Evgeny Morozov
The continuing collapse of public trust in Facebook is welcome news to those of us who have been warning about the perils of “data extractivism” for years. It’s reassuring to have final, definitive proof that beneath Facebook’s highfalutin rhetoric of “building a global community that works for all of us” lies a cynical, aggressive project – of building a global data vacuum cleaner that sucks from all of us. Like others in this industry, Facebook makes money by drilling deep into our data selves – pokes and likes is simply how our data comes to the surface – much like energy firms drill deep into the oil wells: profits first, social and individual consequences later.
Furthermore, the rosy digital future – where cleverly customised ads subsidise the provision of what even Mark Zuckerberg calls “social infrastructure” – is no longer something that many of us will be taking for granted. While the monetary costs of building and operating this “social infrastructure” might be zero – for taxpayers anyway – its social and political costs are, perhaps, even harder to account for than the costs of cheap petroleum in the 1970s.
Such realisations, as sudden and shocking as they might be, are not enough. Facebook is a symptom, not a cause of our problems. In the long run, blaming its corporate culture is likely to prove as futile as blaming ourselves. Thus, instead of debating whether to send Zuckerberg into the corporate equivalent of exile, we should do our best to understand how to reorganise the digital economy to benefit citizens – and not just a handful of multibillion-dollar firms that view their users as passive consumers with no political or economic ideas or aspirations of their own.
The obstacles standing in the way of this transformative agenda are many and, worse, they are structural – not likely to be solved with a clever app. These obstacles stem primarily from the disquieting dynamics of contemporary capitalism – which is more stagnant than our obsession with innovation and disruption betrays – rather than from our supposed addiction to social networkingor tech companies’ abuse of that addiction.
We must find a way to make firms like Facebook pay for accessing our data – conceptualised as something we own in common
First of all, while we might keep bashing “big tech” all we like, one cannot easily ignore the fact that Facebook, along with Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and others, have been key to boosting the US stock market to record heights. They have ensured a modicum of prosperity at a time when the rest of the economy is still struggling with the fallout from the financial crisis.
In some sense, America’s tech markets of the 2010s are not much different from America’s housing markets of the 2000s: both have tried to generate wealth, by means of asset appreciation, even when the real economy struggled. Remove the immense gains in the stock value of big tech companies over the past few years and there would be little reason to speak about any meaningful recovery from the crisis. This, if anything, is the main reason why America is unlikely to do anything to tie the hands of its tech giants, especially when China’s tech companies are increasingly flexing their muscles and expanding overseas. Trump will keep raging about Amazon – until the day he discovers Alibaba.
Facebook can, of course, try to alter its business model. Both Amazon and Alphabet, for example, have recently diversified into the much more lucrative services sector, with artificial intelligence and cloud computing offering them higher profit margins and helping to offset emerging problems with their main businesses. Facebook, although it has excellent AI researchers and plenty of data to keep them busy, is very late to the game. After all the recent scandals, it will have a hard time convincing its potential corporate customers that their data is safe.
It leaves the company with just one choice, already promoted by some of its early investors such as Roger McNamee: ditch advertising altogether and introduce monthly charges – in essence, subscription fees – for its services. The idea here is that Facebook can kill two birds with one stone: make it a less rewarding place for spreading fake news, while also relieving itself of the urge to collect and store so much user data. The optics of such a move are currently not very favourable – who wants to pay for Facebook after all it’s done? – but things may change as the current scandals fade away and a bevy of actors, from governments to universities to philanthropists, step up to pick up those monthly Facebook bills.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is to testify before Congress about how his company collects and uses people’s data. Photograph: Steven Senne/AP
In the meantime, of course, we’ll be subject to a barrage of promises – by politicians, especially in Europe, but also by tech executives – that they will do their best to tighten up controls over our data and even introduce new laws to punish blatant malpractice. This is a development we should watch most carefully, for such rhetoric will inevitably try to restore the sense of normality about the overall state of the digital economy, trying to convince us that, save for a few bad apples and their ethical deviations, all the fundamentals look good and nothing major is at stake.
Such a sense of restored normality will fit well with the worldview shared by two camps that are often presented as inhabiting two diametrically opposed universes. However, despite their much-touted antagonism, European technocrats and Facebook’s techies are quite alike in their understanding of the world: for both, at its very centre lies the untouchable and god-like market, where (regulated) corporations offer all sorts of possible services to the omnipotent and utility-maximising user-consumers, who, if unsatisfied, can always take their business elsewhere.
The only interventions allowed in this world are initiatives to strengthen consumer and data rights, enhance competition, and, perhaps, extract more taxes (this is where European technocrats come in), or design even better services and technologies (the turf of Facebook’s engineers). In this fantastical world, history has truly ended and global capitalism not just rules supreme, it actually works, delivering prosperity and meritocracy everywhere it lands.
Thus, there’s no need to consider or imagine any other forms of social and political organisation – models where, say, cities or citizen groups or the nation state would play a more prominent role in shaping the market or deciding what parts of our lives to keep out of it – for, if those new forms were truly new and useful, the market would have already thought of them. And why bother, since the market is presumed to be working flawlessly anyway?
This conception of the world, of course, is directly contradicted by empirical reality: the success of tech giants in both the US and China, for example, is the direct consequence of strong state intervention in how the market operates, not of letting it run its course. In the case of the US, it took decades of military funding to get Silicon Valley started and at least as many decades of carefully engineering the global trade system to make it much harder for other countries to catch up and develop similar technologies.
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The difference between Europeans and Americans, though, is that while Americans preach one thing and do another, Europeans, foolishly, often do exactly what they say. So while China and the US have been doing their best to protect their ever-expanding tech industries, Europe has been doing its best to make sure that its own industries compete with theirs on fair terms.
The bad news is that this left the continent without much domestic technological capacity. The good news is that, unlike the US – where so much of the domestic economy is tied to tech – and China – where there is no impact of data extractivism on, say, elections, because there are, well, no elections – Europe is the only player well-positioned to lead a very different kind of data revolution – one that can turn the tables on the tech industry and spur innovation on both technological and political fronts.
In a nutshell, instead of letting Facebook get away with charging us for its services or continuing to exploit our data for advertising, we must find a way to get companies like Facebook to pay for accessing our data – conceptualised, for the most part, as something we own in common, not as something we own as individuals.
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Many other parties interested in working with that data and building services on top of it– from universities to libraries, from institutions of the welfare state to public transport agencies, from entrepreneurs to municipalities – can have their own conditions of access, sometimes free and sometimes heavily subsidised including, perhaps, by dedicated state-run venture capital funds, which might also focus on ensuring that key capacities to take full advantage of that data, like the development of artificial intelligence, is lavishly funded.
Where would all these funds come from? Well, it would certainly help that the likes of Facebook and Alphabet will actually have to pay fees for accessing the data, instead of just minimising their tax burden as they do now. The point here, however, would not be to maximise the revenue raised by this new layer of data (if it were, one might as well deploy an auction system to sell off “data entitlements” of some kind). No, the goal would be to “plant” different data trees that would grow on different logics: if Facebook wants to offer services that monetise perpetual surveillance, they should be free to do it – at a very high cost, under complete supervision, and with full consent of their users – but there should be no reason why other types of models (subscription fees, subsidised access, completely free access based on income, etc) shouldn’t be offered around the same datasets.
The closing numbers at the New York stock exchange on March 19. Shares of big technology companies tumbled following the Facebook data breach scandal. Photograph: Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty Images
There are solid arguments to be had about how to balance individual and collective rights to data ownership. Those arguing that we should simply become “data shareholders” and earn a financial return on our data, with Facebook and Google continuing to mine it for advertising or other purposes, should perhaps grapple with the fact that full value of such data emerges only once it’s aggregated across many individuals (even more so in the case of using it for machine learning), so one cannot simply take the total revenue of these companies and divide it by the number of individual users to figure out what each of us is due. Plus, a lot of the data that we generate, when we walk down a tax-funded city street equipped with tax-funded smart street lights, is perhaps better conceptualised as data to which we might have social and collective use rights as citizens, but not necessarily individual ownership rights as producers or consumers.
The usual argument against such a system is that it’s likely to lead to abuses by governments, as the data would no longer be in the hands of companies such as Facebook (Facebook!) and would be stored on some kind of “public cloud”. This is certainly possible, but the current system seems to generate no fewer abuses, only that we treat them as exceptions, rather than the actual rules of the game. And we continue to do so even in the wake of high-profile revelations about systematic government abuse revealed by Edward Snowden.
However, there’s no need to scrap Europe’s famed tradition of data protection; one must only redirect its focus. Instead of continuing on a path that pretends to exist outside of history, barely registering the pressures that global capitalism, the rise of China, or the continued strength of Silicon Valley exercise on the European social democratic welfare model, one should combine data protection with a proactive economic and democratic agenda that will seek to ensure that citizens do not lose control over the precious resource (data) and infrastructure (artificial intelligence), around which most of the future political and economic institutions will be built.
The right, at least of the most –creative, fringe variety, has well understood the stakes of this looming battle. Speaking at a recent Financial Times event, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, listed the fight to restore “digital sovereignty” – which he defined along the lines of reclaiming our personal intellectual property from big tech firms – among the three big themes that will define the populist rage against globalism. Bannon’s anti-globalism is, however, of the pseudo-variety, for the only way truly to monetise our data and receive an actual dividend on it would be by leaving the most globalised of institutions – the world’s financial markets – firmly in place (further extending their power into areas now dominated by Facebook and Alphabet, ie the everyday life).
The left, with the exception of a few brave data ownership experiments on the municipal level, has very little to say on the subject. It’s a pity because this data debate also presents the left with the unique opportunity to rethink many of its other positions: on how to organise the provision of welfare in the age of predictive analytics; how to organise bureaucracy and the public sector in the age of citizens equipped with sensors and, often, superior technologies; how to organise new kinds of trade unions in the age of ubiquitous automation; how to organise a centralised political party in the age of decentralised and horizontal communications.
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Instead, the left keeps banging the technocratic drums of more data protection, more taxes and more antitrust (and the sound of those drums, regardless of the original intent, is increasingly neoliberal). Nothing wrong about these measures per se, but they are inadequate for the task ahead, especially considering the multiple crises besetting the very institutions – the welfare state, the public sector, the trade union, the political party – that the left has used throughout history to mark its territory and advance the interests of its disadvantaged constituents. More regulation, when it’s regulation of the wrong kind, should not be celebrated, no matter how much it reassures European officials that the capitalism imagined by their founding fathers in the 1950s keeps working as promised.
We face three political options. We can continue with the current model, with Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon and others taking over more and more functions of the state. With time, perhaps, we won’t need to worry that their technologies are used to influence elections because most of our lives will depend on what happens in their boardrooms – not on what happens in our parliaments.
Alternatively, we can opt for the kind of pseudo-antiglobalism endorsed by Bannon, reclaiming some autonomy from the tech giants by over-empowering the financial sector (which Bannon, of course, also wants to tame with cryptocurrencies; we’ll see who will tame whom, but so far banks seem to have survived – and even swallowed – their challengers).
Finally, we can use the recent data controversies to articulate a truly decentralised, emancipatory politics, whereby the institutions of the state (from the national to the municipal level) will be deployed to recognise, create, and foster the creation of social rights to data. These institutions will organise various data sets into pools with differentiated access conditions. They will also ensure that those with good ideas that have little commercial viability but promise major social impact would receive venture funding and realise those ideas on top of those data pools.
Rethinking many of the existing institutions in which citizens seem to have lost trust along such lines would go a long way towards addressing the profound sense of alienation from public and political life felt across the globe. It won’t be easy but it can still be done. This, however, might not be the case 10 or even five years from now, as the long-term political and economic costs of data extractivism come to the surface. The data wells inside ourselves, like all those other drilling sites, won’t last for ever either.
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