Charlie Stross’s keynote at the 34th Chaos Communications Congress in
Hamburg is entitled “Dude, you broke the Future!” and it’s an excellent,
Strossian look at the future we’re barelling towards, best understood
by a critical examination of the past we’ve just gone through.
Stross is very interested in what it means that today’s tech
billionaires are terrified of being slaughtered by psychotic runaway
AIs. Like Ted Chiang and me,
Stross thinks that corporations are “slow AIs” that show what happens
when we build “machines” designed to optimize for one kind of growth
above all moral or ethical considerations, and that these captains of
industry are projecting their fears of the businesses they nominally
command onto the computers around them.
Stross says we should be especially worried about machines designed to
command ever-larger slices of our attention, without regard to whether
we’re made happier through this process (after all, you can make someone
pay attention to you by driving them nuts, something that’s often
easier than pleasing them.
He traces the original sin of attention-optimizing autonomous artificial
life-forms to the advertising-driven web, which grew up in the dotcom
bubble, and suggests that perhaps paid media built on something like
microtransactions would have had a better outcome.
I think that this is a causality error, though. The dotcom boom was also
an economic bubble because the dotcoms came of age at a tipping point
in financial deregulation, the point at which the Reagan-Clinton-Bush
reforms that took the Depression-era brakes off financialization were
really picking up steam. That meant that the tech industry’s heady pace
of development was the first testbed for treating corporate growth as
the greatest virtue, built on the lie of the fiduciary duty to increase
profit above all other considerations.
Thanks to the work of Thomas Piketty,
we know that the collapse of regulation was driven by the accumulation
of capital into fewer and fewer hands, meaning that power was weakly
consolidated with the wealthy, who used that power to push for more
wealth accumulation and more power.
All this to say that if the web had been built on direct transactions
through micropayments, the slow AIs of the corporate world would have
still figured out how to toxify the web and the discourse that ran over
it. If clicks were worth direct money (as opposed to indirect money,
paid through ad brokers), the same forces that optimized for
attention-grabbing to attract eyeballs would have just optimized for
microtransaction grabbing.
At the same time, the consolidation of power in a few winners’ hands has
meant that attention-hungry corporations like Facebook and Google are
increasingly able to use law and regulation to prevent public interest
groups or competitors from making tools that give you, the user, more
control over your online experience, the ability to subvert their
algorithms’ gaming of your attention without having to sacrifice the
social connections and utility that the companies deliver. The early web
lived in a dynamic between attention harvesting tools and attention
defending tools like popup blockers; that’s a much more fraught
proposition on today’s web.
Stross’s overall point, though, is an excellent one. The artificial
lifeforms birthed by finance capitalism and technology are taking over,
and they are consuming our political and deliberative processes.
The web came of age with no-holds-barred finance capitalism,
so it’s hard to decide which of the last twenty years’ worth of changes
are the result of the tech industry, or of financialization, or a toxic
mix of both.
In an exhaustive and fascinating article in the American Prospect,
Robert Kuttner and a psuedonymous editor at a hedge-fund-owned community
paper make a compelling case that the acquisition of community papers
by private equity firms from their retiring, patrician family owners
destroyed the news: mass newsroom layoffs, centralized decision making
and design, pay-cuts and pay-freezes, and the kind of petty,
short-sighted penny-pinching that is hard to believe (editorial staffers
at the papers owned by Gatehouse don’t get free subscriptions to the
newspapers they contribute to).
Now, it’s obvious that the web has been hard on the advertising market
for print periodicals, but the hedge-fund-crapification of newspapers
started before the web did, and had already degraded and weakened the
news market, leaving it vulnerable to disruption (not least because
private equity’s favorite play is to sell off a business’s real-estate
and physical plant and load it up with debt, leaving it in fragile
straits should its fortunes change).
And the increased weakness of newsmedia has only accelerated the process. In Canada, a group of US private equity vultures
are publicly choking one of the national newspaper chains to death. The
web is certainly not helping these papers survive, but there’s a lot of
talk about Craiglist’s impact on classifieds, and a lot less on whether
a newspaper that loses 70% of its newsroom and then raises its prices
can be said to be well-managed or even worth saving.
