How the Internet is killing us

Before the Enlightenment spread throughout Europe, inspiring the likes of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson in colonial America, most people were subjects. Their right to life was at the discretion of the king or queen, and their livelihood was determined by an accident of birth that made them obligated to serve the lord or baron on whose land they toiled.

Under American democracy, people became citizens, a concept that not only recognized their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but also ensured that their votes—not a false idea of ​​divine right—would determine who governed them. It was a direct manifestation of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of ​​popular sovereignty, which proposed that governments have a legitimate claim to power only when derived from the “general will of the people,” a situation that creates what he called “the general will of the people.” The “social contract” between the government and the people.

In this way, the rights and responsibilities afforded to the new citizens of the United States of America would enable them to collectively determine the common destiny of their nation. Citizens will have the power to make choices and make changes, while subjects do not.

In contrast to these basic principles of freedom, our current reality is best described, in our minds, as digital feudalism. Like the poor and helpless subjects of kings and aristocrats, we are serfs, subject to a small group of companies that have exploited the feudal structure of the Internet. In this system, humans are treated as afterthoughts—or not thought of at all—in the service of building massive data-mining platforms.

In the United States, the ruling clique consists of the largest software companies of our time: Alphabet, owner of Google; Owner of Facebook and Instagram, Meta; Amazon; apple; And Microsoft. The latter, with its giant investment in research organization OpenAI, has joined the technological arms race to control our data, and the power and profits that come with it. The founders, CEOs, and major investors of major technology companies have significant influence over Internet operations.

Thanks to them and their management teams, whose compensation models incentivize them to maintain or double the status quo, we live at the discretion of their proprietary algorithms. The software that relies on these algorithms—which, like computers, servers, and devices, should be understood as machines—treats us as quarries from which we mine our data, which is now the most valuable commodity in the digital economy. They then collect, organize and use this data to create tools with which their company leaders can influence us.

With the help of sensors and data capture points positioned at every turn in our daily lives — in the words and emojis we put into texts and social media posts, in our purchases, in the movements of computer mice, in the cameras pointed at us, in the GPS devices that track us, And in the listening devices in our homes, in the music we listen to, the videos we watch, the photos we share – these machines store much more information about us and our social connections than we do about our social connections. Special brains can store. As one MIT professor told me: “We live in a minimum-security prison. We just don’t know it.”

according to ProPublica 2016 reportAt that time, Facebook collected an average of fifty-two thousand data points on each of its users. This number, which is likely much higher now, gives an idea of ​​how platforms view us. Their “black box” systems, built with code that no outsider can see, extract a valuable commodity (our data). They then use that commodity to profile each of us and to manufacture a powerful machine (a proprietary algorithm) through which they classify, target, and manipulate us. In doing so, they systematically dehumanize us, just as the feudal system dehumanized the peasants.

In all of this, there is no social contract or even moral obligation for these platforms not to treat us as pawns in their hands. Instead, they bury us in legal contracts, mostly written in small print that no one reads, that impose terms and conditions surrounding our use of these apps and that force us to waive any claims over our data and the content we create and publish. We have literally surrendered our rights and handed over our personality to the giants of Silicon Valley.

This dynamic has been building for two decades, but only recently more and more people have begun to realize the enormity of what we have given up.

An innovative work in this field, the 2018 book by Harvard University professor Shoshana Zuboff, The era of surveillance capitalismIt tells how Google’s data mining model arose in the early 2000s. After Facebook discovered that it could benefit from a powerful, self-reinforcing feedback loop, it adopted and updated this model.

Basically, this is how it worked: Facebook’s monitoring of its users’ activity generated insights into how people responded to different textual, visual, or auditory stimuli. Next, Facebook’s data scientists and engineers modified the platform’s content curation algorithm in an attempt to direct users to interact with other users for longer periods of time. Internally, Facebook called this engagement Meaningful Social Interactions (MSI), and the MSI metrics served Facebook and its customers’ revenue goals. The cycle then repeated over and over again, as new behaviors generated new data, allowing for iterative and permanent “improvement” (i.e., more precise targeting) in the algorithm’s ability to modify user behavior.

One of the most famous applications emerged in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, which broke in 2018. For years, British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected Facebook users’ data without their consent and used it to feed them targeted disinformation. One goal was to influence the 2016 US presidential election; Another goal was to influence the UK’s vote in favor of Brexit.

But, in many ways, that high-profile scandal was an anomaly: the much larger, if more nuanced, problem is the impact of the data mining paradigm on our daily lives. In many ways, these platforms’ algorithms color our view of the world, shape how we engage with issues of importance, and push us into the hands of advertisers. This exploitative business model, which has moved from Facebook to become the way nearly every online platform or app operates, has stripped us of what makes us human: our free will, without which neither democracy nor markets can function, Zuboff says.

Maybe you’re sitting there thinking, “No, that’s not me. I’m in control. I can’t be influenced by some computer code. I’m open to all ideas and suggestions, and I deliberate on them, carefully weighing the pros and cons of each before I decide what to do.”

We heard you. There are different areas of our daily lives over which we retain control. But it diminishes because powerful interests benefit from denying us that control. The owners of tracking and ad-maximizing systems haven’t spent the past two decades figuring out what makes us tick. They monitored to see which content suggestions trigger the dopamine release that leads us to click, “like,” follow, or share. They have discovered our political leanings, our artistic tastes, our sleeping habits, our moods, and, most importantly, the social groups and Internet tribes with which we form bonds and allegiances. Facebook reportedly knows you’re going to break up with your partner before you do. If you abandon even briefly the “I’m in charge; no one tells me what to do” approach, you can see how platforms can and will use their vast amounts of data to shape our individual thoughts as well as our collective behavior – because they are incentivized to do so.

Here’s another way to think about how you pay to extract all this data: Two-decade variation in the prices of various goods and services in the US economy. A chart from online publisher Visual Capitalist shows how prices for the goods and services you need to live a healthy, productive life — such as medical care, college tuition, housing, and food and beverages — rose very sharply between 2000 and 2022. In contrast, prices for products that complement With the Internet our data – such as software, cell phone services, televisions, and other entertainment devices – has been extracted significantly over the same period.

It is worth asking why this is the case. Your quality of life deteriorates in the non-digital world, but your digital existence becomes strangely less expensive. The reason is that the latter is fueled by the increasing amounts of data that technology companies are handing over.

We need to think more seriously about the real price we pay for data mining hardware and related software. Remember, your data is you. Here, the immortal words of information security expert Bruce Schneier are helpful. Nearly a decade ago, he wrote: “If something is free, you are not the customer; if something is free, you are not the customer; if something is free, you are not the customer.” You are the product.”

Adapted from our great battle, Written by Frank H. McCourt, Jr. with Michael J. Casey. Copyright © 2024 by Frank H. McCourt, Jr.. Excerpted with permission of the Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without written permission from the publisher.