[D66] Fwd: Het failliet van het Internet

[A.O.]

(De hedendaagse penarie, nog veel erger dan de multicult...)


http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/jaron-lanier-interview-on-what-went-wrong-with-the-internet.html

‘One Has This Feeling of Having Contributed to Something That’s Gone
Very Wrong’

By Noah Kulwin, nymag.com
View Original
April 17th, 2018

Over the last few months, Select All has interviewed more than a dozen
prominent technology figures about what has gone wrong with the
contemporary internet for a project called “The Internet Apologizes.”
We’re now publishing lengthier transcripts of each individual interview.
This interview features Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in the field of virtual
reality and the founder of the first company to sell VR goggles. Lanier
currently works at Microsoft Research as an interdisciplinary scientist.
He is the author of the forthcoming book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your
Social Media Accounts Right Now.

You can find other interviews from this series here.

Jaron Lanier: Can I just say one thing now, just to be very clear?
Professionally, I’m at Microsoft, but when I speak to you, I’m not
representing Microsoft at all. There’s not even the slightest hint that
this represents any official Microsoft thing. I have an agreement within
which I’m able to be an independent public intellectual, even if it
means criticizing them. I just want to be very clear that this isn’t a
Microsoft position.

Noah Kulwin: Understood.
Yeah, sorry. I really just wanted to get that down. So now please go
ahead, I’m so sorry to interrupt you.

In November, you told Maureen Dowd that it’s scary and awful how out of
touch Silicon Valley people have become. It’s a pretty forward remark.
I’m kind of curious what you mean by that.
To me, one of the patterns we see that makes the world go wrong is when
somebody acts as if they aren’t powerful when they actually are
powerful. So if you’re still reacting against whatever you used to
struggle for, but actually you’re in control, then you end up creating
great damage in the world. Like, oh, I don’t know, I could give you many
examples. But let’s say like Russia’s still acting as if it’s being
destroyed when it isn’t, and it’s creating great damage in the world.
And Silicon Valley’s kind of like that.

We used to be kind of rebels, like, if you go back to the origins of
Silicon Valley culture, there were these big traditional companies like
IBM that seemed to be impenetrable fortresses. And we had to create our
own world. To us, we were the underdogs and we had to struggle. And
we’ve won. I mean, we have just totally won. We run everything. We are
the conduit of everything else happening in the world. We’ve disrupted
absolutely everything. Politics, finance, education, media,
relationships — family relationships, romantic relationships — we’ve put
ourselves in the middle of everything, we’ve absolutely won. But we
don’t act like it.

We have no sense of balance or modesty or graciousness having won. We’re
still acting as if we’re in trouble and we have to defend ourselves,
which is preposterous. And so in doing that we really kind of turn into
assholes, you know?

How do you think that siege mentality has fed into the ongoing crisis
with the tech backlash?
One of the problems is that we’ve isolated ourselves through extreme
wealth and success. Before, we might’ve been isolated because we were
nerdy insurgents. But now we’ve found a new method to isolate ourselves,
where we’re just so successful and so different from so many other
people that our circumstances are different. And we have less in common
with all the people whose lives we’ve disrupted. I’m just really struck
by that. I’m struck with just how much better off we are financially,
and I don’t like the feeling of it.

Personally, I would give up a lot of the wealth and elite status that we
have in order to just live in a friendly, more connected world where it
would be easier to move about and not feel like everything else is
insecure and falling apart. People in the tech world, they’re all doing
great, they all feel secure. I mean they might worry about a nuclear
attack or something, but their personal lives are really secure.

And then when you move out of the tech world, everybody’s struggling.
It’s a very strange thing. The numbers show an economy that’s doing
well, but the reality is that the way it’s doing well doesn’t give many
people a feeling of security or confidence in their futures. It’s like
everybody’s working for Uber in one way or another. Everything’s become
the gig economy. And we routed it that way, that’s our doing. There’s
this strange feeling when you just look outside of the tight circle of
Silicon Valley, almost like entering another country, where people are
less secure. It’s not a good feeling. I don’t think it’s worth it, I
think we’re wrong to want that feeling.

It’s not so much that they’re doing badly, but they have only labor and
no capital. Or the way I used to put it is, they have to sing for their
supper, for every single meal. It’s making everyone else take on all the
risk. It’s like we’re the people running the casino and everybody else
takes the risks and we don’t. That’s how it feels to me. It’s not so
much that everyone else is doing badly as that they’ve lost economic
capital and standing, and momentum and plannability. It’s a subtle
difference.

There’s still this rhetoric of being the underdog in the tech industry.
The attitude within the Valley is “Are you kidding? You think we’re
resting on our laurels? No! We have to fight for every yard.”
There’s this question of whether what you’re fighting for is something
that’s really new and a benefit for humanity, or if you’re only engaged
in a sort of contest with other people that’s fundamentally not
meaningful to anyone else. The theory of markets and capitalism is that
when we compete, what we’re competing for is to get better at something
that’s actually a benefit to people, so that everybody wins. So if
you’re building a better mousetrap, or a better machine-learning
algorithm, then that competition should generate improvement for everybody.

But if it’s a purely abstract competition set up between insiders to the
exclusion of outsiders, it might feel like a competition, it might feel
very challenging and stressful and hard to the people doing it, but it
doesn’t actually do anything for anybody else. It’s no longer genuinely
productive for anybody, it’s a fake. And I’m a little concerned that a
lot of what we’ve been doing in Silicon Valley has started to take on
that quality. I think that’s been a problem in Wall Street for a while,
but the way it’s been a problem in Wall Street has been aided by Silicon
Valley. Everything becomes a little more abstract and a little more
computer-based. You have this very complex style of competition that
might not actually have much substance to it.

You look at the big platforms, and it’s not like there’s this bountiful
ecosystem of start-ups. The rate of small-business creation is at its
lowest in decades, and instead you have a certain number of start-ups
competing to be acquired by a handful of companies. There are not that
many varying powers, there’s just a few.
That’s something I’ve been complaining about and I’ve written about for
a while, that Silicon Valley used to be this place where people could do
a start-up and the start-up might become a big company on its own, or it
might be acquired, or it might merge into things. But lately it kind of
feels like both at the start and at the end of the life of a start-up,
things are a little bit more constrained. It used to be that you didn’t
have to know the right people, but now you do. You have to get in with
the right angel investors or incubator or whatever at the start. And
they’re just a small number, it’s like a social order, you have to get
into them. And then the output on the other side is usually being
acquired by one of a very small number of top companies.

There are a few exceptions, you can see Dropbox’s IPO. But they’re rarer
and rarer. And I suspect Dropbox in the future might very well be
acquired by one of the giants. It’s not clear that it’ll survive as its
own thing in the long term. I mean, we don’t know. I have no inside
information about that, I’m just saying that the much more typical
scenario now, as you described, is that the companies go to one of the
biggies.

I’m kind of curious what you think needs to happen to prevent future
platforms, like VR, from going the way of social media and reaching this
really profitable crisis state.
A lot of the rhetoric of Silicon Valley that has the utopian ring about
creating meaningful communities where everybody’s creative and people
collaborate and all this stuff — I don’t wanna make too much of my own
contribution, but I was kind of the first author of some of that
rhetoric a long time ago. So it kind of stings for me to see it misused.
Like, I used to talk about how virtual reality could be a tool for
empathy, and then I see Mark Zuckerberg talking about how VR could be a
tool for empathy while being profoundly nonempathic, using VR to tour
Puerto Rico after the storm, after Maria. One has this feeling of having
contributed to something that’s gone very wrong.

So I guess the overall way I think of it is, first, we might remember
ourselves as having been lucky that some of these problems started to
come to a head during the social-media era, before tools like virtual
reality become more prominent, because the technology is still not as
intense as it probably will be in the future. So as bad as it’s been, as
bad as the election interference and the fomenting of ethnic warfare,
and the empowering of neo-Nazis, and the bullying — as bad as all of
that has been, we might remember ourselves as having been fortunate that
it happened when the technology was really just little slabs we carried
around in our pockets that we could look at and that could talk to us,
or little speakers we could talk to. It wasn’t yet a whole simulated
reality that we could inhabit.

Because that will be so much more intense, and that has so much more
potential for behavior modification, and fooling people, and controlling
people. So things potentially could get a lot worse, and hopefully
they’ll get better as a result of our experiences during this era.

As far as what to do differently, I’ve had a particular take on this for
a long time that not everybody agrees with. I think the fundamental
mistake we made is that we set up the wrong financial incentives, and
that’s caused us to turn into jerks and screw around with people too
much. Way back in the ’80s, we wanted everything to be free because we
were hippie socialists. But we also loved entrepreneurs because we loved
Steve Jobs. So you wanna be both a socialist and a libertarian at the
same time, and it’s absurd. But that’s the kind of absurdity that
Silicon Valley culture has to grapple with.

And there’s only one way to merge the two things, which is what we call
the advertising model, where everything’s free but you pay for it by
selling ads. But then because the technology gets better and better, the
computers get bigger and cheaper, there’s more and more data — what
started out as advertising morphed into continuous behavior modification
on a mass basis, with everyone under surveillance by their devices and
receiving calculated stimulus to modify them. So you end up with this
mass behavior-modification empire, which is straight out of Philip K.
Dick, or from earlier generations, from 1984.

It’s this thing that we were warned about. It’s this thing that we knew
could happen. Norbert Wiener, who coined the term cybernetics, warned
about it as a possibility. And despite all the warnings, and despite all
of the cautions, we just walked right into it, and we created mass
behavior-modification regimes out of our digital networks. We did it out
of this desire to be both cool socialists and cool libertarians at the
same time.

This dovetails with something you’ve said in the past that’s with me,
which is your phrase Digital Maoism. Do you think that the Digital
Maoism that you described years ago — are those the people who run
Silicon Valley today?
I was talking about a few different things at the time I wrote “Digital
Maoism.” One of them was the way that we were centralizing culture, even
though the rhetoric was that we were distributing it. Before Wikipedia,
I think it would have been viewed as being this horrible thing to say
that there could only be one encyclopedia, and that there would be one
dominant entry for a given topic. Instead, there were different
encyclopedias. There would be variations not so much in what facts were
presented, but in the way they were presented. That voice was a real thing.

And then we moved to this idea that we have a single dominant
encyclopedia that was supposed to be the truth for the global AI or
something like that. But there’s something deeply pernicious about that.
So we’re saying anybody can write for Wikipedia, so it’s, like, purely
democratic and it’s this wonderful open thing, and yet the bizarreness
is that that open democratic process is on the surface of something that
struck me as being Maoist, which is that there’s this one point of view
that’s then gonna be the official one.

And then I also noticed that that process of people being put into a
global system in which they’re supposed to work together toward some
sort of dominating megabrain that’s the one truth didn’t seem to bring
out the best in people, that people turned aggressive and mean-spirited
when they interacted in that context. I had worked on some content for
Britannica years and years ago, and I never experienced the kind of just
petty meanness that’s just commonplace in everything about the internet.
Among many other places, on Wikipedia.

On the one hand, you have this very open collective process actually in
the service of this very domineering global brain, destroyer of local
interpretation, destroyer of individual voice process. And then you also
have this thing that seems to bring out this meanness in people, where
people get into this kind of mob mentality and they become unkind to
each other. And those two things have happened all over the internet;
they’re both very present in Facebook, everywhere. And it’s a bit of a
subtle debate, and it takes a while to work through it with somebody who
doesn’t see what I’m talking about. That was what I was talking about.

But then there’s this other thing about the centralization of economic
power. What happened with Maoists and with communists in general, and
neo-Marxists and all kinds of similar movements, is that on the surface,
you say everybody shares, everybody’s equal, we’re not gonna have this
capitalist concentration. But then there’s some other entity that might
not look like traditional capitalism, but is effectively some kind of
robber baron that actually owns everything, some kind of Communist Party
actually controls everything, and you have just a very small number of
individuals who become hyperempowered and everybody else loses power.

And exactly the same thing has happened with the supposed openness of
the internet, where you say, “Isn’t it wonderful, with Facebook and
Twitter anybody can express themselves. Everybody’s an equal,
everybody’s empowered.” But in fact, we’re in a period of time of
extreme concentration of wealth and power, and it’s precisely around
those who run the biggest computers. So the truth and the effect is just
the opposite of what the rhetoric is and the immediate experience.

A lot of people were furious with me over Digital Maoism and felt that I
had betrayed our cause or something, and I lost some friends over it.
And some of it was actually hard. But I fail to see how it was anything
but accurate. I don’t wanna brag, but I think I was just right. I think
that that’s what was going on and that’s what’s happening in China. But
what’s worse is that it’s happening elsewhere.

The thing is, I’m not sure that what’s going on in the U.S. is that
distinct from what’s going on in China. I think there are some
differences, but they’re in degree; they’re not stark. The Chinese are
saying if you have a low social rating you can’t get on the subway, but
on the other hand, we’re doing algorithmic profiling that’s sending
people to jail, and we know that the algorithms are racist. Are we
really that much better?

I’m not really sure. I think it would be hard to determine it. But I
think we’re doing many of the same things; it’s just that we package
them in a slightly different way when we tell stories to ourselves.

This is something I write about, you know I have another book coming out
shortly?

Yeah, that was gonna be where I took this next.
One of the things that I’ve been concerned about is this illusion where
you think that you’re in this super-democratic open thing, but actually
it’s exactly the opposite; it’s actually creating a super concentration
of wealth and power, and disempowering you. This has been particularly
cruel politically. Every time there’s some movement, like the Black
Lives Matter movement, or maybe now the March for Our Lives movement, or
#MeToo, or very classically the Arab Spring, you have this initial
period where people feel like they’re on this magic-carpet ride and that
social media is letting them broadcast their opinions for very low cost,
and that they’re able to reach people and organize faster than ever
before. And they’re thinking, Wow, Facebook and Twitter are these
wonderful tools of democracy.

But then the algorithms have to maximize value from all the data that’s
coming in. So they test use that data. And it just turns out as a matter
of course, that the same data that is a positive, constructive process
for the people who generated it — Black Lives Matter, or the Arab Spring
— can be used to irritate other groups. And unfortunately there’s this
asymmetry in human emotions where the negative emotions of fear and
hatred and paranoia and resentment come up faster, more cheaply, and
they’re harder to dispel than the positive emotions. So what happens is,
every time there’s some positive motion in these networks, the negative
reaction is actually more powerful. So when you have a Black Lives
Matter, the result of that is the empowerment of the worst racists and
neo-Nazis in a way that hasn’t been seen in generations. When you have
an Arab Spring, the result ultimately is the network empowerment of ISIS
and other extremists — bloodthirsty, horrible things, the likes of which
haven’t been seen in the Arab world or in Islam for years, if ever.

Black Lives Matter has incredible visibility, but the reality is that
even though it has had an enormous effect on the discursive level, and
at making the country fixated on this conversation, that’s distinct from
political force necessary to effect that change. What do you think about
the sort of gap between what Silicon Valley platforms have promised in
that respect and then the material reality?
That observation — that social-media politics is all talk and no action
or something, or that it’s empty — is compatible with, but a little bit
different from, what I was saying. I’m saying that it empowers its
opposite more than the original good intention. And those two things can
both be true at once, but I just wanna point out that they’re two
different explanations for why nothing decent seems to come out in the end.

I want to be wrong. I especially wanna be wrong about the March for Our
Lives kids. I really wanna be wrong about them. I want them to not fall
into this because they’re our hope, they’re the future of our country,
so I very deeply, profoundly wanna be wrong. I don’t want their
social-media data to empower the opposite movement that ends up being
more powerful because negative emotions are more powerful. I just wanna
be wrong. I so wanna be telling you bullshit right now.

So far it’s been right, but that doesn’t mean it will continue to be. So
please let me be wrong.

Platforms seem trapped in this fundamental tension, and I’m just not
sure how they break out of that.
My feeling is that if the theory is correct that we got into this by
trying to be socialist and libertarian at the same time, and getting the
worst of both worlds, then we have to choose. You either have to say,
“Okay, Facebook is not going to be a business anymore. We said we wanted
to create this thing to connect people, but we’re actually making the
world worse, so we’re not gonna allow people to advertise on it; we’re
not gonna allow anybody to have any influence on your feed but you. This
is all about you. We’re gonna turn it into a nonprofit; we’re gonna give
it to each country; it’ll be nationalized. We’ll do some final stock
things so all the people who contributed to it will be rich beyond their
dreams. But then after that it’s done; it’s not a business. We’ll buy
back everybody’s stock and it’s done. It’s over. That’s it.”

That’s one option. So it just turns into a socialist enterprise; we let
it be nationalized and it’s gone. The other option is to monetize it.
And that’s the one that I’m personally more interested in. And what that
would look like is, we’d ask those who can afford to — which would be a
lot of people in the world, certainly most people in the West — to start
paying for it. And then we’d also pay people who provide data into it
that’s exceptionally valuable to the network, and it would become a
source of economic growth. And we would outlaw advertising on it. There
would no longer be third parties paying to influence you.

Because as long as you have advertising, you have this perverse
incentive to make it manipulative. You can’t have a
behavior-modification machine with advertisers and have anything
ethical; it’s not possible. You could get away with it barely with
television because television wasn’t as effective at modifying people.
But this, there’s no ethical way to have advertising.

So you’d ban advertising, and you’d start paying people, a subset of
people; a minority of people would start earning their living because
they just do stuff that other people love to look at over Facebook or
the other social networks, or YouTube for that matter. And then most
people would pay into it in the same way that we pay into something like
Netflix or HBO Now.

And one of the things I wanna point out is that back at the time when
Facebook was founded, the belief was that in the future there wouldn’t
be paid people making movies and television because armies of unpaid
volunteers organized through our network schemes would make superior
content, just like what happened with Wikipedia. But what actually
happened is, when people started paying for Netflix, we got what we call
Peak TV — things got much better as a result of it being monetized.

So I think if we had a situation where people were paying for something
like Facebook, and being paid for it, and advertising was absolutely
outlawed, the only customer would be the user, there would be no other
customer. If we got into that situation, I think we have at least a
chance of achieving Peak Social Media, just like we achieved Peak TV. We
might actually see things improve a great deal.

So that’s the solution that I think is better. But we can’t do this
combination of libertarian and communist ideology. It just doesn’t work.
You have to choose one.

You’ve written this book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media
Accounts. I don’t want to make you summarize the whole book, but I want
to ask what you thought was the most urgent argument, and to explain why.
Okay. By the way, it’s … For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

Right now! So the whole thing is already urgent, so which of these
urgent pleas do you believe to be the most pressing?
There’s one that’s a little complicated, which is the last one. Because
I have the one about politics, and I have the one about economics. That
it’s ruining politics, it’s empowering the most obnoxious people to be
the most powerful inherently, and that’s destroying the world. I have
the one about economics, how it’s centralizing wealth even while it
seems to be democratizing it. I have the one about how it makes you feel
sad; I have all these different ones.

But at the end, I have one that’s a spiritual one. The argument is that
social media hates your soul. And it suggests that there’s a whole
spiritual, religious belief system along with social media like Facebook
that I think people don’t like. And it’s also fucking phony and false.
It suggests that life is some kind of optimization, like you’re supposed
to be struggling to get more followers and friends. Zuckerberg even
talked about how the new goal of Facebook would be to give everybody a
meaningful life, as if something about Facebook is where the meaning of
life is.

It suggests that you’re just a cog in a giant global brain or something
like that. The rhetoric from the companies is often about AI, that what
they’re really doing — like YouTube’s parent company, Google, says what
they really are is building the giant global brain that’ll inherit the
earth and they’ll upload you to that brain and then you won’t have to
die. It’s very, very religious in the rhetoric. And so it’s turning into
this new religion, and it’s a religion that doesn’t care about you. It’s
a religion that’s completely lacking in empathy or any kind of personal
acknowledgment. And it’s a bad religion. It’s a nerdy, empty, sterile,
ugly, useless religion that’s based on false ideas. And I think that of
all of the things, that’s the worst thing about it.

I mean, it’s sort of like a cult of personality. It’s like in North
Korea or some regime where the religion is your purpose to serve this
one guy. And your purpose is to serve this one system, which happens to
be controlled by one guy, in the case of Facebook.

It’s not as blunt and out there, but that is the underlying message of
it and it’s ugly and bad. I loathe it, and I think a lot of people have
that feeling, but they might not have articulated it or gotten it to the
surface because it’s just such a weird and new situation.

On the other hand, there’s a rising backlash that may end the platforms
before they have the opportunity to take root and produce yet another
vicious problem.
I’m in my late 50s now. I have an 11-year-old daughter, and the thing
that bothers me so much is that we’re giving them a world that isn’t as
good as the world we received. We’re giving them a world in which their
hopes for being able to create a decent, happy, reasonably low-stress
life, where they can have their own kids, it’s just not as good as what
we were given. We have not done well by them.

And then to say that observing our own mistakes means that you’re old
and don’t get it is profoundly counterproductive. It’s really just a way
of evading our own responsibility. The truth is that we totally have
screwed over younger generations. And that’s a bigger story than just
the social-media and tech thing, but the social-media and tech thing is
a big part of it. We’ve created a scammy society where we concentrate
wealth in ways that are petty and not helpful, and we’ve given them a
world of far fewer options than we had. There’s nothing I want more than
for the younger people to create successful lives and create a world
that they love. I mean, that’s what it’s all about. But to say that the
path to that is for them to agree with the thing we made for them is
just so self-serving and so obnoxiously narcissistic that it makes me
wanna throw up.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.