User Power

-- By DavidRatnoff - 24 Dec 2021

At the conclusion of this course, we discussed several impossibilities: we can’t expect government to stop watching us; we can’t expect industry to stop harvesting data (or in the self-indulgent term, “self-regulate”); and we can’t remain free in the status quo. We have heard that immaculate self-discipline in the use of anonymity tools can frustrate data collection efforts. But we also discussed that these individual efforts are not scalable, and they are subject to escalating monitoring efforts by intelligence agencies. So, that isn’t a solution either.

Your Logic Is No Good Here

Logical solutions are failing us. Our impulse is to correct the institutions surrounding us, which fail to protect us and our ability to think for ourselves. We want to elect better leaders, advocate for better policy, and wage a (timid) resistance against monopoly power. But these impulses have amounted to nothing. Facebook and Google maintain their duopoly on digital advertising; Congress avoids Section 230 reform with a 10-foot pole (and thereby immunizes Big Tech’s use of collected data to discriminate in the provision of employment, housing, and financial services), and Zoom—with its impressive suite of surveillance tools––dominates the global video chat market.

Technical expertise is not the limiting factor. Throughout this course, we have encountered adequate, if not superior, alternatives to proprietary technology. LibreOffice? . Jitsi. Firefox. All of the computing capabilities to participate in contemporary society, but without a watchful gaze from above. Why aren’t the masses flocking? LibreOffice enjoys 0.11% market share, compared with Microsoft Office’s 65.45%. Firefox’s user base has plummeted in recent years, leaving it with 3.45% of the desktop, mobile, and tablet browser market in 2021. Techspot, a news site focused on the tech industry, speculated that Firefox may be a casualty of a possible Google’s misinformation campaign. In one confirmed report, the Google Chrome store falsely warned users that downloading the Microsoft Edge browser was a security risk. The argument that people will see the inherent goodness of a product and adopt it is unsupported. Instead, people are constantly bombarded by advertising, misinformation, even disinformation, in sly attempts by corporations to attract and retain users. The psychology of advertising and the false impression of user choice give users permission to stay put, locked in an architecture of control. Why? Because it works.

Beat Them at Their Own Game: A Thought Experiment

Those on the side of freedom of thought might consider adopting the same tactics as our adversaries. Why? Because nothing else is working. The existing playbook is ineffective, and time is about to expire.

We know disinformation works.

Consider disinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent scholarship found that consuming “scientific-sounding misinformation” distributed online was most associated with individual unwillingness to take a vaccine protecting against the coronavirus, if available. In a survey of 8,001 participants in the United States and the United Kingdom, researchers identified a 6.2-6.4% decline in their intent to obtain the vaccine after being treated/presented with misinformation. Notice, it was scientifically-sounding information that captured participants. Participants wanted to do what is right, but they were incapable of distinguishing right from wrong.

As new variants continue to spread rapidly, vaccination remains the best defense against death and severe hospitalization. Yet, disinformation stands in the way. Similarly, we have diagnosed the evils of surveillance capitalism and conducted research to confirm the effectiveness of restrictive licensing and encryption-phobia in cementing the current regime. The obvious answer is to exit this system. But disinformation stands in the way.

Apple gave us a device ecosystem and assured us we would be safe inside its walled garden. But, hackers have proven capable of getting inside. And despite this vulnerability, Apple continues to dominate the personal computer and mobile phone markets. This mismatch is illogical, if you believe consumers value their security or privacy. But it makes sense when you understand the environment in which consumers “make choices.” It is an environment full of misinformation. It turns out that consumers are content with convenience and the comforts of familiarity. Indeed, as the COVID misinformation study suggests, people will believe anything, true or false, if presented in an effective way.

So, let’s get them to believe Apple is evil and that a better way is possible. People don’t read, they don’t attend lectures, they don’t watch C-SPAN. They do scroll on their devices, unendingly. Why not deploy bots to generate organic content criticizing tech company practices? Or even to generate disinformation? That tactic worked for Russian operatives seeking to suppress voter turnout in the 2016 U.S. election. Or perhaps we should design bots to share free software resources with the users on proprietary platforms, like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Search. These bot-generated-content-ads could contain scientific-sounding jargon about the dangers of proprietary software and include links to free software alternatives to the very products the audience is currently using. Why not replace infinite scroll technology with infinite pop-up technology. Click the X and another box appears. Whack-a-mole for free thought! This isn’t a hacker art project, but rather a possibility to reach a new future.

To borrow a theory from the world of policymaking, which itself is borrowed from biology, punctuated equilibrium theory holds that policy shifts only occur when issues are salient and widely discussed. A disinformation-style campaign about the dangers of the closed Internet might achieve the salience required to push users onto safer platforms. Rather than conceptualizing this maneuver as a deceitful enterprise, we might ask a different question. How can we know that users are satisfied in their current digital environments? The simple answer is that it is impossible. All the relevant user data is hoarded by proprietary tech companies. So, we are left to imagine, and ask what if, while the proprietary Internet cements its Gramsci-style hegemony. The next generation of users will be unable to query if another Internet is possible. We have that luxury and that obligation.

This thought experiment directs us to the heart of the solution: we can manipulate user behavior for change.

Okay, but you haven't said what you consider to be the optimal market share for free software, or even for the particular tools you think we should measure, because you have measurements. If you consider the important point to be making the information about how to compute with instead of against freedom durable, so that the choices will always be available, you might want to ask, seriously, whether we haven't already achieved that. Understanding the depth and breadth of the free software ecology, and the quite different prevalence numbers you would find if you were to ask what technically-oriented young people (in their tens of millions on Earth, know about and use) might change your estimation of what is not working. Perhaps you should ask about Ubuntu and Debian and everything that arises towards and descends from them. That woiuld be at any rate one good place to start.

---

You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:

• #Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, DavidRatnoff
• #Set DENYTOPICVIEW = TWikiGuest

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.