Your phone is watching you

Your computer knows every keystroke. 

Your Fitbit knows where you've been. 

Your car knows where it's parked. 

Google knows what articles you have read to the end.

Refrigerators will know when we are about to run out of fresh milk. 

Alexa is waiting for a command.

You brought it on yourself. You asked for it, and you like what it does.

We traded privacy for convenience.  

Presidential candidate Andrew Yang said the reason that a Universal Basic Income stipend of $1,000 per person was reasonable was that it was fair. The most valuable commodity in the world isn't oil or gold, he said, it was data. Data about us. Where we are, what we read, what we buy. We were giving up data to the most valuable companies in the world--Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix--and we weren't getting paid for it. 

Yang made two points in the talks I heard in crowded rooms in New Hampshire and Iowa. One was the controversial one that got all the attention, UBI--Universal Basic Income of $1,000 per month per adult. The other was a profound reminder. He told audiences that Rockefeller-style monopolies had reemerged, and that once again American citizens had the power to control them, not them control us.  It's our country. We are a democracy. If companies that use our data want to do business in America, we can make them play by our rules, and we make the rules. We can pay for the UBI by taxing them to repay us for the data we had been giving up for free.

College classmate Ezra Gottheil is a Principal Analyst at Technology Business Research, a technology consultancy. He is widely respected and quoted in the media on trends in technology.

Guest Post by Ezra Gottheil

Ezra Gottheil

First, I like Andrew Yang and his UBI, but Yang need not justify it by calling it "fair" or the people who get it "deserving." That word is usually deployed by the powerful against the powerless, a preemptive strike against the obvious fact that the most powerful are often the least deserving. People should get a UBI because they are fellow citizens and they need it and we have it. Or, in a social contract interpretation, we give them that money so they don't take it away from us by force, which is the logical thing to do in a state of nature. 

There is a lot of talk going around now about the big media companies and the notion that they are secretly spying on us. It isn't secret. Most of that "surveillance" that commentators worry about is open and we, the surveilled, are usually pretty OK with it. Without it, not only would Facebook be even more tedious pablum than it now is, but doing anything on the Web would be a chore. We like getting advertising for the kinds of things we want, and we like getting articles on topics we have shown an interest in. Google, by the way, is extremely unlikely to sell your data. This isn't out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it is good business. They sell access to you, suitably grouped with other people with similar interests. They keep your data secure so they can sell access over and over. They don't eat their seed corn.

This reinforcement of our interests, and the ability to "guess" an interest we haven't yet fully shown, have very bad consequences, but it's not something sneaky. So the bad thing, the feeding us the stuff we like until we no longer know what the outside world is like--that is a real problem-- but thinking about it as "surveillance" is frightens us over the wrong thing.

I think we do need legislation to help control social media, but I don't really have a clear idea of what measures would work. Certainly, it would include content supervision and identifying and blocking bad actors. Zuckerberg, that despicable sociopath, has resisted this, and I think we should force him to behave as much as can be done through legislation. We don't need to try to apply anti-trust laws; they were laws from another time. 

Like "deserving," the idea that we can't regulate business in any damn way we want is another myth. One of the reasons I don't like using the term "surveillance"is that you don't need to do heavy surveillance to encase people in epistemic cesspools. Just giving them more of what they want, what they click on, what they scroll down to the end of, does it. The heavy surveillance and robust AI is to place advertising, like knowing when you might be in the market for a Volvo. Volvo will pay a lot to place an ad to someone with the right demographics whose current car is showing its age. If they're sophisticated, they might want to know where you stand on the environment, but that's about as far as the politics go. 

"Social media" has existed since the first campfire, and new media technologies often shake things up badly. One reason the French Revolution got so crazy was the way that Marat and those guys could write something and quickly have it out on the streets, being read to the largely illiterate crowd. I think society adapts to these changes, but a lot of damage can be done before we adapt. If you want to know the media/technology change that contributed the most to our current state, and is continuing to contribute, it is cable TV. 

Before cable, most people got their news from two sources, both of which were forced by the breadth of their market, to be sort of reasonable. These were, of course, the big networks and the local newspapers. Where the town was big enough to support several newspapers, the more extreme one became pretty extreme, but in most places, the papers, while clearly biased, jibed with reality. The big news networks, of course, had to play it straight down the middle. This wasn't necessarily always good, but they couldn't get too wild. 

By the way, Rush Limbaugh and his evil spawn were enabled by the broad availability of FM radio. Music moved from AM to FM, and Rush led the charge to turn every AM station into a source of evil. Finally, of course, cable enabled news narrowcasting, which is to say "news" turned into political pornography. For all the negative effects of social media, Fox News, which is old-fashioned broadcast media, did the most damage and continues to do so. Any law, or anything else, that could stop their steady poisoning of the American psyche would be greatly appreciated. As I have said, we need a funded well-organized boycott of the entire network.