Big Data, privatization and inequality

Big Data, privatización y desigualdad
Una entrevista con Evgeny Morozov

I

Data has became extremely valuable for  all sort of actors, economical actors, political actors, foreign actors engaged in spying and so forth.

The fact that so much of this data is in the hands of these big private platforms, mostly based in North America, some of them based in China... of course it makes very hard for citizens to have any kind of control and any kind of autonomy and when it comes to it. We are beginning to see that there is amounts of economic value that these firms derive from that data and we also see that perhaps the recent  rise  in inequality, with people becoming poorer and poorer while people like Jeff Bezos for example the founder of Amazon now became the richest man of the world, there is also something there at the intersection of technology creating lots of wealth but that wealth is not being appropriately distributed, which I think is has to do with data and has to do with the fact that we are essentially left without it as ordinary citizens and ordinary users.

II 

What we are seeing now is the centralization of data in the hands of a couple of technology firms, much of the data is produced by us in the course of using these services. So, there is a natural element of justice involved  in making people actually the right owners of the data that they produced, to what extent it has to be done individually or collectively or socially? ... because ultimately a lot of the data we produce we don't produce it individually we produce it as collectives, we produce it as neighborhoods, we produce it as families and so forth. So there are more just than individuals that should be part of this picture and of this landscape, nonetheless I think it's a logical thing to do politically, legally and philosophically by empowering people and essentially by saying you have created some of the data and it should be an argument that you should also be deriving some of the benefits from it. But I think there is a much deep argument to be made in that these new data intensive services, when it comes to transportation, when it comes to management of your neighborhood, management of energy, consumption ... they also open up new ways of collective self-management. We can now delegate more and more power to citizens who feel that they are no longer in charge of their lives, so much of the anger that we have seeing in the last few years driven by concerns and anxieties that people have about politicians being very distant and the system no longer representing them they are quite accurate  and  they are reasonable and they  have base in empirical reality. The problem is that if you really want to preserve a modicum of democracy in our system, if you really want to stay on the path where political and democratic institutions matter there I think it would make sense to design new modes of involving citizens in managing their own lives, essentially, not by means of the market, not by means of having them essentially ... choose what it is what they want to do by choosing a different app or a different product but by having them actually involved in real political decisions relating to their lives .

And I think a basic infrastructure for that is lacking and data was democratized and decentralized and to some extent products built with that data like artificial intelligence can actually help in that endeavor. So the main reason for doing that would be to prevent other forces which do not recognize the importance of democracy, which only think in market terms from essentially offering a solution to people who are dissatisfied with democracy in general.

III 

It's true that for a very long time we have framed the question of technology as a question of consumption. Essentially, to some extent it was a bargain between the consumers of the services and the providers of the services and we framed it as a question of people being informed or not informed about the consequences of those products and people essentially making decisions on their own, as to what it is that they would like do with those technologies... Framing it  as a matter of consumption is not necessarily the best way to frame it because there is a lot of political consequences that stem from that consumption and the externalities and the costs  that we create in consuming many of those  products  have ramifications that go far beyond my personal  household. So I create a lot of consequences for the people as I deepen my dependence on Google and Amazon. This is why we have, of course,  to make, once we politicize the question of technology and data, we have to make people aware of what this they do just like we tried to do with climate change before... The story there was not very different. In the fifties and sixties and seventies we were consuming a lot of products, without having any second thoughts about  the actual environmental cost of consuming them, so ultimately at some point then we started understanding  that the price of production and the price we are paying for those services don't really reflect the whole spectrum of damage that was happening.  With informational products the situation is quite similar in that you don't really realize the full damage of relying on Facebook, on Amazon, on Google because whatever savings we get in the short term get dwarfed by the consequences in the long term. But the problem here really  is that is not enough just  to make people aware, just like people is not enough to make them aware of the whole cost of climate change. So, yes, it is good to have political movements pushing for that but it should be an issue that all the political parties, social movements and activists should be able to grasp, should be able to formulate a problem and essentially be able to translate this technological debate into terms that people, first of all, already relate to, to questions of justice, of inequality, questions of corruptions, questions of crisis of institutions and so forth. You would not be able to make much progress in this fight if you only limit it to highly specialized debates related to environment, related to technology, it's not a one-issue thing. It's something that should cut across the entire society and it should be formulated in terms that people can grasp, because everybody can grasp that they are  much poorer than the richest person in the country and they can ask why and as long we do not present questions of technology in that language we are not going to make much progress in politicizing this issue.

IV

Well, what we had seen over the last decade is that the financial crisis has made it much harder to people to earn a living, so any effort, and any platform and any services that either allowed them to make some money on the side by  putting  their apartments into global circulation, *with stores?* or  by driving a car or a company, like Uber, or by finding other ways to essentially earn a living were, of course, met quite favorably by the people. Same goes for  services that don't charge us for using them  if you already in that and if you are not earning much having a service that gives you cheap products which is the case of Amazon or that not charge you for using their products which is the case of Google is also a very welcome development.  So there is a very good will that these companies have built with their users in the context of the financial crisis just by presenting themselves as being on the side of those who struggle to get by and earn a living and so forth... That of course I think again it  is a very temporary equilibrium, so to say, the long term consequences might actually not favor the citizens at all because the model that has paid for all of this benevolence of these tech firms  up until now had to do either with the  investors subsidizing the provision of many of the services because they expected to get a pay off in the end. So Uber can subsidize transportations  services and  waste a billion of dollars a year just in North America because they know that sooner or later when they will recover the money but being the dominant provider of transportation, or as in the case of Google much of that largesse and  benevolence was funded by data. So data was collected and it was then turned into advertising  and it was* the advertisers who paid for the provision of search services or Youtube services, or indexing academic articles journals... all the services that Google offers. That too I think has a rather uncertain future, so I wouldn't put much faith into advertising as continuing in this current form  in part because it's becoming harder and harder to advertise as we move into the internet of things where there are few screens and screens become small as they do in  the case of mobile phones...  

Plus now the policy makers are so concerned about the fake news they also don’t like the fact that so much of this ecosystem is tied to advertising because ultimately then it  leads  to the manipulation of attention, spread of false information and so forth.  Now there are also legal concerns on top of it which means that a lot of these firms are busy researching  for another business model  which will not be based on essentially advertising and providing subsidized services and that business model is charging  other businesses and charging  governments for using   Artificial Intelligence  services, that  were built with that data or charging users for using the likes of Facebook and Google because ultimately once you have no other choice  and you are stuck there, you might as well pay, maybe  for not seeing the adds. So  in that case we are entering a very different model  where you can not even make an argument that these companies are benevolent and that they are essentially subsidizing us  where we will have to pay them either in taxes because we will be paying taxes to the governments that will then  purchase services from them to offer  artificial intelligence and health, education, transportation  or we will be paying them directly for using their networks. In that environment I think we have to realize that essentially it's a world where more and more our activities that were previously subjected to a kind of control and political supervision by the citizens will no longer be in that position, they will essentially be run by these private entities that are not accountable to us and we will have to contend with that. In that sense, this rise of private power is much more reminiscent of the feudal times where you had no say whatsoever in how you live your life, if you happen to be born to serve, than it is of the modern democratic times, capitalist times, even, where you are supposed to have some say into some areas, not into your area of  employment which capitalists never wanted to open up  but at least into the area of how the rest your life is organized, all of that is slowly eroding and it will end up in a world where we will be promised more and more freedom by these firms but actually have less and less autonomy and less and less ability to influence whatever it is they do.