Who Owns the Future? (29 page)

PART SIX

Democracy

CHAPTER 16

Complaint Is Not Enough

Governments Are Learning the Tricks of Siren Servers

A revolutionary narrative is common in digital politics. Broadly speaking, that narrative counterpoises the inclusiveness, quickness, and sophistication of online social processes against the sluggish, exclusive club of old-fashioned government or corporate power. It’s a narrative that unites activists in the Arab Spring with Chinese and Iranian online dissidents, and with tweeters in the United States, Pirate Parties in Europe, nouveau high-tech billionaires, and “folk hero” rogue outfits like WikiLeaks.

That particular idea of revolution misses the point about how power in human affairs really works. It cedes the future of economics and places the entire burden on politics.

In our digital revolution, we might depose an old sort of dysfunctional center of power only to erect a new one that is equally dysfunctional. The reason is that online opposition to traditional power tends to promote new Siren Servers that in the long run are unlikely to be any better.

Also, it’s silly to think that only a particular sort of activist will benefit from a technology. It’s not as though traditional power structures have been sealed in stasis while digital networking has risen. Instead, old forms of power have been gradually melded into highly effective, modern Siren Servers.

A modern, digitally networked, national intelligence agency, such as the CIA/NSA/NRO complex in the United States, illustrates the trend. A visit to one of these organizations feels very much like
a visit to the Googleplex or a major high-tech finance venture. The same sorts of cheery recent PhDs from top schools cavort in an airy and playful environment with lots of glass and excellent coffee. Spymaster Siren Servers thrive in all countries by now. We tend to hear more about the excesses of foreign ones in China or even Britain, but the trend is universal.

Nations increasingly recast themselves as Siren Servers in other ways as well. China, Iran, and to varying degrees all other nations wish to be the ultimate masters of digital information flow. The clichés are so familiar that you can fill in the blanks. Developing country X bans certain websites, or filters the Internet for certain words, but courageous citizens and stalwart Silicon Valley companies provide sneaky ways to contravene those restrictions. Or: Rich country Y spies on all its citizens online even though it is a democracy, in the hopes of catching terrorists.

It’s easy to motivate a coalition in opposition to control freakery in digital statesmanship, because democracy advocates and network entrepreneurs hate it equally. While there have been some interesting challenges to state power, particularly in the Arab Spring, elsewhere it hasn’t been so easy for such coalitions to have much of an effect. I suspect that the role of digital networking in the Arab Spring was a novelty effect.
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When governments engage in the Siren Server game, they get good at it fast. (It appears that governments are getting better at getting ahead of citizen cyber-movements than commercial schemes, which consistently outwit regulators.)

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Since I wasn’t there, I will not take a position on whether Silicon Valley tech really played an essential role. However, I am sick of hearing us pat ourselves on the back by describing someone else’s revolution as the “Twitter Revolution” or the “Facebook Revolution,” as if the whole world were about us. The half-Burmese journalist Kathleen Baird-Murray pointed out to me that Burma’s population achieved similar results at about the same time without the Internet.

In the long term, I worry that the efforts of online activists who hope to support democracy will backfire the most just when they seem to be succeeding. Opposing a particular type of Siren Server, even when the target is the latest cyber-concept of a nation-state, doesn’t really help when your actions only serve to promote yet other Siren Servers.

For instance, activists use social media to complain about lost benefits and opportunities, but social media (as we currently know it, organized around Siren Servers) also gradually concentrates capital and shrinks opportunities for ordinary people. Within a democracy, the resulting increased income concentration gradually enriches an elite, which is likely to promote candidates who will support yet further concentration.

On the world stage, the same conundrum makes it harder for developing nations to sprout good jobs for educated people, because information flow is currently fated to be “free.” No one expects Twitter to help create jobs in Cairo.

It’s impossible to divorce politics from economic reality.

Alienating the Global Village

Economic interdependence has lessened the chances of war between interconnected nations. This is the gift I thanked Wal-Mart for earlier. Unfortunately, by forcing more and more value off the books as the world economy turns into an information economy, the ideal of “free” information could erode economic interdependencies between nations.

Nations have been far more willing to engage in cyber-attacks on each other than other kinds of attacks, because the information sphere is largely not on the books, which would otherwise reflect how globally interdependent it really is. Chinese interests have hacked American corporations like Google, but they would hardly be motivated to toy with the infrastructure in America that delivers Chinese goods.

A warehouse should not be perceived as being in a separate economic category than a website. China is as economically dependent on an American website’s security as it is on the truck that delivers goods made in China. But that dependency doesn’t show up adequately in international accounting.

Siren Servers are narcissists; blind to where value comes from, including the web of global interdependence that is at the core of their own value.

Electoral Siren Servers

Only genuinely empowered masses of people, with real wealth, clout, and economic dignity, can balance state power. We have seen this in U.S. electoral politics. The cyber-activist community, which leans in a knotted lefty/libertarian fashion, fancies itself able to organize the vote, but actually it turns out that “big money” is even more able to do so.
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Social media are used to raise money first, and directly influence the vote second.

But what does “big money” really mean? At least in the United States we aren’t bribing voters as yet. In fact, voters often seem to vote against their own immediate economic interests. Democrats might vote to raise their own taxes, while Republicans might vote often enough to reduce their own safety nets and earned benefits.

No, what “big money” means is turning election campaigns into Siren Servers. Candidates hire big data professionals and use the same math and computer resources that enable every other type of Siren Server to operate to optimize the world to their advantage.
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The interesting thing about elections is that law dictates multiple competing players. This makes elections unusual in the era of big data, since the “exclusion principle” doesn’t hold. As with wireless operators, there are multiple Sirenic schemes occupying a single niche.

If elections were run like markets, a winning political party would emerge and become quite persistent. This is the failure mode of politics in which a “party machine” emerges. The terminology is instructive. The process becomes deterministic, as if it were a machine. Democracy relies on laws that impose diversity on a market-like dynamic that might otherwise evolve toward monopoly.

Democracies must be structured to resist winner-take-all politics if they are to endure. That principle applied in the network age leads to periodic confrontations between competing mirror-image big data political campaigns. It is a fascinating development to watch.

Perhaps we should expect to see more elections that are either extremely close or extremely lopsided from here on out. If opposing Siren Servers are well run, they might achieve parity, while if one is better than the other, its advantage ought to be dramatic. It’s too
early to say, since big data and politics haven’t mixed long enough to generate much data as yet. It’s like climate change was for a long time—not enough data yet to really say—though it does look like we’re seeing this pattern.

Just as a small, local player in a market loses local information advantages in the shadow of a Siren Server, so does a local political activist. I remember when I was a young person working for political campaigns, we would inform a campaign about potential voters who might be swayed because we knew our own territory. (This often involved seeking out grouchy old New Mexicans and convincing them that the political opponent was a little too cozy with the Texans.)

These days, the central database of a political campaign more often informs local activists of the optimal way to scour the land for votes. The activist becomes like a general practitioner doctor, who acts more and more as a front man for insurance or pharmaceutical Siren Servers.

The problem with optimizing the world to the benefit of an electoral Siren Server is the same as it is for the other species of such servers. It’s not that it doesn’t work in the short term, because it does, but that it becomes increasingly divorced from reality. Just as networked services that choose music for you don’t have real taste, a cloud-computing engine that effectively chooses your politicians doesn’t have political wisdom.

The process is increasingly divorced from real-world events. A message is fine-tuned and tested. Feedback signals are fed into statistics engines. Just as big data in business can function with lower standards of veracity than big data in science, so can big data in politics.

Optimization is not the same thing as truth. The 2012 elections in the United States were widely described as more divorced from facts than any other in history. Before, we could not use central servers to find every person vulnerable to paranoia about Texas; now we more or less can, but that doesn’t mean that paranoia is any more justified or useful.
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I doubt that political views have become more extreme as a result; there have always been extreme views. Politics has always nurtured and exploited paranoia, and I chose Texaphobia only because it is the funniest and mildest example I could think of.

If the party with the biggest/best computer wins, then a grounded political dialog doesn’t matter so much. Reality becomes less relevant, just as it does in big business big data.

Big data means big money works in politics. So if democracy is the goal, it becomes truer than ever that the middle class must have more money in aggregate than elites who might employ Siren Servers. The bell curve must overwhelm the winner-take-all curve.

Maybe the Way We Complain Is Part of the Problem

Two diametrically opposed schools of thought appeared in response to the Great Recession. Roughly speaking, an austerity/trickle-down tendency—a Hayek/Rand axis—opposes a Keynesian/fairness tendency, but the two sides agree about one thing. Both agree that social media like Facebook and Twitter are part of the solution.

Every power-seeking entity in the world, whether it’s a government, a business, or an informal group, has gotten wise to the idea that if you can assemble information about other people, that information makes you powerful. By glorifying the tools that enable this trend as our channels of complaint, we’re only amplifying our own predicament.

There are ongoing calls for rights that might provide a balance to the trend, with an example being calls for digital privacy rights or intellectual property rights. (These are deeply similar, but people trapped in fake conflicts between old media and new media might fail to see that.)

But those arguments are increasingly irrelevant. Trying to update legal rights to catch up with technology only sets up a dismal contest between prohibitions and what actually happens.

Campaigns for rights have tended to play out as benefiting one or another cabal that seeks to run a top server. In a contest between, say, a Hollywood studio and a “pirate” video-sharing site over who should be favored by the law, the answer will hopefully evolve to become a clear “neither.” The idea of humanistic information economics presented here is an attempt to open up a third way.

CHAPTER 17

Clout Must Underlie Rights, if Rights Are to Persist

Melodramas Are Tenacious

My conviction that building a strong middle class in the information economy must underlie the pursuit of rights unfortunately pits me against the kinds of rascals I would otherwise tend to feel more organically at home with. It would perhaps feel better to go with the flow and celebrate outfits like WikiLeaks, but I believe that would ultimately be a self-defeating choice.