Evan Malgrim at The Baffler writes—Socialized Media—What will it take to remake Facebook and Twitter in the public’s interest?
EARLIER THIS MONTH, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and an absent Google representative found themselves before the Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC), where they endured an uncomfortable grilling on topics ranging from the manipulation and value of user data to how one might police the “truth.” These lines of questioning inevitably generated vague speculation about regulation, though it’s difficult to imagine the scope of federal action that would be required in a serious effort to confront the crisis unfolding on the backs of privatized platforms.
It’s popular to refer to digital platforms as town squares, but the shopping mall is a more apt metaphor: they are built to approximate the participatory feel of an open market, while their corridors are ruthlessly designed for the purposes of encouraging consumption and maximizing profit. Depression, anxiety, hate-mongering, fear, and conspiratorial untruths are all acceptable outcomes so long as they are expressed, consciously or otherwise, in the service of growth.
These platform structures are, more and more, the dominant modes of abstract social organization: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have a combined market capitalization larger than the French GDP, and in an earlier hearing, Mark Zuckerberg struggled to name a single serious competitor when pressed on his company’s monopoly status. It’s clear that platform capitalism thrives at the expense of public discourse, and that its monarchs are more entrenched than ever. Still, its horizons remain murky. [...]
If we’re to imagine a meaningful path for Congress to take, it’s worth considering the context of the recent SIC hearing. The previous month, conspiracy news site Infowars was systematically cut from Apple, Spotify, Facebook, YouTube, and a host of other platforms (Twitter followed suit after Alex Jones went on a Periscope rampage and berated its CEO at the hearing itself). The ensuing conversation was predictably frustrating, but enlightening insofar as it revealed how people conceptualize digital platforms. Ostensibly right-wing Infowars journalist Millie Weaver, for example, argued that Facebook has no right to ban private individuals, on the grounds that it is “public” rather than “privately owned.”
She was roundly mocked for appearing not to realize that shareholders privately own publicly traded companies, but her ignorance betrayed a disconnect between this reality and a popular—if subconscious—understanding of digital platforms as public commons for speech and association.
One solution that would align with this idea of social media as a public commons: handing collective power over digital platforms to the people they connect. We usually associate cooperative models with local, small-scale apps for “gig” economy laborers that more closely resemble traditional workers, but the idea of converting mass platforms into user cooperatives has been floated before— including at last year’s Twitter shareholder meeting. Calling for a report on the feasibility of selling Twitter to its users and speculating that such a governance structure could “set more transparent accountable rules for handling abuse” and “re-open the platform’s data to spur innovation,” it’s no surprise the proposal only received 5 percent of the shareholder vote. But what if financial interests weren’t given a choice?
Those who advocate for cooperativizing platforms on the scale of Facebook, Twitter, or Amazon often gesture toward the success of consumer coops like Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI), a retailer of outdoor equipment and the nation’s largest such coop. But the strongest foundation of the cooperativized platform would be a recognition that voluntary human participation—rather than capital, design, or code—is the source of all value generated within their architecture, meaning their structures would more closely resemble worker coops than boutique grocers. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
We sometimes benefit way more from being lied to than the person lying to us.” ~~Mokokoma Mokhonoana
xI have a difficult time believing that hundreds of gymnasts could be molested by a single osteopathic physician over decades, and not report it https://t.co/DxgQoJ5DrR
— Kerry Howley (@KerryHowley) September 26, 2018On this date at Daily Kos in 2004—Violence in Iraq Belies Claims of Calm, Data Show:
One of the best foreign correspondents writing for the SCLM is Rajiv Chandrasekaran (WaPo). if I'm not mistaken, he actually tells us at times he can't get out and about in Iraq, so parts of the stories are from Iraqis who can. Check this out from the Akron Beacon Journal's public editor discussing the paper's reporting of 'bad news':
"I used to jump in a car and drive out to places like Fallujah and Baqubah to write about attacks, to get a sense of what was really happening on the ground. No longer," Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, said in an online chat last week. "The roads are too dangerous, the threat of kidnapping too great."
Imagine another reporter admitting to that? Judith Miller, take notes.
LINK TO DAILY KOS STOREOn today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Gee whiz, another day spent on Kavanaugh. And what a day! Greg Dworkin rounds up the stories and polls. What might have motivated Kavanaugh's behavior? Hatch hates federalism, loves the "Federalist Society." Speaking of... WTF is their deal?
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