Category Archives: Internet

Facebook and moral dyad theory

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Ari David Blaff writes,

while valid concerns about app-tracking, facial recognition, and police surveillance remain a legitimate topic of political and journalistic interest, the other half of the debate is being neglected. The emergence of new cultural norms has seen citizens broadcast aspects of their personal lives that had hitherto remained out of public view. Missing from the latest eruption of public outrage targeting Big Tech and Mark Zuckerberg is an acknowledgement that we voluntarily agreed to surrender our privacy and that we may never get it back.

I relate this to moral dyad theory. We tend to simplify a complex situation by identifying one participant as having agency and the other participant as helplessly being imposed upon. So we think of Facebook the corporation as the former and the users of Facebook as the latter.

See my review of The Mind Club.

Have property rights gotten complicated?

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Russ Roberts talks with Michael Heller and James Salzman, co-authors of a book on issues with property rights. Roberts says,

I think most human beings think about the historical nature of property rights: something’s either mine or it’s not. And, that’s like my house, as long as I don’t have a mortgage. But, we tend to think of property rights is on or off: one, zero. And, what your book does beautifully is explore the rich nuance and subtlety of property rights, currently and in history.

For a number of reasons, I think that property rights are much more complicated now than they were two hundred years ago.

1. Because we are more likely to live in dense urban settings, what you do with your land affects me in many more ways than if we lived on separate farms or in a small village.

2. A lot of wealth now is intangible. That makes patents and trademarks and business rules more important. My claim to own a machine or a piece of land is pretty easy to verify. Intellectual property creates a lot more ambiguity.

You have to use force to take tangible property from me. But you may not have to use force to take intellectual property. Indeed, I may have to initiate the use of force (perhaps with the government on my side) to stop you from using my ideas. So libertarians do not necessarily support intellectual property. As David S. D’Amato put it,

Libertarians are seldom indecisive or wishy‐​washy on the question of intellectual property. We tend either to favor or oppose it strongly, depending on whether we see it as a necessary and proper guardian of legitimate individual rights, or a precarious and inherently unjust form of coercive monopolism. In an era when so much of what is even considered free competition depends on our answer to the intellectual property question, it is important to grapple with the theoretical work that was handed down to us, regardless of our ultimate stances.

My personal view is that information wants to be free, but creators need to get paid. As I see it, not all types of creations should be compensated in the same way. So I don’t take a simple, binary view of intellectual property.

3. There is much more specialization and trade than there was two hundred years ago. That means we depend on many more strangers than was the case back then. As a consumer, when I buy something, I believe–correctly or not–that various rights have been conferred to me. When I rent a bicycle, if the chain breaks when I am ten miles down the trail, do I have the right to be rescued by someone from the bike rental shop? If a drug causes a harmful side effect, do I have a right to compensation from the drug company? from my doctor? from the doctor’s malpractice insurance company? from my own health insurance?

4. Studying the “terms and conditions” for all of the software and web site subscriptions I have purchased probably would take me more than a lifetime. Like most people, I don’t do it. But that means I probably don’t really know what my property rights are.

Overall, if you were a New England farmer in 1800, you could go for months, perhaps your entire lifetime, without encountering a situation in which you were unsure about who owned what. Everything on your land you could sell or give away at will. Today, every time you use your smart phone you probably are encountering a situation in which property rights are unclear. Who owns your email archive? Your location data? Is an app that you “own” something you can sell of give away at will?

Think about all this. Clear, straightforward property rights are probably a necessary condition for a libertarian utopia of minimal government and maximum voluntary exchange. 21st century society requires a lot more governance (not all of which needs to come from government. Social media can censor politicians as well as the other way around).

And if you believe that blockchain by itself can settle all of these property rights issues, you have some work to do to persuade me of that.

Hard tech and soft tech

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Noah Smith writes,

notice that China isn’t cracking down on all of its technology companies. Huawei, for example, still seems to enjoy the government’s full backing. The government is going hell-bent-for-leather to try to create a world-class domestic semiconductor industry, throwing huge amounts of money at even the most speculative startups. And it’s still spending heavily on A.I. It’s not technology that China is smashing — it’s the consumer-facing internet software companies that Americans tend to label “tech”.

He goes on to say that if you want your country to have a strong military capability, you need hard technologies–network hardware, artificial intelligence, etc. You don’t need Facebook.

when China’s leaders look at what kind of technologies they want the country’s engineers and entrepreneurs to be spending their effort on, they probably don’t want them spending that effort on stuff that’s just for fun and convenience. They probably took a look at their consumer internet sector and decided that the link between that sector and geopolitical power had simply become too tenuous to keep throwing capital and high-skilled labor at it. And so, in classic CCP fashion, it was time to smash.

Unwalling the gardens

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A reader points me to something that Gray Mirror wrote last year.

Let’s call a protocol transparent if anyone can send or read a message in the protocol. In a transparent protocol, the whole public has both the technical information and the legal right to encode or decode messages in a transparent protocol, at every layer of the protocol stack. The opposite is opaque.

His proposal is to require that protocols be transparent. Anyone should be able to write an application that uses the protocol. This would change Facebook from a walled garden to an open database.

Here is an example, using Fantasy Intellectual Teams. Suppose that I maintain the definitive database for keeping score, and a schematic of the file format looks like this:

var teams = [
{
teamname: “Clan Graham”, owner: “Geoff”, players:
[
{name: “Joe Rogan”, Bets: 0, Memes: 1, Steelmans: 0},
{name:”Matt Ridley”, Bets:0, Memes:2, Steelmans:0}
]
},

{teamname: “Tim the Enchanter”, owner: “Jon T”, players:
[
{name: “Tyler Cowen”, Bets: 1, Memes: 3, Steelmans:2}
]
}
]

In the walled-garden model, only I know the file format, and thus only I can write reports based on the data. In a transparent-protocol model, pretty much anyone who has ever composed code could write reports based on the data. Gray Mirror would force me to use the transparent-protocol model. As an aside, if a team owner wants to keep his name secret, this is something that could be accommodated in the transparent-protocol model. Data security and protocol transparency are different features, and they are not incompatible.

In the walled-garden model, since I control the reporting, I can sell advertising to be placed on the reports. In the transparent-protocol model, I would have to sell subscriptions to the database. The transparent-protocol model still allows me to have a monopoly, but it strictly limits the uses that I can make of that monopoly.

Would you go to the trouble to create the data protocol for Facebook and, most importantly, undertake the effort to induce people to enter data into your database, if you knew that sooner or later you would be forced to make the protocol transparent? If the answer is “yes,” then Gray Mirror’s suggestion might be a good one.

Claire Lehmann vs. me

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She sent out an email:

Facebook has blocked Australian users from viewing or sharing news content on their platform. The mass-blocking is in response to new media laws proposed by the Australian Government which would mean that digital giants such as Facebook are required to pay for news content.

in resistance to the proposed laws, Facebook has now blocked Australian news sites, and Quillette has been included in the wide net that has been cast. Our Facebook page has been wiped and our links are blocked on the platform. If you would like to share a Quillette article on Facebook you will be unable to, even if you live outside of Australia.

I replied:

1.  I consider Quillette the best of online magazines, and I link to its content often on my blog. 

2.  I see the Australia-Facebook imbroglio as a reason for hope.  If they can ban content from Australian news sites, then they might someday ban content from all news sites.  Then I could go back to using Facebook.

Concerning decentralization

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1. Zvi Mowshowitz and I are going back and forth about decentralization on Pairagraph. In progress. Self-recommending.

2. Tyler Cowen Bloomberg) does a one-person back-and-forth,

Why not, for example, put social media on blockchains and have efficient cryptocurrency micropayments to reward those who help maintain such mechanisms? Censoring postings on such a service would be as difficult as trying to overwrite a blockchain ledger, which is to say very difficult. (Indeed such postings would be a blockchain ledger, albeit in a more digestible form.) And instead of having to deal with the content rules of Twitter or WhatsApp, perhaps you could customize and build your own rules.

On the other hand, (a possibly atavistic) part of me likes knowing that someone or something is in control, whether it’s a government, a bunch of people in Mountain View, or even just my dean.

I do recommend the David Brin essay referred to in my first Pairagraph post.

How journalism responded to the Internet

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Martin Gurri writes

The amount of information in the world was, for practical purposes, infinite. As supply vastly outstripped demand, the news now chased the reader, rather than the other way around. Today, nobody under 85 would look for news in a newspaper. Under such circumstances, what commodity could be offered for sale?

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Times stumbled onto a possible answer. It entailed a wrenching pivot from a journalism of fact to a “post-journalism” of opinion—a term coined, in his book of that title, by media scholar Andrey Mir. Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls.

Tech power and government power

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Allen Farrington writes about

a rather odd belief about where, precisely, the power lies in this relationship—that Twitter, Facebook, and the like have amassed enormous power, are throwing it about wantonly, spiralling out of control, and must be constrained by the wise and impartial. A simpler thesis would be that the reason so much of “Big Tech” spontaneously coordinated as it did was a political calculus aimed at avoiding onerous regulation by currying favour with the incoming administration. Journalist Michael Tracey summarised the essential misdiagnosis of power like this: “The new corporate authoritarian liberal-left monoculture is going to be absolutely ruthless. And in 12 days it is merging with the state. This [is] only the beginning. The real ‘threat’ at this point is crazed oligarchs + politicians using the ‘crisis’ to consolidate power.”