Who Owns the Future? (42 page)

Siren Servers make money by shorting the whole of the project of human civilization. They bet that the improvement of reality couldn’t keep up with the supernatural and extrahuman realm of “something from nothing.” They are the opposite of carbon credits.

Feeding the Frenetic Mind of the Networked Person

So, one potential benefit of retiring Siren Servers is to make room for investments like carbon credits. But there is another network idea for addressing climate change that might also work, based on the way networking
feels
. Networking feels like a game.

This is how derivative funds and high-frequency trading outfits feel to the people who operate them, like video games. This is also what the housing bubble or the earlier dot-com bubble was like for the most engaged, and victimized, small-time investors. People get drawn into the obsessive feedback loop of interacting over a network in real time. The draw might be most profound in social media.

In order for any scheme for idealistic finance to work well, the experience of entering into it would have to be appealing on this profound organic level. Entertainment is based on pacing, and so are cybernetic networks.

It’s All in the Timing

All markets are based on feedback loops with characteristic time delays. The interval between choice made and feedback received varies according to the type of transaction. The timing determines a lot about what use a market can be to people.

Short feedback intervals are often criticized, and I tend to agree with the criticisms. High-frequency trading can’t possibly incorporate information about the real world because there isn’t time for that information to get into the feedback loop. This is a different criticism than the more common question of fairness. Aside from fairness, the problem with high-frequency trading is nonsense.

Similarly, though on a much slower time scale, critics bemoan the quarterly report, which forces corporations to please investors four times a year even when they are in businesses that demand planning years in advance. The biggest problems we face are often even
slower than that, however. Climate change happens over decades and centuries.

Therefore, if there is to be any reconciliation between market forces and a problem like global climate change, some mechanism must come into play to create short-term, entertaining feedback within the information sphere on actions that ultimately matter in a much longer time frame.

People who drive cars that give constant energy efficiency feedback, like the Toyota Prius, seem to enjoy playing the game of driving more efficiently. That principle could be extended to other areas of life, and designs to do exactly that have been proposed by researchers such as Natalie Jeremijenko.
*

*
Natalie proposed devices similar to personal exercise monitors, but more comprehensive, that would constantly measure how much energy one was expending, and how much it cost. At the same time, one might constantly know how much one has saved or wasted in comparison to a “what if” scenario.

In such a scenario, your carbon footprint might be estimated constantly.
^†
Through the use of economic avatars, you would not be forced to start paying for carbon immediately and explicitly, but instead could enter into the practice at your leisure as it became appropriate for you.

†
Results could be displayed on your phone, or to better get your attention, could be more persistent and novel, like an animated tattoo on your wrist, or pixels grafted into your eyelashes so you could always look up at them. (Yes, this author has looked into both possibilities. In the 1990s I used to give undergraduate students an assignment to work out the engineering of body modifications their children would someday perform to freak them out. These were two ideas I gave as examples.)

The Treachery of Toys

But there’s a potential serious problem. This approach would involve constant measurement of your personal activity. That in turn could lead to a horrific surveillance society. There is already something of a revolt against “smart power meters,” which send information back to utilities.
²
Energy use is fundamental to our
lives, so carbon footprint feedback could form the basis of a truly creepy new kind of Siren Server.

One can imagine the nightmare scenarios: “Your energy bill indicates your girlfriend has been over a lot. Now your rent is going up, since two are technically living there.” “Your refrigerator has been opened a lot and is using more power than would be ideal. Your friends will be alerted that you ought to attend a class on green living and food preparation.” Or: “What’s going on with that electricity flow, dude? Grow lights? The authorities have been alerted.”

Can any design improve feedback to help people live their lives more knowingly without also centralizing power in yet another Siren Server? That is the topic of the next chapters.

CHAPTER 29

Creepy

Three Pervasive Creepy
*
Conundrums

*
Eric Schmidt famously applied the term
creepy
to the Internet when he was CEO of Google, while discussing the possible future of facial recognition.

There’s an industry built around a set of tricky problems that include online security, privacy, and identity. The industry extends into antivirus protection, online reputation management, credit repair, data recovery, help desk subcontractors, fancy firewalls, and too many other examples to list. At times I have mused that the servicing of these concerns might be the way to support middle classes in the long term.
^†
Billions of people could labor to fix each other’s privacy and security debacles.

†
In my previous book, this was the scenario called “Planet of the Help Desks.”

Alas, aside from the dark absurdity, an economy based on this principle wouldn’t create enough wealth. If middle classes aren’t earning money from something else, they won’t be able to pay each other to man the help desks. Is there any other way to manage the complexity of creepiness?

All three creepy vexations—privacy, identity, and security—have ancient pedigrees but have been made catastrophically more confusing by big data and network effects. Much of what is said about these problems individually is interesting, but here I will make things simpler by treating them as faces of the same underlying quandary.

Creepiness is when information systems undermine individual human agency. It happens when you feel violated because the flow
of information disregards your reasonable attempts to control your own information life. The principle can be extended to organizations that are undermined by hacking, for instance.

All three sorts of creepiness are promoted by an ever-splintering menagerie of powerful remote interests hoping to hijack your informational life.

Some of the most visible and immediately annoying instigators of creepiness are criminals and vandals. To my mind, however, the actions of legitimate corporations and governments are often not far removed from those of hooligans on the creepiness spectrum.

For instance, Google wants you to be “open” so that it can search all the data related to you, even if you didn’t initially enter it through the company’s services. Google also wants to be closed about how it compiles and exploits your information. Facebook wants you to have only one identity, so that it’s easier to collate information about you and reliably influence the options put in front of you, and it also doesn’t want to share how your information is used (it also doesn’t want Google to have access to it).

Loan and insurance companies demand information about you but don’t share how they make decisions based on that information. Even if you attempt to browse the Web anonymously you will still be tracked and identified by hundreds of stealthy “marketing” companies, unless you develop a rarefied degree of technical skill to insulate yourself.

Distant corporate machinations gradually change your life in unfathomable ways. You never really know what might have been if someone else’s cloud algorithm had come to a different conclusion about your potential as a loan taker, a date, or an employee.

A Hacker’s Paradise

The creepiness problem is basically that most people aren’t idiot savants.

The hacker attitude is often approximately this: “Open up your life to the ’net, all you ordinary people. The world is about to become transparent and that transparency will be the beginning of a golden
age. Sharing is good.
However
, encrypt your life like crazy. Use VPN, etc. Only the smartest people can make no sound in the digital forest.”

This is basically a way of saying that the better your computer skills are, the more right you have to be a genuine individual in control of your own digital life. But we technologists ought to be serving mankind, not turning ourselves into a privileged class.

Creepiness intrudes into the lives of ordinary people with varying levels of sophistication. For instance, it’s rare that criminals or vandals exhibit technical brilliance, although that does happen on occasion. What’s vastly more commonplace is that mediocre hoodlums search for an opening created by a victim’s little mistake or oversight.

No one can remember as many IDs and passwords as we’d wish. This has been one of the choke points of online commerce. So now the industry is shifting to new identity verification schemes, like asking users to draw squiggles. The problem is that we are in an eternal cat-and-mouse game with criminals.

If people were like ideal machines, then perhaps we’d maintain and periodically update different log-ins for many different types of online data, but in reality no one is that perfect. Users do not understand the endless choices that must be made to master privacy policies and even the top companies routinely screw up the administration of such policies. No set of rules foresees all the twisted circumstances that occur in online life.

The way that Siren Servers avoid direct responsibility for doing anything, radiating risk to their peripheral node “users,” also happens to engender a sloppy mind-set about creepiness concerns. To be fair, however, even security companies can’t remember to always set passwords, permissions, encryption, and all the other details correctly. This is why pranksters can eventually find a way in.
¹

Most social media companies have let private data leak, screwed up privacy settings for users, or violated what users had come to think were the rules about how they could be targeted and how their data could be used. In the course of writing this book I assembled references of such screw-ups, but there were so many, and new ones appear so frequently, that I gave up trying to choose.

Social media companies have by now screwed up enough that it’s doubtful they will be trusted anytime soon as commerce platforms,
and that precludes one of the best options for them to turn into successful enough businesses to grow the overall economy instead of shrinking it.

If people had infinite memories and were infinitely reliable, then creepiness would go away (though in that case people wouldn’t need to rely on computation so much). In the real world most people just can’t conform to tedium superbly enough.

Creepiness Thrives on the Quest for Utopia

People often love the feeling of being open and trusting each other with information, and yet we’ve seen over and over that naïve openness fertilizes panopticons.
*
While you’re sharing, the search engine, the market intelligence firm, and the credit bureau are all sizing you up and influencing your life, but without transparency regarding their operations.

*
Michel Foucault popularized this metaphor. The panopticon was Jeremy Bentham’s prison design in which cells were arranged in a circle around a central guard tower so that all prisoners were put under constant surveillance with maximum efficiency by a small number of guards.

Cyber-activists are usually most worried about traditional governments and law enforcement, with perhaps a nod to the potential of businesses or churches to overreach. But just as social networks and derivative funds have become world-shaking giants in only a few years of hypergrowth, so could a new vigilante movement, or a blackmail pyramid scheme, or a cyber-aligned cult.

The devil you know is probably not as scary as the one you don’t. The transparent world so desired by idealistic techies might tame old-fashioned governments on occasion, but it will also empower new kinds of network power, in just the way that making information and code “open” empowers certain Siren Servers like search engines. Don’t worry exclusively about the past forms of power; worry also about the future forms.

Just making a network open and free is not enough to create a balance of powers. Instead, simple-minded openness is actually an
invitation to the cleverest new concentrators of power to percolate creepiness and inspire justified paranoias.

Once Upon a Time I Hoped to Wish Paranoia Away

Creepy darkness in digital networks was foretold fiendishly by some of my writer friends back in the earliest era of digital network research. I remember talking to William Gibson, a founder of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction thirty years ago. I begged him to not make Virtual Reality seem so dark and menacing.

At the time I felt I ought to be trying to hypnotize the world into positivity. We technologists would dream our way into a kind and creative future, as if abuses of power were nothing but bad habits that would vanish forever if they could just be broken once, during a technology transition.