Is this guy seriously arguing that Big Data is a non-issue that no one should care about when it was just involved in very prominent election manipulation? Like, his whole argument appears to be that we’ve been worse off in the past so we’d better apply absolutely no oversight or scrutiny into these tech companies—or golly we might imperil our chance at getting more cat pictures from aunt Maggie on Facebook. Could you imagine if these Golden Cornerstones of modern civilization became slightly restricted or -gasp- not free anymore? I mean, they’re free so they obviously just want what’s best for you. You’re such a populist to sneer at such a fine capitalist Gift. I mean, you did even know about all that data being collected about you a few years back so obviously it can’t be important.
I don’t see him saying that tech companies cause no negative effects, rather that the “huge boon to humanity” (as you describe the Internet) they enable is so large in comparison to the costs that it is ridiculous how e.g. #amazon is so often portrayed as a force of evil. I don’t know why the author calls them populists, but I do think critics could save themselves a lot of angst by simply not patronizing the tech firms they criticize. Yet they often confess they can’t imagine life without Prime.
That's not the way monopoly works, though. In a world without Amazon, I would have to go outside to buy shoes. There are a number of cloistered white people in my neighborhood; we consume shoes (and other goods, but let's stick with shoes). There is a local demand for shoes, that could be satisfied by a shoe store opening up in any one of the many shuttered storefronts. They could sell shoes to rich cloistered white people, they could sell shoes to brown people, they could sell shoes to cops and bus drivers. The economic need of my neighborhood to wear shoes would provide an economic incentive for someone to come to my neighborhood and sell shoes. But in a world with Amazon, I can buy shoes directly from the Chinese gray market through a top-down Internet marketplace that is willing to profit five cents per pair of shoes so long as they sell all the shoes. Not only does anyone selling shoes on the Internet have to do it as cheap as Amazon, they actually have to do it cheaper because there's no real way to attract my attention other than by price since, as previously argued, there's nothing in meatspace to see. Ain't nobody signing a five-year lease for the right to attempt to profit against Amazon. Thus I have no choice but to use Amazon to buy shoes. Speaking seriously, there's a whole lot of disingenuous sleight-of-hand in the essay that disregards externalities as if they were a figment of the hippies' imaginations. Going down the list, Amazon already covered: Facebook has co-opted earlier forms of online communication (mailing lists, newsgroups, etc) and replaced them with an "engagement-driven" hierarchy. Thus the "group" for my town has useful information about meetings and the like, but they're buried under flamewars over the homeless and raccoon memes. I cannot find out when we're meeting about the park without wading through 900 outraged comments for/against/about the homeless. Twitter, meanwhile, has turned communication into a battle over which side can "ratio" the other. Uber and Lyft have spent about about fourteen billion dollars eliminating the taxi industry. Their prices, meanwhile, have increased 50% a year every year. It used to cost $30 to take a taxi to work. It now costs $28 to take a Lyft. The difference is the taxi driver had a license, was in a licensed car, and knew what he was doing. The Lyft driver is making less per mile than the IRS is reimbursing him and she only goes where her GPS tells her. She had to invest in the car (because you can't make any money at all without having something 2 years new or newer) and venture capitalists had to sink their money into the monomaniacal mission to annihilate a working class profession but I guess that's okay because I'm saving $2 on a 15-mile trip. Skype is an open-source video codec and an open-source audio codec transmitted across an open-source protocol wrapped in a proprietary wrapper that Microsoft paid $8.5b for so they could nudge you into their pay-by-month ecosystem. Public funds paid for the development of everything in Skype but it primarily exists now to prevent an open protocol that would do the exact same thing with better interoperability. Youtube has driven the cost of production so low that it has become far more effective as a disinformation engine than anything else. Low-income families used to sit their kids down in front of Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street (been there, done that, got the latchkey). Now they sit their kids down in front of Finger Family. No cost at all! Amazon, for their part, is spending $700m retraining some of its employees. And good on 'em. Thing is, they're retraining a third of their employees so that they can do higher-tech jobs. What do you think will happen to the other two thirds? And what do you think about the fact that Sears has lost more employees in the United States since 2006 than Amazon has hired?Facebook, Twitter, and other social media let us socialize with our friends, comfortably meet new people, and explore even the most obscure interests. The price: free.
Uber and Lyft provide high-quality, convenient transportation. The price: really cheap.
Skype is a sci-fi quality video phone. The price: free.
Youtube gives us endless entertainment. The price: free.
Google gives us the totality of human knowledge! The price: free.
My gripe with the author is this: if you’re going to argue about the cost of big data but ignore the elephant in the room, then you’re not making an honest argument. There’s no way this guy doesn’t know about Cambridge Analytica or Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress etc etc. These are some of the key events which has everyone thinking that maybe the real cost of this data in the grand scheme is actually a lot. The direct cost to you may not be felt, but it may damn well shape the world. The author just grazes by this by saying since people didn’t think this way five years ago, it must not matter? This is basically the whole context for the issue and the author is hand-waving it away so he can frame it as naively as he could 5 years back.
I don't see where he is arguing about or denying the cost of big data, all he says is "five years ago hardly anyone realized that they had data." Do you disagree with this claim that most people were not very worried about their data before tech companies started finding ways to mine it for profit? In other words, the problem of tech companies assembling digital profiles of customers is a direct consequence of our use of their extremely popular services. Even today, people say they want companies to collect less data, but most are not willing to pay for more privacy. If your concern is election manipulation, this seems an inevitable side effect of any mass communication technology: television before the internet, radio before television, newspapers before radio. But again, the author does not deny these negative side effects, he merely claims that the benefits are so great relative to the costs that the unrelentingly negative commentary about tech companies is unreasonable.
A hundred years ago, hardly anyone in Indio realized that they had water. That does not mean that the data has no value, nor that the first person to recognize the value of an asset is entitled to that asset. The study you link does not indicate that people aren't willing to pay for more privacy, it indicates that people aren't willing to pay for Google or Facebook. Every question there is about privacy is a "strongly agree" plurality except "I would like online services such as Facebook and Google to collect less of my data even if it means paying a monthly subscription fee." It doesn't demonstrate that consumers don't value privacy, it demonstrates that consumers don't value Google or Facebook. It's almost as if they're forced into a predatory business model by their lack of utility.I don't see where he is arguing about or denying the cost of big data, all he says is "five years ago hardly anyone realized that they had data."
I don’t see where he claims this. He suggests that many people consider the cost so low it is practically nothing — I think this is probably true for many people who happily provide access to their data in exchange for perceived benefits. If you indeed value your privacy and data more than the benefits you get by sharing them, you can refrain from using the services. In my experience, most people are willing to get the grocery store discount card to get cheaper bananas.sacrificing your data and privacy isn't an actual cost