8 years ago
Nice article in today’s Guardian 
I clicked on the Google links they have and it’s all blank. Yay me! I must have opted out of their data collection at some point, although TBH I can’t even remember doing it. Anyway, I don’t really think that means Google has nothing on me, but I guess at least it sends a message.
I couldn’t check the FB data as you have to log in and, well, I deleted my account.
These days I use Duck-Duck-Go for most search, and Firefox for most browsing. Proton Mail is great for email, but it misses the killer feature of gmail: search. Everything on Proton Mail is encrypted, which means you can’t search it at all. 
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[Facebook Gave Device
Makers Deep Access to
Data on Users and Friends][//www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/03/technology/facebook-device-partners-users-friends-data.html?hpw&rref=technology&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well)
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The Age of Weaponized Narrative, or, Where Have You Gone, Walter Cronkite?
Myth and stories structure reality, create and maintain identity, and provided meaning to people, institutions, and cultures.
[In the 1970s] Political organizers, activists, and others learned to use narratives of oppression and marginalization to attack dominant cultural narratives of elites, while companies learned to generate narratives that supported their brands. Eventually, nations began to see narrative as a tool of foreign policy that they could use to undermine their enemies: weaponized narrative.
…A second example involves the political consulting group Cambridge Analytica, a big data mining and analytics firm that among other jobs worked on President Trump’s election campaign; similar firms worked on the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom. Based on the enormous amounts of data that can be accumulated on each voter, some people claim that such firms have the ability to target select voters with customized individual narratives based on their personal data profiles in order to manipulate their political choices and their decision whether to vote or stay home. Experts disagree on whether these techniques were decisive in the Brexit vote or the US election, but that is beside the point. Technological evolution, in this case involving big data and analytics fed by social media and online data aggregation techniques, is rapidly developing the ability to custom-design narratives that can effectively manipulate political behavior on an individual basis. If it isn’t already here, it will be soon.
Story is power
Weaponized narrative is the use of information and communication technologies, services, and tools to create and spread stories intended to subvert and undermine an adversary’s institutions, identity, and civilization, and it operates by sowing and exacerbating complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms. It is an emerging domain of asymmetric warfare that attacks the shared beliefs and values that support an adversary’s culture and resiliency. It builds on previous practices, including disinformation, information warfare, psychological operations (psyops), fake news, social media, software bots, propaganda, and other practices and tools, and it draws on advances in fields such as evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive science, and modern marketing and media studies, as well as on technological advances in domains such as social media and artificial intelligence.
– The Age of Weaponized Narrative
Issues in Science and Technology
Volume XXXIII Issue 4, Summer 2017
Published by the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine
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More bad press for Facebook:
With an anti-Russian narrative:
With a pro-Russian narrative:
In any case, Facebook could tag you as someone interested in treason… 
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Here’s something amusing that just poped-up on-line:
https://www.rt.com/usa/434532-deep-state-sm-meddling-dotcom/
("‘Deep State social media meddles in US elections’ – Kim Dotcom slams ‘Zuckerspy & Jack the Ripper’" – “.…‘100 times’ more damage to democracy than all foreign meddlers combined.”)
The “Zuckerspy” references is self-evident; with “Jack the Ripper” I don’t catch the association, at least in modern terms.
btw: rt.com (formerly “Russia Today”) offers often quite interesting perspectives, allowing for the obvious bias. I regularly follow many on-line international web news sites (e.g. BBC, DeutscheWelle, Al Jazeera, CBC (Canada), France24, The Local it (Italy), as well as the local (USA) ABC/CBS/NBC and CNN as well as Fox news). RT, Al Jazeera and DeutscheWelle especially have noteworthy investigative / interpretative offerings not found elsewhere. Triangulating from these multiple perspectives helps avoid over-identifying with any one sort of “view”.
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I blame Doctor Evil. 
" I’m leading a bipartisan coalition of 48 attorneys general in a lawsuit against Facebook to end its illegal monopoly."
https://twitter.com/newyorkstateag/status/1336755231946846208?s=21
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At last. This is NY AG Letitia James taking much needed if belated action.
Watch NY AG Letitia James explain the sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Facebook: pic.twitter.com/6qISYzGkLV
— The Recount (@therecount) December 9, 2020
It’s worth bearing in mind that what James calls “buy and bury” is the same strategy that was pioneered in the tech field by Microsoft in the 90s, then known as “embrace, extend, and extinguish”, and resulting in the then-largest anti-trust lawsuit in US history. It is the defining market strategy of the tech world: achieve monopoly first, then print money.
As James points out, this is not only responsible for the arrogant, privacy denying, and user-hostile practices of virtually all the tech giants, it guarantees the stifling of the one thing that these companies should be good at: innovation. We kind of get used to it, but it is really astonishing. For the past decade, none of the tech giants have produced any major innovations. Remember how in the 90s and the 00s, it seemed like there was a major change every year or so? Hey USBs, we can plug any device anywhere! Hey, phones, tablets, laptops, watches! Hey Gmail, we can do our email on the web! Hey Youtube, we can just upload any video and chat about with people! Hey Skype, we can do free video chats! Hey Google, we can find any information we want! Hey Siri, we can talk to our phones! Hey Facebook, we can … I dunno, do whatever people do on Facebook.
Now what we have is somewhat better versions of the same things we had then. In the noughts, Google was all about space elevators and solving climate change. Now they’re about hanging on to market dominance in advertising.
This is all a direct, straight line result from the tech monopolies. So long as we allow this predatory business model to persist, the same thing will happen in every new field that tech colonizes (see Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, and the rest). By establishing this kind of scale, companies become too big to regulate or control, and they can more efficiently externalize costs onto their workers, the environment, the future, and the poor. There’s only one way to stop this practice: break up the tech giants and take away their money.
Oh, and while I’m at it: ban TikTok. Sorry to be a wowser, but it’s not worth it.
Here’s an analysis for geeks.
I’ve reversed the Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter apps. They don’t collect anywhere near the same amount of data that TikTok does, and they sure as hell aren’t outright trying to hide exactly whats being sent like TikTok is. It’s like comparing a cup of water to the ocean - they just don’t compare.
tl;dr; I’m a nerd who figures out how apps work for a job. Calling it an advertising platform is an understatement. TikTok is essentially malware that is targeting children. Don’t use TikTok. Don’t let your friends and family use it.
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Hi Bhante,
Big fan of your work here. I’ve downloaded and browsed at least two of your books, plus the authenticity one you wrote with Ven Brahmali.
I’m not sure if breaking up tech giants and banning TikTok is a realistic target to aim for. It sounds like a pipe dream. And if that actually happens, some other shenanigans will rise to fill the void. It’s just how capitalism works.
What I do think would work is educating the populace. If people knew what happens in the background when you install an app, if people knew that the information and pictures uploaded to your Facebook account are never truly deleted when you press delete, they would be more cautious in the first place. If the lottery is a tax on the mathematically illiterate, then Facebook et al are a tax on the technologically illiterate. Tech literacy is the only long-term inoculation against this and future online threats.
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The laws that govern a market economy in various countries are written by very real people, and so they are subject to change. This has happened many times in the past, so it’s not unrealistic to think that advocacy in the present can lead to positive reforms in the future.
One of my takeaways from the Buddhist theory of karma is that everything matters (at least a little bit). Nothing is completely without meaning or significance, and every change has some effect(s).
We’ve seen what happens when people stop caring and stop trying, and it’s not positive change. We really need people to help to improve the world. All the little rumblings about Facebook and the other tech giants have slowly built up to finally generate some real scrutiny.
I’m going to (again) push back on this assumption of the public’s incompetence.
Not saying that the Chinese government’s regulation of its tech sector is morally good, but at least they’ve proved that governments can regulate even huge technology companies effectively.
The problem in the West is that we’re still not sure what we want from the media. Do we want cheap entertainment? Reliable information? Profitable marketplaces? Calling to “break up” e.g. Facebook is just a scapegoat if you ask me: a convenient way for politicians to avoid the really hard policy tradeoffs.
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I fear there is little more chance for us deciding what this is than of us agreeing on any other matter. 
I guess we want a media and an intertnet that are all things to all people … and are hence in a jumble.
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Oh, there’s no company based in the United States that’s “too big to regulate or control.” We’ve had all the laws that are needed on the books since the first president Roosevelt designed to take down monopolies. It’s just that our political culture now is to turn a blind eye. Plus, our leaders are tech illiterate people who barely understand what is happening these days. I mean, who does? Even those of us who actually know how software works can’t keep up. We just watched one of the world’s biggest cyber security firms (FireEye) announce that they and most of the institutional world has been hacked in an even more fantastical way than ever before. Perhaps that’s the innovation of the 2010s. Hacking.
I also don’t exactly get what “breaking up” a company like Facebook would look like, either. I mean, okay: We could spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. Sure. But beyond that, what would make them not a big monopoly? Maybe force them to create a separate social media company for each country and state of the US? There’s already competition in the form of other social media platforms. IDK, and I expect regulators are a little stumped, too.
The real issue to me isn’t that Facebook is big, it’s that social media has turned out to be better than mass media are driving people crazy with propaganda. Politics is rapidly becoming international as countries jump into each others elections. Here in the US, we appear to have just witnessed one of the two major parties officially decide it’s against fair elections. It’s all very dystopian, and court action against Facebooks seems to me very, very much like closing the barndoor after the horses are gone.
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India banned TikTok. It’s not hard, just pass a law.
I understand that the problems are complex. The thing is, it’s not our job to solve them.
Imagine there was a restaurant, and the health inspector did a random test and found that their food was full of E. coli. “Fix it or shut down,” would be the message. “But it’s hard to fix!” the owner might say. “We get food from different places. And all the different staff, and keeping everything clean, and everything!” Yes, running a restaurant is hard, we all know that. But if you can’t do it without killing people, you need to close down.
They created the problems, it is up to them to solve them, and if they cannot, they shouldn’t be allowed to do business. Maybe the whole idea of social media as we have it today is a fundamentally flawed concept. (I think so!) What would replace it? We don’t know. Maybe an open standard for social sharing (like email but better!) Maybe the Fediverse? Maybe make a limit for the size of social media? (1,000,000 people seems like a lot.)
Remember when tech was all about innovation, about solving problems, about “move fast and break things”? They’re supposed to be the best and brightest. Why can’t they solve the problems that their own deliberate choices have created?
But I think all this is merely window dressing. The real problem is far more fundamental: we need to learn to value right speech. At its root it is a moral problem.
Things are getting no better at Facebook.
They are just getting started. They are building tech to read minds.
Do you trust them with this power? With this power over our children? Never forget what Zuck said:
Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard. Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
What? How’d you manage that one?
People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They “trust me”. Dumb f***s.
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Let’s say that actually happens in the West. What do we do about the other social networks? Do we ban them too? Maybe you don’t care about them at the moment because they’re small, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the same kind of problems. It just means they’re not on the radar at the moment. Let’s say TikTok gets banned and then PikPok comes in to fill the resulting vacuum. What do you do then? Ban them too? What about LikLok and NikNok over there?
What about all the 13-year-olds who know how to use VPNs to get around these bans? It takes about 3 minutes to set up a VPN connection. That’s how the Chinese get around the Facebook ban.
Banning things doesn’t work. It just drives things underground. America tried to ban alcohol in 1920. It worked for a while until black market alcohol gained sufficient momentum to counteract the positive effects of forced sobriety. Meanwhile the government was losing a massive amount of taxes. People have been trying to ban prostitution for millennia. Good luck with that one – any well travelled tourist knows it’s never remotely hard to find. I do fancy living in a world without alcohol and prostitution, but that will only ever be achieved through better education and the empowerment of women, and not through the whack-a-mole approach of banning things that we don’t like.
I’m sure a lot of restaurants got away with that before germ theory became standard teaching in schools. A closer analogy might be a restaurant with hidden cameras everywhere. When you touch the menu, it captures and stores your fingerprints. The food contains nanomachines that remain in your body long after you leave the restaurant, track your movement, eating habits, read your mind, and relay them all back to the restaurant.
I might try to get this regulated as soon as possible, but I would also try to push for greater awareness of hidden cameras, nanomachines, and mind-readers, how they work. Not saying that you yourself are guilty of this, but it’s all too common for people to try and ban things that they don’t understand and that sets a bad precedent. Tech literacy is the only long-term inoculation against this and future technological threats.
Maybe it is flawed. Human brains didn’t evolve to process the input of millions of voices at once. But I don’t see it going anywhere. Social media is way too convenient, and way too profitable. I’m happy to see that Facebook is being scrutinized, but being fixated on it is not seeing the forest for the trees. There is a widespread lack of tech literacy among all age demographics that needs to be addressed.
Yes, I was born in the 80’s at a time when the idea of having a computer at home was just starting to become popular. Right now we’re in a phase of evolution rather than innovation. I agree that big corporations can never be expected to self-regulate, and they need constant pressure and scrutiny to evolve and refine their practices. I don’t think that motioning to get things banned sets a good example.
You know right speech, I kinda know right speech, most of the people on Sutta Central know right speech. Good luck invoking that outside the Buddhist world where wit, sarcasm, and the right to offend are often held in high regard, and arguments are more about scoring points and less about truth.
I think it’s easier to get people, especially children, curious about things, and curious about technology. Tech curiosity opens a path to tech literacy. A tech literate person will be inoculated against the current threats you mention, as well as future threats that we haven’t yet conceived of in our minds.
It’s definitely an attention grabbing headline, but reading the body of the article, none of it seems that far-fetched. Haven’t we had some kind of mind reading technology for a while now? We have technology that can predict what choice a person will make before they actually make it. We have brain control interfaces where we can basically plug a brain into a robot and control it with thoughts. It doesn’t look like they’re at the point where they can tap into the juicy personal thoughts that run through my mind every day.
By all means people should keep an eye on these developments, but “omg they’re building mind reading devices” sounds a lot scarier than what the tech is actually capable of at the moment.
I’m no fan of Zuckerberg, but let’s not get worked up over what 19-year-olds said during a power trip now.
I’m not. I’m reminding people of what the person behind this thought of them when he created his software.
Being 19 is not an excuse, it is when character is formed. I used to be 19 years old, and I was never a 
like this.
Think it through: what happens if you take a foolish and immoral 19 year old, and grant them unlimited power, fame, and wealth? Do you think they are going to to get better? That’s not how it works. He has been massively rewarded for his behavior, and all the history of Facebook shows that it has just gotten worse.
You think that I’m overstating it? Well, nothing I’ve said is nearly as far out as the extreme radical voice of — checks notes — Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, a 150 year-old news magazine from Boston. But you know what? She’s goddamn right.
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I thought the prefrontal cortex of a human isn’t fully mature until well into his 20s. If you never said stupid arrogant like this, you were way more mature than any 19-year-old I ever knew, that’s for sure.
Anyhow, I think we agree to a similar extent that social networks are dangerous and require more stringent regulation. I just think that when people are too fixated on big corporations, it distracts from the more fundamental problem here which is a lack of tech literacy. A tech illiterate senate can’t regulate anything, and based on the questions the senators asked Zuckerberg at his questioning, the lack of tech literacy is obvious.
Lack of tech literacy and education is also at the heart of the political and social stagnation in Myanmar. As someone who lived there for ten years and still travels there every year or so, I couldn’t help but groan a little when you wrote that Facebook is destroying democracy in Myanmar. I mean, first of all you can’t destroy something that never really existed. But more importantly, the utter lack of education – technical and otherwise – is responsible for this and countless other messes they’ve gotten into over there. We’re talking about a populace that went from not knowing what copy and paste is to suddenly having access to affordable smartphones and the Internet in a couple of years. Most internet users in Myanmar lack basic computing skills such as copy, paste, and writing an email. And then suddenly they got phones and Facebook. What could possibly go wrong! If Facebook disappeared overnight, everyone would mobilise on some other social network. The hardcore junta supporters have already assembled on a Russian network called VK since their beloved general U Whatever got banned from Facebook.
You can point out the problems with Facebook and TikTok all you want, and rightfully so. But that doesn’t cut into the heart of the issue, especially in Southeast Asia.