But, how can possibly getting a huge discount be bad? It’s not, if you actually need what you’re buying, and know what you’re buying into. Do you?

Do you know what you’re getting out of that Black Friday deal?

Have you carefully considered your needs and decided a 21″” Plasma TV for the bathroom is going to make your life better? Then by all means, do get it on Black Friday rather than any other day. Do your market research, compare prices and features, track your model of choice and wait for Black Friday to get it. And get it where you can get the best deal — quite likely, Amazon.

That may be a preposterous example, but there’s a reason for seemingly irrational compulsive buying behavior: shopping feels good. It releases dopamine in your brain, a chemical that triggers your reward centers. And if you buy things at discount, the chemical kick is even harder.

It’s just the way our brains our wired, tracing back to our hunter — gatherer history. You may not know or get it, but Amazon sure does. So let’s reframe that question: who would you say is more business-savvy — you or Amazon? At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we have to go with Amazon here. So why would Amazon give you this kind of deal then, and what do you really get out of it?

Amazing Amazon

You probably know the Amazon story already. What has enabled it to go from a fringe online bookstore in 1994 to one of the most important forces shaping the world in 2017 is a combination of foresight and execution, technology and business acumen.

Amazon has a demonstrated ability to see what the latest technology can do for its business and integrate it faster and better than the competition. Online shopping was just the beginning, after a certain point Amazon has not just been pioneering the fusion of existing technology and business models, but also developing new ones.

Amazon went from selling physical goods online to making goods such as books digital and giving out the medium on which to consume them, building an empire in the process. It also expanded the range of what is sold online and built a vast logistics network to support physical delivery. Today Amazon dominates retail to such an extent that its orders account for up to 15% of international shipping.

Amazon has a huge impact in the world, both digital and physical

All that is not even taking into account Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods, which combined with its -once more- pioneering use of digital technology in the physical realm could mean it will soon dominate not just what lands on your desk but also on your table.

Amazon has also been a force for digital transformation. The cloud, machine learning and product recommendations, voice-activated conversational interfaces — these are just some of the most visible ways in which Amazon and its ilk have pushed technology forward.

Amazon really is amazing. There’s just one problem: the one thing in Amazon’s agenda is Amazon.

That’s not to say that everyone at Amazon is rotten of course — far from it. There are extremely smart people working for Amazon, and some of them are trying to promote commendable causes too. And all this technology makes things better, faster, cheaper for everyone, right?

Black Friday

Do you know where the term Black Friday comes from? It started being used in a different way by employers and workers. As Thanksgiving on Thursdays is a holiday, the temptation to call in sick on Friday and have a 4-day long weekend was just too big. On the other hand, since stores are open on that day, people still go out and shop.

The combination of reduced manpower and increased demand is what made employers start calling this Black Friday, as black had a negative ring to it. Eventually marketing succeeded in making this an iconic day for shopping, so the connotation is not negative anymore. Not if you’re not a worker anyway, which brings us to an interesting point.

This Black Friday, Amazon workers across Europe were be on strike. Furthermore, grass-roots initiatives are calling for demonstrations and boycotts against Amazon., and there is a Greenpeace campaign in progress to make and repair things rather than buying more. Before you get all upset about your order possibly arriving late, it’s worth examining the reasons behind this.

Amazon has been known to push its workers to their limits. This means minimum wage, harsh working conditions and doing everything in its power to keep them from unionizing. That includes offshoring and hiring workers from agencies as temps, even though they may be in fact covering permanent positions. In that respect of course Amazon is not that different from other employers.

Not what most people would think of when talking about Black Friday workers, but there are more connections than you think

You could even argue Amazon sort of has to do this. If others do it and it’s legal, how else will they be able to compete, and why would they not do it? After all, keeping cost down and pushing people to get as many packets as quickly as possible means you can get your order for cheap and on the next day, which is great. It’s great if you’re a consumer and it’s great if you’re Amazon.

So why care about some workers doing low-paid, low-skill jobs? Their jobs will soon be automated anyway, and rightly so. Amazon is already automating its warehouses, meaning things will be done faster and smoother. Less manual effort, less accidents, less people needed, and no strikes too. And even the Mechanical Turks will not be needed soon, these tasks are better done by machines.

But what will the people whose jobs are made redundant do?

Brilliant machines

Of course, it’s not the first time we’re seeing something like this. Before the industrial revolution, most of the population used to work in agriculture, and now only 2% does. There are all sorts of jobs nobody could possibly think of at the time which are now made possible by technology. Technology creates jobs, is the adage.

But who creates technology then? People do, workers do. You would then assume the benefits of technology should all come back to them in a virtuous circle of shorts. Unfortunately that’s not really the case. Even though productivity is rising, which should mean reduced working hours and increased income, this is not happening.

[There] is [a] growing gap between productivity and wages. And you can see this in the gap between productivity, a measure of the bounty of brilliant machines, and how it’s being distributed in terms of wages. If we had an inflation-adjusted, productivity-adjusted minimum wage today, it would be something like $25 [an hour]. We would not be arguing about $10.

Laura Tyson, former Chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers

You may argue that there’s the people making these “brilliant machines”, the people doing the low-end jobs, and consumers. We don’t need the low-end jobs, so let’s just retrain these people. Let us all become engineers and data scientists and AI experts, problem solved then, and we can consume happily ever after, right?

Building machines that build machines

Not really. Despite what you may think, engineers and scientists are workers too. Their work may require intellectual rather than physical labor, but at the end of the day, one thing is common: what they produce does not belong to them. It matters not whether you are a cog in a machine or build the machine, as long as you don’t own it. So if we build machines that can do and build more for less, where does that surplus value go?

The best deal ever

If anything, this is the best deal the Amazons of the world, much like the Fords before it, have managed to sell. They have succeeded in riding and pushing the wave of consumerism to disassociate people with the nature of their work to the point where they come to identify themselves as consumers rather than workers.

While it may not be true that Henry Ford started paying workers $5 wages so they could afford his cars, it is true that Amazon pays its workers in part with Amazon vouchers. This is taking an already brilliant scheme to new heights. Workers not only identify as consumers, often turning against other workers, but also keep feeding the machine they build.

So you have raw materials and infrastructure, labor that transforms that into goods and services, and their estimated value. Without labor, there is no value: extracting material and creating infrastructure also takes labor. Yet, the ones putting in the labor get a fraction of that value and zero decision making power in the companies they work for.

But, what about the entrepreneurial spirit of the creators or the Amazons of the world? Surely, their hard work and foresight deserves to be rewarded? As technology and automation progress, menial jobs are becoming obsolete and workers are asked to work not just hard, but smart. To take initiatives, be creative, bold, and entrepreneurial. And workers do that, but in the end that does not make much of a positive difference in their lives.

If data is the new oil, what are the oil rigs?

And what about the brave new world of big data automation? Surely, in this new digital era of innovation there are so many opportunities. All it would take to bring down these monopolies would be disruptive competition, so if we just let the market play its part it will work out in the end — or will it?

If data is the new oil, then the oil rigs for the new data monopolies that are the Amazons of the world are their data-driven products. They have come to dominate and nearly monopolize the web and digital economy to such an extent that if this is not realized and acted upon soon, it may be too late.

Wake up or scramble up

But, sure companies must understand this, right? They must care about their workers, they must have a plan to prevent social unrest, right? How does someone who automates the world’s top organizations answer that question?

“Time flies and technology waits for nobody. I have not met a single CEO, from Deutsche Bank to JP Morgan, who said to me: ‘ok, this will increase our productivity by a huge amount, but it’s going to have social impact — wait, let’s think about it’.

The most important thing right now, what our top minds should be starting to say, is how to move mankind to a higher ground. If people don’t wake up, they’ll have to scramble up — that’s my 2 cents”.

Cetan Dube, IPSoft CEO

Tyson on the other hand concludes that:

“We’re talking about machines displacing people, machines changing the ways in which people work. Who owns the machines? Who should own the machines? Perhaps what we need to think about is the way in which the workers who are working with the machines are part owners of the machines”.

So, what’s your take? How do you identify? Are you a consumer, or a worker?

Article originally published on Medium

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Matt Stoller of the Open Market Institute talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the growing influence of Google, Facebook, and Amazon on commercial and political life. Stoller argues that these large firms have too much power over our options as consumers and creators as well as having a large impact on our access to information.

About Matt Stoller

Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Open Markets Institute. He is writing a book on monopoly power in the 20th century for Simon and Schuster. Previously, he was a Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst to the Senate Budget Committee. He also worked in the U.S. House of Representatives on financial services policy, including Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve, and the foreclosure crisis. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic, Vice, and Salon. He was a producer for MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show, and served as a writer and actor on the short-lived FX television series Brand X with Russell Brand. You can follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Header photo by GrungeTextures

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Ajuntament de Barcelona. Economia Cooperativa, Social y Solidaria y Consum, 2017

Download the original document here.

The Impetus Plan for the Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona, is the result of a municipal initiative. Its aim is to offer a transformative socio-economic vision of the urban reality. It includes an action programme and aims to contribute towards reducing social and territorial inequalities, while promoting an economy at the service of people and of social justice.

The Impetus Plan comprises a diagnosis, the development process and the set of actions desired to be carried out in the city over the coming years. It is structured into the following parts:

•  The social and solidarity economy in Barcelona: analyses the reality of the transformative socio-economic fabric of the city and its roll-out across the territory
•  The Planning Process: explains the process involved in drafting the Plan and related co-production and co-responsibility dynamics.
•  Contents of the Plan: describes the general and specific objectives, lines of work, measures and actions to be implemented.
•  Development of the Plan: indicates the different agents involved in the Plan’s execution and spaces for joint and participatory work.
•  Budget, Monitoring and Evaluation: details the budgetary allocations, as well as the impact assessment criteria used.
•  Annex. Towards a New Socio-Economic Policy: offers an overview of the plural economy and of the proposal for the city’s socio-economic transformation.

Excerpts:

As explained below, this Impetus Plan is the product of dialogue between the SSE sector and the City Council, which gave rise to a shared diagnosis. The report The Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona developed a compilation of needs that are summarised in the following challenges tag cloud.

These challenges, detected by the SSE fabric itself, show those aspects that require input in order to consolidate and strengthen the social and solidarity economy movement. This Impetus Plan contains measures and actions related with these challenges, which often require internal work by the sector itself. In this sense, co-production and co-responsibility in achieving them are essential.

To highlight those that enjoy the greatest consensus, efforts need to be channelled towards improving the coordination of the sector in a global sense. This will make it possible to create a greater shared identity; increase communication outreach to disseminate the principles and values of the SSE among citizens; make spaces available to the SSE so that it can become the backbone of neighbourhoods and districts; improve inter-cooperation to strengthen social market construction; place emphasis on disseminating and training in democratic and participative governance as an eminently transformative element; and influence socially responsible public procurement, based on eco-social values, as a fundamental strategy.

Tag cloud of challenges, Impetus Plan for the Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona

Commons collaborative economy sector

Meetings were held, along with the sharing of spaces for diagnosis, with BarCola, the collaborative economy hub that groups together 18 organisations. In March 2016, the city hosted the Commons Collaborative Economies: Policies, Technologies and City for the People (“Procomuns”) event whose sessions featured participation by over four hundred people and led to a declaration of 120 measures for public policies on commons collaborative economy matters, which were then put forward in the Municipal Action Plan (PAM).

The Planning Process for the Impetus Plan for the SSE in Barcelona

Statistics on the Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona

According to the study The Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona (2016), the city is home to 4,718 socio-economic initiatives that, according to their legal structures, form part of the social and solidarity economy.

Some of the most significant data are:

—— 2,400 third social sector organisations —— 1,197 worker-owned enterprises —— 861 cooperatives —— 260 community-economic initiatives

In total, they account for 53,000 people employed, over 100,000 volunteers, over 500,000 consumer cooperative members and approximately 113,000 mutualists.

SSE initiatives exist in all sectors of economic activity: from energy through culture to the food sector.

Barcelona is home to 861 cooperatives of all types, representing 20% of all the cooperatives in Catalonia. The large majority are worker cooperatives: these account for 77% of the total (numbering 667, of which 36 are social initiative cooperatives).
Furthermore, the city is home to 31 consumer and user cooperatives, which operate in a very wide range of activity fields: food, paper, energy, health, etc.
Since 1993, the city’s main housing cooperatives have built 2,093 homes in Barcelona, and today a new model is emerging known as housing cooperatives with assignment of use rights.
In the education area there are 19 education cooperatives, of which 80% are worker cooperatives, 10% consumer cooperatives and 10% mixed.

They concentrate around 2,500 members, over 5,600 students and they employ over 750 people.

There are also 13 free schools running plus various child-rearing and shared education initiatives for ages between 0 and 3 years.

Worker-owned enterprises enjoy a significant presence in the city: they represent 25.4 % of Barcelona’s SSE enterprise fabric, although a challenge in this sector’s articulation is detected. All local development projects must count on the strength of the third social sector because, with 2,400 organisations in the city, it represents over 50% of SSE initiatives: 48 of them correspond to special work centres and 20 are work integration social enterprises (WISE).

The seven ethical finance organisations operating in Catalonia are all based in Barcelona. Furthermore, in the insurance sector, the EthSI (Ethical and Solidarity Based Insurance) seal exists to certify insurance products, brokers and agents in line with SSE criteria. In Spain there are seven certified companies, four of them based in Barcelona. Community economies have emerged in the city as self-managed and innovative projects in the creation of new forms geared towards resolving people’s needs. In this respect, especially worthy of highlight are 23 citizen-managed facilities, 59 agro-ecological consumer groups, 13 exchange markets, 21 time banks and 20 community market gardens.

Read the entire document; download the PDF here.

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“Our cohort of tech founders is feeling the chill breath of mortality as they drift into middle age. And so part of what is driving this push into space is a more general preoccupation with ‘existential risk’.

Musk is persuaded that we’re living in a simulation, and he or a fellow true believer has hired programmers to try to hack it.

Peter Thiel, our most unfortunate German import, has built a survival retreat for himself in New Zealand.

Sam Altman hoards gold in Big Sur.

OpenAI, a religious cult thinly disguised as a research institution, has received $1B in funding to forestall the robot rebellion.

The biggest existential risk, of course, is death, so a lot of money is going to make sure that our big idea men don’t expire before the world has been received the full measure of their genius.

Google Ventures founded the very secretive life extension startup Calico, with $1.5B dollars in funding. Google loses $4B a year on its various “moon shots”, which include life extension. They employ Ray Kurzweil, who believes we’re still on track for immortality by 2045. Larry Ellison has put $370M to anti-aging research, as anybody would want to live in a world with an immortal Larry Ellison. Our plutocrats are eager to make death an opt-out experience.” (via Re:publica email)

Notes From An Emergency

Maciej Cegłowski | Idle Words | 17th May 2017

{This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 10, 2017, at the re:publica conference in Berlin}

The good part about naming a talk in 2017 ‘Notes from an Emergency’ is that there are so many directions to take it.

The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda.

Depending on where you live, the rise of this new right wing might be nothing new. In the United States, our moment of shock came last November, with the election of Donald Trump.

The final outcome of that election was:

65.8 million for Clinton
63.0 million for Trump

This was the second time in sixteen years that the candidate with fewer votes won the American Presidency. There is a bug in the operating system of our democracy, one of the many ways that slavery still casts its shadow over American politics.

But however tenuously elected, Trump is in the White House, and our crisis has become your crisis. Not just because America is a superpower, or because the forces that brought Trump to power are gaining ground in Europe, but because the Internet is an American Internet.

Facebook is the dominant social network in Europe, with 349 million monthly active users. Google has something like 94% of market share for search in Germany. The servers of Europe are littered with the bodies of dead and dying social media sites. The few holdouts that still exist, like Xing, are being crushed by their American rivals.

In their online life, Europeans have become completely dependent on companies headquartered in the United States.

And so Trump is in charge in America, and America has all your data. This leaves you in a very exposed position. US residents enjoy some measure of legal protection against the American government. Even if you think our intelligence agencies are evil, they’re a lawful evil. They have to follow laws and procedures, and the people in those agencies take them seriously.

But there are no such protections for non-Americans outside the United States. The NSA would have to go to court to spy on me; they can spy on you anytime they feel like it.

This is an astonishing state of affairs. I can’t imagine a world where Europe would let itself become reliant on American cheese, or where Germans could only drink Coors Light.

In the past, Europe has shown that it’s capable of identifying a vital interest and moving to protect it. When American aerospace companies were on the point of driving foreign rivals out of business, European governments formed the Airbus consortium, which now successfully competes with Boeing.

A giant part of the EU budget goes to subsidize farming, not because farming is the best use of resources in a first-world economy, but because farms are important to national security, to the landscape, to national identity, social stability, and a shared sense of who we are.

But when it comes to the Internet, Europe doesn’t put up a fight. It has ceded the ground entirely to American corporations. And now those corporations have to deal with Trump. How hard do you think they’ll work to defend European interests?

The Feudal Internet

The status quo in May 2017 looks like this:

There are five Internet companies—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Together they have a market capitalization just under 3 trillion dollars.

Bruce Schneier has called this arrangement the feudal Internet. Part of this concentration is due to network effects, but a lot of it is driven by the problem of security. If you want to work online with any measure of convenience and safety, you must choose a feudal lord who is big enough to protect you.

These five companies compete and coexist in complex ways.

Apple and Google have a duopoly in smartphone operating systems. Android has 82% of the handset market, iOS has 18%.

Google and Facebook are on their way to a duopoly in online advertising. Over half of the revenue in that lucrative ($70B+) industry goes to them, and the two companies between them are capturing all of the growth (16% a year).

Apple and Microsoft have a duopoly in desktop operating systems. The balance is something like nine to one in favor of Windows, not counting the three or four people who use Linux on the desktop, all of whom are probably at this conference.

Three companies, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, dominate cloud computing. AWS has 57% adoption, Azure has 34%. Google has 15%.

Outside of China and Russia, Facebook and LinkedIn are the only social networks at scale. LinkedIn has been able to survive by selling itself to Microsoft.

And outside of Russia and China, Google is the world’s search engine.

That is the state of the feudal Internet, leaving aside the court jester, Twitter, who plays an important but ancillary role as a kind of worldwide chat room.

Google in particular has come close to realizing our nightmare scenario from 1998, a vertically integrated Internet controlled by a single monopoly player. Google runs its own physical network, builds phone handsets, develops a laptop and phone operating system, makes the world’s most widely-used browser, runs a private DNS system, PKI certificate authority, has photographed nearly all the public spaces in the world, and stores much of the world’s email.

But because it is run by more sympathetic founders than Bill Gates, because it builds better software than early Microsoft did, and because it built up a lot of social capital during its early “don’t be evil” period, we’ve given it a pass.

Security

It’s not clear that anyone can secure large data collections over time. The asymmetry between offense and defense may be too great. If defense at scale is possible, the only way to do it is by pouring millions of dollars into hiring the best people to defend it. Data breaches at the highest levels have shown us that the threats are real and ongoing. And for every breach we know about, there are many silent ones that we won’t learn about for years.

A successful defense, however, just increases the risk. Pile up enough treasure behind the castle walls and you’ll eventually attract someone who can climb them. The feudal system makes the Internet more brittle, ensuring that when a breach finally comes, it will be disastrous.

Each of the big five companies, with the important exception of Apple, has made aggressive user surveillance central to its business model. This is a dilemma of the feudal internet. We seek protection from these companies because they can offer us security. But their business model is to make us more vulnerable, by getting us to surrender more of the details of our lives to their servers, and to put more faith in the algorithms they train on our observed behavior.

These algorithms work well, and despite attempts to convince us otherwise, it’s clear they work just as well in politics as in commerce. So in our eagerness to find safety online, we’ve given this feudal Internet the power to change our offline world in unanticipated and scary ways.

Globalism

These big five companies operate on a global scale, and partly because they created the industries they now dominate, they enjoy a very lax regulatory regime. Everywhere outside the United States and EU, they are immune to government oversight, and within the United States the last two administrations have played them with a light touch. The only meaningful attempt to regulate surveillance capitalism has come out of the European Union.

Thanks to their size and reach, the companies have become adept at stonewalling governments and evading attempts at regulation or oversight. In many cases, this evasion is noble. You don’t want Bahrain or Poland to be able to subpoena Facebook and get the names of people organizing a protest rally. In other cases, it’s purely self-serving. Uber has made a sport of evading all authority, foreign and domestic, in order to grow.

Good or bad, the lesson these companies have drawn is the same: they need only be accountable to themselves.

But their software and algorithms affect the lives of billions of people. Decisions about how this software works are not under any kind of democratic control. In the best case, they are being made by idealistic young people in California with imperfect knowledge of life in a faraway place like Germany. In the worst case, they are simply being read out of a black-box algorithm trained on God knows what data.

This is a very colonial mentality! In fact, it’s what we fought our American War of Independence over, a sense of grievance that decisions that affected us were being made by strangers across the ocean.

Today we’re returning the favor to all of Europe.

Facebook, for example, has only one manager in Germany to deal with every publisher in the country. One! The company that is dismantling the news industry in Germany doesn’t even care enough to send a proper team to manage the demolition.

Denmark has gone so far as to appoint an ambassador to the giant tech companies, an unsettling but pragmatic acknowledgement of the power relationship that exists between the countries of Europe and Silicon Valley.

So one question (speaking now as an EU citizen): how did we let this happen? We used to matter! We used to be the ones doing the colonizing! We used to be a contender!

How is it that some dopey kid in Palo Alto gets to decide the political future of the European Union based on what they learned at big data boot camp? Did we lose a war?

The lack of accountability isn’t just troubling from a philosophical perspective. It’s dangerous in a political climate where people are pushing back at the very idea of globalization. There’s no industry more globalized than tech, and no industry more vulnerable to a potential backlash.

China and Russia show us that the Internet need not be a world-wide web, that it can be subverted and appropriated by the state. By creating a political toolkit for authoritarian movements, the American tech giants may be putting their own future at risk.

Irreality

Given this scary state of the world, with ecological collapse just over the horizon, and a population sharpening its pitchforks, an important question is how this globalized, unaccountable tech industry sees its goals. What does it want? What will all the profits be invested in?

What is the plan?

The honest answer is: rocket ships and immortality.

I wish I was kidding.

The best minds in Silicon Valley are preoccupied with a science fiction future they consider it their manifest destiny to build. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are racing each other to Mars. Musk gets most of the press, but Bezos now sells $1B in Amazon stock a year to fund Blue Origin. Investors have put over $8 billion into space companies over the past five years, as part of a push to export our problems here on Earth into the rest of the Solar System.

As happy as I am to see Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos fired into space, this does not seem to be worth the collapse of representative government.

Our cohort of tech founders is feeling the chill breath of mortality as they drift into middle age. And so part of what is driving this push into space is a more general preoccupation with ‘existential risk’.

Musk is persuaded that we’re living in a simulation, and he or a fellow true believer has hired programmers to try to hack it.

Peter Thiel, our most unfortunate German import, has built a survival retreat for himself in New Zealand.

Sam Altman hoards gold in Big Sur.

OpenAI, a religious cult thinly disguised as a research institution, has received $1B in funding to forestall the robot rebellion.

The biggest existential risk, of course, is death, so a lot of money is going to make sure that our big idea men don’t expire before the world has been received the full measure of their genius.

Google Ventures founded the very secretive life extension startup Calico, with $1.5B dollars in funding. Google loses $4B a year on its various “moon shots”, which include life extension. They employ Ray Kurzweil, who believes we’re still on track for immortality by 2045. Larry Ellison has put $370M to anti-aging research, as if anybody would want to live in a world with an immortal Larry Ellison. Our plutocrats are eager to make death an opt-out experience.

Now, I’m no fan of death. I don’t like the time commitment, or the permanence. A number of people I love are dead and it has strained our relationship.

But at the same time, I’m not convinced that a civilization that is struggling to cure male-pattern baldness is ready to take on the Grim Reaper. If we’re going to worry about existential risk, I would rather we start by addressing the two existential risks that are indisputably real—nuclear war and global climate change—and working our way up from there.

But real problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven’t been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally benevolent God-like AI, rather than figuring out how to put ethical guard rails around the more pedestrian AI they are introducing into every area of people’s lives.

The tech industry enjoys tearing down flawed institutions, but refuses to put work into mending them. Their runaway apparatus of surveillance and manipulation earns them a fortune while damaging everything it touches. And all they can think about is the cool toys they’ll get to spend the profits on.

The message that’s not getting through to Silicon Valley is one that your mother taught you when you were two: you don’t get to play with the new toys until you clean up the mess you made.

The circumstances that have given the tech industry all this power will not last long. There is a limited time in which our small caste of tech nerds will have the power to make decisions that shape the world. By wasting the talents and the energies of our brightest people on fantasy role play, we are ceding the future to a more practical group of successors, some truly scary people who will take our tools and use them to advance a very different agenda.

To recap: the Internet has centralized into a very few hands. We have an extremely lucrative apparatus of social control, and it’s being run by chuckleheads.

The American government is also being run by chuckleheads.

The question everybody worries about is, what happens when these two groups of chuckleheads join forces?

The Winter

For many Americans, the election was a moment of profound shock. It wasn’t just Trump’s policies that scared us. It was the fact that this unserious, cruel, vacant human being had been handed the power of the American presidency.

Scariest to me was how little changed. No one in the press or in social media had the courage to say “we fucked up.” Pundits who were stunned by the election result still made confident predictions about what would happen next, as if they had any claim to predictive power.

After the election both Facebook and Google looked at the mountains of data they had collected on everyone, looked at the threats the Trump Administration was making—to deport 11 million people, to ban Muslims from entering the country—and said to themselves, “we got this.”

The people who did worry were tech workers. For a moment, we saw some political daylight appear between the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the tech sector, and the small clique of billionaires who run it. While the latter filed in to a famously awkward meeting with Trump and his children at the top of his golden tower, the former began organizing in opposition, including signing a simple but powerful pledge to resign rather than help Trump fulfill one of his key campaign promises: barring Muslims from the United States.

This pledge was a small gesture, but it represented the first collective action by tech workers around a political agenda that went beyond technology policy, and the first time I had ever seen tech workers come out in open defiance of management.

A forest of new organizations sprung up. I started one, too, called Tech Solidarity, and started traveling around the country and holding meetings with tech workers in big cities. I had no idea what I was doing, other than trying to use a small window of time to organize and mobilize our sleepy industry.

That feeling of momentum continued through when Trump took office. The Women’s March in January brought five million people out onto the streets. America is not used to mass protests. To see the streets of our major cities fill with families, immigrants, in many cases moms and daughters and grandmothers marching together, that was a sight to take your breath away.

Hard on the heels of it came the travel ban, an executive order astonishing not just in its cruelty—families were split at airports; in one case a mom was not allowed to breastfeed her baby—but in its ineptitude. For a week or two lawyers were camped out at airports, working frantically, sleeping little, with spontaneous efforts to bring them supplies, get them funding, to do anything to help. We held a rally in San Francisco that raised thirty thousand dollars from a room of a hundred people. Some of the organizations we were helping couldn’t even attend, they were too busy at the airport. It didn’t matter.

The tech companies did all they could to not get involved. Facebook has a special ‘safety check‘ feature for exactly this kind of situation, but never thought of turning it on at airports. Public statements out of Silicon Valley were so insipid as to be comical.

Employees, however, were electrified. It looked like not only visitors but permanent residents would be barred from the United States. Google employees staged a walkout with the support of their management; Facebook (not wishing to be left behind) had its own internal protest a couple of days later, but kept it a secret. Every time the employees pushed, management relented. Suddenly top executives were going on the record against the travel ban.

People briefly even got mad at Elon Musk, normally a darling of the tech industry, for his failure to resign from the President’s advisory council. The silent majority of tech employees had begun to mobilize.

And then… nothing happened. This tech workforce, which had gotten a taste of its own power, whose smallest efforts at collective action had produced immediate results, who had seen just how much sway they held, went back to work. The worst of Trump’s travel ban was blocked by the court, and we moved on. With the initial shock of Trump in office gone, we now move from crisis to crisis, but without a plan or a shared positive goal.

The American discomfort with prolonged, open disagreement has set in.

When I started trying to organize people in November, my theory was that tech workers were the only group that had leverage over the tech giants.

My reasoning went like this: being monopolies or near-monopolies, these companies are impervious to public pressure. Boycotts won’t work, since opting out of a site like Google means opting out of much of modern life.

Several of these companies are structured (unusually for American corporations) in such a way that the board can’t control the majority of votes. At Google and Facebook, for example, the ultimate say goes to the founders. And since Google and Facebook are the major online publishing outlets, it’s unlikely that the press would ever criticize them, even if journalists were capable of that kind of sustained attention.

So that leaves just one point of leverage: employees. Tech workers are hard to find, expensive to hire, take a long time to train, and can have their pick of jobs. Tech companies are small compared to other industries, relying heavily on automation. If even a few dozen workers on an ops team acted in concert, they would have the power to shut down a tech giant like Google. All they had to do was organize around a shared agenda.

Workers seemed receptive to the argument, but confused about how they could make collective action a reality. Trade unions in the United States have been under attack for decades. There is almost no union culture in technology. Our tech workers are passive and fatalistic.

So here I am in Europe, wondering, what on Earth can we do?

And I keep coming back to this idea of connecting the tech industry to reality. Bringing its benefits to more people, and bringing the power to make decisions to more people.

Closing the Loop

After Communism collapsed in Poland, I started visiting the country every eight months or so. Even in the darkest period of the 1990’s, it was striking to see people’s material standard of living improve. Suddenly people had cars, phones, appliances. These gains were uneven but broad. Even farmers and retirees, though they were the hardest hit, had access to consumer goods that weren’t available before. You could see the change in homes and in public spaces. It was no longer necessary for office workers in Kraków to change their shirts at lunchtime because of soot in the air. The tap water in Warsaw went from light brown to a pleasant pale yellow.

For all the looting, corruption, and inefficiency of privatization, enough of the new wealth got through that the overall standard of living went up. Living standards in Poland in 2010 had more than doubled from 1990.

In the same time period, in the United States, I’ve seen a whole lot of nothing. Despite fabulous technical progress, practically all of it pioneered in our country, there’s been a singular failure to connect our fabulous prosperity with the average person.

A study just out shows that for the median male worker in the United States, the highest lifetime wages came if you entered the workforce in 1967. That is astonishing. People born in 1942 had better lifetime earnings prospects than people entering the workforce today.

You can see this failure to connect with your own eyes even in a rich place like Silicon Valley. There are homeless encampments across the street from Facebook headquarters. California has a larger GDP than France, and at the same time has the highest poverty rate in America, adjusted for cost of living. Not only did the tech sector fail to build up the communities around it, but it’s left people worse off than before, by pricing them out of the places they grew up.

Walk the length of Market Street (watch your step!) in San Francisco and count the shuttered store fronts. Take Caltrain down to San Jose, and see if you can believe that it is the richest city in the United States, per capita. The massive increase in wealth has not connected with a meaningful way with average people’s lives even in the heart of tech country, let alone in the forgotten corners of the country.

The people who run Silicon Valley identify with progressive values. They’re not bad people. They worry about these problems just like we do; they want to help.

So why the failure to do anything?

Like T.S. Eliot wrote:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

As I said earlier, the tech industry hates messy problems. We’d rather dream up new problems we can solve from scratch.

One reason nothing happens is a culture of tax evasion. There’s a folk belief in American business that if you pay full taxes, you’re not doing your fiduciary duty, and your board will fire you.

Apple now has a quarter trillion dollars offshore that it refuses to put into direct productive use in the United States. Apple boasts that its products are designed in California—they will sell you a $300 book called Designed By Apple In California. But they do their damndest to make sure that California never sees a penny of their overseas profits.

You in the EU are all too familiar with this brand of tax evasion. Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft have all been under investigation or in court on charges of evading European taxes.

Another reason good intentions don’t translate is that capitalism, especially venture capital, doesn’t work very well when there is vast wealth inequality.

The richest 20 people in tech control a fortune of half a trillion dollars in personal wealth, more than the GDP of Sweden.

This small subculture of wealthy technophiles promotes investment into luxury goods for rich people, or into “mom as a service” types of companies that cater to spoiled workaholics in the tech industry. And so we end up with things like a $120M juice squeezer, or three startups competing to deliver organic baby food.

Silicon Valley brings us the worst of two economic systems: the inefficiency of a command economy coupled with the remorselessness of laissez-faire liberalism.

One reason it’s been difficult to organize workers in the tech industry is that people have a hard time separating good intentions from results. But we have to be cold-blooded about this.

Tech companies are run by a feckless leadership accountable to no one, creating a toolkit for authoritarianism while hypnotized by science-fiction fantasy.

There are two things we have to do immediately. The first is to stop the accelerating process of tracking and surveillance before it can do any more harm to our institutions.

The danger facing us is not Orwell, but Huxley. The combo of data collection and machine learning is too good at catering to human nature, seducing us and appealing to our worst instincts. We have to put controls on it. The algorithms are amoral; to make them behave morally will require active intervention.

The second thing we need is accountability. I don’t mean that I want Mark Zuckerberg’s head on a pike, though I certainly wouldn’t throw it out of my hotel room if I found it there. I mean some mechanism for people whose lives are being brought online to have a say in that process, and an honest debate about its tradeoffs.

I’m here today because I believe the best chance to do this is in Europe. The American government is not functional right now, and the process of regulatory capture is too far gone to expect any regulations limiting the tech giants from either party. American tech workers have the power to change things, but not the desire.

Only Europe has the clout and the independence to regulate these companies. You can already point to regulatory successes, like forcing Facebook to implement hard delete on user accounts. That feature was added with a lot of grumbling, but because of the way Facebook organizes its data, they had to make it work the same for all users. So a European regulation led to a victory for privacy worldwide.

We can do this again.

Here are some specific regulations I would like to see the EU impose:

• A strict 30 day time limit on storing behavioral data.
• The right to opt out of data collection while continuing to use services.
• A ban on the sale or transfer of behavioral data, including to third-party ad networks.
• A requirement that advertising be targeted strictly to content, not users.

With these rules in place, we would still have Google and Facebook, and they would still make a little bit of money. But we would gain some breathing room. These reforms would knock the legs out from underground political ad campaigns like we saw in Brexit, and in voter suppression efforts in the US election. They would give publishers relief in an advertising market that is currently siphoning all their earnings to Facebook and Google. And they would remove some of the incentive for consumer surveillance.

The other thing I hope to see in Europe is a unionized workforce at every major tech company. Unionized workers could demand features like ephemeral group messaging at Facebook, a travel mode for social media, a truly secure Android phone, or the re-imposition of the wall between Gmail and DoubleClick data. They could demand human oversight over machine learning algorithms. They could demand non-cooperation with Trump.

And I will say selfishly, if you can unionize here, it will help us unionize over there.

If nothing else, we need your help and we need you to keep the pressure on the tech companies, the Trump Administration, and your own politicians and journalists, so that the disaster that happened in the United States doesn’t repeat itself in Germany.

You have elections coming soon. Please learn from what happened to us. Please stay safe.

And please regulate, regulate, regulate this industry, while you can.

Thank you.

The post How to fight the feudal internet appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this presentation George Nicholas reviews debates over the “ownership” of Indigenous heritage and provides examples of new research practices that are both more ethical and more effective. These collaborative research models, in which the community leads the research, highlight important new directions in protecting Indigenous heritage.

Originally published on Remix the Commons

The post Culture, Community, and Collaboration – New Directions for Protecting Indigenous Heritage appeared first on P2P Foundation.