists
- official reactions to digital monopoly have been neutered by a combination of neoliberal ideology, Chicago Law School judicial thinking and tech lobbying.
- Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan & Co had operations mostly concentrated in a single jurisdiction. Their Trusts were not global operations in the way that modern transnational corporations are.
Since the shocks of 2016 we have seen the growth of a degree of public unease about the dangers of our current generation of Robber Barons (the so-called ‘techlash’). We see this, for example, in the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren at the moment. And there is also some evidence of tech-disaffection on the Right in the US. But the diagnoses and remedial policies that are being discussed seem inchoate, incoherent and unlikely to be fit for contemporary purpose. And — most importantly — there is, as yet, no sign of the kind of public outrage that would motivate serious political action.
One final historically-inspired thought. It took about 35 years for the public outrage that was manifested in the 2012 election to find its full expression in legislation in FDR’s first term as President. Gary Gerstle attributed much of the delay to the length of time it took the US Supreme Court to change its collective mind on some of the key issues involved. That problem remains— maybe in more acute form if Trump gets re-elected. So if anyone is hoping to see rapid and effective control of our current monopolists, they will need the patience of Job.
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Ironically in the present context, Gary’s Chair is endowed by the foundation established by the last of the great monopolists, Andrew Mellon! ↩
Maternal scepticism
Dave Winer writes:
A family story. My mother was a pure capitalist. She believed in hard work, being productive. She felt threatened by evidence of idleness. I drove her crazy. Even as a kid I would sometimes just sit in a chair in the living room of our apartment in Jackson Heights and think. Once she saw me sitting, lights off, no TV, no book, appearing to be doing nothing, and she lost her shit right there. Anyway, many years later, when I sold my company and then it went public, after years of begging me to get a job, her stock in the company was all of a sudden worth a lot of money. It was the only time I remember getting her unqualified approval. She boasted, even when I could hear, that I was profitable. In other words, the money and time she put into raising me made her money.
That rings a bell. I’ve been a journalist and an academic all my working life. (My Observer Editor-in-Chief, Conor Cruise O’Brien, who straddled the same two occupations with great distinction, once said to me that he and I “had a foot in both graves”.) My mother, who hoped I would become an engineer with the national Electricity Supply Board, went to her grave believing that I never had held a proper job.
Boiling away
A sugar-beet factory in East Anglia at full throttle. It’s probably just steam.
As Moore’s Law runs out of steam, it’ll be back to the future
This morning’s Observer column:
In a lecture in 1997, Nathan Myhrvold, who was once Bill Gates’s chief technology officer, set out his Four Laws of Software. 1: software is like a gas – it expands to fill its container. 2: software grows until it is limited by Moore’s law. 3: software growth makes Moore’s law possible – people buy new hardware because the software requires it. And, finally, 4: software is only limited by human ambition and expectation.
As Moore’s law reaches the end of its dominion, Myhrvold’s laws suggest that we basically have only two options. Either we moderate our ambitions or we go back to writing leaner, more efficient code. In other words, back to the future.
The White House’s ten principles for AI
Must be a spoof, surely? Something apparently serious emerging from the Trump administration. Ten principles for government agencies to adhere to when proposing new AI regulations for the private sector. The move is the latest development of the American AI Initiative, launched via executive order by President Trump early last year to create a national strategy for AI. It is also part of an ongoing effort to maintain US leadership in the field.
Here are the ten principles, for what they’re worth:
Public trust in AI. The government must promote reliable, robust, and trustworthy AI applications.
Public participation. The public should have a chance to provide feedback in all stages of the rule-making process.
Scientific integrity and information quality. Policy decisions should be based on science.
Risk assessment and management. Agencies should decide which risks are and aren’t acceptable.
Benefits and costs. Agencies should weigh the societal impacts of all proposed regulations.
Flexibility. Any approach should be able to adapt to rapid changes and updates to AI applications.
Fairness and nondiscrimination. Agencies should make sure AI systems don’t discriminate illegally.
Disclosure and transparency. The public will trust AI only if it knows when and how it is being used.
Safety and security. Agencies should keep all data used by AI systems safe and secure.
Interagency coordination. Agencies should talk to one another to be consistent and predictable in AI-related policies.
Askew
We shape our tools, and afterwards…
In his provocative LARB piece on the intrinsic conservatism of machine learning, Cory Doctorow pointed me to “Instant Recall”, Molly Sauter’s lovely essay, about how the Web has given us “a suite of products and services to programmatically induce reminiscence.”
Apps like Timehop, which presents time-traveled posts from across your social media profiles, or Facebook’s “On This Day” Memories, are attempts to automate and algorithmically define reminiscence, turning the act of remembering into a salable, scalable, consumable, trackable product suite. As the work of memory keeping is offshored, Instagram by Instagram, to social media companies and cloud storage, we are giving up the work of remembering ourselves for the convenience of being reminded.
What’s going on, Sauter says, is that we are being algorithmically fed virtual ‘madelaines’ (those buttery cakes that when when dipped in hot tea were the catalyst for the memories that make up Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.) She contrasts this with psychologist Dan McAdams’s contention that remembering is a generative, creative process that is essential for a happy life. What’s important, McAdams argues, is
the creation and maintenance of life narratives, dynamically evolving situated performances that integrate lives in time, providing “an understandable frame for disparate ideas, character, happenings, and other events that were previously set apart.” These stories are subject to constant additive revision, as through living we continually add more material and revise the material available to us, rethinking and rewriting memories as we age. The process of remembering memories rewrites them, revises them, and this ability to re-envision ourselves is a central part of the creation of seemingly stable life narratives that allow for growth and change.
Sauter argues that if we were, somehow, to lose this ability “to both serendipitously and intentionally encounter and creatively engage with our memories, perhaps we would then also lose that re-visionary ability, leaving us narratively stranded amidst our unchanging, unconnected memories”.
It’s a great essay, well worth reading in full. What I like most about it is the way it reminds one of the deeper ways in which digital technology is changing us. “We shape our tools”, as one of Marshall McLuhan’s buddies put it, “and afterwards they shape us“.
In a way, Mark Twain was right when he said that “the older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened”.
There’s ‘Facebook’; and then there’s Facebook
Dave Winer has been ruminating on the idea of ‘Facebook’ viewed not so much as “Zuckerberg’s monster” or a toxic global corporation (the way most of its critics and the media portray it) but as an astonishing global collection of human users. He’s been thinking along these lines for a while, but the way he puts it now is particularly striking. “When I was 14”, he writes,
I went to high school in the Bronx and lived in Queens. It was a 1.5 hour trip each way. I had a few choices but they all magically took the same amount of time. One of the routes was to take the Q16 bus to Main Street, then the 7 train to Grand Central, and switch to the 4 train uptown. The Bedford Park Blvd station is two blocks from the school. One day on the train, I remember this really clearly, I was watching all the houses and apartment buildings we passed, first in Queens, then in the Bronx. Inside every window, I guessed, was a family, like my own, possibly. With their dramas and struggles, stories, victories, history, abuse, happiness, fear. I tried to imagine how each of them might live and realized in an overwhelming way that I could never begin to understand who they were. NYC, even then, was an ethnically and economically diverse place. Of course as we traveled through the city, the people on the train changed too. Very few of them were Bronx Science students. There were all kinds of people. Who knew what any of them were thinking. The point is this. The world is huge. To keep our sanity we have to simplify it, and to do that we have to ignore differences. The stories we tell ourselves little connection to reality. And so any general statement about a community as huge and diverse as Facebook is certain to miss the mark, widely. And most of what we read only focuses on the company, not the users. To have that appear as journalism is just wrong because journalism has a higher calling, to find out what’s real, what’s true, and then say that.
Watching the way my own extended family uses Facebook, that strikes a chord.
House of Windsor Inc.
So Harry and Meghan are spinning themselves off from The Family Firm. The Economist provides the stock market analysis
Harry and Meghan’s move was announced without consultation with the group’s management, but may have been encouraged by developments within it. The stock price has tumbled recently, as a result of missteps by Prince Andrew, who has now been fired. Prince Charles—who will take over the top job in the not-too-distant future—has hinted that he plans to cut costs and slim down its operations as part of a broader restructuring. Rather than wait for that shake-up, Harry, who knew he was unlikely ever to get the top job, has now decided to cut loose.
This separation has the advantage of strategic clarity, and is likely to unlock value, given that the Harry and Meghan brand was widely perceived to be undervalued. The new entity will now have more freedom to diverge from the positioning of the parent group and to tap overseas markets. The couple say they plan to divide their time between Britain and North America.