Cory Doctorow - How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the 21st century is just how widespread the evidence against them is. You can understand how, centuries ago, people whod never gained a high-enough vantage point from which to see the Earths curvature might come to the commonsense belief that the flat-seeming Earth was, indeed, flat.

But today, when elementary schools routinely dangle GoPro cameras from balloons and loft them high enough to photograph the Earths curveto say nothing of the unexceptional sight of the curved Earth from an airplane windowit takes a heroic effort to maintain the belief that the world is flat.

Likewise for white nationalism and eugenics: In an age where you can become a computational genomics data point by swabbing your cheek and mailing it to a gene-sequencing company along with a modest sum of money, race science has never been easier to refute.

We are living through a golden age of both readily available facts and denial of those facts. Terrible ideas that have lingered on the fringes for decades or even centuries have gone mainstream seemingly overnight.

When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that can explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea has gotten a lot better at stating their case, or the proposition has become harder to deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other words, if we want people to take climate change seriously, we can get a bunch of Greta Thunbergs to make eloquent, passionate arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds; or we can wait for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case for us. In practice, well probably have to do some of both: The more were boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier it will be for the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us.

The arguments for ridiculous beliefs in odious conspiracies like anti-vaccination, climate denial, a flat Earth, and eugenics are no better than they were a generation ago. Indeed, theyre worse because they are being pitched to people who have at least a background awareness of the refuting facts.

Anti-vax has been around since the first vaccines, but the early anti-vaxxers were pitching people who were less equipped to understand even the most basic ideas from microbiology, and moreover, those people had not witnessed the extermination of mass-murdering diseases like polio, smallpox, and measles. Todays anti-vaxxers are no more eloquent than their forebears, and they have a much harder job.

So can these far-fetched conspiracy theorists really be succeeding on the basis of superior arguments?

Some people think so. Today, there is a widespread belief that machine learning and commercial surveillance can turn even the most fumble-tongued conspiracy theorist into a Svengali who can warp your perceptions and win your belief by locating vulnerable people and then pitching them with A.I.-refined arguments that bypass their rational faculties and turn everyday people into flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, or even Nazis. When the RAND Corporation blames Facebook for radicalization and when Facebooks role in spreading coronavirus misinformation is blamed on its algorithm, the implicit message is that machine learning and surveillance are causing the changes in our consensus about whats true.

After all, in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread followings, something must be afoot.

But what if theres another explanation? What if its the material circumstances, and not the arguments, that are making the difference for these conspiracy pitchmen? What if the trauma of living through real conspiracies all around usconspiracies among wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as corruption)is making people vulnerable to conspiracy theories?

If its trauma and not contagionmaterial conditions and not ideologythat is making the difference today and enabling a rise of repulsive misinformation in the face of easily observed facts, that doesnt mean our computer networks are blameless. Theyre still doing the heavy work of locating vulnerable people and guiding them through a series of ever-more-extreme ideas and communities.

Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics kicked off by vaccine denial to genocides kicked off by racist conspiracies to planetary meltdown caused by denial-inspired climate inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to put the fires outto figure out how to help people see the truth of the world through the conspiracies theyve been confused by.

But firefighting is reactive. We need fire prevention. We need to strike at the traumatic material conditions that make people vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here, too, tech has a role to play.

Theres no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EUs Terrorist Content Regulation, which requires platforms to police and remove extremist content, to the U.S. proposals to force tech companies to spy on their users and hold them liable for their users bad speech, theres a lot of energy to force tech companies to solve the problems they created.

Theres a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The solutions on the table today require Big Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to implement the systems these laws demand.

Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if were going to get out of this mess. Today, were at a crossroads where were trying to figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big Techs stranglehold. We cant do both, so we have to choose.