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The Death of the Public Square: Today’s most powerful companies are enemies of free expression.
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2018 06:59:47 +0900
Begin forwarded message: From: Brian Randell <brian.randell () newcastle ac uk> Subject: The Death of the Public Square: Today’s most powerful companies are enemies of free expression. Date: July 9, 2018 at 6:50:53 AM GMT+9 To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Cc: Brian Randell <brian.randell () newcastle ac uk> Hi Dave: Here are a set of extracts from a piece in The Atlantic (Jul 6 2018) that you might think appropriate for IP. Cheers Brian ———— The Death of the Public Square: Today’s most powerful companies are enemies of free expression. by Franklin Foer What is god? When the question first rattled my adolescent mind, I took it to my mom and dad, and received wildly divergent answers. I cracked the beige-in-every-way set of World Book encyclopedias in our attic. And after poking around on the shelves of my anti-clerical father, I found Nietzsche and realized that God was actually dead. If I were a boy now, we all know exactly where I would turn for an answer. All of us enter our questions, both about where to brunch and the meaning of life, into a box with a magnifying glass at its right edge, next to the multicolored logo of the deity that presides over our informational world. Its name, like the lord of the universe, begins with the letter G. What is God? It is only a subject that has inspired some of the finest writing in the history of Western civilization—and yet the first two pages of Google results for the question are comprised almost entirely of Sweet’N Low evangelical proselytizing to the unconverted. (The first link the Google algorithm served me was from the Texas ministry, Life, Hope & Truth.) The Google search for God gets nowhere near Augustine, Maimonides, Spinoza, Luther, Russell, or Dawkins. Billy Graham is the closest that Google can manage to an important theologian or philosopher. For all its power and influence, it seems that Google can’t really be bothered to care about the quality of knowledge it dispenses. It is our primary portal to the world, but has no opinion about what it offers, even when that knowledge it offers is aggressively, offensively vapid. If Harold Bloom or Marilynne Robinson had engineered Google, the search engine would have responded to the query with a link to the poet John Milton, who is both challenging on the subject of God and brave on the subject of free speech—and who would have been a polemical critic of our algorithmic overlords, if he had lived another four hundred years. . . . At the core, Milton was defending something intensely private—the conscience, the freedom of each citizen to arrive at their own religious conviction. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” But Milton also stirringly articulated how the formation of private convictions required public spaces, public institutions—what Jürgen Habermas so famously defined as the “public sphere.” At the time of Milton’s birth, in 1608, there wasn’t much of a public sphere in England. By the time he wrote Areopagitica, it was robust: coffee houses, newspapers, bookstores, theatres, and meeting places—the locales that allowed individuals to come together to form a public. These were spaces largely outside the grasp of church and state—and, in fact, many of these institutions emerged with the express purpose of liberating society from the grasp of church and state. Nobody designed the public sphere from a dorm room or a Silicon Valley garage. It just started to organically accrete, as printed volumes began to pile up, as liberal ideas gained currency and made space for even more liberal ideas. Institutions grew, and then over the centuries acquired prestige and authority. Newspapers and journals evolved into what we call media. Book publishing emerged from the printing guilds, and eventually became taste-making, discourse-shaping enterprises. What was born in Milton’s lifetime lasted until our own. . . The old, enfeebled institutions of the public sphere have grown dependent on the big technology companies for financial survival. And with this dependence, the values of big tech have become the values of the public sphere. Big tech has made a fetish of efficiency, of data, of the wisdom of the market. These are the underlying principles that explain why Google returns such terrible responses to the God query. Google is merely giving us what’s popular, what’s most clicked upon, not what’s worthy. You can hurl every insult at the old public sphere, but it never exhibited such frank indifference to the content it disseminated. This assault on the public sphere is an assault on free expression. In the West, free expression is a transcendent right only in theory—in practice its survival is contingent and tenuous. We’re witnessing the way in which public conversation is subverted by name-calling and harassment. We can convince ourselves that these are fringe characteristics of social media, but social media has implanted such tendencies at the core of the culture. They are in fact practiced by mainstream journalists, mobs of the well meaning, and the president of the United States. . . . And now, the tech giants are racing to insert themselves more intimately in people’s lives, this time as personal assistants. The tech companies want us to tie ourselves closely to their machines—those speakers that they want us to keep in our kitchens and our bedrooms: Amazon’s Echo, Google Home, Apple’s Siri. They want their machines to rouse us in the morning and to have their artificial intelligence guide us through our days, relaying news and entertainment, answering our most embarrassing questions, enabling our shopping. These machines don’t present us with choices. They aren’t designed to present us with a healthy menu of options. They anticipate our wants and needs, even our informational and cultural wants and needs. What’s so pernicious about these machines is that they weaponize us against ourselves. They take our data—everywhere we have traveled on the web, every query we’ve entered into Google, even the posts we begin to write but never publish—and exploit this knowledge to reduce us to marionettes. . . . Donald Trump should be the object lesson that shuts down this debate before it begins. Not since World War I has the United States had a president who so disrespects the idea of free speech—who threatens to file libel lawsuits and muses openly about loosening libel laws, who attempts to rile hatred of media, who talks fawningly of authoritarian leaders in other countries. . . Facebook has made it possible to live in a filter bubble, where we don’t have to contend with the unpleasantness of confronting opinions we dislike—and where there’s a mute button to effortlessly quiet voices we would rather not hear. Mark Zuckerberg’s dream, the dream he continues to profess, even after all of the controversy, is the dream of global community—the idea of a global network that transforms the planet into a place of understanding. As we join Zuckerberg’s community, he fantasizes that the sense of connection will cause our differences to melt away—like a digital version of the old Coca Cola commercial, or, as I argue in my book, World Without Mind, a revival of the ’60s counterculture and the vision of life on a commune. . . . — School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU EMAIL = Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk <mailto:Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk> PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html <http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html>
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- The Death of the Public Square: Today’s most powerful companies are enemies of free expression. Dave Farber (Jul 08)