Connexion
Will the new TikTok bill prove that conservatives can wield government power effectively, or will it blow up in their faces?
The TikTok bill that recently passed the House by an overwhelming majority but faces an uncertain future in the Senate is an interesting test case for conservative use of government power.
On its face, it is written as narrowly as it could possibly be to apply directly to TikTok without being a bill of attainder, which would be unconstitutional.
A new generation of conservatives is arguing that the Republican Party must be willing to use the power provided by its constituents on their behalf, overcoming knee-jerk objections that doing so is always injurious to business, the economy, or a free society. This would seem like a good place to start.
Divestment from China is a legitimate policy objective. We have neither a free speech nor free market obligation to permit Beijing to easily access and store American users’ data. The Chinese Communist Party is using both the global marketplace and the openness of our society against us in a way the Soviet Union, with their greater fealty to the economics of long bread lines and two left shoes, never could.
There are, of course, other ways the Chinese government could obtain U.S. data that this bill does not address. Yet TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is based in Beijing and subject to Chinese intelligence law. It should be possible for lawmakers and regulators to take this into account without being hostile to business or social media in general.
Yet it does not take an amazing amount of foresight to see how a president like Joe Biden might attempt to abuse the power to deem a company that, say, disseminated news stories about Hunter’s laptop or irregularities in U.S. aid to Ukraine somehow “controlled by a foreign adversary,” even with all the checks contained in this particular bill.
Maybe the legislation perfectly anticipates all such chicanery and any effort along these lines would fail, with Congress or the courts rejecting them as biased and bogus.
Nevertheless, the recent track record of the federal government has not been impressive, to put it mildly. This particular bill does at least have the benefit of being bipartisan. Even so, whose warnings have been more prescient over the past 20 years? Those of the bipartisan authors of the Patriot Act or Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, and their forerunners?
There is also the non-trivial matter that the congressional gerontocracy is not especially tech-savvy, recalling former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick’s quips about “Snapface” and “Instachat.” Belichick is a spry 71, nearly a decade younger than Biden and a dozen years younger than Nancy Pelosi.
This is to some degree rectified by younger and more technologically proficient congressional staffers, some of whom presumably know that the internet is not merely a series of tubes and is here for the long haul. But we’re still grappling with the societal effects of the internet’s ubiquity, even on the Right, even among the younger set.
The winning and wielding of political power should not be new topics for anything as old as the Republican Party or the conservative movement. They are nevertheless being discussed anew, on subjects far afield of TikTok or China.
Potentially banning a highly popular social media platform through the granting of powers that will someday—indeed, perhaps immediately—be held by their political opponents is a chance to demonstrate either competence or the law of unintended consequences.
There are some matters that are of genuine public and national interests, concepts that are not simply nice titles for magazines. A mature political movement and party must be able to legislate and govern constructively in these cases.
At the same time, government action often fails even when well-intentioned. Authorities often seek to test the constitutional and statutory limits on their power, unless they find it politically advantageous to punt contentious questions to the administrative state or the judiciary.
The fusionists of old were wrong to pretend they had achieved the perfect synthesis of liberty and virtue in their particular mix of war, welfare, and traditional values. The concept that these are two social goods often in tension with each other, that need to be managed prudently, remains valid.
Let’s see if the cons of TikTok are able to succeed where the Paul Bremers and Anthony Faucis of the world so conspicuously failed.
The post What Is the GOP Position on TikTok Now? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Ukraine Aid Transparency Act will clarify who is on the side of an unelected technocracy and who is not.
The American Conservative reported earlier this week on a bill proposed by Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio that would compel the fullest accounting to date of American aid rendered to Ukraine, including via third-party nations. The proposal would address the ongoing problem of mystery spending on our proxy war with Russia: the president’s broad discretionary powers, which, when used as they have been, defy ordinary accounting and undercut the congressional power of the purse. Hence, the Vance legislation cuts to the core of the Ukraine dispute, which isn’t about the prudence of arming Kiev or the nature of American interests in Europe or the size of the American deficit (which is still a concern in some quarters). It has become a conflict over our form of government.
It’s difficult to tell at this late date, but the American constitutional order is built around a robust form of legislative supremacy. The composition of the Senate is the only unamendable section of the Constitution; the Senate is also, via the impeachment mechanism, the nation’s highest court. (“Supreme Court” is in some sense a bit of a misnomer.) We have no office of dictator, no constitutionally recognized states of exception; we have no notion of “the Crown in Parliament.” The powers of ordering peace and war ultimately and without reservation reside in Congress and are devolved at its sufferance.
The Claremont Institute’s Chairman Tom Klingenstein has written and spoken about the American “cold civil war”—how our public life is no longer merely a deliberative back-and-forth over particular policies but a dispute over the actual form of government and, particularly, the grades of the franchise and its consequences. One group is, broadly, un- or anti-American, thinks that the structures of the American state are corrupt from inception or that the American people are too stupid, racist, or otherwise venal to be trusted with self-government, and consequently supports rule by enlightened technocrats, who by nature reside in the executive branch. The other group is, broadly, committed to the occasionally ugly hurly-burly of American representative democracy.
U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict has become one of the defining flashpoints of this cold civil war. There are good-faith arguments—arguments I happen to agree with—for limiting aid to Ukraine. There are also good-faith arguments for continuing or expanding it, even if I find them unpersuasive. Yet, rather than relying on the strength of those arguments, the Ukraine hawks have made it about whether there should be a debate at all. The Ukrainian cause has been subsumed into the technocratic cause.
“Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” said Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina in February. Michael Brendan Dougherty, our brother in journalism at National Review, rightly points out that this sort of rhetoric is rooted in the premise that the voters are stupid. It is true that we are a republic, not a pure democracy; there is, floating around, the vague residual sense that our politicos ought to have the practical wisdom to be the pilots of the ship of state rather than mere errand boys. Yet the main part of the Ukraine party wants to short-circuit the entire deliberative process. They are insisting on less accountability from the executive and less power for themselves—see the resistance to establishing a special inspector general for Ukraine support. In short, they are passing the buck to the technocrats.
This state of affairs is not the exception; the valorization of the executive at the cost of the legislature has become the norm. Rule by camarilla and administrative cabal is our lot. The Department of Homeland Security has single-handedly suspended the southern border, even as it continues to chew away at the rights of citizens. (This is why the impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is important—it is a reassertion of congressional supremacy.) The Department of Justice looks more and more like a political police. The Pentagon, so far as anyone can tell, does whatever it wants.
Nevertheless, in certain respects, the picture is brighter than it has been for some time. Last May, Congress repealed the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force in Iraq. Legislators of both parties have expressed concern about the unauthorized use of military force in Yemen. There is a real appetite—particularly concentrated in the right flank of the House Republican party, but in some way shared by members of both parties in both chambers—to restore some muscle to the central organ of American national government. It is not efficient, and it is often not very pretty, but tooth-and-nail fights about budgets are the system working as designed; extensive debate about just how much we want to get involved in other countries’ wars is the system working as designed. These powers reside in Congress because it is “inefficient”; it is an organ that discourages rashness.
Vance’s bill not only gives the legislature and the American people a needed tool for deliberating our involvement in this war. In the opposition it draws, it will smoke out the members of the technocratic party—and, in a civil war, cold or not, it’s always helpful to know who is on which side.
The post Vance’s Weapon in the Cold Civil War appeared first on The American Conservative.
The hopes and the fears about technology are substantively identical.
According to a recent survey of over a thousand adults, two thirds of them “believe AI could do their job.” Evidently, the majority of workers really think that their job is so monotonous and simple that it could be entirely automated.
There are a few ways to look at this, and none of them are positive. On its surface, the survey indicates that the American economy is reaching a point where all jobs can be safely outsourced to robots. Whereas technological innovation used to liberate laborers from brutal drudgery, today’s AI Revolution promises to liberate them from work entirely.
Before people don their sassy sweats and make themselves comfortable on the couch as they wait for the monthly UBI check, they should know: Nothing about today’s AI will make work obsolete for the foreseeable future. Most people’s jobs actually consist of more than writing formulaic emails to people who don’t read them, and, even for such jobs, someone has to plug in the prompts and names in the first place.
This brings up another way of looking at this survey, which is the fear that arises from ignorance. As the cliche goes, people fear what they don’t understand, and most people don’t actually understand how artificial intelligence works. Ironically, as society becomes more scientifically advanced, people take a far less scientific view of new technology. Raised on abstractions and fantastical superhero movies, most modern Americans basically see their devices as magic.
Thus, it feels natural to assume computers will run themselves and independently make decisions. It doesn’t occur to anyone that computers have to actually be programmed to do this and the absence of a mind precludes any kind of agency. At its heart, AI is just a fancy calculator.
That’s why the most any informed critic can say about AI is that those who use it have a significant advantage over those who don’t. Just as a man with an automated forklift has an advantage over a man with only his two hands, so too does an office worker with ChatGPT drafting soulless notifications over the coworker debating which emoji he should use to lighten the mood of his online missives.
That said, there is yet another, much more likely explanation for why someone thinks AI could replace them: In his heart of hearts, he really wants it to. Even if this means becoming utterly useless to the world and a slave to the machine, people today still prefer this outcome over making themselves useful and being responsible for themselves.
This could be seen a few years ago when office workers around the world were quietly celebrating the lockdowns caused by Covid. True, a handful of people feared contracting a deadly respiratory virus, but most people simply delighted in working remotely, doing the bare minimum, and receiving a stimulus check from the government for their supposed hardship.
When it was clear that it was safe to return to work and have physical contact with others, many people resisted as best they could. It’s safe to assume most of them didn’t find any fulfillment from their job, nor did they feel any sense of community from working side by side with their colleagues. Americans may be among the hardest workers in the world, but many of them paradoxically hate working.
I personally observed this years ago as a member of my school district’s textbook adoption committee. Our job was to review various English textbooks, listen to the presentations given by publishers, and have a discussion over how textbooks would figure into classroom instruction for the next decade. Despite having much better options, most committee members settled on one particular textbook with mediocre texts, useless ancillaries, and clunky formatting. Why? Because it also had an online feature that could automatically grade student essays.
It turns out that this “grading software” was just a grammar and spell checker. Even so, the committee still voted for it. They were so sold on the prospect of a machine doing their job that all objectivity completely vanished—even when they learned the truth about it.
More recently, I saw this vain pursuit for an essay grading machine appear in an online discussion between AP English teachers. The original post mentioned ChatGPT, which led me to think that it would be about the growing problem of students using AI to cheat on their essays. Instead, it was a teacher asking what AI program English teachers like to use for grading their students’ essays.
To my surprise and disappointment, many teachers were actually using AI to do their jobs. That is to say, they were relying on the generalized and mostly useless feedback of AI writing programs—which still are mostly grammar and spelling checkers—to help their students become better writers.
I then wondered what would happen if both the student’s essay and the teacher’s feedback were both AI—would that qualify as a computer finally achieving self-awareness?
Grading essays is probably the most important thing an English teacher can do. Yes, it’s exhausting and frequently overwhelming, but it’s an essential and fundamentally human task that can’t be outsourced. Writing is thinking, and teachers simply can’t train their students to think clearly and logically if they never read their essays. Moreover, establishing that crucial connection with students is lost when the students’ voices go unheard; the kids might as well teach themselves at that point.
The same logic applies to workers in most industries. In hoping that a computer can think for them, they somehow miss the obvious points that (1) computers will never be able to think and (2) thinking is ultimately what gives life meaning and makes community possible. To pretend otherwise and hope for an AI takeover is effectively embracing nihilism.
For that reason, it’s best to put AI in its proper place and refocus on the marvelous capacities of human beings to use their minds and connect with one another. All jobs should cater to these capacities as much as possible. Insofar as AI can help in this endeavor, it is useful. Otherwise, people should just stop fussing over the hype and get back to work. In the end, they’ll be much happier for it.
The post AI Won’t Take Over the Workplace, Even If People Want It To appeared first on The American Conservative.
Better regulation on devices and in app stores is common sense.
Device manufacturers and app developers pretend that existing age-ratings of apps are effective; they turn a blind eye to the inappropriate ads that have pestered children for over a decade; they tell us that devices, in themselves, are child-safe. The engaged parent recognizes the deceitfulness of these assurances.
On November 16, the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) and the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) released a policy brief on device-level regulation to address these three predicates, among others. The brief couldn’t be timelier. Concerns regarding children’s online experiences drove 42 states to sue Meta over its addictive and harmful designs in October 2023. These lawsuits pose powerful challenges to unnecessarily dangerous and addictive features of Meta apps, and consistent litigation will continue to be essential for this issue. Yet these efforts, however critical, leave a primary issue unaddressed, that the dealers of these substances—device and app store manufacturers—have thus far avoided legislative and legal attention. The IFS/EPPC brief recommends several ways to close that loop.
Until now, devices and app stores, dominated by Apple and Google, have remained unregulated for children. The burden of responsibility for user safety rests disproportionately on the shoulders of parents, and only recently have companies like Meta begun to feel pressure. Legislators and policymakers have not given attention to the role of device manufacturers, focusing their child safety efforts largely on the regulation of dangerous (pornographic, violent) and highly trafficked (social media) sites, as in the case of several federal bipartisan bills that legislators hope to bring to the floor before the end of the year, including the Kids Online Safety Act and COPPA 2.0.
Until now, we have hoped that smartphones and tablets might be neutral tools applied for good or ill. Considering the utter lack of regulation for device and app store makers, they would have to be neutral at the convenience of their manufacturers. The legal environment for devices and the app stores accessed on them is unjustly permissive for Big Tech, thanks to Reno v. ACLU (a 1997 ruling against child protections on the grounds that harmful material does not surface “unbidden” online), Ashcroft v. ACLU (a 2002 ruling against age verification for adult sites), and the overexpansion of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which excuses social media platforms from liability for the posting of pornographic and illegal material.
If we ask Apple and Google to protect minors even before apps are downloaded, we ask them to do something well within their capabilities. The elegance of many of their products, contrasted with the bugginess of the parental controls on offer, suggests that these companies have no motive to resolve their child safety issues.
It’s not that Apple and Google don’t have enough data to recognize whether users are underage and must be guarded from mature content. These companies know enough about your children to recommend games and other apps, but they claim ignorance when it comes time to judge whether material is safe and suitable for them.
Apple and Google don’t want their app stores regulated externally because they, as the brief explains, enjoy a 30% commission on every app downloaded from their stores. And that is before factoring in their profits from ads both in-app and in-store.
Parents simply don’t know what their kids are up to online. It is even less likely that they know that the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory against social media for all minors, going so far as to suggest that the account holder minimum age be raised. App stores should ensure that parents know this when they purchase certain apps for their kids, just as other consumer goods come with Surgeon General advisories when hazardous to the public health, especially that of children.
Just imagine, for a second, walking your kid into a toy store plastered with posters of Cardi B, erotic literature, and alluring factoids on how to attract lovers. No brick-and-mortar store could get away with it. Imagine picking up a movie rated for a General Audience, only for its graphic violence to haunt your child’s dreams for the next ten years. In other markets, we do not tolerate such a complete lack of regard for children’s welfare and routinely correct it via regulation.
It is, without a doubt, good that 42 states are suing Meta. But so must we prosecute the stores promoting Meta’s products. Litigation by private right of action will prove crucial. As Sen. Hawley (R-MO) highlighted during the hearing of Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar on November 7, the doors for litigation against these companies must be thrown open: “They fear parents going into court and holding them accountable. That’s the hammer. That’s what happened with Big Tobacco, that’s what happened with opioids.”
Legislators must open the door for litigation by amending the Federal Trade Commission Act, specifically its prohibition against “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce,” as well as the various state “Little FTC Acts.” The amendments would explicitly prohibit marketing goods to minors with deceptive age ratings and advertisements for abusive, age-inappropriate products. The change could be as simple as clarifying that digital commerce is included in the above prohibition, which would provide state and federal regulators with new litigatory tools to punish Big Tech for failure to comply.
The brief makes yet another commonsense proposal: age verification for all who possess an individual device.
Imagine the ease of it: When you buy a phone, you show your ID to verify your age. This solution is a no-brainer. Or let the buyer age-verify at home by uploading their ID, as they already do for various Apple and Google features such as Apple Wallet. Or if a buyer doesn’t want their ID on their device, Apple and Google could host in-store verification. But, to reiterate, Google and Apple already have precisely what they need to age verify users. They already do it elsewhere—just not for child safety.
If lawmakers choose not to require age verification, the brief continues, they can still require child-friendly default settings across their devices. Our devices should be child-friendly, as these companies claim they are. The brief offers detailed directions for what these child-proof settings can cover, incorporating the recommendations of Protect Young Eyes and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, such as their model system for an obscenity filter activated automatically when the age of a user can be determined during account setup without formal age verification.
At bottom, Apple and Google’s duopoly over devices and app stores must be broken. We need alternatives. As of right now, these Big Tech behemoths make it impossible for device holders to access app store competitors. A federal bill, the Open App Markets Act (OAMA) presented by Senators Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, aims to, among other things, decentralize the market and make it possible for other app stores to break in. We must not forget that the world made in Apple’s image is not the only possible world.
All these measures—alternative device and app stores, child-safe default settings, age ratings for apps—must be navigable and legible for parents. For example, one would expect to see the age rating of an app before approving or declining a child’s request to download. Placement matters—parents should not have to go searching for information that, in the spirit of these devices, should be right at their fingertips.
Restaurants offer non-smoking areas; quiet hours are enforced across whole neighborhoods. The devices we use to communicate, navigate, and socialize have proven unworthy of our trust and do not deserve exemption from our basic standards of living.
The post Unmonitored Minors on Dangerous Devices appeared first on The American Conservative.
If technologists wish to form a more virtuous elite, they must attempt something greater than a program of satiation through hyper-consumption.
On October 30, President Biden signed an executive order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.” The order requires developers to do a variety of things: share safety test results with the federal government, prevent A.I. from conducting dangerous bioengineering, protect consumers, transform education, and advance equity and civil rights.
Reactions to the executive order have been mixed. Some believe the order both legitimizes A.I. and encourages competition in the sector. Others, such as Marc Andreessen, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist, have been extremely vocal on Twitter about their disapproval.
Andreessen’s reaction is no surprise. Several weeks ago, he posted a long document, titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” arguing for unlimited technological acceleration. At first glance, the Manifesto, composed of a host of declaratory statements, lacks a clear argument; Ezra Klein described the piece as a “vibe” rather than an argument. Bemusedly noting citation of “BasedBeffJezos” and Nietzsche, Klein dubs that vibe as “reactionary futurism.”
This seemingly reactionary document draws the ire of both Klein and other critics, who fail to take it seriously and alternately conclude that Andreesen is blinded either by wealth or “violent, right wing machismo.” These are lazy replies written by authors who know their audiences to be predisposed against such men. But these critics ought to have taken Andreessen more seriously; such responses legitimize his project in the eyes of his audience.
What that project is may not be immediately clear: “our enemies are not bad people—but rather bad ideas,” Andreessen claims. Yet, his subsequent list of enemies are not bad ideas themselves, but bad ideas that have been wielded by elites for a “demoralization campaign.” Eventually, it becomes clear that his enemies are, in fact, bad people—those elites.
It is nearly impossible to convince a set of elites to abandon their institutions, their culture, and their ideologies. Nor does Andreessen expect this. Silicon Valley’s feud with the demoralizers has gone on for too long for any such delusion to remain; Tesla ceased replying to reporters’ inquiries four years ago. Rather than persuading the current class, Andreessen clearly intends to raise a new generation of motivated technologists, a generation of new elites, in whom he will inculcate his vision of techno-optimism. As the culture war grinds to a stalemate, Andreessen plots a grand breakthrough.
It is not surprising that the figureheads of Silicon Valley who feel that they have been treated unjustly by traditionally prestigious institutions like newspapers and universities want to drive out the old elites. American culture operates on top of a digital substrate that they built; yet American elites, the demoralizers, are successfully turning that culture against them.
Perhaps nations receive the elites they deserve, but Andreessen is right to despise the present class. Under their stewardship, universities grew to ignore truth; politicians, their constituents, businesses, the consumer; journalists, ethics; artists, beauty; and churches, the orphan and the widow.
Silicon Valley may be more capable of effecting a revolution in the elite class than their opponents realize. As “new technologies enter society, they disrupt the connections between institutions, practices, virtues, and rewards,” Jon Askonas notes. In other words, Marx was right; technology is the true revolutionary principle; but in our case it is the technologists who control the means of innovation. In theory, then, men like Andreessen or Sam Altman, by altering our technological substrate, can make obsolete the structures which formed our elite classes, replacing them with their own cohort, who will legitimize their demands for prestige by leading a new age of innovation. This is, in effect, a revolution, carried out in culture by means of technological change.
These changes are seemingly just around the corner. Generative A.I. promises to undercut the prestige of elite institutions and jobs. The Writers Guild has already attempted to forestall the attempt. Their success, or lack thereof, will become clear in the coming decades. Let a thousand white-collar unions bloom.
The more interesting question is this: Can Silicon Valley produce a more virtuous elite than the one they are attempting to replace? After carefully reading, it seems unlikely.
In fact, the proclamations of the Manifesto bear striking similarities to the ideologies of the current ruling class. We can liberate our soul, it proclaims, through material abundance, created by technology, which “opens the space of what it means to be human.” Technology allows mankind to “create our lives;” it is the “spearhead of progress.” Yet, the techno-optimists “are not Utopians,” which is an odd thing to say about a movement that believes in “overcoming nature.”
The Manifesto is progressive, and it it progressive in the same manner that Andreessen’s enemies are. Woodrow Wilson, in many ways the patriarch of the demoralizers, would approve of the Manifesto’s language, given its similarity to his own. Andreessen could have easily included quotes from Wilson’s speeches, if he had wanted to: “we think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress, development–those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new.”
For, much like Wilson, it is not clear what Andreessen wishes to progress to. In the case of the individual, he speaks of “eudaimonia through arete”, happiness through virtue, but in order for something to be virtuous it must be well-suited to its end. The techno-optimist’s end—humans who are better able to determine their own lives—sounds suspiciously like the language of identity and self-actualization that his so-called enemies employ. It would not be out of place in a Disney movie.
The Manifesto also has a decidedly Marxian tone. It proclaims a program of human emancipation, achieved by using technology to “make everything we want and need abundant.” This is particularly ironic, given how many times the Manifesto condemns communism. It is also confusing. If “human wants and needs are infinite,” how will technological abundance make everything we want?
“Societies, like sharks, grow or die,” the Manifesto proclaims, neglecting history and forgetting that societies are often killed by their own growth. In the end, Andreessen’s techno-capital machine will neither free humanity to be our best selves, nor will it enslave us to its own purposes. Rather, it is a vision of “50 billion people” enslaved to their own gluttony. Andreessen’s ambition of settling other planets does not bring to mind a race of “Technological Supermen” but rather the obese passengers from WALL·E. Yes, humanity will “always be the masters of technology,” but we, in turn, have often been mastered by our own passions.
If technologists wish to form a more virtuous elite, they must attempt something greater than a program of satiation through hyper-consumption.
The post The Will to Progress appeared first on The American Conservative.
Tech companies once dealt with competitors by attempting to develop superior products. Then they discovered they could simply buy them.
Tech exceptionalism is a sin. Tech leaders aren’t especially smart; they’re not even especially evil. They’re just ordinary mediocrities, no smarter or more cunning than you or I. Yet today’s generation of tech bosses have shrunk the internet down to “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”
What happened? How did a clutch of utterly undistinguished businesspeople convert the dynamic, fast-changing world of tech into a sector so inbred that it’s practically got a Habsburg jaw?
Like tech itself, tech concentration is unexceptional. Tech companies once dealt with competitors by attempting to develop superior products. As antitrust enforcement was progressively neutered—tentatively by Carter, aggressively by Reagan, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm by each successor administration, Republican and Democrat—tech companies were able to simply buy their competitors.
Take Google, a company with a single blockbuster product: its quarter-century old search engine. Virtually every other in-house product Google has developed since—its video platform, its numerous social media networks, its RSS reader, and its “moonshot” smart cities division—has failed. Google’s successful products are—with few exceptions—other people’s products, which it bought and operationalized. From mobile to ad-tech, server management to maps, document editing and collaboration to satellite imagery, Google is a company that bills itself as an idea factory, but is best understood as a deep-pocketed, self-sabotaging investor that buys the products it is incapable of designing and fielding on its own.
Google isn’t exceptional here. Facebook identified WhatsApp and Instagram as threats when its users started jumping ship for the new rivals. The company wrote a couple of checks and acquired these two nascent rivals before they could grow to challenge the company’s dominance. As Mark Zuckerberg says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”
Apple, too, is a buying-things company: In 2019, CEO Tim Cook cheerfully boasted to Kara Swisher about the 90 companies Apple had acquired that year. Cook brings home a new company for his board more often than you bring home a bag of groceries for your family.
Not every startup wants to be agglomerated into a Big Tech borg. When a tech giant finds a firm that isn’t willing to sell out, they use their investors’ cash to force them out. Take Diapers.com: When they refused to sell to Amazon, Amazon responded by selling diapers below cost, lighting $100 million on fire before buying the suffocated husk of Diapers.com for pennies on the dollar.
Again, this isn’t exceptional. Most industries have indulged themselves in a 40-year-long orgy of mergers and acquisitions, transforming virtually every sector into an oligopoly ruled over by a cartel of five or fewer companies: athletic shoes, beer, cheerleading, defense contracting, book publishing, eyeglasses, semiconductors, bottlecaps, professional wrestling…the list goes on and on. Whole supply chains have consolidated into fistulated masses: The drugs produced by the pharma cartel are overseen by the pharmacy benefits management cartel and retailed through the pharmacy cartel.
But actually, tech is a little exceptional.
Digital technology is exceptional in a deep, technical sense. The only kind of digital computer we know how to make is the “Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine”—a device that can run every valid program. All computers are, at their deepest level, equivalent, able to run any app we can write. That universality has been a boon to tech competition.
The flexibility of digital systems means that a new market entrant can always make a compatible (“interoperable”) add-on, mod, or accessory. When IBM gouged its customers on mainframe hard-drives, innovators like Memorex jumped into the market with “plug compatible” drives that sold at a fraction of the price.
Microsoft’s wildly unreliable Office for Mac product turned reading and writing Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files into a crapshoot for Mac users, whose files were frequently unreadable by their Windows-using colleagues. Apple responded by reverse-engineering the Office file-formats and releasing the iWork Suite, whose applications—Pages, Numbers and Keynote—could perfectly read and write those Microsoft files. Thereafter, Mac users could collaborate seamlessly with Windows users, and—crucially—Windows users could switch to the Mac without giving up their files or their compatibility with the Windows users who comprised the majority of the market.
For Facebook, the infinite malleability of the digital world was key to its triumph over the incumbent MySpace. Facebook promised dissatisfied MySpace users a superior, surveillance-free alternative, but Facebook understood that no matter how much users disliked MySpace, they loved the friends they had on MySpace more. “Come to Facebook and sit alone in an empty virtual room, admiring the clean user-interface” was a poor pitch.
So, Facebook used interoperable tools to let ex-MySpace users eat their cake and have it too. Facebook provided those MySpace users with a “bot,” an automated program that used the user’s login and password to impersonate that user to MySpace, scraping the user’s waiting messages and putting them in their Facebook inbox. Replies that users typed in on Facebook were then autopiloted back to MySpace. Thus, MySpace users could become Facebook users without having to convince their friends to make the leap with them—and without having to give up on friends who weren’t ready to leave.
This digital flexibility and the interoperability it enabled was a perennial check on incumbent dominance. Any time an incumbent tightened the screws on its customers—raising prices, lowering quality, converting included features into pricey add-ons—an interoperator could sell that customer a screwdriver to loosen the screw again.
What’s more, these interoperators enjoyed the “attacker’s advantage.” In security, the defender—say, an incumbent hoping to prevent its products from being reverse-engineered by an upstart—needs to make no mistakes. The attacker—say, a would-be interoperator painstakingly decompiling a popular product with an eye to offering an after-market improvement—has only to find and exploit a single defect in the defense.
Tech products have always enjoyed explosive growth thanks to the network effects that are endemic to the sector. Every Facebook user signs up to be with the users who are already there, and then becomes a lure for other users who want to hang out with them. Every iOS user is a reason to be an Apple app developer; every new app is a reason to become an iOS user.
But tech’s network-effects-driven growth have always been held in check by that inescapable universality. The second a company used its network-effects-drive scale to start shifting surpluses from customers to its shareholders, an interoperator popped up to offer those customers a better deal.
That was true when IBM gouged on hard-drives; it was true when Microsoft used its scale to visit pain upon Mac users; it was true when MySpace tried to hold its users hostage. Wherever an incumbent used lock-in to extract super-normal rents, a new market entrant popped up to offer those customers an alternative. The more invasive your ads are, the more the ad-blocker company can raise in the capital markets.
The universality of digital platforms meant that every platform that became greedy thanks to its explosive growth was pruned back to size through the good graces of low switching costs delivered by interoperability, which either lowered the friction associated with going from one product to another, or simply modified the product the manufacturer delivered to remove extractive antifeatures.
Tech was forever a dynamic industry, where mainframes were bested by minicomputers, which were, in turn, devoured by PCs. Proprietary information services were subsumed into Gopher, Gopher was devoured by the web. If you didn’t like the management of the current technosphere, just wait a minute and there will be something new along presently. When it came to moving your relationships, data, and media over to the new service, the skids were so greased as to be nearly frictionless.
What happened? Did a new generation of tech founders figure out how to build an interoperability-proof computer that defied the laws of computer science? Hardly. No one has invented a digital Roach Motel, where users and their data check in but they can’t check out. Digital tools remain stubbornly universal, and the attacker’s advantage is still in effect. Any walled garden is liable to having holes blasted in its perimeter by upstarts who want to help an incumbent’s corralled customers evacuate to greener pastures.
What changed was the posture of the state towards corporations. First, governments changed how they dealt with monopolies. Then, monopolies changed how governments treated reverse-engineering.
The Apple II Plus hit the shelves the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail. While it was Jimmy Carter who pulled the first tentative Jenga blocks out of the antitrust enforcement system, Reagan went at it with gusto, tearing them out by the fistful.
The theories of Robert Bork and his Chicago colleagues gained currency. Their new orthodoxy held that Congress had never intended to police the emergence of monopolies per se, but only to rein in those rare monopolists who abused their market power to raise prices or lower quality. This “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust enforcement gradually won out over historic notions of the inherent risks of large corporations and concentrated sectors.
With the drawdown of antitrust enforcement, industries across the board dwindled to oligopolies, but tech got there first and faster. The capital markets proved exceedingly bullish on subsidizing formerly illegal tactics, such as predatory pricing, acquiring and extinguishing nascent rivals, and mergers to monopoly between major competitors.
Shareholders lined up to subsidize below-cost offerings. Amazon spent a mere $100 million destroying Diapers.com. But Uber’s investors financed a bonfire of $31 billion, losing $0.41 on every dollar it took in for the first 13 years of operations. Investors snapped up shares of companies like Google, whose ineptitude at creating successful new products was counterbalanced by its ability to buy other peoples’ companies.
As tech diversity declined, the industry’s ability to capture its regulators increased.
The early, chaotic years of the consumer internet were full of policy setbacks for tech companies. Recall the Napster Wars, when the entertainment sector—dominated by fewer than a dozen companies then, a number that’s halved in the ensuing quarter-century—comprehensively trounced the tech sector. Bedrock case law crumbled, like the “Betamax” decision (Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.) that immunized the manufacturer of any technology that was “capable of sustaining a substantial noninfringing use” from copyright liability.
Congress and state houses introduced strings of bills intended to limit the tech sector’s ability to make new tools without permission from the entertainment company. Michael Powell’s FCC passed the “Broadcast Flag” rule, which required every single digital device to be fitted with technology that would disable file-transfers if a file was marked with a copyright restriction flag (the Broadcast Flag rule was struck down by the D.C. Court of Appeals in 2005).
Then, as now, the entertainment sector was a pipsqueak when compared to tech. By every measure—number of users, number of sales, total profits, profit margins—tech was bigger and (theoretically) more powerful than entertainment. But the difference was that all the power in the entertainment industry had been boiled down to a cozy cartel of frenemies who were capable of forming a united front in policy fights. By contrast, tech was a squabbling rabble. In every policy fight, some tech companies would defect, taking the entertainment industry’s side, muddling the message that regulators, courts and lawmakers heard.
That disunity provided an opening in tech’s defense that entertainment drove straight through, again and again.
But there’s more than one way to solve a collective action problem. The tech sector’s solution was brutally simple: As tech companies merged and re-merged and re-re-merged, its policy goals grew less fractured. Tech companies that had once rudely shouldered their way into the market by reverse-engineering their rivals’ products—Apple, Google, Facebook—suddenly got DMCA-happy and began suing and threatening rivals who tried to do unto them as they did unto their own forebears. When Apple reverse-engineered Microsoft Office to make iWork, that was progress: If you were to try to do the same—say, to make a platform that could run iOS apps and play back media from the iTunes Store—Apple’s lawyers would nuke you until the rubble glowed.
Everywhere questions of tech policy arise—U.N. specialized agencies like WIPO, standards bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium, expert agencies like the FCC, intergovernmental bodies like the E.U. Commission—tech arrives in lockstep to sing from the same hymnal. Their self-serving rhetoric is no longer checked by other commercial actors who speak with the authority of firms that serve millions of customers.
To the extent that a counternarrative appears in the record, it comes from minuscule firms, hobbyists, activists, and academics. For regulators—especially regulators drawn from the ranks of large tech firms—giving them what they want is a no-brainer.
This policy unity has produced a regime where everything that is not prohibited is mandatory. Tech companies get to violate privacy laws where they exist (Europe) or prevent their passage altogether (Washington). They bypass labor law with the fiction that when an app is your boss, you are transformed into a “small business.” They circumvent consumer protection law, arguing that a pay-to-play system that fills our search results with deceptive lookalike products that are inferior to the goods we’re seeking is a form of “advertising.”
Meanwhile, we are prohibited from taking countermeasures. A worker can’t reverse-engineer the Uber app to compare wages with other workers and algorithmically determine when a job offer is a lowball. A consumer can’t install an ad-blocker in an app without risking felony prosecution for violating the DMCA. An entrepreneur can’t mod the Amazon app to remove all the paid results and display comparison prices from rivals. An investigative journalist can’t scrape grocers’ websites to build the case that large firms are colluding to raise prices while blaming inflation.
Interoperability wasn’t killed by the reverse-engineer-proof computer nor by the lack of market demand for aftermarket modifications. It was killed by regulatory capture, arising from market concentration, arising from the bad idea that monopolies are efficient sources of consumer welfare, rather than deep-pocketed rent-seekers who leverage their scale to extinguish rivals, corrupt our politics, harm workers, and gouge customers.
This article is part of the “American System” series edited by David A. Cowan and supported by the Common Good Economics Grant Program. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors.
The post A Murder Story: Whatever Happened to Interoperability? appeared first on The American Conservative.
It is time to let the U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement expire.
The imminent expiration of the U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement (STA) on August 27 presents the Biden administration with a critical opportunity to protect America’s innovative edge from the Chinese Communist Party and to ensure continued American leadership in emerging technologies. Though initially conceived with good intentions to foster bilateral cooperation, over time the agreement has become a conduit for Chinese malfeasance, siphoning off valuable U.S. intellectual property, technology, and research and development, and should be allowed to expire.
The agreement’s roots trace back to a more optimistic era, when an idealistic Washington hoped that engaging with China’s scientists and researchers might moderate the totalitarian impulses of the CCP regime. The STA, signed by President Jimmy Carter and China’s Deng Xiaoping in January 1979, outlines a variety of areas of potential cooperation, including joint research programs and the exchange of scientists and scholars. Four decades on, with copious evidence of Chinese theft and espionage accumulating, those hopes seem profoundly naive.
Consider just some of the ways U.S. taxpayer funds and R&D resources have been exploited to abet Beijing’s relentless technology acquisition strategy under the false pretenses of the STA framework: More than a decade ago, NASA’s engagement with China on sensitive aeronautics research and technology so alarmed Congress over potential military applications that they statutorily banned NASA from conducting such joint projects absent security clearance. Cooperative aerospace and atmospheric monitoring programs lent Chinese engineers valuable expertise, only for advanced surveillance balloons to sail across the United States earlier this year. Even the National Science Foundation, which bankrolls nearly a quarter of all basic research at America’s universities, finds itself so inundated with investigations into foreign influence among its grantees that its inspector general confesses her office is unable to keep pace.
The STA’s vaunted vision of robust reciprocal academic exchange has never materialized. This year, over 300,000 Chinese students filled U.S. university campuses, whereas draconian CCP restrictions have slashed the number of Americans studying in China to just around 350—down from a peak of nearly 15,000 in 2011. Meanwhile, CCP-funded programs like the Confucius Institutes and the Thousand Talents Plan continue to extend Beijing’s influence, technology transfer, and intelligence gathering activities into the American academy.
Defenders of the STA protest that the agreement still carries important symbolic and diplomatic weight, and serves as a useful general framework facilitating technological exchange. Yet these purported benefits ring hollow. Senior officials have not gathered for a meeting under the formal auspices of the STA since 2016.
In 2018, despite a sincere U.S. attempt to salvage the STA by adding a new intellectual property annex, the CCP’s exploitative behavior persisted unchecked, prompting the State Department to conclude two years later that “the PRC ignores international norms and exploits the openness of the United States and other nations for its own benefit, harming the integrity and security of the international research enterprise.”
Preserving an open-ended declaration of scientific and technological collaboration with Beijing seems profoundly counterproductive when considering how the fields of greatest mutual interest are also dual-use by nature, ripe for diversion to totalitarian and military ends by the CCP’s civil-military fusion strategy. Advanced biotechnology can enable bioweapons development, artificial intelligence will push new frontiers in the CCP’s oppressive A.I.-backed surveillance state, and quantum computing threatens to compromise America’s most closely-held national secrets.
International science and technology cooperation is important. The United States boasts nearly 60 science and technology cooperation agreements with allies and partners across the democratic world. Many of these agreements have fostered fruitful research partnerships that strengthen American innovation and competitiveness. The STA’s expiration will help refocus our cutting-edge R&D investments into venues where they are far less vulnerable to being used against the U.S. national interest.
Allowing the STA to lapse will deliver a strong diplomatic signal to Beijing that the era of accommodating CCP technology theft and bad faith dealings is over. It will force CCP leaders to acknowledge that their own hostile actions, provocations, and refusals to abide by international rules and norms have extinguished the basis for open science cooperation enjoyed decades ago. A strong and confident America should not shrink from compelling this reckoning.
The door need not be shut permanently on future collaboration with Chinese scientists and researchers who share our aims of expanding human knowledge and who reject totalitarian technology ends. But restoring a prudent balance that protects U.S. national advantages will first require fundamental changes in the CCP’s exploitative policies. By allowing an agreement that no longer serves our interests to expire, President Biden can strike an important blow for safeguarding American innovation and competitiveness where we need it most.
The post End The STA: Stop Helping China Steal appeared first on The American Conservative.
The right Red response to Blue is to build its own high-tech future.
In a recent piece for The American Conservative, I noted that woke Massachusetts is far from broke. To be sure, plenty of woke states are going broke. One such is blue Illinois, where Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker seems more interested in extending Medicaid to cover all aspects of transgenderism than in improving the state’s business climate, which the Tax Foundation rates as 36th in the nation.
That ranking doesn’t capture the full dimensions of Illinois’ troubles. In Chicago, the local political structure is objectively pro-crime, and that is one more reason why so many corporate headquarters have departed, including Boeing, Caterpillar, and Citadel. Meanwhile, Pritzker seems to see a special destiny for his state as a “beacon” on all things T. Perhaps that is the Pritzker plan for economic development—and yet it’s unlikely to work beyond a certain sector. Still, Illinois is richer than all but two red states, so at least it has a long way to fall before hitting bottom.
In the meantime, the red states have their plan for economic development. It is heavy on the Neo-Jeffersonian prescription of lower taxes, and so it is rife with arbitrage opportunities at the expense of blue states. In 2021, the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry found that of the top ten states for inbound migration in the previous year, eight had Republican governors, and of the top ten states for outbound migration, nine had Democratic governors. He further noted that the average top individual income tax rate in the top ten inbound states was 3.8 percent, compared to an average top tax rate of more than 8 percent for the outbound states.
To be sure, not everyone worries about top tax rates, but some people do. Bloomberg News reports that the wealthy are making a “broader shift” to lower-tax states, “away from places like New York’s Upper East Side and San Francisco’s Nob Hill to warmer, less-dense regions of Florida and Texas.” Bloomberg adds, “As wealthy executives bring their businesses along with them, the merely affluent follow, too.”
In other words, a lot of economic action is on the move as blue money seeks, er, redder pastures. And it’s having a measurable effect. Also according to Bloomberg, zero-state-income tax Florida is “home to 38 of the 50 million-dollar US neighborhoods with the largest price gains by percentage over the past three years … Those areas have all seen home values more than double.”
In fact, Red has an overall positive mental attitude toward development, as a blue financial titan attests. “We now have more employees in Texas than in New York state,” says JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. “It shouldn’t have been that way but Texas loves you being there.”
We’re seeing a classic economic story: Development occurs in one place, and then, over time, it migrates to places with lower costs. So Elon Musk gets his start in Blue—educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford, with his first startup in Palo Alto—and then relocates to Red, namely Texas. We can identify a sort of “regional contract” here: Red needs Blue as a source of rich people, just as much as Blue needs Red as a place for rich refugees to go (from an incumbent political power point of view, better to have malcontents leave than stick around and cause electoral trouble). Although, of course, there is the troublesome syndrome of economic action migrating even further, to Mexico or China, and that puts an implicit cap on red wages.
Yet there’s something on the horizon—actually, it’s already here, inside the house—that could change this familiar pattern: artificial intelligence. One expert predicts that A.I. could do away with 80 percent of jobs in the next few years. If so, what will that do to labor costs? Do to everything? About the only thing that seems sure is that in the coming tumult, it will be better to be above A.I. than below it. That is, upstream, on the making end, as opposed to downstream, on the receiving end.
That raises a pertinent question: Where, exactly, is A.I. coming from? The company that put A.I. into the national conversation is OpenAI, which last year unveiled Chat GPT. And where is Open AI headquartered? Why, at 3180 18th Street in San Francisco. Yes, the city that conservatives love to loathe, as they regard it as the epitome of demented left-libertarianism. To normal people, much of San Francisco is a crime-ravaged, drug-addled, homeless-personed hellscape—where even security-guarded Democratic politicians aren’t safe. But here is the thing: Not everyone is normal.
Without a doubt, having a really high I.Q. and the ability to sit still and code for days at a stretch is abnormal. In fact, in some subcultures, “normie” is a term of separation, even derision. So maybe that explains why the A.I. cluster in San Francisco is booming. According to the San Francisco Standard, a dissident publication, one neighborhood, Hayes Valley, is home to so many A.I. startups that it is known as Cerebral Valley. In fact, city-wide employment in “information” rose 31 percent from 2019 to 2023, even as employment in normie sectors, such as hospitality and construction, plummeted. Yes, it would seem that some people like San Francisco just the way it is, with fewer normies. And if that makes no sense to you, well, maybe you’re not the right fit for an A.I. startup.
If this were just a micro-trend in a relatively small coastal city—San Francisco ranks just 17th in population—it wouldn’t matter much. Who cares if, say, leather men eclipse pup handlers? But again, it’s A.I., so it’s a macro-trend, offering more leverage than just about anything we’ve seen so far in this century. And A.I.’s heart is tangled up in Blue, left in weirdo San Francisco. The money involved is far out, too. According to one report, A.I. has already hiked the fortunes of tech tycoons to the tune of $150 billion. That’s more money, and more power, for Blue, and all that it stands for.
So when A.I. disrupts everything, who is going to be the disruptor, and who is going to be the disruptee? How now do the people who work in the blue city by the bay regard red America? Might all the conservative imprecations—all those attacks on Drag Queen Story Hour—be reciprocated, and multiplied, in some way that we can’t yet fathom? We already know that Chat GPT is full of left-wing political and cultural bias, what will happen when A.I. tsunamis across the entire national landscape?
So what should be the conservative response? Red should recognize that the economic race is being won, not by lower taxes, but by higher coding skills. That’s not an argument against low taxes, it’s an argument in favor of high tech. Not just for economic betterment, but for sociopolitical self-defense, against the revenge of the nerds in ’Frisco. And if one has to fight fire with fire, the first thing to know is how to create fire.
It is great, of course, that eight of the ten winningest college football teams are Red, but maybe the greater battle is brains, not brawn. Yes, Red needs its own A.I. firestarting. And yet according to U.S. News, of the top ten schools in the country (we’re talking academics now), the first nine—Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania—are in Blue. The tenth, Duke (Red), is tied with Northwestern (Blue).
Some will argue that these ratings are wrong; these schools (and perhaps the school-raters, too) have gone woke—and so their credibility is broke. That is possible, although it’s also possible that tech-minded departments are mostly untouched in their spectrum-y solipsism, even as we are all transfixed by the academies’ gender- and race antics. And we know that MIT has de-woked itself on the sine qua non of a tech education; as its dean of admissions said last year, “There is no pathway through MIT that does not include a rigorous foundation in mathematics, mediated by many quantitative exams along the way.” But woke or not, MIT-ers are definitely blue; in the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden won them, 89:8. One can add that it’s bad strategy for Red to see so many of its smartest students going to Blue for higher education. Will they stay in Blue to seek their fortune? And if they come back to Red, what will they be thinking?
So Red needs its own stronger, non-woke, home-grown tech. To that end, here’s a suggestion: Some enterprising, far-thinking, red state should make this offer: Any applicant who gets an 800 on his or her math SAT will not only be accepted, but will get a free ride through college. Yup, every nickel—tuition, room, board, maybe even a stipend—covered, and the only key to unlocking this educational cornucopia is acing a color-blind test on the other queen of the sciences, mathematics. So no horsing around with legacies and quotas and victim statements: just merit, and nothing but.
And for the course work? Same: a choice between math and science, or science and math. This “800” program could be operated through an existing red-state school. Of course, if existing schools didn’t wish to cooperate—there are plenty of woke dots in Red—then an independent “800 U” could be whipped up quickly enough, perhaps in some empty office building. After all, there would be no need to worry about extra-curricular activities or any of that sis-boom-bah stuff. This would be, from the get-go, Grind U. The goal, of course, is that these brainiacs would be acclimatized to alma mater and wish to stay after they graduate—either as smart workers, or as a smart start-uppers. (And if 800 U taught lessons about the value of studying, as opposed to partying, that would be useful as well.)
The idea of a special “magnet” for tech is not new. For instance, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics was founded back in 1980, making all the right noises about the importance of STEM. And yet over the years, the pseudopods of the education blob have snaked their way in to the admission process, such that SATs are not required. And we know what means: Nobody is going to mistake an NCSSM graduate for an MIT grad.
The Great Red Hope is that a new tech cluster will emerge in Troy, or Tulsa, or Twin Falls. Out of that, hopefully, will come the capacity for a red A.I. that can counter blue A.I. There’s no guarantee of that, of course, and yet if Red can’t somehow build that capacity, Blue will win. Big time.
The post Anti-Woke Is Not Enough appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Machines seem “objective,” but often reflect their designer’s subjective preferences.
Michael Toscano’s review of Matthew Crawford’s books and thought on technology was published in our latest print issue and is now featured on our homepage. It is one of my favorite recent pieces at TAC.
Toscano describes the distinction that Crawford draws between tools that “extend human mentality outward” and those, like social media, that “foster a different kind of selfhood.”
The sense one has when scrolling is universality—of being lifted out of one’s immediate surroundings to wherever the spirit leads. Does a conversation bore you? Then scroll. Driving? Then scroll. This sense of seamlessness and easy mastery is reinforced by social media, which relocates “connections” into placeless electronic networks, where one cannot be seen and one’s flaws can be hidden. One’s online avatar is a fully controllable brand.
Social media promises users greater connectivity with their peers. Paradoxically, though, it alienates users from one another by offering a highly addictive, curated experience designed to keep them scrolling:
Rather than unburden the user, these machines contract his mental and physical extension by addicting him to a device that apes mastery but provides none. This makes him more manipulable by choice architects who are secretly pushing the user down predetermined channels. Every click is nudged, tracked, analyzed, and either sold for profit or marked for divergences. As Crawford puts it, “the diversity of human possibility [is] being collapsed into a mental monoculture—one that can more easily be harvested by mechanized means.”
On its face, the technology seems neutral. Social media companies call their products “platforms” to evoke in users a sense that they can “build” their own identities on the apps without interference. But it is a patina of neutrality. Behind the curtain, people, whom Toscano calls “choice architects,” are making conscious value judgments about users’ experiences.
We assume that machines—a speed camera on the roadway, a self-driving car—are inherently more “objective” decision-makers than are the human beings they replace. But in each case, human judgement has not been eliminated, only been bumped up a level. The builders of these machines make value judgements, which appear to end-users as being “objective,” but are only objective inasmuch as they execute, without discrimination, the creator’s subjective designs:
If you have ever passed a state trooper going fifteen over and he just lets you drive on, it’s because, in his judgment, you were driving safely, whatever your speed. Law enforcement by camera knows no such nuance. It is deferred to as “objective.” “Machines don’t make judgments,” Crawford says. “They do, however, offer an image of neutrality and necessity, behind which the operation of human judgment becomes harder to make out, and harder to hold to account.”
Take, as a low stakes example, the debate over baseball’s potential embrace of a robotic strike zone. The rulebook defines a strike as a pitch that crosses home plate below the top of a batter’s chest and above the bottom of his kneecap when “the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.” Deciding when a batter “is prepared to swing” requires human judgment. A robotic strike zone would take the necessary judgment call out of the hands of on-field umpires and delegate it to nerds in a skybox.
In other words, what appears to be an objective judgment from a machine often reflects the subjective choices of the designer, and raises questions about the responsibility of users and designers in contexts far more important than baseball, such as in traffic fatalities:
Driverless cars, Crawford believes, will drive a rift between human beings and their actions that may very well disrupt our self-understanding as ethical beings. If you are being chauffeured about in an automated Google device and the A.I. makes a dumb move and a child is fatally struck, who is to blame? You? The engineers to whom the A.I. is a black box? Google? Do you have any confidence whatsoever that anyone will be held liable?
Proponents of these technologies will have to answer. And Toscano, in his piece, performs a service in asking the right questions.
The post Men or Machines? appeared first on The American Conservative.
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