The Death of the Public Square: Today’s most powerful companies are enemies of free expression.

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Brian Randell <brian.randell () newcastle ac uk>
> Subject: The Death of the Public Square: Today’s most powerful companies are enemies of free expression. 
> Date: July 9, 2018 at 6:50:53 AM GMT+9
> To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
> Cc: Brian Randell <brian.randell () newcastle ac uk>
>
> Hi Dave:
>
> Here are a set of extracts from a piece in The Atlantic (Jul 6 2018) that you might think appropriate for IP.
>
> Cheers
>
> Brian
>
> ————
>
> The Death of the Public Square: Today’s 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 
> civilization—and yet the first two pages of Google results for the question are comprised almost entirely of Sweet’N 
> 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 can’t 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 
> speech—and 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 private—the conscience, the freedom of each citizen to arrive 
> at their own religious conviction. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to 
> conscience, above all liberties.” But Milton also stirringly articulated how the formation of private convictions 
> required public spaces, public institutions—what Jürgen Habermas so famously defined as the “public sphere.”
>
> At the time of Milton’s birth, in 1608, there wasn’t much of a public sphere in England. By the time he wrote 
> Areopagitica, it was robust: coffee houses, newspapers, bookstores, theatres, and meeting places—the locales that 
> allowed individuals to come together to form a public. These were spaces largely outside the grasp of church and 
> state—and, 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 Milton’s 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 what’s popular, 
> what’s most clicked upon, not what’s 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 theory—in practice its survival is contingent and tenuous. We’re 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 people’s lives, this time as  personal 
> assistants. The tech companies want us to tie ourselves closely to their machines—those speakers that they want us to 
> keep in our kitchens and our bedrooms: Amazon’s Echo, Google Home, Apple’s 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 don’t present us with choices. They 
> aren’t designed to present us with a healthy menu of options. They anticipate our wants and needs, even our 
> informational and cultural wants and needs.
>
> What’s so pernicious about these machines is that they weaponize us against ourselves. They take our data—everywhere 
> we have traveled on the web, every query we’ve entered into Google, even the posts we begin to write but never 
> publish—and 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 speech—who 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 don’t have to contend with the unpleasantness of 
> confronting opinions we dislike—and where there’s a mute button to effortlessly quiet voices we would rather not 
> hear. Mark Zuckerberg’s dream, the dream he continues to profess, even after all of the controversy, is the dream of 
> global community—the idea of a global network that transforms the planet into a place of understanding. As we join 
> Zuckerberg’s community, he fantasizes that the sense of connection will cause our differences to melt away—like a 
> digital version of the old Coca Cola commercial, or, as I argue in my book, World Without Mind, a revival of the ’60s 
> counterculture and the vision of life on a commune. . . .
> —
>
> School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU
> EMAIL = Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk <mailto:Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk>   PHONE = +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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