Facebook hires privacy critics: What’s the opposite of “cautious optimism”?

Posted on February 1, 2019 by bhaggart

It’s been fascinating to watch American digital-rights activists react to Facebook’s hiring of three prominent privacy-focused lawyers, particularly the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Nate Cardozo (the other hires were Open Technology Institute’s Robyn Greene and Nathan White from Access Now). Overall, reactions seem to be mostly optimistic, praising the new Facebook employees’ personal integrity and commitment to privacy rights.

Which is funny, because I had precisely the opposite reaction when I heard the news. Not only is it impossible in 2019 to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt on privacy, that after an eternity of treating their users as “dumb fucks” they now want to get serious about privacy, this hiring has the potential to destroy the EFF’s (and those of the other groups) credibility as grassroots, rights-oriented organizations that are not Silicon Valley lobbyists.

Even more importantly, these hires and the positive reaction to them raise serious questions about the distance between the American digital-rights community and the very companies that, as Shoshana Zuboff argues persuasively in her latest book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, pose a threat to liberal democracy every bit as severe as the threat posed by state surveillance.

EFF and regulatory capture

Rather than focusing on the personal integrity of the individuals in question, the best way to understand what’s going on and how it’s likely to play out is to think of EFF as the government and Facebook as the company it is trying to regulate. This analogy isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem. EFF has consistently expressed concern about overly onerous government oversight over the tech industry, often for reasons of protecting freedom of expression. Instead, it has thrown much of its energy into drafting voluntary principles, such as the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability of Content Moderation Practices.

In EFF’s ideal political economy, civil-society groups play a central role in holding companies like Facebook to account, with government regulation coming into play only if absolutely necessary (they also see competition as an important restraint on companies, but I don’t see any competition heading Facebook’s way even in the medium term). Governments can use coercion to enforce its rules while non-governmental organizations like EFF must use persuasion, but the goal is the same: the implementation of rules that companies like Facebook will follow.

When it comes to actual governments, “regulatory capture” and the “revolving door” between industry and regulators are long-recognized problems. I would argue that Facebook’s hires are strongly suggestive of regulatory capture and have the potential to further weaken the independence of American digital-rights groups, many of which (it should be noted) already take money from the organizations they wish to influence.

A revolving door between the regulator and the regulated signals a baseline level of comfort with the industry status quo: while the industry in question may have problems, they are not so severe as to shock the consciences of the regulators.

Here’s what I mean. Can you imagine a nuclear-disarmament activist going to work for the Pentagon under any circumstances? Or think about any government regulator or administration staffer and ask yourself what your reaction would be if you heard that they were now going to be working for the company that just a day earlier they had been responsible for overseeing in the public interest.

Back to the matter at hand, how would the American digital-rights community have reacted if Cardozo had announced he would be working for the National Security Agency to try to make its surveillance protocols fairer and somewhat less intrusive? Would they have given him the benefit of the doubt, and argue that maybe the NSA, after an eternity of spying on the world, has finally gotten the message on surveillance? Maybe, but I would not be at all surprised if they saw it instead as a betrayal of fundamental values, because the problem with government surveillance is government surveillance.

And yet, moving from the activist side to Facebook – a company implicated in a genocide and the global rise of authoritarian populism – for some reason has not generated a similarly negative reaction. This is the same company that, on the same day that these hires were announced was revealed to be paying “users as young as 13 to install an app that gave the company access to everything their phone sent or received over the internet.”

The positive reaction itself suggests that the relationship between Silicon Valley and the American digital-rights community is far too cozy, particularly if groups like EFF are serious about being de facto public-interest watchdogs/regulators of this sector.

New incentives for EFF and privacy activists to pull their punches

These hirings potentially pose an additional credibility problem for those activists at EFF who truly are committed to improving privacy rights (I should note that I’m focusing on EFF because they are the United States’ most prominent digital-rights group). Cardozo’s move to Facebook effectively opens up a new career path for young activists. I don’t know what either EFF or Facebook pay, but I do know that activism is a young person’s game, these aren’t lifetime jobs, and the money is usually much better in corporate America. Knowing that this employment path exists and that people in the privacy-activist community are cool with it, EFF’s new hires might well temper their criticisms of companies like Facebook lest they endanger future employment prospects. And even if they don’t, they won’t be able to escape that perception.

It’s also getting much harder to ignore the argument that while EFF and similar groups are outspoken on government surveillance, they are much less concerned with the regulation of its corporate cousin, what Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. This was the whole point of April Glaser’s Slate article last April, which called out groups like EFF for their relatively weak activism when the Facebook shit started to hit the fan. Glaser’s article came to mind immediately when I heard about these hires; her critique continues to resonate.

The problem isn’t privacy; it’s the business model

What’s more, the argument about changing the system from the inside, implicit in all the talk about personal integrity, is fundamentally misguided. As Siva Vaidhyanathan points out in his recent book, “The problem with Facebook is Facebook.” The issue isn’t that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (the “Typhoid Mary” of surveillance capitalism, in Zuboff’s words) hate privacy; it’s that their fundamental business model depends on constant, expanding, ubiquitous surveillance.

Unless Cardozo and his fellow hires can convince Zuckerberg and Sandberg to give up the model that has made them billions, all their efforts will almost certainly amount to no more than a Band-Aid on a gaping chest wound. At worst, prevented by Facebook from talking to the media, they will be deployed as human shields against criticisms that Facebook isn’t taking privacy seriously.

It would be great if instead of treating Facebook’s hires as just another job announcement, American digital-rights activists took this moment as an opportunity to reconsider their relationship with surveillance capitalists like Facebook, and surveillance capitalism in general. For everyone else, trying to deal with the damage caused by the business model used by companies like Facebook and Google, at least it’s helpful to know where everyone stands.

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Want to understand current Canada-US relations? Look at the 1930s

Posted on June 19, 2018 by bhaggart

One of the reasons it’s hard for Canadians to understand fully the threat posed by Trump and deeper currents in US politics is that Trump has ripped up the rulebook that has governed the Canada-U.S. relationship for over seventy years. There’s just no equivalent to anything that’s happened in most of our lifespans. Certainly nobody in power has ever dealt with a U.S. that’s as belligerent and counterproductively self-interested as the US is under Trump (and, lest we forget Iraq, was under Dubya).

But as those of us who study North American politics will recall, we have been here before, back in the 1930s, a much different time in the Canada-US relationship.

A quick Google Scholar search on historical Canada-US trade wars led me back to John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall’s foundational book, Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies. And, well, the parallels between the Canada-U.S. relationship then and now are … illuminating.

US xenophobia and implementation of self-harming economic policies? Check.

“As a response to the deepening Depression, the same Congress that shut the border to Canadian migrants effectively closed it to Canadian potatoes, beef, butter, and poultry exports with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, the highest duties in US history.”

Canadian (failed) efforts to remind the US how much we mean to them? Check.

“Prime Minister Mackenzie King quietly sent a series of emissaries to warn President Hoover of Smoot-Hawley’s serious economic and diplomatic effects. The Literary Digest and The Nation made the same case to the American public: Canada was the ‘best customer of the U.S.A.,’ two-way trade was the highest between any two nations in the world, and Canada bought one-third more from the United States than it sold to that country. Why jeopardize this with a tariff war?”

American attempt to strike a deal are botched by a president’s incompetence? Check.

“The president offered the prime minister an exchange: he would exempt Canada from the new tariffs in return for a Canadian promise to cooperate in one of Hoover’s pet projects, a St. Lawrence Seaway to open the Great Lakes to oceangoing ships. … But Hoover doomed the deal by leaking the offer to the press.”

Canadians get their backs up, guaranteeing a trade war? Check.

“Trading a seaway for a tariff exemption would mean yielding to U.S. pressure before a binational audience, and the prime minister understood that it was time to cater to his country’s psychic need to stand up to Uncle Sam. King rejected Hoover’s proposal to link the seaway and trade issues and retaliated for Smoot-Hawley with countervailing tariff increases and additional levies on steel and on fruits and vegetables. Canada had fired the second shot in the North American theater of the international trade ware that exacerbated the Great Depression.”

Although the past isn’t necessarily prologue, Thompson and Randall’s history lesson also holds some possible lessons for the future.

Lesson 1: There’s going to be lots of political hay to be made by appealing to anti-American sentiment.

“This counterattack did not save King’s Liberals from defeat in the Canadian election of July 1930. As in 1911, the opposition Conservatives played the card of anti-U.S. chauvanism with consummate skill. … Once in office, the new government’s first actions were to pass a five-page list of tariff increases and to slam Canada’s doors and to slam Canada’s door against immigrants.”

[Note: Would a federal Conservative government be so stridently anti-immigrant in a now-multicultural country? Ontario’s new Progressive Conservative government will provide an early indication.]

Lesson 2: Politicians should tamp down the expectation that trade diversification will protect Canada. We’re stuck with the United States

“Prime Minister Bennett proposed to replace vanished trade with the United States with expanded trade within the British Empire. He had scant success, however, in his attempts to reach reciprocal tariff agreements with Britain and the other Dominions. A much-publicized Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa in 1932 aroused U.S. fears of a British Empire trading bloc, but its practical results were few. The United States never need have worried that its economic influence on Canada would diminish: even as tariff warfare and the Depression cut the total volume of Canadian-U.S. trade in half in the early 1930s, the Canadian economy intertwined with the American. …”

Lesson 3: Personalities matter, but circumstances matter more

“Hoover’s ignorance of and indifference to Canada contributed a dimension of difficulty to U.S.-Canada relations, as did Bennett’s abrasive personal manner, but long-standing circumstances, not personalities, were at the root of bilateral problems. …”

[Note: And as I’ve argued elsewhere, our current circumstances do not favour a return to the status quo.]

The first step to avoid repeating history is to recognize what history you’re in danger of repeating. In order to craft a realistic strategy for dealing with the post-NAFTA era, those charts showing how much Canada trades with all the U.S. states aren’t going to do much good. Time to dust off those old history books.

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Memo: The long-term Canadian response to the Trump presidency

Posted on June 9, 2018 by bhaggart

I wrote this memo in November-December 2016 and circulated it to a few people in and around government. Sadly, I think it’s held up quite well. Posting it here for posterity. For me, one of the key takeaways is that it’s been clear since the beginning that Trump poses an existential threat to the liberal-international order and to Canadian security and prosperity. Or at least it’s been clear to those of us who study North American politics and the international political economy.

Almost two years’ on, it seems people are slowly starting to realize exactly how dangerous the situation is for Canada, and I’m still not sure of the extent to which the Canadian government and politicians of all stripes are facing some of the hard questions I raise below.

December 5, 2016

SUMMARY

The election of Donald Trump potentially presents an existential crisis for Canada of a type previously unimaginable in the post-World War II period. There is a non-zero (and growing) possibility that Trump’s election will accelerate the decline of the US-underwritten liberal international order, ushering us into to a world of power politics that is unfamiliar to the current generation of Canadian policymakers. In this scenario, it is questionable whether the current public Canadian policy of reminding Trump of Canada’s economic value to the United States would be an effective way to preserve Canadian prosperity, let alone autonomy.

By taking a more self-interested, transactional approach to international relations, the United States could fundamentally alter the decades-old international system that has provided the context for all of Canada’s domestic and international economic, political and military activities. Should this come to pass, the fundamental assumptions underlying the Canadian economy – open, free-trade-based – and Canadian foreign policy – multilateral, Canada as the United States’ helpful fixer – would have to be rethought in the context of its relationship with a more-antagonistic United States. Given the extreme downsides to this possible outcome, the Canadian Government should begin preparing contingency plans that will allow the country to deal proactively with this worst-case scenario.

RECOMMENDATIONS

  1. The Government should work pre-emptively to depoliticize Canada-US relations by creating a Cabinet committee on Canada-US relations with representation from the main opposition parties.
  2. The Government should allocate resources across all departments to begin planning for the “post-US” world order. Key topics should include: the optimal structure of the Canadian economy in a world of “hard” regions; negotiating with a belligerent United States; reassessing the extent of Canadian-US military and security cooperation; the status of the North; maintaining the United Nations’ relevance in a world of region-based realpolitik.

THE PROBLEM

The Canada-US relationship affects every single aspect of Canadian society. Currently, the Government’s publicly expressed approach to the incoming Trump administration seems to be based on the assumption that, while perhaps distasteful, Trump represents relative continuity with previous Republican administrations. This is a very dangerous assumption to make and is belied by almost every one of Trump’s actions in his presidential campaign and since becoming president-elect (e.g., igniting an international incident with China via a phone call with the president of Taiwan). It is also belied by the extent to which the Republican establishment has embraced him, of which the courting of former Trump critic Mitt Romney is only the most recent example. While it is possible that Republican free-trade ideology and the traditional US support (however reluctant) of international institutions will carry the day, there is a strong possibility that the US consensus on the importance of a liberal economic and political order internationally is about to be shattered.

Assuming these public pronouncements by Canadian officials represent the opinions of the Canadian Government, Canada faces the very serious possibility of being completely unprepared by the increasingly likely rewrite of the fundamental rules of the global political and economic system by the Trump administration, as well as the eventual, long-term decline of US global dominance. A lack of planning for the worst-case scenarios (which, while perhaps unlikely, seem not as impossible as they did in October 2016) could lock the Government into a reactive stance that produces long-term damage to the Canadian economy and state.

BACKGROUND

The post-World War II period in Canada-US relations has been characterized by ever-deepening political, military and particularly economic integration, the latter of which reached its apex in the formal recognition of an integrated North American economy in the 1989 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. In the 1970s, US political scientists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye termed this relationship one of “complex interdependence,” reflective of societies that had become so intertwined that the obvious power asymmetries between the two countries were not reflected in policy outcomes. Rather, the relationship is characterized by respect for the norm of non-issue-linkage and restraint in the exercise of dominance.

Canada-US relations are embedded in a larger Western international society that emphasizes multilateralism, economic and political liberalism, and sovereignty. As noted by prominent political economist Susan Strange, among others, argue, this international society is underwritten by US hard and soft power, or “hegemony.” Hegemony is not just coercive, dependent on military and economic strength; it also depends on an element of consent – other states and peoples have to “buy in” to the dominant power’s ideas (e.g., free trade, democracy, human rights). US leadership has created what American political scientist Peter Katzenstein calls the “American imperium.” This system is characterized by “open regionalism”: increasingly integrated world regions (Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas) that remain deeply interpenetrated by each other and, particularly, by the United States.

While all this has led to a globalized world in which transnational corporations span the globe and international organizations like the World Trade Organization and the United Nations structure economic and political activity, the United States remains the ultimate guarantor of this liberal international order.

Already, before the election of Trump, US hegemony was under challenge from within and without. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis has led many to question the wisdom of US-style economic liberalism; the 2003 invasion of Iraq raised serious questions about the United States’ commitment to the principles of sovereignty and human rights. In Asia, China’s antipathy toward the current system can be seen most directly in its promotion of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which the Obama administration correctly views as an attempt to gain influence for itself against the US-dominated institutions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In this view, Canada’s and others’ decision to join the AIIB represents a weakening of US hegemony.

In other areas, analysts have observed attempts by the United States, pre-Trump, to move away from its hegemonic role, for instance, in its lack of interest in intervening directly in Syria due to a lack of a direct perceived “national interest.”

The US exercise of global hegemony has always been complicated by its fractious domestic politics. In her 1987 article, “The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony,” Susan Strange remarked that international-institutional instability could be traced to parochial domestic US politics. This observation is even more accurate today, as we can see in the unravelling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP was, primarily, a geostrategic attempt by the United States to balance against China in the Asia-Pacific, cementing US economic, political and military primacy in the area against a rising power. While a smart strategic move, it was undone by US domestic politics. Attempts by US firms to cement their dominance in Asia through policies like strong intellectual property protection and investor-state dispute settlement that provide overwhelmingly one-sided benefits to US corporations were opposed worldwide, and ironically contributed to Trump’s unexpected electoral victory.

The election of Donald Trump is likely to vastly accelerate this already-ongoing process of the loss of US hegemony. Trump’s contribution to this long-run change is likely to come via his disregard (shared by many in the Republican party) for the rules and institutions that undergird the international system. To use Susan Strange’s terminology, while Trump has a keen appreciation for relational power – that is, the ability to dominate others – he does not seem to understand the importance of structural power – that is, the ability to set the rules and context within which other countries operate. He does not appreciate the extent to which the United States benefits from its ability to set the global rules (including promotion of “universal” norms). Instead, his entire campaign and his time as president-elect have been characterized by attacks on this system. Nor does he (or the Republican party at large) have a plan to replace the current system with something else; instead, the instinct will be to rely on relational power – including the world’s most powerful military and its (for now) most vibrant economy – to get what they want from other countries.

These long-term trends will likely lead to an eventual fracturing of US hegemony, and with it – in the absence of the unlikely rise of another liberal hegemonic power – the current liberal-international system. Global free trade (and also transnational production networks) as the foundation of the world economy cannot be assumed to continue forever. As the United States removes its sponsorship of a global liberal economy, it is very possible that a global world will transform into a world of “hard” regions, in which dominant countries shape the policies of the region’s smaller countries, with less emphasis on liberal economic policies and more on a mercantilist approach to trade and economic policy.

As a small, open state whose only border is with the United States, Canada will keenly feel the effects of these changes. Canada’s current economic policies are based on the existence of deep economic integration with the United States, (relatively) free trade and US restraint in the exercise of power. If the United States abandons its commitment to a liberal trading regime and adopts a more transactional relationship toward its partners, Canada will almost certainly be affected dramatically. While economic inertia is a powerful force, the current economic regime cannot be assumed to continue indefinitely if one partner takes an increasingly short-run, transactional approach to economic and political matters. Deep integration did not prevent the United States from imposing economically self-harming border measures post-9/11 to protect what it perceived as its national interest.

Politically and economically, there is no “us” in North America. The “complex interdependence” that has characterized the peaceful Canada-US relations of the postwar period is underwritten by economic factors and normative values. However, while US businesses may experience discomfort as transnational supply chains are interrupted, at the end of the day they respond to the political and economic structures created by the state. For this reason, it would be unwise to place disproportionate faith in the idea that Republican administrations are good for Canada-US trade, or that deep economic integration will necessarily protect Canadian economic interests. Although economists generally agree (with caveats) that free trade is a better economic policy than mercantilism, such a consensus is unlikely to prevent politicians from deciding to go all-in on mercantilism should they choose to do so. Sound economic policy does not always carry the political day.

This brief does not argue that the United States is becoming a less consequential actor, particularly in its relations with Canada. A world of transactional, relational power is not one in which US power is necessarily diminished, at least in relational terms. It is one in which rules are seen as less important by larger states, and one in which smaller states (like Canada) are much more vulnerable to great-power aggression and dominance than they are today. Dealing with a transactional United States would also raise important questions about the extent and wisdom of Canada-US military and intelligence interpenetration, or interoperability, and the desirability of a fully independent Canadian military and intelligence services.

Economically, while successive Canadian governments have assumed that Canada has economic alternatives to the United States (even if these have never worked out), realistically, Canada is trapped in North America. Historically, our geographic location has been an enormous benefit to Canada. However, in a world of “hard regions,” it may become a burden. Pursuing independent extra-North American relations may become increasingly difficult if the United States begins to see Canadian exports, say, of oil to China as a form of aid by one of “their” countries (i.e., Canada) to one of their rivals.

CONCLUSION

In normal times, advice that Canadians not panic over the election of an unsavoury US president, which seems to be the Government’s primary public message, would be sound; the deep economic, political, military and social connections between the two countries would constrain the incoming president and mitigate the damage he could cause to the Canada-US relationship.

These are not normal times. The Trump transition is showing no signs of maturing into a normal Republican administration.

The centrality of the Canada-US relationship to Canadians’ well-being means that managing the fallout from the Trump administration – to say nothing of ensuring that Trump-style populist sentiment does not gain a foothold in Canada – will be the Government’s most challenging file for the foreseeable future. Given the extreme potential downsides to fundamental changes in the relationship and the world order, the Government should a) work to create a united front in dealing with the United States by inviting the leaders of the main opposition parties to participate in crafting a grand strategy to confront these issues; and b) begin serious whole-of-government contingency planning for how Canada will navigate a world of “hard regions.” Even if Trump had lost the election, such planning would be prudent; his election makes it imperative.

Prepared by:
Blayne Haggart
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Brock University

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What is knowledge? Seven ground rules (and three helpful tips)

Posted on May 3, 2018 by bhaggart

I wrote this brief note for my 4th-year Global Political Economy class as a way to bring them up to speed on the knowledge economy. Because it’s intangible, and because it can raise all sorts of questions we usually get into via drunken 3 a.m. dude, is-anything-even-real discussions, it can be difficult to understand what knowledge is in a political-economy sense. Those of you who live this stuff will note the influences of Foucault, Berger and Luckmann, and Bourdieu, among many others, such as Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism and Powers and Jablonski’s The Real Cyber War (in Rule 7).

At the end, I’ve also added three helpful tips for thinking through the political economy of knowledge that follow from these ground rules.

I’m aware that I’m using “knowledge” and “information” in slightly different ways than others, but this distinction works for me. Comments welcome, on this and the rest of the list.

The seven ground rules

Although we have supposedly been in the “information age,” or the “knowledge economy” since the mid-1990s, these terms, as well as related concepts such as “data” and “technology” tend to be used loosely to describe many different phenomena. It can all be a bit confusing. In order to make sense of our object of study, we will observe the following seven ground rules.

  1. “Knowledge” and “information” refer to two different things.

In our phrasing, information refers to phenomena that exists in the world independent of whether or not someone observes it.

Knowledge refers to whatever phenomena humans decide to observe. The act of deciding to observe something, and then observing it, transforms information into knowledge. Put another way, knowledge involves giving social meaning to phenomena.

From this perspective, forms of knowledge include, but is not limited to, the following:

  • Technology (recognized ways of doing things);
  • Intellectual property (including drug compounds, music, the Golden Arches, and so on);
  • Culture (stories, giving meaning to sounds or colours applied to physical materials); and
  • Data collected by your Fitbit.
  1. Deciding that some piece of information counts as knowledge is a conscious, political act.

The world is filled with information, but we must make a conscious decision, informed by politics, culture, economics, morality, and so on, to turn this information into data, or knowledge. In other words, political debates over how to treat data that do not question whether this information should be collected in the first place, that assume this “data” was just hanging around to be collected, already has a profound bias toward collection and use.

  1. Knowledge is intangible.

Unlike material goods, which serve as the economic foundation of a manufacturing economy, commodified forms of knowledge (such as intellectual property, or personal data) do not have a material manifestation. One of the consequences of this fact, as we will see, is that knowledge-based economies function very differently than do manufacturing-based ones. For example, it is very easy, under current laws, for transnational corporations to engage in tax arbitrage by moving the “value” attributed to knowledge across borders. Similarly, the nature of knowledge production means that they produce much different types and levels of employment than traditional manufacturing companies, and have different spillover effects into the local economy. To understand their economic effects, they must be studied on their own terms. Furthermore, the characteristics of knowledge mean that currently it is easy to absorb smaller companies’ knowledge/data and export its value. However,

  1. There are always rules governing knowledge. They always benefit some groups and practices, and impede others.

People tend to assume that knowledge, absent legal protections, can be used by anybody – in other words, that it is non-rivalrous. For example, if there were no copyright laws, anyone could download as much music as they wanted, and could remix that music in any way they pleased.

This is not exactly correct. In practice, the creation and use of knowledge is always and everywhere subject to rules, both formal and informal. These rules determine what knowledge can be used, and by whom. Put most bluntly, there is no such thing as free speech, in the sense of “speech unrestrained by rules.”

At the most trivial level, these rules (such as grammar) render coherent the communication of knowledge. Social taboos against the use of profanity or the discussion of politics at Thanksgiving regulate speech, or a stand-up comic mimicking another’s act. The most formal rules are those such as intellectual-property or hate-speech laws, or governmental freedom of information acts. Speech and data use can also be governed by companies’ terms of service – for example, Twitter’s (unevenly applied) rules against hate speech. Rules and norms may be more or less permissive, but they are always there.

These rules will always benefit some groups over others. A private company that collects data on road use but is forced to turn it over to the state loses the monopolistic benefits it might gain from selling that data even as the state benefits, and vice versa.

  1. New knowledge builds on existing knowledge.

The creation of new knowledge invariably builds on existing knowledge, be it a well-footnoted textbook or a patented algorithm. This reality explains why intellectual property laws are always limited in time and scope, as we will see in Week 3. Failure to include these safety valves would provide current owners of knowledge with a de facto monopoly over the creation of new knowledge. Following from this observation, we can conclude that:

  1. Those who control the definition, creation, and use of knowledge also control the future direction and development of knowledge.

As a result, the control of knowledge shapes not only the economic development of society (e.g., by determining what new technologies get produced), but also its social, cultural and ideological development (e.g., by shaping who gets to tell what stories, and what stories get told).

  1. A society based on the exploitation of knowledge requires constant surveillance in order to function properly and efficiently.

A data-driven economy implies that the activities from which data are being extracted must first be monitored. Non-monitoring results in a loss of efficiency. In a competitive environment, for example, companies seeking maximum efficiency will be driven to maximize their surveillance of workers and production processes lest their competitors get the upper hand via more-intensive monitoring, as we will see in Week 9. Similarly, with respect to intellectual property, any unauthorized uses of IP imply a potential loss for the IP owner, which explains the enduring interest by copyright and trademark owners in coercing internet intermediaries such as Google to surveil their users for IP infringement. This is not only an economic issue; even liberal-democratic states like Canada have engaged in ever-growing surveillance of their citizens. The logic in the security and economic cases is the same: in a knowledge economy, anything less than total surveillance is seen as a potential threat or economic loss.

Three helpful tips

  1. Knowledge is always partial.
  2. Data is never unbiased.
  3. Technology is not a substitute for politics. You can’t tech your way out of politics.
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Regulating Facebook: Radical change or the status quo?

Posted on May 2, 2018 by bhaggart

(I’m currently travelling through Brazil interviewing people for a book project on knowledge governance, hence the untimeliness of this post. (What’s the opposite of the hot take? Cool reasoning?) But since I haven’t seen this opinion anywhere else, and because writing this helps me organize my own thinking, here it is.)

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about the disappointing backlash (as noted by David Murakami Wood and others) against April Glaser’s important and courageous article on why privacy advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation haven’t been more active in the policy debate over pervasive corporate surveillance. When activist firebrands like EFF and others, as Glaser notes, do not have “campaigns related to Facebook, or … proposals for any kind of legislation that would address the ways Facebook and other companies surveil your every mood – and which has been linked by the United Nations to genocide and by the New York Times to all degree of murderous unpleasantness around the world – something’s going on.

EFF and privacy activists play an important role in the debate over data and online regulation: they effectively set the boundaries for the limits of debate over these issues, a role that was first highlighted for me when I was interviewing people in DC for my dissertation on digital-copyright politics. So to have them warn against moving too quickly suggests to me that we should be thinking hard about what’s happening here.

To be clear, I don’t doubt that EFF and other privacy activists sincerely want to reform Facebook and the data-driven economy. And when it comes to state surveillance, you can’t really question their bonafides. It seems to me that a lot of the anger over Glaser’s (very fair and measured) article stems from the fact that in this instance – the debate over how to deal with corporate surveillance and the larger issue of the data-driven economy – EFF and other privacy activists/groups are acting like status quo actors when most people are used to thinking of them as principled (or radical, depending on where you sit) actors. They’re interested in tweaking the knowledge economy, not dealing with its underlying problems.

Here’s the political science. In a great 1993 article, Harvard political scientist Peter Hall argued that there are three types of policy changes. First-order policy changes are routinized and incremental – think adjustments to Facebook’s algorithm to fine-tune its results. Second-order changes involve a reordering of policy tools without changing the ultimate policy objectives. A good example here might be Zuckerberg’s recent announcement of changes to Facebook’s news feed to prioritize personal content. This category would also include calls for software designers and engineers to act more ethically when designing their products, or for Facebook to place a higher priority on individuals’ privacy. It’s a tweak to the system that leaves the system in place.

Third-order policy changes, finally, involve a wholesale reordering of ultimate policy objectives. This would be akin to banning targeted advertising, or forcing social networks to run as non-profits or some kind of heavily state-regulated utility. Or even nationalizing Facebook, perhaps.

An ideological debate

The nice thing about thinking in terms of second- and third-order changes is that it highlights clearly the policy debate at hand. It strongly suggests that the backlash against Glaser’s article is highly ideological and is centred on one of society’s most fundamental organizing principles: what is the appropriate relative balance between the state and the market in this area?

Glaser, I think, is arguing for third-order change, while EFF and others are calling for second-order change. Second-order change involves things such as data portability, strengthening individual consent, calling on engineers to act more ethically, and greater platform transparency.

These policy options are consistent with a suspicion of government regulation, an embrace of a minimally regulated free market, and an ideological belief that market competition will deliver the discipline necessary to sort out any privacy problems. In other words, the standard economic framework that’s been in vogue since the 1980s era of Reagan and Thatcher. You can’t get much more status quo than that.

Against this position, the argument that government does have a legitimate role to play in the regulation of the data-driven economy, and social networks, and that the market does not necessarily deliver optimal social results, is distinctly third-order. (I’d position myself here.) This position would note that there is a legitimate role for the state to act in cases of market failure, including dealing with monopoly power and negative externalities (such as contributing to genocide in the pursuit of profit.) In such cases, the market is incapable of working in a socially optimal manner.

This is the crux of the issue: which will deliver better results for society, the market or government regulation of a monopoly/imperfect competition situation?

Different societies, and different groups have different answers to this problem. As a Canadian, I’m very conscious that much of the commentary regarding how organizations like Facebook should be regulated reflect particular American notions on the appropriate state-market balance, and on what constitutes speech that do not necessarily hold in other countries or societies (or, indeed, amongst non-white, non-male US groups).

The big questions

What all this means is that there are two issues to consider. First, does this moment require second-order change, or is the situation serious enough to reconsider the fundamental nature of the data-driven economy and of social networks?

Second, the debate over how to regulate Facebook et al has no easy, technical solution. Setting the balance between the state and the market is one of the most fundamental choices a society must make. Not only does this type of debate not easily invite compromise, but such battles (think welfare state vs neoliberals) are intensely personal, vicious and – sorry, folks – political.

The debate over Facebook is inviting us to reconsider what type of society we want, not just with respect to novel hi tech data/surveillance problems, but also in more traditional terms. It’s actually kind of ironic that Silicon Valley, with its widespread belief that technology can render politics obsolete, may end up sparking a debate over the economic and social free-market consensus that has dominated US society (and the world) for the past four decades.

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