Super Zuck, champion of “Masculine Energy”

Zeynep Tufekci, Zuckerberg’s Macho Posturing Looks a Lot Like Cowardice, NYTimes, Jan. 15. 2024.

I really, really wanted to like Mark Zuckerberg’s gushing appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast last Friday. [...] On the podcast, Zuckerberg told Rogan about how society had become too “neutered or emasculated” and gushed about “masculine energy” and his newfound devotion to jujitsu.

I’m not their target audience but I feel their vibe. A.C.L. tears, which they spent some time commiserating about, are pretty nasty. And I have a soft spot for martial arts content.

But one of the most recent actions that Zuckerberg’s supposedly emboldened company took was to banish tampons from office men’s rooms. (The products had been provided for transgender or nonbinary employees.) “Masculine energy,” my lady-parts — that is the most snowflake move I’ve heard of in a long time. If the men in your company can’t even handle the sight of a box of tampons, you’ve got bigger problems than an A.C.L. tear.

Also:

This week Meta announced a change to Facebook’s Messenger App. Users who want to customize their wallpaper can still do so, but they will no longer have the option to use themes with colors of the transgender and nonbinary flag.

Whatever one’s position on transgender rights, limiting people’s ability to express themselves — in private conversations with their friends — is not a great way to kick off a free-speech crusade.

It’s a long way from where Zuckerberg was during the Biden or the Obama administration. In those very different political climates, he apologized for Facebook’s role in promoting fake news and hate speech and vowed to take action. The platform even kicked Donald Trump off on Jan. 7, 2021.

But Trump (and his buddy Elon Musk) doesn’t like restrictions on hate speech, and now neither does Zuckerberg. Transgender rights are a flashpoint for Trump’s base, so tampons and theme colors have got to go. Flattery and obeisance are how powerful people keep themselves in favor with strongman regimes. Cash works, too.

Jujitsu to the rescue:

When discussing his love for jujitsu, Zuckerberg told Rogan that the sport let him “just express myself, right?”

“It’s like when you’re running a company, people typically don’t want to see you being this ruthless person who’s just, like, ‘I’m just going to crush the people I’m competing with,’” he said. But in martial arts, “you’re rewarded” for being ruthless.

What is the reward for boasting about your own toughness while charting your umpteenth cowardly zigzag in order to please the people in power? I guess we’re about to find out.

There's more at the link.

How to Say “No” to Our A.I. Overlords

The NYTimes has a useful article about how to avoid the AI that Google, Microsoft and Meta are foisting on us:

Big tech brands like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Meta have all unleashed tech that they describe as artificial intelligence. Soon, the companies say, we’ll all be using A.I. to write emails, generate images and summarize articles.

But who asked for any of this in the first place?

Judging from the feedback I get from readers of this column, lots of people outside the tech industry remain uninterested in A.I. — and are increasingly frustrated with how difficult it has become to ignore. The companies rely on user activity to train and improve their A.I. systems, so they are testing this tech inside products we use every day.

I'm particularly worried about having these things in word-processing and email programs. I think it's particularly important that AI-generated text be clearly marked as such. This is going to make that impossible.

How do you say “NO!” to Big Brother when it controls your computer?

Two years ago I did a series of posts provoked by Facebook. As I explained in the first post in that series, Facebook or freedom, Part 1: Who gave you permission to mess with my mind?:

On Tuesday, August 25, I was using Facebook, as I do every day, and I changed from one page to another. All of a sudden, WHAM! the interface changed and went mostly black. Facebook informed me that they would be changing the interface permanently on September 1, but I could get the new interface now. But, if I wanted, I could, at least temporarily, switch back to the old interface.

I resisted as long as I could, though I knew my resistence was doomed to failure, and in the process wrote a series of posts about how endusers are the at the mercey of Big Corps that provide us with the software we use to run our daily lives. The most recent post in the series went up on December 22 of last year, What do I want from my AI Assistant? [control, that's what].

Though I was aware of it, I neglected to write a post about the ‘right to repair,’ which has been an important issue for farmers and other operators of big equipment:

Modern-day tractors and combines are basically like computers on wheels. And for years, there has been a battle between farmers and manufacturers over who should have access to the information needed to repair them. Equipment manufacturers have made some concessions in order to avoid new laws, but some farmers say that's not enough. A new law in Colorado went into effect that allows farmers to repair their own equipment.

It’s the same issue. WE own it, sorta’, but THEY own it more, and so can control us, after a fashion.

I was reminded of the issue this morning when I woke up and my Android phone displayed a message: “Optimize your updated device. Click to get started.” My immediate reaction was %$!!$$!*##!! I may have to do it just to get rid of that damn message. And the result may be benign, but it’s the principle of the thing.

And THAT’s the deepest issue currently raised by AI, who controls what? It’s pretty obvious that the Big Boyz want to control as much as possible, not withstanding the fact that both Microsoft and Facebook are jumping on the Open Source bandwagon. Regardless of what they want and how the politics evolves, we’re dealing with highly sophisticated technology, technology about which most of us are ignorant. Given that ignorance, how can we possibly exert control over the AI that’s being shoved our way willy-nilly? Moreover it’s clear that AI technology can and will be very useful in educational settings.

Arizona State University just partnered with OpenAI (H/t Tyler Cowen).[1] Who controls what and for whom in that partnership? My guess is that, regardless of what the contracts say, we don’t how things will unfold. Who has what power? OpenAI? ASU administration, faculty, and students? What about the Arizona governor, legislature, and voters? The concentration and density is highest with OpenAI, not to mention the knowledge. To be sure, there are some faculty at ASU who are quite sophisticated about AI – I’m thinking particularly of Subbarao Kambhampati (కంభంపాటి సుబ్బారావు), an AI researcher who is immune to the hype and is quite active on Twitter, I mean X – what role will they play in this partnership? And so on.

You see the problem, don’t you?

In this context all this hype and blather about AI Doom is just a distraction. I’m reasonably certain that the Doomers are sincere in their anxiety, but when you zoom out at look at things from 20,000 feet their actions take on a different cast. The way social systems behave is almost always different from what is intended by individual human actors within those systems.

What’s going on? 

ADDENDUM, Feb. 9, 2024: OpenAI has is now working on agent software that would all but take over user devices and perform useful tasks. Take over?!!! Gary Marcus is skeptical:

Finally, let’s not forget about privacy. Such agents could (more or less by definition) have access to literally all of a user’s personal and professional information: every file, every keystroke, every password, every email, every text message, every location change, and every web search. After all, that’s what it means to take over a user’s device.

Even Orwell didn’t quite dream of that. Combine that with worries about security, and it’s all a colossal accident waiting to happen. Heaven forbid they should be allowed to run such software on Department of Defense computers. One screwup (and we all know LLMs are prone to screwups) and a LOT of people could die.

* * * * *

[1] From the article about ASU:

With the OpenAI partnership, ASU plans to build a personalized AI tutor for students, not only for certain courses, but also for study topics. STEM subjects are a focus and are “the make-or-break subjects for a lot of higher education,” Gonick said. The university will also use the tool in ASU’s largest course, Freshman Composition, to offer students writing help.

ASU also plans to use ChatGPT Enterprise to develop AI avatars as a “creative buddy” for studying certain subjects, like bots that can sing or write poetry about biology, for instance.

Gonick said ASU’s prompt engineering course has become one of the university’s most popular courses, not limited to engineering students. The access to ChatGPT Enterprise means students will no longer be limited by usage caps. He also said that after conversations with OpenAI’s leadership, he feels confident that the tool provides a “private walled-garden environment” that will safeguard student privacy and intellectual property.

OpenAI and ASU’s joint release specified that any prompts the ASU community inputs into ChatGPT “remain secure,” and that OpenAI “does not use this data for its training models.”

What do I want from my AI Assistant? [control, that's what]

It seems pretty clear that sooner or later I’m going to have one. Whether or not it will be one that is focused on my interests as I see them, that’s not at all clear. It’s just as likely, if not more so, that I’ll be forced to accept an AI assistant designed for me by some MegaCorp. This MegaCorp will tell me that it has my interests at heart, and that I can easily customize MyAssist the way I want, I won’t believe it. MyAssist will just be MegaCorp’s way of handling me. If I refuse MyAssist, which I could do, then it is likely that it will be much more difficult, if not impossible, for me to access many of the things I use my computer for.

Why do I think such a thing? Because that’s pretty much the way things are now. Two years ago I published a series of posts on the topic Facebook or Freedom. Those posts were precipitated by a change in the Facebook interface that was being thrust on me. I was happy with the interface just as it was, thank you very much, and I saw no need for a change. I resisted as long as I could; I even considered installing one of the work-arounds that was available to those who really did not want to change. But in the end I had to change. So I did. I’ve adapted, as I have to subsequent changes, all done for my good.

What bothered me then, and still does, is that I had little choice in the matter. The same thing’s been going on with the App Formerly Known as Twitter since Elon took it over. Since the change a bunch of my academic buddies have all but disappeared from the platform, and the number of Babe Bots has increased, but otherwise things are much the same for me. I’ve never been on AFKaT for the politics, so I’ve been able to avoid most of it. That hasn’t changed. I really don’t want to pay a monthly fee (I live on a very modest fixed income), I understand that Elon has to turn a buck, so why has he driven the advertisers away?

I digress.

The fact is, I’m wedded to my computer and to the internet, email and world-wide web. I really couldn’t function very well without them, not as an intellectual. And for the most part I don’t have to spend all that much time fiddling around with things in order to keep them working. But I do have to spend some time. And, yes, I probably could use some changes. But I don’t have the skills I’d need to make those changes, much less the time.

It's obvious that I need an AI Assistant to take care of all of this. Some years ago I sketched out ideas for a PowerPoint Assistant I could control through natural language. I also imagined that what I was thinking about for PowerPoint could be generalized:

The PowerPoint Assistant is only an illustrative example of what will be possible with the new technology. One way to generalize from this example is simply to think of creating such assistants for each of the programs in Microsoft’s Office suite. From that we can then generalize to the full range of end-user application software. Each program is its own universe and each of these universes can be supplied with an easily extensible natural language assistant. Moving in a different direction, one can generalize from application software to operating systems and net browsers.

Back then – the notes originally date from 2002-2003 – the technology we’d need to do that didn’t exist. Now it does.

Who’s going to control these AI Assistants? The end-users or the MegaCorps?

But how could it be anyone BUT the MegaCorps? Real control requires technical skill few end users have. Even if a user has the skills, the humongous AI models at the heart of current AI tech are necessarily in the hands of organizations that have the capital and personnel needed to create and maintain them. To be sure, a lively open-source scene is developing, with Meta and Microsoft encouraging it by releasing relatively small AI engines to the open-source world. Would they be doing that if they hadn’t been caught flatfooted by OpenAI, primarily, and secondarily by Google and Anthropic and a few others? Could governments develop large AI models that they maintain as public utilities? Should they? Can they attract the personnel needed to do so?

I can’t see where any of this is going. I’m in favor of decentralized disbursement and control of the technology. Just how that’s going to work out, who knows? At the moment the Robber Barons of Silicon Valley seem to have the upper hand. I don’t know whether or not they can keep it forever.

And so forth and so on.

More later.

Much more. 

* * * * *

 ADDENDUM: Is Rabbit a first-draft of the assistant I want?

Introducing r1. Watch the keynote.

Order now: https://t.co/R3sOtVWoJ5 #CES2024 pic.twitter.com/niUmjFvKvE

— rabbit inc. (@rabbit_hmi) January 9, 2024

Facebook or Freedom, Part 6: Ideas on the table [so far]

This is mostly a book-keeping post to list the various ideas I’ve gathered on the problem of social media, with Facebook as my prime example.

What I’m seeing at the institutional level is: 1) break them up, 2) third party oversight of some kind, not government, but not directly tied to the for-profit platforms either, and 3) independent not-for-profit digital “public parks.” What if we link 2 and 3 somehow? Or are they too different for such a linkage to make much sense? In any event, they might be the beginnings of a new institutional sphere.

Note: This post does not, however, collect all my Facebook or social media posts.

Institutions

Digital public park

We need to create the digital equivalent of public parks. These would be free to all and perhaps funded through philanthropy (think of Andrew Carnegie). They would require careful tending.

What we need online is the electronic equivalent of a public park [digital public infrastructure]

Break them up (monopoly)

Asking/forcing the major platforms to police themselves will ultimately prove unworkable. It is more properly a function for the state; and it would also lock-in large size and create a barrier to entry as only large platforms can come up with the overhead revenue to do this.

Facebook or freedom, Part 4: Notes on Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

House recommends anti-trust action against tech giants

Oversight Board

We now have two oversight boards, one set up by Facebook, and the other set up independently of Facebook. Could these develop into a new kind of institutional actor, perhaps in concert with one or more digital public parks?

There is a third party board created to critique Facebook. What authority does it have, would it have, over FB? None that I can see.

Facebook critics form their own oversight board [Facebook objects]

Facebook has also established an oversight board, and set it up as a legally separate entity with a multi-million dollar endowment. What real authority does they have, would it have, over FB? None that I can see. Just moral suasion.

Facebook Oversight Board

Facebook announces new 'values'

Phenomenology of interface use

This is based on my own experience and notes how I’ve reacted differently to the forced change in the Facebook interface and the forced change in the Blogger interface. Two factors: 1) I use them in somewhat different ways; this is about technique. 2) I interact with people more of Facebook than on Blogger.

Facebook or freedom, Part 5: A different platform changes its interface, Blogger

Facebook or freedom, Part 3: The game goes on [Media Notes, special edition #1]

Facebook or freedom, Part 1: Who gave you permission to mess with my mind?

Users need to take more responsibility for the interface, and they need tools to do so.

We need decentralized social networks and AI tools to give users more control over them

Other things

There are places in the world where Facebook is essential internet technology.

Facebook or freedom, Part 2: Interlude, If I were Facebook, I’d be thinking…you will comply

There are other uses to which Facebook’s data can be put.

Measuring culture worldwide with a sample of two billion humans using data from Facebook

Facebook or freedom, Part 5: A different platform changes its interface, Blogger

Even as I’ve been playing at cat-and-mouse with Facebook, Google’s Blogger has changed its interface. From my point of view it’s pretty much of a wash, in some ways it’s a modest improvement, in other’s it’s not. And, come to think of it, in one way it’s rather more inconvenient, the HTML interface for entering posts. That has forced to me add a whole other process to preparing posts; it’s not a difficult process, just tedious.

And yet, here’s the point, I don’t find this change so offensive – and I do think that’s the proper word, “offensive” – as Facebook’s change. Both changes have been forced. And while Blogger did allow me to delay the change, it has offered so many delays as FB. Moreover, in some sense I am more ‘intertwined’ with Blogger than with FB. You would think that would make me more resistant to (forced) change, not less.

What’s going on?

I don’t really know. Here’s my current guess – and I’m making it up here and now.

It is because I use Blogger more actively than Facebook that I’m more tolerant of a change in the interface. Even the simplest blog post (e.g. a tweet or a photo or two) requires a number of explicit decisions which, in turn, require that I use different tools provided to me. I’ve got to:

1. switch to post mode,
2. create a new post,
3. select a title
4. place something into the appropriate field (HTML for a tweet, an image or images for a photo post)
5. select tags for the post, and finally
6. post it.

That’s not much, and it’s done quickly, but it’s more than I have to do for many FB tasks. But even posting photos to FB somehow seems simpler, though it can be rather ‘fidgety.’ However, as I’ve said, that’s for the simplest kind of post. Long-form written posts require a fair amount of text-wrangling, which is unlike anything I do with FB.

The upshot, it seems to me at this moment, is that I treat Blogger and its interface as something out there in the world. I use it often, it’s very important to me, but it’s a tool, NOT my mind. I’m willing to adapt to changes in tools.

FB seems more like an immediate extension of my mind.  Moreover, I have much more interaction with others on FB than I do on Blogger. Thus a forced change in the interface seems very invasive. So why isn’t every one else hollering at FB over this?

I note, however, that the switch is offensive enough that one Matt Kruse has created an extension that allows you to keep to the old interface.

Facebook or freedom, Part 4: Notes on Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

Cory Doctorow has recently published, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, August 26, 2020 (on Medium). He spends much of the first half of the book arguing that high-tech claims about the ability to leverage user-data for targeted advertising are exaggerated. The technologists have drunk their own Kool-Aid and keep grasping for more data because, well, they don’t know what else to do. I think he’s right. He also points out, however, that if these same capacities are put to political use to round-up and punish opponents, dissidents, and miscreants, they would wreak havoc.

I would also note that it seems to me that the whole world of personal computing and the web is oriented toward a pre-existing commercial culture of passive consumerism and THAT is the source of much of the difficulties.

Doctorow ends up arguing that the big companies need to be broken up.

Here are some specific passages from the last half of the book.

Dignity and Sanctuary

pp. 64-65

To grow, you need to be and expose your authentic self, and in that moment, you are vulnerable like a hermit crab scuttling from one shell to the next. The tender, unprotected tissues you expose in that moment are too delicate to reveal in the presence of another, even someone you trust as implicitly as a child trusts their parent.

In the digital age, our authentic selves are inextricably tied to our digital lives. Your search history is a running ledger of the questions you’ve pondered. Your location history is a record of the places you’ve sought out and the experiences you’ve had there. Your social graph reveals the different facets of your identity, the people you’ve connected with.

To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your authentic self.

There’s another way in which surveillance capitalism robs us of our capacity to be our authentic selves: by making us anxious. Surveillance capitalism isn’t really a mind-control ray, but you don’t need a mind- control ray to make someone anxious.

Break them up

p. 84

Ultimately, we can try to fix Big Tech by making it responsible for bad acts by its users, or we can try to fix the internet by cutting Big Tech down to size. But we can’t do both. To replace today’s giant products with pluralistic protocols, we need to clear the legal thicket that prevents adversarial interoperability so that tomorrow’s nimble, personal, small- scale products can federate themselves with giants like Facebook, allowing the users who’ve left to continue to communicate with users who haven’t left yet, reaching tendrils over Facebook’s garden wall that Facebook’s trapped users can use to scale the walls and escape to the global, open web.

The problems of tight industries

pp. 85-86

Highly concentrated industries also present a regulatory conundrum. When an industry is dominated by just four or five companies, the only people who are likely to truly understand the industry’s practices are its veteran executives. This means that top regulators are often former execs of the companies they are supposed to be regulating. These turns in government are often tacitly understood to be leaves of absence from industry, with former employers welcoming their erstwhile watchdogs back into their executive ranks once their terms have expired.

All this is to say that the tight social bonds, small number of firms, and regulatory capture of concentrated industries give the companies that comprise them the power to dictate many, if not all, of the regulations that bind them.

This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders winning the right to practice predatory lending or Apple winning the right to decide who can fix your phone or Google and Facebook winning the right to breach your private data without suffering meaningful consequences or victories for pipeline companies or impunity for opioid manufacturers or massive tax subsidies for incredibly profitable dominant businesses, it’s increasingly apparent that many of our official, evidence-based truth- seeking processes are, in fact, auctions for sale to the highest bidder.

It’s really impossible to overstate what a terrifying prospect this is. We live in an incredibly high-tech society, and none of us could acquire the expertise to evaluate every technological proposition that stands between us and our untimely, horrible deaths.

Fake news

p. 88

Fake news — conspiracy theories, racist ideologies, scientific denialism — has always been with us. What’s changed today is not the mix of ideas in the public discourse but the popularity of the worst ideas in that mix. Conspiracy and denial have skyrocketed in lockstep with the growth of Big Inequality, which has also tracked the rise of Big Tech and Big Pharma and Big Wrestling and Big Car and Big Movie Theater and Big Everything Else.

No one can say for certain why this has happened, but the two dominant camps are idealism (the belief that the people who argue for these conspiracies have gotten better at explaining them, maybe with the help of machine-learning tools) or materialism (the ideas have become more attractive because of material conditions in the world).

p. 89

We have always had disagreements about what’s true, but today, we have a disagreement over how we know whether something is true. This is an epistemological crisis, not a crisis over belief. It’s a crisis over the credibility of our truth-seeking exercises, from scientific journals (in an era where the biggest journal publishers have been caught producing pay-to-play journals for junk science) to regulations (in an era where regulators are routinely cycling in and out of business) to education (in an era where universities are dependent on corporate donations to keep their lights on).

The value of online tools: coordination

pp. 90-92

But there’s one way in which I am a tech exceptionalist. I believe that online tools are the key to overcoming problems that are much more urgent than tech monopolization: climate change, inequality, misogyny, and discrimination on the basis of race, gender identity, and other factors. The internet is how we will recruit people to fight those fights, and how we will coordinate their labor. Tech is not a substitute for democratic accountability, the rule of law, fairness, or stability — but it’s a means to achieve these things.

The hard problem of our species is coordination. Everything from climate change to social change to running a business to making a family work can be viewed as a collective action problem.

The internet makes it easier than at any time before to find people who want to work on a project with you — hence the success of free and open-source software, crowdfunding, and racist terror groups — and easier than ever to coordinate the work you do. […]

The upshot of this is that our best hope of solving the big coordination problems — climate change, inequality, etc. — is with free, fair, and open tech. Our best hope of keeping tech free, fair, and open is to exercise caution in how we regulate tech and to attend closely to the ways in which interventions to solve one problem might create problems in other domains.

The prodigal tech-bro in search of redemption

Maria Farrell, The Prodigal Techbro, The Conversationalist, march 5, 2020:

This could almost be a response to The Social Dilemma, and maybe it is, though it doesn't mention it.

The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with invitations to write opeds for major newspapers, for think tank funding, book deals and TED talks. These guys – and yes, they are all guys – are generally thoughtful and well-meaning, and I wish them well. But I question why they seize so much attention and are awarded scarce resources, and why they’re given not just a second chance, but also the mantle of moral and expert authority.

I’m glad that Roger McNamee, the early Facebook investor, has testified to the U.S. Congress about Facebook’s wildly self-interested near-silence about its amplification of Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. I’m thrilled that Google’s ex-‘design ethicist’, Tristan Harris, “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,“(startlingly faint praise) now runs a Center for Humane Technology, exposing the mind-hacking tricks of his former employer. I even spoke —critically but, I hope, warmly—at the book launch of James Williams, another ex-Googler turned attention evangelist, who “co-founded the movement”of awareness of designed-in addiction. I wish all these guys well. I also wish that the many, exhausted activists who didn’t take money from Google or Facebook could have even a quarter of the attention, status and authority the Prodigal Techbro assumes is his birth-right.

Today, when the tide of public opinion on Big Tech is finally turning, the brothers (and sisters) who worked hard in the field all those years aren’t even invited to the party. No fattened calf for you, my all but unemployable tech activist. The moral hazard is clear; why would anyone do the right thing from the beginning when they can take the money, have their fun, and then, when the wind changes, convert their status and relative wealth into special pleading and a whole new career?

The rewards of privilege:

The only thing more fungible than cold, hard cash is privilege. The prodigal tech bro doesn’t so much take an off-ramp from the relatively high status and well-paid job he left when the scales fell from his eyes, as zoom up an on-ramp into a new sector that accepts the reputational currency he has accumulated. He’s not joining the resistance. He’s launching a new kind of start-up using his industry contacts for seed-funding in return for some reputation-laundering.

So what? Sure, it’s a little galling, but where’s the harm?

Allowing people who share responsibility for our tech dystopia to keep control of the narrative means we never get to the bottom of how and why we got here, and we artificially narrow the possibilities for where we go next. And centering people who were insiders before and claim to be leading the outsiders now doesn’t help the overall case for tech accountability. It just reinforces the industry’s toxic dynamic that some people are worth more than others, that power is its own justification.

The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent. Sure, we got some things wrong, he says, but that’s because we were over-optimistic / moved too fast / have a growth mindset. Just put the engineers back in charge / refocus on the original mission / get marketing out of the c-suite. Government “needs to step up”, but just enough to level the playing field / tweak the incentives. Because the prodigal techbro is a moderate, centrist, regular guy. Dammit, he’s a Democrat. Those others who said years ago what he’s telling you right now? They’re troublemakers, disgruntled outsiders obsessed with scandal and grievance. He gets why you ignored them. Hey, he did, too. He knows you want to fix this stuff. But it’s complicated. It needs nuance. He knows you’ll listen to him. Dude, he’s just like you…

For some comments on The Social Dilemma, see this post: Facebook or freedom, Part 3: The game goes on [Media Notes, special edition #1].

Facebook or freedom, Part 3: The game goes on [Media Notes, special edition #1]

It’s been 12 days since my last Facebook post, on September 7, and I’ve had at least four 48 hour reprieves since then, maybe 5 – I’ve not been keeping a strict count. What do I mean by a reprieve? I switch to a new page on FB and Wham! they hit me with the new interface without warning. But so far they’ve also given me the option of switching back, which I’ve done. When I do so, however, they always as why I’m doing it, is it because you don’t like something or want something else? No, I reply, it’s because I don’t like you arbitrarily messing with my mind.

I assume that one of these days I’m not going get that option. When, though, and why do they keep giving my 48 hours and then not following through? Do they want to keep on collecting my comment – I’ve only got one – on why I’m doing back? There’s got to be some logic here.

I’ve been watching this new docudrama on Netflix, The Social Dilemma, which I don’t much like (more on that later), which is about social media, including Facebook of course, and how the tech wizards behind the screen do everything to control us, including running little experiments where they make some change in what we see and note how we respond. That makes sense. From which it follows that my behavior is being closely monitored, not necessarily by a person – I can’t imagine that I’m important enough – but more likely by some program module.

Is that module primed for each individual user? That is, FB has been tracking our behavior on FB and across the web, right? So it’s built up some statistical profile of each person’s activity. I’d assume it’s making guesses about how we’re going to behave in various circumstances. We’ll either confirm the guess, thus confirming its (Bayesian) priors, or not, in which case it updates those priors. Either way the algorithm ‘learns’ something.

So, what kinds of guesses is FB making about my behavior with respect to this interface change? When people make a comment about why they want to keep the old interface, how do they deal with those comments? Are they looking for something in particular? I’d assume that very few – none? – get read by a human. What’s their AI-module checking for?

What’s their plan for me on the next time they switch me over? Are the going to give me the option of switching back? If so, what’s their prediction about whether or not I’ll accept the offer? If they predict that, yes, I’ll switch back, do they already know how many more times they’ll give me to stay with the old interface?

I don’t know. Just how sophisticated is their manipulation software? I don’t know that either. In a sense, neither do they.

* * * * *

And that brings me to The Social Dilemma. I’m about two-thirds of the way through, and it took me two, maybe three, sittings to get that far. Will I finish it? I don’t know, but maybe Facebook, Google, and of course Netflix know, or at least have their guesses. Maybe they’re even betting on my behavior. Now there’s a concept, have the different social networks bet on user behavior? How will the bets be paid off? Shares of stock? User information?

The Social Dilemma switches back an forth between scenes where various experts from industry and academia tell us about how social media – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, etc. – tracks and manipulates our behavior and dramatized scenes where we see people respond to the manipulations of a nefarious AI, personified by Vincent Kartheiser. I don’t feel that I’m learning anything new. Yes, yes, they’re doing all this stuff and yes, yes, they’re really good at it. But there’s no real detail, no substantial argumentation, just all this assertion sandwiched in between this cheesy dramatization, which is useless.

Coming into this program I KNEW there was a problem, tracking, manipulation, fragmentation and polarization in the civic sphere, and so forth. I was looking for something to give form and substance to all these things I already know in a loose and baggy was. The Social Dilemma isn’t doing that.

Three useful reviews:

• Pranav Malhotra, The Social Dilemma Fails to Tackle the Real Issues in Tech, Slate, Sept 18, 2020
• Casey Newton, What ‘The Social Dilemma’ misunderstands about social networks, The Verge, September 16, 2020
• Will Oremus, Where 'The Social Dilemma' Gets Us, Pattern Matching, Dept. 19, 2020 

The Oremus piece reminded me of Marcuse's notion of repressive desublimation, where an oppressive regime allows the expression of some dissent (desublimation) but not so much as to threaten in regime in any material way (repressive). It's a kind of tax the oppressors levy on the oppressed for the privilege of speaking truth to power, but nothing more than speech.

For example, and from Oremus' article:

But if The Social Dilemma largely succeeds in answering its opening question (“What’s the problem?”), there’s a second, crucial, stage-setting scene that the film seems to forget about as it goes on. It’s when the film’s central real-life figure, the “humane tech” advocate Tristan Harris, recounts how he grew disillusioned with his work as a young designer at Google, and eventually wrote an explosive internal presentation that rocked the company to its core — or so it seemed. The presentation argued that Google’s products had grown addictive and harmful, and that the company had a moral responsibility to address that. It was passed around frantically within the company’s ranks, quickly reached the CEO’s desk, and Harris’ colleagues inundated him with enthusiastic agreement. “And then… nothing,” Harris recalls. Having acknowledged ruefully that their work was hurting people, and promising to do better, Googlers simply went back to their work as cogs in the profit machine. What Harris thought had served as a “call to arms” was really just a call to likes and faves — workplace slacktivism.

But also, as an example of the film's narrow tech-bro-centric POV:

As the activist Evan Greer of Fight for the Future points out, the film almost entirely ignores social media’s power to connect marginalized young people, or to build social movements such as Black Lives Matter that challenge the status quo. This omission is important, not because it leaves the documentary “one-sided,” as some have complained, but because understanding social media’s upsides is critical to the project of addressing its failures. (I wrote in an earlier newsletter that the BLM protests should remind us why social media is worth fixing.)

* * * * *

Meanwhile, why not let people have the interface they want? In fact, why not offer several interfaces? After all, Facebook is a huge company; they could afford to do this, no?

All Facebook needs is to be able to pass ads to users, makes suggestions, and track usage. Does everyone have to have the same interface to make this happen?

But then there’s that general principle: We’ve got you under our thumb. That makes sense. I don’t like it at all – which is why I’m putting up (ultimately futile) resistance – but I understand it.

Somewhere out on the web there’s got to be images of Zuckerberg tricked out in Borg cyber gear.

Facebook or freedom, Part 2: Interlude, If I were Facebook, I’d be thinking…you will comply

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Don’t Delete Facebook. Do Something About It. NYtimes, March 24, 2018.

But even if tens of thousands of Americans quit Facebook tomorrow, the company would barely feel it. Facebook has more than 2.1 billion users worldwide. Its growth has plateaued in the United States, but the service is gaining millions of new users outside North America every week. Like most global companies, Facebook focuses its attention on markets like India, Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil and Mexico. At current rates of growth, it could reach three billion users by 2020.

People in those countries are getting value out of Facebook; in some places, it’s one of the few reliable ways to keep in touch. In much of the developing world, Facebook is also the only news source that matters. This should horrify us. But it’s not a problem that will be solved by indignant Americans leaving the service. [...]

Hope lies, instead, with our power as citizens. We must demand that legislators and regulators get tougher. They should go after Facebook on antitrust grounds. Facebook is by far the dominant social platform in the United States, with 68 percent of American adults using it, according to the Pew Research Center. That means Facebook can gobble up potential competitors, as it already has with Instagram, and crowd out upstarts in fields such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Thanks! Yes!

— Shannon Mattern (@shannonmattern) September 7, 2020

A very recent article by @NilChristopher covers this really well! https://t.co/fNVaDCAu9e

— Krishna Akhil (@paranoidhydroid) September 7, 2020

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I certainly don’t know how Facebook thinks about these things – I’m thinking particularly about the current face-lift – but surely they must put their business front and center. And their business is delivering eyeballs and tracking data to advertising. That means they’ve got to keep as many users on the platform as possible.

Thus, to the extent that hate speech, bat-shit crazy conspiracy theories, political scamming, and so forth, drive up audience numbers without, at the same time, driving (too many) others away, that’s all good for business. Some employees and executives may know that this kind of stuff is not healthy for society, but, hey! business is business, amirite?

In THAT context, what about unilaterally changing the user interface? It’s tricky. The number of people who are really angry about it, as I am, is probably rather small. But they’ve been through this before and they know that some people won’t like it. So they give you the option of temporarily going back to the old interface, just to show you that they too feel your pain. And of course it is easy for them to frame the change as something they are doing for you, for us, the users. They’re making Facebook a better place.

The happier we are, the more eyeballs and tracking data they can deliver to advertisers.

The idea is to demonstrate that they own and can control this space, this commons, and that you will comply because, what choice do you have?

* * * * *

See  Facebook or freedom, Part 1: Who gave you permission to mess with my mind?

Rambling into Fall: Facebook & the interface, brain-to-brain communication, AI and rank 5 culture

A lot’s happened since my last ramble (August 22). I’ve changed my attitude toward AI; Elon Music and Christof Koch have triggered one of my hobby horses, direct brain-to-brain thought transfer; and Facebook has decided to change its user interface. It’s start with the last and work through them in reverse order.

Facebook! Don’t mess with my mind!

Facebook has announced that it’s changing its interface. It’s done that to some people already. Others, like me, have been warned. But our respite is only temporary.

I’ve objected to this on two grounds: 1) it’s inconvenient, and 2) general principle: it’s my mind. The first is real but not, at this point, all that consequential. I neither like nor dislike the current interface; it is simply what I’m used to. Changing it will force me to think a bit where now I can act intuitively and automatically. While I don’t know how bad that will be – I do quite a bit on Facebook – I don’t anticipate major problems. Though, who knows, maybe they’ll cripple a feature I like. Twitter did that with their last interface change. I like the Moments feature, where I could group tweets under a single topic. Contrary to what it says in the help notes, it is no longer possible to add new tweets to existing moments. Has Facebook done something similar? I don’t know.

However, I think the matter of principle is deeper and thus more important. But I’m not sure how to argue it. What I’ve said is Facebook is messing with my mind, and I’ve justified that by reference to the idea that all sorts of media, books, sound recordings, movies, etc., are extensions of our minds. I’m wondering if that’s quite right?

What I’m thinking at the moment is that we think of minds as essentially private. You can’t read my mind and I can’t read yours. And, yes, that is true. But aren’t minds fundamentally social as well?

Wittgenstein famously argued that there is no such thing as a private language. Hence language is inherently social. Inner speech is a form of language and hence is, in some way, social and not merely private. That needs clarification and development, but I’m thinking that maybe that’s the way to go.

Social media are also private media, in a sense. I know Facebook has a bunch of settings you can use to control who sees what. I’ve looked at them once or twice in very specific situations, but for the most part I’ve not paid any attention to them because I don’t use Facebook for more or less private purposes. I’m a thinker and a writer and I’m happy to do both in public. That is, it’s my mind, but I’m using it in public and in a public way.

This line of thought goes in two directions: 1) the institutional and civic nature of social media, and 2) the nature of the technology. On the first, it’s not at all clear to me that our current institutional structure is adequate for using and governing this technology. On the second, I think the user needs to be in control of the interface (beyond the blither of settings FB makes available) in a way that requires perhaps a substantial rethinking of the nature of the technology. I suspect that AI will play a role in the future realignment.

Brain-to-brain thought transfer

The idea’s been around for awhile, along with the idea of direct brain-to-machine linkage. I don’t know when it first showed up in science fiction, or how wide spread it is, but I first became aware of it as a scientific and technical proposal in the work of Rodolfo Llinás in the mid-2000s. More recently Christof Koch and, most visibly, Elon Musk have joined the parade.

I don’t get it. There is an obvious technical objection which, as far as I can tell, none of these thinkers have addressed: how does a neuron tell whether an impulse is coming from some other neuron in the same brain or some other brain? If neurons can’t tell the difference, how can there possibly be thought transfer? I’ve offered a more elaborate and explicit argument, but that should be enough. Yet it hasn’t even been considered?

I don't know. I note that no one is suggesting it as something that will be done in the near-term or even mid-term future – though come to think of it, yikes!, Musk told Joe Rogan five to ten years – rather, it’s kinda’ far in the future where who knows what will happen. That is, it’s in a realm where we can’t really think about things rigorously. So, yeah! let’s throw caution to the winds.

Anyhow, it’s right up there with other fantasies of tech-bro religion, the super-intelligent computer (malevolent or benevolent) and uploading the contents of one’s brain to the cloud and thus becoming immortal.

AI and the future of technology

Finally, just the other day I started talking about the evolution of rank 5 culture and linking that, however loosely, with AI. Rather, it’s something a bit beyond AI. For AI is just a bunch of techniques. I’m looking for some one thing, comparable to the role of writing in the emergence of rank 2 or Arabic notation in the emergence of rank 3, etc. Whatever this new thing is, it is as likely to emerge out AI as anywhere else.

To get there AI has to break free of its chess-centric ways and develop a bit of curiosity about the basis of current statistical success, which I’ve been pointing toward in my recent thinking about GPT-3: GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons, and What economic growth and statistical semantics tell us about the structure of the world. As I said before, don’t believe the hype, but there’s a breakthrough there. We just have to find it.

More later.

We need decentralized social networks and AI tools to give users more control over them

Ben Goertzel thinks large centrally controlled social networks, like, e.g. Facebook, are a bad idea. I agree. He thinks that "explainable AI" is one of the technologies we need to work our way out of that trap. I agree with that as well. Here's a blog post he's written setting forth some ideas: The Critical Importance of Decentralized, Explainable AI for Better Social Networks, SingularityNET, July 28, 2020.

What we need to create a better social network, in my view, is relatively straightforward to state:

1. Code should be open source.

2. Ownership and control should be decentralized… so there is no company and no government tasked and burdened with calling all the shots. Embedding blockchain technologies deep in the technical design of the network is the right way to achieve this.

3. Major decisions should be made democratically. If some group systematically doesn’t like the outcomes votes are getting, they can fork the code and make a new version, or copy the code and create a new network using the same software.

4. Recommendations of connections and content should be made using AI that has the ability to explain the reasons behind its judgments — and these explanations need to be shown routinely to users in a way they can understand.

Due to SingularityNET and a variety of other recent developments, we already have the basic technologies needed to support this sort of approach — as far as tech is concerned, we could have decentralized, democratic, transparent and ethical alternatives to Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and so forth right now. We even have some existing websites — such as minds.com — embodying significant parts of the above.

What we still don’t have — yet! — is the alignment of resources to get alternatives fulfilling all four of the above points fully built-out … and then pushed toward wide adoption.

Goertzel's attention seems centered on the content carried by social networks, which is understandable and which is obviously critical. He doesn't say anything about the issue that's got me up in arms about Facebook, the ability of the network's owner to unilaterally change the interface and thereby mess up your mind. But, given some of the more theoretical material in the post – about Hebbian learning in neural nets – I'm pretty sure he'd recognize the issue.

And then we have things like this:

One problem with the lack of transparency in the operation of modern social networks is that it covers up the way the companies owning the networks are exploiting the data obtained from you, the user, to sell things to you and your friends.

But another, less often discussed problem is: Opaque systems do not provide people with the explicit visibility into their own perceptions, actions and judgments that they need to have — if they want to overcome their more egocentric and shortsighted aspects and place more weight on their longer-term benefit and on broader benefit to the world.

Transparent systems help people who are questing to understand themselves, what they like and dislike, what they are reacting to, what they are attracted to versus repelled from. They are valuable tools for people to use to improve their consciousness and experience and become wiser and happier and more useful to the world.

Opaque systems provide much less aid to self-understanding and self-awareness and push the user to instead behave more mechanistically, following their inclinations without much reflection.

There he's snuggling right up to the user-interface issue.  Goertzel goes on:

We also need tools that a user can deploy to understand the judgments they are making themselves. What kind of people am I choosing to follow on Twitter? What kinds of images, when shown to me, am I most likely to look at longest? Which other people tend to read the same documents as I do regarding medicine? Or regarding physics? Or regarding Chinese politics?

There is incredible positive potential to be realized via applying AI and information visualization to allow people to study their own behaviours online. This could be a powerful tool for helping people to achieve greater self-awareness and move toward more positive consciousness — as manifested in their online interactions and more generally. However, this is clearly not how the social network tech industry is oriented.

Frankly, that has interface written all over it. The user needs to have control over the interface, and they need AI tools to help them.

Facebook or freedom, Part 1: Who gave you permission to mess with my mind?

No, I’m not talking about the issues Facebook is having with hate speech and political posts, though those issues are certainly deep and important ones. I’m talking about something that may seem relatively minor, their ability to change the user interface any time any way. After all, it’s their software and their platform/site, no? Yes, but it’s my mind, and yours, that they’re messing with when they make such changes. THAT’s why, over the long term, this may become an important issue.

In this first post I discuss Facebook’s upcoming change in its user interface. To the extent that computer media are extensions of the user’s mind, when Facebook changes its interface, it is interfering with its users use of their own minds. It is alienating them – a Marxist concept – from their minds. In a later post I’ll discuss the possibilities of giving users greater control over the interface.

When the black curtain came down

On Tuesday, August 25, I was using Facebook, as I do every day, and I changed from one page to another. All of a sudden, WHAM! the interface changed and went mostly black. Facebook informed me that they would be changing the interface permanently on September 1, but I could get the new interface now. But, if I wanted, I could, at least temporarily, switch back to the old interface.

I promptly did so. Well, not so promptly because I first had to figure out how to do that. Somewhere in there I also had the opportunity give them feedback. I told them, without giving it a second thought, without trying out the new interface, that I didn’t like the new interface. Not one bit.

Why did I do that without even giving it a chance? General principle, general principle, which I’ll get to shortly.

Once I had the familiar interface back I went searching the web to find out about this change; I probably searched on something like, “Facebook interface change”. I discovered that this had been in the works for some time, that it was more or less well known, and was being done for good and sufficient reasons.

So why didn’t I learn about it until they sprung in on me, WHAM! without warning? I don’t live out on the Siberian tundra or the Australian out-back. I live in upstate New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. And I’m on Facebook every day. Why no warning? Would it have been so difficult?

Anyhow, September first rolls around and I expect Facebook to be sporting its new and improved black look when I sign on. But, no, same old Facebook. They pulled the switch on me on the second, but let me go back, which I did. Still, I assume that one of these days I’ll be stuck with the new interface. And who knows, maybe I’ll even like it.

But why should I HAVE to like it?

It’s MY mind you’re messing with

It’s a cliché that media of all kinds are extensions of our minds. Let’s take that cliché seriously. My computer IS an extension of my mind.

That’s particularly true for me as I am an intellectual and writer, musician, and artist. I have owned and used a personal computer since 1981, when I purchased a North Star Horizon. In 1984 I got a classic 128K Macintosh and have been on some Macintosh ever since. I went online in the 1990s, first email, but then the web starting in 1994. Yes, my mind is in my head, but how I use it is deeply enmeshed with computers, a story I tell in this working paper fro 2015, Personal Observations on Entering an Age of Computing Machines, https://www.academia.edu/18791499/Personal_Observations_on_Entering_an_Age_of_Computing_Machines.

So, when Facebook, unilaterally changed the interface on me, it was messing with my mind. And that’s why I said “NO” immediately and unequivocally. I did not give them permission to mess with my mind.

Do I think the current Facebook interface is wonderful? No. Do I think it is awful? No. The truth is, I don’t think much about it at all. I just use it to go about my life.

For two-thirds or more each year I write two or more blog posts a day; I post each one of them on my Facebook page. The rest of the year, during my dormant melancholy phase, I do blog posts less frequently, sometimes as few as one or two a week. I also link bits of this and that, including my photographs, to my FB page and make comments of various kinds. And I read up on friends and acquaintances. Often enough I get ideas useful for my intellectual work. And I do other things on FB as well, but the details don’t matter. The point should be clear: I make extensive use of FB.

So I think of the FB interface as a part of my mind. No, not “think of”, but rather “use”, I use it as part of my mind. I know where things are and how to get things done. I don’t have to think about any of that, I just do it.

A change to the interface, even an ‘improvement’ to it, thus interferes with my mind, my work, my play. It’s like you have your office all set up so you can use it. It may not look neat and orderly to an observer, but you know where everything is and are comfortable with it. Then a cleaning service comes in, empties the waste basket, sweeps the floor, rearranges your desk top, tidies up you shelves, and takes the scattered books and papers and arranges them neatly here or there. Now your office looks neat and orderly. But it’s useless to you because you can’t find anything in all that neatness. The neat new order is not the order you’re used to. As far as you’re concerned, the new order is a mess.

Now, back on August 25th when FB sprung this on me I figured that maybe I should just up and leave FB. I even said as much publically, on both Facebook and Twitter. And, if I saw a way to bring a couple of million FB users with me, that’s probably what I’d do. Given that FB has well over two-billion monthly users, the loss of a million or two wouldn’t make much difference to them. But if they all left at the same time, and for the same reason, they might pause and think. But that’s not going to happen. I’m not going to bring a bunch of users with me when I leave.

So, I’ll stick around and no doubt I’ll get used to the new interface. After all, I have no choice, no I, not if I want to continue using FB. Will I like it better? I can’t tell, but, really, that’s irrelevant. For better or worse, I’ll adapt.

What about ten or twenty years from now?

But is this a viable long-term strategy, both for Facebook, and for users? If, over the long term, our work and play become ever more deeply enmeshed in computational facilities of all kinds, unilateral vendor-side changes in the interface will become more burdensome for users? Is there a way to give users more control over the interface?

The fact is, no matter what FB says, no matter how hard they claim that they’re doing this to enhance my experience, I also believe that they’re doing this to assert their power over me. That, I suspect, is why they sprung the change on me, and who knows how many other users, without any warning. They did it because they can.

Do I know this? No, I don’t. I’m certainly not privy to FB’s internal deliberations on user relations. It’s quite possible that no one inside FB ever said anything about asserting power over users by making unilateral changes in the interface. That’s not how these things work. Individuals in organizations don’t have to say these things in order for organizations to act as though they’re true.

And the more FB acts that way, the more user’s are going to come to think and believe that that is what FB is doing. How many FB users believe right now that FB is manipulating them against their own interests and in favor of FB’s? Unilateral changes in interface design will inevitably increase that number. That cannot be good for Facebook. But I haven’t the foggiest idea how that level of user dissatisfaction will play out in the marketplace.