As I’ve been saying since 2016, this isn’t going to end well.

The global trend is away from order, away from rules. I fear we’ve shifted so far we lack the means to correct our global course.

Antonio Guterres rails against the four—sorry, five—horsemen of the Apocalypse abroad in the world today:

1. The highest global geo-strategic tensions in years.
2. An existential climate crisis.
3. Deep and growing global mistrust.
4. The dark side of the digital world.
5. Oh, and Pestilence. Why does everyone but Brueghel forget Pestilence?

No one cares. Under his leadership, the UN has died on the vine. It’s not entirely his fault, of course. Like countless before him, being utterly nonthreatening is his stock in trade.

I’ve met him briefly. I got the impression he brings a lot of that to the job. It’s Sec Gen, after all, not Sec Gem.

The fact that he thought that TIME cover was a good idea is a monument to his ineffectuality. Whatever convictions he may have, his tenure at the UN will be remembered as the time when it largely ceased to matter.

Anyway, he doesn’t matter now. I’d like to think otherwise, but let’s be frank: what chance does the UN have of fixing any of the many crises afflicting us right now?

None. We can beat our breasts all we want about missed opportunities and the failure of international entente, but self interest has won.

Self interest, pace Homer Simpson, is the solution to—and the source of—all of life’s problems.

We’ll do stuff about climate change. Self interest dictates it. Investors, insurers and entrepreneurs will do what they can, and states will occasionally use it adherence as policy stick to drive protectionist or interventionist policies.

Heck, it’s possible that global conflict or economic collapse might decide the matter for us.

But even if it doesn’t, I’ve seen with my own eyes just how little Alex Hawke actually cares about climate. He can’t hide his disdain for what he calls ‘climate activists’. And more to the point, we’ve all seen just how little Alex Hawke matters to Scott Morrison’s political future.

And at the part of the point that angels dance on, we can all see just how little Scott Morrison matters to the coterie of business buddies who put the Coal-ition through its paces.

And right where the last angel stands is the coming civil strife in the USA. None of us really matter either.

Chinese belligerence matters, but not as much as the fall of the American Empire, especially since they seem intent on taking us all down with them.

Back when I was 17, I began to write a little ditty called the Fin de Siècle Blues, about a society watching their world fading in front of their eyes, and quietly beginning to accept that it’s never coming back.

I guess I better finish it. Because it is us.

It should be clear by now to Pacific leaders that not only do the things that matter to us not matter to them, we don’t matter to them. We are in fact descending past cynicism to nihilism, and nothing we say or do is going to stop it.

We still have agency though. I said on Twitter recently that lacking the ability to control the outcome of world events doesn’t mean we lack agency.

Control is dredging the harbour. Agency is learning to surf.

We’re going to pass 2 degrees Celsius. Probably 3.

We’re going to see military confrontation in the Pacific, and though I doubt it still, it might reach Melanesia.

I want to be wrong. Not only for my or my family’s sake, but for yours too. I’ll probably get through this. My kids almost certainly will. We live in a Goldilocks zone—a warm place moderated by maritime climate, far away from the worst of everything. What land we have will remain fertile long after Australia and much of Asia have become much less habitable.

If conflict reaches us, it will get here after it’s already swallowed millions. We’ll have time to brace—or hide.

Relatively speaking, we’re where you’d want to be to make it through the mess that’s coming. All we can do now is get ready.

So should you.

What does the future hold for us? That’s easy!

Just apply this handy little flowchart:

With apologies to Leonard Cohen’s ghost, the one thing that everybody knows about Vanuatu politics is that nobody really knows what’s going to happen.

That’s a deceptively simplistic statement, but it’s been the essence of government since time immemorial—or since I got here, at least.

Here’s the thing: There are too many variables for anyone to be across all of them all of the time. Events of the last week or two offer a textbook example of why even the tiniest bit of prediction is certain to hoist you like a petard.

Try to follow along here: Head of Government Business Robin Kapapa resigned his position and moved to the Opposition side. Hours later, a photo emerged on social media announcing that his allegiance had shifted to the so-called G10 bloc, and he remained loyal to government. The same day, another photo was circulated, showing him happily ensconced with the Opposition. It was accompanied by his letter of resignation.

Then his party Secretary General and President lined up behind him, adding their weight, if not their numbers, to the Opposition. Days later, it was announced that Mr Kapapa’s fellow party member from Tanna would be joining him in Opposition. Then he would not.

Then the UMP met to iron things out, and were photographed standing together in solidarity beside their government leader, the deputy prime minister. Then an amplification was circulated, saying that the party had settled its differences, but Robin Kapapa would remain on the Opposition side.

Tired yet? If so, then Vanuatu politics is probably not for you.

This is just another day in the life. The lack of polar political alignment makes the business of running the country a Byzantine affair at best.

There are 52 MPs elected to Parliament, each with his own ideas, agenda and expectations. There are dozens or even hundreds of backers and supporters standing behind each of them, and hundreds more attached to party apparati. There are hundreds more lined up behind failed candidates, including some who ran spoiler campaigns, with great expectations. There are corporate interests and investors, diplomats, cops, spies and whistleblowers. Every single one of them wants something, and every single one of them is trying to decide which horse to back.

Then there are the other politicians and their advisors. The experienced ones know better than to plan. They arrive knowing that their time is short, possibly a matter of months or even weeks. They know that, no matter what’s said at the cabinet table, things could change literally overnight.

As former Prime Minister Serge Vohor famously said, we don’t have one Prime Minister and 13 deputies; there is one Big PM, and 13 Small PMs. Everyone is doing what he can while he can. He knows better than to plan. Plans waste time and delay the returns everyone’s hungrily awaiting.

I’m not suggesting anything untoward here. Quite the opposite. Just getting on with things like disaster response, infrastructure development or even cost-saving initiatives is a dark art. Even those who have mastered it only manage to succeed at a minority of things they set out to do.

I’m loth to provide a single example, because it might put undeserved emphasis on a single person or activity. I hope it’s sufficient to say that no one is immune.

So with that proviso, let’s look at one really commendable reform that the 2016 government took on. Within weeks of taking office, the minister of infrastructure and public utilities announced a wholesale review of vehicle use. He commissioned a study(!!!), and declared that his reforms could save the government hundreds of millions of vatu annually.

The measures included establishing a Fleet Management Unit under the Public Service Commission to oversee the acquisition and disposal of vehicles. It instituted a single payer plan with local fuel suppliers. It installed GPS units on the majority of public vehicles. It placed a moratorium on short-term rentals without prior approval. It required that vehicle types and prices be justified prior to purchase. It instituted a tender process for vehicles at the end of their service life.

And then the savings rolled in and everyone did exactly as they were told and rainbows filled the sky.

Or not.

The fuel deal stuck, because it worked for those involved, simplifying billing and making it easier to chase payment. It didn’t necessarily stop drivers from filling others’ tanks from their allotment, but some of the more wanton abuses were stopped.

The GPS units did allow officials the ability to see where their cars were, and geo-block them or turn them off remotely after hours. Which was cool, and a little embarrassing to more than a couple of stranded drivers sheepishly calling back to base for a pick up.

Now, all G-plated vehicles are under the purview of the Fleet Management Unit of the Public Service Commission. Which is why there are so many publicly-owned vehicles that no longer sport a ‘G’ on the plate. Amusingly, it seems to have been the State Law Office that found the loophole. It doesn’t operate under the PSC and therefore vehicle acquisitions are its own business. Likewise, the Police, Vanuatu Mobile Force, the Public Prosecutor and constitutional bodies such as Parliament, the President’s office and countless others.

When the regs were implemented, the Speaker’s vehicle was plated RV2 (RV1 is the President’s car). In a deal brokered shortly in the previous parliament, the Opposition Leader was provided with a car. Its tactfully coded number plate, RV2A, was the subject of intense negotiation.

Since the vehicle reforms came into place, parliamentary vehicles experienced less, not more, oversight. Now the number plates go all the way to RV2Q.

People who used to avail themselves of protocol vehicles or rentals now have nice new cars of their own, as it were.

In early 2019, I conservatively estimated that the government was more than VT 700 million over budget for vehicle-related expenses over a 12 month period.

So what does this have to do with the unpredictability of Vanuatu politics? Well, nothing and everything. The minister tried—and partly succeeded—in achieving an actual policy objective. But he was ousted from government a while later. Although he later returned, it was in a different ministry, with a different set of policy objectives.

And here’s the thing: Everyone knew they only had to toe the line—for a while.

And they knew that before too long, they could bend the regs and ignore the intent of the reforms. The plan was flawed. It only promised improvements tomorrow, not today. And they only improved the government’s existence, not their own.

So if an MP seems unengaged with a particular policy brief, or disinterested in a project that’s going to take time and effort, don’t blame him. There’s no tomorrow in politics, and not much upside in playing a long game.

So how did some of the major policy wins of the past come about then? How did the Department of Strategic Planning, Policy and Aid Coordination stand itself up? How did the visionary Vanuatu 2030 strategy come about?

How did the telecommunications policy and the Universal Access Policy, which revolutionised communications in the country, come about?

How did the infrastructure push come into play?

Why haven’t we spent our passport money like a punter who hit big on the ponies?

Because while politics is lived day to day, a core group of hard-working professionals still manages to cling to the middle and upper layers of the civil service, and do right by the country as well as their minister. And there are in fact some politicians who care about this stuff. And a great many others who know better than to get in the way.

But these people know better than anyone how things can change. They know that priorities shift with the wind, and that even for them, their mandate may last no longer than the life of a mayfly.

They don’t survive by predicting the outcome of the next contest, or by hitching their wagon to a particular star. They survive by delivering quickly on the things that make their life liveable, and then spend what little time remains to them shepherding the long-term stuff quietly along. It’s a thankless—and often fruitless—undertaking.

They are heroes.

Now, don’t you dare blame politicians for this. They didn’t invent it. The sand is shifting under their feet every moment of the day. They know they have to deliver, and quickly, or someone else will be the one making the promises, and driving the car.

A lot of people try to make a living by pretending they know what’s going to happen in politics. But the ones who survive year after year aren’t the ones who are sure. The survivors are the ones who know better than to be sure about anything.

The good ones know: Nobody really knows.

Back in June of last year, I wrote an exposé documenting millions of dollars of waste on government vehicles and related expenses. Accompanying that article were a series of photos of wrecks involving public vehicles.

The part that I didn’t talk about was what led to these crashes, and to more than a few metaphorical crashes in politics and government over the years.

I’m talking about booze.

Before I jump in, I need to make clear I’m not getting all accusatory here. I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict myself. I had the good fortune of celebrating 30 years without a drink in January. But I haven’t forgotten the damage that it did to my life, and the choices I made.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I drank to self-medicate, to survive in what felt like an otherwise unliveable world. But I didn’t have the genetic predisposition to alcoholism that afflicts so many. I watched the members in my fast-living circle of friends stunting and even ending their lives because of alcohol, but I was able to walk away on the first attempt.

I watched others try and try and try, and the best they could ever manage for themselves was a brief respite from the cycle of drunkenness, remorse and depression.

Politicians in Vanuatu face insane pressures. Many of them don’t choose the life for themselves, but have it foisted on them by their community leaders. No matter what leads them into public life, many of them arrive unprepared for the non-stop cycle of pushing and pulling inflicted on them by their supporters, detractors, allies and rivals.

For a minister, the demands are unrelenting. From one minute to the next, there’s always someone wanting something. It’s not unusual to see people leave office indebted, or with almost nothing left for themselves.

Many of these pressures are accessorised with bonhomie. Good food, friendly company and lashings of booze. Everybody has a good time, and it’s all free, just sign here. And there’s an ever-present chorus of supporters and hangers-on who want to eat from the Minister’s plate, egging him on through all of this, and ready to make consequences for him if he doesn’t get in there and smile and enjoy it, dammit.

This process reaches into the higher levels of the public service, too. Some Directors and DGs face similar demands, and not to put too fine a point on it, there’s a fair sized contingent in the upper layers of Vanuatu society who aspire to little more than having a good time.

Alcoholism is a workplace hazard for politicians and senior administrators in Vanuatu. There are mountains of evidence to attest to it. I’ll leave the images of fleets-worth of smashed vehicles to speak for all, because I don’t want to expose anyone to the malicious ridicule and gossip of our local keyboard cowboys.

Suffice to say that alcohol has been a significant contributor to reckless and sometimes downright violent behaviour. It’s shortened and sometimes ended promising careers, and it’s tragically shortened lives.

I haven’t said a thing about these people’s personal lives. Because it’s none of our business.

It would be a stretch to say that alcohol is the cause of countless questionable policies projects and decisions. It is not a stretch to say that it’s made many of them far worse than they had to be.

This isn’t a 1000-word subtweet. I am emphatically not targeting any individual. And I reject outright our hypocritical love of ridicule and public shaming where drunkenness is concerned.

Nor am I even anti-alcohol. It would be stupid of me to assume that the thing that almost ruined my life me will necessarily do the same to everyone else.

But it is ruining lives here. It’s shortening what should be promising careers. It’s costing us money. It’s putting policy-making at risk. It’s exacting a political cost that no one has ever stopped to tabulate.

My guess is that the damage done by this ritualised linking of drink to decision-making is easily commensurate to a moderate cyclone every odd year.

Moralising won’t get us anywhere. I’m not going to sit here in my digital pulpit and rail about the demon drink.

But if I were a politician today, I’d take note that people are trying to get me drunk, and to keep me that way. And I’d ask myself why.

a.image2.image-link.image2-967-1456 {
padding-bottom: 66.41483516483517%;
padding-bottom: min(66.41483516483517%, 967px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-967-1456 img {
max-width: 1456px;
max-height: 967px;
}

[I don’t propose to compose these things daily. Not by a long shot. It’s just that this particular topic has numerous facets, and the argument isn’t served unless we at least cursorily examine them all.]

The impact of social media on developing countries has received little attention in the popular press, with the exception of horrendous events such as the attempted extirpation of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

These impacts are real and cannot be overstated.

Here in Melanesia, societies are at once more susceptible to gossip-driven scares and even mob behaviour, and more resilient in the face of it. It’s easier to set people off, and it’s easier to spread common sense.

The simple reason is that we are closer together. Your neighbour may drive you round the bend from time to time, but go far enough round the bend and you’ve done a circuit of the island. They’re not going anywhere, and neither are you. That’s the historical truth, anyway.

Social media has made the public sphere vastly larger and noisier, but the same rules apply, more or less.

Women are harassed, abused and faced with physical harm not just by their family and neighbours now, but by the entire online population.

Gadflies and conscientious objectors face opprobrium not just from the chiefs and other people of rank, but from masses of virulent and often anonymous attackers.

And anonymity/pseudonymity is a novelty that many struggle to come to terms with. While it’s freed the tongues of many who felt constrained from speaking before, a significant minority of them have used that liberty to behave horribly to others.

But in the midst of this chaos and rancour, a fascinating thing has happened: People are learning to moderate debate in real time. The pattern here in Vanuatu typically runs like this:

A person attacks another, making allegations that might or might not be true. One side piles on, either in concert with or in reaction to the original poster. Generally speaking, the conversational tide runs almost entirely in one direction, with few people showing the gumption (or the chutzpah) to gainsay the rest.

But then, slowly and sometimes softly at first, the first words of moderation appear. Before long, others find it in themselves to support this view or to supplement it with their own objections. Eventually, a trend begins to come clear, and comments with widely divergent views either peter out or are drowned out.

The process can sometimes be outright vituperative, sometimes not. Sometimes the right answer is found, sometimes the wrong one is reinforced. But even in the worst cases, where we see incitement to violence, to burn homes, expel people, exact vengeance or pour shame on a person or group, there are few if any instances of people actually acting on them.

In cases where people actually have done reprehensible things to one another, they were seldom discussed or organised over public social media channels. Slut shaming in cases of perceived infidelity are the one glaring exception.

The flow of discourse resembles nothing so much as a village meeting. I’ve attended more than a few, and they tend to follow the same pattern. If you walk in cold to the early stages of a contentious meeting, it can sometimes feel like the only possible outcome is open conflict. The tension is often palpable.

But as it unrolls, tempers begin to subside, and more nuanced and reasonable arguments begin to emerge. By the end of it, more often than not, the chief is able to find a ruling that will carry the room, and people part with handshakes and a sense of having accomplished something.

(I’m painting with a very broad brush here, so forgive the massive elisions in that description.)

We’ve been able to resist of the worst conspiracy mongering here. Even when Indonesian state actors conducted a Cambridge Analytica-style campaign to undermine confidence in the government of the day, the effect was minimal.

But it didn’t stop until high-level meetings were held with Facebook executives. Faced with a Prime Minister fully prepared to regulate them or see them leave the market immediately, they did the right thing.

That was only one victory among literally thousands of attempts. Dozens of user reports concerning this influence network received no response at all. Hundreds of reports of incitement and hateful comments went unheeded. In rare cases where a response was received, Facebook’s so-called community standards allowed imagery and language that were shocking to us—and to any thinking, feeling human. Images of dead and dismembered bodies, sexualised and clearly brutalised children… the list goes on.

Then, adding insult to injury, imagery of people in kastom dress were banned, because apparently a nambas or a nipple is beyond the pale, even though they scarcely raise an eyebrow here.

The push here became strong enough that Facebook’s head of Global Connectivity Policy met privately with the Prime Minister to dissuade him from moving ahead with a proposal to require them to register as a local company.

The Prime Minister’s rationale was that Over The Top services such as Facebook should be required to contribute to our Universal Access Policy, the same way all local telecommunication providers are.

But another, and I believe more compelling, argument is language. There is no business case for Facebook to provide support for Bislama, Solomons pidgin, Tok Pisin or any other of the thousand-plus languages in the Pacific islands. It’s just never going to happen.

The only way these languages—and our cultures and societies—get the respect and support they deserve is when social media networks become our networks. Without ownership of the content and of the management service, we are not masters in our own house.

Technology generally and social media in particular can accurately be described as a (re)colonising force. The imposition of standards, expectations and requirements that are not only foreign and new, but often beyond the capability of a great many people here doesn’t just bring development potential. More to the point, they’re largely impossible to alter to fit the local context.

Technology and social media are just as subversive as they are liberating.

And while our societies are generally better at self-regulation, we’re hardly perfect. The suffering and subjugation of women in the Pacific has always been a matter of concern. Social media adds slut-shaming, stalking, coercive talk and mobbing to their already tremendous burden.

The inexperienced have often been victimised by cons, scams and schemes, but they have only grown in proportion since the advent of the internet and social media.

Decentralisation and federation of social media services doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t provide any guarantees at all. Except one: if we screw it up, it’ll be our screw up, not someone else’s.

And that’s what decolonisation has always been about.

My last missive discussed the technical (and to a lesser degree, the social) arguments for a decentralised, federated approach to social media.

It didn’t entirely answer a kind of a big question: Why do we need it?

In a word: Jurisdiction.

There’s no end in sight to Facebook’s 14-year apology tour, and following the announcement that they’re going to take their ball and go home unless Australian news media stop asking for a share of the pyre—er, pie—it’s abundantly clear that something has to happen.

In a conveniently (but not deliberately) timed piece of news, Facebook has shown that it’s willing to take steps to control malicious activity, especially when it comes to state-to-state mis/disinformation operations. Their globe-bestriding status makes it possible for them to analyse and avoid these abuses.

But reach is exactly why their platform is being used for these ops. And lord knows they’ve been effective. Carole Cadwalladr’s exposé of Cambridge Analytica makes it abundantly clear that the platform is a near-ideal factory for weapons-grade propaganda.

I’m counting the hours before the folks at Facebook begin to leverage that power to dig themselves like a tick into our digital landscape. The only thing that keeps them from doing it right now is potential loss of trust among their audience, and the fear that acting in one nation’s favour might prejudice their relationship with another.

In short, they’re still trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Australia’s decision to foist regulation on the company upsets that delicate balance. Now, they have to decide. Publicly at least, Josh Frydenberg has stated that his government won’t respond to Facebook’s extortionate plan to simply turn off all Australian news.

But I expect that if there isn’t a strategic national interest conversation going on right now between the platform and the state, there will be. It’s also highly likely that Facebook will realise that Rupert Murdoch is their adversary, and the Australian Government is simply the hatchet man.

Once it does, all bets are off. Can, as Willie Nelson so coyly put it, old age and treachery beat youth and skill? Not forever. And, I suspect, not this time.

But if Facebook continues to take an antagonistic stance, there will be blood. And they will be subjected to regulation. And it will lead inexorably to more.

AT&T survived its breakup. Microsoft survived the legal sanctions it was burdened with, as well as the commodification of its operating system and software. Despite a balls to the wall rear-guard action against free software, open protocols and interoperability in the nineties and early oughties, it’s still ticking along just fine.

Google will survive as well, because it can argue much more convincingly for the good it does. With a lower evil index, it presents a smaller attack surface for its adversaries. And frankly, it could drop Google News tomorrow and remain the company everyone thinks it is.

But Facebook is a different kettle of fish. Along with its liberating and democratising influence, it brings the potential to quite literally overturn societies, inflict immense damage on personal lives, and oust regimes.

They’re doomed by their own dominance, and damned by their own tacit admission in their threats against Australian media that they actually have market dominance. The one defence a monopoly has is not to abuse that position, and that was the first card they threw away.

That’s why, no matter what play they choose, they’re going to find themselves coping with the perils of interacting with—and accepting liability in—all of the world’s jurisdictions.

It won’t all happen tomorrow, and it won’t all happen because of this stoush with Murdoch. But it will happen.

So if they’re smart, they’ll hive off the risky part, the one the plays an editorial role. They’ll either fragment themselves into a federation of national operations (more or less like every multinational that deals in physical goods), or if they’re really smart, they’ll open up their platform on a pay-for-play basis, and allow other companies to cling remora-like to their data corpus.

That makes for more modest profits, but it wins those profits with next to no accountability.

This is a terrible outcome for some people, of course. The moment you force an information service to work within the constraints of an authoritarian environment, you place people at risk.

The trade-off here is that people would only be at risk from their own authoritarians, and not their strategic rivals and adversaries.

People call this balkanisation. I get it. I don’t like it either, but commercialised and commoditised access to Facebook’s user base is really the only way we preserve anything of worth for a great many people. The stakes are high, and sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good.

And that’s why decentralisation and federation are a good idea for Facebook today.

Why decentralisation and federation are the future of online media

---

Over the last decade or so, I’ve been commenting in fits and starts around a theme:

Centralisation of internet infrastructure and services is anti-democratic.

Starting with Iran’s internet blackout following the 2009 presidential elections, I have been less-than-methodically reviewing the impact of centralised networks on the internet’s ability to ‘treat censorship as damage, and route around it’, as Internet pioneer John Gilmore famously said.

The idea of a neutral, borderless network of networks where any point could connect to any other was a brilliant design. We can legitimately call it revolutionary. In its best case, decentralisation is democratisation.

The protocols that distribute our cat pics and right swipes are indiscriminate and able to go literally everywhere there’s a pipe. But who owns the pipes? When it’s a government, a state-controlled entity or a large-scale corporate player—or some combination of that—then the tendency will inevitably be toward control, whether for profit or political reasons.

Back in 2009, we didn’t really have the means to cope with that, and in Iran’s case, it provided the government with the ability to control the entire nation’s communications through a mere five control points.

At the time, Farhad Manjoo used this bitter experience to argue that this meant that the revolution will not be digitised. I responded that he was conflating the physical networks and management tools with the protocols themselves, which are actually far more permissive. In the end, it seemed to me that the best—and worst—we could expect was a mixed bag.

So no surprise then, that back then I was strongly anti-regulation.

I wasn’t against it because I didn’t see any merit in the idea. I was against it because when large companies are regulated by governments, what usually ensues is either regulatory capture (as happened in the US telecoms market) or state cooption (as witnessed in China, Iran, Ethiopia and countless other autocratic nations).

And that’s why I’m against most regulation of social media companies.

Most, but not all.

I think we would all benefit from a little monopoly-busting. Well, commoditisation, at least. Facebook, Twitter, Google & Youtube all skate around their fundamental responsibility not to break society to bits because they claim to be as borderless as the network protocols that underpin their service.

Walled gardens are dangerous. They create a disparity of information, in which the platform knows everything about us, and we know next to nothing about the platform, or how it works.

Allow me to quote at length from the 3000-word screed that inaugurated this substack:

In 2013, Neil M Richards wrote about The Dangers of Surveillance. At the heart of his principled cry for what he described as ‘intellectual privacy’ is the contention that it’s not data per se that is dangerous to an individual, but the disparity of access to it. 

Our problem, the argument runs, is not that Facebook knows everything about us, but that we know next to nothing about Facebook. What exactly does it know? Who else is it telling? Why is this lie/ad/scam/rumour being shown to me right now? What information about me makes their algo think I’ll be particularly receptive to this so-called ‘sponsored content’? 

If we knew the answers to these questions, it would at least make the task of unraveling the untruth a trifle more possible. 

…

The contention that big data, the algorithms that shepherd it and the profits that derive are all private is bullshit. 

The contention that the resources required to acquire data, put some shape on it, and make sense of it all spring up sui generis like mushrooms in Mario World is equally bullshit. 

There is absolutely nothing in the world, bar a few private islands worth of wealth, that stops corporations from building their algos publicly, sharing exactly how they were built, down to the slightest minutiae, and still making a very large bundle of dosh. Better still, that bundle of dosh can be amicably and equitably shared among all the contributors to this wealth creation project in amounts commensurate to their contribution. 

Socialism! Yes. Just don’t say it like it’s a bad thing.

The ‘how’ of big data algorithms is devilishly hard to understand, and hella expensive. The ‘what’, however is not. And people have a right to know it. 

This is not the Secret Sauce. Or maybe it is, but who cares? It’s a secret sauce that can only be spread on a Very Large Dataset using Very Large Resources. 

And it’s a Secret Sauce made for use on Us. 

If algos and their impacts were public, companies would only have the size and composition of their dataset to compete with. And they would retain the allegiance of that data set (data is people!) by making it worth the data’s while. 

That’s how it works right now, only people’s data is kept secret from them. The public don’t have any way to choose who to trust it with, and for what purpose. Those secrets must be revealed. It’s not the end of the world. It won’t bring the data giants crashing down. 

It does mean they’d need to compete more, and compete on things we all can see, and measure.

That might be convenience. That might be services tailor-made to order, okay Google? That might be by demonstrably and consistently telling the truth (which would be pretty cool). That may mean straight up profit sharing. Who cares? We’re not prescribing, remember?

What I’m trying to say here is that the role of aggregator of data can be—and should be—separate from the role of content service provider. The aggregators need to be utterly transparent. The service providers need to be utterly responsible.

But you can’t be both. Because being both the one who gathers the data and the one who serves it up creates the situation we’ve got today, where straight-up ratfuckery and deadly collusion happen behind an utterly opaque and impenetrable barrier. Facebook has proven that it’s only willing to be as good as it has to be. And practically speaking, it profits more from being not good.

Right now, faced with the prospect of being forced to remunerate news agencies from which it derives immense revenues, Facebook’s best play is to pull a Murdoch. Sidle up to the Coalition government, remind them which side their bread could be buttered on, and leave those nasty Australian (and global) media to die on the vine.

The potential power that this represents is a fundamental threat to democracy and a rules-based order.

And there are few if any scenarios in which regulation doesn’t end up being coopted in one way or the other.

Unless…

Unless that regulation required them either to localise their businesses and operate as a media organisation, or to contract the provision of their data on a neutral basis.

In the best of all possible worlds, your social media data would be as commodified, and as private, as your email. In other words highly imperfectly. But owned by and controllable by the parties who contributed to it.

It’s not impossible to achieve this. It’s just really really hard, because you’d be militating against an entire generation of Tech Money, and returning the internet to its hippy roots* and make the services that run on the internet look more like the decentralised protocols that made it all possible in the first place.

* The truth is that its decentralised design was the US Defence Department’s plan to make communications networks that could survive a nuclear ‘beheading attack’. They didn’t envision cooption from within. Which is why centralised services like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter and the rest are actually antithetical to the internet that made them possible.