Internet giants: capitalism red in tooth and claw

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This morning’s Observer column.

Like the other titans of the online world – Google, Facebook, Yahoo and to a lesser extent, Microsoft – Amazon is driven by data and algorithms. But not entirely. What many of its customers may not realise is that the results generated by Amazon’s search engine are partly determined by promotional fees extracted from publishers. In his book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Brad Stone describes one campaign to exert pressure for better terms on the more vulnerable publishers. It was known internally as the gazelle project, after Bezos suggested “that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”. (With a nice Orwellian touch, company lawyers later changed the name to the “small publisher negotiation programme”.)

That’s a revealing metaphor: capitalism red in tooth and claw. And it’s a useful antidote to the soothing PR of the corporations that now dominate our networked world…

Read on

LATER: Ram Reddy emails to point out Jeff Bezos’s wife’s very critical review of Brad Stone’s book — published on the book’s Amazon.com site. Excerpt:

Everywhere I can fact check from personal knowledge, I find way too many inaccuracies, and unfortunately that casts doubt over every episode in the book. Like two other reviewers here, Jonathan Leblang and Rick Dalzell, I have firsthand knowledge of many of the events. I worked for Jeff at D. E. Shaw, I was there when he wrote the business plan, and I worked with him and many others represented in the converted garage, the basement warehouse closet, the barbecue-scented offices, the Christmas-rush distribution centers, and the door-desk filled conference rooms in the early years of Amazon’s history. Jeff and I have been married for 20 years.

While numerous factual inaccuracies are certainly troubling in a book being promoted to readers as a meticulously researched definitive history, they are not the biggest problem here. The book is also full of techniques which stretch the boundaries of non-fiction, and the result is a lopsided and misleading portrait of the people and culture at Amazon. An author writing about any large organization will encounter people who recall moments of tension out of tens of thousands of hours of meetings and characterize them in their own way, and including those is legitimate. But I would caution readers to take note of the weak rhetorical devices used to make it sound like these quotes reflect daily life at Amazon or the majority viewpoint about working there.

Interestingly, when she came to look for a publisher for her own novel, she took it to an old-fashioned bricks ‘n mortar publisher: Knopf.

WhatsApp: in the end, money talks

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The thing I liked most about WhatsApp is that it had a sustainable business model that did not require it to screw its users: you paid for it, just like you pay for electricity or petrol in the offline world. And now it’s been gobbled up by one of the “siren servers” that makes its money by spying on its users. Bah!

I also admire Jan Koum, WhatsApp’s co-founder and CEO, who seems to me to be one of the sanest people in the Valley. This interview (with Kara Swisher) gives a flavour of the man.

When are leaks legitimate?

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Thoughtful review by Jack Shafer of Rahul Sagar’s Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy (Princeton University Press, 2013, 304 pp. $35.00).

Sagar asks, when is it legitimate for an official to disclose secrets? His answer is both conventional and brave — because he must know how many readers will find examples that call his reasoning into question. Unauthorized disclosures of classified material should remain illegal, he writes, because no one official can know with any certainty which disclosures will ultimately serve the public interest. Having made the case for keeping the laws against leaking secrets intact, Sagar then sets five conditions a disclosure must meet before officials can disregard the laws: the disclosure must reveal real wrongdoing or the abuse of public authority, it must be based on evidence rather than hearsay, it must not threaten public safety disproportionately, it must be limited in scale and scope as much as possible, and the leaker must unmask himself and take his lumps to prove that he made the disclosure in good faith and not to gain advantage for himself or his allies.

The Snowden affair happened too late for Sagar to include it in Secrets and Leaks beyond a throwaway footnote, but it makes for an obvious and interesting test of Sagar’s framework. Snowden’s unilateral disclosures do not come close to clearing Sagar’s standard for legalization: as an NSA worker bee, Snowden was in no position to balance the public-interest repercussions of his acts. Nor do they clear Sagar’s first condition for justifiability: although the mass surveillance Snowden revealed may have come as a disconcerting shock to many of his fellow citizens, it might not have been illegal.

Shafer goes on to apply Sagar’s other tests to Snowden and makes some interesting points. He finds that some of them aren’t really relevant or useful. So we’re back to the intractable problem of how to deal with excessive secrecy in a democratic society.

Sagar devotes a chapter to why the regulation of secrecy can’t be turned over to the courts — they lack the expertise and the training to parse secrets, and they are supposed to be open institutions, doing their business in public. Nor can Americans expect Congress to do much better than the executive branch, he argues in another entire chapter. Congress can serve as a watchdog, but there is no reason to think it “will behave any more responsibly than the president,” especially when it knows that outsiders will not be able to second-guess its decisions. That leaves whistleblowers and the press to hold the president accountable for his handling of secrets. Sagar shuns this option. Although he approves of leaks that prevent abuses of power, he believes (along with many others in and around government) that journalists lack the necessary understanding of the big picture to responsibly pass unauthorized disclosures on to the public.

I disagree (but then, as a journalist, I would), because from where I sit, it seems the press has actually been quite conscientious in this regard — for example, in its reporting on the files stolen by the army private now known as Chelsea Manning. In January 2011, my Reuters colleague Mark Hosenball, a national security reporter, cited internal U.S. government reviews that assert that the massive leaks of diplomatic cables by Manning “caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad” and “made public few if any real intelligence secrets.” As with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the leaks created more embarrassment than damage.

As for the Snowden leaks, it’s too early for journalists and others to discount the damage they may have done to U.S. national security. But rare is the leaker whose output unites almost half the House of Representatives, as well as the top Internet companies — Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and AOL — which issued a joint statement in early December protesting the government spying revealed by journalists working with Snowden.

This is a very good review which makes uncomfortable reading because it suggests that the ‘democratic dilemma’ of how to balance secrecy with accountability and openness might actually be insoluble. Some of the most vociferous establishment attacks on the Guardian‘s Editor, Alan Rusbridger, focus on the proposition that he is not in a position to judge whether a particular disclosure will endanger national security. But the weakness of that position is its assertion that only those who are within the secret circle are capable of making the judgement call. And, because of the necessity for secrecy, they can never explain their reasoning to us: in the end, that proposition boils down to “trust us”. But we have no idea if they are worthy of that trust, and sometimes they have clearly shown that they are not.

Lost in translation

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It seems that my column about the anniversary of the BBC Micro has wound up in unexpected places. Today I received this charming email from a Greek who has been struggling to understand my references to (Sir) Clive Sinclair.

Good day.

Would you be so kind to explain this sentence?

“One was Sinclair Research, the eponymous vehicle of Clive Sinclair, a self-made man who worshipped his creator.”

I’m poor in english, but friends of mine who are good enough to work as teacher and translator, are met problems with understanding too.

Well I admit, the “vehicle” is just comprehensive metaphor for company, that allows its creator to move forward bot in professional and social planes. But “eponymous”? Did you meant company gave its name to products or made Clive famous?

Next problem is right after second comma: “a self-made man who worshipped his creator”. I think, the “self-made man” is mr. Sinclair. What about worshipping then? I even peeked in wikipedia, but there is nothing about religious motives of Sinclair nor his family traditions.

My reply:

Thanks for your email.

  1. “vehicle” is indeed a metaphor for his company, which was the corporate extension of SInclair’s personality.

  2. “a self-made man who worshipped his creator”. This an English joke, I’m afraid. Clive Sinclair is indeed a self-made man in the sense that he came from a relatively obscure background. But he also has a very high opinion of himself. A polite way of putting it would be to say that he does not suffer from a lack of self-esteem.

No religious connection is implied by the joke.

Best

John

It’s a reminder of how difficult translation is. And how impossible culturally-specific jokes are for non-native speakers.

Kansas loses it, finally

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Wow! You really could not make this up. Great post by Andrew Sullivan.

The bill that just overwhelmingly passed the Kansas House of Representatives is quite something. You can read it in its entirety here. It is premised on the notion that the most pressing injustice in Kansas right now is the persecution some religious people are allegedly experiencing at the hands of homosexuals. As Rush Limbaugh recently noted, “They’re under assault. You say, ‘Heterosexuality may be 95, 98 percent of the population.’ They’re under assault by the 2 to 5 percent that are homosexual.” As its sponsor, Charles Macheers, explained:

“Discrimination is horrible. It’s hurtful … It has no place in civilized society, and that’s precisely why we’re moving this bill. There have been times throughout history where people have been persecuted for their religious beliefs because they were unpopular. This bill provides a shield of protection for that.”

The remedy for such a terrible threat is, however, state support for more discrimination. The law empowers any individual or business to refuse to interact with, do business with, or in any way come into contact with anyone who may have some connection to a gay civil union, or civil marriage or … well any “similar arrangement” (room-mates?). It gives the full backing of the law to any restaurant or bar-owner who puts up a sign that says “No Gays Served”. It empowers employees of the state government to refuse to interact with gay citizens as a group. Its scope is vast: it allows anyone to refuse to provide “services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges; counseling, adoption, foster care and other social services; or provide employment or employment benefits” to anyone suspected of being complicit in celebrating or enabling the commitment of any kind of a gay couple.

As Andrew points out, if the Republican Party wanted to demonstrate that it wants no votes from anyone under 40, it couldn’t have found a better way to do it. “Some critics”, he writes, “have reacted to this law with the view that it is an outrageous new version of Jim Crow and a terrifying portent of the future for gays in some red states. It is both of those. It’s the kind of law that Vladimir Putin would enthusiastically support. But it is also, to my mind, a fatal mis-step for the movement to keep gay citizens in a marginalized, stigmatized place.”

He goes on:

It’s a misstep because it so clearly casts the anti-gay movement as the heirs to Jim Crow. If you want to taint the Republican right as nasty bigots who would do to gays today what Southerners did to segregated African-Americans in the past, you’ve now got a text-book case. The incidents of discrimination will surely follow, and, under the law, be seen to have impunity. Someone will be denied a seat at a lunch counter. The next day, dozens of customers will replace him. The state will have to enforce the owner’s right to refuse service. You can imagine the scenes. Or someone will be fired for marrying the person they love. The next day, his neighbors and friends will rally around.

If you were devising a strategy to make the Republicans look like the Bull Connors of our time, you just stumbled across a winner. If you wanted a strategy to define gay couples as victims and fundamentalist Christians as oppressors, you’ve hit the jackpot. In a period when public opinion has shifted decisively in favor of gay equality and dignity, Kansas and the GOP have decided to go in precisely the opposite direction. The week that the first openly gay potential NFL player came out, the GOP approved a bill that would prevent him from eating in restaurants in the state, if he ever mentioned his intention to marry or just shack up with his boyfriend. Really, Republicans? That’s the party you want?

Why the obsession with “coding” misses the point

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My relatively mild column about the Year of Code fiasco has generated a fair amount of comment, and a good many emails, including some from friends who think I was too willing to give the YoC crowd the benefit of the doubt, and citing Andrew Orlowski’s characteristically caustic take on the matter.

Leaving aside the motives of those involved in the ‘initiative’, a bigger concern (for me at any rate) is that the obsession with “coding” has two significant downsides:

  • it misses the point of the new school curriculum (or which more in a minute); and,
  • it risks alienating the audience that the initiative urgently needs to convince — schoolteachers who are not techies and are probably very nervous about what lies ahead for them as they come to terms with the new computing curriculum.

In her disastrous Newsnight interview, Lottie Dexter (and indeed her tormentor, Paxman) both seemed to think that the only motivations for the ‘coding’ initiative are utilitarian and economic: it was, they seemed to think, about kids being able to get jobs, start companies and thereby boost the prospects of UK Plc.

It’s nothing of the kind. This is first and foremost about citizenship. Today’s schoolchildren will inherit a world that is largely controlled by computers and software. The choice that faces them is “Program or Be Programmed”, as Douglas Rushkoff puts it in his book of the same title. If we don’t educate them about this stuff, then they will wind up as passive users of powerful black boxes that are designed and controlled by small elites, most of them located abroad.

Preparation for citizenship in this new world requires an understanding of how software works, how it is created and controlled, and how it can be changed. We don’t want them to grow up as technologically clueless as the parliamentarians who are supposed to oversee GCHQ; or indeed as Paxman, who at one stage fell back on the old trope about not having to understand electricity in order to replace a light bulb. (The obvious riposte — that light bulbs don’t decide whether you get a mortgage, monitor your private communications or count your vote – was obviously beyond poor Dexter.)

The other aspect of this is that, while learning to program is desirable, it’s not the most important part — which is about having a good critical understanding of the technology. And much though I love Raspberry Pi, teachers can achieve a lot of what I would like to achieve without ever touching a piece of hardware — as the wonderful Computer Science Unplugged project in New Zealand demonstrates.

Why Year of Code already needs a reboot

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This morning’s Observer column.

Last week, my email inbox began to fill up with angry emails. Had I seen the dreadful/unbelievable/disgraceful/hilarious/ (delete as appropriate) Newsnight interview with Lottie Dexter? I hadn’t and as I’d never heard of Ms Dexter I wasn’t unduly bothered. After all, life is too short to be watching Newsnight every night.

Still, the drumbeat of indignation in my inbox was insistent enough to make me Google her.