Zuckerberg’s latest ‘vision’

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This morning’s Observer column:

Dearly beloved, our reading this morning is taken from the latest Epistle of St Mark to the schmucks – as members of his 2.3 billion-strong Church of Facebook are known. The purpose of the epistle is to outline a new “vision” that St Mark has for the future of privacy, a subject that is very close to his wallet – which is understandable, given that he has acquired an unconscionable fortune from undermining it.

“As I think about the future of the internet,” he writes (revealingly conflating his church with the infrastructure on which it runs), “I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms. Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.”

Quite so…

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The abandoned boat

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I’ve photographed this scene in Burnham Deepdale on the Norfolk coast before, but invariably towards the end of the day. This is how it looked yesterday morning.

Click on image for a larger version.

The Christchurch atrocity, extremism and the Internet

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Thoughtful and sombre commentary by Kevin Roose:

Now, online extremism is just regular extremism on steroids. There is no offline equivalent of the experience of being algorithmically nudged toward a more strident version of your existing beliefs, or having an invisible hand steer you from gaming videos to neo-Nazism. The internet is now the place where the seeds of extremism are planted and watered, where platform incentives guide creators toward the ideological poles, and where people with hateful and violent beliefs can find and feed off one another.

So the pattern continues. People become fluent in the culture of online extremism, they make and consume edgy memes, they cluster and harden. And once in a while, one of them erupts.

In the coming days, we should attempt to find meaning in the lives of the victims of the Christchurch attack, and not glorify the attention-grabbing tactics of the gunman. We should also address the specific horror of anti-Muslim violence.

At the same time, we need to understand and address the poisonous pipeline of extremism that has emerged over the past several years, whose ultimate effects are impossible to quantify but clearly far too big to ignore. It’s not going away, and it’s not particularly getting better. We will feel it for years to come.

So Facebook does exercise editorial control after all

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Senator Elizabeth Warren is running for President — or at any rate for the Democratic nomination. One of her policy proposals is to break up the tech giants. Like all other presidential hopefuls, her campaign advertises on Facebook. The ads included a video which pointed users to a petition on Warren’s campaign website urging them “to support our plan to break up these big tech companies.” “Three companies have vast power over our economy and our democracy”, said one ad that Warren’s campaign had placed on Friday. “Facebook, Amazon, and Google. We all use them. But in their rise to power, they’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field in their favor.”

Guess what happened next? Facebook removed the ads on the grounds that they violated the company’s terms and conditions for advertisers. Politico reported the takedown, after which Facebook hurriedly restored the ads. “We removed the ads because they violated our policies against use of our corporate logo,” explained a spokesperson. “In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads.”

Warren then tweeted

“Curious why I think FB has too much power? Let’s start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power,” she tweeted. “Thanks for restoring my posts. But I want a social media marketplace that isn’t dominated by a single censor.”

WhatsApp groups and Brexit extremism

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Charles Arthur has a perceptive piece in the Guardian asking whether WhatsApp is pushing UK MPs towards what Cass Sunstein calls “enclave extremism”.

Barely a week goes by without government ministers or MPs warning Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube (a subsidiary of Google), Instagram or WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook) that they must do more to prevent radical or dangerous ideas being spread. A “crackdown” is always just around the corner to protect users from harmful content.

Oddly, MPs never wonder whether they might be victims of the same effects of these tools that they, too, use all the time. Why not, though? We keep hearing that it’s a big problem for people to be repeatedly exposed to radical ideas and outspoken extremists. It’s just that for MPs, those tend to be within their own parties rather than on obscure YouTube channels.

Yep.

Quote of the Day

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Q: We’re now more than two years out from that experience, and obviously the controversies have not gone away — they’ve actually multiplied. Do you think Zuckerberg and Sandberg have made any progress on the stuff you warned about?

A: I want to avoid absolutes, but I think it’s safe to say that the business model is the source of the problem, and that it’s the same business model as before. And to the extent that they made progress, it’s in going after different moles in the Whack-a-Mole game. From the point of view of the audience, Facebook is as threatening as ever.

From an interview with Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook and apparently a recovering former mentor to Mark Zuckerberg. He’s also the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.

Warren is on the warpath and she’s right

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One of the planks of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s emerging campaign is a radical proposal to break up the tech giants. She did a robust defence the other day of her proposal.

I’m with her all the way on that, as is Dave Winer. But, Dave writes,

we need to do more, and do it very soon. They [the tech giants] are destroying natural resources the way oil giants did before the government stepped in. However our political leaders, like most users, don’t understand.

The natural resource they are destroying is the World Wide Web, an open, unowned resource that has fostered the innovative environment that gave birth to Google and Facebook.

Google is acting as if it were the government, without any checks and balances, no oversight, no redress of grievances. They say they’re doing it for the good of the net, but we know they’re a huge corporation, and that’s not how it works.

Facebook is sucking the life out of the web, along with Medium (where Warren published her manifesto!). Some simple rules, if followed, would restore balance to the web ecosystem. But there are no rules here, so they run wild, and take whatever isn’t nailed down.

They’ve had a fantastic run, but it’s long past time for some rules, and consequences for not respecting that we all have ownership of the resource they are foreclosing on.

Yep.

The 5G enigma

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This morning’s Observer column:

The dominant company in the market at the moment is Huawei, a $100bn giant which is the world’s largest supplier of telecoms equipment and its second largest smartphone maker. In the normal course of events, therefore, we would expect that the core networks of western mobile operators would have a lot of its kit in them. And initially, that’s what looked like happening. But in recent months someone has pressed the pause button.

The prime mover in this is the US, which has banned government agencies from using Huawei (and ZTE) equipment and called on its allies to do the same. The grounds for this are national security concerns about hidden “backdoors”: it would be risky to have a company so close to the Chinese government building key parts of American critical infrastructure. Last week Huawei filed a lawsuit against the US government over the ban. New Zealand and Australia have obligingly complied with the ban, blocking the use of Huawei’s equipment in 5G networks. And last December BT announced that it was even removing Huawei kit from parts of its 4G network.

Other countries – notably Japan and Germany – have proved less compliant; the German Data Commissioner was even tactless enough to point out that “the US itself once made sure that backdoor doors were built into Cisco hardware”.

The UK’s position is interestingly enigmatic…

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How to write about automobiles

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Here’s the Observer‘s Martin Love on the Mercedes G-wagon:

Looking across the street to where I’ve parked a whopping Mercedes G-Class, I watch a short scene unfold, which sends me plunging down memory lane. A little boy is walking to school with his mum. His younger sister is thrashing around in her pushchair like a netted salmon. Suddenly, they all stop. The boy has spotted the emerald green G-Wagon lurking across the road. His mum patiently wheels the buggy across to it and then, slowly, they inch around the car – the boy’s mouth gapes with incredulity. His toy car has been reborn as a colossal giant. At one point he delicately lays his hand on its immense flank – as if he’s touching a sleeping tyrannosaurus. He’s mesmerised by the car’s size and promise of power. It’s exactly what I would have done… Scratch that, it’s exactly what I did do a few days earlier, when I collected the car. If machines get you, they always will. And there are few with more emotional traction than the G-Wagon.

This barnstormer takes quasi-industrial styling and military machismo to nose-bleeding levels…

Funnily enough, as a recovering petrolhead who now drives a sensible hybrid, I know just what he means. Returning from Provence last Summer, we were parked at the Eurotunnel terminal waiting for our shuttle to be called. When we got back to the car after getting a coffee, there was a span-new G-Wagon parked next to us. And, despite myself, I had exactly the same reaction. It’s an astonishing vehicle. Completely OTT. But not repulsive in the way that the Humvee is.

Love finishes his essay nicely…

I popped across the street and asked the small boy if he’d like to climb in and “start her up”. He gleefully accepted… feet dangling, finger hesitating over the ignition, then the omnipotent roar of the engine. Start saving now, little guy.

Only £143,305 to go.