Democracy on the Internet? By Emily Schofield
This publication is the written and extended version of a performative lecture given in form of a video at Central Saint Martins on the 18th of February 2016. It is part of a brief and annual performative lecture event, Free Criticism, supervised and curated by Joshua Trees.
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The publication is a work in progress that will grow as I gather more information and find new ways of presenting that information in a comprehensible and meaningful way. For now, it is a rather informal transcript of my lecture and during the next weeks I will add chapters on journalism and ethics, offer suggestions of how to make a change to the situation we are in, as well as update the sporadic citation.
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Democracy in the digital sphere is a topic that I have been interested in for a while and that grew out of a fascination with the fact that we are still, after about 25 years, completely overwhelmed by the internet. Especially when it comes to understanding the digital sphere in a physical sense, we are usually baffled. We understand its importance and we understand some of its problems, but a deeper analysis of why the internet is so important and where its prob-
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lems come from is usually lost. The NSA scandal has shed a light on the extent to which our privacy is violated on the web. However, it is important to understand that a key player is not just the government, but digital media and tech corporations. This publication aims to give a quick and precise overview and insight into some of the main problems we are currently facing with democracy on the internet.
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25 years ago the internet was seen as a groundbreaking democratic platform. A place for the people. A place to communicate freely, voice opinions, trade information and content and so forth. Expectations for the internet were high during its early years: there was going to be a flow of communication unthinkable before then, corporations would lose their manipulative powers over consumers and upstart
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competitors would be given a chance, governments would no longer be able to operate in secrecy and education would become available to everyone, not just the elite.1 Robert W. McChesney recalls that The early internet was not just non-commercial, it was anticommercial. Computers were regarded by many of the 1960s and 70s generation as harbingers of egalitarianism and cooperation, not competition and profits. Apple's Steve Wozniak recalls that
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everyone at his 1970s computer club „envisioned computers as a benefit to humanity - a tool that would lead to social justice.“2
Considering Apple is exploiting factory workers in Asia and miners in Africa in order to produce those ‘tools of social justice’, one has to wonder what happened to the early internet enthusiasts. Do they still believe in the justice and powers of the internet or were they, somewhere along the way, swept up by the seductive comfort and prestige of
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Silicon Valley?
In some ways, of course, the internet managed to deliver. We have experienced an unthinkable flow of communication (and with it, an unthinkable flow of problems with being able to communicate all the time with everyone) and we have seen social change aided by digital communication. The best example for this are, of
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course, the uprisings during the Arab Spring. They were only made possible by communication and organization amongst activists on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Occupy Wall Street similarly owes its success to digital communication. And regardless of active protest, information has never been so accessible to so many people and in many beautiful ways the internet helps us to make sense of the enormity of our world, to overcome distance and
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to get in touch with the rest of the world out there. That, in essence, is social change. However, one thing that was not imagined 20 years ago was the commercialization of the internet. Nobody had imagined that all this communication and connection and sharing of content would come at a great personal cost: the loss and exploitation of our personal and private
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data. Nobody had imagined that everytime you send a message to your friend or comment on an article it would fuel the pockets of a few, extremely rich and powerful corporations. Nobody had imagined that this in turn would serve to create the same unfair gap between the mighty and the powerless that had already been created in our ‘real’ world. 20 years ago this was unimaginable and simply unacceptable.
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In fact, in 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, rejected advertising as part of Google. They said We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. The better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed by the consumer to find what they want.3
Last year Google made 67.39 Billion US Dollars in advertising.
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And in fact throughout the last ten years Google has been accused multiple times of manipulating their service in favour of their own products or products of the highest paying advertisers.4 In other words, they had done exactly what they said they wouldn‘t.
And it get's worse: a lot of large digital media companies are currently
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lobbying in the US against net-neutrality. It means that they'd like to be able to do things like slow certain competitive websites down and charge money for having other websites load faster. So if you're trying to buy a book on a small second hand bookstore's website and the site takes ages to load, you might switch to search for the book on Amazon instead. Amazon's website will probably load way faster because they can afford
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to pay for that privilege. Thus the gap between newcomers and independents and the established large corporations would become even bigger and even our basic right to access websites would become corrupted by commercialism. When it comes to digital media corporations, the important thing to understand is that we are not their customers. We are their product and advertisers are their customers.5
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This is the only reason services are offered to us ‘for free’ on the web. What we need to understand is that they are not free, we are paying for them with our data and, ultimately, with our freedom. Astra Taylor writes Others use the term ‘social factory’ to describe the Web 2.0, envisioning it as a machine that subsumes our leisure, transforming lazy clicks into cash. ‘Participation is the oil of the digital economy’, as Scholz is fond of saying. The more we comment and share, the
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more we rate and like, the more economic value is accumulated by those who control the platforms on which our interactions take place.6
Take Facebook for example. Sure, Zuckerberg wants us all to be much closer too each other, to connect to each other, virtually spend time with each other, chat and comment and like and share with each other. But most of all he wants to collect the money he gets from each and every one of those shares and li-
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kes and comments. He wants to sell them to advertisers, so that in turn our newsfeeds are interrupted by advertising that always seems slightly too personal.
Mark Zuckerberg gave us a groundbreaking communication platform that lets us stay in touch with friends we've made years and years ago or lets us get back in touch with people we met but never saw again.
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It lets us share photos with each other, write each other messages, communicate in groups or share interesting information with each other. It also, silently, over the years, let corporations join in on the fun, make facebook pages for themselves, offer prizes if you ‘like’ their pages so their advertising can sneak into your newsfeed just that little bit more.
They like to pretend they're cool
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people who understand our thoughts and problems and not multibillion-dollar enterprises.
Facebook used to be a place that was purely social and not about buying, selling, consuming and advertising. But facebook, too, is not user friendly, it's advertising friendly.
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If you've ever tried to delete your wall on Facebook, you'll know. It's nearly impossible, because facebook has conveniently left out a 'delete all' option. Commercialism has taken the internet away from us. It is selling us freedom – freedom of speech, freedom of unlimited communication, freedom of information – while at the same time taking freedom away from us.
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With the commercialisation of the internet comes the loss of privacy as a natural consequence. Tech companies don't exploit our personal and private data for the fun of it, they do it to earn money from it. And we are letting it happen. We have, over the last years, become aware of the full extent of ownership over data on the web. In other words, we know we don't have the rights over our own images and messages. As investigative journalist David
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Rose puts it You need to know one simple truth. You have no privacy with regard to your electronic communications. Nothing you do online, via a wireline telephone or over a wireless device is outside the reach of government security agencies and private corporations.7
Why do we accept this fundamentally unfair situation? Since when does privacy mean so little to us? In 1983 and 1987 the German government attempted to conduct a
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census in West Germany that was, both times, perceived as asking too personal questions. Citizens were enraged, drawing comparisons to 1984 and campaigning for a boycott. The questions ranged from source of income to the duration and type of commute to work.
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How is it possible that 30 years later we willingly give away private messages, images, addresses and payment details? How have we come to a point where the CEO of the most powerful tech company in the world, Google, can get away with saying things like ‘If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place’?8 Why do we entrust a service, the ‘Cloud’, that we know very little
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about and that many people do not even understand, with the handling of our most valued and private data?
Our phones have sound recording devices, cameras and GPS. All of which can be used even when the phone is not being used and some of them are permanently on by default and will stay turned on, unless the user knows about this and turns them off. As two investigative re-
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porters for ProRepublica put it ‘Let's stop calling them phones. They are trackers.’9
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Perhaps the biggest problem in the matter is that we have so little choice. Google, Facebook, Amazon and co. have created a monopoly for themselves. That means they have strategically erased competition and have now created a market that is run by a handful of very large, very powerful people. If you've ever played monopoly you know what this means: once a player has started building enough houses and hotels and you haven't, you can't
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keep up. They will get increasingly richer and also more powerful, buying up other peoples properties they themselves can't afford anymore and consequently winning the game.
They achieved and manage to sustain their monopoly by buying up emerging competitors as part of a venture capital scheme, patenting promising technology, suing smaller
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companies and lobbying. Their wealth allows them to either use the technology developed by their acquisitions or discard and render their acquired companies ineffective, simply to put them out of competition. Google has, on average, one acquisition a week since 2010. Additionally their scheme of patenting and lawsuits renders emerging competition powerless due to
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enormous trial costs. Thus, when it comes to tech products and services, we have very little choice but to accept the terms and conditions under which they are offered to us. Fair alternatives will hardly make it through the obstacle course. Even if they do, it is difficult to establish themselves amongst tech giants that have been offering us services and products for years now. Duckduckgo, for example, is a fair
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and honest alternative to Google's search engine. Yet making the switch is difficult:: we've become accustomed to Google's user interface for so long now, that anything else seems foreign and uncomfortable to us. Monopolized systems not only take the choice away from us, but also give too much power to too few players. As Robert McChesney writes ‘Monopoly is the enemy of competition,
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and competition is what keeps the market honest.’10 It is especially problematic when it comes to services that need to be unbiased. A search engine needs to provide us with information regardless of how much the provider of information has payed the search engine to appear at the top of the list. A search engine also needs to pro-
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vide us with information regardless of what its algorithm thinks may be interesting to us.
Of course, personalised filter systems can be useful. But that is a choice the user needs to make. Only the user should get to decide what they are interested in and wether they would like services to be tailored to their own interest. A corporation cannot and should not
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make assumptions as to what a user identifies with, is interest in and likes to be made aware of. And it should not make the assumption that a user would like to be kept inside a bubble of those interests.
When it comes to the provision of information in ‘traditional’ media, most progressive countries have laws preventing monopolistic systems, as well as channels in the public domain.
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You would not want your television channel, newspaper and radio channel to be in the hands of the same private corporation. So why are there no laws for the internet yet? The strategic elimination of competition is one reason we find ourselves to be dependent on these mighty corporations. Another reason is that they have built a system of dependency within the services and products they offer.
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Tech companies no longer stand for only one service or product, but in fact offer a range of different hardware and software. Thus, they can offer profits to the user if a software is matched to a hardware by the same corporation or they can make one only compatible to the other.
Apple has mastered the craft of dependency within its products, ma-
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king sure the newest operating system only fully functions with the newest product. And if you neither buy the newest version of the iPhone, nor update the operating system on your old iPhone, you won't be able to download the newest Apps or even use older versions of Apps you had previously used. And regardless of compatibility issues, many people simply want to have the newest version of every gadget offered to them by Apple and co.
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As discussed by Horkheimer, Adorno and the philosophers of the Frankfurt School in the mid 20th century, the catch is that we don't even know we want these products until that need is created for us by the very corporations who then offer it to us. And so we find ourselves tangled up in the clever systems designed by Silicon Valley giants. Another problem of a monopolistic system is that these companies can
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get away with more. They can afford to lobby and make bargains with politicians and in that way they can gain more rights. The NSA scandal has made it clear that both the US as well as the UK government not only tolerate the exploitation of private data but in fact cooperate with various corporations in order to spy on their citizens.
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In 2013 Obama appointed Tom Wheeler, a former venture capitalist and lobbyist for cable and internet companies, as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC is in charge of making sure that communication companies don't achieve unfair status due to such practices as lobbying. And in the UK earlier this year the government had offered a prestigious job to a senior executive from Amazon. This was after it had emer-
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ged that Amazon had once again performed massive tax avoidance in the UK. At some point, in 2012, they had actually received more government grants than they had paid in corporation tax. In other words, they took money from the country, made billions and then gave less back than they had gotten to begin with. In fact tax avoidance in itself is a good example of how much tech giants can get away with.
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There is hardly one tech company that has not stood accused of tax avoidance at some point. At the forefront is Google, whose CEO has publicly admitted to being ‘unashamed of their tax avoidance scheme’11, and whose executives and lobbyists had visited the White House on average once a week during the whole Obama administration. The visits included those made to the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), while being ivestigated by the same
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office for antitrust violations. Another alarming example is that a month after Microsoft purchased Skype, they patented a ‘legal intercept’ technology that can ‘silently copy’ every communication done on VOiP services like skype. Microsoft, however, refuses to answer the question of wether this technology has been built into skype. The patent itself is alarming of course, but what is even more alarming is the fact that they can
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get away with simply not answering the question.
Finally, monopolized system on the internet could pose a threat to creatives. One of the most important and beautiful aspects of the internet is that it makes the elimination of middlemen possible. It provides platforms for sharing, trading and communicating in a
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direct and easy way that is only made possible through the digital medium. However, many tech giants have taken up that role as middlemen and created unfair conditions for artists and creatives. Spotify and iTunes have created a music monopoly on the internet that makes it impossible for newcomers to be heard unless they use these platforms for distribution.
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The problem with distributing on Spotify and iTunes, however, is that artists are payed a miniscule amount per play. It works for well known musicians, whose songs are played over and over again. However, it does not work for unknown newcomers. Spotify argues that the more people use their service, the more artists will be payed. Thus, they defend their unfair corporate strategy while at the same time making sure more
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and more people will use their service. In the long run, streaming services will not be able to sustain a cultural sector. David Byrne writes What's at stake is not so much the survival of artists like me, but that of emerging artists and those who have only a few records under their belts (...) Many musicians (...), who seem to be well established, well known and very talented, will eventually have to find employment elsewhere or change what they do to make more money.
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Without new artists coming up, our future as a musical culture looks grim. A culture of blockbusters is sad, and ultimately it's bad for business. That's not the world that inspired me when I was younger. Many a fan, myself included, has said that ‘music saved my life’, so there must be some incentive to keep that lifesaver available for future generations.12
Google's scheme of publishing books online without permission and compensation of their authors and in violation of copyright laws is equally alarming.
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If we want to create a fairer market for creatives and artists on the internet we have to understand the consequences of using free or cheap services offered by tech giants. We have to second guess their intentions instead of trusting their advertisements and sales copy. We have to stop being selfish and re-evaluate what culture means to us and how much it is worth for us.
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Essentially, when it comes to monopolized systems and power hierarchies on the internet, it's as simple as this: consider all the information you receive everyday on the internet and consider all the content you look at everyday on the internet. Should all of it really be in the hands of only a few companies? Companies with questionable and unfair practices? Companies whose first and foremost priority is money? Companies who violate the law?
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Should a search engine not be in the public domain? Do we not have the right to demand unbiased services and information? Do we not have the right to transparency when it comes to questionable corporate actions? And do we not have the right to our own private messages, conversations and images?
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1 McChesney, R.W.(2013): Digital Disconnect. New York: The New Press, pp. 96-104 2 ibid. 3 ibid. 4 Arthur, C. (2011): European commission reopens Google antitrust investigation. [Online] The Guardian. [Accessed on
12.02.2016] 5 Newman, N. (2011): You're not Google's Customer - You're the Product: Antitrust in a Web 2.0 World. [Online] Huffington Post. [Accessed on 13.02.2016] 6 Taylor, A.(2014): The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. London: Fourth Estate, p. 18 7 McChesney, R.W.(2013): Digital Dis-
connect. New York: The New Press, p. 151 8 Huffington Post (2010): Google CEO On Privacy[Online] Huffington Post. [Accessed on 08.02.2016] 9 McChesney, R.W.(2013): Digital Disconnect. New York: The New Press, p. 150 10 McChesney, R.W.(2013): Digital Dis-
connect. New York: The New Press, p. 136 11 Arthur, C. (2013): Google chairman Eric Schmidt defends tax avoidance policies. [Online] The Guardian. [Accessed on 15.02.2016] 12 Byrne, D. (2013): David Byrne: The internet will suck all creative content out of the world [Online] The Guardian. [Accessed on 15.02.2016]