Is Freedom Really Free? IV: Who Can Control You, Research Time, 18/07/2017

Make sure you notice that I didn’t write that subtitle as a question. I don’t want to ask the question – if you ask a question, it implies that you’d be satisfied with only one answer. No, call it an investigation. An investigation never really stops.

He wasn't a private investigator as a profession. He was a private
investigator as a person. He found himself in a weird and complicated
situation, and wanted to find out what the hell was going on. You
won't be satisfied with the first, easiest answer. The Dude isn't lazy
where it counts.

There's no mystery. Only a world to explore. That’s the secret of Sam Spade. And The Dude.

So let’s start with a fundamental truth about Milton Friedman’s moral thinking – what he thinks it fundamental to a just society. It’s about liberty, and liberty is defined as freedom from coercion. The perfect society is the one where no one can tell you what to do.

Primarily on economist, he’s most concerned about economic structures. What kinds of economic systems prevent the most coercion and violence? That’s the economic democracy of the free market. There, you’ll find potentially infinite variety of business, product, and service – whatever an enterprising huckster can produce with ingenuity and materials at hand.

A frequent argument – at least in the 1960s, when Friedman was writing Capitalism and Freedom – against a totally free market was that the state needed to have the power to break up monopolies.

Monopolies create situations of mass vassalage to a single company or small group of business magnates in an entire industry. Say an industry began as a bunch of little companies.

But some company makes a technological innovation that gives it an enormous advantage over competitors. Their technology disrupts the balance of the entire sector. It either buys up all their competitors or forces them into bankruptcy.

The entrepreneur is a truly virtuous man.

Once it’s taken over the whole sector, it crowds out or buys out new competitors and whatever innovations they’ve come up with, before they grow enough to challenge them. The smartest* companies roll out some version of their acquired competitor’s innovations among their own products.

* Or most diabolical, however you want to think of the practice.

Such monopolies, says Friedman, are never stable. Most of the time, they aren’t even true monopolies. Free market competition – some little upstart who refuses to be bought or contained – will overcome even the most aggressive big player.

No, to Friedman, the only true and stable monopolies are those supported by the government, or state-owned companies themselves. Or else, they arise through an unjust collusion, as industry heads conspire together to stifle genuinely competitive market relationships – price-fixing, or supply control.

Either way, it all comes back to the government. Because if a government doesn’t want to tolerate some kind of industry collusion or monopoly, they can smash it. They have gladly. So a government has to build a monopoly through a state corporation, colluding with business magnates, or turning a blind eye to the collusion of business magnates.

Well, that’s not really so true anymore. I think it may have been true, or at least the rule had few enough extensions to stand. At least it did in the 20th century.

You have to understand that people really used to look like that
when Monopoly the board game was invented.

But look at the examples I linked, and you’ll see how powerful technological disruptions enabled – if not monopoly – then the creation of an oligarchy. Oligarchy – gangsterish collusion among super-rich business magnates given the dignity of a technical name.

If you consider the economic conditions of 21st century Earth, you’ll see a situation where disruptions create real monopolies – or at least business models whose ultimate stated goal is to become a monopoly. That’s literally Uber’s corporate mission.

This is the ideal of fortune through disruption in Silicon Valley’s business culture. You develop a particular kind of technological disruption – a communications platform that lets you undercut the labour of an entire industry at once. Your profit is built on finding ways to lower labour standards legally, and pocket the entire difference yourself.

It’s a problem that I find libertarian concepts are inadequate to dealing with. If your labour conditions get worse and worse – more and more time on the job for less and less money – how can any contract between a pauper and an oligarch ever be fair?

No Solutions II: Forgetting Our Social Selves, Research Time, 06/02/2017

What does this have to do with efficiency? In a way, it’s an expression of the stereotypical engineer’s mentality – I can figure out a solution to everything.

Here’s an example Evgeni Morozov talks about. Obesity is a serious public health problem in American society. So how does a Silicon Valley engineer and businessperson do some kind of civic duty and fix it?

Another problem with using personal smartphone apps to curb obesity
is that a lot of people who suffer most from obesity do so not because
of a personal failing that a tech fix can repair, but because of a social
cause – like living stuck in an urban food desert, or poverty in
general. In our society, the big projects like space exploration have
been left to the good mad scientists. Our government, which is
supposed to look after the public good, has been rendered incapable.

Because Silicon Valley consists, for the most part, in people who want to become billionaire businesspeople improving their society with technology. For all the examples of petulant man-children or mad scientists, most leaders and workers in Silicon Valley really want to make the world a better place.

It’s messed up, I know. But one thing I’ve learned after working in the business world is that even though it’s all hype, a remarkable number of people actually believe their own hype. So okay, you’re making the world a better place. By doing what?

Create a business that encourages people to become healthier – eat better, exercise. Social networking business ideas – ideas that work in the Facebook economy, essentially, whether in their app ecology or that take it as a model – use data and tracking to achieve their goals.

So self-tracking devices on your phones can let you monitor your consumption and exercise. Then they make a game out of tracking all this data. Earn badges for cutting down on carbs and processed foods, bonus points for eating free-range meat.

The healthy eating app is an efficient way to get people to improve their health. You just do what the game tells you when you play it. Arguing, reasoning, long sessions of training to improve your habits aren’t nearly as effective, because you have to work through them in a long, difficult process of personal growth.

Who wants that shit? Self-tracking apps become a way to replace your dietician here, parking enforcement cops there, maybe even your therapist too.

I think sometimes that when Ted Kaczynski, the radical anti-technology
terrorist, looks at the growing disaster of our planet, he smiles. As if
he was right. Morozov isn't anti-technology, and neither am I. We just
have very critical attitudes about how our technology has developed.
I'm especially upset at the ecological harm that our civilization causes,
which Morozov's beef is the moral erosion of an ideology of arch-
individuality and efficiency. There'll be some projects involving Ted
in the future. They're shaping up to be more than a little terrifying to
the human soul.

This is just one summary of examples of real businesses and apps that Morozov describes throughout To Save Everything Click Here. They all unfold in essentially the same way.

The Silicon Valley method is to develop the most efficient routes to changing human behaviour they can. That efficiency is based on manipulating behaviour, bypassing all the deliberation, self-conscious effort, and personal ethical searching that actually shapes and defines a human’s individual subjectivity.

Here’s Morozov’s whole argument in a few sentences. I mean, I had fun reading his 400+ page book, but the underlying point was remarkably simple. He discovered a lot of different perspectives on this basic idea through all his analyses of various parts of the industry.

So all that detail – how the apps encouraging the erosion of privacy interact with self-tracking approaches to civil service, public health, and education, for example – is useful in letting us see the many facets of the whole affair.

But it all revolves around one central insight: When you prioritize the most efficient way to solve problems above all else, you atrophy our moral senses of responsibility to wider society. You forget that humanity is a society fundamentally.

Ironically, you use social networking platforms to encourage people to think of themselves as disconnected individuals instead of an interdependent network. Ends up treating us as less than human.

No Solutions I: Stripping Ourselves to One Line, Research Time, 03/02/2017

I don’t know if I’d say this is continued from yesterday’s post, as much as it’s another turn around the same idea. Appropriate for a post that follows Groundhog Day.

Set the stage. So Evgeni Morozov wrote a book called To Save Everything Click Here. Steve Fuller sent me a copy, and I’ve finally got around to reading it.

An aesthetic issue. I find his writing style a little too polemic for my liking personally, as it sometimes makes him sound more like a technophobe than he really is. Because it’s clear from reading the whole book that he’s in favour of a technological society – he only has a problem with some influential business ideologies.

With the government having been systematically defunded over the last
decades since the late 1970s, it's left to private industry to build the
brighter tomorrow we all dreamed of. And it sometimes feels like
everyone except Elon Musk would prefer to build a health tracking
app they can sell to Facebook for $1-billion.

The problem ideology. Solutionism. It’s the ideology that pervades Silicon Valley culture – people as different as Travis Kalanick, Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel all think as solutionists.

What is Solutionism? In its simplest form, it’s the notion that any difficulty people encounter is to be smoothed away with the algorithmic and analytic powers of contemporary data technology.

That could come from self-monitoring, the dynamics of ubiquitous social media sharing, data analysis, or actually modifying the environment to restrict human choices from inefficient or destructive activities.

I mean it about that last issue. One of the ideas Morozov discusses to encourage people to follow the law is installing rotating cage doors in subways instead of waist-high wickets to prevent queue jumping.

That leads to another aesthetic issue. This book is too long. I mean that in the sense that it’s longer than it needs to be. Morozov’s style of exploring long lists of examples ultimately drags the book out much longer than it needs to be.

As a philosophical argument, you only need enough examples to demonstrate the point. Morozov seems to list enough examples to prove the absolute ubiquity of these ridiculous solutionist ideas all over the entire business class of the tech industry. And the examples – there being so many of them – tend to bury the core concepts of his argument, which are most important.

Do you seriously think your parking meter can help save your city from
being underfunded and disorganized? Then Evgeni Morozov will hector
you.

To Save Everything Click Here is about a moral inversion that Silicon Valley’s ideology perpetuates. And it’s a problematic ideology – the replacement of responsibility with efficiency.

Here’s how I lay it out, and the best way Morozov himself lays it out. He returns, in several contexts throughout the book, to an approach to business ideas common in Silicon Valley culture – gamification.

Literally, you solve problems by making a game of them. Creating a set of incentives and rewards for civil public behaviour – recycling, improving energy use, improving personal health. You earn these rewards as you carry out the activities we want you to. With each item you recycle, you earn points in the game, and those points translate into real rewards.

This interplay of incentives and rewards makes activity that has previously been a moral responsibility – we work to improve the environment because we’re good citizens with duties to do so – into a prize. Instead of recycling to help our society become healthier and more sustainable, you recycle to earn direct material rewards.

The presumption underlying making civic responsibility a game: that everyone acts only for their own self-interest. Morozov never says so, but it’s that sketchy libertarian principle underlying so much of Silicon Valley culture.

The veneration of self-interest as humanity’s central drive pervades the culture. That’s true for folks all over Silicon Valley whether their explicit political beliefs are as progressive and futurist as Elon Musk or as demented and retrograde as Peter Thiel.

Is self-interest humanity’s primary drive? No. No it isn’t. Morozov cites a few solid psychological experiments demonstrating such. But that’s not how you disprove a purely conceptual question like that.

No, you disprove it in the conceptual realm. Which means you have to point out that moral motivations – drives to act in the name of benevolence – have always been real. If we were only ever truly acting in our self-interest, we never would have developed moral principles in the first place.

We never would have developed concepts of our responsibilities to others if we didn’t perceive that responsibility in our ordinary, everyday social relations. Our moral obligations to each other are real – we experience them in our social relations every day, providing we don’t have something medically wrong with us.

Through understanding the strength and interdependence of our social obligations to each other, we see self-interest as one of many possible motives in the dense network of those obligations. So if you think self-interest is the only drive of humanity, you’re cutting away a lot of human experience.

Now, what does this have to do with efficiency? . . . To be continued

When It Feels Like an Entire Language Is a Con, A History Boy, 07/09/2016

An old acquaintance of mine M messaged me on LinkedIn over Labour Day weekend, asking my advice on how to jump from the academic world to professional communications work.

I thought for a while over what I’d say, and I finally decided to lay it all out there. I've done alright so far, but I've also hit some roadblocks. My first contract was frankly disastrous. Handling member communications for an American company that was a networking hub for hundreds of business owners. 

The Elizabeth Holmes story is about how personal
networks, authoritarian control of a business'
information, and a brilliant ability to play a hype
machine can make a charismatic fraud billions. I
find it very disheartening that an industry that talks
constantly about "the best talent" lionizes what
turns out to be empty gestures.

But I received no training and was often left adrift, or disciplined for not being constantly in my home office and on call at a moments notice. Even though I was only being paid for hours spent on work done, going to the grocery store or a doctor’s appointment was being unacceptably far from my desk for too long. It was a ridiculously stressful six weeks during which I earned almost no money.

I left without even being given an opportunity to sign the company’s non-disclosure agreement, which is why I can talk about it on this blog and in conversations at all. 

That company, along with many other young startup execs and communications pros in Toronto, all shared a common language – hype. All the buzzwords of the marketing industry had genuine meaning for them, even when the least amount of critical thought revealed an empty core. 

My communications professors told me my greatest strength was my ability to see through bullshit. It’s part of what I trained in for years when I was writing philosophy full-time. When I’d network with long-experienced communications professionals – women and men at the top of the career pyramids – online or in person, I’d hear the same thing.

But I feel as though, when it comes to simply finding a foothold in the industry, that’s actually a detriment. The long-experienced high-performing communicators see uncommon insight for someone at the start of their career. 

The mid-level or just-above-entry-level see someone who’s smarter than them and who can threaten their superiority. The frustration is that informal networking events connect me with people who understand me, while actual gatekeeping for hiring connects me with people who understand me all too well.

While thinking about that cruel context, I read this feature article about the fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. I hadn’t read much about this company myself because its industry was never really on my professional radar. But looking into the history of the company revealed in such clear light so much of what I find distasteful about the modern startup scene.

The more I read about the corruption of Silicon Valley's
leaders and culture, the more contempt I have for it. And
the more contempt I have for a lot of my own city's
startup scene, which seems filled with empty hype-men.
Elon Musk's companies seem like the only ones whose
purpose sincerely is to change the world for the better,
not merely squeezing gullible investors for billions on
empty promises.

Toronto's startup culture is very much inspired by Silicon Valley. The tech sector especially aspires to be a Silicon Valley of the North. The problem is that they absorb all the Valley’s hype uncritically, never asking whether it’s worth having sound business principles or well-researched products and services. 

All that matters instead is that you have a solid pitch to potential investors that combines utopian ideals and the appearance of business acumen in the right ratio, and a perfect PR spiel for a TED Talk. If you think I’m speaking in stereotypes or I'm ill-informed, just look at the story of Theranos and tell me there isn't a serious problem with the Valley's culture.

Holmes seems to have built a $7-billion company based entirely on a scientifically impossible pipe dream and lies. She took an idea she had when she was 19, and used her family’s connections in the business world and America’s state institutions to lend herself credibility to start a massive medical technology company. 

She kept Theranos going for more than a decade based on lies, strict secrecy, ruthless cover-ups, and her perfect recitation of the Silicon Valley song. Is there any wonder why I can’t trust the Silicon Valley business model? Or even take it seriously?

Are we over Silicon Valley already? I’ve been over it for a while. I’m increasingly over it to the point where I’m surprised when anything of value emerges from its society. There’s basically Elon Musk’s companies, and that’s it. Anything else, I consider barely worth paying attention, let alone falling for their stale salesmanship.

Yet so many businesses in Toronto run on the same hype machine, and successfully convince government officials of how productive and efficient their business model and culture is. But I don’t have any reason to trust the startup culture. So I feel more than a little lost in this world.