Dave Farber
2018-07-09 00:09:39 UTC
Date: July 9, 2018 at 09:00:37 GMT+9
Subject: Re: [IP] The Death of the Public Square: Todayâs most powerful companies are enemies of free expression.
Hi Prof. Farber,
The same Franklin Foer's recent book, "World Without Mind, The
Existential Threat of Big Tech", NY 2017 is also worth reading .
(Sami) Aronson-Unger
-------------------------------------------Subject: Re: [IP] The Death of the Public Square: Todayâs most powerful companies are enemies of free expression.
Hi Prof. Farber,
The same Franklin Foer's recent book, "World Without Mind, The
Existential Threat of Big Tech", NY 2017 is also worth reading .
(Sami) Aronson-Unger
Subject: The Death of the Public Square: Todayâs most powerful companies
are enemies of free expression.
Date: July 9, 2018 at 6:50:53 AM GMT+9
Here are a set of extracts from a piece in The Atlantic (Jul 6 2018) that
you might think appropriate for IP.
Cheers
Brian
ââââ
The Death of the Public Square: Todayâs most powerful companies are
enemies of free expression.
by Franklin Foer
What is god? When the question first rattled my adolescent mind, I took it
to my mom and dad, and received wildly divergent answers. I cracked the
beige-in-every-way set of World Book encyclopedias in our attic. And after
poking around on the shelves of my anti-clerical father, I found Nietzsche
and realized that God was actually dead.
If I were a boy now, we all know exactly where I would turn for an answer.
All of us enter our questions, both about where to brunch and the meaning
of life, into a box with a magnifying glass at its right edge, next to the
multicolored logo of the deity that presides over our informational world.
Its name, like the lord of the universe, begins with the letter G.
What is God? It is only a subject that has inspired some of the finest
writing in the history of Western civilizationâand yet the first two pages
of Google results for the question are comprised almost entirely of
SweetâN Low evangelical proselytizing to the unconverted. (The first link
the Google algorithm served me was from the Texas ministry, Life, Hope &
Truth.) The Google search for God gets nowhere near Augustine, Maimonides,
Spinoza, Luther, Russell, or Dawkins. Billy Graham is the closest that
Google can manage to an important theologian or philosopher. For all its
power and influence, it seems that Google canât really be bothered to care
about the quality of knowledge it dispenses. It is our primary portal to
the world, but has no opinion about what it offers, even when that
knowledge it offers is aggressively, offensively vapid.
If Harold Bloom or Marilynne Robinson had engineered Google, the search
engine would have responded to the query with a link to the poet John
Milton, who is both challenging on the subject of God and brave on the
subject of free speechâand who would have been a polemical critic of our
algorithmic overlords, if he had lived another four hundred years. . . .
At the core, Milton was defending something intensely privateâthe
conscience, the freedom of each citizen to arrive at their own religious
conviction. âGive me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely
according to conscience, above all liberties.â But Milton also stirringly
articulated how the formation of private convictions required public
spaces, public institutionsâwhat JÃŒrgen Habermas so famously defined as
the âpublic sphere.â
At the time of Miltonâs birth, in 1608, there wasnât much of a public
coffee houses, newspapers, bookstores, theatres, and meeting placesâthe
locales that allowed individuals to come together to form a public. These
were spaces largely outside the grasp of church and stateâand, in fact,
many of these institutions emerged with the express purpose of liberating
society from the grasp of church and state.
Nobody designed the public sphere from a dorm room or a Silicon Valley
garage. It just started to organically accrete, as printed volumes began
to pile up, as liberal ideas gained currency and made space for even more
liberal ideas. Institutions grew, and then over the centuries acquired
prestige and authority. Newspapers and journals evolved into what we call
media. Book publishing emerged from the printing guilds, and eventually
became taste-making, discourse-shaping enterprises. What was born in
Miltonâs lifetime lasted until our own. . .
The old, enfeebled institutions of the public sphere have grown dependent
on the big technology companies for financial survival. And with this
dependence, the values of big tech have become the values of the public
sphere. Big tech has made a fetish of efficiency, of data, of the wisdom
of the market. These are the underlying principles that explain why Google
returns such terrible responses to the God query. Google is merely giving
us whatâs popular, whatâs most clicked upon, not whatâs worthy. You can
hurl every insult at the old public sphere, but it never exhibited such
frank indifference to the content it disseminated.
This assault on the public sphere is an assault on free expression. In the
West, free expression is a transcendent right only in theoryâin practice
its survival is contingent and tenuous. Weâre witnessing the way in which
public conversation is subverted by name-calling and harassment. We can
convince ourselves that these are fringe characteristics of social media,
but social media has implanted such tendencies at the core of the culture.
They are in fact practiced by mainstream journalists, mobs of the well
meaning, and the president of the United States. . . .
And now, the tech giants are racing to insert themselves more intimately
in peopleâs lives, this time as personal assistants. The tech companies
want us to tie ourselves closely to their machinesâthose speakers that
they want us to keep in our kitchens and our bedrooms: Amazonâs Echo,
Google Home, Appleâs Siri. They want their machines to rouse us in the
morning and to have their artificial intelligence guide us through our
days, relaying news and entertainment, answering our most embarrassing
questions, enabling our shopping. These machines donât present us with
choices. They arenât designed to present us with a healthy menu of
options. They anticipate our wants and needs, even our informational and
cultural wants and needs.
Whatâs so pernicious about these machines is that they weaponize us
against ourselves. They take our dataâeverywhere we have traveled on the
web, every query weâve entered into Google, even the posts we begin to
write but never publishâand exploit this knowledge to reduce us to
marionettes. . . .
Donald Trump should be the object lesson that shuts down this debate
before it begins. Not since World War I has the United States had a
president who so disrespects the idea of free speechâwho threatens to file
libel lawsuits and muses openly about loosening libel laws, who attempts
to rile hatred of media, who talks fawningly of authoritarian leaders in
other countries. . .
Facebook has made it possible to live in a filter bubble, where we donât
have to contend with the unpleasantness of confronting opinions we
dislikeâand where thereâs a mute button to effortlessly quiet voices we
would rather not hear. Mark Zuckerbergâs dream, the dream he continues to
profess, even after all of the controversy, is the dream of global
communityâthe idea of a global network that transforms the planet into a
place of understanding. As we join Zuckerbergâs community, he fantasizes
that the sense of connection will cause our differences to melt awayâlike
a digital version of the old Coca Cola commercial, or, as I argue in my
book, World Without Mind, a revival of the â60s counterculture and the
vision of life on a commune. . . .
â
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU
+44 191 208 7923
URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html
<http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html>
are enemies of free expression.
Date: July 9, 2018 at 6:50:53 AM GMT+9
Here are a set of extracts from a piece in The Atlantic (Jul 6 2018) that
you might think appropriate for IP.
Cheers
Brian
ââââ
The Death of the Public Square: Todayâs most powerful companies are
enemies of free expression.
by Franklin Foer
What is god? When the question first rattled my adolescent mind, I took it
to my mom and dad, and received wildly divergent answers. I cracked the
beige-in-every-way set of World Book encyclopedias in our attic. And after
poking around on the shelves of my anti-clerical father, I found Nietzsche
and realized that God was actually dead.
If I were a boy now, we all know exactly where I would turn for an answer.
All of us enter our questions, both about where to brunch and the meaning
of life, into a box with a magnifying glass at its right edge, next to the
multicolored logo of the deity that presides over our informational world.
Its name, like the lord of the universe, begins with the letter G.
What is God? It is only a subject that has inspired some of the finest
writing in the history of Western civilizationâand yet the first two pages
of Google results for the question are comprised almost entirely of
SweetâN Low evangelical proselytizing to the unconverted. (The first link
the Google algorithm served me was from the Texas ministry, Life, Hope &
Truth.) The Google search for God gets nowhere near Augustine, Maimonides,
Spinoza, Luther, Russell, or Dawkins. Billy Graham is the closest that
Google can manage to an important theologian or philosopher. For all its
power and influence, it seems that Google canât really be bothered to care
about the quality of knowledge it dispenses. It is our primary portal to
the world, but has no opinion about what it offers, even when that
knowledge it offers is aggressively, offensively vapid.
If Harold Bloom or Marilynne Robinson had engineered Google, the search
engine would have responded to the query with a link to the poet John
Milton, who is both challenging on the subject of God and brave on the
subject of free speechâand who would have been a polemical critic of our
algorithmic overlords, if he had lived another four hundred years. . . .
At the core, Milton was defending something intensely privateâthe
conscience, the freedom of each citizen to arrive at their own religious
conviction. âGive me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely
according to conscience, above all liberties.â But Milton also stirringly
articulated how the formation of private convictions required public
spaces, public institutionsâwhat JÃŒrgen Habermas so famously defined as
the âpublic sphere.â
At the time of Miltonâs birth, in 1608, there wasnât much of a public
coffee houses, newspapers, bookstores, theatres, and meeting placesâthe
locales that allowed individuals to come together to form a public. These
were spaces largely outside the grasp of church and stateâand, in fact,
many of these institutions emerged with the express purpose of liberating
society from the grasp of church and state.
Nobody designed the public sphere from a dorm room or a Silicon Valley
garage. It just started to organically accrete, as printed volumes began
to pile up, as liberal ideas gained currency and made space for even more
liberal ideas. Institutions grew, and then over the centuries acquired
prestige and authority. Newspapers and journals evolved into what we call
media. Book publishing emerged from the printing guilds, and eventually
became taste-making, discourse-shaping enterprises. What was born in
Miltonâs lifetime lasted until our own. . .
The old, enfeebled institutions of the public sphere have grown dependent
on the big technology companies for financial survival. And with this
dependence, the values of big tech have become the values of the public
sphere. Big tech has made a fetish of efficiency, of data, of the wisdom
of the market. These are the underlying principles that explain why Google
returns such terrible responses to the God query. Google is merely giving
us whatâs popular, whatâs most clicked upon, not whatâs worthy. You can
hurl every insult at the old public sphere, but it never exhibited such
frank indifference to the content it disseminated.
This assault on the public sphere is an assault on free expression. In the
West, free expression is a transcendent right only in theoryâin practice
its survival is contingent and tenuous. Weâre witnessing the way in which
public conversation is subverted by name-calling and harassment. We can
convince ourselves that these are fringe characteristics of social media,
but social media has implanted such tendencies at the core of the culture.
They are in fact practiced by mainstream journalists, mobs of the well
meaning, and the president of the United States. . . .
And now, the tech giants are racing to insert themselves more intimately
in peopleâs lives, this time as personal assistants. The tech companies
want us to tie ourselves closely to their machinesâthose speakers that
they want us to keep in our kitchens and our bedrooms: Amazonâs Echo,
Google Home, Appleâs Siri. They want their machines to rouse us in the
morning and to have their artificial intelligence guide us through our
days, relaying news and entertainment, answering our most embarrassing
questions, enabling our shopping. These machines donât present us with
choices. They arenât designed to present us with a healthy menu of
options. They anticipate our wants and needs, even our informational and
cultural wants and needs.
Whatâs so pernicious about these machines is that they weaponize us
against ourselves. They take our dataâeverywhere we have traveled on the
web, every query weâve entered into Google, even the posts we begin to
write but never publishâand exploit this knowledge to reduce us to
marionettes. . . .
Donald Trump should be the object lesson that shuts down this debate
before it begins. Not since World War I has the United States had a
president who so disrespects the idea of free speechâwho threatens to file
libel lawsuits and muses openly about loosening libel laws, who attempts
to rile hatred of media, who talks fawningly of authoritarian leaders in
other countries. . .
Facebook has made it possible to live in a filter bubble, where we donât
have to contend with the unpleasantness of confronting opinions we
dislikeâand where thereâs a mute button to effortlessly quiet voices we
would rather not hear. Mark Zuckerbergâs dream, the dream he continues to
profess, even after all of the controversy, is the dream of global
communityâthe idea of a global network that transforms the planet into a
place of understanding. As we join Zuckerbergâs community, he fantasizes
that the sense of connection will cause our differences to melt awayâlike
a digital version of the old Coca Cola commercial, or, as I argue in my
book, World Without Mind, a revival of the â60s counterculture and the
vision of life on a commune. . . .
â
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU
+44 191 208 7923
URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html
<http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html>
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