re The Death of the Public Square: Today’s most powerful companies are enemies of free expression.

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: saronson-unger <saronson.unger () gmail com>
> Date: July 9, 2018 at 09:00:37 GMT+9
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: Re: [IP] The Death of the Public Square: Today’s most powerful companies are enemies of free expression.
>
> Hi Prof. Farber,
>
> The same Franklin Foer's recent book, "World Without Mind, The
> Existential Threat of Big Tech", NY 2017 is also worth reading .
>
> (Sami) Aronson-Unger
>
> > On 7/8/18, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > > 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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