Issue of the Week: Human Rights, Economic Opportunity, Disease, Personal Growth
The bright shiny object in your hand (c) 2018 Planet Earth Foundation
The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Eight.
We broaden-out in today’s post, from the specifics at the bottom of the internet pit last week of online child sexual abuse, to the impact over-all of the digital age.
Last week we wrote:
“In a fundamental way, socially, culturally and economically, we live in the digital age.”
From headlines to subtexts related to this issue and its impact on everything economic, political and cultural, there is no end to the deluge.
It has been a key factor in the end of civilization as we knew it.
Thankfully, we have a lot of help in covering this colossal issue.
We’ll repost excerpts below of our post from October 29 last year on John Naughton’s momentous piece in The Observer, on the eve of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, “Why we need a 21st-century Martin Luther to challenge the church of tech”.
Additionally, we refer you to Naughton’s ongoing series in The Observer since the beginning of the millennium, January 2000, “The Networker”. It is literally a real-time history of the digital age, in ongoing articles from then to now.
This equivalent of a several-volume body of work is, to make one of the more obvious understatements of the millennium so far by definition, irreplaceable. It will take some time to read it all, to be sure. But the description of what it is, and the intellectual and reporting skill-sets of the author, should sufficiently inform of the value. You don’t get to take the pill in The Matrix, but the transformational wake-up is in actual reality.
His most recent installment, on September 9, notes this “is a month of anniversaries, of which two in particular stand out. One is that it’s 10 years since the seismic shock of the banking crisis – one of the consequences of which is the ongoing unravelling of the (neo)liberal democracy so beloved of western ruling elites. The other is that it’s 20 years since Google arrived on the scene.”
We’ll post the article below.
First, two other articles to comment on and post.
With the bad news last week, and before, of the terrorism of online child sexual abuse, we also re-visited the good news about concrete efforts to end it, and the international commitment to end the abuse of children in all forms, even if only a start—endured by half of the children on earth.
We referred last week to the larger context of the cognitive impact of the digital age on everyone, and especially the youngest generations who’ve grown up with it, the Millennials and now Generation Z.
Not a reassuring picture.
Here’s the thing, though. In addition to the kids who receive proper adult guidance, modelling and supervision, there’s this phenomenon which can be defined in numerous ways called the human spirit. Or the will to survive, which requires being in reality. Or many other potential descriptions and views on the human drive that is a natural antidote to destructive excess at some point.
And it has its own particular engine at the youth end of the spectrum. So the very people being most effected are in many cases the ones most leading the way in another direction as adolescents and young adults.
Talk about hope for the future. Research shows that there’s part of a sixties generation mantra, “don’t trust anyone over thirty”, that rings true in a not-so-flattering way for that generation now. The younger generations, while still by a majority deeply engaged in social media, are moving away from it, while the over 45’s, while a majority are not engaged, are moving more toward it.
The extraordinary ubiquity, impact, addiction and destructiveness of the digital age, alongside the increasing youth rebellion against it, are covered extremely well in The Guardian article by Sirin Kale on August 29, “Logged off: meet the teens who refuse to use social media”:
Generation Z has grown up online – so why are a surprising number suddenly turning their backs on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat.
“For 17-year-old Mary Amanuel, from London, it happened in Tesco. “We were in year 7,” she remembers, “and my friend had made an Instagram account. As we were buying stuff, she was counting the amounts of likes she’d got on a post. ‘Oooh, 40 likes. 42 likes.’ I just thought: ‘This is ridiculous.’”
Isabelle, an 18-year-old student from Bedfordshire who doesn’t want to disclose her surname, turned against social media when her classmates became zombified. “Everyone switched off from conversation. It became: ‘Can I have your number to text you?’ Something got lost in terms of speaking face to face. And I thought: ‘I don’t really want to be swept up in that.’” For 15-year-old Emily Sharp, from Staines in Surrey, watching bullying online was the final straw. “It wasn’t nice. That deterred me from using it.”
It is widely believed that young people are hopelessly devoted to social media. Teenagers, according to this stereotype, tweet, gram, Snap and scroll. But for every young person hunched over a screen, there are others for whom social media no longer holds such an allure. These teens are turning their backs on the technology – and there are more of them than you might think.
While many of us have been engrossed in the Instagram lives of our co-workers and peers, a backlash among young people has been quietly boiling. One 2017 survey of British schoolchildren found that 63% would be happy if social media had never been invented. Another survey of 9,000 internet users from the research firm Ampere Analysis found that people aged 18-24 had significantly changed their attitudes towards social media in the past two years. Whereas 66% of this demographic agreed with the statement “social media is important to me” in 2016, only 57% make this claim in 2018. As young people increasingly reject social media, older generations increasingly embrace it: among the 45-plus age bracket, the proportion who value social media has increased from 23% to 28% in the past year, according to Ampere’s data.
This is part of a wider trend. According to a study by US marketing firm Hill Holliday of Generation Z – people born after 1995 – half of those surveyed stated they had quit or were considering quitting at least one social media platform. When it comes to Gen Z’s relationship to social media, “significant cracks are beginning to show”, says the firm’s Lesley Bielby.
She believes we will definitely see an increase in younger people quitting or substantially reducing their use. “And as younger Gen Zers notice this behaviour among their older siblings and friends, they too will start to dial down their use of social media.”
As the first generation to grow up online, Gen Z never had to learn social media, or at least not exactly. They glided through every iteration: Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), Instagram (2010) Snapchat (2011) in real time, effortlessly adopting each one. But a life lived in pixels from your earliest age is no easy thing.
“You start doing things that are dishonest,” says Amanuel, who quit social media aged 16. “Like Instagram: I was presenting this dishonest version of myself, on a platform where most people were presenting dishonest versions of themselves.”
Like Amanuel, Jeremiah Johnson, 18, from Luton, grew weary of the pressures of sustaining an online persona. “It’s a competition for who can appear the happiest,” he says. “And if you’re not happy and want to vent about it on social media, you’re attention-seeking.”
After being “bugged” by his friends to get Instagram (he had stopped using Facebook aged 16), Johnson joined. He lasted six months. “If you’re having a bad day and scrolling through it, you’re constantly bombarded with pictures of people going to parties. Even if that’s not an accurate portrayal of their lives, that’s what you see. So I stopped using it. It became depressing. It was this competition of who’s the happiest.” He pauses. “Participating in that is not something I’m interested in.”
Hyper-connected teens have been faced with a surfeit of clicks, retweets and likes – and the dopamine rush of online validation – since the neural pathways in their brains were formed.
“They’re becoming overwhelmed with the responsibility of maintaining their social sites and with upholding the somewhat inflated persona many have created on these sites, where they are constantly seeking approval via the amount of likes they get for any given post,” Bielby says.
“The people who are the most honest about themselves do not play the game of Instagram,” Amanuel says. “The game of Instagram is who can maximise their likes by being the most risque, outrageous or conformist as possible. I didn’t want to play that game.”
At school, social media can be a brutal barometer of popularity. “If you meet someone new and they ask for your Instagram and you only have 80 followers,” says Sharp, “they’re going to think: ‘You’re not that popular’, but if you have 2,000 followers they’re going to be like: ‘You’re the most popular person in school.’” Sharp quit social media at 13. “I’d rather not know what other people think of me.”
A desire to build authentic, offline friendships motivated some to quit. “I’m so much better at real-life socialising now,” says Amanuel. “Not just those people you accept on a friend request who are friends of a friend.”
For Tyreke Morgan, 18, from Bristol, being a hard man to get hold of – he has no social media presence at all – has its advantages. “Everyone goes through other people to find me,” Morgan laughs, “and when I hear that they’re been trying to get hold of me I say: ‘Great!’ Why would I need 500 flakey friends?”
But when you are from a digitally native generation, quitting social media can feel like joining a monastery. Amanuel was recently asked by co-workers if she had Snapchat. “I said no,” Amanuel remembers, “and I instantly heard, like, gasps. It was like I’d revealed something disgusting.” She explained that she did have a Snapchat handle, but never used it. “Relief came out of their eyes! It was really weird.”
Teenagers not ready to quit entirely are stepping back for a while. Dr Amanda Lenhart, who researches young people’s online lives, conducted a survey of US teenagers, asking them about taking time off social media. “We found that 58% of teenagers said they had taken at least one break from at least one social media platform. The most common reason? It was getting in the way of schoolwork or jobs, with more than a third of respondents citing this as their primary reason for leaving social media. Other reasons included feeling tired of the conflict or drama they could see unfolding among their peer group online, and feeling oppressed too by the constant firehose of information.”
Bielby agrees that young people are becoming more aware of the amount of time they waste online. Of the young people Hill Holliday surveyed who had quit or considered quitting social media, 44% did so, she says, in order to “use time in more valuable ways”.
“I don’t know how people doing their A-levels or GCSEs have the time for it,” says Isabelle. “They’re constantly studying, but their only distraction is social media.” Rather than get sucked into a “mindless vortex of never-ending scrolling,” as she puts it, when Isabelle isn’t studying she prefers to be outdoors.
The fact that Gen Z have had their every move documented online since before they could walk, talk, or even control their bowels helps explain their antipathy to social media: it makes sense for them to strive for privacy, as soon as they reach the age when they have a choice over their online image.
“I’ve seen parents post pictures of their child’s first potty online,” says Amy Binns of the University of Central Lancashire. “You think: ‘Why are you doing this to your child? They wouldn’t want this to be public.”
Gen Z has an interest in privacy that subtly sets them apart. “Young people want to get away from the curtain-twitching village, where everyone knows everything about you,” Binns says. So while today’s teens spend a lot of time online, they don’t actually share that much personal information. And when they do share, it’s strategic. “You’re painting a picture of who you are and your image,” says Binns. “It’s your own shop window or brand.”
“Framing a picture and posting it on there is not a five-minute thing,” says Amanuel, explaining that any post will be well-thought-out in order to project a certain image and maximise likes. “It takes hours of deliberation.”
“When social media started, we didn’t really know what it was going to mean,” says Binns. “Young people are more aware of the value of privacy than we were 10 years ago.”
Amanuel says that the Cambridge Analytica story, with its exposure of widespread data harvesting, helped prompt her to get off social media, and many more young people seem to be turning against Facebook; on Tuesday, it was reported that the number of Facebook users aged 18 to 24 in Britain is expected to fall 1.8% this year.
Some of the teens I spoke to were concerned about how technologies such as Snap Map – a Snapchat feature that tracks your friends geographically, in real time – were spreading through their schools, and mistrustful of the privacy consequences of being surveilled by your followers wherever you go. “Snap Map is this big thing with a lot of my friends, but there is a sense of privacy that is being breached as well,” Isabelle says.
Teenagers are also educated about the ramifications of an offensive tweet, or explicit picture, as well as the health consequences of too much screen time. “Young people are being taught in schools about sharing nudes and how tweets can travel around. They’ve seen the horror stories,” says Binns.
Isabelle agrees. “Constant screen time damages your ability to see, and it also causes internal damage, such as anxiety.” Studies have shown that social media use can negatively affect mental wellbeing, and adolescents are particularly susceptible: one nationally representative survey of US 13- to 18-year-olds linked heavier social media use to depression and suicide, particularly in girls. And 41% of the Gen Z teens surveyed by Hill Holliday reported that social media made them feel anxious, sad or depressed.
But quitting social media can create new anxieties. “Our research shows that the biggest fear of quitting or pausing social media is missing out,” Bielby says. Some are more sanguine than others. “Do I miss out on stuff?” Morgan asks. “Yeah, of course. People find it hard to keep in contact with me. They say: ‘It would be easier if you had this or that.’ But I don’t think it’s that hard to type in my number and send a text. You’re just not willing to do it.”
Others struggle with the fear of missing out. “It’s like everyone in your friend group has gone to a party without telling you,” Johnson says. At times, he questions himself. “I second-guess myself a lot. There are some days I’m really convinced I want to reinstall it, not for myself, but because I want to appear normal.”
Still, refuseniks such as Johnson may not be outliers for ever. In a world in which everyone is online, renouncing social media is a renegade, countercultural move: as quietly punk as shaving your head or fastening your clothes with safety-pins. Morgan has become a svengali for classmates wanting to escape. “My friends come to me and say: ‘Tyreke, I don’t have social media any more,’ and I go: ‘Why? I thought that’s what you guys do.’ And they say: ‘Thanks to you, because of the things you said and the stuff you’re doing.’ It’s quite cool.”
Quitting social media is a determined move: apps including Facebook and Instagram are designed to be addictive. “Social media is so ingrained in teenage culture that it’s hard to take it out. But when you do, it’s such a relief,” Amanuel says. She has received a lot of “admiration” from her peers for quitting. “They wish they were able to log off. People feel like social media is a part of them and their identities as teenagers and something you need to do,” she says. “But I’m no less of a teenager because I don’t use it.”
Now, to another article, exceptionally well-written, on a truly extraordinary story about how democracy and economic equality must be and can be applied in the corporate digital age, as has been done before in regulating corporate power. It’s been one of the most read articles in The New York Times since published on the front-page of the digital edition September 7 (and front-page business the next day in print). A now 29-year old woman may be changing the world, in work she has been developing throughout her twenties.
“Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea”.
By David Streifeld, Sept. 7, 2018
“The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University’s law library.
“Antitrust Dilemma.” “The Antitrust Impulse.” “Antitrust in an Expanding Economy.” Shelf after shelf of volumes ignored for decades. There are a dozen fat tomes with transcripts of the congressional hearings on monopoly power in 1949, when the world was in ruins and the Soviets on the march. Lawmakers believed economic concentration would make America more vulnerable.
At the end of the antitrust stacks is a table near the window. “This is my command post,” said Lina Khan.
It’s nothing, really. A few books are piled up haphazardly next to a bottle with water and another with tea. Ms. Khan was in Dallas quite a bit over the last year, refining an argument about monopoly power that takes aim at one of the most admired, secretive and feared companies of our era: Amazon.
The retailer overwhelmingly dominates online commerce, employs more than half a million people and powers much of the internet itself through its cloud computing division. On Tuesday, it briefly became the second company to be worth a trillion dollars.
If competitors tremble at Amazon’s ambitions, consumers are mostly delighted by its speedy delivery and low prices. They stream its Oscar-winning movies and clamor for the company to build a second headquarters in their hometowns. Few of Amazon’s customers, it is safe to say, spend much time thinking they need to be protected from it.
But then, until recently, no one worried about Facebook, Google or Twitter either. Now politicians, the media, academics and regulators are kicking around ideas that would, metaphorically or literally, cut them down to size. Members of Congress grilled social media executives on Wednesday in yet another round of hearings on Capitol Hill. Not since the Department of Justice took on Microsoft in the mid-1990s has Big Tech been scrutinized like this.
Amazon has more revenue than Facebook, Google and Twitter put together, but it has largely escaped sustained examination. That is beginning to change, and one significant reason is Ms. Khan.
In early 2017, when she was an unknown law student, Ms. Khan published “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” in the Yale Law Journal. Her argument went against a consensus in antitrust circles that dates back to the 1970s — the moment when regulation was redefined to focus on consumer welfare, which is to say price. Since Amazon is renowned for its cut-rate deals, it would seem safe from federal intervention.
Ms. Khan disagreed. Over 93 heavily footnoted pages, she presented the case that the company should not get a pass on anticompetitive behavior just because it makes customers happy. Once-robust monopoly laws have been marginalized, Ms. Khan wrote, and consequently Amazon is amassing structural power that lets it exert increasing control over many parts of the economy.
Amazon has so much data on so many customers, it is so willing to forgo profits, it is so aggressive and has so many advantages from its shipping and warehouse infrastructure that it exerts an influence much broader than its market share. It resembles the all-powerful railroads of the Progressive Era, Ms. Khan wrote: “The thousands of retailers and independent businesses that must ride Amazon’s rails to reach market are increasingly dependent on their biggest competitor.”
The paper got 146,255 hits, a runaway best-seller in the world of legal treatises. That popularity has rocked the antitrust establishment, and is making an unlikely celebrity of Ms. Khan in the corridors of Washington.
She has her own critics now: Several leading scholars have found fault with Ms. Khan’s proposals to revive and expand antitrust, and some have tried to dismiss her paper with the mocking label “Hipster Antitrust.” Unwilling or perhaps unable to accept that a woman wrote a breakthrough legal text, they keep talking about bearded dudes.
Ms. Khan was born in London to Pakistani parents who emigrated to the United States when she was 11. She is now 29, an Amazon critic whose Amazon account is largely inactive, newly married to a Texas doctor who uses his Amazon Prime account all the time. Ms. Khan was supposed to move this summer to Los Angeles, where she had a clerkship with Stephen Reinhardt, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge and liberal icon, but he suddenly died in March. Instead, Ms. Khan is set to start a fellowship at Columbia this fall, and is considering other projects as well. There is no shortage of parties that want her advice on how to reckon with Big Tech.
“As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies,” she said. “But as citizens, as workers, and as entrepreneurs, we recognize that their power is troubling. We need a new framework, a new vocabulary for how to assess and address their dominance.”
At the S.M.U. library in Dallas, Ms. Khan was finding that vocabulary. These dead books, many from an era that predated the price-based era of monopoly law, were an influence and an inspiration. She was planning to expand her essay into a book, she said in an interview here in June.
Then: Rockefeller. Now: Bezos.
Ida Tarbell, the journalist whose investigation of Standard Oil helped bring about its breakup, wrote this about John D. Rockefeller in 1905:
“It takes time to crush men who are pursuing legitimate trade. But one of Mr. Rockefeller’s most impressive characteristics is patience. … He was like a general who, besieging a city surrounded by fortified hills, views from a balloon the whole great field, and sees how, this point taken, that must fall; this hill reached, that fort is commanded. And nothing was too small: the corner grocery in Browntown, the humble refining still on Oil Creek, the shortest private pipeline. Nothing, for little things grow.”
When Ms. Khan read that, she thought: Jeff Bezos.
Her Yale Law Journal paper argued that monopoly regulators who focus on consumer prices are thinking too short-term. In Ms. Khan’s view, a company like Amazon — one that sells things, competes against others selling things, and owns the platform where the deals are done — has an inherent advantage that undermines fair competition.
“The long-term interests of consumers include product quality, variety and innovation — factors best promoted through both a robust competitive process and open markets,” she wrote.
The issue Ms. Khan’s article really brought to the fore is this: Do we trust Amazon, or any large company, to create our future? In think tanks and universities, the battle has been joined.
“It’s one thing to say that antitrust enforcement has gotten far too weak,” said Daniel Crane, a University of Michigan scholar who doesn’t agree with Ms. Khan but credits her with opening up a much-needed debate. “It’s a bridge much further to say we should go back to the populist goal of leveling playing fields and checking ‘bigness.’ ”
As Mr. Crane writes in a forthcoming law review article: “Antitrust law stands at its most fluid and negotiable moment in a generation.”
The resistance is fierce and prominent. Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, wrote that if companies like Amazon are targeted simply because their low prices hurt competitors, we might “quickly drive the economy back into the Stone Age, imposing hysterical costs on everyone.”
Timothy Muris, a former chairman of the F.T.C., and Jonathan Nuechterlein, a former F.T.C. general counsel, published a paper in June that was a response to Ms. Khan and the antitrust reform movement. Called “Antitrust in the Internet Era,” it was about the A.&P. grocery chain.
A.&P. essentially invented the modern supermarket in the 1920s. With its low prices, wide range of products and penchant for disruption, the chain became the leading retailer of its era. It owned 70 factories and eliminated middlemen, which allowed it to keep costs down. Yet, Mr. Muris and Mr. Nuechterlein wrote, “A.&P.’s very popularity triggered a backlash.” The government pursued A.&P. on antitrust grounds during the 1940s, egged on by competitors that could not compete. After decades of decline, A.&P. shut its doors for good in 2015.
The analogies with Amazon are explicit. Don’t let the government pursue Amazon the way it pursued A.&P., Mr. Muris and Mr. Nuechterlein warned.
“Amazon has added hundreds of billions of dollars of value to the U.S. economy,” they wrote. “It is a brilliant innovator” whose “breakthroughs have in turn helped launch new waves of innovation across retail and technology sectors, to the great benefit of consumers.”
Amazon itself could not have made the argument any better. Which isn’t surprising, because in a footnote on the first page, the authors noted: “We approached Amazon Inc. for funding to tell the story” of A.&P., “and we gratefully acknowledge its support.” They added at the end of footnote 85: “The authors have advised Amazon on a variety of antitrust issues.”
Amazon declined to say how much its support came to in dollars. It also declined to comment on Ms. Khan or her paper directly, but issued a statement.
“We operate in a diverse range of businesses, from retail and entertainment to consumer electronics and technology services, and we have intense and well-established competition in each of these areas,” the company said. “Retail is our largest business today and we represent less than 1 percent of global retail.”
‘We’re at the Very Beginning of Solutions to This’
The first time Ms. Khan held power to account involved a Starbucks in suburban New York that was banning students from sitting down. Ms. Khan decided to write an article about the policy; Starbucks wouldn’t answer her questions, but she managed to interview the employees. The New York Times picked up on the tempest, leaning on her reporting. Ms. Khan was 15, a correspondent for her high school newspaper.
Her father was a management consultant; her mother an executive in information services. Ms. Khan went to Williams College, where she wrote a thesis on the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. She was the editor of the student paper but worked hard at everything.
“We were routinely emailing each other on separate floors of the library as it was closing at 2 a.m.,” said Amanda Korman, a classmate.
Like many a wonkish youth, Ms. Khan headed to Washington after graduating in 2010, applying for a position at the left-leaning New America Foundation. Barry Lynn, who headed the organization’s Open Markets antimonopoly initiative, seized on her application. “It’s so much easier to teach public policy to people who already know how to write than teach writing to public policy experts,” said Mr. Lynn, a former journalist.
Ms. Khan wrote about industry consolidation and monopolistic practices for Washington publications that specialize in policy, went to Yale Law School, published her Amazon paper and then came back to Washington last year, just as interest was starting to swell in her work.
In the summer of 2017, Open Markets was ejected from New America amid messy accusations that it displeased Google, a prominent funder, after the company was rebuked by European regulators for anticompetitive behavior. The think tank is now independent.
“Polls show huge concerns about concentrated power, corporate power, but if people are asked, ‘Do we have a monopoly problem?’ they answer, ‘I don’t know,’ ” said Mr. Lynn. “They don’t have the language for it.”
Amazon’s $14 billion purchase of Whole Foods in the summer of 2017 — a startling move into physical retail — was almost a watershed, but not quite. Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law, called for hearings but did not get them.
“The whole country has been struggling to understand why the economy is not operating in the right way,” Mr. Cicilline said. “Wages have remained stagnant. Workers have less and less power. All we’re trying to do is create a level playing field, and that’s harder when you have megacompanies that make it virtually impossible for small competitors.” He added, “We’re at the very beginning of solutions to this.”
Somewhere in the midst of all this, Ms. Khan found the time to marry Shah Ali, a doctor now doing a cardiology fellowship in Dallas, which explains why she was camping out at the S.M.U. law library. The honeymoon was in Hawaii. Dr. Ali took Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” because he hadn’t reread it in a while. Ms. Khan brought a book on corporations and American democracy.
‘The New Brandeisians’ Lacks a Certain Something
The battle for intellectual supremacy takes place less these days in learned journals and more on social media, where tongues are sharp and branding is all. This is not Ms. Khan’s strong suit. She is always polite, even on Twitter. One consequence is that she didn’t give much thought about what to call the movement to reboot antitrust. Neither did anyone else.
That presented an opening for the reformers’ critics, who have tried with a limited degree of success to popularize the term “Hipster Antitrust.” Konstantin Medvedovsky, an antitrust lawyer in New York, came up with the label last summer in a tweet that was responding to a tweet that was responding to a tweet by Ms. Khan.
“Antitrust Hipsterism,” he wrote. “Everything old is cool again.”
Mr. Medvedovsky, who calls Ms. Khan’s article “the face of this movement,” said the term was designed to be “playful rather than pejorative.”
Admirers of Ms. Khan and her fellow reformers have sometimes called them the New Brandeis School or the New Brandeisians, after Louis Brandeis, the Progressive Era foe of big business. As brands go, these are somewhat less catchy than “Hipster Antitrust.”
The April issue of the journal Antitrust Chronicle, edited by Mr. Medvedovsky, features a drawing of a bearded man on the cover right above the words “Hipster Antitrust.” In the middle of an article by Philip Marsden, a professor of competition law and economics at the College of Europe in Bruges, there’s a photograph of a bearded man taking a selfie next to the chapter heading “Battle of the Beards.” It is perhaps relevant that only one of the 12 authors or experts in the issue is female.
The Hipster issue was sponsored by Facebook, another sign that Big Tech is striving to shape the monopoly-law debate. The company declined to comment.
Things are moving fast, so there is a lot to write papers about.
Mr. Chopra, with Ms. Khan’s assistance, pushed the argument further on Sept. 6 with a 14-page official comment that suggested the F.T.C. bring back a tool buried in its toolbox: the ability to make rules.
Contemporary antitrust regulation, the commissioner wrote, is conducted in the courts, which makes it numbingly slow and dependent on high-paid expert witnesses. He called for the agency to use its authority to issue rules that would “advance clarity and certainty” about what is, and what is not, an unfair method of competition.
These rules would not be “some inflexible prescription” but standards, guidelines, pointers or presumptions, he wrote. Since everyone affected by a proposed rule would have the opportunity to weigh in on it, the process would be more democratic.
There is more than an echo here of Ms. Khan’s notion that the past can help rescue the future.
“These are new technologies and new business models,” Ms. Khan said. “The remedy is new thinking that is informed by traditional principles.”
Antitrust Foot Soldiers
Big Tech’s great strength is that it is everywhere. Hardly anyone can live without it. But that omnipresence can be a weakness too. Just ask Facebook. It was the only global social media network, an enviable position — until it wasn’t. Ideas for regulating Facebook that were once unimaginable are now on the table.
Ms. Khan was not the first to criticize Amazon, and she said the company was not really her target anyway. “Amazon is not the problem — the state of the law is the problem, and Amazon depicts that in an elegant way,” she said.
From Amazon’s point of view, however, it is a problem indeed that Ms. Khan concludes in the Yale paper that regulating parts of the company like a utility “could make sense.” She also said it “could make sense” to treat Amazon’s e-commerce operation like a bridge, highway, port, power grid or telephone network — all of which are required to allow access to their infrastructure on a nondiscriminatory basis.
Ms. Khan put those ideas out there, which is how Rachel Tsuna found them.
Last fall, the Barnard College senior was casting about for a subject for her senior thesis. “What is really interesting to you?” her adviser asked. Ms. Tsuna, now 22, had worked for a chewing gum start-up — yes, there are such things — that sold through Amazon, and knew firsthand the retailer’s tight grip. “Amazon is scary!” she exclaimed.
This impulsive declaration suggested a topic: Did the F.T.C. have the grounds to move against Amazon? Ms. Tsuna made little progress until she came across Ms. Khan’s paper.
“I finally felt like I was pursuing something valid,” Ms. Tsuna said. “Lina Khan gave me the confidence I needed.” The thesis, which is quite fair to Amazon, got an A minus.
That’s the way movements begin. Little things grow.
“This is a moment in time that invites a movement,” said Ms. Khan. “It’s bigger than antitrust, bigger than Big Tech. It’s about whether the laws serve democratic ends.”
It was late at night in late July, and she was eating a burrata concoction at a popular restaurant near the Washington apartment she uses when not in Texas with her husband. After the death of Judge Reinhardt, her options opened up. She had the Columbia fellowship. Maybe she would also write the book. Or go back to the F.T.C. full time. Or somehow do it all.
“Amazon is a monopoly, and I worry that it monopolizes Lina,” said her husband, Dr. Ali. “I learn about what she is doing from looking at her Twitter feed.”
“I throw myself into things,” Ms. Khan agreed. “My life is spread out now.”
With some cajoling, she revealed her Amazon account. There were just three purchases in 18 months. An altimeter for her father, who has taken up hiking, is the only one she will agree to have mentioned, although the other two are incredibly benign. One attribute Ms. Khan shares with Amazon is a strong desire to control the flow of information.
Somewhat to her surprise, she is becoming a public figure. Before beginning her stint at the F.T.C., she said the news of her working there might be no more than a sentence or two at news sites that cover policy intensively. Instead it was a full-fledged story. The Information, a tech news site, declared: “Amazon Antitrust Push Slowly Gains Ground.”Politico just named her one of the Politico 50, its annual list of the people driving the ideas driving politics.
Balancing the attention and the achievement, the expectations and the demands, is difficult, perhaps impossible.
“I don’t think of my work in grandiose terms. I feel an urgency but I’m also wary of hubris,” Ms. Khan said. “Nobody has been expecting this to succeed. I’m awed by the challenge.”
We continue now with John Naughton’s “What’s the biggest influence on the way we think? (Googling it won’t help)”, in The Guardian, September 9:
The dominant search engine of its time is a powerful tool – but now it is shaping us
“This is a month of anniversaries, of which two in particular stand out. One is that it’s 10 years since the seismic shock of the banking crisis– one of the consequences of which is the ongoing unravelling of the (neo)liberal democracy so beloved of western ruling elites. The other is that it’s 20 years since Google arrived on the scene.
Future historians will see our era divided into two ages: BG and AG – before and after Google. For web users in the 1990s search engines were a big deal, because as the network exploded, finding anything on it became increasingly difficult. Like many of my peers, I used AltaVista, a search tool developed by the then significant Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which was the best thing available at the time.
And then one day, word spread like wildfire online about a new search engine with a name bowdlerised from googol, the mathematical term for a huge number (10 to the power of 100). It was clean, fast and delivered results derived from conducting a kind of peer review of all the sites on the web. Once you tried it, you never went back to AltaVista.
Twenty years on, it’s still the same story. Other search engines are available (Bing, WolframAlpha, DuckDuckGo, to name just three), but basically Google – with a market share ranging from 80% to 90%, depending on territory – is really the only game in town. Its centrality is symbolised by the fact that it’s even become a verb. “Just Google it” is now a part of everyday conversation (no one ever talks about “Binging it”), which means that Google has effectively become a memory prosthesis for humanity. You don’t have to bother remembering stuff any more because Google will always help you find it.
In that sense, it’s become one of those indispensable tools – like pens and paper, typewriters and reading glasses, calculators and spreadsheets – that humans have acquired over the centuries to boost their cognitive capacity. The trouble is that dependence on such resources has consequences. The arrival of the electronic calculator, for example, meant that our capacity to do mental arithmetic evaporated. Likewise, who can nowadays remember more than a few telephone numbers? And university students increasingly have difficulty in examinations because their handwriting has atrophied.
As a tool, though, Google search is in a different league from earlier tools, and so the consequences of being dependent on it are more serious and far-reaching – for two inter-related reasons. The first is that it can influence what you think you know and shape the way you think because it knows more about you than you realise. And secondly, it’s not a passive tool that you own and control, but the property of a huge corporation that has acquired strange – and in some ways unprecedented – powers.
Ten years ago, Nicholas Carr published a striking article – “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” – in the Atlantic. The title was misleading because the thrust of the piece was actually about how the internet might be messing with our brains, and in that sense Carr was using Google as a proxy for the technology in general. Which is a pity because there are plenty of important questions to be asked about Google’s impact on the way we think. Its search results, for example, are heavily influenced by how many websites it finds that are supposedly relevant to a query. Sometimes, that’s fine. But sometimes it’s toxic – yet many people think it provides the “truth”. And because people’s search queries can sometimes be very revealing, the company knows more about people’s innermost secrets, fears and fantasies than even their friends or partners. We ask Google questions that we would not breathe to any living soul.
So Google, as philosopher Benjamin Curtis points out, is anything but a passive cognitive tool. Its current offerings, boosted by machine learning algorithms, are increasingly suggestive. Its Maps not only provide navigational help but give us “personalised location suggestions that it thinks will interest us”. Gmail makes helpful suggestions about what to type in a reply and Google News highlights stories that it believes we will find interesting. “All of this,” says Curtis, “removes the very need to think and make decisions for ourselves.” It “fills gaps in our cognitive processes, and so fills gaps in our minds”.
In two short decades, therefore, Google has gone from being a geeky delight to something that influences the way we think. All of which brings to mind something that John Culkin, a buddy of Marshall McLuhan, said many years ago: “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Amen to that. And you can Google him to check the quote.”
We conclude with an excerpt from our post on October 29, 2017, and Naughton’s classic piece and links to his 95 theses challenging what he describes as the Church of Technopoly, of which we are all members, “Why we need a 21st-century Martin Luther to challenge the church of tech”.
World Campaign post excerpt, October 29, 2017:
We post on the eve of another epic anniversary.
This Tuesday is the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation started by Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” pinned to a church door in Wittenberg.
Fitting it falls on All Souls Day.
It’s on the short list of world-changing events that influences in countless ways still.
Today, in The Observer in London, John Naughton has penned a long-form piece that takes us back to the past and the future at once, in an utterly brilliant multidimensional absorbing essay.
He brings us the planet-crashing importance of what happened with Luther in a manner that grabs your soul and yanks it out of time to observe the moment in time and all the issues at play.
Then he yanks your now far better educated self back to the future.
Luther’s target was the Catholic Church, the economic political superpower of the time, of which he was a part, but could no longer abide.
Naughton’s target is the “Church of Technopoly’ as it has unfolded to date in the digital, internet, et all world, the economic political superpower of our time, in which he was once a true believer, and now sees the need for a reformation no less radical and just as jarring as Luther’s in changing the power and consciousness dynamics.
Naughton’s own modern version of the 95 Theses on the church of tech will be unveiled Tuesday. Missing it really could mean missing the rest of your life. Not because he’s got every answer (we don’t agree with anyone all the time, we’re all learning), but because he’s reminding skillfully the degree to which most of us are missing living in reality, and its costs.
Devotees of Mr. Robot will see some parallels, but Naughton has gone to galaxies far, far away from the fully conscious awareness of most of us that need urgent attending.
It all starts with just telling the truth. Good luck with fighting Naugthon on that front.
At the end of his masterful essay on the Russian Revolution in our last post, Ian Frazier notes, “a world in which the richest eight people control as much wealth as 3.6 billion of their global co-inhabitants (half the human race) will probably see a readjustment. The populist movements now gaining momentum around the world, however localized or distinct, may signal a beginning of a bigger process.”
A “readjustment”. Ya think? Oh, the power of intentional understatement.
The richest eight and a handful of others represent the most concentrated economic elite in history—the corporate powers of the digital age.
So, the powers Frazier noted, are the powers Naughton now takes on, today, and in the release of his own updated 95 theses on Tuesday.
The point is not to personalize the issue of those who have more money in their hands than half the planet (although history always does personalize it if not corrected before the “problems left unsolved take their own course”)–the point is the ancient systemic rot that allows such an impossibly obscene imbalance in wealth and power to occur, be corrected through cataclysm, re-occur on a worse level, get better than ever before through worse cataclysm, and on and on. Some of the above do magnificent charitable work and do or will give away the majority of their money. Makes no difference unless the call and action is to radically alter the system to create equality now and in an ongoing way. Charity can’t solve the problems–it can in fact misdirect, unless targeted to help organize and support systemic equality. Systemic political and economic public policy are what can provide basic needs and rights for all.
In 2008 we wrote in “We Are One: The Force Behind Everything”:
“And then we have the internet, which filled with promise, has become the greatest purveyor of more bad things and lies than any medium in history, simply by its nature and accessibility.
And this goes beyond the most obvious examples, such as use by terrorists, child sexual predators, and even the excesses of those trying to defend us from these horrors going from what many would consider welcome, needed and legitimate, into encroaching on basic rights. The internet could and can be an alternative source of information, more democratic in the sense of being more readily accessible—as we certainly hoped and still hope will come to pass in a healthy manner. But with freedom comes responsibility as always, and the wild west of the internet has a long way to go.”
Then, in 2016 we wrote in “We Are One: A Reflection”:
“And one of many other issues at the forefront is the issue of technology changing the landscape as never before. We are one digital world. And our privacy is taken away, and given away, by our own choice. We have no idea what is happening to us in this arena in the main.
If we survive the process of the forces of global exploitation being defeated by the inexorable movement toward global equality, the tools that connect the world are making it a brave new world of addicts in denial while the architects and even the architecture of the new world technology itself can become the ultimate exploiters. The lines between our intelligence and artificial intelligence and who controls what are harder and harder to locate. Science fiction becomes more and more reality every day. This presents challenges to human rights and even the definition of being human in countless ways.”
Go to sleep, once again, say the digital media monied interests of our times. Look at the bright shiny object in your hand.
John Naughton’s opening paragraph in his piece in The Observer today, which follows below, says much the same. Then goes on to insightfully instruct us on the specific contours and outcomes of the convergence of new technology, money, power, human rights, progress and dangers, from 500 hundred years ago to this very moment.
Here’s the article:
“Why we need a 21st-century Martin Luther to challenge the church of tech”, John Naughton, The Observer, Sunday 29 October 2017:
It’s 500 years since Martin Luther defied the authority of the Catholic church. It’s time for a similar revolt against the hypocrisy of the religion of technology
“A new power is loose in the world. It is nowhere and yet it’s everywhere. It knows everything about us – our movements, our thoughts, our desires, our fears, our secrets, who our friends are, our financial status, even how well we sleep at night. We tell it things that we would not whisper to another human being. It shapes our politics, stokes our appetites, loosens our tongues, heightens our moral panics, keeps us entertained (and therefore passive). We engage with it 150 times or more every day, and with every moment of contact we add to the unfathomable wealth of its priesthood. And we worship it because we are, somehow, mesmerised by it.
In other words, we are all members of the Church of Technopoly, and what we worship is digital technology. Most of us are so happy in our obeisance to this new power that we spend an average of 50 minutes on our daily devotion to Facebook alone without a flicker of concern. It makes us feel modern, connected, empowered, sophisticated and informed.
Suppose, though, you were one of a minority who was becoming assailed by doubt – stumbling towards the conclusion that what you once thought of as liberating might actually be malign and dangerous. But yet everywhere you look you see only happy-clappy believers. How would you go about convincing the world that it was in the grip of a power that was deeply hypocritical and corrupt? Especially when that power apparently offers salvation and self-realisation for those who worship at its sites?
It would be a tough assignment. But take heart: there once was a man who had similar doubts about the dominant power of his time. His name was Martin Luther and 500 years ago on Tuesday he pinned a long screed on to the church door in Wittenberg, which was then a small and relatively obscure town in Saxony. The screed contained a list of 95 “theses” challenging the theology (and therefore the authority) of the then all-powerful Catholic church. This rebellious stunt by an obscure monk must have seemed at the time like a flea bite on an elephant. But it was the event that triggered a revolution in religious belief, undermined the authority of the Roman church, unleashed ferocious wars in Europe and shaped the world in which most of us (at least in the west) grew up. Some flea bite.
In posting his theses Luther was conforming to an established tradition of scholastic discourse. A “thesis”, in this sense, is a succinctly expressed proposition put forward as the starting point for a discussion. What made Luther’s theses really provocative, though, was that they represented a refutation of both the theology and the business model of the Catholic church. In those days, challenging either would not have been a good career move for an Augustinian monk. Challenging both was suicidal.
To understand the significance of this, some theological background helps. A central part of Catholic theology revolved around sin and the consequences thereof. Sins were divided into three grades – original, venial and mortal. The first was what you were born with (because the default setting for humans was “flawed”) and was absolved by baptism. The second category consisted of peccadillos. The third – mortal – were grievous sins.
The church had established an elaborate machine for enabling its members to deal with their moral transgressions. They could confess them to a priest and receive absolution on condition that they did a prescribed penance. But for a medieval Catholic, the visceral fear was of dying with an unconfessed – and therefore unabsolved – mortal sin on your record. In that case, you went to hell for eternity, tortured by perennial fire and all the horrors imagined by Hieronymous Bosch.
If you died with just unabsolved venial sins, however, then you did time in an intermediate prison called purgatory until you were eventually discharged and passed on to paradise. Being in purgatory was obviously better than roasting at gas mark six, and your place in heaven was ultimately guaranteed. But if you could minimise your time in the holding area then you would.
Into this market opportunity stepped the Roman church with an ingenious product called an indulgence. This was like a voucher that gave you a reduction in your purgatorial stay. Initially, you could get an indulgence in return for an act of genuine penitence – following the confessional model – or for visiting a holy relic. But there came a moment (in 1476) when Pope Sixtus IV announced that indulgences could be purchased on behalf of another person – say a deceased relative who was assumed to be suffering in purgatory, and therefore lying beyond the reach of confession and absolution. In a continent of credulous and devout believers, this turned indulgences into a very big business. And, as with the US sub-prime mortgage market pre-2007, it got out of hand. By 1517, as Luther saw it, indulgences had become a racket in which a crass financial transaction substituted for the serious duty of real repentance. A couplet coined by a particularly enthusiastic indulgence-hawker captured this crudity nicely:
As soon as a coin in the coffer rings,
The soul from purgatory springs.
The audacity of Luther’s 95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgencescame from the fact that in attacking the theology underpinning the doctrine of purgatory they were also undermining the business model built upon it. In two consecutive theses, 20 and 21, for example, Luther set about attacking the very essence of papal authority. “When he [the pope] uses the words plenary [ie total] remission of all penalties,” Luther wrote, “he does not actually mean ‘all penalties’, but only those imposed by himself.” Therefore, continues thesis 21, “those indulgence preachers are in error who say that a man is absolved from every penalty and saved by papal indulgences.”
This might not look like much to a modern reader, unfamiliar with the intricacies of 16th-century Catholicism, but it was the equivalent of calling the pope a liar. And in the Europe of 1517, that was fighting talk. People had been burned at the stake for less. In the ordinary course of events, the church would have squashed such a turbulent friar as one would a mosquito. All it would have required was a letter to his religious superior, followed by a kangaroo court in Rome, and that would be that.
But it didn’t happen. Instead, Luther escaped death, survived excommunication and went on to light the fire that consumed Christendom. How come? Historians cite two main reasons. The first is that Luther was lucky in that Frederick the Wise – the local bigwig who was one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor – protected him and indeed saved his life (protection that was continued by Frederick’s heirs and successors). The second is the printing press, which is what enabled Luther to “go viral”, as modern parlance has it.
Of course we’ve known for eons about the role of print in the Reformation. But it’s especially interesting to look back at the story in the light of what has happened to our own media ecosystem in the past few years. After all, we have lived through political earthquakes that were fuelled at least in part by new media, and we find ourselves contemplating what has happened with the same kind of “informed bewilderment” that must have afflicted Pope Leo X as he watched his pestilential priest become the most famous man in Germany.
What happened, in a nutshell, is that Luther understood the significance and utility of the new communication technology better than his adversaries. In that sense, he reminds me of Donald Trump, who sussed how to use Twitter and exploit the 24-hour news cycle better than anyone else. But whereas Trump contributed nothing to the communications technology that he exploited, Luther did.
His understanding of the new media ecosystem brought about by print has been expertly explored by the Reformation historian Andrew Pettegree in a brilliant book, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation (Penguin, 2015). Unlike most scholars of his time, Luther was both interested in and knowledgable about the technology of printing; he knew the economics of the business, cared about the aesthetics and presentation of books and understood the importance of what we would now call building a brand.
He knew, for example, that his message would only spread if he gave printers texts that would be economical to print and easy to sell – unlike conventional scholarly books in the early decades of printing. Because paper was expensive, printing a standard scholarly tome required capital resources for buying and storing the necessary reams of paper. And because there was no developed market for distributing and marketing the result, many printers went bankrupt – which is why most printing and publishing was concentrated in large towns with established universities where at least some of the necessary infrastructure existed.
Although the original 95 theses were in Latin, as were most theological books of the period, Luther decided that he would write in German. In doing so he immediately expanded his potential market by orders of magnitude. He also developed a literary style that was, as Pettegree observes, “lucid, readable and to the point”. But his masterstroke was in enabling printers to make money by publishing his works. Because paper was expensive, he channelled his output into extended pamphlets that could be printed on one or two sheets of paper, suitably folded into eight or 16 pages at most.
The strategy worked. Within five years of posting his theses he was Europe’s most published author. A printed sermon or a commentary by Luther was a surefire seller, and appealingly inexpensive to produce. The nascent printing industry was quick to respond: Wittenberg, which had a solitary shambolic printer when Luther began, was soon home to a handful of presses, including one run by Germany’s most accomplished publisher, Moritz Goltz. Luther, proactive to a fault, took care to spread his work among all of these new publishing houses and was, Pettegree observes, “sufficiently popular to put bread on the table of publishers throughout Germany”. By the time Luther died in 1546, nearly 30 years after posting the 95 theses, this small town in Saxony had a publishing output that matched that of Germany’s biggest cities.
Luther was clearly a remarkable, complex individual – charismatic, divisive, inspiring, intense, gifted, musical, courageous, devout and lucky. He also had a very unattractive side – as seen most starkly in the misogyny and ferocious antisemitism with which his works are peppered. But I’ve always been fascinated by him, and as the 500th anniversary loomed and Trump rose to power on the back of our new media ecosystem, I fell to pondering whether there are lessons to be learned from the 95 theses and their astonishing aftermath.
One thing above all stands out from those theses. It is that if one is going to challenge an established power, then one needs to attack it on two fronts – its ideology (which in Luther’s time was its theology), and its business model. And the challenge should be articulated in a format that is appropriate to its time. Which led me to think about an analogous strategy in understanding digital technology and addressing the problems posed by the tech corporations that are now running amok in our networked world.
These are subjects that I’ve been thinking and writing about for decades – in two books, a weekly Observer column, innumerable seminars and lectures and a couple of academic research projects. Many years ago I wrote a history of the internet, motivated partly by annoyance at the ignorant condescension with which it was then viewed by the political and journalistic establishments of the time. “Don’t you think, dear boy,” said one grandee to me in the early 1990s, “that this internet thingy is just the citizens band [CB] radio de nos jours?”
“You poor sap,” I remember thinking, “you have no idea what’s coming down the track.”
Twenty-five years on, I now describe myself as a recovering utopian. When the internet first appeared I was dazzled by its empowering, enlightening, democratising potential. It’s difficult to imagine today the utopian visions that it conjured up in those of us who understood the technology and had access to it. We really thought that it would change the world, slipping the surly bonds of older power structures and bringing about a more open, democratic, networked future.
We were right about one thing, though: it did change the world, but not in the ways we expected. The old power structures woke up, reasserted themselves and got the technology under control. A new generation of corporate giants emerged, and came to wield enormous power. We watched as millions – and later billions – of people happily surrendered their personal data and online trails to be monetised by these companies. We grimaced as the people whose creativity we thought would be liberated instead turned the network into billion-channel TV and morphed into a new generation of couch-potatoes. We saw governments that had initially been caught napping by the internet build the most comprehensive surveillance machine in human history. And we wondered why so few of our fellow citizens seemed to be alarmed by the implications of all this – why the world was apparently sleepwalking into a nightmare. Why can’t people see what’s happening? And what would it take to make them care about it?
Why not, I thought, compose 95 theses about what has happened to our world, and post them not on a church door but on a website? Its URL is 95theses.co.uk and it will go live on 31 October, the morning of the anniversary. The format is simple: each thesis is a proposition about the tech world and the ecosystem it has spawned, followed by a brief discussion and recommendations for further reading. The website will be followed in due course by an ebook and – who knows? – perhaps eventually by a printed book. But at its heart is Luther’s great idea – that a thesis is the beginning, not the end, of an argument.
John Naughton’s theses
No 19: The technical is political
This thesis challenges the contemporary assertion of the tech industry that it stands apart from the political system in which it exists and thrives. This delusion has deep roots – for example in the fact some of the dominant figures of the 1970s computer industry were influenced by 1960s “counterculture”, which was suspicious of, and hostile to, the US political and corporate system that had enmeshed the country in the Vietnam war. It found its wildest expression in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
The idea that the tech industry exists, somehow, “outside” of society was always misconceived, even when the industry was in its infancy. After all, it was built on the back of massive public investment in defence electronics, networking and research conducted in corporate laboratories such as Bell Labs or consultancies such as BBN. But in an era where it’s clear that Google and Facebook have, unintentionally or otherwise, been influencing democratic politics and elections, it is positively delusional. We have reached the point where almost every “technological” issue posed by the five giant tech companies is also a political problem requiring political and possibly legislative responses. The technical has become political.
No 92: Facebook is many things, but a “community” it ain’t
One of the favourite phrases of Mark Zuckerberg is “the Facebook community”. Facebook is many things, but a community it is not. It’s a social network, which is something quite different. In a social network (online or off), people are connected by pre-existing personal relationships. Communities, on the other hand, are complex social systems because they consist of people from different walks of life who may have no personal connections at all. A good example is the English village where I live. I am friends with some villagers, and know my neighbours pretty well. But there are many others in the village whom I don’t know and with whom I may have little in common. But there’s no doubt that they and I are all members of the same community.
Online groups confirm the power of homophily – the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with others of similar ilk. Facebook provides a framework that contains innumerable homophilic groups. But it isn’t a community in any meaningful sense of the world.”
Again, here is the link to Naughton’s full list of 95 theses.
. . .
To be continued.