I don’t know how many times we have to dance around pretending that there is some reasonable argument for in-app browsers, but there just isn’t. In-app browsers cut users off from sites they log into on their standard browser, forcing them to log in multiple times on the same device. They cut users off from history and browsing tools they have learned when they choose or accept their default browser.

In-app browsers are incredibly privacy invasive. They let the parent app do all sorts of shitty things to track you and intentionally evade any protections you’ve given yourself through your browser choice and configuration.

Apps are fundamentally bad, but in-app browsers are even worse. A plague on modern app development—a potent avoidance strategy of privacy advances in the browser and device—they present no advantage to the user.

In-app browsers are fundamentally worse experiences designed for only two purposes: more invasive tracking and to keep you trapped inside an app at the moment you have specifically made a choice to escape. They make it harder to read the web while parasitically benefitting from the open web’s existence.

In-app browsers make it harder to share pages to other apps, a down-right crime in our new era of social platform plurality. Worst of all, they prevent you from using the browser experience you’ve specifically selected on your phone.

In-app browsers are gross. Their very existence shows that the 30% that app stores claim as a tax used for moderation and safety for users is a dirty lie. That the dominant phone OSes allow them to exist is a fundamental compromise of any claim that they are acting on behalf of users.

In-app browsers are fundamentally anti-user. And yet… they fking persist.

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Notably none of new batch of social networks require in-app browsers. Except Threads.

Oh, plenty of apps keep trying to sneak it back in, to change the defaults on an update, to convince you: this time the in-app browser is good. But it is not good. Users have, historically, rejected it in the micro-blogging context in particular. By which I mean Twitter. Chances are if you’ve come here from Twitter you’ve turned off your in-app browser in that app at least two times.

Text-focused social networks like the growing selection of Twitter competitors, and Twitter itself, understand that their primary use is link amplification and organization. Threads—Meta’s new offering to the ‘what if Twitter wasn’t run by an egomaniac racist discriminatory asshole’ product category—is a short-post text-focused social network. Therefore its primary use is also link amplification and organization. At least 50% of what you do on Threads is click links.

Instagram has long managed to get away with its in-app browser because it is designed as a link-light social network. You are not joining Instagram to share links. That doesn’t make Instagram’s in-app browser more acceptable, it just makes it less noticeable and annoying.

Threads is a link-heavy social network. Threads is a network for sharing links. That’s what all short-post text-focused social networks are for. If anyone tells you that there is a social network whose primary medium is short text and it isn’t for sharing links… they are a liar. For all the attempts that social networks make to keep you inside the walled garden, it just isn’t possible for a format like Threads and Twitter presents.

That’s why Threads’ in-app browser isn’t just a bad user experience, it isn’t just privacy-invasive… it is offensive. The Threads in-app browser isn’t just bad, it actively counteracts the entire user flow of that type of social network Threads intends to create.

Facebook is loathe to give up the in-app browser because it gives them so many better options for tracking and because it is their best tool for preventing users from realizing that a great deal of their “Facebook” interactions aren’t on a platform owned by Meta. But while it is bad everywhere, it is unacceptable on Threads.

Threads doesn’t just present an in-app browser… it doesn’t allow you to choose anything else. Unlike almost every other non-Meta social network app, there is no way to turn off the opening of external links in the in-app browser and there is no justification for it. I don’t mean this metaphorically. Meta/Facebook/Instagram has never given any real justification for its use of in-app browsers in any of its apps and absolutely hasn’t for Threads.

In-app browsers are unacceptable in any context but on Threads, where the primary action is clicking on links, it is anti-user. It is impossible to sustain. No one should accept this. Yell, thread, tweet, email, weave, whatever it takes. You cannot let this stand. If you let Threads get away with it, then the window of what is acceptable changes and more will try. Apps are already barely useable but a world of apps where we allow Twitter clones to get away with in-app browsers as a default unalterable setting is fking unlivable.

Don’t settle for any social network that telegraphs just how much it hates you by forcing you into in-app browsers.

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I promise I’ll get to my Reddit API post next time around. This just was too infuriating. I’ve decided to try an open comment section for this post. Don’t disappoint me by being an asshole.

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This post represents my **personal** opinion and does not reflect the position of my current, past, or future employers, this platform, or anyone other than me singularly.

This newsletter is now Schizochronotopia, which I’m sure is just as hard to remember how to type as the last long name I gave my newsletter, but at least it has a nice domain attached to it. I’ve tried to shift some of the colors around as well. I think I’ve kept it accessible visually, but if it isn’t, let me know.

With my output on Twitter likely to go down, the type of stuff I like to talk about there is going to end up more and more on there. So I picked a name that, in more ways than one, reflects this new focus.

The first is the connection to my Twitter username, I think that is fitting. The second way the name reflects what I want to do more of here is a little more complicated.

You may not realize this but once upon a time I was an English major in college and a pretty big fan of all types of literary analysis. I was then, and still am, very interested in media literacy, deep reading, and contrasting the results of different types of analysis. My Twitter username “Chronotope” came about during this time. I was working heavily in the digital humanities space and thought that it would be a fun reference that a few people would get and the rest would just think it sounded sort of cool. You know… internet username thinking.

It has been a long time since writing deep literary analysis was a regular occurrence for me, so hopefully in trying to explain this I won’t sound like too much of an idiot or get it incredibly wrong. Chronotope is a concept from Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin who originally used it as part of an analysis of literature which centered around the idea that time and space metaphorically fuse to create concepts that are similar to genre. These are chronotopes which can be used to define a story even if the timespace is outside of the borders of the exact story being told. To steal and summarize the Wikipedia article on this, the timespace of “the road” is something that mediates stories, connects them, and allows them to be interpreted in relation to each other and in relation to the concept. Chronotopes are fusions of specific spaces and times from which narratives originate.

This was particularly appealing to me when I wrote my first Tweet because my focus at the time was thinking about stories and specifically how to read and tell them using technology.

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From there I ended up on an unexpected path, the goal was to figure out ways to tell stories using technology, and I ended up a copy editor, a journalist and then a web engineer because I kept chasing this concept: what can we do to enable better storytelling with technology? I suspect I’m not the only one.

Eventually, I found out that the biggest problem that we needed to overcome was advertising, or more specifically: how to make money writing on the internet. That’s how I ended up working on ad tech and discovering that it was and continues to be a huge disaster. I kept chasing the biggest problem for telling stories on the internet and it turned out the biggest problem was that no one could make money doing it.

Monetization of written content (and perhaps all types of content) is fundamentally broken. And that problem causes all these other problems: fraud, misinformation, terrible media businesses, bad coverage decisions, bad US presidents, bad laws, bad companies, and quite a stack of additional problems that I suspect we’ll dig into in future newsletters.

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Schizochronotopia is also a term from literary analysis (surprising from me, right?!) which refers to when stories, people and landscapes are trapped between timespaces. To paraphrase Wikipedia again: a rift where the past and present render each other unbidden, that is a schizochronotopia. We are trapped between time, space, theme, past, present and future. Right now talking about media, ad tech, and the economics of a present built by Silicon Valley feels very much like trying to render some very different concepts into something that hopefully makes sense.

Thus the name. My goal is to continue to try and describe mediatech though a filter of the specific chronotopes relevant to the discussion. I think that it is impossible to move forward without understanding that our present is very much grounded in our past. We’ll need to talk about history to understand that nothing in the present is particularly new. Maybe we’ll find some solutions along the way.

This is not a sponsored link or anything, I just want to note for an example of what I’m talking about, a solid chronotope for understanding the central themes of tech past/present, I recommend you read along with me Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, by Malcolm Harris.

It’s exactly what I’m talking about: a history of a place that has metastasized into a sort of symbolic concept that is very much associated with everything happening right now. You should read it!

Ok, that’s enough literary theory for now. Back to our regularly scheduled programming from here on out. Next newsletter will probably be about Reddit being run by a big dummy.

I don’t think it is an exceptional assumption to look at the activity of the world’s most online billionaire and see him going down a well-known radicalization pipeline, exploring more extreme beliefs, dropping more (and I must emphasize: only relatively more) sensible friends and finding comfort in the welcoming arms of extremism. Musk is following a not-particularly-exceptional path that many a white man has taken before and you can take his antisemitic conspiracy theory bullshit about Soros as just a deeper step in that pattern. I think we can argue about if Musk has gone Nazi, but he is indisputably going Nazi in an extremely predictable way. There is no arguing with the fact that not only is Musk Going Nazi directly in front of us but he is intentionally leveraging, using, and getting benefit from Twitter to do it.

Twitter used to be the place to speak truth to power, now it's a platform for power to speak over you as obnoxiously as possible.

As such, existing on Twitter has entered a very particularly tenuous state. You get the distinct feeling that we are living in the first, new, verse of an old poem.

First they came for the transgender people and I did not say anything, because I was not transgender.

It’s clear that the Right’s “war on woke” is coming from them being Too Online. But that’s not exactly right. More than one study has shown that while, Twitter has never been a majority traffic source, stories and trends start on Twitter and transition to other platforms where the actually trackable “virality” happens. We can see that the Right’s trend towards more extreme and better organized hate, bigotry and transphobia (hint: I’m using the rule of threes here, these are all the same) is unmistakably gaining energy from the end of real moderation on Twitter. Even if it wasn’t, hate is determinedly persisting and spreading, with the significant help of Twitter’s owner and his shitty little account.

I shouldn’t have to explain why this particular bigotry is just one step towards fascism. By now you should know how this works. You should look at the rhetoric attempting to de-person trans people and find it unacceptable even if it stopped at that. But you should also know it won’t stop at that. This isn’t a stretch. It’s already happening. Silicon Valley is full of little “mouthbreathing machiavellis” and their tendency towards fascism is becoming more pronounced and less easy to ignore. Nowhere is this more obvious than with Elon Musk and his increasingly fash-friendly shitstorm of a platform.

So it is indeed worth asking… why the fuck are we still on there?

When Facebook was starting to go bad, it was more like watching a barely-remembered acquaintance’s parent get Alzheimer's. Sure, Facebook couldn’t remember who you were but also you couldn’t really remember why to care, even if you probably should have. I don’t know how else to describe it. I should have felt worse about suddenly departing Facebook. For years I’d built not just an audience but a significant amount of traffic routed through Facebook to my own efforts. Enough that I could run somewhat notable experiments. At peak, I likely could marshal more traffic than the average local newspaper. It felt like, in some ways, Facebook was more a part of my identity than Twitter ever has been. While I’ve had more than one person say they ‘oh, I follow you on Twitter’, for years multiple people would introduce me as “the guy who posts really good stuff on Facebook.” I’m not bragging. I’m pretty sure that isn’t something to be proud of. But it was a thing I cared about and put a lot of effort into for a pretty long time. Despite all the relative success I found DJing news articles on Facebook I dropped it dead basically overnight.

While I (once) made it far more viral on Twitter than I ever did on Facebook this was never rewarded by the platform with significant success or a continuous flow of interaction or traffic in the same way Facebook did. The success of content on Twitter happens off the platform and the success of people on Twitter happens off the platform. The way Twitter works is: it does not reward its adherents until someone else does. Twitter has never verified me. It hasn’t rewarded me with a million followers. It hasn’t gotten me a book deal. Twitter, the platform itself, does nothing for its users. What the hell do we get out of it exactly?

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The mistake every analyst makes about Twitter is the assumption that it is a self-contained platform. That Twitter is about itself. That is incorrect.

Twitter is not a social network. Twitter is an event platform where we celebrate content. Its other function is to help you desperately try not to be the subject of content. Twitter is a platform where we have a big party every time someone posts online some writing we like or a big roast when they post some real bad shit (and yes, specifically writing).

Twitter has never been a microphone, it has always been an amp.

The truth of Twitter is that it supplies power through the connections of communities in a way that nothing has before and nothing has since. A particular irony is capitalists are obsessed with Twitter when it is really an evolution of the People’s Microphone concept we saw so well deployed during Occupy.

Twitter hasn’t just been useful for getting refunds from bad behaving corporations. It hasn’t just been responsible for (at least) my last two jobs. It hasn’t just been a venue to connect with experts and learn things that I didn’t even know were available to learn.

It has shamed powerful men and amplified the work of those who would see them dispossessed of power.

It has made an entire sector of shitty humans so afraid of “canceling” that they literally cannot stop talking about it, that they have turned “talking about canceling” into an industry.

Twitter has changed the world in a way that none of the other tech companies really have. Facebook hasn’t done more than take up our attention, fart out bad UI in the night, and, lately, fall down a hill. Google may have organized the world’s information and made itself richer than … most countries, I guess? But what did it do in your life? Do you remember something happening on Facebook like you remember the Arab Spring happening on Twitter? Do you remember Google as part of your life during crazy shit like Jan 6th? If you’re reading this: you used Twitter and it’s a part of your memory like the others just aren’t.

What Twitter does is connect us, often to people we would never connect to without its help. In doing so, when it is good, it opens our mind to things that would never have found us otherwise.

Now, all of this is good, and it is also very bad. These same tools could and were freely used by shitty people to do terrible things. But it isn’t only that.

Some people who complained about Twitter really just don’t like the rest of us talking back. Now they’re the ones in charge. They have turned the arc of power on Twitter against most of its users. They have turned Twitter from the People’s Microphone to the Oligarch’s Podium. We already have plenty of those. So what is the reason I’m still on Twitter? Why is anyone with a sense of morality and a modicum of thought on Twitter?

The answer comes easier than I’d like. Despite the fact that one’s participation on Twitter is implicitly supporting a project focused on shifting The Discourse to the extreme Right, it is still—for some godawful reason—where my community is. We’re all stuck on Twitter because we’re all fucking grasping each other hoping that we can hold on together and float to the top instead of drown. After all, we have all together floated above similar-seeming maelstroms before. In the past we have achieved change on Twitter not with Twitter but in spite of it.

Collectively we all can’t get around that history of success through togetherness that was once the defining characteristic of Twitter. We are sure that this time will be like all the others; that we will manage to hang together, maintain our community; and make it out of the water before we drown.

No one is floating out of the maelstrom on Twitter this time. We’re going to drown… eventually. That time is far enough off that we can convince ourselves we can somehow rise above the sewer and make it through clean. So you’re on Twitter and so I’m on Twitter and so our community is on Twitter and so you’re on Twitter and so I’m on Twitter. Round and round we go, convinced that this valuable tool that has made a profound impact on our lives isn’t broken irreparably. We pretend our presence isn’t being used to legitimize people who want us all dead, once they finish off the most vulnerable and have the time to get to the rest of us.

We are on Twitter because it’s easy to live our lives and feel safe in the arms of our little communities on the platform, just as long as we don’t look up and see whose flag is flying above us.

Looking up would mean seeing this is all incredibly unacceptable. But I don’t know what else to do or where else we can all gather in the specific way that Twitter has enabled. My community is on Twitter and I can’t leave it. My community won’t leave Twitter unless I start the process by extracting myself.

I’m on Twitter

because I look down.

I will be changing the name of this newsletter. I think to “Schizochronotopia” (see). If you think that’s a bad idea or you have a better idea of what I should rename it to, reach out ASAP.

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This post represents my **personal** opinion and does not reflect the position of my current, past, or future employers, this platform, or anyone other than me singularly.

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Updated: Nov 11 2024 to fix music embed.

this is quite a question. In the vast and complicated ecosystem of advertising and ad tech there can be a very nuanced discussion around data brokers and the services they provide. After all, why would there be so many of them and why would they be extracting so much money from the advertising ecosystem?

In this essay I will explain…

wait wait…

There’s actually a really good explanation already I can just embed in here.

Ok, just a little trick:

Take the following content and just swap in the words “data broker” every time you hear the word “war”.

There, solid explanation. We may discuss.

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This post represents my **personal** opinion and does not reflect the position of my current, past, or future employers, this platform, or anyone other than me singularly.

Why do we keep having this conversation about somehow separating TikTok from China when that doesn’t do anything. The problem is international data flow and the data flow problem will persist regardless of who owns the app.

I could go on a long rant about why all data ends up in China anyway (if China wants it). But in short: it’s because we have an entire shadow economy of user-data-as-currency that is worldwide and China—like everyone else—can just buy your user data off the open market.

We could talk about how these systems are already filled with sketchy arbitrage and outright, already illegal, fraud. If we had actual law enforcement against internet scams these platforms would not be a problem. If we had actual data privacy laws in place, it would not be a problem. Until that comes around, nothing TikTok is doing that helps the Chinese government can’t be accomplished by connecting an ad to any other app.

This TikTok BS is all very dumb, and possibly racist.

It’s also an incredible excuse to avoid doing the work of passing a federal privacy law that, if properly put together, would absolutly solve this problem on TikTok—and everywhere else.

Shoshana Wodinsky already wrote the best possible article on this situation back the last time we talked about TikTok ownership and national security.

So you should just go and read that. Really that’s the be all and end all of this discussion.

But just in case you need further proof:

• CR on the irrelevance of the app for this concern

• Gizmodo on SDKs

I don’t want to have these conversations anymore. They’re bad conversations. They are not, in any way, progress. I don’t care about what individual apps are doing unless dealing with it is going to set a legal precedent that applies to all apps and this definitely doesn’t do that. It might even be bad all on its own. I dunno. I have to reiterate: this is the wrong conversation to have.

The issues with Silicon Valley Bank that have derived from it's involvement with startup culture are clearly fairly unique to the particulars of how that bank is involved deeply in that culture. Matt Levine's piece on SVB's double exposure is an excellent dive into this. That isn't the reason that the tech community is suddenly under critique nor is it the reason a whole bunch of people on Twitter are talking about why venture capital and their startups shouldn't be bailed out.

No, the problem is the hypocrisy. Of course no one wants to see the line employees of these companies in trouble. Not to mention, SVB isn't just a bank for startup cash, it has regular employees, standard bank users, housing, and businesses of all types. Generally, most critics don't want to see these depositors underwater.

On the other hand we’ve spent years watching Palo Alto types, VCs and the residents of Silicon Valley constantly arguing against exactly the regulation that might have helped prevent this problem to begin with.

Surely you can see how those outside the startup bubble might perceive this sudden turnaround in economic philosophy? When this crew of capitalist ghouls are begging for bailouts it seems a clear statement that their previous political positions weren't really based in any sort of philosophical or economic theory, but instead in a firm belief that there should be two Americas:

In SV's first America there are the home owners, the student loan takers, and the average man on the street. Apparently these people should not benefit from regulation, protection, or the funds of the US government. This first America should, in the view of the Startup Elites, lose money and garner no protections.

Then there's Silicon Valley's other America. In this other America they don't need to pay taxes or face regulations. They get to extract more money up and up into the already wealthy pockets of VCs while making it harder and harder for everyone else to make a living.

The VCs are flipping their position on government bailouts after spending years arguing that they shouldn't be constrained by any regulations or rules, financial or otherwise. People, both with and without a historical understanding of the marketplace, are understandably upset when they perceive a clear and certian statement that for all the talk of “wealth generation” and the moral burden of taking loans and running a buisness that VCs have done over the years these same self-identified gurus clearly feel no particular ethical requirements themselves. Apparently the moral hazard of the market is for us lesser beings, not the startups and their funders.

Those folks in the tech world who have any emotional intelligence (perhaps this is a narrow minority) surely can stop faking-it-to-make-it long enough to see where the sudden backlash is coming from. The behavior of their loudest voices is not earning them any sympathy.

This is apparently quite a surprise to the tech world. However, it isn't a surprise to me. There are the busses that transport SF employees to tech campuses that must reroute against angry opposition. Don't forget the loud "disruption" startups that meet with immediate anger and refuse to back down. I shouldn't even have to mention the crypto startups that have crashed and burned with millions in normal Americans' money on the promise of startup culture delivering big profits to the normal person.

America has been in an open class crisis that started with Occupy Wall Street and basically hasn't stopped. It has been hard to see at times over the last decade-plus because this class conflict has been successfully disrupted by the Right and basically split into two sides: the type of Q-anon, Jan 6., internet-weirdos who backed Trump to get one over on "the elites" and identify as the alt-right; and the rising labor and DSA movement that sits on the left. But both of these movements--when you talk to the average citizens on the ground--are about class conflict.

The future of this conflict is exactly this type of discussion: who gets regulated, who doesn't, and who is clearly willing to throw their strongly argued economic decisions out the window when their own wallet, or the wallet of their buddies, might be threatened.

It's easy to look at the fall of Silicon Valley Bank and spin out theories about the future of the tech world, startup culture, Northern California, etc...

It's also easy to say “but we created wealth” as so many startup culture “geniuses” have apparently fallen back upon to defend themselves.

It's a lot harder to adjudicate just how much startup culture is responsible for the uneven flow of that wealth. The rest of us are out here seeing rents go up, grocery prices go up, the price of living go up, and we're not getting bailed out. Instead, housing is purchased by rich people to rent on AirBnB. Getting around has been hijacked and priced up by Uber while it argues against any regulation or public transport. Groceries with reasonable prices are being pushed out by 15-minute delivery hubs whose lack of profitability is held off by VC funding. Living outside of Northern California, it sure seems like startups have been getting their bailouts continually for years. It can feel like karmic balance for the tech world to take its turn on the banking crisis-based rack. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

One thing is for sure, no one is going to forget just whose libertarian politics suddenly went on pause to protect their own wallets. Perhaps Startup Culture should stop being so defensive and listen for once. Maybe they could use this as an opportunity to be a little humble, to realize that their tactics and politics might not hold up quite so well to the real world outside of their now-popped bubble.

Perhaps they could use this time to reconsider how harmful they've been--how bad their: economic philosophy; austerity politics; lobbying; badly thought-out and unprofitable startups--can be.

It sure would be nice to see these VCs express the same level of concern for the rest of America’s citizens as they have for themselves and their drinking buddies. It would be a great time for the tech-wealthy to step back and realize they are looking down on most of America and offering cake via drone.

But I sort of fucking doubt they’ll think to apply their concerns to the rest of us. After all, when you live in the America of VCs and the ultra-rich, there are never any consequences.

Additional sources, reference, and reading.

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This post represents my **personal** opinion and does not reflect the position of my current, past, or future employers, this platform, or anyone other than me singularly.

This position has been publicly constructed in front of us by those who fear the changes privacy might bring: ad tech is positioned as reasonable compromisers helping the little guy; while they accuse ’elites’, ‘academics’, and ‘dirty money’ of trying to create a fantasy movement for privacy while ad tech leaders claim none truly exists. For the defenders of personalized tracking, it isn’t just ‘small businesses’ any more, ad tech wants to position itself as an angry populist movement, because that is the new standard procedure for subverting actual movements with broad national support, of which privacy is one. The great middlemen extractors of the ad tech industry want to claim that they represent the open web. They don’t. They only feed off it. Privacy on the other hand is an actual popular movement with real citizen support and a long history at the heart of the internet.

So much of this opposition to privacy by ad tech seems to come from a much more boring place. Many have become rich and comfortable profiting off of the unregulated trade of user data. Many of these people don't even run well-functioning companies. The big black box of ad tech has allowed many operators to become rich, build big profits, but also be lazy. When everyone is talking about measurement and allegedly no two measurements give the same results there is no such thing as measurement.

Ad tech firms can easily perpetuate fraud against advertisers and publishers. Even when ad tech middlemen don’t perpetuate fraud, the anti-privacy stance defends a model that allows ad tech to profit by observing users at high value sites and arbitraging their purchase on low value sites, sometimes hate sites, sometimes fraud sites, sometimes sites under international sanctions, but also just bad sites. The black box is an intentional design that allows them to extract even more value from every participant in the ecosystem, while simultaneously funneling money to the web’s worst actors. 

Ad tech leaders who make their money in the foggy middle of the ecosystem are lazy because there is currently almost no way to catch them being incredibly bad at their job and making a tremendous profit off of it.

The middlemen are flying high, taking a cut of the ad tech tax, and desperately afraid that even the smallest amount of regulation might reveal the majority of the more than 10k ad tech companies are built on top of extremely unstable sand. So the big opposition comes from the place most Big Opposition comes from: fear of change.

Let me be blunt and clear with you about what I don't dispute: That fear is legitimate. Privacy will disrupt the ad industry significantly. The narrowing of signals will mean measurement will be forced to become more accurate or not work at all and there will be far fewer measurement companies needed. The end of cross-domain trade in real-time user-data-as-currency will negate the need for what is likely to be thousands of jobs.

The reshaping of the programmatic landscape will leave hundreds of parasitic lamprey ad tech firms with no leg to stand on and no actually functioning technology to fall back on.

I'm not going to, nor have I ever, lied about this.

But also, it doesn't have to end with thousands of jobs lost--if leadership steers the boat away from the gaping whirlpool that is opening up immediately in front of it.

Most ad technology in the modern age is built on top of a fundamentally unethical system and it leverages that unethical system to build palaces of fraud, monopoly, bad practice, inaccuracy, rent-seeking, and tax. To build these palaces the systems of modern ad tech infringe on our human rights. I'm not making up a all-new right here, I'm quoting one:

Article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

From: the UN Universal Deceleration of Human Rights.

This is where things get messy, because what the Anti-Privacy Opposition doesn't understand is that the movement towards privacy is a people's movement and more than that it is a human rights movement.

The type of opposition that puts you at odds with a legitimate human rights movement isn't just about who gets to preserve capital and when. It's about who is on the right... and wrong... side of history.

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So let's talk about history.

Fairy Tale History vs Real World Action

In "Fairy Tale History: The Root Of America's Problems" journalist Oliver Willis explains how the United States has failed to teach history:

Via laziness and repetition, combined with outside forces that have shaped education curricula, we collectively learn a fairy tale. While it is understandable that young children aren’t exposed to the horrors of chattel slavery in their kindergarten classes, or told about the subordinate role women were forced into in America’s early days, or how Native Americans were systematically killed and had their lands stolen from them, it is a failure that these topics aren’t as familiar as the founding myths.

All countries have their shared national origins, but in America it tends to resemble something like a Marvel Comics-level myth.

I think this is 100% true and Willis focuses on how we have erased the violence of discrimination, slavery, and the unequal application of human rights from our history. We need to fight the myths of bad history because if we do not, the sins we wish to ignore from our history will inevitably come back in an acid reflux burn to the state and society.

That is not the only thing we have erased from history. We have also erased the consequences to the opponents of human rights. When we falsely perceive that slavery was solved with the Gettysburg Address; that civil rights were solved by one MLK Jr. speech; that women's suffrage was solved by an amendment; that Roe v Wade ended the question of abortion rights with swift correct justice; we don't just erase the history of the worst things our society has done and still benefits from today, we also hide the direct and violent actions that underlie the progress that was made.

In Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline the Swedish climate scholar explores the strange re-framing of history that the climate movement has engaged in to justify a mandate for non-violence and the problems of this pure non-violent approach.

Malm notes:

The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time. After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it; of their own accord, under their inner compulsion, they can do nothing but burn their way to the end.

Yet in the face of these vampire capitalists the environmental movement only summons non-violence, and it rewrites history to make this choice appear continuous with history. But Malm provides counter arguments:

collective action against slavery perforce took on the character of violent resistance.

and

The suffragettes took great pains to avoid injuring people. But they considered the situation urgent enough to justify incendiarism – votes for women, Pankhurst explained, were of such pressing importance that ‘we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt businesses, destroy valuable property, demoralise the world of society, shame the churches, upset the whole orderly conduct of life’.

among other examples.

The conclusion he gets to is quite clear in his analysis of the American civil rights movement:

The civil rights movement won the Act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power.

You should read the book, I highly recommend it, especially since I am grossly simplifying its argument here. 

To reinforce his conclusion, Malm notes that environmental justice is uniquely well situated for direct violent action against property as part of protest because to do violence against polluting property is to not just show willingness to take protest to its most extreme conclusion, but also serves the function of environmentalism by eliminating a thing that is doing polluting.

Malm paints the other missing side of history, we can't just teach the terrible things we did in our history; we must also recall the terrible things those who fought for human rights did to defend themselves and bring their cause to realization.

I am not calling for violence, that is the sort of thing that gets one in trouble, but I couldn't help but think that many of the arguments Malm makes about environmental action are just as applicable to the cause of privacy. His portrayal of the insane suicidal opponents of environmentalism feel akin to how the anti-privacy leaders act.

Ad Blockers are Direct Action

I think it is actually a really easy argument to make that Ad Blockers are a sort of intentional vandalism of the web. They deface websites in a pretty direct way. Imagine if you went to your local newsstand and took the entire stack of newspapers, cut every ad out of them, and put them back into the stack. There would be no argument about what this was.

When I call ad blockers vandalism though, it isn't a criticism. It is a recognition that the people want privacy and have already begun to leverage violence against property to get it, even if not every individual can fully articulate it that way. The future of protest is the past here and it turns out the longest running and most expensive example of political industrial sabotage has been here, running in browser extensions under our noses all along.

The IAB’s demonization of ad blockers shows just how deep the threat of its stance against privacy could be to publishers. It has created an opportunity for the ad blocker, like some past direct action campaigns, to be infiltrated and subverted by its target—the ad blockers that are easiest to find in a search are those that participate in an “Acceptable Ads” scheme which allows privacy-violating trackers.

We need to recognize that while we might have erased our perception of history, as Malm notes, direct action against the suppression of human rights is a historical constant.

While Ad Blockers are easy action by people, the less easy action (one less easy to subvert as well) seems inevitable if the powers behind the ad tech lobby continue to try and suppress, denigrate, and ignore the privacy movement.

Many of the arguments Malm makes in his book about the justifications & logic of doing physical violence to the mechanisms of pollution apply just as well to so much of ad tech's mechanisms of tracking and user data.

Asymmetry invites action

In "Principled Privacy" Robin Berjon talks to the misuse of user data and the power differential they create:

These asymmetries of power need to be addressed. They threaten personal autonomy, they harm innovation and economic diversity, and they damage collective intelligence

Asymmetries of power are vulnerable to action by the people and they push citizens into positions where they feel they have nothing to lose. Running Privacy Badger or Orion to block network signals is just the simplest example. Let us follow through: take a look at a Digital Billboard, like LinkNYC, as a mechanism of realizing the asymmetry of personalized cross-context cross-domain tracking into the physical world. This device runs ads and these ads are increased in value through tracking, perhaps in the device itself, but likely much more simply through the purchase of user data from cell phone providers.

Attacking and defacing or destroying digital billboards has almost no downsides from an activist perspective. It seems easy. No chance of hurting a human. It doesn't have the immediate surveillance of attacking a camera. It serves both as protest message and direct action against the problem because it makes using personalized advertising techniques directly less profitable.

Now I'm not recommending you take a hammer to your nearest digital billboard. In the same way that I think How To Blow Up a Pipeline is an interesting and useful thought experiment that can lead you to draw real conclusions I wonder if this concept--what would it mean and do to destroy a digital billboard in the subway or on the street--is also useful. It brings the concept of running an ad blocker into a more physical reality. 

Beyond that, I wonder if it is predicting the inevitable. There are so many products out there in the physical world and on store shelves that are vulnerable to exactly this type of destructive action.

If the argument to regain the human right of privacy is frustrated by the entities that represent ad tech middlemen in DC I wonder if direct action will inevitably escalate to the point that the physical mechanisms of ad tech become common targets. I wonder what new ways digital property destruction will come to be realized beyond ad blockers. Especially if they can’t shake the energy and material use that links these concerns with environmental ones.

What if we just didn't?

I think there is an irony in that none of this has to play out this way. The regime of personalized multi-party tracked surveillance-based advertising has been an extractive one for participants on both ends of the equasion. Buyers pay more yet commonly report that most digital advertising does not deliver outcomes, when it is not outright harmful. Users deal with a worse, heavier, and offensively invasive web and increasingly decamp to more and more limited walled garden platforms. At the same time the asymmetries of power are exacerbated by privacy-invasive ad tech. Most publishers have been in an endless downward spiral. Those problems will only be worsened by ad tech firms forcing users to manage increasingly complex consent systems that users will more and more often use to say no to tracking with.

All the money that goes into ads and all the legitimate supply that provides an outlet for those ads are ill-served by the status quo.

The only ones who are truly making out like bandits are the middlemen, the tax collectors, the data traders who have convinced the world that they need to exist.

...

They don't need to exist.

...

If we acknowledge that, then no one need lose their job. The move to privacy provides many business opportunities in and of itself. A private world will require new technologies, interesting products, and new approaches. A technological revolution approaches the horizon and that is a wave that the firms threatened by privacy could ride, instead of be drowned by.

But the rhetoric of the leaders of ad tech would push you under that wave. It pushes ad tech into an eternal war with users, a never ending opposition to not just the very users that you depend on, but to a cause that is tied up inexorably with human rights.

Going to war with users benefits no one but big tech companies who this psychological violence drives users into the walled gardens of; and the ad tech parasites who extract capital from the conflict, mostly by selling the equivalent of weapons.

If ad tech leadership decides to take the position that the only people calling for privacy are extremists then extremists is what they will create.

In the ad tech arms race take advice from an elder AI: "The only winning move is not to play."

Sacred Ground

At the beginning of David Cohen's speech to the IAB leadership on this topic he tells the story of the first banner ad ever created for the web, on HotWired. It's too bad that he neglects a deeper look into the history of that particular event.

We came with the attitude that this [the internet] was a sacred ground. The rest of advertising had been ruined and dammit, we weren’t going to let that happen this time,”

-Joe McCambley, one of the creators of the first banner ad.

HotWired was an entirely unique entity compared to modern websites. It didn't look or act anything like a modern website. The banner ad on HotWired was designed to be unlike anything that had come before. It wasn't intended to sell you something directly, it was supposed to bring you to a new experience and to feel like something fresh.

As you consider the future of ad tech, it helps to remember the past with clear eyes, instead of a fairy tale history. The banner ad, now one of the most standard advertising formats, was supposed to be something new and unique, something that leveraged and engaged with users' idealism about the internet and curiosity about what the web could be.

If you have made it this far and are still considering which side of history you want to land on for the human rights battle that is privacy, perhaps recall the real history of digital advertising.

It was made by those willing to embrace change, and the power and wonder of an open web. 

///

This post represents my **personal** opinion and does not reflect the position of my current, past, or future employers, this platform, or anyone other than me singularly.

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The latest development, that Twitter is going to stop allowing people to link off the platform, is truly insane.

Oh boy. Well, before I get banned or they start blocking links to Substack I’m going to come back to doing more writing here (or port my email list over to a different service, we’ll see), so sign on up here if you want to continue to talk about media, ad tech, technology and fkn bullshitters like we did on Twitter.

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Pretty straightforward.

Of course someone asked ‘Hey could you do this with web2?’ and yeah yeah I can. So let’s get that out of the way.

The result of my request? Over 80 Web3 definitions. Not a lot of them were totally compatible. Those of which were legible and even slightly serious I’ve collected here, separated by major category, semi-sorted by time:

Web3 is token-based interactions

Web3 is micropayments

Web3 is creating ownable/tradeable property out of digital media and data (financialization)

Web3 is about “Decentralization”

I’m putting decentralization in quotes here because I think that people do not share a clear definition on that either.

Web3 is specifically about Blockchain decentralization

Web3 is about burning up the planet for various reasons

Web3 is about Cryptocurrency

Web3 is about Decentralized ID / Login

Web3 is a straight up scam

The Taxonomy of Web3 Definitions

Hopefully I haven’t offended anyone by their placement in this loose taxonomy of Web3 definitions! My intent was to try and reduce it down as much as possible to a minimum of useful categories.

Now this is hardly a scientific polling process, but seeing how this is a newsletter I’m going to draw assumptions from it anyway.

It’s interesting to me that the most commonality (outside of calling it a scam) was in identifying Web3 as a project of financialization. A number of supporters and detractors defined Web3 this way and likely would identify Web3’s process of financilizing the internet as the very reason they support or dislike Web3 as a concept.

I was also really interested in a number of people identifying Web3 as a way to log or opt-in, which was something I very much did not expect and would never have suggested as a definition. I know you *can* log in with Web3 tools, but considering the pseudo anonymous nature of cryptocurrency/blockchain I don’t really consider “logging in” to be useful to Web3 projects except as a means to other ends.

The same for microtransactions, Web3 enables microtransactions to happen more easily, but it doesn’t make sense for me as a goal, there are numerous products out there to manage transactions and microtransactions at scale without forcing users to jump through the significantly difficult hoops that creating and filling and connecting a crypto wallet requires.

The case against tokens

I think the most organized and clear support and definition for Web3 was argued with this idea of defining it as “doing stuff with tokens”. It’s an interesting definition that divorces web3 from the requirements of using Blockchain (a notable category of answers) or crypto currency.

This is what I would *like* to have Web3 mean personally. As an engineer who is interested in technology, that’s the space that seems to have a lot of interesting potential use cases that are—as yet—unsatisfied. Tokens for login, tokens to participate in specific types of groups or projects, tokens to represent specific information or membership, etc… I think this is the sort of thing that might have real uses. I’m not the only one and it is very clear that the cryptocurrency community saw that and glommed on to that set of use cases to advertise themselves and establish the idea of Web3.

But I don’t think that the idea that Web3 represents some new token-based web is reality-based. At this point I’ve built my own tiny blockchain, read a bunch of white papers and technical docs from cryptocurrency projects, and read a ton from all perspectives on this. (I will be publishing a collection of readings soon.) More notably than that, I spent a good week of my free time really really trying to set up a way to use the existing ecosystem of crypto wallets to manage arbitrary tokens unattached to any existing cryptocurrency and—as far as I can tell—that is impossible and no one appears to be actively working on it.

The idea that anything token-based in the “Web3” space does or could operate independently from cryptocurrency seems to be, at best, fantasy; at worst, purposeful misdirection. There certainly does not appear to be relevant technology available yet to support those use cases. More importantly: there seems to be almost no one who would define themselves as a Web3 proponent interested in that use case, though it would almost certainly expand adoption of related technologies, increase user base, and open up all new types of projects that could expand the definition of Web3. No, it seems the only thing about tokens that interests Web3 developers is their ability to act as securities for cryptocurrency, or as a thing to spend cryptocurrency on in some way or another.

So, Web3 is?

So I have to go back to how I would define Web3. The conversation that started this specific post:

and I’ve seen no particular definition adequate enough to convince me otherwise. At the end of the day all these other definitions are, to quote one responder, marketing. All of these projects, when they actually manifest in the Web3 space, always connect back to a cryptocurrency blockchain. In fact they are designed specifically on the concepts of trade and value that require backing by financial transactions. It’s an interesting dream that Web3 could be separate from cryptocurrency, but in reality there is no Web3 stuff I can see that isn’t either cryptocurrency, or churning cryptocurrency by design. That’s reality as I see it!

Maybe one day this will change. As others have said, this feels like a solution in search of a problem. Maybe it will find that problem! But I await that reality rather than assuming it will one day arrive.

To come: a really long page with every interesting thing I’ve read about cryptocurrency. But it won’t be an email. I’ll link it.

This narrowing has become even more difficult to escape now that my entire music experience is filtered through a streaming service, there’s no longer any time to trip over a song on the radio or even stumble over a recommendation on a pirating site. Even if someone was going to lend me a CD, I don’t have anything to play it anymore. Taking a single recommendation often isn’t enough to break out of the effect of my overall listening pattern. If I do nothing but passively consume music via a streaming service, I’ll likely never be pushed to the edge, much less out, of my comfort zone.

This problem isn’t just one of music recommendations. Only, I think there’s a solution that leverages the algorithmic recommendation process to broaden, instead of limit, us and we can see it already in Spotify.

The Sweet Escape

A brief guide to breaking your way out of your musical comfort zone.

Leveraging Organic encounters

In the world of the web, the term “organic” is used for a piece of content we find through actively searching for it, when it comes to music there is a similar process. I’m always fast on the Shazam trigger if I hear a song I like in a restaurant, movie or film. In the days I went outside (because we weren’t in a pandemic) I’d find a lot of very different songs that way. I also like Sofar Sounds concerts, I go in not knowing what music I’m going to get and potentially find something very different to enjoy.

Once I get a song I like, that doesn’t really sound like anything else to which I listen, the first thing I do is head to the artist’s About page on Spotify. From there I can follow links to Discovered On, a set of playlists that include the artist. While one song isn’t enough to escape the reinforcement of listening to the same music on loop, a whole new playlist of similar music starts to open things up.

A good example is the time I stumbled across Los Ángeles Azules’ “Amor A Primera Vista” in a restaurant. Their About page led me to a Spotify-created playlist around Cumbia Sonidera and checking through their Fans Also Like page let me dive into some similar bands.

Stealing from Friends

As you dig into these different playlists, you’ll find that listening impacts your Discovery playlist, which uses similar algorithmic tools to generate suggestions. If you go wild in your journeys outside your comfort zone you may find it becomes a little less useful.

I’m pretty sure I’ve broken my Discover playlist because it seems to often be filled with stuff I don’t particularly like. One time it was filled with bitcoin rap about “lambos”, which was the worst. If I’m looking for an antidote, but with nothing particular in mind, I also look for new music by finding other people’s Discovery playlists in the Friend Activity feed. Now I have a folder entirely composed of other people’s Discovery playlists. It’s great because some of my friends have better and sometimes very different musical tastes than I. Hopping into a friend’s Discover playlist is a lot of fun, as it puts you outside your comfort zone, and is also a great exercise in listening to entirely different kinds of music.

Occasionally there will be something great in my Discovery playlist, even now, so you can make mine the first you explore.

This just scratches the surface of how you can dig into the algorithm for more musical variety.

Using the Relationship Graph

Every Noise at Once is an algorithmic attempt to categorize music by genre and then place those genres and the bands that play them in relationship to each other. The project emerged from trying to understand what a musical genre even is and how one could even recommend songs on that basis and is part of a system that was purchased by Spotify to help run the recommendation system you encounter in their app today.

Here’s what the ENaO graph looks like for Classic Rock, one example of a genre I frequency listen to:

In the description of how this algorithmic sorting came to be engineer Glenn McDonald notes:

The approach allows us (or our customers) to seed, and then organically grow, a new genre or style from essentially any inspiration. In a couple peculiar cases, we’ve gathered an initial artist list, let the computers give us some songs, and only then listened to those songs to find out what kind of music we were even talking about.

By creating a system which can organically enter into a genre and essentially reverse engineer it, Spotify has a tool that lets me easily break out of any musical bubble and find my way–wikipedia-effect-style–into entirely new universes of music.

ENaO brings forth the ability to see the relationship graph of a genre. Here’s Classic Rock’s closely related genres (based on how listeners act, not on any historical reasoning).

Now if I want to make a small move, say I want to still get some of the sound of classic rock but move away from the core music of the genre I might choose to move towards psychedelic rock, traditional folk, or art rock. The position tells me a little about the genre in relation to Classic Rock: “down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.” But ENaO gives me another option, the inverse graph:

Now, if I’m feeling like I really want to flip my listening on my head I can pick something totally opposite of my normal genre. Perhaps Fluxwork or some Montreal Indie?

From the Map area of ENaO I can expand the playlists I might explore based on a particular genre. The map shows a set of bands that I can try exploring individually. I can also head to one of the playlist links:

• playlist sends me to “The Sounds of [Genre]” playlists on Spotify. When I stumble across an interesting genre I will often save the Sounds Of playlist for later when I’m in the mood to explore it a bit deeper. As a result I have a wholebunchoftheseplaylists which essentially act as up-to-date overviews to the genre I can dive into at any time.

• intro is essentially an ‘introduction’ to this genre with music that represents the core sound and is most popular among listeners of the genre.

• pulse is an interesting look at which songs listeners of this genre currently prefer.

• edge is a fun one that shows you songs that people who like this genre currently enjoy outside the genre itself. It’s another great tool for pulling yourself out of a listening rut.

I might go to one or all of those playlists depending on how curious I am in order to find new music and save it to my liked songs.

Don’t Stop the Music

Once I find a song or genre I like, of course not every related song is my cup of tea, in the same way I like some classic rock bands, but not others. This is the part where I can “hack” the algorithm to help me develop an ear for a particular genre without knowing much about it. This is especially useful for me when I, an English-speaker, explore non-English genres. Here’s how it works:

My neighborhood Vietnamese restaurant plays really great Thai music. Of course, I didn’t know what type of music it was or even what language it was in when I first heard it, I had to Shazam it. The nature of exploring music this way is sort of naive so please excuse any factual errors to follow. Over the course of one dinner I had a few songs that I could explore. “โคตรเลวในดวงใจ” by Takkatan Chollada is classified as Thai pop country. “เสียเวลาว่ะ” by electric.neon.lamp is in Thai pop indie playlists while “เสพติดความเจ็บปวด” by The Yers appears to be Thai pop rock. These are assumptions I make by looking at the Discovered On playlists and translating the names.

Judging on these three songs it looks like I would enjoy Thai Pop music. Now I can throw these songs together into a playlist. When I create a Spotify playlist around songs from a new genre, it only takes a few entries before I can scroll to the bottom and use the Recommended Songs area.

By hopping into that section and listening further for what I enjoy, I can pretty quickly develop a playlist of my favorite parts of this genre I’m newly exploring, without knowing a lot except the particular sound that appeals to me.

This is sort of similar to the framework of Pandora, but is far more interesting because your seeding of the playlist can be a lot more focused and the way Spotify handles it gives you more transparency and control.

Getting a Taste

Once I do this for long enough, I start to develop a better ear for the subtleties of a specific genre. I may not have the tools of a music academic, so excuse my lack of proper terminology, but I will start to hear particular sounds or auditory themes that I groove to. I start by adding those into the playlist, but when I can start to differentiate the sub-genres by ear there comes a time to subdivide.

When I started, I saw all three of those songs above as “Thai Pop”, but by looking at what playlists they are in and listening to them and any of the recommended songs I enjoy, I start to get a sense of what differentiates them.

I’ll act on my new understanding of those differences by splitting the playlist into the three genres of Thai music that I perceive. Thai Pop, Thai Rock, and Luk thung (please excuse my ignorance as there is not a lot easily translatable or in English about most non-English music genres, but a rough description of this genre–as I understand it–is Thai Folk Country music. I highly recommend the Luk thung Wikipedia article).

Every Day I’m Shuffling

The key to this process is the Recommended Songs list at the end of every playlist. It’s a particularly fascinating piece of the user interface for Spotify. The section represents a radically different way of interacting with a recommendation algorithm, one that differs from other social platforms. It is the difference between being directed by the algorithm as a subject vs you directing the algorithm as a tool.

McDonald (still a few years from his employer being acquired by Spotify and this Recommendation mechanic becoming part of the app) states the core approach that creates this difference:

The point of the map, as with the genres, is not to resolve disputes but to invite you to explore music. It is an attempt – however uneven, idiosyncratic, and incomplete – to embrace this new state of the world, in which nearly all of humanity’s recorded music is streamable or downloadable, and give you a way to find out what you don’t know you don’t know.

All it takes is a few small changes in the user experience to make an algorithm that is a tool for exploration, expanding your view instead of narrowing it. I’m not saying that Spotify or this approach is perfect, but it is worlds different from using an algorithmically sorted platform like Facebook or Twitter because, with the exception of a few auto-generated playlists, Spotify has made the choice to give users the tools to “hack” the algorithm to explore new things, instead of trapping them in an ever narrowing funnel from the initial preferences they had when they started.

Editor’s Note - Podcasts

It’s worth noting that I wrote this before a well-earned explosion of controversy around Spotify royalty rates and podcasts. The podcasts question is especially interesting because all this awesome stuff that works well with music doesn’t work at all for podcasts (podcast recommendations seem to be a mystery in comparison). It’s a whole other essay, but I wonder if part of the problem is trying to run a whole new type of content without any of the tools that make Spotify, as an experience for music fans, work.

You should read more about what’s going on here:

• Spotify to let artists promote music for cut in royalty rates

• ‘The Joe Rogan Experience,’ a podcast that has sparked outrage, is a huge hit for Spotify

• Joe Rogan, Alex Jones and Spotify’s illusion of neutrality

• Spotify Is Defending Alex Jones’ Appearance On “The Joe Rogan Experience”

• ‘Justice At Spotify’ Campaign Calls for Increased Royalty Rates, More Transparency

• Spotify hints at subscription podcast service

• The Problem with Muzak

Anyway…

Let’s talk about a house. Specifically, a house I lived in.

This isn’t the house, this is the building that used to be Forbes HQ before they moved to New Jersey for some reason. Totally unrelated.

Back in the day, right after I finished college, I stuck around in Fairfax, VA, for a while to do work for George Mason University and eventually work freelance, mostly from home. I needed a place to live, so I joined a bunch of dudes who had been in a fraternity with me (it was the Jewish fraternity, don’t get excited) in renting a house walking distance from campus. We all knew each other well, and we, as a group, were mostly graduated. We all went in together because we wanted to hang out, have a porch, a place large enough to throw the occasional party, and a big room where we could put a big TV. It was our early 20s, you know?

I didn’t set up the agreement, but I moved in after the first few months they were. I liked it because I could claim the master bedroom, have my own bathroom, and be near people who would pull me out of my 80-hour work weeks to see sunlight and eat normal food.

We rented the house for under market price. I’m not sure how much under market price, but perhaps a lot under. The house had been expanded by its owner and they did not do a good job. There was a cheap conversion of the garage into the aforementioned big room to fit the big TV. Also, someone hadn’t had the foresight to understand why putting the A/C vent at ground level behind the leaky sink in a second-floor bathroom was a bad idea.

We had a sort of unspoken agreement with the owner; he charged us a very reasonable rental rate and mostly ignored the consequences of renting to a group of 20-something bros, as long as we kept the front lawn clean and well mowed. In return, we didn’t mention the fact that the basement washer and dryer (the basement was supposed to be its own living space) didn’t work, or that putting vents at flood-level caused the occasional drip into the kitchen, or that the hill to the bottom entrance was impossible to back a car into if you wanted to unload furniture. We would only really call when something life-threatening happened, like when that downstairs dryer lighting on fire, or the time the garage-expansion started smelling like we’d entered a hell dimension because the leaky vent caused substandard drywall to degrade into sulfur.

The house was in a nice neighborhood for families (walking distance from a school even) and I wouldn’t be surprised if the rising housing prices around us allowed him to get a tax break on his losses with our low rent, it almost currently allowed him to consider the value of the rapidly degenerating residence significantly higher than it probably was worth. On the outside the value of the house kept looking better and better in the rising marketplace, but on the inside we barely had a working kitchen, collectively owned a startling number of cats and dogs over the years, discovered black mold, and occasionally the satanic smell would come back as another piece of drywall degenerated.

Song break! I’ve been really into a genre I only just have stumbled into called Murderfolk. It’s fun! Anyway, here’s one of those songs:

So when the first group moved into the house they had put down a security deposit. Over time some people left the house and it was refilled with other friends. The people who were involved in putting down the initial deposit… well… we couldn’t *prove* we weren’t getting the deposit back when we finally moved out, so, when a person moved into their room, that new person would pay them back their portion of the deposit and then be responsible for that chunk of the deposit, like a debt that got passed on and purchased by new entrants.

At some point, we were all ready to move out. We’d all hit our mid-20s and also, for some reason, none of the doors worked properly anymore. As we were considering the move, we made some good attempts to clean up, we even patched the depression in the floor where a chunk had collapsed and people were basically supported by carpet tension. We deeply, deeply considered trying to fix the drywall that fell apart in one of the closets because the shelving hadn’t been attached to any studs. Deeply considered it. Instead, we decided we’d just move out slowly, passing our rental agreement on to the next generation of early 20-somethings who we didn’t know very well.

We moved out one at a time and each of us had our portion of the safety deposit purchased by an incoming new resident. Each of us got a little cash and headed out to grow up and live in less flop-house-esque places. The house, on the inside, was worse for our passing. The new group saw their rent go up as the marketplace went up. As long as the outside looked fine, the rotting inside didn’t really matter. The guy who owned it, he got his rent, we who had lived in the house in its prime got a fun time and got some money out of it. And the next group? Well, as long as they followed the unspoken agreement where no one mentioned the holes in the floor and just walked around them, they benefited from the illusion as well.

I don’t know how long this process went on after us. Eventually, that house is going to be sold, if it hasn’t already. When they sell it, the owner will likely put a spitshine up with that security deposit, but the quick clean up won’t fix the A/C vent that doubles as a drain; they will reattach the shelf to the drywall instead of the studs and it will likely be aided by that cheap drywall. But the owner will make a profit, I’m sure!

Here’s the thing, the new owner, they’ll probably hit all those same problems soon enough, but as long as they keep up the illusion on the outside of the house, they’ll likely be able to make good money on their sale too.

Eventually though? The whole neighborhood will turn around in surprise as the house falls in on itself. But right up until they do people will likely pass by and say ‘look at the outside of that house, it must be a very, very fine house.’

Forbes: a very very fine house.

At the top of the reading list, may I recommend Wonkette’s piece “Stick To Sporps”:

Forbes has had an outsized role in sending modern-day Vandals to sack and poop on their betters. There is a class of media management that have been hiring each other to ruin the LA Times (defeated! for now!), all of Tribune publishing (renamed tronc by its idiot looters), and now the former Gawker Media, which became GMG (Gizmodo Media Group) when Univision bought it and then G/O Media when Great Hills took it off Univision's shaking hands. (Last link by Univision employees. And it's not pretty either!)

At the LA Times, former Forbes dude Lewis D'Vorkin, in his very short career there, was ready to implement an "unpaid contributor model" instead of journalism by journalists. At G/O, former Forbes dude Spanfeller had BIG NEW ideas straight out of 2004: MOAR LISTICLES. Plus those Taboola things littered all over the Internet. Plus ??? PROFIT!

A very good read!

More good reads:

• This is how things work at G/O Media.

• Stick to Sports? No Way. Deadspin Journalists Quit en Masse.

• "the collapse of Deadspin is so spectacularly stupid, so clearly self-inflicted, that it has an epochal quality."

• Remember, not everyone can quit.

• G/O Media Executive Defends Firing Deadspin Editor for Not Sticking to Sports

• What’s happening at Deadspin is a travesty

• About All That

• Farmers Insurance Pulls Million-Dollar Ad Campaign With G/O Media After Editorial Staff Raises Hell

• The Adults In The Room

• This is how it’s gonna work

• Let’s All Stop Mindlessly Clicking and Sharing Zombie Links

• The Mavening of Sportswriting

• Deadspin Resignations Threaten New Owner’s Turnaround

It has become increasingly common to hear variants on the phrase ‘you have the right to freedom of speech but not freedom of amplification.’ As danah boyd put it in 2018: “Choosing what to amplify is not the same as curtailing someone’s ability to speak.”

It isn’t so much the content of fake news but how it is distributed. Social platforms have taken as a rule that while all amplification may not be equal, all amplification is good and should propagate with speed.

So what happens when we take, as the starting point, a limited-use social network? I have been fascinated by the idea of being able to spin up a single-use timeboxed network for a particular event, allow people to interact with it over the course of that event in a setup that is tied to in-person attendance, and then move an archived version to the web as a sort of conference proceedings-style tool after the event. I want to re-imagine user permissions in the context of an actual physical event. Also considering amplification, not just within the system, but what could happen after the proceedings are taken public. Let’s think differently about how social media can be used.

Like most of my side projects, I bit off more than I can chew, so while I’m still working through the code I figured it might make sense to write up my thoughts and ask for feedback.

So, for the purpose of this we’re considering:

1. How do we emulate the social mechanics of a well designed, supportive and safe conference space where people trust each other? To provide the baseline here, I’m building on SRCCON, which is very good at this, and in the past has provided users with in-person permissioning. The badges had colored lanyards and the different colors mean things: green - my image in this space can be freely recorded and shared; yellow - you must ask permission to record and share my image; red - do not record or share my image.

2. How do we give users the capability to operate on the system in confidence that their requested permissions will be respected while still leaving the space open enough for users to freely share?

3. How do we retain the data so people can learn from automatically generated conference proceedings without violating users’ preferences, especially as interaction with the open web increases the chance their work might be seen by actors who do not respect the rules of the system? We also want to attribute credit as accurately as possible.

All participants will, like in a well-structured conference, be presented with these rules as part of a code of conduct and consent to it. Because we’re dealing with a limited group invited into the space, I think as long as the rules are clear we can make this assumption.

Our goals in this experiment are to allow the users to contribute and converse freely and openly within the bounds of the conference while giving them control over who gets to see and amplify what they have to say on this platform. Users can expect their work to be handled in one way during the conference and another after the conference. The goal being to preserve useful information and educational content without forcing them to forever have their name associated with it in a way that might make them less open to talk or share during the conference. (In this consideration, the conference has strong conduct rules around what is on and off the record).

A quick song break before we get too deep!

Let’s start with the type of settings a user can control, both for their profile as defaults but also on individual posts or pieces of content (like images) where applicable:

• A: Possible Amplification

  1. All Posts and Comments may be Re-shared into other contexts or embedded from the Archive. Content is exportable by others for reuse/remix. All content marked CC-BY by default.

  2. No Posts or Comments may be Re-shared Except for Trusted Users and on Request. The Archived versions will not be embedded unless a request is confirmed by the user. Content is not exportable. Access to the capability to re-share may be revoked on an individual basis.

  3. No Posts or Comments my be re-shared or embedded. Content is not exportable.

• B: Content Visibility

  1. All Posts, Images and Comments visible.

  2. All Posts and Images visible, Comments and Images within them only visible to Top Poster, Admins, on Request and Trusted Users.

  3. All Posts public, but comments, images and comment threads by user are only visible to Trusted Users, on permission given by the user and Admins. Users may not request access of the user.

  4. Posts prompted to be public but by default visible only to Trusted Users and Admins and approved requesters. Comments only visible to Trusted Users and Admins and approved requesters. Users may not request access of the user.

• C: Content Permanence

  1. All content retained in Archive with user’s name.

  2. All content retained in Archive, but the user’s name will be removed and replaced with an anonymous ID unless the user specifies otherwise on individual Posts and Comments. (Other users will see a signal for this on posts throughout if set.)

  3. No content retained in Archive. (Other users will see a signal for this on posts throughout if set.)

• D: Profile Visibility

  1. User Profile publicly visible and can be archived.

  2. User Profile visible to Trusted Users and on Request.

  3. User Profile never visible to any but Admins.

• E: Profile Permanence

  1. User Profile will be in Archive and can be exported by others and is publicly visible.

  2. User Profile will be in Archive but not exportable by others.

  3. User Profile will be in Archive but not publicly visible, instead assigned an anonymized ID code that only the user will retain.

  4. User Profile will not be in Archive.

• F: Personal Moderation Level (Admin Moderators may intervene at any level)

  1. All Posts and threads you create (unless the thread is on a post with a different permission level) are open to real time comments without pre-moderation.

  2. All Posts and threads you create are open to real time comments by Trusted Users without pre-moderation, other users most have their first Post moderated in a thread you control, and then will be allowed to Post in real-time by default.

  3. All Posts and threads you create will be fully moderated. You must approve any Posts on those threads regardless if the user is trusted.

Ok. That is a lot. We need a system goal of allowing users to easily set these preference levers in a way that makes sense to how they are likely to interact with the system.

To do this, we’re going to give users clear packaged permission settings into user levels they can select on joining the system.

Green User - I Am In Public

• Your content may be freely re-shared in the system.

• Your posts are viewable to all.

• Your threaded comment responses are viewable to all.

• All posts and threads you create are open to real-time commenting.

• Your user profile is public to all.

• All uploaded assets are free to reuse by others under CC-BY.

• All your posted content is exportable by others.

• Your user profile is exportable by others.

• Your posts may leave the intranet for the archive to live on the open web at conference end.

• (A:1, B:1, C:1, D:1, E:1, F:1)

Yellow User - Please Ask Me For Permission

• Your content can only be re-shared within the system with your active consent for each re-share or by users you consider trusted.

• Your base posts are viewable to all but do not have real-time comments active except for trusted users.

• Your threaded responses are only available to your trusted users and the owner of the parent thread.

• Your profile is private but other users may request access.

• Your uploaded assets are available on approved request. Approved users may embed your content but each embed may be revoked on a per-case bases or overall. Availability subject to custom CC type.

• Your posted content is only available for export on approved request. You may freely export their own content.

• Your user profile must be requested for export.

• Your personal data will be purged at conference end but any content you had chosen to make public will be visible and stripped of identifying information.

• (A:2, B:2, C:2, D:2, E:3, F:2)

Red User - I Am Private

• Users may not re-share your content across the intranet.

• Your base posts are viewable by all but you will be prompted to double check if you wish to make the posts private. All posts and comments will be marked as intended to purge the end of the event.

• Your threaded responses are only visible to the top level user in that thread and your Trusted Users. Access must be actively given and cannot be requested. Your response posts will be marked as intended to purge at the end of the event.

• Your profile is private to all but system administrators and may not be requested.

• Your assets will be purged at the end of the event and can be exported only by you.

• Your profile is only exportable by you.

• All content, posts and profiles will be deleted from the system at the end of the event.

• (A:3, B:3, C:3, D:3, E:4, F:2)

Ok, hopefully these user levels make sense!

I envision these rules applied to two connected systems, a Twitter style system adapted off a similar technical model from Mastodon where Posts are basically Tweets/Toots. Users (or those with permission to amplify) can escalate those Posts into full forum-style threaded conversations with support for unlimited blocks of text.

We’d have User Profiles and at the end of the conference the system would be moved from an intranet in the physical conference space to an internet website that would be locked in a static state.

Any individual user would be able to export all their content in a usable package at any time and tell the system what location they would like to consider canonical if they intend to host it themselves. For those individual user exports, any threads they posts that they started would come along and user IDs would be treated the same way as in the archive.

To enforce the privacy levels above, users would have their profile names cleared and replaced with an anonymous ID and they would get an encryption key. They may also choose to leave their profile in place and their name on some posts but not others. The anonymous ID will be applied to selected posts. The user’s real name would be purged from any association with the anonymous ID. Users who wish to limit embedding rights would be able to grant embeds to others on request by using their key to sign their approval to such requests. (This part, admittedly, is the most in need of additional technical thinking.) The other thing that this key would enable users to do is prove that they were the ones who made a particular post by decrypting the ID, if they ever wish to do so.

Only those posts that have the proper permissions set would have embed buttons in the archive and all others would have prominent notices making it clear that they should not be re-shared without permission. To aid in this we’d have clear CC-style rights notices.

My hope here isn’t that this system is the be all and end all of social media. Like I said, to what extent this can be accomplished, I’m thinking of it specifically for time-limited uses. Perhaps this isn’t the right format even for that. I’m hoping people will be interested and, if they see problems, object! Perhaps this slow side project will not be completed before someone builds a better version of the idea.

Whatever happens, I think it is interesting to think through how to design a social network with substantially different goals for users than current systems. Where the design is intended to allow users to set their exposure to the public in different contexts and control who can amplify them. Users should have a clear option to leave up content they think might have value without having to tie themselves to that content forever. I hope the system still values and helps with sharing and conversation.

We are often trapped by particular assumptions about how social media should work. We don’t need to be. If this inspires you to write another totally different approach I’d like to hear it!

Further Reference:

• 5 Lessons for Reporting in an Age of Disinformation by Claire Wardle

• Here’s what we are doing with Galley, our discussion forum app by Mathew Ingram

• How to run a small social network site for your friends by Darius Kazemi

• Reading ActivityPub by Darius Kazemi

• The Coral Project’s extensive public research

• Heather Gold’s presentations on Tummeling

Interested in talking more about this newsletter? Join the Keybase.io team to chat about it: https://keybase.io/team/gneist.newsletter

Photo Credits:

1. Street Speaker (Used under CC BY-SA)

Generally, I think trying to detect a user who is explicitly trying to go undetectable is a bad idea. Publications have the best case for interdicting privacy-mode users. The majority of privacy mode hits to publisher sites are likely to bypass the means by which they pay people to create the content (bad) and, basically by accident, makes things even harder for publishers by not only skipping a paywall, but also stripping out the target-able user data that digital ads are sold on. There’s a genuine argument to be made on the other side as well; some people who use privacy mode do so with a genuine concern about the surveillance state and tracking and with the ecosystem of ad tech.

But let’s put aside if this is actually “OK” for a second and talk about the reality of Chrome’s changes.

In the document Google used to announce the feature, they state: “The main motivation for this work is privacy”. This puts simply the position of publishers who might attempt to detect incognito as “against privacy”. Very black and white, very binary.

Reality has some grays.

When the Chrome announcement of the feature came out, the papers who employed incognito mode blocking were pretty much locals. Most people didn’t notice the announcement. I know I missed it when it came out early in February. Beyond that, actual releases of Chrome features are not always on schedule and occasionally subject to outside pressure. It didn’t seem to stop The New York Times from rolling out their blocker.

There’s a good idea here, a good cause in theory. I think we can all agree, generally speaking, that privacy is good and giving users more privacy is good. Giving people the tools to enforce their decision to be more private is good.

It reminds me of AMP, which also has a good idea at its core. But because it is backed by Google tech, pushed to general use by Google’s weight in the community and leveraged to force adoption due to its presence in Google’s search pages it is deformed by those interests and requirements, no matter how open source it is. Google allows it to bypass all the usual checks and balances for web standards and has created its own non-traditional incentives for users. At the same time, Google’s incentives are a little less than clear.

The problem isn’t just ‘is blocking people in privacy mode bad?’. The question is who gets to decide, when, why and with what justification? Perhaps most of the people who are trying to access publisher sites in privacy mode are doing so because they have genuine concerns about their privacy and user data. But perhaps not. I’m withholding my own opinion here, but I do think this can be the sort of discussion a consumer can have with the publisher they are trying to read, an active challenge and dialogue through use, reviews and public reaction. This is the sort of things publishers and readers can determine together. Well, at least it was. Now they can’t. But Google can!

Music break! Last week I stumbled on Ukrainian rap group Grebz, and have been highly enjoying their 2016 album along with their big hit “Ice Melts”:

A publisher doesn’t have data to make more money off the user in privacy mode, but Google does. It has your device, your browser, potentially your operating system, those device IDs, geodata, IP address, occasionally network-level data, the ad tech behind the page to weave all those pieces of data together, parse that data, turn it into a persistent ID, privacy mode or not.

This hits at a deeper issue. When people interact with the internet they do so at the surface of whatever particular page they are on. The underlying systems or economics beneath the page aren’t obvious to them, nor are the mechanics of the browser they operate on. But pages on the web are subject to those mechanisms anyway. If Safari, Firefox or IE make a change to how their browser interacts with the web, it is a single pressure point. When Google makes a change to how their browser interacts with the page, especially in regard to privacy, they are usually penalizing sites for mechanics introduced by Google elsewhere. This persists across almost all Google decision making. The capability to introduce both problem and punishment without ever being identified as the cause is… troubling. Let’s take for example:

• Google changes SERP listing to include speed as a measure / Google’s ad serving system is the biggest drag on speed for most sites.

• Google pushes AMP for better cleaner faster websites (in theory) / The biggest problem causing complexity and extra scripts on websites are ad-served scripts that Google is capable of blocking in its ad systems but doesn’t.

• Google removes privacy mode detection / Google’s ecosystem is built to value user data, even perhaps over the interest of the publishers using it.

When Google speaks out about issues it wishes to resolve, it seems these issues are mostly due to Google’s operations elsewhere. But they don’t identify themselves as the problem and so disadvantage falls entirely on publishers. Google squeezes their ability to operate sustainably from both ends and, because users encounter these problems on the level of the webpage, the blame for why the system works the way it does lands squarely on publishers’ shoulders.

I think individual Chrome engineers’ motivation for the work of privacy is likely pretty genuine. But that doesn’t counteract a system that uses that motivation in the service of Google’s business.

If you are dealing blackjack in a casino and you give one customer a win because you feel bad for them you’re not actually helping. This is the same thing happening at Google. Privacy mode is nice, but it does nothing about the fact that the vast Google overmind is focused on slurping up your data and feeding it to others. The deep internal knowledge Google has of Chrome as an in-house operation benefits them in the long term because it allows them to deform the entire marketplace to work in accordance with their ad tech and they get to be the most ahead of the curve in implementation.

We are all, readers and publishers, gamblers on the web while Google runs the tables; and the house always wins.

At the end of the day the core problem is why should Google alone get to decide what privacy should look like for the majority of users?

Why should Google be the one to decide how publications react to the privacy movement, how they set their editorial strategy, how they monetize, how they set up their pages, and not just one of these things but all aspects, all the time? By turning off privacy mode detection for publishers it makes them and the entire ad ecosystem more reliant on Google. By what right has Google taken this authority and by what right do they get to exercise it without explanation or warning? These are serious questions that need some serious answers.

This is not to say that Google can only do wrong, but we do need to acknowledge the perverse incentives that fundamentally deform any attempt to do good. Google is only too happy to lay the problems it creates at the feet of others. We shouldn’t let them escape blameless.

For some individuals at Google, perhaps the main motivation is privacy, but at the end of the day, it all ends in service of accruing to Google more power, more money and more control over the web. No matter what benefits appear to trickle down to us, in the end, it only advantages Google.

Related Readings:

"Because our laws frame privacy as an individual right, we don’t have a mechanism for deciding whether we want to live in a surveillance society."

— The New Wilderness

What’s certain now, is that, the old rules of the internet are being rewritten right now. And whether we like it or not, the borderless, stateless, cyberspace is not going to be happening anytime soon.

— Who Controls the Internet

“We need to approach building these products with user preferences in mind […] anything that relies on people taking it upon themselves to protect their data is doomed. […] If they’re telling you they care about privacy but don’t always behave like they do, you still need to have respect for them […] They mean what they say and they’re not children. They’re not lying to you.”

— You Care More About Your Privacy Than You Think

The complexity of how Google’s products weave together—and the opacity of its pricing—makes the process of buying online ads murky even to industry insiders.

“Even industry veterans don’t have perfect knowledge of how the whole thing works,” Mr. Vidakovic said. “It’s really just a labyrinth.”

— Why Google’s Advertising Dominance Is Drawing Antitrust Scrutiny

Interested in talking more about this newsletter? Join the Keybase.io team to chat about it: https://keybase.io/team/gneist.newsletter

Photo Credits:

1. Dim Sum! (Used under CC BY-NC-ND)

Yes my friends, the debate over who should or should not be doxed is back. Along with it is the question: what is a dox? Do you really use 2 ‘x’s like that? Is there ever a good doxing? Or a bad one? What—dear deity—are the rules here?

The inciting incident this time is a Daily Beast story about the person who created and distributed the fraudulent video of Nancy Pelosi. In that story they revealed the name of the person and some journalistic-types and random Twitter people got Very Upset.

CJR rounded up some folks to talk about it:

They are all a lot more qualified than I am, but I have some real FEELS about doxing as a practice. Those feels haven’t gone anywhere as I’ve seen it well-weaponed against Nazis.

I think it is worthwhile to first speak a little to what it is “to dox”. There are a variety of definitions out there and all of them tend to come under dispute. I'm going to be very strict in my interpretation here: doxing is revealing or amplifying personal identity information about a person without their consent. This is a more stringent definition than most, but I think it is accurate to how I think about doxing. With this frame all of the following are doxing:

• Revealing the real life name of someone who was previously posting under an anonymous username.

• Revealing the real life location of someone who is posting under their real life name.

• Taking efforts to significantly publicize the employer and employer contact information of someone who might have been previously public with their name but didn't make that information widely available.

Two major things to note here: First: I consider doxing to be the revelation of anything that would make it significantly easier to push a person into real life consequences for digital behavior. Second: I think that taking information that was public in a narrowly-available way and pushing it to be public in a broadly available way is indeed doxing, if only by amplification.

The baseline standard for what I consider doxing? Does it make harassing a person significantly easier? If the answer is yes, then it is likely doxing.

Ok, so now I have established what doxing is. Is it ever ok?

Yes.

I think that doxing, under ethical rules and considerations, is an important and relevant journalistic function. There are people who take advantage of operating in the dark and they use that anonymity in ways that responsible people should see as reason to withdraw that protection. That said, there are serious bars to doxing someone I think are worth considering before making a decision. I'll put all the rules at the top and go into detail below.

1. Does the doxing achieve a journalistic objective?

2. Have you fully confirmed this information is true and accurate?

3. If you have doxed this person through your own research have you documented that research and made your methods transparent and honest?

4. Are you minimizing harm?

5. Have you added context?

6. Is this person a public figure or do they deserve to be?

7. Are you punching up?

8. Is the only possible use of this information unethical?

(1) Does the doxing achieve a journalistic objective?

Does the revelation of personally identifying information about this person provide a larger context? If just the identity alone does not provide a larger context, is revealing in the service of a larger piece of reportage in which the identity of this person is a relevant fact to the larger story; or in which their attempt to seek anonymity is contextually relevant? Is this information the public needs to know? Would people not knowing potentially put them in danger?

If the answer to these questions is no, then perhaps it doesn't even make sense to pursue the person's identity.

(2) Have you fully confirmed this information is true and accurate?

Before taking any further steps is this information verified? 'Someone tweeted it' and 'Reddit said it was true' are both not valid verification. A real human or a legitimate news organization both count as verification. Interviews, research, documents, all of these can be supporting sources.

(3) If you have doxed this person through your own research have you documented that research and made your methods transparent and honest?

If you are doxing a person purely with information you have discovered and have confirmed to your own satisfaction that your methods are accurate can you account for those methods? You should publicly document them.

(4) Are you minimizing harm?

While many of these rules are built on top of SPJ's code of ethics this one is more directly applicable. ‘Use compassion, avoid arrogance and avoid pandering to lurid curiosity’. Particularly notable:

– Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage. Use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles, victims of sex crimes, and sources or subjects who are inexperienced or unable to give consent. Consider cultural differences in approach and treatment.

– Recognize that legal access to information differs from an ethical justification to publish or broadcast.

This is especially relevant in the modern age where identifying even a Twitter account can open someone up to significant online harassment. If doxing a person would open them to harassment or significant offline consequences then the question has to be asked: does the journalistic value of this reporting—in whole or in part—outweigh the potential harm?

(5) Have you added context?

There are very few cases in which saying "Account X is Person Y" or "Person Y is at Address Z" is in the public interest. There are exceptions, but if all you are doing is just revealing personal information about a person against their wishes you may just be an asshole, not fulfilling an ethical imperative. Ask yourself: 'What's the story here?' and if the story is 'this Twitter account is this person' then you likely have failed to reach the bar for an ethical dox.

(6) Is this person a public figure or do they deserve to be?

Hopefully this has been addressed when considering the first and fourth rules, but it is especially important and so deserves special mention. Again from SPJ's code of ethics:

– Realize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than public figures and others who seek power, influence or attention. Weigh the consequences of publishing or broadcasting personal information.

This does not mean that only public figures are eligible for doxing, but it does mean that people who are not already public and known figures deserve special consideration.

That said, note the language of the SPJ rules here. Those seeking power, influence or attention are held to higher standards and that alone may be enough of a case for revealing or amplifying their identity.

(7) Are you punching up?

This is particularly relative to the situation, in that it means that there are cases where it makes sense and is ethical for one person to reveal the identity of Person Y but not for another person. It is especially relevant where people share a peer association. It might be unethical for me to dox someone who is another engineer or journalist if they are relatively minor in the field or if they work for me.

On the other hand, revealing that an abusive Twitter account is actually a VP of a company in your industry is legitimate. When someone is of equal stature or when you have significant influence over their professional field you should consider strongly if you are the right person to be doing the dox. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to pass that information to a journalist who would consider it with more abstract judgment.

If you are going to dox someone, don't punch down. Being in that situation compromises your judgement and it will likely make you look petty and unreliable anyway.

(8) Is the only possible use of this information unethical?

Perhaps this applies to your entire action, or perhaps only to a piece of it, but it is important to consider. If you reveal a piece of data that has no conceivable use except to help people harass the person, then don't. A good rule of thumb is: would this help a third-party sign the person you are doxing up for a magazine subscription or a credit card on behalf of the subject of the dox? Personal home addresses feature prominently among the data points that likely shouldn't be revealed with a dox.

In Practice

Let's consider some real and theoretical situations that can illustrate how to use these rules:

Drunk Pelosi

Poulsen wrote that his story was evidence “Russia doesn’t have a monopoly on disinformation,” and that “even a hastily produced, low-budget fraud can fool millions if it lands just right.” But not long after it was posted, a number of critics—including many associated with the alt-right—said the story was a sign of something else entirely: namely, a shameful attempt by the media to identify or “dox” a previously anonymous citizen for the harmless crime of posting a video. On Twitter, Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald said it was “repellent to unleash the resources of a major news outlet on an obscure, anonymous, powerless, quasi-unemployed citizen for the crime of trivially mocking the most powerful political leaders.”

From: Should The Daily Beast have exposed the man behind ‘drunk Pelosi’ video?

Our example from the top! Let’s dig into it. First of all, FFS Greenwald for not seeing that any time your argument gets you aligned with a bunch of Nazis it isn’t worth making.

Ok, that’s out of the way.

Is this a doxing?

Yes. This person’s name might have already been out there, they may have been willing to talk to a journalist but those do not automatically make this persons identity ‘public’. This is an example of doxing via amplification.

Is this a legit doxxing? Let’s check the rules.

1: This person’s identity is relevant because many people are being exposed to this piece of content without the context of who created it, how or why.

2: Yes, confirmed with the person themselves apparently.

3: Passes, see above.

4: The author of the article uses archive (dot) is links in order to assure they are not directly linking to the persons user accounts. Since those accounts are the place the video was posted this seems the maximum amount of protection for the individual that can reasonably be expected. Personally, I would have just downloaded the video and re-posted it rather than even use the archive links, but I think this is a reasonable decision.

5: Yes, the article adds a lot of context about why this person’s identity is important.

6: Examine SPJ’s code of ethics statement. The author of the doctored video clearly “seek[s] power, influence or attention”. Test passed.

7: This is where the argument can be made that the reporter had more of a platform than the author of the video. However, as we noted in 6 the creator of the video is clearly seeking more of a platform and in this particular case managed to create a significant audience. At this point we leave it to a professional journalist to handle this using a relatively neutral professional platform. Which is what occurred.

8: The Daily Beast withheld any non-relevant personal information that would only be used for abuse. The person’s personal address is not amplified, their phone number is not given away, their family is not put in the spotlight. This is a responsible selection of personal information for publication.

Verdict:

Ethical Doxing.

Random Sexiness

Before long, a user in the subreddit r/randomsexiness managed to figure out her name, track her down on social media and post a host of personal photographs -- including requisite bikini beach shots -- along with her full name. As can be expected, there were creepy remarks, like this one: “From when her first pic showed up, I knew that chick was looking for this attention.” Most commenters, however, criticized the original poster -- one even complained that the post should be taken down as it violated Reddit’s ban on “doxxing,” the practice of outing someone’s personal information on the Internet.

From: Doxxing Internet babes: "She wanted it"

This is another clear example of doxing by amplification. What was used here was already-public information on someone who was a nominally public figure. But it’s bad. It fails literally all of the 8 tests. I don’t even have to go into detail about why.

Verdict:

Unethical Doxing. Duh.

Doxing at Temple

Nieman Journalism Lab editor Josh Benton accessed private user data through the Disqus commenting platform to identify [name withheld] on Twitter and share other samples of disagreeable comments. Specifically, he was able to obtain her email address out of the Disqus administrator back end, information only available to him because of his role as a comment moderator for Nieman Lab's website.

From: In Temple 'doxxing' case, news orgs should learn a lesson about respecting readers

I wanted to talk about this case because it is a difficult one from an ethical standpoint and was what started me thinking about building ethical doxing rules to begin with.

Is it a doxing?

Clearly so.

Is this a legit doxxing? Let’s check the rules.

1: This person’s identity is relevant because they are an educator in a field responsible for training students specifically opposing the very type of thinking they are demonstrating.

2: This is fully confirmed with clear data from the commenting system.

3: The methodology is clear and documented. However, the person did not have a chance to comment and the exact nature of what is going on is obscured by using screenshots.

4: I don’t think harm was minimized here. Not only was their place of employment specifically mentioned but it was also tagged. The form and tone is aggressive. If it was less so perhaps the mention of her place of employment might have been justified, but just making it clear that she was indeed in a role where her identity was relevant without diving into amplifying specifics may have been sufficient.

5: There was some added context in the form of history of comments elsewhere, but that context did not include detailed thought about why the holding of these views in this specific case were bad. One could argue that was perhaps self-evident, but the lack of it in this case would make things a lot clearer.

6: This is a maybe. This person is not seeking a larger platform with their views and it would be very easy to argue that the messaging Benton did around revealing their identity was not particularly journalistic, something he later stated. Does this person even deserve to be a public figure is another questionable case. It could have been proven out if there was more context on how this person’s beliefs impacted what they did at their job or in public; say quotes from students or something along those lines. Remember: “Recognize that legal access to information differs from an ethical justification to publish or broadcast.”

7: Here’s where the biggest problem is. As both a fellow academic and a media reporter Benton has not one but two positions of power over this person. Some readers caught this right away, that the Twitter thread almost came out as a threat. Once again, there is a world in which a threat to employment can be justified, but that was not done here. The power differential is just too high in favor of the person doing the doxing, they are very much punching down. This is a definitive case for passing the information to a more neutral and less power-imbalanced third-party. Someone else might have been able to make this an ethical dox, but a fellow academic was not the right person to take the information public.

8: Tagging in their place of employment could be relevant and valid with additional reportage around the person being doxed, but right now it is not. There have been previous examples where the point of reporting the person’s place of work was a case for individual safety or to call for boycott (a good example is the attempts by antifa to not only ID Nazis marching in public but make them unemployable by tying them back to their jobs). I think in cases where the individual has threatened the public safety (like by being a public Nazi) or where their views and work give them an opportunity to do indirect harm (say lawmaking) there is a case that could be made for making their place of work public as part of reporting on them. This could be one of those cases, but there would need to be further reporting to prove it out.

Verdict:

Unethical Doxing. As made even clearer by the later apology by the doxer.

There was a version of this that could have been an ethical doxing, but—as it happened—it was not. It lacked the right person doing the doxing and the appropriate power differential between the two parties. Remember, sometimes it is better to pass the information on and let someone further from the case make the call.

You disagree?

At the height of some rather strident arguments on my Facebook page around (sigh) ethics in video games journalism I decided to enact some rules about how commenters are supposed to behave within comment threads with my face on the top post. These rules were written by me, for me—a reminder for when I get angry and illogical—that there are ways I should act and standards that I want to hold myself (and the spaces I’m in charge of) to.

That's the intent here too. I will apply these rules to myself (these days the only place I could conceivably dox someone is in the comments sections of my old WordPress blogs) but this is intended as a reminder and a standard of how I want to act ethically on the internet. These are my rules for me, you can adopt them (or not).

PS: Because I’m sure some people might challenge me on ‘being a Nazi’ as sufficient reason: Being a white supremacist or Nazi requires you to believe that a whole bunch of people not only have lives that are less valuable than your own but that they deserve to die for their differences. They are inherently a threat to public safety.

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I’m pretty sure this will end up with Google assessed some paltry sum that they will be able to pay off with the amount their stock goes up once investors see there are no consequences to becoming Lexcorp. (I’m going to refer to ‘Alphabet’ as ‘Google’ throughout because Alphabet was a tactic from day one.)

But I do love me some fantasy antitrust case adjudications, so let us think on this for a hot minute: What would Google look like if the United States decided to break it up? What units would Google/Alphabet get broken up in to? This is a fun game, but good games need rules:

• We’re being fair: This isn’t just an excuse to give Google the finger. Each business unit has to be at least as functional as a Baby Bell and have the potential to be a stand-alone business.

• This is my theoretical fantasy land where we have a working government and judicial department, so we’re not going to worry about them merging back together like the Baby Bells did. Also, this would inevitably be followed by antitrust examinations of the rest of Big Tech and likely some serious changes to those companies.

• Each unit must be logical, that is representing a whole component of business operations that can operate on its own, and also have a self-contained set of purposes and goals that, when independent, have incentive to act competitively in the marketplace.

• The breakup must serve the American Consumer. The broken-up company should end up with a set of organizations that make the marketplace more competitive by opening up spaces for new companies. The breakup must also create opportunities for the consumer’s buck to go further. Finally, it should also make the consumer safer and more private.

OK, with these rules in mind, off we go!

Since we’re going to be American Superheroes here, this music break is brought to you by the most American, modern Superhero who watches over Wall Street: Your friendly neighborhood Spiderman.

Drive - The Professional Services Unit

This is an easy one. The most logical stand-alone service provider is the one that has basically been languishing under Google for years now. Drive does not seem to really benefit from developments in other units and would be the core of the PSU (Dropbox proves this is a fully functional stand-alone business). It would be joined by Google’s entire tool-set of Docs, Sheets, online programming tools, like Google Colaboratory, Hangouts, whatever other chat/conference applications are still active and, most notably, Gmail and Calendar.

Gmail has basically languished for years. It has lacked competition and so its capabilities are slow to develop. Google has little incentive to do anything but make it better for targeting and showing ads. Pulling the Gmail system out of there is needed to assure this breakup enhances user privacy. Housing it with the Professional Services Unit makes the most sense. Gmail is basically the loss-leader for Google Drive and always has been. Good fit there. Hopefully we’d get a better Gmail product and create a competitor for that space that should keep prices lower.

The Gmail ad space will open to any exchange willing to meet its specs.

This will also be a good location for Google Fi as a useful rounding out of the services that this business could provide to both individuals and other businesses.

NewsTube - The Media Unit

YouTube is obviously dangerously overpowered. It needs to be separated from search and ads, but that doesn’t solve some of its core problems. It needs some synergy from another part of Google to make the platform actually make real money. The easy answer is that ChromeCast production could fall into this unit. But it isn’t just that. Google, along with the rest of the web, has been preaching the gospel of news video. And its major partners in any ChromeCast operation will include cable media.

YouTube’s success as an independent operation will come out of good, effective and ethical aggregation. You could say it has made a business out of hosting video, and it is that, but that isn’t really their business; anyone can host terabytes of video now. The goal of YouTube as a business is to keep you engaged by stringing together different content sources effectively. The longer you watch, the more ad dollars. That aggregation includes handling content from news organizations, so it makes sense to pair YouTube with Google News. Google News is also fundamentally an aggregation unit that can make a profit via interstitial advertising.

The NewsTube unit will be formed around the theory that multi-platform, multi-format aggregation of news and related media is an operational business. Others seem to have pulled it off, though they hit up against the wall of Google, so this will create brand new energy in the marketplace. Competitive pressure on this unit will force it to reconsider how it understands itself as a host vs an editorial organization and require it to differentiate itself via moderation and selection, instead of being protected from competitive pressure by living relatively rent-free on Google’s servers.

It will require two major changes:

• YouTube and Google News will have to open up their advertising systems to any effective service providers, forcing them to state technological requirements and collaborate with ad tech providers to move the ad tech space towards more effective video-focused technology overall.

• The Search product will need to restructure how they handle news to be a more abstract user-controlled RSS Feed Reader-style product and open its architecture up to any organization who wishes to provide editorial-aggregation-as-product (EAaP) to that space. If Search wants their news product to be driven by Google News you can make that choice, but others can also engage in the aggregation space of the Search company, from Flipboard to the NYT. Aggregation becomes a competitive space within search and the Search unit will be forced to do clear rule-making that may give opportunities to other EAaP providers. Further, it opens opportunities for different types of aggregation products not deformed by Google News’s dominance in the marketplace.

Games and Coins - The App/Transactions Unit

The Google App & Money Skimming Business that is Google Play is clearly non-functional without transactional technology, including whatever Google Pay is languishing as and other payment and processing technologies. This becomes essentially a Steam-style service for apps and games. It would be easy to see them expanding their selection platform outside of Android in this situation, potentially providing a general Linux application storefront and eventually expanding to other operating systems.

Making this an independent unit that might end up having to compete with other operations (it is very easy to see Product Hunt become its own apps/games storefront in this world, as just one example) and would force quality control and security to the forefront as competitive concerns.

This is clearly an emerging business, Epic Games and Valve both see it as such, as does Amazon and, like Amazon, the addition of an overall transaction service provider will nicely bootstrap this into its own company while opening up Android for competition from other storefront providers who can compete on technological, editorial, or ideological differences.

The one inevitable hiccup here is people will claim that this opens up people to download more unsafe applications, as a centralized authority is thrown out the door, to which I will reply: How safe is the Play store right now? Not really that safe.

Search, Analytics, Finance, Translation, Maps and Servers - The Search and Engineering Services Unit

Search cannot work without innovation in servers because good search is expensive and requires a lot of CPU and storage. Analytics needs to be separated from the ad business for privacy and safety reasons; this is its most natural fit because it works on collecting data with the same logic that is used to determine the stature of pages’ rank in search. Translation is an obvious fit here; understanding webpages’ relevance requires translation tools to fill in the personalization gaps. Translation and Analytics also belong together because they both involve parsing webpages. Maps becomes a useless product without Search and Search would become significantly less likely to succeed as a business without Maps. Same can be said of Finance.

The Engineering Services Unit would also include all of Google’s web hosting tools, cloud computing for business and anything that is currently intended to compete with the AWS suite. Also, to whatever extent Go and other developer tools are still being developed internally, they would end up here.

The focus of this particular setup is, instead of dictating standards to others, this business is forced to collaborate and cooperate with the open web and browsers to create a more open taxonomy of the web; clearer community-supported engineering standards; and focused competitive products around engineering and web parsing. The goal with this unit is to diffuse how Google has used the leverage of Search in combination with Ads and Chrome to negatively impact technological standards while still leaving the new unit with enough capabilities to improve the web.

Search and the other products under this unit will continue to be a space for advertising, but now it must consider all technologically capable vendors for running that ad space. I suspect we’ll need to give them a year with the new Ad Services Unit running it so others can understand and spec up to the requirements and then require this group to open that space to competition.

Android & Hardware - The Phones, Chromebook, Nest, Google Home and VR Unit

I’m really tempted to put Android and the phone hardware in different units, but I don’t think Google’s phone hardware business is all that strong and I’d be wary of Android residing anywhere else.

Developing Android further as an operating system and the hardware into a better functioning business (as opposed to the irregular mess it is now, in part, because it lacks real market pressures) seems like logical paired opportunities and separating this business unit from the Play Store could potentially create a new set of Hardware/OS mobile devices, like we briefly thought was going to happen when Palm and FirefoxOS sort of looked like they might be a thing. All the rest of the hardware Google produces either pairs with their mobile devices or runs Android and, thus, should fall into this business unit. This organization could also realize some Red Hat-style B2B opportunities that Google isn’t required to bother with right now.

It is important to separate out the devices here that do data collection from the ad business for obvious reasons.

Chrome, AMP, Identity & Labs - The Chrome, X, Robot Cars and Other Silly Experiments aka Chrome Labs.

Chrome isn’t a business and AMP is somewhat community run right now. These aren’t really profitable components, so they best fit in the Bell Labs of this breakup, the experimental development group that’s going to land a lot of the weird Google patents that haven’t been realized anywhere. Licensing those patents and developing new car brains, space software, and whatever the hell else X Labs does would make a decent stand-alone unit.

Keeping Chrome the away from both ads and search is really important and AMP’s integration with search is a clear anti-competitive behavior right now, in that it wouldn’t work without control of Chrome, the Ad Networks that sell into it, the search page placement and the caching and server integration that backs it. Moving it to become a part of how Chrome talks about how they wish the web would work makes it a lot safer.

Stick Google Fiber in here because Google clearly doesn’t treat it like a business but much more like a weird experiment.

Wow, we’ve come a long way, and now we get to talk about ads! Let’s do a 2nd music break! How about some Latvian Bagpipes? Did you know that Latvia has its own type of bagpipe? They are called dūdas.

Also, a reminder that you might consider paying me for work like this:

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So this is the ad tech section! This is important because I take a different view than some as to how Google’s ad business might be split up. Specifically, I don’t think it should all be its own thing. That would still leave a significantly anti-competitive operation. To really open up the ad tech marketplace to honest competition, while creating theoretically sustainable businesses, it needs to not just be separated from Google but also split in half. On one side, the ad serving technology and, on the other side, the ad exchange technology. This clears up some conflicts (like AdX having privileged status within Google Ad Manager) and has a logic to it; they are two sides with different requirements for success.

AdX - The Ad Exchange Unit

This unit would comprise all of Google’s current set of Ad bid and exchange products, including AdX, EDBA, GDN, DV360. This means all technology that manages bids, exchanges ads, understands user data, etc…

This is important because it separates the technology that transacts on data from the technology, like Google Analytics, which collects the data, mirroring the separation between those two sides in the rest of the ad tech space. It would send a clear message that 3rd-party data collection cannot be part of ad exchange businesses without causing conflicts of interest that harm consumers. It also removes a number of privileged anti-competitive system interactions, including: AdWords and Search, AdX and DFP, and a variety of Google-controlled demand matched with YouTube or AdMob. I’d also hope that it would push exchanges to be more competitive in a way they currently are not.

A while back someone I know suggested that all exchanges be non-profit and if we’re making up fantasy DoJ cases here I’d prefer that even more.

Double Click - The Ad Services Unit

This unit would be all ad services for other platforms, including what is now called Google Ad Manager (aka DFP): AdMob, Google Campaign Manager and AdWords. Running these systems within their own business will leave a lot of other products with empty spaces where they used to integrate Google ad tech. That would be awesome. Now those products have to examine a competitive marketplace for ad tools. They will be required to take general bids post-breakup from ad server providers, including this new business.

The ad services business still has enough successful contractual connections and revenue that it could continue to offer a free product. Removing its tight integrations with the exchange systems will relieve significant marketplace pressure that pushes people into Google ad products, creating an opportunity for others to offer competitive ad servers.

Google’s has failed to innovate in the ad services space (DFP has been almost entirely bereft of technological improvement for at least a decade) but retained their dominance in that space. This is a clear indicator of anti-competitive behavior by Google. Pushing the Ad Services Unit out on its own would require this new organization to push forward real technological improvements or (without the advantages of integration with servers, search or exchanges) face actual competition that might innovate on things like privacy and performance.

The Ad Units’ separation from Google and careful division is clearly the most difficult part of this proposal to consider. So much of what has made Google’s ad systems the most dominant in the marketplace is unclear, blackbox integrations and connections. We could look at this separation and say: Is even this enough?

If one company controls Supply and Demand systems, even without execution, that could allow them to place unfair requirements or control on the market. I think that’s an OK argument to make, but I think the ad tech marketplace requires real change from where it is now. The goal with the separation here is to create opportunities for these units to actually compete with other ad tech in ways that create market innovation and change.

The end result of all this should advantage general web users. Like I said at the top, these individual Baby-Bell-Style businesses should not be non-functional or without an opportunity for profitability. The separation I suggest creates two very different opportunities. One company would be forced to innovate and differentiate on their capability to provide service. The other would have to improve their technological performance within the larger ad tech landscape. A different split might be possible, but I think this is the most fair.

But I’m open to other ideas! Tweet them at me if you feel strongly that there’s a different, better split possible here. Also Tweet at me if you have any alternative ideas for the whole thing! I think we really need to talk about this in public because regulators, if they ever end up breaking up Google, will need a vigorous public discussion about how that would work.

This was very long, so I’m going to give you one last song. If you made it here, thanks for sticking with me!

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I was very satisfied, especially because the group leveled a bunch of questions at me that I hadn’t thought deeply about but should have and also because I think at least some of what I had to say was new to them.

The workshop I presented was a restructured and expanded version of the two 2.5 hour presentations I gave at The New School titled “Ad Tech: Broken by Design”. I split the topic into four parts:

1. The history of publishers ignoring the opportunity of the web advertising space (and why) as they entered digital publication and then by allowing it to metastasize into bad tech and systems. Then how this created an opportunity for ad tech middlemen to come in and start stealing money away from publishers.

2. Why—given the framework of an ad space on publishing sites, which fails to integrate the advertising involved in any way—the current publisher consideration of ad tech creates room for significant fraud and just a few of the many ways that opportunity for fraud is realized.

3. The requirements for and use of user data that creates a vicious cycle that has platforms and algorithms creating and tracking more data and agencies and advertisers seeking ever more user information to the extent that the need for user data has become completely integral to the entirety of the modern ad tech stack.

4. How metadata, combined with an aggressive handling of potential Javascript code exploits and browser-level tools, can be used to potentially empower publishers to create a better ad tech space.

The reason I frame the discussion in this order and around these points is because I think it is pretty much impossible to understand how ad tech works or why it is so bad without a real overview of how we got up to this point both in terms of publisher and publishers-as-platform-clients history. If you were to dive deep into the ad tech space as it stands right now it would be impossible to understand why it works in the insane way it does. Something as basic and fundamental to ad tech as 'why are there five trackers on a single ad' or 'why does VPAID exist' doesn't make sense without dissecting the distrust between publishers and advertisers, the breakdown of agency fees, which itself increases agency fraud, the lack of transparency in the system that makes such fraud possible, the circle of vulturous ad tech providers that enable fraud to succeed, exchange incentives… and here we go down the well.

Depending on what slice of this crazy ad tech space you deal with, you are only going to encounter perhaps a quarter of the overall problem. And without the whole picture, it’s almost impossible to understand why we've ended up where we are now.

Most of the time, when I talk about these topics, I'm talking to the publishing side, people who have seen the publisher side of things but don’t know what has brought them to this stage. It was great to get very different feedback from people who encounter these problems from another angle. The browser side encounters the technical consequences of ad tech malarky—the tracking, the slow mess of network requests, the shitty code—without needing to deal with what the ad tech space does or doesn't do for publishers and advertisers.

Browser user performance and concerns create an entirely different set of worries and priorities of course and that manifested itself in some ways I hadn't thought about.

One big one: We don't think much about what will become of people who have turned off tracking but not blocked ads during the browser-led transition of the ad tech space to mostly first-party targeting. At least, I didn’t. But the first thing that came up after I talked about ad value’s link to user data was that people browsing third-party-cookie-free will spend that period of transition as the lowest-class-citizens. The first adopters of privacy will end up having the worst experience of all.

As long as ad tech still uses deep third-party data, users without those cookies will be seen as data-lite and, therefore, the lowest-value target for advertising, with the result of them getting bottom-of-the-bucket ads (and potentially a higher percent of malicious ads as a result). Not great. We talked over a few solutions, maybe more on that later.

Song break! Do you know someone at Waxwork Records who you can convince to put the Chopping Mall soundtrack on Spotify? It would make me so happy.

Another question came up when we were diving down into content fraud of all types: The impact of fake followers.

We were discussing different types of fraud when, during our conversation about follower fraud, I noted a study in which the following was stated, in regard to a Fiverr user generating fake social accounts:

“In other words, one user from Moldova has earned at least $1.5 million/year, which is orders of magnitude larger than $2,070, the GNI (Gross National Income) per capita of Moldova.”

One of the participants asked: even if we could somehow extend the reach of our laws to another country, should we penalize these people who have managed to make a living exploiting the platforms? It was something I hadn't really thought about from that angle but after some consideration I realized: No.

In the period immediately following the US Revolutionary War, the fledgling United States essentially jump-started its economy by violating international intellectual property agreements, particularly those of the British crown. In fact, the Copyright Act of 1790 extended the right to intellectual property only to American citizens creating a marketplace for reprints of mostly British works (see p320-324 of the linked PDF), including numerous textbooks, without paying royalties back to the original authors.

In the case of successful fake follower creators, it feels more like they are following our revolutionary-era example than anything else. The bounty of the powerful, in this case the effectiveness of social media platforms, can be harvested by less wealthy nations. No, I don’t think the penalties should fall on these users, but on the platforms and analytics tools who promise genuine engagement to advertisers with no capacity to deliver. At a fundamental level the platforms and ad tech understand what they are doing is unsustainable. The people who take advantage of the giant wealthy systems that have imposed its way into their lives, all of our lives, shouldn’t be the target of our efforts to better the web. After all, they’re just leveraging the space between the truth and the bullshit in the ad tech pitch.

I think the platforms realize this. As protests to the current methodology of ad tech grow louder, most of the world thinks about Facebook and Google and how to punish or regulate them. But it isn't just that. If ad tech's problems were quite so centralized they would be far easier to solve. Is Facebook a monopoly? Yes. It should be broken up. But the source of its monopoly-like power has little to do with its placement in the marketplace or primacy in the app store created by absorbing other platforms.

The power of Facebook is its monopoly on user data because it is given greater amounts and more accurate user data than any other platform and can directly turn that user data into money. Facebook's break up would do little to resolve this issue. The transaction and trade of user data has become built into the mechanisms of much of ad tech and it may still be able to connect that database to the theoretical post-breakup Baby Facebooks, even if those systems are legally separate.

What these companies fear then are not the regulatory power of governments (which they have proven the power to compromise anyway) on their moderation techniques nor the anti-trust lawyers (though they should be subject to such powers) but the revolutionary independence of user data. Like the early Americas, we sit on the precipice of a system that could potentially free us from imperial chains of ownership; our data and ourselves belong to Facebook and Google. Perhaps a law, perhaps a browser, but likely a combination of both could liberate that data. But, and this is important, for it to work consent isn’t the only thing we have to consider.

In ad tech, fake users seeing ads make as much money for most of the middlemen companies (including Facebook and Google) as real users. The value isn’t even the user though, it is their behavioral data. If we are going to regulate how big platforms operate and derive value, we have to start with the control of data, which is where the money is made. At the end of the day, Facebook, Google and the rest of them are networks for communication. They don’t need to own our data for that to happen. They don’t even need to own our data to make money showing us ads. We need a middle ground where we can use these platforms, make our data visible to whom we choose, but refuse to give control of it to any centralized power.

A version of Facebook where the revolutionaries operate without the oversight of the Facebook data stores is a one where Facebook becomes safe, far more effectively than any anti-trust action could make them. Right now the sun doesn't set on Facebook. But history shows that those types of Empires don't last. King Zuck can only reign for as long as we acknowledge the platform is a necessary repository for the power we give it. Not Google, not Facebook, no ad tech company should be a repository for that power because at a fundamental level it should reside with individuals. When we move to punish platforms (instead of users) by removing their most important assets—our data—from their grasp: So sets the sun.

*Ok, I started on the plane back, but all trips back from SF (and only SF, it doesn’t happen coming back from Seattle) kill me with various types of fatigue, abnormally bad jet lag, and/or disease, so I ended up spending most of the week recovering from existing in SF and then edited and finished off the newsletter at a later point. I was happy to visit and had a lot of fun but, honestly, how do people live there?

Interested in talking more about this newsletter? Join the Keybase.io team to chat about it: https://keybase.io/team/gneist.newsletter

Readings:

• Data Privacy is a Human Right

• What Is “Surveillance Capitalism?” And How Did It Hijack the Internet?

• “If we use privacy constructively and create a legal framework, we can incentivize those who want to go up against the entrenched players by marketing themselves as explicitly privacy-focused”

• Friend portability is the must-have Facebook regulation

• Breaking Up Facebook Isn’t Enough

• Paying People to Click Doesn’t Actually Pay Off

Progress:

• Palantir's Github Page Is the New Battleground in the Fight Against ICE

• Tech workers organize protest against Palantir on the GitHub coding platform

This upbeat image is here to make sure that any soci…

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In my experience, the decision to stop working with a person or organization often feels like an accretion of bad experiences. However, one time with a previous employer it was a single moment.

This is how it went down with the previous employer: I can remember this moment exactly. It had been a tough week because I already felt uncomfortable with the chain of decisions coming down from upper management: A focus on video I felt would be bad for the long term; a decision to interview someone, we’ll call them M, who was clearly a Nazi but—at the time—hadn’t been fully acknowledged as such by the general media. I was on the Engineering side and I didn’t feel it would be appropriate to object to an editorial decision. To an extent, I felt divorced from it. Even when internal casual conversation tied the decision (at least in part) to questions of traffic, something which felt bad and abnormal in an undefinable way, I was still one step removed.

Later that week, the interview with M was done and it was ready to go up. Executive management felt that this was a big deal, and if we pushed it out to prominent placement on front it would get even more traffic and boost our early video efforts. I had built a tool that allowed us to embed anything into the top slot of the front page, so we used that to embed the video to the front.

I was in a bar, it was after the work day, a Wednesday, and I was meeting up with a friend and had come there straight from work. Just after we sat down, I got a message that the Big Deal Video wasn’t properly showing on the front page, something about the embed code of the video and the embed management of the slot was conflicting and I needed to fix it. So I sat down at the bar, excused myself to my friend for 15 or 20 minutes and pushed out a code fix to deal with the conflict.

After I was done, a thought occurred to me, I was enabling this thing, this incredibly shitty thing, to happen. Though the general media would take months to come around to deciding that M was a straight-up Nazi, I already considered them as such and I was playing a pivotal role in this asshole’s self-promotion. That was the moment I knew I needed to quit.

It took just under a year before I did.

Image: Discussing the ethics of roofing for evil in Kevin Smith’s film Clerks.

“I'm alive because I knew the risk involved with that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky. Any contractor working on that Death Star knew the risk involved; if they got killed, it's their own fault. A roofer listens to this [pointing to his heart], not his wallet.“

“I think what they did is pretty despicable but at the end of the day, I didn’t give a fuck,” one former employee said. “I was engrossed by the technical problems that this afforded me.”

From “The Perks Are Great. Just Don’t Ask Us What We Do.” by Juliana Reyes at WIRED.

I’m hardly the first to comment on working for organizations that are… less than good. It isn’t even the first time I’ve done so in this newsletter and we’re only on issue three (this has been entirely by accident, I swear). It is no mistake though that this has partly come out of interacting with ad tech. It has put me in touch with people who have come to see their jobs as somewhat of a farce, reorganizing the deck chairs atop a house of cards that could fall down at any second. Often these people operate on a different side of things than engineering, but never has so perfect a window been opened into the cognitive dissonance involved as with Juliana Reyes 2016 WIRED article about the Philly-based engineering-focused operation of a scamware startup, which I’ve quoted above. (Though Digiday’s Confessions series comes pretty close.)

Reyes’s story manages to have people who are completely divorced from the shitty unethical thing they are involved in, alongside people experiencing the horror of understanding their employer’s business model. In many ways, it was ahead of its time. It’s hard to imagine how shocking it was to read in 2016, and prescient, considering the Never Again Pledge was just months away.

We’ve now entered an entirely different age. Not only are some tech workers publicly struggling with the consequences of their code, sometimes successfully, now editorial employees are struggling with how their bylines are used by their employers. We’re all wrestling with not just how to support these public stances, but also how to respond to the blowback.

While workers are not directly responsible for the actions of their employers, they also create the inherent product by which their employers persist. A tech company does not survive without code, a media company does not survive without creators, and so on. Doing that work can be inherently self-satisfying. Many developers or writers may approach their output in a work-a-day manner, which is fine, but some do take genuine joy out of it. It is easy to obscure the overall evil of a company when you love the little corner of it you are responsible for maintaining. That creates a particular blindness. In other words: you shouldn’t have to love your job, but if you do, it makes it particularly hard to spot fault with the system that pays you.

Beyond that, as Jen Lowe states so plainly in the tweet above, there are other factors that keep people working at a place, even as they gain awareness that all is not right. To quit immediately when things become nefarious is a privilege accorded to those with resources and working significant others (or, alternatively, no one relying on them). People who don’t have high rent, who aren’t concerned about money flow, don’t immediately need insurance, don’t have potential emergencies medical, familial or otherwise. It is nice to have that privilege and I definitely don’t begrudge or criticize those who have it and use it.

The rest of us can get stuck in a disconcerting middle area.

I love my current job, but I came to it in part because I try to be strategic about where I work and this means spending the time looking for the next job, like I did after that evening staring at a video of M while using it to test my code fix, at places we no longer feel comfortable being.

I think part of the reason unionization talk is rising is many companies are being more obviously evil with greater consistency, not just in their treatment of labor, but generally. Most people do not have a boss who is so obviously evil as the rogue geneticist of Jonathan Coulton’s “Skullcrusher Mountain”, instead, we find ourselves being asked to do occasional unethical things. In my situation it was occasional bouts of sketchiness while the overall organization mostly did good. These are the liminal situations that we have to be most cautious about.

The dangerous space is where it feels like we are mostly doing good (or at least not evil) and only a little bad. Sometimes that is the case and everything is ok! We can be comfortable staying, or staying there long enough to quietly find the next job. But we could also be running the vents for a supervillain’s body incinerator and not realize it!

There is definitely a line. It takes work to understand it but I think that work is worthwhile. You don’t need to know how to do accounting to understand the general sweep of your business model. If you do try to understand how your company works it can provide a lot of mental security, the type that can let you sleep at night. At a good company with good people this is something you should be able to discuss.

Without that knowledge it can be very easy to be like the engineer in the Philly adware company, focused on the problems, while scamming grannies and empowering evil.

The other question is: what can you do when you don’t have the privilege available to quit, even if you want to?

I think this situation is creating some interesting results right now. For one, there’s a lot of leaking to the press happening from within the types of tech companies that would normally never leak anything. It’s clear this is an option, and perhaps even a way to push corporate policy away from bad practices.

Depending on your position, and if it would be difficult for the company to hire into it (say if they made a huge public mess of firing someone), you can potentially speak out internally, pushing leadership to act more ethically by being vocal. This option also is more available to those with particular privileges (especially, I’d think, men and expensive engineering hires), but if you can do it you may be able to create worthwhile change, or at least hold off situations where you end up complicit in shitty behavior.

Remember that your consent as labor to collaborate with bad management allows management to force consent to bad behavior on other employees. Perhaps you can start a union? Or at least a walkout. Or perhaps sign a letter in support of the folks doing the good behavior.

Finally there’s always the last resort: throwing yourself in the gears. If you can’t object, organize, or create external pressure, there is some degree to which you can work on the good things and delay on the bad ones. It isn’t the greatest option, but depending on the scope of bad behavior you may find yourself with a degree of moral obligation.

There have been times when I’ve had to put a lot more thought into this than I’d like and in more than one employment situation. There is an obligation to protest being put on labor, for better or worse, as we go deeper into this weird ultra-greed-focused era of capitalism. There is increasingly little choice but to look at the employer/employee relationship as adversarial.

Some employers look for every opportunity to milk every possible second of work out of workers and seek to take every advantage to extract money out of society. If that is the case then employees either have to resist or be taken advantage of, lest they get pulled further down into a realm with less options and a higher likelihood that their labor is put to use making the world a worse place.

Wherever you are, I hope you can find a way to hold the line and, at the very least, avoid making things worse.

Interested in talking more about this newsletter? Join the Keybase.io team to chat about it: https://keybase.io/team/gneist.newsletter

Additional Reading:

• I Used to Work for Google. I Am a Conscientious Objector.

• The Gig Economy’s Unhappy Middle Class

• How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

• Jamie Dimon wants a kinder, gentler capitalism. Shut up, Jamie.

• Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got ‘Greedy.’

• Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?