Don't believe Obama's Big Tech criti-hype

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mostlysignssomeportents https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/682262353660755968/dont-believe-obamas-big-tech-criti-hype :

Obama’s Stanford University speech this Thursday (correctly) raised the alarm about conspiratorial thinking, and (correctly) identified that Big Tech was at the center of that rise — and then (wildly incorrectly) blamed “the algorithm” for it.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3382803-obama-points-finger-at-tech-companies-for-disinformation-in-major-speech/

Obama was committing the sin of criti-hype, Lee Vinsel’s incredibly useful term for criticism that repeat the self-serving myths of the subject of the critique. Every time we say that Big Tech is using machine learning to brainwash people, we give Big Tech a giant boost:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

You may have heard that the core of Big Tech’s dysfunction comes from the ad-supported business model: “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.” This is a little oversimplified (any company that practices lock-in and gouges on repair, software and parts treats its customer as the product, irrespective of whether they’re paying — c.f. Apple and John Deere), but there’s an important truth to it.

The hundred of billions that Google and Facebook (or Meta, lol) rake in every year do indeed come from ads. That’s not merely because they have a duopoly that has cornered the ad market — it’s also because they charge a huge premium to advertise on their platforms:

https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-platforms-and-digital-advertising-market-study

Why do advertisers pay extra to place ads with Googbook? Because Googbook swears that their ads work really well. They say that they can use machine learning and junk-science popular psychology (“Big 5 Personality Types,” “sentiment analysis,” etc) to bypass a user’s critical faculties and control their actions directly. It boils down to this: “Our competition asks consumers to buy your product, we order them to.”

This is a pretty compelling pitch, and of course, ad buyers have always been far more susceptible to the ad industry than actual consumers. Think of John Wanamker’s famous quote, “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” How wild is it that Wanamaker was convinced he was only wasting half his ad spending?!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence for the efficacy of surveillance advertising is pretty thin. When Procter and Gamble decided to stop spending $100,000,000 per year in online advertising, they saw no drop in their sales:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Every time someone tries to get an accounting of the online ad market, they discover that it’s a cesspit of accounting fraud — Googbook lie about how many ads they show, and to whom, and how much money changes hands as a result:

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-isnt-stealing-news-publishers-content-a97306884a6b

This is where criti-hype does Big Tech’s job for it. It’s genuinely weird to look at Big Tech’s compulsive lying about every aspect of its ad business and conclude that the only time these companies are telling the truth is when they assert that their products work really, really well and you should pay extra to use them.

After all, everyone who’s ever claimed to have invented a system of mind-control was either bullshitting us, or themselves, or both. From Rasputin to Mesmer, from MK Ultra to pick-up artists, the entire history of mind-control is an unbroken chain of charlatans and kooks.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#hypernormal

It’s entirely possible that Big Tech believes they have a mind control ray. Think of Facebook’s hilarious voter turnout experiment. The company nonconsensually enrolled 61m users in a psychological experiment to see if they could be manipulated into voting in a US election rather than staying home.

The experiment worked! 280,000 people whom the experimenters predicted would not vote actually voted! 280,000 people is a lot of people, right?

Well, yes and no. 280,000 votes cast in a single precinct or even a single state would have been enough to change the results of many high-salience elections over the past couple of decades (US politics are generally balanced on a knife-edge and tip one way or another based on voter turnout). But Facebook didn’t convince 280,000 stay-homers in one state to vote: they convinced 280k people out of 61m to vote. The total effect size: 0.39%.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11401

US elections are often close run, but they aren’t decided by 0.39% margins! The average US precinct has 1,100 voters in it. In the most optimistic projection, Facebook showed that they could get 4.29 extra voters per precinct to turn out for an election by nonconsensually exposing them to psychological stimulus.

Now, it’s possible that Facebook could improve this technique over time — but that’s not how effects in psych experiments usually work. Far more common is for the effectiveness of a novel stimulus to wear away with repetition — to “regress to the mean” as we adapt to it.

https://locusmag.com/2018/01/cory-doctorow-persuasion-adaptation-and-the-arms-race-for-your-attention/

Remember how interesting Upworthy headlines were when they arrived? Remember how quickly they turned into a punchline? Remember that the first banner ad had a 44% click-through rate!

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-first-ever-banner-ad-on-the-web/523728/

So Facebook performed a nonconsenusal psych experiment on 61m people and learned that they could improve voter turnout by 4 votes per precinct, with an intervention whose effectiveness will likely wane over time. What does that say about Facebook?

Well, on the one hand, it says that they’re a deeply unethical company that shouldn’t be trusted to run a lemonade stand, much less the social lives of 4 billion people. On the other hand, it shows that they’re not very good at this mind-control business.

That’s where Obama’s Stanford speech comes in. When Obama blames “the algorithm” for “radicalizing” people, he does Googbook’s work for them. If Mark Zuckerberg invented a mind-control ray to sell your nephew fidget-spinners, then Robert Mercer stole it and used it to make your uncle into a Qanon, then Zuck must have a really amazing advertising platform!

But like I said, Obama’s correct to observe that we’re in the midst of a conspiratorialism crisis, and Big Tech has a lot to do with it. But Obama — and other criti-hypers — have drastically misunderstood what that relationship is, and their own contribution to it.

Let’s start with the ontology of conspiracy — that is, what kind of belief is a conspiratorial belief? At its root, conspiracy is a rejection of the establishment systems for determining the truth. Rather than believing that scientists are telling us the truth about vaccine safety and efficacy, a conspiracist says that scientists and regulators are conspiring to trick us.

We live in an transcendentally technical world. You cannot possibly personally resolve all the technical questions you absolutely need to answer to be safe. To survive until tomorrow, you need to know whether the food safety standards for your dinner are up to the job. You need to know whether the building code that certified the joists holding up the roof over your head were adequate.

You need to know whether you can trust your doctor’s prescription advice. You need to know whether your kid’s teachers are good at their jobs. You need to know whether the firmware for the antilock brakes on your car is well-made. You need to know whether vaccines are safe, whether masks are safe, and when and how they’re safe. You need to know whether cryptocurrencies are a safe bet or a rampant scam.

If you get on a Southwest flight, you need to know whether Boeing’s new software for the 737 Max corrects the lethal errors from its initial, self-certified, grossly defective version (I live under the approach path for a SWA hub and some fifty 737 Maxes fly over my roof every day, so this really matters to me!).

You can’t possibly resolve all these questions. No one can. If you spent 50 years earning five PhDs in five unrelated disciplines, you might be able to answer three of these questions for yourself, leaving hundreds more unanswered.

The establishment method for resolving these questions is to hold truth-seeking exercises, which we call “regulation.” In these exercises, you have a neutral adjudicator (if they have a conflict of interest, they recuse themselves). They hear competing claims from interested parties — experts, the public, employees and executives of commercial firms. They sort through these claims, come to a conclusion and publish their reasoning. They also have a process to re-open the procedure when new evidence comes to light.

In 99% of these exercises, we can’t follow the actual cut-and-thrust of the process, but we can evaluate the process itself. Honest regulation is a black box (because most of us can’t understand the technical matters at issue), but the box itself can be understood. We can check to see whether it is sturdy, honest and well-made.

The box isn’t well made.

The regulatory process has been thoroughly captured, and is now more auction than truth-seeking exercise. Regulators themselves are drawn from the executive ranks of the companies they are regulating. How could it be otherwise? 40 years of antitrust malpractice has led to incredible concentration in nearly every industry:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

When five (or four, or two) companies control an industry, the only people who truly understand that industry are the executives at those companies. What’s more, all of those executives are awfully cozy with one another, even if they’re notionally bitter competitors. An industry with just a few companies is one in which most executives have worked at most of those companies at some point in their careers. They are godparents to each other’s children; they’re executors of each others’ estates. Hell, they’re married to each other.

https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/

This coziness — between competing companies, and between industries and regulators — makes regulation incredibly susceptible to capture. And since the administrative agencies (not Congress) have the most immediate and profound effect on your quality of life, this matters.

How did the Sackler family start the opioid epidemic that has killed 800,000 Americans (and counting) and walk away with billions? Their regulator slept on their transparently bullshit claims that their blockbuster drug Oxycontin was effective and non-addictive.

When someone tells you they won’t trust vaccines because Big Pharma is full of profit-maddened murderers who don’t care who they kill to make a buck, and their regulators are in on the scam — they’re not wrong.

From aerospace to pharma, agriculture to transportation, labor to the environment, privacy to broadband, the administrative branch has failed us again and again — and every time, the process itself is grossly, obviously rigged.

In Anna Merlan’s excellent Republic of Lies, she illuminates the relationship of trauma to conspiratorialism. When you are injured — especially by a corrupt process — you are no longer able to trust the process. But you still need some way of resolving complex questions you yourself aren’t qualified to answer:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

This produces a condition of epistemological chaos: you no longer trust the process, but you don’t have anything to fill it. Into this void rushes conspiratorialism, communities of people who attempt to answer the brutal logic of “caveat emptor” by “doing the research” themselves.

Obama presided over eight years of extremely consequential regulatory failings, starting with his decision to continue bailing out the banks instead of borrowers. That led to the foreclosure crisis, financial consolidation and the finance sector’s bid to corner the market on housing.

Obama’s FDA failed to stem the opioid crisis. Obama’s DoJ and FTC permitted waves of mergers and acquisitions, from Facebook/Instagram to Dow/Dupont to United/Raytheon to Heinz/Kraft.

Big Tech’s mergers and misdeeds during the Obama years were especially grave, and Obama himself was extremely deferential to Big Tech’s claims to be benign, efficient, and (especially) brilliant. When Obama accuses Big Tech of fueling conspiratorialism through algorithmic radicalization, he’s merely restating his belief in their genius.

But they’re not geniuses. As I explained in my 2020 book, “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” the role that surveillance plays in conspiratorialism is in finding people, not convincing people.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

That is the actual mechanic of Googbook’s advertising efficacy: by spying on us all the time, Big Tech is able to target ads. So if you want to sell cheerleading uniforms, Big Tech can show your ads to cheerleaders. That is a big change in advertising, but it’s not mind control.

The internet is a system that allows people to find each other — for better and for worse. If you hold a socially disfavored view (“gender is a spectrum,” “Black lives matter”), tech will help you locate others who share that view, without requiring you to go public with it and risk social sanction. Unfortunately, this also lets people who hold odious views (“Jews will not replace us”) do the same thing.

What’s more, the ad-tech parts of the system help grifters locate and target vulnerable people. If you want to sell anti-vax (which has its own line of products, from fake vaccine cards to quack remedies), ad-tech will put your message in front of people who participate in conspiratorial communities.

And yes, Big Tech makes people vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking — but not by bypassing their cognitive faculties to put outlandish ideas in their heads. Rather, Big Tech — like all monopolies — creates the conditions for epistemological chaos, by demonstrating, day after day, that our regulatory process is an auction, not a truth-seeking exercise. Every day that goes by without the US having a federal privacy law with a private right of action is a day that wins converts for conspiratorialism.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/stop-forced-arbitration-data-privacy-legislation

Upton Sinclair said that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Obama would prefer to believe that Big Tech has a mind control ray because the alternative is recognizing that deference to corporate power has plunged the world into political chaos.

This is where the centrist/liberal world overlaps with the far right. Recall that when England erupted with a racial uprising in 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron — a far right ideologue — insisted that the whole thing was down to “criminality, plain and simple.”

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/05/ideomotor-response/#qonspiracy

This is effectively mysticism. “Criminality” in this view, is some kind of defect that naturally occurs. It has no causal relationship to the outside world. It can’t be measured (though maybe if it could, we could precrime all the people who have it and put them in jail?). As a political philosophy, the idea that problems arise from “criminality, pure and simple” is about as useful as blaming problems on demonic possession.

Likewise Obama’s thesis, that Qanons are the result of Big Tech mind-control, and not material circumstances. It poses Big Tech’s leaders not as mediocre, sociopathic monopolists, but as evil sorcerers who must be tamed. It forecloses on weakening the companies by denying them their illegitimate market power, and it deflects any inquiry into why people are vulnerable to conspiratorialism.

All of this is to Big Tech’s advantage. If you’re Google, Obama’s condemnation of your powers of mind control is something you can add to your sales literature: “We have a data-advantage that makes our ads unstoppable — even Obama says so!”

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/11/halflife/#minatory-legend

Image: Shira Inbar https://shira-inbar.com/

Onezero https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (Your picture was not posted)

tiny house saga

life, the big update

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A long-awaited post of progress photos.

Starting with the most recent, and then i’m putting the long thing behind a cut: [image: image]

[image description: interior of the cabin, looking down from the sleeping loft at the expanse of the roof rafters and the floor below, where a door in the south wall, newly installed, stands propped open.]

I should tell the whole story. So in like…. what was it… October or November of 2019 I had the yurt I had been sleeping in during the summers for 3 years on my sister’s farm burn down due to a chimney failure with my woodstove. Plans began somewhat immediately to build a tiny house to replace it, and I’d found some free plans and my dad was plotting with me to use salvaged materials and such. The house was going to be really tiny, like 10x12 feet or so, with a tiny sleeping loft, and somewhat ramshackle probably; I’m sure we weren’t going to insulate it.

Then the pandemic hit, and shit got weird, and no progress was made. I spent 2020 sleeping in my sister’s guest room whenever I was at the farm, since nobody else could visit anyway. And then my father died suddenly, in December of 2020, and it seemed silly to mourn the concept of the tiny house, but I was also really grieving the experience of doing a project with my Dad, which i’d really been looking forward to– my nephews were both old enough that he was starting to teach them welding and such, and I’d thought the boys and Dad and me could spend some time on this and would have a good time and just– it was really awful to realize that of course now it’ll never happen.

Without me saying anything, my brother-in-law, the one who owns the farm with Farmsister, on whose property all of this was supposed to have taken place, approached me and said we could still build a house, and that he’d help instead. He has construction experience, but is so busy I hadn’t wanted to expect his help except for maybe some of the big work. But he said no, he’d step in.

In March of 2021 we took a family trip– me, BIL, Mom, my older sister, and one of her sons– to Jamaica, VT, where the Jamaica Cottage Shop https://jamaicacottageshop.com/ has its fabrication yard. We looked at an example and I decided to buy their Vermont Cottage plans, in view C https://jamaicacottageshop.com/shop/veromont-cottage-c-living/, for the 16x24 size.

Yeah, it’s a far cry from the tiny shack I’d planned to build, but I had resolved that if i was going to involve BIL, it was going to be something that was nominally up to code, built with new materials, and would be usable for decades, rather than some weird fun little project that would be full of spiders and eccentricity. The increase in cost wasn’t that much with the increase in size (once i committed to using new rather than salvaged materials), so I went for it.

Immediately we had to revise the plans, but BIL was confident. In May I bought the first lumber, to build the skids, and along with it, a battery-operated electric nail gun. We built the skids, and also excavated the site, and backfilled it with gravel sourced from a natural gravel deposit on the farm; I also spent the summer picking buckets of rocks out of the fields and hauling them over a few at a time. I probably moved about 1 ton of rocks by hand, and then BIL carried over about 15 more tons with the tractor.

I ordered several thousand dollars’ worth of supplies, lumber and others. The insulation and windows and doors and the like were stashed in a spot that flooded in July, when a flash flood caused a large amount of damage to the farm, but nothing was lost. In August we finally got the skids set and began to assemble the platform upon which the whole thing was going to be built. [image: image]

[image description: a grid of lumber sits atop cinder blocks in a cleared space among greenery, with trees in the background.]

We were delayed by a labor shortage on the farm, but mostly by a delay in the delivery of the lumber from the mill I’d ordered it from, a local place that had apparently not adequately maintained their equipment and so was shut down for weeks at a time for maintenance.

But eventually we had everything. And at the end of September, my other brother-in-law showed up, with a lot of woodworking and finish carpentry experience, and also some free time, and with him working steadily for a week, and a number of assorted characters rotating through, we made rapid progress. [image: image]

[image: farm-BIL, a tall thin white man in a khaki baseball cap, kneels on a wooden platform, screwing down a sheet of plywood. To his right stands Army BIL, a well-built white man in a camoflage baseball cap, hands on hips, looking up at the skyline, atop the plywood-sheathed platform.]

In a matter of days, Army-BIL had done the rough framing, and had started putting in the interior wall siding. (The cabin is constructed inside-out, with the framing, then the interior siding, then rough 2x4 nailers, then insulated wallboard, and only then a final moisture barrier with rough board-and-batten siding overtop.) [image: image]

[image description: the rough-framed walls of a house stand, the nearest one faced with tongue-and-groove interiorsiding with a window and door cut out, and inside on a scaffold stands a boy in a blue t-shirt (my older nephew, then 12), holding up a pair of rafters in their approximate rough final places, while Army-BIL stands on a ladder making measurements inside the house.]

By the end of the last week of September, my older sister’s sons and husband had, with some help from various of the rest of us, framed in the rafters as well. [image: image]

[image: my older sister, a tall thin white woman in a dark gray ballcap worn very low over her face what are you doing, stands holding several boards; to her left, her husband affixes the other end of one of the boards to another rafter. Below her, two boys in blue shirts, her sons, are climbing on the scaffolding.]

And there progress halted for the winter, but for some incremental improvements– I stapled hardware cloth around the base of the platform, burying the bottom of the hardware cloth as deep as I could manage to deter groundhogs, rats, mice, or raccoons from making their home under the house, and we got the rafters done and then secured big billboard tarps over them for the winter.

In March, we took the tarps back off, and it looked like this.

[image description: looking into the house from the east, sun shining brightly, rafters highlighted against blue sky, the walls are all covered in the interior siding of pine, and there’s a scaffolding inside still set up.]

We got the nailers on all around the lower storey, and slotted the insulation panels in– I discovered that I had just the tool for the job to cut the panels, since they’re too thick for utility knives– yes, that lady’s leg shaped knife I got for my birthday. Worked like a charm, am delighted. Once that was up, we could wrap the whole house in moisture barrier– well, most of it, just not the part above the deck, which we’d have to work on separately.

[img description: the house from one corner, showing silver-colored panels labeled DuPont wedged in among the wooden nailers surrounding the windows.]

The roof needed a layer of sheathing, and Dude helped me with that. i found out he hates ladders, which i somehow had never learned thusfar in 19 years with him. Now I Know. Mostly, though, BIL did all that work, and in one uncomfortably epic day we finished the roof sheathing and then drafted my sister into helping us put the rubber Tyvek roofing underlayment over the top of it. The loft was still not enclosed, but we’d framed in the window, and so we left the underlayment long and stapled it down over that missing half-wall, to make the whole shebang weatherproof.

Then we got the door on that side installed, and it was largely weatherproof.

[image description: the porch side of the house, with green Tyvek strips messily stapled down at angles, in the upper part, and then on the lower floor a white steel door with a window sits, not quite closed, with no doorknob.] We installed a doorknob too, because otherwise the door wouldn’t stay closed.

In April we came back and pulled up the Tyvek, trimmed it off, and put the interior siding up on the upper storey. Once we had that, we installed all the windows– well, the 7 downstairs windows, and then later in the week we managed to get the upper storey window installed too.

[img description: from the interior of the house, with the loft foreshortened so you can’t tell it’s a loft, farm-BIL is visible with his legs, standing on a ladder, showing through the open doorway and his head and shoulders through the window he’s installing in the upper storey. The roof is visibly made of sheathing boards, the gaps between them illuminated green where the roofing underlayment is on the outside of the sheathing.]

Farmsister and I came and fixed that upper storey window so it’s a bit straighter, once we got the housewrap on and correct. it’s tricky because what do you level it to?? Hard to say. Anyway. It’s in there.

We got the second door installed too, in the south-facing wall. And that’s where we’ve left it– still needs the metal roof on the exterior, and the insulation and interior siding on the ceiling on the interior; still needs soffits put in, as the eaves are open to the elements and the breeze (and bugs) can sorta whistle through there at will; still needs a floor installed over the rough plywood subflooring; still needs conduit put in for what plumbing and electrical there may or may not be. But as it is, I’m going to see about at least building myself a sleeping nest in the loft; I don’t want to move furniture in, since it still needs to have scaffolding put up for the ceiling and the more I move in now the more I have to move out later, but the loft is largely done and move-in-ready enough to be getting on with.

(I may need a mosquito net, if I spend any time in there.)

I leave you with a view from the loft.

[image description: in the foreground there’s a little corner of the loft floor, but then the rest of the frame is looking out into the house. The south-facing door is propped open with a rock, extra scaffolding is stacked against the west wall, the light is coming green through the roofing underlayment showing in the cracks between the sheathing, and you can see two lovely 3x4-foot windows in the west wall.] (Your picture was not posted)