The drumbeat of concern about the perils of our digital economy just got a lot louder. Facebook co-founder and Mark Zuckerberg college roommate Chris Hughes is now urging that Facebook be broken up.
The drumbeat of concern about the perils of our digital economy just got a lot louder. Facebook co-founder and Mark Zuckerberg college roommate Chris Hughes is now urging that Facebook be broken up in an op-ed in today’s New York Times. He follows early Facebook investor and Zuckerberg mentor Roger McNamee in seeing the company as a “catastrophe.”
What is to be done? Can tech be regulated?
Zuckerberg himself has been calling for regulation from lawmakers and has recently insisted, along with Google chief Sundar Pichai, that privacy must be the watchword for their businesses as they go forward.
But at some level we all know perfectly well that privacy of the sort we had before personal computers is impossible unless one unplugs from the grid entirely. There is a reason Harvard Business School professor Shoshanna Zuboff’s term “surveillance capitalism” has caught on; that’s how the business model works.
Yet there’s more to it than the digital observation of everything we do online. There is, as Hughes notes, “the unbounded drive to capture ever more of our time and attention.” We only recently discovered “attention deficit disorder,” but now we are faced with attention-distraction disorder.
We face a constant struggle over our attention: how much time did you waste scrolling through Facebook, posting ephemera on Instagram (also a Facebook platform), and watching animal videos on YouTube last night? The platforms are designed to collect data about your online behavior in such a way that you will stay glued to the screen.
Of course, this is at one level only an extension of television’s effort to “rent eyeballs” for advertisers. But Nielsen’s crude data-gathering methods could not hold a candle to the artificial intelligence-driven methods deployed by the platforms to monopolize our attention.
Hughes argues in his New York Times op-ed that we have the tools to regulate Facebook and create accountability for the awesome power it exercises over speech and says that Zuckerberg’s power goes “far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government.” Those tools are the traditional ones of antitrust and anti-monopoly law, which he argues have fallen into disuse.
But those kinds of law were created for analog industries that might combine vertically or horizontally to dominate particular segments of the economy – the railroads, steel, telephone service.
It’s not clear that these tools will work in regard to technologies that form a whole new way of life. For that’s what our personal devices and the apps that we use on them have done. People want to use their devices because they make life easier, more interesting, more entertaining. They capture our attention, and do their damnedest not to let go.
Breaking up Facebook, as Elizabeth Warren has proposed, would be a valuable test case. It uniquely dominates the social networking space. But it’s not clear why people might not find competitors more palatable.
