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John Lancaster, in the London Review of Books from
August 9, 2017 has a piece titled appropriately One year after the
enough "You Are the Product", all about the great Titanic Rump took
Facebook scourge. the White House,
and it dawned on
The piece is long and a bit repetitive-- everyone that the
and Lancaster seems a bit weak as a infrastructure of
writer, with a knack for paragraphs that democracy was wide
are stronger with the first sentence open and gameable.
crossed out.
THE_TOY_WEB
Still, he talks about some of the real
stuff, and there's a point or two in THE_LANCASTER_LESSONS
there I can't say I already knew.
This is a piece that (nominally)
reviews three books:
Wu, "The Attention Merchants"
Martinez, "Chaos Monkeys"
Taplin, "Move Fast and Break Things"
John Lancaster quotes an unamed expert
comparing Google and Facebook:
"An internet entrepreneur I know has
had dealings with both companies.
'YouTube knows they have lots of dirty The culture of an
things going on and are keen to try organization does matter,
and do some good to alleviate it,' ... and Google's "Don't be
'Google in my experience knows that evil" (now Alphabet's "Do
there are ambiguities, moral doubts, the Right Thing") is not
around some of what they do, and at at all irrelevant.
least they try to think about it.
Facebook just doesn't care. When Google is certainly
you're in a room with them you can capable of evil, but
tell. They're'-- he took a moment to it typically seems
find the right word-- 'scuzzy'. " like "evil lite".
But it continues to seem
foolhardy to put our fate in
the hands of large companies,
and just cross our fingers and
hope they won't be too evil.
John Lancaster quotes Tim Wu, from "The Attention Merchants":
"As Wu observes, Facebook is 'a business with an
exceedingly low ratio of invention to success'."
Lancaster cites a point that has since become a cliche
in my world:
"The crucial thing with internet start-ups is the
ability to execute plans and to adapt to changing
circumstances."
We have a knack of learning the worst possible
lessons from others' successes: From Facebook they
concluded that having a good idea doesn't matter,
which may explain why all the ideas out there now
seem like garbage.
Lancaster goes on to cite approvingly Zuck's
business acumen:
"...Instagram and WhatsApp, were bought for
$1 billion and $19 billion respectively, at
a point when they had no revenue. No
banker or analyst or sage could have told
Zuckerberg what those acquisitions were
worth: nobody knew better than he did."
That's an unsually glowing comment on what's been
standard practice in the tech world for some time: buy
out your competitors before they get too big.
The absolute low point of this piece
has Lancaster pushing what's supposed
to be a great revelation: people think
the Zuckster is an Asperger's case
without a feel for human nature, Taking some psych classes is a
little do they know that he was common move for anyone worried
double-majoring in-- psychology! about their own psyche, and the
idea that you learn something
useful from them is a bit of a
stretch...
However, it does seem that it's an
occupational hazard of psych majors
that many regard themselves as
master manipulators, which could
explain something of the Zucksters
self-image...
Lancaster discusses that the investor Peter Theil was a
fan of "US based French philosopher René Girard,
as advocated in his most influential book, _Things
Hidden Since the Foundation of the World_".
"Girard's big idea was something he called 'mimetic desire'.
Human beings ... look around at what other people are doing,
and wanting, and we copy them. In Theil's summary, the idea
is 'that imitation is at the root of all behavior.' "
Lancaster expresses the now common sentiment:
"To 'connect' turns out to mean, in practice,
connect with people who agree with you.
We can't prove just how dangerous these
'filter bubbles' are to our societies,
but it seems clear that they are having
a severe impact on our increasingly
fragmented polity. Our conception of 'we'
is becomming narrower."
He goes on to talk about the sentiments expressed
by Facebook to start Doing Something about fake
news and the like, and expresses some skepticism
about their sincerity, bringing up the obvious
problem:
"One man's fake news is
another's truth-telling ... "
Lancaster mentions:
"Facebook works hard at avoiding responsibility
for the content on its site-- except for sexual
content, about which it is super-stringent.
Nary a nipple on show. It's a bizarre set of
priorities, which only makes sense in an
American context ..."
Lancaster talks (somewhat unconvincingly) about the Internet
destroying the music business. Arguably it killed sales of
recordings, but that was never really the main revenue of
musicians, who as I understand it make most money from live
performances.
A good quote from Lancaster:
"A version of Gresham's law is at work,
in which fake news, which gets more clicks
and is free to produce, drives out real news.
Lancaster talks about the switch from desktop to
mobile reading was accompanied by a drop in value
of ads.
Myself, I wonder if that's cause and
effect, or something that would've happened
anyway... Lancaster's point could be
saved by data showing that desktop users
are bigger suckers than mobile, which would
surprise me.
He talks about click data declining in value,
and Facebook adopting a strategy he calls
'onboarding' (a phrase I've heard, but I'm not
sure Lancaster describes it correctly), which
is bringing together knowledge about a person from
multiple sources to target ads more precisely.
Oh, and on this point, I have to award myself
an "Oh, Duh" award, as John Lancaster points
out something that should've been obvious to me
(and that I should've read elsewhere, and
probably would've if the subject of advertising
didn't bore me so much):
"... the Facebook button tracks every Facebook user,
whether they click on it or not. Since the Facebook
button is pretty much ubiquitous on the net, this
means that Facebook sees you, everywhere."
Facebook has convinced nearly every site to put
up "log-in with facebook" or "share via facebook"
links: since the image is hosted at their own There are firefox
sites, this provides them with data about every plug-ins to hide you
page impression on the web. from facebook and/or
google. Must install.
Lancaster goes on to talk about the issue of bots
used to generate fake clicks (to manipulate revenue
from Google, or increase charges from Facebook),
something I've known about for some time-- but it
occurs to me what I don't know about is the counter-
measures taken and how successful they are.
John Lancaster doesn't belabor the point, but
does essentially acknowledge that a lot of the
corporate world is, shall we say, not exactly
pure rational actors:
"I've heard academics in the field say that there is a
form of corporate groupthink in the world of the big
buyers of advertising, who are currently responsible
for directing large parts of their budgets towards
Facebook. That mindset could change."
John Lancaster:
"... when people change their minds about a
service, they can go off it hard and fast."
"For that reason, where it to be generally
understood that Facebook's business model is A rather rosy view of
based on surveillance, the company would be human nature perhaps,
in danger." but there is the John
Oliver principle to
consider: privacy
issues are too abstract
until you're talking
Specifically, I think that while network effects about dick pictures.
create an attractive force that bring people in, Then people get it.
it remains easy to try something else, and if
everyone is inspired to try some other thing *at
the same time*, network effects make suck them
over to the new.
Thus far, Facebook has succeeded in buying up
some of the candidates for the New Thing before
they got too far along...
Another good bit in the Lancaster piece, he reviews
an incident I think I knew about, but had forgotten
about:
"... the scandal in 2014 when it turned out that social
scientists at the company had deliberately manipulated
some people's news feed to see what effect, if any, it
had on their emotions."
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