MSP77 [] The Ultimate Disruption: Breaking Up Big Tech

This is a download from BFM89.9, the Business Station. This is Tech Talk made possible by TM1. It's fun Friday, my name is Jasandu. Whatever we cover on MSP, we always seem to be pulled back to the tech giants and social media.

On the final part of our disrupted World Series, I like the name, we return to Silicon Valley to ask Matt, is it time to break up the giants? So Matt, is it time to break up the giants? I don't even have any effort you've put into the questions in the intro this week. I'm trying to be disruptive.

Well, I guess that's one of the points that we've been trying to make over the past few weeks. I thought the point of last few weeks show was to get as many Game of Thrones references into the show as possible. And that is actually the perfect segue for me to make a Game of Thrones analogy. You could look at the current season of the show as being disruptive in the sense that it's disrupting any sense of narrative plot development.

We're seeing character arcs being disrupted, geographical distances disrupted, and even weaknesses and flaws the show has spent seasons creating, being disrupted out of CGI'd existence with the waft of a pixel. And it's no different here in the real world. Disruption has become this shorthand for being mean and rude. It's a bit like saying, no, I didn't poke you in the eye.

I simply changed the way you see the world. When you're the one who's been disruptive in that way, it is just a poke in the eye. Sorry, but this week we're talking about the giants getting the poke in the eye rather than the free folk. See, the Game of Thrones references are just going on and on.

Yeah, this week we're touching on one of the biggest disruptions of them all. Should we break up the tech giants? Or can we break up the tech giants? Should we subject them to more oversight?

In which case, who is going to administer that oversight? And in whose interest are they going to be operating? So to say that it's a complicated topic is to disrupt the meaning of complicated. We might as well say right here at the start, you know, it's probably one of those insurmountable challenges.

It's a bit like that Churchill quote about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the others, which, you know, of course I'm paraphrasing. Whatever solutions to be come up will be bad. Well, they don't have to be in theory, but as we often find that things that don't have to be bad in theory, they turn out to be bad in practice. And I've a feeling that however we manage to fix this problem with the tech companies, we're going to end up with a fairly awful compromise.

It's like most things, you know, it's much easier to prevent something than to try and cure it. So modern medicine can give you a new kidney, but you're not likely to break any Olympic records after you've had one. At least today is sure there does seem to be some wider consensus out there. You haven't just plucked this topic out of the ether, right?

Well, even that wider consensus is a little bit worrying. So US presidential contender Elizabeth Warren has made the breakup of companies like Facebook a central part of her campaign plan. That's fine, but it really would be preferable to see this kind of broader opinion on the issue. It isn't something that we want to become a political item and for people to kind of struggle because it's already a them and us struggle.

It's about the consumers, it's about companies, but this could make it a them and them and us issue because you've got politicians and consumers and companies. And that's not going to be healthy for us because politics is already so partisan and compartmentalised. This isn't an issue that should fall into one of those boxes. Are we already seeing a partisan approach?

Yeah, and that's quite funny. You know, President Trump has railed against Facebook and Twitter for being unfair to him and to conservatives in general. So they aren't so much in favour of limiting the power of social media networks as amplifying the voices of the people they want to hear more from. I know you have a slightly different take on the freedom of speech argument.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think we have any right to be on any of those services. There isn't a freedom of speech argument. You know, we've taken for granted the fact that we can go onto Facebook or Twitter or Reddit and spout pretty much any nonsense that we like. Social media has kind of turned into this down at Hill diner at 4am on a Sunday morning.

It's a great place to go to a failure belly with cheap greasy food, but a terrible place to go for information and advice because it's full of crazy people. Maybe that's an aspect that the companies should have come down on earlier. And it is something we've talked about before. These companies are not social services.

They're private, profit-seeking companies. And they don't have to entertain me or my views. Oh, which is again something we've covered many times before? Yeah, we have the rights on those services that they allow us to have.

And as we've said in the past, because we're their users, not their customers, we don't even have that many of those rights. They get to ban one of us for one set of actions and then promote others for exactly the same set of actions. I think there was a story this week that an anti-abortion advocacy group in the US had managed to benefit from $150,000 of free Google ads. You know, these are the kind of over sites and discrepancies that get people riled up.

I mean, imagine what this show could do with $150,000 of free ads. Nothing good. Exactly. And that's essentially my mission in life.

You know, Google's motto used to be don't be evil. At Matt's point, it's doing no good. And you can take that to mean whatever you want. In a sense, though, we are asking a lot of tech companies to do something impossible.

Well, you want Facebook to charge you no money, but at the same time you want it to protect your privacy, check the spread of fake news, ensure your kids or your parents don't see anything untoward and still somehow make a profit. If you gave those as a set of constraints for a group of, like, up and coming entrepreneurs in a hackathon, I'm pretty sure that everyone would fail. If one of those companies did start to make money, I think it would be fair to assume that they weren't following those constraints to the letter, because how could they be? It's an impossible recipe.

It sets you up to fail or disappoint. And for most tech companies, the reality is going to be both. Well, we talk about how difficult is it to fat check, but slightly Wikipedia managed to do it without a profit incentive. I mean, it's a quandary, isn't it?

I mean, clickbait and hatred are generally a lot more fun to consume than a summary of the Byzantine Empire. And certainly, Wikipedia isn't trying to moderate information at the same rate or scale as the social media companies. And it generally isn't as time sensitive. I can wait a couple of days to find out about minotaurs, whereas it doesn't make much sense to show people a photo of what I had for breakfast last Tuesday.

In some ways, we shouldn't think of Facebook or Apple or Huawei or as anything but this kind of alpha test, a subroutine for the next leap forward in human development. Not evolution? Well, it would be nice to think that we'd evolve some kind of frog-like, nictitating membrane over our eyes to filter out digital eyes. But that's probably a couple of million years away, which is quite literally the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.

But this idea of living in a digital age, it's so new. We still haven't mastered living in cities after hundreds of years or managed to spread the rewards of development more equally. Future map will probably regard us as one of any number of lost generations, some kind of transitional people whose idols, the leaders of the Fortune 500, will end up as nothing more than some ones and zeros in a quantum computer's redundant memory. Is that how you see our lives as a kind of a damage limitation exercise for future generations?

Well, I know that sounds pretty bleak. And by the way, data mining suggests that bleak is one of the more popular words on this show. But no, I wouldn't call you a liar. You know, this technology is disruptive in the same way that the Industrial Revolution was disruptive, or the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age.

Huge cultural and economic transformations are always, always messy. And how much of our current frustrations do you think are down to tone deafness and the disconnection? Well, that's where we come back to disruption. And after the break, we'll try and frame it in a slightly different way.

There was a hugely insightful piece by Jenny Morozov, another name that crops up quite regularly on the show, on the Guardian website where he kind of more masterfully summarizes some of the ideas that we've been running around for the past few weeks. But I'll give you an example of the disconnect from something that happened to me earlier this week. Now, I needed to transfer all my data from one cloud storage platform to another. I won't bore you with the details.

Partly it was to do with trying to reduce the number of different cloud services I'm paying for, which already out numbers my fingers and toes. I've heard that you're more than your fair share of those. Well, I'm from rural UK. It's normal for us to have toad hooves.

We just call it selective breeding. Anyway, more digression. So I signed up for this service to help me sync the data between these two drives. And I got the usual welcome message in my inbox.

And I got this, hi there. I'm blah, blah, blah, the co-founder of blah, blah, blah. And your login email is... So, you know, most of the things you sign up for online send you a hello, a welcome message.

That's normal. But you can see how this sounds sinister. I'm the founder of a tech company and I have your email. That's not a friendly sounding message.

And that's what I mean about disconnect and tone deafness. So somebody at that company has decided that this is an acceptable or even desirable way to talk to their customers, their consumers, to tell them that they have a record of your identity. And that's just one of the many reasons we have a problem with big tech. And to the credit, when I mentioned this on Twitter, the company did get in touch with me.

And said they would put my suggestions under consideration. Wow, we'll see what that happens. When we come back, actually, I've got no idea what's going to happen. Matt has generally disrupted my sense of editorial flow.

So we'll see what happens after this. 89.9. You're listening to TechTalk made possible by TM1. Before Friday, materializes BFM 89.9.

You're listening to TechTalk made possible by TM1. And we're back. My name is Jasandu together with CulturePops Night Amatage. Before the break, we talked about some stuff.

It was all very disruptive. And now for, I guess, something else? Well, I'll let you gather your thoughts by digressing again. So as we all know, there are approximately 7.5 billion people in the world.

Now, of those around 2,000 people are billionaires. That equates to about 1 billionaire for every 3.75 billion people. Now, a report on the Vox website this week alleges that in San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley's wealth, 1 in 11,600 people is a billionaire. Wow.

And that is a staggering statistic. It shows you how skewed and concentrated this kind of distortion of power, and this group of power breakers actually is. And that's disruptive? Because it shows you who is reaping the benefits of disruption, and it's a very small group of people in a very limited set of locations.

Conspiracy theory. Heaven's no. No, I don't think they're acting together. I think they probably hate each other more than they hate everyone else.

You know, it's like, oh, your G500 only has carpeting. Mine has Italian marble floors. You know, that kind of thing. No, I think it's more about the perception of disruption.

And what we said a couple of episodes ago about us, the people who are the non-millionaires and billionaires, we're the ones whose lives end up being disrupted. Because in a lot of ways, it's the potential of technology to improve our lives that's being intercepted or disruptive, depending on how you look at it. So let's go back to something we were talking about earlier, which was clickbait and ad revenue. We were talking about that, Mel.

OK, just stay with me a little bit longer. I promise you after today's show, we'll do something easy, like cosmic rays and bit flips. As I like to mention, we're not Facebook or Twitter customers. Clickbait is an easy way to get us to produce the milk that they sell on to their actual customers.

So what do you do if you're a company looking for eyeballs and money? What do you do if shady or covert political groups want to spend hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars with your company, especially when the content they're promoting is going to help keep those customers glued and commented? Even if those things are making us miserable and angry. But that's one of the fundamental mistakes we make.

You know, why do we assume that Facebook or Twitter or Microsoft or Apple is there to make us happy? That they're to keep us connected, perhaps they're there to keep us informed. If powerlifting camels and meal prepping tutorials count as keeping us informed, it's the same reason that we follow celebrity gossip. It's not because it makes us happy.

We envy their lives and hope they'll have some kind of scandal or downfall. I mean, it's likely in the way I use Twitter. After five years away, it was the sheer amount of information that feeds into this show that brought me back to it. It's one of the easiest ways to get in touch with people and to sound out their opinions.

It's useful, but it doesn't make me happier. I stay happy by limiting the amount of time I spend on those networks. But you're not the typical user? No, and it's not because I'm any smarter than any other user.

I mean, I might be a little bit more cynical, but also, you know, I don't forget what Twitter is. It's a tool that's run in its own self-interest. And that's the thing about self-interest. It is naturally exclusive.

There was an op-ed in the New York Times this week written by a former British deputy prime minister called Nick Glick. And he now happens to be the vice president of global affairs and communication at Facebook. He's one of the top PR guys. Yeah, essentially.

Now, I'm not going to comment on the revolving door between public service and industry. I'm sure people have their own views on that. But Mr. Clegg wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times on May the 9th, titled Breaking Up Facebook is not the answer.

So I just want to have a quick look at that. I'll quote a little bit, which relates to areas that Facebook is requesting that lawmakers legislate more tightly. So we concentrate on four key areas, reducing the amount of harmful content that people post. Protecting democratic elections, supporting unified rules for data privacy, and giving individuals more ability to easily move their data.

In all these areas, we believe that governments should make the rules consistent with their own principles, not those of private companies like Facebook. I think Nick Clegg also points out that very few industries as governments for more regulations. And that's perfectly true. So Nick Clegg also admits in the same article that the company makes almost all of its money from digital advertising.

And what he certainly isn't advocating for is protection of user data from advertisers or from political parties. And that would be something that's simpler to do. We talk about the problem of protecting elections. All these companies could simply stop taking money for any form of political advertising.

That doesn't require legislation. And of course, Nick Clegg is a former legislator. And that's one of the reasons that I think very few of the current crop of global lawmakers has any real answer to the problems that we're facing at the user end of this technology. I feel like we're drifting from the original premise, disruption and big tech.

Are you more committed to your sense of editorial integrity or this show? You can't have both. I'm not going to get you to answer that question. Hell, not that he would make the slightest difference to what you're about to say.

Exactly. And that's what disruption is actually about. It's about protecting that veneer. That's the thing.

Breaking up those big tech companies will protect us from them, but not necessarily from the problems that they're allowing to proliferate. So break up Facebook. And there's still a risk of fake news because the people touting that news will move to whatever network systems we're using. We're already seeing that transfer.

I mean, India is often referenced. Fake news and disinformation coming to platforms like WhatsApp and other messaging apps around the world. And that's even more difficult because it's decentralized, it's encrypted, and it's almost undetectable. That doesn't mean that the company isn't moving to combat these problems.

No, I think it's been reported that Facebook is deleting up to 2 million WhatsApp accounts a month to try and combat spam and fake news and all of these things. And this week, we also found out that an Israeli-based intelligence company had developed software that targeted vulnerability in WhatsApp, which we'll be talking about more in Geeks' works after the break. But these are societal and industry flaws. They're not company-related ones.

So for example, breaking up Amazon won't necessarily bring retailers back to the high streets or the malls. It does empower Amazon's rivals. Exactly. What we're seeing is a change in our own behavior.

It's easier to buy things online than to go out to a store. And that's why these changes essentially have to originate from us. Lawmakers have to be more beholden to us than business interests. That's true.

And I mentioned Evgeny Morozov before the break. So I would suggest anyone who's enjoyed this show so far. That's one of you, I guess. Go and read his Guardian article titled, rather self-explanatoryly.

It's not enough to break up big tech. We need to imagine a better alternative. I'll post a link to that in the show now. What do you mean by change?

Well, I'll try and do a mix of Morozov and me and see if it makes any sense. It's not going to. We have to not be beholden to tech companies or to people who are beholden to the tech companies. The problem is the problem, rather, to an infrastructure problem, whether it's a failing government service, a distribution network, or an information technology system, is not to bring in a corporate monopoly to replace it.

I think Morozov refers to Brazil's president calling for Google or Amazon to take over the country's personal service. That's not a solution. So we want to see more empowerment? Yeah, we were sold the idea of technology as a tool for social change and mobility.

We were sold on the idea of citizens generalists harnessing the power of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. What we got a company's concentrating the power away from us and retaining the profits. So the medium has changed, but the status quo remains the same. What has been disrupted is the transformative power of that technology.

In his piece, Morozov refers to it as survival tech. In what sense? That we're all afraid. Look at the fake use spreading via WhatsApp in India or the vaccine and health workers who have been targeted in Pakistan.

We use this technology to hunk it down, to build physical and digital bunkers, to use these tools to communicate with people who are like us and exclude those people who aren't like us. As Morozov also says, breaking up Facebook or Google or Amazon isn't enough to overcome these problems. It might be a start. That's something that you have to decide.

But that's why I talked about us being an alpha test for a digital future. If we want a different or what we consider to be a better future, we're going to have to imagine it and make it happen. Well, it's easy to see how to do it. It is.

There's another great piece on Vox this week. It's about people demanding more privacy and then going out and buying devices that give it away. So go figure. We need other solutions and ideas.

Morozov calls it rebel tech. I'm not sure I agree with the terminology, but I agree with the idea. Google's vision of the future, a giant data absorbing desert. That needn't be our vision.

But to combat that vision, we have to actually have one. We have to have ideas to counter those other visions. And it's your ideas? No.

People have to figure out what they want for themselves. Of course, I have vision, which would be me living in Superman's eyes palace. But it's not enough to be obstructionist to say that you're against what's coming. You have to have something to work towards.

Now, your vision of the future might be a world of decentralized, sub-sustaining villages. Maybe it's a people focused one world order. It could be hyper market driven or compassionately socialist. It doesn't matter what I think.

Any more than it matters what Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin or Jeff Bezos or the fander of that data service thing. It only matters what you think. And you have to disrupt the world by telling other people. All right.

That concludes our four part series. Four part series on disruption and the ultimate disruption. You can find out all the transcripts and links to the show on couchpot.com. You can get a podcast on BFM.com or you can get it on Spotify as well.

We'll be back with Geeksquox after this BFM 89.9. The Business Station.