[P2P-F] Fwd: Excellent reflection: Notes from an emergency

Mon May 22 20:10:14 CEST 2017

a must read on fighting the feudal internet

------ Forwarded message ----------
From: Brian K Murphy <brian at radicalroad.com>
Date: Mon, May 22, 2017 at 6:07 PM
Subject: Excellent reflection: Notes from an emergency
To: B Murphy <brian at radicalroad.com>

Notes From An Emergency

Maciej Cegłowski |* Idle Words* | 17th May 2017

*{This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 10, 2017, at
the re:publica
<https://re-publica.com/en/dub16/page/republica-2017-berlin> conference in
Berlin}*

The good part about naming a talk in 2017 ‘Notes from an Emergency’ is that
there are so many directions to take it.

The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic
nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of
online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to
advance an authoritarian agenda.

Depending on where you live, the rise of this new right wing might be
nothing new. In the United States, our moment of shock came last November,
with the election of Donald Trump.

The final outcome of that election was:

65.8 million for Clinton
63.0 million for Trump

This was the second time in sixteen years that the candidate with fewer
votes won the American Presidency. There is a bug in the operating system
of our democracy, one of the many ways that slavery still casts its shadow
over American politics.

But however tenuously elected, Trump is in the White House, and our crisis
has become your crisis. Not just because America is a superpower, or
because the forces that brought Trump to power are gaining ground in
Europe, but because the Internet is an American Internet.

Facebook is the dominant social network in Europe, with 349 million monthly
active users. Google has something like 94% of market share for search in
Germany. The servers of Europe are littered with the bodies of dead and
dying social media sites. The few holdouts that still exist, like Xing
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XING>, are being crushed by their American
rivals.

In their online life, Europeans have become completely dependent on
companies headquartered in the United States.

And so Trump is in charge in America, and America has all your data. This
leaves you in a very exposed position. US residents enjoy some measure of
legal protection against the American government. Even if you think our
intelligence agencies are evil, they're a lawful evil. They have to follow
laws and procedures, and the people in those agencies take them seriously.

But there are no such protections for non-Americans outside the United
States. The NSA would have to go to court to spy on me; they can spy on you
anytime they feel like it.

This is an astonishing state of affairs. I can’t imagine a world where
Europe would let itself become reliant on American cheese, or where Germans
could only drink Coors Light.

In the past, Europe has shown that it's capable of identifying a vital
interest and moving to protect it. When American aerospace companies were
on the point of driving foreign rivals out of business, European
governments formed the Airbus consortium
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus>, which now successfully competes
with Boeing.

A giant part of the EU budget goes to subsidize farming
<https://europa.eu/european-union/topics/agriculture_en>, not because
farming is the best use of resources in a first-world economy, but because
farms are important to national security, to the landscape, to national
identity, social stability, and a shared sense of who we are.

But when it comes to the Internet, Europe doesn't put up a fight. It has
ceded the ground entirely to American corporations. And now those
corporations have to deal with Trump. How hard do you think they'll work to
defend European interests?
The Feudal Internet

The status quo in May 2017 looks like this:

There are five Internet companies—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and
Facebook. Together they have a market capitalization just under 3 trillion
dollars.

Bruce Schneier has called this arrangement the feudal Internet
<https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/the_battle_for_1.html>.
Part of this concentration is due to network effects, but a lot of it is
driven by the problem of security. If you want to work online with any
measure of convenience and safety, you must choose a feudal lord who is big
enough to protect you.

These five companies compete and coexist in complex ways.

Apple and Google have a duopoly in smartphone operating systems. Android has
82% of the handset market
<https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/16/14634656/android-ios-market-share-blackberry-2016>,
iOS has 18%.

Google and Facebook are on their way to a duopoly in online advertising.
Over half of the revenue
<http://fortune.com/2017/01/04/google-facebook-ad-industry/> in that
lucrative ($70B+) industry goes to them, and the two companies between them
are capturing all of the growth (16% a year).

Apple and Microsoft have a duopoly in desktop operating systems. The
balance is something like nine to one in favor of Windows
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Desktop_and_laptop_computers>,
not counting the three or four people who use Linux on the desktop, all of
whom are probably at this conference.

Three companies, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, dominate cloud computing. AWS
has 57% adoption <https://rcpmag.com/articles/2017/04/01/aws.aspx>, Azure
has 34%. Google has 15%.

Outside of China and Russia, Facebook and LinkedIn are the only social
networks at scale. LinkedIn has been able to survive by selling itself to
Microsoft.

And outside of Russia and China, Google is the world’s search engine
<https://www.statista.com/statistics/220534/googles-share-of-search-market-in-selected-countries/>.

That is the state of the feudal Internet, leaving aside the court jester,
Twitter, who plays an important but ancillary role as a kind of worldwide
chat room.

Google in particular has come close to realizing our nightmare scenario
from 1998, a vertically integrated Internet controlled by a single monopoly
player. Google runs its own physical network, builds phone handsets,
develops a laptop and phone operating system, makes the world’s most
widely-used browser, runs a private DNS system, PKI certificate authority,
has photographed nearly all the public spaces in the world, and stores much
of the world’s email.

But because it is run by more sympathetic founders than Bill Gates, because
it builds better software than early Microsoft did, and because it built up
a lot of social capital during its early “don't be evil" period, we’ve
given it a pass.
Security

It's not clear that anyone can secure large data collections over time. The
asymmetry between offense and defense may be too great. If defense at scale
is possible, the only way to do it is by pouring millions of dollars into
hiring the best people to defend it. Data breaches at the highest levels
have shown us that the threats are real and ongoing. And for every breach
we know about, there are many silent ones that we won't learn about for
years.

A successful defense, however, just increases the risk. Pile up enough
treasure behind the castle walls and you'll eventually attract someone who
can climb them. The feudal system makes the Internet more brittle, ensuring
that when a breach finally comes, it will be disastrous.

Each of the big five companies, with the important exception of Apple, has
made aggressive user surveillance central to its business model. This is a
dilemma of the feudal internet. We seek protection from these companies
because they can offer us security. But their business model is to make us
more vulnerable, by getting us to surrender more of the details of our
lives to their servers, and to put more faith in the algorithms they train
on our observed behavior.

These algorithms work well, and despite attempts to convince us otherwise,
it’s clear they work just as well in politics as in commerce. So in our
eagerness to find safety online, we've given this feudal Internet the power
to change our offline world in unanticipated and scary ways.
Globalism

These big five companies operate on a global scale, and partly because they
created the industries they now dominate, they enjoy a very lax regulatory
regime. Everywhere outside the United States and EU, they are immune to
government oversight, and within the United Statesl the last two
administrations have played them with a light touch. The only meaningful
attempt to regulate surveillance capitalism has come out of the European
Union.

Thanks to their size and reach, the companies have become adept at
stonewalling governments and evading attempts at regulation or oversight.
In many cases, this evasion is noble. You don’t want Bahrain or Poland to
be able to subpoena Facebook and get the names of people organizing a
protest rally. In other cases, it’s purely self-serving. Uber has made a
sport of evading all authority, foreign and domestic, in order to grow.

Good or bad, the lesson these companies have drawn is the same: they need
only be accountable to themselves.

But their software and algorithms affect the lives of billions of people.
Decisions about how this software works are not under any kind of
democratic control. In the best case, they are being made by idealistic
young people in California with imperfect knowledge of life in a faraway
place like Germany. In the worst case, they are simply being read out of a
black-box algorithm trained on God knows what data.

This is a very colonial mentality! In fact, it’s what we fought our
American War of Independence over, a sense of grievance that decisions that
affected us were being made by strangers across the ocean.

Today we're returning the favor to all of Europe.

Facebook, for example, has only one manager in Germany
<https://digiday.com/media/german-publishers-facebook/> to deal with every
publisher in the country. One! The company that is dismantling the news
industry in Germany doesn’t even care enough to send a proper team to
manage the demolition.

Denmark has gone so far as to appoint an ambassador
<https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/02/24/denmark-appointing-ambassador-big-tech/>
to the giant tech companies, an unsettling but pragmatic acknowledgement of
the power relationship that exists between the countries of Europe and
Silicon Valley.

So one question (speaking now as an EU citizen): how did we let this
happen? We used to matter! We used to be the ones doing the colonizing! We
used to be a contender!

How is it that some dopey kid in Palo Alto gets to decide the political
future of the European Union based on what they learned at big data boot
camp? Did we lose a war?

The lack of accountability isn’t just troubling from a philosophical
perspective. It’s dangerous in a political climate where people are pushing
back at the very idea of globalization. There's no industry more globalized
than tech, and no industry more vulnerable to a potential backlash.

China and Russia show us that the Internet need not be a world-wide web,
that it can be subverted and appropriated by the state. By creating a
political toolkit for authoritarian movements, the American tech giants may
be putting their own future at risk.
Irreality

Given this scary state of the world, with ecological collapse just over the
horizon, and a population sharpening its pitchforks, an important question
is how this globalized, unaccountable tech industry sees its goals. What
does it want? What will all the profits be invested in?

What is the plan?

The honest answer is: rocket ships and immortality.

I wish I was kidding.

The best minds in Silicon Valley are preoccupied with a science fiction
future they consider it their manifest destiny to build. Jeff Bezos and
Elon Musk are racing each other to Mars. Musk gets most of the press, but
Bezos now sells $1B in Amazon stock a year
<http://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-bezos-idUSKBN1772ZQ> to fund Blue
Origin. Investors have put over $8 billion into space companies
<http://fortune.com/2017/02/20/space-startups-travel-satellites/> over the
past five years, as part of a push to export our problems here on Earth
into the rest of the Solar System.

As happy as I am to see Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos fired into space, this
does not seem to be worth the collapse of representative government.

Our cohort of tech founders is feeling the chill breath of mortality as
they drift into middle age. And so part of what is driving this push into
space is a more general preoccupation with ‘existential risk’.

Musk is persuaded that we’re living in a simulation, and he or a fellow
true believer has hired programmers
<http://www.businessinsider.de/tech-billionaires-want-to-break-humans-out-of-a-computer-simulation-2016-10?r=US&IR=T>
to try to hack it.

Peter Thiel, our most unfortunate German import, has built a survival
retreat for himself in New Zealand
<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich>.

Sam Altman hoards gold in Big Sur
<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny>.

OpenAI, a religious cult thinly disguised as a research institution,
has received
$1B in funding
<http://www.vcpost.com/articles/112005/20151213/elon-musks-open-reached-1-billion-funding-hopes-develop-artificial.htm>
to forestall the robot rebellion.

The biggest existential risk, of course, is death, so a lot of money is
going to make sure that our big idea men don’t expire before the world has
been received the full measure of their genius.

Google Ventures founded the very secretive life extension startup Calico
<https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603087/googles-long-strange-life-span-trip/>,
with $1.5B dollars in funding. Google loses $4B a year on its various “moon
shots”, which include life extension. They employ Ray Kurzweil, who
believes we’re still on track for immortality by 2045
<https://www.inverse.com/article/29010-singularity-2029-sexy>. Larry
Ellison has put $370M to anti-aging research
<http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/27/anti-aging-technology-larry-ellison-peter-thiel-sergey-brin.html>,
as anybody would want to live in a world with an immortal Larry Ellison.
Our plutocrats are eager to make death an opt-out experience.

Now, I’m no fan of death. I don't like the time commitment, or the
permanence. A number of people I love are dead and it has strained our
relationship.

But at the same time, I’m not convinced that a civilization that is struggling
to cure male-pattern baldness
<http://www.businessinsider.de/samumed-wants-to-regenerate-hair-bone-cartilage-2017-3>
is ready to take on the Grim Reaper. If we’re going to worry about
existential risk, I would rather we start by addressing the two existential
risks that are indisputably real—nuclear war and global climate change—and
working our way up from there.

But real problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more
abstract problems that haven't been sullied by contact with reality. So
they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to
give Earth an earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally
benevolent God-like AI, rather than figuring out how to put ethical guard
rails around the more pedestrian AI they are introducing into every area of
people's lives.

The tech industry enjoys tearing down flawed institutions, but refuses to
put work into mending them. Their runaway apparatus of surveillance and
manipulation earns them a fortune while damaging everything it touches. And
all they can think about is the cool toys they’ll get to spend the profits
on.

The message that’s not getting through to Silicon Valley is one that your
mother taught you when you were two: you don’t get to play with the new
toys until you clean up the mess you made.

The circumstances that have given the tech industry all this power will not
last long. There is a limited time in which our small caste of tech nerds
will have the power to make decisions that shape the world. By wasting the
talents and the energies of our brightest people on fantasy role play, we
are ceding the future to a more practical group of successors, some truly
scary people who will take our tools and use them to advance a very
different agenda.

To recap: the Internet has centralized into a very few hands. We have an
extremely lucrative apparatus of social control, and it's being run by
chuckleheads.

The American government is also being run by chuckleheads.

The question everybody worries about is, what happens when these two groups
of chuckleheads join forces?
The Winter

For many Americans, the election was a moment of profound shock. It wasn’t
just Trump's policies that scared us. It was the fact that this unserious,
cruel, vacant human being had been handed the power of the American
presidency.

Scariest to me was how little changed. No one in the press or in social
media had the courage to say "we fucked up." Pundits who were stunned by
the election result still made confident predictions about what would
happen next, as if they had any claim to predictive power.

After the election both Facebook and Google looked at the mountains of data
they had collected on everyone, looked at the threats the Trump
Administration was making—to deport 11 million people, to ban Muslims from
entering the country—and said to themselves, "we got this.”

The people who did worry were tech workers. For a moment, we saw some
political daylight appear between the hundreds of thousands of people who
work in the tech sector, and the small clique of billionaires who run it.
While the latter filed in to a famously awkward meeting
<https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/20/14022284/trump-tech-summit-silicon-valley-hypocrisy>
with Trump and his children at the top of his golden tower, the former
began organizing in opposition, including signing a simple but powerful
pledge <http://neveragain.tech/> to resign rather than help Trump fulfill
one of his key campaign promises: barring Muslims from the United States.

This pledge was a small gesture, but it represented the first collective
action by tech workers around a political agenda that went beyond
technology policy, and the first time I had ever seen tech workers come out
in open defiance of management.

A forest of new organizations sprung up. I started one, too, called Tech
Solidarity, and started traveling around the country and holding meetings
with tech workers in big cities. I had no idea what I was doing, other than
trying to use a small window of time to organize and mobilize our sleepy
industry.

That feeling of momentum continued through when Trump took office. The Women's
March <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Women%27s_March> in January
brought five million people out onto the streets. America is not used to
mass protests. To see the streets of our major cities fill with families,
immigrants, in many cases moms and daughters and grandmothers marching
together, that was a sight to take your breath away.

Hard on the heels of it came the travel ban, an executive order astonishing
not just in its cruelty—families were split at airports; in one case a mom
was not allowed to breastfeed her baby
<http://www.scarymommy.com/immigration-ban-separates-breastfeeding-11-month-old-from-mother-for-hours-at-airport/>—but
in its ineptitude. For a week or two lawyers were camped out at airports,
working frantically, sleeping little, with spontaneous efforts to bring
them supplies, get them funding, to do anything to help. We held a rally in
San Francisco
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/business/trump-travel-ban-apple-google-facebook.html>
that raised thirty thousand dollars from a room of a hundred people. Some
of the organizations we were helping couldn’t even attend, they were too
busy at the airport. It didn’t matter.

The tech companies did all they could to not get involved. Facebook has a
special 'safety check <https://www.facebook.com/about/safetycheck/>'
feature for exactly this kind of situation, but never thought of turning it
on at airports. Public statements out of Silicon Valley were so insipid as
to be comical
<https://venturebeat.com/2017/01/29/amazon-apple-facebook-google-microsoft-netflix-and-others-tepid-responses-to-trumps-muslim-ban/>.

Employees, however, were electrified. It looked like not only visitors but
permanent residents would be barred from the United States. Google
employees staged a walkout
<https://www.theverge.com/google/2017/1/30/14446466/google-immigration-protest-walkout-trump-googlers-unite>
with the support of their management; Facebook (not wishing to be left
behind) had its own internal protest a couple of days later, but kept it a
secret. Every time the employees pushed, management relented
<https://www.buzzfeed.com/blakemontgomery/mark-zuckerberg-trump-immigration?utm_term=.iaDVgQg9kW#.prXqNWN9zR>.
Suddenly top executives were going on the record against the travel ban.

People briefly even got mad at Elon Musk
<https://www.buzzfeed.com/priya/people-are-canceling-tesla-orders-because-elon-musk-is-worki?utm_term=.hlxbWnWz63#.fqweyYy5d1>,
normally a darling of the tech industry, for his failure to resign from the
President’s advisory council. The silent majority of tech employees had
begun to mobilize.

And then... nothing happened. This tech workforce, which had gotten a taste
of its own power, whose smallest efforts at collective action had produced
immediate results, who had seen just how much sway they held, went back to
work. The worst of Trump’s travel ban was blocked by the court, and we
moved on. With the initial shock of Trump in office gone, we now move from
crisis to crisis, but without a plan or a shared positive goal.

The American discomfort with prolonged, open disagreement has set in.

When I started trying to organize people in November, my theory was that
tech workers were the only group that had leverage over the tech giants.

My reasoning went like this: being monopolies or near-monopolies, these
companies are impervious to public pressure. Boycotts won't work, since
opting out of a site like Google means opting out of much of modern life.

Several of these companies are structured (unusually for American
corporations) in such a way that the board can't control the majority of
votes. At Google and Facebook, for example, the ultimate say goes to the
founders. And since Google and Facebook are the major online publishing
outlets, it's unlikely that the press would ever criticize them, even if
journalists were capable of that kind of sustained attention.

So that leaves just one point of leverage: employees. Tech workers are hard
to find, expensive to hire, take a long time to train, and can have their
pick of jobs. Tech companies are small compared to other industries,
relying heavily on automation. If even a few dozen workers on an ops team
acted in concert, they would have the power to shut down a tech giant like
Google. All they had to do was organize around a shared agenda.

Workers seemed receptive to the argument, but confused about how they could
make collective action a reality. Trade unions in the United States have
been under attack for decades. There is almost no union culture in
technology. Our tech workers are passive and fatalistic.

So here I am in Europe, wondering, what on Earth can we do?

And I keep coming back to this idea of connecting the tech industry to
reality. Bringing its benefits to more people, and bringing the power to
make decisions to more people.
Closing the Loop

After Communism collapsed in Poland, I started visiting the country every
eight months or so. Even in the darkest period of the 1990’s, it was
striking to see people's material standard of living improve. Suddenly
people had cars, phones, appliances. These gains were uneven but broad.
Even farmers and retirees, though they were the hardest hit, had access to
consumer goods that weren’t available before. You could see the change in
homes and in public spaces. It was no longer necessary for office workers
in Kraków to change their shirts at lunchtime because of soot in the air.
The tap water in Warsaw went from light brown to a pleasant pale yellow.

For all the looting, corruption, and inefficiency of privatization, enough
of the new wealth got through that the overall standard of living went up.
Living standards in Poland in 2010 had more than doubled
<http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/graphs/2014-10-06_poland_success_story_en.htm>
from 1990.

In the same time period, in the United States, I’ve seen a whole lot of
nothing. Despite fabulous technical progress, practically all of it
pioneered in our country, there’s been a singular failure to connect
<http://www.epi.org/files/charts/img/5527.png> our fabulous prosperity with
the average person.

A study just out shows that for the median male worker in the United
States, the highest lifetime wages came if you entered the workforce in 1967
<https://fguvenendotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/gks_lifetime_history_2017_apr_nber.pdf>.
That is astonishing. People born in 1942 had better lifetime earnings
prospects than people entering the workforce today.

You can see this failure to connect with your own eyes even in a rich place
like Silicon Valley. There are homeless encampments across the street from
Facebook headquarters
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/31/facebook-campus-homeless-tent-city-menlo-park-california>.
California has a larger GDP than France
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_U.S._states_and_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)>,
and at the same time has the highest poverty rate in America
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2016/09/28/why-does-california-have-the-nations-highest-poverty-rate/#3320bf1412d9>,
adjusted for cost of living. Not only did the tech sector fail to build up
the communities around it, but it’s left people worse off than before, by
pricing them out of the places they grew up.

Walk the length of Market Street (watch your step!) in San Francisco and
count the shuttered store fronts. Take Caltrain down to San Jose, and see
if you can believe that it is the richest city in the United States
<http://www.techtimes.com/articles/103831/20151106/san-jose-california-is-now-richest-city-in-america-how-it-got-to-the-top.htm>,
per capita. The massive increase in wealth has not connected with a
meaningful way with average people’s lives even in the heart of tech
country, let alone in the forgotten corners of the country.

The people who run Silicon Valley identify with progressive values. They’re
not bad people. They worry about these problems just like we do; they want
to help.

So why the failure to do anything?

Like T.S. Eliot wrote <https://allpoetry.com/The-Hollow-Men>:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

As I said earlier, the tech industry hates messy problems. We'd rather
dream up new problems we can solve from scratch.

One reason nothing happens is a culture of tax evasion. There’s a folk
belief in American business that if you pay full taxes, you’re not doing
your fiduciary duty, and your board will fire you.

Apple now has a quarter trillion dollars offshore
<http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/09/apple-borrowing-billions-while-sitting-on-huge-overseas-cash-pile/>
that it refuses to put into direct productive use in the United States.
Apple boasts that its products are designed in California—they will sell
you a $300 book
<https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MLXF2LL/A/designed-by-apple-in-california-102-x-128-inches>
called *Designed By Apple In California*. But they do their damndest to
make sure that California never sees a penny of their overseas profits.

You in the EU are all too familiar
<http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/apple-google-taxes-eu/> with this brand of
tax evasion. Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft have all been under
investigation or in court on charges of evading European taxes.

Another reason good intentions don't translate is that capitalism,
especially venture capital, doesn’t work very well when there is vast
wealth inequality.

The richest 20 people in tech
<http://www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/careers/the-thirty-richest-techies-in-world-3505886/>
control a fortune of half a trillion dollars in personal wealth, more than
the GDP of Sweden.

This small subculture of wealthy technophiles promotes investment into
luxury goods for rich people, or into “mom as a service” types of companies
that cater to spoiled workaholics in the tech industry. And so we end up
with things like a $120M juice squeezer
<https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/04/juicero-teardown-hints-at-a-very-expensively-built-product/>,
or three startups competing to deliver organic baby food
<https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/little-spoon-is-a-baby-food-delivery-service-hoping-to-fly-where-others-flopped/>.

Silicon Valley brings us the worst of two economic systems: the
inefficiency of a command economy coupled with the remorselessness of
laissez-faire liberalism.

One reason it’s been difficult to organize workers in the tech industry is
that people have a hard time separating good intentions from results. But
we have to be cold-blooded about this.

Tech companies are run by a feckless leadership accountable to no one,
creating a toolkit for authoritarianism while hypnotized by science-fiction
fantasy.

There are two things we have to do immediately. The first is to stop the
accelerating process of tracking and surveillance before it can do any more
harm to our institutions.

The danger facing us is not Orwell, but Huxley. The combo of data
collection and machine learning is too good at catering to human nature,
seducing us and appealing to our worst instincts. We have to put controls
on it. The algorithms are amoral; to make them behave morally will require
active intervention.

The second thing we need is accountability. I don’t mean that I want Mark
Zuckerberg’s head on a pike, though I certainly wouldn't throw it out of my
hotel room if I found it there. I mean some mechanism for people whose
lives are being brought online to have a say in that process, and an honest
debate about its tradeoffs.

I’m here today because I believe the best chance to do this is in Europe.
The American government is not functional right now, and the process of
regulatory capture is too far gone to expect any regulations limiting the
tech giants from either party. American tech workers have the power to
change things, but not the desire.

Only Europe has the clout and the independence to regulate these companies.
You can already point to regulatory successes, like forcing Facebook to
implement hard delete on user accounts. That feature was added with a lot
of grumbling, but because of the way Facebook organizes its data, they had
to make it work the same for all users. So a European regulation led to a
victory for privacy worldwide.

We can do this again.

Here are some specific regulations I would like to see the EU impose:

   - A strict 30 day time limit on storing behavioral data.
   - The right to opt out of data collection while continuing to use
   services.
   - A ban on the sale or transfer of behavioral data, including to
   third-party ad networks.
   - A requirement that advertising be targeted strictly to content, not
   users.

With these rules in place, we would still have Google and Facebook, and
they would still make a little bit of money. But we would gain some
breathing room. These reforms would knock the legs out from underground
political ad campaigns like we saw in Brexit, and in voter suppression
efforts in the US election. They would give publishers relief in an
advertising market that is currently siphoning all their earnings to
Facebook and Google. And they would remove some of the incentive for
consumer surveillance.

The other thing I hope to see in Europe is a unionized workforce at every
major tech company. Unionized workers could demand features like ephemeral
group messaging at Facebook, a travel mode for social media, a truly secure
Android phone, or the re-imposition of the wall between Gmail and
DoubleClick data. They could demand human oversight over machine learning
algorithms. They could demand non-cooperation with Trump.

And I will say selfishly, if you can unionize here, it will help us
unionize over there.

If nothing else, we need your help and we need you to keep the pressure on
the tech companies, the Trump Administration, and your own politicians and
journalists, so that the disaster that happened in the United States
doesn't repeat itself in Germany.

You have elections coming soon. Please learn from what happened to us.
Please stay safe.

And please regulate, regulate, regulate this industry, while you can.

Thank you.

•••••••••••••

-- 
*Click here for Peter's recent writings*
<https://www.dropbox.com/s/o8s52g2y905rq6w/WatermanGmailSignaturePanel%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20Updated.docx?dl=0>

-- 
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#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
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