Manipulation, habits and response-ability in our online world.
The mass harvesting of personal data by Cambridge Analytica was just the latest in a string of incidents involving the use (and misuse) of online data to further of a political agenda. Sadly, in the context of the on-going stories of Russian attempts to influence elections on both sides of the Atlantic, it wasn’t a great surprise.
We have been merrily sharing our thoughts, feelings, events, pictures at our best, pictures at our worst for over 10 years now. We have done exactly as the owners of what technologist and philosopher Jaron Lanier calls ‘siren servers’ have wanted us to do all along: provided an enormously sophisticated data set that can be used to sell back to us — whether what we are sold are products, services or, indeed, futures (#MakeAmericaGreatAgain). As Lanier puts it in Who Owns the Future:
We regularly communicate with people we would never even have been aware of before the networked age. We can find information about almost anything at any time. But we have learned how much our gadgets and out idealistically motivated digital networks are being used to spy on us by ultra-powerful, remote organisations. We are being dissected more than we dissect.
I think the Cambridge Analytica scandal gives us pause to think about the consequences of our behaviour online as well as the way it is shaped. The topic is nebulous so I’m going to make two suggestions: we should revisit how we value our time online and leaders like Mark Zuckerberg need to demonstrate that they can be part of the solution to the challenges they have become embroiled in.
From the bottom-up: what is our time worth?
John Dryden, England’s first poet laureate wrote, some time in the 17th century:
We first make our habits and then our habits make us.
It is now becoming clear that our every habitual like or share creates a model of us that can be used to exploit our fears and desires in the interests of particular groups, whose intent we are not completely aware of. I realise that sounds like the plot of a bad dystopian novel but that is, after all, what Cambridge Analytica were attempting to do.
If you believe theorists like Yuval Noah Harari, data gathered about us will eventually be able to make every decision for us (this is one of the central arguments in his second book, Homo Deus). I’m not particularly interested in living in that future and I don’t know many people who are. I think that if we build an awareness of what many of us have been doing without awareness we can begin to, to coin a now familiar phrase ‘take back control’.
So, in this context, what are we to do? I hear very few people say “I really spend too little time on social media”. There’s a reason for that. I think we have all been conscious, at some level, that we are paying for our access, but to what extent? Day to day I notice little more than the occasional advert for public speaking training or a dodgy shirt.
Perhaps now is as good a time as any to take a step back from our online habits and think:
1. What value do I honestly derive from this activity?
2. What am I not doing in order to engage online?
I doubt there are many people who would say that all of their online experiences are valuable, or that they have nothing else to do in the real world. This is important. It’s important because we are paying for access with our time. It’s even more important because that data is used in ways that, whilst we may have absent-mindedly checked a box as we signed up, may not be in our best interests. On our own, we can’t change the context but we can decide how to act within it.
The leaders of the big players aren’t going to lose any sleep because I think twice before I ‘share’. I’m also self-aware enough to see that there is a certain irony to posting an article about social media on social media. I’m not being a 21st century luddite either. I use social media and derive value and pleasure from it. I doubt we’ve scraped the surface of the opportunity that these global connections hold for us. But I also waste a lot of my time, or pay with half-engagement in the read world. And I think we could all do with building our ability to discriminate the value-laden from the value-empty.
We can, and should, reflect on our habits. Doing so will ensure that we at least derive something of value in exchange for our privacy.
From the top down: steering the future of social media
Another thing that the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed, in my view, is that many (perhaps most) people act online as if there is no business model, as if websites like facebook and twitter are merely spaces that enable communication, friendship, arguing and the sharing of pictures of cats.
That is hardly surprising, given the way that Mark Zuckerberg talks about the entire mission of Facebook:
Right now, I think the most important thing we can do is bring people closer together. It’s so important that we’re going to change Facebook’s whole mission to take this on.
Today, we are painfully aware that this is only half the story. Bringing the world closer together in order to do what? Bringing the world closer together and what else?
I have no interest in castigating Zuckerberg. I don’t know him and I don’t know if he means what he says. But I am very interested indeed in what he does from here, because what he and his team do now will demonstrate the extent to which they are really engaged with their stated mission.
Whether Zuckerberg is to blame for the misuse of personal information is beyond this discussion. But he is response-able: he and his team can steer their monolith from here. He can define what bringing the world closer together looks like and enable his customers (and never before has it been so clear that we are customers) to choose how they want to respond. I would be interested to see whether recent events have been associated with a decline in total data uploaded to Facebook but the growth of the ‘delete Facebook’ hashtag at least demonstrates that some are voting with their feet (or their fingers).
When you are responsible for the future of a network of 2 billion people, and bad news can devalue your stock by nearly $30Bn overnight, it is incumbent on you to respond.
But more than monetary value, facebook has become powerful enough to influence society as a whole (directly or indirectly) and Zuckerberg himself has set the bar pretty high for what shape that influence could take:
Our lives are all connected. In the next generation, our greatest opportunities and challenges we can only take on together — ending poverty, curing disease, stopping climate change, spreading freedom and tolerance, stopping terrorism. No single group or even country can do that alone. We have to build a world where people come together to take on these big meaningful efforts.
He clearly positions his organisation as being part of the solution to the world’s challenges. He clearly needs to start at home: to demonstrate that he and his team can get a grip on the way they manage personal data. Without doing so, the mission that he so passionately articulates will look like little more than empty rhetoric. We can only hope they are up to the task.
With this in mind, I think we are due a slightly less pithy update to that 17th century quote I used earlier:
Leaders shape organisations. Their organisations shape people. People shape society.
