Disinformation and surveillance capitalism

I don’t love the term “surveillance capitalism.” It has “neoliberal” vibes to me. Which is to say it seems to stand as a catch-all phrase for whatever the invariably left-of-center speaker doesn’t like that in any way intersects with data collection and capitalism.

I do like Cory Doctorow. Honestly I couldn’t finish Walkaway, although I don’t read much fiction. But I like the way he explains how power works in tech. So I had to listen to Cory Doctorow on the True Dangers of Surveillance Capitalism.

I liked Doctorow’s point that many policy ideas around combatting "surveillance capitalism" actually further entrench tech monopolies. We should take a lesson from finance, where so much “consumer protection” regulation is written by and for incumbents to further entrench banking incumbents.

But it’s his passage on disinformation and radicalization which really struck me. It’s a topic dear to my heart. Earlier this year I wrote about it for Exponents: Why We’re F*cked on Disinformation.

Here’s what Cory had to say:

So one of the things that you talked about is radicalizing people. One of the things that you talked about is disinformation. They're really different kinds of harms and they have different theories. The idea that people are being radicalized because of their susceptibility to radicalization, I do talk about that a lot in the book.

What I say is that the primary thing that makes you susceptible to radicalization is trauma combined with the manifest untrustworthiness of institutions. If you've been harmed by institutional failures or people you love have been harmed, then the conspiracy that says that the institution should be torn down and nothing it says should be believed is credible.

And you're right that maybe if people who have been traumatized by, say, the opioid crisis and the lack of enforcement action by regulators that allowed it to kill more Americans than the Vietnam War, maybe if they never encountered anti-vax, with its story that the pharma industry wants to kill you and the regulators would let it, maybe they wouldn't be anti-vaxxers, right? But they would eventually end up in some dysfunctional space, not because of the particular views that people promulgate to them, or the ability to target people who are in self-identified skeptical groups or whatever, but because they've got a huge hole punched in their cognitive immune system by their lived experience.

Focusing on stopping wounded people from believing bad things is laudable, but it is reactive and incomplete. The only really meaningful intervention that we could make that would really change the situation is to make interventions in the system that produces the trauma to end monopolies which are ... Monopolies are conspiracies, right? Monopolies are corruption and corruption is conspiracy.

So to reduce corruption is to reduce the extent to which people are traumatized by the world around them, which is to give them the resilience that they need to fight back against conspiratorial beliefs.

When I was a baby libertarian, learning about regulatory capture really radicalized me. The financial crisis of 2008 drew me in, and regulatory capture was a system that seemed to have so much explanatory power. It’s unearned power.

I love Matt Stoller and Cory Doctorow because they are angry about and report on and explain regulatory capture in the tech industry. But I do think they are a bit hyperbolic when they describe tech companies as monopolies.

What I love about this passage above is that it creates a compelling moral case and posits an effective, humane solution.

Doctorow says monopolies are corruption and corruption is conspiracy. I think monopolies result from corruption. Monopolies result from regulatory capture and lax, captured enforcement of government officials who are supposed to be punishing companies for anti-competitive behavior. It’s unearned power. It’s powerful people using mechanisms like regulation to gain power over the less-powerful without having to create value for them.

We don’t have to argue about the exact definition of monopoly to admit that our government works with incumbents to fuck over consumers and that’s fucking traumatic. That causes people to lose trust in institutions, rightly. Trauma and erosion of trust leads to there being a market for disinformation. Like drugs and sex work, you cannot simply punish suppliers into compliance. If the market exists, it will be supplied. You have to reduce demand.

In all cases, much of the demand is driven by trauma.

The only effective, humane solution to disinformation is the same solution to the Opioid Crisis. You have to prevent and heal trauma. You have to make institutions trustworthy again by holding the powerful to account and removing the mechanisms they use to gain power without providing value.