Category: Internet

Sounds like a yawn, eh? Not a very big fine, for a not-very-big crime.

But it was a big crime. Newspapers, web sites, etc…pivoted to video. Facebook said that views were as much as 900 percent higher than they actually were (counting, among other things, three-second views as viewership.)

So companies hired video staff, got rid of writers and pivoted.

And revenues crashed, because there wasn’t actually viewership or a way to monetize that viewership.

Virtually the entire online humor industry, for example, went under.

Facebook and Google are parasites and predators. They don’t create sweet fuck all, but they take a huge share of the revenue that would go to actual content producers. They devastate entire industries. And in this case, Facebook did it by straight-up fraud. They made billions from their lies, and paid a tiny fine.

In other words, the fine is so small, that Facebook knows they should commit fraud again in the future.

This isn’t effective law, effective regulation, or anything approaching justice.

Facebook needs to be broken up into constituent parts, and they need to be regulated. As a place to connect to friends, with a chronological timeline, Facebook provides a genuine service. As surveillance capitalism and a gateway that skims actual producers’ profits, destroying producers wholesale, it’s a catastrophe.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Problem with Public Expertise

By Ian Welsh

On June 26, 2019

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One of the talking points against the internet and social media is that it has led to the death of expertise.

The issue with this is that, when you move away from the hard sciences and engineering, which still leaves vast swathes of public policy, the experts aren’t much, if any, better than laypeople.

The majority of pundits got the Iraq war wrong. The majority of economists (the vast majority) did not see the housing/CDO bubble and did not expect the financial collapse.

The people that were the gatekeepers of the old media pick, suck. Almost all of them got wrong the two most important issues of 2000s.

So the idea that the internet and social media is worse seems questionable.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

As for fake news, I will point out, again, that the New York Times liked about the Iraq war. Fake news.

With devastating consequences.

This isn’t to say that no filters or regulation would be good, but I don’t trust this government or these social media companies to decide who gets to talk.

I think anyone who does is foolish.

The Forbidden Truth About Analog Technology

By Ian Welsh

On April 16, 2019

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… is that a lot of it was, well, better, than digital technology.

I was remembering, the other day, library card catalogues.

Here’s a truth many will refuse to believe: They were faster to use, easier to use, and provided better results than modern computerized library terminals. You looked up the code for what you wanted, flipped that section of the cards, and not only did you usually find the book you wanted, you found a bunch of other books which were related, whether or not their title sounded like it.

Then you went to that section of the library shelves and found all sorts of books on the subject in which you were interested, along with related subjects.

Then, there were employment centers. They put the cards on walls. You walked in, looked at them, copied down the contact info for any in which you were interested. The process took minutes, especially on any follow up visits, as you’d recognize any old jobs.

When they were replaced by computers, I found the process took at least ten times as long.

Back in the late 90s, I worked on a huge auditing project. Some of the files were computerized, some were still entirely on paper. I can state for a fact that the paper files were faster to audit — about half the time, because I was doing both at the same time.

Having worked on both paper file systems and computer systems, I can say that, in general, paper file systems were faster. Further, each new iteration of computer technology has slowed things down. The old mainframe systems were faster than PCs, and as PC software went through generations, it became less and less efficient. Often this was because managers wanted control: They wanted workers to click buttons and confirm things were done, and enter extraneous information, and use pull down menus, and blah, blah…all things that slowed work down.

Other times, it was because the servers were no longer on site, they were some distance away. I remember when one employer moved the servers to IBM: It may have saved $$ on server costs, but each button click took half a second or so. I actually measured the loss of worker productivity (because management refused to believe it existed). It was about 30 percent and the better the worker, the more it was. The best workers were losing about half their productivity; the system could not keep up with their flying fingers.

Then there are things like answering machines and emails. These are ways for people to interrupt workers and demand they do something — often something “right now.” These interruptions slow workers down, interrupting work flow. Often, if the worker was left alone, whatever problem the caller or emailer wanted dealt with would have been taken care of, but constant interruptions destroy productivity.

That isn’t to say that PCs, the internet, and cell and smart phones never increase productivity. Sometimes they do, usually by allowing remote work, as long as that remote work is not closely supervised. Remote workers are usually more productive if doing skilled work.

The horror show side is where real-time telemetry is used to micromanage workers doing repetitive tasks. Amazon warehouses and call centers are both hell-zones due to this. This certainly improves efficiency, but it turns workers into drones and loses all benefits of worker initiative and innovation. If a manager doesn’t think of it, it doesn’t happen, and even low-ranked managers in these regimes are really just supervisors dancing to an algorithm.

All of this speaks to a dirty secret: With a few exceptions, the allaged productivity gains from the internet and late telecom revolution just haven’t shown up. This revolution is a control revolution. It allows finely-tuned control by bosses and the powers that be. It allows them to have access to fine-grained information that, in the past, required a Stasi-like state, without having to send someone to the basement for the file, and with algos doing the first-wave of sorting and analysis.

Information is what this is good for — information and data.

But information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to flow uphill to bosses, governments, and spies. Information allows levels of control which are, in effect, totalitarian.

Technologies are not neutral. They are better for some things than for others. And this tech revolution is a revolution whose main effect has been to allow closer control of humans. It is inherently authoritarian.

That’s not all it is — there have certainly been good effects — but it is not a utopian technology which makes everyone better off.

The reverse appears to be true, at least so far. Even in fields like social media (which are surveillance technologies masquerading as public forums), the studies are in, and they are clear: The more you use social media the worse it is for you.

Humans aren’t meant to be surveilled by anyone except their family, friends, and neighbours. Anything beyond that is inhuman and has negative effects on our well-being.

So, we have a technology which mostly hasn’t improved productivity, which is inherently authoritarian and which, the more it is used for certain major tasks, leads to reduced well-being.

Tech revolutions aren’t always good. So far, it looks like this one, on balance, is bad. (And I say this as someone who has personally benefited from this revolution.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Problem with Banning Huawei 5G Tech

By Ian Welsh

On January 27, 2019

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So, the Huawei saga rolls on. The executive arrested, the daughter of the CEO, will probably wind up released, as it’s been made clear this is a political arrest. (Trump has said so, and it’s over Iran sanctions. Breaking Iran sanctions is clearly political, and probably even the ethical thing to do in many cases.)

But something else is more important to note. Huawei genuinely has the most advanced net tech in the world. It’s that simple.

America no longer manufacturers telecom equipment – Cisco got out of the business several years ago – and Huawei’s two Scandinavian competitors are too little, too late, and too expensive…

the Shenzhen firm is spending $20 billion a year on R&D, about four times as much as either Ericsson or Nokia, its only important challengers in the telecommunications equipment market.

Huawei’s internal assessment holds that its technological lead in 5G mobile broadband is so wide that the competition has no effective chance of catching up. In late February, Huawei will introduce its Balong phone, with a chipset that can handle downloads ten times faster than the best 4G LTE speeds, while operating with 4G networks as well.

Or:

“China’s largest tech company makes high-quality networking gear that it sells to rural telecommunications operators for 20 percent to 30 percent less than its competitors do, says Joseph Franell, chief executive officer and general manager of Eastern Oregon Telecom in Hermiston…”

This is hopeless. It’s probably true that Huawei stole a lot of technology, especially in the 90s and the 2000’s. One of its victims was Nortel, Canada’s telecom giant, which makes me angry.

So what?

They have the technology. It’s cheaper and more advanced than anyone else’s and, hilariously, the US doesn’t even compete in this type of telecom equipment any more.

If this is a strategic matter, then the US has fallen down completely. If an industry is strategic, a country must make sure it, or a trusted ally, stays in the lead. Not only did the US not do that, but US policies from the 80s onwards effectively off-shored this sort of production and research, as a deliberate policy choice.

Now they cry?

5G is lost. If the US, or the US and its allies, want a shot at 6E they’d better figure out how to do industrial policy. That might, indeed, mean banning Huawei, but only if they’re willing to put up with worse, more expensive internet for a decade or so. (But then US and Canadian internet is already not nearly as good as the best.)

One of the key tenets of neoliberal economic policy is that it doesn’t matter where something is manufactured, or done. Let the cheapest domicile do it, and everyone will benefit.

This is bullshit, and always was. Making and designing new things is where economic strength, the good life and military power all come from.

Nations which forget this wind up in the dustbin. Free trade, as an ideology, is the deathknell of great powers, including Great Britain, and likely to include the US. It does work for smaller powers, and should be the default policy mode for all city states, but great powers are not small powers, let alone city states.

So, if the US wants to ban Huawei, it’d better figure out how it’s going to support Huawei’s competitors enough so that they at least catch up, or even consider making sure the US has its own telecom manufacturers. If it can’t do that, this is a band-aid on a wound.

(Oh, and there’s a reason the US, whose technology is used in most of the older telecom equipment, especially cables, thinks that China might use that to listen in. Mmmmm. What would that be?)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Difference Between Compulsiveness and Happiness

By Ian Welsh

On November 23, 2018

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One of the most striking bits of research lately has been that every study I am aware of of social media finds a correlation between unhappiness and social media use. The more social media people use, the less happy they are. It’s really extraordinary.

I’ve been thinking about this recently. While ill recently I played some Civilization VI (the worst version of Civilization in its history.)

I found it compulsive. I’d be sitting there, not enjoying myself, yet found myself playing “just one more turn.”

Social media feels much the same. You tweet or put up a Facebook post or comment, or an Instagram picture, or whatever, and then you wait to see if people respond. The responses are intermittent: you can’t entirely predict them, so it’s very strong reinforcement.

The feeling of posting on social media is compulsive. Like one has to check to see if there are responses: like on has to post something new.

It’s not a happy feeling, usually. Instead it feels like addictive behaviour. Perhaps mildly addictive in some case, perhaps seriously in others.

I find happiness, right now, for me, happens most often while listening to music. It isn’t compulsive at all. I enjoy it, I stop when I have something else to do. It’s relaxed.

Dopamine hits aren’t particularly enjoyable. They’re just demanding: compulsive. “Do more of this.”

Happiness is something else. Not compulsive. Optional.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Books vs. the Internet

By Ian Welsh

On July 28, 2018

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One of the major changes in my life this last year has been that I’m reading a lot of books.

When I was young, I read a lot. For much of my childhood and most of my teen years I was reading about two books a day. During holidays I often read three a day or even four. Even into my twenties and early thirties, I maintained a book a day or so. I was one of those people who always carried a pocket book. Heck, I’d walk down the sidewalk, reading, the analog version of people staring at their smartphones.

Then along came the internet. A fair bit of my attention went to forums, but that didn’t slow down my book reading too much. Until I became a blogger, and somehow the internet ate my life.

A lot of that was good, especially from 03-08, but one casualty was book reading. I went down to one or two a week. I was intensely involved in political and economic issues, and paradoxically that made me hate reading books about economics and politics. I had trained myself, as a writer, to look for what people were (to my mind) wrong about, get angry about it (because it had real world consequences that were ugly), and then use that anger to write a post.

This made reading full books by people I disagreed with (almost all mainstream economists and political theorists of the time) really unpleasant.

This conditioning took a lot of time to overcome. But about a year ago I started really reading again, and today I’m up to about a book and a half a day. Buying a Kindle (yeah, Amazon, I know, but my experience with Kobo sucked) made this easy, and in general e-books are cheaper.

So I’ve been reading and reading, and I confirmed what I’d known, but put aside, that internet reading is not a substitute for reading books.

The vast majority of internet reading is too short. Even longer form articles and essays, which are becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of the internet anyway, just don’t match up to a decent book.

You don’t get enough information or argument or description. Even a five thousand word essay, which almost no one publishes on the internet anymore, and no one reads, does not allow the proper development of either the argument or the supporting facts as well as a good book. (Granted a lot of books are overgrown magazine articles, but that’s why I qualified with “good.”)

One gets pieces, on the internet, facts out of context, or arguments without all the facts. When learning about a new subject, one rarely gets all the context one needs: No essay is comprehensive enough.

Just recently, I spent a lot of time reading about the Chinese economy, and Chinese trade. I’ve kept a general eye on China for years, but I still didn’t know basic facts, like, for example, that China has the most decentralized government spending of any federal government in the world. (This is a fundamental and important fact, and explains much of why China succeeded.)

There is an idea, prevalent today, that one doesn’t really need to know things, because one can easily look them up.

This is not true if you want to understand anything, however. Your mind cannot work without facts and theories you don’t know. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know, and what you know you don’t know, you can then go study. If there’s important information you don’t know you don’t know, you can’t even take your ignorance into account.

Information outside your head can’t be used to improve your world and understanding, to make new connections, to understand more.

And disconnected facts and theories, not embedded within a fuller network of facts and theories; decontextualized, can be deeply misleading. They may make sense, but if you knew more you’d know they aren’t correct or don’t mean what you think they do. Equally you may think a theory or set of facts are bullshit, where if you knew more you’d understand whatever truth, or usefulness, they carry.

We thought the internet would be a huge boon, and in some ways it has been. But as with the research that shows that the more one uses social media the more unhappy and anxious one is, the fact of having so much information at our fingertips, while lovely, has also led to too much of it floating, almost context free, un-embedded in the networks of theory and meaning and additional facts necessary to make sense of it.

So, in general, while I think the internet has a lot to offer, I have to say that for those who want to understand the world, it should be used as little more than a reference library and news ticker; social media should mostly be avoided, with a careful calculus of whether the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, and one should spend most of one’s reading time with books, not online writing. (Er, of course, my blog is an exception. *cough*)

Books: Still better for actual understanding. And better for your happiness and your ability to concentrate as well.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and Inevitable Abuses that Inevitably Happen

By Ian Welsh

On March 20, 2018

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So, you’re probably aware of the furor over Cambridge Analytica. They scraped Facebook’s database and used the psychological information to craft their campaign. They have also been caught on tape admitting they do dirty tricks like honey traps, and propaganda (knowing lies).

And there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

First of all, it is essentially impossible that they are the first group to scrape Facebook’s database, as Atrios points out.

The data is there for the taking, and I am sure many others have done so, including both Democrats and Republicans.

Second, the techniques Analytica used against the US are extensions of techniques used against other countries regularly, and especially against the Muslim, Russian, and post-USSR world. To the extent that Russia is involved, they likely regard this is a fair play–they’re just doing what the West has done to them, post-USSR Republics, and their allies for many years.

Third, Facebook is a data-gathering organization, as is Google. What they do is create psyshological and life-event profiles so that advertisers can manipulate people to sell to them. This is hardly different from using the same data to manipulate people to sell candidates or policies.

Cambridge Analytica is just one part of an entire industry set up around this sort of information. Peter Thiel’s Palantir does much the same general sort of stuff, but Thiel is smart, and does it for the US military and spies, so he is protected, even though Palantir does far more evil.

There are certain doors that should not be opened. Collection of this sort of data is probably past one of these doors. The problem isn’t just scraping, the problem is that it will inevitably, and I do mean inevitably, wind up available to anyone. Every leak, every hack, is available, and so many records from so many companies have leaked that you have to simply assume your information is available to anyone who cares enough to plunk down a little money, or who is a little code savvy.

Just as information on who was what religion was used by Nazis to hunt and kill Jews, and just as when it was destroyed, it saved lives, this information will inevitably be abused. So one has to ask if the public good of knowing it and having everyone able to know it, is superseded by the public bad of knowing it, and having everyone able to know it.

As with moving from physical cash to electronic cash, I think the answer is no. (I know the answer is no with respect to cash.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

And So Net Neutrality Ends in the US

By Ian Welsh

On December 14, 2017

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Not unexpected. This will make direct competition with entrenched players nearly impossible, as they will be able to buy access to customers, and upstarts won’t. The Internet as a place where anybody could start a new business will constrict.

Oligopoly and monopoly providers (and many areas effectively have only one ISP) will extract even higher profits (understand that high speed internet profits are about 100 percent already) and will either hold anyone who wants to get to customers hostage for access or will force retail customers to pay premium rates for relatively unfettered access.

The fight will continue in court, and can always be overturned by elected officials.

Public internet, by a heavily regulated utility provider, is one solution down the road. The other to do what was done in the days of dial up and force providers to let other companies sell access to the internet through their networks.

To a remarkable degree, the internet is a natural oligopoly. It doesn’t make sense to drive multiple wires or set up multiple sets of towers–that’s irrational. As such, it needs to be regulated as a natural monopoly, with forced upgrades, set levels of profits (a low, single-digit number, inflation-adjusted) and regulatory knee-breakers who are not allowed to work for industries they ever regulated. (Meaning, you can go from industry to regulation, but not vice versa.)

These are, as usual, mostly solved problems. The world has had public or regulated utilities for ages and we know how to make them work if we want to.

Right now we don’t. We want private actors to make unregulated monopoly profits and to shut down innovation and the creation of new work and jobs.

So be it.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Internet Page 2 of 3

Facebook, Destroyer of Media

The Problem with Public Expertise

The Forbidden Truth About Analog Technology

The Problem with Banning Huawei 5G Tech

Books vs. the Internet

Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and Inevitable Abuses that Inevitably Happen

And So Net Neutrality Ends in the US